More Stories from the Twilight Zone (30 page)

“That's Bob Dylan playing up there, isn't it?”

“Indeed it is.”

“I had a shark tank?”

Beatrice was in a daze, as if she were watching herself think. “You can't do this all the time. There's no way.”

MacCleary nodded solemnly. “I was born in Montreal in 2010, and Montreal, 2031, was my primary residence when I obtained the device. I have a self-designed home on the beach that I've visited for my last three summers, respectively during the years 0001, 0003, and 0007. I made most of my money in stocks and a little trading of vintage champagne in the Russian imperial court, but that's a whole other story. Ditto Hamilton and Washington. Oh, and wherever I am, Friday is Ride Day, and I go out prospecting for gold with an old friend of mine in the Wild West of the 1860s.”

“And it doesn't change . . . I mean, we can't . . .” Beatrice had no idea how to put it into words, present or past tense.

“It doesn't seem to. Perhaps because there are many other dimensions, worlds, and universes out there in which our lives go in all kinds of directions—so many that this device does not impact on ours. Whatever the case, I don't believe I've altered anything in
our
world.”

“Where did the device come from?”

“That's too long a story for our first night. Also, I'm not sure how much I should tell you about the future. The less you know about the future, the less you'll surreptitiously surrender to it.”

He studied her intently. “My God, and I thought you were gorgeous at forty-nine.”

 

Back at Trooley's, the band became intoxicated and now talked quite loudly about doing a music video for something called “a Partnership for a Free-Drugs America.” Reli looked at the six different cuckoo clocks over the bar. Beatrice and MacCleary had been gone almost ten minutes.

She thought that if her shy friend didn't get MacCleary into the sack, she, Reli Trooley, might take a run at him. Wall Street sharks, punk-ass musicians, and slimy construction workers were starting to bore her. Reli could seriously use a change of pace.

 

They were sitting beneath the Statue of Liberty, all alone by the water reflecting the city's lights brighter than stars. Beatrice had asked to go somewhere quieter so they could get their thoughts together.

“I abide by camping rules—take only photos, leave only footprints. And I prefer peace. It's amazing how much of history will run its course with or without one person's input. So I choose not to get in the way.”

Beatrice nodded gently, head nestled on MacCleary's shoulder as they gazed at the skyline from the grass.

“I'm sorry I broke your heart in 2031, Devin.”

“Try not to do it this time.”

He pulled her close. Beatrice Baxter, now a scholar of space and time, then experienced the best kiss
ever.

 

He left her on the cloudlike feather bed in the modest stone-and-palm hut he had spent most of the summer of 0001 constructing, near a beach in what would later be known as Costa Rica. She slept soundly, naked in the warm ocean air.

MacCleary wasn't tired at the moment. He put his dark green suit back on again, switching the homburg hat for a black Stetson.

 

“LAST CALL!” shouted Reli.

The bar had been empty most of the night—not enough patrons to justify even an open-night mike—and the band, the only bar patrons left, all looked at each other.

“Bottle of champagne, please,” the lead guitarist, Doc, stated.

“Veuve Clicquot only. Hundred bucks.”

The band responded by cheering wildly and slapping the bar. “And we wanna play, too,” the bassist, T.J., pronounced.

Reli waved a hand at the stage. “Go ahead, audition. Even if you suck, you get some good bubbly.”

 

Arthur Trooley was pissed.

Not only was the bar getting too rowdy, but the goddamn cowboys were back in town for more whiskey. Or, as they put it, “put their winnings into the whiskey business”—to which end they were buying up his extra whiskey kegs and wholesaling them out west.

Trooley shuffled down the long stretch of his stupendous bar, his greatest creation, his American Dream. Hailing from Dublin, he had landed at Ellis Island in the Year of Our Lord 1865 and the bar had been slinging hooch and hoochie-coochie in lower Manhattan since early 1866. Maintaining decorum was crucial to his establishment, he felt, a fact that was reflected in his immaculate white tuxedo shirt, black suspenders, bow tie, and slacks. The other patrons ranged from the distinguished gentlemen-about-town to the decent-to-better class of skilled worker, a fact the latter tried to hide by dressing in the cleanest clothes they could procure and perhaps even deigning to bathe.

