Once Beyond a Time (11 page)

“Well, girls, I’ll be in the back room,” Gloria says when she finishes filling me in. “Holler if you need anything.”

I look at Gail, and she looks at me. She smiles. She’s a pretty girl with long brown hair and big brown eyes and skin that doesn’t have one single pimple anywhere. Not even a blackhead. Her nose might be a tad too long but it’s nothing that’s going to scare any boys away. I think I’m going to like her, but I might as well not let on yet.

“You’re not from around here,” I say. The missing Southern accent gave her away.

“No.” She shakes her head. “Toledo.”

“So what are you doing here?”

A couple of kids come in looking for tootie-fruity ice cream cones. I can’t believe we have a flavor called tootie-fruity. Gail serves them the cones, rings them up, and then says, “My dad was sick a long time and then he died last year. After that it was just my mom and me, so she decided she wanted to live with Grandpa who lived over near Chicago. He said okay, but he’d been thinking about retiring here in Black Mountain. Mom said great, why don’t we all go down? So here we are.” She shrugs.

“Oh.” And then I add, because I know it’s expected, “I’m sorry about your dad.”

“Thanks.”

“So, you like it here?”

“You kidding? I love it here.”

Well, after Toledo, maybe that’s no surprise.

She says, “So you just moved here too, right?”

“Yeah, from Pennsylvania.”

“Cool. So, what do you think so far about Black Mountain?”

I have to think for a minute about how to answer since I don’t want to burst her bubble or anything. “Well,” I finally say. “It’s different. From Pennsylvania, I mean.”

“Yeah.” She laughs. “I guess so.” She’s puttering around as we talk, wiping down the counter, checking the supplies, filling up the canisters of toppings. I feel like I should be doing something, but I don’t know what.

Finally, four old men come into the shop, and Gail greets them like they’re a bunch of long-lost relatives. She calls them by name and introduces me to them, and you’d think we were having a party or something instead of just serving ice cream to a bunch of old geezers. I smile at them and say it’s nice to meet them even though I’d much rather be meeting guys about a hundred years younger. They say they’ll have the usual, and I guess Gail knows what that is because they take a seat and she goes to work digging out scoops of ice cream from the freezer.

“They’ll want coffee too, so you can pour that,” she tells me.

I’m glad for something to do. I pour coffee into Styrofoam cups and carry them on a tray out to the geezers. They’re at a couple of tables that have checker boards painted on the top so people can play while they’re sitting there eating their ice cream.

“Why, thank you, pretty miss,” one says, and then they all say something like that, and they’re all looking at me with their beady little eyes, and I want to tell them to keep their comments and their eyes to
themselves, but I just smile and walk back behind the counter. Bunch of perverts, is what they are.

“Hey Gail,” one of them calls, “Bim coming tonight?”

Gail lifts her head up out of the freezer. “He’ll be here in a bit.” She finishes scooping up four dishes of various flavors and carries them out to the men, who are setting up the checkers games. When she comes back she says to me, “They’re regulars here on Friday and Saturday nights.”

Boy howdy, aren’t we lucky. Something I can look forward to all week.

We start getting busy then, with the bell over the door tinkling like wind chimes in a gale, and after a while Gloria comes out and mans the cash register while Gail and I are freezing our hands off digging up scoops of ice cream for just about everybody in town it seems. There’s little kids everywhere and moms and dads and young couples out on dates and several more old geezers and I think my arm is going to fall off before they’re all satisfied.

I’m digging up some sort of black cherry walnut concoction when Gail says, “Well, it’s about time you got here, Grandpa. The others have been at it for an hour over there.”

I look up from the freezer and see yet another old geezer across the counter. This one takes the cake for ugly, though, like he’s been dead five years and he doesn’t know it and no one’s bothered to tell him. His eyes and cheeks are sunken in, and there’s a sack of skin under his jaw that looks like a turkey wattle, only worse because it’s got tiny gray whiskers sticking out all over it. I mean, this guy’s got hairs sticking out all over the place—his ears, his nose, his chin. And his eyebrows look like a wig factory blew up in his face. Sheesh! Why doesn’t somebody just bury him and get it over with?

