A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL

NaNoWriMo excerpt

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

I drove out to Bobby’s the following weekend. I’d phoned ahead, just to make sure he was home. There’s no point driving out to the country only to find out he'd left for the city two hours earlier. The day was bright and warm, and the narrow road I followed was covered in patches of mud from where farmers and their tractors left one field and made their way to another. The fields were flat with old stalks of corn looking withered and worn, and endless acres of pumpkin and squash rolling out as far as the horizon. The sky was a pale blue, with high level cirrus clouds giving way to larger, lower level towering cumulus in the distance. 

I’ve always liked clouds.

Jen, Bobby’s wife, was also home with the kids. They seldom went anywhere together it seemed, and she tried not to let me see how much it bothered her because she was almost certain Bobby was having an affair. And who could blame him, I thought? They married fresh out of high school. Jennifer was pregnant, but we didn’t know it then; I’m pretty sure she did, though. Anyway, she trapped him as some girls will, and he did the noble thing—the right thing—by marrying her; only it wasn’t the right thing, was it? It’s never the right thing to do when there are kids involved. There’s bound to be feelings of resentment—and if it’s not directed at each other, you can sure as hell bet it’ll be directed at the kids.

I’m pretty sure Bobby didn’t love her, and grew to love her even less as the years went by. She never cleaned the house; sat around all day watching her soaps on an old RCA TV, and she got fat. One of the reasons Amanda and I seldom went to visit my brother was the feeling of hostility that seemed to float in the air like some underlying current whenever the two of them were in the same room at the same time. It could make for some awkward family dinners.   

They had three kids, two dogs, a cat with three legs, as well as a salamander in a converted fish tank. The house always smelled of wet dog, or else dried mud from the tank which sat near a window in the front room, baking in the sun. There were always dirty dishes on the counter, and the sink was usually full. When Mom and Dad used to visit, Mom would spend an hour doing dishes and wiping things down because, well, that’s just what Mom was like. I laugh at people when they say you always marry a girl like your mother. My mother was nothing like Jen. For one thing, she wasn’t fat. Jen liked tattoos, and her left arm was a sleeve design that had no cohesion to it. It was a puzzling design of different things she’d collected over the years, a helter-skelter mishmash that made no sense. She dressed in colours that didn’t match—purple tops and lime green sweat pants—while Mom wore matching outfits she picked out of the Sears catalogue.

My brother was a good-looking guy when he was younger, but he’d let himself go over the years. He was still as thin as a railroad tie, his ribs visible through the threadbare tee-shirts he wore, and had his pants cinched tight as if he’d pulled on his belt like he was Sinbad from that cartoon I watched as a kid. There was six years between us. Bobby was the oldest, and I was the youngest. Jimmy sat smack-dab in the middle, the I-can’t-win-for-losing-kid who got stuck doing everything because I was too young to cut the grass, and Bobby was already out scrounging for summer jobs. It didn’t come as a surprise to any of us when Bobby bought his first house before he was twenty-five. It was a surprise when he sold it and moved out to the country though, for someplace that had five acres and well-water. He said he didn’t want to raise his kids in the city.

Bobby was in the backyard working on a dirt bike when I drove in on the circular driveway. He was giving the bike gas and a huge cloud of blue smoke hung in the air while Johnny, the oldest of his three boys—Huey, Dewey, and Louis I called them—stood off to the side with his fingers in his ears. Jen was standing on the back step yelling at Bobby, but it was obvious he either wasn’t listening, or couldn’t hear her. He looked up when he saw me though, and let go of the throttle, nodding at Johnny who quickly jumped on the bike, kicked it into gear, and shot off down the driveway giving a quick whoop. Jen was off the back steps giving chase, waving the helmet in the air as if she was suddenly over-protective.

“Hey, Ricky,” Bobby said, his smile genuine. He was almost at my door before I stepped out of the car. He gave me a hug and leaned back against the fender, wiping his hands on a dirty rag he pulled out of his back pocket and fishing for a smoke. He offered me one and we stood watching Johnny ride up and down the hills. The boy either had lots of talent, was ballsy as fuck, or didn’t have a clue. I was hoping it was talent.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” he said, wiping his hands on the rag. “Can I get you a beer?”

“It’s only ten,” I said.

“And…?” he said, walking out to the fridge he kept in the garage.

“Yea, sure,” I smiled.

The sun’s always over the yardarm somewhere, I thought.

I smiled at Jen who came walking back having chased Johnny down and forced his helmet on him. She had one arm swinging back and forth and the other holding the long pleats of her dress, as she grinned—maybe remembering something funny, or just happy to see me.

“Hey Ricky,” she said, smiling up at me and leaning in to give me a hug. “Long time, no see.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”

“Sorry? For what? Seeing you once or twice over the few month is still more often than we see Jimmy.”

“Well, Jimmy’s got a lot going on,” I said, thinking how lame it sounded just saying it. What could he possibly have going on that he couldn’t call his brothers? “To be honest, I haven’t seen him since me and Mandy split.” 

“Hey, do you ever hear from Amanda?” she said, trying to sound as if it was random, or a spur of the moment squirrel sighting, because nothing that woman said was ever on impulse. Everything was planned and well thought out.

“Mandy? No. Why?” I said.

“Oh, no reason. It’s just, she called me up a couple of weeks back. Wanted to go out for drinks and a chat,” she added, using air quotes.

There’s nothing good about anything when someone uses air quotes.

