That’s what I was thinking when I turned a corner and saw Pauline’s bare ass again in the bathroom mirror. Rather, I saw some of her ass because she held her nightshirt hitched up with one hand, her panties pulled partway down with the other. Teetering awkwardly on tiptoe, she arched to look over her shoulder and see her back in the mirror’s reflection.
She saw me in the mirror. “Frannie, come here! Come here!” I looked at my shoes. “Pauline, put your nightshirt down.” “No, you have to look. You have to see this. You have to tell me you see it too and I’m not crazy.”
I stepped forward, eyes still averted. “See what?”
“My tattoo. It’s gone. Everything is gone, even the bandage covering it. How’s that possible? I didn’t touch anything. I just peeled the bandage off a little to look, but then I put it back really carefully. But now it’s all gone. Everything.”
“Let me see.”
It was true. The other night when I’d seen her standing naked, there had been that feather, bright, swollen, and colorful tattooed at the base of her spine. Now there was nothing—only perfect teenage skin.
“This is exactly where it was.” She touched the place and her skin dimpled. “Right here, but now it’s gone. How’s it possible, Frannie?”
I touched her to feel if there might be any tactile proof or indication that something had happened there. I slid my finger across her skin hoping for an abrasion, a cut, any roughness to prove how a large amount of multicolored ink injected under this girl’s skin less than three days before had disappeared.
Nothing. Rather than stay there trying to explain to Pauline something I could not explain, I pushed her out of the bathroom, did my bit there, and returned to the kitchen. Earlier Gee-Gee had said that things were different outside today. Now I was beginning to know what he meant. I needed answers, and he was the only one around who might have some.
When I got to the kitchen, Pauline was pointing through her nightshirt to the spot on her back where the fugitive tattoo had been. As I walked in Gee-Gee said in an innocent voice, “So show me.”
I slapped him on the back of the head. “Cut it out. Come with me, doofus. Pauline, we’ll be back in five minutes.”
As we were leaving he touched her shoulder and said, “Don’t move, you. I’ll be right back and I want to see where that tattoo was.”
“Okay, Gee-Gee,” she warbled.
“If you so much as touch Pauline—”
“Cool it. What are you, my chaperone? And why hit me in front of her like that? I didn’t do nothin’!”
“No, but you’re planning to. ‘I want to see where your tattoo was.’ Ha, what a terrible come-on line. You must have graduated from the Fred Flintstone School of Seduction, Gee-Gee. Sub-tie. Real sub-tie.”
He shoved me. “Where are we going?”
“You said things were different today. What did you mean?”
“Open the front door and see for yourself, mud-brain.”
The man who lives across the street from us drives a white Saturn. He always parks it directly in front of his house and gets pissed off if anyone else uses that space. When I opened my door I saw a gleaming black Jaguar Mark VII parked there instead of the Saturn. A rare and expensive car when it was made back in the 1960s, today it is very rare. I know because my father owned one. His one great indulgence, Dad bought a used Jaguar that he loved even though it was an indisputable piece of shit, your classic lemon. From the moment he brought it home until he later sold it for a whopping loss, that car broke down almost continually, costing him untold money and trips to an expensive “foreign car” mechanic in a neighboring town. No one in our family but Dad liked that automobile. But he could never be convinced the previous owner had cheated him.
Anyway, that morning parked across the street from my house was a black Jaguar identical to the one my father had owned. A landslide of memories thundered down my head as I stared at it. But there were things to do, so I only pointed it out to Gee-Gee and said, “Looks just like Dad’s Jag, huh?”
“It is Dad’s Jag, pal. I saw him get out of it before.”
Before I could answer, a forest-green Studebaker Avanti drove slowly by. There was a woman at the wheel. Although dark in there, from what I could make out of the driver she looked familiar. I hadn’t seen an Avanti in twenty years. This one looked like it just came off a showroom floor.
Two kids slouched down the sidewalk toward us. Around sixteen, they had shoulder-length hair and their sloppy clothes were all tie-dyed. Hippies thirty years too late. In front of the house, both flashed us the peace sign and said, “Hey, McCabe!”
Both Gee-Gee and I said hey. Then we looked at each other. Then the hippies looked at each other but kept on truckin’ along like stoned characters in a R. Crumb comic strip. Happy at the site of these living anachronisms, it took another moment for me to realize who they were. “Was that Eldritch and Benson?”
“No other, brother.”
“How is it possible?”
Gee-Gee’s voice was all sarcasm. “Well, let’s think about this a minute. There’s Dad’s Jaguar across the street. Eldritch and Benson just passed. Andrea Schnitzler drove by in her Avanti—”
“That was Andrea?”
“No other, brother.”
My father was dead. Andy Eldritch died thirty years ago in Vietnam. Andrea Schnitzler moved from Crane’s View after our junior year in high school and was never heard from again. Her father owned a green Avanti. We used to talk about which we desired more—Andrea or her car.
“It’s the sixties? We’re back in the sixties?”
“Yup.”
I thumbed toward the house. “But back inside, Pauline and Magda are—”
“Exactly, back inside the house. Out here it’s the sixties. Welcome to my world.” He hopped up and perched himself on the wooden railing that went around the porch.
Before I could say anything, a door slammed across the street. My father came down the walk toward his car. He was in his forties again and still had some hair left. He wore a beige summer suit I remember going with him to buy. He always wore a suit to work, always wore a tie. Usually it was one solid color– black or maroon. Stripes or crazy designs weren’t him, ever. For his birthday I’d once given him a tie designed by Peter Max with Day-Glo-colored elephants and spaceships on it. He dutifully wore it to please me, but it was plain he was mortified. This man dressed like he didn’t want to be seen, like the less the world noticed him the better. When I was Gee-Gee’s age I loved my Dad but had little respect for him. We may have lived in the same house but not on the same planet.
This was in the sixties. We wore buttons on our jean jackets that announced (idiotically) never trust anyone over thirty. Or really anyone who had a regular job, wore a suit, carried a mortgage, believed in The System ... I was never a hippie because I thrived on violence, selfishness, and intimidation. Pacifism would have deprived me of fun and opportunity. But I sure did like the drugs and free sex that were such an essential part of the movement. Which predictably made matters geometrically worse between Dad and me. Only later, after being to Vietnam and seeing people like Andy Eldritch get their heads blown off, did I realize how much of what my father said and lived was correct.
Gee-Gee shouted out, “Hey, Dad! Over here!” as the Jaguar passed. But the driver, a man I had buried with my own hands, didn’t look our way, although it was definitely him—Dad. Alive again.
We watched the car until it was out of sight. I turned to the boy and asked, “What the hell’s going on?”
“My guess is someone fucked up. Astopel or one of the people he’s with.”
“Meaning?”
He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. “Meaning someone needs Frannie McCabe to do something for them. You’ve got a one-week time limit to get it done. But for whatever reason they can’t tell you what it is. So first they start off by giving you hints—the buried dog coming back, the feather, the empty Schiavo house ...”