Written in Time (13 page)

All but one. The long-barreled Colt Single Action Army, five chambers loaded, rested on the nightstand.
 

Jack got into bed, his right arm curling around Ellen’s bare shoulders. “Wanna make love? Might be our last chance in this century.”
 

“What a come-on line, Jack! You ought to save that one for a book!”
 

“Well, it might be.”
 

Ellen rolled into his arms and brushed her lips against his. “But just think how romantic it will be making love in the past, before we were even born. Do you want the little guy to be all tired out? Don’t you want to save up until—”
 

“He’s getting bigger by the second. He won’t get tired out, and I don’t need to save up. I make more all the time. Even when I’m sleeping, I’m always working, making more just for us. I’ll get pimples. You wouldn’t want me to show up in the past with a zit or something. Have you considered that? I think not” Jack Naile’s left hand cradled his wife’s face and he kissed her hard on the mouth. The zit thing almost always worked . . . .
 

The movie set looked just like something out of a movie, with several cameras—one of them on what looked like railroad tracks—and lights and canvas-backed folding chairs with names or titles stenciled on them and bunches of people. Half of them just milled around and seemed to be doing absolutely nothing, while the other half walked or occasionally ran. The frontier “town” consisted of a wide street lined on either side with clapboard commercial buildings, flat-roofed adobe huts of varying size, corrals and a big red barn at one end of the street, smallish houses with white picket fences at the other. What Elizabeth could see from standing near the catering truck and something her father had called a “generator truck” indicated that about half of the commercial buildings were not buildings at all, but merely facades, with nothing behind them.
 

The purplish gray mountains off in the distance—to the east?—were wholly real, she assumed.
 

Her father and David—David reluctantly—were off somewhere with the armorer, the property man in charge of the guns, while Elizabeth and her mother stood beside a long table stacked with stainless steel coffee urns, white Styrofoam cups and every imaginable kind of donut or breakfast pastry. There were bottles of water, too, representing several different brands. Bottled water, Liz had always thought, tasted pretty much like bottled water, regardless of what label it carried.
 

Holly Kinsey was someone Elizabeth had been reading about almost since picking up her first pop-culture magazine, watched as a presenter or recipient on innumerable awards shows, seen in every movie the woman had made. Attired in an ankle length, velvet-looking robin’s egg-blue dress with a high lace collar, her usual shoulder-length brown hair hidden beneath a wig of cascading curls reaching to her waist, she walked straight toward them and stuck out her right hand. Her pansy eyes sparkled as she spoke. “I’m Holly! You must be Elizabeth. Hi! And you’re Mrs. Naile?”
 

“Ellen, please.”
 

“Ellen, then.”
 

Elizabeth shook Holly Kinsey’s offered hand. “I never thought I’d ever get to meet you, even when Mom and Daddy said you were one of the stars of the movie. I’ve seen every one of your movies. My favorite was Sweetheart’s Revenge.”
 

Holly Kinsey flashed brilliantly white teeth as she smiled and said, “That was my favorite, too. But I think your mom and dad’s movie is going to be just terrific. The raspberry danish are really good, and there’s orange juice and soft drinks, if you don’t like coffee, or I can send out and get you something.”
 

Elizabeth was aware, on one level, that the thread of conversation continued for a moment, then passed her and resumed, but between Holly Kinsey and her mother. Holly Kinsey was gabbing with her mother! Her mother! And, if this time travel thing really happened, she’d never be able to tell Keisha or Amelia or any of her other girlfriends about it! Life sucked . . .
 

Elizabeth would look beautiful, albeit a little nervous, Ellen guessed. Ellen, on the other hand, felt perfectly stupid. She’d never liked dressing up when she was a little girl, even for Halloween. And looking at herself in the mirror, dressed this way, considering what lay ahead of them, was extremely creepy. Her own hair was pulled back in a tight bun, some tendrils drawn out on either side of her face and made into curls by one of the makeup technicians. Holly had personally accompanied them to wardrobe after making the suggestion, “Would you guys like to be extras in the street scene? One of the AD’s— assistant directors—can fix it up so the Guild doesn’t throw a fit. Come on! It’ll be fun! Especially for you, Liz!”
 

