Written in Time (21 page)

Jack Naile looked over at his son, “Just like the YMCA pool in Athens, huh? Come on!”
 

Once they hit the water, Ellen’s description of the water temperature proved woefully inadequate. “This is freezing!” Jack shouted as he stepped into the stream.
 

“Yeah! Isn’t it though!? Didn’t you wonder why my lips had turned blue, Jack?” Ellen called back from the other side of the carriage, where she and Lizzie stood out of sight.
 

“Lips are not what’s turned blue on me!”
 

“You shouldn’t talk that way in front of your daughter, Jack! You and David have fun. If you’re good, maybe we won’t hide your clothes.”
 

Five minutes by the face of the Rolex was all that Jack could take, and David was out of the water in three minutes flat. David was rubbing his naked arms and legs to shed excess water, glaring as Jack emerged from the stream. “This was a dumb idea, Dad.”
 

“We’ll get used to it, son!” But Jack hoped they wouldn’t have to get used to it for long. On the return trip to Atlas, Ellen and Lizzie sat huddled in their shawls, their bodies still shaking a little. Maybe David had been right, Jack Naile mused. It had been a dumb idea.
 

It was very nearly dusk as Jack was handed back his deposit on the buggy and the horse and saddle. He’d dropped his family in front of the store that would, if this round of history proved out, someday be theirs. Rather progressively, considering that the time was after five, the store had still been open. David had taken the rifle with him, Jack keeping charge of the all-important attaché case that contained the family fortune.
 

Jack lit a cigarette, his second of the day, remembering to use a match rather than the Bic. He was down to one pack remaining and, after that, it would be learning to roll his own, smoking cigars or quitting.
 

He felt lighthearted, more so than at any time since their abrupt and potentially deadly arrival in the past. The property where the house would be built looked even better than it had/would. If they could rig it up and find something to use for wiring, the stream would provide more than enough hydroelectric-power potential. And despite the water temperature, the dip in the stream had been fun. Had the children been elsewhere, it would have been more fun, with Ellen’s body up against his in the water and wanting his body’s warmth once out of the stream. Yet those times would come. All too soon, he realized with each day that passed, the kids would be grown, on their own, he and Ellen alone with memories of a past that was a future that had not happened yet, but somehow had.
 

As Jack approached the boarding house from the opposite side of the street, he wondered absently if Ellen, Lizzie and David had already gone up on the little porch and continued inside.
 

The corset salesman, looking weary beyond endurance, sat in the solitary rocking chair. Jack couldn’t remember his name. “Let me guess. The axle for your wagon still isn’t fixed.”
 

“You’re right there, fella.” The corset salesman shifted his bulk—he was pushing three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce—simultaneously with shifting the stump of a cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right side. “I needa be on my way soon. Got customers to see.”
 

“Corsets a big business?”
 

“Big. Future’s in corsets.” Jack laughed silently at that. “Someday every woman in this here great land o’ ours gonna be wearin’ one o’ my corsets. See, I don’t just sell ’em, neighbor. My brother-in-law and me, we own the factory back in Chicago what makes ‘em. I cover the West and he covers the East.”
 

“Sounds like he’s got the easier job, friend.”
 

“Future’s in the West, neighbor. And your average woman, well, she wants to have what other women have, and that’s a corset. If’n you’ll pardon the word, ‘virgin’ territory. That’s what the West is for corsets. Virgin territory.”
 

Jack Naile shrugged his shoulders. “Where I come from, most of the women who wear corsets aren’t exactly virgins. Say, you see my wife and son and daughter come in?”
 

“That wife o’ yours—and I mean no disrespect—but her and your daughter, you might wanna get ‘em some of the Night Thrush corsets. They’re top o’ the line. Top!”
 

“My girls aren’t the corset type, friend; but, I’ll ask them. So, they went inside?” Jack pressed.
 

“Ain’t seen ‘em, neighbor, and I been on this here porch since . . .” He tugged a big gold pocket watch from the confines of his nearly bursting vest. “Since half-past four.”
 

