Smith's Monthly #21 Read online

  He quickly dug out the earplugs and handed each person a pair. When he handed the pair to Jenny, he smiled. “You said you trusted me. Just hold on for one more moment and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.”

  She was really frowning now, but she did as everyone did and put in the earplugs.

  “Ready,” Dave asked, smiling.

  Stout nodded, and Dave dropped the quarter into the machine and after a moment hit the number to the song that would take him back to the moment when Sandy was born.

  Stout looked into the eyes of the woman he loved. “Cover your ears,” he shouted so she would hear. “And think of this moment right here and right now. Think of this bar. Okay?”

  She nodded, and then the music started and Dave was gone and they were all still here.

  “How?” Jenny said, but he could barely hear her through his ear-plugs.

  He just held up a finger for her to wait and pointed toward the jukebox. Then he put his hand on hers, holding her solidly in the Garden Lounge.

  The two minutes of the song stretched into an eternity.

  Then, faintly, he could hear the song ending and Dave shimmered back into being, smiling.

  Everyone pulled out the earplugs and Dave rejoined everyone at the bar. “You know,” he said to his daughter, Sandy, “you sure were a damn pretty baby.”

  “You all right?” Sandy asked, just before Stout did.

  Seeing his wife again had to hurt some. She had died a couple years back from cancer and everyone missed her.

  “I’m fine,” he said, taking a drink.

  “So what the hell just happened here?” Jenny said. “What kind of magic trick was that?”

  “No trick I’m afraid,” Stout said, pointing at the jukebox. “That thing really takes people back to their memories. You end up inside the body of the person you were, only with old memories. When the song ends, you come back, unless you have changed something.”

  Dave held up his glass. “One Christmas Eve, years ago, Stout gave four of his best friends a very special Christmas gift. He let us go back and change something in our pasts we wanted to change. I went back and saved my wife from being killed in a car wreck; as a result, Sandy, here, and her sister were born.”

  “That’s why we only turn that thing on for Christmas Eve,” Stout said. “And why we’re very careful. It’s very dangerous and can change a person’s life.”

  He stared at Jenny for a moment, then said, “You still don’t believe us, do you?”

  She looked him square in the eye and he could tell she was angry. A deep-down angry.

  He wanted to throw up. This couldn’t be happening.

  “You have to admit this is hard to swallow,” Jenny said. “And I don’t see why you would play this sort of trick on me, Stout.”

  The silence in the bar could be cut with a knife. He could hardly breathe. Was he going to lose the only woman he had ever loved for the second time because of the jukebox?

  “No trick,” he said, softly. “That really is a time machine.”

  Again the silence became thick and smothering. He had to do something and do it quickly.

  “Do you remember the song that was playing right after you told me about your job while we sat in the student union?”

  She nodded. “Longest song ever,” she said. “I was waiting for you to say something and you didn’t say anything.”

  “Do you remember the name of the song?”

  “It was a classic old Mindbenders song about love. Why?”

  Stout took a quarter out of the cash register and went around the bar to her side. He took her hand to indicate she should get down off the barstool. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  She walked hesitantly to the jukebox. “Earplugs everyone,” he said.

  Then he turned to the woman he loved. “You can’t change anything while we are there. Nothing. Our older selves will be in control of our younger bodies, and our younger selves won’t remember our little visit. But change nothing, all right? Please. A lot of lives depend on it, including your wonderful children and grandchildren.”

  She glanced around at the people at the bar, then nodded, suddenly clearly very afraid.

  He dropped the quarter into the jukebox and once again punched A-1.

  A moment later he was sitting again across from the young Jenny.

  Only this time Jenny’s eyes didn’t stay focused on the table in front of her as they had done the first time. They looked up at him, panicked.

  The older Jenny was in there this time.

  Then she looked around, listening to the song over the sound system of the old student union, smelling the greasy fries and smell from the two jocks sitting far too close.

  Finally she looked back at him. “Is this real?”

  He nodded. “Can you remember your life with Stephen? Your kids being born? Your grandkids?”

  She nodded, still looking around. “How is this possible?”

  “There’s some kind of very advanced equipment in the jukebox I’ve never had the courage to touch. Somehow it lets the power of a memory from a song take the person listening to their memory.”

  “And our young selves won’t remember this?”

  “Do you?”

  She thought for a second, then shook her head.

  “This was our turning point the first time, wasn’t it?” she asked

  “It was,” he said.

  “If you had said you wanted to marry me, I would have stayed.”

  “But sometimes things work out the way they are supposed to,” he said. “We weren’t ready that first time around.”

  She nodded. “I would have been angry at you for making me stay.”

  “I know,” he said. “And I would have been angry for you making me leave.”

  “You’ve sat here before from the future, watching me, haven’t you?”

  He nodded. “A number of times. It’s how I discovered the power of the jukebox.”

