Katherine's Kingdom Ch. 02

Finally, Mike knew he was beat. Unable to control his jelly-filled legs, He collapsed onto the sofa. Face buried in hands. "Oh my gosh. There's no way. There's just no way!"

"What's he talking about?" he heard Antonia ask Jessica.

The ex-quarterback could almost see his girlfriend's shoulders shrugging. "I think he's a little out of his element right now, and quite frankly, so am I. Just for clarity, are you telling us this is officially Monday, May 21, 1962?"

"That, and 10:52 in the morning." Mike glanced up in time to notice the teen girl consult the alarm clock on her nightstand. It was one of the circular analog types with two big bells atop. "There, now that I've told you two all of what you wanted to know but likely knew already, why don't you start being the real deal? Besides, you're harmless."

"How'd you figure that one out finally?" Jessica asked.

"You would've hurt me by now if you were going to do it. So, what's your story? How'd you two get into the house without me noticing? Did you break in to hide out from the law?" Antonia's eyes widened over a hopeful, cherubic grin, almost hoping for it to be so. "That would be groovy, in an odd sort of way. Life is so boring in Winterset. Nothing ever happens here."

Like 2020, like 1962, Mike thought. "It's a little more fantastical than that. Are you into science-fiction at all, Antonia?" he asked, point blank.

"You mean like Twilight Zone with Rod Serling? Sure, I sample it every now and then, when mom and dad let me." She paused, sitting on the edge of her bed with sandwich in hand. Taking a big bite, the teen girl continued. "What, are you two time travelers or something?"

Mike nodded slowly and solemnly. "Yes, as hard as it is for any of us to believe, that's exactly what I'm saying."

She almost choked with laughter. "Prove it. Pull out a death ray gun and make that ugly Japanese wall décor disappear." Antonia indicated the samurais and swords. "Drat my mother. She has such awful taste."

"Unfortunately, we don't have anything so futuristic. However, will this do?" Mike produced his Kennedy half-dollar between thumb and forefinger. The brand-new coin gleamed in the light from overhead.

"What's so special about that?" she asked, unimpressed. Then, Antonia peered closer. "Is that our President on a fifty-cent piece? That's got to be counterfeit. Benjamin Franklin is on the real ones."

"Look at the date and tell me what you see." He raised the coin higher.

She gasped. "It says the year 2020! How can that possibly be?"

Now that the shock of being a stranger in a strange land was starting to subside, Mike's tone was flat. "We already told you. Jessica and I are time travelers, albeit it unwillingly and unwittingly, from the year 2020."

"Is your mind flexible enough to wrap around a concept like that?" his girlfriend asked. She, too, sounded calmer, almost resigned to her fate.

Antonia appeared to be weighing the question with great thought, sitting there with half a sandwich in hand and the other balled up against her cheek. "I have to admit, you are throwing a lot at me, and if it were any other girl, you would probably be in the back of a squad car right now on your way to a sanitarium. However, your coin and your clothes are just too darn convincing. Nobody that I know wears skirts that short or shirts with pictures on them." She indicated Jessica's hemline, which was several inches above the knee, or Mike's tee, which depicted a Mountain Dew logo. "Let's just say I've read enough Creatures From Outer Space comic books to believe that anything is possible."

"Fantastic." He blew a sigh of relief, glad now that they had scaled one more mega-hurdle.

"So, how did you come back..." Antonia counted silently on her fingers. "Fifty-eight years? Jiminy crickets!"

Mike figured that what was passed for risqué language in the Villapiano household. "It's like we told you," he said. "Jessica and I were asleep in bed upstairs..."

"Wait! You two in the same bed? Are you married or something? Wait, you can't be! You have different last names!"

His girlfriend was ready to protest, but Mike beat her to the punch. He was more in tune with what was acceptable in 1962 and what wasn't. Unmarried couples living together could be the source of major scandal in a world where a television husband and wife were relegated to separate beds. "Things are a lot more...liberal...where we come from. Couples, whether they be..." He stopped himself from saying gay, knowing that the word meant something quite different at the moment. Besides, the concept of same sex couples was probably foreign to a sheltered young girl like Antonia. "...married or unmarried, can live together, or even apart, without anybody around them thinking twice about it. People can pretty much do what they want."

