Dirty Water

by Tom Kratman

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Time Travel

Synopsis

A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME—BACK TO BOSTON!

1462: an alien who feasts on the suffering of sentient beings dines off the agonies of Vlad the Impaler’s twenty-thousand victims near Targoviste, Romania.

1688: a woman is framed for witchcraft and hanged by the neck in Boston.

1965: a toy store that never seems to run out of special toys is suspected of being the location of a temporal portal, the same one used by the agony-feeding alien.

2022: a grandfather, showing his young grandchildren what remains of the Boston of his youth, is shown that portal by his granddaughters.

And they’re off! Off through the gate that grants wishes, off to deal with time travel, off to break and enter, off to endure the pain of seeing afresh loved ones long since departed in their own time. They’re off to deal with hardened, murderous criminals and with equally murderous aliens.

And all of that is set around the time of Christmas joy, in old, fine hotels, with presents, fresh loves, Handel’s Messiah, a department store’s enchanted village, old delicacies, modern weapons, lasers . . . and a very special calico cat.

Release date: November 7, 2023

Publisher: Baen

Print pages: 400

Sample

Prologue

 

Boston Gaol, Prison Lane, Boston, Massachusetts

16 November 1688

 

Though it was cold, bitterly cold, and windy, it wasn’t the weather that set the creature to trembling. Oh, no; the Q’riln trembled with anticipation as the old, worn woman—the Q’riln thought of her as “the pursuer”—bound in cold and rough iron chains, was hustled from the jail and pushed into a crude wagon, drawn by a single horse. Forming a circle around the short passage from jail to cart were some scores of catcalling, sneering, garbage- and mud-hurling men and women. Those emotions were spice, perhaps, but the main meal, the “juice,” as the Q’riln termed it, was still to come.

 

The old woman about to be mounted on the cart was not so old as all that, not as her own people measured things. But, since being assigned to Earth, along with her mate, everything in her assignment had gone utterly wrong. First there came a hard life of war, capture, deportation, and sale as an indentured servant to Barbados. In the course of all this, she’d lost her mate, a loss that pressed down upon her soul like a stone block. This, more than anything, was what made her seeming seem prematurely aged. Indeed, she’d grown old at heart and soul, these last fifty years, even as her people measured things.

Worst of all, the old woman going to her miserable death was further agonized by the knowledge of failure. Sent to track down and eliminate the Q’riln, she, instead, had been arrested. Worse, the Q’riln had somehow managed to deprive her of sensible local speech. All she had left was her own native Galactic Common III, and nobody here spoke that, not even the Q’riln.

The pursuer’s name here and now was Ann Glover but among her own people she was, and to her late mate she had been, called something that meant “Topaz,” for her smoky yellow eyes. Those eyes sought desperately for an open human she could transfer to and inhabit to continue her pursuit. But no, no, These are as closed-minded a bunch as Sinesquotian War Tarts, no hope of even a temporary home with them.

But where can I find shelter? I’ve set up the cat, but that’s not my first choice of a future.

Around the cart, a group of halberdiers and arquebusiers, the latter with their long matches smoking, formed a secure ring, three of each to each side. The driver flicked the reins, causing the horse to begin its slow trek to the town gallows, which stood near to a muddy, stinking, corpse contaminated pool, out on Boston Neck.

 

Chapter 1

 

The most serious charge which can be brought

against New England is not Puritanism but February.

—Joseph Wood Krutch

 

Interstate 81, Shenandoah Valley, Southwest of Stanton, Virginia

 

The car, a late model Avalon, black in color, with leather seating, more or less vibrated with the music coming from four throats and rather more speakers than that. The song was Shel Silverstein’s “Dirty Water,” a cultural icon of Boston and, especially, its sports teams.

