“Let’s have a story,” Rebel Simpson said.
“Yes, tell us one, Tom,” Mando said.
“Tell us Johnny Pinecone,” Rebel pleaded. “I want to hear Johnny Pinecone.”
I nodded at that. It was one of my favorite things, to hear how in the last seconds of the old time Johnny had stumbled on one of the hidden atom bombs in the back of a Chevy van, and had thrown himself on it like a Marine on a grenade, to use Tom’s expression, hoping to protect his fellow citizens from the blast—how he had survived in the bubble of still air at ground zero, but been blown miles high and rearranged by cosmic rays, so that when he floated down like a eucalyptus leaf he was loony as Roger, and immortal as well. And how he had hiked up into the San Bernadino Mountains and up San Gorgonio, and gathered pinecones and taken them back to the coastal plains, planting them on every new riverbank “to put a cloak of green over our poor land’s blasted nakedness”—back and forth, back and forth for year after year after year, until the trees sprang up and blanketed the countryside, and Johnny sat down under a redwood growing like Jack’s beanstalk and fell asleep, where he snores to this day, waiting for the time when he’s needed again.
It was a fine story. But others objected that Tom had told it last season. “Don’t you know more than three stories, Tom?” Steve ragged him. “Why don’t you ever tell us a new one? Why don’t you ever tell us a story about the old time?”
Tom gave him his mock glare and hacked. Rafael and Cov chimed in with Steve. “Give us one about you in the old time.” I sucked rum and watched him closely. Would he do it this time? He looked a touch worn and out of sorts. He glanced at me, and I think he recalled our argument after the meeting, when I told him how great he always made America seem to us.
“Okay,” he decided. “I’ll give you a story of the old time. But I warn you, nothing fancy. This is just something that happened.”
We settled back on out stumps and in our rain-warped chairs, satisfied.
“Well,” he said, “back in the old time I owned a car. God’s truth. And at the time of this story I was driving that car from New York to Flagstaff. A drive like that would take about a week, if you hurried. I was near the end of the trip, on Highway Forty in New Mexico. It was about sunset, and a storm was coming. Big black clouds looked like a wave rolling off the Pacific, and the land below was desert floor littered with mesas. Nothing on it but shrubs and the two lines of the road. Ghost country.
“First thing I noticed was two sunbeams breaking over the top of the cloud front. You’ve seen that happen, but these two were like beacons, fanning out to left and right of me, like signs of some sort.
“Second thing that happened, the old Volvo puffed over a big rise, and a sign on top said Continental Divide. I should have known. Before the downslope there was a hitchhiker by the side of the road.
“Now at the time I was a lawyer, and I valued my solitude. For a whole week I didn’t have to talk, and I liked that. Even though I owned a car I had hitchhiked in my time, and I had known the hitchhiker’s despair, made of a whole bunch of little disappointments in humanity, slowly adding up. And it was about to rain, too. But I still didn’t want to pick this guy up, so as I drove by I was kind of looking off to the left so I wouldn’t have to meet his eye. But that would have been cowardice. So at the last second I looked at him. And believe me the moment I recognized him I put the car on the shoulder and skidded over the gravel to a halt.
“That hitchhiker was me. He was me myself.”
“Oh you liar,” Rebel said.
“I’m not lying! That’s what it was like in the old time. I mean to tell you, stranger things than that happened every day. So let me get on with it.
“Anyway. We both knew it, this guy and me. We weren’t just lookalikes, like the ones friends tell you about and then you meet them and they don’t look anything like you. This guy was the one I saw in the mirror every morning when I shaved. He was even wearing an old windbreaker of mine.
“I got out of the car, and we stared at each other. ‘So who are you?’ he said, in a voice I recognized from tape recordings of myself.
“ ‘Tom Barnard,’ I said.
“ ‘Me too,’ says he.
“We stared at each other.
“Now as I said, at this time I was a lawyer, working winters in New York City. So I was a pretty slight little guy, with a bit of a gut. The other Tom Barnard had been doing physical work, I could tell; he was bigger, tough and fit, with a beard starting and a dark weathered color to his skin.
“ ‘Well, do you want a ride?’ I said. What else could I say? He nodded a bit hesitantly, picked up his backpack and walked to my car. ‘So the Volvo is still hanging in there,’ he said. We got in. And the two of us sitting there, side by side in the car, made me feel so strange I could hardly start the engine. Why, he had a scar on his arm where I once fell out of a tree! It was too uncanny. But I took off down the road anyway.
“Well, sitting there silent gave us both the willies, and we started to talk. Sure enough, we were the same Tom Barnard. Born in the same year to the same parents. By comparing pasts all through the years we quickly found the time we had separated or broken in two or whatever. One September five years before, I had gone back to New York City, and he had gone to Alaska.
“ ‘You went back to the firm?’ he asked. With a wince I nodded. I had thought of going to Alaska, I remembered, after my work with the Navaho Council was done, but it hadn’t seemed practical. And after much deliberation I had returned to New York. In the end we pinned down the moment exactly: the morning I left for New York, driving before sunrise, there was a moment getting on Highway Forty when I couldn’t remember if the onramp was a simple left turn, or a cloverleaf circle to the right; and while I was still thinking about it I came to, already on the freeway headed east. The same thing had happened to my double, only he had gone west. ‘I always knew this car was magical,’ he said. ‘There’s two of it, too—but I sold mine in Seattle.’
“Well—there we were. The storm crashed over us, and we drove through little flurries of rain. Wind pushed the car around. After a time we got over our amazement, and we talked and talked. I told him what I had done in the last five years—mostly lawyering—and he shook his head like I was crazy. He told me what he had done, and it sounded great. Fishing in Alaska, mapping rivers in the Yukon, collecting animal skeletons for the fish and game service—hard work, out in the world. How his stories made me laugh! And from him I heard my laugh like other people heard it, and it only made me laugh the harder. What a crazy howl! Has it ever occurred to you that other people see you in the same way you see them, as a collection of appearances and habits and actions and words—that they never get to see your thoughts, to know how wonderful you really are? So that you seem as strange to them as they all appear to you? Well, that night I got to look at myself from the outside, and he sure was a funny guy.