Running Out of Time (8 page)

“Oh, they're having some germs going around. Colds, nothing serious. I'm sure there are times when Oakdale's a little empty, too,” Mrs. Spurning said.

Her tone was so casual that Jessie decided Mrs. Spurning really believed what she said. How was she to know?

“Shh,” Mrs. Spurning said. “It's time for the seventh and eighth graders. Would you all know this?”

In unison, Mary, Hannah, Chester, and Richard began reeling off the states and the years they had joined the union. They stumbled a little between Tennessee and Ohio (1796 and 1803), but the students around Jessie looked impressed.

“They don't have as many to memorize,” one boy said.

“True. But could you do even half?”

The boy grinned and shook his head. Jessie wasn't quite sure what Mrs. Spurning meant—how many states did the United States have? And why didn't these children know them? But Jessie liked Mrs. Spurning defending her friends.

Mary looked right out at them just then, and Jessie had to fight back the impulse to yell out, “Mary, I'm right here.” Mary looked sad and her braids drooped. Jessie would have liked to have told her that Jessie, at least, wasn't sick.

The other children around Jessie were getting restless, as though it were them sitting on the school benches. They whispered and laughed while Mrs. Spurning talked on. If anyone in Clifton's school had done that, Mr. Smythe would have sent them to a corner or, worse, gotten out his whip. But Mrs. Spurning and the chaperon didn't scold anyone.
Mrs. Spurning just sighed, looked at a timepiece on her wrist, and said they should go.

This time Jessie would have liked to linger, watching her classmates recite under the stern gazes of Mr. Smythe and the George Washington and Martin Van Buren portraits. Here, finally, she was somewhere Mr. Smythe couldn't yell at her.

But Jessie followed the group out, and then down a different hall. This one had paintings, not those clear pictures-that-weren't-drawings. All the pictures had writing underneath, like, “1848. California Gold Rush,” and “1876. Invention of the telephone.” They led up to a mirror with the caption, “1996. You visit Clifton Village!”

Jessie realized the pictures were hints about what had happened in the one hundred and fifty years she thought of as the future. It might have been good to study them, but they made no sense to her. What was a telephone? One picture's caption said, “First airplane flight, 1903,” and showed a man in a strange contraption apparently soaring through the sky. It had to be a fake. People couldn't fly. Or could they? Jessie's ignorance scared her. What if she couldn't make sense of anything in the outside world?

The pictures made Jessie so nervous, she decided to ignore them. In spite of her fear, she had to leave. The tour had already delayed her, and who could say what even a few hours meant to Katie and the others?

At the end of the hall, Mrs. Spurning said good-bye and left the children to the harried chaperon.

“All right, kids, you can eat your lunches now. If you brought money, you can go to the snack bar. Let's all sit in a group over there. Okay?” the chaperon said, pointing to the
tables and chairs where the guards had sat the night before.

Jessie liked the chaperon a little better for saying “okay.” So it was allowed out here!

‘I'm going to the gift shop,” Nicole said. “Want to come? I think they sell some of those horseshoes the blacksmith makes.”

For a minute, Jessie was tempted. It would be less obvious if she went into whatever this gift shop place was, instead of walking out the door right away. She'd never seen a “gift shop” before. And maybe Nicole would tell her what it was like being a Negro. The only way Nicole seemed different was that she was nicer than the other children.

But Jessie remembered she didn't have time for curiosity.

“No thanks,” she finally told Nicole. “I've got to find my, uh, classmates.”

Jessie wished she hadn't had to lie to Nicole.

“Okay,” Nicole said. “It was nice meeting you.”

Jessie watched Nicole turn and walk away. Then, when the chaperon looked the other way, Jessie headed for the front door.

T
he world outside had a floor—not quite like the shiny floor inside the building, but solid gray, with lines every four feet or so. And wait—farther on, a little lower, part of the floor was solid black, and kind of tarry. Jessie had never seen anything like it. Who put floors outdoors?

