Ken Grimwood (3 page)

"That's right," Jeffs mother said. "Not five minutes ago, I was saying how long it'd been since you called."

Jeff had no idea whether that meant a week or a month, and he didn't want to ask. "Hi, Dad," he said quickly. "I hear you bagged a prize pompano."

"Hey, you should've been there." His father laughed. "Bud didn't get a nibble all day, and the only thing Janet came up with was a sunburn. She's still peeling—looks like an overcooked shrimp!"

Jeff hazily remembered the names as belonging to one of the couples his parents had been friends with, but he couldn't put faces to them. He was struck by how vital and full of energy his mother and father both sounded. His father had come down with emphysema in 1982, and seldom left the house anymore. Only with difficulty could Jeff picture him out on the ocean, besting a powerful deep-sea fish, the Pall Mall in the corner of his mouth soggy with spray. In fact, Jeff thought numbly, his parents were now almost exactly his own age—or the age he had been this time yesterday.

"Oh," his mother said, "I ran into Barbara the other day. She's doing just fine at Rollins, and she said to tell you Gappy got that problem all straightened out."

Barbara, Jeff dimly recalled, was a girl he'd dated in high school; but the name Gappy meant nothing to him now.

"Thanks," Jeff said. "Next time you see her, tell Barbara I'm real glad to hear that."

"Are you still going out with that little Judy?" his mother asked. "That was such a darling picture you sent of her, we can't wait to meet her. How is she?"

"She's fine," he said evasively, beginning to wish he hadn't made this call.

"How's the Chevy doing?" his father interjected. "Still burning oil like it was?"

Jesus; Jeff hadn't thought about that old car in years.

"Car's O.K., Dad." That was a guess. He didn't even know where it might be parked. The smoky old beast had been a graduation present from his parents, and he'd driven it until it finally died on him during his senior year at Emory.

"How about the grades? That paper you were griping about, the one on … You know, the one you told us last week you were having some trouble with. What was that, anyway?"

"Last week? Yeah, the … history paper. I finished that. Haven't gotten the grade yet."

"No, no, it wasn't for history. You said it was some English Lit thing, what was it?"

A child's voice suddenly came on the line, babbling excitedly. Jeff realized with a jolt that the child was his sister—a woman who'd been through two divorces, who had a daughter of her own just entering high school. Hearing her nine-year-old's exuberance, Jeff was touched. His sister's voice seemed the very embodiment of lost innocence, of time turned poignantly back upon itself.

The conversation with his family had grown stifling, uncomfortably disturbing. He cut it short, promised to call again in a few days. When he hung up, his forehead was damp with chill sweat, his throat dry. He took the stairs down to the lobby, bought a Coke for a quarter, drained it in three long gulps. Someone was in the TV room, watching "Sky King."

Jeff dug in his other pocket, fished out a key ring. One of the six keys was for the dorm room, he'd used that to let himself back m last night; there were three others he didn't recognize, and two that were clearly a set of General Motors ignition and trunk keys.

He walked outside, blinked at the bright Georgia sunshine. There was a weekend feel to the campus, a distinctive lazy quietude that Jeff recognized instantly. On fraternity row, he knew, captive squads of pledges would be mopping the houses clean and hanging papier-mâche decorations for the Saturday-night round of parties; the girls in Harris Hall and the unnamed new women's dorm would be lounging about in Bermuda shorts and sandals, waiting for their afternoon dates to pick them up for a drive to Soap Creek or Stone Mountain. Off to his left, Jeff could hear the chanted cadences of the Air Force ROTC drill, being conducted without irony or protest. No one was playing Frisbee on the grass; no odor of marijuana hung in the air. The students here could not conceive of the changes the world was about to endure.

He scanned the parking lot in front of Longstreet Hall, searching for his blue-and-white '58 Chevy. It was nowhere in sight. He walked down Pierce Drive, then made a wide circle on Arkwright past Dobbs Hall and up behind the other cluster of men's dorms; the car wasn't there either.

