Time Travel: Recent Trips

by Paula Guran

  "Don't you see?" she'd say to me. "I'm doomed. It's in my blood to be doomed. Some people are born losers—it's built into their chromosomes. You've hitched your wagon to a falling star . . . "

  She started sleeping twelve, fourteen hours a day, and not getting out of bed when she did wake up. The house fell into a piled-up disorder like a sculpture representing her depression. She started talking about suicide. Suicidal depression had been a black tsunami poised over her just before we'd met—and then my intercession had let her run from it, for a time. But it couldn't be outrun, she insisted. The giant black wave was falling on her at last. Perhaps, she suggested, we could die together . . .

  I went to see my Uncle Roger, but really it was to talk to Crosswell. "You're a physician, Doctor Crosswell—do you know somebody good for this kind of illness?"

  He recommended a Dr. Hale Vennetty. I went to see him, for a consultation about my wife. He was a tall pale dour psychiatrist with a phlegmatic, fatalistic air, and he was convinced that once a person was "imprinted" by their childhood, that imprint was their destiny and there was little to be done, though electroshock could be tried. He was interested in Becky's case, since it had an affinity with his pet theory, evolved mostly to account for cyclic ghetto miseries: parental abandonment led to a tendency to abandon one's own children, as if the abandoner were re-enacting the despair of their own childhood. It was a vicious circle that spiraled through the generations, abandonment leading to abandonment. "Why," he chuckled, "the only way to change it, really, once the imprint has happened, would be to travel back in time and persuade someone who started the cycle of abandonment not to do it . . . "

  I couldn't believe it was hopeless. I went to two more doctors, one of whom suggested an experimental new drug, something called an "antidepressant." I was planning to persuade Becky to sign on for the experimental therapy program . . .

  I'd talk to her about it, I decided, right after I got back from Albuquerque.

  Then she was dead. I was alone.

  I would grieve, and find someone else. Someone healthier.

  But I drank a great deal of beer, and over ate, and put on forty pounds, becoming even less attractive. Worse, I was dogged by self-loathing that other people infallibly sensed. Self-loathing is not an attractive quality. But I couldn't shake it. I just kept thinking I could have saved her, after all. If I had stayed with her . . . Hadn't gone on that trip. I'd known she was at risk for suicide but I went anyway. Because she was becoming a burden to me—I wanted to get away from her.

  I tried blaming it on her sister Sandra. If only she'd let me talk to Becky that night, I might've cheered her up . . .

  But it didn't take. I blamed myself. I spent much of 1975 and most of 1976 blaming myself . . .

  By degrees, I became fixated on Vennetty's theory, his cycle of abandonment. Then I remembered Crosswell's story about Collier. The recordings. The tale of time travel . . .

  Crosswell wouldn't talk about it. But I had a key to my Uncle's house because I fed their four cats when they were out of town. I let myself in one day and searched the file box in the den Crosswell used for an office. It took me all of five minutes to find the manila envelope, at the back of the lowest drawer, with the transcription of the tapes. I took it home and read it with a mixture of dread, disbelief, and growing excitement.

  The description of the method used for time travel had an eerie verisimilitude for me. On rare occasions, as I'd hinted to Crosswell, I'd experienced something of the sort myself. In the little ghost towns I'd visited, I had felt, sometimes, for perhaps just a second, that the veil of the ages had drawn back, and I'd glimpsed the town in its teeming heyday; had smelled the reeking mules and the reeking prospectors, had blinked in the rising dust . . . before it had faded away. I had almost . . . almost traveled in time.

  Collier's process was the same method, crystallized by fanatical dedication. It was a psychological, then a psychic, process. You surrounded yourself with artifacts of the era you wanted to travel to. You dressed for the era. You visualized the era. You fixed the date and time in your mind. You repeated, over and over again, the time, the place, the destination you wanted to travel to. You visualized, you visualized, you visualized. And since the quantum uncertainty hidden at the heart of the universe is penetrable by mind itself, a persistent man might just project himself into the past through sheer force of will . . .

  Was it really possible? Was it possible I could project myself a year into the past, and stop Becky's death?