Jessie was so busy looking at the ground that it took her a minute to notice the rows and rows of carriages—at least, they looked kind of like carriages—parked on some of the black floor. There must have been hundreds of them, some shiny red, some blue, others green or white. They gleamed in the sunshine. Jessie went closer to look at one. She heard a woman coaxing a little boy.

“Come on, Jason. Get out of the car,” the woman said.

“Car,” Jessie repeated under her breath. The word did sound like “carriage.” So this was what Ma had been talking about
when she said Miles Clifton had a limousine, and a limousine was a very big car. Were these limousines or just regular cars?

Whatever they were, Jessie decided they were grand. She watched one turn in to the driveway near her. It didn't have horses! How did it move?

Hoonk!

The noise sounded like the geese that came through Clifton in the fall and spring. Jessie turned around and saw the
hoonk
came from a car that had its nose pointed right at her. Inside, a woman sat behind a wheel looking mad.

Jessie jumped out of the way, then looked back as the car sped by. However these cars worked, it seemed they did something to the people in them. Why had the woman looked so mean? Jessie thought of the stories some of the other children in Clifton told about witchcraft. Was that how cars worked? But Jessie hadn't believed such stories before, and she didn't believe them now.

Once the car was gone, Jessie glanced down to see where she was standing. She was relieved to find she was on a patch of grass, beside a small maple tree. The grass was thicker than she was used to, but it still looked good. Whatever else had happened to the world, at least some things were familiar. The outdoor floor didn't go everywhere.

But there wasn't time to relax on the grass and think about that. Jessie saw a sign that said
CLIFTON VILLAGE EXIT
. Was it safe to just walk away from the tourists and all their cars? Casually, Jessie glanced around to make sure no one was watching. A few adults walked among the rows of cars, but none seemed to notice Jessie. Good. Two men were spraying water on a startling bunch of flowers near
the door, but they were facing the opposite direction.

Feeling more confident, Jessie began walking toward the exit sign. She marveled that Ma's plan seemed to be working: Evidently no one had noticed Jessie was gone. Mr. Seward and the others that Ma called “Clifton's men” must think she was sick in bed, like Katie. Otherwise—Jessie shivered. Otherwise there would probably be plenty of guards around, looking specifically for her. And as long as she stayed near the tourists, she'd be easy to find.

Jessie walked faster, grateful for the arrowed exit signs that appeared every fifty yards or so. But she stopped in her tracks when the arrows pointed her around a corner.

In front of her, lined up in diagonals, were about thirty enormous yellow cars—cars so big that Pa's blacksmith shop could have fit in any of them. Jessie gawked. Was this what Ma meant when she said limousines were big cars? Were these all Miles Clifton's limousines?

Jessie edged close enough to read the lettering on the side of each car:
GRANT COUNTRY SCHOOL DISTRICT, M.S.D.
OF Martinsville, school bus. The lettering didn't tell Jessie if the big cars were limousines or not, but she did recognize the word
school.
These must not belong to Miles Clifton. Did the schoolchildren who were tourists at Clifton Village get to ride on those? Jessie felt a stab of envy for those future—what had the chaperon called them?—teenagers.

It was all Jessie could do to resist peeking in one of the windows of the school maybe-limousines. Later, she told herself. After she got help for Katie and the others, she could come back and look closely at them. But just in case—as she walked on, Jessie stared back to try and register all the
details, so she could impress Andrew later. He'd be mad, anyhow, that Jessie had gotten to leave Clifton and he hadn't.

Just beyond the cars and the school maybe-limousines, one more exit sign pointed down a road that disappeared into the forest. The road was wide and smooth, covered with more of the black tarry surface. It made the new road they'd just built into Clifton look ridiculously bumpy. But this road was lined with familiar split rail fences, just like the ones that surrounded animal pens in Clifton.

Jessie climbed the fence and walked by the trees, hiding whenever she heard a car go by. Sure, no one seemed to be looking for her, but she didn't want to take any chances. Besides, she didn't want any more cars
hoonking
at her.

