Lady Olivia obeyed instantly. Ignoring the horn and the yelling, they changed places. Linda had orders to protect her guest. But she had a higher priority. She drove in the same direction as the truck. Olivia sat silent beside her. As they approached the school, Linda began to circle. She reached out:
Blue bounced beside her. Holding onto blue. Red across the aisle jumped back and forth. Green spun out of control. BANG! Green disappeared. Perry Gibson cried. Other kids laughed.
On a quiet street, Linda caught sight of the yellow bus making its slow, easy way toward a cluster of women and carriages and pre-schoolers. She looked around, saw nothing and so made no move for the .32 caliber automatic concealed under the driver’s seat.
“It’s Sally, isn’t it?” Linda had forgotten about Olivia. “You have sensed a threat.” Linda nodded, circled the block. Found nothing. Pulled into a wider arc around the bus. “I would aid you however I can.”
The air was full of balloons and she was holding onto the blue balloon. All around were yellow balloons and red. But only one blue balloon. Perry, sticky with tears, grabbed for it, and her elbow went out and stopped him.
Linda approached her house cautiously. She drove up the next street, looked at the back of her place and saw nothing. She pulled into her driveway as the yellow bus turned the corner. While it pulled to the curb, she checked the house and garage doors. No sign of forced entry.
“How long have you had the ability you just showed?” Olivia asked.
Linda knew this woman had studied her all the while her attention had been focused on her daughter. She cut the truth to fit the moment. “Before Sally? Randomly. And only with those I could actually see. With her? As you observed.”
She and Olivia walked out to the sidewalk. The balloon came toward them. “Mommy, I told them that Auntie Olives was from England and she’d sing.” Linda saw Olivia blink and realized that she too had caught Sally’s memory of standing before her class announcing what she was bringing to Show and Tell.
“Honey.” Linda pretended this hadn’t happened. “I said you had to ask her first. What if she doesn’t want to?”
Linda turned and found the Lady looking at Sally with a mixture of tenderness and regret. Olivia had a daughter. A child born and taken from her. Two hundred years ago. A few months before.
“I will, my dear Sally,” said Olivia. “I’ll sing and I’ll tell a story.” A thought seemed to amuse her. “I’ll tell you all about the Ferryman and the Wolf.”
Roy, Linda and Olivia had been invited to a dinner party that evening at the Stanleys’. George and Alice Stanley were celebrating their wedding anniversary. They lived two doors down on the block behind Roy and Linda Martin. Cindy, a rare teenager in this neighborhood of young couples and small children, had agreed to babysit with Sally.
When Roy got home, Linda told him about the truck. They agreed not to change their plans. But, as if on a whim, Roy went out the back door carrying a bottle of champagne. No fence or hedge separated their yard from the Hackers who lived directly behind them. He let the women go first, hung back. Scouting the ground, Linda knew, in the off chance he had to come back from the party in a big hurry.
In her black party sheath, she watched Olivia sweep before her in full skirt. Frank and Marge Hacker, on their way to the party paused and awaited them. “How do you like America?” Frank asked Olivia.
“Your driving is exhilarating!”
“Different side of the road than in England.”
“Your provincial rules are an endless plague!”
Frank was dazzled; Marge was plainly annoyed. Linda caught a glimpse through their eyes, of Olivia and herself. And of Roy behind them. He scuffed at something with his shoe.
Alice and George Stanley had gotten married shortly before he was sent over to England with the Army Air Corps. Wartime now seemed to them distant and romantic.
At dinner, Linda’s attention rode on a dream taking place in Sally’s bedroom a few hundred feet away. It involved a class of bad dogs who would not listen to their teacher.
Then she heard George Stanley ask Olivia, “Were you in London during the Blitz?” Lady Wexford paused. Conversation stopped. Olivia said, with just a slight tremor, “Awful. Terrible. The city destroyed. Nothing but rubble.” Everyone made consoling noises.
