(Larry)
“Wait a minute wait a minute wait a goddamn minute,” I said. “How’d you get Ishmael’s watch.”
“It’s my damn watch,” the old dude said. He pulled out one of those little notebooks that English majors like and flipped through it quickly. “Give me a minute, here. I did my homework earlier, but it never hurts to check your notes. Let’s see. You sure as hell aren’t Lovejoy, so you’ve got to be Larry.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But who are you? And why do you have my bro’s watch?”
“Bro?” he said. “Oh, I don’t believe you two are related.”
“No, man, he’s not my brother. That’s, like, a figure of speech. But he is my, I don’t know the word for it. Boss, I guess. But I’m not getting paid. So, what do you call that, and why do you have his watch?”
“Like I said before,” said the old guy, blue eyes ready to drill holes in my face, “it’s my watch. Ishmael’s only borrowing it.”
“Oh...” it clicked. You know how it feels when something clicks? Kind of like getting some unexpected overtime hours on that paycheck for the job you hate. “You’re Ishmael’s grandpa!”
“Great-great grandfather, to be precise.”
“Whatever, gramps,” I said.
Then he slapped me upside my head.
“Don’t call me ‘gramps,’” he said. “If you’ve got to call me anything, call me Queequeg.”
“Queequeg?” I said. “What the hell kind of name is Queequeg?”
“A literary one,” he said. “If he can be Ishmael, I can be Queequeg.”
“Sure, whatever,” I said. “I was just totally expecting Ahab.”
“’Whatever,’ indeed,” said Gramps. “Grab those saw blades. We’ve got a jailbreak to engineer.”
* * *
So, we had some equipment to gather. Apparently Gramps had connections in that town. At least one, at any rate. He hollered over at Hannie about some crate he had stashed in her shed. She threw a ladle at him and said not to shout so early in the morning. I tell you what, the sexual tension was not rife between those two. They were more like inlaws. I suppose Gramps was too old, anyway. Cause, like I said, Hannie still definitely had it. Gramps on the other hand, well, let’s just say the moniker Queequeg does not detract from his charms.
Anyway, after Hannie chased us out of her establishment we had to shuffle through some hip-deep snow out to what was probably once one of those sheet metal sheds my uncle filled his backyard with. It was hard to say, though, because the thing had been braced, reinforced, rebuilt and repainted about fifty times in three centuries. It could have started out as a double-wide manufactured home for all I knew. At least it looked like it might have been one of my uncle’s tool sheds. Some parts, where the metal paneling showed through all the reinforcing crap, the paint on it was so thick it looked like butter cream frosting. I wouldn’t eat it, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if humanity had cheaped out and went back to lead-based paint at some point between my time and now.
So, Grampy Queequeg goes into the shed and bangs around looking for whatever. Show and icicles are shaking off the roof, and I swear the whole thing’s liable to fall in on him at any minute. And he’s bitching up a storm.
“Of course the effing thing has to be underneath every other damn piece of crap tool and gewgaw Ishmael’s dragged here over the years,” he says.
Then he calls for me to get my ass in there, so I’m like, okay, I’m three hundred years in the future and I’m going to die in a tin shed catastrophe.
So, in this little eight by ten deathtrap, there’s this bad-ass looking, old fashioned style wooden crate buried under lawn mowers and extension cords and a gasoline powered generator and a bunch of other stuff.
“Why all this?” Gramps bitched. “Did Ishmael seriously think he would be able to get a hold of any gas to run this? Get it off my crate for me.”
“Where should I put it?”
“I could give a shit,” he said. “Out in the snow, if you have to.” I kind of liked Gramps’ attitude.
“I told you not to call me ‘Gramps.’”
Have I been narrating out loud?
Anyway, it took a few minutes of careless, random hucking of stuff, but we got everything cleared off of the trunk. Grampy Queequeg handed me a pry bar and I popped off the lid.
Inside the crate was a pair of Igloo coolers like what you’d fill with the beers you were taking to your buddy’s pool party. Gramps popped open one of them and shuffled through what looked like a bunch of papers. He pulled out at big poster-sized architectural drawing looking thing. “Hope the utility connections are accurate on this.”
Then he closed that cooler up tight and opened the other one. Out of that, I’ll be damned if he didn’t pull a corded circular saw.
“Looks like we’ll need that generator after all,” I said.
“Nuts to that,” he said. “I’ve got an extra-universal adaptor.”
* * *
Next thing I know is Gramps is having me lug this industrial grade circular saw and the stupid saw blades across the damned snow again. I realized then that, if I was going to keep up this time travel business, I was going to have to trade my canvas Chucks for something more water resistant. I’d always thought Doc Martin’s were too punk for the kind of loving vibe I wanted my fashion choices to send out, but I was starting to worry about losing toes. Besides, the ‘loving vibe’ hasn’t been working for crap anyway. I’m getting zero action with it.
So, Gramps was following these yellowed architectural plans like they were a pirate’s treasure map. We were carefully counting our paces and checking our positions against landmarks, like how many rusted out lamp posts we tripped over. And the sun wasn’t even up yet.
“I’ve got to hand it to you, Grampy Queequeg,” I said. “You sure know how to show a guy a good time on his birthday.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “You don’t have a birthday within 250 years of now.” He was right. It really wasn’t my birthday. I’m not even sure why I said that. Sometimes I just say things, because I feel things need to be said. Just because. You know what I’m saying? But, actually Gramps was still talking, so I’ll get back to what he was saying. In full on crotchety grandpa mode, he was all, “quit your bellyaching. We’ve got to spring Ishmael from jail, or I’m never going to get my watch back.”
