The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time (28 page)

"Blushing? You were embarrassed about being my wife?"

She laughed out loud and told him, "That's just an expression, Silly. You've heard that before, haven't you?"

"No, I have not." He opened the refrigerator and gasped at what he saw. In a near panic, he asked, "Where did this come from?"

"What?" she asked, coming close quickly. She was afraid something had gone bad. She was not, she readily admitted, the world's best homemaker, but she did try to remove things from the refrigerator before they returned to life.

"This!" he asked, producing a bottle of Dr Pepper. And it was in an oddly shaped plastic bottle claiming to be a full two liters of the illegal drink!

"The store," she told him, becoming confused again. "Don't tell me you don't remember Dr Pepper! It's your favorite drink! You not remembering Dr Pepper would be like you not remembering which direction was up."

"I know it's my favorite drink—before, anyway," he told her. "But it's illegal to have it here! You can't take it out of Texas!"

"Since when?" She had suddenly forgotten her plan to go with anything he said as the current conversation seemed nothing less than absurd.

"The war! When the Party took over, they outlawed the import of all products from Texas."

"Import?" she asked with a smile. "Since when can you not transport things between Texas and Colorado?"

"What is a Colorado?" he asked. "You have used that word before. Is it a place? A country? What?" Surely the machine had not transported him to another location again. No, that could not be. He had seen his laboratory and the La Plata. To reconstruct the La Plata Canyon would be far more trouble than even the KGB would go to.

"Colorado," she said. "You know, one of the fifty states—like Texas. You know, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida: the lower forty-eight and all?"

He shook his head, "I know none of these names, except Texas. You say they are states—states of what country?"

"The United States of America!" she exclaimed, finding it hard to believe that he had never heard of the U.S.A. It was an odd selective amnesia, if that were what it was. She still hated to even entertain any other explanations.

"The United...They're still around? You're saying that in the year 2005, the United States of America are still around?"

"The United States of America is around. We're no longer a plurality. Unfortunately, some say. But, yes! We're still here."

"And we are a part of them? La Plata Canyon and Durango?"

"Yes! Of course we are!"

"Colorado," he mumbled at the map. To her, he asked, "How far west do these United States of America go? Are we still near the Japanese border?"

She laughed and told him, "We aren't near the border in any direction, especially not the Japanese border. They're an island on the other side of the Pacific. The U.S., though, stretches all the way to California."

"The Spanish lands?" he asked with awe. No single country had ever stretched from sea to sea on this continent that he knew of. If she were making this up, he asked himself again, why was she being so outlandish? Why make up an entirely new world? He, too, quelled from the possible answer.

"Not for about two hundred years," Heather replied, amazed at Garison's lack of knowledge of all this. If he had forgotten so much of this, how was it that he still remembered English, or how to walk? "I think we bought California from Mexico—or Spain. I really don't know that part of history very well. I don't think it was a war, though." She laughed, "It may have had something to do with Zorro."

He just shrugged at her joke and sat down at the kitchen table with a glass of Dr Pepper in his hand. He sipped it and said, "Cold. I have never tried it this way." It was quite good, he admitted. After a long pause, as he tried to sort the information he was being bombarded with, he asked, "You say there is open trade between these United States and Texas?"

"Texas is a state of the United States. Again, unfortunately, some might say. But that's where I'm from. Surely you remember that."

"You said that, didn't you? You said Texas was one of the fifty." He thought for another long moment, then asked with something like awe, "You are from Texas? Really?"

She nodded, "Don't you remember? My father is a law partner with your uncle Virgil."

"I have no uncle Virgil," he told her, beginning to quell in the face of someone who either hadn't done their research or was telling a terrible truth. "I have no relatives at all. My parents died in a plane crash...twenty—no, fifteen years ago—depending on how you look at it."

"No they didn't," Heather told him, her brow creased with confusion. Surely, she had thought, he would remember his parents. Of course, he hadn't remembered so many other things—including his wife. He also had some sort of skewed view of reality. What was wrong with her Garison?

