Lasts a thousand years. And speaking of grocery stores, I had never heard of one called the Red & White. If you wanted to shop for food in The Falls, you went to the IGA a block down on 196. It was right across from the old railroad station. Which was now a combination tee-shirt shop and tattoo parlor.
All the same, the past felt very close just then—maybe it was just the golden cast of the declining summer light, which has always struck me as slightly supernatural. It was as if 1958 were still right here, only hidden beneath a flimsy film of intervening years. And, if I hadn’t imagined what had happened to me this afternoon, that was true.
He wants me to do something. Something he would have done himself, but the cancer stopped him. He said he went back and stayed for four years
(at least I thought that was what he’d said),
but four years wasn’t long enough.
Was I willing to go back down those stairs and stay for four-plus years? Basically take up residence? Come back two minutes later . . . only in my forties, with strands of gray starting to show up in my hair? I couldn’t imagine doing that, but I couldn’t imagine what Al had found so important back there in the first place. The one thing I did know was that four or six or eight years of my life was too much to ask, even for a dying man.
I still had over two hours before I was scheduled to show up at Al’s. I decided I’d go back home, make myself another meal, and this time force myself to eat it. After that, I’d take another shot at finishing my honors essays. I might be one of the very few people who had ever traveled back in time—for that matter, Al andI might be the only ones who had ever done it in the history of the world—but my poetry students were still going to want their final grades.
I hadn’t had the radio on when I drove to town, but I turned it on now. Like my TV, it gets its programming from computer-driven space voyagers that go whirling around the earth at a height of twenty-two thousand miles, an idea that surely would have been greeted with wide-eyed wonder (but probably not outright disbelief) by the teenager Frank Anicetti had been back in the day. I tuned to the Sixties on Six and caught Danny & the Juniors working out on “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”—three or four urgent, harmonic voices singing over a jackhammer piano. They were followed by Little Richard screaming “Lucille” at the top of his lungs, and then Ernie K-Doe more or less moaning “Mother-in-Law”:
She thinks her advice is a contribution, but if she would leave that would be the solution.
It all sounded as fresh and sweet as the oranges Mrs. Symonds and her friends had been picking over that early afternoon.
It sounded
new.
Did I want to spend years in the past? No. But I
did
want to go back. If only to hear how Little Richard sounded when he was still top of the pops. Or get on a Trans World Airlines plane without having to take off my shoes, submit to a full-body scan, and go through a metal detector.
And I wanted another root beer.
CHAPTER 3
1
The gnome did indeed have a flag, but not an American one. Not even the Maine flag with the moose on it. The one the gnome was holding had a vertical blue stripe and two fat horizontal stripes, the top one white and the bottom one red. It also had a single star. I gave the gnome a pat on his pointy hat as I went past and mounted the front steps of Al’s little house on Vining Street, thinking about an amusing song by Ray Wylie Hubbard: “Screw You, We’re from Texas.”
The door opened before I could ring the bell. Al was wearing a bathrobe over pajamas, and his newly white hair was in corkscrew tangles—a serious case of bedhead if I’d ever seen one. But the sleep (and the painkillers, of course) had done him some good. He still looked sick, but the lines around his mouth weren’t so deep and his gait, as he led me down the short stub of a hall and into his living room, seemed surer. He was no
All the same, the past felt very close just then—maybe it was just the golden cast of the declining summer light, which has always struck me as slightly supernatural. It was as if 1958 were still right here, only hidden beneath a flimsy film of intervening years. And, if I hadn’t imagined what had happened to me this afternoon, that was true.
He wants me to do something. Something he would have done himself, but the cancer stopped him. He said he went back and stayed for four years
(at least I thought that was what he’d said),
but four years wasn’t long enough.
Was I willing to go back down those stairs and stay for four-plus years? Basically take up residence? Come back two minutes later . . . only in my forties, with strands of gray starting to show up in my hair? I couldn’t imagine doing that, but I couldn’t imagine what Al had found so important back there in the first place. The one thing I did know was that four or six or eight years of my life was too much to ask, even for a dying man.
I still had over two hours before I was scheduled to show up at Al’s. I decided I’d go back home, make myself another meal, and this time force myself to eat it. After that, I’d take another shot at finishing my honors essays. I might be one of the very few people who had ever traveled back in time—for that matter, Al andI might be the only ones who had ever done it in the history of the world—but my poetry students were still going to want their final grades.
I hadn’t had the radio on when I drove to town, but I turned it on now. Like my TV, it gets its programming from computer-driven space voyagers that go whirling around the earth at a height of twenty-two thousand miles, an idea that surely would have been greeted with wide-eyed wonder (but probably not outright disbelief) by the teenager Frank Anicetti had been back in the day. I tuned to the Sixties on Six and caught Danny & the Juniors working out on “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”—three or four urgent, harmonic voices singing over a jackhammer piano. They were followed by Little Richard screaming “Lucille” at the top of his lungs, and then Ernie K-Doe more or less moaning “Mother-in-Law”:
She thinks her advice is a contribution, but if she would leave that would be the solution.
It all sounded as fresh and sweet as the oranges Mrs. Symonds and her friends had been picking over that early afternoon.
It sounded
new.
Did I want to spend years in the past? No. But I
did
want to go back. If only to hear how Little Richard sounded when he was still top of the pops. Or get on a Trans World Airlines plane without having to take off my shoes, submit to a full-body scan, and go through a metal detector.
And I wanted another root beer.
CHAPTER 3
1
The gnome did indeed have a flag, but not an American one. Not even the Maine flag with the moose on it. The one the gnome was holding had a vertical blue stripe and two fat horizontal stripes, the top one white and the bottom one red. It also had a single star. I gave the gnome a pat on his pointy hat as I went past and mounted the front steps of Al’s little house on Vining Street, thinking about an amusing song by Ray Wylie Hubbard: “Screw You, We’re from Texas.”
The door opened before I could ring the bell. Al was wearing a bathrobe over pajamas, and his newly white hair was in corkscrew tangles—a serious case of bedhead if I’d ever seen one. But the sleep (and the painkillers, of course) had done him some good. He still looked sick, but the lines around his mouth weren’t so deep and his gait, as he led me down the short stub of a hall and into his living room, seemed surer. He was no
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