Stumbling over roots and branches, Jessie realized she could go a lot faster on the smooth road. No, be cautious, she told herself. That wasn't like her. Hannah was the cautious one in the family. But Hannah wouldn't have been brave enough to leave Clifton. Jessie would just have to pretend she had Hannah's caution and her own bravery.

A twig snapped nearby and Jessie froze. Then she relaxed, hearing a squirrel chatter by an oak ahead of her. Jessie tried to remember what Ma had said about getting down to the main road:

“It will be a long walk, maybe a mile. If I remember the way they planned it, the road will wind around a lot. And then you'll see a highway”—Jessie had looked puzzled at that—“a very big road, bigger than anything you've ever seen before. There should be signs with numbers, only I can't remember…. Seventeen? Twenty-seven? Thirty-seven? I think it's a number like that. Turn north and walk along the
road. It goes all the way to Indianapolis, but you should be able to find a phone long before you get there.”

A robin chirped in one of the elms and Jessie smiled. If she had a mile or more to walk, she wasn't going to walk the whole way fretting. She didn't need to be as big a worrywart as Hannah! She should be happy to find out they still had robins and squirrels in the 1990s. Then she laughed at herself. Of course they would! It was hard not to think of this as the future, this strange new world she'd just found out about.

Feeling freer with her laughter, Jessie took longer steps. She could do that in pants. She'd always wondered what it would be like to be a boy. This was as close as she'd get.

All the boys back in Clifton, Jessie thought, would be jealous that Jessie was out in the woods instead of in school listening to Mr. Smythe yell. On nice spring days like this, Andrew and his friends began talking of playing hooky from school and going fishing in Crooked Creek. Of course Andrew never did, because he knew Pa would tan his hide. But some of the other boys' fathers actually let them. Jessie remembered Mr. Wittingham saying it didn't matter, as soon as Horace learned his figuring and a little reading, he was taking him out of school, anyhow.

“What's he need with all those names and dates? He's going to be a barrel maker the rest of his life, same as me!”

Andrew had tried the same excuse on Pa, but Pa would have none of it.

“Doesn't matter if you're a blacksmith forever or not. Your ma thinks there's a value in being educated just for the sake of being educated. She's probably right—and anyhow, you do what your ma wants,” he'd said.

Now a new thought struck Jessie. Could Pa and Mr. Wittingham have said those things just to play a role for the tourists? What if they didn't believe their own words? What did they really think?

It was too confusing—and scary—to ponder. Jessie went back to studying the landscape around her. Except for the road to her right and the long line of split rail fences, it looked just like the woods surrounding Clifton.

Jessie heard a car behind her and stepped behind a huge evergreen until it passed on. The noise zoomed by, but then it seemed to slow down. From the sound, Jessie guessed that the car had almost stopped, maybe one hundred yards down the road. Then the noise picked up again and faded away.

Jessie crept from behind the tree, scratching her face on the tree's needles. She crouched beside the rail fence and looked down the road. There was a small building ahead, like the guardhouses or sentry stations that surrounded all the forts in Jessie's history book pictures. The car must have slowed down passing the guardhouse. Well, she'd just have to go deeper into the woods and circle around the guard. Then she'd find her way back to the road—and to that main road with the number name—as soon as she passed the guardhouse.

Proud that she'd thought to stay off the road all along, Jessie crawled back to the evergreen. She was sure the guard had not seen her. Even if he'd been looking her way, she would have been hidden by the fence and the trees.

Now it wouldn't be long, Jessie told herself. She moved deeper into the woods. The underbrush was denser here, and she had to shove branches and vines out of her way. She didn't care. She was almost away from Clifton, and maybe it
wouldn't be far down that number-name road before she'd find the thing Ma called a phone….

Then Jessie saw the fence.

It was huge, at least twice Jessie's height, maybe three times. It was made of some kind of metal. Even yards away, Jessie could see the intricate twists of strong metal that would take Pa years to make. And at the top, almost at a right angle from the rest of the fence, there were rows of wires full of poking barbs. Those would be sharp, Jessie realized numbly. She could probably climb the fence, but she was bound to tear her clothes. And what if—? Oh no.