Time Flying (10 page)

After a few minutes, her distracting work done, Amanda pushed herself up off the floor, and turned to look down on me while she distractedly ran her majorette’s baton through her fingers. My eyes met hers again and I made a concerted effort to keep them there, ignoring the slightly more interesting view my vantage point offered.

“See you later, Richie,” Amanda said, her small smile back.

“Seeya.”

After Amanda left, I stood, stretched my arms out to the side, shaking off the tightness from sitting. Putting my feet together, I bent double at the waist, grabbing my ankles and stretching my hamstrings. Amazing what time does to our bodies, so slowly, a day at a time, so little we barely notice. But then, it's all back and you realize how far you'd gone from this. I reached down and slapped the leather basketball, and when it bounced up, I hit it again. A few repetitions, and in a few strokes, I had the ball in a normal dribble. Down the court, through my moving legs a few times, around the back both ways, and then at the top of the key, I accelerated toward the basket until a couple steps past the free-throw line I took one more dribble with my left hand, transferring the ball to my right as I jumped. The rim hit my arm a good four inches below my wrist, and I slammed the ball through the hoop, catching the rim in my right hand and hanging on for a brief second before letting go to land back on both feet.

I'm just a shade over six foot three. At my best, first time through the 70s, I couldn't come close to doing what I had just done, but now, not quite four months since arriving back here, I had, gotten strong enough to dunk off the dribble, quite easily. The path I followed this trip through the decade was beginning to bend further and further away from the original. I left the ball bouncing as I picked up my gym bag and walked toward the doors to the parking lot, wondering if it were possible to bridge those two paths now, even if I wanted to.

My episode with Amanda had distracted me from what had happened before she showed up in the gym. The memory of my sudden return to 2007 hung over the rest of the day, darkening my thoughts. I'd promised my dad I'd drop by one of the job sites, and inventory some material. Though he never told me I couldn't climb and work with roofers, or help hang drywall, he didn’t like me doing anything that put me in a position to repeat last year’s accident, so I didn't. He didn't try and turn me into a clerk, but always seemed to find something that  sort of blended job that wouldn't look like a waste of time, but yet wouldn't put me in danger of getting hurt again. I enjoyed the work this time around, being more mature and experienced and considered getting to know this business better, quickly changed my mind, remembering hard economic times coming and nothing I could do would change history enough to avoid it.

I counted the materials on the list, about a 50/50 mix of shortages and overages, something which irritated my father to no end. He was constantly frustrated with this kind of thing, often complaining “people can't seem to master the fine art of counting.” This time around, his tirades made me smile, visibly at first, until he caught me and asked “what's so goddamn funny?” After that, I managed to hide my enjoyment of my much younger than I remember him father getting pissed. Fortunately, on this day he wasn't on site, instead working in the office.

After a couple hours checking and double-checking the numbers, I put the inventory forms into the folder and sat down to eat the ham sandwich I had packed into my gym bag. Since my work on this day didn’t include manual labor, I had stayed in the sweats I'd worn at the gym. The temperature was a little too warm for them, but the short basketball trunks worn at the time didn’t work for me off the court. They'd never bothered me before, but after years of fashionably long and somewhat baggy shorts, these I found myself again having to wear, with their legs ending a few inches below the crotch made me look like one of the Village People. The first time I pulled a pair from my dresser and put them on, I looked in the mirror and imagined myself in a leather biker's cap, an Indian Chief on one side of me, the construction worker on the other. Jeesh, at least I understand now why we wore those long tube socks. Three months later, and I still hadn't gotten used to wearing the shorts again.

Lunch time on the job had come and gone, so I sat on the lowered tailgate of the El Camino listening to the sounds of the construction site and ate my ham sandwich alone, since my mood didn’t suit or desire company. I tried for as long as I could to deny the incident in the gym was my traveling back to 2007. Had to be. There was no doubt I'd had a car accident, but thinking about it in the detached way I'd been able to do here in 1976, proved different from finding myself in the wreckage of my car, unable to move, a number of people trying to come to my rescue. The man with the round glasses calling for the “Jaws of Life” meant they were having to cut me out of my ruined Chrysler Pacifica. 

