My Great American Novel (which I have been calling Paradox lately) has 123 chapters and about 1585 pages. The page count may go down a bit as I edit, but that’s still Tolstoy length.
A year or more ago, when the size of the story was obvious, I pondered how I would ever market such a book, who would take a chance on reading it, and what a fair price would be to ask for it. I soberly faced the reality that there really isn’t a market for it. Nobody’s gonna buy a doorstop-sized novel in a male-friendly genre unless the author name is Tom Clancy or W.E.B. Griffin. But even those guys don’t write books this huge.
On the one hand are my motives. I write fiction I would like to read–not what “the market” dictates. In this case, I wrote it because I just had to. It’s been in my mind just too long, bursting to get out. Call it cathartic, theraputic, whatever…but this has been a fulfilling experience. Even fun–that’s one reason I took my time and even still, with my country turning into a dystopian hellhole all around me, I’m in no hurry to publish.
On the other hand, even a well-written, great read (yes, I’m implying that this is) will never get much in the way of sales without visibility. Even if the audience exists, they can’t buy and read the book when they don’t know the book exists, too. And in a market dominated by Amazon…well, with a simple tweak of an algorithm, its easy to ensure that the audience never discovers that well-written great read. I say this as somebody who has written three novels that hit #1 bestseller status in multiple categories. (Pretty sure I enthused about that here on the blog in years past, with screenshots–if you feel up to verifying.)
On another hand (when did I grow a third hand? Did somebody vaccinate me while I wasn’t looking?) the market is a shitshow.
I would puke my guts out, hold my nose, and crank out hackneyed lesbian vampire romances with contrived Marxist messaging if I wanted to “write to the market,” garnering sales and reviews galore.
Ah, but what about the “conservative” fiction market? It’s much like the RINO GOP Establishment–meaning, at its core, not much different from the mainstream drivel. It’s got the same Kickass Womyn Warrior tropes; same LGBT-pandering; same “the radical right is the greatest threat” narratives. But with lower corporate taxes and “Back the Blue” flags. And, much like everything else, it’s all uninspiring, mediocre pap.
Oh yeah: and you have to sell your soul on top of all that, just for the algorithm architects to make your mediocre pap discoverable. The longer I slog through life’s various shitshows, the more convinced I become that nearly every “inspiring success story” in my lifetime has been fake and gay. Especially “exciting new authors” who are unknown one minute, then the next minute their mediocre, formulaic debut novel (Harrumphs of the NPC: Book One in the Narrative Reinforcement Series) has 3,000 glowing, yet non-specific Amazon reviews.
Not gonna sell my soul–that market is flooded with cheap merchandise, too. Buyer’s market. Competition everywhere.
So, why sweat it at all? I wrote this tome for the joy of it. In my mind I know the Marxist Hive Mind that controls every single institution will hate it and condemn it to obscurity. Maybe even virtually incinerate it. But there’s the principle of the matter, sez I. Therefore, I must do what I can to monetize this years-long investment of my life.
Break it up and make it a series, of course. Right? The entire publishing shitshow market is geared toward series fiction. And our functionally illiterate culture has cultivated attention spans that can’t handle much beyond a TikTok video or Facebook post. A 1500+ page BOOK????????? One of those crazy outdated relics with pages, and words? I might as well have written a harpsichord concerto in the Baroque style.
Making Paradox a series is a no-brainer, on the surface.
Trouble with that is, this is a time-traveling sports adventure saga that follows the protagonist from his pre-adolescent years into his late ’20s. So, by fragmenting it, the first one or two books in the series would technically be “young adult” or “coming of age” time-traveling sports adventure (and [gasp! the horror!] without any lesbians, vampires, or Kickass Womyn Warriors). The other series installments would not be. So the unicorns male coming-of-age readers might feel cheated because of where the first book or two leave off. This was not written to be episodic. There is one character arc–not three or four. And the readers…both of them…besides myself, who would buy and read grown-up time-travel sports adventure sagas might never even begin the series because young adult just does not float their boat.
I shoved those concerns aside and kept writing the story I wanted to tell.
But now here I am: editing the rough draft and still clueless about how to market Paradox and how much to charge for it.
There seems to be no good solution to this conundrum. (Is it a conundrum or dilemma? The horns poke me, either way.)
So, I’m gonna bust it up and release it as a series. I think that’s the least self-defeating of the two options. My next move, then, is determining where to sever the plot, and adding scenes/sequels to make the different sections more episodic.
Know what else? Probably gonna move forward with no beta readers.
My bright idea of posting chapters here has resulted in exactly zero comments of any kind on the blog. Destructive criticism is the most common flavor and easiest to get (unsolicited, at that). But I didn’t even get that. The most I’ve received are some likes on Gab and MeWe. It’s nice to assume those like buttons were clicked after reading my posted chapters, but who knows. The only comment I received there was by somebody who read at least part of “Spin the Bottle,” then informed me that my depiction was not the way the game was played in their day. And, uh…they somehow decided that there’s some sort of “same sex” action in the chapter. Your guess is as good as mine. (Assuming you exist and are reading this blog post. Big assumption, at this point.)
I may post a couple more chapters, but am already close to where the first book will probably end, so this experiment will likely conclude, soon. Got some work to do, so I will get to it.
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.
UPDATE: This book is published! Click here to buy on Amazon.
You’d have to be blind to not notice how stupid-happy I was after that short little evening and morning. Still, Dad didn’t press me on it. He left me alone with my thoughts and fresh memories for the next leg of our trip.
I did finally ask him if it would be possible to correspond with Gloria. He turned thoughtful, gave me a long look, turned back to the road, thought some more, and finally said, “It’ll be tricky, but maybe we can work something out.”
***
After a few more days, I was able to function again and actually think about something other than Gloria Benake.
While meandering through the plains and deserts of the Southwest in that hot rod Willys, we got into a discussion about time travel. Dad asked me a question he had to rephrase a few times. But once I understood what he was getting at, I would think about it a lot as I got older.
“Okay, Sprout: You’ve been to a few different points in time already. You started out with your life there in St. Louis. Then you jumped back to the Orange Grove. You jumped forward with me to BH Station. Then way back to New Orleans for Sullivan-Corbett. And now back to this road trip. Did I get it in the right sequence?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Really? You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you figure? How can you be sure of any linear sequence when the illusion of time is no longer relevant?”
My reply was steeped in wisdom and just slopping over with all the intellectual prowess of a pre-adolescent boy: “Huh?”
“The only solid evidence we have that time even exists is entropy,” he said. “But anyway, of all the space-time coordinates you’ve visited, New Orleans is the earliest. BH Station is the latest. So wouldn’t the correct sequence of your travels begin with New Orleans, and end with BH Station? And where we are right now should be in the middle, right?”
“No,” I said, vigorously shaking my head.
“Why not? That’s proper chronological order.”
“Because that’s not the order of how it happened.”
“So you’re saying that St. Louis is the singular reference point; that everything else is lined up in the sequence according to that coordinate.”
“Um, yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
“But why? How do you know what sequence is correct? 1892 came before any of the other coordinates, right?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
“And 1934 comes after 1892. Then 1947 comes after 1934. So the chronologically correct sequence is New Orleans, the Orange Grove, then this vacation, St. Louis, then BH Station. That’s just simple math. 1892 is the earliest date, so of course you went there first. 1934 is the next earliest date. So that’s where you went next.”
“That may be the historical sequence,” I said, “but I visited those times in a different sequence.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I remember how it happened.”
“Ahh. So your memory is calibrated from that one reference point, back in St. Louis. And your memory records remain consistent throughout the series of warp jumps. Why is that?”
“Because that’s just the way it happened.”
“What you’re saying is, that’s how all the puzzle pieces fit together in what you consider reality,” he said. “But can we even define reality anymore? Is our concept of reality even relevant?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” I said.
“I’ll answer the question for you: Yes. You’re right. And the supporting evidence is relative growth. Even though you’ve been moving backwards and forwards through time, you’re still aging—according to a sequence that is anchored in the reality you lived in St. Louis. You didn’t grow decades older when we went to BH Station, and obviously you didn’t grow younger for every year we went back, or you would have ceased to exist before we got to these coordinates. So you’re right. But why are you right?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I don’t know either, Sprout. But I’ll tell you—I sometimes wonder if that truth is ironclad. Maybe reality can change—and our memory will self-adjust to accept it. Wouldn’t that be a mind-blower?”
I didn’t answer. This whole conversation sounded crazy.
“Pretty smart scientists have proposed that time itself is just a stubbornly persistent illusion,” he said. “Other scientists have determined that there are at least six dimensions beyond the four that we perceive. Now, somebody with a warp generator can pierce the illusion and jump through unperceivable dimensions. That means it’s theoretically possible to exist outside of time altogether.”
I wasn’t following his logic, so I remained quiet.
“Let’s say it’s Thanksgiving and the Macy’s Parade is underway. You’re watching it from the top of a skyscraper, with binoculars, while most people are watching it at street level. Down there, the Budweiser float has just passed the people standing at Times Square or wherever. Right in front of them is the Coca-Cola float, and if they lean to peak around that Coca-Cola float, they’ll see the one with the Charlie Brown and Snoopy balloons.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to picture the scene he described.
“So you remember the Budweiser float. You see the Coca-Cola float in front of you right now, clear as day. And you think you can see far enough to predict that the Peanuts float is coming next. Budweiser is the past, Coca-Cola is the present, and Peanuts is the future. Well, up on top of the skyscraper, you see all three floats simultaneously. You can see every float in the entire parade. You don’t have to remember or predict anything, because past, present and future are all there for you to clearly see. In fact, there is no past or future. Everything is present.”
“How does that relate?” I asked. “You say I’m on the skyscraper…outside of time. How could I actually get there? Who could actually be there?”
“Outstanding question, Sprout. Maybe you can’t ever get there. Probably only God is outside time like that, looking into our stream and seeing everything at once. But if He’s there, looking at past, present and future simultaneously…then that’s the reality that supersedes all others, ain’t it?”
I had no answer for that; nor was I prepared for what came next.
“So if that’s the true reality, then there is no actual separation. There is no linear progression. It’s just a stubbornly persistent illusion—it’s an imposed limitation. Well, I suspect our subconscious mind can glimpse into the unperceived dimensions sometimes. Some people more than others, probably. But that might explain where some of our weird dreams come from. Or bizarre phenomena like deja vu.”
“Dreams?” I asked.
“I have dreams, sometimes, that don’t make much sense,” Dad said. “But when I analyze them, I wonder if they’re not evidence that my subconscious is perceiving into different streams. If there is one true reality, then not only do past, present and future exist simultaneously in a given stream; but even the different streams themselves…the different realities…are all actually one. God simply determines which illusion we are limited to and calibrates our memory accordingly. You, me, anybody with a warp generator can trespass into illusions we weren’t assigned to, but our calibration anchors our cognition to the reality we originated in—at least during conscious thought. And our biology, too.”
“I’m confused,” I admitted. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
He chuckled and shrugged. “Well, at least remember this conversation. Think about it. One day you’ll understand at least what I’m asking. And if you ever think you’ve found an answer…let me know.”
“Okay.”
Not long after that, we were driving somewhere north of Roswell, New Mexico, and I experienced an oppressive, creepy, foreboding sensation. I got goose bumps, and began looking around in and outside the car, wondering if the source of the feeling was visible.
Dad noticed me looking around and studied me. He noticed the hair on my arms standing up, and pulled the car over onto the shoulder of the road. That’s when I noticed that he had goose bumps, too.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You tell me,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
He rubbed his own arm, then looked down at mine. “You feel that, right?”
“I feel…something,” I said.
He got out of the car, gesturing for me to do the same. “Describe what you feel,.” he said.
I did my best to put the sensation into words.
He nodded, using his more expansive vocabulary to clarify my attempt at description. “Ominous. Tumultuous.”
“Maybe evil…?” I suggested.
“Interesting,” he mused, looking out over the plains. “I guess this might make sense.”
“It does?” I asked. “What does?”
“Maybe it wasn’t a weather balloon after all,” he muttered.
“Say what?”
“I guess you never read the details about this,” he said, then pointed out into the plains. “Somewhere out there is a ranch—not very far, I’d guess. Right about here and now, something has crashed, is crashing, or will crash very soon at that ranch. You never heard of the Roswell UFO?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said. “Area 51. Hangar 18. Right?”
“I dunno,” he said. “I’m not a UFO nut. But now I know something is happening here, too.”
“Here, too? You lost me, Dad.”
He chewed on his lip for a while, studying first me, then the landscape. “Tell you what: let’s take another field trip real quick.”
We got back in the car, took off, and immediately warp-jumped to a place he called “S.A. Station.” The scenery was exotic and beautiful.
It turns out “S.A.” stood for South Africa, and the year was 1958. But we had only stopped there to pick up the VTOL with cloaking capability.
The VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) was quite an aircraft, even without the Predator technology. It had retractable, forward-swept wings and cowled propellors that could swing from vertical to horizontal. But Dad distracted me from examining it much by showing me some equipment similar to what the Erasers used.
It was like a heavy poncho—the outside of it covered with thousands of little L.E.D. screens. Wires crisscrossed inside the fabric of the poncho. For every screen, there was a microcamera on the opposite side of the poncho, recording whatever it “saw.” So the LED screens displayed live footage from behind whatever or whoever the poncho covered. No matter what angle you looked at it from, you simply saw a distorted image of the background on the far side of it. An electronic, active camouflage. Dad said that more advanced cloaking tech had come out since the poncho was made, available in jumpsuits and facemasks. He said the suits were very heavy and hot to wear, and they still just distorted the light rather than truly enabling invisibility; but made a person or vehicle extremely difficult to detect, unless you knew where and what to look for. He turned it on, and it became just a visual anomaly. Then he handed me his sunglasses and told me to put them on. When I did, I could see the poncho, with all its tiny LED segments glowing.
“That’s why you wear these all the time,” I said. “What are they?”
He hung up the poncho, shut it off, and took the shades back. “Relatively simple technology. The lenses block ultraviolet light, and are also polarized. The polarization keeps the LEDs from tricking you.”
“So you can see the Erasers, plain as day,” I said.
He nodded. “One of my science labs is working on a contact lens prototype. For now, we’ve got these.”
“Can I get a pair?”
“I guess so, Sprout. But let’s hope you never need them.”
We strapped into the VTOL and took off—up and away. We shot a warp and Dad cloaked the craft as we approached a large city.
There was a park or something with a little patch of woods inside the city. Dad guided the VTOL down through a gap in the trees and landed it expertly. We disembarked. Using the electronic compass in his “pocketwatch,” Dad navigated on foot to the edge of the copse, coming to a halt before breaking through the treeline. He held his arm out sideways to keep me from emerging into the open.
The city we saw from our ground-level perspective was quite an eyeful. Tall columns lined the streets, colorful banners hanging from them. Heroic sculptures were placed all over. The architecture of the buildings was alien to me. Some of it could perhaps be described as art-deco, but most of it looked like something else—gleaming new, but stylistically a throwback to antiquity.
Upon a large parade ground were perfectly- arranged mass formations of soldiers and vehicles. Just beyond this, dominating the scene, was a colossal structure, shaped like a sporting arena. The enormous stadium reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the ancient coliseum in Rome, only much bigger. A roar of a great multitude cheering rose out of the stadium.
“You’ve been studying history, right?” Dad asked in a hushed tone. “You know where we are?”
“Nazi Germany,” I said, noting the hundreds of huge red banners with black swastikas inside white circles.
“Specifically, the Olympiad,” he said. “Berlin, 1936. The Olympic Games. I discovered this at a Nuremburg Rally, but it’s here, too.”
“What’s here? I asked.
“The Big Spooky. Relax for a minute. What do you feel?”
