Back to the Future (5 page)

“They probably knew going in who was gonna win,” Dave nodded. “The rest was just window-dressing.”

“Sour grapes,” Linda said softly, not looking up from her dessert, which was Jell-O Instant chocolate pudding with a generic brand instant whipped topping.

“It’s too bad,” Mom sighed. “I think your group’s very good. I just don’t see how any other band could have been better.”

Dad looked up from his homework. “Believe me, son,” he dared to venture, “you’re better off not having the aggravation of dealing with that YMCA dance.”

“What aggravation?” Marty asked coldly.

“Well, you’d have to worry about getting all your equipment there—”

“We’ve done that lots of times already,” Marty interjected. “It’s no problem.”

“You’d have to make contingency plans in case somebody got sick,” his father continued.

“Nobody’s ever been sick.”

“All the more reason for somebody to be now,” he went on. “Then you’d have to make sure you got your money, see that everybody got the right share, settling with the musicians’ union…”

“Wow,” Marty muttered. “You sure can find a lot of good reasons to do nothing.”

It didn’t slow down his father even a half-beat.

“What if you were so good other people wanted to hire you?” he continued. “Then you’d have to worry about scheduling your job around school.”

“You’re right, Dad. Maybe I’d better just take to my bed right away. The longer I stay alive, the more problems I’m going to have.”

“Believe me, son, you’re better off without all those headaches,” his father concluded.

“He’s right, Marty,” Dave added sardonically, putting on his father. “If there’s one thing you don’t need, it’s headaches.”

Marty finally stopped arguing, even though quitting made him feel a little like his father.

Lorraine McFly turned her attention to Linda, who was finishing her pudding. “You didn’t have to eat that, you know,” she said. “We’ve got cake.”

Linda raised her eyebrows. “What cake?” she asked. Lorraine pointed to the three-layer cake on the kitchen counter. On the top was written
WELCOME HOME UNCLE JOEY
. Above the letters was a tiny black bird flying out of a barred window. It was hardly subtle, but Uncle Joey’s situation wasn’t a secret.

“It looks like we’ll have to eat this cake by ourselves again,” Lorraine smiled grimly. “Uncle Joey didn’t get a parole.”

“Maybe we should just try putting a file in something,” Dave suggested.

“It’s a shame,” Lorraine continued. “They practically assured him he’d get out this time. Then there was that shake-up in prison management. I guess that hurt him more than anything. Everybody has his own axe to grind.”

“It’s probably just as well,” Marty said. “If he came out, there’d be a lot of decisions to make. He’d have to find a job and fill out tax forms…”

“True,” Dave chimed in. “He’d have to worry about getting from place to place, having enough change to make phone calls…It’s probably better that he’s gotta stay in the joint.”

Lorraine frowned, looked at both of them angrily. George McFly did not look up from his homework.

“I wish you’d show a little more respect,” Lorraine said. “He’s my brother, you know.”

“Well, I think it’s a major embarrassment, having an uncle in prison,” Linda murmured.

“We all make mistakes in life, children,” Lorraine said philosophically.

“Yeah, but Uncle Joey made them consecutively,” Dave smiled. “And while on parole. That’s not only a mistake, that’s plain dumb.”

Lorraine didn’t answer. Instead she took another helping of potatoes.

Looking once again at the clock, Dave wiped his mouth and pushed his chair back. “Damn,” he said. “I’m gonna be late again.”

“Please watch your language,” his mother warned.

“Hell, yes,” Dave said, getting up and starting for the front door. A moment later, they heard his car start up and roar off. Marty wished he owned his own car, even a heap like Dave’s. At least he would be independent; if something went wrong with the car, he would have only himself to blame.

“By the way,” Lorraine said. “That girl Jennifer called…wants you to call her back.”

Marty nodded.

“I think her last name was Parker.”

“I know her last name, Mom.”

“But it could have been another Jennifer, couldn’t it?”

“Yes, but I don’t know any other Jennifers right now.”

“Sorry,” his mother said, scooping up the remains of her potatoes with a crust of bread. “Anyway, I’m not sure I like her. Any girl who calls up a boy is looking for trouble.”

Marty and Linda exchanged a meaningful glance. Had their mother lost her marbles?