As if on cue, everyone shut up for a moment as the Old Man reached over and turned down the volume so that the youngest member of the party, his granddaughter, Cossima, eight years old, olive-toned, and tiny, except for her voice, could sing out, with The Standells, a particular line that was, in the family musical lexicon, hers. The line concerned, among other things, the personal qualities of the muggers and thieves strolling, much like the lovers, late night, along the River Charles.

The volume shot up again, the lyrics changing immediately to a discussion of the nature of the water—formerly, as in when the song was first written, so filthy it had been a health hazard if not even a fire hazard. But did the Roman still revere Father Tiber? Did Londoners have the Thames flowing through their hearts? So, too, did Bostonians feel about their river, the Charles, their “Dirty Water.”

The song then was suddenly but briefly interrupted by the noxious aroma of a pig farm, just west of Interstate 81, emanating from more tons of pig manure than a human being’s nose ought to be subject to.

Pig crap notwithstanding, through coughs and some gagging, the song continued all the way through to the final dedication to the Charles.

The Old Man, while gray and a tad worn, wasn’t actually that old, mid-sixties, perhaps, and looking a bit younger since he carried more weight now than was comfortable, which extra lard kept the skin taut. Between the weight and some serious mileage, he was more worn than he looked, despite that little bit of looking a little younger than his true age.

There were many names by which he was known. Officially he was Sean F. Eisen. Unofficially, people often appended, “that son of a bitch” to the name.

This was not, to be honest, entirely undeserved; when one grows up in as Irish a place as South Boston, Massachusetts (where one cannot throw a beer bottle of a Friday night without bouncing it off the heads of three Doyles, two Hanrahans, and a Quinn before it hits a Mahoney and then a Delany, mid-chest, or possibly two before finally falling to the ground) with the last name of Eisen . . . well, Johnny Cash pegged it pretty well in “A Boy Named Sue.” Eisen had grown up fast and he’d also grown up with a mean streak, keen of wit and with a fast punch.

Some of the names were more or less special, just between him and his grandchildren. These ranged from the commonplace, “Grandpa,” to “Old Man,” to “Grumpy Old Man,” and points beyond.

Eisen, “The Old Man” had, unofficially, taken up the cause of the cultural education of his grandchildren, as well as keeping them in touch with their Boston roots. This had become rather more difficult since terroristic levels of property taxation, aided by an influx of overpaid yuppies and dinks, had driven the extended family entirely from the city limits out into the suburbs of Braintree, Quincy, Plymouth, Hanson, and even such terra incognita spots on the North Shore as Salem. Yes, that Salem.

“Hey, Old Man,” asked the grandson, Patrick, “Can we get some lunch?” Patrick looked exactly like the Old Man had at the same age. Indeed, he’d once found a picture of his grandfather as a seven-year-old and asked, “Hey, how did I get in this picture? And where did that old uniform come from?”

“That’s an interesting question,” observed the Mean Old Grandpa, referring to lunch, not old photographs. “Should I feed you three or develop your characters by letting you go hungry for another twenty-four hours or so? Building character is so . . .”

“GRANDPA!!!” cried all three.

“Oh, all right.” He glanced up at a road sign and asked, “Snivel, snivel, snivel.

German work for you spoiled brats?”

“YYYEEESSS!!!”

“Edelweiss, it is, then.”

 

The food smelled simply wonderful. Even so, the Old Man rested his head on the fingers of one hand and shook it, when the accordion player in the background began unwittingly playing the “Horst Wessel Lied.” Eisen considered calling him over to explain his musical faux pas, then decided, Nah, let him figure it out for himself.

The plates being presented, the Old Man and the kids ganged up on the Goulasch, ingested the Jaegerschnitzel, reduced the Rahmschnitzel, slaughtered the Sauerbraten, and veritably wiped out the Wiener Schnitzel. The Spaetzle and the red cabbage hardly stood a chance.

“And there’s about that good of a chance of me buying you little monsters dessert, either.”

“We don’t want any,” said the eldest, twelve-year-old Juliana, who had, within family circles, a rather pungent nickname. That, however, was only for within family circles.

