A History of the Future (24 page)

Fourier stares at me for a moment. “Perry and Jerry,” he goes. “That’s downright tuneful.”

“You know how folks are. See you tomorrow morning,” I say, pleasantly, on my way out.

“See you then,” he goes.

I thought I might puke from nerves, on an empty stomach no less, but finally I can leave. It’s a mild evening out, though, and when I get up there Front Street is busy, but I couldn’t relax and enjoy it. It was weighing on my mind that I’d told Fourier I was staying at the Eagle Hotel because there was a pretty good chance that people would be coming after us. I felt foolish for not minding the urgency of our situation until then, but I was intent on getting that boat. So I decided right there, on the front porch of Salter’s store, with its lamps just lit on each side of the big front door, that we would not spend the night in Buffalo after all, that we would shove off in the
Kerry McKinney
that night, and that I would hurry up and get what provisions I could to last us just a few days on the water before we had enough distance out of Buffalo to land and resupply.

Salter’s was a cut above Einhorn’s store, I can tell you—nothing against Mr. Einhorn—but they had all the goods you could ever want, even a wall of books from the old times. I bought a big slab of bacon, hunk of cheese, hard sausage, five-pound sacks of onions and potatoes, honey, jam, butter, applejack, licorice candy, salt, hot pepper sauce, fish hooks and line, blankets, candles, matches, alcohol for the stove, a bucket and some rope, and two books—because they were famous and very long and would last us a long time, reading them out loud in the evenings for entertainment when we anchored somewhere:
Moby-Dick
and
War and Peace
. Altogether I’d spent nearly seven ounces of silver. I had to buy sailcloth totes to carry the provisions in as well and made two trips from the store to the boatyard to stow it all aboard. Night was falling. No light burned in Fourier’s office. I didn’t want to see any more of him.

Then I went back to find Evan at the Niagara. I inquired at the desk and the woman there sent me to a third-floor room, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the hotel dining room either, or at O’Brian’s Meals down the street, so I went back to the Niagara. He still wasn’t in his room. It was going on nine o’clock. I got so angry I thought of setting sail without him, but I just couldn’t do it, leave him there, him being younger and sort of my responsibility. Then I happened to glance in the Niagara barroom and, what do you know, there he was sitting at a card table with four other men, his back to the front window. He also had on new clothes, including a linen sack coat and a fine cotton shirt, which is how come I didn’t know him when I’d peeked in from the street. He had little stacks of silver coins on the green cloth tabletop. I went over just as he was winning a hand of poker and bent down and whispered in his ear: “What the hell did I tell you about going out and about?” The other players shot me dirty looks. I smiled back pleasantly. I notice there’s a glass next to Evan’s elbow with whiskey in it, just like the others. Me and him, we’re trying to argue in whispers.

Evan goes, “I was bored out of my mind in the room, and it was hot up there.”

I go, “You’re goddamn immature. Come on. We’re going.”

“But I’m on a hot streak,” he says.

“I don’t care,” I say.

One of the other players, a workman from his burly looks and clothes, complains about me disturbing the game. I have to yank Evan out of his chair.

“He’s going,” I explain.

“Who the hell are you, anyway,” says another player, who has a narrow, toothy face like a human crocodile.

“I’m his big brother come to take him home,” I say.

“He’s got our money,” Crocodile says.

“I won it,” Evan says.

“He’s got to give us a chance to win it back,” says a third man.

“I won it fair and square,” Evan says.

I’m like, “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to go.”

“You can’t do that,” says Crocodile.

“It’s a free country,” Evan says. He’s drunk, I’m sure.

“It ain’t a country anymore, kid. It’s Buffalo and Buffalo rules.”

Just then, I notice through the window six men on fine horses canter up to the front of the Eagle Hotel, across and up the street a little ways from us. Two of them hurry up the front steps of the Eagle. The others wait in the saddle cradling rifles. They’re looking all around as if they’re searching Front Street. Just seeing them I’m sure it’s us they’re looking for. The memory of Farnum curled up on the floor of his office oozing blood all over his hands flashes through my mind and I’m afraid I must have killed him after all.

