Written in Time (10 page)

“That’s where Jack Naile’s store once stood, Mr. Naile,” Arthur Beach announced, pointing a well-manicured finger across that street.
 

“Remember, Arthur? Call me Jack. Mr. Naile’s what they call my son.”
 

“Right.”
 

“That law office?” Clarence asked.
 

“Only the foundation is original, Mr. Jones. The building-commission people and the historical-society people were almost one and the same, husbands on the building commission and wives on the historical society. So when downtown was redeveloped, the wives got the husbands to save as much as they could, which is why this street looks like it’s part of another town or something by comparison to the rest of downtown.”
 

The “rest of downtown” wasn’t all that much, really.
 

The old main street, where they stood, ran a distance of a long city block. The old foundations and some old facades, many of the buildings vacant, lined both sides of the street. At three of the four corners were short blocks which, Arthur Beach had told them, were part of the downtown-development project. The fourth corner was nothing more than where the highway did a right angle and went on past Atlas, across higher desert and toward the nearby mountains. A convenience store, an ordinary gas station that offered mechanical work and a diner that advertised it had slot machines and also sold ammunition were the only businesses there.
 

The old main street—which was called Old Main Street—was admirably wide. At eleven in the morning on Sunday, there was no traffic at all. Jack Naile stepped off the curb and started across the street.
 

The sun wasn’t quite overhead yet and its angle allowed Jack to see his own reflection in the plate glass window of the law office. The wind coming in off the desert blew his longish, still mostly brown hair across his forehead. He noted that the corners of his mouth were downturned under his salt-and-pepper mustache. Was he as wary as he looked, he wondered absently, or was this just a face he turned toward Clarence—who had been pissing him off— and Arthur Beach, who was so cooperative that it made him wonder if Beach had some ulterior motive?
 

Jack stepped up onto the far side curb and stood in front of the window. He stood just a little less than six feet, and his shoulders looked broad within the A-2 bomber jacket. Since he’d stopped drinking beer and started drinking white wine, his waist was back down to a thirty-four, with not too much of a droop at the belly. Not bad for mid-forties, he reassured himself.
 

Jack thrust his hands into his pockets, his eyes glancing at the foundation below the plate-glass window. What did he feel? Did he know those bricks? Or would he? What he felt, really, was that he wished Ellen were with him, standing beside him. And he felt naked—because he’d flown, he’d left the Seecamp .32 in the gradually self-destructing glove compartment of Clarence’s Honda. Jack Naile was so used to the feel of the little gun in his right pants pocket that its absence was something of which he was keenly, continually aware.
 

He looked back into the plate-glass window. Clarence, a big guy but looking that much bigger beside the slightly built Arthur Beach, was crossing the street. Jack lit a cigarette.
 

“Do you want to see the ranch? I mean, what’s left of it, Jack?” Arthur Beach called out.
 

“Yeah, let’s see the ranch.”
 

As he’d lit the cigarette, Jack Naile had noticed the bronze plaque set into the foundation, assumedly by the local historical society. It read Jack Naile—General Merchandise. He noticed that his hands were trembling and thrust them into his pockets.
 

Clarence refused to enter the ruin of the house and stayed by the car. Jack stood within what had obviously once been a quite large home. Whether the structure had been claimed by fire—his own faulty electrical work?—or wind, there was no way to tell upon casual inspection. All that remained was a meticulously fitted stone-and-mortar chimney, most of the mortar gone, the chimney jutting defiantly upward from an extraordinarily large hearth of the same construction.
 

The land on which the house was built was almost a terrace, as level as if graded by modern equipment. The lot was separated from a stream by the distance of what would have been the width of an ordinary backyard, its far edge abutting the sloping bank. Fast moving, ideal for hydro-electric power, the stream’s waters emerged from deep within a forest of pines, its boundary perhaps a hundred yards distant. A double rank of the trees broke away from the woods, arced downward and across the opposite boundary of the level terrace and onward, nearly intersecting the single-lane wide dirt track that had led them up toward the house from the highway. The highway was eight or ten miles back, perhaps two hundred feet lower in elevation.
 