  “And you never said anything? Never changed our future? Why not?”

  “I loved you too much,” he said. “And then, after a while, I knew if I changed my future, a number of people wouldn’t be alive right now. And that was before I knew about your wonderful family.”

  The song was slowly nearing its end.

  “You are a very special man,” she said, smiling.

  “Then will you stay with me this time? In the future, of course.”

  “I want to more than anything. In the future, of course.”

  He smiled. “Would you marry me the second time around?”

  She looked around at the old student union and laughed as the song finished and they appeared back in the Garden.

  She put her arms around him and said, “Yes, you stupid fool. Of course I’ll marry you.”

  Then she kissed him in a way he knew he would never forget, song or no song.

  And the friends in the Garden Lounge cheered.

  This time, it was his life the jukebox had saved.

  PART FOUR

  The Failure of Music

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  About one hundred and eleven years earlier…

  May 30th, 1909

  Roosevelt, Idaho

  TALIA AND RYAN stood in the front window of their cabin looking out over what they could see of the Monumental Valley below Melody Ridge. The rain pounded the valley with a constant drumming sound and Monumental Creek was flowing over its banks, not only from the rain, but the snowmelt up the valley.

  Talia and Ryan had shut down all recording equipment and covered everything. It had been a long winter and only a few miners and suppliers had managed to get in over the trails so far this spring. Unlike in years past, the gold rush was starting to wear down and the push to come into the valley early was fading.

  For the last three springs, Talia and Ryan had been happy when new arrivals started to show up for the summer. But this year was different.

  Very different.

  Today would be
the start of the end for the town below them. None of the other thirty people who had stayed this last winter in the town area knew that. Just below the Dewey Mine up Mule Creek to the right, a mudslide would start.

  That would be the beginning of the end of this entire area.

  In the last three and a half years, she and Ryan had made amazing progress on the mathematics of sound and waves through time. And every summer Bonnie and Duster joined them and continued the progress on the math.

  The summers had been wonderful, but Talia had also come to enjoy the winters with just her and Ryan in the cabin.

  During the three years, they had only had a few minor problems. Ryan twisted his ankle one January afternoon two years before when he slipped on a rock going out to the stable to take care of the horses. That had kept him on the couch for a few weeks, but luckily it had been no more than that.

  Both of them had managed through a number of colds, usually in the spring when others started arriving. And Janice had gotten sick with some intestinal virus and she and Steven had shut down the general store last fall and headed out.

  So this last winter, even though the town was still below them in the valley, was their first winter really alone.

  Even the pianos had fallen silent this last winter, which made the valley seem even more desolate.

  Her initial worries about the relationship with Ryan were completely unfounded. She loved having him there, depended on him more than she wanted to admit, and had grown to love him even more in the last three years than she thought possible to love another human being.

  And she really loved his intense mind. He seemed to see things in ways mathematically that would have slipped right past her. And her knowledge of the math of waves seemed to add in and expand the boundaries of physics they were pushing. Even Bonnie and Duster were impressed and sometimes had trouble following where the math went.

  Talia and Ryan together were a very, very powerful team and they had talked about that over dinners.

  Each summer they had also spent a full week in the Monumental Lodge, being fed wonderful breakfasts and dinners and having a great time with Dawn and her husband Madison.

  The three years had been eventful, yet quiet. Talia couldn’t believe it was now May 30th. The day of the landslide that would put this entire town under water.

  Outside the rain just kept coming.

  She turned to Ryan. “It’s going to take most of the day for the front edge of the mudslide to reach the edge of this valley. You want to go watch it arrive?”

  He stared silently into the rain for a moment, then nodded. “I think we need to, since we’re going to be staying here for some years.”

  “I agree,” she said.

  They stood there in silence for a moment. She knew she needed to see the landslide arrive. She needed to see what would finally kill this mining town she had come to love.

  For the last three years it had been in steep decline. There was no doubt that Roosevelt, in time, would have become just another ghost town. This area was so remote and without the mining, which was almost done, there was no reason to be in this valley.

  But the landslide just sped up the death.

  So later in the afternoon they would go watch the mudslide arrive and start across the valley right in below the main part of town.

  It would be like watching a slow-motion bullet entering someone’s body.

  No way to stop it and death a certainty.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  December 24th, 2020

  Boise, Idaho

  STOUT WAS EXCITED. This was his and Jenny’s first time back to the Garden for Christmas Eve. Richard had decorated the place in what Dave called “Standard Stout” which meant no real decorations, only red Christmas candles on the ten tables and a few beer signs with Christmas on them.

  Stout couldn’t believe they had actually made it for the party. Tomorrow morning early, Christmas morning, they were flying down to the Bay Area to have Christmas Day dinner with one of Jenny’s sons and their family. Stout was actually looking forward to that almost as much as spending a few hours here in the bar with his adopted family.

