The Wooden Sea (18 page)

"Yup."

I thumbed toward the house. "But back inside, Pauline and Magda are--"

"Exactly, back _inside _the house. Out here it's the sixties. Welcome to my world." He hopped up and perched himself on the wooden railing that went around the porch.

Before I could say anything, a door slammed across the street. My father came down the walk toward his car. He was in his forties again and still had some hair left. He wore a beige summer suit I remember going with him to buy. He always wore a suit to work, always wore a tie. Usually it was one solid color-- black or maroon. Stripes or crazy designs weren't him, ever. For his birthday I'd once given him a tie designed by Peter Max with Day-Glo-colored elephants and spaceships on it. He dutifully wore it to please me, but it was plain he was mortified. This man dressed like he didn't want to be seen, like the less the world noticed him the better. When I was Gee-Gee's age I loved my

Dad but had little respect for him. We may have lived in the same house but not on the same planet.

This was in the sixties. We wore buttons on our jean jackets that announced (idiotically) never trust anyone over thirty. Or really anyone who had a regular job, wore a suit, carried a mortgage, believed in The System ... I was never a hippie because I thrived on violence, selfishness, and intimidation.

Pacifism would have deprived me of fun and opportunity. But I sure did like the drugs and free sex that were such an essential part of the movement. Which predictably made matters geometrically worse between Dad and me. Only later, after being to Vietnam and seeing people like Andy Eldritch get their heads blown off, did I realize how much of what my father said and lived was correct.

Gee-Gee shouted out, "Hey, Dad! Over here!" as the Jaguar passed. But the driver, a man I had buried with my own hands, didn't look our way, although it was definitely him--Dad. Alive again.

We watched the car until it was out of sight. I turned to the boy and asked, "What the hell's going on?"

"My guess is someone fucked up. Astopel or one of the people he's with."

"Meaning?"

He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. "Meaning someone needs Frannie McCabe to do something for them. You've got a one-week time limit to get it done. But for whatever reason they can't tell you what it is. So first they start off by giving you hints--the buried dog coming back, the feather, the empty Schiavo house ..."

"And Pauline's tattoo, which was a picture of the feather. But now even that's disappeared. Wait a minute--she had the newspaper in her hand. She must have stepped out here this morning when things were changing!"

He blew one smoke ring and nodded. "Which exactly fits into what I'm thinking. None of those hints got you to do what they wanted. So I bet they got desperate and brought me here to help.

If grown-up Frannie can't do it, bring in Frannie the kid. But that didn't work either so they pushed both of us to the future."

I took the cigarette from him, had a puff, handed it back. "Who're _they!"_

"I got no idea. That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. But it almost doesn't matter. We know how powerful they are. They can mess around with time and parts of our life and other stuff. But so far they haven't been able to make you do what they want. So how powerful can they be? If they were God they'd just say, `Do that!' But they don't because they can't."

"Maybe they're small gods," I mumbled, thinking out loud.

Stubbing out the cigarette on the bottom of his boot, he flicked the butt into Magda's mums.

"Small gods, that's right. But look around, man--they really screwed up this time. You were in the future and were supposed to return to your time. Instead you came back to both yours _and _mine at the same time."

"Gee-Gee? Where are you?" Pauline's voice floated out of the house.

He slid off the railing and started for the door. I caught his arm and asked, "How did you figure this out?"

He undid my fingers. For the first time his voice became soft and vulnerable.

"It's the best I could come up with. You think I might be right?"

"I think you probably are right."

He brightened and encouraged, leaned in close to tell me his next brainstorm.

"And you know something else? I think they brought me back because whatever it is they need, you can't do it by yourself. You need me along because otherwise you're going to blow it."

"Why do I need you?" I asked too loudly.

The bad boy voice, attitude, everything slipped instantly back into place.

"Because you been tamed, Chief McCabe. You dry your face with pretty pink towels and don't even realize it `cause you're used to it.

