20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  I asked her not to hold my being rich against me, and she promised not to, and I think we were both secretly relieved. We kissed for a long time without otherwise touching and I all but swooned and so did she. Wow. I really do think I’m… No, I’m not going to write it.

  So I’m paying court to a woman who lives in 1940 and has been dead for more than sixty years.

  Nice going, Neal. Really smart.

  July 6, 2000

  So there I am for once actually working yesterday afternoon, mowing the back lawns and using the trimmer/edger around the garage when Bud comes out wiping his hands and waves. Few minutes later he gestures that I shut off the machine as he wants to talk to me. Here it comes, I think. O. Kay.

  He comes up to me, saying whatever is that contraption on your head. I lift it off and put it on his head. He lifts it off immediately and looks down at it. Then puts it on his ears again tentatively. Is once more startled and takes it off again. “What music is this?” Then he gets it. “It’s very harsh and strident, isn’t it?” he asks. He is talking about the Dave Matthews Band, not the Red Hot Chili Peppers! Then he asks, how in the world did they fit a phonograph in that little thing? He’s looking at my CD player and headphones.

  I tell him I don’t have a clue. I do, of course, but he’s never heard of laser technology, so hey!

  Change of subject. He’s spoken to Celia and he’s pleased that I’m so “well-heeled,” as he puts it. I’ll bet he’s somewhat surprised too. Tells me how his father became her protector as his close friend, her father, lost most of his wealth during the Stock Market Crash and dove onto Chicago’s Marshall Avenue head-first. Ingals Senior salvaged what he could and put it to work for the girl and she’s worth about two hundred grand and change, i.e., not too shabby. When Bud’s papa died two years back, Bud got wardship of Celia and has her moola in trust.

  I naturally ask if he’s got a problem with me and he admits that she’s interested in no one. “Of course, there’s Tony. They are very close. Girls often choose close pals.”

  “Except that Tony is gay,” I say. Then in case he hasn’t gotten it, “homosexual.”

  Bud admits the truth of that with a shrug, and it’s so casually done I believe that maybe the two of them have more than once in their own long close friendship and youth played “Let’s Hide the Salami.” But hey, I don’t care.

  “The real problem with you courting her is a bit different, isn’t it?” Bud says. “You’re not always here, are you?”

  “You guys are the ones who keep disappearing,” I tell him.

  “Whichever,” he comments slyly and I have to agree, it is a problem. Right now an insoluble one.

  But there’s something I want to know. “About Tony… he can’t exactly be happy the way he is.”

  Bud agrees but says Tony’s coping as best he can. But no, he’s not happy.

  “What will happen to him?”

  Bud replies that Tony will do what other fellows do, i.e., he’ll repress it, hide it, marry respectably and try not to act on it. “It’s done like that everywhere daily.”

  To which I reply that’s too bad. And decide to ask Tony what he wants. Why? Well, let’s say I’ve got another theory. Or rather, a theory built upon a previous theory.

  July 13, 2000

  What did I say? It was the lightning. But not alone. Something else too.

  Drove into Junction City to the big Staples there to get a ream of copying paper and a new ink cartridge for my printer. Decided that there might be some use for this journal, so I’m keyboarding it and printing it out. Never know…

  While there, I dropped into the library and saw Jim Kleinherz—little heart in German?—and he told me he’d found more about Ingoldsby. Seems that the articles had been listed variably under the place name or under Ingals’s name. This one he found under the latter, and as there have been a few Chester Ingalses, he wasn’t sure it was applicable.

  To make a long story short (too late for that, Neal!), he came up with another piece in the paper, this one from the very end of the year of the fire. Part of the town’s fire department yearly report blamed a new electrical generator that Bud evidently bought and had attached to the house at the living room where all the wiring comes together and in and out of the house. Evidently electricity goes out during lightning storms and this goes on. Typical of Bud to find a “new scientific solution.” Except this might be precisely what screwed them! Who was it who wrote that character is destiny?

