Circle of the Stove
Entering his van, Jack checked the time, “13:30.” His Navy training and his days with old Coach Rhodes, “The Sea Dog,“ taught him to think in military terms. “Still plenty of time.” One more look at his cellphone, “No further appointments. Great!”
His second trip to Millinocket this year, in fact this month, it being only January 24th, yielded a large sale of controllers to Katahdin Paper. So the flight and the snowy drive up from Logan were worth it, and now, he was in the state of his youth. Ahead, just two exits on the Maine Pike, his old hometown awaited ,and he thought, “Those were the days.” He recalled his optimism when he graduated from Etna High. Not like today, when he spends all his time racing the clock. “Sell! Sell! Sell! Be here at 8:30, there at 10:00, don’t forget Seattle on Saturday.” His hectic schedule cost him; a wife, a marriage, everything he loved. The divorce became final in December. He remembered saying, “Just in time for Christmas.”
And come New Year’s, it was all he could do not to break down, as he recalled in bitterness laced with sadness, how they met, what seemed so long ago, that New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Sure, everybody was a little merry and drank a bit too much, but they seemed to be right for each other. Their first kiss came as the ball dropped. “And I guess from then on, I dropped the ball,” he thought.
Turned out she really liked the booze, and men to go along with it. Four years of suspicion culminated in shouting matches over who would get the house. He won that small point, but still, she was gone.
“Oh, hey, That was then, this is now. Time to live again,” he whispered to himself.
His exit didn’t acknowledge Etna. The signpost read Pittsfield. He reminisced as he turned his van into the exit; about his glory time as a running back for the Etna Wildcats, about Coach Rhodes, the ex-sailor and his gravelly voice, about those ski trips to Sugarloaf, and about Charlotte, the green eyed cheerleader with her wicked ways. She was largely why he left for the Navy after graduation. It wasn’t his time to settle down, he had a world to see. He wondered… “What if?”
On his left, the old granite sundial, a four foot block, that marked the entrance to Etna, and behind it, the practice fields and the high school. Outside the entrance, buses waited. He remembered sitting on that sundial, the carved Roman Numerals all that remained of a timepiece, and asking Charlotte to wear his ring……
“Jesus!!!”
He swerved as a Semi came out of nowhere and barreled towards him, its horn screaming in baritone, “Get out of the way!”
“Shit!” he yelled as his van skidded and everything was swathed in light. It blinded him with its intensity. For what seemed forever, he saw white-light, nothing else, and then darkness as the airbag let go. He wasn’t sure how much time expired till he was alert. He reached for the door and opened it, slid sideways out, and stumbled into the wet snow. He slowly picked himself up, feeling wet and chilled, looked at his phone and figured he’d been out about fifteen minutes.
He swore, again, to himself, thinking, “Where can I get help out here?” Across the road the High School stood curiously empty. There was no one on the practice fields, or the sidewalks. No buses. No sign of the big black rig that ran him off the road. No one in sight. He assumed he’d figured wrong about the length of his blackout, or maybe his phone was broken. He checked it again, “14:16.” It looked like it was functioning. “I’ll hoof it up to Anne’s,” he said to himself, and set off up the long hill to seek help at Anne’s Lunch Counter, a favorite hang out, back in the day.
Entering Anne’s Hillside Store and Lunch Counter, shaken, and seeking assistance and maybe some repairs to his van before returning to the Maine Pike, he was struck with the store’s dark and dismal atmosphere. Somehow, he remembered it as being brighter. The bells over the door did not ring, They simply were not there. He passed the old Grandfather clock with its split-second time, so called because the second hand was partially split. He couldn’t help but inhale the familiar aroma of coffee and French toast in maple anointed holiness. In the corner on an easel stood another covered masterpiece, waiting in oils. Anne was an artist and her paintings hung in several buildings about the town. He heard the woeful whisper of air being drawn through a cold pipe, and then a match being struck.
Around the Franklin, force feeding pickled eggs and sipping Moosehead ale, sat four aged gentlemen that he knew from his past; Nathan, the musty far-out Archaeologist whose story is purely pictographic, Isaac, the harpoon happy hunter who wafted of whale and the wharf, Karl, the Osteopath less chosen, who ran amok of the A.M.A., and Ed the magnified Astronomer, a lesson learned on why not to believe in Genesis. With air brake constraint, he approached slowly, looking for remembrance, but none was forthcoming.
Then, like a mace in the face, the crack back blond, who had julienned his heart in his senior year,the schoolgirl call girl, having fallen down the stairwell from heaven, came through the swinging kitchen door smelling like a papaya from paradise.
His sensual urges, those migratory cardinal sins, returned without impunity. She was older now, but he could still see that magical smile, those big green eyes, and her body hadn’t suffered much with time, just a few pounds heavier. O.K. more than a few, but in all the right places. “Charlotte?” he asked with impassioned discomfort.
“Can I help you?” was the parboiled reply as she turned to face him.
“Don’t you remember me?….Jack!”
“Bill! .. Oh, I’m sorry, sir. For a minute there I thought you were someone else. You must have me confused with someone too. My name’s Marie,” and she pointed to her black and white name tag.