But me? I'm still the caveman version of Fran-nie McCabe. I kick ass and piss out the window. I swing on vines in the jungle. I hunt with a club on the fucking _veldt."_

I had to have a look. No matter how little time remained to figure out what

"they" needed done, I had to call a short intermission and see Crane's View rewound thirty years.

I went back into the house for a pair of pants and shoes. Gee-Gee and Pauline were in the kitchen talking and laughing. They ignored the old guy in the boxer shorts as he passed. It was a pleasure to see

Pauline looking so happy, even if it was due to Mr. Hot Pants and his sleazy ways.

In a pair of jeans and a T-shirt I went out the door again and down the porch stairs. As I began walking toward town I stopped and looked across the street.

Why was my father coming out of that house so early in the morning? I tried to think back to who had lived there three decades before but came up blank. I would have to ask Gee-Gee later.

What I did remember was that as he grew older, Dad had increasingly bad insomnia and used to go out walking or driving around at all hours. My mother and I grew used to his coming and going at the strangest times. Once Mom even said the Jaguar and the insomnia were the two things that made him different from every other Tom, Dick, and Harry. My father's name was Tom.

Walking toward town I remembered a terrible story she told. Right before they were married, they made a date one day to meet in New York under the big clock at Grand Central Station.

Mom was a few minutes early and waited eagerly for her fiance to arrive.

After some time she saw him walking toward her so she moved to greet him. It took many steps (her phrase) while staring straight at the guy to finally realize it wasn't Tom McCabe but a complete stranger. Shocked at her mistake and then relieved she hadn't made a fool of herself, she slunk back to her place under the clock.

A few minutes later she was _sure _she saw Tom. Again she moved out to say hello. But God forbid, it happened again-- only a few less steps this time to recognize this second stranger who also looked so much like the love of her life wasn't him. She laughed when she told the story, but Mom never told it when my father was around. We both knew it was funny but sad as hell too.

Because it was the truth--throw a stick at a bunch of commuters waiting at any Westchester County train station at seven any morning, or during coffee break in a Manhattan office building, and you would have hit six guys identical to my dad.

That's why his showy car and insomnia pleased her so. They were his only distinguishing characteristics.

Walking along, I enjoyed seeing great old cars that in my time were like extinct animals--a Corvair and a MG-A parked on opposite sides of the street.

Passing Al Salvato's old house, there was his father's dogshit-brown Ford Edsel. The car with automatic transmission buttons in the middle of the steering wheel. Salvato's father enjoyed seeing us kids sit in the Edsel when it was parked in their driveway. Al always encouraged me to sit in the driver's seat, but that was only because he was afraid. All my pals were afraid of me and for good reason. I loved fighting, stealing, lying, and hurting. My favorite sport was knocking people out, preferably with an iron bar or anything hard. I thrived on being everything your parents warned you against. I was the delinquent, the crud, the bad apple, and the criminal they knew would one day go to hell, to jail, to no good end. And I wore that charge proudly. I passed the little blue house where the assistant high school principal had lived. When he suspended me from school for stealing a teacher's book, I set his car on fire. Down the block in an ugly split-level had lived the head of the Crane's View branch of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. One night

I broke into their meeting hall and stole every gun they had on display. Et cetera.

But was Gee-Gee right? Had things like Magda's pink towels and a happy life declawed me?

More important, did I care? Did it matter if I had left him, _that _Frannie, behind years ago?

What do you see when you look at old photos of yourself, besides bad haircuts and tasteless clothes you gave away to the

Salvation Army twenty years ago? Was that strutting punk back at the house really me, or had we only lived in the same body, like an apartment, at different times?

A small dog trotted by, looking self-important and full of plans.

"Jack!" Hearing its name, it stopped and checked me out. I slowly offered my hand, which it sniffed but no wagging tail followed. This was my friend Sam Bayer's dog. A pooch I had liked very much when it was alive. Which didn't stop me, however, from pissing on it and Johnny Petangles one day years ago while Jack sat on Johnny's lap, but that's another story.

