The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (45 page)

The man behind the counter in the hardware store I took to be Hector himself. He looked like Hector, slain in vengeance beneath the walls of paintbrushes—the kind of semifriendly, publicly optimistic man who would tell you about his crazy wife and his ten-penny nails. I bought a gallon of kerosene and a plastic paint funnel, put them into the trunk of the Citation, then walked down the block to the Mark Twain Bank. Mark Twain died at the age of seventy-five with a heart full of bitter accusations against the Calvinist god and no hope for the future of humanity. Inside the bank I went to one of the desks, at which sat a Nice Young Lady. I asked about starting a business checking account. She gave me a form to fill out, then sent me to the office of Mr. Graves.

Mr. Graves wielded a formidable handshake. “What can I do for you, Mr....?”

“Tillotsen, Gerald Tillotsen,” I said. Gerald Tillotsen, of Tacoma, Washington, died of diphtheria at the age of four weeks—on September 24, 1938. I have a copy of his birth certificate.

“I’m new to Kansas City. I’d like to open a business account here, and perhaps take out a loan. I trust this is a reputable bank? What’s your exposure in Brazil?” I looked around the office as if Graves were hiding a woman behind the hatstand, then flashed him my most ingratiating smile. 

Mr. Graves did his best. He tried smiling back, then looked as if he had decided to ignore my little joke. “We’re very sound, Mr. Tillotsen.”

I continued smiling.

“What kind of business do you own?”

“I’m in insurance. Mutual Assurance of Hartford. Our regional office is in Oklahoma City, and I’m setting up an agency here, at 103rd and State Line.” Just off the interstate.

He examined the form. His absorption was too tempting.

“Maybe I can fix you up with a policy? You look like dead meat.”

Graves’s head snapped up, his mouth half-open. He closed it and watched me guardedly. The dullness of it all! How I tire. He was like some cow, like most of the rest of you in this silly age, unwilling to break the rules in order to take offense. “Did he really say that?” he was thinking. “Was that his idea of a joke? He looks normal enough.” I did look normal, exactly like an insurance agent. I was the right kind of person, and I could do anything. If at times I grate, if at times I fall a little short of or go a little beyond convention, there is not one of you who can call me to account.

Graves was coming around. All business.

“Ah—yes, Mr. Tillotsen. If you’ll wait a moment, I’m sure we can take care of this checking account. As for the loan—”

“Forget it.”

That should have stopped him. He should have asked after my credentials, he should have done a dozen things. He looked at me, and I stared calmly back at him. And I knew that, looking into my honest blue eyes, he could not think of a thing.

“I’ll just start the checking account with this money order,” I said, reaching into my pocket. “That will be acceptable, won’t it?”

“It will be fine,” he said. He took the form and the order over to one of the secretaries while I sat at the desk. I lit a cigar and blew some smoke rings. I’d purchased the money order the day before in a post office in Denver. Thirty dollars. I didn’t intend to use the account very long. Graves returned with my sample checks, shook hands earnestly, and wished me a good day. Have a
good
day, he said. I
will,
I said.

Outside, the heat was still stifling. I took off my sports coat. I was sweating so much I had to check my hair in the sideview mirror of my car. I walked down the street to a liquor store and bought a bottle of chardonnay and a bottle of Chivas Regal. I got some paper cups from a nearby grocery. One final errand, then I could relax for a few hours.

In the shopping center that I had told Graves would be the location for my nonexistent insurance office, I had noticed a sporting goods store. It was about three o’clock when I parked in the lot and ambled into the shop. I looked at various golf clubs: irons, woods, even one set with fiberglass shafts. Finally I selected a set of eight Spalding irons with matching woods, a large bag, and several boxes of Top-Flites. The salesman, who had been occupied with another customer at the rear of the store, hustled up, his eyes full of commission money. I gave him little time to think. The total cost was $612.32. I paid with a check drawn on my new account, cordially thanked the man, and had him carry all the equipment out to the trunk of the car.

