F&SF July/August 2011

by Fantasy; Science Fiction

  26 December 1964

  It couldn't have been a robbery. Who waits outside a tool foundry in front of a parking lot full of witnesses for an ordinary guy to walk out the door carrying his lunch pail after punching his time card? He didn't have an enemy in the world. He seemed to know his attacker. The assailant ducked around the corner of a long building and a bunch of tool and die men who wouldn't have wasted any time arriving a few seconds later saw nothing of him.

  19 April 1974

  I walked in the room and sat down on the sofa. Mom looked up from her knitting. "Close the door. Think you were born in a barn?" I got up and closed the door, sat back down.

  There was the question I had never asked before. "Why did you have me?"

  Mom didn't answer but her head jerked in a funny way and I knew I had stepped into forbidden areas. I changed the subject. "How long are we going to stay here, Mom?" The room smelled bad and the bathroom was worse. Mom always kept a clean house.

  "I'm looking for a job. I can still type and my shorthand was always pretty good. I have a lead down at Cleveland Graphite Bronze for hundreds of years. c" tell meor. We'll get along."

  "We're not going back?" I asked.

  "No," Mom said. "We'll get a place soon. After the divorce is final we'll sell the house. It's still in good shape and none of them have moved into the neighborhood, so it should bring a decent price."

  "I wish we could go back," I said.

  Mom shook her head. "That's done, dear. You can't go back."

  So I said I was going to go back and kill the man who killed my real father and make it all didn't happen. "Doesn't work that way, kiddo." She lit up and made a blue-gray cloud. "And if you could, you'd be second in line. You play the mess you're dealt."

  3 January 1966

  It was as though he had walked around the horses and disappeared. The article in the Press said that a year after the shooting, police still had no leads. They suspected the murder was committed by a heroin addict who had disappeared back into the users' underground. The investigation was still active. So was mine; I was beginning to get an idea, but I was being careful.

  16 May 1960

  The house was the same as the other sixty houses on the street, a postwar suburban bungalow on a fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lot. I adjusted the uncomfortable sheath skirt, hefted the sample suitcase, and rang the bell. My mother answered, looking so young and serene. "Avon," I said, smiling, and she invited me in.

  "Can I get you a cup of coffee?" she asked, and I said yes, and she stood up, heading into the narrow kitchen. I looked around and took in the beige carpeting, the plastic covers zipped over the living room furniture, flat sheets tucked over the plastic so guests would not stick. The Ethan Allen table in the dinette with the padded cover. The pale yellow Sanitas wallpaper on the dinette walls with green country scenes repeating every four feet around the small room. Not much was different, except later the table cover hid the gouges and stains and burns in the wood. I knew their bedroom was down the hall. Someone back there plucked a banjo.

  My mother returned with the coffee. "Would you like anything in that?" she asked and I said black was fine. "Hon?" she called, "Avon Lady's here."

  I heard a couple of chords and a voice, low and smooth with a bit of the hills still in it. "Well, you tell her hello for me," and my heart did a funny thing and I almost dropped the cup I was lifting.

  "I'm new in this neighborhood," I said, covering.

  "Do you live around here?" Mom asked and I said no, over in Lyndhurst near the middle school, could I interest her in our new makeup collection as I fumbled open the case. "No, but I could use a new eyebrow pencil," and I got out what I had, skipping the most expensive one because I knew Mom never bought the most expensive one of anything, saying the only difference between the most expensive and the next most expensive was just more chrome.

  There was a bang from in back and Mom yelled " Don't slam the door!" and my brother ran into the room, holding a plastic model and making a whoosh noise.

  "I finished it, Mom!" and she took it, examined it critically and said, "Very nice, but you got some glue on the body." Mom never offered undiluted praise; she just wasn't built that way, and eventually you learned to ignore it.

  "May I see it?" I asked and she handed it to me. It was white and had a tapering pointed nose, lean bullet-shaped body, rakishly swept wings and tailfins. "It's beautiful, it looks like Captain Midnight's airplane," I said.

