In Times Like These (52 page)

He takes our plates back to the s
ink and scrapes the remnants into the trashcan. He gestures me toward the door. “Come on. We got more work to do.” He opens the front door and points me to the edge of the porch. “Have a seat, while there’s still some shade. I want you to work on setting your chronometer with your eyes closed.”

“You don’t want me to look at it?”

“You shouldn’t have to. You’ve been wearing that thing on your wrist long enough now. You know where the dials are. Remember where your settings are after each jump and you should be able to set the next one without looking. You have to start using your brain to its full potential before you can get the real potential out of that gizmo.” I sit down on the edge of the porch. “And don’t cheat, or I’ll come out and blindfold you.”

He lets the screen door slam behind him. After a few moments I hear the clink and clatter of dishes again. I look down at my wrist. I feel over the face of the indicator and then touch my fingertips to the different dials.
Okay. I can do this
. I shut my eyes and concentrate.
Let’s do five minutes
. I let my fingertips find the minute dial. I give it a twist. I reopen my eyes to find it set on eight minutes.
Damn it
. I reset the chronometer and try again. This time I undershoot to the four mark. A hawk keens above me and I see it circling out over the desert, riding waves of thermals. I go back to my chronometer.

It’s the better part of an hour before I start getting any kind of consistency.
Benji comes out to check on me briefly and gives me my glass of water, but then goes back inside. I keep at it. During one of my longer periods, trying a more difficult combination, I hear a scraping noise behind me. I turn to see Cheeto pushing his way out the screen door. He clumps and scrapes himself along the rough boards behind me, before plopping off the end of the porch into some brittle tufts of grass. I hear more rustling as he burrows himself into the space under the porch.

Once the sun is directly overhead, I lose my s
hade and slide back against the wall of the shack to get out of the sun. Benji reappears after a little while and gestures me inside. He points me to the bed where he’s laid out a pair of khaki cargo shorts, a baseball cap, and a tube of sunscreen. “You’re gonna want those. We’re going back out.”

Once I’m out of my jeans and smelling like a coconut, I rejoin
Benji outside. We refill our canteens from a barrel around back labeled, “Drinking.” We return to the dry lakebed with the drums. I run drills around the barrels again, alternating between leaps and simple taps. Benji mixes things up by throwing rocks at me, requiring me to time my blinks so as not to get pelted. Luckily, my mess-ups only result in bruises, and I manage to avoid getting anything fused into me. By the time we’re done for the afternoon, my clothes are soaked again, and despite the frequent layers of gravitized sunscreen, the skin on my neck and arms is decidedly pink. Once we’re back to the shack, Benji gets me out another change of clothes from a trunk near his bed.

“There’s a wash basin out back you can use to scrub yourself clean. You’ll find water for washing in the rain barrels back there. Should still be some left. There’s food in the cupboards too. Nothing cold but it should be enough to tide you over till tomorrow.”

“You’re not staying?” I say.

“No. Not tonight.”

“Where are you going?”

“None of your business,” he replies. “Just get some rest. I’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll carry on from there.”

“Okay.” I nod and examine the clothes on the bed. When I turn around again, he’s gone.

I find the corrugated basin out back like he described and a clean towel hanging from a hook. A big block of soap and a washcloth are sitting on a window ledge of the shack. I strip down and pour some water into the basin out of the barrel labe
led “Bathing.” It has a slight rust color but I know I’m just going to get it dirtier.

I scrub
myself all over and squat down as low as I can, to get my head under the spigot of the water barrel to rinse my hair. By the time I’m done rinsing off, the bottoms of my feet are in a puddle of mud, but I feel better. A lizard watches me from the wall of the shack as I towel off, but the rest of the desert view seems vacant and lonely. I keep the towel and walk around the front of the shack, wiping my feet off and donning my clothes on the porch. Back inside, I idly browse through the books on the bookshelf near the bed for a few minutes before getting myself a glass of water and going back out to the porch. Dusk is highlighting the dunes in reds and oranges.

As I settle onto the porch, I notice the tortoise has partially reemerged from under the shack and is viewing the twilight scenery as well. I close my eyes and try to remember my last chronometer setting
. I think I left it on a thirty-second interval
. I look down. Twenty.
At least I was close
. I close my eyes again and practice for a while longer. As night descends, I admire the stars appearing in the darkening sky. Soon it grows too dim to see my chronometer settings, but I keep practicing anyway until my eyes start to droop. Cheeto has made his way over and is eyeing me from a few feet away.

“It’s just you and me tonight, buddy.”
I watch the stars for a while longer.
The view might not be as good as Montana, but it has to be close.
I stand up and open the screen door. The tortoise watches me.

“You want to come in for the night
, dude?” I walk over to him. He watches me but doesn’t retract himself back into his shell. “Okay. We’ll try this again.” I pick him up, and this time he doesn’t try to pee on me. I pry the screen door open and set the tortoise on the floor inside.

“There you go
, my friend.” I refill his plate of grass before lying down on the bed. I try to read some more of Quickly’s journal, but in the dim light it gets too difficult to see. I watch the shape of Cheeto munching on his grass instead, and soon drift off.

When I wake in the morning, there’s no sign of
Benji. The tortoise is waiting near the door, so I let him outside again. I find myself a box of strawberry pop tarts in one of the cupboards and chew on those while I wait. I walk back out to the porch and practice my no-look chronometer settings for a while longer but then find myself at a loss for what else to do. I begin running circles around the outside of the shack, blinking myself forward in twenty and thirty-second intervals as I tap each corner. I gradually move myself up to five-minute intervals. By the time I stop for breath, I look up at the sky and realize that I’ve fast-forwarded through a couple of hours.

