Written in Time (30 page)

Her father and mother had both gravitated toward the porch. She joined them, giving the shotgun to her father.
 

The cloud of dust was bigger, definitely nearer, but she couldn’t see what was causing it. “Hey, guys? You think it’s a stagecoach?”
 

“No stage line passes this way. No freight line, either. Whatever it is, whoever’s driving it is coming to see us.”
 

“You don’t think it’s Fowler’s guys, now that you’re no longer filling in as town marshal?” Ellen asked.
 

“A wagonload of range detectives? Doubtful. But be ready to get up on that porch and into the house and grab a gun if it looks like trouble.” As he finished speaking, Jack seemed to weigh the shotgun in his hands. “Ellen? Lizzie? This shotgun was first used by the United States military as a trench gun during what will be World War I.”
 

“Now is not the time to play Jeopardy, Jack.”
 

“It’s a ‘97 Winchester Pump. And if you have to use it fast and at close range, anchor the buttstock against your hip, work the pump and hold the trigger back. Peculiarity of ‘97s. As long as you hold the trigger back, the gun will fire as soon as the action closes. There’s buckshot in here, and at close range—and I mean pretty close, like from here to the porch—you’ll do a lot of damage. Just a good thing to remember.”
 

“Right, Jack. We’ll remember that. Won’t we, Liz?”
 

“Oh, yeah! You bet!” Lizzie remembered the ‘97 part was what the gun was called, her attention elsewhere, on the still growing cloud of dust.
 

“‘A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust—’”
 

“It’s probably not the masked man and his faithful Indian companion, Jack.”
 

“Just trying to lighten things up a little bit, ladies.”
 

“Don’t try and lighten things up, Daddy. Just try and see what—”
 

“It’s the Suburban!” Ellen Naile exclaimed.
 

“You’ve got good eyes, kid,” Jack Naile declared. “Not only can you see through a cloud of dust that’s more than a mile away, but you can see a hundred years into the future.”
 

“Look! When the dust parts a little, Daddy,” Liz said. “It’s big and kind of gray—”
 

“Holy shit,” Jack Naile hissed. “It is the Suburban, I think.”
 

By this time, the horses, which were tethered to a sturdy rope picket line while the corral was being built, were starting to react, at first to the gigantic dust cloud. Soon they would see, and then hear the Suburban. The horses were hobbled, so they couldn’t run.
 

Lizzie had to urinate, but that could wait.
 

So this was the legendary Naile family, minus the one that Clarence talked about more than any of the others. Clarence often quoted Jack or Ellen, talked unendingly about how wonderful and pretty Lizzie was—and she was beautiful, certainly—but he talked about David’s capabilities as if David were some sort of “wunderkind” who was, somehow, beyond the ordinary human.
 

Peggy had stood off by the Suburban, the tethered horses seeming skittish but not terrified as the initial greeting, the reuniting of this oddly mixed family, took place. She’d smiled, was hugged by Lizzie, had shaken hands with Ellen, shaken hands with Jack, too, then was hugged by Jack as Clarence had mentioned, almost in passing, that they were engaged and had waited to be married until the family was reunited in the past. At this, Lizzie not only hugged her again, but seemed on the verge of tears of happiness. Ellen only looked at her, at once warmly yet oddly. Jack had said, “Welcome to the family, Peggy.”
 

There were several exchanges about what was in the Suburban, in the trailer, some of the most genuine enthusiasm she had ever seen when Clarence reassured all and sundry that he’d brought all of the electrical wiring. There was the perfunctory man thing when Jack inspected the handguns, selected a “brace” of them, as he called them, and shoved them in his belt. She’d noticed that he was already wearing one gun and holding another in his hands as they’d approached.
 

There was a quick exchange between Clarence and Jack Naile about “How’d you get here?”
 

Clarence ended it by telling his uncle, “Long story. Tell you about it later.”
 