Twelve years old was an important age for a girl, it being the last year for her to remind everyone how sweet she was before puberty turned her completely—albeit hopefully temporarily—psychotic.

In any case, for now, Juliana was very sweet, very short, and very, very pretty, with brown hair and eyes, and a fairly regal bearing, inherited from her grandmother, Eisen’s much mourned, desperately missed, late wife.

Thus, a very sane—at least for the nonce—Juliana asked, “You’ve never really shown us South Boston; what was it like?”

Nodding, the Old Man answered, “I’ll show you this trip. It was a magic place, really, back then. There’s even a song about it, ‘Southie Is My Home Town.’ ‘I was born down on A Street, raised up on B Street . . .’ In fact, though, I was born in the Boston City Hospital, and raised up on I Street, right across from the Gate of Heaven church.”

He mused aloud, “Ah, the Gatey. Maybe the most beautiful non-cathedral in all of Roman Catholicism.

“It was odd,” Eisen continued, “an odd way of living, compared to today. Though we were not nearly as involved in church affairs as many, you still lived your life to the rhythm of the church and the church’s bells. Mass in the Gate of Heaven was an every-week event, and holy days of obligation were rarely if ever missed. Even if you didn’t go to Catholic school, religious education for those of us in public school was essentially mandatory, weekly, and well organized. We’d traipse over to the Gate of Heaven School for it.”

The Old Man started to laugh.

“What’s so funny,

Grandpa?” asked Cossima.

“Well . . . when I was about seven the nun teaching our catechism class explained to us that, were we boys to be killed in action in battle for our country and against communism, it would count as baptism by fire and we’d be translated straight to Heaven. Makes for an odd outlook; makes boys want to sign up to fight. Makes some of us even go to Army Ranger School.

“Yep, that sort of thing was effective,” the Old Man continued. “Even South Boston’s criminals would eagerly sign up for combat if there were a war in the offing. My uncle the cop’s friend, Pat Nee, interrupted his criminal career to join the Marines and do a tour as a grunt in Vietnam. Note, too, that if the rest of the country had volunteered for Vietnam at the rate boys from South Boston did, we could not possibly have lost; the Viet Cong and NVA, both, would have been extinct.

“For that matter, Stevie Flemmi, who worked for Whitey Bulger and killed a number of people, had the Silver Star from fighting as an infantryman in Korea. And Jerry Angiulo, a high-ranking mobster, underboss in the Patriarca crime family, also fought with the Navy all through the war in the Pacific. Although he was from the North End. Still, the principle holds. Hell, the head of the Winter Hill Gang, Howie Winter, lied about his age to enlist in the Marines when he was fourteen years old, and fought through the last half—and, for the Marines, the worst half—of the Pacific War.”

“That’s pretty wild,” said young Patrick who, as a nine-year-old, already had, indeed had always had, firm intentions of following his father and grandfather into the service.

“It is. Like I said, ‘strange place,’ especially by modern lights. At age five, even four, I could go anywhere I wanted on my own, in the sure and certain knowledge that anyone, anyone, who saw me in trouble from someone older than me would spring to the rescue. It was much safer than Boston is today.

“And, though as a boy of perhaps seven or eight on up you had to be prepared to fight at any time, anywhere that wasn’t sort of common, like the shopping areas on the two Broadways, there wasn’t any street crime as such. Can you guess why?”

Seeing the blank looks on the kids’ faces, the Old Man knew they hadn’t a realistic clue. “I’ll tell you why; because the real and really serious criminals would hunt them down and kill them, quite possibly in inventive ways. Why Willie Delaney, the family hit man . . .”

“‘Family hit man’?” asked Patrick, incredulously.

“Well, yeah,” Eisen shrugged. “Willie had been dragged into court on something fairly trivial and the old man, the other old man, posted his bail. From then on he was on call if needed. We never, so far as I know, anyway, needed him.

