The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time

First Time

The Legend of Garison Fitch

by Samuel Ben White

Copyright 2001. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reprinted or reproduced—except for brief quotations in printed reviews—without prior written permission from the publisher.

Sometimes I wonder if anything is ever ended. The words a man speaks today live on in his thoughts or the memories of others, and the shot fired, the blow struck, the thing done today is like a stone tossed into a pool and the ripples keep widening out until they touch lives far from ours.

Louis L'Amour—
The Daybreakers
(used with permission from the Louis & Katherine L’Amour Trust)

What if history didn't happen that way the first time?

Prologue

He lay there, wide awake, with a headache. It wasn't one of THE headaches. He hadn't had one of those since he got back. Or had he? It was hard to remember sometimes. And was this "back"? He hadn't really come back, had he? And now it looked like he never could get back. He was here now, and here he would have to stay.

But it was a headache. The two pills he had taken didn't seem to have helped. What was it she had called them? Ibuprofen? Aspirin? Whatever she called them, they didn't work.

He also felt like throwing up. Or maybe crying. He wasn't really sure why on either one. He wanted to think about it, to try and figure it out, but when he thought about it, the desire to throw up intensified. So did the headache. And his eyes hurt from the crying. He hadn't cried like this since his parents died. Thinking about them, well, that just made the headache worse.

Thinking. That was his problem.

He had to stop thinking. He'd tried thinking about other things, simple things, safe things. He just couldn't force his mind do it. He'd start out thinking about football (the way it was supposed to be played), or hiking old favorite trails, but soon his mind was on to Sarah and Heather and two weddings and his two married lives and his children already born and the one not born yet and the grandchildren he would never know now and good friends he had seen only the last week who had been dead for two centuries.

He put his hand over his mouth at the thought, whether to stifle the sobs or the vomit he wasn't sure anymore.

Had it all really happened? He wondered sometimes, though he searched his mind and knew it had. It had all happened. But then, half of it hadn't. And never would. Not now, anyway.

His thoughts led him to Irene Marshal. She used to run that little store over at Cortez. Sweet lady. Somehow always carried sugar even when the other stores were out. She charged handsomely for it, too, even when the other stores DID have sugar. He chuckled at the memory. But she wasn’t there anymore. Neither was the store. He had checked around a little and no one in Cortez remembered an Irene Marshal ever having lived there. No one remembered a store at that location, either. It had been the site of the water works offices for as long as anyone could remember.

So, where was Irene? Charlie Begay was still around, but what about Irene? And Frank? Or that Miller boy that used to deliver the papers? Were they all gone? Had they ever existed? If they were as gone as they seemed, what had happened to them? Had anything happened to them or had they just never been? If so, what happened to their dreams? Their prayers? Did they somehow know it was all his fault?

Even thinking about these missing people was better than the alternative, for they were missing acquaintances. A loss, to be sure, but a bearable one. But then, his mind would trail down that rabbit path and wind up back at Finneas, and Purdy, and Sarah. People he truly cared about--Sarah who he loved--who were long gone. Long and truly gone. An eternity away.

He went to the bathroom, careful not to wake anyone, but thinking he would throw up and rather planning on it. He couldn’t though. He just sat there, his back against the tub, bare feet on the cold floor, sobbing.

Chapter One

She had given up on waiting for a moment when the rain would stop entirely and was about to let go of the wish for a lull. It was one of those storms the La Platas are known for that come up seemingly out of nowhere and turn the high valley into a fantasy world of smoldering peaks and crackling sky. Sometimes the storms rolled in like a blitzkrieg and left like a mere memory only minutes later, but this looked like one of those rare storms that was going to last all day. But then, they almost all looked like that from the middle.

She had a hard time remembering that it was day, for the sky was black and she had had to turn on the porch light just to get a glimpse of the laboratory fifty feet away. The rain shielded the light from the tiny bulb, though, and the only sight of the lab she got was in the flash of lightning whose thunder clap shook the house so hard she thought the windows might break. The falling water pounded on the metal roof of their log home in a deafening roar, turning the whole afternoon into some sort of macabre sensory deprivation experiment where the ears were overwhelmed and the eyes only occasionally worked.

A flash of lightning as big and bright as she had ever seen leaped from peak to peak, illuminating the whole valley, and she suddenly decided she would rather get wet getting to Garison than spend another minute alone in the house. So, with her slicker held tightly against her body and her hood pulled snugly around her head, she darted through the puddles that had already formed on the walk and made her way quickly to the laboratory.

Rushing through the door, she slammed it behind her against the torrent that seemed to have followed her across the yard. It had felt as if an enormous bucket of water had been thrown specifically at her and, even with the slicker, she was wet to the bone. She tossed off the slicker and rapidly slipped out of her shoes and socks, relishing the feel of the dry, warm carpet of the laboratory floor.

She walked over to where Garison was sitting at his computer and commented, "I'm surprised your power hasn't gone off."

He was a handsome man. Tall, dark-haired and with a black mustache. She still wasn't used to that mustache.