Before I could answer, what looked like clouds of swirling confetti wafted up from the stadium and into the sky—defying gravity. The roar of 100,000 voices shook the air again.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Pidgeons. Or doves. Some kind of birds. Supposed to symbolize world peace or something.”
“Yeah, right,” I said with a sneer, remembering what the Nazis actually brought to the world.
“Concentrate, Sprout. Evaluate what you feel.”
I tried to both relax and concentrate at the same time, ignoring my conditioned response to all the swastikas, and the inherent danger of the situation which caused us to speak quietly, lest we be discovered.
“It’s a lot like what I felt back in Roswell,” I said, incredulous that the same unusual oppressive atmosphere would be here on the other side of the planet and 11 years earlier. “Only, there’s also…”
Dad nodded. “Right. In this case, it’s ominous…but it’s also got a seductive quality, doesn’t it?”
“Seductive?” I repeated, confused. “You mean like in sex?”
“That’s not how I mean it. I mean appealing. There’s almost a temptation to want to be a part of the great, momentous event going on.”
“Yes!” I agreed, amazed at how accurate his description was of something I personally felt. “That’s it, exactly.”
He nodded again. “It was the same at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution. But I’m not taking you there. This is a big enough risk.”
“But this is a sporting event,” I observed. “Not a UFO landing.”
“Right. I don’t know exactly how the Olympiad is so significant in the scheme of things, but there’s no denying the sensation. And that extra, seductive aspect…it must be the added zeitgeist factor—like at Nuremburg and 1917 Petrograd, and 1959 Cuba, and…”
“What’s a zeitgeist?” I asked.
“It means ‘spirit of the times.’ It’s when mass portions of a population all get on the same page. They all jump on the same bandwagon, share the same emotion collectively, believe in the same ideology, adopt the same goals…this is one coordinate right here and now that has it in droves.”
“Too bad we can’t watch the Games,” I said.
“Yeah. Jesse Owens won four gold medals for America and embarrassed Der Fuehrer right out of the stadium. But we’re taking a big enough risk already, Sprout. Neither of us speak the language and you don’t want to go barging into one of these socialist Utopias without your papers in order. Besides, the games last for two weeks, and the cloaking tech is gonna drag down our batteries much sooner.”
He took one last glance toward the imposing stadium, and sighed. “What’s really going on here, under the surface? It’s more than pole-vaulting and discus throws.”
We returned to the VTOL and lifted off out of the little copse, into the sky.
We jumped a warp once airborne, and Dad began to breathe a bit easier. But soon we were approaching another city—more modern, but at least as big. He noticed my curious expression, and announced, “Dallas, Texas. November 1963.”
We approached a downtown area, descending on the way. “This…sensation you felt,” he told me, “I discovered it by accident, but I started tracking it through history. It happens a lot, at coordinates all over the four-dimensional map. We’re just hitting some of the highlights this time. For some reason, in the ’60s they spring up all over, like popcorn. Like weeds. Most of them are like the Olympiad—meaning I don’t know exactly what’s so significant about the coordinate. I picked this one for this trip because it’s fairly easy to grasp the significance.”
He lowered the VTOL to a landing in a grassy field in the middle of a square bordered by multi-story buildings, and shut it down while leaving the cloak active.
“This is such a public place, out in the open,” I observed, as we stepped outside. “What if somebody bumps into the VTOL?”
Dad shrugged. “People are gonna see all kinds of stuff here tomorrow that doesn’t make much sense. Whatever doesn’t fit The Narrative will be ignored or discredited. At worst, somebody’s story of an invisible futuristic craft parked in Dealey Plaza the day before the assassination will be easily dismissed as just another ‘crazy conspiracy theory’.”
“Assassination?” I asked.
He just nodded.
We strolled around the plaza. Dad studied the top of a few buildings; a rain gutter and a grassy area behind it; sections of the street; trees, light poles and signs. “You feel it?” he asked me.
I nodded. The ominous sensation was as thick as gravy. You couldn’t see it, hear it, smell it or touch it, but it was there in abundant quantity. I wondered if being exposed to deadly atomic radiation was like this, or if you wouldn’t even know you were exposed to it until your skin started falling off. Or maybe some people could feel it—as I was feeling whatever this was, now.
Assassination. Dallas. 1963. Dealey Plaza. These words came together in my mind and triggered something in my long-term memory. “Kennedy! JFK—this is where he was shot?”
“Not ‘was’ shot. Will be shot. Tomorrow.”
It began to rain. Pedestrians around the plaza opened umbrellas. Dad ushered me back to the VTOL.
Before he took off, he opened a metal case and activated a squadron of microdrones, disguised as flying insects. One at a time he remote-piloted them to different spots around the area, landed them, and placed them on “stand-by.”
“You’re going to record the assassination?” I asked, strapping in.
“Yup,” he replied. “I plan on getting a lot of footage from multiple angles and vantage points. Nobody here and now knows about my drones, and therefore they can’t be tampered with.”
He fired up the engines and we took off.
“Why?” I asked, remembering his speech about how changing history would split the timestream and tip off the CPB to our presence.
Dad shrugged. “‘Cause I want to know what really happened. Don’t you?”
I didn’t answer. The JFK assassination happened long before I was born, and hadn’t particularly interested me so far. The name “Lee Harvey Oswald” echoed through my mind. They knew who the killer was, so there was no mystery to solve. To me the battles of the Crusades or the best Rose Bowl games ever played were much more interesting.
***
Our next stop was Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention. Yup—same old goose bumps. Same ominous, foreboding sensation. The “Big Spooky” was on the scene. We mixed with the crowd a little bit, seeing what we could see. I watched smelly, long-haired potheads and drug addicts clash with police in riot gear. Dad seemed more interested in listening to people not engaged in violence—whether they were in a conversation or shouting slogans to any who might hear.
“What’s different about this coordinate?” Dad asked me once we had broken away from the crowds and had some relative privacy.
“Nobody was fighting at the other coordinates,” I said. “There was unity. Right?”
“Yes and no. There may not have been a manifestation of violence in Berlin or Dallas, but there was violence in the air. And don’t let the conflict here fool you—there’s still a zeitgeist at work…a powerful one. This is just a struggle for control of the left-wing. People on both ‘sides’ want the same thing; it’s just that the New Left want it faster than the Old Left, while the Old Left wants to maintain the facade of actually loving what they’re trying to destroy.”
“Who wins?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Hegel.”
“I don’t know who that is, Dad.”
“You’ll learn about him when you’re older.” He pointed to the building where the convention was being held. “Thesis.” Then he pointed to the rioting protestors. “Antithesis.” Now he waved toward me, then himself. “The world we grew up in is the synthesis.”
I had no interest in politics yet, and let the subject drop.
“The ’60s is the beginning of the end for America; but it still has a lot going for it if you can ignore that,” he opined, as we strolled back toward where he had hidden the VTOL. “Fantastic decade for a young man—especially the last half.” He craned his neck to ogle some women in miniskirts walking toward the convention. “It’s easy to get girls; females are still feminine; and obesity is still fairly rare.”
Meeting Gloria had jump-started a process in my body and mind that would soon result in radical changes. My attitude toward the opposite sex began to change with it, so I did take an interest in Dad’s observation.
***
Our next stop was another November—this one in 1910 at Brunswick, Georgia. After leaving the VTOL cloaked in an area surrounded by tall trees, Dad and I snuck over to a small, lonely, terminating rail station. We chose a discreet point to observe from, and ate snacks quietly while a train rolled up in the dark of night.
It was the shortest train I’d ever seen, and I whispered as much to Dad.
“That’s a private car in between the locomotive and caboose,” he whispered back. “Came all the way from New Jersey. If you knew anything about railroads, you’d know somebody powerful had to pull some strings to get this little train’s routing priority above all the crucial freight and passenger trains. In these times, the railroads are the national infrastructure. They’re how people get mail, food, fuel…everything. You don’t make room for some private ‘duck hunting trip’ in the middle of all that unless you’ve got enormous clout.”
“Duck hunting trip?” I echoed.
Dad nodded toward the private rail car. It looked fancy. The windows glowed dull yellow—probably from kerosene lamps inside. Shadows flashed in the flickering light, betraying movement inside.
“That’s their cover story,” Dad said. “Do you feel anything?”
I shook my head. “Feels normal.”
He nodded, then gestured for me to follow. We left our observation post and crept quietly toward the train. When we came within a few yards of the private rail car, the Big Spooky hit me with such force, I nearly wet my pants.
Dad looked at me, an expectant question in his eyes. I nodded.
On the other side of the train from us, the conductor opened a door on the rail car, and a handful of men began filing out. I could make out feet and legs by peering underneath the train. I heard their voices, too.
Now the Big Spooky throbbed so excessively that my eyes watered.
Dad grasped me by the shoulder and steered me back toward our surreptitious vantage point. As we went, the oppressive sensation faded. Once back in our spot, I felt tremendous relief.
“Why didn’t I feel anything until we got close?” I asked.
“It’s concentrated, here,” Dad explained. “I’m not saying we can’t find the Big Spooky at earlier dates, because we definitely can. I have. But here and now it’s like…I don’t know…a seed, or something. Maybe a beach head. From here it grows and spreads out—like to the other places we found it.”
“It sure was intense right there,” I said. “Is this another one you don’t understand, or is there something significant about these coordinates?”
“Oh, it’s significant,” he said, solemnly. “The men getting off that train—they’re gonna climb on a boat that takes them to a private venue on an island, where they’ll have a meeting. In that meeting, they’re gonna develop a plan to destroy the United States of America, and freedom…and a whole lot of other stuff.”
“Destroy America?” I asked, confused. “But…”
“Not tomorrow,” he said. “Not next week. Not by some sudden catastrophe. In fact, their plan won’t seem to have made much of a difference for a long time. For three years there won’t be any evidence at all that an American could point to. But they’ve put something in motion. Three years from now, they’ll take a big step toward their goal.”
“Their goal…” I mused. “Destruction of the USA?”
He nodded. “In seven years they’ll take another step. They’ll suffer a few setbacks here and there, but 19 years from now they’ll take another big step. In 22 years they’ll start taking huge steps, one right after the other…starting in another November, in fact.”
I didn’t understand what he was alluding to, but I was getting the idea that November was a popular month for the Big Spooky.
“There will be plausible deniability for generations,” Dad went on. “In the post-war USA, it’s the most prosperous time anyone in world history has seen. Only a crackpot would argue that anything could be wrong, right? Even back in the coordinates you came from, almost nobody could see the problem.” Now he pointed to the locomotive. “America was a big, powerful, fast-moving engine, with a lot of momentum built up. It took over a hundred years for the cancer, eating away at her from the inside, to be obvious to enough Americans to even be mentioned in the mainstream. By the time there’s enough people aware of the problem to demand repairs, the poison will have spread everywhere. It’ll be too late. The locomotive will come off the rails; the boiler will explode; the whole thing will collapse into a pile of mangled metal. Then all the foreign vultures we’ve helped and protected over the generations will move in and pick through the scrap, taking whatever’s valuable to them. That was happening in the coordinates I came from.”
His speech had lost me. He must have realized my confusion, because he sighed and forced a grin as he tousled my hair. “But you and me have a way to cheat Fate. At least we can survive the slow-motion train wreck. And some day you’ll take an interest in history. We’ll talk then—a lot. Then all this should make more sense.”
We made our way back to the VTOL. Once inside it, I asked him, “Is there something special about us? I mean, why can we feel the Big Spooky but nobody back in Dallas or Berlin did?” I frowned and scratched my head. “Or did they? That would be even more confusing.”
Now Dad’s smile didn’t appear forced. “That’s a great question, Sprout.” He leaned back in the pilot seat and folded his hands. “You ever hear the parable of the frog?”
I shook my head.
“If you want to boil a frog,” he said, “you don’t throw it into a pot of water that’s already hot—it’ll jump out. What you do is put it in the water with the temperature nice and comfortable…then gradually turn up the heat in stages. Be patient. The frog gets used to water that’s 70 degrees, then you turn it up to 80. It’s uncomfortable for the frog at first. It may complain a little, but if you’re patient, it’ll become acclimatized to the discomfort. Then you can turn it up to 90. It’s uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough for the frog to jump out of the pot. The Founding Fathers said something, in the Declaration of Independence, along the lines of: ‘men prefer to just suffer, while evils are sufferable.’ That’s what the frog does. If you keep cranking up the heat, but you do it gradually enough for each new level of misery to become the status quo for a while, eventually you’ll boil the frog alive.”
“Have you ever done that to a frog?” I asked, disgusted.
He sneered. “Of course not. I’m not a sick, sadistic dirtbag. This is a parable. A metaphor. It’s how America will be destroyed. It’s why the people who wouldn’t take shit from the Japs, or the British, or the Barbary pirates, will let their freedom and future be stolen from them by enemies in their own government. In fact, they’ll obediently fund the thieves who do it. But I think it might also be why people living in certain coordinates never notice the Big Spooky. It comes on them gradually enough, they acclimatize to it. You and I notice it because we ran into it from ‘normal’ times, and it hit us all of the sudden. Like a stinky house—if you live in it, you get used to the smell, and don’t notice it. But if you enter from out in the fresh air, it hits you hard.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I said. “But what is the Big Spooky? What causes it?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I wish I did.”
***
We jumped a warp and came down inside another city—this one easily the biggest I’d ever seen. It had art-deco skyscrapers to prove it. We landed inside a vast expo complex and, this time, Dad turned off the cloak and shut all the power down. I asked him about this as he locked the VTOL’s hatch. He told me people would assume our craft was an exhibit and, by the time organizers looked into it, we would be gone.
It was 1939 in New York City and the goose bumps sprang up from that oppressive, ominous sensation. Again, Dad said there was no obvious reason why the Big Spooky was present at that space-time coordinate, but it was unmistakable—although at a weaker dose than other stops on our tour.
He also revealed the purpose of this tour: to confirm that I recognized the same sensation at the coordinates where/when he experienced it.
The research portion of our experimental time tour over, he advised me to try ignoring the Big Spooky and enjoy the rest of the day.
Over the course of the day I gradually grew accustomed to the Big Spooky—kind of like how I hardly noticed the noise of traffic, barking dogs and gunshots around the old trailer park. I did enjoy the 1939 New York World’s Fair, very much. We spent the entire day there exploring “The World of Tomorrow.” I was fascinated by everything—in detail and as a whole. And I could tell Dad enjoyed it all, too.
There was a big robot (named “Electro the Moto-Man”); a time capsule; a carnival-style ride that took us through a “city of the future”; some fantastic, futuristic (in an art-deco way) locomotives and trains, showed off in a special railroad park; new fabrics and inventions on display (including the “tele-vision” and a “View-Master” which you could use to look at three-dimensional slides); new music, sculptures, paintings and other art; and a science fiction convention.
Evidently this was the first world sci-fi convention ever held. Dad bought me an armload of books (and some of the very first superhero comic books, about characters like the Human Torch and the Submariner) while he stopped and chatted with some of the authors.
Of course most of the speculative “technology of tomorrow” envisioned at the World’s Fair was long obsolete by the time I would be born, but I still found it incredibly cool. I had never owned or seen a View-Master before, so the 3D slides were new to me. It was neat seeing what television was like when the technology was new. And it was cool discovering what artists, authors and scientists thought the future…my lifetime, give or take…would look like, even though they were almost all completely wrong.
For most of my life after that initial exposure to the 1939 World’s Fair, I found myself wishing that the future some of those dreamers imagined had turned out to be the real one.
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I organized the belongings I had collected since that first day at the Orange Grove—except for the fancy shoes and custom suit from Mami. I didn’t have that much, yet, so I easily packed it all in a very old suitcase Uncle Si gave me—made out of something like cardboard covered with wallpaper, lined with something silky on the inside. I asked if I could take some of the adventure magazines (“pulps” he called them) with me, and permission was granted.
