6
I got the clothes Al had recommended at Mason’s Menswear, and the clerk told me yes, they would be more than happy to take a check, providing it was drawn on a local bank. Thanks to Lorraine, I could oblige in that regard.
Back at the Jolly White Elephant, the beatnik watched silently as I transferred the contents of three shopping bags to my new valise. When I snapped it shut, he finally offered an opinion. “Funny way to shop, man.”
“I guess so,” I said. “But it’s a funny old world, isn’t it?”
He cracked a smile at that. “In my opinion, that’s a big you-bet. Slip me some skin, Jackson.” He extended his hand, palm up.
For a moment it was like trying to figure out what the word Drexel attached to some numbers was all about. Then I remembered Dragstrip Girl, and understood the beatnik was offering the fifties version of a fist-bump. I dragged my palm across his, feeling the warmth and the sweat, thinking again: This is real. This is happening.
“Skin, man,” I said.
7
I crossed back to Titus Chevron, swinging the newly loaded valise from one hand and the briefcase from the other. It was only midmorning in the 2011 world I’d come from, but I felt tired out. There was a telephone booth between the service station and the adjacent car lot. I went in, shut the door, and read the hand-printed sign over the old-fashioned pay phone: REMEMBER PHONE CALLS NOW A DIME COURTESY OF “MA” BELL.
I thumbed through the Yellow Pages in the local phone book and found Lisbon Taxi. Their ad featured a cartoon cab with eyes for headlights and a big smile on its grille. It promised FAST, COURTEOUS SERVICE. That sounded good to me. I grubbed for my change, but the first thing I came up with was something I should have left behind: my Nokia cell phone. It was antique by the standards of the year I’d come from—I’d been meaning to trade up to an iPhone—but it had no business here. If someone saw it, I’d be asked a hundred questions I couldn’t answer. I stowed it in the briefcase. It would be okay there for the time being, I guessed, but I’d have to get rid of it eventually. Keeping it would be like walking around with an unexploded bomb.
I found a dime, dropped it in the slot, and it went right through to the coin return. I fished it out, and one look was enough to pinpoint the problem. Like my Nokia, the dime had come from the future; it was a copper sandwich, really no more than a penny with pretensions. I pulled out all my coins, poked through them, and found a 1953 dime I’d probably got in change from the root beer I’d bought at the Kennebec Fruit. I started to put it in, then had a thought that made me feel cold. What if my 2002 dime had gotten stuck in the phone’s throat instead of falling through to the coin return? And what if the AT&T man who serviced the pay phones in Lisbon Falls had found it?
He would have thought it was a joke, that’s all. Just some elaborate prank.
I somehow doubted this—the dime was too perfect. He would have shown it around; there might even eventually have been an item about it in the newspaper. I had gotten lucky this time, but next time I might not. I needed to be careful. I thought of my cell phone again, with deepening unease. Then I put the 1953 dime in the coin slot and was rewarded with a dial tone. I placed the call slowly and carefully, trying to remember if I’d ever used a phone with a rotary dial before. I thought not. Each time I released it, the phone made a weird clucking sound as the dial spun back.
“Lisbon Taxi,” a woman said, “where the mileage is always smileage. How may we help you today?”
8
While I waited for my ride, I window-shopped my way through Titus’s car lot. I was particularly taken by a red ’54 Ford convertible—a Sunliner, according to the script below the chrome headlight on the driver’s side. It had whitewall tires and a genuine canvas roof that the cool cats in Dragstrip Girl would have called a ragtop.
“That ain’t a bad one, mister,” Bill Titus said from behind me. “Goes like a house afire, that I can testify to personally.”
I turned. He was wiping his hands on a red rag that looked almost as greasy as his hands.
“Some rust on the rocker panels,” I said.
“Yeah, well, this climate.” He gave a whattaya-gonna-do shrug. “Main thing is, the motor’s in nifty shape and those tires are almost new.”
“V-8?”
“Y-block,” he said, and I nodded as if I understood this perfectly. “Bought it from Arlene Hadley over Durham after her husband died. If there was one thing Bill Hadley knew, it was how to take care of a car… but you won’t know them because you’re not from around here, are you?”
“No. Wisconsin. George Amberson.” I held out my hand.
He shook his head, smiling a little. “Good to meet you, Mr. Amberson, but I don’t want to getcha all over grease. Consider it shook. You a buyer or a looker?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said, but this was disingenuous. I thought the Sunliner was the coolest car I’d ever seen in my life. I opened my mouth to ask what kind of mileage it got, then realized it was a question almost without meaning in a world where you could fill your tank for two dollars. Instead I asked him if it was a standard.
“Oh, ayuh. And when you catch second, you want to watch out for the cops. She goes like a bastid in second. Want to take er out for a spin?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I just called a cab.”
“That’s no way to travel,” Titus said. “If you bought this, you could go back to Wisconsin in style and never mind the train.”
“How much are you asking? This one doesn’t have a price on the windshield.”
“Nope, just took it in trade day before yest’y. Haven’t got around to it.” Gut. He took out his cigarettes. “I’m carryin it at three-fifty, but tell you what, I’d dicker.” Dicka.
I clamped my teeth together to keep my jaw from dropping and told him I’d think it over. If my thinking went the right way, I said, I’d come back tomorrow.
“Better come early, Mr. Amberson, this one ain’t gonna be on the lot for long.”
I was again comforted. I had coins that wouldn’t work in pay phones, banking was still done mostly by hand, and the phones made an odd chuckling sound in your ear when you dialed, but some things didn’t change.
9
The taxi driver was a fat man who wore a battered hat with a badge on it reading LICENSED LIVERY. He smoked Luckies one after the other and played WJAB on the radio. We listened to “Sugartime” by the McGuire Sisters, “Bird Dog” by the Everly Brothers, and “Purple People Eater,” by some creature called a Sheb Wooley. That one I could have done without. After every other song, a trio of out-of-tune young women sang: “Four-teen for-ty, WJA-beee… the Big Jab!” I learned that Romanow’s was having their annual end-of-summer blowout sale, and F. W. Woolworth’s had just gotten a fresh order of Hula Hoops, a steal at $1.39.
“Goddam things don’t do nothin but teach kids how to bump their hips,” the cabbie said, and let the wing window suck ash from the end of his cigarette. It was his only stab at conversation between Titus Chevron and the Tamarack Motor Court.
I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by. The urban sprawl between Lisbon Falls and the Lewiston city line didn’t exist. Other than a few gas stations, the Hi-Hat Drive-In, and the outdoor movie theater (the marquee advertised a double feature consisting of Vertigo and The Long, Hot Summer—both in CinemaScope and Technicolor), we were in pure Maine countryside. I saw more cows than people.