“They’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
“Damn,” she exclaimed, standing quickly up. “Stupid interruptions.”
“I know,” I said regretfully, looking at her naked body, knowing I’d been less than a minute away from finally entering it.
“Oh well,” she shook her head sadly, as frustrated as I was, probably more so. “The best laid plans and all that.” She took a good look at herself, at her dripping body. “I need to get cleaned up before they get here. I can’t go home smelling like this.”
“No,” I said, paling as I thought about Mary Blackmore getting a whiff of the odor of sex on her daughter. Sure, she probably suspected that Nina and I were intimate with each other. That was one thing. But to have physical proof of it was quite another. “That wouldn’t do, would it?”
“I need to use your shower,” she said, gathering up her dress. “I’ll be out before they get here. Can you go out to the car and get my bra?”
“You bet,” I said. “And I probably oughtta brush my teeth too.”
She giggled. “Probably oughtta,” she agreed, heading for the bathroom, her dress trailing out behind her.
By the time the EMTs dragged Tracy back into the house and deposited her in her bed Nina was dried off and dressed once more, her bra properly in place. Everyone greeted her warmly, not expressing any surprise at her presence. I did notice a few knowing looks from both Tracy and my dad however. If they had anything to say, they kept it to themselves.
Nina and I chatted with Tracy for a while and then Mom and Dad, who had assumed their places before the television set. I kept up my end of the conversation but I couldn’t recite a single thing we talked about. My teenaged hormones were surging through my body and I was having a difficult time keeping my erection from returning as I thought about Nina just sitting there, talking normally, while under her dress she had no panties on. My balls were aching fiercely.
We went up to my room about a half-hour before I needed to start getting ready for work. This was nothing unusual. We often spent time up there alone. Usually we did nothing more than kiss.
“Got blue balls?” Nina asked me, a smile on her face.
“In the worst way,” I confirmed.
“I’m sorry,” she told me, sitting on the edge of my bed once more. “I really meant to let you make love to me. I wanted it, Bill. I still do.”
“I know,” I told her. “It’s okay.”
“I guess fate just doesn’t like you for some reason.”
I had to laugh at what she said. Fate like me? Probably not. “No,” I said, “I don’t believe that fate likes me at all.”
She gave me a puzzled look for a moment and then her eyes took on a little shine. “So what are you gonna do about the blue balls?” she asked. “Play with yourself after I leave?”
“Probably before your car even starts,” I confirmed. “I can’t go to work like this.”
“Maybe I can help,” she said softly. “Come over here.”
“Why?” I asked suspiciously.
She reached out and grabbed the waistband of my shorts, tugging me to her so I was standing between her legs. Her mouth was right at the level of my crotch. “You ask too many questions,” she told me, reaching for the button and undoing it.
“Nina,” I said, feeling myself coming to full erection once again, “my parents…”
“Would never come in without knocking,” she put in. She unzipped me and pushed my shorts down. Another push to my underwear and my cock was waving in her face. “Just be quiet and let me do my work.”
“If you insist,” I croaked as her mouth slid over me.
________________________________________
My mom was in the habit of leaving me a plate of whatever she’d cooked for dinner that night in the refrigerator so I could heat it up when I got home from work. That night was no exception. I was gobbling up a large bowl of her beef stew and turning a thought that I’d been having over in my mind when the doorbell rang. I heard my dad answer it and a moment later say, “He’s in the kitchen.” A few seconds after that, Mike came in, wearing a T-shirt from the fire department.
“What’s up Mike?” I greeted, putting my thoughts on hold for the time being. “How’s the new job?”
“It’s cool,” he answered, grabbing a seat. “I spent most of the day filling out the forms and all that crap. Then one of the captains that works days took me out in the truck to show me what I’d be doing. I’ll start tomorrow on the normal route.”
I offered him some of Mom’s stew - there was plenty in the fridge - and he declined. While I finished up he continued to tell me about his new career. When I was done eating and had put my dishes in the sink, we went out front.
“I’m off the buds now,” he told me seriously once we were out of my parent’s earshot.
“You?” I asked, raising my brows. “Off the buds? What’s up with that?”
He shook his head sadly. “I’ll be driving a courier truck for the fire department. They have a policy. If anybody driving any vehicle gets into any accident of any kind, they have to get drug tested. It’s some lawyer shit they have there. I wish I would’ve known about it a few weeks ago. I smoked some the other day with Maggie. Now I have to hope and pray I don’t have some asshole crash into me in the next six weeks.”
“Hopefully fate will be kind to you,” I said, suppressing the joy I wanted to express. When I made my crack about fate I hadn’t even been worried about it. Mike had already beaten fate. He had been forced to choose between marijuana and a career and he had chosen the career with hardly a second thought. Remarkable when you consider what had happened to him in his previous timeline, when he’d continued to smoke pot knowing that he would eventually be drug-tested and caught. He just hadn’t cared. Now, at eighteen, he was much more mature than “the other Mike”, as Tracy would have put it, ever was or ever would be. “Are you gonna miss it much?” I asked him.
“Oh yeah,” he admitted, nodding. “There’s nothing like getting stoned. Well, almost nothing. But I’ll live. I hope Maggie understands. She likes to smoke a little bit with me. But I don’t think it’ll bother her that I quit. And the minute I make captain and don’t have to drive anything anymore, I’m gonna go score me a fuckin’ ounce and smoke it all in one night.”
I grinned. “Be sure and invite me over,” I told him. “How’s it going with you and Maggie anyway?”
“It’s goin’ great,” he assured me. “If she wasn’t at work right now I’d be over there instead of bullshittin’ with you.” He grinned lasciviously. “I’m tellin’ you, Bill, that chick really knows how to fuck.”
“What?” I asked, surprised at his words although I really shouldn’t have been.
He nodded knowingly. “And she can suck dick like you wouldn’t believe too. The other night she finally gave it up for the first time. Goddamn she was hot. We started out in her living room. We were watching some TV and then we started kissing a little. She let me feel her tits - she has nice tits - and then she unbuttoned my…”
“Mike,” I interrupted.
“What?” he asked, looking confused, wondering why I was intruding upon his sex story.
“Have you told anybody else about this?” I asked him.
“About fucking Maggie?” he asked. “No, you’re the first. Why?”
I shook my head. “Don’t take what I’m telling you the wrong way,” I said. “I’m telling you this in friendship and to help you, just like when I told you about the Air Force recruiter, remember?”
“Yeah, but… what are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell people about what you do with Maggie,” I advised sternly. “Don’t tell anybody a damn thing. Not even me. Not even if they ask. Keep it to yourself. I know it’s hard to do, I know that a guy’s instinct is to share his conquests with everyone, to let other guys know he’s a man. But it’s a bad idea. A very bad idea.”
He looked at me strangely. I could see the old immature hostility at being contradicted wanting to come forth. “I’m just telling you,” he said. “Maggie doesn’t know. And she wouldn’t care anyway.”
“Wrong.” I said. “Now I don’t know Maggie as well as you do, but I know women pretty well. And I know guys pretty well. If you tell me, you’ll tell others. But even if you don’t, you can’t even trust me. Suppose I passed on what you said to Tracy. Tracy might run into Cindy, who is her friend. Cindy is also a friend of Maggie’s. Suppose Maggie hears from Cindy exact quotes from what you just told me. She wouldn’t be very happy. Her unhappiness will increase with each person that the story passed through before it got back to her. It really is a small world and if you are in the habit of blabbing your exploits to people, word will get around and get back to her. Women will break up with you in an instant if they find out you’re telling people about what you do with them in bed. Worse than that, any other woman that the story has passed through will not have anything to do with you because they know you’ll tell everyone. Are you following me?”