Jack licked his lips, simultaneously snapping away the butt of his cigarette and thumbing the hammer loop off his revolver holster.
 

“Thanks, friend!” Jack shouted, grabbing up the attaché case as he broke into a dead run through the gathering darkness, toward the store, his right hand on the butt of his gun lest it pop out of the holster.
 

Jack heard indistinguishable voices from the narrow breezeway to the side of the store. The store’s lights were still on. He passed the store at a dead run, glancing through the near window, the double doors and the far window as he ran. The aproned, balding proprietor was sweeping up, no sign of customers.
 

The sounds coming from the breezeway were definitely voices, male and female.
 

Jack stopped, his hand still on the butt of his Colt, his palms sweating.
 

“Lookee heah, gals. Don’t matter no mind to me an’ Lester whether you hitch up them there skirts y’selves or we go an’ do it fer ya. Less’n ya like gettin’ on ya knees and doin’ us that way. And don’t go lookin’ to the boy. If’n he wakes up, it won’t be for a long time, and that’s fo’ fact.”
 

“Go to hell, you son of a bitch.”
 

It was Ellen’s voice, and Jack, stepping into the mouth of the breezeway, announced, “And I can send both you assholes to hell real quick.”
 

The only light in the breezeway came in broad pale-yellow shafts emanating from gaps in the curtained windows above. The general store had a false front, but the building beside it had a true second floor, the rooms there serving as a cheap rooming house for cowboys and drifters.
 

Ellen and Lizzie, all but lost in shadow, but obviously scared, stood shoulder to shoulder, their backs against the side wall of the Merchants Café. The men bracing them, on the general-store side of the breezeway, were more readily visible in the weak light from the café’s second-story windows.
 

David lay sprawled on the ground, mostly in shadow, and Jack couldn’t tell his condition.
 

“Lester” and the man who’d declared his foul intentions wheeled around to face Jack. They had the look of Fowler’s range detectives about them, broad-brimmed slouched hats, leather stovepipe chaps, each of the men with a six-gun at his right hip and a second one butt forward at his left. Jack noticed one of them had a third revolver, probably David’s.
 

“They mess with you or Lizzie, Ellen?”
 

“They don’t have the balls, Jack. One of them—that piece of shit, Lester—” Ellen stabbed an accusatory right index finger toward the man with David’s revolver in his belt—“he slugged David from behind while David was beating the crap out of the other one.”
 

Jack Naile wanted a cigarette very badly. “If you harmed my son, guys, you’re in deep shit.”
 

“Back y’all’s play an’ fill y’all’s hand!” Lester of the three revolvers shouted, the gun at Lester’s right hip springing from his holster as if levitated by David Copperfield.
 

Jack felt his body moving, his right leg snapping out and forward, his right shoulder dropping as his right knee slightly bent and the fingers of his right hand closed around the butt of his Colt. Something whistled past Jack’s right ear—probably a bullet.
 

The sound of the Colt firing from the hand at the end of Jack’s extended right arm shocked him into awareness of what he’d been doing only by reflex action. The single shot from Jack’s Colt struck Lester somewhere between the dark wild rag over Lester’s Adam’s apple and the belt buckle above Lester’s chaps. Lester fell back against the wall of the general store.
 

The unnamed man, who had threatened Jack’s wife and daughter with rape, had a six gun in his right hand and was grabbing for Lizzie with his left. Ellen punched him in the face. He let go of Lizzie and seemed perplexed for a split second, stepping more fully into one of the shafts of yellow light. Hit the woman or shoot the man?
 

Jack didn’t wait for the range detective’s decision, triggering a second shot. The man’s right eye and cheekbone seemed to collapse, as if sucked into his face, his pistol discharging into the ground near his boots. His body sprawled back along the wall of the general store.
 

“My God, Daddy,” Lizzie murmured, just loudly enough that Jack could make out the words over the ringing in his ears. And he heard something else. The voices of men behind him, cheering, applauding.
 

