The Bellbottom Incident (14 page)

Some spying is in order
, Abigail had said. I understood the plan without needing an explanation. I was well versed in organizing campus events and knew how much discussion it took to get any group to agree on anything, no matter how small the group or the matter. The timing of the trip, the destination, and the other associated details would all have been hashed out in advance by the book club. All we needed to do was to jump back to the last meeting and eavesdrop.

The place where the club met each week, the recreation room of St. Olaf’s, was on the ground floor at the end of the hallway, Xave explained. “There’s a Ping-Pong table and some chairs and a couch. I don’t go there much.”

“Their last meeting would have been Friday the twenty-ninth,” Dr. Little said, and reached for his duffel bag to get the equipment out and calculate coordinates. “Mooney—”

“You’re kicking me out again? Well, I suppose I do need to show my face at the lab, or my advisor will think I’m slacking off.”

I had reset my watch yet again. “It’s past 9:00 p.m.,” I protested, unwilling to see him leave and quite certain that I wouldn’t see him again until we got back to 2012. (From his point of view, the next time he would see me would be on my first day of work in the science dean’s office. It was an odd thought.) “How will your advisor even know if you’re in the lab this late or not?”

“Oh, he’ll know. Dr. Eatchel already thinks my time-travel idea is an embarrassment to the department and would probably be happier if I just…left. I wish I could introduce you to him. Oh, how I would love to see his face after you showed him that little smart phone.”

“I bet,” Dr. Little said.

“Will I see you three again?” Xave asked from the doorway.
 

“Yes,” I answered for all of us.

“Thanks for the sandwich.”

Once the door had closed behind him, Dr. Little briskly unzipped his duffel bag. “I’ll run the necessary calculations for the Slingshot—I’ll send us to the Open Book, and we can walk over from there.”

 
For the first time since we’d stepped into 1976, I was optimistic that everything was going to work out just fine.

A jump of three days back got us to October 29, the day that Dr. Little had originally planned for his run and the very day when Sabina had arrived on campus. We found the ground by the Open Book muddy from a light drizzle. The green area on which the sculpture sat was empty except for a few students crossing it, their forms shadowy under the sparse streetlights. Sabina was presumably inside the warm, well-lit cafeteria, but we had no way of getting to her—this day was already in her past and could not be changed.
 

Still, I tossed out the idea of one of us trying to sneak up on Sabina to slip a note into her pocket for her to find later, with instructions not to do anything foolish such as stow away on a transatlantic liner, but the plan was waved away. Neither of my companions thought it would work.
 

Abigail pulled her coat closer around her thin frame as we strode across the plaza to St. Olaf’s Hall. Assuming there had not been any unexpected minor adjustments by History, it was just about eight thirty, and the book club meeting had already started. Dr. Little reminded us that bold was occasionally the way to go, and we strode up the brick path of St. Olaf’s Hall and toward its front steps as if we belonged.

It didn’t work. We hit an invisible wall about halfway up the path.

“
Oof
. I wish there was some kind of warning about these things,” I complained, rubbing my shoulder where I had smacked it against History’s wall.

We regrouped behind the shrubbery in the dorm’s courtyard. After a few minutes’ discussion, we decided that trying to march in as a group had drawn too much attention and it would be better to send in a single person.
 

Dr. Little tried first. Having set his duffel bag on the ground, he left the shelter of the shrubbery and, still sticking to his theory that bold trumped stealthy, gave striding up the path another go. He came back in defeat, his hair matted from the light drizzle.

Abigail tried the opposite approach, stealth. Petite as she was, she made herself smaller by hunching her shoulders in and turning the collar of her coat up over her ears. She headed up the path, softly stepping on the worn bricks glistening in the rain.
 

“Well, that didn’t work at all,” she said, having stomped back without any further attempt at stealth.
 

“My turn.” I remembered a rule that had been drilled into us before the Pompeii run—
Blend in
. We were trying to crash a book club meeting and needed to look the part. “Do either of you have a book, textbook, anything of that sort?”