He looked a little shell shocked by my words. “Yeah, I see. But you wouldn’t tell Tracy anything.”
“You can’t know that,” I told him. “You can’t know that about even me and I’m your best friend. All it would take would be a few beers with Tracy, a little loosening of the tongue, and then out pops the story. You definitely can’t know that about other people. Trust me on this. Keep you mouth shut about it if you want to keep her. Fuck the shit out of her at night. Enjoy it immensely. But don’t tell a soul about it. Why even take a chance on her finding out? What’s more important, Mike, continuing to get the pussy and not having anybody know you’re getting it, or getting it a few times, letting everybody know, and then losing the pussy because you blabbed? Myself, I gotta go with continued pussy every time. No contest.”
He was looking thoughtful at my speech but didn’t say anything.
“Besides,” I went on, “after it becomes known that you and Maggie are together, everyone is gonna know you’re fucking her anyway. They’ll know you’re a man, they’ll know you’re taking her home and boffing the shit out of her. So why provide them with details? Let them just think about what you’re doing with her and they’re not. Let the fuckers be envious.”
He nodded a little, brightening to what I’d said. “I see what you’re saying.”
“So if I come up to you and say, “Mike, you been fucking Maggie or what?”, what are you gonna say?”
He smiled. “I’d say this…” He shrugged. “Maggie and I are just good friends.”
I grinned. “You’re learning, Mike. You’re learning.”
“You know where I learned that line from?” he asked me.
“Where?”
“From you,” he told me.
“From me?”
“Over the last couple a years,” he said, “I used to see you with girls from school all the time. They used to be around you at lunch, around you after school, around you before school. Whenever I’d ask you about one of them, that’s what you’d say. That you were just friends.”
“And friends were all that we ever were.”
He shook his head in wonder. “You sly motherfucker,” he said respectfully.
________________________________________
The next morning, shortly after breakfast, Tracy and I were playing a game of cribbage in her cave. Tracy was not a happy person being eternally trapped in a den of her parent’s house. She was suffering from a full-blown case of cabin fever and was very cranky at best. I was twenty points ahead of her and had just slapped down a double card run, fouling her mood even more.
“You lucky asshole,” she said in disgust, throwing her cards at me. “This is a stupid game.”
“And I’m about to skunk you at it,” I added. “Which means you’ll owe me fifty cents instead of a quarter, plus double points.”
“Fuck you and deal,” she told me. “And please turn off whatever crap that is you’ve put on the turntable. It reminds me of taking car trips with Mom and Dad when we were little.”
“It’s The Beatles,” I told her. “This is the most classic rock and roll there is. How can you not like it?”
“It’s old fogy music. Put on one of my albums. They’re much better.”
“Eighties music is an atrocity. You can’t compare the freakin Thompson Twins to The Beatles. It’s not even the same category.”
“I like the Thompson Twins,” she said. “And I hate The Beatles. And I’m the one that’s injured and you’re the one in my room. So put on the fucking Thompson Twins.”
“All right,” I gave in, setting the cards down and heading for the stereo. Just then the phone started to ring.
“You got that, Bill?” Dad yelled from his perch in the living room. Mom was off at work.
“Yeah,” I said, changing course and heading for the phone. “Hello?”
“Bill?” It was Nina and she sounded very excited. “Have you got your mail yet?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, already intuiting what she was talking about. “Nobody’s gone out to get it anyway. Why? Did you get a letter from the college?”
“Acceptance and full academic scholarship!” she squealed happily. “I’m in, Bill. I’m in! And I’ll be able to afford to go!”
“That’s great, Nina,” I said, getting excited myself. “Let me go check the mail and see if mine’s there. Here, talk to Tracy.” I handed the phone, actually tossed it, to my sister and rushed out of the room.
Still wearing my sweat pants and no shirt I rushed by my dad, who looked at me curiously, and out the front door. I went directly to the mailbox by the curb, throwing open the door and peering inside. There was a stack of mail in there. I grabbed it, shuffling quickly through the envelopes, magazines, and junk mail, looking for a return address from the University of Washington at Seattle. I found it near the bottom.
Standing there, holding it in my hand, I was suddenly scared, suddenly afraid to open it. Inside was either a yes or a no. If it were yes, Nina and I would be going to college together. If it was a no, who knows what would happen. I took a deep breath. With hands that were shaking, I finally tore open the envelope. One quick glance told me all I needed to know. I returned to the house.
I tossed the rest of the pile of mail at my dad as I rushed by him once more. I went back into the den and ripped the phone out of Tracy’s hands.
“Me too!” I said happily to her. “Acceptance and full academic scholarship!”
We talked for a few minutes excitedly to each other about our plans, about our excitement, about how much we loved one another. During this, Tracy seemed to actually cheer up and dad wandered into the room to see what was going on. When I finally hung up Tracy was the first to congratulate me. She gave me a big hug and even a little kiss on the cheek.
Dad was next. “Congratulations,” he told me. “I’m very proud of you.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, still trying to accept the fact that everything was working out for me.
“Be sure and call your mother right away and let her know.”
“I will,” I promised. “I’ll do it right now.”
“It seems,” Dad said, “that the mail is full of good news today.” He handed me a small folding piece of paper, an announcement. On the front of it was a picture of two bells clanging together.
I opened it and read what was inside. The text was written in tastefully printed calligraphy.
THE STEVENS FAMILY:
YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO THE BLESSED NUPTIALS OF
JACK JACOB VALENTINE AND ANITA LYNN BROWLING
SATURDAY, JULY 28, 1984 AT BLESSED SACRAMENT CHURCH, SPOKANE
WEDDING CEREMONY 1:00 PM FOLLOWED BY
RECEPTION AT ENDERS HALL
PLEASE COME JOIN US IN THIS CELEBRATION OF LOVE
It was that evening, long after work, shortly after Mom had gone to bed. Tracy was in the den sleeping the sleep of narcotic intoxication. Dad and I were sitting in front of the television, each of us drinking a beer, the coffee table littered with empty bottles. This was something we did with fair frequency since I’d shared my secret with him and I valued these talks with him. Being treated like an adult by your father, with all of the respect due from such a relationship, is something that I believe every boy strives for whether unconsciously or consciously.
“So what do you think about Anita’s wedding?” Dad asked me, taking a sip out of his fourth beer. We were making short work of the twelver he’d purchased the day before.
“I’m so happy about it,” I told him, feeling my own buzz loosening my tongue, “that I could shit. Do you know what this means? It means that I was right. That I actually did something right. That one of my plans actually worked. Wouldn’t that make you happy?”
He nodded wisely. “It would,” he said, “but sometimes I think you sell yourself short. You have a keen head for hatching schemes and putting them into motion. You have a gift for it. When you told me all the trouble you went through just to get them together…” He shook his head. “You did good Bill. You should be proud of yourself. But what I wanted to know was if you thought we should go to the wedding. Your mother and Anita haven’t really spoken in quite some time. I think you know why.”
“Yeah,” I said. “My fault. And I’m sorry for that. I wish I could tell Mom how sorry I am that I hurt one of her friendships.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “From what you’ve said, the relationship pretty much died after they got married anyway, didn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It did. Anita left the area and never looked back. I’m glad she’s back on track.”
“And the wedding?” he persisted.
“I want to go,” I told him. “Whether you and Mom go or not, I still want to. It’ll give me closure to this whole thing with her.”
“Closure?” he said, puzzled.
“Sorry,” I chuckled. “Buzzword from the nineties. I used to hate it then but here it is slipping from my mouth now. It means that once I see that Anita is happy, that she is content with her husband, I’ll be able to put the episode with her behind me once and for all. To close it.”
“I see,” he said thoughtfully. “Closure. I like it.”