Jack felt suddenly nauseous, but suppressed the reaction, dropping to his knees beside David. Ellen and Lizzie were already at David’s side.
 

Lizzie was crying, hugging David. Ellen said something like, “He’s alive.” So far.
 

The town’s occasional doctor was, of course, not in town, but the traveling dentist who had been so impressed with the Naile family’s dental hygiene was among the cheering crowd of well-wishers who surrounded Jack in the aftermath of the shooting. In lieu of a medical doctor, the dentist had volunteered to examine David and treat, as best he could, any injuries David might have sustained. The two men Jack had shot needed no treatment.
 

Jack was rather out of it, and Ellen took over. “Yes, please, examine him.” David was starting to come around. Western movies and detective novels notwithstanding, any blow on the head could be serious, and one which resulted in unconsciousness, however fleetingly, could be deadly.
 

After an almost too-quick examination to ascertain that David’s neck or back had not been broken from the range detective’s blow with a pistol butt, two of the townsmen made a chair seat of their locked hands and carried David to Mrs. Treacher’s, ensconcing him in the parlor.
 

A large crowd had gathered on the porch, with more gathering in the street.
 

Jack, still seeming numb, knelt beside the couch as the dentist—his name was Joel Lowery—looked David over more carefully. Lizzie held an oil lamp for Dr. Lowery while Ellen held David’s hand. Ellen felt oddly reassured when David jerked his hand from hers.
 

“How many fingers am I holdin’ up, young fella?” Lowery asked, raising three fingers of his right hand.
 

“Three.”
 

“Good. Now, focus on my index finger and follow it with your eyes as I move it.”
 

“I’m following it just fine.”
 

“I’ll be the judge of that. Any double vision?”
 

“No.”
 

“Headache?”
 

“Yeah.”
 

“Good. A headache is logical to expect after a blow like you got. There’s a bruise on the right side of your neck. The polecat missed your spinal column. Good thing. Must have just grazed your skull behind the right ear. Here. Listen to my watch.” He placed his pocketwatch beside David’s right ear, gradually moving it farther and farther away. “Can you still hear it?”
 

“Yeah.”
 

“Keep listenin’ and tell me when—”
 

“I can’t really hear it now.”
 

“You’ve got good hearin’, young fella. Get a good night’s rest and take it easy for the next couple of days, and you should be fine.”
 

“Thank you,” Ellen said sincerely.
 

“We’re in your debt, Doctor,” Jack volunteered, his voice barely above a whisper.
 

“No. I don’t charge for doctorin’ unless I gotta cut somebody open and dig out a bullet or like that. Dentistry is my trade. And you folks could sure help me by tellin’ me what it is that you use on your teeth. The young fella, here, looks like all his teeth are perfect. That’s not too surprising with a good diet, and the same with your daughter. But you and your wife gotta be near twice their ages and your teeth look just as good.”
 

“Not quite,” Ellen confided.
 

“Can you analyze something for chemical content?” Jack asked.
 

“Daddy!” Lizzie cautioned.
 

Dr. Lowery said, “I can send it back east.”
 

“Good. I’ll give you a sample of what we use on our teeth, and you can check it for yourself.”
 

“I push baking soda.”
 

“Baking soda is good,” Ellen told him, hoping he’d forget about Jack’s offer to give him a sample of latetwentieth-century toothpaste.
 

“Your boy looks like he’s gonna be right as rain,” a booming, jovial-sounding voice from behind them volunteered.
 

Ellen looked up toward its origin. The man was about her height, over two hundred pounds, somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, a derby hat clutched in both hands as if shielding the classic male potbelly behind it. He had thinning blond hair with a hint of gray and a high forehead over a broadly set face.
 

“Hope you’re right.” Ellen smiled up at him.
 

“Looks like a healthy young man to begin with. And Dr. Lowery makes a right good sawbones when he has to.”
 

“Thanks, Tom,” Lowery said. “Folks, this fella is Tom Berger, mayor of Atlas.”