Authors: Richard Bowes
“Not even the same town. That was an A&P in Larchmont, remember? This is a Safeway. In the Leather Stocking Shopping Center in Grove Hill.” Then she repeated something she had said before to other refugees fleeing Upstream or Down. “These suburbs sprang out of nowhere. No one knows anyone else.” She added, “Here you are my English cousin, Olivia Smithfield. A bit odd, a bit exotic. But a recognizable commodity. Here everyone is a bit of an Anglophile. This is where you learn to blend.”
Lady Olivia’s eyes narrowed. Blending in was not why she had been born and raised. In the checkout line, she fumbled with a wallet and bills. The lesson for today was paying for purchases. In her prior life she had never touched so much as a penny. “Foolish colonial monies!” she said, but smiled as she did, amusing the cashier and winning an approving nod from Linda.
It was well after noon by the time they had wheeled the cart out to the Chevy, loaded the groceries into the trunk, and sat in a booth at the back of a mostly empty luncheonette.
“You said that you were raised in this time.” Lady Wexford’s expression indicated that she found the idea fascinating and appalling.
The oldest student trick, Linda knew. Get the teachers to talk about their VERY favorite subject. Themselves. Still, her cover story came in layers, so she peeled one off and said, “I’m a Ranger’s wife. We go where he’s assigned. I’m happy that we’re where I can help him.
“Yet you are not a Ranger.”
“No. My mother was. A station chief like Roy. 1950s North America was her assignment. More or less the same one he has. Keeping the peace, managing the Time Stream. Jake Stockley was her husband. He was a Ranger field operative, kind of low level. Not a bad guy at all. Lovable. But he wasn’t my father. My dad was dead before I could remember him. My mother had remarried.”
Olivia listened intently. Linda found herself surprised by how much she wanted to talk.
“The first time we hit 1960, I wasn’t even two and didn’t know the difference between that and 1950. All I understood was we were in a new house. Outside Chicago. Mom and Jake were real estate agents. A nice cover. It fooled me.
“By my second 1959, I was eleven. I thought Tony Curtis was dreamy and had a major crush on Danny Larogga in my sixth grade class because I thought he looked like Tony Curtis. I was lobbying for a poodle skirt and training bra in exchange for having to wear braces on my teeth. Couldn’t have been more typical if I’d been trying.
“Mom had been dropping hints for a long while. And the evidence was all around me, the number of strange ‘friends’ who stayed with us, the way Jake traveled on business all the time, the fact that Mom read the papers, watched the news constantly but was never surprised by anything. So I knew, but I didn’t want to find out.” Linda looked inquiringly at Lady Olivia, who nodded her understanding.
“At that point, Mom took me aside and explained that she and Ranger Stockley and I were going to move. Bad enough. But, instead of it being to an identical ranch house in another town, we were going where I could get to see them build the ranch houses. Where Tony Curtis was still waiting tables and Danny Larogga was being toilet trained.
“The name of our new home was 1950. The Korean War. Harry Truman. Ancient history. We, it turned out, had reached the end of Mom’s Beat. As Jake put it later, ‘Weird, huh kid, whores and cops have beats.’
Linda caught Olivia’s look, distant, speculative. She had said too much. “Want to get behind the wheel?” she asked.
As they got in the car, she reached out and was aware of blue. Bouncing in the air. The whole class had been given balloons. Sally’s was blue. The bus was here and she was taking her blue balloon home.
A few minutes later, Linda and Olivia were in the Chevy. Lady Wexford marveled as she headed for the parking lot exit, “As if I had in hand a team of a thousand horses!” In her enthusiasm, she stepped down on the break. The car bucked and stalled.
A trailer truck with Wonder Bread logos was pulling into the lot. Gears ground, what sounded like a steam whistle blared. From his high seat, the trucker yelled, “Drive it or park it, lady!”
As he did, Linda saw a black delivery van the same or the twin of the one that morning speed by on the access road. Instantly, she took a deep breath and said. “Get out of the seat!” The van had already disappeared. It was between her and Pathfinder Elementary School.
Lady Olivia obeyed instantly. Ignoring the horn and the yelling, they changed places. Linda had orders to protect her guest. But she had a higher priority. She drove in the same direction as the truck. Olivia sat silent beside her. As they approached the school, Linda began to circle. She reached out:
Blue bounced beside her. Holding onto blue. Red across the aisle jumped back and forth. Green spun out of control. BANG! Green disappeared. Perry Gibson cried. Other kids laughed.