Uncle Si packed whatever he was taking in a similar suitcase, and we met at one of the hangars, dressed in duds from the wardrobe. This time, my clothes fit me pretty well.
Inside the hangar, he opened the trunk of a strange-looking old car, and put our luggage in it. This automobile had the same flowing, rounded contours of the cars at the Orange Grove, but it wasn’t as low-slung or long and sleek. I asked him what it was and he said, “The body is based on a ’41 Willys.”
I had never bothered to memorize anything about cars before. Just like my interest in football began with a few pictures and stories, my interest in automotive machinery began with passenger experiences in a few special vehicles from Uncle Si’s collection.
Our first stop was the Orange Grove to spend the weekend with Mami. I was anxious to get started on the vacation, but I missed her and was happy to see her again. She seemed delighted to see us as well, as usual. She tested me to see if I’d kept up on the Spanish she’d been teaching me. Then, using both languages as needed, she asked me how I was doing in general, if I was excited about our pending road trip, and so on.
She slept in late with my uncle again, both days. After waking early the first day and finding the kitchen empty, I wandered by the master bedroom, looking for her. I heard her voice from inside. At first I thought she was in pain of some kind—she moaned and wailed and made what sounded like pleas for mercy. I was afraid somebody had broken into the house and was torturing her. But just as I was about to try forcing the lock and breaking in, she calmed down. Her cries mellowed out. She sighed and whispered. She sounded happy. I couldn’t make out the words, but I recognized the breathless tones and inflections as of an extremely affectionate nature. And a couple times she spoke my uncle’s name.
She pronounced it “sigh-moan,” which I found ironic after all the sighing and moaning she’d done.
I certainly didn’t understand sex yet, but I’d heard enough and seen enough in the movies to figure out what was up.
The next morning I read some “Black Bat” stories in my room until I heard voices and movement from the kitchen. I figured it was safe to come out, then.
Over breakfast, Uncle Si looked uncomfortable when he told me, “Because of the risks involved by interacting with regular people, we have to make some changes. I’ll let you know about those as we go, but there’s one starting now; and we’ll have to practice it during this vacation.”
I paused from chewing my food and paid close attention.
“When we went back to see the Sullivan-Corbett fight, we went as father and son,” he said, with a blank face. “Well, that’s gonna be permanent, starting now. Don’t call me ‘uncle,’ and don’t even think of me as your uncle. Start thinking of me as your father. Then you’ll be less likely to slip up in conversation and arouse somebody’s suspicion.”
“Suspicion of what?” I asked, doubting many people could guess that my uncle was an international supervillain who traveled with his nephew through time and space.
“Of anything. We want to seem as normal and unremarkable as possible to anybody we encounter. A boy who has no parents, adopted by his bachelor uncle is not normal. You also have to be cognizant of where and when we are at all times. Don’t talk about Madonna or Mike Tyson or Dodge Vipers, if we’re in, say, the 1970s. Don’t say anything about Vietnam in the 1950s. Don’t mention Pearl Harbor in the time we’re in right now. Savvy?”
“I savvy.”
“Your name is gonna change, too,” he added. “Both of ours. I’m still working on that. For now, go by your first name, only. If there’s a situation where we have to state a last name, for now it’s ‘Harris’.”
“Well, it’s already an improvement over Bedauern,” I said. He nodded agreement.
From that moment forward, I had a dad.
When Mami cleared the table and went to the sink to wash dishes, I asked Dad, “What about her? A kid with a father but no mother is unusual, ain’t it?”
“It is. So when we’re out and about, Mom is simply ‘back at the house’ if anybody asks. If we’re actually at one of my houses, then whichever woman I have living there is ‘Mom,’ so far as anybody else is concerned.”
This made me wonder how many women, like Carmen, he had. But I didn’t feel comfortable asking about it.
***
We took the ’41 Willys back to 1947, and began a tour of the USA—something Uncle…Dad said he’d wanted to do for a long time. We visited Valley Forge, Concorde Bridge, Gettysburg, Kittyhawk, Mount Rushmore, the badlands, the site of the Little Bighorn battle, parts of the Oregon Trail where wagon ruts were still visible in the hardened mud, what was left of Dodge City and Tombstone, Yellowstone, the Redwood Forest, Hollywood again, and all sorts of places in between.
One aspect of 1947 I noticed that was consistent regardless of where we went, was that everyone seemed to be happy. Dad explained that this generation was optimistic by nature, and what he called “pop culture” (music, movies, magazines, etc.) encouraged their optimism. Nobody (outside of college professors, he speculated) openly bad-mouthed America like everyone did at the coordinates I came from. All the movies, music, TV shows, celebrities, teachers, and audiences of all the above from my old world hated America, and anybody who dared suggest America wasn’t horrible. These people in 1947 were proud to be Americans, and grateful to be living in the USA. Furthermore, they had just come through a Depression and a World War. Their lives had all gotten much better two years ago, and the peace and unprecedented prosperity they saw unfolding in the country was assumed to be unstoppable. Nobody suspected anyone would want to stop it—why should they?
That ’41 Willys was some car. Dad once confided in me, “There is nothing factory-stock on this entire car. Nothing. I built it from the ground-up with all the best parts I could find from the 1980s, ’90s, and beyond. I don’t let anybody look under the hood or snoop around underneath it.”
There were plenty of places in 1947 with no posted speed limits, and he opened it up on those stretches. He couldn’t quite let it all hang out like he had when we visited the Bonneville Salt Flats, because the quality of the roads usually wasn’t good enough. But that hot rod seemed faster than a speeding bullet. After one such jaunt, while buying gas at a service station, a police car approached from the direction we’d come, siren blaring and beacon shining.
The light on this police car was so different from what I was used to, it piqued my interest. It was like a round floodlight, only mounted horizontally, facing the front, and the red lens spun.
Anyway, I assumed the cop would race past us on his way to whatever, but instead, he pulled into the service station, parked nose-to-nose with the Willys, and got out to confront Dad, who was returning from the restroom.
“Do you know how fast you were going back there?” the cop asked.
“About 180,” Dad replied, simply. I knew he didn’t like cops, but his demeanor was pretty friendly.
“Nobody likes a wise guy,” the cop said, frowning. “No car can go that fast.”
“How fast will yours go?” Dad asked, conversationally.
The cop seemed to lighten up a bit as he patted the hood of his patrol car. “I’ve got her up to 110 on a long downhill stretch before. This engine has got power like…” He sobered up again, somewhat. “But you left me in the dust back there. I had it floored, and you were still losing me.”
He began walking around the Willys, and Dad visibly stiffened.
“Where in the world did you get tires like these?”
“Custom made,” Dad said.
The cop made his way around to the driver side and peered through the open window, whistling. “I’ve never seen a speedometer that read so high. Most of them don’t even go up to 100.”
He turned back to Dad with a look of bewilderment. Dad extended his hand, “Simon Harris. I’m an engineer at the Automotive Division of Planetary Future Technologies. I’m testing out some of the equipment we might be using in a prototype to be unveiled at the next Automobile Expo.”
The cop shook his hand. “Jumpin’ catfish, fellah. They let you play with these gizmos a lot?”
“I play with these, and a lot more,” Dad said.
“And you get paid for it, to boot?” He whistled again, then ran his hand over the smooth, glossy surface of the Willys body. “Why did you stuff all the new features inside a pre-war model car?”
Dad shrugged. “Let’s me test it out on public roads while still remaining incognito…except when it comes to sharp eyes like yours. No use letting the whole world, and the competition, see everything we’re working on.”
“No, I guess not, at that,” the cop said.
He began asking technical questions. I don’t know how honest Dad was with him, but he had answers for everything that evidently impressed the cop. Afterwards, Officer Bob Frey shook his hand again and, almost apologetically, said, “We don’t get that many scientific engineers comin’ through here in futuristic vehicles. And even though there’s no posted speed limit, I still have to get folks to slow down when it strikes me that their speed is unsafe. If you still need to test this thing out around here, your best bet is take it out to Bonny Lass Road. Nobody should bother you out there.”
Dad thanked him, they shook hands again, and we drove off our separate ways. Officer Frey no doubt went off to meet some fellow cops and tell them a story over coffee and doughnuts that would eventually become an “urban legend.” We drove off to find Bonny Lass Road, of course.
“Cops sure are different now, too,” I observed out loud.
Dad nodded. “Once upon a time, decent men became cops. They wanted justice and to actually help people. Obviously, something changed. Maybe it was all the jingoistic cop movies and cop shows—I dunno. But it became just a way for would-be Hitler Youth to get their sick jollies pushing people around and hiding behind a badge.”
Aside from the conveniences of advancing technology, everything was better in the past, it seemed.
***
I had an even higher opinion of Dad during and after the vacation than when it began. We talked about anything and everything that interested me: sports; music; gadgets; even the pulp stories I’d been reading. He had knowledge in every subject that intrigued me, and either shared my interest, or could remember back to when he had. We didn’t watch a single television show the entire time (TV was pretty new in 1947, fairly crude and expensive, and only some people even had it) and yet I was thoroughly entertained the entire time.
I noticed now and then that he occasionally limped, and often massaged his knees when sitting. I asked him about it and he mumbled something about parachuting, but never answered in detail. However, that did lead to what would prove one of his many lectures about health. He went over good habits vs. bad habits, and how they would affect my knees and back. He also warned me to never starve myself for any reason. While I should never be gluttonous, I should also never reduce the amount of food I ate to below what my body wanted. There was no need to, he told me, because he had kitchens throughout space and time, well-stocked, with competent cooks, and I’d always be welcome to eat three squares a day, free of charge, even after I was old enough to make my own way.
We stayed in hotels and motels periodically, taking advantage of the showers (and swimming pools, in some cases), but mostly camped out, with a tent and sleeping bags. The smell of pine trees, and smoke from campfires, would forever cast my memory back to that fantastic vacation, no matter how old I got.
More than once, when we went swimming at a lake, the ocean, or in a hotel swimming pool, people would notice the scar tissue all over Dad’s back. It soon became obvious who had fought in the war and who hadn’t, not just by their age or physical condition, but by how they reacted to Dad’s wound. Those who hadn’t served would invariably ask, “Did you get that in the war?” Veterans would either simply ask, “Where’d you get that?” or ignore it, at least initially, and maybe get around to probing the issue later.
We ran into veterans vacationing with their families (nearly every man over the age of 21 was a veteran in 1947), and I managed to make friends with their kids. We would swim and play while the grown-ups talked.
New friendships are always exciting. Plus, when the other kids were younger than me, I became the default leader—so it was a sort of leadership practice, and I learned a little about group dynamics.
I never paid attention to an entire conversation Dad would have with the other adults, but I caught fragments. Dad mostly asked questions and kept the other folks talking about their own experiences. But he evidently had a cover story set for how he got burned; and (as I came to appreciate later on) he knew a lot about World War II—more than enough to make his cover story sound plausible.
When we camped out, often we just pulled off the main road, followed an unpaved path to a suitable spot, and pitched the tent. Out West there were vast areas of public land; so we made use of it. We did find this one purpose-made campground, though. We got the tent set up and the fire ready to light by about an hour before dusk.
The place had public restrooms with running water in sinks—quite the ritzy setup for the time. Dad let me take a stroll up to these centrally-located facilities by myself. In one of our many conversations, Dad revealed that women or children were safe to walk alone at night pretty much anywhere in the country (excepting cesspools like Chicago and New York City, of course) up until maybe the 1970s.
After relieving myself and washing up, I took a stroll through the campgrounds, mostly just observing the natural scenery, and the many different families, their cars, and their shiny silver camp trailers.
When I came to an area with unoccupied campsites, I figured the secluded area would be safe to try something I’d had an urge to do ever since watching Tarzan and His Mate. I pounded both fists against my chest and, at the top of my lungs, bellowed my best impression of Johnny Weissmuller’s ape-man yodel. It didn’t sound as good as I imagined it would, even to my own ears. But still, it was kind of fun. With my upbringing, I had learned to amuse myself to fend off boredom…and sometimes I could do it via quite unsophisticated means.
By the time I found my way back to our campsite, there was a family of new arrivals at the next site over. The man from that group was talking to Dad while the man’s wife set up some cooking implements, and a pretty girl about my age looked on.
Dad looked away from the man briefly, noticing my arrival. He must have heard the Tarzan yodel, as sound carried so far at night there. In retrospect, I realize he almost certainly knew it was me who did it, too. But he never mentioned it. I was so sure I was doing something brave and rebellious with that ape-man imitation, but of course it was just silly kid stuff—tame (or lame, depending on perspective) by the standards of my original generation.
After the men’s conversation went on for several minutes, Dad introduced me in passing. The man nodded; his wife smiled and bid me hello; the pretty daughter mumbled hello with an expression I would, years later, come to recognize as the Female Glare of Guarded Evaluation, or FGGE. At the time it looked like disgust or hostility, so I turned away and prepared to light our fire.
The family’s name was Benake. They were from Oakland. The hostile pretty girl’s name was Gloria. She was blonde, but darker blonde than her mother.
Before I lit the match, Mrs. Benake called out to her Husband. “Honey, why don’t you invite our neighbors over, instead of standing there talking over the bushes all night?”
“Well, I guess she’s got a point, at that,” Mr. Benake told Dad. “Why don’t you and your boy come on over and eat with us? We brought more food than just the three of us can eat, to be frank. We even have marshmallows to roast for dessert.”
“Thank you,” Dad said. “That sounds fine.”
Mrs. Benake seemed pleased as she looked at me. “Peter, would you help Gloria fetch some water from the public washroom, so I can boil the corn?”
I glanced between Dad and her. Dad nodded, slightly.
“Sure,” I said. “What should I pour it in?”
Gloria spoke, holding up a big metal pail by its handle. “I’ve got it right here.”
I didn’t have much interest in spending time with somebody who took an instant dislike to me, so I said, “I can get it by myself, if you like.”
Both Gloria and her mother shook their heads.
“It’s heavy when it’s full,” Gloria said. “You’ll see.”
Her countenance had changed to a more friendly, welcoming configuration since our initial sighting of each other, so I shrugged and agreed.
Once I was beside her, she said, “I’m not sure where the public bathrooms are.”
“I know how to get there,” I told her, with all the pride of a frontier scout informing tenderfoot pilgrims on a wagon train that I could guide them safely through Indian Country.
“Alright. I’ll go where you go, then.”
It’s rather pathetic how the male of the species turns to mush when an attractive female does something as mundane as smile and/or utter an innocent statement like that. But her assurance to go wherever I went triggered something in the fantasy-generating segment of my imagination which went far beyond a trip to fetch water. And this was technically before I had developed an interest in girls.
She carried the pail as we went, complaining, “Every time we go camping, I have to haul the stupid water. Makes me wish we would just roast weenies or something.”
Her opening up like this struck me as an improvement over the hostile glare from earlier. “I’m surprised you can carry it at all, by yourself, when it’s full.”
“I can’t,” she admitted. “Dad has to help me. But still, I’m probably going to get callouses from this handle.”
“I’ll take it,” I said, holding my hand out.
“Oh, thank-you.”
She handed me the bucket.
“You’ll probably need my help once it’s full, though—even though boys are stronger; I know.”
I turned to study her as we walked. This was a surprising admission from her. In my world all the movies, TV shows and literature portrayed females as superior to males in every way—including physical strength. And girls from my generation seemed to believe the message.
“Especially now,” she went on. “It seems all the boys from my class are getting taller and stronger every day.” Something strange happened to her voice as she said this. “Sultry” might be a good description of her tone right then, though my vocabulary wasn’t advanced enough to have chosen that word at the time.
She asked my age, and I, in turn, asked hers. She was a couple months younger.