He looked up in surprise and asked, "What did you say?"

"Your parents didn't die in a plane crash. They live in Denver."

He look a long sip of his drink, then asked, "My parents are alive? And living in—where is this Denver?"

"It's the state capitol. You've heard of Texas and Durango and Japan, but not Denver?"

He shook his head. "In my day," he said, falling into the form of speech he used to use when telling Sarah of the twenty-first century, "The capitol of this region was called...Cherry Creek. It has been so long since I thought about this region that I had almost forgotten that name. But I don't remember a Denver."

"Cherry Creek," Heather repeated. "You mentioned something about that yesterday but didn't respond when I asked you if you meant your uncle's store by that name. You were thinking of a city. I wonder where that was located in your mind?" She hadn't intended to say the last part out loud, but she did and he answered, apparently taking no offense.

"On the other side of the mountains," he said. "You follow along the mountains, going north, until you come to Cherry Creek. It lies where the Platte River and the plains meet up with the Rocky Mountains."

"That sounds like Denver to me," she told him. "In fact, that's got to be the same Cherry Creek as where your uncle has his store. They tell me it used to be way out in the boondocks, but now it's almost in downtown Denver."

"Perhaps Cherry Creek is now Denver. But why the name change?" Garison hadn't intended, himself, to say all he had said outloud. He reminded himself just how lousy he would have been at counter-espionage. Tex had probably learned a lot more from him than Garison was willing to admit.

He paused and thought for a long time. Heather, knowing how he liked to be undisturbed in such moods, kept quiet while she waited for him to speak. Finally, he looked up and told her, "If you can take me to my parents, I can start to believe many of the wonders you tell me of." In his mind he thought: because all these things can be created by clever people; the house, the lab, and even you. But no one could recreate my parents or make substitutes good enough to fool me. He also had a flashback of identifying their charred and broken bodies. It had been a horrible sight, but there had also been no doubt as to who he was seeing. The original moment had made him vomit and the memories sometimes did, too. This time, however, the surge was quelled by the idea that they might, possibly, be alive.

"Let's go first thing in the morning," she said. "Maybe it will jog your memory."

"How will we get there? If Denver is Cherry Creek, the distance is quite far, isn't it?"

"We can get there in a couple hours by plane."

"Do you think I know how to pilot an airplane?" he asked disbelievingly.

"No, but I do," she told him.

"You do?"

"I've been flying since before we met," she told him. "In fact, that's kind of how we met—not counting that first phone call. You probably don't remember that flight down to Gallup with Bat, do you?"

"We flew with a bat?" he asked, wondering why some of her lies—if they were lies—were so poorly conceived.

"No, Bat is a person's name. Bat Garrett. His wife Jody is my best friend, apart from you."

Garison shrugged at the explanation, still thinking it was an odd name for a person, but asked, "If you can fly us up there, why don't we go now?"

"I think you might want to get a haircut before we see your parents. You know what your father would say."

"You're right," he told her, reaching for his pony tail and actually liking the thought of being rid of it. But did she really know his father that well?

"But, you know," she added, "I kind of like you with long hair. Maybe if you got it styled..."

They slept in separate rooms again that night, after a long day of conversation. They spoke mostly of trivial things when they talked, for each of them was afraid to broach the really deep questions that they were both wondering about. For herself, Heather wondered why Garison weren’t more anxious to see his parents, if he really believed them to have been dead for almost two decades. For Garison, he wondered the same thing, but realized that—deep down inside—he was afraid of meeting his parents for what that would say about his memory or even his whole life up to this point. Could it have been a dream? Could he have made up even Sarah?

No, he thought as he lay down that night, the last five years were real. He had the pony-tail to prove it, he chuckled grimly. But what about before? What if Heather were telling the truth and he just weren’t remembering it? Maybe it was because of a hit on the head, or maybe it was because of some trauma he had willed himself to forget. He lay down troubled and slept that way.

