Written in Time (9 page)

“If we went back tomorrow to 1903, and—help me with the math here,” Ellen said. “How old are you? I can never remember how old I am.”
 

“This month you’ll be forty-four, and five days later I’ll be forty-six.”
 

“So, if you were forty-six in 1903, you’d be fifty-one when your Dad was born. When he was twelve, you’d only be—” And Ellen stopped talking.
 

“The same age he was when he died from his first and last heart attack.” Jack Naile’s initial impulse was to light a cigarette, but he decided against it.
 

Jack had refigured the dates as they related to his father, remembering that Arthur Beach had found out the Naile family had first arrived in Nevada in 1896. If Jack Naile waited for his father to reach age twelve, he’d be seventy years old when he met his dad. If Jack Naile died at sixty-three, as his father had, he would be dead when his father was only five years old.
 

As Ellen Naile had predicted, FedEx shipments to their part of Northeast Georgia were running late because of the particularly violent thunderstorms the previous evening. Arrivals at Hartsfield were delayed.
 

Their check—a very nice big one with lots of lovely zeros on the left side of the decimal point—arrived at precisely five minutes after two, meaning that to deposit it before Monday morning would be an exercise in futility.
 

Ellen sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, the supermarket kind; she rarely bought any of the fancier variations because sometimes, when checks were late, the saving of a few pennies here and there made a difference.
 

The photo taken in 1903 was still on the kitchen table. She looked at it, realizing the irony represented by the photo and the house in which she sat while viewing it. Their house was built in 1903, perhaps under construction at the very time the photo—which hadn’t yet been taken, but had been taken—was being taken.
 

Jack was right (something which Ellen certainly would not admit to him); just thinking about the anomalies of time travel was enough to give anyone a headache.
 

“Headache,” Ellen murmured aloud, just as Jack entered the kitchen.
 

“You have a headache, kid?”
 

“No, but I was just thinking. Let’s say we do wind up moving to Nevada, but almost a hundred years ago. We’d be reduced to boiling down bark from a willow tree in order to get aspirin to knock out a headache.”
 

“On the plus side, think of all the money we’d make if we preinvented liquid Tylenol!”
 

“I’m serious, Jack.”
 

Jack sat down, lit a cigarette; he had cut down quite a bit from his usual daily consumption. “We really do have to start to plan,” Jack said.
 

“So, we’re going to figure out some way to get a washer and dryer back to the past with us?”
 

“I don’t think we can manage that,” Jack told her, smiling, running a hand back through his hair. It was mostly still brown, and no less full than when they’d been in high school. “But it appears as though we arrived in Nevada with some items we had today. Even with knowledge of the future, we would have needed money.”
 

“That would go along with the gun-on-the-hip thing?” Ellen suggested.
 

“No, silly. It meant that they brought it with them—the money. And the wagon story could have been a ruse.”
 

“A ruse?”
 

“A ruse,” Jack repeated, so that the word sounded as if it had been said by Peter Sellers in the persona of his dim bulb French police inspector. Jack persisted with the accent—not doing such a bad job, really—as he continued. “It would be, I think, trés easy to ‘ave the—‘ow you say thees word?—wag-on?, thees wag-on ‘idden away, no?”
 

“Shut up and be serious, Jack.”
 

“Je suis ‘Jaques,’ mon cher—” Ellen hit Jack on the top of the head with her open palm—not hard—and he shook his head and wiggled his lips like some sort of cartoon character struck by a falling anvil. “Thanks. I’m better now.”
 

“You’re not thinking that somehow we’d be able to take the Suburban back in time with us?”
 

“I can’t say for sure, but if we all get sucked back in time together and we all stay with the Suburban, there’s a chance, right? We take out the rear seat and leave it. I take the Suburban over to the Chevy dealer and get them to put a roof rack on it and add an auxiliary gas tank. We get four additional tires—”
 

“Those ones from Sam’s Club have held up real well.”
 