Jack Naile stood about an inch or so under six feet tall, had a broad chest, a surprisingly narrow waist with little trace of a middle-aged gut. His arms—he was shirtless at first, but donned a shirt as they entered the house—were long, muscled with reasonably well-defined triceps. His hair was reddish-brown, with plenty of silver-gray, especially at the sides, though not yet at the temples. His mustache had the mottled look of both his hair colors and held a hint of yellow from his smoking. He’d lit a cigarette—rolling it first; Clarence kidding him about it—as they stood outside and talked. He had brown eyes and his hands—bony, with the knuckles and veins prominent—looked as though they should have belonged to a pianist, a violinist or a surgeon. He was, of course, none of these. According to Clarence, Jack had a really good singing voice but was too fumble-fingered to play any instrument requiring more manual dexterity than a kazoo. Clarence had told her, on more than one occasion, that Jack would say, “I was going to be a brain surgeon, but I couldn’t complete my studies because of the expense. It was those custom-made surgical gloves with ten thumbs.”
 

The hair on Jack Naile’s chest, particularly the right side, had significant white in it, and there was some beginning trace of white hair on his shoulders. He had a lot of hair on his back, and she didn’t like that, although she imagined that some women probably found it sexy.
 

Ellen Naile, who was forty-six, Peggy knew, looked barely thirty. With the right clothes and makeup—and she didn’t seem to be wearing any makeup—she would have looked younger still. There was a gray hair or two visible when the sun caught her just right, but her hair— a dark auburn—was beautiful. Parted down the middle, sixties fashion, or what kids in the 1990s called a “butt cut,” Ellen had hair almost to her waist. Ellen’s features were prominent without being at all sharp. With the right makeup, her cheekbones would have looked like the kind a model would have envied. Ellen stood about five seven, discounting the period shoes she wore which added another inch or more to her height. Her eyes were what some would call hazel, gray and green without being either or both. They were very pretty.
 

Jack’s voice was baritone, at once soothing and commanding. Ellen was a perfect alto.
 

The much-spoken-of Lizzie immediately struck Peggy as the warmest, sweetest person she had ever met. Her features more closely followed those of her father than her mother, even to his eye color, and she shared his hair color. And her hair, without any part, held back by an anachronistic plastic headband, fell just past her shoulders. Dark-eyed, with the most genuinely, sincerely engaging smile Peggy had ever seen, Lizzie somehow had her mother’s look about her, even though there was no particular feature or combination of features that could at all be compared.
 

With a more amply endowed bosom than her mother, Lizzie stood perhaps five-three or five-four. Like her mother, Lizzie was also alto-voiced.
 

Lizzie seemed to convey her mother’s femininity and confidence, while mingling it with her father’s apparent strength. She was an interesting girl, complex yet somehow seeming to be one of those people about whom it was said, “What you see is what you get.”
 

After they had all entered the house, Ellen offered drinks, apologizing for not having any sort of refrigeration. There was only wine, whiskey, water, coffee or tea. Clarence announced, “We brought a bar refrigerator, Jack!”
 

“Bless you,” Lizzie declared emphatically. “Now we can have ice.”
 

Clarence took a glass of water. Peggy had a glass of wine, as did Jack and Ellen. Lizzie had water, complaining that it tasted like nothing at all, only wet.
 

Clarence smiled as he held out a package of unfiltered Camel cigarettes to Jack and said, “I’ve got a dozen cartons packed in the trailer.”
 

“Which nut you want me to cut off, the left or right?”
 

“Daddy!”
 

“Sorry, princess. I was overcome by emotion.”
 

Emotion was, it appeared, the watchword here. Ellen had merely given Clarence a light hug and a peck on the cheek when they first arrived. But that she loved Clarence was obvious from everything about her. Jack had hugged Clarence as if Jack and his nephew were two bears about to get into a wrestling match. Lizzie had hugged Clarence around the neck and given him several kisses on the cheek, then held his hand for a while.
 

“Anybody want some lunch?” Ellen asked, as if desperate to do something.
 

“I’ll help,” Peggy volunteered.
 

“The kitchen’s awfully small at the moment. With no refrigeration, we’ve been eating a lot of pasta. I make it myself. Liz helps me.” She looked at Clarence, “I hope that’s a pretty good-sized bar refrigerator, or we’ll be eating smoked turkey for Christmas. How soon before you guys can get some electricity in here?”
 