In the morning, they ate breakfast and prepared to leave. Heather's plane was at the airport between Falfa and Oxford, so they would go through Durango to get there. In Durango, Garison could get a haircut and they could still be in Denver by noon.

As he looked in his closet he was surprised at what purported to be his taste in clothes. Dressing in the odd assortment of colors Heather showed him was in his closet, he felt naked after all the years of wearing eighteenth century garb. Even the twenty-first century clothes he remembered were of a more utilitarian nature than these. The fabrics of this twenty-first century, he had discovered, were so light and airy he almost felt as if he were not wearing clothes at all. They were comfortable clothes he had in the twenty-first century, he admitted, but would take some getting used to. He felt a tremendous urge to wear a trench coat even in warm weather just for modesty's sake.

As he finished dressing, Heather called to him from the bathroom and said, "I'm going to clean up a bit, first. And you might want to take a shower yourself before we go."

His years in the past had caused him to forget the twenty-first century's emphasis on cleanliness. While far cleaner than most of his eighteenth century compatriots, he had had—on occasion—to go days without a proper bath. So he smelled himself and agreed that Heather was right. He mused that it would be nice to clean oneself with the ease of the twenty-first century, again. There should be another bathroom downstairs, he remembered, so he went down there to take a shower. He had always enjoyed a good, hot shower, but never so much as on his return to indoor plumbing after a five year absence. For a moment, he felt guilty about enjoying any part of where he was, knowing it meant he had left Sarah so far behind, but he had to admit the hot water felt wonderful.

He finished before Heather and went into the living room to wait for her while she curled her hair. In two hundred and fifty years, he thought, women have become no faster at getting ready. Modern conveniences had not allowed them to be quicker, just to do more. If all women looked like Heather, he reasoned, the modern conveniences were worth their time. The thought crossed his mind that he had never known anyone in the Soviet Americas—or anywhere, for that matter—as physically pretty as Heather. If all women were now that pretty, how had such a change taken place? He ignored the question for he still refused to believe all of what he was seeing wasn't just some sort of elaborate hoax. He also felt guilty considering Heather's beauty. It had just been two days since he had been flirting in the kitchen with Sarah. That thought made him feel terrible.

Garison noticed Heather’s purse sitting open on a small table at the end of the couch and he went to it. As much as he hated to pry, he took out what he guessed to be some sort of wallet. It was much like the one he had seen his mother and other twentieth century women carry, except more compact.

Of course, he thought, no spy is going to leave anything incriminating laying out in their wallets to be found by anyone. In fact, anything that could be found might have been put there so it would be found. Still . . .

He opened it up and found first the pictures. In the fore was a picture of him. He was dressed in some sort of odd sports outfit and wearing an oversized leather glove on one hand and a peculiar hat on his head. The next picture was of he and Heather in what appeared to be wedding raiment. He stared at it for quite a while and decided that—if it were airbrushing or computer-generated—it was a commendable job. In the picture, he was wearing some sort of odd, ugly black suit wherein the lapels appeared to be of a different material than the rest of the suit. He was also wearing some sort of pleated sash that made it look as if he had pulled his pants up above his navel. "Hideous," he remarked to himself. Her dress was quite lovely, though not—he remarked—as pretty as Sarah's had been. Though it was somewhat low-cut across the bodice, a realization that made him upset with himself for noticing both from a general propriety's standpoint and also from a specifically married man standpoint.

The next picture was of another couple who looked to be in their late twenties. He turned to the back of the picture and—written in his hand writing—it said, "Bat and Jody Garrett." He shrugged and wondered again what sort of a name Bat was for a person. And who had been able to copy his handwriting so well? The next picture was of a stunning young blonde woman named Darla Gaston, according, again, to his writing, and the pictures following that were of him. So far, the women did appear to be prettier than he remembered.