After that, Ellen Naile sank into what-can-you-do mode and agreed, figuring that Lizzie would have a wonderful time.
 

Wardrobe was full of enormous, uncomfortable-looking dresses and inane hats and clunky-looking shoes. Holly Kinsey shepherding them—almost smotheringly—every step of the way, outfits were selected and trailers were found and Ellen and Elizabeth went their separate ways. Damned if she’d wear a waist cincher, Ellen had squeezed herself into the dress and practiced her contortionist skills to get it closed up her back.
 

Hats were something Ellen Naile positively detested, and especially the one she wore. It had a broad brim, with lace trim banded around the crown matching the tight and itchy collar that felt like it was closing more tightly around her throat by the second. Remembering to catch up the enormous skirt and billowing petticoats under it, Ellen Naile opened the trailer door and warily navigated the trailer steps, her feet buttoned inside what had to be the ugliest cross between orthopedic shoes and combat boots ever conceived.
 

Settling her borrowed clothing, Ellen began looking for Elizabeth, after a few seconds and even fewer hesitant steps encountering her so suddenly that they almost bumped into one another, Elizabeth climbing down from the trailer next door.
 

“Oh, you look beautiful, Lizzie!”
 

“You look beautiful, Mom. You really do.”
 

“I feel like an idiot.” As if on cue, a wind blew up along the alley-width walkway between the rows of trailers and Ellen Naile felt her hat starting to go. She put her right hand, open palm, on top of it to keep it in place. “Having to dress like this every day is going to suck big time,” Ellen declared.
 

Lizzie started to cry, and Ellen thought, “To hell with the hat,” and put both arms around her daughter and just hugged her close while the wind kept blowing. But the wind from the mountains beyond the fake Western town wasn’t the source of the chill that Ellen felt. The reason for the icy tingle that spread upward along Ellen’s spine and stopped so abruptly at the crown of her head under the damned hat that her body shook with a paroxysm was something different. Both she and her daughter had glimpsed the reality that stalked their destiny, haunted their souls. They would be in a time when women were cared for and protected and sheltered and never, ever consulted, a time when everyday tasks consumed enormous amounts of time and a woman’s intellect and desires weren’t given a second thought.
 

“Kirk Douglas always believed—said so in print in his autobiography—that if he rode real erect-like in the saddle, he’d look like more of a horseman than he was. And he did.”
 

Jack glanced down from the saddle into the weathered brown face of Elvis Wilson. “Are you saying I should sit up straighter in the saddle, Elvis?”
 

“Since you and your family got here ten days ago, and you connived me into teaching you and them some ridin’, you’ve gotten a damn sight better, Jack. But until you get better still, sit erect. Remember Kirk’s words, and you’ll look good, at least.”
 

The advice of Elvis Wilson was to be taken seriously. Some of the stuntmen on the set claimed Wilson was almost in the Ben Johnson class when it came to horsemanship. Once Jack Naile and his family had arrived on location, Jack had set out to find somewhere in the area where basic horsemanship could be learned.
 

It was Holly Kinsey who had said, “Elvis Wilson taught me and half the actors I know. He’s good, and he doesn’t expect miracles. And he likes kids, so he’d be great with Liz. Your daughter is just the sweetest and smartest girl in the world. And is your son David terrific-looking! He’s so awfully mature.” After thanking the actress for the compliments to his daughter and son, Jack had looked up Elvis Wilson, who was doing some stunt riding and a little acting in Angel Street when he wasn’t supervising the horse wrangling. Despite Jack’s insistence, Elvis Wilson refused to take money for his services, saying instead, “Everybody who’s a decent person should learn himself to ride. Folks who aren’t—decent, I mean—well, the horses are better off. Buy me a steak dinner or a bottle of scotch sometime, and we’ll call it even.”
 

