Smith's Monthly #23

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  Twice I slipped and had to stop as the jarring pain blinded me and took my breath away. Getting to a jail and a hospital would be a relief after this.

  I stumbled up onto the edge of the hot freeway and glanced back at my husband and Ted. They were nowhere to be seen. They had done as I had told them and moved back into that hot culvert to sit and wait.

  What wimps. What did I ever see in those two men?

  THREE

  Cars flashed past, then a big truck, kicking up a hard wind filled with fine sand.

  There wasn’t a cop in sight.

  Good.

  Suddenly, in the other lane, a blue camper braked hard, swerved to the inside lane and then off the road and across the shallow ditch between the two sides of the freeway. It hesitated for just a moment to let a big truck flash past, then spinning dirt and dust, it accelerated toward me, cutting across the two lanes and sliding to a halt off the freeway near me.

  Alice.

  Right on time. My miracle had arrived.

  And, I hoped, with all the money.

  “I thought I’d never find you,” Alice said as she jumped out of the camper and ran toward me. “I’ve been cruising this freeway for the past half-hour looking for you.”

  I didn’t quite stop her from hugging me, a wonderful, sweaty hug that almost caused me to pass out from the pain in my arm.

  “Oh, man, are you all right?” Alice asked, stepping back.

  “Bob broke my arm in that stupid wreck. It took a little longer to get everything set up.”

  “And where are the two love machines?” Alice asked.

  “Down in the ditch right under us,” I said. “Both hurt, but not that seriously. They just think they are. A couple of wimps.”

  Alice nodded. “Nothing new there.”

  “They thought you were captured.”

  “And we’re going to be,” Alice said, her control voice in full force, “if you don’t get into the camper before too many more people see you.”

  I didn’t argue.

  The first movie was over. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice was rolling the credits now.

  But we just hadn’t bothered to tell our dear husbands that this was a double feature. Thanks to Bob’s shitty driving, though, we still had a few twists and turns to make it through.

  The camper Alice had found was one of those small things with a small back bedroom, another bed or storage area over the driver, a tiny kitchen area, and a bathroom so small, you couldn’t sit down without scarring your knees. It looked new, so new in fact that it had a price and features list glued to the counter.

  I knew exactly where she had gotten it, which dealer lot, which dealer, and how. I had planned it, and it seemed that Alice had carried out my plans perfectly, even after the wreck.

  Alice slammed the door and scampered into the driver’s seat. The van was still running and I could feel the air-conditioning flowing over my sweating face and arms. Between the pain, the excitement of being rescued instead of arrested, and the air-conditioning on my skin, I almost had an orgasm right there.

  I moved to the copilot chair as Alice kicked the van into gear, waited for traffic to speed past, then got onto the freeway. The movement of the camper and the roughness of the road forced me to again hold my broken arm tight up under my breasts.

  “I’m going to need a doctor to set this before we go too far.”

  Alice nodded. “So do I. That husband of yours sure can’t drive.”

  It was at that moment I noticed the dried blood and the bandage wrapped around her leg.

  “You got any idea of where we might find one?” I asked as I turned both dashboard vents to face me, blowing cold, wonderful air over my skin.

  “If you can make it, I have an old friend who’s a doctor about six hours south of here. He’ll help us if we give him a little side treat, if you know what I mean?”

  “After a shower, that will be a pleasure.”

  Alice laughed. “Better than what old Bob and Ted are going to get. You feel bad about them?”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked. I didn’t feel bad in the slightest. Relieved, actually, to be away from them.

  Alice laughed. “Yeah, know what you mean. When should we tell the police where they are at?”

  I smiled at the idea of the two of them coming up out of that culvert to find the police waiting and me not there. “Let’s give them a half hour to sweat.”

  “Good,” Alice said. “We’ll be across the state line by then as well.”

  “And the money?”

  Alice nodded toward the back. “More than we’re ever going to be able to spend, tucked safely under the bed in the back.”

  All I could do was laugh. Except for the car wreck, the plan had gone perfectly. The only robbers the bank saw were Bob and Ted, and no amount of talking on their part was ever going to convince anyone that their wives had taken part. In fact, with the blood that I splattered around our house before we left, it’s going to look like the two of them killed us and dumped our bodies before their little bank robbery.

  I braced my arm and sat back, enjoying the cool air and the smooth ride of the camper. Alice and I had money, and we were free.

  Completely free.

  With new identities already made up and set.

  Judy Freeman, a.k.a. Carol, wife of Bob was now dead. Welcome to the world Thelma Downer, rich widow of oil tycoon Bobbie Downer.

  I closed my eyes and just let myself relax.

  “Carol, you all right?”

  “Carol’s dead,” I said, glancing at the woman I loved more than anything in the world. “Remember?”

  Alice laughed. “That’s right. The new movie starts now, doesn’t it?”

  “That it does, Louise.”

  She smiled as I turned to face her. “So, after the doctor, where would you like to go, Thelma?”

