CHAPTER FIVE
“You’d be proud of your son, Jack,” Ellen was saying.
Jack merely lay there, head cradled in his wife’s lap as she knelt on the ground, hugging him.
“I thought you just might be dead despite it all, this time-travel thing. I thought you might be, but told myself you wouldn’t be, and the time-travel thing has nothing to do with it.”
Jack’s own voice sounded odd to him. “I thought I was maybe dead, too.”
“David couldn’t get the fuselage door open and the cockpit was already in flames. Lizzie and I tried helping him. It was no good. The locking mechanism was jammed. He spotted a case bolted to the fuselage, opened it. It was some sort of survival kit. Anyway, there was an axe and a spare first-aid kit. He handed the first aid kit to Lizzie, told us to stand back, and he split the locking mechanism for the fuselage door with one swing of the axe.
“He got us out, used the axe to break into the cargo compartment and started getting out our stuff before the whole aircraft went up in flames or exploded. I told him to leave the luggage, that it wasn’t worth the risk. He ignored me, of course, ignored his sister. We couldn’t have tried to stop him physically, because we were already running toward you.”
“But David’s okay, right?”
“He’s fine, Jack. Rescued the attaché case with the gold and diamonds, got all the luggage, your gun cases, even your cowboy hat.”
Jack started to speak, but couldn’t. He felt tears welling up in his eyes and his throat tightening, but not from smoke this time.
“David got away from the helicopter about thirty seconds before it blew up. He lit a cigarette as it happened. I told him he was a hero. Lizzie told him he was a hero. All David said was, ‘Dad saved our lives. He’s the hero.’”
Jack Naile lost it and wept uncontrollably.
Miraculously, it didn’t seem as if Jack had broken anything, not even redislocated his right shoulder, something she had really expected from the position his body had been in when they reached him. Ellen had examined him to the extent of her quite limited medical training and when he seemed willing, encouraged him to try to stand up. The best way to get well was to act well, she’d always believed. And, with the afternoon waning, with no idea where they were except that their present location would have been an unpleasant one if a mountain lion or bear decided to get curious, there was little choice but to get in motion.
The weather was much colder than it had been when they’d boarded the helicopter, and the night promised to be colder still. If Jack could handle it, they had to get going somewhere, probably down and away from the mountains. At worst, they needed to find a sheltered area and water. Then David could use the helicopter’s axe to cut firewood, and, if they found water, they could find a way to boil some for drinking purposes and stay by the fire for warmth as well as to scare away any wild animals.
When Jack did stand up, aside from being wobbly and visibly quite sore, he seemed to be all right. “You sure you can handle this? We can always wait a while longer if you like.”
“I’m sore, but I’m cool,” Jack told her.
“I’m going to have such fun counting all the bruises you’ll have, especially if they’re anything like the one on the left side of your forehead. You don’t even have a bump, though. See, this wasn’t any big deal.”
“Sure. Everybody should be in a helicopter crash. Good for what ails you, huh?” Jack became more serious. “What about the pilot?”
Ellen’s face grew somber then she shook her head. She checked her husband’s vision to see if his eyes could follow a moving object, inquired about blurriness, nausea. The bruise on his head spelled the possibility of concussion, if nothing worse. But he’d displayed none of the obvious signs of which she was aware. When they reached some resting place, if either of the microfiche readers had survived without being shattered—there was an unsettling rattle from the case housing the video camera—she would probe more deeply into the symptoms of concussion.
“There’s something I’ve got to do,” Jack said. He leaned over and kissed Lizzie’s forehead, then tilted her face up toward his and kissed her lightly on the lips. Lizzie hugged her father, and then Ellen put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Slowly, a little unsteadily, Jack walked toward where David sat beside the cases and luggage.
Jack lit a cigarette. He offered one to David, who merely shook his head.
Ellen could hear David as he said, “‘Jack Naile and his family were on their way to California, but there was an accident with their wagon.’”
Ellen watched as Jack leaned over and kissed David’s forehead. David didn’t pull away, but didn’t help, either.
Ellen closed her eyes. Not a single aircraft had passed overhead. There had been not the slightest sound that could have been a truck engine or a chain saw. But the absence of such phenomena was unnecessary. As David had chosen to put into words, Ellen knew deep inside herself, no words necessary.
They weren’t in the twentieth century anymore . . .
Despite his soreness, Jack Naile announced, “We’ve got to take the most direct route that we can to get out of these mountains. The highway—or the stage road along the ridgeline—whatever or whenever it is—should be easy enough to find. If we find—when we find—the road, all we have to do is follow it away from the mountains and we’re bound to find a ranch or farm. Worst case, we’ll reach Atlas in a day or so, whatever century it is. David?”