I walk to the top of a large dune
and have a look around. Still no sign of anyone. I fill up a canteen and wander out to the lakebed. I run the drills I learned the day before, jumping over barrels and pretending to dodge rocks and obstacles. I practice until I’m soaked with sweat and coated with a layer of dust. When I make it back to the shack a couple of hours later, I find Benji sitting on the front porch.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey.”

“Where’ve you been?”

Benji stands up and gestures toward the inside with his head. “I got you something.” When I walk inside, I find a ball of brown waxed paper tied with string, sitting on the kitchen table. “Go ahead,” Benji says. “Open it.”

I untie the string and unwrap the paper. In the center of the package sits a doorknob. The metal is discolored and darkened around the edges, but it seems to be intact.
“You recognize that?” Benji asks.

I pick it up and consider it. I note that it is technically only half of a doorknob, since nothing is on the other side.
“It’s from the lab?”

“You got it.”

I turn the knob over in my hands. I remember Malcolm writhing in the chair with wide eyes as I walked toward him. “I never should have let that door shut,” I say.

“Well, now yo
u can reopen it.”

“Thank you.” I tuck the knob back into its wrappings.

“Look, Ben. I know I’ve not been the easiest on you out here, but I do think you can do this. I wouldn’t have signed on for this job if I didn’t think you had it in you. I’m not saying you have it all figured out. Your skills can still use a lot more practice, everyone’s can, but you’ve certainly got enough knowledge and ability to take out a shithead like Stenger.”

“What if I don’t?” I say. “What if he wins?”

“I would never put ‘winning’ and ‘Elton Stenger’ in the same sentence together. That guy lost at life a long time ago. Surviving isn’t all there is to winning, Ben. A lot of good men have died in the act of doing something great. That doesn’t mean they lost.”

I nod.

“Come on. We’ll clean up your stuff.” Benji helps me gather my clothes from the day before and we scrub them by hand in the washbasin out back. Once they’re clean, he hangs them on a line that he strings from the shack to the outhouse. By the time we’ve finished eating some late lunch and I clean myself up in the basin again, the afternoon sun has dried my clothes enough to wear them. I walk back inside feeling clean, but still hot. I grab the loose wad of hundred dollar bills and my pen that I took out to wash my pants, and stuff them back into my pocket.

“Let me see
your chronometer.” Benji has a small box of tools out on the kitchen table. I hand him my chronometer and he uses a set of micro screwdrivers to remove the back.

“What’re you doing?”

“Seeing if your unit is already wired with a remote receiver. If it is, I can tune a remote switch to it for you.”

“Where did you learn how to do that?”

“Abe Manembo. The guy is a genius.” He sets the back of the chronometer on a clean white rag and holds the chronometer a few inches from his face. “You should look him up sometime if you get the chance . . . and yes. He put one in here already. That means I just need to see what range it’s using . . .” He uses a jeweler’s magnifying glass to read inside the chronometer. “All right. I can do that.” He pulls one of the tube-like remote switches from his toolbox and pops the end open. He uses pliers to remove a red diode, and replaces it with a blue one. Lastly, he closes up my chronometer and hands it back to me.

“
Here. Try that out.” He hands me the remote switch. “You just flip over the safety just like on the DG’s, and then you can push the button. This is one more thing you don’t want going off in your pocket when you aren’t paying attention.”

“Great, another exciting way to die.
I’ll add it to the list.”

Benji
smiles. “Go ahead. Give it a shot.”

I dial my chronometer for a two-second jump without looking at the dial, but then double check it as I place my chronometer hand on the counter near the sink. I flip open the safety on the remote with my thumb.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” I say, and push the button.

When I reappear,
Benji is still smiling. “See? Child’s play.” I look down at my still existing body in relief. “I have something else for you too.” Benji moves to the closet and removes a gas mask, a pair of welding gloves, and a large fire extinguisher. “I couldn’t get my hands on any real fire gear but this will be better than nothing.”

I nod, thinking of the heat I’
ll be facing on the other side of the doorknob. “Thank you, man. This is all really fantastic.”

“You should probably take this too.” He pulls a leather
jacket out of the closet. “Not like I get to wear it much out here anyway. Are you ready to do this now or do you want to wait for the morning?”

I walk over to the bed and pick up Quickly’s journal.
“I think I’m ready to go now. The longer I wait, the more time I have to worry about it.”

“All right then. You remember what time you’re going back to?”

“Yeah. I wrote that one down.” I flip open the journal to the page where I scribbled my jump information and dial in my time. My heart begins to beat faster in anticipation. I stuff the journal into my back pocket and don the leather jacket, then pause to take a deep breath.
You’re not gonna die, Ben. Get it together.
I slip the gas mask onto the top of my head, but leave it up on my forehead so I can still speak. The welding gloves are next. I pull the left one on first and it covers my chronometer and half of my forearm. The fingers of the glove are thick and awkward for holding anything small, so I realize I can’t wear both. I stuff the other glove into one of the jacket pockets, and pick up the remote with my right hand.

“You’re
gonna do great,” Benji says, looking at me approvingly.

I set the remote down on
the fire extinguisher and extend my hand. “Thank you. Thank you for being here for this.”

“It was my pleasure,”
Benji shakes it. “Sorry I hit you with so many of those rocks.”

I smile and pick up the remote again, readying it with my thumb and forefingers. I then slip my remaining fingers under the handle of the fire extinguisher and pick it up.
Benji takes a step back and crosses his arms to watch.

“H
ey, Benji?”

“Yeah
, Ben.”