“Don’t like it too much,” I told him. “It’ll be horribly overused and you’ll hear it so much you’ll want to puke eventually.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he said, draining the last of his beer. “And I’ll feel your mother out about going to Anita’s wedding. But for now, I think I’m gonna call it a night.”
“Me too,” I said. “Oh, and by the way, can you do me a favor tomorrow?”
“What’s that?”
“Well, earlier tonight, after dinner, I was going over my net worth. Do you know that I now have more than twenty thousand dollars in stocks?”
“Not bad,” Dad said, impressed. “Almost like you were psychic, huh?”
I chuckled. “Almost. Anyway, I figure I can afford to cash out about a thousand dollars worth.”
“What for?”
I told him.
He listened carefully to me, not speaking.
“I think that’s a good idea, Bill,” he finally said. “I’ll do it as soon as I get up and around.”
________________________________________
The next day at work I told Mindy my good news. She expressed sadness that she would be losing me as an employee come August 30 but was very happy for me. I asked her if she would give me a letter of recommendation and by the time I left that night she handed me five copies of the most glowing, syrupy letter you could ever hope to read. According to her words, a hospital would be committing financial suicide by not hiring me as an employee. She assured me that any central supply supervisor would hire me on the spot once they read it. I thanked her and went home, filing the letters away.
The next day I went to the bookstore and bought copies of the two major Seattle newspapers. I began pouring through the want ads, looking for central supply tech positions. I found two. I called the numbers listed and gave my address. They promised me that applications were on their way to me.
The day after that I took the money Dad had cashed out for me and went to downtown Spokane. It took me three hours but at last I found what I was looking for. I still had more than three hundred dollars left over. Some instinct told me not to put it back into stocks. I listened to my instinct, stashing the money in my checking account instead.
On the Fourth of July Nina, Maggie, Mike, and I took Dad’s boat out to Lake Pend Oreille again. We left early in the morning, stocking up with two cases of beer and another onslaught of food courtesy of my mother. The lake was very crowded and it took us nearly an hour to launch once we hit the boat ramp. We spent the day water-skiing, drinking beer, hanging out on various islands, and generally just enjoying each other’s company.
Maggie and Nina seemed to lose the awkward relationship they had with each other and worked their way to chatting happily about school, future careers, and even female problems. They had a long, drawn-out conversation about the pros and cons of birth control pills, which eventually led to the discussion of period cramps and water retention. Mike and I put in the obligatory male chauvinist pig comments when they seemed required but basically just kept out of the conversation. I was glad to see Nina developing a friendship with another girl. She had so few friends.
As the sun started to sink in the sky we loaded up the boat and worked our way northward on the lake, heading for the resort town of Sandpoint, which had a fireworks display each Independence Day that drew observers from all over the Pacific Northwest. Nine o’clock anchored us about a half mile offshore amid hundreds of other boats. At ten o’clock the fireworks began.
It was truly a spectacular show and I’d chosen our observation platform well, maybe a little too well. They burst right over the top of us for more than twenty minutes. The explosions were loud enough to hurt and the debris rained down all around us, instilling a sense of danger to the show. When it was finally over we began heading back towards the south end of the lake, a trip of nearly thirty miles.
It was well after midnight before we pulled the boat from the water. Like before, I’d ceased drinking more than three hours before so I’d be sober enough to drive home. Like before, everybody else was asleep before we even reached I-90. As I drove us towards home I remembered the last time we’d taken the boat out, the news that had awaited me when I got home. Irrationally, I worried as I drove, wondering what bad news would be there when I arrived.
But there was none. My house was darkened when we pulled up to it at 1:30 the morning of the fifth. We parked the boat and everyone went home. Well, almost everyone, Mike decided he would see Maggie safely back to her apartment. And so ended a perfect day.
________________________________________
Nina and I had no real opportunities to be alone long enough to do what we so badly wanted to do. Tracy had her appointments but they always seemed to be during my work hours. Sure, we could have torn one off on the boat trip, Maggie and Mike had, taking “a little walk” on our island and disappearing for an hour, but both of us, by unspoken agreement, wanted our first time to be in an actual bedroom.
She never left me with blue balls when we went out. She became quite accomplished with her mouth and hands whenever we went out to the movies or on some other date. I received several blowjobs from her while parked in my car at the local make-out spot near her house. Once she even wore a dress and I was able to return the favor, eating her to orgasm in the back seat while music played on the tape player. But as for intercourse, we bided our time, knowing that eventually the perfect day would come.
I was sent the applications for the central supply tech from the two Seattle hospitals and I filled them out, sending in an impressively constructed resume that Maggie, who had a flair for such things, had done for me along with copies of my letter from Mindy. It was the University of Washington Medical Center, the hospital that Nina would eventually train in, that responded first. They offered me an interview on July 23 at 11:00.
I didn’t want to drive to Seattle for the interview since it was four hours by car so I looked into plane tickets. I was quite appalled by how much a round trip across the state cost on the cheapest airline.
“I’d better get this fucking job,” I muttered, mostly to myself as I reserved a seat on an airliner. Dad, who had been nearby, overheard me and asked me what the problem was.
I told him how much I was spending for the ticket and grumbled about the goddamn airlines for a moment. He looked kind of thoughtful for a second, and then said, “Why don’t you give Ron a call?”
“Ron?” I said, knowing whom he was referring to. Ron Valet was the private pilot who worked with Dad and a good friend of our family. It was Ron and his wife Karen that Mom and Dad went to the space needle with every day after Thanksgiving. I’d been up in the plane with him several times during my life, although not since my recycling. He happily jumped on every opportunity to display his skills.
“Why not?” Dad asked me. “He’s off work for the summer, just like I am. If you paid for the gas I’m sure he’d be happy to fly you down there and back. Hell, he’d probably even pay for the gas if you couldn’t afford it. He was bitchin to me the other day about how he hasn’t done any flying lately.”
“That’s a good idea, Dad,” I told him. “You really don’t think he’ll mind?”
“If he’s not doing anything else, he’ll be more than happy,” Dad assured me.
Unfortunately, when I talked to Ron, it turned out he was doing something else. “Sorry, Bill,” he told me with genuine regret. “Karen and I are purchasing some investment property up in Idaho and we have an appointment that day to sign all the papers at 1:30. I wouldn’t be able to fly you back.”
“That’s okay, Ron,” I replied. “It was just a thought.”
“I’d be happy to fly you down in the morning,” he told me. “And if you didn’t mind staying overnight or something, I’d even be happy to pick you up the next morning. Still might save you some money.”
I considered for a moment, my mind going over the figures in my head. I could rent a motel room in Seattle for about forty bucks. The cost of gas for four flights would be only about fifty bucks. That was still quite below what the cost of a round trip airline ticket would be. “I think that’s a good idea, Ron,” I finally said. “Are you sure you won’t mind?”
“It would be a pleasure,” he assured me with complete truth.
I was flipping through the latest copy of the Seattle newspaper later that day, looking for something to occupy myself with during my overnight stay there. I’d considered and then rejected the idea of asking Nina to come along with me. As much as her parents were growing to like me I did not think they liked me quite enough to allow their daughter to accompany me on an overnight trip. It was as I was perusing the sports page that I happened across a couple of advertisements that got my attention. I looked at them carefully, considering what I was thinking about. Was it possible to take care of two things at once on the Seattle trip?
I made a few long distance phone calls, putting my name down for reservations and promising I’d have checks in the mail the very next day. If my plans didn’t work out I could always renege on these promises. I called up Ron again.
“Would it be a big problem,” I asked him, “if you picked me up in Seattle around six o’clock at night instead of in the morning?”
“None at all,” he assured me. “Got some plans?”
“Something like that,” I said. “And would there be any problem with a passenger on the way up and back, and with, oh, say forty pounds of cargo or so for the return leg?”
