by Rex Bolt
“Let’s not get carried away . . . and let me ask you something, why are you bothering with tax records? What are you trying to prove?”
“We’ll find out.”
Pike put away the phone and Audrey said that was yet another conversation that sounded interesting.
“Yeah, well, same old thing,” Pike said.
Audrey said, “I liked the part where you said, you know what you took care of.”
“You did, huh?”
Audrey took his arm and nodded. “And of course you moved a sign, plus someone’s blood type entered into it, and naturally the police were involved, as were the tax records.”
“You say the tax records. You have inside knowledge then?”
“I’m getting there,” she said. “It’s challenging.”
“Glad I could provide some entertainment.”
“You certainly are . . . But . . . about what my dad was upset with?”
“That’s fine. Wasn’t the outcome I was hoping for, but I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise.”
“No,” she said. “What I’m getting to is, it didn’t go down that way.”
“It didn’t?”
“I went back through my mom’s journals, more carefully . . . The first time I was so thrown off, so shocked, that it was all a blur. Yes they had an affair, but it began and ended three or four years ago.”
Pike was digesting this. “But your dad,” he said, “why would he say that?”
Audrey took a deep breath. “I’m sad that I didn’t know my mom. At least not from the inside . . . what made her tick . . . She was seeing someone when it happened, maybe two different people. Not your dad though . . . My dad knew all that, it turns out. I just think when you walked in tonight it triggered something.”
“Jeez,” Pike said.
He wondered, if someone really was in love with you . . . and you really were in love with them back . . . could you continue to keep secrets from them?
He decided you could. But maybe with a little luck, you could change all that.
Chapter 6
Monday at school things began routinely enough, but then kids started coming up to him and asking what the point of ripping down the letter had been.
Pike ran back through it. Maybe the night security guard reported it, or even more likely, someone going to the basketball game saw Pike getting in the squad car. Either way, one thing led to another, and today he was a dipshit celebrity around school.
In the middle of third period he got hauled into the principal’s office. Coach Geddes was there as well. “The thing I don’t get,” Coach was saying, “is how you maneuvered the thing? You just persuaded one steel plate to cut loose from another?”
Mr. Hill the principal said, “I’m actually more concerned with the blatant disregard for, and destruction of school property. As opposed to the logistics of the procedure.”
“That too,” Coach said. “I’m just saying . . . the whole deal, it’s kind of mystifying.”
The principal said, “Are you saying this is out of character for the young man?”
“I would have thought so, yeah. Except there’s been a few things this year.”
“Well, then,” the principal said. “My decision is a three-day suspension, effective tomorrow morning.”
“That’s it?” Coach said. “No cleaning up the school grounds? Jeez, give him some kind of semi-hard labor at least.”
“I’m afraid we’re not allowed to impose sanctions such as those, in today’s litigious climate,” the principal said.
“Fine,” Coach said. “But he better put the damn letter back up.”
“Again,” the principal said, “something like that, it’s beyond the scope of district policy.”
“So screw district policy,” Coach said. He said to Pike, “You get that letter back up. It’s part of our field, our traditional, every time we line up out there. You don’t, I’ll personally shove the thing up your ass.” And he walked out.
“Mr. Geddes appears agitated,” Principal Hill said to Pike. “In any case, let this be a lesson. You’re a senior, real life awaits just around the corner, I’m afraid . . . Have you been giving specific thought to your future?”
“Not enough,” Pike said. “For now I’m focussing on the past . . . trying to figure out how to improve upon it, I guess.”
“Well that’s commendable as well,” the principal said. “What parts of your past are you finding relevant?”
“Those’d be mostly . . . the parts that didn’t work out.”
“I give you an A for honesty then,” Principal Hill said.
***
It was weird that after all that, the suspension didn’t begin until tomorrow. But it was what it was. Pike went through the motions the rest of the day.
By lunch the letter business started dying down, and fortunately the questions had been mostly Gillette, what the hay were you trying to prove? As opposed to how in the world did you do it?.
He wondered for a moment if Audrey, now that it was probably clear what he was referring to when he said I know what I changed, might be questioning his mental health just a touch, but he pushed the thought out of his mind.
After 6th period Clarke came up to him in the hall and said, “See? You should have come to Tahoe.”
The guy was logical, and Pike knew in a perfect world that was absolutely what he should have done.
But now he had other business on his plate, and three days to try to take care of it . . . Which might actually mean nine days on the other side, or wherever it was . . . so some leisurely snowboarding at Lake Tahoe seemed pretty tame at the moment. Not that it wouldn’t have been a lot less complicated.
***
If there was one thing Pike was pretty darn sure of, this wasn’t going to be as clean as his previous little experimental forays one day back in time.
That night he shut everything down at 10 and tried to go to sleep, but he had trouble, and when 5am rolled around he slept through his alarm.
The idea was to get to school, and into that closet, by 6:30, before any early-bird administrators had shown up. Roy, the morning custodian, opened the gym at 6, which Pike remembered from experience when Coach had disciplined the team a couple times and made them attend crack-of-dawn punishment practices before school.
