Written in Time (19 page)

“So, who’s this Jess Fowler guy? Local big shot?”
 

“Don’t rightly know a party’d call Jess Fowler that, but he owns half o’ ever’thin’ round these parts and has his damned eyes on—”
 

“Tom Bledsoe! In front of women to say such!”
 

“Sorry, Mary,” Tom called back over his shoulder, but then turned to David and Jack, his voice barely above a whisper. “He’s a sneakin’ son o’ a bitch for a fact.” He spat tobacco juice and fell silent.
 

For once in her life, Ellen Naile wished that she had a fat butt. The added cushioning would have helped. While she and Liz were taking turns at the outhouse, they agreed to use the ride to pump as much useful information as possible out of the Bledsoe women, hoping that Jack and David would do the same as concerned Tom Bledsoe.
 

While the springless wagon bounced and jostled along what would someday become the highway their lost Chevy Suburban had driven/would drive over so effortlessly, they worked the “pump.”
 

The actual year was 1896, but it was early fall rather than summer, the date September nineteenth. Atlas had not yet undergone the mining boom, which would be good news for David’s financial empire-building. Real-estate values would be low and would increase dramatically.
 

Jess Fowler was the local rich bastard, and then some. Some of the “I never gossip none, y’all know” that Mary Bledsoe shared with them concerning Fowler, if there were any substance to it beyond rumor and hearsay, drew a chilling portrait of a megalomaniacal sociopath, like something out of one of Jack’s old Hopalong Cassidy films—he loved them and thought that William Boyd was not only a fine actor, but had created an unforgettable character. Fowler owned much of the land and a substantial portion of the town which it surrounded, and he controlled much of the local government from behind the scenes.
 

Yet, more like a twentieth century rackets boss, Jess Fowler kept himself whistle clean with the law, letting his hired minions—the range detectives—do all of the dirty work.
 

Atlas, as an entity, was barely getting along. Fowler controlled the local economy with such a tight fist that he strangled economic growth or expansion, business dying unless it was his business. Ellen realized, sadly, that her family had done absolutely no research on the town in the years preceding the date of the photo from the magazine. That they could have been so shortsighted was, in the cold light of reality, beyond sobering.
 

The next few years, she realized, were a total unknown. Jack could have been killed, the store named by David after his late father. The possibilities were endlessly scary.
 

Mary Bledsoe, true to her sex, also craved information. She had pegged them as Easterners; Ellen confided that all of them had been born in Chicago and lived, for a number of years, in Georgia, not too far north of Atlanta. The combination of Chicago and Atlanta and having the apparent wherewithal to travel all the way to California seemed to have suggested to Mary Bledsoe that she— Ellen—and her daughter, who Mary evidently thought was older than fifteen, would have all the latest word on fashions of the day.
 

As Ellen and Elizabeth—quite valiantly, fantastic bullshitter that Lizzie could be—tried bluffing their way through talk of bustles, hats and hemlines, Ellen silently wondered if she would go mad here. A bustle would have been great at the moment, had she been able to sit on it; hats were something she wore with less frequency than aprons; hemlines, in the era from which she hailed, could be anywhere from the ankle to just south of the crotch. And Ellen Naile could not have cared less.
 

Ellen had a terrible thought. If the photo of Jack, Lizzie and Davey—her own image conspicuously absent— hadn’t been taken by her, her being behind the camera the accepted explanation within the family, had she died of boredom? Or merely been institutionalized among the insane?
 

David was given a turn at the reins, and the only time before that he had driven a horse-drawn conveyance was when he had just turned eight. The occasion involved a horse-drawn carriage in New Orleans and a driver who had become fed up (albeit, good-naturedly) with David kibitzing his driving techniques. That David was nine years older and driving two horses this time instead of one did not inspire Ellen Naile with that much confidence.
 

Bledsoe and Jack were talking about manly stuff, most pointedly about Jack’s revolver. “Yeah, a friend fixed it for me, Tom. And another friend refinished it. It has a fourteen ounce trigger pull.”
 

“I’d admire tryin’ it when we rest the horses, Jack.”
 