David did not like horses. A natural athlete in every sport he’d ever tried, riding interested him not at all and chiefly because he openly ridiculed everything and anything which had to do with the Old West. This was, of course, because his father liked westerns, was a dedicated student of Earpiana and owned a cowboy hat and a Colt .45. Yet David agreed to the riding lessons without protest.
 

That only heightened Jack’s already eerie feelings concerning their future in the past. Ellen, who loved horses but had ridden almost not at all, made steady progress, as did Liz, who admitted that she was afraid a horse would bite her. Of the Naile family’s four students of equitation, it was David, of course, who was learning to ride so well that, with proper wardrobe, he could have served as a Mongol warrior under Genghis Khan.
 

Jack glanced down again into Elvis’ weathered face. Wilson wasn’t made-up; the scene in which Wilson was about to perform was one in which his face would never be seen. Wilson would be riding across a great barren expanse as one of fifty desperadoes on their way to wreak death and destruction. At Wilson’s prompting of the second-unit director, Jack and David would swell that number to fifty-two.
 

“Nobody will see my face wearing some damn cowboy hat, right?” David had insisted when the idea was suggested a day earlier.
 

“Nobody will see you wearing a cowboy hat, son.”
 

“Fine. I’ll do it.”
 

David, hat stuffed under his arm and leading his already saddled horse, walked out of the holding corral. “We ready?”
 

Elvis looked up at Jack Naile and winked, then went to get his horse.
 

It was hot despite the wind, or maybe because of it. The wind rustled the manes of the horses, tore at the hats of the men and necessitated squinting against driven dust. But it was the perfect special effect for the shot, and cost nothing. If Jack had learned one thing about moviemaking since they’d arrived on set, it was that free stuff was good.
 

“What did you say one of those camera trucks was called, Dad?”
 

“An insert car, I think.”
 

There were two of them, whatever they were called, trucks with special suspension, each mounted with a movie camera, the cameras rolling. The second-unit director had just called “Action” and was getting the long shot of the head desperado turning around in the saddle and giving his cohort of nasties a pep talk about all the fun death and destruction that they could perpetrate upon the town. In another few seconds, he’d wave his sombrero and it would be the signal for everyone to start forward on their mounts, at little more than a canter at first, then breaking into a gallop.
 

“You up for this, Dad?” David inquired.
 

“Yeah. I’m not going to do anything dangerous. And you remember that, too. If the other riders start going a little too fast for us, we can rein back a little. Nobody’ll notice. I mean, we’re supposed to be bad guys, not cavalry in a John Ford western.”
 

“Whatever.”
 

The sombrero was waved, and, more to the point, the second-unit director signaled. Trucks rolled and mounted men started forward. “Kind of exciting,” Jack Naile enthused to his son over the clopping of hoofbeats and the creaking of saddles and gun leather.
 

“Kind of dusty.”
 

“That Holly Kinsey really seemed to like you, David.”
 

Jack remembered to sit up straighter in the saddle, pulling his costume-department cowboy hat lower over his eyes against the rising clouds of dust.
 

“If I tell you something, promise you won’t tell Mom?”
 

This was David’s way of insulating himself from Ellen’s direct criticism. David knew perfectly well that Jack would hold a confidence sacred from anyone except his wife. But prefacing the revelation as he was, David knew that his mother would never mention it, no matter what.
 

“Tell me.” That was Jack’s usual sort of response, noncommittal.
 

“Tell me first. What did she say? Holly, I mean.”
 

“That you were good-looking and seemed—yeah, mature. Holly said mature. Why?”
 

“I had sex with her the first time a little over a week ago.”
 

“We’ve only been here a little over a week, David! The first time?! For God’s sake! She’s almost old enough—”
 

“I never dated anyone younger than I am. And don’t worry—Holly’s on the pill.”
 

“Aww shit, son! Your mother and I never had sex with anybody but each other. Ever.”
 

“It’s the nineties, Dad, huh. You wouldn’t buy one of these horses without taking it for a test ride, right?”