“Oh, Mother,” Linda muttered, “there’s nothing wrong with calling a boy.”

“Well, I think it’s terrible,” Lorraine persisted. “Girls chasing boys—whoever heard of such a thing? I never chased a boy when I was your age. I never called a boy, or asked a boy for a date or sat in a parked car with a boy…”

What a dull childhood, Marty thought.

“Because when you behave like that, boys won’t respect you, Linda. They’ll think you’re cheap.”

Linda rolled her eyes. She’d heard it several hundred times already, although it probably seemed like at least one million.

“Then how are you supposed to meet anybody?” she asked.

“It’ll just happen,” Lorraine smiled. “Like the way I met your father.”

“But that was so stupid!” Linda whined. “Grandpa hit him with a car.”

“It was meant to be.”

“Maybe you should hang around the emergency wards,” Marty suggested.

“That wouldn’t do any good,” Lorraine said, unaware of his sarcasm. “You see, you’ll meet Mr. Wonderful in a certain way that you can’t make happen. And you won’t be able to avoid it either. It’s just bound to happen, like the sun’s supposed to come up tomorrow morning.”

All the metaphysics did not impress Linda. “I still don’t understand what Dad was doing in the middle of the street,” she said.

Dad, oblivious to the entire conversation, did not look up from his work, so Mom raised her voice to get his attention. “What was it, George?” she asked. “What were you doing there—bird-watching?”

George shook his head like a person coming out of a coma. “Huh?” he muttered thickly. “Did you say something, Lorraine?”

“Never mind.”

“He was probably just a very incompetent hitchhiker,” Marty offered. He really wasn’t interested in hearing how his parents had met.

Lorraine was interested in telling the story, however. “Anyway,” she went on, “Grandpa hit him with the car and brought him into the house. He was completely unconscious…”

“Like now,” Marty interrupted.

Lorraine shot a chiding glance at him. “He seemed so helpless…like a little lost puppy. And my heart just went out to him.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Linda smiled. “You’ve told us a million times. It was ‘Florence Nightingale to the rescue.’“

Lorraine leaned back in her chair, her eyes dreamy with nostalgic thoughts and pictures. “The very next weekend,” she continued, “we went on our first date. The ‘Enchantment Under the Sea’ School Dance.”

“Under
the sea?” Marty interrupted again. “You mean everybody came dressed as a clam or an oyster?”

His mother ignored him.

“I’ll never forget it,” she said. “It was the night of that terrible thunderstorm. Remember, George?”

“What’s that, dear?” George McFly mumbled.

“The night of our first date.”

“Mmm. It was raining.”

“Worst thunderstorm before or since,” Lorraine elaborated. “People still talk about it. Anyway, your father kissed me for the first time on the dance floor…and that was when I realized I was going to spend the rest of my life with him.”

“That really must have been some thunderstorm,” Marty smiled.

“I can’t believe Dad actually got up enough nerve to kiss you in public,” Linda said.

Lorraine flushed. “Well,” she said coyly. “I may have encouraged him a little…”

“I’ll bet you had to practically jump on his bones,” Marty offered.

With that, he finished eating, declining a piece of the convict’s non-homecoming cake, wiped his mouth and stood up.

Lorraine scarcely noticed, so lost was she in thought. “Thinking back on it,” she reminisced, “I did. I practically had to—”

Not wishing to fall into contemporary “obscene talk,” as she called it, she let the rest of the sentence die in her throat. It was an appropriate ending, anyway. Marty was halfway out of the kitchen, Linda was looking out the window at something happening next door and George was still lost in his papers. Lorraine shrugged and reached for the nearest knife. If no one was going to have a piece of Uncle Joey’s cake, she would give it a try.

Smiling in anticipation, she carved herself a four-inch wedge, shoved it onto her coffee saucer, and began to attack it. As the creamy icing melted in her mouth, so evaporated any feelings that the past thirty years had been anything but glorious.

Doc Brown eased the venerable step-van onto the Twin Pines Mall parking lot shortly after midnight. There were more cars than he expected so he pulled to the far rim of the asphalt area and waited.

“Must be a long movie,” he said to himself.

Einstein, the large dog curled on the passenger seat, hopped up as soon as the van stopped and poked his wet nose against the window.