“Dad?”
They stood about one hundred yards downslope from the gutted helicopter.
“I need you to take that axe and mark some of the trees as we go along, so we can backtrack to this spot without much difficulty. We’ve got too much stuff to carry. So, before that, take the Winchester 94 and load it up, then look around the immediate area for a safe place to stash what we can’t carry for maybe as long as a week or ten days. Use the axe to mark a path from the helicopter to where we leave the stuff. Lizzie?”
“Daddy?”
“Help your mom with organizing what we can’t travel without and what we’ll leave behind. The guns won’t be in the cases, so we can use the rifle and pistol case for additional storage of anything that might be easily damaged when left behind.”
“If we’re not in the nineteenth century, Jack, being visibly armed won’t be a good idea,” Ellen supplied.
“Agreed. It might not be such a good idea even if we are, coming up on some little ranch house or something. David and I’ll each carry a rifle. It’s not going to look odd with two guys carrying lever action rifles. Each of you ladies carries one of the little guns in a pocket or something—the Seecamp and the derringer. Everything else gets thrown into a suitcase. And, remember, when you guys pack and separate, we can’t carry too much ammo because it’s too heavy, but we’ll want just about fifty rounds of .45 Colt and twenty rounds of .45-70, plus what’ll be in the guns.”
“You want to bury the stuff or just cover it from view?” David asked, picking up the axe.
R R R
Their trek toward some outpost of civilization wasn’t anywhere near as long a one as she had supposed that it might be. And Elizabeth couldn’t deny that the scenery was gorgeous. The farther down the mountain they went, the more abundant and luxurious were the trees, pine trees of astounding height, many as tall as or taller than those in their neighbor’s back lot in Georgia, and those were taller than three- or four-story buildings. She recognized spruce trees, but that was the limit of her knowledge of evergreens (except for magnolias, which, unlike in the climate outside her bedroom window back home, would not grow here.)
The conifers, on the other hand, were either suffering some sort of blight or it was not only the year that had changed (if it had), but also the season. Leaves were everywhere, except in the trees.
Elizabeth had been hoping against hope for some sign of late-twentieth-century civilization, and her heart raced then sank with her first glimpse of the small house, lean-tos and two horse corrals still perhaps four city blocks distant. She had a case with a pair of her father’s binoculars slung from her shoulder. She took out the binoculars, raised them to her eyes and adjusted the focus as she studied the landscape below. Beneath the shelter of one of the lean-tos was a wagon, what her father called a “buckboard” whenever he referenced one on those occasions when she could not escape watching a western movie. It looked not quite new, but not like an antique, either.
“If no one mentions hearing an explosion or seeing a fire, remember, don’t mention it, either. Okay?” Elizabeth’s mother told them.
“Gotchya,” David agreed.
“And if somebody does mention it, let your father do the talking, and all of us will back him up. He’s the wordsmith, remember, so he tells lies for a living.”
David laughed.
Elizabeth’s father murmured, “Thanks a lot.” Then he looked over his shoulder at David. “Hold that rifle with your hand over the receiver and keep the muzzle pointed toward the ground. That’s the least threatening way.”
“Right.”
Elizabeth couldn’t take her eyes off the ranch ahead.
Maybe half again the distance beyond the ranch house from where they were there were a few cattle, just grazing, with no fences that Elizabeth could see. A dozen or so chickens wandered aimlessly in the front yard, pecking at the ground. There was a windmill—she didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed that earlier—and it was mounted high on something that looked like a wooden version of one of the big metal-framed utility poles that connected one town’s power grid to another. From what she had read of the period, knowing this time transfer was going to happen, Elizabeth imagined that the windmill’s sole purpose had nothing to do with running electrical conveniences but was for pumping water instead. No wires of any type led into the house. There was no satellite dish.
They would be meeting people from the past for the first time, people who were dead before she had ever been born. Meeting people meant making first impressions. Elizabeth put away the binoculars and instinctively took stock of her clothes. The bib-front overalls that she wore were a little dirty and a lot wrinkled. Her jacket—”Daddy!”
“What is it, sweetheart?”
“We all have zippers on our jackets, and they didn’t have zippers in the old days, did they?”
“Whitcomb L. Judson displayed a primitive zipper at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and the modern zipper was in use by World War I. Zippers weren’t in general circulation until the 1930s.”
