Grab Bag Page 11

  I never did get a chance to share these exalted thoughts with the Brain. He stopped inviting me on his journeys in time. I knew he was still going back to Arabella’s because I saw him there, twice. Both times he was just standing on the sidewalk. I didn’t speak to him. He wouldn’t have heard me.

  It was two days before Christmas when he approached me again. In all my medical experience, including the time I took a first aid course at Boy Scout camp, I have never seen a person change so much in four days. He must have stopped sleeping altogether. His face was gray and there were wrinkles in his forehead that looked as if they’d been there forever.

  “Williams,” he said, “you’ve got to help me. I’m going to get her out.”

  I guess I stared at him. I know I couldn’t speak.

  “I need you.” He was almost begging.

  “Huh?” I managed to stammer. “Sure, anything I can do.”

  I was astonished. I was incredulous. But mostly I was sorry for the guy. To a man forty years old, falling in love for the first time is a desperate business anyway. But when he has to cross three-quarters of a century to call on his girl, he really has a problem. And now he was proposing to bring her together with him in a way that staggered the imagination. He couldn’t do it, of course. But then nobody could build a time machine, either.

  Another thought struck me. “You can’t just transplant somebody into an entirely different time frame. You’d scare her to death, or drive her crazy.”

  “She’s scared to death and half crazy now,” he said bitterly. “Her uncle’s forcing her to marry Martin. I’ve seen him, Williams. I’ve watched him try to make love to her. He knows she loathes him and he gloats over making her miserable. Damn sadistic devil! He’ll kill her or she’ll kill herself if I don’t act now. I can’t stand it.”

  He was telling the simple truth. I’ve never seen a man closer to cracking. I tried to reason with him, which was a waste of time, naturally.

  “What year do you think it is? Was? You know what I mean.”

  “Eighteen ninety-nine. I saw a calendar in the house.”

  “Then why don’t we look up the old newspaper records for 1900? We could find out if she did marry him, or—”

  “No! Damn it, Williams, can’t you understand? I’m not going to let it happen.”

  “But it’s already happened. Whatever it was, it happened sixty-four years ago. You can’t stop it now.”

  “Like hell I can’t. Will you help me or shall I do it alone?”

  “I said I’d help, didn’t I?” And I hadn’t had sense enough to cross my fingers at the time, either. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Come with me.”

  I followed him into his lab. We locked the door and went to work. Don’t ask me what we did. I simply followed his orders and tried to keep from fouling up. He worked like a demon, first making alterations to the original box, then turning his attention to a different apparatus.

  “What’s this thing for?” I asked finally. By then it was after midnight and I was tired and hungry.

  “This is the materializer,” he explained. “She’ll be invisible to us when we get her, just as we are to her now. We can’t leave her in that state, naturally.”

  “It would be an awful waste of all that curly hair.”

  “She is lovely, isn’t she?” He spoke so quietly, yet so feelingly, it was like a prayer. Then he grabbed a screwdriver and went back to work.

  This was the first time I’d seen the Brain in his lab. He worked in a fury of concentration. Nothing appeared beyond him, from the most delicate mechanical adjustment to the most abstruse calculation. It made me nervous finally, like watching a high-wire performer doing a particularly dangerous balancing act. Surely he’d never make it. But he did, I guess. About three in the morning he straightened up, took off his lab coat, and said, “Thanks, Williams.”

  I yawned and rubbed my stubbly face. “When do we pull the snatch?”

  “The … uh … oh. This coming afternoon at about half-past five, with any luck. She’s going Christmas shopping and won’t be returning till then, she told her maid. It will be dark by that time. If we can get her just as she’s stepping out of the carriage, it should be quite simple.”

  That’s what he said. We went and had ham and eggs at an all-night diner, then I took a taxi home. I offered Carter-Harrison a lift, but he said he felt like walking.

  I was late getting in, and I’m afraid my mind wasn’t on the large intestine much of that day. As the hours ticked off, the thought of what we were trying to do took hold of me completely. Could we possibly pull off a kidnapping? If we did, what then?