“Linda, this is my grandpa,” Gail says proudly. “You can call him Bim. Everybody does.” The next thing I know the old guy’s got his old eyes fixed on me and they’re starting to water up like he’s crying or something, and I almost start to wonder if he
is
crying, except I know old people’s eyes are
always watering for some reason.

“Gramps, this is Linda. She’s new in town. She’s going to be working with me. Isn’t that great?”

The old man nods his head a little. He works his mouth for a minute like he has to gather up some spit to wet his whistle before he can talk. Finally he says, real quietly, “Linda.” Just that. Just my name. Like he doesn’t have the strength to say anything else. Holy cow, somebody call the undertaker, will you?

“Hi,” I say. But that’s it. I’m not going to be caught dead calling anybody Bim.

The old guy turns his head when someone calls, “Hey Bim, where you been? I’ve just been sitting here waiting to beat you at a game.”

“Go on and have a seat, Gramps,” Gail says. “I’ll bring you some coffee in just a minute.”

The old man turns his eyes back to me. Now that he’s turned off the waterworks, I can see that his eyes are a deep blue, so much so that I’d say once, when he was young, they were probably his best feature. But that was before the rest of him shriveled up into this walking prune. He goes on staring at me, and I want to tell him to take a picture, it lasts longer, but I can’t say anything because he’s giving me the creeps. Another pervert. In my first two hours working at Pop’s Ice Cream Parlor, I’ve met a dozen old geezers, a bunch of middle-aged losers, about a zillion little kids, and a few high school kids who have already paired up, but not one single unclaimed good-looking guy. Not one single hunk like—well, like Austin Buchanan. Yeah, somebody like Austin Buchanan. I wish Austin could walk in that door, but it’s 1968 here and on this end of the timeline he’s probably been dust for at least a good decade. Maybe even longer than that. Yeah, probably even longer than that.

Monday, July 22, 1968

I
HAND THE
ignition key to a local named Ruben Poteat so he can take the ’57 pickup for a test drive. Steve said last year they let a fellow named Ernest Fortune take a brand new Camaro for a spin, and he drove it all the way to California. The highway patrol was alerted in a dozen states, but before he could be spotted and arrested for grand theft auto, Ernest totaled the Camaro and killed himself somewhere along the Pacific Coast Highway.

I just hope we see the pickup truck again. Ruben Poteat is another matter. I’d feel just fine if he took his business elsewhere. I’m not sure I trust him. But then, he probably doesn’t trust me either. I am, after all, a used car salesman.

Ruben honks the horn and waves and pulls out of the lot with tires squealing. Great. Just what I need. Some guy who thinks he’s a Nascar racer taking one of my better models on the road.

Well, for now, I’d best get back to my desk. Plenty of paperwork waiting to be done. The Setterquists—nice young couple—want to know what kind of deal I can give them on that ’65 Chevelle. It’s in good shape, mid-size but roomy, not too many miles on the odometer. They’re going to need something larger than that Volkswagen Beetle they have now, once the baby comes.

Inside the trailer a cloud of tobacco smoke wafts like morning fog, drifting outward and bumping up against the walls of faux oak paneling. I have the windows open and a fan that blows straight across my desk, but the fan doesn’t do much to spare me the stench. It just means my papers have to be anchored with paperweights. I can’t imagine how bad it’s going to be in here, come winter.

Ike Kerlee has his feet up on his desk and his hands behind his head. “That Ruben,” he says with an admiring smile, “he really knows how to burn rubber, don’t he?”

I grunt my assent and turn away. Today marks one week on this job, and I am miserable. I had a calling once, and now it’s gone. I destroyed it with my own two hands.