David was laughing. “Aren’t you glad you asked, Liz?”
“Point is,” Elizabeth’s father continued, “if the zippers get noticed, all we say is something like, ‘Yeah, this guy named Judson invented them. They’re really popular where we come from.’ And we leave it at that, which isn’t telling a lie at all.”
“What about my deck shoes?” David asked, as if daring his father.
“It’s like an Indian moccasin, but with a harder sole.”
“Lizzie and I are wearing pants and bras,” Elizabeth’s mother threw in.
“Women were more physically modest—at least openly—in these days than in the time we come from. So nobody’ll see your underwear. As for pants, after the accident with the wagon, with God only knew how long a walk over rugged terrain ahead of us, wearing pants like a man seemed like the only sensible choice for you guys. Try me on another one,” her father dared.
“Ohh, ohh!” Elizabeth’s mother exclaimed in an artificial sounding high voice. “How do men just ever stand wearing these terrible trousers?”
“That was a good one, Mom,” Elizabeth proclaimed.
“Thank you, Lizzie.”
“Okay, Dad,” David volunteered, shifting his burdens and removing his wristwatch. “These things didn’t come around until World War I, either.”
“Good point, David. Make sure to keep your sleeves down so the paler skin where the watchband covers isn’t visible.” As he spoke, Elizabeth’s father opened the bracelet of his Rolex and hid the watch in a pocket of his bomber jacket.
“I’m Tom, and this here’s my wife, Mary. We’re the Bledsoe’s.” The man was holding a rifle, but had a pleasant enough look about him.
“Pleased to meet y’all,” Mary Bledsoe seconded, a shy smile crossing her pale lips, her hands bunched on the edges of a long white cotton apron.
A girl about Elizabeth’s age approached hesitantly.
“Come on, girl. Come on up here and meet these folks.” Tom Bledsoe waved the girl forward.
“Hey,” Lizzie said, smiling.
No one could resist Lizzie’s beautiful smile, and Jack Naile had that confirmed when the Bledsoe girl sort of half curtsied and said softly, “A pleasure to meet y’all folks. I’m Helen.”
Jack Naile deduced that it was his turn. “I’m Jack Naile, and this is my wife, Ellen, our daughter, Elizabeth, and our son, David. We were on our way to California, crossing the mountains, when there was a terrible accident with our wagon.”
“You poor things!” Mary Bledsoe blurted out, wringing her hands around her apron and then smoothing it as she went on. “Helen!”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Go start puttin’ food on the table while I find Mrs. Naile and her daughter something decent to wear. Scoot, child!” As Helen ran off—she had a good stride, skirts raised in order to accomplish it—Mary Bledsoe started gathering Ellen and Elizabeth to her, like a mother bird folding her wings about the babies. “It’s terrible for you poor things.”
Despite the fact that Mary Bledsoe seemed positively outraged that females—even strangers—were forced by circumstance to wear trousers, it was easy to see who wore the pants in the Bledsoe household. Jack Naile looked over at Tom Bledsoe. “David and I didn’t know what we might bump into. Didn’t want to put you folks off by walking up here with these.” He gestured with the 1895 Marlin lever action that was in his right hand.
“Man’d be a fool for sure not goin’ armed in these parts, critters with four legs and critters with two, and of ’em, the two-legged kind is the worse.”
David asked, “Crooks—I mean outlaws?”
“Reckon y’all didn’t pass through Atlas, didchya?”
Jack answered, “We were in kind of a hurry to get over the mountains into California, and we had all the supplies we needed, until the wreck, anyway.”
Tom Bledsoe had long since lowered his rifle—a Winchester 1873—from a casual port arms to rest against his leg, the fingers of his left hand barely touching the muzzle to support it. “You’ll need a hand fetching anything else from the wreck?”
“There’s nothing left worth salvaging.”
“That’s a shame. You folks don’t have much left.”
“How far is it into town, into Atlas?”
“About two hours by wagon. My wife, Mrs. Bledsoe, her sister Margaret keeps school in Atlas, and young Bobby Lorkin rode out not more’n an hour back tellin’ us Margaret was feelin’ poorly and wanted Mary to look in on her. We reckon to set out early ‘morrow mornin’. Y’all got people in Atlas? Well, reckon not if’n y’all didn’t go a-stoppin’ there. You can stay with us a spell.”
Jack responded, “You and your family are very kind. If it’s no trouble, we would very much like to spend the night tonight and take you up on that ride into Atlas. But I heard tell, I think, that there was a hotel in Atlas, or maybe we could rent a cottage.”