“But I’m telling you, Willie was loyal! I remember this one time—the old man had forgotten a Mother’s Day gift and mentioned the fact to Willie after hours. So Willie went to the electronics store on Broadway and L, threw a rock through the plate glass window, and brought back a toaster for a present. I only met Willie a couple of times, well, okay, maybe half a dozen, but he seemed like a good sort to me. For a multiple murderer.

“Anyway, Willie got himself killed. There’s the official story and then there’s the story

the old man, the other one, told me. He said that Willie was first tortured with both a blow torch and electricity, then bent into a C-shape, backwards, with his neck and ankles connected with piano wire. Then they threw him into the harbor’s polluted water to either drown or half cut his own head off. The torture session before that was serious, as I said, involving a propane torch, a pair of pliers, and electricity. Me, I believe the old man; he was in touch with the kinds of people who did things like that.”

“Ummm . . . Grandpa,” Juliana began, brown eyes gone quite wide, “were we . . . criminals?”

“‘The Murphia,’ we used to call it, as a joke. Well, I wasn’t. When I used to blow up vending machines that cheated me I never kept any more than the money they’d stolen. That would have been wrong! But I can make no vouchers for anyone older than me except for my Uncle Billy, the cop, my Uncle Tommy, who was blind, my mother, her sisters and their husbands; oh, and my grandmother, too, of course. Billy was an honest man even though he had a number of dishonest friends, like Pat Nee whom I mentioned.”

“Did you know any criminals when you were young?” Cossima asked.

“Fair number or, rather, I met a fair number, like Willie. Pat Nee, I think it was, came down to the cottage in Brant Rock for a couple of weekends when I was seven or eight, before he shipped over to Vietnam with the Marines. Then, too, Whitey Bulger . . .”

“Him, too?”

“Just once. I couldn’t have been more than ten or so and was with my mother—you may recall she was a very beautiful girl—when she went into Whitey’s liquor store to buy some . . . mmm . . . rum, I think it was. Whitey had a taste for beautiful girls so was plainly hitting on her. When we left she said, ‘Well, that’s the last time I go in there.’”

“Why?” Cossima asked.

“Because women involved with Whitey’s gang had a tendency to disappear, I suppose.”

“But you said there was no street crime.”

“And there wasn’t; Whitey would kill them or have them killed in the privacy of someone’s home, then bury the bodies in the cellar. He didn’t kill randomly, except once by mistake; he shot the entirely innocent twin brother of the guy he was supposed to kill. But some women who really didn’t understand the situation would threaten to go to the cops over what they knew, and those he’d kill. And business rivals. And people on the other side of the gang war.”

Eisen’s brow furrowed as he thought back to those days.

“Same with Pat Nee,” he said, “come to think of it. Come to think of it, too, I think at least two and maybe three of Whitey’s victims were buried in Pat Nee’s cellar. Still, no street crime, to speak of. If you stayed away from that kind of life, it would generally stay away from you.”

“No, wait a minute,” Juliana said. “Your uncle, the cop, was an ‘honest man’ and

he was friends with a . . . with a murderer?”

“Well, an accessory to murder, anyway. Hmmm . . . well, usually just an accessory. There was one occasion, though; the murder of Bucky Barrett. Pat was in on that, I understand. Even there, though, Pat was caught dead to rights on so many charges, and was let out of prison so readily and so early, that you have to wonder who he was really working for. A lot of folks are pretty sure he was working for the U.S. government all along, even while working for the Irish Republican Army.

“But, in any case, my uncle was a cop in East Boston, not Southie. Made all the difference in the world, you see; Eastie was Eastie and Southie was Southie. To put things in perspective, Robert Mitchum, the actor, while filming The Friends of Eddie Coyle, is credibly alleged to have dined nightly with local gangsters, to include Whitey Bulger.”

Sighing, wistfully, the Old Man added, “And then there was Slocum’s Toyland, though we never called it that. It was just Slocum’s, or Slokie’s, or Sloke’s, the best toy store in the world by density per cubic foot. Closed now, sad to say; been closed for, oh, it must be about thirty years. The place was magic.”