“None at all,” he repeated. “That’s well within the weight limit of the plane. What do you have in mind?”
I told him and he assured me again that there was no problem with anything. Smiling, I hung up and then dialed Nina’s number. Jack answered the phone and recognized my voice immediately.
“I’ll get Nina,” he said.
“No,” I told him, “it’s you I wanted to talk to.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Jack, you’re on light duty right?”
“Yeah.”
“Any chance you could take off the 23rd and the 24th of this month?”
He snorted. “All they have me doing is busy work. Besides, I’ve been there for thirty-three years. I can take off whenever I damn well please. Why do you ask?”
“A friend of my family is flying me to Seattle that day for a job interview,” I told him, “and I’ll be forced to stay overnight for various reasons. Now I was flipping through the paper and happened to notice that the Mariners are playing the A’s on that day at four o’clock. I’ve managed to get my hands on a couple of home plate tickets. Interested?”
“You want to take me to a baseball game in Seattle?” he asked, surprised.
“Not only that,” I went on, “but I also have a couple of reservations on a deep sea fishing boat that leaves the waterfront at 6:30 the next morning and stays out for eight or nine hours. I know you like fishing so I thought that maybe you’d like to come along. Ron, that’s our friend, will pick us up at the airport at six o’clock that night and have us home by 8:00.”
There was a long pause. Finally, “Bill, why didn’t you ask one of your friends to do this with you?”
“I did, Jack,” I replied.
A slight cough. “Bill,” he said, “you’ve got yourself a traveling companion. Thank you for inviting me. Of course you’ll let me pay for…”
“Negative,” I interrupted. “It’s all on me. I can afford it. Just be packed and ready to go at 7:00 that morning.”
“Thank you,” he repeated, seemingly touched.
Of course, being me, I did have an ulterior motive.
________________________________________
I picked Jack up at his house at 7:00 AM on the morning of the 23rd. He carried a small suitcase with him and seemed quite excited to be going on the adventure. Nina accompanied him out and gave me a hug and kiss before we drove off to the small, private airport.
When we arrived, we found Ron already there, performing the pre-flight checks on his small Cessna. Ron was sipping a cup of coffee and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. Aviator sunglasses were perched on his nose. He was a short, terminally joking man and I’d always liked him. He’d given me fifty bucks as a graduation gift.
The introductions were made and Ron noticed that Jack was giving nervous glances at the aircraft.
“Not afraid to fly are you?” he asked Jack gently.
“I was a paratrooper in the war,” Jack replied. “The last time I flew it was over Berlin and I had a parachute and an M1 on my back.”
“Well have no fear,” Ron assured him. “I go along with the smart pilot’s credo. There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots. I’ve been flying for more than twenty years, including a stint in A-1 Sandies in Vietnam. I’ve logged thirty-six combat missions and more than twelve thousand hours total. You are perfectly safe with me at the stick.”
“That’s good to know,” Jack put in.
We roared into the sky shortly afterward, Jack sitting in the front next to Ron, me sitting in the back. The two older men exchanged tales of their war experiences as we soared over the gentle rolling hills of eastern Washington and finally over the Cascades where the unstable air bounced us around quite frightfully. We landed perfectly normally at 9:15 that morning and caught a cab to the motel where I’d made reservations.
I changed into my suit and caught another cab to the medical center, arriving twenty minutes early. The interview went well, outstanding in fact. I was all but assured that the job was mine if I wanted it.
We went to the baseball game and spent a pleasant four hours just shooting the shit and drinking beer and eating hotdogs. Jack bought my beer for me and no one ever questioned the fact that I was drinking it. The Mariners, despite horrible odds to the contrary, beat the A’s 4-3, coming back with a two run homer in the eighth just when things seemed hopeless.
We went back to our motel room and crashed hard, Jack in one bed, me in the other. Jack, I found, snored like a chainsaw.
A wake-up call at 5:30 the next morning got us up and around. The day was beautiful for fishing, with no clouds and no rain. Summer is the best part of the year in Seattle. We scored some coffee and a light breakfast from the motel restaurant and then caught a cab to the waterfront. I had a large ice chest with me, the same one I took on boat trips, and we filled it with ice and beer. We obtained our one-day fishing licenses, rented our equipment, and at 6:40, the seventy foot fishing boat headed out of Puget Sound for the open water.
The sea was very rough, with fifteen-foot swells bobbing us up and down like a cork in the Pacific Ocean. There were sixty paying customers on the boat and well over half of them became completely incapacitated with seasickness. Bodies were laying everywhere, on every bench, on every table. The bathroom was flooded in vomit. It overflowed the toilet and ran across the floor.
Jack and I did just fine. Both of us had been deep-sea fishing before, Jack many times throughout his life, me on five consecutive years as part of a company function in my previous life. Of course I didn’t tell Jack this and he admired my stamina. Those of us that remained un-sickened managed to catch the limit for everyone else that was unable to fish. We no sooner dropped our lines in and let them sink to the bottom than we were pulling them up with three fish on the hooks. I caught twelve rock cod and Jack caught ten. He also managed to hook a lingcod, an ugly, dangerous looking fish, which the first mate gaffed and drug aboard with a long pole.
Jack and I basked in male bonding throughout that day, becoming closer and closer to each other, becoming friends despite the differences in our ages (which wasn’t quite as great as Jack thought it was). We drank beer and ate the sandwiches we’d bought at the waterfront deli before departure. We gave contemptuous glances and comments to those that were too sick to fish, even though their non-participation was a blessing because we rarely got our lines tangled with another fisherman.
By the time the all the lines were pulled in for the last time and the boat began heading back towards the protected water of Puget Sound, we were pleasantly exhausted, sunburned, and sore all over. We found a relatively clean spot near the stern of the boat and sat down, both of us cracking open a fresh beer. Jack surprised me by producing a couple of cigars from his belongings. He offered one to me and I took it, seeing with pleasure that it was a genuine Havana.
“These are illegal in this country,” I said with mock sternness. “And you, a government employee, has them in your possession.”
He burped, firing his up with a disposable lighter. The fragrant smoke drifted off behind the boat. “Yep,” he commented, unconcerned that he was violating a federal law. “A buddy of mine makes a trip up to Calgary every couple a months and picks me up some. Those shitpot Cubans ain’t good for much but goddamn if they don’t know how to make a cigar.”
I took his lighter and, after considerable work in the wind, managed to get mine burning. I’d never been much of a cigar smoker but Jack was right, there was something about a good Cuban. I had a sudden vision of offering him a few +++es off of the illegal smokeable that I had stored in my bible and the image of Nina’s father getting stoned was so amusing that I had to suppress a grin.
We smoked in silence for a few minutes, feeling the stern of the boat go up and down, left and right in the swells, watching the seasick people that were still laying out on every available surface. I was gathering my courage to bring up the subject that I wished to talk about. Jack, perhaps sensing my mood, simply sat there.
“Can I show you something Jack?” I asked him finally.
“Sure,” he told me, tossing his empty beer can into a garbage can six feet away; a fairly remarkable shot I might add.
I reached into my pocket and took out a small box that I’d carried with me the entire trip. Inside of it was what I’d purchased downtown the other day. Wordlessly, I handed it over to him. He looked at the felt-lined box for a moment, his eyes narrowing. Finally he opened it and beheld the diamond ring that sat inside.
“That’s an engagement ring, isn’t it?” he asked, snapping the box shut and handing it back.
“It is,” I agreed.
“I’m already married,” he told me. “And I don’t think I’m your type. But I’m flattered.”
I laughed nervously. “I think you know who the ring is for,” I told him.
“I guess I do,” he nodded, opening the ice chest. “Why are you showing it to me?”