"Wow." Antonia had a faraway look in her eyes. "Imagine having the freedom to come and go as you please. I wish I could go to your time and live."

"You can get there the conventional way, but you'll be in your seventies by the time you get there," Jessica said, smiling.

"Fiddlesticks!" Antonia stamped her foot on the carpeting. Another clean curse word, Mike thought.

"You don't want to be where we've been. You don't want to see what we've seen," he said in all sincerity. "The future might seem glamorous from where you sit, but trust me, you're better off skipping along as a happy-go-lucky youth of the early sixties."

"How can you say that? What wonderful inventions your time must be filled with! Do you fly around in automobiles over the sky? What about a pill to replace all the meals you'd eat in a single day? I thought I read about that possibility in Scientific American once." The teen girl's eyes lit up even more.

Mike groaned. He should've seen this coming from a mile away. "No, we don't have anything like that in 2020." Her disappointed bottom lip pout was almost comical. "What we do have are things like computers the size of your fingernail that can practically replace everything a human can do. We have cars with so many technological bells and whistles that they resemble rocket ships. We have something called an internet where you can surf, stream, or search any subject in the world to your heart's content. However, with all that supposedly great stuff comes plenty of awful. Our government is corrupt and self-serving to the highest level. The average citizen would rather sue you than say howdy. Political correctness runs so rampant that everybody's undies are always in a bunch."

"Political correctness?" Antonia scratched her dark hair.

Crap, that genie's left the bottle and there's no getting it back. "Just a stupid term we use to explain people that think they know what's best for everybody else," Mike said.

"Oh, we have a name for people like that, too. They're called parents!" she said without missing a beat while grinning like a Cheshire cat.

The joke made Jessica laugh out loud, which immediately broke Mike's remaining tension. He chuckled with the girls, then brought up a point neither he or his girlfriend could deny. "Well, honey, we need to face facts. I don't think we're going back the way we came, not unless there's another nuclear war brewing on the horizon." The ex-quarterback knew the Cuban Missle Crisis would put the United States and Soviet Union of an apocalyptic winter in October, but there was no reason for Antonia to know about that just yet. Besides, Mike and Jessica's mere presence now might cause the butterfly to spread its wings. Maybe Nikita Khrushchev tries to plant missiles in the rogue island nation even earlier. Maybe the stuffy Russian Bear goes back into hibernation for another Siberian winter.

"You mean we're stuck here?" Suddenly, she wasn't in such a jovial mood. Her face darkened considerably at the prospect.

"Right now, for the interim, that's exactly what I'm saying. We can either whine and complain about this rather unique situation we've been thrown into, or we can make the best of things. I say we take the bull by the horns," Mike said with something actually approaching enthusiasm. He was already plotting how personal knowledge of sixties history and culture could best be used to his advantage.

Jessica drug a toe along the floor. She paced back and forth a few times, sighed a few big sighs, and eventually plopped back down on the couch, defeated. "I suppose you're right, although for the record, I wish you weren't," she said.

"Look at it this way. Even if we could get back, we'd be returning to nothing but a nuclear slagheap. Here, at least we maybe have a chance to build a life for ourselves and make the world a better place at the same time."

Antonia opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it. Mike could just see the questions swimming about in her eyes. She was burning to ask about future events and how they would shape the years to come. What point anyway, when each moment moving forward would likely scatter everything beyond that like a pack of billiard balls? Better to just shut my mouth and take life as it comes from now on, he thought.

"I might have a solution for you two, at least on a temporary basis," the teenage girl finally said. "Mother and Father have one of our two upstairs bedrooms for rent to earn some extra money. They're out of town at a religious retreat, but said if anyone answered our advertisement in the newspaper, I could give it to them if they seemed respectable enough."

"Respectable enough? I guess we qualify," Jessica said offhand.

"Let me guess, bedroom at the end of the hall?" Mike asked. Antonia nodded. He snorted with humor. "Well, doesn't that beat all? I travel back in time half a century and wind up hanging my hat where I hung it in 2020."

"Life has its little coincidences," the Villapiano daughter said.