She asked a lot of questions and got me talking about myself—just as Dad was able to do with the average grown-up. This was new territory for me. I didn’t normally open up about myself—even without all the secrets I now needed to keep. But she coaxed me into chattering away as if I was outgoing. I was careful to stick to the cover story, but that still left room for plenty of honest revelations, and I was flattered by the attention.
We filled the bucket, outside the building, from a spigot that appeared to be there for that very purpose. The full pail was indeed heavy, I found out, as we lifted it together. The weight of it made the handle bite into my hand. She had to stop and rest before we made it 30 yards; and again before we made it 20 more yards. The next time she had to stop I changed my grip and picked it up by myself. I had to lean away from it, compensating for the weight, and it was awkward to carry it without spilling the water.
“You don’t have to do that,” she protested. “I can help.”
I made it about 80 yards and had to set it down. I shook my hurting hand and prepared to lift it with my other arm, but she reached toward me and said, “let me see that.”
She took hold of my hand and pulled it toward her. “Oh, my,” she said, examining the sharp red indentation across my palm, in the diminishing light. “You are stubborn, aren’t you?”
I was absorbed in the contrast of her hands to mine. Hers were small, clean, soft works of art, with long fingernails. Her touch was a pleasant sensation. She flattened one of her delicate hands out, so those fingernails wouldn’t scratch me, and rubbed her velvety fingertips over the sore impression the bucket handle had left in my skin. I don’t know how effective her technique was, medically, but I forgot all about the pain.
“You’ve already got callouses,” she said. “What are those from?”
“Monkey bars,” I said. As part of my daily training, I had to go down and back a line of monkey bars in the gym at BH Station. It had caused blisters the first few times I did it. Those blisters ruptured as I continued. Later on, the skin toughened up.
We carried the pail together the rest of the way, and the next time she had to stop and rest, she showed me the red indentation in her own hand. This was probably an invitation to return the favor she’d done me, but I assumed it was my own genius idea.
Her touch was nice. Touching her back was nice, too. Even better was the way she accepted my touch.
We were chattering away when we returned to her parents’ campsite. The parents exchanged looks and Mrs. Benake said, “You two look like old friends already. Bring the water over here, please.”
In the midst of the fire were a couple flat-topped rocks. Mrs. Benake set a large pot on those rocks so that the flames licked all around and underneath it, and poured water from the pail into it. Then she dumped several corn cobs in the water. Mr. Benake said he’d gone pheasant hunting yesterday, and proved it by producing four gutted-and-plucked birds to roast by spit over that fire.
Gloria helped her mother for a while. I sat on a stump and stared off into the woods, forcing myself not to stare at Gloria. To my delight, when she came to sit down awaiting supper, she set up her folding chair next to me.
We continued to talk, and I was enamored. I remember Dad once mentioning that you should never stare right into a fire at night, or it would screw up your “night vision.” So I watched Gloria, who did stare right into the fire, for the most part. The firelight made her look even better.
She mentioned a lot of different music she liked, and various musicians. I’d never heard of any of them, so I mostly just nodded and listened. She asked me which songs and musicians I liked. Thinking fast, I coughed up some artists and titles I’d heard on the radio at the Orange Grove. Her eyes widened and nostrils flared after hearing me recite a few. “Those are so old!” she cried.
I shrugged. “My mom likes them. I’m not normally good with remembering the names, except for some of her favorites, ’cause I hear them so much.”
“Where is your mom?” she asked. “Why didn’t she come with you?”
“She’s back at the house. This is a father-son deal,” I said. “He’s busy a lot, so I don’t get to see him as much as the…as her. This is our time together.”
“That’s neat. Your dad seems like a great guy.”
I nodded.
When the food was ready, Mrs. Benake passed out dishes and utensils. But before we ate, Mr. Benake asked everyone to bow our heads. He spoke a short prayer, giving God thanks for the meal, thanking Him for the good company (meaning us, I deduced) and asking blessings on this, that, and the other. I hadn’t heard anything quite like it, and was fairly unacquainted with this custom anyway.
We ate, and roasted marshmallows afterwards. The food was good, but the company was better.
When I finally did drift off to sleep that night, it was contented sleep with pleasant dreams. The next day the Benake family packed up and left after lunch. Before that, Gloria and I went for a walk by ourselves. She touched me a lot when she talked that day, and we wound up holding hands on the way back to the site. Before they left, she wrote her mailing address on some notebook paper and gave it to me, asking me to write and come visit her someday if I could.
The immediate postwar years had really impressed me, and meeting Gloria was the icing on the cake.
UPDATE: This book is published! Click here to buy on Amazon.
When I arrived in the gym one day for my training, there was another boy there, with a grown-up I hadn’t seen around before. Paulo and Uncle Si stood together, arms crossed, staring at me with stony neutrality. They mumbled to each other in Portugese, and occasionally glanced at the other kid.
The boy had Asian features, as did the adult with him. He wore workout sweats like me. He met my gaze once but his face was perfectly blank, so I had no clue what he might be thinking.
Paulo and Uncle Si went over to the adult and had a brief conversation I didn’t hear, then Uncle Si approached me.
“Go get your mouthpiece,” he said. “You’re doing something different for training today.”
“Sparring?” I asked, glancing again at the other kid, my heart rate increasing.
He almost smiled, but was trying hard to remain inscrutable, it seemed. “Not exactly. There’s an important difference: sparring is practice; this is a test.”
“A t-test…?” I repeated, suddenly nervous.
“When you spar, you and your partner normally have an unspoken agreement to pull your punches. It’s not about trying to beat the other guy; it’s about refining techniques, improving your defense, and sharpening reflexes. This won’t be like that, today. This kid is here to test you. Your job is to test him. So don’t hold back. He’s not going to hold back, either.”
Now my heart was really pounding. This was a fight!
How good was this blank-faced Asian boy? I sized him up, but couldn’t tell much. He might have been a little taller, but I wouldn’t necessarily call him “a big kid.”
Paulo came back from the equipment room with hand wraps, gloves, foot pads and a head protector. He helped me put it all on, while the stranger did the same for the other boy. The last thing Paulo did was smear petroleum jelly on my cheeks. “Fight I teach you,” he said.
I assumed he meant “Fight the way I taught you.”
We both entered the octagon. The bell rang. I looked to Paulo and Uncle Si to see if this was the starting bell, or if I should wait for another one.
“That’s the work bell,” Uncle Si said, simply.
I felt afraid and utterly alone. I walked toward the center of the octagon to touch gloves with my opponent. He stopped me short with a kick to my head. I was stunned, but realized that the kid wasn’t playing around. Just like my uncle warned, he wasn’t holding back.
Quick learner, me.
He followed up with another kick, and a hand combination. I ducked the former and blocked the latter, shuffling back out of range. All the adults were yelling, now, but I couldn’t make out the words through the fog of my adrenaline rush.
Something warm and wet dripped down my face and into my mouth. It had a salty, copper taste. It kept trickling, threatening to get in my eye. I wiped it away. My wrist came back into my field of vision slick with blood.
I can’t say for sure if my heart rate slowed down or sped up, but something happened to me. Some sort of change. My visual focus zeroed in on the other boy, and everything else was blurred. But I did hear Uncle Si calling out, “Get your feet going!”
I put my feet to work, bouncing on the balls as if skipping rope, and began circling my opponent.
His steps were sure and steady, with no bouncing. He feinted a couple times, but I didn’t fall for it. He made a more serious effort, but I simply bounced back out of range. We circled some more.
Having felt me out all he needed by now, I guess, he lunged forward to the attack with a surprising burst of speed. His lead kick caught me in the stomach. I would feel the pain later, but right then it didn’t do much. All the sit-ups, crunches and flutter kicks had turned my belly hard as a slab of frozen beef. I kept my guard up and slipped left and right to avoid his hand strikes. Then I noticed an opening.
How long had he been showing me his head like that?
I fired one of the combinations Uncle Si had taught me with the punch mitts: double jab; straight right; hook, uppercut. The jabs and overhand right caught him solid. I began to bicycle back out of range, but hit the wall of the octagon and could go no farther.
He doubled up on his lead kick. I saw it coming and side-bounced. The first one brushed my hip. I sprang off my trail foot, back-spinning, and slammed my heel into the inside of his thigh while his leg was still extended.
This jolted him off-balance, forcing him to shuffle under his center of gravity. Something flashed in his stony eyes, too. Pain, I hoped.
But I didn’t waste time pondering it. I closed the distance, fired a snap-kick that connected to his chest. This foiled his effort to regain balance, and I pressed in, hooking off the jab, catching him on his head protector about where his ear should be.
He backed out of range, adjusting his headgear with an irritated expression. This was the first time I’d perceived emotion of any kind from him.
Since he was retreating, I advanced. We mixed it up a bit and he hit me with a couple good shots.
The bell rang.
I walked to the chain-link wall of the octagon. Paulo was at my side quickly. He gave me a water bottle, from which I took a couple long gulps. Meanwhile, he pressed a towel against the laceration on my brow with one hand, and reapplied the Vaseline to my face with the other. Behind me, Uncle Si spoke through the chain link.
“Settle down. Loosen up. Don’t just move straight in and out—move side-to-side also. Keep that bicycle rolling. You see he likes to lead with his feet. Good work breaking that up. This next round is study time for you. Take his measure. Finding that opening was great, but be patient and take mental notes for now. Keep him at bay while you watch him work. There might be more to the pattern.”
The bell rang and we moved toward each other. The fear was gone this time…or at least nonexistent compared to how oppressive it had been at the beginning. I stopped before getting in range, then got on my bicycle. I tried to follow the instructions I was given.
He came after me, and tagged me a few times, but I played defense and tried to keep out of his reach while watching him close. He really did like starting his combinations with a lead-foot kick. He did it every time. Smart, really: legs are longer than arms, and therefore give you more reach. But I quickly got to where I could see them coming, and I consistently muffed his kicks by extending my own lead foot to shove my arch into his ankle.
The kid didn’t crouch and bob—he stood up straight when he fought. In fact, it seemed he leaned slightly backwards—maybe in anticipation of incoming blows, so he would have a head start at leaning farther back to avoid getting tagged. When he threw a roundhouse or side kick, he leaned quite a ways back. His arms went out and down, leaving him wide open.
The round was fairly uneventful. In the break before the next one, Paulo worked on my face again and let me drink water.
“What did you learn?” Uncle Si asked.
“He leans back,” I said.
“Make him pay for that,” he said. “Your bicycle’s pedaling pretty good. Keep it going, but study time is over. Be smart, but go after him. Work the body whenever you can—hard.”
When Paulo pulled the towel away from my head, I glanced up at it and saw the blood. I shifted my gaze to the boy’s blank, expressionless face and got pissed. I wanted to make him bleed worse than I had.
Anger, it turned out, was not an advantage. I stalked him and threw leather with bad intentions, forgetting much of what I knew. He made me pay for it, too. He hit me from all angles. I waded through the storm and tried to swarm him. I caught him a couple times, but not flush. Mostly I only caught air.
“You’re telegraphing!” Uncle Si yelled. “Settle down and work the body!”
I targeted his midsection, but was still swinging for the fences and mostly missed him.
By the end of the round, my anger had faded, to be replaced with fatigue. I was gassed.
While Paulo went to work on my face, Uncle Si said, “Well, that was stupid.”
I made no effort to reply, too busy sucking wind and water. Besides, he was right.
“How did you forget everything in the course of a couple minutes? If you had worked his body, he’d be slower and easier to hit now. Instead, you’re the one who’s gonna be slow. That’s how you punch yourself out, genius.”
“Sorry,” I grunted, through ragged breaths.
“You only got one more round, and he smells blood. You better wise up real quick, or he’s gonna knock you out. When he…”
The bell interrupted him. I handed the bottle back to Paulo and walked out to meet the boy. “Act like you know what you’re doing!” Uncle Si called out, annoyed.
The kid smelled blood, alright. He went right after me. I covered up and weaved, making him miss as much as I could. Then, swinging my torso back up from a slip, I drove a left hook into the side of his head. It landed solid. His attack fizzled out and he shuffled backwards.
My conditioning paid dividends at a good time. I felt my second wind building up, and got my feet going again.
I bounced inside, feinted, and bounced back out. Then I did the same thing again, noticing him flinch.
He had felt that hook.
I bounced back in and scored with a jab and a cross, then backpedaled out of range.
He launched a kick, but I muffed it and scored with another jab.
His nose was bleeding now. Not bleeding enough for my satisfaction, but it was something. He glared at me while adjusting his headgear again.
He led with a roundhouse kick. It was time to take advantage of his backward lean and dropped guard. But his leg kept me at bay. I couldn’t get inside fast enough to exploit the opening. We separated with no damage done, and circled each other a bit.
He came in again, leading with a high kick. I dropped and swept his trail foot. He fell back on his ass.
The grown-ups were yelling all at once. I rushed forward, but the boy sprang quickly to his feet and assumed a defensive posture. I shifted my momentum sideways. He attacked again.
This time I rushed at an oblique angle. I cut it so close that his foot brushed my shirt on the way past. I spun and clocked him with a backfist while he was leaned back, and his guard down.
He staggered back across the octagon. I’ll never forget the stupid, bewildered look on his usually blank face.
“He’s hurt!” Uncle Si screamed. “Finish him!”
I charged in to do just that, and got caught in a clinch.
My arms were tangled in his grip. He wouldn’t let go, and every time I pushed one or both hands down, or pushed him back, he simply tied me up again. It was like wrestling with an octopus.
This went on for a long time, me getting more and more frustrated. I forced him back against the chain link. He held on doggedly. I whipped around inside his clinch, manage to drop my right shoulder, then came up with an uppercut that drove into his gut. He grunted and slackened enough for me to rip out of his hold.
It would have been a perfect time to swarm him, but it had taken so much energy to break out of that clinch, I couldn’t move fast enough. He retreated out of range.
I wheezed big gulps of air and advanced. Then he did something that confused me. It was a simple southpaw switch, but all my tired brain registered was that he was suddenly a much more awkward target now.
“Move to your left!” Uncle Si called out. “Your left!”
My brain didn’t compute this at first, either. I threw a lead right instead, that whiplashed his face. Then another lead right to the body.
Then the bell rang.
It was over. The grownups raced inside the octagon to pull us apart. Paulo lifted the other kid’s hand in victory. The adults shook hands, then Paulo and Uncle Si escorted me to the locker room. Paulo gave me an examination that was something I might expect from a doctor—including the shining of a pen light in my eyes. Once he was done, he mussed my hair a bit. Uncle Si slapped me on the back and said, “Hit the showers, Sprout. Then we’ll bandage that cut and have a chat.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, but his back was already to me as he and Paulo left the locker room having a discussion in Portugese.
***
I expected a dressing down from Uncle Si as we took seats in the living room, but he appeared rather cheerful. “”What do you think?”
“I thought I won,” I said.
“You won the last round,” he said. “But you threw away the Third.”
I nodded, dejected and starting to feel the effects of the blows I took.
“It’s pretty common for the loser of a decision to think he won,” Uncle Si added. “It’s a matter of perspective—and you tend to skew it in your mind when you’re part of it. You discount some of the other guy’s punches because they don’t bother you that much at the time, I guess.”
“Sorry about Round Three,” I said.
“Yeah. What was that about?”
“I got mad.”
He nodded. “There’s another valuable lesson for you: anger is like fear. It can be an asset if you channel it into a smart game plan. Control it; don’t let it control you.”
“How do you do that?” I asked.
“It’s not something that can be taught. You just have to learn through experience. Experience like what you just earned. What you just went through is like precious gold. Treasure it.”
“But you think I lost,” I said.
“You did lose. And that’s what makes it so valuable. There’s a lot more to learn from defeats than from victories, as a rule.”