“Because I’m asking your permission to marry your daughter,” I said. “A little old-fashioned maybe, but I know how much she means to you and I thought I owed you this.”
“You’re asking my permission?” he asked, considering this while he pulled two beers from the ice and handed me one. “And suppose I say no? What are you going to do then?”
“Are you saying no?” I asked, cracking open my beer.
“I’m not saying anything just yet,” he answered. “I’m just curious as to what you’re going to do if I say no.”
“Ask her anyway,” I admitted. “I think you know that.”
He chuckled. “Then I guess this whole conversation is pretty much meaningless then, isn’t it? No matter what I say, you’re still going to do it.”
“But I’d feel better about doing it,” I explained, “if I had your permission, which would necessarily include your blessing. It also would make you a co-conspirator when we tell Mary.”
He laughed harder. “Mary scares you a little bit does she?”
“A little,” I admitted.
“Good,” he nodded. “Maybe that fear will keep you in line.” He looked meaningfully at me. “I’d be proud to have you as a son-in-law, Bill. You have my permission and you have my blessing.” He held out his hand to me.
I shook with him, feeling relieved that this conversation had gone well. “Thanks, Jack. Thanks a lot.”
He nodded, puffing his cigar. “But those threats I made to you that one day, remember those? They still apply. Even more so now.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“When are you going to ask Nina for her permission?” he asked next.
“Soon. Very soon.”
* clap clap clap *
By the way, now you are at which chapter????
Don’t say we never support hor….
Tracy reluctantly had herself removed from the case on the grounds that the victim had once stabbed her brother. The case eventually went to trial but the jury deadlocked 9-3 in favor of acquittal. The DA elected not to re-try it and Sergeant Castleton was released. He was given a court martial by the military and ultimately reduced one grade in rank. He would go on to fight another day. I only wished I’d had the opportunity to buy him a drink at some point.
Tracy, like many of my friends and all of my family, is considerably wealthier than her colleagues thanks to her wise choices in investments. She owns a large house not terribly far from Mike and Maggie’s. She vacations in some new, exotic place each year. She’s been to Russia, to Africa, to the Middle East, and even did a brief stint on a very expensive Antarctica tour in 1993. She always returns from her vacations refreshed and ready to get back into the fray of the Spokane County justice system.
In addition to her DA duties she is also active in many victims rights organizations. MADD is chief among them, although she is not a mother. She is very radical on the subject of DUI laws. Sometimes I think the Iranians would think her a tad radical on that subject.
Her personal life could use a little improvement. She is driven by her job and her relationships with men reflect that. She’s been married twice now, both marriages conceived in passion and haste, both dissolved after less than two years. No children were produced either time. Most men have a hard time with her aggressive, pushy nature, not to mention the long hours that she works at her job and her volunteer work. Husband number one was a fellow prosecutor and you would have thought he’d have understood. He didn’t. Number two was a detective sergeant with the Spokane Sheriff’s department. He didn’t understand either. Both were drawn to Tracy by her good looks and strong personality and then driven away when they found that personality was stronger than they’d thought.
But there’s hope for my sister yet. She attended my birthday party five months ago and there met Brent Hartley, a colleague of Nina’s and one of our family friends that we’ve developed. Brent had recently been utterly fucked in a divorce settlement and at times seemed on the verge of suicide. Tracy and he began chatting together and before the night was over both were smiling and being very chummy with each other. They’ve been dating ever since and they seem to be happy together. Who knows? Maybe something will come of it.
________________________________________
Mom and Dad have done well for themselves. Dad has been listening to my investment advice ever since I lived at home and as a result he was able to retire comfortably in 1990, fully five years before he retired in my previous life. Mom retired shortly after this. Their house is now paid off but they refuse to move out of it even though they could easily afford something quite nice if they wished. They love their house, have many memories attached with it and plan to die there. The longer I live in my own house, the more I understand their feelings.
What they’ve done instead is buy a large (and I mean large) motor home that they use to tour North America with. They are often gone for months at a time, several times a year, to parts as distant as you can get without leaving the continental landmass. They have taken their motor home to Alaska, to Florida, to Maine, to Arizona, and to many places in between. They are planning a trip to Cabo San Lucas later this year.
I arrange to have their place looked after while they are gone and to pay their bills in their absence. I make sure their lawn gets mowed, their Northwest Electric gets paid, and their water pipes don’t freeze. I’m glad to do these tasks for them. They seem very happy in their retirement.
________________________________________
Jack and Mary Blackmore are still hanging in there and show no signs of stepping out anytime soon. They too have made use of my stock knowledge and are quite wealthy. Unlike my parents, their desire to move someplace very nice was stronger than their desire to stay in their house for nostalgia’s sake. They live in a nice lakefront three bedroom on the shore of Lake Coeur d’ Alene. When Nina and I need a babysitter it is usually they who are the first to volunteer.
Jack, Mike, and I have become frequent companions. Jack fits in with us very well and sometimes we completely forget that he is more than forty years older than we are. We all go hunting together each fall, finding the most remote airstrip we can to stage from, always spending at least a week out in the boonies somewhere, tromping around in camouflage gear, packing hunting rifles, drinking beer, sleeping in tents. We go fishing together several times a month on either Jack’s lake or mine (usually Jack’s, he’s got a bitchin bass boat). We fly to Seattle for Mariners games at least four times every season. We have an annual deep-sea fishing trip that we take on a chartered boat.
Jack drinks as much beer as he always has and he’s had no further heart problems. He was seventy-three years old on his last birthday but looks fifty due to frequent exercise and outdoor activities. When Viagra first came out I asked him jokingly (after several beers on the fishing boat) if he wanted me to ask Nina to write him a prescription for some.
He looked at me lecherously and said, “I certainly don’t need any of that shit, youngster. I ain’t that old.”
________________________________________
So that’s how our lives have gone, how things turned out differently with pre-knowledge. I didn’t change the world, just a few lives in it. Fate has seemingly accepted us, made allowances for us. We have left a wake of passage in the smooth fabric of what was supposed to be but, as I’ve seen, the wake has mostly closed up behind us leaving only a few ripples to mark our passage.
Only a few ripples.
________________________________________
On a beautiful April afternoon in 1998 I had to drive to Spokane to pick up the new fish-finder I was planning to get Jack for his birthday. Laura, who was almost three, and Jason, who was seven months, were with me since it was a day that Nina worked.
As always when I found myself in Spokane on such days, I stopped at the trauma center for a brief visit. Nina, as well as her co-workers, enjoyed seeing the kids for a few minutes and I enjoyed seeing my wife doing her job. I got the most enjoyment when we snuck in while she was in the middle of a procedure and I got to observe her at work. It was then that I could contrast the Nina that was with the Nina that should have been. It was then that I could feel how I’d thwarted fate, how I’d defied it in the control of a life.
We spent about twenty minutes in the doctor’s lounge, the kids sitting on their mother’s lap. Laura was babbling about something or other, using her fifty or so word vocabulary while Jason and I were munching on some chips from a dip tray that someone had brought in. Most of the crumbs from Jason’s chip were tumbling down the front of Nina’s scrub shirt, which was just starting to bulge outward at the abdomen from the presence of the as-yet-unnamed Megan, who was four months along in her belly.
Finally a nurse poked her head in.
“Nina,” she said, “we got an ambulance three minutes out with a twenty mile an hour auto-ped. Positive loss of consciousness and repetitive questioning. Obvious tib-fib fracture too.”
She sighed. “Thanks, Jen,” she said sourly, handing the kids over to me. “Oh well, duty calls.”
We exchanged kisses and I took the kids and went outside to the ambulance bay, hanging out until the ambulance of which they’d spoken backed in.