After dinner, Marge Hacker remarked to Linda Martin, “You seem so far away.” She followed Linda’s gaze and saw Roy amid a group of men who were discussing the old Joe DiMaggio and the new Willie Mays. Roy was silent. He looked at Olivia, who was looking back. Several of the women, in phone conversations the next day, pinned Linda’s distance to the fine rapport that had sprung up between her English relative and her handsome husband.
“But you picked up nothing from the driver,” Roy said that night when he and Linda were in bed. Slightly drunk and needing sleep, he was reviewing her account of the delivery truck driver. “Clumsy,” he said. “Our Upstream friends use their human agents a lot more adroitly.”
“Unless they want them to be seen.” Linda lowered her voice, though Olivia was asleep down the hall. “Any word on how much longer our guest will be with us?”
“Another week, possibly two. Then she gets moved up closer to the Front. I don’t know what the game is.” He sounded wistful. In the Time Wars, 1956 was a rear area, far away from the action. “I thought you found her interesting.”
“Mrs. Wood showed me something today.” Linda felt him tense at the mention of Mrs. Wood. But she said, “Olivia was a wild-haired, pregnant Bacchae. She sat on a pile of rubble, naked except for a silk wristlet. She carried a head. Its mouth was open. Like it was still indignant at having been separated from its body.
“We in the Main Stream know the head’s former owner as the one who became King George III,” Linda said. “In that particular 1759, Lady Olivia Wexford helped tear it off his shoulders, impetuous minx that she is.”
“I say, no Boston tea party for Georgie that time around,” Roy murmured in a silly ass voice and sank under deep waters. Even in sleep, Linda was deflected from his thoughts. What she felt when trying to touch them reminded her of the static between stations on the radio dial.
She remained awake in the midst of the quiet streets, the slumbering neighborhood. Then she saw a face, round and flushed, youthful but with deep, ancient eyes under white powdered hair. Olivia dreamed of her former lover. Linda automatically looked away.
Lord Riot was what the London mobs called him. He had an abundance of names along the Time Stream. Linda thought of him as Dionysius. But Riot was as good as anything else.
Lord Riot had swept up a large part of the population of Olivia’s England, joined it to hordes from a dozen similar places, hurled the frenzied mass Upstream, and pushed the frontier back a few years. The Gods were going down hard.
They have ruled the back of our minds, the willing places in our hearts for a thousand generations. But their reign will last only as long as human thought and emotion. A couple of centuries Upstream is a Frontier. On the other side, beings move and communicate. But we would call them machines and they will call us meat.
Jake Stockley, Linda’s stepfather, had tried to explain to her the alliances of the Rangers and the Gods. She was twelve and first asking questions. “Politics, makes strange bedfellows, kid,” he said. “Somewhere up the chain of command this game makes sense.” But even he didn’t seem convinced.
In that game, Olivia was a prize. It seemed to Linda that using Riot was like trying to harness a cyclone or ride a tidal wave, that Lady Wexford was dangerous to be near.
On the night air, she heard a cry, saw an image sharp as a Blade: an infant, swaddled, wrapped in rabbit fur, seen one last time. Lady Olivia dreamed of her baby being taken away from her. Ancient eyes stared out at Linda. Lord Riot claimed his child.
2.
Nice towns like Grove Hill exist outside every city in the nation. Pass through there on the train today and you’ll find that the stores on Main Street have bec
ome antique shops and boutiques. The trees that survive are bigger. The parking lot is larger. ATVs have replaced the station wagons and many women await the 7:49.
But much looks the same as on a Thursday morning almost fifty years ago when Linda drove the Chevy to the station. Olivia and Sally rode in the back seat. Today was Show and Tell.
Roy sat beside her smoking his fifth cigarette of the morning. The day before, he and Linda had argued at any moment when they were alone. In the morning it had been about how Sally was being brought up. “I don’t want you leaving her with the God damn witch.” When he was that angry, tiny cracks appeared in his twentieth century American accent. “Mrs. Wood!” He managed to say the name as if it was a euphemism for shit.