I drove to a park near the bank; Loose Park, they called it. I felt loose. Cut loose, drifting free, like one of the kites people were flying that had broken its string and was ascending into the sun. Beneath the trees it was still hot, though the sunlight was reduced to a shuffling of light and shadow on the brown grass. Kids ran, jumped, swung on playground equipment. I uncorked my bottle of wine, filled one of the paper cups, and lay down beneath a tree, enjoying the children, watching young men and women walking along the footpaths.

A girl approached. She didn’t look any older than seventeen. Short, slender, with clean blond hair cut to her shoulders. Her shorts were very tight. I watched her unabashedly; she saw me watching and left the path to come over to me. She stopped a few feet away, hands on her hips. “What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Your legs,” I said. “Would you like some wine?”

“No thanks. My mother told me never to accept wine from strangers.” She looked right through me.

“I take what I can get from strangers,” I said. “Because I’m a stranger, too.”

I guess she liked that. She was different. She sat down and we chatted for a while.

There was something wrong about her imitation of a seventeen-year-old; I began to wonder whether hookers worked the park. She crossed her legs and her shorts got tighter. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“San Francisco. But I’ve just moved here to stay. I have a part interest in the sporting goods store at the Eastridge Plaza.”

“You live near here?” 

“On West Eighty-ninth.” I had driven down Eighty-ninth on my way to the bank.

“I live on Eighty-ninth! We’re neighbors.”

It was exactly what one of my own might have said to test me. I took a drink of wine and changed the subject. “Would you like to visit San Francisco someday?”

She brushed her hair back behind one ear. She pursed her lips, showing off her fine cheekbones. “Have you got something going?” she asked, in queerly accented English.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, have you got something going,” she repeated, still with the accent—the accent of my own time.

I took another sip. “A bottle of wine,” I replied in good midwestern 1980s.

She wasn’t having any of it. “No artwork, please. I don’t like artwork.”

I had to laugh: my life was devoted to artwork. I had not met anyone real in a long time. At the beginning I hadn’t wanted to, and in the ensuing years I had given up expecting it. If there’s anything more boring than you people it’s us people. But that was an old attitude. When she came to me in K.C. I was lonely and she was something new.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s not much, but you can come for the ride. Do you want to?”

She smiled and said yes.

As we walked to my car, she brushed her hip against my leg. I switched the bottle to my left hand and put my arm around her shoulders in a fatherly way. We got into the front seat, beneath the trees on a street at the edge of the park. It was quiet. I reached over, grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck, and jerked her face toward me, covering her little mouth with mine. Surprise: she threw her arms around my neck and slid across the seat into my lap. We did not talk. I yanked at the shorts; she thrust her hand into my pants. St. Augustine asked the Lord for chastity, but not right away.

At the end she slipped off me, calmly buttoned her blouse, brushed her hair back from her forehead. “How about a push?” she asked. She had a nail file out and was filing her index fingernail to a point.

I shook my head and looked at her. She resembled my grandmother. I had never run into my grandmother, but she had a hellish reputation. “No thanks. What’s your name?” 

“Call me Ruth.” She scratched the inside of her left elbow with her nail. She leaned back in her seat, sighed deeply. Her eyes became a very bright, very hard blue.

While she was aloft I got out, opened the trunk, emptied the rest of the chardonnay into the gutter, and used the funnel to fill the bottle with kerosene. I plugged it with a kerosene-soaked rag. Afternoon was sliding into evening as I started the car and cruised down one of the residential streets. The houses were like those of any city or town of that era of the Midwest USA: white frame, forty or fifty years old, with large porches and small front yards. Dying elms hung over the street. Shadows stretched across the sidewalks. Ruth’s nose wrinkled; she turned her face lazily toward me, saw the kerosene bottle, and smiled.

Ahead on the left-hand sidewalk I saw a man walking leisurely. He was an average sort of man, middle-aged, probably just returning from work, enjoying the quiet pause dusk was bringing to the hot day. It might have been Hector; it might have been Graves.

It might have been any one of you. I punched the cigarette lighter, readied the bottle in my right hand, steering with my leg as the car moved slowly forward.

“Let me help,” Ruth said. She reached out and steadied the wheel with her slender fingertips. The lighter popped out. I touched it to the rag; it smoldered and caught.