“I never been inside no hotel, but it’s a fact there is one. Ain’t no cottages I heard ‘bout. Lemme take some of y’all’s possibles and let’s go on up to the house.” And with that, Tom Bledsoe grabbed up one of the suitcases in his right hand. “Never seen no thing like this afore. Travellin’ bag?”
“That’s what it is,” David agreed.
“Leather, huh?”
“Special kind of leather called expanded polyvinyl,” David told Tom Bledsoe, smiling.
Mary Bledsoe was Elizabeth’s height, a little over five foot three. Mary had three dresses besides the one that she wore, four extra aprons (one with a bib front and lace trim all around it) and a solitary skirt.
Holding one of the dresses in front of her, Ellen realized that it was four inches too short, about the length that a young girl might wear. She opted to borrow the dark gray circular skirt and wear it with her own sleeveless top, but took the shawl Mary Bledsoe offered to cover the unseemly sight of bare arms. Elizabeth fared better, one of Mary’s dresses—a lighter gray—was a perfect fit except for the bustline, which was tight. Young Helen provided Lizzie with a shawl.
“Don’t have me much in underthings,” Mary had confided to them.
“We’ll be just fine, Mary,” Ellen had told her, grateful not to have to wrestle with weird and uncomfortable underwear. By forcing the skirt down closer to her hips than her waist, it wound up at a respectable length.
Ellen and Elizabeth helped Helen set the table with very pretty plain white china, likely Mary’s best. Mary finished the cooking. There was a potbellied stove at the center of the solitary large room, but the hearth was what was used for cooking. When it was cold, bricks would be heated on the hearth and placed in the beds in the two other rooms of the house. By comparison to frontier homes about which Ellen had read, the Bledsoe place was a condo on Chicago’s Gold Coast, even boasting a well-fitted board floor.
When Lizzie volunteered to assist Helen with fetching water, the mere mention made Ellen Naile realize that she hadn’t peed since a few minutes before boarding the helicopter.
Ellen Naile almost asked, “Where’s the john?” Instead, she asked, “The outhouse?”
Mary Bledsoe’s face flushed at the mention of something so intimate, so personal. “‘Hind the house, o’ course.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
The outhouse—complete with crescent moon cutout on the door, also handy for letting flies in during the right season—would have defied even Jack’s powers of description. Pulling the skirt’s waistband up to her natural waist, her face twisting into a grimace designed to limit oxygen intake through the nose, Ellen Naile stepped inside, for once in her life wishing that she were a man.
David had laughed at both of them when he saw them, and Jack had merely smiled, asking, “Having fun, darling?”
“Oh, peachy, Jack.” Ellen was wearing an apron. After she had volunteered to help Mary finish preparing dinner, Mary had run to fetch one for her. Ellen, despite her sex, had worn an apron voluntarily perhaps half a dozen times in her adult life. “What have you guys been doing, Jack?”
“Tell her, David.”
David sat down on the crate he’d brought in, evidently bidden to do so by Tom Bledsoe. There were seven for dinner and only six chairs in the entire house, including the rocking chair and one of those little fireplace chairs with a spatulate-shaped back, a heart-shaped cutout at its center.
“Well,” David began, “Mr. Bledsoe kindly showed us his tack, let us see the horses and showed us the field he’s going to plant next spring. He’s got one fine manure pile, let me tell you.”
“Gosh, menfolk have all the fun, don’t they, Helen?” Lizzie lamented, wiping her hands on her apron.
Helen didn’t say a word, only smiled enigmatically.
Dinner was a surprisingly tasty rabbit stew with a number of overcooked and hard-to-identify vegetables, great-tasting dumplings and fresh wheat bread. David had always looked older than he was and was solicited by Tom Bledsoe to join him and Jack for a “snort from the jug and a chaw on the settin’ porch” while the women saw to “clearin’ and all.”
Ellen Naile would have loved to be able to turn herself invisible and watch and listen in; but since she could not, she helped Mary, Lizzie and Helen make quick work of the dishes (in a way that made her shudder to think that she’d just eaten off of these same dishes). There was no mention of joining the men on the porch or having an adult beverage for themselves, but Mary put on the kettle for tea and showed off her latest needlepoint, confiding that there was always so much mending to do that she had little time for such frivolous activity.
Despite the unspeakable outhouse, clean as such things went, she imagined, and the awkward clothing and social status, Ellen Naile realized that she wasn’t really having such a bad time. It had been years since they had dined in the home of friends.
