The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything

Chapter Nine

Not until Kirby stood up did he see, beyond the end of the concrete bench, a little pile of clothing — a pair of lime slacks, white sandals, a white blouse with a yellow figure, a yellow jacket, a white purse. He picked them up and put them on the bench. The items missing were the blue-green nylon bra, the matching panties.

Her voice came from ten feet behind him. “Hey! Hey, sugar, this is more damn fun!”

He spun and saw her there in the sunlight, brown and beautiful, winded, glowing with excitement. The sun glinted on the gold watch in her hand. She put her fingers on the stem of the watch. “Give it to me!” he yelled, but she was gone before he could say the last word.

He heard thin cries, almost but not quite like the yelping of the gulls. He looked far down the beach to the north where the crowd was the thickest and it seemed to him that all the people down here had gone mad simultaneously.

He squinted against the glare and thought he saw Bonny Lee appear and disappear again in the middle distance, but he could not be certain.

He began to realize that he had made a poor estimate of her response to the red world. Bonny Lee had a totally pragmatic mind. She would not give a damn for theory. All that would concern her was that it worked, and he had given her the clue as to how to make it work. Though — from the viewpoint of his limited experience — she had given him ample, skillful and luxurious proof that she was a woman grown, and even though she had devised a philosophy of existence which seemed to suit her and seemed to work for her, he remembered that she was but “twenny, practically,” that there was a child inside the woman, and the child had never had much chance for the games of childhood, and that she was a hoyden, reckless, irreverent, comical and inventive. He remembered, too, that she was in bursting health, firm, fleet and tireless.

He squinted at the people running to and fro in the distance, yelping, and he wondered if he had not inadvertently loosed upon them on this pleasant Tuesday morning something just as fearful as a playful tiger. He remembered the mischief and the satisfaction of tucking the gull under the fat boy’s shirt. He had astonished himself with that act. Surely Bonny Lee would go a good deal further than that before astonishing herself.

He wondered if he should walk down the beach and see what was happening. But Bonny Lee would expect to find him at the bench.

He saw two figures coming up the beach at a dead run. They seemed more energetic than fleet. He stared at them as they went by. First one would hold the lead and then the other would overtake her and pass her. They seemed to be heading for the parking lot. They were a pair of young women of rather generous construction, naked as a pair of eggs.

An elderly tourist who had been walking by came to a dead stop near the bench and stared at the running women. He wore a Truman shirt, Bahama hat, Bermuda shorts, blue sneakers. He watched them make the sweeping curve toward the parking lot and disappear. He turned and stared questioningly at Kirby.

“ ’Til this very minute, son, I prided myself on twenty-twenty vision.”

“Sir?”

“Mind telling me what just run by?”

“Uh — two young women.”

The man moved closer. “Son, what would you say they were wearing?”

“They didn’t seem to be wearing anything.”

The old man peered at him. “If I was your age, son, I’d be right with ’em, running like a deer. You don’t seem even interested. You sick?”

“I — was thinking of something else.”

“I got down here from Michigan day before yesterday. Maybe I got the wrong idea. Maybe that ain’t so unusual a sight around here.”

“Well, I wouldn’t—”

“Good day in the morning, here comes another one!”

She was a small sunburned redhead, with a transistor radio in one hand and a thermos bottle in the other. She was near the end of her endurance, wobbling from side to side as she cantered along.

After she, too, was out of sight, the old man sighed heavily. “One thing I give you, son. You picked the right place to set. Is it a new fad, you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope it catches on.” He shaded his eyes and peered up the beach.

Suddenly Bonny Lee was close enough to touch and there was a pile of paper money on Kirby’s lap. It spilled onto the bench and onto the sand. She laughed once and was gone.

The old man whirled around. “Son, you got a high laugh on — ain’t you spilling something?”

“Oh, this?”

“Money, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” Kirby said heartily. “It certainly is.” He grabbed at the bills that started to blow away.

“I think the sun has got to me,” the old man said. “I think I better get the hell out of it.” He plodded away.

Some other people had moved near, staring curiously at the money. Kirby gathered it up quickly. She hadn’t bothered with one-dollar bills and there were only a few fives. It made a wad so thick that after he had folded it once, he had difficulty putting it in the side pocket of the borrowed slacks. He picked up Bonny Lee’s clothes and walked away from the bench, north along the beach, knowing that she could always find him. While she was in the red world, he would be motionless to her. He became aware of a vast traffic jam in the drive behind him. He heard sirens in the distance. He came upon a man walking in a slow thoughtful circle, hitting himself in the forehead with his clenched fist.

Suddenly Kirby had a new pipe in his mouth, a bouquet of roses tucked under his arm, a gold ring with a big yellow diamond on the little finger of his left hand, and Bonny Lee in her pretty undies striding along with him, chuckling. He made a frantic grab for her, but she danced back, fiddled with the watch and flicked out of his world. He looked at the place where she had disappeared and saw blurred shallow footprints heading north. The fact that they were blurred and now perfect meant she had already reappeared somewhere else. He realized that inasmuch as his world was static to her, in relation to his time, she had to reappear somewhere else the instant she disappeared in front of him.

