The Wooden Sea (12 page)

understood what he wanted. It had been so long since I was in a place where I didn't speak the language. Now suddenly I was in two simultaneously-- Austria and Old Age.

While concocting some piece of nonsense about my "grandson" to tell Gus Gould, I heard a huge high sound. Instinctively I knew what it was because I'd made the sound myself many times on my Ducati--the high ripping whine of a downshifting motorcycle. Turning from Gus toward the street, I saw the last thing I would ever see: A most beautiful silver and sleek motorcycle, airborne, was sailing straight at me.

The End.

*Holes in the Rain*

The next thing I knew, I was staring at my hands. They were holding a strawberry milk shake in an old-fashioned fluted glass. They were "my"

hands again--no liver spots, bread-dough skin sagging in tired layers, no knuckles the size of walnut shells protruding from beneath.

Instead, the skin was a healthy color, not the patchwork quilt of sickly hues and spots it had been in Vienna.

Slowly, I curled one into a fist and was thrilled as a child to feel no pain slither up through it. But before I got too excited, I uncurled the hand just as slowly to see if it worked the other way too.

Success. Was I back? Was I me again? Putting the hand flat down on the red Formica counter, I felt the cool of the plastic beneath my reborn palm. I slid it back and forth across the smooth surface. Then I lifted my hand a few inches and had the fingers do a little dance to celebrate our return.

"Are you going to drink that milk shake or are you trying to hypnotize it?"

I knew it was too good to be true. I knew the voice and did not want to see the face it came from. But against the advice of every atom in my body, I turned the rotating stool to look.

I was in Scrappy's Diner in Crane's View. Scrappy's is never empty from the minute it opens at six in the morning until it closes at midnight. But the joint was empty now. That is, except for me and good old Astopel sitting way down at the other end of the counter. Watching me, he smiled like a son of a bitch.

"Couldn't I just have had thirty seconds of happiness alone before I saw you again? Isn't there a law against too much you in one lifetime?"

"You can have all the time you want, Mr. McCabe. But your clock is ticking."

My throat was dirt-dry so I sipped the milk shake, which tasted as good as sex at that moment.

In fact I couldn't stop sipping, which turned into glugging until the glass was empty. Even my throat felt younger, it was so happy and eager to belt the sweet stuff down.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. "All right, _what _clock is ticking?"

"How did you like your death? It's certainly dramatic."

"Is that really how I'm going to die?"

"Yes, a motorcycle in the head."

"I'll be killed by a motorcycle in the head in Vienna when I'm a hundred years old and so worn out and cantankerous that I should have died years before. Now that's something to look forward to."

"Not quite one hundred, I'm afraid."

"How old?"

"I cannot tell you. You must find out all those things yourself. But at the rate you're going, you won't even find that out before your time is up."

"Explain."

He slid off his stool and went behind the counter. He walked toward me, picked up my glass, and poured more into it from a metal shaker.

He placed it in front of me. "Strawberry, right? That's the flavor you prefer?"

"You made this? It's good."

"Thank you. `Consider the last of everything and then thou wilt depart from the dream of it.' Do you know that line? It's from the Koran." He drew a glass of Coke from a machine and to my astonishment, put it in a microwave oven.

Setting to its highest temperature, he waited till it pinged seconds later.

Removing the glass, he took a sip of what must have been six-hundred-degree Coca-Cola and smacked his lips in delight.

"Astopel, tell me you didn't do that. Is your tongue asbestos? Or are you the devil? Is that what all this is about?"

"You keep looking for easy answers, Mr. McCabe. Unfortunately there are none.

Perhaps you should find a better way of looking."

"Yeah? Well, a moment ago I was too busy being traumatized as an old man and wearing a motorcycle for a hat."

"That's a pity. Because you only have four more chances to go back to your future before the week is over. _When _you return is up to you, but you have only these six days--

"What do you mean, six? You said seven. You said I had a week."

"Look outside."