  Here’s the new article I got:

  July 15, 2000

  And there it is, happening right now! Yesterday p.m. as I was getting into my Speedo I heard a truck pulling up and going by. Once I realized that it was an old ’30s truck, a Chevy I think, I realized they didn’t have to ring for me to open the gate—back then it’s already open. Two guys inside and on the flatbed, this big weird-looking mechanism.

  The generator, sure enough. Two guys from Milwaukee had driven it over and they were already installing it exactly where I guessed they would, back of the living room, not far from the fuse box. Bud was waxing poetic to the others about it.

  I asked Celia what she thought about it. “Well, if Bud wants it.” Then “I sort of liked it without electricity. Candlelight is so lovely.”

  Spent the evening with the three of them instead of at my usual Saturday sex-fest. Celia made dinner—tomato consommé, which is a gelatin soup (okay), veal loaf (good), creamed casserole of potatoes (very good), green beans (overcooked), and a dessert made out of rennet (which is what, exactly?) that tasted like regular old vanilla pudding my mom used to make.

  Afterward we all took turns foxtrotting with Celia to music coming all the way here to the middle of the country from the Waldorf-Astoria Ballroom in New York City. (“Tony loves the Waldorf,” Celia said. And I thought, “He would!”) At any rate the first hour is really kind of nice and old-fashioned, stuff my grannies would love, then guess who comes live on the radio? Carmen Miranda and her band. They’re the guest artists. Seems she’d recently made her American debut in a movie—Tony told me—titled Down Argentine Way, and she played what she called the Merengue but sounded to me like Salsa. So I showed them how to do it. Celia got embarrassed trying to copy me. Too much hip involvement.

  July 18, 2000

  Hot afternoon. Where did today come from!? Tony asleep on his chaise, snoring away, and Celia indoors napping in her room. Bud joins me in the pool. We evidently awaken Tony, who snortles something, then goes inside to nap.

  Soon as we get out of the pool, Bud starts in on me. “Maybe you can explain this to me. Yesterday I went to read that Popular Mechanics issue I showed you last week, looking for it on the table out here where I’d left it, and it was gone.”

  I told him I took it with me to the gate-house.

  “Ten minutes later,” Bud tells me, “it was right there out on the table again.”

  I guess it didn’t work, I tell him. I tried but I found that I couldn’t bring it with me into my own time.

  “You mean into the year 1980?” he asks.

  “No, the year 2000.” I watch his mouth fall open a little. “It’s July there. It’s what? Mid-May here?”

  “So Frequency Modulation is the future of wireless?” Bud asks. “Until those little things with headphones come along. What else? That radio with moving pictures we saw at the New York World’s Fair? What was it called? Television? That will be commonplace, won’t it? And machines that calculate faster than a million men but that fit into a valise. What else?”

  I’m very touched by Bud, for some reason, and almost begin to cry. Then I decide to let him know. “Digitalization and micro-computer chip technology allow computers in most homes. On people’s desks. More common than typewriters in your time. Instant communication with anyone in the world in real time via the Internet.”

  “Flying automobiles?” Bud asks. I say no. Then he asks, “What is it like? Are we like Stone Age people to you? Is that fun for you?”

  A
nd I get really upset and ask why he’s saying those things. It’s not intentional on my part. I don’t have any control. When I least expect it, they vanish and the house is all closed up and empty… I tell him I’m really unhappy when that happens. Really!

  After a minute, Bud wants to know why I tried taking the magazine back.

  I tell him to prove to myself it’s really happening, because what if it stops again for good? What if I never see them again? What then?

  Bud says, “You’ve always got that woman in town and other people.” Then he realizes that’s lame. He says, “‘What then’ is right, Neal. We really are a fix, aren’t we?”

  That’s when I ask why he’s not so surprised by me and the time thing. Surprised but not that surprised. He’s seen someone or something before here at the place, hasn’t he?

  “Never anything like you! But…as kids…me and Tony.”