I looked at the ambulance with nostalgia, as I always did when I found myself in such situations. It was amazing how much I remembered from my former career, how much I missed it at times. The ambulance was the 96-240. I remembered that it was the rig with the bizarre electrical problems that sometimes caused the radios, the power windows, and the power steering to just die until you shut off the engine and started it again. The EMT that jumped out of the driver’s seat was Rob Forehand, an aspiring fireman that had been my partner for a short time once. The paramedic that jumped out of the back was Jim Corgan, one of the oldest employees at the company. He was number one on the seniority list and always had his choice of shifts when we bid for them. He was also cursed with a chronically sore back, a hazard of the business, and typically took off four months of every given year on work comp. I knew these two well but they had no idea who I was.
I smiled as they gave me a disinterested glance, probably figuring I was the family of a patient out for a smoke or something. They pulled their patient out of the rig. He was a street person dressed in scraggly clothes and smelling strongly of alcohol. He was strapped to a backboard, a cervical collar around his neck, two IVs plugged into his arms. They started to move him towards the entrance doors.
“Hey, Rob,” I said to the EMT, smiling. “Hope you get hooked up with the fire department soon.”
He looked at me strangely, trying to place my face, trying to figure out if he knew me.
Before he could say anything I turned to his partner. “How you doing, Jim? Good to see you. How’s the back treatin’ you these days?”
He gave me the same expression, finally answering, “Uh, it’s okay.”
“Good,” I said, shifting Jason in my arms and grabbing Laura’s hand once more. “I’ll let you get back to your work.”
I disappeared back to my Toyota Four-Runner, leaving their puzzled expressions behind me. Sometimes I just couldn’t resist doing things like that.
We left the trauma center and headed for better parts of town. We picked up the fish-finder and I decided to treat my two children to some greasy fast food from a drive-through. Nina would most definitely not have approved but Jason couldn’t talk yet and Laura lacked the vocabulary or the memory to rat me out.
We took our contraband to a nearby city park. Had I known something was going to happen? Had I been led there by fate for unknown reasons? Maybe. Maybe not. If so, fate does have its kind side.
The park was one that I’d once taken my daughter Becky to when she was young. Did I stop there out of nostalgia? Did I stop there because I remembered it was a good park to take kids too? I honestly don’t know. I don’t remember the vision of Becky coming to my consciousness at all in the decision to stop there. Thinking of Becky always made unpleasant feelings of guilt and loss to surface so my mind worked hard to keep those thoughts suppressed.
But whatever the reason, Laura, Jason, and I soon found ourselves sitting at one of the picnic tables beside the playground area. Ten or so kids of various ages and sizes were playing on the monkey bars, on the swings, on the slides, while their parents, mothers only for the most part, sat at benches or tables and kept an eye upon them.
The kids chowed down their chicken nuggets and french fries. They slurped their orange sodas dry. Finally Laura headed off to play on the jungle gym with the other kids. I carried Jason over to the swings and installed him in the baby swing. His little fists gripped the chain tightly but his face was all smiles as I began to push him in ever increasing arcs.
Then it happened.
“Swing me, Mommy, swing me!” A girlish voice demanded from behind me.
I froze, waves of gooseflesh traveling up and down my entire body. I felt myself go clammy. I knew that voice, knew it well. It had been more than fifteen years since I’d last heard it. I had fought hard to keep it out of my conscious thought. But I never doubted for an instant, even before I turned around to look, that the voice was Becky.
I let my head pivot on my shoulders until I was looking at the little girl. She was about three years old, her dark hair tied into pigtails that bounced up and down as she skipped towards the swings. She was wearing a pair of blue jean overalls and sandals. It was Becky, no doubt about it, none whatsoever. Her face was slightly different than it had been, different in only the subtlest ways, ways that probably reflected the difference in paternity. But she had the same brown eyes, the same brown hair, the same upturned nose that she’d inherited from her mother. I was inundated with stark feelings of merging realities, with a horrid sense of deja vu unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.
This feeling was intensified when I saw Lisa coming up behind her. She looked exactly the same as she had when I’d last seen her. Exactly. She was wearing a light summer dress that came to her knees. It was white with blue patterns upon it. I remembered that dress, had seen Lisa wearing it many times when we’d switched off Becky according to our custody arrangement.
Becky came running up at full speed and jumped onto the swing next to mine, one of the big-kid swings, landing on her stomach. Her feet came up off the ground and her forward momentum set her swinging in that position. She didn’t even notice the man next to her, staring at her, not breathing as he did so, his mouth agape in surprise. Was her name still Becky? I knew that it was, I simply knew it.
Lisa noticed me staring at her daughter and quickened her approach, her eyes looking at me suspiciously. Parents do not like to see complete strangers looking at their children in that manner. I forced my mouth closed, forced myself to commence breathing once again, forced my eyes off of the small child, forced a pleasant, non-threatening smile onto my face. My hands returned to Jason’s swing, picked up the task of keeping him in motion. Lisa continued her approach, keeping a wary eye upon me, keeping her distance in case I proved to be dangerous.
I looked at her, keeping my smile upon my face. “Hi,” I greeted.
“Hi,” she said carefully.
“Sorry I was staring,” I told her. “Your little girl there looks and sounds just like my niece. It kind of startled me for a moment when I saw her since she lives kinda far away.”
This seemed to put Lisa’s mind at ease a little. “That’s okay,” she said. “No harm done.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I assured her, giving Jason another push and trying to keep my eyes off of the little girl swinging back and forth next to me. “The resemblance was kind of startling at first. I guess I’ll have to tell little Belinda she’s got a twin in Spokane.”
Lisa smiled for the first time as Becky climbed off the swing and then held her arms out to Lisa to be picked up. “Swing me, Mommy, swing me!” she demanded again.
Lisa dutifully picked her up and placed her on the swing in the proper fashion. Becky grasped the chains and her mother began swinging her up and down, her rhythm matching that I was setting with Jason. As she pushed I noticed that there was one thing different about Lisa, one feature that hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen her. This Lisa was wearing a wedding ring.
“Higher, Mommy, higher!” she demanded, giggling.
“If I swing you any higher, Little Beck,” Lisa replied, “you’re going to go catapulting across the park.”
I felt another chill as I heard Lisa use the nickname we’d routinely called Becky. I suppressed any outward display of how weird I was feeling.
“How old is yours?” Lisa asked me as she continued to push.
“Jason here is closing in on eight months,” I answered. “I have a three year old over there by the monkey bars too. And yours?”
“Just turned three,” Lisa answered. “We’re finally out of the terrible two’s, thank God.”
“Yeah,” I agreed with genuine sympathy, “us too, at least until Jason here gets into them.”
We began to talk, the polite conversation of two parents that meet in a park. At least at first that’s how it was. By the time the kids got tired of swinging, by the time Becky moved off towards the monkey bars and the jungle gym, we were conversing like old friends. I could tell that Lisa was surprised by how easy I was to talk to, by how our two personalities seemed to click to a certain degree. We moved over to one of the benches that sat next to the play area, me carrying Jason in my arms, and sat down. We talked of the rigors of child-rearing in this day and age.
“My husband and I both have to work,” Lisa told me, “but child-care is so expensive. So we try to keep our schedules as opposite as we can. We don’t see each other as much as we’d like to but at least Becky doesn’t spend much time in daycare.”
“What does your husband do?” I asked, seemingly casually.
“He’s the manager of the grocery store where I work.”
I knew instantly whom she was talking about and felt another little chill. In my previous life, just as Lisa and I had started flirting with each other during my many trips to her line for sandwiches, she’d been bothered by her store manager, a man named Nick Morse who obviously wanted to date her. He’d been flirty with her ever since her initial hiring at the store but had become persistent after she’d broken her ankle in the fall. Since a relationship had seemed to be developing with me, she’d shunned his advances during this time period. It eventually got to the point, just after we’d began officially dating, that she had to threaten him with a charge of sexual harassment if he didn’t back off. Back off he did. Eventually, in that life, he began to date another girl that worked in the store and married her about the time that Becky was born.