Evan scoops his money off the table and gets most of it into his pocket, but I’m man-handling him and a few coins fall down and ring on the floor. He scrambles around down there to get them. I practically drag him out of the room. When we’re out of earshot of the poker players, I’m like, “I just saw a bunch of men ride up in front of the Eagle. I bought us a boat and we’re getting out of here right now. You hear me?” I give him a shake and, being smaller, he stops resisting me. He smells like a distillery. He has to keep hiking up his new pants, the coins are weighing him down so. I tell him to follow me.

We steal out the barroom, across the front room where the hotel desk is, and into the restaurant on the other side. I figure there’s a back door through the kitchen and indeed there is. Evan follows me. The cooks and bottle washers are all occupied and barely notice us passing through. We slip out into the side alley. I can see two of the mounted men are still out there on the street, minding the horses, which tells me maybe two more of them have gone into the Niagara where we just came from. I tell Evan to watch where I go and to follow twenty yards behind me, like we’re not together. I creep out of the alley onto Front Street and hurry down toward the boat basin. The sun has set and there are no streetlights. As far as I can tell nobody has noticed me. Once I’m down by the docks, I jog toward Fourier’s slips. I turn around and see Evan coming. I’m on the dock waiting.

I go, “I ought to thrash you for that, you goddamn fool.” I drag him over to where the
Kerry McKinney
is tied up. Of course, it still says
Pearl
on the transom.

He’s like, “Is this the boat you bought?”

“Yes it is,” I say. “Get aboard. We’re shoving off.”

He’s like, “We can’t see anything out there on the water. Maybe we should wait until day.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” I go. “There’s men back there in town looking for us.”

He goes, “This boat is ugly as a pig.”

Finally I just lose my patience and shove him into the cockpit where he lands with a thud and a loud jingle of silver and a cry of pain when he splits his lip. I free up the mooring lines, shove us off, and leap aboard. There’s no wind but there’s a long sculling oar lashed to the cabin wall and it fits into a cleat on the transom. You push it back and forth and the boat moves clear of its slip. It’s a bit clumsy working our way out. We bump into other boats, but before long we’re clear of the slips. Evan is sobbing. I tell him to shut up. I can dimly see the rise of the jetty that encloses the basin and I follow along it, sculling in the darkness. It looks like someone has lighted a lamp in a building back at the slips just as we get to the tip of the jetty. I scull around it heading down the back side of it into the open water of Lake Erie. The jetty is a hump of rock and fill standing maybe ten feet above the waterline. Where we are, behind it, it blocks out Front Street and the boatyards and the lamps of town are no longer visible, just a million stars above, but I can hear some shouting from back on shore. I know from having studied the map on Fourier’s wall which way is which. Running down the back side of the jetty, I’m sure we’re headed south following the lakeshore, toward Pennsylvania and Ohio. I didn’t want to go north and get anywhere near the Niagara River and its current, which would take us over the famous falls and surely to our death.

Evan had stopped blubbering and was now apologizing drunkenly over and over. Once we were out into Lake Erie proper, a breeze came up and a quarter moon was rising over the darkened land so you could see things again. I told Evan how to raise the small stern sail at the rear of the cockpit. He stumbled around in the dark, but finally he figured it out and raised the sail. We didn’t bother with the larger forward sail. Moments later, you could hear the water purling against the hull as the breeze pushed the boat forward at a very modest pace. I stowed the sculling oar and took the wheel, which was on the right side of the companionway into the cabin. The
Kerry McKinney
felt very safe and trustworthy and I was now a sailor on the Great Lakes. I was sure we had just barely escaped getting captured there in Buffalo, and very likely hanged. I was sorry I killed Mr. Farnum, if that’s what happened, but I would not be sold into an indentured slavery. And if that was the normal way of things now in the country, I was opposed to it, even if that made me an outlaw.