  That was where I stuck. Had the Brain applied his gigantic mental powers to the What then?

  It was just after five on Christmas Eve when Carter-Harrison stuck his head in at the door and said, “Coming, Williams?” He had his machine in a green book bag slung over his shoulder. The parts we’d added last night made it too big to fit in a coat pocket. We started off in silence, but I knew I’d have to speak or pop.

  “If we succeed—”

  “We’ll succeed.”

  “All right, we’ll succeed. Then what?”

  “We take her back to the lab in a taxi and use the materializer to materialize her.”

  “Yes, but I mean what happens after that? I’m sure you’ll work the scientific part all right. I just want to know how you plan to cope with an hysterical woman in a bustle who’s found herself among strangers in a new century.”

  That jolted him, I could tell. I honestly don’t believe it had occurred to him that while he’d been falling in love with her, she still didn’t even know he existed.

  “Why, we’ll simply explain to her who we are and what we’ve done.” He was trying to sound confident. “She’ll understand.”

  Which showed how much he knew about women. “Where’s she going to live?”

  “She can stay in my apartment.” He caught me smirking and added hastily, “I’ll go to a hotel.”

  “And after that what?”

  “Naturally I shall continue to consider her my responsibility until she makes a satisfactory decision as to her future.”

  You poor prune, I thought. You haven’t a clue about what you’re taking on.

  But what’s the use talking to a man in love? We were almost to Arabella’s house now, and the butterflies in my stomach had put on their dancing shoes. The Brain seemed perfectly in control, though somewhat tense. As we reached the brown-stone steps, he set down his book bag and opened the top.

  “Here, Williams, take your handle and be ready to move fast when she comes.”

  He straightened up, holding his end of the wire, and a second later we were back in 1899. The avenue was empty. “I hope we haven’t missed her,” he fretted.

  Two men came down around the park. They were both well-fed types with fur-collared overcoats buttoned across their corporations and curly-brimmed derbies setting off their handsomely curried mustaches. Seeing them, Carter-Harrison went white with fury.

  “There are Uncle John and that rat Martin,” he hissed.

  Martin didn’t look like a rat, he looked like a pig. He was talking loudly and flashing his dentures in a phony smile. “Maybe we ought to follow them inside,” I said.

  “We can’t. We’d never get her out the door. Oh Lord, we should have come earlier. I don’t know what to do.”

  Our problem solved itself just then, as the carriage appeared between the iron gates. We could see Arabella’s white feathers bobbing up and down inside.

  “There’s the dear girl now,” said Uncle John unctuously. He and Martin stood on the steps to wait for her. All together, we made quite a reception committee.

  Poor Arabella looked positively nauseated when she caught sight of Martin. That ended my qualms. Acting on Carter-Harrison’s orders, I stepped forward as she descended from her carriage, fastened a heavy webbing belt around her waist and attached wires to her wrists while he worked feverish
ly at the time machine’s controls.

  “Come along, Arabella,” urged her uncle. “We mustn’t keep Mr. Martin waiting.” You could hear the menace behind his jovial tones.

  “I-I can’t, Uncle.” Arabella sounded puzzled, as well she might. “Something seems to have got hold of me.”

  “Nonsense!” He started down the steps. Carter-Harrison pressed the switch.

  Just for an instant, I thought I could see Uncle John and Mr. Martin staring incredulously at an empty space on the sidewalk. Then they were gone and the Brain and I were back in 1963 with an oddly agitated webbing belt between us.

  “We’ve got her!” Carter-Harrison waved wildly at a miraculously empty taxi. “Medical Building, Driver, and make it fast.”

  It was impossible to be gallant toward poor Arabella. We just shoved her, or what we assumed to be her, into the cab, out again, and up in the elevator to the Brain’s laboratory. We had a vague feeling of a form between us, but it was almost weightless. Only the occasional jerk of the belt and the wires showed she was alive and kicking. With frantic haste, Carter-Harrison attached the wrist wires to the materializer.

  “Now, Williams, pray,” he said, and threw the switch to on.