On a quiet street, Linda caught sight of the yellow bus making its slow, easy way toward a cluster of women and carriages and pre-schoolers. She looked around, saw nothing and so made no move for the .32 caliber automatic concealed under the driver’s seat.
“It’s Sally, isn’t it?” Linda had forgotten about Olivia. “You have sensed a threat.” Linda nodded, circled the block. Found nothing. Pulled into a wider arc around the bus. “I would aid you however I can.”
The air was full of balloons and she was holding onto the blue balloon. All around were yellow balloons and red. But only one blue balloon. Perry, sticky with tears, grabbed for it, and her elbow went out and stopped him.
Linda approached her house cautiously. She drove up the next street, looked at the back of her place and saw nothing. She pulled into her driveway as the yellow bus turned the corner. While it pulled to the curb, she checked the house and garage doors. No sign of forced entry.
“How long have you had the ability you just showed?” Olivia asked.
Linda knew this woman had studied her all the while her attention had been focused on her daughter. She cut the truth to fit the moment. “Before Sally? Randomly. And only with those I could actually see. With her? As you observed.”
She and Olivia walked out to the sidewalk. The balloon came toward them. “Mommy, I told them that Auntie Olives was from England and she’d sing.” Linda saw Olivia blink and realized that she too had caught Sally’s memory of standing before her class announcing what she was bringing to Show and Tell.
“Honey.” Linda pretended this hadn’t happened. “I said you had to ask her first. What if she doesn’t want to?”
Linda turned and found the Lady looking at Sally with a mixture of tenderness and regret. Olivia had a daughter. A child born and taken from her. Two hundred years ago. A few months before.
“I will, my dear Sally,” said Olivia. “I’ll sing and I’ll tell a story.” A thought seemed to amuse her. “I’ll tell you all about the Ferryman and the Wolf.”
Roy, Linda and Olivia had been invited to a dinner party that evening at the Stanleys’. George and Alice Stanley were celebrating their wedding anniversary. They lived two doors down on the block behind Roy and Linda Martin. Cindy, a rare teenager in this neighborhood of young couples and small children, had agreed to babysit with Sally.
When Roy got home, Linda told him about the truck. They agreed not to change their plans. But, as if on a whim, Roy went out the back door carrying a bottle of champagne. No fence or hedge separated their yard from the Hackers who lived directly behind them. He let the women go first, hung back. Scouting the ground, Linda knew, in the off chance he had to come back from the party in a big hurry.
In her black party sheath, she watched Olivia sweep before her in full skirt. Frank and Marge Hacker, on their way to the party paused and awaited them. “How do you like America?” Frank asked Olivia.
“Your driving is exhilarating!”
“Different side of the road than in England.”
“Your provincial rules are an endless plague!”
Frank was dazzled; Marge was plainly annoyed. Linda caught a glimpse through their eyes, of Olivia and herself. And of Roy behind them. He scuffed at something with his shoe.
Alice and George Stanley had gotten married shortly before he was sent over to England with the Army Air Corps. Wartime now seemed to them distant and romantic.
At dinner, Linda’s attention rode on a dream taking place in Sally’s bedroom a few hundred feet away. It involved a class of bad dogs who would not listen to their teacher.
Then she heard George Stanley ask Olivia, “Were you in London during the Blitz?” Lady Wexford paused. Conversation stopped. Olivia said, with just a slight tremor, “Awful. Terrible. The city destroyed. Nothing but rubble.” Everyone made consoling noises.
After dinner, Marge Hacker remarked to Linda Martin, “You seem so far away.” She followed Linda’s gaze and saw Roy amid a group of men who were discussing the old Joe DiMaggio and the new Willie Mays. Roy was silent. He looked at Olivia, who was looking back. Several of the women, in phone conversations the next day, pinned Linda’s distance to the fine rapport that had sprung up between her English relative and her handsome husband.
“But you picked up nothing from the driver,” Roy said that night when he and Linda were in bed. Slightly drunk and needing sleep, he was reviewing her account of the delivery truck driver. “Clumsy,” he said. “Our Upstream friends use their human agents a lot more adroitly.”
