Wildside

by Steven Gould

  I put my hand on the catch. “Safeties off?”

  “Yes,” said Clara. Joey nodded.

  I pulled against the door. It hadn’t been opened in a while and it took effort to pull the two sides open. We blinked in the bright sunlight.

  When we’d gone into the barn, it had been overcast. The sky outside this door was so blue it hurt the eyes.

  I held my hand out for the shotgun. This time Clara didn’t protest, clicking the safety on before handing it to me. I eased out the door, checking both sides, and then looked up, to check above the door. It seemed clear.

  “Come on out,” I said.

  We were standing on the side of a small hill in knee-high golden grass. Before us, the grass stretched level for a while, then dropped away into a valley where huge cottonwoods lined an unseen river. The wind blew gently and the grass shifted like the surface of water. A large flock of birds flew to the south in a sky so cloud free that it seemed as if someone had dropped a giant porcelain bowl over this place, a bowl so big that its edges were hidden behind the hills and the trees.

  I pushed the door shut behind us and used the wire to raise the bar so it dropped back into its brackets.

  Marie was the first to speak. “Where’s the airstrip? There’s the Brazos, but I don’t remember those trees. And where are those cotton fields that we line up on to land at your strip?”

  Rick said, “There aren’t any telephone poles. You have a major power line south of your place. I don’t see the towers. I don’t see any cattle. The place to the east of you runs cattle, right?”

  Joey pointed. “Look, those black spots on that hill over there. Those are cattle.”

  I took the binoculars out of the bag and handed them to Joey. “Look again.”

  While he held the field glasses to his face, I scanned our perimeter again.

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “What, Joey?” Marie said.

  He handed the binoculars to her. “Tell me I’m seeing things,” he said.

  Marie looked through the binoculars at the opposite hill. “Buffalo?”

  “Let me see that!” Clara said. Marie reluctantly gave up the binoculars.

  Clara stared. “They are buffalo. Big buffalo.” She swung the glasses slowly across the herd. “Uh, they’re upset about something—they’re starting to move.”

  We could all see the dust that rose up from the moving black dots. Rick took his turn with the binoculars. “They’re coming this way.”

  The edge of the herd grew closer, the forerunners dropping out of sight for a moment in the shallow valley before us. We could hear them now, a surprising sound, low and deep, hundreds of hooves pounding the ground. On the far hill, more dark dots kept coming over the ridge, and dust rose above them like smoke. We’d seen only a part of the herd before.

  I said, “Technically, they’re bison. Back up. We’ll watch from the doorway.”

  They moved back with me, without question, because the sound was now a pounding that we could feel with our feet. I kept my eyes on our rear, especially the hillside above the door. It could be I was overcautious, but I didn’t care.

  Uncle Max hadn’t been cautious enough.

  We reached the doorway. Marie opened it and we backed in, keeping our eyes on the valley below. Three, four, six buffalo came into sight, then a steady stream, following the rising hill into the meadow that corresponded to my airstrip on the other side. About a hundred yards in front of us, they swerved to our left, to the low point of the ridge, to run into the next valley.

  Marie said something to Joey, but he shook his head, unable to hear her over the wave of noise.

  She shouted, “They’re huge!”

  They were taller at the head than any of us, with the possible exception of Rick. At the shoulder, they towered far above us. I yelled to be heard. “I believe these are woods bison. They’re bigger than plains bison.”

  A cow, running with a half-grown calf, swung wider than the rest, coming closer to us. The calf was laboring, unable to keep to the pace of the adults. A bull swung wider still and came between us and the calf. It peered at us, turning its head left, then right. It shook its head and bellowed, its long beard flapping below its chin. Its short curved horns seemed longer and sharper than before.

  I edged closer to Marie’s ear and said, “Hold still. If he charges, we shut the door. Nobody shoots. Pass it on.” Moving slowly, she told Joey, who told Clara and Rick.

