Written in Time (29 page)

He was making himself a potential target and he knew it, but if there was some man out there injured, a man who had tried to help Jane, Clarence would find him.
 

And he did.
 

There was a body perhaps a hundred yards distant, posed at an unnatural angle over a slab of upthrusting gray-yellow rock. Hatless.
 

Clarence climbed down from the boulders, nearly losing his balance, then starting forward again, the rock which he’d picked up to use as a bludgeon still clenched tightly in his left fist.
 

He lost sight of the hapless figure for a few seconds, and then broke through a patch of low conifers into open ground. Clarence could move more quickly, the footing more reliable. And he could see the body more clearly. There was a gun belt about the man’s waist, but the holster was clearly empty. The man’s feet were stockinged only, the boots taken, too. No horse grazed nearby—stolen, of course.
 

Just in case the man were alive and had some other weapon, Clarence called out to him as he approached. “Hey, man! I’m a friend of the old lady you helped back there. I want to help you.”
 

The man’s head rose slightly, and his lips moved, but Clarence could hear nothing.
 

Narrowing the distance to the apparently injured man, Clarence dropped the rock, showing his open hands. “I don’t mean you any harm, man.”
 

This time, the man’s head did not rise.
 

Cautiously, lest this was some sort of trick of the men who had robbed Jane, Clarence approached the prostrate figure. As he did, he could see something he recognized quite clearly from military first aid films—the man had a sucking chest wound. Clarence bent over the man, the boulder he was laying on at approximately the height of a table. There was a bandana around the man’s neck and Clarence untied it, placed it over the wound. “Look, pal, my girl’s a doctor. I’ll get her and you’ll—”
 

“Old lady—how is she?”
 

“Good,” Clarence responded, thinking he was probably lying. Jane had looked pale as death, and her breathing had seemed labored. And this man was clearly beyond any help short of a fully equipped modern hospital and a blood bank; his clothes were saturated with blood, and blood had puddled on the rock beneath him. The bullet had gone through and the man was bleeding from both sides of his body, the blood dark, which Clarence thought he remembered meant it was arterial. But Clarence kept compression on the chest wound despite the fact that the bandanna—Jack would have called it a “wild rag”—was already saturated. “What’s your name, friend?”
 

“Al Cole. Look. Ya ever meet up with a Jim Cole— looks just like me. We’s twins, twin brothers. Tell ‘im he should go ‘n’ marry up Clarisse. She loves us both. An’ me, I’m outa it fer good, an’ that’s plain fact. I’m killed by them darn devil range detectives workin’ fer Jess Fowler.”
 

There was a rattle from deep within the man’s chest as he tried to say something else and failed. His eyelids fluttered, remained open, and his head lolled back. Blood trickled across his lower lip for a second or two, onto his chin. Then the blood flow stopped.
 

It was creepy in the extreme, but Clarence forced himself to touch the dead man’s eyelids and push them down, having no idea if they would stay that way.
 

Clarence stepped back, stared at the man for a moment longer. He paused to pick up the rock he’d dropped, thinking that he might need it. At a quick jog trot, he started back toward where he had left Peggy to care for Jane, fearing that he might just be in time for another death.
 

Making his way rapidly along the route over which he had come, passing once again the rocks in which the light array had been/would be placed, Clarence quickly rejoined Peggy and Jane.
 

He had missed death, arrived only in time for its sorrowful aftermath. Clarence took Peggy up from her knees and into his arms and simply held her while she cried, Jane’s body resting on the ground as if peacefully asleep.
 

Would her soul join that of her late husband, although he had not yet been born to grow up, meet her, live and work beside her and unwillingly abandon her through his death?
 

Time-travel, Clarence had realized from the moment he’d learned of the fate potentially in store for Jack, Ellen, Lizzie and David, was fraught with questions, scarce on answers.
 