“And I’d admire trying that thumb buster on your hip, Tom.” Bravo, Jack! Ellen thought. Don’t let that guy hold your pistol unless you’re holding his. She was going crazy, Ellen decided; aside from the fact that her thoughts could have been some sort of perverted sexual reference, they were certainly paranoid. The Bledsoe family had been marvelous to them and there was no reason to suppose that any malicious thoughts had crossed any of their minds. Still, caution was a good thing.
 

His father had been practicing, David Naile decided. Jack Naile, who had been writing about guns and shooting since 1973 (a ridiculous contradiction, of course, knowing that it was only 1896), had always, with admirable honesty, portrayed his own marksmanship skills as mediocre, which they always had been. That his father had taken steps to correct that was obvious.
 

Firing the seven-and-one-half-inch barreled Colt Single Action Army at a deadfall tree from a one-handed dueling stance, he had just placed five earsplittingly loud shots into a circle of about four inches at what David estimated as just a little less than fifty feet.
 

David looked back toward the wagon. His mother, sister and the two Bledsoe women were holding their hands over their ears.
 

When Jack Naile reloaded the revolver and handed it to Tom Bledsoe in exchange for Bledsoe’s less spectacular looking and shorter barreled Colt, Bledsoe eyed the gun almost reverentially.
 

“Watch that trigger pull. Really light.”
 

Bledsoe raised the revolver and the first shot went off into the air. “Dang! That ain’t like nothin’ I ever shot ‘fore.”
 

This time, the revolver was lined up before Bledsoe even cocked the hammer. There was a reassuring mark on the dead tree. Bledsoe fired out the last three rounds and, David had to admit, wasn’t as good with the gun as his father had been, but hit what he aimed at.
 

David watched as his father made to fire Bledsoe’s revolver.
 

The gun barked, a puff of gray smoke emanating from the end of the barrel (his father would, correctly, call that portion of the revolver the “muzzle”). The bullet hit the dirt in front of the tree.
 

David’s ears rang so badly that he was certain it would be hours before he’d be able to hear properly. He was used to wearing ear protection on those occasions when he did any shooting; ear and eye protection were safety considerations that his father and mother had always driven home with both him and his sister.
 

His father changed the way he held the gun: if memory served, it was called a “Weaver stance.” He held the revolver in his dominant hand, pressing against his left hand, his left shoulder turned nearly toward the target.
 

The revolver discharged again; the tree was struck this time. Three more shots—David’s ears felt hollow, somehow—and the dead tree was “killed” three more times.
 

David watched as his father and Tom Bledsoe exchanged revolvers, exchanged pleasantries concerning them. He could hardly hear much of anything.
 

Jack inspected his revolver briefly, drew the hammer back to second position—when a genuine Colt or one of the twentieth-century Italian copies was cocked, the sound seemed to spell “C-o-l-t”—and swung open the loading gate. He punched out the empty brass and reloaded with his modern ammo, slipping a cartridge into the first chamber, skipping the next, and then loading the remaining four. Drawing the hammer to full stand rotated the cylinder in such a way that the empty chamber was under the hammer. He lowered the hammer gently.
 

Had Bledsoe used cartridges from his own belt, they would have been filled with black powder and necessitated more cleaning of Jack’s pet Colt than Jack would have liked. There were two thousand rounds of Federal 225-grain lead hollow points packed in the Suburban, which, somehow, Jack Naile couldn’t quite give up on seeing again. In what was now the objective future, the remains of a late-twentieth-century wall outlet had been found in the ruin of the house they would build. Unless things had already changed, that modern outlet had to get into the objective present somehow, and there were four dozen such outlets packed in the Suburban.
 

In another hour or so, they would reach Atlas. Ellen and Lizzie would need to acquire proper clothing for the period at once, which meant exchanging some of the gold in the attaché case. The diamonds would have to wait.
 

“Reckon y’all and the boy there oughta ‘member this. My Mary,” Bledsoe said suddenly as the most remote edge of Atlas came into view on the horizon, “she’s a handsome woman, I always considered. Y’all’s women are right beautiful.”
 

