“And Pauline’s tattoo, which was a picture of the feather. But now even that’s disappeared. Wait a minute—she had the newspaper in her hand. She must have stepped out here this morning when things were changing!”
He blew one smoke ring and nodded. “Which exactly fits into what I’m thinking. None of those hints got you to do what they wanted. So I bet they got desperate and brought me here to help. If grown-up Frannie can’t do it, bring in Frannie the kid. But that didn’t work either so they pushed both of us to the future.”
I took the cigarette from him, had a puff, handed it back. “Who’re they!”
“I got no idea. That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. But it almost doesn’t matter. We know how powerful they are. They can mess around with time and parts of our life and other stuff. But so far they haven’t been able to make you do what they want. So how powerful can they be? If they were God they’d just say, ‘Do that!’ But they don’t because they can’t.”
“Maybe they’re small gods,” I mumbled, thinking out loud.
Stubbing out the cigarette on the bottom of his boot, he flicked the butt into Magda’s mums. “Small gods, that’s right. But look around, man—they really screwed up this time. You were in the future and were supposed to return to your time. Instead you came back to both yours and mine at the same time.”
“Gee-Gee? Where are you?” Pauline’s voice floated out of the house.
He slid off the railing and started for the door. I caught his arm and asked, “How did you figure this out?”
He undid my fingers. For the first time his voice became soft and vulnerable. “It’s the best I could come up with. You think I might be right?”
“I think you probably are right.”
He brightened and encouraged, leaned in close to tell me his next brainstorm. “And you know something else? I think they brought me back because whatever it is they need, you can’t do it by yourself. You need me along because otherwise you’re going to blow it.”
“Why do I need you?” I asked too loudly.
The bad boy voice, attitude, everything slipped instantly back into place. “Because you been tamed, Chief McCabe. You dry your face with pretty pink towels and don’t even realize it ‘cause you’re used to it. But me? I’m still the caveman version of Frannie McCabe. I kick ass and piss out the window. I swing on vines in the jungle. I hunt with a club on the fucking veldt.”
I had to have a look. No matter how little time remained to figure out what “they” needed done, I had to call a short intermission and see Crane’s View rewound thirty years. I went back into the house for a pair of pants and shoes. Gee-Gee and Pauline were in the kitchen talking and laughing. They ignored the old guy in the boxer shorts as he passed. It was a pleasure to see Pauline looking so happy, even if it was due to Mr. Hot Pants and his sleazy ways.
In a pair of jeans and a T-shirt I went out the door again and down the porch stairs. As I began walking toward town I stopped and looked across the street. Why was my father coming out of that house so early in the morning? I tried to think back to who had lived there three decades before but came up blank. I would have to ask Gee-Gee later.
What I did remember was that as he grew older, Dad had increasingly bad insomnia and used to go out walking or driving around at all hours. My mother and I grew used to his coming and going at the strangest times. Once Mom even said the Jaguar and the insomnia were the two things that made him different from every other Tom, Dick, and Harry. My father’s name was Tom.
Walking toward town I remembered a terrible story she told. Right before they were married, they made a date one day to meet in New York under the big clock at Grand Central Station.
Mom was a few minutes early and waited eagerly for her fiance to arrive. After some time she saw him walking toward her so she moved to greet him. It took many steps (her phrase) while staring straight at the guy to finally realize it wasn’t Tom McCabe but a complete stranger. Shocked at her mistake and then relieved she hadn’t made a fool of herself, she slunk back to her place under the clock.
A few minutes later she was sure she saw Tom. Again she moved out to say hello. But God forbid, it happened again– only a few less steps this time to recognize this second stranger who also looked so much like the love of her life wasn’t him. She laughed when she told the story, but Mom never told it when my father was around. We both knew it was funny but sad as hell too. Because it was the truth—throw a stick at a bunch of commuters waiting at any Westchester County train station at seven any morning, or during coffee break in a Manhattan office building, and you would have hit six guys identical to my dad. That’s why his showy car and insomnia pleased her so. They were his only distinguishing characteristics.
Walking along, I enjoyed seeing great old cars that in my time were like extinct animals—a Corvair and a MG-A parked on opposite sides of the street. Passing Al Salvato’s old house, there was his father’s dogshit-brown Ford Edsel. The car with automatic transmission buttons in the middle of the steering wheel. Salvato’s father enjoyed seeing us kids sit in the Edsel when it was parked in their driveway. Al always encouraged me to sit in the driver’s seat, but that was only because he was afraid. All my pals were afraid of me and for good reason. I loved fighting, stealing, lying, and hurting. My favorite sport was knocking people out, preferably with an iron bar or anything hard. I thrived on being everything your parents warned you against. I was the delinquent, the crud, the bad apple, and the criminal they knew would one day go to hell, to jail, to no good end. And I wore that charge proudly. I passed the little blue house where the assistant high school principal had lived. When he suspended me from school for stealing a teacher’s book, I set his car on fire. Down the block in an ugly split-level had lived the head of the Crane’s View branch of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. One night I broke into their meeting hall and stole every gun they had on display. Et cetera.
But was Gee-Gee right? Had things like Magda’s pink towels and a happy life declawed me? More important, did I care? Did it matter if I had left him, that Frannie, behind years ago? What do you see when you look at old photos of yourself, besides bad haircuts and tasteless clothes you gave away to the Salvation Army twenty years ago? Was that strutting punk back at the house really me, or had we only lived in the same body, like an apartment, at different times?
A small dog trotted by, looking self-important and full of plans. “Jack!” Hearing its name, it stopped and checked me out. I slowly offered my hand, which it sniffed but no wagging tail followed. This was my friend Sam Bayer’s dog. A pooch I had liked very much when it was alive. Which didn’t stop me, however, from pissing on it and Johnny Petangles one day years ago while Jack sat on Johnny’s lap, but that’s another story.
Since I was no more than a stranger with an empty hand, Jack walked away. I realized he was probably going back to my house because that’s where the Bayer family had lived when we were kids. I had always liked that house, and when it came on the market a few years ago I bought it. What would the dog find when it got back there? The Bayer family circa 1965, or teenagers Pauline and Gee-Gee still flirting over their cups of Italian coffee? What if it was the Bayer family? What if I was to follow the dog home and find that everything I knew as an adult had disappeared into thirty years ago? What if I had been sent permanently back to the world I had inhabited as a sullen, mean-hearted semipsy-chotic teenager?
“Shut up and get going,” I said out loud because if I didn’t nudge myself along, I could easily have stood there waiting for Godot or anyone to come along and tell me what I could do to get out of this fix.