  Then he tells how the first time it happened they couldn’t believe it. They were playing behind the older house built here, in the woods, and suddenly, walking past was a family of Indians. He didn’t know what tribe. An old and young woman, two dogs pulling a triangular sled filled with gear. Three kids. Two braves. One kid saw them. The dogs sniffed him and Tony as they went by. The Natives all went up to the house, and the old garage, a converted stable, astounded to see it. They looked in the windows, spoke quickly, saw the old Marmon 16, and took off fast!

  “It was like a dream. Only, we smelled them,” Bus said, crinkling up his nose. “We could have touched them, I’m sure. Totally unfamiliar smells. One dropped this—and he went in and came back with a leather necklace with a polished white stone wrapped in a knot.”

  I asked if the boys had told anyone.

  Bud said they mentioned it to the servants, who said there had been other odd incidents. A laundry woman once saw a Pony Express rider dash by as she hung out wash. He was astonished by her and the house. She said he stopped on the bluff, looked at a map, then at the house, back and forth, map and house. The house wasn’t on his map. Other servants, staff members who closed up for the summer, also reported seeing campfires in the wood and hearing chanting and drumming. Bud added, “But you’re the first to…”

  “To interact? Because I could have been from your time?”

  “Yes. And because we’ve all fallen for you in one way or another.”

  Such an admission that I said, “I love you guys too. Celia most. But all of you!”

  We are, as Bud said, really in a fix. Aren’t we?

  July 21, 2000

  Doc and Joe came over for cards again last night. Caught me coming back from Ingoldsby, where I’d been most of the early evening with Celia. Then she and the others were going to Bud’s Grandma’s again for dinner. I asked if I could come over later, but Celia said she’d be putting up her hair later and reading movie magazines. She was wearing the yellow sweater thing and I got to second base. I really am crazy, aren’t I? But hey, it felt like a big thing.

  So they come upstairs and I prepare to take them for a few bucks. Only tonight Doc is kicking butt, so I begin asking him about the property that Ingoldsby is built on. Seems no one in town knows a damn thing about it, I say. Which I’m pretty sure will provoke Doc’s inborn know-it-all-ness. He says he knows whatever there is to know. I ask him to tell me about it and why it was that no one lived there before the Ingalses put up a house.

  He says, “Plenty people lived there. They just didn’t stay living there.”

  Why not, I ask.

  Here Joe Weyerhauser says his grandpa told him that the property had a bad reputation from the time of the Indians. “They considered it a sacred place. Or at least a special place, going back fifty years before any whites lived out here.”

  Naturally I asked what happened back then. And Doc, in his best know-it-all mode, says everyone knows what happened back then. It was the New Madrid earthquake, allegedly the most powerful to hit North America in historic times. 1835. Looking back to letters and records of the few whites living there, and to the Indian stories, scientists figure it was a 9.1 on the Richter scale. That’s a thousand times stronger than the San Francisco Quake of 1906. Seems every wooden frame house anywhere in a five-hundred-mile area was shaken to the ground. Horses and domestic animals went berserk, ran off, and some never returned. The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers ran backward for a thousand miles north and south of the earthquake’s epicenter. Sounded like a major bitch.

  Something happened on the property at Ingoldsby at the same time. Some piece of land either rose or fell hundreds of feet in a few seconds or altogether vanished or came out of the blue, Joe said, his grandpa had heard from some old Indians but couldn’t get straight exactly what occurred, and the Natives never again stayed to camp on the land. They abandoned it. Marked it with cairns or something and split for good.

  So I’m losing pennies like a fool and asking if anything had happened in modern times to support the Indian superstition and Doc says, “Well, every house built there has been struck by lightning and burnt up.”

  Then Joe says, and halfway through Doc tries to shut him up but I won’t let him, “And of course folks are disappearing all the time.” When I ask which folks besides Bud Ingals and his friends, Joe says, “Why, that caretaker fellow, some twenty-odd years ago. That’s why we were all so surprised to see you here. We thought that up in Chicago they all understood.” Then Doc does manage to shut Joe up.

  So someone else vanished here, just like Ashley said. And what they have been describing seems like some kind of unstable rift in time, brought into being by a SuperQuake.

  Oh, Mr. Neal, honey. What in the World you got your fool self into?!