But he suspected that he knew one answer. There had been something that struck him oddly about the mission supervisor, Marc Cole. It had been as if he had never met Marc Cole before, albeit that he had worked with the man for six months. And the cowboy, Al Cole, with the twin brother, Jim. And the girl—Clarisse had been her name—who had loved them both but, evidently, was to marry Al, who was dead. Had/would she marry Jim Cole instead? Had there been something different about the mission supervisor with the long blond hair before Jane had been inserted into another era? Had Al Cole not been killed, gone on to marry Clarisse? Was that it?
 

The answer, he knew, was that he would never know the answer, only wonder. If there had been something different about Marc Cole, the mission supervisor, Clarence could not remember what it was. And that infuriated him.
 

Another question nagged at him. Jack had once recounted a science fiction time-travel novel that he’d read as a boy. Clarence had never thought about it until now. In the story, when one of the time-travelers died in the past, it was as if they had never lived. Clarence believed in Fate, but not even Fate could be quite that cruel. But if it were, he would never know. He wanted to hit something, pulverize it.
 

That would have to wait until he met up with “them darn devil range detectives workin’ fer Jess Fowler.” Jane’s wristwatch would be a novelty, the sort of thing a psycho might hold on to because of its uniqueness, as a kind of trophy.
 

Whoever this Jess Fowler bastard and his fucking range detectives were, if Clarence ever saw that “trophy” in the possession of one of them, he’d beat the man to death with his fists and enjoy every minute of it.
 

CHAPTER
NINE
 

Liz Naile didn’t like her hair. Without the use of a hair dryer, it always looked flat. It reached to her shoulder blades. If she cut it short, as she’d worn it sometimes, drying it would be easier, but women in 1898 didn’t wear short hair, and she would only draw more attention to herself.
 

Once, while substitute teaching for the frequently ailing Margaret Diamond, as she did periodically and more often than she cared to, she’d remarked to one of the students—a pretty girl of thirteen with really gorgeous hair—that the girl’s hair always looked so perfect, she reminded her of Marsha Brady. Since television hadn’t even been invented yet, and The Brady Bunch wasn’t even in first runs let alone re-runs, Liz had quickly made up some little piece of bullshit to cover the slipup.
 

On another occasion, when the class had been studying a unit called “History of The World,” and the closest thing to a textbook for twenty students had been one beautifully illustrated two-volume set with the same title, she had compared Genghis Khan to Adolph Hitler. She’d covered that by telling her students, “You’ll study about him a lot later on.”
 

That night, Lizzie asked her father and mother the dates for World War Two, realizing that, indeed, it would be much, much later on that anyone would hear of him. Her father had told her, “Hitler should be about nine years old right now.”
 

“What if we went over to Germany—”
 

“Austria. He wasn’t born in Germany. But what if we went over there and killed him?”
 

Lizzie thought about it and then said, “I guess we’d still be killing a nine-year-old boy and not a dictator, because he hasn’t even heard of Nazis yet, right?”
 

“History,” her mother began, “is going to present us with a lot of dilemmas, Liz. And a lot of opportunities. We’re just going to have to decide on a case-by-case basis if something we do is going to screw up history and do more harm than good. Lots of times, it’ll be a compromise.”
 

As Liz stared at herself in her makeshift bedroom’s mirror, compromise was exactly what she saw looking back at her. She wore her high school tennis-team T-shirt under a sweatshirt that had Calvin Klein emblazoned across the front, all of this over an ankle-length full skirt, the toes of her solitary pair of track shoes poking out from beneath its hem.
 

If someone rode up to the house, she could always lie and say something like “Uncle Calvin likes to personalize his gifts” and scrunch down a little so her skirt would cover her shoes completely.
 

She quit her room and started toward the front door along the wide corridor. One side of the house—where they had been living most of the time for the last six months—was completed, her father and mother still holding off on finishing the rest of the house in the—she considered—vain hope that somehow they’d find a way of electrifying parts of it. Liz had about given up on that. And David, who spent most of his time in town running the store, didn’t seem to even think about it.
 

