Time Travelers Strictly Cash (3 page)

“About three o’clock I wrap up my work, and I get to thinking about how strange his face looked when he gave me

those envelopes. So I take out mine and open it. Inside it are two very big downs-you know, powerful tranquilizers. I sit

up straight. I open Tom’s envelope, and if I hadn’t worked in a drugstore once, I never would have recognized it. Demerol. Synthetic morphine, one of the most addictive drugs in the world.

“Now Tom is a hippie-booking guy; like I say, long hair and mustache, not long like yours, but long for a newspaper.

So I figure this accounting guy is maybe his pusher and somehow he’s got the idea I’m a potential customer. I was kind of fidgety and tense in those days. So I get mad as hell, and I’m just thinking about taking Tom into the darkroom and chewing him out good, and I look up, and the guy from accounting is staring at me from all the way across the room. No expression at all, he just looks. It gives me the heebiejeebies.

“Now, overhead is this gigantic air-conditioning unit, from the old warehouse days, that’s supposed to cool the whole building and never does. What it does is drip water on editorial and make so much goddamn noise you can’t talk on the phone while it’s on. And what it does, right at that moment, is rip loose and drop straight down; maybe eight hundred pounds. It crushes all the desks in editorial, and it kills Mabel and Art and Dolores and Phil and takes two toes off of Tom’s right foot and misses me completely. A flying piece of wire snips off one of my ponytails.

“So I sit there with my mouth open, and in the silence I hear the publisher say, ‘God damn it,‘from the middle of the room, and I climb over the wreckage and get the Demerol into Tom, and then I make a tourniquet on his arch out of rubber bands and blue pencils, and then everybody’s taking me away and saying stupid things. I took those two tranquilizers and went home.”.

She took a sip of her coffee and sat up a little straighter.

Her eyes were the color of sun-cured Hawaiian buds. “They shut the paper dOwn for a week. The next day, when I woke up, I got out my employee directory and looked this guy up.

While Bobby was in school,I went over to his house. It took me hours to break him down, but I wouldn’t take no answer

for an answer. Finally he gave up. ‘I’ve got fivesight,’ he told me. ‘Something just a little bit better than foresight. ‘It was the only joke I ever heard him make, then or since.”

I made the gasping sound again. “Precognition,” Doc Webster breathed. Awkwardly, from my tailor’s seat, I worked my keys out of my pocket and tossed them to Callahan. He caught them in the coffee can he had ready and started a shot of Bushmill’s on its way to me without a word.

“You know the expression ‘Bad news travels fast’?” she asked. “For him it travels so fast it gets there before the

event. About three hours before, more or less. But only bad news. Disasters, accidents, traumas large and small are all he ever sees.”

“That sounds ideal,” Doc Webster said thoughtfully. “He doesn’t have to lose the fun ofpleasant surprises, but he

doesn’t have to worry about unpleasant ones. That sounds like the best way to … ” He shifted his immense bulk in his chair. “Damn it, what is the verb for precognition? Precognite?”

“Ain’t they the guys that sang that ‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog’ song?” Long-Drink murmured to Tommy, who kicked him hard in the shins.

“That shows how much you know about it,” she told the Doc. “He has three hours to worry about each unpleasant surprise-and there’s a strictly limited amount he can do about it.”

The Doc opened his mouth and then shut it tight and let her tell it. A good doctor hates forming opinions in ignorance.

“The first thing I asked him when he told me was why hadn’t he warned Phil and Mabel and the others. And then I

caught myself and said, ‘What a dumb question! How’re you going to keep six people away from their desks without

telling them why? Forget I asked that.’”

“‘It’s worse than that,’ he told me. ‘It’s not that I’m trying to preserve some kind of secret identity-it’s that it wouldn’t do the slightest bit of good anyway, I can ameliorate to some extent. But I cannot prevent. No matter what. I’m not… not permitted.’

“‘Permitted by who?’ I asked.

‘By whoever or whatever sends me these damned premonitions in the first place,’ he said. ‘I haven’t the faintest

idea who~

” ‘What exactly are the limitations?’

