Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

DING! IT IS2:00 a.m. in my dorm room at Wardell-Pierce College, and I’m pounding out a paper (due in eight hours) for a rhetoric class—and yes, there was such a subject. My title was “Comparative Criticism in Sports Reporting: Baseball/Track,” chosen because I was a sports reporter for the Wardell-Pierce Pioneer and that week I had covered both a ball game and a track meet. My roommate, Don Gammelgaard, was trying to sleep, but I was on a deadline. And because it was raining there was no way I was going to tramp all the way across the quad to the Student Service Building. As I recall, I aced Rhetoric. * * Note: A check of transcripts shows I got a B minus in Rhetoric at W-P. My mistake… ==============

DING! I’M ATa so-called desk in the so-called office of the Greensheet Give-Away, the free shoppers’ guide that once provided the Tri-Cities with oodles of coupons, advertisements, and, in the back pages, local-interest stories where regular folks could see their names in print. I was crafting a piece on a dog show just held at the old Civic Auditorium—my pay was fifteen bucks!—when the most beautiful woman who ever started a conversation with me walked by and said, “You type fast.” She was right, and since I was the fast type, I wooed her, wed her, and have been her main squeeze for over forty years.

THAT SAME DISH of American Womanhood brought me back from back in time when she came into the kitchen, telling me to move that typewriter and set the table for dinner. The grandchildren were coming over and it was going to be Make Your Own Taco Night, so a mess was due. The Underwood has powers unexplained, a vehicle for my dreams, so I locked it back into its case and carried it to a shelf in my home office, pronto. At night I think it glows in the dark…

* Note: A check of transcripts shows I got a B minus in Rhetoric at W-P. My mistake…

Because his plane was getting a new designer interior installed, J.J. Cox was hitching a ride to New York on Bert Allenberry’s WhisperJet ViewLiner.

“I thought you were a smart man, Bert!” J.J. was yelling at his friend.

They’d known each other since they were twenty-year-old college kids, drivers for FedEx, full of moxie and spunk—their two heads bursting with ideas. They pooled their paychecks to rent a windowless garage on the outskirts of Salina, Kansas, which became their live-in workshop. After three and a half years of working 120-hour weeks, they’d come up with a prototype of the Shuffle-Access Digital Valve-Relay. They might as well have invented fire. Thirty years and $756 billion later, J.J. was just now learning that Bert had paid $6 million a pop to some outfit called Chronometric Adventures for—get this— time travel vacations . No, no, no!

Cindee, the fourth and youngest ever Mrs. Allenberry, was clearing the lunch china herself. She was well practiced at the chore, since she had been the flight attendant on the plane just a year ago. She had to work fast as there were but minutes before landing. Two problems with the ViewLiner: speed and vertigo. The flights from Salina to New York City took only sixty-four minutes, barely enough time to lick your fingers clean of BBQ ribs. The transparent floor and ultrawide windows made for a nail-biter of a flight, especially if you were afraid of heights.

“I thought they had dosed us with some narcotic,” Cindee called out from the plane’s galley. “You wake up with a terrible headache and the room looks all different. Then you conk right back out and sleep for hours.”

J.J. could not believe what he was hearing. “Let’s figure out this scam. You go into a room, you fall asleep and wake up when ?”

“Nineteen thirty-nine,” Bert chirped.

“Of course you do.” J.J. smirked. “But then you pass out, wake up again in 1939.”

“Right there in the City. In a hotel on Eighth Avenue.” Bert was looking down through the fuselage. Pennsylvania was becoming New Jersey. “Room 1114.”

“And you spend the day sitting in a hotel room?” J.J. wanted to slap his own head, as well as some sense into that of his friend and partner.

“Everything looks real,” Cindee continued as she returned to her seat to buckle up for landing. “You can touch things. You can eat and drink. And smell. The men wear stinky hair oil and the women use too much makeup and everyone smokes. And their teeth! Crooked and stained.”

“Roasted coffee is in the air.” Bert was smiling. “From a factory in New Jersey.”

“You woke up in 1939,” J.J. said. “And smelled the coffee.”

“Then Cindee took me to the World’s Fair,” Bert said. “For my birthday. We had VIP passes.”

“It was a surprise.” Cindee shot her husband a smile and took his hand in hers. “The Big Six-Oh only comes once.”

J.J. had a question. “Why not go back in time to see the signing of the Declaration of Independence or Jesus on the cross?”

“You can only go to 1939,” Bert explained. “June 8, 1939. Chronometric Adventures has a franchise in Cleveland. You can go to 1927 and see Babe Ruth hit a home run, but I’m not a baseball fan.”

“Babe Ruth. In Cleveland.” J.J. nearly spit. “Jesus on the cross.”

“He’s gone back four times without me,” Cindee said. “I’d had enough of everyone thinking we were father and daughter.”

“I’m going again tomorrow.” Bert smiled at the thought.

J.J. was laughing now. “Thirty-six million dollars! Bert, for half that I’ll arrange for you to meet Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and do the naked limbo. You’ll just have to trust me on how I make it happen.”

“My husband would live in 1939,” Cindee said. “But he can only stay twenty-two hours.”

“Why only twenty-two hours?” J.J. asked.

Bert told him why. “Wavelength in the Time-Space Continuum is finite. You can ride the echo only so long.”

“They provide this money made of paper and old-fashioned coins,” Cindee said. “I bought a tiny, gold-plated space needle and globe.”

“The Trylon and Perisphere,” Bert corrected her.

“Right. Yeah. But when we woke up it had turned into dried-out putty.”

“That’s the Molecular Singularity.” Bert was not buckling his seat belt for landing. He owned the plane. Screw the FAA.

“Why not go back and change history?” J.J. wanted to know. “Why don’t you kill Hitler?”

“Hitler wasn’t at the World’s Fair that day.” The WhisperJet began to slow, the ground rising up to meet them. The articulating engines were tilting minutely, soon to allow a vertical landing on the roof of 909 Fifth Avenue. “Besides, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Singular Dimensional Tangents,” Bert said, looking down at Central Park, which hadn’t really changed all that much since 1939. “There’s an infinite number of tangents, but we all exist in just one.”

J.J. glanced at Cindee. She shrugged her shoulders—what could she do with the old guy?

“He likes seeing what the future was going to look like. But, we’re living in the future. You’d think that would spoil everything,” she said.

Twelve minutes later, J.J. was zipping along the HoverLine in his Floater, headed to his private island in the sound. Bert and Cindee had taken their private elevator from the landing pad on the roof and were settling into their apartment on floors 97 to 102. Cindee immediately changed into a new outfit from one of her closets. They were going to Kick Adler-Johnson’s twenty-fifth birthday party and a private hologram performance of the Rolling Stones. Bert could not stand Kick Adler-Johnson though he respected her husband, Nick, who had made a fortune buying up air and water rights around the world. Besides, the actual Stones had played the company Christmas party in 2019, when he was married to L’Audrey, wife number three. He wanted to stay home, but Cindee wouldn’t allow that.