Then of course there were the two goddamn cowboys who
had invaded his place like banshees from hell. He'd have thrown them out except that they made so much money for him. Pooling their funds, they bought his famous basement-distilled Irish whiskey by the barrel and peddled it to the hundreds of batwing-door saloons back west as top-shelf liquor. Everyone was getting rich off their enterprise, so Trooley humored them.

The bar had been about evenly divided that evening among the newspapermen, who were jovial and drank a lot; the bankers, who were more reserved but also drank a lot; and a boisterous battalion of barbers, bakers, butchers, and horse-carriage jockeys, who were often mad as a mud pit full of fighting pigs, but paid well to drink a lot and didn't rough up the girls any more than the other customers.

The girls. The goddamn cowboys had bought his four most beautiful ladies with their damn Wild West gold. At this very moment those Wild West Horsemen of the Apocalypse were ravaging them in the upstairs bedrooms, stealing that gorgeous tail right out from under his other patrons, particularly the bankers, who were furious at having to wait for a little of their own hoochie-coochie.

April and Autumn, the seventeen-year-old Norse blonde and the olive-skinned Italian brunette, had gone with that loudmouth rancher named Brough, whom Trooley only tolerated because Brough claimed his father came from the same part of County Louth as his own father had. The second cowboy, MacCleary, had commissioned the other two—Summer, the tanned, sun-blond-haired half-Dutch girl from the faraway Caribbean (and Arthur Trooley's personal favorite), along with Snowy (who, via a plantation in Virginia, came from the even-farther-away Congo).

The bankers had never previously faced any competition for Trooley's high-priced honky-tonk courtesans. The bankers were at the very moment discussing how to attack the mine owners when they returned from the whores' quarters upstairs. Their arsenal
included concealed handguns, daggers, and a shocking array of brass knuckles. The bankers occasionally needed to let off some serious steam.

Then the cowboys appeared at the top of the stairs, smirking.

Rudy MacCleary, the shaggy-haired frontiersman, had slid almost completely down the gleaming wooden banister when the bankers charged him and his partner. Rudy took on two tweedy-suited, bowler-hatted, knife-wielding financiers with his fists. Rudy's partner, the one in the inexplicable suit with his cowboy hat, kicked an attacking banker back down the stairs, but took a thrown whiskey bottle in his right temple and tumbled down the steps himself, crashing into the prostrate banker. The liquor in the opaque bottle—marked only “XXX TTT,” Trooley's legendary Irish whiskey—was fortified with authentic American Wild West fulminates. When the bottle shattered against the westerner's skull, the elixir's secret ingredients—the severed heads and tails of various venomous rattlers—were marooned atop the man's head.

His New York crowd always enjoyed the adventure of drinking genuine Wild West whiskey, so Trooley accommodated them.

Trooley watched MacCleary rise unsteadily, while the same banker who had hurled the bottle kicked MacCleary unceremoniously down a second descending corridor of stairs to the sub-basement. He booted a stray snakehead—still steeping in the lower half of the broken bottle—down the stairs after him.

Arthur Trooley couldn't bloody well stand for this mayhem. His precious whiskey was not to be used as a weapon. He pulled out his shotgun from behind the bar, blasted a load of rock salt into the ceiling, and hollered, “MIND YAR DAMN MANNERS!”

With that, the fighting stopped, and four bankers shrugged with studied insouciance and ambled up the stairs to the ladies.

 

He was just so damn handsome, it was a serious shame to see his gorgeous face all bloody and messed up. The blood dripping . . .
almost
coursing
. . . down from a gash over his right eye looked awful.

He tried to make a joke of it, leaving his cowboy hat on as he stagger-strolled back into Trooley's, a grin/grimace on his face. His face and olive suit were bloody, and he was drunk.

Filling a bar towel with ice, Reli tended to his wounds.

“Dare I even ask?” Reli snarled.

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.” MacCleary winced as the ice chilled the bruises. Reli cleaned and sterilized the wounds with napkins soaked in bar vodka.