  I got the disdainful look of an expert. "It's not Captain Midnight, it's real . It's the Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket. Scott Crossfield was the first man to fly at Mach two in it."

  I handed it back to him.

  "Polite," Mom said with The Tone.

  " Sorrrry, " he said. "I just wanted her to know. Bye, Lady," and he zoomed upstairs.

  I gave her a mirror and as she was trying the pencil I asked if her husband needed subsequentbre sequence—any toiletries. "Only if you sell Old Spice," she said and we both laughed and I ached inside. From around the corner the mellow voice was finding chords and singing about growing too old to dream.

  8 February 1992

  Driving south on the Interstate to Columbus, the hearse with mourners' cars behind picked up U.S. 33. Heading southeast, it passed Lancaster and Logan, turning onto Route 78 in Nelsonville, heading for Buchtel; putting half-remembered places back into Mom's stories. The flat land of central Ohio wrinkled and rose as it approached coal country. After parking on Happy Hollow Road, everyone walked up to Whitmore Cemetery, shivering.

  There was no ceremony, at Mom's request. She told me my real father hadn't wanted one and neither did she. "If people didn't want to come over and see me when I was alive, I don't want them around when I'm dead." I had handled the arrangements, let the right people know time and place. It was Ohio in February, cold.

  There were almost two dozen people. Many were old neighbors tonsured by age, some old golfing friends, and a couple of cousins. The hearse driver unfolded the cart and rolled the coffin out of the back. He pushed it up the roadway to the edge of the section. Six of us picked the coffin up and carried it to the open grave. I had never helped carry one before and was surprised how light it was, considering. One cousin, a nun, opened a prayer book and read a couple of passages. Mom, who told me late in life that she never had believed in God but went along with it because my real father did, would have been amused. Her Jewish friend Rose lowered her head and recited Kaddish, stopping twice for a silent sob.

  I stepped forward and unfolded Mom's favorite quilt over the lid, because I didn't want the memory of the sound of dirt and stones hitting the bare wood. Several people said something short, and a couple stepped forward to place a small bouquet of violets on the coffin. And then it was done. I thanked each person for coming and as I watched people moving away I thought I saw my half-brother across the road, sitting in a car. I walked over.

  "Hi, Sis," he said.

  "Why are you here?" I asked.

  "She was my mother, too. I came to pay my respects."

  He looked like hell. "You might have stopped by occasionally while she was alive," I said. "Dealt any drugs lately?"

  He held up his hands. "I'm clean," he said. "Want to search me?"

  I gestured with my head toward the grave. "Want to come up?" I asked.

  "No. I can see fine from here."

  "What happened to you?" I asked.

  "Mom happened to me. After Dad was shot she took up with that lowlife she married before Dad was properly cold."

  "It was almost two years," I said.

  "She didn't show the proper respect. And that hunk of crap in Dad's bed...." He shook his head.

  I wanted to say a lot of things, but I was putting Mom in the ground. Without saying good-bye, I turned and walked away. He started his car and drove off.

  I waited down the hill a ways until the workers finished filling the hole, having cigarettes and practicing blowing smoke rings to pass the time. When they were done I walked
back to the small mound of fresh dirt. On the right side I knelt down to brush the clods off the low headstone marking my real father. He had been born in the hollers, and Mom said he always wanted to be buried there, where his own ancestors had crawled into the hills and blackened their lungs and shouted fire in the hole. They were back together again.

  Since I was kneeling anyway I made the Sign of the Cross and said my prayers. Once upon a time I had prayed and believed. Now I prayed and wondered and hoped. I said an Our Father and a Hail Mary and a Glory Be and started crying and couldn't stop and squeezed my interlaced fingers tight and my eyes shut and said aloud Please God Make It Didn't Happen.

  12 August 2003

  The soil was hard and warm against my kneI pick up the corner of the net... I pick up the corner of the netacc photographores and when I opened my eyes there were trees in full leaf under a hot sun. Trimmed, yellowing grass covered Mom's grave and her stone was aligned with her first husband's. I touched my down coat and it still felt cool.