“No, Einstein,” Doc Brown murmured. “Not yet. We have a few minutes, so make yourself comfortable again.” Einstein yawned, curled his tongue back into his mouth and tried to scratch beneath the collar he was wearing. The battery-operated digital clock attached to it undulated in the moonlight, changed from 00:07 to 00:08, then came to rest as the dog either satisfied its itch or gave up trying to scratch where he couldn’t reach.

A few minutes later, several dozen people emerged at once from the mall’s interior and moved to their cars. A series of starting engines, blinking lights and squealing rubber enlivened the vast treeless plain for a few minutes. Then all was silence again. The faint smell of gasoline fumes hung in the thick air as the tiny specks of light disappeared into the early morning darkness. In comparative solitude once again, Brown felt better. People made him feel vaguely insecure.

He was dreamily anticipating public reaction to his coming experiment when he suddenly realized he had forgotten one of the most important tools to be used.

“Damn,” he muttered.

Fortunately, it was 1985 rather than the old days, when he would have been forced to find a public telephone booth somewhere in the mall. Reaching under the dashboard, he pulled out his telephone and began to dial.

Marty was not asleep, partly because he had every intention of meeting Doc Brown, and partly because his mind was filled with dark unsettling thoughts. As far as Jennifer was concerned, of course, the damage had been done. He had forgotten to call her. Looking at his watch, he decided it was too late to give her a buzz, especially since he didn’t know if she was still at her grandmother’s or had gone home. Possibly this was a rationalization for his being too lazy. In any event, he dropped his wrist down across his chest and closed his eyes once again.

In the light from the single lamp, it was possible to see that the room’s occupant was heavily into rock music, cars and sound reproduction. Covering the walls were posters of rock stars and new cars, particularly Toyota four-by-fours. A tape recorder, portable home synthesizer and sizable stack of lead sheets were packed in one corner while a bass guitar and amp sprawled in another.

Although he was weary from all the running around, Marty couldn’t sleep. He continued to think of the shoddy treatment he had gotten at the hands of the section committee and began to wonder if he would ever get anywhere in the recording business. After twenty minutes, he got up and walked to the desk near his bed. He picked up the submissions form with R & G RECORDS on the letterhead, read it over, and put it in the accompanying envelope along with his demo cassette.

It’s worth a try, he thought. Just send it.

And then another darker side of him hesitated. Send it for what? Another rejection? Spend postage just so he could live with hope for another few weeks before his bubble burst once more?

Shrugging, he dropped the cassette and letter into the waste basket and fell back into bed. His mind, occupied with depressing thoughts, eventually released him into a deep sleep that ended shortly after midnight.

Beep. Beep-beep.

Marty shook his head and reached for the cordless telephone next to his bed. “Hello.”

“You didn’t fall asleep, did you?” Doc Brown asked on the other end.

“Uh, no. Course not.”

“You sound like you just woke up.”

“I was thinking,” Marty said. “What’s up? I don’t have to leave for a while yet.”

“Uh-huh,” Brown replied. “I was just wondering. I forgot my video camera. Could you stop by my place and pick it up on your way to the mall?”

“No problem, Doc. Key still in the same place?”

“That’s right. Under the potted plant.”

“That’s not a very good place,” Marty said. “First spot a burglar would look.”

“I haven’t been robbed yet. Anyway, the place looks so junky. Nobody’d ever suspect there’s a billion dollars’ worth of research in there.”

“O.K., Doc. I’ll see you in a half hour or so.”

“Right.”

Marty hung up, put his shoes back on, grabbed his jacket, the skateboard and his new Walkman, which he carried with him wherever he went. Then, retracing his steps to the bed, he shoved some extra pillows under the covers to make it seem as if a body were lying there, sound asleep. Even as he did it, he wondered why he bothered. This wasn’t, after all, a prison. The guards didn’t patrol every hour making a head count. But somehow it just seemed the thing to do when you were heading out of the house late at night.

Whistling softly, he closed the door quietly behind him and tiptoed down the stairs.

Letting himself out the front door, Marty walked a half block before putting down the skateboard and using it. He had discovered once, to his chagrin, how much noise they could make on a quiet evening. On that occasion, about two years ago, he had been sneaking out to meet the guys when his mother heard the sound and came after him in the car.