‘If a pot of water is going to boil over and scald me, I can’t just not make tea that night. Sooner or later I will make tea and scald myself. The longer I put off the inevitable, the worse 1 get burned. But if I accept it and let it happen in its natural time, I’m allowed to, say, have a pot of ice water handy to stick my hand in. When I saw that my neighbor’s steering box was going to fail, I couldn’t keep him from driving that day, but I could remind him to wear his seatbelt, and so his injuries were minimized. But if I’d seen him dying in that wreck,I couldn’t have done anything-except arrange to be near the wife when she got the news. It’s… it’s especialiy bad to try to prevent a death. The results are…I saw him start to say ‘horrible’ and reject it as not strong enough. He couldn’t find anything strong enough.

“‘Okay, Cass,’ I said real quick. ‘So at least you can help some. That’s more than some doctors can do. I think that was really terrific of you, to bring me that stuff like that, take a chance that I’d think you were-hey, how did you get hold of narcotics on three hours’ notice?’

“‘I had three hours’ warning for the last big blackout,’ he told me. I took two suitcases of stuff out of Smithtown General while they were trying to get their emergency generator going. I… have uses for the stuff.’”

She looked down into her empty cup, then handed to Eddie, who had it refilled. While he was gone, she stared at her lap, breathing with her whole torso, lungs cycling slowly from absolutely full to empty.

“I was grateful to him. I felt sorry for him. I figured be needed somebody to help him. I figured after a manic oppressive like Freddie, a quiet, phlegmatic kind of guy might suit me better. His favorite expression was, ‘What’s done is done.’ I started dating him. One day Bobby fell out of a tree and broke his leg, and Uncle Cass just happened to be walking by with a hypo and splints.” She looked up and around at us, and her eyes fastened on me. “Maybe I wanted my kid to be safe.” She looked away again. “Make a long story short, I married him.”

I spilled a little Bushmill’s down my beard. No one seemed to notice.

“It’s… funny,” she said slowly, and getting out that second word cost her a lot. “It’s really damned funny. At

first… at first, there, he was really good for my nerves. He never got angry. Nothing rattled him. He never got emotional the way men do, never got the blues. It’s not that he doesn’t feel things. I thought so at first, but I was wrong. It’s just that living with a thing like that, either he could be irritable enough to bite people’s heads off all the time, or he could learn how to bold it all in. That’s what he did, probably back when he was a little kid. ‘What’s done is done,’ he’d say, and keep on going. He does need to be held and cared for, have his shoulders rubbed out after a bad one, have one person he can tell about it. I know I’ve been good for him, and I guess at first it made me feel kind of special. As if it took some kind of genius person to share pain.” She closed her eyes and grimaced. “Oh, and Bobby came to love him sot!”

There was silence.

“Then the weirdness of it started to get to me. He’d put a BandAid in his pocket, and a couple of hours later he’d cut his finger chopping lettuce. I’d get diarrhea and run to the john, and there’d be my favorite magazine on the floor. I’d come downstairs at bedtime for vitamins and find every pot in the house full of water, and go back up to bed wondering

what the hell, and wake up a little while later to find that a socket short had set the living room on fire before it tripped the breaker and he had it under control. I’d catch him concealing some little preparation from me, and know that it was for me or Bobby, and I’d carry on and beg him to tell me-and the bcst of those times were when all I could make him tell me was, ‘What’s done is done.’

“I started losing sleep and losing weight.

“And then one day the principal called just before dinner to tell me that a school bus had been hit by a tractor-trailer and fourteen students were critically injured and Bobby and another boy were… I tbrew the telephone across the room at him, I jumped on him like a wild animal and punched him with my fists, I screamed and screamed. ‘YOU DIDN’T EVEN TRY!’ “she screamed again now, and it rang and rang in the stillness of Callahan’s Place. I wanted to leap up and take her in my arms, let her sob it out against my chest, but something held me back.

She pulled herself together and gulped cold coffee. You could bear the air conditioner sigh and the clock whir. You could not hear cloth rustle or a chair creak. When she spoke again, her voice was under rigid control. It made my heart sick to hear it.

“I left him for a week. He must have been hurting more than I was. So I left him and stayed in a crummy motel, curled up around my own pain. He made all the arrangements, and made them hold off burying Bobby until I came back, and when I did, all he said was…what I expected him to say, and we went on living.