But when he woke up for real and it was 8:10, that strategy went out the window.
His parents and brother and sister were all gone when he came down, which was good, he didn’t want any distractions this morning, and he raided the fridge, figuring he could use the extra fortification. There was leftover lasagna he microwaved, and there were hot links from Costco which he always liked, so he fried up two of them as well. Finished the whole thing off with a sizable bowl of Cheerios.
Then he drove to school but parked on a residential side street. He didn’t like hoodies, but he’d pulled out a dark grey one he’d gotten for Christmas, and tried to limit his face as best he could. He checked the time, and waited a few minutes until he was comfortable that school was into second period, most everyone pinned in a classroom Then he jogged around the backside of the baseball field, which led you to the track and hopefully that side door to the gym.
When Pike opened the gym door he’d of course forgotten about the darn P.E. classes, one of which was going on right now, kids in their designated gym uniforms having to play badminton this morning. He darted across the back of the gym and hurried down the hall to the closet, hoping no one recognized him, but figuring even if someone had, he’d be disappearing off-campus very soon, so there’d be nothing to report . . . Wouldn’t he?
There was janitorial equipment spread out in the closet and it felt like Roy may have just been in there, but right now it was free, and Pike scrambled into position, having to move a mop and bucket this time. The hard part, the real uncertain thing now, was going back to the day it happened.
Which was October 1st, a Saturday. 8-and-a-half weeks ago now, exactly 60 days.
On what had started off as an interesting, and somewhat exciting day. Pike had driven to Manhattan Beach in the morning, it was his first time meeting Mitch, and they had lunch and he had come clean to an extent to Mitch on his situation. Which was a relief, having someone to spill it out to, and having Mitch be totally interested, on his side, trying to help him figure out what in God’s name was going on.
This had been three weeks after he first noticed his empowerment, in the Friday night home football game against Bellmeade. Before he left Manhattan Beach, there had been that incident in the ocean where Pike had torn into the water to help the lifeguard.
When he got back to Beacon that night, pretty upbeat, that’s when his mom and dad were in the living room with the long faces, waiting for more news on the tragedy that was unfolding.
Now as Pike began to slip into his increasingly familiar state of altered consciousness, he re-ran everything about that day through his head. Then he focussed specifically on that morning, as he prepared to leave for Manhattan Beach. Taking a shower, heading outside, opening the car door . . . The day bright and clear . . . His dad busy doing something in the back yard . . . Checking his GPS for the best route . . . Picturing Audrey’s mom, at the same time, taking the dog up the block for his first walk of the day . . .
The spin, shake and Boom . . . He was on the sidewalk in front of Audrey’s house again, about 10 yards from where he ended up on his return trip from Logan, Utah.
This was good. He was trying for his own driveway, but at least he’d made it to Beacon, since he was worried he could end up on the Manhattan Beach Pier. The crux of the matter now, the only important thing, was the day. Did he nail it.
Again, he needed it to be Saturday, October 1st . . . Just as when he came back from Utah, there was a newspaper sticking out of a slot near the mailbox. Not the Milburn’s this time, theirs was empty, as though they’d picked up their paper already, but the next door neighbor apparently hadn’t and Pike’s heart was beating pretty fast as he pulled it out and checked the date.
Thursday, September 29th.
Son of a bitch . . .
It was remotely possible the neighbors with the newspaper were away or for some other reason hadn’t picked up that particular paper, and that it could still be Saturday . . . But it didn’t feel like a weekend. There were a few too many cars passing by, and not much sign of life in the houses up and down the block.
It unfortunately had that slightly urgent feel of a typical weekday work morning.
Pike was fed up with screwing around when he got into these deals. He stepped out in the middle of the street and waited for the next car, either direction, which was a Ford Ranger pickup with a roughly 35-year-old guy driving.
Pike stood there and the guy was forced to stop, and Pike, without any excuse me or other lead-in, demanded from the guy: What’s today’s date.
The driver was polite enough under the circumstances, and confirmed it was indeed the 29th.
Pike thanked him and got out of the way. Now what?
It was unthinkable to mess with going home. Could he actually run into himself there? Or would the current he, standing here in front of Audrey’s, be the only he in Beacon today?
This was where you got a major headache, trying to unravel this bull.
Pike decided to trust his instinct, which was you don’t fool around with yourself in the past. Period.
It felt like you were violating one of the 10 Rules, specifically the Number 9 one, that said any alterations should be enacted according to the laws of the universe.
He had nothing else to go by, it just seemed wrong, and worse, like you might be jinxing something that could come back to haunt you.
So until proven otherwise, no, you don’t go home. So how else do you kill two days, until Saturday? . . . Do you have to camp out or something? . . . Staying in a motel might work except there was the issue of the money . . . If he got his rear end to Manhattan Beach he was pretty sure Mitch would take care of him, but how would you get there without stealing your own vehicle--the same one that someone else named you might be needing the next couple days.