  Then just as they’re leaving Doc turns to me with Joe down ahead of him and asks, “How in hell did you know that they called him Bud?”

  “Him who?” I feign innocence.

  “Chester damn Ingals Junior!” he replies. Looking at me like an old owl.

  Ooops!

  July 24, 2000

  Fresh with this info from Joe and Doc, I phoned Kleinherz and asked if he could find something else for me a bit more recently, say 1980. He sounded busy, harassed, etc. So I said, I’d find him a date. What was his type? Blonde? Brunette? Did he go for legs, tits or ass?

  “I go for males,” he replied. “Tall, dark, handsome, slender males,” he added.

  “And I’m sure that a cool-looking guy like you gets more than your share,” Mr. Neal Slick replied. Then I told him I’d keep an eye out for someone for him. I’ll admit that I was secretly displeased that he didn’t say “short, blonde, with a swimmer’s body.” But hey, you can’t win them all, can you?

  But he came through after all. This morning’s e-mail contained the following:

  July 26, 2000

  Ever subtle, I asked the three about Jason Terranova. Celia was actually in the pool—first time I’ve seen her doing that; cute little pale blue—her color—one-piece bathing suit, and this big rubber bathing cap on top, natch, not that she’d ever get that close to the water. She was sort of dog-paddling about when I got there, threatening to come out. I said nonsense and dived in far away from her so as to not scare her, then swam up to her and we sort of fooled around in the water and I held her so she could try out some swim strokes without fear of drowning in the five feet of water at the shallow end, which let me cop a few feels and, even better, let her brush against my almost constant chubby, before she was tired and climbed out. Very demure and all. But I was more excited than anytime with the postmistress. Imagine! I almost popped right there and scuzzed up the pool.

  Meanwhile Bud was trouncing Tony at backgammon. Tony was saying things like “It’s only suggested you take my pieces,” to which Bud naturally scoffed and wiped Tony out. So after me and Celia dried off, I asked them if she’d ever heard of Terranova. Bud remembered him. “Cheeky sort of fellow, wasn’t he? Didn’t last here but a few weeks, if I remember.” Then Tony remembered, “Wasn’t he the one with the (lowered voice) mezz?�
��

  I am not an American History Ph.D. candidate for nothing and well know that “mezz” in Pre–World War II U.S. slang means pot, grass, marijuana. Recalling what reporter Wagner said townsfolk had rumored of Jason T, I said it was more than likely, yes, he had mezz. Tony gets this faraway look in his eyes, but clams up. From which I imply that he personally sampled mezz, and possibly also sampled Jason Terranova.

  Then Celia says something absolutely breathtaking which I’m not at all certain how to take. She says, “Didn’t Jason quit working here to go marry that pretty young widow whose husband died, leaving her with the diner on Lakeview Drive to run all alone? What was her name, Tony? Janice! Janice Snyder.”

  Nota Bene that Snyder’s Country Inn is, in the year 2000, the largest, poshest, and most elegant restaurant of this part of Portage County, with four dining rooms on two floors, a staff of maybe fifty, and parking for a hundred. I pass it often.

  “Ray Snyder didn’t die,” Bud says. “He vanished. Remember? In fact, some people said he was last seen around my property here. At first Janice said that Ray last mentioned that he was coming to meet up with Terranova and some other people. She changed her story later and said she was mistaken.”

  That’s all they remembered. But for me it was plenty. So another trip to Junction City is needed. Don’t want to impose too much on Kleinherz.

  July 28, 2000

  Well, if Mohammed won’t go to the mountain, Bev Freneau will come to the gate-house. At least she did yesterday night. Guess she missed her usual ashes hauling session. She appeared outside, buzzing me through the gate, and when I let her in, she didn’t want to talk, not even to hear an explanation why I’ve not been seeing her (Celia asked me not to; ergo I won’t). But once she was inside, what could I say? What could I do? You guessed it, and I feel terrible, going back on my word to Celia. Except I really needed it, and I fantasized she was Celia the entire time! So it’s not complete betrayal.