It was pitch-black out there. "Today's over?"

"Today is over."

"Today is Tuesday."

"Was."

"I have until next Tuesday either here or in my future to figure this out?"

"Correct."

I tapped the edge of my glass on the counter. "Or else?"

"Well, remember what Antonya Corando told you."

"She said she didn't kill herself. Said someone else did it to her."

Astopel nodded. "And not only your own well-being is at stake now. A great many others' as well. You have seven days because you have seven days. You can spend your remaining time trying to understand why, but I think that would be a waste.

"Perhaps it will comfort you to know there are others in the same situation as you right this minute, Mr. McCabe."

"Who have to do the same thing as me?"

"Yes."

"They're in Crane's View?" "No, all around the world."

I drank the last of the strawberry shake. It didn't taste so good this time.

"Two other things to know, Mr. McCabe. You can return to your future whenever you want this week. Say the phrasèholes in the rain' and you will go. Once there, however, your return to the present is out of your hands--it will simply happen.

"The second thing to know is when you visit the future, it will always be to the day previous to the one you experienced. So your next visit will be to the day before you died."

"This is completely crazy."

"Hopefully it will eventually make sense to you." He finished his drink and came around the counter. Without looking back, he moved toward the door.

"Wait! One more thing: Why did I marry Susan Ginnety? Did something happen to
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Magda? _Will _something happen to her?"

He raised his head and looked at the ceiling. "Something happens to everyone, Mr. McCabe."

And then he left.

The streets of Crane's View were empty and still as I trudged home from the diner. Night keeps its own sounds to itself because most of them come from the other side of silence. Because there is so little noise after midnight, your ears perk up and strain to hear anything in their neighborhood. So used to being flooded with everyday white noise, they don't know how to relax. Ears are not happy with hush;

it's not their domain. So they turn up the volume on the single-engine plane flying by far overhead, or the lone car moving its way across the night five blocks away.

And when those were joined by the screech of a cat being humped at that quiet hour, it was the sound equivalent of a pair of scissors jabbed into your ear.

But all of them came from here and now, this moment, not the future--now. I welcomed them and wished there were more to reassure me I was back in the time where I wanted to be.

As often happens when I'm confused, I started talking to myself. It's a helpful habit I developed in Vietnam while trying anything to keep from going crazy in that hell.

With the utmost concern I asked myself, "Are you all right?"

Pause. Scowl. "All right? I'm alive. That's it. I'm alive and don't know what the fuck to do. What the fuck I'm _supposed _to do. I know zero but am still supposed to figure all this stuff out in a week. Or else. Good luck, daddy-o."

Looking around at the quiet familiar surroundings, the combination of rancor and confusion for what had happened to me, combined with the love in my heart for where I was almost made me dizzy. "That's what this whole thing does--it makes me dizzy!"

I needed a lot of Crane's View to regain my balance that night, so I took the long way home despite the late hour. I purposely passed the Schiavo house just to see if anything else had happened there. What was left of the burnt-out ruin was dark and silent. A few minutes later I stood in front of George

Dalemwood's place. As usual the downstairs was lit up because George doesn't like the night.

He says lit bulbs keep him company. I would have loved to knock on his door and gone in for a long talk about everything but didn't. I

knew that before I spoke with him again about any of this, I needed to think things through carefully. I was sure sometime in the future I'd want his help, so presenting the details to him clearly and calmly was essential. George was a patient, open-minded man but hearing what had happened to me that night, especially if I told it the wrong way, might make even my good friend reach for a butterfly net.

I sighed/said, "Go home, Fran. Go home to your family."

Smith sat like a statue on the top step of the porch to our house, looking as if he had been waiting for me to return. I was so tired I'didn't even say hello. Reaching down, I just stroked his head a few times and then opened the front door.

Home sweet smell. The Dutch have a line that goes something like the sound of a clock ticking is always nicest at home. Even better are the smells of home.