He paused from his typing for a moment and told her, "It has a couple times."

She pulled up a chair beside him and, trying to make conversation, remarked, "I hate it when that happens. Seems like it would always happen right at one of those moments when I hadn't saved my work of the last few minutes."

He nodded, but pointed with a thumb over his shoulder and explained, "I have the computer hooked up to the Box."

She looked absently at the Box, then asked, "Have you looked at the storm? I know how much you like—how much you used to like to watch the storms. Do you still?"

He leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms and fingers and suddenly realizing how cramped they had become from all his typing. With that wistful look he got so often of late, Garison recalled, "I used to go up in my observation tower—that's what I called it, anyway—and watch the lightning dance across the tops of the La Platas and San Juans. I could spend hours up there, if the storm lasted that long."

"Observation tower?" she asked.

He nodded and looked toward the ceiling. "I had built a sort of cupola on top of this building. It had windows that could be cranked outward so that I got a good breeze, but still kept most of the rain out. It was a great place for watching storms, or a sunset, or just sitting and reading. Kind of like my own little world."

"Sounds wonderful. Kind of like that bay window in our bedroom, huh?"

He nodded, thinking of the bay window he couldn't remember building even though he had notched and laid every log himself of the entire house. There was so much he still hadn't been able to remember.

She cast a glance out of the nearest window as a bolt of lightning lit up the yard and asked, somewhat rhetorically, "I wonder why you didn't build an observation tower on this lab?"

"I don't know," he mumbled, having just wondered the exact same thing.

The topic they had danced around for over a month and had come close to being voiced more than once, was on both their minds, but something always stood in the way. Finally, she asked, "What was it like? Where you grew up, what was it like?"

He looked out the window at the storm-darkened La Plata Canyon and replied, "Like this. I mean, the countryside looked exactly like this. The boulders, the game trails, they were all the same. But thirty miles west of here was the Japanese border and it was marked with four or five rows of thirty foot barbed wire fence, most of it electrified. There was another fence just like it about fifteen miles to the south dividing us from Texas."

She shook her head and said, "I just can't imagine it. A North America divided three ways between the Japanese, the Russians and the Republic of Texas." She looked him in the eye and asked, "And I can't understand how you put up with it. You've always been so independent. That's what first attracted me to you. I just can't see you being this ideal Soviet man you've talked about being."

Garison shrugged and acted as if he were about to reply, then paused as he tried to find the words for the idea he wanted to express. Finally, he said, "When you grow up your whole life under communism, you learn to live with it even if you don't like it. I hated communism, but the only alternatives were the totalitarian dictatorships of Japan and Argentina."

"What about Texas? You said they were free."

Garison chewed his lip a moment before replying, "They were. But you have to realize that the communist propaganda machine is tremendous! I knew better than to believe everything I read in American Pravda, but it was often the only news I ever got. You spend thirty years reading about how horrible things are in Texas and what evil people they all are and, well, you can't help but believe some of it. So I hated the system I was in, but the only thing I could think of to do was run away from it and there wasn't anywhere to go. That's why I built this place."

"Didn't you ever think about trying to change the system? Revolution, something like that?"

"That's a lot easier said than done. Plus, you're thinking only in terms of the Russia you know. The Motherland I knew had never lost a war. They had won what you know as World War II, defeating the Germans after their defeat of Britain. There were really only two super-powers: Japan and Russia. Everyone else was an also-ran. You don't take on a fight like that on a whim."

She was still having trouble picturing a world that was, geologically, just like her own, yet so different. "You always talk about Japan like they were so important. Why?"

"You're still thinking only in terms of the world you know," he chastised. He suddenly corrected himself, "Which does make sense. But picture a world that didn't have the United States. Specifically, picture a world that never had the Monroe Doctrine."

"Huh?"

"When the Europeans came to this continent they had that idea of manifest destiny. The idea that might makes right and that the world belonged to whoever was strong enough to hold it and even that they were doing the natives a favor by conquering them and bringing them up to the nineteenth century. But thanks to Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and James Monroe and a singularly impressive group of men and women who came together in this country, that thought changed.” He held up a hand to stave off the objection he knew was coming from her Cherokee blood and said, “Granted: it didn’t go away over night. But it began to crumble the first time a white man sat down to eat supper with a red man and their children saw this. In one century, the 1800s, the idea of imperial conquest that had ruled international politics for centuries came to a virtual close. At least, imperialism has never been as successful since. Later, your United States and their allies stood up to the likes of Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler, Hirohito and Galtieri.

"That never happened in my world." She looked up at his use of the phrase "my world", which he had ceased to use of late. He continued, "The Japanese and Russians were both still convinced of their own manifest destinies and were preparing to use all their imperial might until the world rested solely in the grasp of one or the other. That was seen to be the natural order of things and it was what people expected. It was a world where peace didn't really even qualify as a dream."

"I'm not sure I could ever understand what you went through—what you grew up with."

He shook his head and agreed, "No one can. My experiences of growing up are foreign to everyone alive and the only people who could ever understand the confusion I feel when I see this world around me were never born."