The drive from the highway had been less boring than the last leg of the drive from Reno to Atlas, the terrain rolling up through foothills and into the mountains, mountains that would have been visible from a porch here, had one still stood.
 

“Who owns this property now?” Jack heard Clarence asking Arthur Beach.
 

Beach answered, “I don’t know. I’m still trying to find out. Some corporation, it looks like.”
 

“Find out, Arthur,” Jack Naile called back over his shoulder without turning around. “I’d really appreciate it.”
 

On the drive from Atlas to what had been the Naile ranch, Arthur Beach had asked about the book that Jack had told Beach was being written. Jack had given truthful answers about the progress of their research and the general plotline, never mentioning that with each detail that was uncovered, it seemed more and more frighteningly obvious that at issue was not a book, but an inescapable trip through time.
 

“You know, if you and your nephew would like, I can arrange for you to get some help if you want to go to Carson City, to the State Historical Society. It’s not too far below Reno. Do you have the time?”
 

Jack Naile looked at Arthur Beach, then at Clarence. “What do you think, Clarence?”
 

“You let me drive, we’ll get there with time to spare.”
 

Clarence was an excellent driver, but Jack Naile didn’t like being driven by someone who seemed frequently inclined to exceed speed limits, as Clarence had exhorted him to do while they’d crossed the desolate expanse that was the final leg of their trip to Atlas. When necessary, Jack could speed with the best of them, but never otherwise. He’d developed that habit—trying to attract as little attention as possible to his driving—when he and Ellen had lived in the metropolitan Chicago area and carrying a gun was seriously illegal.
 

Jack started walking toward Arthur Beach’s white Jeep Cherokee, resigned to the fact that Clarence, who wore a thirty-six leg length, would get the front passenger seat again. “Let’s see what time it is when we get back to town. And then I might get you to make that call, Arthur. I can’t thank you enough already.” Getting into the Jeep’s backseat was bad enough, but getting out of it made him feel like a cork getting tugged out of a wine bottle.
 

***

 
“The reason we learned nothing new in Atlas was because there was nothing new to learn—it’s a pile of crap.” Variations on that theme had liberally laced Clarence’s end of the conversation for the entire length of the trip back to and past Reno, toward Carson City. There had also been several remarks about Arthur Beach being “in” on whatever “it” was. Their overnight motel reservations—they would be flying back to Atlanta the following morning—were in Reno, and, after the visit to the State Historical Society, they would be retracing part of their route.
 

Finding the State Historical Society using Arthur Beach’s directions was effortless in the light Sunday traffic, though finding a space in which to park the rented Ford proved somewhat challenging. Once inside, however, the first person they approached turned out to be the woman Arthur Beach had phoned and asked to assist them. Mrs. Hattie Lincoln, mid-sixties and a little plump, with a pinkish face and cheeks that indicated high blood pressure, heavy alcohol intake or too much blush, had already assembled mounds of materials for their review.
 

Jack told Clarence what to look for, and they split the work, Mrs. Lincoln popping in on them several times in the office she’d let them use. If Ellen had been with them, the research would have been smoother and more productive, Ellen being the best and most meticulous researcher Jack Naile had ever encountered. Yet even without her, with time running out before the facility closed for the day, Jack unearthed several documents, which Mrs. Lincoln cheerfully copied for them.
 

Atlas’ single newspaper from shortly after the town’s birth as a mining camp in 1861 until the last issue came off the presses in 1933 was the Atlas View, and copies of the weekly’s every issue from 1877 until 1933 were on file. Jack had majored in English in college—which, in part, accounted for his phenomenal (lack of) economic success—but had been a course or so short of a major in History. And, it took little historical insight to discern that the Atlas View was staunchly Republican, as Nevada had always been in those days, some even suggesting that Nevada’s comparatively quick and easy shot at statehood had been because of that.
 

