In Times Like These (34 page)

“I think that’s in blizzards and stuff. I don’t think that counts if it’s not snowing.”

I pop open my door and the blast of cold air assaults my lungs. I stuff my hands in my armpits and shuffle carefully around the back of the car. Blake joins me.

“They should issue winches with all these rental cars,” he says.

Francesca slowly emerges from the driver’s side as well
, and mumbles something I don’t catch under her scarf.

“Let’s hope they have a fireplace,” Blake says.

My sneakers slip and slide on the patches of ice on the road. I stick to the areas with gravel showing through as much as possible as we climb the little undulating rises in the terrain. Francesca mumbles something again at the top of the next hill.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I say.

She pulls her scarf away from her mouth and points her finger ahead. “I see smoke.” I look where she’s pointing, and sure enough, little patches of smoke are drifting out of the chimney on a distant building.

“That can’t be more than a half mile,” Blake says.

With renewed enthusiasm, we trudge and slide our way over the next dozen rises. The first building we come to appears to be an old equipment barn. A rusting tractor hides in the shadows as we make our way past the dusty windows. The next outbuilding is also dilapidated, but is more encouraging, as there is a fluffy, gray cat perched on the edge of a hay bale, watching us with pale, gold eyes as we walk past the open door. The interior of the oversized shed is filled with tools and a riding mower.

“How are we going to get these people to help us?” Blake asks.

“I guess we need to see if they even have the toolbox, and go from there,” I say.

Turning the next small bend in the road reveals the main house of the ranch, but to my surprise, the chimney of the house is not the one that’s smoking. The smoke is rising from the top of a long
, narrow building about twenty yards past the main house. An immense barn sits across from it with an empty paddock behind it. The split rail fence of the paddock is draped with snow and dead vines. Other than the subtle movement of the smoke from the chimney, the ranch is eerily vacant.

My toes have gone numb in my sneakers but I attempt to wiggle them as I walk toward to the low porch of the smoking building. It looks like it holds multiple units
, and I suspect it may have been used to house ranch hands in more vibrant times. The room with the smoking chimney is at the farthest end of the building, away from the main house.

Once we reach the porc
h, Blake and Francesca use the edge of the step to knock the snow off their boots. The wooden door has a fan of glass windows at the top. I can make out a ceiling light through the cloudy glass.

My knock on the door inspires movement inside. A chair scrapes the floor and a steady footstep follows until a shadow appears beyond the frosted glass. The shadow pauses at the door and contemplates me. I fear it’s not going to open the door at all, but a moment later
, I hear the deadbolt slide back. As the door opens a crack, a set of wrinkled fingers and a sharp blue eye belonging to a leathery brown face appears. The man has a thick crop of grey hair sprouting behind his ears but the top of his head is rather wispy. His jaw works the tobacco in his lower lip and he looks like he is in need of a spit. I worry from his expression that he’s going to spit it at me, but he contains himself.

“Hi there,” I say.
The weathered face doesn’t respond. “How are you?” The man’s blue eyes appraise Blake and Francesca behind me and then come back to my face. “We’re looking for the person who owns this toolbox.” I hold up the photo for him.

He glances at the photo for a quick second, then garbles in a voice that sounds rough and out of use. “That’s mine. What’s it to ya?”

“Well, sir, we were wondering if you might let us see it?” I say.

“What for?”

“Uh . . .” I falter.

“We think
it might be valuable,” Francesca improvises. “Um, there were some special boxes that were made that year . . . that are now collectors’ items.”

The man steps out of the door and strides to the edge
of the porch. He has on a green-and-brown flannel shirt and his battered jeans are held up with suspenders. He spits into the snow bank along the porch. I notice there are multiple brown stains in the drift from previous outings.

“Got that toolbox off a shelf at Sears. Proba
bly had a dozen more just like ’em sittin' on the shelf next to it. You trying to tell me that’s what goes for collectors’ items these days?”

“Well
 . . . there’s a market for everything,” Francesca says.

“Do you mind if we have a look at your box?” Blake says.

The man slips back inside. As he crosses his threshold, I notice he is only in socks. The heat from his home feels heavenly on my face.

“It’s not for sale.” He begins to shut the door.

“Sir do you mind if we at least see the box?” I say. “So we can determine if it really is one of the rare ones. It would really help us out if we knew just how many of them are still around. We could compensate you for your time.”

He considers this a moment. His eyes linger on my arm
, and I notice my chronometer is showing past the sleeve on my jacket. I move my sleeve and cover it back up.

“I’ll get my boots.”

He turns his head away and I get a glimpse of the fire burning in the hearth and a rough-spun blanket draped over the back of a leather couch in front of the fireplace. The room looks cozy and well lived in, right until the door shuts in my face.

We could have waited for you to put your boots on in there.

I stuff my hands into my pockets and shiver.

“You think he buys it?” Blake says.

“I don’t know. It is a pretty flimsy story but it’s the best we’ve got,” I say. “No offense, Fresca.”

“None taken,” Francesca says. “You weren’t exactly wowing him with your eloquence there.”

“No, it was great thinking,” I say. “I had nothing.”

I stomp my feet a few times to get feeling back into my toes. The door clicks behind me and the weathered man reemerges in a wool coat and
a hat with fuzzy earflaps. He’s carrying a set of keys. He spits into the snowdrift again as he passes by and leads the way across the yard toward the barn.

The late afternoon sun finds a gap in the overcast sky and for a few moments the pasture gleams a blinding white. I shield my eyes until we reach the barn.