As he walked toward Clifton Road Jeff could again hear the barked commands and rote responses from the ROTC field. The sound made something click in his mind, and he turned left over a small bridge across from the post office, then trudged up a road past the Phi Chi medical fraternity. The campus property ended there, and a block farther on he found his car. He was a freshman, so he couldn't get a parking sticker until next fall; he'd had to park off campus that first year. Even so, there was a ticket on the windshield. He should've moved the car that morning, according to the hours posted on a sign above him.

He sat behind the wheel, and the feel and smell of the car evoked a dizzying jumble of responses.

He'd spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours in this tattered seat: at drive-in movies and restaurants with Judy, on road trips with Martin or other friends or by himself—to Chicago, Florida, once all the way to Mexico City. He had grown from adolescence to adulthood in this car, more so than in any dorm room or apartment or city. He'd made love in it, gotten drunk in it, driven it to his favorite uncle's untimely funeral, used its temperamental yet powerful V-8 engine to express anger, jubilation, depression, boredom, remorse.

He'd never given the car a name, had considered the idea of doing so juvenile; but now he realized how much the machine had meant to him, how thoroughly his own identity had been meshed with the quirky personality of that old Chevy.

Jeff put the key in the ignition, started it up. The engine backfired once, then rumbled to life. He turned the car around, took a right on Clifton Road past the half-constructed bulk of the Communicable Disease Center. They'd still call it the CDC in the eighties, but by then the initials would stand for Centers for Disease Control, and the place would be world-renowned for its studies of such panic-inducing scourges of the future as Legionnaire's Disease and AIDS.

The future: hideous plagues, a revolution in sexual attitudes achieved and then reversed, triumph and tragedy in space, city streets haunted by null-eyed punks in leather and chains and spiked pink hair, death-beams in orbit around the polluted, choking earth … Christ, Jeff thought with a shudder, from this viewpoint his world sounded like the most nightmarish of science fiction. In many ways, the reality he'd grown used to had more in common with movies like
Blade Runner
than it did with the sunny naïveté of early 1963.

He turned on the radio: crackling, monaural AM, no FM band on the dial at all. "Our Day Will Come," Ruby and the Romantics crooned at him, and Jeff laughed aloud.

At Briarcliff Road he turned left, drove aimlessly through the shaded residential neighborhoods to the west of the campus. The street became Moreland Avenue after a ways, and he kept on driving, past Inman Park, past the Federal Penitentiary where Al Capone had served his time. The city street signs disappeared, and he was on the Macon Highway, heading south.

The radio kept him company with its unending stream of pre-Beatle hits: "Surfin' USA," "I Will Follow Him," "Puff, the Magic Dragon." Jeff sang along with all of them, pretended he was listening to an oldies station. All he had to do was hit another button, he told himself, and he'd hear Springsteen or Prince, maybe a jazz station playing the latest Pat Metheny on a compact disc. Finally the signal faded, and so did his fantasy. He could find nothing across the dial except more of the same antiquated music. Even the country stations had never heard of Willie or Waylon; it was all Ernest Tubbs and Hank Williams, not an outlaw in the pack.

Outside McDonough he passed a roadside stand selling peaches and watermelons. He and Martin had stopped at a stand just like that on one of their Florida drives, mainly because of the long-legged farm girl in white shorts who'd been selling the fruit. She'd had a big German Shepherd with her, and after some pointless city-boy/country-girl banter, he and Martin had bought a whole bushel basket full of peaches from her. They hadn't even wanted the damned things, got sick of smelling them after thirty miles or so, and started using them for target practice on road signs, whooping with inane glee at the
"Splat
—

Kerblang!"
that resulted from a successful toss.

That had been, what, the summer of '64 or '65? A year or two from now. As of today, he and Martin hadn't made that trip, hadn't bought those peaches, hadn't stained and dented half the speed-limit signs from here to Valdosta with them. So what did that mean now? If Jeff were still in this inexplicably reconstructed past when that June day rolled around again, would he make the same trip, share the same jokes with Martin, throw those same ripe peaches at the same road signs? And if he didn't, if he chose to stay in Atlanta that week, or if he simply drove past the girl with the legs and the peaches … then what of his memory of that episode? Where had it come from, and what would happen to it?