“Ahh—”
 

“Think about those devilled eggs you like, Clarence, before you give me an answer. And, Jack, you think about that cherry cream-cheese pie Lizzie makes. You don’t like smoked turkey, remember?” Ellen smiled and walked off, presumably toward the kitchen.
 

The house—what was completed of it—was remarkably (and uncharacteristically for the period) bright and airy, with large picture windows about the size of what might be seen in a jewelry store. The furniture was quite plain, simple. It looked less than half-finished, but when it was done, its size would be impressive.
 

The homemade pasta was good, but Ellen apologized for it. “You can’t get most of the herbs and spices to make a decent spaghetti sauce. In the spring, I’m finally going to start a garden.”
 

The water for the pasta was boiled over the hearth, the room slightly warmer than comfortable, but the fire was gradually diminishing. How could any woman who had been living and working in the late nineteen hundreds ever live here, Peggy Greer wondered. No stove, no refrigerator, probably no running water. “There may be a chance for you guys to escape,” Peggy blurted out.
 

Jack and Ellen both looked at her. Without shifting his gaze from her face, Jack said, “Clarence—it’s about time you told me how you guys were able to get here.”
 

Clarence started, Peggy chiming in with some of the scientific details, assuming that Jack and Ellen and Lizzie might understand at least some of the process, pleased that they seemed to grasp it quite well. When Clarence recounted Jane’s tragic death and the death of the cowboy, Jack Naile offered an explanation of just who Jess Fowler was and the nature of his range detectives.
 

“Daddy killed two of Jess Fowler’s range detectives when they tried to assault Momma and me. David was fighting one of them off, but the second one hit him from behind. When Daddy was town marshal, Fowler’s men left us alone. Now, though . . .” Lizzie let the sentence hang unfinished.
 

“Clarence told me something,” Peggy Greer volunteered. “It’s important. There was a tech guy—head guy, really, like the mission-command guy—and his name was Marc Cole. I didn’t notice it, but Clarence thought that Marc Cole seemed strange somehow, familiar but not. And the young cowboy was named Cole. He was a twin, and he and his brother were in love with the same girl. Now, suppose that because Jane Rogers came into the past, the young cowboy’s life ended when it shouldn’t have. What if Marc Cole was somehow different? I mean, there’s no way to tell from this end, but if we could get back, and we found out that Marc Cole’s great-grandfather was the young cowboy’s brother, what if that’s the reason Marc Cole struck Clarence as somehow odd, something wrong with him? What if Marc Cole, as we knew him just before we left, was different because the young cowboy should have been his great-grandfather and Jane changed all of that?”
 

“So,” Jack Naile posited, “we know that Ellen and the kids and I were supposed to come here, into the past. But anyone else, like you guys, could alter history in little ways or big ways.”
 

“Like when I suggested going to Austria and killing Hitler!” Lizzie enthused.
 

“Hitler?” Clarence repeated.
 

“Yeah, he’s about nine years old now,” Jack said dismissively. “Where we came from, though, the little shit grew up—nobody killed him while he was nine. On the surface, if you get around the moral problem of killing a nine-year-old who hasn’t become a mass murderer yet and won’t for another three-plus decades, you’ve gotta basically ask yourself if playing God could cause more evil than it prevented. The point I think you’re making, Peggy, should have dawned on you guys before you came here in the first place.
 

“I’m ecstatic over having the contents of the Suburban,” Jack Naile went on, “especially the electrical wiring—”
 

“And the cigarettes,” Ellen supplied.
 

“And the cigarettes—right. And, we don’t have to tell you how much we missed you, Clarence, and how happy we are to know that you and Peggy are getting married. But if Alan Naile was right that there was no historical record of you being with us in the past, then you’ve altered the time loop. Even if you guys go back—and you have to explain how that would work—the damage—” He lit a precious Camel cigarette. “‘Damage’ is too harsh a word. Let’s say the change could already have radically or subtly altered the future. Maybe for the good, or maybe for the not so good.”