With more and more sucking up in the general media about the Democrats and the wonders of their presidential candidate, Jack Naile found the old newspaper’s politics remarkably refreshing.
 

After thanking Mrs. Lincoln—no relation to the Lincoln, she told them when Clarence asked—Jack Naile climbed behind the wheel of the rental car. Clarence settled into the passenger seat beside him, and remained stonily silent for the duration of the drive back to Reno.
 

The aircraft an hour outside of Atlanta, Clarence started talking. “It pisses me off that you guys are going to disappear on me. You’re about ninety percent of the only family I’ve got.” Jack didn’t bother to correct the math, just let Clarence talk. “I don’t know if I can hack it, Jack.”
 

Jack Naile took Clarence’s hand for a moment; if the other passengers thought they were gay or something, he didn’t care. “Look, Ellen and the kids and I love you, too, Clarence. You’ve always been like another son to us. You know that. But, if this crazy thing happens, I can’t change it, alter it so that you can come along. Anyway, I understand they cooked with peanut oil a whole lot in—”
 

“Knock it off about my allergy.”
 

“Look,” Jack continued. “From everything that’s stacking up, I don’t think Ellen and I can stop this from happening.” Sometimes, however awkward, there was no time like the present. Jack cleared his throat and told Clarence, “When we first made out wills—”
 

“For God’s sake—”
 

“Let me finish, son. When Ellen and I first made out wills, when the kids were little, we named you as our contingent beneficiary.”
 

“I get all the bills, huh?”
 

Jack forced himself to laugh, and so did Clarence. “No. No bills, but the house is worth a good chunk of dough. We have other assets, like royalties off books, and there might be more money off this movie deal.”
 

“I don’t wanna talk about that now.”
 

“Fine. Later.” If there would be enough later left.
 

Jack had barely walked into the house when the phone rang. “Take it, Jack; whoever it is will want to talk to you anyway,” Ellen told him as she kissed him on the cheek.
 

“Right,” and Jack took the receiver from Elizabeth’s hand. It was their “agent.” “Yeah, Lars. What’s up?”
 

Lars’ voice betrayed his excitement. “They’re starting principal photography on Angel Street in six weeks, Jack! Six weeks and they write a check for pickin’ up the option! Hey! And, they want you guys out there—all expenses paid—the day they start shooting! Some publicity thing or something. Wonderful, huh!?”
 

Jack shook his head, incredulous at the news. “Hold on a second, Lars.” He pushed the hold button and told Ellen, the kids and Clarence, “Nothing wrong or anything; just the opposite. They’re starting principal photography in six weeks, we get the money in two weeks and they want us out wherever the hell they’re shooting it. All expenses paid.”
 

“I can’t leave my job,” David said flatly.
 

“Summer-school session one will be over the end of next week, David,” Elizabeth interjected. “You can work your days off to give you a four day weekend.”
 

“David’ll need more time than four days. We’re going to have to drive out there with our stuff. Can’t risk being separated from each other or what we hope to bring.” Jack punched back on with Lars, Ellen automatically handing Jack his cigarettes and lighter and pushing the ashtray nearer to the phone.
 

“Lars, how can they have a script? It hasn’t been more than a couple of weeks.”
 

“This is the sweet part, Jack. This screenwriter I never heard of liked your book, wrote the script and then took the script to his agent and the script was the reason they optioned your book. The only reason it’s taken this long— imagine!—is because they had to nail down the male lead. Some guy I never heard of, but he’s big with kids. Got some TV show that’s really up there.”
 

“You remember his name?”
 

“Naw. I’ll get it. Hey! Did Lars deliver or what, man! I’m gonna get you guys more deals like this! Wait! Just wait! Look, Jack, I’ll get back to you with more details.
 

Gotta fly!”
 

“Yeah, Lars. Have a nice flight. Thanks.” Jack Naile hung up the telephone, wondering why—knowing why— he was depressed even though he was about to see more money in one chunk than he’d ever seen in his life.