Pike started walking toward downtown. He remembered last time in this same situation, coming back here unexpectedly from Utah State, he walked all the way to school, easily two miles, because he had to retrieve his truck. Downtown was a lot closer, and by the time he got there this time he’d made his decision, to go back and try it all over again. Try to do a better job getting the day right, rather than having to kill 48 hours who knows how.
The old library seemed as good a place as any. It clearly predated 1956, in fact it looked about a hundred years older than that. Big slabs of granite and marble and high ceilings, and stuff carved into the water fountains. He thought for a second about looking in on that librarian, who’d been kind to him when he was searching for the time travel books, and who hadn’t reacted funny when he said he needed books on how you did it, even though she probably thought he was off his rocker.
But forget that. The goal now was to find a spot and get out of here, and he started with the top floor, which was the fourth. No men’s rooms up there, and only one closet, but locked. There was an open reading room at one end, a few odds and ends of people studying, and a huge desk off to the side, which didn’t seem to be used by a human anymore, but was now displaying a bunch of books. This month’s theme seemed to be hydroponics, which Pike surmised from the material was growing plants in stuff other than soil.
In any case, there was a nice deep cavity under the thing, and Pike made sure no one was looking directly at him, and he casually ducked down there and got into position.
A couple minutes later he was on the football field at Hamilton. He was getting better at this, at least the return-trip efforts, and he stood there for a moment giving himself a bit of credit, though he quickly remembered he was suspended from school and wasn’t supposed to be here, and he laced up his hoodie tight and hightailed it back to the truck.
He always felt a little headachy after these treks, and he just wasn’t up for trying it again right now, but ice cream sounded good and that’s where he went, and some real sleep in his own bed sounded very good, so that was next.
Chapter 7
Palm Springs, California
November 25, 2016
On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when Marty Clarke invited Pike to Tahoe but Pike decided he needed to organize another session to prove his mind wasn’t playing tricks on him, Dani Andriessen began the day lounging by the pool in Palm Springs.
The school district in Pocatello was more liberal than the one in Beacon. Not only did they have Friday off, but they had Wednesday off as well, the day before Thanksgiving.
So you were dealing with a five-day holiday, and Dani and her new friend Chuck, with the help of a good deal from Expedia, decided to get away from the Pocatello cold and enjoy some California desert warmth.
For Dani, Chuck followed Bob who had followed Richard. Who had of course followed Marcus, who was eliminated the real way. The others didn’t work out for various reasons. The problem of course, the thread that tied all of Dani’s relationships together, was she was attracted to seemingly nice guys who became abusive.
Chuck hadn’t been too bad so far. There’d been the one incident a few weeks back at the Texas Roadhouse on Yellowstone where Dani ran into a guy she knew as an undergraduate. Guy named Lawrence. He was happy to see her and without particularly acknowledging Chuck he came over from the bar area and gave her a hug and then a big, slightly lingering kiss on the lips.
Chuck didn’t bring it up during their meal, but on the car ride home he let Dani know he was pretty upset. Dani kept quiet and let him blow off steam, but when they got back to her apartment and she’d opened the fridge Chuck grabbed her by the arm and swung her around and told her that better not happen again. Those were his exact words, no more, no less, and nothing was said the rest of the night by either of them.
In the morning Chuc
k went out and got coffee and fresh pastries, and they went for a hike and later did a movie, and if you didn’t know better they were a happy couple and there’d never been an issue.
And that’s how Dani preferred to look at it.
Now, stretched out under blue skies in 84-degree conditions, she started up a casual conversation with the man next to her. Chuck was off doing a run. He ran 6 miles a day, 3 days a week, hit the gym the other 3 and took 1 day off. He was very organized, and hated to break his routine. That’s how they met in fact, Dani working the volunteer check-in desk for a 10K charity run, and Chuck showing up and registering to run it.
The guy next to her by the pool had an Australian accent, which Dani always enjoyed hearing, and once they became introduced it was like a switch went on and he talked non-stop. It was all interesting. His various takes on American life, sports and politics. Dani could have sat there all day listening to him, as long as she kept the sunblock liberally applied, except for the slightly ominous fact that Chuck would be returning from his run in about twenty minutes.
When the man came to the end of a story and paused, Dani excused herself and dived in. It would be safer to be fooling around in the pool when Chuck returned.
Except the Australian decided to join her. They were hanging onto the wall under the diving board, the guy on another tangent now, how his daughter lives in Costa Mesa, is a grad student in the States, loves it here and he fears may never return to Melbourne.
Dani had a hand up shielding her eyes from the sun, listening to the guy, when she saw Chuck somewhat gingerly getting in the shallow end.
She swam over to meet him. “You did your full run?” she said. “How was it?”
“Nah,” Chuck said. “Had to cut it short. Damn calf, tightening up on me again.”
“Gosh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Dani said. “Would it help if I worked on it a bit?”
“Suit yourself,” Chuck said, not making any move to get out of the pool, which implied if Dani wanted to massage his calf, she’d have to do it underwater.