  I almost fell over. An adrenaline surge of fear and hope and confusion stuttered my heart and made me sick to my stomach. Looking around at the green leaves on the trees, I got my breath under control. Then I shivered, closed my eyes, and tried again, hoping.

  10 February 1992

  When I opened them, it was cold and I was staring at a pile of dirt. I got to my feet somehow and walked up the hill. There was a parking ticket on the car. The date on the ticket was two days after the funeral and the paper looked fresh. I glanced back to the graves and knew that somehow I was going to make it didn't happen.

  23 June 1959

  I found a seat two rows behind my real father and brother; Indians vs. Tigers. He had a Nixonian widow's peak with straight comb lines in his thinning hair; Get Wild Root Cream Oil Charlie, It Keeps Your Hair in Trim. They had started in general admission but attendance was so low those days in that cavernous ballpark that after the third inning the ushers looked away when fans moved down into the reserved seats. Rocky Colavito fouled one off in our direction and my real father jumped up and got enough meat on the ball to deflect it but not grab it and it popped into the hands of a guy at the end of the row. My father got up and sidled down to the fellow and came back to his seat a minute later. I craned to listen. "I told that gentleman you were one of Rocky's best fans, and he said I touched the ball first, so I had dibs anyway," and he handed the ball to my brother. I had seen him reach in his pocket and give the man some bills. My brother stared at the ball until the game was over, tossing it up and catching it. My real father ate peanuts and complained about the Tribe's pitching.

  11 October 1986

  He had attended high school in Medina, quit and joined the army and got kicked out with a dishonorable discharge. There were three arrests for misdemeanor drug possession, one including disorderly conduct. There was one felony charge for escaping jail, sentence reduced to three years probation and time served. There was a four-year gap where I could find nothing about him until he turned up again on the police blotter, charged with possession, charge later dropped.

  21 November 1974

  Mom and I sat on a secondhand couch in a small three-room apartment on Hayden Avenue, not far from the Fisher Body Plant at 140th and Coit. She sipped a Carling Black Label from a glass, The Quality Brew at the Popular Price, and took occasional drags from the butt she kept balanced rather precariously on the edge of the ashtray. The civil divorce had become final and the pastor had refused her Communion. Her ex-husband was fighting the property settlement and was still in the house but the judge had freed up what was left in the bank for living expenses. She had run into a man at Fisher Foods while picking up a turkey for Thanksgiving who had helped her take her purchases to our car, a disreputable '48 Chevy coupe that was, she said, pretty much out of first gear.

  "I think he was a rum-bum or one of those drug people," she said, "But he was polite and it being the holidays I gave him a dollar for his trouble."

  I pretended to read my geography textbook for a while, and then closed it in my lap. "I know you get bored, Mom. But please tell me more about my real father," I said.

  "Oh, must we, kiddo?"

  "Please? For the holidays?"

  She didn't play hard to get. "He was a tinker," she said. "He could fix the crack of dawn with a can of Bondo. And when he was done it would look better than new. The vacuum cleaner stopped working and he took it down to the basement and put it on his workbench and just looked at it. I swear he had X-ray how things are goingooom photographorvision, like Superman. Then he took it apart and a couple of hours later he came upstairs with it, plugged it in, and it ran like new."

  She paused to cough. "He found a little bird that had fallen out of its nest and he made a bed for it in the garage with chicken wire and old towels and a lamp to keep it warm. He said mother birds won't take back a nestling when a person has touched it, you know." I said I knew. "He went back to the garden and dug a bunch of worms and fed that little bird and damned if it didn't grow up and one day hop out and fly up into a tree and then away. He just stood there watching the sky."

  9 September 1994

  It took time to track him down, but I had that, God knows. Besides, I was doing my damndest to be careful, skipping stones across the river of time before I chose my spot to toss in the stick of dynamite. I found the house sale contract at the country records office. I wasn't surprised. Sooner or later we always go home. He would have had enough money from his dealing whenever he wanted to make a down payment in that depressed market.