“Too bad it wasn’t video-taped,” I said. “I could see what you saw.”
“Who says it wasn’t?”
I stared at him. “There weren’t any cameras in the gym.”
“There weren’t?”
He rose from his seat and gestured for me to follow. We marched through the catacombs to one of the chambers I didn’t have personal access to. He let us in. The place was like a warehouse. He led me to a shelf with a variety of objects on it. He picked up a ballpoint pen and handed it to me, asking, “What’s that?”
“A pen?
“It’s also a camera,” he said. He took it back from me and set it down, then handed me a pair of sunglasses. “How about these?”
I examined the shades. “There’s a camera in here?”
“Yup.” Next he picked up what looked like a cockroach. “In here, too. This is an advanced model. Radio controlled; moves like the real thing; transmits streaming audio and video.”
I found this hard to believe. “How could you even fit a battery in there?”
“Small battery,” he said.
We left the Secret Agent Supply Depot and went to the computer lab. Uncle Si typed some commands, and soon we were watching footage of the kickboxing match I’d just participated in.
I looked like a clown in Round Three. In Round Two, the other boy was the only one with any offense, so it made sense he was awarded that round. Round One went more his way than I remembered it. I could see how somebody might judge that he won that one, too. Even more disappointing: Round Four wasn’t as decisive as I remembered it, either. Sure, I scored pretty well. But it wasn’t lopsided.
“I’m sorry,” I said, depressed, now.
“What are you apologizing for now?” he asked.
“Embarrassing you.”
He shook his head. “You didn’t embarrass me, Sprout. Your opponent was three years older; a lot more experienced; and had the reach on you. This was your first bout. He suckered you with that opening combo when you were trying to touch gloves. And yet, you made adjustments; listened to instructions…with the exception of Round Three…you improvised and took the fight to him. I saw some good work from you, today.”
“Really?”
“Really. In fact, you’ve been picking up on a lot of stuff, and doing really well.”
“I have?” Ever since Uncle Si became my de facto guardian, I’d pretty much just been having fun. Frankly, I’d been half-expecting the other shoe to drop at any time—for some grown-up to give me a speech telling me it was necessary for me to move back into some shithole trailer park somewhere, eating hot dogs on stale bread, with my status reduced back to a level so low that what I wanted or needed was never considered when decisions were made that affected me. This fun life, with people who seemed to like me, just didn’t fit the pattern I was familiar with. Certainly somebody would decide I was escaping my dues, and insist that my life start sucking again.
“Yup,” he said. “I think it’s time you had a real summer vacation. So pack your stuff tonight. We’re gonna take some time off. Training is suspended until further notice.”
UPDATE: This book is published! Click here to buy on Amazon.
We took a tour of New Orleans, collecting from the various bookies. Each one paid us $400 in then-current denominations. With a net of $300 from each bet, we now had a couple thousand more than what we’d brought there.
We found our horseless coach where we’d left it, climbed in and shot a warp back to the hangar at BH Station. As we got out, Uncle Si handed me the stack of money and said, “And that’s one way to get yourself some seed money.”
I flipped through the stack of bills, unbelieving.
“You could take that stake right there, buy up a bunch of real estate in Florida, and you’ll be a millionaire in the post-Disneyworld USA.”
As I examined one of the bills, I was reminded of what had bothered me before. “Uncle SI, why does it say, ‘the United States will pay to the bearer $100?’ If you’re the bearer, you already have $100. What’s gonna happen—they just trade you this hundred for another one?”
He chuckled and tapped his temple. “You’re sharp, Sprout. It’s good you notice these things, and question them. You should always be that way.”
I followed him back into the cool underground labrynthe and he explained on the way. He began by producing a bill from his own wallet and handing it to me.
“Compare those two,” he said. “Aside from the denomination and the design, what else is different?”
After I pointed out a few superficial differences he shook his head, made a cutting gesture, then pointed at the bottom of my bill.
“What does that say?”
“United States Note,” I replied.
Now he pointed toward the bottom of the bill he’d pulled from his wallet. “How about that one?”
“Federal Reserve Note,” I read, aloud.
He took his note back. “You don’t see anything on here about paying the bearer anything, either.” He flopped it around a bit before putting it back in his wallet. “Just some vague statement about it representing legal tender for all debts, public or private. This is what’s known as ‘fiat’ currency. It has no worth whatsoever, beyond durable fire kindling. It’s propped up only by assumptions, and the credibility of a government.”
He now pointed to my stack of money. “That’s not real money, either. It’s paper. The difference is: it doesn’t pretend to be real. Before it was replaced by funny money, you could take it to a bank and exchange it for real money—the amount of money printed on the note.”
I scratched my head. “Okay…then what is real money?”
“Gold or silver. That’s what a government backs paper currency with, if it’s honest, and not trying to screw the people. At your age it’s probably too much of a complicated, boring mess to be of much importance to you. But we’ll talk about it more when you’re older. Ultimately, the fate of the USA was settled by this very issue.”
***
We turned in our period clothing at the wardrobe and dressed comfortably again. Carmen fixed a meal for us, then we relaxed in the living room.
“So tell me what you learned on our field trip,” my uncle said.
“Well,” I said, “if you can travel through time, that means you know the future when you’re at earlier points in the time stream. You can make easy money when you know about what hasn’t happened yet.”
“Well said, Sprout. And now you know one of many reasons why history is important for you to know.”
“How many times had you seen that fight?”
“That was my first time.”
“B-but…” I stammered. “How…?”
“I’ve studied history,” he said, with a smirk. “I knew that Corbett won that fight.”
“But you knew more than that,” I protested. “A lot more. You were predicting what would happen, and when.”
He tapped his temple again—obviously one of his most common gestures. “Pattern recognition. I’ve got it. You’ve got it, too. That’s one reason why television bores you so much.”
“Especially sitcoms,” I said, reacting to his remark without considering how he knew this about me (we’d never talked about TV before).
“As you get older, it’ll help you out when you apply it to stuff beyond television, too. Important stuff.” He cleared his throat. “Of course, I’ve read a little about Sullivan, and a little about Corbett. Enough to make some deductions. The other part is, I know about fighting, and fighters. I’ve seen a whole lot of fights in my life. I’ve been in a few. That’s gonna become part of your training—watching fights. The more you do it, the more you’ll learn. When I first started, I didn’t understand much. I couldn’t tell when a man was hurt. I assumed the guy with the best physique was stronger and therefore would win. I didn’t understand why clinching was so effective. Actual real-life knockout punches didn’t look that impressive to me…partly because in Hollywood movies, guys get hit with freight train haymakers all the time…with bare knuckles, no less…and it hardly fazes them, unless some 98 pound chick throws it. Or unless the plot calls for it”
He opened a dark bottle of something and took a swig. “So what else?”
I replayed the “field trip” in my mind, briefly. “People couldn’t have been more wrong about the matchup,” I said. “It was completely backwards from how they thought it would go.”
He chuckled and leaned back in his seat, gaze roaming across the ceiling for a moment. “So much for ‘experts’—then and now. There’s some psychological factors at work, here. It can give you clues about human nature; and you can extrapolate from there into other situations. The sports writers who wrote all those articles you read? They probably saw Sullivan in action back when he was young, in shape, and hungry.”
“He sure didn’t look hungry when I saw him,” I said.
“That’s not the kind of hunger I’m talking about,” he said. “It has nothing to do with food. Once upon a time, Sullivan was hungry…probably starving…to prove himself. To make his mark in the world. To become a world champion. Then to stay champion. It made him very dangerous. He was a wild brawler, but was probably pretty good back in the day, relative to his contemporaries in the game. Remember that boxing was mostly illegal up until the fight we just saw, so there were social disincentives to get involved in it at all. There might have been somebody better during his own time—but if so, they didn’t fight him. Hell, Corbett himself might not have been able to keep out of range from the young, hungry John L. Sullivan.
“Anyway, that’s the Sullivan people remembered. When he wasn’t in a fight…and he’d been inactive for four years when he met Corbett…it was like he was invisible to the public at large. They didn’t realize he was becoming an alcoholic couch potato. They still remembered him as he was in his prime, and that’s who they expected to see again.
“In fact, they had probably exaggerated their own memories until he was better in their minds than he actually had been. There were 10,000 men in the audience, and most of them had never seen him fight before. All they knew about him was from exaggerated stories they’d heard—second or third-hand hearsay in a lot of cases, embellished at every telling. That’s why so many people assumed he was invincible.”
I nodded. This made sense, when I considered it this way.
“That sort of thing is a danger for everybody, to some extent,” he went on. “If you’re not careful, you’ll add to or take away from memories, until the actual truth is replaced by some more pleasing, or more convenient, modified version. Then you cling to your romanticized truth, and even if you’re reminded of the actual truth now and then, you’ve grown to like your version better, so you hang on to it and dismiss whatever disagrees.”
“That’s silly,” I said, laughing.
He shrugged. “Human nature is often silly. And what I just described is mild. Some people keep twisting and twisting the original data in their mind until they fall off the deep end. They can’t accept reality anymore because this fantasy they’ve concocted becomes their reality. And what’s even crazier is that groups of people…sometimes in the millions…can all adopt the same basic fantasy, insisting that it is truth and that their fantasy is the actual reality.”
I hadn’t yet witnessed this. Without experience or context, I couldn’t imagine it. I was sure Uncle Si knew what he was talking about, but the phenomenon had no more meaning or import to me than did the “West Coast Offense” during my life before picking up a football magazine in my mother’s favorite hair salon.
“What else?” he asked.
“What you’ve been teaching me about sudden violence,” I said, “it really works. It worked for me against the kids in the park. It worked for you against the guy with the handlebar mustache.”
He waved, as if shooing a fly. “That clown was no threat. Except to our ability to watch the bout. What else?”
“About Sullivan and Corbett?”
“Well, yeah. For starters. I’ll give you something to think about: what you saw there in New Orleans is the culmination of a pattern that has happened over and over again, and probably always will.”
I leaned forward and rested my chin on my fist.
“You see this especially in the Heavyweight Division of professional boxing,” he said. “Western boxing, that is. Some brawler comes along, and he’s a wrecking machine. He doesn’t just score knockouts on his way up the ranks, but he ends careers. His victories are so devastating, the victims are psychologically damaged afterwards. They’re beat so bad, it shakes their confidence. They’re never good enough to seriously contend again after a beat down from the Bad Boy. So finally, he slugs his way to the top. He is crowned champ, and in such convincing fashion that people assume he’s invincible. Including himself, sometimes.
“But then, now that he’s on top he gets complacent. Maybe because he believes the hype about himself, but also because there are no serious challengers now. None of the potential contenders have survived the mauling he dished out on his bloody climb to the top. So guess what happens?”
“He stops training?”
Si nodded, pleased with my answer. “Sure—in many cases. Or he stops taking his training seriously. Bottom line is, he gets soft physically at exactly the same time his ego goes out of control. What does overconfidence do?”
I recited what he taught me: “It leads to arrogance. Arrogance leads to recklessness. And recklessness leads to defeat.”
“That’s my man, Sprout. So while the Bad Boy is on his ego trip, up comes some fresh new guy, who wasn’t a victim of the bad boy’s rampage…maybe he hadn’t turned pro yet; was too young; inexperienced; whatever. But he climbs up the human rubble left over from that rampage, and next thing you know, he’s in position for a title bid.”
“And nobody takes him seriously?”
“Of course not! Not in a fight against the Bad Boy. The Bad Boy is invincible!”
I laughed at this.
He knocked back another shot of booze. “Let’s call this guy ‘the Challenger.’ Y’know, I can think of one time when he wasn’t even all that good, but the result was the same.”
“Big upset? New champion?”
He nodded. “That’s right. Every single time. Well…I take that back. There’s one exception in the history of western boxing: Marciano. The Rock never got complacent; never slacked off on his training; never stepped through the ropes without bad intentions…until retiring undefeated as a professional. And he stayed retired.”
“I think I’ve heard of him,” I said.
“But like I said: the Rock is the exception. The only exception to this pattern.”
“So the same thing happened to Corbett?” I asked.
He grimaced. “Not exactly. Corbett was never a wrecking machine, so he doesn’t fit the pattern, anyway. Still…there are similarities. After he became champ, he got lazy. Starred in a Broadway play about himself instead of defending his title.”
“And along came the Challenger!” I crowed, proud of how clairvoyant I was.
“Bob Fitzsimmons,” my uncle said, nodding. “A blacksmith by trade, so he had pretty good upper body strength. Looked like a heavyweight from the waist up, but skinny little birdie legs. He was actually a middleweight, if memory serves. Tough son of a bitch, too, I’m guessing.
“So he gets a title shot. Gentleman Jim isn’t at his best, but he hasn’t fallen apart, either. I forget how many rounds they go, and Corbett just makes him look stupid. But Fitz isn’t out of shape and over the hill like Sullivan was. He’s game, and waits for his puncher’s chance.”
“I guess he got it,” I surmised.
“Yup. And a body shot, at that. Sports wags called it ‘The Battle of the Solar Plexus.’ Knocked the wind out of Corbett. Gentleman Jim couldn’t beat the count. New champ.”
“The solar plexus—where’s that?”
He reached over and gently pushed his fist against the center of my torso just under the sternum.
“Pit of the stomach. You take a big shot there, it can paralyze you for a minute or so. It’s one of those nerve centers I’ll teach you about down the road. There’s another one in your ass. Anybody ever literally kicks your ass…I mean between the cheeks and up into the hind part of your crotch…it hurts like a blind mother. I mean pain like high voltage chainsaws ripping all through your body.”
I knew what he was talking about. Allyson had kicked me there when I was six years old. The pain was crippling. She made fun of me for crying, but I couldn’t stop.
“So what else did you learn?” he asked.
I thought some more before answering. “Corbett’s technique had flaws. His punches were sloppy—lousy form, and sometimes he telegraphed, too. It’s just that Sullivan couldn’t slip or block them, anyway.”
“So what does that teach you?” He fixed me with a piercing gaze.
“Perfection isn’t necessary to win,” I said. “Sometimes mediocrity is enough.”
He scared me by jumping to his feet and whooping, his bottle held high over his head. “Helmuth Von Moltke the Elder! Outstanding!”
Carmen entered the room to see what all the noise was about. He pulled her into an embrace and covered her mouth with his. I turned away as they seemed to be trying to eat each other. But then he pulled away, Carmen’s lipstick now smeared all around his mouth, and pointed at me. “That is one sharp young man, right there! What’re we gonna do with him?”
What he would do with me, it turned out, was test me to see if I could put what I knew to use.
As usual, rather than addressing Hallie Biden’s revelation, the Thought Police simply censored it. See, that’s what you do when you’re certain people would agree with you after hearing both sides.
There were many times when I would ask a question, that Uncle Si would use as an opportunity to teach me something, rather than just answer directly. There are few better examples than when I asked him how he became so rich.
He stopped what he was doing right then, and ushered me into a computer lab. Sitting down facing the monitor, he said, “Knowledge is power. You can turn that knowledge…that power…into money, then use your knowledge to make it grow.”
The computers resembled the ones I’d seen in computer stores, and in the office at school, but they seemed to be much faster, and capable of a lot more. Physically, the most noticeable difference was the monitors. The pictures on the screen seemed sharper, but also, the screens were flat and the entire monitor was only about the size of a laptop.
He brought up an image of a $100 bill on the screen. Not that I’d seen any $100 bills in real life before, but it looked very odd to me. On closer scrutiny, I noticed a printing date from 1880 and the unfamiliar phrase, “This note is legal tender for 100 dollars,” and “United States will pay to bearer 100 dollars.”
I knew absolutely nothing about money, but something struck me as paradoxical about this.
Before I could ponder it much, Uncle Si continued his impromptu lesson.
