“That’s exactly what I was doing, and your treasure is right back there,” I said, pointing my thumb at the case. “I need to know which direction to turn. Chura, you might find a map in that compartment in front of you.”
By the time Chura unfolded the map and she and the others located us on it, I reached a paved road — right beside the Buffalo River. Awaiting further instructions, I looked at the water and thought of its significance considering our situation.
My display utterly useless in our navigation, I relied on my passengers’ careful direction as I turned left and headed for a town called Jasper. It was about 40 minutes down the road if their calculations and the Jeep’s speedometer were accurate. They had decided it was the nearest town likely to have a motel room or other form of lodging we could use as a base for our operations. Although we had only slightly more than 20 hours left, we needed a place to stay. It was getting dark, and going around knocking on doors at night was not a good idea.
“I hate to lose all this time right at the start. If only we could have jumped in the morning,” Danetta said.
“Fate forced our hand on that one,” I said. “If you believe in Fate.”
Hills draped in green surrounded us as we drove through Boxley Valley. The Ozarks were more similar to the Smoky Mountains than the Rocky Mountains. Trees ran all the way to each peak, with only points of erosion or cave collapse showing bare rock.
Almost exactly 40 minutes later, we arrived in Jasper, where we immediately saw Riverview Motel and Canoe. The sign indicated vacancies. Unanimously elected to check us in, I pulled the Jeep into a parking spot and then popped the clutch to kill the engine. The ladies’ heads snapped back.
“Smooth,” Chethra said.
“You’re welcome to take a crack at driving,” I said.
“Before you get out, hang on,” Danetta said. She spit on her fingers and reached for my face.
“Ugh, Aunt Danetta!” Chura said.
“Likewise,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“We have to get some of this dirt off your face.” She wiped my forehead, then reloaded her spit and cleaned my cheeks.
I looked in the rearview mirror. “I look like shit. Is that better than I looked before you put your spit on me?”
Danetta picked at my hair. “Believe it or not,” she said.
As I approached the motel office, I noticed a window sign that proclaimed, “No shirt, no shoes — no service.” They need this kind of notification? Below it was a rectangular, white sticker that read, “Beam Me Up, Jesus.”
A bell rang when I walked through the door. Nobody was tending the counter. Through a door behind it, I saw a dark room with flickering light, probably from some primitive sort of display device. I think they called it “television.”
“Gawd dayum, Jean, cain’t you hear that bell?” a voice called from somewhere deeper than the room I saw. Hearing that accent, my mind flashed back to Theo.
A human shadow appeared and crossed the wall in front of me, until a short woman appeared in the doorway. A white towel wrapped into a turban sat atop her head, concealing all but a few whisps of her dark brunette hair. She wore a tattered, pale yellow bathrobe and held a cigarrette between her lips.
She turned back and yelled, “I tell ya, them boys Fante and Mingo was sweet on each other.”
The hidden voice replied, “They was torturing people, Jean. I ain’t never heard of no homo what liked torturin’ people.”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but I was in a bit of a rush, so I spoke up.
“You are Jean, I presume?” I asked.
“I am,” she said, facing me now as she approached the counter. “You ever seen The Big Combo?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
A face appeared briefly in the doorway behind Jean, then ducked into the shadows just as quickly.
“Well, my husband and I seen it together on our first date back in ‘55. The Harrison TV stations won’t never play nothin’ like that. I wish they was some way we could see that again. You know, just watch an old movie here on the TV. Any movie we want.”
“Maybe someday you’ll have that opportunity. I saw that you have rooms available.”
“Sure do.”
I heard a throat clearing loudly, somewhere in the darkened room.
“Well, hold on a minute now,” Jean said. She ducked into the dark room and got into a hushed, heated discussion with a man I assumed to be her husband.
His voice louder in his anger, the man said, “I don’t want no… what is he? Some kind of nigger chink? Whatever he is, I don’t want him stayin’ here.”
“We need the business this time of year, honey. River’s low in these parts, and ain’t many people knockin’ down our door for a room. Just give me a minute.”
Jean returned to the counter. “How did you wanna pay today?”
“Cash,” I said.
“Well, I think you’re in luck.”
“Thank you, Ms. –”
“Just call me Miss Jean.”