“Right. Get four new wheels—we wouldn’t be able to remount tires. If you did the research and got Lizzie to help you, we could get everything we needed to know on microfiche. Hell, we could probably get Encyclopedia Britannica that way. Medical and dental info, and the stuff we’d need for basic field surgery, dental care, like that. Learn how to fabricate nutritional supplements. You’ve always had a green thumb.”
 

“There are lots of books we could get, and probably on microfiche—”
 

“Or get them put on microfiche, which could be kind of expensive, but worth it.”
 

“And what are you going to be doing?” Ellen asked her husband. “Learning how to brand steers and—”
 

“No, I’m serious. I’ll find out what we’d need so that we could keep some semblance of twentieth-century civilization going, even though we were a century in the past. Evidently, the Naile family lived there for quite some time, which means they built or bought a house, probably had one built. We could have one room that we could electrify if we brought the wire and the switches and the circuit-breaker box.”
 

“How will we get electricity?” Ellen said.
 

“We build near a stream or river, set up a sophisticated waterwheel, or windmills—solar would be too cumbersome. We couldn’t pack enough stuff to make it work. So, Lizzie could still listen to CDs, we could still have an electric clock—”
 

“A microwave—no, we wouldn’t need it. But a hair dryer.”
 

“A toaster!” Jack supplied.
 

“When was the last time we used a toaster? And electric can openers never work. But a small, conventional electric oven and a flat four-burner electric stove.”
 

“There you go!” Jack enthused. “Stuff that would make life more livable. We could have electric lights. If we did the research, we could figure out a way to step down the voltage so that we could use the bulbs that Edison had already invented by then, and we could have a couple of fluorescent fixtures and replacement tubes and starters and everything so that we could have really serious light occasionally. Hell, with the right research and the money to get the work done, we could have somebody build us new fluorescent tubes in a couple of years. We could build another house and have the whole interior just like a modern place and nobody’d be the wiser. And running water? Hey, the Romans had running water. All we need is some PVC and gravity and—”
 

“I get the idea, Jack. That’s all going to fit into the Suburban?”
 

“Yeah. I don’t see why not. If we pack carefully. It’s not like we’re going to need a lot of clothes, because modern clothes would be a dead giveaway.”
 

Ellen leaned back in her chair. “Nothing I’m going to like better than wearing twenty pounds of ankle length clothing everyday. Want a cup of coffee?”
 

“Sure.”
 

Ellen stood up and went to the stove, pausing as she turned on one of the electric range’s burners. “You really think we could do that? Keep a modern life, kind of?”
 

“What? The electricity and plumbing and stuff? Yeah, if the Suburban comes back with us. And the microfiche—we’d need two readers and a really ample supply of batteries, and we never let the case with that stuff out of our sight. We sleep with it, so even if we didn’t get the Suburban back, we’d be able to reconstruct most of the stuff we’d need from things available a hundred years ago. It’s just all in knowing how.”
 

“What about your gun collection? The guns and the ammo will take up a lot of room.”
 

“I’ve already been thinking about that,” he told her.
 

Ellen had assumed as much. “I bring everything I’ve got in .45 Colt. There’s going to be plenty of .45 Long Colt ammo available a century ago. I’d need a serious rifle. Maybe an 1895 Marlin in .45-70 and get a Vernier tang sight installed. A couple of knives made with modern steel. Everything else we can get when we get there. We sell the rest as quickly as we can and the money from the guns and stuff goes toward the electrical and plumbing stuff and the microfiche and shit like that. What do you think?” Jack picked up a cigarette, but set it down, unlit . . .
 

The cheapest way to get to the small town in Nevada devolved to flying via Las Vegas and over to Reno. Clarence, despite more than six years in the Air Force, hated flying and made no secret of it. Jack rented a car in Reno; Clarence talked all the way as they drove. “Ellen was really worried.”
 

“Not after I reminded her that all four of us were in that one photograph and the Nailes arrived as a family of four. So, some of us aren’t going to get time-zapped and the others left behind. We’ll be fine. Relax, Clarence.” Jack Naile’s main problem was that he was too relaxed, about to fall asleep, the terrain different from Georgia’s insistent greenery, but just as repetitive. He’d had the window open earlier, but Clarence didn’t like open windows in cars, so Jack had closed it. But Jack started cranking the window down again. “I’ve gotta open a window, Clarence, or I’m gonna fall asleep.”
 