“Unless they want them to be seen.” Linda lowered her voice, though Olivia was asleep down the hall. “Any word on how much longer our guest will be with us?”
“Another week, possibly two. Then she gets moved up closer to the Front. I don’t know what the game is.” He sounded wistful. In the Time Wars, 1956 was a rear area, far away from the action. “I thought you found her interesting.”
“Mrs. Wood showed me something today.” Linda felt him tense at the mention of Mrs. Wood. But she said, “Olivia was a wild-haired, pregnant Bacchae. She sat on a pile of rubble, naked except for a silk wristlet. She carried a head. Its mouth was open. Like it was still indignant at having been separated from its body.
“We in the Main Stream know the head’s former owner as the one who became King George III,” Linda said. “In that particular 1759, Lady Olivia Wexford helped tear it off his shoulders, impetuous minx that she is.”
“I say, no Boston tea party for Georgie that time around,” Roy murmured in a silly ass voice and sank under deep waters. Even in sleep, Linda was deflected from his thoughts. What she felt when trying to touch them reminded her of the static between stations on the radio dial.
She remained awake in the midst of the quiet streets, the slumbering neighborhood. Then she saw a face, round and flushed, youthful but with deep, ancient eyes under white powdered hair. Olivia dreamed of her former lover. Linda automatically looked away.
Lord Riot was what the London mobs called him. He had an abundance of names along the Time Stream. Linda thought of him as Dionysius. But Riot was as good as anything else.
Lord Riot had swept up a large part of the population of Olivia’s England, joined it to hordes from a dozen similar places, hurled the frenzied mass Upstream, and pushed the frontier back a few years. The Gods were going down hard.
They have ruled the back of our minds, the willing places in our hearts for a thousand generations. But their reign will last only as long as human thought and emotion. A couple of centuries Upstream is a Frontier. On the other side, beings move and communicate. But we would call them machines and they will call us meat.
Jake Stockley, Linda’s stepfather, had tried to explain to her the alliances of the Rangers and the Gods. She was twelve and first asking questions. “Politics, makes strange bedfellows, kid,” he said. “Somewhere up the chain of command this game makes sense.” But even he didn’t seem convinced.
In that game, Olivia was a prize. It seemed to Linda that using Riot was like trying to harness a cyclone or ride a tidal wave, that Lady Wexford was dangerous to be near.
On the night air, she heard a cry, saw an image sharp as a Blade: an infant, swaddled, wrapped in rabbit fur, seen one last time. Lady Olivia dreamed of her baby being taken away from her. Ancient eyes stared out at Linda. Lord Riot claimed his child.
2.
Nice towns like Grove Hill exist outside every city in the nation. Pass through there on the train today and you’ll find that the stores on Main Street have become antique shops and boutiques. The trees that survive are bigger. The parking lot is larger. ATVs have replaced the station wagons and many women await the 7:49.
But much looks the same as on a Thursday morning almost fifty years ago when Linda drove the Chevy to the station. Olivia and Sally rode in the back seat. Today was Show and Tell.
Roy sat beside her smoking his fifth cigarette of the morning. The day before, he and Linda had argued at any moment when they were alone. In the morning it had been about how Sally was being brought up. “I don’t want you leaving her with the God damn witch.” When he was that angry, tiny cracks appeared in his twentieth century American accent. “Mrs. Wood!” He managed to say the name as if it was a euphemism for shit.
Wednesday evening, the argument had been about Ranger procedures. “How much longer will we be saddled with her Ladyship?” Linda snapped.
At home, in front of Sally and their guest, small domestic difficulties produced monumental silences. By Thursday, they hardly spoke. Silent tension seemed almost natural to Linda, raised in a household with a secret mission in the heyday of the Cold War. Roy, used to active combat, found it maddening.
“Can I see you sing tonight?” Sally asked, Olivia.
That evening, a concert version of Handel’s Acis and Galatea was being given at Carnegie Hall. Olivia had seen it two hundred and five years before and had her heart set on seeing it again. They were, she, Roy and Linda, going into the city.
“Foolish girl,” Olivia said. “Professional singers,” a slight disdain in her tone, “will entertain us.”
A day or two before, Linda would have made a note to explain to their guest that in this brave new world, professional singers were the aristocracy. That, as they spoke, a new king swiveled toward Memphis waiting to be crowned.