I went to the Jeep to get money. Miss Jean and her husband certainly hadn’t laid out the red carpet. It was a roof over our heads, though, and if his animosity was any indication of the majority attitude, I didn’t want to risk looking anywhere else.
“So, how did it go?” Chura asked.
I opened the case as she and the other ladies looked on. “Not great, but we have a place as soon as I pay. Does anybody know what a nigger chink is?”
“Did someone call you that?” Danetta asked.
“Evidently not the person in charge, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“That’s a racial slur,” Chethra said.
“What’s the purpose?” Chura asked.
“Obviously, the locals think that our friend Mr. Falcon is, using eras-gone terminology, half African-American, half Asian-American.”
“And they don’t like that for some reason?” Chura asked.
“Oh there’s probably plenty of dislike for either around here,” Chethra said, “but I wouldn’t say it’s based on reason.”
“This is going to be harder than I thought,” Danetta said.
“We’re screwed.”
“Chura!”
(continue to Part 14)
Let’s see if I can do an overall recap in a few minutes here…
Like I said before, the prose is more engaging that I was expecting it to be, Mark. It may be safe to say that I’ve been reading a bit of evolution since TWAK and other of your previous writing. It’s pretty engaging stuff and doesn’t seem to have any extraneous bits in it. Keeping in mind that you’re writing this on the fly with little more than an idea of the direction you’re going in.
I don’t want to spend much time nit-picking about the time travel bit. The story’s the key here and I’m willing to suspend incredulity at relativistic implausibilities for the sake of being engaged, you know?
(No idea, either, if any of these comments have been relayed in the previous posts since I haven’t gone back to read the comment threads, so if I’m rehashing old criticisms, just smack me upside the back of the head with the butt of your BFG.)
In CH.2 I immediately thought that you made Falcon three when he jumped in his attempt to fly because that’s how old Ben is now. Don’t know if that was intentional, but it struck me that it might be.
I found some of the interjectory nuances a little distracting. There’s certainly a fine balance between establishing that this IS a different time and sometimes sounding a little off. For example: “For 50 percent of a second…” pulled me right out of the narrative and I re-read the paragraph a few times to get back into it. Others, like calling Chura a ‘half-liter’, worked for me.
Agents Glock and Speel made me laugh. Made me think of musically-inclined Mulder and Scully from the X-Files. Their portrayal also seemed pretty wooden in the story for the brief appearances they made. Not sure if that was intentional or not, but they were just played off of by the main characters, not developed themselves.
Also loved the name of the Ruger BFG 3000. Brought to mind my university days of infiltrating the uninhabited computer labs to play network DOOM over the LAN. Damn, those were good times!
Another minor criticism is that some of Falcon’s back-story narratives seem a little too expository. It’s important that the reader become aware of enough history about time travel and Falcon’s particulars and all that, but there were a few paragraphs that sounded a little too much like Falcon talking to the audience. Just a few times over the course of 50+ pages, but there it is.
There was one single measurement I caught you slipping back to imperial on. In the 9th paragraph of CH.8 you mentioned that Danetta was sitting 15 FEET off the ground. I immediately thought to myself, “Gotcha!” My love of the metric system knows no bounds and I reveled in the opportunity to throw that one right back at you. It’s 5 metres, dude, yeah!! Again, in CH.10, you referenced “…a quarter mile past our involuntary stop…”, which is more like 400 metres.
Totally random thought at the beginning of CH.10: are they still eating Cheerios to be pissed in, or has the expression just held up over time? Also, really grew to like the character of Theo. Rich dude with nothing to do with his money and loved risking life and limb for the sake of adventure. Sort of reminded me of that Columbian guy that Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas ran into in Romancing the Stone; the guy who read his hombres the novels that Turner’s character wrote. Strange that Theo reminded me of him, but he really came to life for me.
Spelling pedantry:
“I find your alacrity borders on disingenuous.” Should be a “-ness” on the end there.
I got sort of confused in the middle of CH.10. Danetta digs into Falcon’s pocket to fish out the plasti to unlock his door. Danetta and Falcon banter back and forth and then Chura chimes in with, “Mom! Falcon! Cut that out.” Isn’t Chethra Chura’s mom? Was that just a slip, she should have called her ‘Aunt’?
In CH.11, I liked the phrase, “All I can hear are the birds and the breeze.”