“Now, one way to get your initial stake is to jump a warp back to whenever, hire yourself out for an odd job…it was a lot easier to do in years gone by…and simply earn some cash. But I’m gonna help you get started quicker.”
He used a keyboard and mouse to choose a few options, then selected “print.”
One printer in a row of several came to life. After a few minutes, it shoved out a green rectangle. He grabbed it, rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, wadded it into a ball, straightened it back out, and handed it to me. I took it and, upon feeling it, immediately noticed the counterfeit bill had not been printed on normal paper. It was special, sturdy paper that felt like the real thing. He let me keep it, then printed some more bills.
He led me to a large chamber he called “the wardrobe.” I would have called it “the costume shop.” He picked out some clothes, disappeared into a dressing room, and emerged dressed like a wealthy cowboy. His sunglasses were gone—replaced by old-fashioned round spectacles. It was harder finding duds for me. Everything he had was too big for me, but with some alterations by a skilled seamstress he paged over the intercom, who used a very modern, computer-controlled sewing machine, I soon had a pair of farmer’s bib overalls, and a simple cotton shirt to wear. Uncle Si plucked a straw hat off a rack and dropped it on my head.
We took an elevator up into a hangar that I hadn’t seen inside before. We climbed into a fancy horse-drawn coach…only there were no horses. I inquired about this and Uncle Si simply replied that we could always acquire horses where we were going, if we needed them.
We took seats. He opened a hidden panel in the silk-covered inner wall of the coach, adjusting controls. Soon I felt the overwhelming sensations that told me we were shooting a warp.
***
When we climbed out of the coach it was night time. Our coach was parked near a horse livery in a city with no electricity and a whole lot of all-wooden buildings.
“Still got the C-notes?” he asked, walking toward a dark alley.
By the way he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together again, I inferred he was speaking about the counterfeit $100 bills. “Yeah. Are we in 1880?”
He shook his head. “New Orleans, September Six, 1892. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. I’m your father. We’re visiting from Texas.”
The dark alley fed out into a dirt street illuminated by lanterns on poles. It was quite a scene. Other pedestrians were out, and the way they were dressed made me stare.
Uncle Si checked an old-fashioned pocket watch ever so often, when nobody else was nearby. On one such occasion, I noticed a glow coming from the watch. Next time he checked it, I maneuvered around behind him to get a look. On the face of the watch was an LED display with a time readout and a digital map.
He found a small office annexed onto a wooden warehouse building, and ducked inside. We took our hats off inside the door, because according to him it was impolite to keep them on indoors in this culture. A fat bald man with jewelry on his hands asked what our business was.
Uncle Si waved his hat toward me and, in a western drawl, said, “Junior here just come into an inheritance. Dang fool kid wants to bet it on Corbett for tomorrow. I wasn’t gonna allow it, but I reckon it might teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.”
“On Corbett?” the fat man asked, as if not sure he’d heard correctly. “How much?”
Uncle Si gestured that I should hand him a phony hundred. I did.
The fat man took it from me, examined it and whistled. “That’s an expensive lesson.”
“Do it,” Uncle Si insisted. “If’n he learns it now, he’ll be less likely to make bigger fool mistakes once he owns the ranch.”
The fat man shrugged and happily pocketed the money. “Well, you are gettin’ four-to-one. Should Corbett win, you stand to make a tidy sum.”
Uncle Si and the fat man burst out laughing in unison.
Still snickering, the fat man handed me a newspaper. “Read the sports page, boy. Next time, at least get informed before your money burns a hole through your pocket.”
We visited several different bookies that night, Uncle Si performing variations on this same skit. We also collected more publications—newspapers, “hand bills,” and a black-and-white magazine with crude illustrations sprinkled through the text with a title on the cover that said: “Police Gazette.”
We checked into a hotel and Uncle Si told me, “Well, you got plenty to read tonight. I’ll be back.”
So I read the small stack of literature we had gathered.
There was to be a “boxing match” tomorrow—a heavyweight championship under “Queensbury Rules.” Only after finishing a few different publications did I figure out that meant boxing gloves would be worn. Evidently “bare-knuckle” boxing was a thing.
The champion was a man called “The Boston Strong Boy.” John L. Sullivan was his name, and he was really something. He had fought both with gloves and bare-knuckle. He had knocked out 500 men, and sometimes toured the country offering huge (for the time) cash prizes to anyone who could last four rounds with him. But few men even lasted one round with this savage bull of a man. He himself had never been beaten. He was strong, and tough, but he also must have had incredible endurance: one fight lasted 39 rounds, and in his most recent match, he knocked his opponent out in the 75th round!
Just from what I’d learned about fighting so far…including what boxing I’d seen on TV…I knew that you had to be incredibly tough, with tremendous stamina just to last 12 rounds, wearing 12-16 ounce gloves.
In the fight tomorrow, the gloves would be five ounces.
There were descriptions of the horrific damage inflicted on Sullivan’s victims throughout his career: broken jaws; broken ribs; opponents knocked through the ropes; intervention by the police to keep him from killing other men inside the ring.
Sullivan’s challenger was a bank clerk who went by the name of “Gentleman Jim” Corbett. He was outweighed by 25 pounds, and wasn’t nearly as strong as the Boston Strong Boy. Experts predicted he would be knocked out by the third round—though some imagined it was possible he might last into the seventh.
I didn’t understand what lesson I was supposed to be learning from this. I would never have bet on this fight if I hadn’t been told to. I was naturally tight with money anyway, never having much of it available at any given time. At least this was just counterfeit cash.
There were pictures of Sullivan in the magazine, and he did kind of look intimidating—though from the written accounts I half-expected him to stand eight feet tall and be built like the Incredible Hulk. He wasn’t nearly as tall or muscular as Uncle Si, but he had a big handlebar mustache and looked mean. His pose confused me though. His stance wasn’t very good, and his guard was horrible. It looked like both his arms were cocked to throw uppercuts. He looked wide open—like he was so tough that he didn’t care if you could hit him.
Uncle Si returned, nursing a bottle of vodka, and sat down on his bed, facing me. “Did you read about John L. Sullivan?” he asked. His speech was a little more forceful than normal; and his complexion kind of ruddy. This was normal when he drank.
I nodded.
“What do you think?”
“He sounds invincible,” I said. “I don’t think this Corbett guy stands a chance. Did you really intend for me to blow all those hundreds on bets for him?”
Ignoring my question, he took another swig from the bottle. “Remember. Remember everything you know right now. Okay?”
***
The next day we walked through the city to a place called The Olympic Club—an impressive arena with a boxing ring set up in the middle of acres of folding chairs inside a slapdash “auditorium” with no floor. There were thousands and thousands of men there, gathered around. I marveled at how heavily they dressed in such humid heat: nearly all of them were in suits, with long-sleeve shirts and vests under their jackets. And they all came inside wearing hats—some were top hats; some looked like the kind that restaurant in Los Angeles must have been modeled after (Uncle Si said they were called “bowlers” in Britain but “derbies” in America). Somehow Uncle Si had reserved ringside seats for us.
My eyes stung from all the tobacco smoke, and breathing was a struggle. Men pressed in around us from every side, and I was jostled probably three times every second for a while. An announcer finally stepped into the ring and began to project his voice into the multitude, hyping the coming fight and encouraging spectators to sit down so those behind them could see. When he mentioned “timed rounds of exactly three minutes—” I turned to Uncle Si. “Does he think we’re ignorant?”
My uncle shook his head, taking a swig from a metal hip flask, just as many other men were doing—mostly those who weren’t smoking pipes or cigars. “The sport of boxing hasn’t settled on universal rules. In most bouts up until now, a round lasted until somebody got knocked down, however long that took. Three-minute rounds is a new concept here.”
“Jeez,” I said.
“Yeah. Sullivan suffered so much damage in his last title defense, he decided he would only fight according to Queensbury Rules thereafter. Set a historic precedent, unbeknownst to him. Boxing is the way we know it because of Sullivan, when you think about it.”
I pondered how one person’s personal decision, made for whatever reason, could affect millions of people for centuries to come.
A man with a mustache just like the one Sullivan had in the picture was standing next to us. He narrowed his eyes while staring at us—perhaps because we spoke of the future as if we knew it, and the present as if it had already happened. Uncle Si ignored him.
The boxers were introduced and stepped through the ropes along with their “seconds”—their corner men. Both competitors wore tight pants with leather boots, but were bare from the waist up. Corbett was lean, like he’d faithfully stuck to his roadwork for years. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw “The Boston Strong Boy.” He didn’t resemble an athlete of any type—much less a legendary heavyweight champion.
“That’s Sullivan?” I blurted. “What a slob! He looks like 300 pounds of chewed bubblegum!”
It couldn’t be him. This flabby butterball was clean-shaven, and didn’t even resemble the Sullivan in the picture I’d seen.
Handlebar Mustache, next to us, flashed me a dirty look.
Uncle Si said, “Well, first of all, he’s over the hill. You can counteract Father Time if you’re fanatic about your conditioning. But he hasn’t been training; hasn’t defended his title in four years. He’s a hard-drinking over-eater who indulges himself too much—especially for somebody who has to fight a younger, faster opponent.”
I couldn’t shake the hype from all the sports writers. “But Corbett is a bank clerk who can’t take a punch!”
“Corbett is one of the very first ‘scientific’ boxers,” Uncle Si said. “He’s a pioneer of what Muhammed Ali will one day call ‘the sweet science.’ He’s got a trainer who fought the champ before; he trains with discipline; and studies his opponents before he fights them.”
The announcer finally finished bellowing to the crowd, then had his rules talk with the two boxers.
The bell rang.
Their stances weren’t much better than the awkward pose I’d seen in the Police Gazette. Sullivan kept his right cocked, but his left extended almost straight down to his left thigh, while he stalked the smaller man flat-footed. Corbett actually moved pretty well, but he had no guard whatsoever—both hands hung down around his waist.
And speaking of hands, I was dumbfounded by the gloves worn. Five ounce gloves looked like little more than mittens—not much of an improvement over bare knuckles, I would guess.
Sullivan charged like a drunken bull. Though Corbett was obviously agile, for some reason he allowed the ponderous old champion to back him into a corner. Uncle Si leaned forward with interest, as did most of the men around us.
With malice in his eyes, Sullivan wound up and threw a haymaker. He caught nothing but air. Corbett escaped while the blow was just building up steam. The smaller, quicker boxer grinned as he danced away. Before the round was over, Corbett backed into a different corner. Again, Sullivan loaded up for a big shot. Again his wild roundhouse missed as the grinning Corbett danced away untouched.
Corbett hadn’t even thrown a punch. He seemed interested only in making Sullivan look stupid. The crowd began to boo.
By the end of the second round Sullivan had yet to land a punch, and Corbett still hadn’t thrown one. However, Corbett had backed into all four corners. He ducked, dodged and danced out of harm’s way before Sullivan could tag him.
Uncle Si tapped my chest with the back of his hand. “You see that?”
“What?” I asked.
“Every time Sullivan loads up to swing that right…as if he’s not telegraphing bad enough already…he slaps his thigh with his left hand.”
“What’s that about? I asked.
“Not sure.”
Sure enough: next time Sullivan wound up for a haymaker, he slapped his thigh when he threw it.
“See it that time?”
I nodded.
“Never, ever a good idea to be so predictable. I’d be real surprised if Corbett hasn’t noticed it.”
The crowd was turning ugly fast—booing and jeering. At first I assumed this was due to the champion’s unprepared condition and dismal performance. But their contempt was aimed at Gentleman Jim for running away. At one point, Corbett turned away from Sullivan, faced an ocean of his hecklers and waved both hands at them. “Wait a while,” he said with a grin, “you’ll see a fight!”
It occurred to me that neither man had a mouthpiece. They must not have been invented yet.
In Round Three, Corbett backed into a corner yet again. Sullivan looked determined not to let his quarry escape this time, and actually refrained from slapping his thigh before launching that freight train of a right roundhouse. But before he could get off, Corbett suddenly came to life. He stepped into a left hand that landed flush in Sullivan’s face, and followed up with a flurry that got the champion moving backwards for the first time.
Corbett peppered him with shots from both hands, and before I knew it, Sullivan was the one trapped in a corner.
Uncle Si laughed out loud and drank from his flask. Bedlam broke out in the audience. The din of yelling voices was deafening. Men waved their hats, or stripped off jackets and swung them in circles by the sleeves. Judging by all the hanging jaws, this turn of events was a shock to most.
When the bell rang, blood was gushing from Sullivan’s nose.
“Corbett’s ready to go to work, now,” Uncle Si said. “He still might play with his food a bit, but he’s measured his man and he’s ready to start building the coffin.”
Handlebar Mustache glared at my uncle, who just tossed back a pull from the flask.
At the start of round four, an infuriated Sullivan charged out in pursuit of Corbett again, hell-bent on avenging his broken nose. But the elusive boxer sidestepped and danced out of harm’s way time and again. I was sure I could feel Sullivan’s frustration.
The fight progressed according to a pattern of Sullivan charging and Corbett retreating, but periodically surprising the champion with flurries and counterpunches.
“Wow—Corbett’s footwork is really good for his time,” Uncle Si observed. “He’s riding circles around John L with that bicycle.”
“I guess it should have been four-to-one for Corbett,” I admitted. “Everyone had it backwards: he’s the invincible one.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Uncle Si said, with a disdainful sneer. “Footwork is the foundation, but you can’t neglect the other stuff. Both these guys have terrible form. Granted: Corbett doesn’t have to fight a perfect or even textbook bout here. But still…look at those punches.”
I studied Corbett with a new focus for a bit. His guard was still completely down. When he did flick out punches, they were stiff-armed, windmill-style blows that an uncoordinated child would throw. The fact that they were bedeviling Sullivan made them no less ugly.
“You’re right,” I said.
He shrugged. “He doesn’t have to be great to be the better man today. But almost any contender from a more refined era would beat him. Jack Johnson would give him fits. Gene Tunney would take him apart. Even Max Baer would make him pay for his sloppiness.”
Evidently, Handlebar Mustache had heard enough.
He glared at Uncle Si, saying, “You must be a sports writer or somethin’. Is that what you are, cowboy?”
Uncle SI didn’t reply, but screwed the cap back on his flask and slipped it in his pocket.
“Just who do you think you are, anyway?” Handlebar Mustache demanded. “You must figure yourself a fight expert. But I’m gettin’ tired a’ hearin’ all this malarky from you and your hayseed boy.”
“At ease, shitbag,” my uncle said, simply, still watching the match.
“What’d you call me?” Handlebar Mustache obviously didn’t intend to wait for a verbal answer to his question. He lurched to his feet, tore off his hat, peeled out of his jacket and vest with angry, jerking movements.
I barely caught the movement of Uncle Si’s hands as he shot up from his chair. His left blurred up to land open-handed on the man’s face with a loud smack. It caught the guy on the mouth, and up into the bottom of the nose. Handlebar Mustache staggered back from the humiliating slap, then his head snapped back from the follow-up right that caught him on the jaw.
As Handlebar blinked and swayed, Uncle Si grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around and tripped him forward to fall on his hands and knees.
The men surrounding us had diverted their attention from the bout to watch this much more decisive action. Handlebar pushed himself up off the ground, retrieved his vest, dug through the pockets, then came at Uncle Si with a knife. I was transfixed by the economy of movement that followed. Uncle Si slapped the man’s knife hand from the outside, pushing it onto a trajectory which would widely miss the target. Shuffling forward a step, his hand now gripping Handlebar’s wrist, Uncle Si yanked hard on the captive arm while pivoting his upper body, driving his elbow into the man’s temple with all the torque of his shoulders behind the blow. In the same motion of the natural recoil of a delivered strike, Uncle Si grabbed a fist full of hair, pulling the man’s battered head forward and down, as he sprang into the air and drove his knee up to meet the man’s face.