Raising one eyebrow, a trick he’d picked up from his grandfather, Patrick asked, “What was magic about it?”

Without missing a beat, the Old Man answered, “It was magic how every store and toy department in the big department stores, like Jordan’s and Filene’s, could be completely out of the key toy of the year and yet Slokie’s would still have it. It was magic in the sheer volume of the toys inside, tiny as the place was.”

“How tiny?” Cossima, the tiny one, asked.

The Old Man pushed his chair back onto its two rear legs, looked up, and scoured his memories for facts. “Well . . . understand, I haven’t been in there in . . . pushing fifty-five years or so now, but I think it must have been maybe . . . oh . . . twelve or thirteen feet or so across. Yes, that was about it, I think, twelve or thirteen feet across. Certainly not more than eighteen feet across, anyway, counting the space of the shelves that were filled with toys.

“It was divided into two sections. On both sides of the left-hand section, where the front door was, and in front of you were toys on shelves all the way up to the ceiling. On the right side of that area, too, sitting on the floor, was a glass case with various goodies, a sort of stand with baseball cards, gum, candy and such, the cash register, and an opening to the other half of the store. Old Slocum never let anybody into that half. At least neither I nor any of my friends were allowed on that side, and we were all pretty regular customers. It wasn’t barred or anything; it’s just that if you tried to wander to that side you would find Slocum, himself, barring the way. No matter where you thought he’d been standing, he’d beat you to the gap. For that matter, the plate glass window on that side was blocked by something or other. Or maybe it was painted dark. Hard to

 remember, at this point in time.”

The Old Man laughed again. “It was a widely held theory among my then peers that on that other side was an interdimensional portal and that this was why Slocum never ran out of toys and never let us back there. Nonsense, of course.”

 

Paying the bill and standing up, the Old Man said, “Time to get back on the road, brats.”

All three started to scramble for the car, but Patrick was the one with the presence of mind to call out the time-honored and sacred cry: “Shotgun!”

“Grandpa?” whined the two girls with a single voice.

“He called it; he’s got it. Now shut up and get in the car.”

“But I’ll get carsick,” claimed Juliana.

“Nah; after pigging out the way you did you’ll be asleep within half a mile of leaving the parking lot.”

Indeed, bellies full to bursting, both girls had fallen asleep within twenty minutes of leaving the restaurant.

Half an hour after that, however, both the girls began to mumble and moan in their sleep. This had happened before, more than once, on trips that took the crew north past the town of New Market, Virginia.

“Females are odd,” the Old Man told his grandson, who remained awake. “I do not understand the mechanism of it—I doubt any man can—but they seem somewhat attuned to a different reality. They know things that they should not know or, at least, that no one has told them. And they know it all together. Think, for example, of the drop in birth rates everywhere in the world. Here we claim it’s the result of birth control and education of women and girls. But what explains the Islamic world, or Africa? No, the women—or their bodies—have simultaneously decided to have fewer kids. And we haven’t a valid clue as to why.

“And it hardly stops with reduced birthrates.”

They passed a dog, patiently standing by the side of the highway for a safe opportunity to cross over. That sparked a thought in the mind of Patrick, riding up front. He spared his sisters a glance before asking, “Tell me about the dog, Grandpa.”

“Which dog?”

“You know which dog.”

“I suppose I do. My boxer, Suzy?”

“Yes, that one, please?”

“Well, she was supposed

to be a male. My uncle, the cop, took it upon himself to provide his sisters’ families with one dog. Period. If your dog ran away or died he was not going to buy a second one.

“I was, I suppose, two and a half or three, but I can still picture the enclosure where the family that had bred their own female boxers kept the puppies. It was in a corner. The walls were a dark knotty pine, much darker than the knotty pine in my grandmother’s kitchen that I wrecked; did I ever tell you about that? No? Well, maybe later.