  The apartment Becky had died in had grim associations for Sandra and she'd recently given it up. I rented it, splurging my tiny savings to do it, and sat on a chair in the bedroom, staring at a newspaper from the day before Becky had died—it'd taken some doing to get hold of it. Then I tried for hours to travel back to that night . . .

  Now and then, there was a flicker. I almost went. The room would shift— Sandra's old furniture would start to appear. Once I thought I glimpsed Becky. But the trouble was, 1975 was too much like 1976. It wasn't different enough, somehow, for the mind to find its bearings. I kept slipping back to my own time.

  But I had confirmed that time travel was possible. I had gone into the past—if only for a moment. And there was one other possibility for saving Becky. Suppose . . .

  Suppose I took seriously what Dr. Vennetty had suggested facetiously. Suppose I traveled back to the time of the Old West's Billy Clanton—and stopped him from being there, in Tombstone, that October day in 1881. He was reputed to be a pretty good-natured kid, overall. With any luck, if he weren't shot down in the OK Corral fight, he'd marry Isabella, and he'd stay with her, and raise that child, and the cycle of abandonment would be broken, and that child's children would not be marked with despair, would not be imprinted, and Rebecca Clanton would not be seeded with depression—and suicide.

  I freely confess, I wasn't quite in my right mind in those days. I felt haunted by Becky—as if some black shimmering from her despair had settled over me, an invisible cloak I always wore. It drew itself over my eyes, and made me see things in extremes. Forgetting about Becky, letting her go, was not an option. I had to save her—or die myself.

  So I went to Tombstone, Arizona, in October 1976—went there in period costume. It isn't strange to dress in the manner of the 1880s there. No one even stared at my frock coat, the watch and chain on my weskit, the silk top hat. I rented a room in a bed-and-breakfast, a tourist-outfitted building that had existed in 1881, and retreated to a room already furnished with the right antiques. My pockets were heavy with silver dollars wrapped in outdated paper money. I'd sold my car to get enough money to buy the antique funds from a numismatist. I even had a small pistol, circa 1879, hidden in my coat.

  I decided I should try to go right to the morning of the day the gunfight happened, so that there were fewer variables to deal with—and because, since I was a historian of the Old West, that day was already firmly fixed in my mind. I had visited it many times in my imagination, reading and re-reading accounts of the gunfight and the events leading up to it. I had the edge, a jump on visiting Tombstone, Arizona, October 26, 1881.

  I set up my own tape recorder, and recorded the words over and over again . . . "October 26, 1881 . . . it is nine in the morning, the morning of the OK Corral gunfight, in Tombstone, Arizona . . . October 26, 1881 . . . it is nine in the morning . . . " And in the background was music, not too loud, a tape loop of tunes recorded by contemporary folk musicians but on acoustic instruments, only songs that were extant in 1881. "Camptown Races" . . . "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" . . .

  It took three days, scarcely resting, with only a few breaks to eat dried food and drink bottled water, the occasional short nap, for the process to really begin. On my few visits to the men's room, down the hall, I encountered tourists, people who stared at me suspiciously. They'd heard the mantra-like drone from my room, the interminable music . . .

  October 26, 1881 . . . it is nine in the morning, the morning of the OK Corral gunf
ight, in Tombstone, Arizona. Picturing this room, that day. The street outside, what it must have been like. Envisioning faces familiar to Tombstone in those days—faces I knew from old tintypes and photographs— that would be nearby. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Big Nose Kate Elder, Mayor Clum, George Parsons, Fred Dodge. Seeing them in my mind's eye. October 26, 1881 . . . it is nine in the morning . . .

  And then what Collier had called "the absorption" began. Suddenly I was drawn inward, caught up in a drifting sensation—I understood now exactly what Collier meant—and a mounting disorientation. The room around me seemed distant, detached. The sound of my droning voice, those songs, became thick, distorted, as if I were going deaf. Then I ceased to hear them—and heard instead a shouting from the street, the clatter of horse's hooves. The tinkle of a cheap piano.

  The sounds of Tombstone, October 1881.

  The officiating lady of the whorehouse was a stout woman with flaming red hair contrasting vividly with her blowsy blue dress; she was leaning back in a rocking chair on the front porch, her pale thick-ankled left leg cocked over her right knee, smoking a pipe. She didn't seem particularly surprised to see me, a stranger, walk out of her house, though she hadn't marked my entrance.