“But I thought you have your watch now,” I said.
“Technically, yes, I do,” he said. “But, it’s complicated. There’s a thing with a thing, and a gambling debt, and a talking allosaurus.”
“A talking allosaurus like Jorge-George?” I said, remembering the freaky incident in my old neighborhood where the taco truck turned out to be smuggling dinosaur meat.
“So you’ve met Horkachorge?” he said. “Yeah, well, you can appreciate that, like any dealing with a talking dinosaur, things are convoluted as all hell. But the long and short of it is, if Ishmael ends up being the guest of honor at the Christmas bonfire, my ass is grass. Plus, I’m only holding onto the watch now, because Ishmael and I are both here at the same time and the watch can only exist once at the same time, and since it’s mine, it’s with me.”
I had no idea what that all meant, but I could tell it was my turn in the conversation to say something. I took a stab at it.
“So, Ishmael doesn’t have his watch?”
“What did I just say?” said Gramps.
“Honestly, I’m not sure, but I think we’re busting Ishmael out of the pokey and that’s all I really need to know.”
“Fair enough,” said Gramps.
We stopped at a place where the snow seemed to have fallen in on itself. It was sunken in, or something. I’m not sure how to describe it. Just, it was a spot where the snow seemed less.
“Did you bring a shovel?” he asked.
“Dude, I brought this freaking heavy-ass saw. What are you talking about?”
“Right,” he said. “Set all that crap down a minute and take this shovel.”
He threw the shovel at me like it was a spear. I caught it, but crap, Grampy Queequeg was one of those world class dangerous old guys. You gotta watch out for him. Who knew he’d have a shovel? Of course, it makes sense, him and Ishmael being related, the two guys in all of space and time who would have collapsible shovels tucked into their trench coats.
Luckily, all I really had to do with the shovel was clear out the sunken in bit of snow from the opening of an old parking lot storm drain. The metal grate that would have covered it in a normal, from my time, parking lot had rusted away long ago. Once the snow was out of the way it was an easy shimmy into the tunnel underneath.
The tunnel was pretty good size. I could almost, almost stand up in it. I had to crouch a little bit, but no big deal. The tunnel was dark as all hell, though.
Of course, Gramps had a solution for that as well. He fired up this crazy ass tiki torch that, whatever it was burning, smelled a lot more like barbecue than citronella. Recycled cooking grease, I’m sure. It would have been a welcome smell if it weren’t for the fact that this storm drain had some serious sewage odors going on in it.
Gramps was following the plans again and led us through a few zigs and zags, but nothing too tricky. Soon he picked out a spot on the wall.
“This’ll be it,” he said. He then grabbed a piece of charcoal from somewhere, his pocket, I guess. With the charcoal, he drew a square about two foot by two foot.
“All right, kid. If I’m reading my plans right, the basement they like to keep the houseguests in is on the other side of this wall. All we’ve got to do is cut along the dotted lines, and spring Ishmael.”
I loaded up a saw blade, and pulled my shades out of my pocket for eye protection. Safety first, right? But there was something that seemed like a pretty big deal, a nigh insurmountable problem.
“Where are we going to plug this thing in?” I said.
“That’s what I brought the extra-universal adaptor for,” he said. “We’re going to run it off the watch. It’ll be slicker than shit. You’ll see.”
So, he laid out this weird, extension cord thing in front of him. He plugged the watch in on one end of the cord and the circular saw on the other. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to work because, a watch, right? Who runs a saw off a watch battery?
But the saw fired up like a champ. In fact, I was this close to losing my foot because I wasn’t expecting it to turn on at all. I just about dropped it as it came to life. So much for safety first.
Anyway, that saw was actually a bit small for the job, but what are you going to do? Take it back to Home Depot with a 300 year old receipt? Not really. I started working on cutting the wall and Gramps would splash some god-awful sewer water on the blade every now and then. It made the cutting a little easier, but everything sure stank to high hell.
Even with the wetting, the first blade crapped out before I was done with the first cut. We had two more blades, but, at this rate we’d blow through them before completing our escape hole.
“I suppose it was too much to expect this to go smoothly,” said Gramps. Then he took his charcoal and drew a diagonal slash through his square outline. “Let’s make it a triangle. And try to at least score all the edges before going for broke and cutting through. We may have to take a sledge and bust it out the old fashioned way.”
“You’re the boss,” I said. “One more thing, though.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s that sound?”
At first I had thought it was just the sound of my teeth settling back into their sockets after the vibrations of the saw. But that didn’t really make sense, because I’m a person, not a cartoon.
It was a skittering sound. One of those menacing, skittering sounds, like what you hear when the rats have come to finish your roommate’s KFC that he left in the middle of the living room before passing out last night. Only this was a bigger menacing skittering than I was used to.
Grampy Queequeg waved his torch around, hoping to catch whatever it was in its light.
And there it was. For a second, I thought it was one of those freaky hairless cats, but it didn’t have ears, and it wasn’t really standing like a cat, and it was totally the wrong shape, and its skin looked more like iguana skin than the saggy old lady at the pool skin those cats kind have.
“Crap,” said Gramps. “Velociraptors.”