I kept the dark shore in view at all times. The moon rose higher in the sky and I could see the outline of the treetops and even hear the little waves breaking on the shore. We coasted along it, a few hundred yards off land, until the last vestige of the city of Buffalo was far behind us. Evan had crawled off into the cabin. I was starving, but there was nothing I could do about it. Some time later—I don’t know how long—I lowered the sail and let the little waves push us closer to the shore. The moon was high and bright now and there was nothing but woods there. I went up to the bow and gently lowered the anchor over. It went down maybe ten feet to the bottom and grabbed. When I was sure we were anchored fast, I crept downstairs. I could hear Evan breathing on one of the bunks. Moonlight came through the portholes and the transom windows of the cupola above. I rummaged through our totes for the cheese and hard sausage and devoured a fair portion of our store. It was growing chill out on the water. I found the blankets and put one over Evan. Then I curled up on the other front bunk and went to sleep.

T
HIRTY-FOUR

Jack Harron lay awake in the darkness in his room behind the kitchen in Andrew Pendergast’s house, his mind roiling with perturbations about the order of the universe and his place in it. He felt grateful and aggrieved at the same time and he could not sort out his feelings, nor understand why a mysterious fate had chosen to place him in the company of his new . . . the word “master” resonated in his head. He saw himself as something like a dog. Andrew, as Jack was instructed to call him, trained him relentlessly all day long, one task after another, things that he had seen other people do, things that he had never troubled himself to learn, things he had no prior conception of doing: how to clean a kitchen with vinegar; how to polish silver with salt and alkali made from burnt wood ashes; how to make corn bread (properly); how to dress a turkey; how to beat a rug (he’d never heard of it before); how to grind the pigments that Andrew used in his artistic endeavors; how to take apart a mechanical clock (though not yet how to put it together); how to use the scores of tools Andrew had carefully collected before the old times suddenly became the new times, and countless other things that Jack had also never considered before.

He was confused but not sure he still felt broken, in the way he had during those desperate days before Christmas—in need of being fixed. He was confused about feeling tied down to a place and to another person and about what otherwise might be his lot if he wasn’t tied down but cast back into a world that seemed utterly without kindness, fairness, or meaning. He wondered what sort of world this was where people could have masters, just like dogs used to have masters, when people owned dogs. Maybe this was what people did now, in the new times, lacking dogs. He was confused about liking the attention and care that Andrew showed him in teaching him how to do things, but he dreaded the moment he was sure lay ahead, maybe days, perhaps weeks, when Andrew would venture to touch him in a personal way that would offend his manhood, for everybody knew the sort of person Andrew Pendergast was.

He also began to suspect that his fears about the world—which before had seemed set, as though he were constantly surrounded by a circle of scary totem poles planted in the ground, designed to remind him at all times that the world was a frightful place—might be subject to revision. He was no longer so certain, for instance, that the world was unkind, unfair, and devoid of meaning. He took the example of Andrew, who so casually assumed the task of Jack’s redemption and was going about it in a way that appeared to be kind, fair, even generous. And Jack had glimpsed inklings of meaning and purpose in the tasks that Andrew had put him on to. He saw how a job of work defined a chunk of time and, when it was completed satisfactorily, made that time spent seem worthwhile, and when it worked out so he felt an ease in his mind to which he was unaccustomed. There were duties he looked forward to and enjoyed, especially tasks in the kitchen, where it was warm, and there was always something to eat, or a cup of tea with honey, and Andrew gave Jack the impression that he was welcome to eat what he wanted from the larder, if it was not prepared for guests. He even discovered pleasure and satisfaction in routine chores such as splitting stove billets, visiting the chickens morning and evening with their rations of cracked corn, and setting out new candles. Andrew Pendergast was the richest person Jack had ever known in mysterious ways that went beyond his possessions and whatever treasure he had.