Since I was no more than a stranger with an empty hand, Jack walked away. I realized he was probably going back to my house because that's where the Bayer family had lived when we were kids. I had always liked that house, and when it came on the market a few years ago I bought it. What would the dog find when it got back there? The Bayer family circa 1965, or teenagers Pauline and

Gee-Gee still flirting over their cups of Italian coffee? What if it _was _the Bayer family? What if I was to follow the dog home and find that everything I knew as an adult had disappeared into thirty years ago? What if I had been sent permanently back to the world I had inhabited as a sullen, mean-hearted semipsy-chotic teenager?

"Shut up and get going," I said out loud because if I didn't nudge myself along, I could easily have stood there waiting for Godot or anyone to come along and tell me what I could do to get out of this fix.

Something did save me, something unexpected--my stomach. It let loose a grumble that sounded like a small lion's roar. I still hadn't eaten.

The hunger that had been there since I awoke was becoming urgent. But that was all right because I was near Scrappy's Diner. I'd go there for a whopper breakfast, and while eating I could think some more about what to do. A plan.

I finally had a plan and that made the rest of the walk to town pleasant.

Climbing the diner stairs, I looked down at the last one. I'd broken off a large piece of that step one night when I threw a sledgehammer at my

then-girlfriend. Thank God it missed her by a mile but knocked off a large chunk of the slate step. Scrappy Kricheli, who was such a cheapskate that he would have recycled his farts if he could have made money on them, didn't replace it for two years. Lucidly he never discovered who broke it. Untold numbers of customers tripped on it and threatened to sue him. I think the guy enjoyed watching them fall down. Ultimately someone did sue the cheap bastard and Scrappy lost a bundle.

There it was again under my adult foot, looking like someone had taken a jagged bite out of the stone. So they even had that detail down too, whoever they were. Walking into the diner I wondered how many times I was going to have to refer to them as "whoever they were."

Inside, the first thing I saw was Scrappy Kricheli sitting behind the cash register with a toothpick in his mouth, reading a copy of _The National

Enquirer. _Today Scrappy looked to be in his forties. He would die of a stroke sitting in that same seat just after his sixtieth birthday.

Behind the counter, wearing a red waitress dress that barely contained her amazing body, was his daughter Alice. Both looked at me indifferently. I sat on the ninth stool facing the counter, the same place I always took here. That made me smile. When I looked up Alice was staring at me with a "What's your problem?" look in her eyes.

I wanted to say something but what? Instead I reached for a menu. As usual, three of them (turquoise with thick gold lettering) were stuck behind each jukebox selector down the counter.

When I was finished ordering breakfast, I

wanted to see which hot tunes Scrappy was stocking on his box that day.

"You want coffee?" Scrappy's family lived in the Bronx and they all spoke with a heavy accent.

When Alice said the word it came out sounding like

"coo-woffee."

"Yes please. And I'll have scrambled eggs, hash browns, and bacon with that."

She nodded while pouring me a cup of smoking brown coffee. Yes, brown.

It also smelled like dishwater and I knew that's what it would taste like because that's what coffee always tasted like here. Scrappy's Diner was a greasy spoon that catered to cops and truckers and high school kids who ate anything so long as it was a hamburger and french fries. Ask for an espresso here and, like Gee-Gee, they would have thought that you were a soft ice creamer.

I was admiring Alice's behind when I sensed him first and then heard his soft voice next to me.

"Excuse me? I'm sorry to bother you, but I just gotta. Do you mind?"

I turned and there was my Dad two feet away gaping at me.

I rotated the seat around so as to give him my full face. "Yes?" Up that close I realized we were about the same age. My father and I were today both in our late forties. I got so many shivers going up and down my spine that it almost fell off.

"I don't know how to say this and it sounds crazy but... Would you mind if I sat down?"

"Please--have a seat." I pointed to the stool next to mine.