Handlebar fell backwards and lay still with his eyes rolled up in his head, blood leaking from his lips and nose. It didn’t look like he’d be pulling himself to his feet any time soon.
Uncle Si produced his flask again, took a drink, and with a wicked smile asked, “Anybody else want to stick his nose in my business?”
There were no challenges from the onlookers. A couple of them lifted Handlebar off the floor and carried him away through the crowd.
Uncle Si glanced at me. “I’d advise against using a knife in close combat. But if, for some reason, you ever have to use one in self-defense, don’t lead with it.”
He went back to watching the match. Eventually, so did I.
It seemed to me that Corbett’s style was more about timing than technique. He kept one step ahead of the champion, but timed his movements to evade attacks when Sullivan made a sudden rush to close the distance. Nearly every offensive effort from Sullivan instigated a combination of punches from Corbett to the head and body. Corbett’s punches still looked sloppy, but they landed with a high degree of accuracy.
“See the way he’s working the body?” Uncle Si asked me, after Corbett had thrown a double hook to the ribs.
I nodded.
“That can take the wind out of even a fighter who’s in shape. You’re gonna see Sullivan slow way down if this keeps up.”
It did keep up, and Sullivan slowed down.
My mood changed from one of astonishment that the immortal, invincible John L. Sullivan could be so badly outfought, to a sickening sadness at how he was being systematically dismantled. A large portion of the crowd, however, had a markedly different reaction. Their enthusiasm for destruction never waned—they simply switched loyalty from Sullivan to Corbett. Passion, when coupled with a fickle nature, is frightening.
By the 14th round, Corbett was landing almost at will, and Sullivan’s offensive efforts were getting fewer and farther between.
“Corbett’s just playing with him, now,” Uncle Si remarked.
“Seems to me Corbett could finish him now,” I said.
“But he’s smart, and being methodical. Sullivan’s still got a puncher’s chance, even though his best chance evaporated after the first couple rounds were done. You never want to get careless, especially with a dangerous puncher. Corbett’s gonna wear him down with attrition until there’s no risk.”
The match wasn’t even competitive. After that, I lost any hope that it might be.
During Round 20, Uncle Si looked a little disgusted as he said, “Corbett needs to quit playing around and put him out of his misery. This is just embarrassing.”
Sullivan’s face was covered with angry welts. There were red marks all over his torso as well. He wasn’t even throwing punches anymore. As he gasped for breath, his primary concern seemed to be simply remaining on his feet.
“Remember this,” Uncle Si said. “There’s a lot of principles at work here that have application outside of this match. Sullivan’s not used to being on defense…so he’s got no defense. He doesn’t know how to fight going backwards, and he’s got no choice but to go backwards now. He’s hurt, and completely out of gas, too. He’s helpless.”
“Why doesn’t he throw in the towel?” I asked.
“Pride.”
The crowd, now tired of the matador-and-exhausted-bull show, was hissing and jeering again.
***
In Round 21, Corbett must have decided it was now safe to let it all hang out. He landed a left hook to the head with an audible smack that reverberated through the noisy, smoke-filled building. The champion staggered backwards, and Corbett pursued, stinging him with jabs and crosses as if his fists were a swarm of bees.
Sullivan backed up to the ropes and reached out clumsily, groping for the top one to use as an anchor and keep his feet. As he tried, and failed, to grab the rope, Corbett loaded up for the coup de grace. Why not? There was no danger anymore.
Corbett caught him right on the button with a freight-train of a right hand…one of those Hollywood haymakers you’d never get away with on a target that wasn’t already out on his feet.
Sullivan’s knees buckled. He toppled over and hit the canvas with a thud, then rolled over on his back. The place went crazy. Everyone was on their feet, yelling.
I couldn’t hear what Uncle Si told me, but judging by the movement of his mouth I think it was, “We’ve seen enough. Let’s go collect your money.”
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The next day, Uncle Si informed me that my training would resume. It was more important than ever now, he said, since the Erasers were after me.
But first, he gave me a tour of the Orange Grove.
“You ever think about how we have electricity out here?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Not really.”
He nodded. “Of course not. In your time, everybody in America has electricity—even out in the boonies. But there’s no power company that has lines out this far, where and when we are right now.”
He took me to what looked like a tall, sturdy barn. Once inside the blazing hot structure. I saw that it had no roof. It was not a barn at all, but a disguise. Inside the walls was something like a green house, with a slot recessed into the floor, full of water. Sitting in that pool, but with the top sticking up out of the greenhouse, was a gigantic wheel, slowly rotating through the opening of the structure. The wheel was a circle of metal tanks, all connected by spoke-like pipes deflecting around a central hub. The hub drove an axle which also protruded from the greenhouse (horizontally, in this case) and into a gearbox which, in turn, drove a large circular mechanism.
Uncle Si pointed to this last component. “That’s the alternator. Don’t get too close; it puts out enough current to fry you to a crisp.” Then he waved to the big wheel. “That is a Temperature Wheel. Not very fast, but massive torque. Each tank contains a gas with a very low boiling point, and they’re all interconnected. It’s sunny just about all year ’round, here. The sun heats the pool, which heats the tanks that are in the pool. The gas expands, pushing through the pipes into the tanks that are up in the breeze–but under shade. There the gas cools down, settles as liquid, making the tanks on top heavier, and gravity pushes them back down.”
“…So the wheel spins,” I finished.
“I get enough juice to power everything here, and it costs almost nothing,” he said.
“Almost?” I repeated. “Looks completely free to me. You don’t have to pay for the sun, or the air. The water doesn’t get used up; and neither does the gas in the wheel.”
“But it did cost me something to build it,” he said. “And it does require occasional maintenance.”
“Oh, yeah.”
He pointed to the inner walls of the pseudo-barn. They were lined with heavy shelves which held large, solid-looking boxes all connected by thick, insulated cables. “For the occasional cold spells when I don’t get at least a 3.5 degree difference in temperature between the air above the greenhouse and the water in the pool, I’ve got a network of battery banks, to keep the property powered.”
“Those are batteries?” I asked, staring at the huge, dark casings. They were enormous compared to car batteries.
He nodded. “Nickel-iron. They’ll last forever and take plenty of abuse. Slow discharge, but with nearly unlimited cycling. Just about perfect for this place.”
Several huge concave mirrors were placed up high inside the walls of the open-top barn, reflecting extra sunlight into the greenhouse.
I stared at the huge, slow-turning wheel. “This is something else.”
“It’s crude technology,” he said, dismissively. “Since putting this together, I’ve stumbled on some mind-blowing stuff. But anyway: like with any of the goodies I have around here, you can’t ever tell anyone about it. Savvy?”
I hadn’t heard the term “savvy” before meeting Uncle Si, but deduced from context he was asking if I understood. “I won’t tell anybody anything.”
He nodded, then continued the tour.
He opened a big, up-swinging door on the other side of the hangar, and I discovered that there were airplanes there, after all. He climbed in one and started it. Twin propellers spun into a blur. He steered it out of the hangar and got out to shut and lock the hangar door.
I couldn’t remember ever seeing a prop plane in real life before. This plane was like nothing I’d ever seen—even in old movies. The windows were tinted such that I couldn’t see anything inside. The contours were sleek and swoopy, like so many other manufactured objects in this era. But still, it looked like something out of a 1930s cartoon, more than a 1930s airport.
“Get in,” he said.
He climbed in and out, checking his lights and other components. By the time he was done, the engines were warmed up and ready to go. He taxied around to an air field cut out of the sprawling grove.
“Is this plane from 1934?” I asked, once strapped into the co-pilot’s seat, scanning over some real sophisticated, high-tech-looking instrumentation around the cockpit.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s a one-off custom. I had it built to look like something that belongs in the age of art deco, but not even an aircraft buff could place this baby.”
I halfway expected him to slip on a radio headset, but he didn’t. He throttled up the engines, released the brakes, and we sped down the runway. The plane lifted off smoothly, and picked up speed as it climbed at a shallow angle.
Uncle Si fiddled with one of the instruments, and I was wracked by the same phenomenon I experienced in the badass car a week ago: my stomach free-floated; vision and hearing went haywire; then everything came roaring back to normal.
Normal except the airplane was flying over a totally different landscape, now.
The plane leveled off, then began a shallow descent. Ahead and below I saw another air field, with crisscrossing runways, hangars and other buildings , hacked out of a jungle between three mountain peaks. Uncle Si did put on a radio headset, now, and engaged somebody in a short conversation I didn’t follow.
“Where are we?” I asked, once he was done.
“BH Station,” he said, without looking away from the windshield. “One of my most advanced, extensive bases. The rain forest thins out a bit up here, but unless you know what you’re looking for and where to look, it’s the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
Ever since meeting Uncle Si, my vocabulary had been expanding. On my next session with a dictionary, I would have to look up “proverbial” and “art deco.”
The sights below stretched out from a map-like image to life-sized reality—surrounded by the dark green carpet of jungle extending to the horizons. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the transition of scale.
The runway grew underneath us until we could touch it. The landing was nearly as smooth as the takeoff. Then we taxied toward a long row of speed-bump-shaped metal buildings.
As we drew closer to one particular hangar in the midst of the row, it became obvious how enormous the structures were. They were painted to blend in with the surrounding countryside, and so hadn’t been noticeable from higher altitudes.
A man in greasy overalls ran past us to open the hangar doors, and Uncle Si stopped the plane to wait. I shifted my gaze from the front to below. My eyes were caught by something shiny in the pavement under us. It was a piece of metal—maybe from an old soda can pull-tab or something—which had evidently gotten mixed up in the asphalt somehow. Had we been 20 feet farther away in any direction, I never would have noticed it. It was only because I was on top of it that I even knew it existed. It seemed odd enough as to serve as a good landmark, but after the hangar doors were open and the plane began moving again, it disappeared into the texture of the tarmac. I could no more locate it now than I could before I knew it was there.
I didn’t ponder the contrast of microcosm to macrocosm very long, though, because of what I saw inside the hangar. There was a collection of aircraft (both jet and propeller) that belonged in a museum—everything from futuristic to antiquated.
Uncle Si disembarked and I followed him out of the plane into the hangar. The air was heavy, hot, and sticky. I began sweating almost immediately. But I stared at the other planes.
“What’s in all the other hangars?” I asked.
“Some of them are still empty,” he said, shrugging. “Most have other aircraft. This is the hangar for twin engine passenger planes.”
“Different vintages so you can visit different times?” I asked.
He grinned, but touched his index finger to his lips briefly. “Shh.”
The man in greasy overalls arrived. Uncle Si shook hands with him, asking, “How’s it going with the VTOL?”
“Still got some tweakin’ to do. But fuel consumption is down about four percent.”
Uncle Si frowned. “I was hoping for more than that.”
The man looked at me curiously.
“Sprout, this is one of my mechanics: Frank. Frank, this is…you can call him Sprout, for now.”
Frank nodded at me…a cursory jerk of the head…and turned his attention back to my uncle. Not a very friendly guy; or at least not all that interested in me. They walked and talked, and I followed.
Their discussion sounded technical, with too many words and acronyms I didn’t understand. Outside, Frank slid the hangar door shut and locked it. He walked away by himself. Uncle Si led me to a control tower.
“Um, Uncle Si? Who owns this airport?”
Without looking at me or breaking stride, he said, “I do,” as if it were a silly question.
Beyond the air strip, out around the fenced perimeter, I noticed men in green uniforms and mirror-like sunglasses walking routes, brandishing weapons.
My uncle is a James Bond villain!
After unlocking the steel door at the base of the tower, Si led me inside and locked the door behind us. He sure was security-conscious. There was a metal staircase leading up, but instead of climbing it, he turned to a chain-link cage with a warning sign that read: “DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE—KEEP OUT.” In the same font but some other language, it spelled out what I assumed was the same notice.
Ignoring the sign, Uncle Si unlocked the gate on the cage and opened it. Inside the cage was a large steel casing with more high voltage warnings, humming like a power transformer. He unlocked the casing and swung it open. Inside, of course, I expected to see some kind of control panel with buttons, switches, and gauges. Instead, there was a metal ladder extending down.
He sent me down the ladder while he locked up behind us. I reached an underground floor at the bottom of the ladder and looked around. I was in a small, hexagonal chamber with heavy vault doors on six sides. The temperature was much cooler down here, thankfully. Uncle Si joined me, placed his hand against a scanner on one door, pushed his face against an eyepiece, and the door popped ajar with a thunk. We walked through.
Down a gray concrete-lined corridor, we came to an enormous gymnasium that made The Warrior’s Lair look shabby by comparison.
A few pairs of men were sparring. Others were working the bags, stretching, practicing techniques, and all the other activities I’d grown used to.
Uncle Si turned to me, pointing to a locker against one wall. “You’ll find some work-out clothes that fit you over there. You’ve had a week to rest and goof off, but now it’s time to get back at it. The next couple days will be an evaluation to see how sharp you are. If you haven’t lost much, we’ll start adding to your skills again after that.”
A thin, dark man in a traditional white martial arts outfit left one of the sparring pairs and bowed to Uncle Si, who bowed back. They conversed in a language that sounded similar to Spanish, then they both looked at me.
“I’m too busy to stay down here for the duration of your daily training,” Uncle Si said, “but I’ll be checking on you regularly. This is Paulo. He’ll be your primary trainer, now. Pay attention to anything he tells you. For the most part, your routine will be the same one we’ve established. But he’s going to teach you some new stuff to add, now and then.”
I had a thousand questions, but it was reassuring to know that my training would continue.
***
I hadn’t collected any rust in the previous week. My movement was still solid, and I worked the bags with familiarity. Paulo only spoke broken English, and he didn’t seem the type to pat someone on the back, but I caught him nodding every now and then. Without words of encouragement (in fact, with hardly any words at all except when I needed correction), the old me would have been miserable under this training regimen. But something had already started changing inside me. I didn’t need as much encouragement as I would have required before Uncle Si came into my life. Now, even when I made a mistake, I nonetheless had a glimmer of hope in my core that I was a human being with value anyway, and would continue to improve.
At nights and at dawn, when the air outside had cooled off, I did my roadwork around the inside of the perimeter. The armed guards soon got used to me passing them on their beats. I would gaze up in wonder at the strange constellations in the night sky as I ran. Inside, before training with Paulo each day, I had to concentrate on conditioning. That included circuit drills, monkey bars, rope climbing, wind sprints, etc.
Aside from roadwork, and my three hours of training a day, Uncle Si let me have the run of the place.
BH Station (Brazilian Highlands Station, that is) had a small city concealed underground—all connected by concrete-lined tunnels and catacombs. It might have been the ultimate dream playground for any young boy with an imagination.
The power source wasn’t explained to me (and I probably wouldn’t have understood it at that point in my life, even if somebody tried) but Uncle Si did mention that it was far more efficient than the Temperature Wheel back at the Orange Grove. I did meet a man he introduced as an engineer, though, who evidently designed BH Station’s power plant, and spent most of his time working on stuff that was even more important. His name was Dr. Torstenson. I think he was Norwegian, though he wasn’t interested in telling me about Vikings—and didn’t seem to know much about them, or Norse mythology.
There was a library full of books and computers; a sprawling recreation area with raquetball courts, a swimming pool, video arcade and the coolest go-cart track ever (for electric carts that could really move); barracks for the guards; a cafeteria; a laundromat; commissary; motor pool; several laboratories; individual quarters for other people who lived there; and Uncle Si’s suite which included bedrooms, private kitchen and bathrooms, living room and the works. My palm print and retina scan was added to the security database so that I had access to most of the facilities in the complex, and several of the entries/exits.
There were guards; electricians; mechanics; engineers and assistants; pilots and drivers who lived there. There were also maids, cooks, dishwashers, nurses, and other women whose job descriptions I didn’t know.