Wednesday evening, the argument had been about Ranger procedures. “How much longer will we be saddled with her Ladyship?” Linda snapped.
At home, in front of Sally and their guest, small domestic difficulties produced monumental silences. By Thursday, they hardly spoke. Silent tension seemed almost natural to Linda, raised in a household with a secret mission in the heyday of the Cold War. Roy, used to active combat, found it maddening.
“Can I see you sing tonight?” Sally asked, Olivia.
That evening, a concert version of Handel’s Acis and Galatea was being given at Carnegie Hall. Olivia had seen it two hundred and five years before and had her heart set on seeing it again. They were, she, Roy and Linda, going into the city.
“Foolish girl,” Olivia said. “Professional singers,” a slight disdain in her tone, “will entertain us.”
A day or two before, Linda would have made a note to explain to their guest that in this brave new world, professional singers were the aristocracy. That, as they spoke, a new king swiveled toward Memphis waiting to be crowned.
But this was no innocent herded Upstream, dazed by all she saw around her. Lady Wexford needed no help from anybody.
“And you will get to stay with Dorrie whom you love,” said Olivia. “And with Mrs. Wood,” she added and suddenly asked, “What is your Mrs. Wood like?”
Before Linda could interrupt, Sally frowned and replied, “She’s a TV.”
As they parked, Roy said, “Train’s here,” jumped out of the car like he was escaping, and came around for his kisses and hugs. Perfunctory for Linda, fervent in the case of his daughter. “See you ladies this evening,” he said. Sally had eyes only for him as he bounded onto the platform, mingled with the crowd, and boarded the 7:49.
Linda felt Roy on the train. He nodded to a pair of vets who were comparing Ike and MacArthur, slid into the seat behind them, and buried himself in work. More than that she couldn’t know.
His fellow commuters had learned all that men needed to find out about Roy from chance remarks exchanged in line at the hardware store, leaning against a fence at a backyard barbecue.
He was from the West Coast, had flown with the Air Force in Korea, had his own small import/export company, and traveled a lot.
They rode the train together. But once in the city, all went their separate ways. They joked with Roy about how much time he spent out of his office. When Frank Hacker or George Stanley remembered that they were supposed to invite him to play golf that weekend, or solicit a contribution to the Fresh Air Fund, they would get his secretary, a formidable lady with a slight and unplacable accent. Roy usually wouldn’t return their calls until the end of the day.
Even catching him as they left the train at Grand Central wasn’t possible. They might notice him, attaché case in hand, newspaper under his arm, walking through a now crowded car as they pulled out of Pelham Manor. Asked, he’d mentioned getting off at 125th street to see a man at Columbia University who translated his business correspondence with Iran.
Because he was so adept, but mainly because none of them could envision such a thing, no one ever saw Roy walk into Time. That usually happened in the confusion of their imminent arrival in the city.
With a brisk step or two and the help of the train’s motion, he would stride away from 1956. Sometimes he went up towards ’59 for liaison with a neighboring Station Chief. Or back toward ’50, a recurrent trouble spot where tensions were always near a boiling point.
That morning while Olivia, unaccompanied, sang Froggy Went A’Courting to an audience of enraptured six-year-olds and their teacher, Linda wondered if she knew any more about her husband than did the men on the train.
When Olivia began the story of the Ferryman and the Wolf, Linda half listened.
Once there was a ferryman who lived with his wife in a little house on a river bank. When his son was born, the father asked the river to be the boy’s godfather. In answer, a stout tree branch floated ashore. The father carved it into a pole for his son.
Linda began to pay attention. Rangers were recruited as children. She recognized a tale of the Stream, worn smooth by passage up and down the human ages.
The boy grew up to be a ferryman also. He carried passengers from one side of the river to the other. The river was very wide and each day he could only make three trips one way and three trips the other. His boat was small and on each trip he could carry only one load beside himself.