But without my presence in the picture Nick had apparently been successful in his courting of Lisa. I had not asked her name during our conversation, but I would have been willing to bet my net worth that it was Lisa Morse. The little girl, my daughter, and yet not my daughter, had to be Rebecca Morse. The fact that she was still married to him a year after my marriage with her had dissolved in divorce told me that she’d found the right person, or at least a person more right than I was. There was a twinkle in her eye when she spoke of her husband, a twinkle that I’d never seen when I had been married to her.
What did all of this mean? Lisa was now with someone she actually enjoyed being married to. I was with someone that I enjoyed being married to. This had occurred because I hadn’t followed the path that I was fated to follow. I had been fated to marry her, to have Becky with her, and to be unhappy with her. She was fated to be unhappy with me. By altering fate we’d both ended up happy instead of sad. We’d both ended up finding soul mates instead of finding each other. What kind of fate had arranged for the previous pattern? What kind of fate had wanted us to not find the person that matched? Was fate cruel, or just indifferent? Who or what had written these patterns? How much damage had been done by altering them?
I didn’t know. I still don’t.
I never saw Becky again. It was quite enough to know that she was simply alive.
________________________________________
I began searching for Mr. Li shortly after Nina and I moved back to the Spokane area. I had a thousand questions to ask him, a thousand things I wanted to know about him. How had he come by this power that he had? Why had he picked me? I also felt I owed him a large debt of gratitude for what he had done for me. I wanted to make sure that he did not end his life dying in a shitty convalescent home. I wanted to try to prevent his getting terminal cancer in the first place if I could. Depending on where the cancer had started, that was surely possible.
But Mr. Li proved impossible to track down. My source of information was Tracy, who, as a deputy DA, had access to a nationwide computer network of known people. This should have done the trick. Unfortunately, I did not know enough information about Mr. Li. All I knew was his last name and his age approximated to within ten years or so.
When I’d first met Mr. Li on that fated night in 1999 I didn’t know that he would have a very profound impact upon me. I’m surprised I was even able to remember his last name by the time it became apparent what he’d done. When I’d gone to bed that night Mr. Li had been nothing but a vague memory of a sad event, an event that I’d been forced to stand helpless before. Paramedics train their minds not to think about such things. If we grieved for every person that died before us, if we allowed ourselves to feel saddened by all of the human suffering we saw, we would all go mad very quickly. A paramedic’s mind is accustomed to purging all information the moment it is no longer relevant.
According to Tracy’s computer work there were nineteen hundred and four people with the last name of Li in the State of Washington that were between the ages of fifty and eighty. And that was only in Washington. Who was to say that Mr. Li even lived in Washington back then? My task seemed quite hopeless.
But as the years rolled closer and closer to 1999 and as my hopes of preventing Mr. Li’s death from cancer decreased, I knew that I could at least keep the man out of the convalescent hospital. I could have him put up in a private home with around the clock nurses and premium medical care. Hell, I’d even spring for daily blowjobs if that’s what he wanted. I was determined to see that old man die in comfort, to repay him for what he’d done for me.
I made contact with several people in the administration of that particular con home in mid-1998. I passed several envelopes full of twenty-dollar bills and extracted promises that I would be called immediately the moment anyone named “Li” was admitted to their facility. I promised more little envelopes when the information arrived to me. I checked back frequently with them, more than once a week when 1999 began.
But a strange thing happened, something I could not figure out. As 1999 wound onward towards the 7th of July, the date that I’d met him and come back, no Mr. Li appeared. He had to have been there for a while before I’d encountered him, hadn’t he?
By July 2nd I was very confused. Still no Mr. Li in the con home. The man was going to die in five days, had to be wracked with cancer at that very moment. Where the hell was he? Had I imagined the whole thing? That certainly wasn’t possible. How else could I have had so much knowledge of what had been unless I’d really lived through it?
July 4th came. The Stevens’ family and the Meachen family celebrated by taking our cabin cruiser out onto the lake and watching the fireworks near Sandpoint. It was an annual tradition. We all got drunk and poured ourselves into bed later that night, Nina and I in our room, Maggie and Mike in a guest bedroom, Jack and Mary, who had watched our children, in another guest bedroom. The next morning, still hung over and feeling like shit, I’d called the con home once more. Still no Mr. Li.
Nor was there an admission on the 6th of July under the name Li. Very strange. Would the anniversary, the sacred date, the date of his death pass by without my ever contacting him? It seemed it would. And there was nothing I could do about it.
The 7th of July was a hot, sticky, typical eastern Washington summer day. I went out to get the mail about 10:00 that morning, the same time I always did. Our mailbox was out on the main road in front of our plot and it was a considerable walk from the house itself. I took Frank, our two-year old Labrador retriever with me like always. He tagged along my heels, sniffing this, peeing on that, as we went. I reached down and petted him a few times, talking to him as a man does his dog.
I hadn’t been thinking of much of anything as I opened the mailbox and pulled out the pile of envelopes and advertising circulars that were inside. I was flipping through them, sorting what was important from what was not when a voice called my name.
I jerked a little, startled by the voice in the stillness and looked towards its source. Our little stretch of the world was typically pretty deserted and having someone else out there when I picked up the mail was so unusual as to be unheard of. Frank barked once and then began to growl menacingly, his eyes locked onto one of the pine trees that guarded our driveway.
A man stepped out from behind it. I did not recognize him at first. He was Asian and very short. He was dressed in a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt. His face was rugged and ageless. His appearance there coupled by the fact that he knew my name, put me immediately on guard.
“Can I help you?” I asked with a voice that was not quite steady. Beside me, Frank continued to growl.
The man smiled, continuing his approach. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything, just continued to watch warily.
“Not surprising,” he said. “The last time you saw me I looked considerably worse than I do now. But I know you’ve been looking for me for a long time.” The smile widened. “I didn’t want to be found by you, didn’t want to cause you undue worry. But today the time has come for you and I to have a little talk.”
I stared, wondering if what I was thinking was correct. “Mr. Li?” I asked in disbelief.
He chuckled. “The one and only.”
I stared in disbelief at the vision before me. He was not emaciated in the least. In fact, his body appeared to be in tip-top physical shape. His calves were muscular, his stomach flat. His face was unlined, his eyes bright and inquisitive. He had no respiratory problems, in fact seemed to be breathing quite a bit easier than I was at that moment.
“But…” I started, “you’re supposed to be…”
“Dying?” he asked, smiling at me.
I nodded.
Another chuckle. “There are a lot of things that have happened in the last seventeen years that weren’t supposed to happen, eh? And a lot of things that were supposed to happen that didn’t. You’ve led me on a very strange journey, Mr. Stevens, a very strange one indeed. But the time has come for you and I to have a little talk together, to hash out a few details.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. “This is my address. It is imperative that you show up here tonight, alone. I believe your wife Nina is off work today, is she not? Childcare for your three lovely children should not be a problem.”
“Mr. Li…”
“Take the paper,” he told me, offering it. “Be there tonight at six o’clock. Be sure you are not late. Do not tell Nina what you are doing. If you care for the life that you have built over the last seventeen years, you will do as I say.”
Numbly, I took the paper from his hand. I glanced at it, seeing the address: 123 Lakefront Drive. I shivered as I read this.
“Yes,” Mr. Li told me. “I live less than three miles from where we now stand. I jogged over here as a matter of fact. I’m sure you’ve noticed my house a time or two as you sat out on your back deck. It’s the brown one you can see across the bend of the shore.”