Another spelling thing. Last few lines of CH.11 have the sentence: “But everyboy in the world looks like us.” Should be ‘everybody’.
I got to thinking about the time paradox in CH.12. If they made their second jump later than the first, and Danetta still left her TP note, would there not have been two notes, or at least the possibility of running into their former time-traveling selves? I’m sure that there are a bunch of holes that could be punched in time travel portion of this story, but like I mentioned earlier, I’m more into the narrative bit than analysing the likelihood of actual time travel and the implications thereof.
Also after CH.12, I started to think that there needed to be more buildup of the motivation behind Danetta’s initial ploy. There’s little mentioned except for the fact that what fortune her family had was squandered for environmental preservation and the last bit scraped together for the first time jump. So Danetta’s a tree-hugger and Chethra is bitter for being robbed of what should have been her share of the money. That’s all I know. Perhaps it’s enough, though. This story IS more about Falcon that the ladies. I did feel like a B-grade actor up on stage, fist clenched and face raised in anguish to the relentless sky: “What’s my motivation?!?!” (tongue in cheek there, a bit.)
OH! And you totally get about 10,000 bonus points for a Serenity reference in CH.13. That sweeps.
Overall, I like the racial amalgamation that’s occurred in their future. That’s where I see us eventually heading in ‘real life’, I don’t know how many hundreds or thousands of generations from now.
Hope that my rambling made sense. I’ll keep up from here on…
A new tagline for this blog may be in order:
A Storied Man
Writings from the Past and the Present… now featuring the Future!
(um, kidding)
Excellent as usual…. though things are moving at a slower pace now… but that’s good…. hope it doesn’t end while I’m on vacation!
Simon – Gosh. Thanks for all that. It completely made sense to me.
I intended to stay metric. In fact, I originally wrote (yes, I revise a little same-day) Theo saying, “A quarter of a mile,” and then he says, “Oh, pardon me, 400 meters.” But, then I realized that somewhere Falcon’s narrative had accidentally abandoned metric, so I did too. Won’t on the re-write, though. Metric system is far superior and my vision of the future will have nothing less.
I understand the “talking to the audience” point. Dialogue is a better way to do some of that, but I didn’t want the ladies to seem that they had lived under a rock (after all, time travel is a consumer product, albeit an expensive one).
After I got Theo and Falcon to the shed, the Columbian guy in Romancing the Stone wouldn’t get out of my mind. When Theo showed Falcon the ATV, I expected him to say, “This is my Lil’ Mule.” Theo is one of my favorite creations.
The bit about Chura calling Danetta “Mom” outside the old time lab was a complete slip on my part. Thanks. And thanks for the other corrections. I can’t tell you how many times I read that part where Chursa says, “But everybody looks like us,” and never noticed “everyboy.”
Did they make the second jump later than the first? I didn’t mean to make it that way, if I did. I meant for them to arrive at about the same time, and then have Danetta leave the note for the first time again. In my time travel, people can’t meet themselves when they jump back in time. Not sure why or how, but they can’t. But, it’s obvious that time travel is not the main focus, so, like you said, I can overlook some of that. I’m sure some time travel nuts can’t get past it.
As far as the ladies’ backstory — there hasn’t been much time to stop and discuss that, and since I’m writing in the first-person narrative, they just do their own thing a lot of the time. But, what better time than a night in a motel room to get to know them?
The Serenity reference was totally a fluke. I got online to research movies Ronald Reagan had appeared in, because I thought it might be funny to have them watching one of his movies and joking about how they can’t believe he’s the governor of California (1967-1975), then one of them saying he might be president one day. The two would then laugh their heads off while Falcon held his tongue. I found a movie called “The Killers,” and a reader’s comment referenced “The Big Combo.” I went to check out that movie, and found that there are two characters in it named Fante and Mingo. I’m sure some Firefly and Serenity fans somewhere have made this connection before me, but to me it was a neat discovery.
Nice use of “sweeps,” by the way.
Simon – I like the tagline. I have another future story over there, but it’s kind of lame (I wrote much of it almost 15 years ago).
Dave – Yep, it had to slow down a little at some point (although it won’t last long, because they have only 24 hours to put up or shut up).
Nice to get here and see I wasn’t the only one who thought about dual notes. It was also nice to have your explanation. Never thought I’d hear how you were thinking.