Great.

I still didn’t believe this experience was my life “flashing before my eyes,” because it was taking a hell of a long time, and I had changed so much in the course of the three short months I had been here. Try as I might, the “I must be dead” idea would not fit into the puzzle, so more and more the massive hallucination brought on by the accident theory seemed a better solution. I missed my wife and daughter, but the thought of going back to a situation full of any number of kinds of pain didn't appeal to me at all. There is a certain comfort to being in your past. I knew in the fall, Jimmy Carter would be elected President of the United States, the Russians wouldn't be launching ICBMs at us, and it would be a long, long time before another Arab oil embargo created lines at the gas pump. On the other hand, I was aware Elvis had about a year to live, and I wondered how I could get to a concert before next August. I had to admit to myself I hadn't a clue who would win the World Series in October, or the next Superbowl.

From time to time, I would think about the things I remembered happening between 1976 and 2007, the good and the bad. I wondered trying to change them would be of any use. In 1980 for instance, should I get on a bus or airplane to New York and head off Mark David Chapman, kick his ass before he stalked and killed John Lennon? A good friend of mine in 2007, who is a Beatle fanatic, would vote for trying to talk him into leaving John alone and shooting Yoko instead, since he believes she broke the band up! What about John Hinckley? Should I go to Washington, DC and stop him from shooting President Reagan? Given my actions over the past few months, I didn't have any clear devotion to preserving the time line of my life. I'd upended the whole damn thing. As long as I'm here, why should I stop with the things that directly affect me? Why not reshape history in any number of ways? I have the potential to mess with some key turning points I know are coming up.

But, I realized despite all of my grand ideas about changing the world I remember, I wouldn't. What I truly wanted was to get back to my family and resume the 2007 life I'd grown accustomed to. Sure, reliving some dark days and making them a bit lighter was fun, and I'd be lying if I said flirting with Amanda Tully wasn't titillating, amazed as I was I didn’t feel any guilt about it. I sometimes experienced a twinge of fear about overturning the chain of events so much my wife might not be available to me in 1990, the year we would meet. 

And always on the periphery of my thoughts about my situation was the wondering what my experiences in Belton the day before my car crash in 2007 meant. According to Annie Bennett, I will bodily travel back to 1933 sometime in 2008. On the one hand, believing she was right was comforting, because it meant I would in fact, return from this time. On this day however, sitting on the lowered tailgate of Girrard Construction's El Camino, my dark attitude whispered to me I would travel to 1933 from the 2008 that proceeded from this timeline. What if I never made returned to 2007, but instead aged from here, until in 2008 I either stumbled upon or had forced upon me the secret to bodily doing what I had done in this case, with only my consciousness making the trip?

It should be pretty obvious why I was bummed out.

When I considered all of this, my trip this morning back to 2007 didn't seem so threatening, but instead gave me some hope I would return to my life in the future. But first, I had some loose ends to tie up in 1976. Nodding to myself, the decision made and committed to, I pushed myself off the El Camino's tailgate, collected and walked my lunch trash over to the small fire my Dad's crew had built to burn trash, again amazed at how much things had changed over the years. “Hang on a minute,” I called to the crew's painter, Delray, whose afternoon entertainment of tossing an almost empty bucket of paint thinner into the fire to enjoy the explosion was imminent. I threw my trash in and smiled at him to go for it, and jogged toward the car. I needed to go see someone and have a conversation I'd been putting off.

25 minutes later I pulled the car into the driveway at home. I found Thelma and Katie in the backyard, my sister sitting on the ground surrounded by her Barbies and their clothes, Thelma sitting on the picnic table sewing something. I'd pulled a couple Cokes from the fridge in the kitchen and held one out to Thelma as I sat down on the bench across the picnic table from her. She nodded for me to set the can down on the table. I did so and popped the ring top on mine, peeling thin slice of aluminum off of the can and laying it on the table.

