The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time (30 page)

And, not only is Dr Pepper legal in this place they call Colorado (a Spanish name retained even though the country isn't Spanish), you can actually buy it at all the markets. (The marvel of a market that sells fresh produce is another topic and something I could expound on for hours.)

If this is the world I created, what a strange world it is!

Garison Fitch was quite impressed with Heather's airplane. It was a twin engine Cessna she had purchased the previous summer and it handled wonderfully, even in the high altitudes and among the many updrafts and downdrafts caused by the Rocky Mountains. Heather, he realized quickly, was an expert pilot. She occasionally darted low over valleys and mountains, giving Garison an exciting—yet frightful—view of landscapes he had only seen from a car or forty thousand feet, before. Private airplanes were virtually unheard of in the Soviet Americas and reserved for people with higher standing in the Party than Garison had had even at the height of his fame.

"What part of Texas did you live in?" he asked as they flew over the mountains. He had never ceased to be amazed at the panorama of the Rocky Mountains. A small plane was a great way to see them, he realized; much better than the commercial airlines. Of course, nothing beat tramping them on foot or crossing them on horseback (after an allergy shot) and he determined to do one or the other one day soon. That ought to really show him just what had changed about the world and what hadn't, he mused inwardly.

"Dallas," she replied. "I was born and raised there."

"I was in Dallas once," he told her. "I guess it was just about three years ago, but to me it was eight."

"Really?" she questioned. Garison had never been a big fan of her home town. He complained that everything in Dallas cost too much (making him by no means the first to register such a complaint against the "Big D", but it did seem a ridiculous complaint to be coming from someone from Durango). He had also complained, as had everyone else who had ever been there, that the roads seemed to be in a perpetual state of construction.

"Yes. I spent three days with President Hecht and we went to Dallas on the final day." He added, "He took me on a tour of their most impressive highway system. Some people said Dallas had the best highway system of any major city in the world."

"Interesting you should say that," she quipped, wondering if he had somehow read her mind.

"Houston, however, was said to have had the worst highway system in the world."

"Some things never change," Heather laughed. "My father had a chance to move his law office to Houston once, but he didn't do it."

"Really, why?"

"The town, I guess. He said it might be a nice town if they ever got it finished."

After a moment, something he had said dawned on her and she asked, "President Hecht? Was he president of a corporation or something? I don't believe I ever heard of him. There's a Nathan Hecht on the Texas State Supreme Court."

"That was his name," Garison told her. "In my day, he was the President of the Republic of Texas. And quite a good one, at that. Had an excellent background in law and had turned their legal system into the most efficient in the world. His vice-president was a good man named Ryan. Tall, good-looking man. Perfect for the Texas image of the cowboy."

If Heather had been in a car, she would have slammed on the brakes in shock. She turned to Garison and asked, "You don't mean Nolan Ryan, do you?"

"That was his name, yes," Garison answered. "What sort of job does he do now?"

"I don't think you're ready for that answer," Heather replied. She looked forward again, although still shaking her head. She probably would have voted for Hecht and Ryan herself, but the prospect still seemed odd. She shook her head again as she started to realize she was believing Garison's story about coming from another time. She chuckled, wondering if her "Texas nationalism" were kicking in and making her want to believe her home state had once been a world power. Growing up, she had often wondered what Texas might have been like if the people had listened to Sam Houston and stayed out of the United States.

"I visited several Texas towns," he went on. "I saw Dallas, and Austin, of course, and Houston and New Orleans and Amarillo, and Albuquerque, and Santa Fe."

"Albuquerque and Santa Fe and New Orleans were in Texas?" she asked with disbelief. At times, she switched from starting to believe him quite suddenly to believing Garison less and less and wondering what sort of fantasy land he lived in and just how hard he had been hit over the head. She reminded herself to feel his head for a bump when she got the chance, even though he had said there wasn't one there.

"Oh yes. Ever since the war of...1836, I believe."

"That was right after Texas got its independence from Mexico," she mumbled. Then, to him, she instructed, "Go on."

"Well, parts of what I believe you call Colorado were also part of the Republic of Texas; but they were sold to the British Americas in exchange for the swamp lands near the Mississippi River. That's what it was called in my day, anyway. I believe it came from an aboriginal word. What do they call the big river that runs through the middle of this continent now?"

"The Mississippi," she replied, then slipped into a stunned silence. Heather sat in amazement as she tried to fathom what Fitch was saying. Texas stretched all the way to the Mississippi River? That would cover the entire state of Louisiana, and would explain why he listed New Orleans as a Texas town. "How far west did it go?" she asked.

"Texas? It went to a point about thirty miles west of the La Plata Canyon." He laughed, "Many people said that the reason the Texans had been able to hold onto their land so long was because no one else wanted it.

"There is another story," he added, smiling. "I was once told that when God was creating the earth, He finished all parts but Texas, intending to work on it the next day and make it something very unique and special. But, when he returned the next day, He found that the land had dried and become hard as a rock and completely useless. To correct the problem, He would have had to start all over again with the entire earth. So, God decided—"

Heather injected, "'Instead of rebuilding the whole thing from scratch, I'll just create some people who like it this way.'"

"Funny," Garison remarked, "That a joke like that would have survived the destruction of a civilization when so many other things apparently did not."

"That is odd, isn't it?" She agreed, not questioning the basic premise of his observation. What did she really think about all this? she asked herself. She shrugged and added, "But I believe we are in for many more odd findings."

"I would guess that you're right."

Heather handed Garison a map of the United States and said, "Show me on this map where Texas was."

