Written in Time (51 page)

“I’m a little cold. You might want to change clothes, get into something warmer.”
 

“Where?” But before her husband could answer her, she asked a more important question. “What did you do with the Suburban?”
 

“Well, there really is a grove of cottonwoods just outside of town, or, anyway, something like cottonwoods. I parked it as far in as I could get, got the tarp staked down over it and whacked off some boughs that I could reach. It’s as camouflaged as it’s going to get. Hold the good thought that nobody spots it. In this era, I don’t think we have to worry about somebody coming along and breaking the ignition lock and hotwiring it.”
 

“I hope you’re right.”
 

“Let’s get inside and get tickets and see about getting you into dry clothes.”
 

Ellen wouldn’t let him take back his saddlebags as Jack regrasped the handles of their luggage.
 

The Overland Limited departed at precisely four minutes after six. It was so excruciatingly on time that a seventeenyear-old boy from the town of Dovia, in Italy, whose name was Benito Mussolini, would have been ecstatic—had he known about it. Mussolini and his Fascists had made/would make a big deal out of getting Italian trains to run on time.
 

The station master had allowed Jack and Ellen the use of a storeroom for changing into dry clothing, Jack offering the explanation—now familiar—that they had walked through the rain because of a “problem with the wagon.”
 

Jack was reminded of the times in a subtler way when he and Ellen left the storeroom, the eyes of the other waiting passengers staring at a man and a woman openly demonstrating that they would disrobe in front of one another. In this age, many genteel people still referred to the legs of a piano as limbs, because the word legs might be misinterpreted to have a sexual connotation. Although virtually everybody had sex, it was somehow dirty to acknowledge the fact.
 

Using a small tarp borrowed from the stationmanager, Jack had gotten his wife and himself aboard the train without additional water damage. After returning from the bathroom, Ellen began to unbutton her wet shoes as she related, “It’s kind of like an outhouse. What you do goes straight onto the track bed as you do it. You could really catch a draft on your butt in the wintertime.”
 

“One of the principal reasons why men run the world,” Jack told her, smiling. “We can piss standing up.”
 

“Nothing to do with brains, just the ability to pee without getting your legs wet. I’m glad you admit that it has nothing to do with intellectual superiority.”
 

“Well, of course, there’s always the fact that we have superior upper-body strength.”
 

“It’s necessary to hold up the larger heads that inflated egos require. All that empty space in the brainpan area has to be filled with something.”
 

“True enough,” He laughed, taking his sodden hat and starting to manually reblock it. “Try and get some sleep. If we stay on time, we should pull into Ogden, Utah, at eleven forty-five tomorrow morning. We’ll lose this Southern Pacific engine and pick up one from the Union Pacific and we’re on our way to Cheyenne.”
 

“Fine,” she responded. “Let me have your arm.”
 

Ellen wrapped her arms around his right arm and rested her head against his chest. Neither of them had eaten, but neither of them was hungry just yet. If old western movies had depicted things at all accurately, shortly someone would come along selling sandwiches.
 

The guy with the sandwiches came along, and Jack purchased a couple of them, saving them until Ellen woke up.
 

The glow from the lamplight was yellowish, stronger than candles, but hardly strong enough to read by comfortably. He looked down at his wife’s face. Ellen was as beautiful in repose after twenty-eight years of marriage as she had been the first time she’d used his chest for a pillow, on a Chicago Transit Authority bus when they were still in their teens.
 

Jack Naile alternated between watching his pretty wife’s face and stealing the occasional glance at the other passengers, mostly male, mostly wearing business attire, mostly trying to fall asleep under the brims of their hats.
 

With the single exception of Indians—and not all Indians—every man wore a hat.
 

“The West,” as it was popularly depicted, wasn’t really the way that it was. There were some men who used a great deal of profanity, certainly, but as a general rule, profanity was considerably less common in the time where he presently lived than it had been/would be ninety-six years into the future. Among women, it was nearly unknown.
 

The formality of dress Jack Naile found even more interesting. Women, of course, were stuck with their impractical long skirts and dresses and would be considered freaks if they wore trousers. But even men, regardless of their social station, had a more rigid code. No matter what they were doing, men rarely rolled up their sleeves.
 

Conservatism in dress was everyone’s watchword: corsets for women and union suits for men. In their store in Atlas, the only kind of men’s underwear David stocked was one-piece union suits, trapdoor and all; that was all any of the store’s male customers or their wives who purchased it for them wanted in male underwear. After painstaking searching, David had discovered a catalog from a New York firm that offered something close to boxers; briefs were nowhere to be found. They went nearly to the knee, and Ellen kindly shortened them.
 

Some one of the passengers lit a cigar; Jack could smell it, only then realizing that his eyes were closed. Men smoked everywhere; women, unless they were of the “scarlet” variety, never lit up in public. Ellen, who had smoked for a good number of years before quitting (she occasionally stole a drag from one of his cigarettes), had always been adamant in her belief that it looked slutty for a woman to have a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, equally so for a woman to have a cigarette in her hand if she was walking, especially outside.
 

Jack opened his eyes and looked again at his very beautiful sound asleep wife. Jack resettled his gun belt, tugged down the brim of his hat and closed his eyes.
 

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
 

After the comparatively brief train trip from Cheyenne to Denver, Jack and Ellen registered at the Hotel Grande Excelsior, taking the rather optimistically named Presidential Suite. Both bathed; then, hair still a little wet and Jack’s beard stubble shaved away, they dressed.
 

“So, where do we find Teddy Roosevelt?”
 

Jack looked at his leather-cased Rolex. “In exactly three hours, his special will be pulling in at the train station, where we arrived.”
 

“And?”
 