There was nothing that would work in the two backpacks I had brought with me. Dr. Little retrieved a pencil flashlight from one of his pockets and rummaged briefly in his duffel bag. “Yes…here.” It was the 1976
Old Farmer’s Almanac
(the Bicentennial issue, with a yellow cover and an Uncle Sam–featuring ad on the back that proclaimed
EVERYBODY AND HIS UNCLE LOVES SNOW’S CHOWDER
). I saw that Dr. Little had printed out the
actual
weather data for fall of 1976 and taped up the tables inside the pages. “Handy for checking the weather forecast on the go,” he explained with a straight face.
 

It wasn’t ideal as far as literary club reading material went, but it would have to do. Leaving the cover of the shrubbery, I tucked the almanac in one coat pocket so only the top of it was showing and set a course up the path and toward the front steps of the dorm. As far as I could tell, there was no one watching from any of the windows—it was too early for Friday night parties, and the only signs of activity inside were silhouettes in lighted windows and the sound of a door shutting somewhere. I guessed that the bottleneck was someone in the common area just inside the dorm door.

I successfully passed the halfway point of the brick path, where Dr. Little and Abigail had been stopped, and, turning up the collar on my coat like Abigail had, brainstormed wildly about what my next move should be. Would it be best to keep my head down? Plaster what I hoped was an erudite, literary look on my face? Take the book out of my pocket and hold it in my hands?
 

Before I could decide I had pulled the front door open.
 

The hall monitor, a lanky and pimple-ridden student, glanced up briefly from one of the easy chairs. The TV was on, blaring fast-paced dialogue. “Close the door, it’s cold.”
 

I did and tapped the almanac in my pocket. “I’m here for the book club.”

“Rec room. At the end of the hallway.” He gestured with his head and went back to watching TV above the textbook in his lap.
 

“What’s on?” I asked.

The student gave me the same look I might have given if asked what
American Idol
was by a contemporary. “
Hawaii Five-O
.”
 

“Right, right.” As I continued past, I thought I heard him mutter under his breath, “Udo attracts them like flies.”

The door to the rec room was open. The cigarette smoke (of both the regular and the less legal variety) was so prevalent that a fine fog engulfed the space. I stepped inside. A dozen or so students were sprawled on the room’s couches and chairs or cross-legged on the floor. The Ping-Pong table had been pushed aside and under the window, leaving room for the speaker, who was standing in the middle of the cleared space. Fighting my twenty-first-century reflex to open a window to clear the air, I took a seat against the back wall, where there were several empty wooden chairs.
 

Udo Leland—for it could be no one else—was gesticulating with passion as he spoke. He was dressed all in black: a black turtleneck hugged his thin body over slim black pants and black shoes. His blond hair streamed over his shoulders, and he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses—black ones, of course. He looked so much like the artistic sort as to be a walking cliché, except that what was considered cliché in 2012 was probably fresh and exciting in 1976.

All of the female students—and some of the male ones, too—certainly appeared to think so. They were hanging on Udo’s every word. For his bit, he was delivering his speech without making eye contact with his audience, as if humanizing his crowd distracted him from the topic at hand, which seemed to be Writing with a capital
W
.
 

“Forget the television sets in your parents’ living rooms, the fancy cars in their yards. Forget their expensive clothes and watches. What the
true
writer needs is connections with his roots, with his community and friends…not the empty luxuries of the bourgeois life.”

There were murmurs of agreement, though I thought he was laying it on a bit thick. It seemed to me that Udo was perhaps talking about his own family when he disdained fancy cars and clothes, like a trust-fund kid turning his nose up at his parents’ wealth. Most undergrads at St. Sunniva are from within the state, both back then and in the present, and if there’s one thing Minnesotans tend to be, it’s thrifty. Though they were perhaps too embarrassed to say so, the students he was addressing probably came from hardworking families who had reached deep into their pockets to send their kids to college. This was certainly the case with my own mother and her family. She was at the foot of the couch, in a super-short blue dress and knee-high boots, her legs curled underneath her to one side. Like the others, she looked riveted by Udo’s speech.

