We returned to S.A. Station, traded the VTOL for the Willys, and jumped a warp to 1953 Bakersfield, California. Mr. Benake had tipped Dad off about some kind of future real estate deal that Dad researched, then wanted to check out for himself.

Dad put me in a motel, stocked the ice box with food, left some period-correct money with me, and disappeared for a few days after warning me not to use my birth name.

My first day at the motel, I spent nearly all the hours of sunshine at or in the pool. I met some other kids and we played around together, having a good time. But their parents made them leave the pool for meals, outings, and bedtime. The next day, those families were gone. I realized I would have to go through the whole thing again if I made friends with a new cycle of kids coming through the motel.

After breakfast, I took a walk instead.

I bought a fountain soda and a stack of comic books at a drug store, and explored the area a bit, hoping to find a good spot with shade to sit down and relax for a while. I found a nice little park adjacent to a residential area, sat down on a bench in the shade, sipped on my soda and started reading.

Before long, a small group of boys arrived. One of them brought a football, They threw, caught, and horsed around a bit. There were four white boys, two Hispanics, and one black. But they all seemed to get along with each other just fine. I watched to see what they would do.

An errant kick caused the ball to land near my bench. I shagged the ball and fired a 20-yard bullet to one of the boys. It grew quiet as they all stared at me. Then one of them asked, “Hey, we’re about to have a game. Wanna play?”

I left my drink and comics on the bench and walked over.

A tall white boy extended his hand and said, “Hi. I’m Kip. We were gonna be three-on-four, but this makes it even.”

“You can call me Slinger,” I said. I’d read a little about a quarterback called “Slingin’ Sammy” Baugh who played for the Washington Redskins way back in the ’40s or something, so I thought I was being clever.

The other boys laughed at me. A boy about my height named Winston said, “Let’s just see about that, ‘Slinger’.”

We divided up into teams, flipped a coin for the kickoff, and began to play.

At first I wasn’t trusted on offense to do anything but block. But on defense I sacked the other team’s quarterback (Kip), made several tackles, then broke three different tackles after intercepting a pass, and romped to a touchdown. Next time on offense, Fredrico (playing quarterback for the down) tossed the ball my way. I snatched it and broke two more tackles during my non-stop touchdown.

“Gosh—he’s hard to bring down,” somebody on the other team complained. My teammates shook my hand and congratulated me on a good play.

Next offensive huddle we had, I asked, “How ’bout letting me pass this down?”

In my life before Uncle Si…Dad…I never would have been bold enough to just come straight out and promote myself like that.

I was already a different person, in many ways, from the boy growing up in that St. Louis trailer park.

Fredrico didn’t like the idea, but Ronny (the black kid) and Charlie (a white kid, a little shorter and stockier than me) made the point that it was only fair everybody got a chance. And so on the next play I made a 30-yard completion to Ronny. Then I hit him on a 15-yard buttonhook route. Then with Charlie blocking, Fredrico dove in for a score on the next down.

Ronny kept getting open, and I kept tossing the ball to him. Nobody asked to take the quarterback role from me, and they began to call me “Slinger” with no ironic overtones.

My team was up by three touchdowns…pretty embarrassing for the other boys…when I saw her. She was walking along the sidewalk that bordered the park. She saw me and started staring. She sat down on the bench, and kept staring.

After several glances, I recognized her: It was Gloria, only…different. Her face was very similar, but she moved differently, she was a little taller, had breasts and curvy hips.

The boys had all pretty much reached a consensus by then that the game was over. I asked them to excuse me for a minute and walked over to the bench where she sat. I had left my stuff there, so if I got closer and realized it wasn’t her, after all, I had the perfect excuse for why I came over.

She watched me with a curious smile. I reached her and said, “Hi.”

“Hello,” she said. Her voice wasn’t exactly the same—but still more familiar than her body. “Please forgive me for staring. It’s just that you really favor somebody I met, once.”

“It’s okay,” I said, then mentally fumbled, trying to think of something witty or impressive to follow up with. It was her—really her.

“Are you new to the neighborhood?” she asked.

“I’m not really in the neighborhood,” I said, thumbing over my shoulder. I’m staying at a motel back that way. I’m just kind of goofing around over here.”

She giggled and covered her mouth. “Gosh, you are so much like him!”

Now it occurred to me that she had aged six years since the campground, while I was only a few days older. There was no way I could have convinced her I was the same boy. And if I tried, it would just cause the sort of unwanted attention Dad warned me about.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, smile fading as she studied my face.

“Nothing,” I lied, and extended my hand. “I’m Slinger.”

She shook my hand. In a way it was better than before; in a way it was worse. Her hand was more womanly and even softer than when I held it in the campground, but her electric response to my touch was missing.

“Gloria,” she said.

“How about you?” I asked, remembering that their family was from Oakland. “Are you new to the neighborhood?”

“Oh, no. We moved here years ago.” Her lovely lips twisted into a frown. “Do you have a cousin, or big brother, named Peter Harris?”

This was getting uncomfortable. I shook my head, and turned to my stack of comic books and drink. “Naw. Anyway, nice to meet ya. I just came over to get my stuff.”

I turned my back on her and walked back to the group of boys, who stood in a cluster watching, while trying not to look like they were watching.

When I reached them, there were some under-the-breath remarks and subdued whistles.

“You sure do aim high,” Kip told me.

“First day here,” Fredrico said, “he wants to be a hot dog player; and he walks right up to Gloria Benake.”

“Hey boy,” Ronny said, extending his hand toward me, “that’s guts, right there.”

I shook his hand, then the rest of them shook my hand, too.

“Did you two know each other?” Winston asked.

“She says I look like somebody she knew,” I replied.