  "Now did that Marissa bring herself a man up there without consulting me?" she asked, almost rhetorically, as she frowned at her pipe, knocking its dottle clear on the railing. "The wicked vixen owes me a dollar and no mistake . . . "

  "Here is your dollar, ma'am, and good day to you," I said, my voice trembling as I laid the worn silver dollar the porch railing beside her.

  She chuckled and went back to singing wordlessly to herself. I stepped out into the October morning, into the smell of sage and horse dung and leather . . .

  Believe, I told myself, feeling dreamlike as I stepped off Fifth Street and onto Allen, in the Tombstone, Arizona, of October 1881. Believe!

  I turned left, passing the Golden Eagle Brewery, striding by several shops including a hostelry, Campbell and Hatch Billiards, the Cosmopolitan Hotel, the Eagle Meat Market, Hafford's Saloon . . . Believe in this. This is no dream. These creaking wagons pulled by oxen and horses; that stagecoach arriving; these weary ladies of the night blinking in the morning light as they stumped blearily to their beds in their high-button shoes; this shopkeeper, with the flaring muttonchops and the red gaiters, opening up his emporium; the smell of alkali dust and new-cut lumber and the smell of horses and the raw rich scent of privies, many privies, blowing in on the sharp desert wind . . . It's no dream!

  But it was the dream of every Old West historian. To actually visit Dodge City or Virginia City or Tombstone—back then. And this day of days, the day of the most storied gunfight of the Old West! I could get the truth about the gunfight—no one would ever believe me, of course, but I'd know. I'd know who started the fight, and if indeed the Clantons and McClaurys had not even drawn their weapons, as the anti-Earp Tombstone Nugget had claimed, or if it was, as the pro-Earp Tombstone Epitaph had insisted, a straight-up fight with Frank McClaury and Billy Clanton drawing first . . . Too bad I didn't bring a camera back with me, a Polaroid, say, or—

  The streets of Tombstone rippled; I seemed to glimpse a Cadillac glimmering into visibility, asphalt appearing under my feet . . .

  No! Don't think of things like that! Focus. Be here. There's only here and now—October 26, 1881!

  I saw an apothecary's shop then, across the street. Focus on that. An old-fashioned apothecary's shop. You have a plan. You must go there and make a purchase . . .

  I went into the shop, and found the apothecary's assistant—a sallow, sleepy-eyed, greasy-haired woman in a long black dress—and I instantly suspected her of being a laudanum addict. No matter. I made my enquiry and, wordlessly, she sold me what I needed to carry out my plan.

  I stepped out to the wooden sidewalk, shivering in the chill wind, and looked fiercely around, trying to fixate on something that would keep me in this time. I focused on a man walking unsteadily along, across the dusty street, a man in a sombrero. He was a plump-faced white man with an oiled mustache and a small pointed beard; the silver and black sombrero didn't seem to go with his stained frock coat, his tall black boots. Then I knew the man for who he was. It was Ike Clanton, full up with liquor.

  I understood the dark, intent look on his face, too. There was fear and anger, perfectly mixed, in that expression, the whole framed by the sullen stupidity of alcohol. I knew what was behind that look . . . and how it would lead to the "Gunfight at the OK Corral."

  Earlier that year, the stage had been robbed, and Bob Paul had been killed. The Earps had learned that the robbers were local ne'er-do-wells surnamed Leonard, Head, and Crane. But the stage robbers had made good their getaway. Wyatt Earp knew that Ike Clanton and the McClaury brothers were close acquaintances of the stage robbers—"acquaintances" at the very least. He'd approached cowboys Ike Clanton and Frank McClaury secretly and said that if they'd ask around, and then tell him how to find the stage robbers, he'd see that Ike and the McClaurys would get the reward money on the quiet, with Earp taking credit for the arrest, and in consequence getting himself elected to the lucrative job of town sheriff. Ike and Frank agreed and traded some information—but before it could be acted on, local ranchers Isaac Haslett and his brother Bill, in need of the reward money, had bushwhacked Leonard and Head, only to be killed, presumably by a vengeful Crane, soon after—Crane vanished and the whole deal between the Earps and the cowboys fell apart.