“I started drinking. I mean, I started in that motel and kept it up when I went home. I never had before. I drank alone. I don’t know if he ever found out. He must have. He never said anything. I…I started growing away from him. I knew it wasn’t right or fair, but I just turned off to him completely. He never said anything. All this started happening about six months ago. I just got more and more self-destructivç, more, crazy, mere… hungry for something.”

She closed her eyes and straightened her shoulders.

“Tonight is Cass’s bowling night. This afternoon I…” She opened her eyes. “… I made a date with a stockboy at the Pŕthmark supermarket. I told him to come by around ten, when my husband was gone. After supper he got his ball and shoes ready, like always, and left. I started to clean up in the kitchen so I’d have time to get juiced before Wally showed up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Cass tiptoe back into the living room. He was carrying a big manila envelope and something else I couldn’t see; the envelope was in the way. I pretended not to see him, and in a few seconds I heard the door close behind him.

“I dried my hands. I went into the living room. On the mantel, by the bedroom door, was the envelope, tucked behind the flowerpot. Tucked behind it was his service revolver. I left it there and walked out the door and came here and started drinking, and now I’ve had enough of this fucking coffee. I want a screwdriver.”

Fast Eddie deserves his name. He was the first of us to snap out of the trance, and it probably didn’t take him more than thirty seconds. He walked over to the bar on his banty little legs and slapped down a dollar and said, “Screwdriver, Mike.”

Callahan shook his head slightly. He drew on his cigar and frowned at it for having gone out. He flung it into the fireplace and built a screwdriver, and he never said a mumblin’ word. Eddie brought her the drink. She drained half at once.

Shorty Steinitz spoke up, and his voice sounded rusty. I service air-conditioning systems. The big ones. I was over at Century Lanes today. Their unit has an intermittent that I can’t seem to trace. It keeps cuttin’ in and out.”

She shut her eyes and did something similar to smiling and nodded herhead. “That’s it, all right. He’ll be home early.”

Then she looked me square in the eye.

“Well, Jake, do you understand now? I’m scared as hell! Because I’m here instead of there, and so he’s not going to kill me after all. And he tells me that if you try to prevent a death, something worse happens, and I’m going out of my

mind wondering what could be worse than getting killed!” Total horror flooded through me; I thought my heart would stop.

I knew what was worse than getting killed.

Dear Jesus, no, I thought, and I couldn’t help it. I wanted very badly to keep my face absolutely straight and my eyes holding hers, and I couldn’t help it. There was just that tiny hope, and so I glanced for the merest instant at the Counterclock and then back to her. And in that moment of moments, scared silly and three-quarters bagged, she was readng me clearly enough to pick up on it and know from my face that something was wrong.

It was 10:15.

My heart was a stone. I knew the answers to the next questions, and again I couldn’t help myself: I had to ask

them.

“Mrs-?”

“Kathy Anders. What’s the matter?” Just what I had asked her, a few centuries ago.

“Kathy, you… you didn’t lock the house behind you when you left?”

Callahan went pale behind the bar, and his new cigar fell out of his mouth.

“No,” she said. “What the hell has that-“

“And you were too upset to think of-“

“Oh, Christ,” she screamed. “Oh, no, I never thought! Oh, Christ, Wally, that dumb cocky kid. He’ll show up at ten and find the door wide open and figure I went to the corner for beer and decide it’s cuts to wait for me in bed, and-” She whirled and found the clock, and puzzled out the time somehow, and wailed, “No!” And I tore in half right down the middle. She sprang frbm her chair and lurched toward the bar. I could not get to my feet to follow her. Callahan was already holding out the telephone, and when she couldn’t dial it, he got the number out of her and dialed it for her. His face was carven from marble. I was just getting up on my hindlegs by then. No one else moved. My feet made no sound at all on the sawdust. I could clearly hear the phone ringing on the other end. Once. Twice, Three limes. “Come on, Cass, damn you, answer me!” Four times. Oh dear God; I thought; she still doesn’t get it. Five times. Maybe she does get it and won’t have it. Six times.

It was picked upon the seventh ring, and at once she was shrieking, “You killed him, you bastard. He was just a jerk kid, and you had to-“

She stopped and held the phone at arm’s length and stared at it. It chittered at her, an agitated chipmunk. Her eyes