“I never got your name,” I say, as the man fiddles with the lock on the barn door.

“I never gave it.”

I wait for him to offer it now but he only jerks the lock open and unlatches the door. Snow and dirt rain down from the top edge of the door as he swings it open. He kicks at a few chunks of ice to get them out of the way, and then pushes the door into a drift till it sticks. He pulls a locking rod up from the ground on the other half of the door and it swings open with a moan.

The interior of the barn has been cordoned off into stalls, but I see no animals. The man strides into the open center, and as we follow him in, my attention is drawn upward to a dome of multicolored fabric strung from the ceiling. The fabric looks to be synthetic and it encompasses the entire center section of the immense roof.

“Oh wow. Is that a parachute?” Francesca asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

One of the stalls we walk past has an elaborate metal object on a table that reminds me of a jet engine. It has a perforated grill and a couple of flexible hoses coming from the center of it. Away from it in the corner of the stall, sitting on a metal shelf, are two ten-gallon propane cylinders.

The weathered man pays none of the stalls any attention until he reaches the back left corner. That stall has been made into a work area with sawhorses and a workbench. Along the floor under the workbench are four large fire extinguishers and a stool. The toolbox from our photo is sitting atop the workbench next to a leather tool belt.

The man turns to face us and gives his head a jerk to the left. “That’s it there.”

Francesca puts on a serious expression and steps up to the box. She runs her fingers over the top and sides
, and then with some effort, turns it around on the bench to view the back.

The toolbox has no exceptional markings or labels. The corners of the steel lid have begun to accumulate some rust and I recognize the handle as being the same one I have riding around in my backpack.

“Hmm,” Francesca says. “I think this does look promising. Do you mind if I open it?” The man says nothing, but she takes that as a yes and begins to fiddle with the latches. The interior of the lid has a Craftsman sticker on it with some ID numbers. “Ah. Here we go.” She turns to me. “Benjamin, do you want to check the numbers against our list?”

“Um. Okay.” I pull my pack off my back and rummage around in it for a
moment, before pulling out my logbook. I flip through it, and after settling on an arbitrary page of my jump entries, I pretend to be reading numbers on it. I step up and read the model and serial number of the box. “Uh huh.”

Does she want it to match or not?
I hold the page up to Francesca at an angle that obstructs it from the man’s view. She pretends to check it.
The man’s face is stone. He spits in the corner and resumes glaring at us.

“
I think you might have a winner here,” Francesca says. “Do . . . um, do you mind if I have a few moments in private with my associates?”

The man’s jaw works and he spits again.

“Also, do you happen to have an electrical outlet nearby?” I say.

He looks like he wants to murder us.

He jerks his head toward the ceiling of the stall that is also the floor of the loft above us. A bare bulb has been wired through with two electrical outlets at the base. “I’ll have to turn on the generator for you,” he grumbles. “You need me to dial in them chronometers for you too?”

He turns and steps back into the main barn area. “
’We could compensate you for your time.’ Ha! You just tell Bob I want a raise when you see him.” He spits one more time for emphasis and walks away. I watch him go in amazement. The barn door bangs shut as I turn back to Blake and Francesca.

“Wait, he knew?” Francesca says.

“Yeah, I didn’t see that one coming either,” Blake says.

“Apparently we aren’t the first time travelers to come calling,” I reply.

A motor coughs and rumbles outside the barn wall and the light bulb above us flickers to life. Francesca has turned red. “God, I feel like such an idiot. He must think we’re complete jerks.”

“It’s okay.” I toss my logbook back into my pack. “I get the feeling he doesn’t like much of anybody.”

Blake holds his arms out to the toolbox. “So it’s here.”

Francesca flips it shut to look at the handle. “Looks like the one in the picture. So what now?”

“Now we figure out how to blink ourselves to 1989.” I pull out Quickly’s journal. “I was reading up on this on the plane. Apparently what we need to do is plug in our chronometers to a power source using our chargers, and then we can blink a lot farther. Our chronometers only go up to five years, but that’s plenty for us.”

“Does it say that you can do that with multiple people?” Francesca asks.

“It says you can do multiple people, and then it says you can do it plugged in. I don’t see why you can’t do both.”

“But it doesn’t say that specifically?”

“Well . . . no, but he just sort of scribbles things in here, it’s not really all that organized . . .”

“Oh God. I’m going to die.”

“If you want to have the chronometer and I can hold on to you instead, we can do it that way,” I say. “I feel confident about it.”

“No. That’s okay,” Francesca exhales nervously. “I’m not gonna make you do that. I would feel terrible if you got left floating in outer space. I’m not sure I could handle that.”

“Ben and I would feel terrible too,” Blake says.

“Y
eah, but if it happens to somebody, I don’t want to be the one feeling guilty about it forever,” Francesca says.

“You’d rather be the one launched into space, than to
have to feel guilty?” Blake asks.

“Yeah. I don’t want that on my conscience,” Francesca replies.

“Nobody is getting launched into space!” I frown and pull the chargers out of the pack, handing them both to Blake. “See if you can reach that outlet.”

Next, I pull out the envelope with the to
olbox handle and its photo. I extract the photo, and after considering the handle for a moment, stuff that back inside. “Okay. The box is sitting on a table in this picture. Is this the same table?”

Francesca steps over to look. “No. I don’t think so. See that background? It actually looks like it’s out there, in the picture.” She points to the main area of the barn.

“It doesn’t have a height dimension on this one,” I say. “You can see the floor though. I would guess that’s like three and a half feet or so, wouldn’t you?”