“Well—”
 

“Oh, we’re gonna wing it.”
 

“Well, I’ve got some ideas on how we’ll get to meet him.”
 

Ellen laughed. “I know. ‘We’re from the future.’ That’ll be good enough to get us hauled off to the booby hatch.”
 

Jack smiled and reassured her, “Well, at least we’ll be together, darling.”
 

Ellen hoped the wrinkles would fall out of her dress. She didn’t want to be committed to an asylum in something tacky looking.
 

In reality, Jack had a plan, hatched before they left the ranch, when he remembered something that he had read years earlier about Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, ever the scholar, had studied in Germany during his youth. It followed that a man with such an inquisitive mind would have picked up at least a decent command of spoken German and an even better skill level when it was written.
 

The documents taken from the Lakewood Industries couriers hyped technology not yet dreamed of, a tantalizing taste of the future. The mere idea of something like an M-16 rifle would be irresistible to one of the few men who would carry a revolver in his hip pocket during his presidency.
 

McKinley had not yet been assassinated; Lincoln’s death was a bitter national tragedy three and one-half decades old, Garfield’s 1881 assassination was still fresh in memory. Theodore Roosevelt was, after all, only a vice-presidential candidate in an era when seeing an armed man or any number of armed men at a political rally didn’t even arouse suspicion.
 

In such an environment, it would be possible—certainly for a pretty woman like Ellen—to rush up to Governor Roosevelt’s platform at the rear of his train and shove a handful of documents toward him.
 

Jack freely admitted to himself that his “plan” had the serious potential for failure, but it was the best that he had. If Ellen got the documents to Roosevelt and Colonel Roosevelt even glanced at them, he’d be hooked. Attached to the documents was a letter with little more than their names and the name of the hotel at which they would be staying until the following morning. Glued to the letter, saved from the handful of pocket change Jack Naile had inadvertently carried with him into the past, was an ordinary dime, a caption beneath it reading, “Do you recognize the profile of your eighteen-year-old cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Note the date that this coin was/will be minted: 1990.”
 

Would Roosevelt come, inquire about the strange references to future technology available to the highest bidder?
 

The future of history was at stake in a game of chance unlike any other ever played.
 

The crowd at the rail station was mixed. There were uniformed soldiers, some of whom might have served with Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. Men in suits and working clothes. Women in their customary long skirts and dresses and omnipresent hats, some with children in their arms or held in the viselike grip of a gloved hand. There were placards waving, hand written signs of support for McKinley and Roosevelt. And there were other signs, far fewer in number, decrying “Expansionism!” and “Imperialism!” and supporting the rival Democratic candidacy of the already once-defeated William Jennings Bryan.
 

Ellen, standing close beside Jack, remarked, “It’s interesting, isn’t it? Almost no one remembers Bryan as a political candidate, really. He’s mostly remembered as the man who locked horns with Clarence Darrow at the Scopes Monkey Trial.”
 

Before Jack could respond, a band struck up a lively air, the quality of its repertoire closely akin to that often associated with high school musicians still struggling with coordinating such things as embouchure and notation. The level of sincerity was essentially identical.
 

The special was coming slowly along the track, accompanied by the smell of burning coal, the hiss of steam, the squeaks and rattles and the almost human sigh as the engine slowed still more. The crowd—supporters and protesters alike—closed over the rails behind the train in a wave. Somehow, the band sounded a little better, the placards waved a little higher. Small American flags were raised at the ends of upstretched arms.
 

Propelling Ellen ahead of him by the elbow, Jack wriggled his way through the crowd, dodging a little girl in a pink coat and pink hat and hair bows, edging round a burly cavalry buck sergeant, slipping in front of a clerically collared minister or priest.
 

The door at the rear of the last car opened and the crowd went wild with noise as the forty-two-year-old military hero and governor of New York stepped out onto the small, flag-draped, balconylike structure. Arms raised, a smile on his full face, a glint of sunlight, as if on cue, catching his glasses, Teddy Roosevelt clearly reveled in the adulation.
 

One of the protestors shouted something unintelligible as he rushed forward, waving his placard like a sword. An army officer emerged from the doorway just behind the vice-presidential candidate and started to interpose himself between Roosevelt and the protestor.
 

Roosevelt shouldered the officer aside, leaned over the wrought-iron railing of his train car and glared at the protestor. In a voice not terribly remarkable except that it could be heard over the din, Roosevelt challenged, “You wish to speak with me, sir?!”
 

The protestor stopped his charge cold. The crowd of Roosevelt supporters pushed the fainthearted protestor back, man and sign disappearing within the mass of humanity.
 

Unflappable, Roosevelt was back in form, arms raised, the familiar toothy grin flashing.
 

The band was winding down its brassy tune. Jack had Ellen almost in reach of the train car’s black railing. “I’ll give it to the army officer, Jack! That’ll be better.”
 

“Okay! Now, kid!”
 

The band stopped.
 

Ellen stood outstretched, the envelope in her gloved right hand inches from the army officer.
 

Theodore Roosevelt looked down at her and smiled. “Thank you for coming today, madam.”
 

Roosevelt looked up and raised his voice and declared to all present, “It is with utmost sincerity that I declare that it is a feeling unmatched by any other to return, once again, to the American West and to the city which is the jewel at the center of our continent!”
 

Ellen shoved the envelope against the officer’s hand several times before he turned his head and looked at her. Shoving the envelope toward the man, she pointed the first finger of her other hand toward Theodore Roosevelt.
 

The officer—he was a captain—took the envelope from her, and Ellen sank back against Jack. Jack retreated with her into the crowd—but not too far.
 

Jack bent to whisper in his wife’s ear, “Let’s enjoy the moment for a while, Ellen.”