“In any case, my uncle William and I walked in and the family opened the gate to that enclosure to let a veritable sea of boxer puppies pour forth. They were all cute, of course, but there was a little female and between us it was basically mutual love at first sight. She was tiny, easily the smallest of the litter, but she knocked me over on my back, even so, climbed onto my chest, and proceeded to give my face a good washing. Maybe I needed it; I don’t know.

“Uncle Billy tried to prod me to another dog, a male, but—and I can still hear my probably not quite three-year-old voice saying it—I answered, ‘No Unca Billy; I already foun’ my own frien’ doggie.’

“And so it was; she became my dog and I became . . . well . . . approximately, her baby. We were inseparable for the next two years.

“Then kindergarten started and I wasn’t able to be with her all the time. No matter, she was always waiting for me outside the school gate when kindergarten, and later first through third grades, got out. Then we’d walk home or maybe go to the beach, or M Street Park, or down by Farragut Circle to play before going home.”

Suddenly Cossima screamed, “Noooooo!” and sat bolt upright.

“What’s the matter, Cossie?” the Old Man asked. Cossima screaming was unusual; she was a gymnast and, for all practical purposes, knew no fear.

Or at least I didn’t think she did, thought Eisen. Well, barring the bees and such.

She looked around like a trapped rat, obviously confused, until she realized she was safe and in her grandfather’s car. After a few deep breaths, she said, “Nightmare. I was hurt . . . bleeding. They carried me to a filthy table . . . then I was being held down on a table by four big men . . . and somebody was trying to cut my leg off with a saw. WITH A SAW!”

“Hmmph. Must have been from some history talk or other I’ve given you. No matter, go back to sleep.”

“Not a chance, Grandpa. I’ll sleep when I’m in Boston. Yes, even though you are the only one I trust enough to sleep while riding with.”

“Suit yourself, bratso. Any musical requests?”

“Billy Joel,” she answered instantly.

“‘Only the Good Die Young,’ it is.”

 

New Market spurred a set of depressing thoughts in the Old Man. Ignoring Billy Joel, he mused, “Die young?” That civil war, compared to the one that’s coming, would count as mere. No huge armies maneuvering across the countryside this time, if we can’t avoid it, but a combination of Argentina’s Guerra Sucia and 1980s Beirut, written across a continent and written by people with a much greater penchant for mass, organized violence than either Arabs or Argentines.

And I have no idea if we’ll be able to avoid it or how we even might. I don’t think anyone does, because nearly everyone else who’s even aware of the possibility is actively, albeit ignorantly, trying to cause it or looking forward to it with drooling chops. I wonder how many on the left know that, in the phrase, “zombie apocalypse,” they are the zombies.

 

Billy Joel being, for the nonce, finished, and with the music off, the Old Man, as usual for these trips, tallied the votes on what they were going to see and do over the two weeks he was planning on spending in the Boston area.

“These are the options,” he said. “Just think about them and then we’ll go down the list of priorities and preferences: Gardner Museum. Museum of Fine Arts. Aquarium. Duck Boats. Freedom Trail, which is an all-day event, too, by the way, especially if we both walk it and stop for lunch. Quincy Market. Downtown shopping. South Shore Plaza, which is a large mall. Brant Rock. Southie. Fort Independence and Castle Island in Southie. Lexington and Concord Battlefield. Bunker Hill. USS Constitution. Plymouth. Plimoth Plantation . . .”

At that, Cossie piped up with, “I want to see the cows again at Plimoth Plantation.”

“Hold your horses, shorty,” said the Old Man. “Let me finish the possibilities. Italian food in the North End . . . geez, you know I don’t even know what’s still open. Durgin Park . . . oh, never mind; it closed permanently. Shithead city should have taken it over and kept it open but noooo. Aiming further afield, the ‘cottages’ of Newport, Rhode Island. Mystic Seaport. Salem, as in witchcraft . . .”