“A chat? About what?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t go. I’m not gonna sit in a bar and pretend like nothing happened. I’m suppose to pretend she didn’t leave you for some junior accountant because she thought she could do better? You got a good union job, with a pension. You can’t do much better than a man who has a pension. That’s a shitty thing for anyone to do, but it’s even shittier coming from her. You guys were married and that’s gotta count for something.”

“Yeah, well, what’s done is done, right? Maybe I’m better off for it?”

“What’s that?” Bobby asked, coming out of the workshop carrying two beers.

“Amanda,” I said. “I’m better off without her.”

“Like a bad habit,” he laughed. “Anyway, there’s not a handful, there’s a land full. Isn’t that what Mom always said when one of us came home with a broken heart?”

“So what do you think she wanted to talk to you about?” I asked Jen.

“Something vapid, no doubt.”

“No doubt!” Bobby laughed.

“Hey look,” I said, meaning to change the subject and get down to what I wanted to ask in the first place. I’d always wondered if he’d believed the stories Dad used to tell us when we were kids. Or were they different stories for all three of us? He should have written them down.

“Look, I been going out of my way to see Dad. No, no,” I said quickly, before he had a chance to say anything. “I don’t mind. I take him out for lunch, and we sometimes go to strip club; the girls seem to like him there. Sometimes he even remembers who I am, but most of the time, he doesn’t. He just knows I’m one of his sons. He has two more sons he says, and a daughter.”

“A daughter?” Bobby said, popping open a beer and handing it to me.

“But he does have his lucid moments. I mean, there are times when he knows me, and he asks me how my brothers are. He doesn’t always remember who’s who, but he knows he has three sons—”

“You mean five, and a daughter,” Bobby said.

“Well, in one of those lucid moments, he said he wanted me to open his old trunk. Do you know what I’m talking about? I don’t have a key to the storage locker, and was hoping you did.”

“Yeah, I got it. I got all that stuff. What’s he want you to open it for?”

“He says there’s a bracelet in there he wants to give me. I kinda want to know what’s inside, since he’ll forget five minutes after I tell him, anyway. I’m hoping he might’ve written some of that shit down.”

“That would be some pretty cool shit,” Bobby smiled.

“You think?”

“What kind of stories did he tell you?”

“Well, first of all, I thought they were just fantasy stories he’d made up, because the man he described wasn’t him. I mean, he said he had long flowing hair. I guess if you’re going to tell your kids stories you might as well give yourself a head of hair. I’m hoping he might have left some notes, or maybe he has a secret notebook that has all these amazing stories in it, and they were thought to be the find of the century.”

“You do know how to run with an idea, don’t you?” he smiled.

“What do you think is in it?”

“He ever tell you he could bring things back?”

I nodded.

“His sword? Or his crossbow and arrows?” he asked.

“Oh, the bow,” I smiled.

“Yeah, that’s what I’d want to see inside it.”

“And what is it supposed to be?” Jen asked.

Bobby smiled.

“When we were kids, Dad told us stories about this alter-ego of his who lived three hundred years in the future and was fighting a rebellion. He was married to a Princess who was also a magician—”

“And they had three children who were each special in their own way,” I laughed.

“Three? Like us?”

“I guess I never looked at it like that before—except one was a girl.”

“Ameroose,” he said, and I nodded.

It was a pretty sombre moment, I’ll admit. But then Jen ruined it by talking. I think I understand what they mean when they talk about zen. It’s the zen of this, or the zen of that. I get it, or I think I get it. I can look at something in depth, or think about things and work out different little scenarios about something that used up five seconds of my day. I’ve always been able to do that—not that it’s a super power. It’s just an over active imagination.

“And just what the hell is Ameroose?”

“It’s here. In three hundred years from now. That’s what this place was called.”

“The cities were almost derelict; the factories were all broken. Three or four generations earlier, someone had the brilliant idea to free the animals in six of the countries largest zoos. Hippos in the Mississippi; giraffes, zebra and lions on the prairies. African crocodiles. Nature was fighting back. And winning.”

“Dad was a great warrior. A natural hunter. He didn’t look like Dad, though.”

“No,” Bobby laughed. “He had hair, and muscles.”

“Not Dad at all,” I smiled.

Dad would sit in his favourite chair after work, after having had his coffee, and take a short nap. He’d always snap his arm out and the bracelet he always wore on his left wrist would slide down his forearm like it was made out of quicksilver. Somehow, it just seemed to melt into his arm and he’d be fast asleep—gone for an hour.

Mom never saw it the way we did. To her, the bracelet was something Dad had been given by his father. She never questioned it. We never knew where Mom put the bracelet because she died before any of us thought it was important to know. But I think we were both secretly hoping for something to be in the trunk.

“So when do you want to open it?” Bobby asked at the same time I asked him about Jimmy. He’d probably want to be there as well, I said.

“What do you think he’s looking for?”

“Closure?” I asked. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?

“Ameroose,” Bobby smiled, and Jen got up off the ground and rolled her eyes,  groaning; once again ruining a perfectly zen moment.

I gave most of this away and only put the paywall up for the last little bit. I want people to look at it and get curious. Maybe they might want to subscribe? There’s only four of you here. The whole idea is to bring in new readers. I think I’ve got 58 so far. Not great, but not bad either. I’m hoping people will want to look at this because it’s NaNoWriMo. It’s not a big deal to me, but it’s all about a book that you can write in a month, and some people take it very seriously. I’m going to put up 2 pieces a week, because I was posting two of my JACK OF DIAMONDS excerpts every week. I figure it’s a fair trade off. If you know people who like to read—brothers, sisters, cousins, or even children—send them a link.

So leave me a comment and tell me what you think. No one will see it except the four of you.