  Still, Ike was afraid that the leader of the cowboy gang, Curly Bill Brocius, would find out Ike had played along with Wyatt Earp. Rumors seemed to suggest as much. Ike felt he had to bluster and damn the Earps, and call it all a lie, in order to keep his standing in the gang. Earp pal, former dentist and fulltime gambler John Henry "Doc" Holliday, knew Curley Bill, and Crane too, and Ike was afraid Doc had told them. So it was necessary to call Doc Holliday a dirty liar, all around, which didn't please Holliday. Meanwhile the Earps accused the other Clantons of rustling, and Tom McClaury and his brother of stealing government mules. Though it was hard to convict them with corrupt Sheriff Behan covering up for them, rancor grew on both sides.

  Holliday by now had breezed into town from Tucson, at the request of the Earps, Big Nose Kate in tow. Sometime after midnight, Wyatt Earp ran into Ike Clanton at the Eagle Brewery, where Wyatt ran a faro game. Ike had hinted that Holliday was betraying him to the gang, and telling lies about him, and he was going to have to fight him. "I am not fixed just right," Ike had said then, meaning he hadn't been carrying his weapons. "But in the morning I'll have a man-for-man with you and Holliday."

  Trying to defuse the situation, Wyatt had replied he'd fight no one "because there's no money in it." Ike was known for his bluster, after all. There was no need to take his threats seriously.

  But Ike Clanton kept on blustering, confronting Holliday in a restaurant around midnight—and only the intercession of Deputy Marshal Morgan Earp prevented Doc from shooting Clanton down. "You son of a bitch," Doc told him, "you ain't heeled." Meaning armed. "Go heel yourself."

  Ike kept drinking, guzzling hooch all night long. Weirdly, he played poker with Virgil Earp with something approaching civility, till around 7:00 a.m. But when Virgil got up to go home, Ike gave him a message for Holliday: "The damned son of a bitch has got to fight."

  An hour later Ike told the bartender at the Oriental that if the Earps and Holliday showed on the street, "the ball would open" and they would have to fight. Having stayed up all night drinking . . . Ike judiciously went on drinking. Going from bar to bar, uttering threats, stoking the fires with his cronies where he could.

  And it was still morning when I found him. Staring at Ike Clanton, in the drunk and belligerent flesh, fixed me firmly in October 26, 1881. Ike glowered at me and swaggered unsteadily off down the wooden sidewalk.

  I followed him, hoping he'd bring me to his brother Billy. A block down, Ike slipped into the Grand Hotel, where he kept a room—to catch a little fitful sleep, perh
aps. Not knowing where else to go, and knowing that Ike would eventually meet up with his brother Billy—for they were both there at the OK Corral gunfight—I went into a café next door to Dexter Livery and Feed, across from the hotel, to keep an eye out for Ike's emergence.

  I ate a hearty breakfast, the food remarkable for its rich taste in some way I could not identify. I over-tipped the owner so there'd be no complaint if I was there for some time, telling the man with the handlebar mustache I might have to wait for some hours, watching the street, as a friend was coming on a mule all the way from San Simon. Looking over the silver dollars, he winked and said I was to make myself comfortable.

  I tried to remember where Billy Clanton had first been seen, after he'd ridden into town that day—but I was overwhelmed by all that had happened, all that I was seeing, and the information would not come into my recollection. So I sat at the window, drinking coffee—as if I'd never tasted coffee before!—and watched the street, the dour shopkeepers and ladies in their stately dresses, silver miners on a day off, cowboys riding through from outlying ranches; I sat there glorying in it all, fascinated with the town's quality of newness, of enterprising energy.

  About half an hour before noon, his eyes red, his face pale, Ike emerged from the Grand Hotel, swaying, now carrying a Winchester rifle, a pistol on his hip. He wandered down the street, seeming to have no definite destination, and I followed—and was unsurprised when he went into a saloon. I stepped over a sleeping drunk, the man's urine soaking the sawdust coating the floor for just such eventualities, and posted myself at the bar, the other end from Ike, hoping to see Billy Clanton arrive. Perhaps I should ask around town for him, head him off before he found Ike. But if I missed him—