The story was a riddle, a challenge. As she listened, Linda wondered if Lady Wexford told this more out of boredom than contempt, or the other way around.
One day a farmer asked him to carry a prize cabbage as big as a small child across the river where the king’s own cook would give him a silver coin for it. The Ferryman agreed. But before he could start out, a shepherd appeared with a hungry lamb and asked the Ferryman to take her across the river to a field of clover. As payment the Ferryman could have her wool, which was soft as silk.
The Ferryman agreed, but he noticed how the lamb looked at the cabbage and knew he must never leave them alone together. He was about to take the cabbage across, when a wolf appeared with a sack on its shoulder and said, “Kind sir, I must cross the river. Carry me and I will give you what is inside this sack.”
In this story of choice and chance, Linda noticed, only the wolf and the ferryman spoke. Only they were acting on their own behalf. Cabbage and lamb were just baggage.
The wolf looked longingly at the lamb, anxious to be left alone with her. The ferryman did not think long, but he did think hard. He put the lamb in the boat. Since he knew the wolf would never eat a cabbage, he left those two together. He carried the lamb across the river and on the way he sang:
Oh river deep and river wide
Bring me swift to the other side
The ferryman left the lamb. Returned. Picked up the cabbage and carried it across. As he did, he sang:
Oh, river wide and river deep
I pray you safe my cargo keep
The lamb was happy to see the cabbage. But the ferryman picked her up and took her back with him. When he got to the other bank, it was growing late. The wolf was overjoyed to see the lamb. But the ferryman told him to get in the boat. The wolf was very hungry, but he obeyed. As they went, the ferryman sang:
Oh river brave and river swift
Please send a tide my hopes to lift
The ferryman carried the wolf across and told him to guard the cabbage. The wolf agreed, thinking that when the ferryman returned with the lamb it would be dark and he would snatch his prey.
By the time the ferryman reached the lamb it was almost night and too late to make another trip. But he put the little beast aboard his boat, and as he poled his way across he sang:
Oh river swift and river brave
Grant me now a favoring wave
And in the last moments of light, Godfather River reached up and bore the tiny craft from one side to the other faster than the eye can blink. The wolf was pacing back and forth on the other side.
As the sun fell and the boat put in to shore, the wolf leaped. But the ferryman took his stout pole and whacked him over the head so hard that the wolf dropped his sack and ran away.
The king’s cook was so delighted with the giant cabbage that
he gave the ferryman a bag of coins. And the lamb when he brought her to pasture yielded wool as soft as silk.
Over the heads of the children, Linda watched Lady Olivia look at Sally. The wolf and the lamb, she thought to herself. And the cabbage, she added, including herself.
So the ferryman brought home the coins and the wool and the sack to his wife and daughter. His wife opened the sack. And what was inside? Oh, wine and sweets and a jeweled hen who laid a gold egg every morning and could tell your fortune. But The Ferryman’s Wife is a tale for another time.
A story of desire, distortion of Time and even the hint of an oracle. With a happy ending. Real life would not be so nice. Linda was certain of one thing. Olivia and Sally would never be left alone together.
Dinner that evening was under the perpetual Christmas ornaments of the Russian Tea Room. The waiters, old and disdainful, each with an account of aristocratic privileges lost along with the Czar, were deferential around Roy. As if they instinctively detected a greater, scarier fraud than their own.
Over blini, caviar and vodka, Linda watched her husband lean forward and tell Olivia, “This place is a sentimental favorite of mine because of how my wife and I met.”
The Englishwoman wore black and silver. A cameo at her throat showed an ivory profile set against rich blue. The blue caught the color of her eyes. “You mean to say you met in Russia. Two . . . Americans.” She still hesitated on the word. She was amused, curious. Linda watched her.
“Not quite. In Budyatichi,” said Roy. “A miserable town of shacks and mud, far enough into Poland for the population to be surprised when the Red Cavalry Army showed up.” Roy’s eyes grew somewhat misty. He had already put away two double martinis.
If Angels Fight Page 9