“But, how…”
“Tonight,” he said, turning from me and stretching his legs a bit. “Everything will be answered tonight. Just be sure to be there.”
He began trotting off down the road, his legs pumping as he ran. In less than thirty seconds he’d disappeared around the bend.
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I spent that day very troubled, very uncommunicative with Nina. She commented upon it a few times and finally dismissed it as a case of PMS on my part. She retreated to her private den to study some medical journals, leaving me to keep an eye upon our brood.
I mechanically made lunch and then dinner, serving everyone about five o’clock. I only picked at my food. After Nina began doing the dishes I told her that I had to go into town to take care of some business. I don’t believe that she bought the lie that I gave her but she didn’t question me.
I climbed onto the Harley-Davidson Fatboy I’d bought a few years before and headed off, arriving before Mr. Li’s house less than ten minutes later.
It was more modest than ours was but definitely expensive. A single story, four bedroom or so with a swimming pool. I walked up the steps and rang the doorbell with a trembling hand.
Mr. Li answered the door before the echo of the doorbell even faded away. He was dressed in a pair of sweats and was shirtless, his stomach and chest without an ounce of fat upon it.
“Bill,” he greeted, stepping aside. “Come in please.”
I stepped in and he showed me around his house. There were indeed four bedrooms, two of which were empty. Pictures of an Asian woman were in every hallway, on every wall. She was pretty and the pictures were from various points in her life. He made no comment upon them. His den was what interested me the most. It had an expensive roll-top desk and a modern computer upon it. The window looked out over the lake and my house was plainly visible from there. A large telescope sat next to the window.
Mr. Li led me back to the living room and offered me a seat upon his couch. He disappeared for a moment and then came back holding an icy cold bottle of my favorite brand of beer. This didn’t surprise me at that point. I simply took it from him and gulped down half the bottle in less than ten seconds.
“So you remember what you did for me?” I asked, although it was not a question as much as it was a statement.
“Yes,” he said, sipping out of a bottle of Chinese beer. “I remember everything.”
“How did you do what you did?” I asked. “What powers do you have?”
“Powers?” he scoffed. “I have no special powers at all. None except for one special gift that I’m allowed to pass on at my moment of death. I passed my gift on to you, Bill. I shouldn’t have done it, but I did. What has allowed you to do what you have done was the result of a miscalculation of thinking on a dying old man’s part. An old man whose judgment was severely impaired by the effects of enough narcotic painkillers to kill an average person. An old man who’d been consumed by loneliness and loss but who should have known better. When I think of what might have happened, what could have happened, I still shudder to this day.”
I stared, unable to comprehend exactly what he was saying.
“I am descended from ancient Chinese royalty,” he told me. “My family has been instilled with this gift, the granting of a single wish, for the past sixty generations at least. The gift is intended to go to the first-born grandchild of each recipient. It is intended that no one else but that grandchild even know about the gift. Don’t ask me who gave it to us, why we have it, what entity powers it. We have this gift, I know not why. Only the bare essentials of it were explained to me when I received it for reasons that will become clear in a moment. The gift must be passed on by each holder upon his death or it is lost forever.” He looked sternly at me. “I had no one to pass the gift on to, at least no one I would have trusted it to. I’d spent the years of my life thinking that it was finally going to die when my cancer took me away.”
“You have no kids or grandkids?” I asked.
“My only son is dead. I have no daughters. My only grandson lives in Seattle. He is a greedy, shallow man who is only interested in himself. It is he who had me sent to that horrid place when my cancer finally reached the stage that I was unable to care for myself. If I had given the gift to him, God only knows what horrors might have occurred. I’d decided long before you were even a part of this earth Bill, that he would not receive the gift. I decided to let it die with me before he would have it.”
“You were given this gift?” I asked, sipping from my beer, trying to comprehend.
“By my grandfather,” Mr. Li said. “It was 1938 and I was nineteen years old. This was in Nanking, in Manchuria. We were under occupation by Japanese troops and it was not a gentle occupation. The Japanese were running wild in the streets, killing men at random, especially service-aged men such as myself. They were raping any women they could get their hands upon, even the elderly and children, often killing them afterward. They burned houses, temples, dug mass graves, and slaughtered thousands.
“All of my family died that year at the hands of the Japanese,” he continued. “I was not the one intended to receive the gift. I had two older brothers and a sister. I was the baby of the family. My oldest brothers were both killed in the army, fighting the Japanese. My parents and my sister were killed in Nanking on a night that I had been out visiting the girl I was courting. Even in the horrors of war some things still go on. Love is one of them. I was taking a great chance by leaving the safety of our family house to go see her. Had any soldiers seen me I most likely would have been shot on the spot, maybe even tortured first.
“It is perhaps ironic that I had been the one taking a huge risk in leaving the house but that while I was gone on that day, it was the house that became a deathtrap. A squad of soldiers had wandered by while my sister was out getting water. They took a liking to her and followed her back home. There, they held my family at gunpoint while they took turns raping her in front of them. Then they shot everyone, leaving the bodies there to rot while they continued about their business.
“When I returned home I found all of them dead in the living room, my mother, my father, my sister, my grandmother, all except for grandfather. Can you possibly begin to imagine the horror of finding such a thing? Can you imagine it, Bill?”
“No,” I answered honestly, shaking my head.
“Grandfather had been shot twice in the chest,” he continued. “He was covered in blood, both his own and that of grandmother who had been shot in the head while she’d been sitting next to him. He was dying fast but he was awake when I came in, he was alert. And he was staring at me, beckoning me over to him.
“I was still trying to deal with the knowledge that my entire family had been slaughtered like pigs, worse than pigs actually, people didn’t torture pigs first. I was looking at their corpses, their beloved faces that were now dead and locked in screams of terror. My sister was lying naked in the middle of the room, her legs spread wide, bruises on her body, a hole in her throat from a bayonet. Father had died trying to protect mother with his body, he was lying atop of her, more than twenty bullet holes in his back. The bullets had simply traveled straight through him and into mother.
“I wanted to scream. I wanted to go find a rifle and start killing any Japanese that I saw. I wanted to attack their headquarters in Nanking personally, seeing how many of them I could kill before they cut me down. I wanted revenge.
“I knew nothing about the gift that grandfather had for me; I wasn’t the one whom it was intended for remember, but grandfather knew my state of mind at that moment and he also knew his time was very short.
“The gift can be a very dangerous thing. Extremely dangerous if it is used improperly. It is customary for the giver of the gift to act as advisor to the recipient long before the time comes for the passage. It is imperative that the gift be used wisely and not for the purposes of achieving power or influence. Grandfather did not have much time to convince me of several things. One that the gift existed in the first place, two, that I should not use it to either wish for the destruction of the Japanese Empire, which I probably would have done happily considering my state of mind, or to have my family back alive again. I must not do either of those things he told me as blood ran out of his mouth and he gasped for every breath. Do you know why he told me these things, Bill? I suspect that you do.”
“Fate,” I answered. “You would have been tampering far too much with fate. If you had wished for the destruction of the Japanese Empire, who knows what could have happened, what sort of world would have resulted. Even though the major events of World War II hadn’t happened yet, it would have altered the entire historical timeline.”
“Yes,” Mr. Li said. “Grandfather explained that this was not a wise choice for that very reason. And as for wishing my family back alive…”
“It would have been basically useless,” I finished for him. “They were fated to die. If you had brought them back alive then they simply would have been killed again the next day or the next week.”
“Correct,” Mr. Li said. “Grandfather told me that the use of the wish had to come from my heart and had to be a wish aimed at personal betterment. He was going fast, reaching the end of his strength when he asked me the question at last. What was my greatest wish?”
“What was it?” I asked, fascinated.