The Third Circle
Chapter 46
Chapter 46
They stood naked in their kitchen. The watches were gone. Their clothes lay on the floor. They looked at each other and then embraced for a long, long time.
"What a wish that was," John whispered.
"A perfect wish. I love you so much."
"I love you too, Claire. Forever and ever." He kissed her.
They found their wedding rings among the clothes on the floor and put them on each other and kissed again. Then they wandered slowly through their house, drinking in all of the familiar smells and images. Thomas was asleep on their bed. Poppy was on her table. Mack was digging a hole in the flower garden. Their new clock sat on the antique table in the living room. They sat down on the couch, still naked.
"That was a journey," John said.
"A nice vacation!" Claire laughed. "A little scary at the end, though!"
"What was scary? Where did you go?"
"Looking for you." She took his hand. "I was looking for you and ended up finding myself. I'll tell you all about it. How long have we been gone?"
"Who knows," smiled John. "Long enough, I think."
"Yeah," she said. "I'm not feeling stuck anymore."
"Neither am I."
They sat quietly for a moment. They were both thinking the same thing.
"John?" Claire broke the silence.
"Yes."
"Did that really happen? Or was it just ..."
"Just a dream or illusion or something?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know."
Claire got up and went outside to the laundry porch. John followed her.
"The dress is gone," she said.
"You did laundry Saturday."
"Oh, right."
They went into their bedroom. Both dresses she had worn on Friday were hanging in her closet.
"There isn't any evidence that we were gone at all," she said.
"Why would there be?" he asked.
She pulled on some shorts and a shirt and went in the den. John grabbed some clothes and followed her. She looked in the phone book for area codes.
It's Sunday," John said.
"I know." She picked up the phone and called Texas directory assistance. John picked up the portable extension.
"What city please?" an operator asked.
"Amarillo," said Claire.
"Go ahead."
"Uh, Leland, Daniel."
"One moment, please."
"He's probably dead," said John.
"Maybe not," Claire said. "He'd only be seventy or so."
"Under Leland, I don't show a listing for Dan," the operator said.
"Under attorneys," said Claire. Is there a Robinson?"
"That's a long shot," said John. "Bryce is dead for sure."
"Maybe his son or something."
"He didn't have one."
"Nothing under Robinson," the operator said.
"How about Walker Creek Enterprises?" John asked into the phone.
"Of course," said Claire.
"Checking," the operator said.
They each held their breath and looked at one another.
"I don't show a listing for Walker Creek," the operator said.
"Nothing under Walker Creek at all?" Claire asked.
"I have several listing for Walker," she said. "Nothing under Walker Creek."
"Thanks," said Claire, hanging up the phone.
They stared at each other.
"Maybe the name got changed," John suggested. "Maybe they moved to Houston or someplace."
"Or maybe none of it really happened." She walked to the window and looked out. "Except the important stuff," she said.
John came up behind her and embraced her. He smiled and nodded.
"It's okay if the money didn't happen. I still got my grassy place. That was real. And the best part," she said, turning in his arms, "is that now you're there with me."
He kissed her. "I guess we'll just have to wait and see what tomorrow brings," John whispered.
"I wonder if that tuna salad is still good."
She
looked. It was. They shared the last of it in a sandwich and had iced
tea.
Bodie
Over the Labor Day weekend, 1995, Claire and John and Marie took a trip to Bodie. It was a magical weekend. They stayed in a motel on a creek in Bishop, had pancakes in the morning at the Sportsman Cafe, and then drove over the hot gravel road to the old ghost town. Claire took her camera.
They peeked through windows and marveled at how small the beds were. They wondered how people had lived in so much desolation. In the museum, they saw a photograph of a prostitute named Rabbit-Tooth Kate. Her forlorn eyes stared out at them from an 1872 photograph, and they wondered what she had been like, and by what combination of destiny and fate she had happened to come to this bleak, forsaken, windswept place. They saw pictures of mule trains laden with fire wood making their way through the drifts of snow to bring heat to a town where no trees grew. They wondered at the fortunes that had been made here, the people who had died here, been born here. They peeked through a murky, dusty window at what had been a school room. The desks were still there, where children had sat and studied history, grammar, arithmetic. What had they dreamt at night? Did they know why they had come? Did they think their days would ever end?
"Do you feel the nostalgia?" John asked Marie.
Marie nodded. "I feel a lot of nostalgia for the 1970s," she said. "I wonder what things were like back then. What people were like."
"It's like some longing of the soul," said John, "for what it can't have. The thing just beyond reach."
"I think I know why it's so mysterious and rich," said Claire, running her hands over the smooth oak of a hitching post in front of a boarded up house. "The past."
"Why?" asked John.
"It's what I wrote in the introduction to my book."
Her book, Images of the 1940s, had already been accepted for publication by the company Claire had worked for. It was expected to be out in time for Christmas. Marie loved it, and had memorized long sections of it. She quoted it now: "When we look at these old pictures, we feel the peculiar sadness of nostalgia for the things that are gone. Part of it is grief for what has been lost. But the larger part may be grief over the fact that what we think we lost, we never had. Nostalgia is the realization that we weren't there."
"That's a nice theory," John said.
In other realities, far away from those of Claire and John, and of Marie, and of Rabbit-Tooth Kate and the children of Bodie, Max Steenberg retired to Vera Cruz, Mexico following his great notoriety at having located Wilhelm Dussenbach, the escaped Nazi war criminal. Dussenbach, who was being harbored in Hyde Park by Willard Morrisey, a United States Congressman, was found guilty at Nuremberg in 1947 and executed for personally overseeing the deportation to death camps of over fifty thousand Jews from Yugoslavia.
The Congressman died in Leavenworth Federal Prison in 1957. Max Steenberg died in 1978 in a storm while fishing off the gulf coast, along with his fishing companion and long-time friend, Lennie Schoeman, the famous civil rights lawyer. Schoeman's family had left Amarillo in 1950 and settled in Austin, where Mrs. Schoeman opened a thriving millinery shop. Schoeman's mentor, Franklin Garrabrandt, who published four textbooks on environmental jurisprudence, died in an airplane crash in 1957.
Rudy Jackson retired from the railroad in 1948 and became an electronics mogul. His oldest son ran his corporation, contributing to the development of micro-circuitry in the 1970s. Rudy's youngest son went to Berkeley, joined the Black Panther Party, and became a member of the Communist party in 1966.
Danny Leland married his best friend's wife Virginia in 1952 and died of a heart attack in 1975. Their son, Raymond, took over the multi-million dollar Walker Creek Enterprises, moving it to St. Louis in 1984. He had filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against Bryce Robinson in 1979 for patent infringements. The subject of the suit was some new oil drilling apparatus, invented by Marcus Crawford, who was killed when one of the devices exploded in 1977. Bryce Robinson died in his sleep in 1987.
Annie left the veterinarian in Tulsa and married Gus Lineweaver in 1948. They had three sons, all of whom died in Vietnam.
Carl Walker made a road past his house, built cabins, made a small fortune, and built a home at the seashore where he died in 1962.
Henry Wallace made an unsuccessful bid for the Presidency on the Progressive ticket in 1948, and died in obscurity in 1965.
The End