“O.K. but you sure do look familiar…Marie.”
“You’re not from around here, so what brings you to Anne’s?”
“My van’s down the road, by the high school. I got run off the road by that black eighteen-wheeler that just came through.”
“Mister, trucks don’t come through here. Are you alright? Did you bump your head or something?”
“No, I’m fine. .Are you sure there was no truck, say about thirty minutes ago?”
“Look, it\'s impossible. This road out here, don’t go nowhere, just trails off into the woods, turns to dirt at the top and hardly ever gets used… No trucks.”
When she said “don‘t go nowhere‘ it was exactly as Charlotte would have said it. He looked at her with increased interest, then said, “Wait a minute, the other end dumps onto the Pike at the Newport exit. It always did.”
“You must have whacked your head harder than you think. Why don’t you sit down and have some coffee, maybe some muffins or French toast?”
He sat on a counter stool, head down in his hands, confused about what had happened to him in the last hour or so. He didn’t hit his head, his airbag had released, and he clearly saw the truck. So why didn’t these folk see it? Why didn’t they recognize him like he remembered them, and Charlotte of all people should have….but her name’s Marie. Maybe she changed it after her experiences in Portland?
“Here’s your coffee mister. So now, what’s it gonna be, muffins, toast, I can get ya a burger or a steak if you’d like?” All the while, she looked intently at his face.
“No thanks, Char…sorry, Marie, I’ll have some of that French toast.”
“Comin up. So why’d you say you were in Etna?”
“I grew up here. Graduated from high school in 1995. Mom moved away after Dad died. Haven’t been back since.”
“Whoa ,mister. You’re really starting to creep me out. Are you sure you’re okay?“ and with that she stared into his eyes as if he might be delirious. He knew those were Charlotte’s eyes. He felt the old heat as she touched his face. In her eyes he thought he saw a glimpse of recognition.
“Yeah, why?” Jack asked, “What‘d I say wrong this time?“.
“You sure you’re in the right town, cause they closed the high school and the elementary back in 90? Kids all go to Highlands Regional, now. They take the bus. It stops out front here“.
“No, no, that‘s not right… this is, Etna?”
“Yeah.” and then she asked him, “What did you say your name was?”
“Jack…Newman.”
She lifted her head to engage the four men by the stove. “Hear that boys, Mr. Newman here graduated from our high school in 1995?” There was a collective chuckle around the stove.
One of the men asked another, “What year did you graduate, Ben?”
The pipe-smoker replied, “Would have been ‘44, but with the war and all, I never did. Got back and started my own business. Been fixing cars ever since…well, till I retired.”
Jack couldn’t resist, “So, you were never an Archaeologist?” and another full-circle laugh occurred. When it had subsided, Jack asked, “Ben, maybe you know someone that can help me with my van?”
“Sure thing, Bill can help you. He’s got my old garage just up the hill, and he’ll be by soon. Comes by every day to see Marie. It’s about the only thing he does on time.”
Marie interrupted, “I’ll give him a call,” and picked up her cell phone.
“ Thanks, Marie…So, Ben you say his name’s Bill?. . and how old is he?”
“About the same as you I imagine. How old’s that fiancée of yours, Marie?”
“Bill’s 30.”
Jack further asked Ben, “So, he must have gone to Highlands?”
“Yep, sure did, star running back, too.”
Marie was laying his French Toast down in front of him, and as she placed the silverware, he touched her hand. “Thanks, Marie,” he said softly, and continued to hold her hand. She did not pull away.
“Bang!” went the entrance door, and there in the doorway, clutching a tool box, stood Coach Rhodes. The old salt looked like a grease monkey.
“Close the door Smitty!”, said the red-headed man reading the paperback, but Smitty didn’t listen. Instead, tool box in hand, he ran across to Jack and whispered in his ear. Jack sat upright like he’d been electrified. Sat a moment and rushed out the door chasing Smitty.
As he ran, Jack stopped to close the door, looked back and said, “Going to get my van started,” as though he owed an explanation. He followed his coach running further uphill until he caught him when Smitty stopped to gasp for breath. “O.K. Coach, or Smitty,” Jack said with heavy breathing, “I think you owe me an explanation. “What is going on here?…and how did you know to call me Cutter?”
“Because it’s me, Coach Rhodes. Now, I know you don’t believe me, but that’s how I knew your football name.”
“I think I know you Coach, but what‘s with this Smitty crap.”
“Jack, that’s who I am here. No one in this dry dock knows Coach Rhodes, except Anne, and now you, maybe. Let me show you something. You remember my Navy tattoo, remember which arm and where, and what it said?”
“Yeah, left arm, ‘A heart closest to your heart,’ you always said, and the name was Stella.” All the while Smitty was rolling up his left sleeve , and there it was, just as Jack had described it, A red heart on the upper arm with the name Stella across it. “Wow…but that could be a coincidence. It doesn’t prove a thing and how do I know for sure that you’re Coach.”
“Jack, we don’t have much time here. Haven’t you felt the strangeness of this place? Don’t you wonder why no one recognizes you? It’s the same reason they don’t recognize me.”