“I want to see Salem,” interjected Juliana.

“Even though the witchcraft was bunkum and the witch trials complete miscarriages of justice?”

“Yes,” she replied, “even though.”

“Maybe, then.” Continuing on, he added, “Boston Common, Public Gardens, and Swan Boats. Copley Square Library. Newbury Street fashion district—”

That elicited a groan from Patrick along with some exciting jumping in their seats and hand clapping from the girls.

“Boston Latin. Boston College. Harvard and Harvard Square. Harvard Museum of Natural History. Harvard Art Museums, especially the Fogg Museum. Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. Peabody Museum of Archeology. The Enchanted Village of Saint Nicholas, whatever is left of it, at Jordan’s Furniture which, by the way, has nothing to do with Jordan Marsh.”

Sighing again, the Old Man said, “I swear; I wish I could show the three of you the old Enchanted Village, along with the stores as they were, and the Old Arch Street Inn, where treason was plotted and where my mother and I used to eat after shopping in Jordan’s and Filene’s. Oh, well.

“So, Juliana, what’s your first choice?”

“Newbury Street,"

 she answered, without hesitation.

“In favor?

“Aye,” answered Cossie.

“Opposed?”

Patrick scowled. “What’s the point, Grandpa? I’ve already lost that vote.”

“True; isn’t democracy a bitch? Your turn, Patrick.”

“Bunker Hill and the USS Constitution. They go together, right?”

“They do. In favor? In FAVOR?”

“Oh, all right,” answered Cossima, “But only if he won’t vote against my first choice.”

“I won’t,” agreed the boy.

“Plimoth Plantation and the cows.”

“Fine,” said Patrick, with ill grace. Meanwhile, Juliana had kept quiet. She intended to trade her future agreements to get to go where she wanted to go.

“My turn,” said the Old Man. “I want to see the Gardner Museum and you don’t get a choice on that. Juliana? Your turn . . .”

 

The sun was long down and the traffic thinned out to near vanishing. Despite Cossima’s words, she was dead asleep on the rear seat, as was her older sister, Juliana, the former with her head to the right, and the latter with hers to the left. Patrick had his seat leaned back and was equally dead to the world.

At least none of the kids were snoring.

Meanwhile, the Old Man drove on, more or less blankly, aware of the road with one part of his mind but effectively on autopilot with the rest.

West Virginia and Maryland were well and long behind them. Now came the interminable slog thorough Pennsylvania. Before hitting Scranton, the Old Man slid a Harry Chapin CD into the player and advanced the music to “Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas.”

All right, he thought. So I’m superstitious. So I’m really superstitious. No matter how bad the traffic around Scranton, how abominable the weather, how much ice there may be on the roads, playing this song as I pass through has kept me alive and out of the hospital so far. And I’m not going to go against obvious success.

 

There was a twenty-four-hour diner just off Interstate 88, west of Albany, New York, that the Old Man knew served a good breakfast. Better, the waitress was young and pretty. He’d let the kids have whatever they wanted, but ordered light on the food, heavy on the coffee, for himself. Thus, while a slow eater, he’d finished before them and, given the coffee, stood, groaning, to find his way to the toilet. The fact that all three of them had had their noses stuck to their cell phones probably delayed their finishing.

“This whole getting old with backaches thing,” he said, “means that when my time comes, I intend to have a serious talk with the Almighty.” Taking out a credit card he passed it to Juliana, telling her to, “Pay the bill if you can get the waitress’s attention. In the meantime, I need to hit the can. Don’t talk to strangers while I’m gone.”

In the few minutes he was gone, attending to business, the three set to talking in low whispers. “When do you think the accent will come back?” asked Cossima.

“Which accent?” queried Juliana. “He’s got two, no, three; Brahmin and Southie, plus his usual non-accent.”

“Doesn’t matter,” observed Patrick. “We’ve seen it before, first tollbooth on the Massachusetts Turnpike and he’s dropping Rs all over the place.”

