An amazing number of people smoked. Men and women puffed on cigarettes, cigars, pipes. "Don't they know how bad for them that is?" Justin asked.
"They know. They mostly don't care," Mr. Brooks said. "They say they'd rather enjoy life more, even if that means they don't get quite so much of it." He shrugged. "Not how I see it, but that's what they say."
An African American walked by. He looked like a janitor. Not many of his race got to be much more than janitors and farm laborers in this Virginia. They weren't called African Americans here, either. Polite whites called them Negroes. Whites who didn't bother being polite used a different name, one that sounded something like the nicer label.
Randolph Brooks saw Justin noticing the black man. "If you aren't racist here, they'll think you're peculiar. Sometimes you have to use those words."
"Won't be easy," Justin said. In the home timeline, people used what had been obscenities in the twentieth century without even thinking about them. What once was bad language turned normal. But if you used a racist or sexist or homophobic word there, most people wouldn't want anything to do with you. It wasn't exactly illegal, but it was like picking your nose in public or wearing fur.
A beat-up white Honda pulled into a parking space in front of the donut house. The middle-aged man who got out looked pretty beat-up himself. He had a narrow, suspicious face and about a day's worth of stubble on his chin. He wore those brown jeans and a T-shirt. Except for the color of his pants, that would have been ordinary enough in the home timeline. Here it said he was a tough guy, or wanted people to think he was.
Whatever he got took out of the space between the front and back seats was wrapped in a blanket. It made a heavy, bulky load. His arm muscles bulged as he lugged it into the donut shop.
"Wonder what he's got," Justin said.
"About a month's supply of donut holes," Mr. Brooks said gravely. Justin started to nod, then sent him a sharp look. More to him than met the eye.
A few minutes later, the man came out and started back to his car. A pair of policemen in Smokey the Bear hats walked down the street toward him. When he saw them, he almost jumped out of his skin. If Justin were one of those cops, he would have arrested the man in the T-shirt on general principles.
They could do that here, too, more easily than in the home timeline. Some states in this alternate had bills of rights that limited what their governments could do. Virginia did, but it had lots of exceptions. If the police thought they were putting down a Negro revolt, they could do almost anything they pleased.
These policemen walked past the man in the T-shirt and jeans. They walked past the donut house. They went on down the street, laughing and talking. The man might have been on a sitcom, he acted so relieved. He jumped into the old Honda and drove away as fast as he could.
"Wonder what that was all about," Mom said—she'd noticed, too, then.
"Nothing to do with us," Mr. Brooks said. "All we have to do is sit tight, and everything will be fine." That sounded boring to Justin. He hadn't yet found out that you didn't always want excitement in your life. He hadn't—but he would.
Two
Beckie Royer sat on the back porch of the Snodgrasses' house and watched the grass grow. That was what people in Elizabeth called sitting around and doing nothing. They seemed to spend a lot of time doing it, too.
There sure wasn't much else to do. Beckie yawned. For her, there wasn't anything else to do. Gran sat inside, chattering away with Ethel Snodgrass. The two cousins were trying to catch up on more than half a lifetime apart in a few days. Mrs. Snodgrass seemed nice enough, but she was a lot more interested in Gran than she was in Beckie.
The grass in the back yard needed mowing. Maybe you really could watch it grow. It probably grew faster here than it did in Los Angeles. It rained more here—that was for sure. To Beckie, any rain in the summertime was weird. But these folks took it for granted.
Somewhere not far away, in bushes under some trees, something made a mewing noise. In California, Beckie would have thought it was a cat. Here, it was more likely to be a catbird. Those didn't live in Los Angeles. She thought they were handsome in their little black caps. Robins strutted across the lawn after bugs and worms. They had them in L.A., but you didn't see them every day. You were almost tripping over them here.
She wondered if she'd see a passenger pigeon. Three hundred years ago, just before 1800, they'd probably been the most common birds in the world. By two hundred years ago, they were hunted almost to extinction. But a lot of states banned going after them, and they pulled through. They would never form such huge flocks as they had once upon a time, but they were still around.
Something flew into the trees above the bushes where the catbirds were squawking. Was it a passenger pigeon? For a second, Beckie got excited. Then she saw it was a plain old ordinary pigeon. So much for that.
She looked over toward Jephany Knob. There it was: a knob. In California, it wouldn't have been tall enough to deserve a name. Maybe she would climb it, or go over to the fish hatchery Mrs. Springer had talked about. Or maybe . . . she would just sit here and watch the grass grow.
Little by little, she was starting to understand why places like this seemed to belong to an earlier time. They had modern conveniences. But if you weren't watching TV or using your computer, what could you do? Go to your neighbor's and chat. Go hunting if you were a man, cook if you were a woman. And sit around waiting for something to happen. It was usually a long wait.
She glanced at the sun. It was heading for the horizon, but it was still a couple of hours away. Talk about long waits . . . Some time between now and then, she needed to go back into the house and spray on some mosquito repellent. They had that back in California, but you really needed it here. The bugs would eat you alive if you forgot. They came out when the sun went down.
You almost had to be nuts to sit outside then, even with repellent on. The stuff wasn't perfect. You'd get bitten anyhow. But if you did stay out, if you ignored the buzzes that sounded like tiny dentist's drills whining through the humid air, you got to see fireflies.
Lightning bugs, they called them here most of the time. The locals took them for granted, because they saw them every summer. Beckie didn't—no fireflies in Los Angeles. She hadn't known what she was missing. There you were in the evening twilight, and all at once this little light would blink on in the air. And then it would disappear, and then come back again. Or another one would go on, and another, till you'd think the stars had started to dance.
Fireflies were just bugs. If you saw one in the daytime, when it wasn't glowing, you'd want to swat it or step on it. But when they flew, when they lit up, they weren't just bugs. They were marvels.
Gran came out on the porch to watch them, too. She was tight-lipped and disapproving of most of the world, but fireflies made her smile. "I almost forgot about them," she said. "Can you imagine that?"
"How could you forget anything so cool?" Beckie asked.
Her grandmother shrugged. "You just do. I haven't seen lightning bugs for more than forty years."
"Wow." That was more than twice as long as Beckie had been alive. She knew how big the number was, but she didn't understand what it meant. She could feel herself failing whenever she tried. And what was it like to be seventy? She looked at Gran's wrinkled face and gray hair. One day she would probably be that old herself. She knew as much, the same way she knew Saturn had rings. Both were true, but neither seemed to matter to her now.
"I'm glad I came back, in spite of all this silly talk about the border," Gran said.