“Thank you,” Jack Naile told him.
 

“Ain’t the point, Jack, David. Jess Fowler’s range detectives been known to’up’n start a pistol fight over women was a whole lot less favored than y’all’s. What I mean t’say is, hope y’all’s as good at a’jerkin’ that fancy pistol down on a man as shootin’ at that ol’ dead tree.”
 

With genuine sincerity, Jack Naile almost whispered, “Let’s pray that we don’t have to find that out.”
 

CHAPTER
SIX
 

Talk drifted to politics while the buckboard creaked and groaned across the mile or so remaining of the flat and comparatively barren expanse at the end of which lay the town of Atlas. David Naile, not interested greatly in politics per se, liked that kind of conversation nonetheless, because politics and business could be inextricably linked.
 

Tom Bledsoe spat every time he mentioned the word Democrat, making Bledsoe’s own political bent obvious.
 

Atlas, like most of Nevada in the post Civil War period, was a Republican stronghold, but Jess Fowler had thrown his weight to the Democrats in the state government. Because the Democrats were a minority who wished to improve their lot, Fowler could figuratively—and literally— get away with murder as long as he provided financial support. As a result, Atlas was, effectively, rendered an island in a hostile and violent sea controlled by Fowler.
 

Steve Fowler, a notorious bank robber and killer, was often seen out in the county, roaming about unmolested between his murderous rampages of lawlessness, occasionally in company with his older brother, Jess, and the county sheriff.
 

Republican loyalty was the reason that Nevada was a state and not a territory, statehood having been rushed through in the aftermath of the Civil War. During the War Between the States—“In Georgia, where we come from,” David interjected, “some people still refer to that as the War of Northern Aggression.”—Nevada had supplied the Union with much of the financial capital needed to keep Mr. Lincoln’s armies marching and winning. Because of the rush to statehood, Nevada was in many ways still wild and untamed.
 

“Reckon y’all weren’t ol’ ‘nough to fight,” Bledsoe said to David’s father.
 

David smiled as he heard his father’s response. “I’m forty-six and this is 1896. An eleven-year-old wouldn’t have gotten too far trying to join up.” His father had just given the impression that he was born in 1850, without actually lying and saying that he was.
 

“What caused Yankees like y’all t’ move t’ Georgia there?”
 

“Well, I make my living as a writer, and Ellen and I just got tired of the hard winters in Chicago right around the time Lizzie was born. So we moved south.” That was all true. Brilliant, David thought. Then David’s father laughed a little conspiratorially. “I never did push the idea that I was a distant relative of President Grant’s vice-president, though.” True again.
 

Bledsoe laughed out loud. “Dang, ain’t y’all the smart ones! Yeah, them ol’ Rebs for fact woulda wanted t’ skin y’all’s hide.”
 

“We found the people in Georgia to be pretty much like people everywhere: lots of nice ones and some few not so nice. It’s a good place to live—Georgia.”
 

“I’ve got a question, Mr. Bledsoe,” David interrupted.
 

“Ask away, boy.”
 

“How is it that a man who spits when he says the word Democrat and calls Southerners Rebs has what I’d call a Southern accent?”
 

“Pa was born in southern Illinois, and Momma’s people had come out from the Carolinas. A whole mess o’ families from them parts moved west to Kansas and, lemme tell y’all, boy, soundin’ Southern weren’t no good thang in certain o’ them parts o’ Kansas in them times.”
 

“‘Bloody Kansas,’” David’s father interjected.
 

“It were that fo’ sure. Yeah. It were that.” And, abruptly, as if lost in some unpleasant reverie, Tom Bledsoe fell silent.
 

Bledsoe turned the wagon and, stretched out before them, in all its lack of splendor, lay Atlas, Nevada.
 

The town was one long street of clapboard buildings, mostly whitewashed, some painted gray or slate-blue. Corrals—each with one or more lean-tos—were set at the near and far ends of the street. Beyond the farthest of the buildings and the respective corrals lay a half-dozen or so smallish tents and one larger one, these all faded khaki in color.