The stranger wasn’t Bob’s partner after all. But he was equally bad. He must want to take his place. He would molest me. Or worse. Dad made him sound a lot worse.
As Little Sam’s memories merged with my own, I slowly understood why he ran from me. He thought I was just another Uncle Bob, but one who was much more dangerous. He didn’t know exactly how it would be possible to be worse. He just felt it.
I heard a siren. A tall middle-aged cop threw open the front door, raced halfway up the stairs, and stopped, pointing his gun directly at me. “Stay right where you are, Mister.”
Lifting my hands slowly, I said, “I’m harmless. I was just helping Sam. That guy was molesting him.”
Two younger cops joined behind the first, and they moved me down to the bottom of the stairs, their guns trained on me the whole time, then handcuffed me.
Once I was secure, the first cop went upstairs to look in Sam’s bedroom. I heard him gasp at the scene, and I could imagine him silently wondering what had happened.
Everybody else was dead quiet.
The older cop came slowly back down from the bedroom. “Mister, you’re under arrest for murder.”
I shook my head. “I was protect -- ”
“Shut up, you asshole.” He pistol-whipped me hard across the side of the face. Once again, I was almost knocked senseless.
“What -- ?”
“I said shut the fuck up! You got no idea, do you?”
I must have looked as puzzled and dazed as I felt.
“You come to town, defame people, and then kill one of our most prominent citizens. The most kind and generous man in the whole city. Forget the lies, you miserable faggot. It’s clear what you really wanted. If you expect any mercy after this, you’re seriously mistaken. You won’t live to see your trial. In fact, you’re not going to live to see the inside of your jail cell.” He looked at the gun in his hand.
He turned to the other cops to explain: “It was Bob Collingwood.”
They all glared at me. “Councilman Collingwood?” one of them asked.
A nod.
Councilman? Uncle Bob wasn’t somebody who crawled out from under a rock?
For the first time, I was happy when I felt the first pangs of one of my dissolvings, thanking God for taking me out of here and sending me back to Jenny.
Chapter 30
I woke, relieved I was back home.
But when I opened my eyes, my heart sank as I could see that wasn’t the case at all.
There were no hospital walls, no machines beeping, and no scent of antiseptics. Instead, I was back at The Pond, and I knew I was still in 1968.
I pulled myself up into a sitting position, and could see the baseball field in the distance. Another game was on, kids yelling, running, laughing.
Why?
I had no answers and now was even more confused than before. The pattern of bouncing back from my own time to 1968 was broken. Am I stuck here now? I wondered.
All kinds of thoughts passed through my mind as I stood and slowly strolled in from center field towards the game. I was still too far out to interfere, but cutting through the field was the fastest way to get back to my room.
Was I ever going to get back to see Jenny?
Bewildered, I was almost at the limits of the field when I noticed Little Sam was playing in the ball game and was about to bat. I stopped and kneeled, not wanting him to see me. He’d be spooked after everything that had happened.
He hit a short Texas leaguer that dropped in for a single, and I had an eerie sense of déjà vu come suddenly over me. “Same hit as yesterday,” I mumbled.
Yesterday? Or was it longer? I really didn’t have much of an idea anymore of what day it was.
Little Sam was stranded at first, as the next batter swung out to retire the side.
Same again.
And then I knew. Instead of going back to my own time with the last dissolving, I had gone back a single day earlier, when I had watched this very same game from out in right field.
I slowly turned my eyes over to that direction.
And I saw myself in right field, sitting against the Oak tree, watching the game.
My mouth went dry. The first insane question I asked was, How can I be over there, when I’m over here? I sat on the ground trying to sort it out.
It’s yesterday, I knew.
I had watched the game from right field. After that, the disasters all happened. I talked to Little Sam, scared him, he ran off, I later encountered Uncle Bob, and that led to his death.
But none of that has happened yet.
I can stop it.
That’s why I was there instead of back in my time. I had to stop the chain of events leading to Uncle Bob’s death, and my own likely death at the hands of the police.
The game continued as I slowly walked over to myself. It was so -- strange -- to see myself sitting there. I could see myself as others see me, not as a reflection in the mirror. I was somehow bigger than I thought, bulkier, quiet, almost trance-like, concentrating on the game. I needed a haircut.
I didn’t disturb the me that was there until I got very close. “Hi,” I whispered. It sounded like such a pathetic thing to say.
He turned and saw me, slowly rising up to look at me. He too was at a loss for words.
“It’s me,” I said. “I mean I’m you.” How to explain? “This is my yesterday. I was you. I made a big mistake, and now you’ve got to fix it. You can’t do what you want to do.”
He finally croaked out his first words to me. His voice sounded like mine as played back on a tape recorder. “How can you be me?”
“Just listen. Let me start over.
“Yesterday, I was here, right where you are. I was you. I watched this same ball game. Afterwards, I made a terrible mistake. I went to Sam and told him everything. Just like you’re going to.”