  Suddenly the bull spun away from us and charged to the left, bellowing. I saw something tawny streak through the grass, then rear up, screaming, clawed paws raised, lips drawn back from huge curved teeth. The bull charged forward and the cat jumped to the right, racing around the bull for the calf, but by now other bulls charged out of the black rolling mass, between the cow and the cat. With a higher-pitched bawling sound, the calf found hidden reserves of strength and ran back toward the herd, its mother beside it.

  The cat turned aside and streaked away from the charging bulls, vanishing back into the grass.

  Joey shut his mouth and shifted his grip on the thirty-ought-six. “We’re going to need bigger guns,” he shouted.

  I shrugged, nonchalant. When he looked back at the bison, I carefully wiped my sweating hands off on my jeans and checked the safety on the shotgun again.

  The herd took another five minutes to pass and, by the time they did, the dust was dimming the sun and making us breathe carefully through our noses. There were wolves following the stragglers. Big wolves trotting through the dust like ghosts in fog. I shut the door before they got near us, secured the bar, and we went back through the tunnel to the barn.

  This time, nobody made fun of the way I locked the door in the back wall. Joey even gave the lock an extra tug. We stacked the hay back where it had been and locked up the barn. The sky was still overcast but not with dust—just ordinary clouds. Joey and Rick walked over the top of the hill, lining up on the barn, to satisfy themselves that there wasn’t a herd of bison on the other side of it.

  They were back in five minutes, quiet and thoughtful. Joey flopped down on the edge of the porch. Rick stood on the porch steps, his arms crossed.

  “Well?” said Clara.

  “It’s not the same place,” said Rick. “Just what it should be. The ranch next door and the other end of the runway. No buffalo. No wolves.” He paused for a moment, then said, “No sabertooths.”

  I took another sandwich from the cooler and didn’t say anything.

  “So that’s the secret?” said Joey.

  I nodded.

  “What’s happening, Charlie?” Marie asked.

  “I’m eating lunch.”

  Clara raised her voice, “You know what she means! Is it a time machine? What’s that stuff on the other side? Did we just go back in time? Those were ice age mammals, weren’t they?”

  I put the sandwich down, “That’s what I first thought, too, but I don’t think so.”

  Rick uncrossed his arms and sat down, leaning back against the porch post. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, Charlie. We know about the door in the barn—we might as well know the rest.”

  I looked at each of them in turn, waiting. Joey looked as if he was angry about something he couldn’t understand. Marie’s eyes were wide and she kept moistening her lips as if they were dry. Rick’s face was blank, as if his mind was a universe away. Clara looked downright excited.

  I cleared my throat and began. “Okay. It starts when I was seven. My dad was still active duty air force and stationed at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. During the summer break, they shipped me out here to spend a month with Uncle Max and Aunt Jo.

  “Well, Uncle Max took me hunting with him. I use the term loosely—he’d take a rifle and a pistol and we’d go through the tunnel and walk. He never shot anything, though once he fired in the air to turn away this hairy elephant.”

  “Mammoth?” said Clara.

  “I don’t know. I was only seven. Mammoth or mastodon, I’m no
t sure. Had a wonderful time, though. Until I went back to school.” The corners of my mouth turned down and I frowned. “I tried to tell my classmates about the stuff I saw and they said I lied. The teachers weren’t too hard on me—they suggested I had an ‘overactive’ imagination. No one believed me and eventually, I came to doubt it myself.

  “The next time we came here was when my Aunt Jo died, when I was nine. We were living in Atlanta—Dad had left the air force and was working for the airlines then—and we flew into Houston and drove up. We stayed in town, in a hotel, and the services and reception were at the Methodist Church, so we never got out here. I thought about the door during the funeral, but the memory was like memories of pretend games you play when you’re a kid and it was all tangled up with memories of Aunt Jo alive.

  “Uncle Max visited us a few times after that, but we never talked about the door. Seven years ago, he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared? I thought he was dead,” said Marie.