As she exited the house into the early December morning—it was nearly noon, but sleeping late when she could was one part of her old life she’d been able to hold on to—she saw her father. There was a chill in the air but, in spite of it, he was shirtless. He wore a gun, as he always did, but not his fancy one in the fancy black gunfighter rig, just a plain one he’d bought in town, worn crossdraw in a plain brown holster on a plain brown belt. Jack Naile was using a posthole digger, and she knew that he’d be expecting her—and her mother—to help him after a while. And she would. Despite her sex, she’d always had a great deal of upper-body strength; with David rarely home because of the store, more and more she’d found herself filling the function of surrogate son. She just thanked God that her body type didn’t get big muscles from doing that sort of stuff, like guys did.
 

Her mother was down by the stream working with the cereal box-like camera and tripod she’d ordered from St. Louis. David brought it out on his last visit from town. Ellen Naile, all her adult life forced by necessity to take photos of little else but guns and holsters and knives in association with Jack Naile’s magazine articles, was determined to actually do something she wanted with a camera; wisely, saving the film she had brought with her for special occasions, she was attempting to master the equipment currently available. Her mother was into compromise as well, Liz thought, smiling. For as long as Liz could remember, her mother had always preferred pants in the fall, winter and spring and shorts in the summer, only wearing a dress or skirt when the occasion called for it. Now Ellen Naile wore a long, dark blue skirt and a light blue long-sleeved blouse. The sleeves of the blouse were rolled up past her elbows, the collar of the blouse was left unbuttoned and the back of the skirt was drawn up between her legs, its hem tucked into the skirt’s waistband, forming something like baggy legged pants. Her mother flat-out refused to wear an apron as so many women did as part of their regular attire.
 

Liz sauntered over toward the stream. When her dad saw her, he waved and she waved back, which gave him an excuse to stop using the posthole digger and roll a cigarette. He smoked much less than he had before they’d traveled back in time, but took a certain pride, she thought, in having learned to quite deftly roll a cigarette, even outside when it was a little breezy, as it was this morning.
 

Her mother was looking through the camera lens, and Liz could hear her snarling, “What a piece-of-crap lens!”
 

“Hey, Momma.”
 

“Hi, sweetheart,” her mother responded. “I’d be better off with Dad’s mother’s old Box Brownie. You know, I’m not into fancy cameras. That 35mm of mine we bought at
 

J.C. Penney’s back in 1975, I think. And I almost never used the wide angle lens. But this thing really sucks!”
 

Liz had started to hitch up her skirt just like her mother’s as she asked, “Isn’t there a better camera available? Maybe from Europe or someplace!”
 

“I don’t know.”
 

Liz was about to say something reassuring as soon as she could think of it. As she tucked the hem of her skirt into her waistband, she caught sight of a cloud of dust coming from the direction of town and the higher mountains beyond. “Who’s that? It must be a big wagon or something?”
 

Her mother turned the camera around and leaned over it. “I can actually see something through this lens! You’re right. That’s a big dust cloud. Go tell your father.”
 

Lizzie ran toward where her father was building the new corral, on the other side of the house from the stream, where the ground was flatter. “Daddy! Daddy!”
 

Her father had, apparently, just picked up the posthole digger again, the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. “What’s the matter, princess?”
 

“Look! In the direction of town!”
 

She stopped running, about halfway between her mother and her father, her hands fumbling with the hem of her skirt to pull it out of her waistband so she could hide her 1990s track shoes from 1890s eyes.
 

“Lizzie. Go up on the porch and get that new Winchester shotgun David brought up from town. It’s loaded, but the chamber’s empty. Be careful.”
 

Liz ran toward the porch, nearly tripping on her skirt. The shotgun—her father had told her what it was called, but she didn’t remember—was leaned beside the door frame, its butt resting in a notched piece of wood her father had chiseled out for it, then nailed to the porch floor, the muzzle in a similarly contoured piece of wood. The shotgun was big and heavy.