“I wouldn’t tell him -- ”
“Yes, you will. But you can’t. I challenged Uncle Bob. He beat me up.” I remembered my scars and felt my head. No blood.
“Bob?”
“He was molesting Little Sam. I killed him. The details don’t matter. The point is, you can’t do that! We aren’t here to fix things that way. It was a mistake. I’m here to stop you from doing that.”
I added more details, fleshing out the story. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally, he said, “I think I understand. This is a shock.” He took a peek back at the game and then turned to face me. “What happens now? We can’t both be here.”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s sit here and watch the game and think about it.”
We sat, two identical twins, side by side. A few minutes later, I heard him gasp and saw the pain in his face. He was having another dissolving. His face turned a bright pink and sweat pushed out of the sides of his head. He gritted his teeth and looked at me. Slowly, he faded. At first, I didn’t clue in to what was happening. I started to be able to see the trees right through his body. Within ten seconds, he had turned into a ghost, and then he was gone altogether.
I was alone again.
Chapter 31
I didn’t do a lot in the next three days, mostly hid in my room and drank a lot more beer than I should. I just wanted to hide from everybody.
The third day was the worst. I started drinking at ten in the morning and had finished a dozen beers by the time I started really feeling woozy only a few hours later. As I was walking to the bathroom with a full bladder, I fell against the doorframe, woozy and feeling like I was ready to puke.
In the distance, I could hear my father yelling next door. I didn’t know what day of week it was but was guessing it was a weekend.
The bastard. Drunk already.
Him or you? I asked myself.
And then I slowly sunk to the floor, my bladder forgotten. It had never occurred to me until that very minute I was being a hypocrite.
This wasn’t the first time I had been totally pissed this early in the day. I alwa
ys brushed it off as just letting off steam.
But I sure wasn’t about to let my father get away with the same excuse. He was just a fucking drunken asshole.
I looked at the half-finished bottle of beer in my hand, a set of white scratches covering one side, the remains of my feeble attempts at pulling the label away from the brown glass.
In my mind, I could see Jenny and how she had always hated my drinking so early in the morning. She tried so many things. She’d ignore me. She’d get mad at me and yell.
When we were still married less than a year, she tried to use logic. “Why don’t we just put that down, and we’ll go out for lunch or a picnic somewhere?” she once asked. She sounded cheery and happy, but I knew it was an act.
I didn’t remember hitting her. I only know I looked at her and there was such shock in her face, such
disbelief . . . and such fear. I went to hold her, to take it all back, but there are some things you can never take back.
My temper was always the worst part of me. It’s how I could hit Jenny, and again, and again. For three years, I hit her.
It was the very worst thing I’ve ever done.
Eventually, I stopped. Some part of me realized I was an inch away from losing her -- an inch away from losing everything that mattered to me.
I still don’t know why she didn’t leave me.
Even now, she tenses whenever she sees me with alcohol. For the past ten years, I’ve only drank when she wasn’t around. She always knew, of course, but we just didn’t talk about it.
I closed my eyes, the room swimming around me. A tear leaked out from one eye, and I slowly fell onto my side, passing out. The last thought as I fell was that I was exactly the same person my father had been. And I had never clued in to that before.
Part 7
Yesterday is but today’s memory. Tomorrow is today’s dream.
Kahil Gibran
Chapter 32
It seemed like a long time passed before I awoke. My dreams were mixed blurs, horribly vague swirls of color and noise floating by me. Somehow, I knew these mixed images represented my father and me. I had no idea what I was supposed to learn from the dreams, if anything.
When I woke, I kept my eyes shut and licked my lips. No taste of beer left, and my mind didn’t feel cloudy.
“Sam!”
I jumped when I heard Jenny call my name. I opened my eyes just in time to see her lean down to me. “Oh, Sam, you’re okay!”
“Jenny . . . ” I lifted my arms around her and pulled her close to me.
“Be careful,” she said. “You can’t over-exert yourself.”
I laughed, the sound coming out as a small grunt. My throat was raw. “Do you have some water or something?” I whispered.
There was a glass of orange juice on the bedside table. She helped me drink it down.
“God, it’s so good to see you again.”
She nodded and held me.
For a moment, I just stared into her eyes. I wanted to ask her so many things. How long was I out? How did she get me to a hospital? Where was I? What had she been thinking?
In the end, all that mattered was seeing her beautiful face looking down at me. I pulled her to me and kissed her. “I missed you.”
“Oh, me, too.”
“Who’s minding the store?” I knew Jenny’s assistants could run Second Stories just fine without her, but I also knew it would be on her mind. She’d want to get home.
“Everything’s fine there. A new shipment arrived yesterday, so it’ll be fun to open that up when we get back.”
I nodded and held her hand together with mine, her short fingers only reaching to the bottom of my nails.
“Were you -- ?”
She couldn’t quite get the question out. “Yes,” I answered. “I was back in 1968.”
She nodded. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll sort it out. First thing is to get me out of here.” I looked around. “Speaking of which, where are we?”
“Great Falls. It had the nearest hospital.”