  “He probably is.”

  Joey said, “So you think he went through and got munched?”

  I lowered my head and stared at Joey over the tops of my glasses.

  Marie hit him on the arm. “What a thing to say!”

  “When did you discover the door again, Charlie?” Rick asked.

  “When Dad was transferred to DFW, Mom didn’t want to live in the metroplex—she and Uncle Max are from here, so Dad decided to commute. Mom came back several times to try and find out what happened to Max and to make sure the place was okay. He left a will naming her executor and a power of attorney in her name. The power of attorney was in effect, but the will didn’t go into effect until he was finally declared dead three months ago. That’s when I inherited formally.”

  “What about the rest of your mom’s family?”

  “There isn’t any. Their parents died before Dad and Mom were married. My dad’s side of the family goes on and on, but it was always just Uncle Max on Mom’s side.” I blinked. “Maybe that’s why Mom took my moving so hard. I’m her only blood kin.”

  “And the door?” Joey said, impatient.

  “I’m getting to it. We knew all along that the farm came to me in the will, so I was ‘allowed’ to do most of the upkeep on the place. Mow the place with the tractor, rake, cut up the dead trees, paint. Fix the fences. I was standing in the barn one day, and the memory of going hunting with Uncle Max came back, very strong.

  “The hay was stacked like it is now—but it was older hay, years old and dry, and it kept cracking and falling to the floor. Every week or so I’d rake up the pieces and put them in the compost heap, but one day I decided that it would make more sense to get rid of all the hay, once and for all.

  “As you might imagine, I found the door then. The locking brackets were empty and I found the bar just inside the door. I figure Uncle Max expected to be gone long enough that he didn’t want someone finding the door, so he restacked the hay behind him before closing the doors.”

  I paused to take a breath and Rick said, “Didn’t they look for him? I mean, the county sheriffs department? Didn’t they come out here and search? Why didn’t they find the door?”

  “Apparently they spent most of their efforts interviewing his neighbors, his friends, and places like his bank. By the time they started asking around, he’d been missing about a month—that is, they found a month-old bank record of a small cash withdrawal that was done in person at a teller and the utility bills had been paid by checks dated from that same week. One theory was that he had an accident away from the house so they had dogs out in the woods all around and down by the river. Another theory was that he was fishing the river and he fell in.”

  Joey shook his head. “The sheriffs department couldn’t find its ass with both hands.” Joey’s DWI arrest had been by a county deputy, so the statement didn’t make much sense—they’d found him after all.

  I continued. “Anyway, I stuck my head out the far door and confirmed that it wasn’t just a tunnel through the hill. I thought about telling my parents about it, and I thought about telling the police, but I didn’t.”

  Marie asked, “Why not, Charlie?”

  “Because Uncle Max had already been gone for five years. And he’d kept it a secret for as long as I’d known him. And it was mine. Or it was going to be. I wanted to know what it was before I handed it over to anybody else.”

  “How the hell did you catch those pigeons with buffalo stampeding all over the place? I wouldn’t think any pigeons would land,” Rick said.

  “To be honest, you don’t see something like that very often. It was a freak. I’m glad it happened because it showed you how different the other side can be, but it took me a week of walking around the other side before I saw any buffalo. Lots of tracks, but no buffalo, no sabertooths. Did see some wild dogs, maybe some wolves. And passenger pigeons. So many they darkened the sky and their shit made the ground white.”

  “Well I wouldn’t have told anybody,” said Joey. “The government would be all over your ass.” He looked a little sheepish. “I hate to say it, but I understand why you didn’t want to tell us.”

  “You guys were right,” I said. “I had to tell you sometime. I’m going to be even more honest with you—what I want to do is dangerous. If we don’t trust each other—if you don’t trust me—it won’t work. Worse, it could get some or all of us killed.”