"Wait a minute. The offer of a place to stay is certainly hospitable, but how are we going to pay for it? We didn't bring any cash, short of my fifty-cent piece, but that's not exactly going to put a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, or food in our mouths."

Antonia came to the rescue again. "If you two need cash, you can always come to work with me tonight at the pizza place we own. It's out near the highway about seven or eight blocks away. Mother and Father typically have summer help for cash on the barrel. It cuts down on the paperwork or something, I guess."

Mike and Jessica would be certified fools, prime candidates for the men with the white coats and net, if they kicked this gift horse in the mouth. However, since seeing was still believing, he requested a short tour of the house. Deep inside, the ex-quarterback knew that his girlfriend wouldn't fully accept their fate until seeing a little bit more of 1962 than a basement.

Antonia agreed readily, leading her two prospective tenants beyond their perimeter of comfort into the unknown. He eyeballed the kitchen first from the head of the basement steps, noting immediately how it seemed both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The dimensions looked the same, but everything else was different from the modern dark cherry wood and rose quartz motif Charles and Caroline Montgomery favored. Instead, white enamel countertops and like-painted cupboards reigned. A pale blue Kelvinator fridge with large chrome handles hummed loudly beside a pale yellow GE electric range. The large island Mike was so accustomed to no longer remained, either. A small table with ribbed metal strip around the edge and chrome legs stood in its place. Padded chairs similar in hue to the oven sat neat and square on all four sides.

Things got a bit more interesting in the living room. Creature comforts in the twenty-first century were big business, but here in conservative 1962, that was shunned in favor of practicality. The Villapianos were no different, sporting a couch/easy chair set with flat brown cushions and wooden bases that looked slightly more comfortable than a porcupine. Burnt-orange curtains flapped in the mid-May breeze around one of those old eight-hundred pound RCA Victor television consoles that had wooden shelves built in. Jessica eyed that monstrosity with more than a little intimidation.

Upstairs, Mike, in eagerness to see what his old (new?) room looked like, lead the way up the stairwell (which was narrower and steeper than what he remembered) and down the hall. He twisted a gigantic brass knob that hadn't been there before (or had been, if one wanted to get technical) and opened up to a sensible, tidy space that smelled vaguely of furniture polish. Strange circular-shaped gold satin decorative pillows adorned a queen-sized bed. A duvet of similar hue was tucked primly between the mattress and box spring. The writing desk in the far corner by the window looked just like his in the future, but of course this one was of thicker wood and more heavy-duty.

"Is this closet and dresser for both of us?" Jessica asked, glancing at the latter item's ornately carved headpiece with disdain.

"That's okay. We can buy another one after we've earned and saved enough. We'll also need to think about buying some clothes. The ones on our backs aren't going to cut it after a few days, even if not at the height of 1960s fashion," Mike said.

"I can borrow you some of my dresses for now, Jessica, and Mike, I'm sure Father wouldn't mind at all if I loaned you out a few shirts and ties of his. He would consider it the Christian thing to do," the younger said.

"Speaking of the Christian thing, your parents, by the sound of it, aren't exactly going to be pleased with a young unmarried couple living in sin right under their roof. How do we get around that?" Jessica asked them.

Mike shrugged his shoulders. "We'll pretend we're married. We've got no choice. I'll find you a makeshift wedding band from someplace so you can pass it off as the real thing."

"Would you like a tour of Villapiano's right now?" Antonia asked.

Mike's hand went into his hair. Plaster dust from the 2020 kitchen ceiling and other future debris still lingered there, and now in small particles around him. A shower sure sounded good right about now, but just then, his body clock began catching up with him. He yawned deeply. It might be late morning in 1962, but right now he and Jessica were still on late night 2020 time.

"Is there any way we could catch forty winks before work tonight? All this time travel has given me some serious jetlag," he said, stretching out to his fullest extent.

"Sure, that's no problem," their host said. "I usually open up the restaurant around 6pm, so that'll give you plenty of time for some shuteye. Meantime, I can lay out some clothes for the both of you."

"Thanks again for being so understanding and for believing us. I can't say I'd do the same thing if our situations were reversed," Mike said.

She nodded. "Yes, you would. You're both good people. I just have a feeling about you two. Now, have a nice nap and I'll see you guys in a few hours."