  There was no flash, no crash, no fizz, no fumes. There was just, after a moment, Arabella.

  Everything had gone perfectly. Carter-Harrison had succeeded in transporting the woman of his dreams sixty-four years in time without mussing a flounce or a feather.

  He had however, omitted one small calculation. If you take a pretty Boston lass of nineteen and move her ahead sixty-four years, you get—well, what we got was Mrs. Jared Fortescue Martin, who’d been a relentless perpetrator of good works ever since her bridegroom was mysteriously stabbed to death with a buttonhook on their wedding night. She was also the highly irascible sole trustee of the J. F. Martin Research Fellowship, presently awarded to James Carter-Harrison.

  “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not my fellowship more,” the Brain murmured sadly as he reversed the materializer switch.

  He got himself transferred to Stanford not long after that. As for me, I stick to the gastrointestinal tract and walk a block out of my way to avoid a kid with a jumprope.

  Clean Slate

  MY FRIEND BETTY’S FATHER used to race trotting horses around the county fairs. He picked up some interesting local lore, and told one story that inspired me to write this. Jud Hale of Yankee magazine, no mean Yankee yarnspinner himself, published it in their November 1965 issue.

  The only bright thing Henry Giles ever did in his life was to marry Sue Kilmer. Whether or not she took him solely to get Mrs. on her tombstone as some of her acquaintances alleged is beside the point. Granted, Sue was pushing forty by then and had never been a beauty. Nevertheless, it was a lucky day for Henry when he led her to the altar, or rather to the parlor of the Methodist parsonage. Sue wasn’t one to waste good money on a fancy wedding.

  She was a crisp little body, straight as a ramrod. The cotton print dresses and long white aprons she wore summer and winter were starched so stiff they rattled. After they’d been married awhile, Sue even managed to put a little starch in Henry’s backbone.

  Henry had bumbled along for almost fifty years before he got around to tying the knot. He’d skinned through grade school somehow, then gone to work full time in his father’s general store. Twenty years later the old man was dead and the store was Henry’s. He’d proved to be no great shakes about carrying on alone. Gradually Giles’s Store had got seedier and seedier. The windows had filmed over with dust, not thick enough to hide the litter of broken cartons and rusty cans inside. Folks had taken to driving over to The Corners for their groceries and dry goods.

  The day after the wedding, though, things changed. At eight o’clock sharp, Henry was out on the sidewalk washing the windows. Sue was inside, clearing away flyspecked posters announcing long-past bean suppers, scrubbing the long oak counter, sprucing up the shelves with fresh merchandise.

  Little by little, Giles’s Store perked up. Down came the dusty flypapers that had hung from the rafters since nobody could remember when. Out went the old sawdust box that had always stood beside the potbellied stove. In came a shiny new brass cuspidor. What was more, Henry kept it shined. He even black-ironed the stove regularly once a week.

  Old Tige the store cat could no longer be found snoozing in the cracker barrel on a rainy afternoon. Sue kept him on the payroll because Tige earned his keep, but she made sure he took his catnaps in seemly dignity on a cushion behind the counter.

  Ladies who’d shied away from dragging their flounces over Henry’s splintery, tobacco-juicy floorboards could find no fault with Sue’s well-varnished oilcloth runners. Dropping in at Giles’s to look over the new calicos and muslins got to be a popular afternoon’s entertainment. It was a real treat to be waited on by a scrubbed and smiling Henry all togged out in a gray alpaca shop coat and a new straw boater with a red ribbon around it.

  So Sue and Henry throve and prospered. If they ever gave a thought to the children they might have had, nobody knew of it. The store was their baby. They lived over it, in two spotless rooms. They lived for it. They pampered it, gussied it up with every new fixing they could think of, kept it swept and dusted and straightened to a fare-thee-well. Gradually all the things his father had tried to teach him percolated back into Henry’s consciousness. He became a competent storekeeper.

  But Sue was the boss. She did the buying, handled the cash, and kept her help up to the mark. She was no nagger; she didn’t have to be. Henry had just about sense enough to realize his wife was the brains of the outfit, and good nature enough not to resent it. As a matter of fact, Henry’s good nature was the only fly in their ointment. She had to bring him up short about letting people’s bills run on more than once.