  They were quiet for a moment, staring at me. I wondered if what I’d said was too melodramatic, but after that buffalo stampede, I doubted it would be taken that way. Clara asked the next question.

  “What is it, Charlie, that you want to do? That you want us to do?”

  “Well, to know that, you have to know what the other side is.”

  “Do you know?” Rick asked. “It’s driving me crazy. We wiped out most of the buffalo and we wiped out the passenger pigeons. Did we wipe out the sabertooths? Anyway, does the tunnel go back in time?”

  I shook my head. “No. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t—if we were to go back through the tunnel in another six hours, do you know what we’d see?”

  “Well,” said Marie, “it would be dark.”

  “Yes. And if it weren’t cloudy you could look up and see the positions of the planets and the moon and the stars. No satellites, though.”

  “So?” said Joey.

  Clara turned to him, “It could tell you what year it was. The moon was closer to the earth in the past, the planets line up in particular patterns. Even the constellations change positions over a great enough time.” She faced me. I’d never seen her like this; she was excited and, even better, she was excited about what I had to say. I smiled in spite of myself. “What would we see, Charlie?”

  I paused. “Exactly the same sky you’re used to. The moon would be the same size and it would be in the same phase. The constellations would be where you expected them to be and they’d be the shape you’re used to. The planets would be in the same place.”

  “So it’s the same time,” Clara said, beating me to it. “It’s not the past or the future.”

  “So what is it?” asked Marie.

  They waited for me and I drew it out for a moment. I wasn’t used to this much attention. It felt good.

  “It’s the same time, but it’s a different earth.” I paused. “It’s probably a different universe.”

  “Different but parallel,” said Joey.

  Rick looked at Joey with new respect. “Whoa, Einstein. Pretty quick there.”

  Joey flushed. “I’ve seen Star Trek. What else accounts for the same landscape, the same biology?”

  “Well, not completely the same,” Clara said. “We don’t exactly have bison roaming the streets of College Station.”

  “So why are there bison there? Why are there passenger pigeons?” Rick said.

  It was Clara who said, “Because there aren’t any men, er, humans. At least not in this area, perhaps not in this hemisphere.” She turned to me. “Am I right?”

  I nodded. “Let me p
ut it this way—I haven’t seen any sign of humans and when I took a portable radio far enough away from the tunnel to avoid leakage, I don’t get any radio broadcasts. Not FM, not AM, not shortwave. I’ve checked several times during day and night. If there are humans on the other side, they don’t broadcast and they haven’t made it into this area.”

  “And that’s why there are all these extinct species, right?” Clara leaned forward, still excited. I looked into her eyes for a moment and smiled.

  “That’s certainly what I think,” I said.

  “So what’s the plan, Charlie,” Joey said, leaning back. “Are we going to sell more extinct species? Mastodons for sale, mammoths for rent? Anybody for a saber-toothed tiger? They make excellent pets—warn the mailman, though.”

  I shook my head. “We’re going to have a hard enough time keeping the secret with the pigeons we’re selling now. If we continued to sell extinct species, someone would think what you did, Joey—that someone has a time machine. Don’t you think the government would be interested in that? Want to win a war? Wipe out the country before it was ever formed. Eliminate the fathers of tyrants. Kill Hitler as a teenager.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Joey. “We’ve all seen Terminator. We’ve all seen Star Trek. But it isn’t a time machine, so they can’t do that.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Who’s going to tell them? Who are they going to believe? Besides, there’s plenty of reasons for them to want the secret. You want the best bomb shelter there ever was? You want a place to put all the radioactive waste there is without endangering humans? All the toxic waste? They’ll want to do on a very large scale what I want to do on a small one.”

  “And what’s that?” said Clara.

  “If man hasn’t been on this planet, or at least in this hemisphere, then he hasn’t drilled out the oil that’s there, he hasn’t lumbered all the forests, and he hasn’t mined out all the minerals.”

  “You want us to drill for oil?” asked Clara.