  I stopped over at Kelly's Island in 1961 for a few days to rest and look at the glacial grooves, then went back to start things over again.

  26 January 1995

  The neighborhood was showing its age, the young subdivision trees grown mature and the bare winter branches overarching the roadway, the once nearly-white concrete now chuckholed asphalt with black-streaked ice in the gutters. The house needed a paint job, new windows. I heard in my head the old Rosemary Clooney song my mom used to sing along with on the kitchen radio about the tuckered out old house as she made stuffed cabbage, melding the beef and pork together with Grandma's old hand meat grinder.

  I got in the same way I had as a kid when I locked myself out without my keys, popping open the milk chute next to the side door and reaching down to turn the lock from the inside. A television was blaring in the living room, and I let memory guide my feet through the house. The kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes; there were old food wrappers everywhere. The place smelled musty from unwashed clothes.

  I found him in the basement. He was slouched on an old lumpy mattress, staring up at the unpainted rafters. He looked over at me, either unsurprised or uncaring. "Why did you do it?" I asked without preamble.

  "Hi, Sis. I see you let yourself in. Been a while."

  "Why did you kill him?"

  "Who?"

  "Our father. Why did you kill him?"

  "You figured that out?"

  "Yeah. Once I figured out how to travel I also figured someone else could probably do it, too. The likely suspect was you. The appearance at work, the familiarity, the impossible disappearance afterwards. Yeah, it had to be you. I just want to know why."

  "I don't remember," he said, looking away and rubbing the back of his neck. "Maybe I was high on this." He held up what looked like an oddly shaped asthma inhaler. "I have a friend uptime who makes these things, powdered coke and horse in your nose. Coke, meth, any load you want. I seem to have a weakness for drugs in this world," he said.

  "Why did you do it?" I asked again. He didn't seem surprised that I was there at all. I wondered if he had gotten a step ahead of me somehow and I had walked into a trap. Then I looked at his face and realized he was far beyond such things.

  "Maybe it just seemed like a good idea at the time." He giggled. "Don't knock this stuff," he said, shaking the inhaler. "It's how I learned to travel. Take a big hit and va-va-va-voom. Must be because we shared the same mother, somehow.
How'd you manage it?" he asked.

  "I prayed at Mom's grave," I said and he laughed out loud.

  "Jesus takes my half-sister time tripping," he said. "Though I walk through the valley...."

  "You're a God-damned coward," I said. "You had to try it," I said. "But you didn't have the stones to risk yourself. So you killed ourI pick up the corner of the net... I pick up the corner of the netacc photographor father after you were born, but before I was. That me ceased to exist, forever. You killed me."

  He picked up the inhaler and took a small hit. "I probably figured that if I wiped myself instead of my sister I'd never know how it worked out. Like I said, I was probably out of it." He squinted at me. "Besides, what's your problem? You're just you, you're not my sister. She's gone, she never existed. You just have this weird idea you're her reincarnation, or something."

  "I have her memories," I said.

  "No you don't," he said. "Impossible."

  "I remember. The memories my mother gave me of the man who was my first father. My real father. Gone except for the patterns in my head. No more and no less."

  "He was just a guy," he said. "You think you know but you don't." He waved the inhaler listlessly. "Nothing matters. Everything is just...," and he gestured at the void. "You know, sometimes I think God got bored and decided to take this enormous toke and then thought, 'Oh, wow; Let there be, like, light,' or something."

  "Don't blaspheme like that."

  His head fell back and he closed his eyes. "Ants can't blaspheme," he muttered, telling his whole life in three words. "You don't know."

  "I do know, just enough to know what you took from me, you bastard. When you went back and killed him you changed my world line. You changed Mom's world line. But you also changed your own world line, you fool. I know. I've checked out what I could. The three of you were happy. You could have grown up being loved, you could have had a life, instead of being a dropout with a dishonorable discharge and petty crime and dealing drugs and ending up like this."