One whiff and the soul knows where you are before the mind does. I stood in the front hall and, closing my eyes, simply breathed home for a little while.

After what I had been through, it was God's perfume. My life was on that air.

The people I lived with, the objects we owned, the cat, popcorn someone had made earlier, Pauline's CK One cologne; even the dust smelled familiar.

Upstairs the two women would be asleep--Magda in sweatpants and one of my Macalester College T-shirts, her body sprawled across as much of the bed as possible. Pauline in a nightgown huddled on an edge of her bed as if she were afraid of taking up too much space.

Unlike her mother, she slept lightly, she had bad dreams; her closed eyelids always fluttered.

I was exhausted and empty as a dead man's mailbox. The thought of slipping into the warm bed beside my wife was almost as gratifying as the act itself.

But as soon as the word "wife" trotted across my mind, the next thing that followed was a picture of Susan Ginnety who, _x _years in the future, would be Mrs. F. McCabe. Thinking about that deranged union snapped my eyes open.

The cat purred at my feet. Without warning, he raced across the room, leapt in the air, and threw himself full force against a window. There was a squeaky squawk and a bird sprang off the outside windowsill and fluttered away. Two large white feathers drifted lazily down and out of sight. I watched and thought-- feathers. So now that feathers were on my mind, up came a picture of the one tattooed on Pauline's spine and then the one I'd found and buried with Old Vertue and... Like a bomb bursting in my brain, I remembered something from my future.

It made me so excited that without thinking I said, "Holes in the rain!"

Because I had to return to find another feather I'd seen up there that might be the answer to everything.

I was naked. I was naked and in bed. I was naked and in bed with a woman. Who was naked.

And old. And not my wife Magda. And she had her hand on me, clearly trying to bring Old Horny to attention with her busy fingers.

I stood straight up on the bed and covered myself, but not before noticing she had been semisuccessful with her hand jive.

An old Susan Ginnety smiled up at me with a triumphant leer. "I told you I'd get you up, Frannie! Get back down here now. Stop being silly."

Sixty years earlier, this woman and I had had sex in every position two eager teenage bodies could manage, not to mention using every one of our nooks and crannies to fullest effect. But now, towering above her on wobbly old man's legs, I felt as modest as a nun in the boys'

locker room.

"Cut it out, Susan! Are you crazy?"

That got her up. She stood on the side of the bed with hands on her bony hips showing me a naked body I did _not _want to see. "I have been very patient until now, Frannie. But I am a
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woman. I have _needsl"_

If I played this wrong, I'd never get any answers out of her.

"Look at me, Susan. You want to make love to _this _body? I look like a Dead Sea Scroll!"

She was unmoved. "Why did you marry me if you knew this would happen?"

Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, "That's a good question."

She punched me in the knee. Thank God I stood on a bed because I collapsed sideways and my head bounced like a Ping-Pong ball on the mattress.

"Bastard! You proposed to me! Why did I ever say yes? Why did I ever think it would work?"

World War Knee had my full attention while she ranted. Even when the pain dropped back below the danger zone, I kept rolling around and groaning. As if I'd been kneecapped by the Mafia rather than punched there by an old woman.

Two sharp knocks on the door froze us. We stared at each other like we'd been caught doing something bad. A short pause followed by three more knocks. I pulled the blanket up to my chin. In no hurry, Susan wrapped herself in a green terry cloth robe that had been slung over a chair.

For the first time since I'd "awakened" here, I looked around. It was one of the most beautiful hotel rooms I'd ever seen. It should have been occupied by a head of state, or at least someone with their own Gulfstream jet fueled and waiting at the airport; definitely not a room for the Crane's View chief of police. My first wife (First? Now I was apparently on my third!) loved the caviar life, so I had spent time in many plush hotel rooms. But those were railroad waiting rooms in Upper Volta compared to this palace. How the hell had I ended up here with a geriatric nymphomaniac? More importantly, who was paying for it?

"Hi, Gus," she said glumly.