Ellen and Lizzie were washing the breakfast dishes, helping Mary while she fed the chickens and collected the eggs and milked the cow. It was already late, according to something she’d overheard Tom Bledsoe saying. By Ellen’s own reckoning, the time was about six in the morning. Jack and David were assisting Tom with hitching up the team and feeding and watering the rest of the stock.
“I think I felt a mouse near my foot last night,” Lizzie confided, edging closer to Ellen at the wash basin.
“It was probably Helen’s toe,” Ellen reassured her daughter, thinking all the while that Lizzie was probably right. Lizzie and Helen had, at least, had a bed—Helen’s. Ellen’s own sleeping accommodations had been to share the bed with Mary Bledsoe that Mary normally shared with Tom. The bed had seemed clean enough, the mattress too soft, too uncomfortable, the bed’s framework easily felt every time Ellen rolled over. Mary had only one nightgown, and it wouldn’t do to sleep in twentieth-century underwear, so Ellen had slept in her clothes. In the morning, the once-unwrinkled skirt was no longer that way.
Lizzie was lamenting, “And that outhouse! Yuck! I just won’t go, Momma!”
“A couple of hours riding along a dirt road in the back of a wagon with no springs will make you feel differently. Go potty!”
“They don’t wash or anything!”
“You’ll hurt their feelings. Think of it this way. Would you really want to use a bathtub set up in front of the fireplace? I don’t think so.”
“My hair’s all greasy, Momma!”
“So’s mine, so’s your father’s and so’s your brother’s. We’ll find a way of getting clean once we get to town.” Ellen Naile wished that she felt as certain about that as she hoped she sounded.
Ellen had spoken precious little with her husband since their arrival at the Bledsoe place, the way of things between men and women in this time. But in a brief moment Jack had told her, “Bledsoe says that things are a little wild in town, advised us to carry pistols if we had them. Make sure Lizzie’s up on using a Seecamp, and you know how to use that derringer. Each of you carries once we start for town.”
She’d given Jack a snotty “Yes, sir, Jack, sir,” but realized that he was only looking out for them.
With the dishes through, she told Lizzie, “Hey! How’s about this? We go out to the outhouse, and I’ll use it first, then you’ll be using it after me? Okay?”
“Yeah, dammit,” Lizzie moaned.
“Ladies don’t talk that way, now or anytime.”
When they stepped together onto the front porch, the potential lethality of all of the unknown factors into which they were about to insert themselves hit her with the force of a rock. Jack was dressed in the same gray long-sleeved shirt and dirt-stained black Levis he’d worn the previous day. The item of apparel that was different was the gun belt, the black Hollywood rig that Sam Andrews had made for him, the gleaming, long-barreled Colt revolver sitting almost jauntily in its silver concho-trimmed holster.
When she noticed David, helping Bledsoe with hitching the team, the rock that had hit her struck again; but this time it had grown to boulder proportions. Her seventeen-year-old son had Jack’s second Colt, the old blued one that someone had cut the barrel back on to an “unofficial” five inches. He wore it in the old brown-leather Arvo Ojala gunfighter rig his father had so proudly traded for years ago, which David had never worn, never even wanted to try on without being forced.
David had fired a gun under his father’s tutelage for the very first time when he was only five. In this time and place, seventeen was a grown man’s age and, if others were armed, it would be incumbent upon David to be armed as well. Dumb clothes and outhouses were an inconvenience; Jack and David facing an armed encounter every time they stepped outside into a street was frightening.
“Y’all look like one of them ‘range detective’ fellers Jess Fowler went and hired on,” Tom Bledsoe remarked out of the blue.
“Range detective?” David asked from behind them.
“A euphemism for hired gunfighter,” Jack told his son. “You remember Jack Palance in Shane?” Jack Naile dropped the idea, because, even though David had seen the classic film, he would have pushed it from his thoughts because it was a western.
“Jack who?”
“Famous guy where we come from, Tom. And Shane started out as a book.”
“Can’t say I read much, ‘ceptin’ the Bible and them catalogs down at the general store. Giddyup, there, Dusty.” Tom Bledsoe flicked the reins to the team, Jack Naile noticing the man’s perfect ease. Dusty was obviously the horse on the right side, and had been lagging behind the other animal. When the reins cracked, the rein on the right came down hardest.
The four women occupied the wagon bed, Ellen and Mary sitting facing forward, Lizzie and Helen facing back (which was probably making Lizzie a little car sick). David sat scrunched between Tom and Jack on the seat, his gun belt pulled around so that the holstered Colt lay over his right thigh.
“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.”