Sitting at my desk, I take inventory of the tools of my new trade: loan application forms; pens that advertise Birchfield Chevrolet; pencils and erasers and scrap paper; an adding machine; extra rolls of adding machine paper.

I hate numbers. The only numbers in my old job were chapter and verse. And of course, the deficit in the church budget—though I managed never to worry too much about that. I floated on the assurance of the Lord’s provision.

But that was then, in the other life. Now it’s through numbers that I will feed my family.

I look out the window and see Steve in the distance, wandering around the new car lot with a couple of prospective buyers. Funny thing about Steve is that he has no idea about the strange happenings up at the house. Oddly enough, it was Donna who said we shouldn’t tell him. “I know Steve better than any of you,” she’d said. “You tell him what Vernita said, not only the whole of Black Mountain knows, but the whole world knows.”

Meg and I agreed to keep the secret, knowing that was best for now. One thing we wondered, though, was whether there would be any more
“sightings.” Or maybe we’ve seen all we’re going to see. That Vernita Ponder said the thing seems to go dormant and nothing happens for a long time. Maybe the shooting was a small eruption and the volcano has gone back to sleep.

Certainly that would be all right. I have more than I can handle right here in 1968. With Meg and Linda both angry at me and the memory of Charlene plaguing me—well, the mystery of how to do right by women is enough. The mystery of seeing into time can be solved by the next occupants of the house, far as I’m concerned.

Charlene. Every memory of her leaves me feeling kicked in the gut. Still, I can’t help wondering what she’s doing now. She returned to Des Moines, I know. But what she’s doing, what her plans are—that’s a blank. We all agreed there would be no contact ever again, not between me and Charlene. Even Charlene agreed. She wept when she said it, but she took her leave and that was that. Though I can’t help feeling that somehow even that was left incomplete. Something, I sense, was left undone. But it’s too late now to make things right.

A squeal of tires signals Ruben’s return. Ike Kerlee drops his feet to the floor and laughs. He crushes out his cigarette in one of the ashtrays on his desk and lights up another. The front door of the trailer flies open and Ruben Poteat, dripping sweat and looking windblown, steps inside. “You got anything that can do zero to sixty in thirty seconds or less?” he asks.

I long for the days when the numbers were chapter and verse.

Wednesday, July 24, 1968

I
DECIDED TO
play some music on the old widow’s phonograph, so I looked through her albums and chose the collection of Brahms.
Piano Concerto No. 1
is playing now. I pause in my dishwashing to listen. There has always been something uncommonly soothing about this piece, as though just below the notes someone is speaking words of comfort. I believe I could stand here for hours, just gazing out the window and listening.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I turn abruptly from the sink to see who’s behind me. A woman sits in one of the rocking chairs by the fireplace, holding a teacup in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

I’m aware of my heart pounding in my chest. Yes, she startled me, to say the least. “It’s all right,” I say. “I’m just not used to—” I finish the sentence by shaking my head.

“To people suddenly appearing?”

“Yes.”

“It
is
rather strange, isn’t it?” But she doesn’t
look
like she thinks it’s strange. She looks as though, to her, this is perfectly normal.

I take a moment to catch my breath and let my heart settle. Then I ask, “You know about the house then?”

She smiles placidly. “Yes, I know about it.”

She is a strikingly beautiful Negro woman, with well-defined features, intelligent eyes, and skin the color of creamed coffee. She wears her shoulder-length hair in a myriad of braids, very different from the Afro that’s so popular now. But then, she doesn’t live in the now, does she?

“What year is it,” I ask, “where you are?”

She looks at me with a face of unchanging serenity. “2005.”

I gasp, feeling myself once more awash with wonder. “2005,” I whisper. “Why, it’s the twenty-first century!”

“And where you are?” she asks.

“1968.”

She nods. “I’d offer you some tea but …” Her voice trails off and she smiles again, somewhat apologetically.

“I know,” I say. “My daughter told me. I wouldn’t be able to hold the cup.”