  “Anywhere but the Grand Canyon.”

  Sometimes very special friends, even friends you can’t remember, give you a chance to change your past by following the memory of a special song.

  Should you take the special Christmas gift, take the trip, and change your own history?

  Or maybe take a look at tomorrow and change that instead.

  “A Golden Dream” was first published under the title “The Song of a Gift Horse” in Black Cats and Broken Mirrors anthology edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers.

  Also, a very altered version of this story was part of the novel Melody Ridge: A Thunder Mountain Novel.

  A GOLDEN DREAM

  A Jukebox Story

  ONE

  She came through the heavy front door of the old hotel with a face as young as yesterday. And for just a moment the stale piss-smell of the thick air, the stained and faded linoleum floors, the peeling paint on the smoke-yellowed walls were forgotten by the three of us in the front foyer.

  For just a moment we forgot our long, dull days of old men’s boredom, moving like zombies from our rooms, to the sitting room with the television, to the front stoop, back to the sitting room, then back to our rooms, punctuated only by a silent lunch and an even more silent dinner in the small kitchen.

  Mitchel, Hank and me. When she came through that door we forgot we were three corpses too damn old to just lie down and be done with it. We forgot we were the last residents of The Golden Dream Hotel for men.

  We even forgot it was Christmas Eve.

  A year ago crusty Jamison bought the old hotel from a development agency. We all had an understanding that the four of us would be able to live in the hotel until we all died. Jamison died the next month at the age of sixty-eight, giving me the hotel in his will. Now all the three of us did was sit around and wonder who would be next. But no one talked about it. Since I am the youngest at sixty-six, I figured I would have the longest to wait. Since I owned the place that sort of made sense.

  And now, as she stood there on this cold winter evening, her short, perfect-skinned nose wrinkling at the smell of old age, even the tho
ught of dying was forgotten.

  She blinked in the dim light and then focused on the old black and white television flickering in the corner. I could see she had bright, large eyes, thick eyebrows, and a full mouth. The kind of mouth I remembered that Alice had back what seemed like a million years ago. Alice was my first love, my first sexual partner, my first real girlfriend. We never married and I always wondered why.

  The young woman brushed a long slender hand against her nose, then straightened her shoulders as if she were going to face a firing squad. She stepped toward the three of us. Her high heels clicked on the linoleum floor and I wondered when that floor had last felt the steps of a woman.

  “Excuse me,” she said. Her clear, soft voice seemed to fill the old hotel with life. She stopped and glanced around, as if startled by the sound of her own words. “I’m.... I am looking for a Mister Fred Thorpe.”

  I thought I was going to swallow my teeth. She was looking for me, as if I actually existed to someone outside of these walls besides the social security department. “That’s me,” I said, sort of waving a hand in her direction. My voice sounded really odd following hers.

  She seemed relieved and took another step toward me. “Would it be possible for us to talk?”

  I shrugged and pointed to the vacant chair that had been Jamison’s.

  She shook her head. “In private, if you don’t mind.”

  Again I shrugged and without looking at the others pushed myself up from my chair in the most dignified manner I had managed in years. I nodded toward the hall that led past the old front desk cage. “We can talk back in the kitchen.”

  She said fine and I shuffled ahead of her distinct and firm footsteps down the hall and into the kitchen.

  After we were both settled at the old wood table she took a deep breath. She started out saying that I wasn’t going to believe her.

  She was right.

  I didn’t.

  TWO

  The old Wurlitzer jukebox sat like a king at the end of the oak bar in the Garden Lounge. Radley Stout, the owner of the Garden polished the old jukebox every week and the chrome and glass sparkled as if the machine had a life and energy of its own.

  Above the jukebox was a polished wood and glass case that held four drinking glasses with the old Garden Lounge logo and a name etched on each.

  Carl, Dave, Jess, and Fred.

  Except for Christmas Eve, the jukebox was always unplugged and the glass case always locked.

  The Garden Lounge was a local, quiet bar. It had old-styled booths, a hundred regular customers and enough atmosphere in plants and low lighting that everyone felt safe when they came in.

  Radley Stout had owned the bar for eleven years and for ten Christmas Eves he had plugged in the jukebox. Tonight was to be the eleventh and he hoped it would be something special.

  THREE

  The kitchen smelled of the hot dogs we had had for lunch, and the dirty pan and plates were still in the sink. I couldn’t remember if it had been my turn to do dishes or Hank’s. It was Christmas Eve. What did it matter?

  “My name is Sandy Reeves,” the good-looking young woman said to me across the kitchen table. “I am a private investigator and I was hired to find you by a Mr. Radley Stout.”

  I laughed and leaned toward the woman who looked like she might be barely old enough to be out of high school. “Right. So what is the gimmick? What are you selling?”

  She didn’t seem bothered by my rude question at all. Calmly she reached into her large purse and pulled out at small, black pistol. With a thump she placed it on the table between us. “I have a permit for that,” she said, smiling slightly.