I looked at my watch. 4:30. It was still light out, so that made it afternoon. “We can leave first thing tomorrow,” I said.
“Oh, Sam, you know we need for you to stay here till you’ve recovered.” She adjusted her glasses as she spoke.
“No. I’ll recover fine. I’ve been through this enough now to know that nothing I do or don’t do makes a damned bit of difference.”
“But the doctors -- ”
I cut her off with another kiss and then whispered in her ear, “Tomorrow, my love.”
Chapter 33
After our honeymoon trip that zigzagged through the western part of America, Jenny and I settled into a
two-bedroom bungalow in the outskirts of Seattle. The house was already fifty years old and pretty creaky by that time. Our real estate agent was a flamboyant middle-aged woman who always seemed to wear bright hot pink dresses with lots of jewelry. The dresses clashed with her almost blue hair. “This is just a part-time job,” she’d told us several times. “I just do it because I love helping young people like you.”
Yeah, whatever. The commission didn’t hurt.
She showed us several houses that were way out of our price range before finally getting the message. Between us, we only had a pittance for a down payment, so our options were pretty limited. Jenny did not want to live in an apartment, though. It had to be a house. Even a
fixer-upper.
The place wasn’t bad, really. After all, it was our first shared home. We were newlyweds, and I had a new exciting job, so things were pretty cozy in many ways.
Except for my drinking.
And except for the shadow of my father that seemed to fall on us all the way from Montana.
I didn’t tell my parents about Jenny until we were married for a month. They wouldn’t have approved, and it just felt easier to put off the inevitable arguments. Jenny didn’t meet them until two years later, and then only the one time.
When we were on the way to meet them, I said to Jenny, “They aren’t very accepting.” I looked across to her, sitting beside me in the used Corolla we had picked up. “They’re old school.”
“Old school,” she said. She seemed to roll the words around in her mouth. “Old school. Gee, I wonder what that means.”
We both knew exactly what it meant.
When I met Jenny, it was happenstance. I already wrote about how I was living in the boarding house for a couple weeks before even meeting her. She just stole my heart, and I’ve never looked back.
But it was always clear what my father’s first thoughts would be when he saw her. “You married a fucking nigger?”
I didn’t think he would say those words aloud, and when we finally pulled up to the old house, Mom and Dad ran out to meet us. Mom seemed to stumble a bit on sight of Jenny, but Dad stopped dead, like somebody had smashed him over the head with a baseball bat. You married a fucking nigger? I could almost hear the words. So could Jenny.
“Oh, Jenny,” said Mom. She hesitated, then added, “Welcome to Nelson. It’s so nice to meet you.”
Jenny climbed out of the car and lit up the driveway with her broad smile that just melted most people. She wasn’t going to let these bigots push her down. Mom smiled back and shook her hand. She was taken off guard and wasn’t pleased Jenny was black, but she at least tried to mask her displeasure.
Dad looked over at me and frowned. Then he went over to Jenny and nodded. No hand shaking for him, not even so much as a smile. “I’m Sam’s dad.”
“It’s so good to finally meet you, Mr. Ellis.”
He just nodded again.
It was a very, very long weekend.
Earlier, I said that when I was growing up, everyone used terrible language to refer to anyone who wasn’t white. Niggers. Spics. Chinks. I was wrong. My travels back to 1968 made me realize one more error in my memory. Only my father said these things. Not Mom. Not my brother. Not Mrs. Wi
lliamson. Not Old Man Jones, not Scott the bartender, not the girl I met at the orphanage, not Claire in her Remembrance Diary.
Just my father.
And me.
Jenny changed me. When I fell in love with her, I became color-blind immediately.
I thought of all this again that night in the hospital in Great Falls. Thought of the names I called innocent people because my father did. Thought of the times I’d be drunk by noon because my father did. Thought of the times I had hit my wife because my father did.
And in my heart, I finally knew I wasn’t going back to 1968 to stop the treatment from Uncle Bob. Obviously, I had survived all that. I was going back to stop the abuse from my father. It wasn’t completely clear yet that I was going to ever put aside the lessons he had taught me.
That night in the hospital was long and quiet. I sent Jenny back to a hotel to rest, claiming I needed to be alone to recover. We both knew it was a fiction to allow her a break, and it worked. She had been by my bedside for two days without sleep, and we needed her rested for the morning.
I could hear a strong breeze blowing through trees outside the window. It was now mid summer, many months since my first dissolving, although it’s difficult to keep track of what month it is, let alone what day, since I had lived so much more than most people since then.
At three o’clock in the morning, I pulled out the IV that was connected to my left arm and moved to the window, opened it. I felt the fresh breeze rushing in. Even though I was feeling a bit weak, I knew nothing serious would happen to me.
After a few minutes, I picked up a pad of paper that was lying on the bedside table and started to make some notes. After ten minutes of thinking, I had written the following:
Need to deal with Dad.
How is this happening? Research QM?
How prove to Jenny?
The Memory Tree Page 12