“And what might that be?”
“I don’t know. All I can tell you is that Anne and I came through eight years ago. You saw the light, I know you did, just like we did. It’s got to be some kind of fracture in space or something.”
“What are you nuts? You’re talking like some kind of raving maniac. . . So tell me, Smitty, what’s your game, what is it you want?”
“Damn it, Jack! Listen! . . . .It’s 24-21. We’re trailing Bangor, last year’s state champs. We got 32 seconds left. We’re on their 41 yard line. I signal a starboard-side run. We hand you the ball. Their big linebacker, Winston, breaks through, hits you behind the line, you spin off, cut back to port, just like you always did, but they’re waiting, expecting it, and that’s when you throw the only pass of your career, to our tight end Powell and he runs it in without being touched…. Now tell me how I knew that if everybody here goes to Highlands?”
Jack was stunned, holding his head, and beginning to believe. ”I can\'t fathom this. I know this place isn’t the way I left it, and you sure sound like Coach Rhodes, I recognized that gravelly voice back at Anne’s, and you sound like you know me, and you’re the only one.”
A black Peterbilt rolled up alongside them. The woman inside shouted out the open window, “Get in!”
Jack thought this was the same kind of truck that ran him off the road. Smitty grabbed Jack by the suit coat and tossed him toward the cab, “In the back,” he said. They climbed in, Smitty in front.
“What the…?” Jack was surprised by the body on the floor under him. They’d hardly closed the door before the truck bolted forward and he tumbled onto the floor, his knees resting on the man’s back.
“That’s Bill, he’s just unconscious. Take a good look and tell me if you believe it.”
Jack rolled the man over, and it was his twin, or as near as you could get. Jack rolled up the man’s right pant leg. Same scars on the knee. Same football injury, no doubt..
Smitty said, “Quite a shock , hey mate. Guess what his name is?
“Like you said, it’s Bill.“
“Yep, I did, but that’s Bill Cutter. How’s that for coincidence? He’s going with us if you choose to stay.”
“And why would I do that?”
“For Charlotte. I mean Marie, you know who I mean“.
“So why’s he leaving?”
“You both can’t stay here. He’s you., well sort of, he’s this world’s version of you.”
The tractor streaked past Anne’s. The driver, whom Jack now recognized, was a middle aged, rather plain looking, brunette, and she glanced out the window at Anne‘s, and shouted “Goodbye Hell!”
“Jack, you remember Anne. Since the day we crossed, she’s been unable to paint, and she’s been miserable.”
“And so has he.” she said, ”We’ve got freedom on the other side and we’re going to hit the road.”
Smitty added, “I’ve always wanted to drive, and travel wherever I want, and Anne wants to see places and paint.”
“And what about you two, before?”
“You must have heard the rumors.“
“I was a kid.”
“Anne and I have been in love now for 15 years. We were making our way back to Anne’s that morning when it happened. We were being discrete. You know how small towns are.”
“What makes you think it will happen again?”
“Like I said, we were being discrete. I was an hour ahead of Anne, yet we both crossed through . So we hope it happens again, soon..”
“This is all too incredible. Why don’t you just drive down the hill and out of town?”
Anne answered, “We don’t want to just leave town, we want our old lives back.“
“Why haven’t you left sooner?”
Coach explained, “We need to go through the portal, or whatever it is, when it happens. We had to stay close to it for access and wait for another occurrence. When I heard your name today at the garage, from Bill, I knew it was time.”
Anne spoke, “I have some papers here for Marie. Will you give them to her? It says she can have my place, I wrote the deed over to her.”
Jack took the papers, put them in his suit coat pocket. The big rig stopped. Coach said to Anne, “How much time?“
“Five minutes, maybe”
Jack dragged Bill out from the rear seat, Coach Rhodes helped Jack get the body hoisted onto his shoulders and Jack began the trek across to his van. ”Look Coach, all right, I believe you, but I need to know about Charlotte. Can’t I go back with you and find her?”
“ I didn’t want to have to tell you this, right away. I don’t know… maybe I should have… but Charlotte’s dead. She was stabbed, down in Portland, two years after she graduated. If you stay here it will be for Marie. They’re one and the same, just at different times, or in different places. Here’s your van. Make up your mind, it’s you or him“.
“What happens to him?”
“I’m not sure. I think he’ll wake up as you. Now hoist anchor and get the hell away from here. It’s about to happen.”
With those final words from his old coach, Jack became “Cutter” again and ran up that hill like he was carrying the football. Finally winded, he stopped and looked back to see the Peterbilt back up, rev it’s engine and scream down the hill toward his van. A wall of light lit the roadway, and then it was gone. He could see nothing but an empty hillside. He felt bitter cold. It was a longer walk to Anne’s than it had been earlier. He went further up the hill to Bill’s garage and changed clothes.
When he entered Anne‘s, the bells rang. The place was sparkling bright. Marie called out to him, “Bill, honey, you’re late. What happened?
“Oh, I slipped on the ice. Had to go back and change.”
‘Well come out back with me, I need you to fix something.”
At the circle of the stove there was a collective chuckle.