“No,” Juliana insisted. “Sometimes it’s not until the second or third or even fourth tollbooth. Remember, in western Massachusetts a lot of them sound more like upstate New Yorkers than Bostonians.”

“Betcha,” said Patrick.

“What do you want to bet?”

“First, when do you think it will come back?”

She thought about that for a moment, then said, “I’ll go long; fifth tollbooth. You’re betting the first one?”

“Yep.”

“Cossima, what’s your call?” Juliana asked.

“I’m with Patrick, first tollbooth.”

“Okay, so which ever one is closest? For a dollar each. That means if you guys are right, I pay two dollars, one to each of you. If I am, you each pay me one. Is that fair?”

“Deal,” said Patrick, offering his hand to shake on it.

“Deal,” Cossima repeated.

“What’s a deal?” the Old Man asked, having returned unnoticed from the toilet.

“It’s a secret,” Cossima said.

“Oooo, a secret. Well, I won’t pry, then.”

“Did you manage to get the bill and pay it, Juliana?”

“Not yet, Grandpa.”

“Okay, then give me the card back and I’ll pay it.”

The four walked to the cashier’s station where Eisen noticed they had some higher end chocolate bars—Godivas—for sale. He turned over his credit card, bought one bar, and walked the few steps back to where they’d been eating. The waitress, that same young and pretty one, was clearing the table.

“I’ll put a monetary tip on the card,” he told the waitress. “But it pains me that you have to pay tax on it. So—since no girl can resist chocolate—please take this to make up for the tax bite.”

Smiling, the waitress answered, “You’re right; we can’t. Thank you.”

“Very welcome,” The Old Man replied, adding, “Now if only I were forty—even thirty—years younger, miss.”

That got him a bigger

and better smile, still.

“Age is only a number,” the girl said.

“True,” Eisen agreed, “but in my case it’s a really high number.”

 

In western Massachusetts the Mass Pike was actually a scenic and generally stress-free drive, with continuous trees behind neatly trimmed grass, few or, for long stretches, no billboards, and all of that over gently rolling terrain. It didn’t become even slightly difficult until one approached the outer half-ring road around the landward sides of Boston, Interstate 495, while traffic became quite dense and often quite slow once one hit Route 128, the inner half-ring road.

The Old Man’s back just kept getting worse. It wasn’t anything he’d actually done, though, just the normal wear and tear of a pretty hard and energetic life.

Every time I do this it gets worse. The day’s coming when I’ll have to take the train. And lie down all the way. And that day’s coming fast.

As they’d passed across the Massachusetts border, the Old Man thumbed his nose at the “Massachusetts Welcomes You” sign.

“I used to enjoy doing that more,” he told the kids. “Back in the seventies and early eighties there used to be signs up at all the entrances to the state—at least all the ones I ever saw—threatening anyone who brought an unlicensed pistol into the state with a mandatory year in jail. The problem, from the state’s point of view, was twofold, though there were three problems, in fact. In the third place, it deterred tourism, and Massachusetts makes a lot of money from tourism. And in the second place, it was sometimes hard to get a conviction. People accused, so I’ve been told, would demand trial by jury and the juries would often tend to nullify the law and vote not guilty no matter what the law and the facts. But in the first place, it isn’t obvious that it did much, if anything, to deter crime.

“Oh, and remember not to say a word to the police about the guns I’ve got locked up in the trunk. We’re going to New Hampshire if we get stopped by a cop. We’re just passing through.”

“Why should . . . ummm . . . I don’t understand, Grandpa,” said Juliana.

“In 1986, I think it was, Congress enacted a law, duly signed by President Reagan, to allow someone to carry his gun risk-free, even through anti-gun states, provided it was locked up, unloaded, and in an inaccessible part of the car. This was also the law that forbade putting more machine guns into the civilian stream of commerce, thus driving the price of those to astronomical heights. There’d been all kinds of silly crap going on before that, ...