  All I could do was stare at the black gun while she pulled her wallet out of her purse, flipped it open, and slid it across the table at me. Then she scooped the gun back into her purse.

  Open in front of me was her driver’s license and her private investigator’s license from the state. I glanced at her birth date. She was twenty-six. At lot younger than any child Alice and I might have had. I nodded and slid her wallet back at her. “So what does this Mr. Stout want from me?”

  She sort of shrugged. “Actually, I am not exactly sure. He owns a place called the Garden Lounge, down on Main. He said he just wanted to buy you a Christmas Eve drink.”

  “That’s all?” I shook my head. “He hired a private investigator to find me to buy me a drink?”

  She nodded, almost looking embarrassed. “I am just supposed to take you down to the Garden Lounge. And Mr. Stout gave me strict instructions to not force you in any way. He knows nothing about how you are living or even that you are alive. So are you interested in having a drink?”

  I glanced at her and then around at the old kitchen and the dishes in the sink. It was Christmas Eve and I had absolutely nothing better to do. “What the hell,” I said. “I’ve always believed that you never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “True,” she said. “You just never know when a miracle might happen.”

  I stared at her, but she only smiled, not explaining at all. Slowly I pushed myself back from the table and stood. “I could use a drink tonight.”

  She nodded. “So could I.”

  FOUR

  Jukeboxes, by their very nature, are time machines.

  Not only do they look as if they belong in another decade, but by playing songs, they sometimes take the listeners back to the memories associated with those songs.

  The jukebox in the Garden Lounge did a little more than that. It physically took the listener back to their memory from a song. And the listener could be there, inside the listener’s younger body, until the song finished.

  The listener could also change events that occurred during the time the song was playing. And by changing those events, change the future.

  That was what made the jukebox so dangerous. That was also the reason the jukebox was never plugged in. When new customers in the Garden asked about the jukebox, Stout just told them it was broken.

  Stout, the owner and only bartender of the Garden Lounge, originally saved the old jukebox from the bankruptcy court a good hour before the bank locked up his first bar. For one full year in which he had tried to run the bar, the jukebox had sat in the back hall, covered with a blanket and a good inch of dust and grime. It had been just part of the old furniture and things that came with the bar. Almost as a lark, he took the jukebox to his garage, hiding it from the bank, figuring that he would fix it up some day.

  That day came another year later on a Saturday.

  He was thinking about buying a second bar and giving the bar business another try. The old jukebox would make a great item to have in the new place if he could get the jukebox to work.

  When he opened the jukebox up, he found a lot of sealed boxes and weird looking electronics that seemed far beyond anything needed or standard in an old Wurlitzer jukebox.

  He studied the insides for a few hours without figuring any of it out. Finally he just dusted everything off, fixed the electrical cord that looked as if someone had ripped it from the back, and plugged the jukebox in.

  The jukebox blinked a few times, the colored lights came on, and nothing blew up.

  So Radley went in search of a record to play on it. Luck would have it that the only forty-five record Radley owned was an old song he and Jenny had bought. It was their song and it reminded him of the day in the student union that he wanted to ask Jenny to stay with him, not leave town, but hadn’t. The next day she went back to college and eventually met another man.

  He dug the old record out of his scrapbook, cleaned it off, put it on A-1, and punched the buttons. With the first note the world shifted, his garage disappeared, and he suddenly found himself sitting in the old Student Union café, facing Jenny across a scarred table.

  The air in the room felt warm and seemed to close in on him. He could smell Jenny’s wonderful perfume. Her light brown hair was pulled back and off her face. She was nodding in time with the beat of the song, waiting for
me to say something.

  And smiling. Night after night for years Radley had remembered, and would remember, that smile.

  The chair felt hot and sticky under him and his hands seemed to be glued to the table top. The song, their song, was on, echoing through the large room, and he stared around at the others studying or eating at tables nearby before turning to stare at Jenny. He could not believe this. He could remember all of his older memories and his younger ones, too. He knew exactly that he wanted to ask her to stay with him, maybe even marry him.

  And he knew exactly what his future held because he hadn’t.

  The thought of that future scared him even more than asking her to stay with him.

  He sat there, not saying a word, staring at Jenny and her smile until the song ended and he found himself back in his garage. He took a deep shuddering breath and then barely made it to the back door before he threw up.

  The next day, after a long night of no sleep, he finally got up the courage to play the record again.

  And again he did nothing but sit across from Jenny and stare.

  He never played their song again, even though it remained for eleven years as A-1 on the jukebox.

  Except on Christmas Eve.

  On Christmas Eve, the only night he plugged in the jukebox for his friends, he takes that special record off and places it in the safe. He didn’t want to ever take a chance of anyone else playing it.

  FIVE

  Sandy Reeves, Miss Private Eye with the Big Black Gun, held the front door of the Garden Lounge open for me to shuffle through. I had passed by the Garden a hundred times and always thought about stopping. Never had. It had just not been the right time. I never expected Christmas Eve to be that right time.