One woman in particular lived in Uncle Si’s suite. In retrospect, Carmen was not only beautiful, but the Brazilian lady was classy, sweet, and generous. I couldn’t recognize any of that for some time, out of an instinctive loyalty to Mami. As much as I admired Uncle Si, his double life in different time-space coordinates struck me as a betrayal of the woman I loved like a mother.
Uncle Si flew in and out of BH Station at least once a day. He wasn’t gone for long…relative to my fixed perspective. But he used a variety of different aircraft, and on some occasions, left in a land-bound motor vehicle on a winding mountain road leading away from the complex.
One of my first nights there I had a nightmare about the Erasing of my mother and half-brother. It woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep right away. I took a walk around the complex, and heard something going on in the gym. Curious, but cautious, I snuck up to take a peak.
Uncle Si was in there by himself, working out like a man possessed. Did he do this every night when everyone else was asleep? He wore shorts and knee braces. His sunglasses were gone and his shirt was off. I wondered if I’d ever have muscles like his. Then I glimpsed his back. Most of it was covered by what looked like an awful burn scar.
I wondered how he might have got that scar. Maybe in the car accident that put him in a coma? It must have hurt bad.
There was still an awful lot I didn’t know about my uncle. What I did know was that I wanted to be like him when I grew up.
***
Although there were residents of BH Station from other countries, most were Brazilian. They spoke a dialect of Portuguese, which I couldn’t speak or understand. Nevertheless, Uncle Si warned me sternly not to discuss time travel with anybody. To me, that meant they didn’t know anything about dimensional warps and he wanted to keep it that way. Still, I kind of suspected Dr. Torstenson and some other engineers had at least some inkling.
Working beside my uncle, I overhauled my first engine in the underground motorpool. It was a small one…a V-twin motorcycle engine to be exact…but it introduced me to how internal combustion works. I would continue to build on that little seed of mechanical knowledge throughout my life. It also taught me the importance of math, which he insisted I study for a half hour a day.
He limited my time in the recreation center, requiring that I spend time each day in the library. He welcomed me to learn about any subject that interested me, but frequently emphasized the importance of knowing history.
Having never been much of a student, an assumption common to me and everyone I knew was that I had no aptitude for school learning. Somehow, Uncle Si knew better. It turns out I had a voracious appetite for knowledge. I was already anachronistic at coordinates like this in that I enjoyed reading, so it should have been no surprise that once I got my nose into the sagas of Ragnar Lothbruk, I couldn’t stop until I’d devoured all of them.
At BH Station, people were addicted to “smartphones”—little handheld devices that could perform computer functions as well as make telephone calls via radio waves—but I preferred books and full-sized computers.
From the Norse sagas I went on to research Atila; Alaric I; El Cid, Charlemagne, Harold Hardrada; William the Conqueror; Genghis Khan; Tamerlane; Saladin; William Marshal; Napoleon Bonaparte; Robert E. Lee; Carl Von Clausewitz and Helmuth Von Moltke.
Reading about all those historic warriors, generals and kings kept the concept of leadership toward the forefront of my thinking. The historical events surrounding those figures piqued my curiosity enough to read about the world wars, and that led me to research weapons. I already had an interest in lances, flails, pikes, etc., and looked forward to the day Uncle Si would teach me how to use swords and other melee weapons. Now, through my research, I learned the difference between rifles, submachineguns and machineguns; cannons, howitzers and mortars; infantry, cavalry and artillery.
(The guards who walked the perimeter at BH Station carried rifles, while the roving guards among the buildings carried either shotguns or submachineguns. All of them wore sunglasses, like Uncle Si’s.)
It turns out, by living this way, I received an education superior to anything an institution could have taught me in between their attempts to tame, socialize, and foment ideological conformity.
In time, I grew brave enough to ask Uncle Si to elaborate on what he’d told me about leadership. I asked him specifically about the characters in The Lost Patrol.
In quite a few of the big, modern properties Uncle Si owned, he had his own little movie theaters. He took me into the one at BH Station and we watched The Lost Patrol again. He commented on what characters said and did, and asked me questions. This would become a ritual of ours, and he seemed to enjoy it as much as I did: we would watch movies that depicted groups of people, whether in a military unit, on a sports team, in an office, or any other scenario that might require people to work together. We’d watch them twice. On the second screening, he would point out certain characters he called “real life,” and others he claimed were “total bullshit.” He gave them letter grades on how they handled different situations.
He went into more detail about the Ziggurat. On the top were who he called the Big Dogs. Whether they actually made good leaders or not, they almost always wound up in leadership because others were willing to follow them. Their confidence was such that they not only believed themselves to always be the best man to lead, they effortlessly made others believe it, too. He used Douglas MacArthur, Joe Namath and Vince Lombardi as examples.
The next step down the Ziggurat were the Lieutenants. They shared some qualities with the Big Dogs (like leadership potential) but were willing to follow and make the Big Dog look great by doing a good job with whatever authority was delegated to them. They not only felt protective of the Big Dog they served (until ready to become a Big Dog themselves), but protective of the Ziggurat itself. Like Omar Bradley, Sir Lancelot, Bart Starr, or Al Capone’s top henchmen.
On the middle steps of the Ziggurat were the Worker Drones. They didn’t get the best salaries, the best women, or much in the way of recognition; but were the backbone of pretty much any successful organization. They made it work. They were the offensive linemen. The defensive backs and special teams players. The infantrymen. The engineers and maintenance men. The truckdrivers, mechanics, and railroaders.
On the bottom steps were the Creeps. They resented their low position and thought they deserved better, but were lousy climbers. They could never get to the top unless somebody put them there—and then would do a lousy job. They were passive-aggressive cowards and liars; but embraced the delusion that they were superior to everyone else. They saw themselves as secret Big Dogs-in-waiting but nobody else did—especially women above Tier Six or so. The Creeps’ efforts with women were buffoonish and cringe-worthy; and the harder they tried, the more repulsive they were. They were the desperate salesmen, the pervy college professors, psychiatrists and grandiose comic book villains (“The fools wouldn’t listen to me, but I’ll show them! When my master plan is complete, they’ll all bow before the throne of the All-Powerful Doctor Creep!”)
There were two categories of men who existed independent of the Ziggurat. Dad called one the “Lepers.” Lepers were underneath the Ziggurat. They weren’t just socially awkward like the Creeps; they were socially non-existent. They were the nobodies who were nameless and faceless to men on the Ziggurat. They had nothing to say because nobody cared what they thought, and they knew it. They were the janitors, the meter readers, the lonely monks and the warehouse book keepers. The Untouchables.
The other category was the Loners. The Lepers were off the Ziggurat because they couldn’t get on it. Loners could find their place on the Ziggurat (maybe even at the top) if they wanted to; but they didn’t want to. They didn’t want to play all the political games that were necessary just to be a cog in a machine. They didn’t need the Ziggurat…sometimes were oblivious to it. They could sometimes pull in the highest salaries and Top-Tier women all while ignoring the hierarchy and its rules (which infuriated the Big Dogs). They were the explorers, inventors, Army scouts, buffalo hunters, mountain men, pilots, wildcatters, and pioneers in every field. Real-life examples might include Charles Lindbergh, Kit Carson, Nikola Tesla and the Wright Brothers. Tarzan, Conan, Batman and Zorro were a few fictional examples.
I hung on Uncle Si’s every word and thought about these lessons constantly.
***
I think Uncle Si must have known the bond I had to Mami, because every weekend we would warp-jump back to the Orange Grove. I missed her during the week, but this regular visitation provided the stability I needed.
My irritation at his unfaithfulness to Mami notwithstanding, I looked forward to any time I got to spend with Uncle Si. Unlike any other adult I’d known, he sometimes listened to me and considered my thoughts seriously. He taught me constantly on multiple subjects, but often asked me questions and seemed genuinely interested in finding out what my answer would be. I didn’t always have an answer, but it was really cool that he listened if I did.
Gradually, from remarks that came out in passing now and then, I was able to piece together some of his story. Uncle Si had been in some secret military unit when The Great Reset came about. (As near as I could figure, “The Reset” was an absorbtion of the USA into a foreign empire some time in the future…the future relative to my original time-space coordinates.) A veteran with an impressive record, he was drafted into the TPF and helped build the unit that would become the Erasers. He hadn’t known, at first, that the Erasers were to be a time-traveling death squad. After being ordered to lead a number of erasure missions, however, he secretly made a decision to desert and disappear. Although he’d never been a scientist, everyone had underestimated his technical aptitude. The way he told the story, he surprised even himself by successfully reverse-engineering a warp generator.
One part of Uncle Si’s personality that I didn’t understand or care for was his drinking. I hadn’t noticed him drink all that much before, but BH Station was evidently where he spent a lot of his time, and when he wasn’t busy doing something else, he indulged an addiction to straight vodka.
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With all the other chores Mami kept on top of, imagine my surprise when I found out she had put together a custom suit for me. Things like fancy clothes had never been a priority in my life, but the gratitude poured out of me nonetheless. She simply kissed my cheek and shooed me away so she could get ready for the outing.
Uncle Si was dressed in a suit as well. He stood me in front of a mirror and showed me how to knot a necktie. After we were ready, and waiting on Mamita, he led me outside to the hangar/garage.
He opened a different huge door this time, into a much bigger partition of the hangar. There were several cars inside—very strange looking. Most were long and swoopy, with smoothly rounded corners like the refrigerator inside—just about the opposite of the squared-off mechanical monster I’d arrived in. He noticed my state of wide-eyed wonder and chuckled. “You see something in the lines. You like the design. Don’t you?”
I nodded. “I do. But I don’t know exactly what to say about it. I’ve never seen cars like these.”
“It’s no coincidence that you were so fascinated by PJ’s Rube Goldberg contraptions.” He tapped his temple, looking me in the eye. “You’ve got the brain of an engineer.”
I shook my head. “Me? No. I just…”
“How would you like to help me take one apart and put it back together?” he interrupted.
“Seriously? Could I?”
“Yup. But for now…which one do you like best?”
After some hesitation, I pointed to a convertible with chrome tubes poking out of the hood and disappearing into the fenders.
“The Doozy. Good taste,” he said. “But Mami’s been spending a lot of time fixing her hair, and a long ride in a roadster will mess it up. Try again—but stick to the hardtops this time.”
“Why can’t we just put the top up?” I asked.
“I picked this one up in 1962,” he said. “Fixed it up and brought it back here. But the ragtop is in bad, bad shape. I have one of my slipstick jockeys working on a replacement, made out of space-age fabric, but it’s not a priority and he’s been busy on other projects.”
I selected a long, sleek land missile made from such lustrous sheet metal, it perpetrated the illusion of seeming to be made of deep, polished red glass.
Uncle Si climbed in and started it up. The engine sounded healthy, but much smoother than the one in the car from the other day. It purred with a deep tone as he eased it out and around to the front of the house. He left it running, walked back to shut the garage door, and locked it.
Mami emerged from the front door in a yellow silk dress with matching purse, shoes and hat. Her black hair was down, under the hat, and appeared even silkier than the dress. She looked so pretty I was afraid to go near her, lest I mess something up. Uncle Si opened her door for her, helped her in, and closed it before returning to the driver’s side to slide behind the wheel. I jumped in the back seat and off we went.
It was a nice ride. From what I could see of California, I liked it.
The grown-ups passed the driving time jabbering back-and-forth in Spanish—too fast for me to pick out many individual words.
Eventually, a city appeared before us. We pulled over to a gas station with tall, cylindrical pumps. A man in a uniform and hat came out of the station to politely ask what we would like.
“Fill up,” Uncle Si replied.
“Of course. And check your oil and radiator coolant as well, sir?” the uniformed man asked.
“Nope. Don’t open the hood. But do please check the tires.”
“Yes sir.”
I’d never seen a gas station like this, either. Nobody even had to get out of the car. Everything was done for us, and Uncle Si only had to pay him. The uniformed man took the money inside and returned with his change.
Next we stopped at a shoe shop. I went inside in my socks, leaving my sneakers in the car. Uncle Si gave the proprietor some story about my shoes getting lost. The guy sat me down, measured my feet, brought out a pair of shiny shoes that seemed to go well with the suit I was wearing, then added two other pairs that weren’t as fancy, but were still more fancy than what I was used to.
“You shouldn’t buy all this for me,” I protested.
“You mean you want to walk around barefoot?” Uncle Si asked, casually. “The rattlesnakes and scorpions will love that.”
I bit my tongue to avoid thanking him more than once, or to apologize for how much money I was costing him.
We resumed our journey into the city. Palm trees were everywhere. There were hot dog stands shaped like hot dogs; burger joints shaped like hamburgers; and ice cream shops shaped like ice cream cones. At one point, I could see the ocean. California looked like paradise.
“You know where we are?” Uncle Si asked, over his shoulder from the driver’s seat.
“Where?” I asked.
“Los Angeles,” he said, “decades before it became the cesspool of the West Coast. Even during the Depression, it was the cat’s pajamas. But it’s real heyday was in the ’20s. We’ll visit it then, some time. You gotta see it to believe it.”
“I’m not sure I believe what I’m seeing now,” I mumbled.
We came around a corner and, up in the hills I saw the Hollywood Sign…only it actually read “HOLLYWOODLAND.”
“I’m in a famous place,” I told myself. “And I’m there in 1934.”
Uncle Si took us to some big clothing stores where he had Mami pick out dresses, shoes, hats and “unmentionabes”—as the store clerk called them. Uncle Si bought all of it for her.
In my life, only other kids had parents or relatives with a lot of money.
Up until now.
Uncle Si was loaded, I realized. Dollars were worth a lot more in 1934 than they ever were in my lifetime, but I’d still never witnessed this much money being spent.
We went to the coolest theater I’d ever seen. It was called a “movie palace,” but was all decked out like ancient Egypt. The place was packed, and everybody seemed excited to be there. There were balconies above the normal seating, and all those plush seats were occupied, too. We watched cartoons, a “news reel” (talking about a “dust bowl” in Oklahoma, political events in Germany, the FBI chasing Pretty-Boy Floyd, and a brand-new prison named Alcatraz), a Little Rascals episode (only it was called “Our Gang” and some of the characters were different, while others were younger), and not one, but two full-length movies. One was The Lost Patrol, a movie set during some old war that reminded me, at times, of Uncle Si’s talk about leadership. My favorite of the night was Tarzan and His Mate. Everything was black & white, but I didn’t mind at all. Every time I smell popcorn, my memory takes me back to that evening.
After the movies, we went to a fancy restaurant shaped like an old-fashioned hat, and ate steaks with vegetables and hot, buttered bread.
The restaurant had entertainment: a guy dressed in ill-fitting clothes, the same kind of old-fashioned hat, and big shoes on backwards, with a little Hitler mustache, came out twirling a bamboo cane and performing some slapstick gags—all without uttering a word. The other diners were more amused than I was (Uncle Si would later explain that he was impersonating a famous comedian that everyone loved), but the trick he performed was pretty amazing. He balanced a plate on a wooden stick and spun it there. Then, while that one was still spinning, he did the same to another. By the time he was done, he had plates spinning on sticks held in both hands, on one foot, one knee, and his nose. That made for a lasting image. Even years later, I could think about that night, close my eyes, and see him there spinning multiple plates.
It wasn’t the supper, or the movies, or any one thing in particular, but I was overwhelmed with a feeling of happiness. Since crying my eyes out that one day, I hadn’t really missed Mom all that much. I felt sad she had died as she had, but of the two different realities, this one was much, much nicer to live in.
I loved being with Uncle Si and Mami. It felt like…well, like I was part of a real family. I felt sorry for every kid who didn’t have a family like this.
UPDATE: This book is published! Click here to buy on Amazon.