“So, what do you know about all this, Thelma?”

She regarded me over the top of the glasses she wore for reading and close work. “I know you're different from you were before you became 45 years old.”

“47.”

“47, right.” Thelma admitted, looking back down to her sewing.

“Different? How?” I asked, taking a drink of Coke.

Thelma shrugged. “My Nan passed on 22 years ago. She raised me, after my Mama died having me, and my daddy…” She sighed, not looking up from the sewing, and added, “He ran off.”

I nodded, interested. I had never heard this story before.

“Nan dyin' hit me hard. I had my boys, but they were old enough they didn't need me so much anymore, so I didn't handle it well.” Thelma put the sewing down, took off her glasses, opened her can of Coke and tipped her head back for a drink. She glanced over at Katie for a second before continuing.

“She'd been gone for a month or so, and it was harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. Today, they'd say I was…’depressed.’ Back then though, I just had the blues. One day, it got to be too much. I had gone into Nan's room to start going through her things, and started to feel real strange. I went to sit down on her bed, but didn't make it down. They told me later I collapsed and hit my head on the night stand.”

Thelma took another drink of Coke, her eyes looking off into the distance. “Next thing I knew, I was sitting on a bench in the park in Memphis, Tennessee in 1936.” Her eyes turned and she stared at me, daring me to express any disbelief.

I didn't.

“Everything about it was real. After a day or two, I just kinda accepted the whole thing and started living day to day. Nan back living again, me younger, I didn't really question any of it, figuring it was God’s will, I guess. Sometimes, I thought maybe I was dead, or I was 20 and had dreamed everything else, but I missed my boys something terrible, and would not believe they were just my imagination.”

I nodded, understanding her perspective without saying anything, because I wanted to the hear the whole story.

“At first,” Thelma continued, after another sip of Coke, “I pretty much did what I remembered doing the first time. Going to work at the River Hotel, helping Nan with the washing she took in, whatnot. After a while though, I remembered I was 18 years older than the world thought, and I seemed to be living in my past. I didn’t have to make the same mistakes this time, and so I began to change my life and try some things I hadn't done before. I also did NOT do some other things I HAD done the first time.”

At this, Thelma glanced over at me and smiled. “I made a few folks pretty upset.” Her smile grew wider. “Once I got going, I loved it. I read books I'd never read before, I quit the hotel and traveled around some, got a job writing for a newspaper! Learned to take photographs.” She kept smiling at the memory.

“Did you tell anybody what had happened?” I asked.

“No siree, I did
not
. Who would have believed me? I’d have been locked me up in a padded room, or worse,” she said.

“How did it all work out?” I grew hungry for the answer, I could sense was close.

Thelma paused, thinking, and I saw the smile slowly fade. “You must understand something, Richie. I love my boys. I missed them something terrible, but had made some mistakes the first time I had no intention of repeating, given another chance.” She pursed her lips, turning her face away. I thought I could see the beginnings of a tear forming in the corner of her left eye.

I realized immediately what she meant. Given the chance to repeat an important part of her life, she made the choice not to be a mother. I found myself nodding, understanding what she had gone through. Thelma had raised two boys, Christopher and Darnell, completely by herself. The boys father clearly being someone who, when given a second chance, Thelma took a “pass” on. Therefore, her alternate past included no Christopher, the Crispus Attucks High School basketball star I'd met once and idolized from then on, and no Darnell, the laughing, always-joking pastry chef who lived in Chicago and had the biggest, most magnificent afro I'd ever seen.

“How was that?” I asked, ashamed at the stark simplicity of my question.

“Broke my heart.” She said, looking directly at me. Somehow the tear had disappeared, or maybe had never been on her face in the first place.

Thelma paused a second and took a last drink of Coke.

“And healed it.”

I nodded again, comprehending exactly what she meant, and understanding why on my first day back here, she had asked me what I was back here to do.

“You got a do-over, and you lived differently,' I said. 'How could you tell I was going through the same kind of thing?”