Mike smiled and shook his head, shutting the bedroom door after she left. Her wide-eyed wonder, the implicit trust of two strangers and probably the entire world around them...so evocative of the era they were now in. Antonia Villapiano was a believer, that's for sure.

True to her word, their host had laid out clothes for Mike and Jessica upon their awakening: white sleeveless undershirt, white button-up shirt, dark blue tie, and slacks to match, while his girlfriend found a springtime yellow frock that covered everything neck to knee except for her arms which poked out of holes slightly past the shoulder. While he found wearing the ensemble constricting and uncomfortable on such a muggy late afternoon, he did it without complaint, reasoning that a life under cover for the time being was the only logical thing to do. Jessica, on the other hand, made no bones about how she hated every last second of looking like an old biddy, as she put it, from the cramped space in front of the bathroom mirror.

"I'm roasting!" she said to him, a little too loudly.

Mike tried shushing her from his seated position on the commode lid. It looked surprisingly like a 2020 style toilet, all except for the pale pink porcelain that matched the lavatory's tiled walls. "Would you get with the program, please? With just a little bit of luck and hard work, we can land on our feet in no time," he said. "Besides, it isn't so bad, is it? This is what middle America dresses like in the early sixties."

"I want to go back to 2020," Jessica said for what seemed like the thousandth time. She tried using one of Antonia's hairbrushes to straighten out her unruly red hair, but the damp air was making it difficult. "God, how can these people live like this? No air conditioning, no internet, no GPS...no anything!" She stepped on the hardwood floor, which in turn creaked companionably.

"Count your blessings," he said. "We may have been dumped unceremoniously back in time, but despite that, we already have jobs and a temporary place to live. We could just as easily be sleeping in a cardboard box under a bridge." Mike reached for the tube of Brylcreem to her side and briefly contemplated styling his hair (just for fun, of course) into an Elvis Presley inspired duck's ass, but didn't think it would jive with his new clothes that well. Instead, he just slicked it straight back and dribbled on a little of Mr. Villapiano's Old Spice musky aftershave.

Eventually, Jessica gave up trying to tame her flame and used her hairclip to clasp it back into a ponytail again. "Can't we try going down into the basement closet to somehow reverse this curse? I'm all for that idea."

"Did you ever stop to consider that maybe there's a reason why we were brought here? A higher power might be trying to tell us something or giving us a lesson to learn."

He saw the reflection of her doubtful eye in the mirror. "Pray tell, what would that be? The only lesson I've learned is how much I miss my parents. What if they died in that attack? How will I ever know for sure?"

"You won't, at least not from this reality," he said, lending her arm a comforting hand. "Here, there's been no holocaust, and might not ever be if our presence alters the course of events in a positive way. Here, my parents and your parents might live to a ripe old...oh wow, there's a paradox I never thought about before!"

"How's that?" she asked.

"Well, here they're all still alive and well. However, what if we change history so much that both couples never meet? Does that mean we're never born?" Mike scratched his head.

"Okay, say they do meet and we're born. Now there's two of each of us out there."

"It boggles the imagination. Right now, all I can concentrate on is one day at a time."

Mike adjusted his tie one last time, and after a thumbs-up of approval from Jessica, they headed downstairs to find Antonia waiting for them in front of the boob tube. The blacks, grays, and whites of some religious show flickered across the screen. A televangelist was literally thumping his Bible as he looked straight into the camera, yelling something about his virtual congregation repenting of their wicked ways so that Jesus could scoop them into his arms and avoid Satan's fire and brimstone fate. The message in his thick southern drawl resonated about as badly now as it did in 2020. Antonia rose and pressed the power knob when she noticed them. Their human savior faded to black.

"Much, much better," she said after examining their new threads. "You don't stick out like a sore thumb now."

"I should be so lucky," Jessica said under her breath, which luckily her younger didn't catch. Mike gave his girlfriend a subtle nudge to keep quiet.

"Shall we go, ladies?" Remembering that chivalry was alive and well in this era, he opened the front door and held it like a gentleman for his female companions. They all stepped onto the sidewalk as the two newcomers got their first real glimpses of 1962.