“The writers who
matter
…You know them—Vonnegut and others…Do they worry about being
liked
? No. Is their goal a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, a TV set in the living room, and a station wagon in the driveway? No.”

More murmurs of agreement. A patch of cigarette smoke cleared temporarily, and an odd, unexpected detail popped out at me. Udo’s hair showed tinges of brown at the roots. So he had dyed it blond. It certainly stood out against his brown eyes and eyebrows and the all-black outfit. A lot of people in the state and on campus sported blond hair, courtesy of Minnesota’s Scandinavian immigrant community. I was not one of them, and apparently neither was Udo.
 

“They wanted to write prose that would stand the test of time, words that would
transcend
time…”

My mind wandered a bit as he continued in this vein for a while. I was impatient for him to get talking about the important part, the tree he held in such high regard—and its location.
 

I couldn’t help but stare at my mother. She seemed caught up in the moment, bedazzled by Udo and what he had to say. Was there a baby bump under her blue dress, or was the soft curve of her cheeks and arms just youthful pudginess? I wasn’t sure how early that sort of thing showed. Once again there was a cigarette between her fingers, and this time there was also a beer bottle by her side. If she knew she was pregnant, was she…
ignoring
it? Is that why History had allowed me to come to 1976, because my influence, barely affecting even one person, had yet to be felt?
 

It was all a bit ego-squashing. I wasn’t particularly swollen-headed or anything, but I wasn’t immune to wanting to feel special…at least as far as my mom and dad were concerned.
 

I watched my mother watch Udo and a thought flew into my mind that immediately filled me with horror. Could the very man who had almost run me over and was even now delivering a hackneyed speech actually be my father?

I shook the idea away as being ridiculous and cleared my throat in an effort to forestall an emerging coughing fit. Speaking of Dad, there he was too, sitting in a chair across the room. He was in a tie-dye shirt and jeans, looking very young and in need of a good haircut and a shave under his large-framed glasses. He kept reaching for his handkerchief (fall was allergy season for Dad—ragweed—and the smoke probably wasn’t helping.) He occasionally glanced at my mother, then quickly away, as if he didn’t want to be caught staring. At one point his eyes shot to the broad-shouldered man sitting at the foot of the couch next to my mother. It was the man I’d seen her with in the cafeteria, the one with the strong-jawed profile and dark hair.
 

I tried to focus on what Udo was saying (“Every great novel is not about a single character, but Character…”) but my eyes kept returning to my mother. She and the student next to her occasionally rubbed shoulders as they passed a cigarette back and forth in a familiar fashion. A good buddy of hers…or someone more important? My father certainly seemed to think so.
 

As did the student on the
other
side of the guy with Mom. The body language of the dark-complexioned woman in a sari revealed that she felt she should be on the receiving end of the man’s attention, not my mother. She was pretending to read a book, testily turning its pages in the dim light.

Dad tried to stifle a sneeze and received a look of irritation from Udo, which I was proud to see he ignored. At least I knew the story had a happy ending. For Dad, not the other guy. I knew that all would turn out well and that he and my mother would end up together. Still, I wanted him to stand up, offer an arm to my mother, and lead her into their future life together.
 

As I tried hard not to keep my gaze fixed on Missy’s belly—somehow I was very sure that Dad did not yet know that she was pregnant—I thought fondly of my previous time travels, which had flung me into life-threatening ghost zones but hadn’t taken me anywhere near my family members. I was seeing potential fathers everywhere—first Udo, now the mystery man next to my mother. At least I knew that History wouldn’t send me back, since I had successfully managed to blend in three days from now, on November 1. So, though I was starting to get a little light-headed, I figured History wasn’t the culprit. Rather it was probably all the smoke. The dark-haired man passed his cigarette again to my mother. The strong line of the jaw, the somewhat large ears—who did he remind me of?