He looked at it for a moment, then said, "It comprised, roughly, the areas marked on this map as Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Louisiana—and almost half of this state you call Arkansas.

"This area," he pointed to the spot known to Heather as the Four Corners Area, where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona converged, "Was anticipated to be quite a trouble spot in the coming war. With Texas, the Japanese Americas and the Soviet Americas all butting up against one another, this area was expected to be quite a hot spot. Which, obviously, would have put my—our—house right on the front." He suddenly realized he was starting to accept the seemingly unacceptable premise of his most recent time travel. "Oddly, though, I seem to have single-handedly averted that war."

"So why did you live there—if it were going to be such a trouble spot?"

"You used the correct verb tense," he commented, completely out of the blue. "I don't meet many people who do."

"You taught me," she laughed. Garison had, for some odd reason, always been a stickler for that one little-known and even less-used rule of grammar. It made her happy to know that a little quirk like that was still inside this man sitting next to her. She reminded him, "You were going to tell me why you lived in La Plata Canyon even if it were such a trouble spot," adding emphasis to the word just for fun.

He laughed at her emphasis and shrugged, "I love La Plata Canyon. And, I never expected the war to become a reality. I guess now it never will."

"Some things are constant."

He looked up and asked, "What do you mean?"

"I've always known you had a mistress."

"What?" he queried, shocked.

"The La Plata Canyon. I always knew I was sharing your love with her."

Garison's Journal

extra entry

Heather Dawson Fitch is, as I mentioned earlier, an uncommonly beautiful woman. But there is more to her than just her beauty. I am also learning that, like Sarah, she is also uncommonly intelligent. I hate to in any way compare her with Sarah—for Sarah was incomparable—but this is a positive comparison.

I am trying to put down on paper what I understand of her life history in the hope that, if she is an extremely good actress who is lying, I can catch her in one. Here's what I have learned about her:

She was the valedictorian of her high school in Highland Park (a suburb of Dallas that is, according to a map she showed me, actually completely surrounded by Dallas), and, while there, she led all the women's' athletic teams—answering my earlier suspicions about her physique. Heather had, supposedly, been touted as a possible member of the Olympic volleyball team, but she had been too intent on starting college to want to take the year off to prepare. I think she sort of regrets the missed opportunity now.

She attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas and graduated with a pre-law degree in three years with a perfect grade point average. She continued her studies at the University of Texas at Austin and completed her law degree there, again at the top of her class. She then became one of those fairly rare people who passes the Texas State Bar Exam on the first try. In fact, if it had not been for her reputation proceeding her, her score was so high she might have been suspected of cheating. If all this is true, then I imagine that "the world was there for the asking" for her. [One of President Hecht's reforms was to increase the difficulty of the bar exam, insuring that only the very best could ever practice in the Republic. As a lawyer, I had immense respect for that piece of legislation and had wished for it in the Soviet Americas as we had so many lawyers who were, for lack of a better term, yahoos.]

At SMU she had worked in the time to be a volleyball standout there, too. A professional womens league was trying to form in Dallas at that time and had tried to talk Heather into joining the rookie crop, but she declined in favor of the full scholarship she had received to the University of Texas. She almost played, she said. I got the feeling she might would have rather played volleyball, but didn't want to be the second member of her prestigious family to forego a career in law. Apparently, Dawson life plans are made up far in advance of birth.

After a summer tour of Europe as a graduation present, she went to work with her father in the law office of Dawson, McElroy and Fitch. It is a very "well-to-do" firm, she says, one that any law student in the country would dream of going to. Heather didn't say it out loud, but I think a part of her resented the fact that she had received such a good position not because of her qualifications, but because she was the boss's daughter. Still, if her qualifications were as great as she says, I'm sure her father and my apparent uncle were glad to have her.

[Speaking of relatives, one gaping hole in her story is her mention of my uncle Virgil Fitch, who is supposedly my father's brother and her father's law partner. I don't know about her father's law firm, but I do know my father was an only child.]

During the time she worked for her father's (and brother's) law firm for a little more than a year, she worked with a private investigator named Bat Garrett and met Garison Fitch while working on a case (or, so she says, it all seemed rather convoluted when she tried to explain just what the case entailed). Heather had later been the maid of honor for Bat's wife Jody and Jody had assumed the same honor for Heather (which made the story of how she met Jody all the stranger as they had supposedly been rivals for Garrett's affections).

The strange thing about all this is that, as Heather told me about it, it all sounded familiar. I would swear I had never heard of Southern Methodist University or volleyball or many of the other things she told me about, but...well...somehow I had. It was rather like stumbling across a story your mother had read to you as a child and you had long since forgotten until stumbling across the book as an adult. You don't remember the details, but as they come out, you do. It's all very strange.

As they flew over the mountains around Leadville, things had become silent. They watched the little puffs of cloud that drifted over the mountains like oddly placed cotton balls that hung in the air for no apparent reason. The mountains still held quite a bit of snow in their troughs and valleys—and along the higher peaks they were completely covered—and the clouds often became indistinguishable from the snow. It had been a wet winter and there would probably be much snow still clinging above the timber line when the fall snows came, unlike the many years when everything melted off.

Finally, Heather broke the silence and asked, "What was she like?"

"Huh?" Garison asked, coming out of a near trance as he looked at the mountains and memories came back of fishing trips taken with his father and vacations spent with his parents. Some of the memories were sharp and crisp, though, and some were fuzzy and convoluted. He had been trying to figure out what was going on inside his head—because it seemed like more than just the usual confusion over old memories—when she disturbed him..