“Why don’t you turn on the air-conditioning? Or let me drive.”
 

“It’s cold with the air-conditioning. Fresh air is good for you, Clarence, keeps the lungs in shape. We’ve been breathing canned air on two airplanes. Time for some fresh.” Clarence might bitch about it some more, but Jack Naile really didn’t care and kept the window down about two inches.
 

“That photo with only you and the kids scares the crap out of me, Jack.”
 

Jack Naile lit a cigarette. “I go with the theory that Ellen took the photograph. The composition is good. It looks like her work, with a modern camera. So that’s why Ellen wasn’t in the photograph.”
 

“This is a pile of bullshit, right, Jack? I mean, there’s gotta be some damned logical explanation for it.”
 

“You think of one, let me know, Clarence.” The two lane road was well maintained, but seemed to go on forever, the terrain surrounding them a cross between high desert and low rolling hills, as inviting as lunar landscape.
 

“You really see yourself and Ellen and the kids living here? David would never make it!” Clarence declared.
 

“Why would David never make it? He’s ridiculously physically fit, smart—”
 

“Think about it, Jack! For God’s sake, David has to have the newest and the best of everything,” Clarence continued, chuckling. “And he doesn’t even like going to a rodeo! You really think he’s going to ride a horse? No way.”
 

“Well, I tell you, Clarence. He’ll either ride a horse, drive a wagon or walk until automobiles get out this way. You remind me of Cleopatra.”
 

“What? Are you nuts?”
 

“That’s beside the point, son. You remind me of Cleopatra after her barge sunk in the river—you’re in de Nile.”
 

“Yeah, you just go ahead and laugh! But you’re buying into a load of shit,” Clarence growled. Jack had long ago decided he’d fight the man who criticized Clarence for having a short temper, but that wouldn’t mean that Jack wouldn’t agree with the guy. “This is just fuckin’ trick photography and some elaborate scheme of some fuckin’ nutball, and you’re buying into it. Time travel doesn’t happen, Jack. We both know that.”
 

“Looks like it’s about to,” Jack informed his nephew. “See, I don’t particularly care to wind up in the Old West of a hundred years ago, either. Think about it, Clarence. If this movie actually gets made, it’ll open the door for a lot of our other stuff to get made into movies, maybe. And just maybe we’ll make enough money we can relax a little, do some good things for the kids, for you. Remember how Ellen and I’ve always said that the day we got a really big check in would be the day we had a nuclear war or a meteor struck the planet or something? Much as I wish it weren’t, this time-travel thing looks like it’s not only a meteor, but a fucking nuclear meteor, and aimed right at us. And there’s not a damned thing I can do about it except try to make the best of it. We’re going to miss you, Clarence, and you’re going to miss us, but I can’t change it,” Jack concluded.
 

“Bullshit, Jack! Fuckin’ bullshit!”
 

“You want me to turn around, and you can fly back to Atlanta?”
 

“Fuck you—no, dammit!”
 

“Then relax, okay? You’ll live longer. We don’t want to leave you in the present while we go into the past, but, if this happens, it doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of choice.” There was a green-and-white information sign coming up on the right. “See what that sign says, Clarence.”
 

Jack already knew what it said—“Moment of truth upon you in four miles.” His hands sweated on the steering wheel, and the pit of his stomach felt like somebody had just turned on a blender.
 

Practically the first words out of Arthur Beach’s mouth had been, “My God, you look just like the Jack Naile in those old photographs!” Because of this, Jack realized, Clarence had taken an instant dislike to Arthur Beach.
 

Atlas, Nevada, looked nothing like it had in the photograph that started the whole thing, Jack Naile mused. It looked modern, normal. There was a strong breeze blowing in from the desert, gradually intensifying; the occasional dust devil was the only thing that made the blacktopped street look like something out of a Western town.