CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Father and son, Jack and David, prepared to mount up, their horses tired, sweat soaked, close to used up. The two Lakewood men who had been left behind had made a good, quick fight of it. Jack had gotten a terrible scare when David was hit. But it was only a flesh wound across his left tricep. Cleaned properly, it would amount to little more than an inconvenience.
“The war’s still going on out on the lake bed, Dad.”
“I suppose we should, shouldn’t we?”
David swung up into the saddle. “Shit, that hurt!”
“Pain makes a great reminder, doesn’t it, son?” Jack observed. He was securing the captured twentieth-century weapons to the mounts the two dead Lakewood men had ridden. Jack climbed up into the saddle, feeling his fifty years a lot more than he usually did. He lit a cigarette. Pretty soon, he’d be back to rolling his own again.
“You ought to quit those things, Dad, before they kill you.”
“When I smoke the last of these, I promise I’ll try. One last battle?”
“Sure. Maybe they’ll be through by the time we get there, huh, Dad?”
Exhaling smoke through his nostrils and mouth as he spoke, Jack smiled at his fine son. “I wouldn’t bet on that.”
Jack Naile thwacked his heels against the black’s flanks, but not too hard. The mare would go down dead if she went too fast. And they didn’t have to hurry.
Jack and David turned their horses toward the heavily occluded horizon and rode together to the sounds of the guns.
Enemy combatants were considerate enough to fight to the death. If there were any survivors, they eluded the troopers sent against them. The only disturbing thing was that no corpse had been found to match the description of the renegade scientist Morton Hardesty. But there was no reason to suppose the traitorous Hardesty had survived. Beyond what information concerning future technology had been cabled to the French, Germans, Russians and the British, nothing of the Lakewood “sales kits” survived, the men who had carried them already intercepted. Their fate had not been discussed. It took months of meticulous checking and rechecking to accumulate all the weapons, cartridge cases and miscellaneous equipment, including the tanks, the remains of the armored personnel carriers and the bodies. Everything was gathered together at what Teddy Roosevelt had described as “an undisclosed location, buried under tons of rock.”
Jack had voted for William McKinley and his brash running mate, Teddy Roosevelt. Ellen couldn’t vote. Women would not have the vote in Nevada until November of 1914. Although election results wouldn’t be “known” for quite a while, compared to the speed with which election winners were announced in the 1990s, Jack and Ellen already knew the results as they sat together on the front porch. Ellen wore no corset under her dress and no apron over it—and no stupid hat. Jack was rolling a cigarette. A rifle rested against the door frame. Jack was smoking far fewer cigarettes than he had; Ellen held out hope that he would really, finally quit.
The citizenry of Atlas was so confident that the McKinley/Roosevelt ticket would be triumphant, they were holding a party hosted by Republican leaders in the town. Ellen had made her venison stew—Jack raved about it—and sent a huge pot of it along as her contribution to what amounted to a town-wide block party. Bobby Lorkin had picked up Lizzie, showing off his new spring wagon and the matched pair of dapple gray geldings pulling it. Clarence, recovered from his near fatal wound, and Peggy were in the secret room, watching a movie and just keeping company. Eventually, the tapes would wear out. Clarence was a political conservative, but Peggy, a lifelong Democrat, as had been/would be her parents, could not make herself go to a Republican rally. As Ellen reflected upon that, she realized that the Naile family could accept this one terrible flaw in Peggy’s otherwise fine character.
As to David, his politics were a mystery, but he’d liked Teddy Roosevelt. And he liked parties. There was a girl he’d been seeing, as pretty as she was smart. Good daughter-in-law material. The store was a runaway success. David had just returned from a business trip two towns over, where he’d opened up a second Jack Naile— General Merchandise store. The family’s fortunes, in David’s hands, were on the increase. Horizon Enterprises was on its way to its destiny.
Jack fired his cigarette, and Ellen moved to stand beside him. The stars shone so brightly over Nevada in 1900 that, on a clear November evening, Ellen no longer considered herself night-blind—almost, at least.
“Gimme a drag,” she told Jack, taking the cigarette from between his fingers. She inhaled deeply; then, as she exhaled, told him, “This roll your-own-stuff is nowhere near as good as a Camel.”
“Yeah, I know. Boy, would I walk a mile for one.”
“Do you miss it? Besides the cigarettes, I mean?”
“Yeah, I guess. But I’m way ahead of anybody else in this time or any other. Come here.” Jack snapped the cigarette away over the porch rail, folded Ellen into his arms and kissed her hard on the mouth.
After a long moment, Ellen leaned her head against his chest and said, “I thought a good cowboy hero was just supposed to kiss his horse.”
“No see, those are the kinky cowboys. Real cowboys kiss girls and that’s how you get little cowboys and cowgirls.”
“Whoa, pardner!”
“Don’t fret none, ma’am. I recollect how I got the sawbones to fix me up a few years back.” Jack tilted her chin up, smiled and whispered, “We can fool around all we want.”