In one sense he appeared to be reliving his life, replaying it like a video tape; yet it didn't seem that he was bound by what had taken place before, not entirely. So far as he could tell, he had arrived back at this point in his life with every circumstance intact—enrolled at Emory, rooming with Martin, taking the same courses that he had a quarter of a century before—but in the twenty-four hours since he'd reawakened here, he'd already begun to subtly veer from the paths he had originally followed.

Standing up Judy last night—that was the biggest and most obvious change, though it wouldn't necessarily affect anything one way or the other, in the long run. They'd only dated for another six or eight months, he recalled, until sometime around next Christmas. She'd left him for an "older man," he remembered with a smile, a senior, going on to medical school at Tulane. Jeff had been hurt and depressed for a few weeks, then started going out with a string of other girls: a skinny brunette named Margaret for a while, then another dark-haired girl whose name started with a D or a V, then a blonde who could tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue. He hadn't met Linda, the woman he would marry, until he was out of college and working at a radio station in West Palm Beach. She'd been a student at Florida Atlantic University. They'd met on the beach at Boca Raton …

Jesus, where was Linda right now? Two years younger than he, she'd still be in high school, living with her parents. He had a sudden urge to call her, maybe keep on driving south to Boca Raton and see her, meet her … No, that wouldn't do at all. It would be too strange. Something like that might be dangerously far afield, might create some horrendous paradox.

Or would it? Did he really have to worry about paradoxes, the old killing-your-own-grandfather idea? That might not be an appropriate concern at all. He wasn't an outsider wandering around in this time, afraid of encountering himself at an earlier age; he actually
was
that younger self, part and parcel of the fabric of this world. Only his mind was of the future—and the future existed only in his mind.

Jeff had to pull off the road and stop for a few minutes, head in hands, as he absorbed the implications of that. He'd wondered before whether he might be hallucinating this past existence. But what if the reverse were true, what if the whole complex pattern of the next two and a half decades—everything from the fall of Saigon to New Wave rock music to personal computers—turned out to be a fiction that had somehow sprung full-blown into his head, overnight, here in the
real
world of 1963, which he had never left? That made as much sense as, maybe more than, any alternative explanation involving time travel or afterlife or dimensional upheaval.

Jeff started the Chevy again, got back onto two-lane U.S. 23. Locust Grove, Jenkinsburg, Jackson … the dilapidated, drowsy little towns of backwoods Georgia slid past like scenes from a movie of the depression era. Maybe that was what had drawn him to make this aimless drive, he thought: the timelessness of the countryside beyond Atlanta, the total lack of clues to what year or decade it might be.

Weathered barns with "Jesus Saves" painted in massive letters, the staggered highway rhymes of leftover Burma Shave signs, an old black man leading a mule … even the Atlanta of 1963 seemed futuristic compared to this.

At Pope's Ferry, just north of Macon, he pulled into a mom-and-pop gas station with a general store attached. No self-service pumps, no unleaded; Gulf premium for thirty-three cents a gallon, regular for twenty-seven. He told the kid outside to fill it with premium and check the oil, add two quarts if it was low.

He bought a couple of Slim Jims and a can of Pabst in the store, clawed ineffectually at the beer can for a moment or two before he realized there was no pop top.

"You must be mighty thirsty, hon." The old woman behind the counter chuckled. "Tryin' to tear that thing open with your bare hands!"

Jeff smiled sheepishly. The woman pointed to a church-key hanging on a string by the cash register, and he punched two V-shaped holes in the top of the can. The boy from the gas pumps shouted through the ratty screen door of the store: "Looks like you need about three quarts of oil, mister!"

"Fine, put in whatever it takes. And check the fan belts, too, will you?"

Jeff took a long sip of the beer, picked a magazine from the rack. There was an article about the new pop-art craze: Lichtenstein's blowups of comic-strip panels, Oldenburg's big, floppy vinyl hamburgers.

Funny, he'd thought all that happened later, '65 or '66. Had he found a discrepancy? Was this world already slightly different from the one he thought he knew?

He needed to talk to somebody. Martin would just make a big joke of it all, and his parents would worry for his sanity. Maybe that was it; maybe he should see a shrink. A doctor would at least listen, and keep the talk confidential; but an encounter like that would carry the unspoken presupposition of a mental problem, a desire to be "cured" of something.