Greasy smoke stung my eyes. By now the man had noticed us. I hung my arm, holding the bottle, out the window. As we passed him, I tossed the bottle at the sidewalk like a newsboy tossing a rolled-up newspaper. The rag flamed brighter as it whipped through the air; the bottle landed at his feet and exploded, dousing him with burning kerosene. I floored the accelerator; the motor coughed, then roared, the tires and Ruth both squealing in delight. I could see the flaming man in the rearview mirror as we sped away.

On the Great American Plains, the summer nights are not silent. The fields sing the summer songs of insects—not individual sounds, but a high-pitched drone of locusts, crickets, cicadas, small chirping things for which I have no names. You drive along the superhighway and that sound blends with the sound of wind rushing through your opened windows, hiding the thrum of the automobile, conveying the impression of incredible velocity. Wheels vibrate, tires beat against the pavement, the steering wheel shudders, alive in your hands, droning insects alive in your ears. Reflecting posts at the roadside leap from the darkness with metronomic regularity, glowing amber in the headlights, only to vanish abruptly into the ready night when you pass. You lose track of time, how long you have been on the road, where you are going. The fields scream in your ears like a thousand lost, mechanical souls, and you press your foot to the accelerator, hurrying away.

When we left Kansas City that evening we were indeed hurrying. Our direction was in one sense precise: Interstate 70, more or less due east, through Missouri in a dream.

They might remember me in Kansas City, at the same time wondering who and why.

Mr. Graves scans the morning paper over his grapefruit: MAN BURNED BY

GASOLINE BOMB. The clerk wonders why he ever accepted an unverified counter check, without a name or address printed on it, for six hundred dollars. The check bounces. They discover it was a bottle of chardonnay. The story is pieced together. They would eventually figure out how—I wouldn’t lie to myself about that (I never lie to myself)—but the why would always escape them. Organized crime, they would say. A plot that misfired.

Of course, they still might have caught me. The car became more of a liability the longer I held on to it. But Ruth, humming to herself, did not seem to care, and neither did I. You have to improvise those things; that’s what gives them whatever interest they have.

Just shy of Columbia, Missouri, Ruth stopped humming and asked me, “Do you know why Helen Keller can’t have any children?”

“No.”

“Because she’s dead.”

I rolled up the window so I could hear her better. “That’s pretty funny,” I said.

“Yes. I overheard it in a restaurant.” After a minute she asked, “Who’s Helen Keller?”

“A dead woman.” An insect splattered itself against the windshield. The lights of the oncoming cars glinted against the smear it left.

“She must be famous,” said Ruth. “I like famous people. Have you met any? Was that man you burned famous?”

“Probably not. I don’t care about famous people anymore.” The last time I had anything to do, even peripherally, with anyone famous was when I changed the direction of the tape over the lock in the Watergate so Frank Wills would see it. Ruth did not look like the kind who would know about that. “I was there for the Kennedy assassination,” I said, “but I had nothing to do with it.”

“Who was Kennedy?”

That made me smile. “How long have you been here?” I pointed at her tiny purse.

“That’s all you’ve got with you?” 

She slid across the seat and leaned her head against my shoulder. “I don’t need anything else.”

“No clothes?”

“I left them in Kansas City. We can get more.”

“Sure,” I said.

She opened the purse and took out a plastic Bayer aspirin case. From it she selected two blue-and-yellow caps. She shoved her palm up under my nose. “Serometh?”

“No thanks.”

She put one of the caps back into the box and popped the other under her nose. She sighed and snuggled tighter against me. We had reached Columbia and I was hungry.

When I pulled in at a McDonald’s she ran across the lot into the shopping mall before I could stop her. I was a little nervous about the car and sat watching it as I ate (Big Mac, small Dr Pepper). She did not come back. I crossed the lot to the mall, found a drugstore, and bought some cigars. When I strolled back to the car she was waiting for me, hopping from one foot to another and tugging at the door handle. Serometh makes you impatient. She was wearing a pair of shiny black pants, pink- and white-checked sneakers, and a hot pink blouse. “ ’s go!” she hissed.