“I wondered why she kept looking at you,” Fredrico said.

“Hey, you can use that to your advantage,” Ronny said, with suggestive expression, gestures and tone of voice. “I’m real sorry you miss your friend, Gloria-baby. Come on over here, sit in my lap, and let me comfort you.”

The other boys laughed, lacshiviously.

I risked a glance over my shoulder to see if Gloria was still there. She wasn’t.

“Boy, she’s long gone!” Winston crowed, noticing my effort.

“She’s in high school,” Charlie said. “She only pays attention to big kids.”

“She won’t even look twice at me,” Kip said, “and I’m the oldest one here.”

“You guys play here every day?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

“Some days,” Fredrico said.

“You gonna play here tomorrow?” I pressed.

Charlie looked to his comrades. “How about it fellahs? You wanna have another game tomorrow?”

“You play pretty good, Slinger,” Kip said.

“Thanks,” I said. “You too.”

“I don’t wanna do the same thing every day,” Fredrico said with a scowl. This started an argument among all the boys.

“How would you all like to go swimming?” I asked.

“You know how far it is to the ocean, new boy?” asked the other Hispanic kid, Juan.

“In a pool, I mean.”

“There are no pools in the neighborhood,” Kip said.

At the time, I didn’t know how unusual that was for California. Nevertheless, I told them about the pool at the motel and invited them to come the next day. Kip, Winston, Charlie, and the other white boy, Wally, all committed to attend. I suggested they invite some girls, and as an afterthought, threw Gloria’s name in there.

***

I forgot to give them a time to meet, so after breakfast I put on my trunks and just hung around the pool, reading to pass the time until they showed…if they did.

Around 10am a whole mob showed up—boys, girls…and Gloria.

The day didn’t live up to my expectations. By the time my noisy guests were asked by motel management to leave that afternoon, it had become obvious I would get nowhere with Gloria. Other than the initial familiarity, she just had no interest in me whatsoever. This baffled me, since I was the same person she’d been interested in before, and hadn’t changed. The only logical answer was that she had changed—and not just physically.

But speaking of those physical changes—they caused no small amount of consternation for me that day. Her bathing suit wasn’t as skimpy as they would become decades later, but it still put her shape and plenty of skin on display. And that caused a rather embarrassing reaction I hadn’t suffered before—at least not for the same reason. I ached with arousal the whole day—and the trunks couldn’t hide it. I tried to hide it with a towel, and by keeping half-submerged in the water, but I know other kids saw it. Some of the girls whispered to each other and snickered while glancing at me.

The boys, however…at least those I knew from yesterday…seemed to be sympathetic. Charlie and Kip invited me to come back to the neighborhood the next day, maybe to play some more football. That didn’t happen, because Dad finally returned, and we left 1953 Bakersfield.

***

Back at BH Station, Dad “debriefed” me on our latest field trip, after Carmen had cleared the supper table and was back in the kitchen washing dishes.

Afterwards, I asked him what he knew about the Big Spooky.

“Not as much as I’d like to,” he said. “But I’ve got a hypothesis. We talked about relative anchor points in a particular reality or timestream—how that remains your reference point no matter how many space-time coordinates you visit.”

I nodded. I didn’t exactly understand the conversation, but I remembered it.

“Initially,” he said, “I thought the locations where it happens are at coordinates where the timestream loops back on itself.”

I scratched my head. “You mean when the stream is split, but not in a big way, but then it flows back together again and the alternate realities merge?”

He grinned and patted my shoulder. “I’m starting to suspect, however, that all the coordinates with that…whatever it is…have portals that lead back to one specific anchor point. Someone, or something, from a particular reality visited all of those coordinates, and what we’re feeling when we go there is a residue, like an after-effect.”

“Residue of what?” I asked. “Evil? That’s…um, spooky.”

“Ain’t it, though? Anyway, I can’t prove it yet. Maybe it can’t be proven.”

“You said ‘someone or something.’ So you think it might not be human?”

He sighed heavily, retrieved a beer from the fridge, a vodka bottle and shot glass from a cabinet, and retreated to the living room. I followed him. Once seated, he poured his first shot and sighed again.

“I don’t believe in extra-terrestrial life. At least, I don’t believe that’s what’s behind Roswell and all the other UFO sightings. Oh, there may be intelligent life out there on other planets, with technology more advanced than ours—who knows. But I don’t think that’s what’s behind the UFO stuff.”

He threw back his first shot and gasped his satisfaction.

“What I do believe,” he said, “is that there’s extra-dimensional life; that those creatures have visited the human world multiple times; that they are up to something very creepy; and that they are nobody to mess with.”

“Why do you think that?” I asked.

He gulped a beer chaser and wiped his mouth. “That’s a good question to ask. Not just now, but in a lot of conversations. Or debates. Some people believe the goofiest shit, and don’t even know why they believe it. If you ask them how they came to that belief, honest people will be forced to challenge their own prejudices. Dishonest people…well, debating with them is a waste of time, anyway.”

He poured another shot. “The reason I believe it is that I’ve witnessed some stuff.”

I snapped my fingers. “The CPB—are those guys really aliens disguised as humans?”

He grinned and swallowed his shot. “You’re bright. Especially for your age. No: I don’t think so. But I do think that one or more people at the top of the CPB are subservient to these…entities.”

After his beer chaser, he brightened. “But that’s enough loopy theories that I can’t prove. For now, anyway. So do you have your first letter ready for Gloria?”

My mood worsened almost instantly. “I’m not gonna write her.”

“What’s up?”

I didn’t want to talk about it, at first, but he made a convincing argument that he could help me if he knew the details. I wound up giving him a blow-by-blow of my entire experience with Gloria.

 

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