  “You’re a storekeeper,” she’d snap, “not Santa Claus.”

  Still, Henry never could seem to put his foot down fast enough. One Saturday night, Sue ran out of patience. She took a slate out of stock and wrote on it, “Jos. Gibbs owes $19.73. S. Peters owes $8.59,” and so on down the list of flagrant debtors.

  “What you aimin’ to do with that?” Henry asked her.

  “I’m going to hang it right here over the till.” And she did.

  Henry fiddled uneasily with his apron string. “Folks ain’t goin’ to like havin’ their names stuck up there like that.”

  “No,” said his wife, “I don’t expect they will.”

  They didn’t, of course. One by one, red in the face and mumbling excuses, they paid up. By the end of the week, the slate was clean. Sue left it hanging as a gentle reminder, and it got to be a village joke. The first thing every customer who came in did was to sneak a peek in case somebody’d been posted. Credit problems at Giles’s Store became scarce as hens’ teeth.

  Once in a while the slate got used again. Nobody could say the Gileses were mean about it. When Joe Gibbs got laid off at the mill, they let his bill run on for months without a murmur. But then Joe went back to work and his wife appeared at church in a new Easter bonnet while there was still a sizable amount on the books. On Monday morning the slate read “Jos. Gibbs owes $57.16.” Emma Gibbs kept her new hat out of sight after that until Joe had cleaned the slate.

  In May the Gileses had the store painted fresh inside and out. On the first of June, they were robbed.

  It was Henry who discovered the break. He’d come down early to sweep out and roll down the new striped awning he was so proud of. There was Tige, asleep in the cracker barrel as of yore.

  “Tige! How’d you get in here? I put you out last night my—” Henry saw the open back window and stopped short. A cold sweat broke out all over him. “Somebody’s been in here.”

  He raced up the stairs three at a time. “Sue! Sue!”

  “Henry, what’s the matter? Here, sit down before you fall down. Land’s sakes, you’re puffing like a steam engine.”

  “Sue! We been robbed!”

 
“Well, I never.” His wife sank into the rocking chair. For once, all the starch was taken out of her. They stared at each other, stupefied by shock. Their store. Their store.

  Sue came to her senses first. “What did they take?”

  “I … I dunno. I just seen the back winder open an’ came to get you.”

  “Just so.”

  Sue got up from the rocker, her apron crackling like a burst of grapeshot. “Come along, Henry.”

  She took his hand and led him downstairs as if he’d been her little boy. It was the first spontaneous gesture of affection that had passed between them since their wedding night.

  At the sound of Sue’s footsteps, Tige leaped from the cracker barrel and scooted out the open window. They both jumped.

  “Consarn that cat!” Henry exploded. “See anything missin’?”

  Sue pointed at the empty cash drawer left hanging open. “Somebody’s been here, all right.”

  “They didn’t get the money?”

  “Of course not. The cash is where it belongs, upstairs under the mattress stuffed into one of your old socks. But they must have taken something.” Her eye lit on the empty tobacco case. “That’s it. There’s what they stole.”

  Henry groaned. “Cleaned out. Cigars, cigarettes, pipe tobaccer, plug tobaccer, snuff an’ all.” He did some laborious mental arithmetic. “Forty-six dollars an’ seventy-five cents’ worth.”

  “Forty-nine dollars and fifty-seven cents,” Sue amended. “See, there’s one of those new Gladstone bags missing. They must have taken that to put the tobacco in.”

  Henry saw red. “I’m goin’ for the constable.”

  “Henry Giles,” snapped his wife, “you stay right where you are and keep your trap shut.”

  “But Sue!”

  “Henry, you’re not to breathe one word about this robbery to a soul. Not one living soul.”

  “But forty-nine dollars an’ fifty-seven cents! All right, Sue. If you say so.” The wretched storekeeper dragged his broom out to sweep the sidewalk.

  June passed. Sue put up new flypapers and Henry changed them religiously once a week.