  Sandy and Dave were both there, along with Fred and Carl and Billy. And Richard was standing behind the bar where Stout had been all those years. And honestly, Stout didn’t mind not being back there at all.

  He liked his new place sitting at the bar with his wonderful wife Jenny just fine.

  “So who is going back this Christmas Eve?” Carl asked as Richard closed up and locked the front door right at 10 p.m. as was the custom

  “I’m going to see Sandy being born,” Dave said. “Then he glanced at Richard. “If you don’t mind, dear barkeep.”

  Richard laughed. “As long as I don’t have to go along, fine by me.”

  Carl said he wanted to do his regular trip and everyone nodded to that.

  Billy and Fred both passed.

  And Stout knew that Richard would never go back through the machine. He never had.

  “So how about you two?” Carl asked, looking at Stout and then at Jenny.

  Stout shook his head, as did Jenny beside him. They had talked about it and neither of them wanted to see anything in their pasts. They were both very happy with the moment in time right now.

  “Not this year,” Stout said.

  Richard nodded.

  “So I’ll start this off,” Dave said, holding up a quarter.

  Richard headed around the end of the bar and as everyone watched, he plugged in the jukebox.

  The lights came on in rainbows of colors, as always. Sometimes over the years, Stout had just wished that jukebox had been a regular jukebox. The customers would have liked it and it would have made a little extra money as well.

  Then Richard went back behind the bar and dug in the drawer near the cash register and handed out earplugs for everyone.

  Stout sure understood that. Especially now that David had played this song a few times in the past. No point in all of them jumping to previous Christmas Eve memories. That would be just too weird.

  When everyone was set and Stout had hold of Jenny’s hand, David dropped in the quarter, took a moment to search for his song, then punched it in and turned to face everyone as the record exchanger pulled up the record.

  Stout expected a moment later for David to just fade away, as normal.

  But he just stood there. Then, after a few seconds, he looked back at the jukebox, then back at Richard and Stout and shrugged.

  Then David just shook his head.

  Clearly the jukebox didn’t work for him anymore.

  Or maybe it didn’t work for anyone anymore.

  So for the entire length of the song, David just stood there, because no one dared take out the earplugs.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  About one hundred four years earlier…

  April 16th, 1916

  Roosevelt, Idaho

  TWO MONTHS BEFORE tragedy struck, Ryan and Talia had worked out the final parts of the math on how the sound waves had the power to punch through time.

  Actually, they didn’t jump back or forward in the same timeline, but jumped timelines to basically identical timelines. Just as Bonnie and Duster had all of them doing. Just moving around in identical timelines.

  But the final solution actually hinged on the power of the human brain. And that had both surprised Ryan and Talia.

  And excited them.

  Since time and energy and matter all acted as fluids, waves could move through that fluid mix if at the correct frequency and power. So could light waves and such, which explained things like deja vu, because an image could come back to a person from a certain timeline future giving the person the sense they had been somewhere before.

  It seemed the sound waves easily traveled through the fluid state of energy, time, and matter. Talia and Ryan had proved that a few years earlier with mathematics that Bonnie and Duster had both confirmed. But the final problem had been why the sounds from the pa
st could be heard.

  It wasn’t until a snowy night in January as Ryan sat with his feet up near the fire listening to recordings in earphones that the solution had dawned on Talia. She had been stretched out on the couch, just staring at the fire and thinking. The two of them spent a lot of time in silence and they both loved that, something Ryan was very grateful for.

  Talia had suddenly waved her arms to get his attention and he had clicked off the recording and sat up straight, taking off the headphones.

  “We are missing the critical element of all this,” Talia said. “The receptor.”

  Ryan had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Our brains are powered on forms of chemical impulses as well, correct?”

  Ryan honestly didn’t know, since that had not been his area of study in the slightest. But he tried to add what little he did know. “Chemical impulses moving along like a wave from cell to cell is what I remember from a very early class.”

  “Exactly,” Talia said. “Our brains, through our ears and eyes get sounds and images. So why don’t they also hear and see what is coming through time? And translate them?”

  “And magnify them?” Ryan asked, starting to get an idea of where she was headed with this.

  “Just as our equipment can pick up certain wave patterns coming through time and clean out the other sounds and amplify the ones we want,” Talia said, “Our brains work in the same fashion.”

  Ryan was starting to understand where she was going.

  “And experiences of the person doing the observing can amplify or deaden the reception as the case might be,” he said.

  “That’s why songs can bring back such vivid memories,” Talia said, almost bouncing on the couch. “Our brains pick up and filter the actual sounds from the past in a way to bring the memory the song has attached into sometimes clear focus.”

  “Like a scope looking back through time,” Ryan said, smiling. “That’s the one element we have been missing.”

  “We’re going to need research and massive computer power to crunch all this math,” Talia said.