Reli wondered in passing where the Stetson had come from, but decided she didn't want to know.

“Did Beatrice . . .?” Reli asked instead.

“Beatrice is safe. She had nothing to do with this. She'll be back in a moment.” He shifted the ice on his head. “Ow. Can you do me a favor and make sure there's no glass in there?”

Reli grimaced, but her eyes were still warm.
What the hell is this guy's story?
she wondered.
And why do I always get interested by guys like this?

She poured two rock-glass shots of whiskey and scowled at the intricacies of the messiest wound, the one on his temple. Dark shards of glass gleamed in it. She pushed one of the shots to Devin.

“Hold still. This is probably going to hurt.”

From the stage, the band struck up an upbeat song they called “Black and Blues.”

 

In August of 0001, in the Costa Rican palm beach hut, Beatrice awoke. She felt glorious.

Until she spotted the large jungle cat . . . a cheetah? A leopard? A jaguar? . . . prowling along the beach in the morning sunshine.

She hoped Devin had some sort of firearm here to deter
ferocious felines. She was about to ask him as much when she realized he was gone—the device with him.

She hoped he was just getting some breakfast from the future.

 

“That's the Universal Truth Machine, isn't it?” MacCleary queried, as Reli patched up his head.

“Sorry?”

“The band onstage . . . it's got to be the Truth. Right?”

“I guess that's what they said. I dunno, never seen 'em before.”

“They're huge in 2031.”

“I'm sure they hope so.”

“No, I mean, they're the stuff of legend by then.”

Reli sighed. “You know, if you were going to leave the bar to get stoned, you could have invited me.”

“I'm not stoned. I travel through time. That's all.”

“Okay, now you're hallucinating, and I'm worried. How hard did you get hit on the head, dude?”

Devin stood up abruptly, as Reli was finishing wrapping gauze around his skull.

“Fine. I'll prove it. Mostly because I like hanging out here. I've been in and out of the scene here for almost two hundred years.”

“Riiiight,” Reli said.

“I'll be right back,” said MacCleary. He eased his cowboy hat down over the bandages and sauntered to the bathroom, removing something shiny from his pocket as he did so.

The band onstage was singing a new song. It went:

If you think we're losing our minds
If you think we're fallin' behind
If you think we're none of a kind
Well, you're right—it's time to fight!

 

If you think we're losing our hearts
If you think we're falling apart
If you think it's time we got smart
Well, you're right—it's time to fight!

 

If you've got a way with it, you've got to get away with it
If you've got a hand at it, you've got to take a stand
If you've got a way with it, you've got to get away with it
If you've got the swing of it, you've got to come out swinging

 

That's the State of the Art, now
That's the State of the Art, now
That's the State of the Art, now
All right!!

They weren't half bad, Reli figured. Maybe Crazy Devin was onto something.

She hoped he wasn't doing coke in the bathroom. She preferred men who drank.

 

MacCleary reappeared in Costa Rica and took Beatrice by the hand.

“Awake, my dear? Care for a morning mimosa?”

“Where did you go?” Beatrice asked anxiously. “There was a cougar on the beach . . . I mean a jaguar . . . I mean . . . Devin, you're bleeding . . .”

“No, no, I
was
bleeding, I'll be fine. Let's go have brunch in Russia.”

Later on, Beatrice couldn't really recall what happened next—something to do with Catherine the Great's court, and a lot of champagne. No one except the lower-class Russians spoke Russian, so everyone spoke French. MacCleary could communicate
with them all just fine, anyway. Beatrice's college French helped her follow half of the conversation . . . barely.

There was champagne everywhere, in bottles that appeared almost comically oversized and everywhere else. It was all Veuve Clicquot champagne. For some reason she remembered that Russia had purchased 70 percent of the Veuve Clicquot supply by the turn of the twentieth century.

A man was playing a piano that overflowed full of champagne. Dancing along the strings inside were a hundred live sardines.

They were in an opulent home's library along with several other merchants from France and Russia, all of whom had something to do with champagne. They sang cheerfully at the gurgling, champagne-drenched piano.