Later he was to learn that, during the fifteen minutes she was on the loose, she spent, as near as she could remember, about four subjective hours in the red world, four hours until she tired of the games and could think of no more.

Later he was to learn, in more detail, of the bewildering calamities which befell all those unfortunates among the thousand and a half people enjoying that stretch of Atlantic beach.

As Bonny Lee told him, “There they were, all them broads, naked as the law allows, strutting it around to work up the guys, and I figured it would be a lot more honest they should unwrap the merchandise entire and see how the guys reacted then. That’s before I was working it so good, before I learned you can do it okay one-handed, just push down with your thumb and give it a little bitty twist. So all the ones in the right positions so I could get at their suits and halters and stuff, I went to work, where they were gathered thickest, and honess, sugar, I worked like a horse, maybe a half-hour, peeling that stuff off them and carrying it down and tossing it out over the water — pushing it out. When everything is red, you can’t throw anything. It kind of stops.”

“I know.”

“Nine outa ten, I swear, they looked a hell of a lot better with the suits on. A lot of those guys got a bad shock. Anyhow in that one patch of beach I got maybe forty stripped entire, and got the top half off I guess twenty more. And what good is a joke you can’t see it, hey? So, seeing how I was dressed, I thought I should sort of hide, then I realized compared to them sixty broads, I was overdressed. So I just went to a spot where nobody was looking right at me and pressed the dingus.”

“How did you find out about doing that?”

“Anybody smart enough to make a cute thing like that is going to make it so you can use it and not be waiting around for the time to run out. So I tried turning it and tried pushing it and found out how.”

“Oh.”

“Shees marie, Kirby, you shoulda seen! Out of sixty, maybe three or four took it cool. The rest went straight up in the air, screeched like to bust your ears, scrabbled around for towels, but I’d got rid of them too. Then they tried to find something to hide behind or under. But a beach is damn empty, you know. Those guys had their mouths hanging open and their eyes bugged out, and the broads milled around, yelping, and then all the ones could swim, like those lemming things somebody told me about once, they went into the ocean on the dead run, maybe seven guys with good reaction time right after them. And the ones couldn’t swim, they headed every which way, the smart ones heading toward where I hadn’t gathered the towels and stealing them from other folks. I laughed until I had the hiccups, and then two guys started closing in on me so I went back into the red place, put two big sand buckets over their heads and took off.”

“How about the money?”

“The money?”

“The money you dumped in my lap.”

“Oh. That. Oh, that’s from when I went over into all those stores over there. Ever’ time I went by a cash drawer, I took some. But carrying stuff is a drag. You gotta kind of push it or pull it along. In the department store I found a hell of a thing, you know? An old lady had tripped or something right at the top of the escalator and there she was, tilted way out, her hands out in front of her, her face all screwed up. That’s when I found out you can move people, too. I went behind her and got her around the waist and braced myself and first I thought I couldn’t. But if you give a real steady pull, they come along. I pulled her back and straightened her up and there she was, about eight inches off the floor. So I got in front of her and pushed her about six feet, and pulled her back down onto the floor. Then I picked her packages out of the air over the stairs and put them in her arms. I had her holding them funny, but I didn’t want to try bending her arms. I was afraid I’d break something. So then I went to the racks and got a dress and put it on and went back and stood by her and turned the world back on. She gave a big jump and dropped all her packages. She wore the damnedest expression, sugar. She stared at the escalator and then she picked the packages up and stared at the escalator again and dropped them again. Then she picked them up and shook her head and started walking toward the elevator. It was right after that I found out something else funny.”

“What was that?”

“In the sports part — I was still wearing the dress off the rack — there was a little bit of a boy throwing a basketball to a clerk. It was in the air. The clerk had his hands out, grinning. The ball was in the air and in my way, so I just shoved it toward the clerk as I went by. A second later time ran out on me. I forget all about time in a store anyhow. And I heard this thud and this horrible gagging sound and something falling. I looked around and the clerk was rolling around on the floor hugging his stomach, and making them sounds, and the little boy staring down at him, and the little boy’s mother.

“ ‘Honey, you threw it too hard,’ she said to the little boy. They helped the clerk up and his face was a terrible color. The woman said she was sorry her little boy had thrown it so hard. The clerk told her she was missing a great opportunity. He said she should take the little jerk out to spring training and by October he’d be in the series, making big money. The woman started yammering and the little boy started crying and the clerk started yelling, so I turned the whole thing off and got out of the damn dress and got rid of the purse I took to carry your money in, and came back. I think it was right after that I got into the softball game.”

“The softball game?”

“No. First I took car keys. Gawd, sugar, it’s funny walking in those cars knowing if you push the dingus, they’re suddenly going like hell. I was going to reach into those and take the keys, but I didn’t rightly want I should get nobody killed, so I took the keys out of the cars stacked up for the red light. There was a big convertible so I climbed into the back and turned the world on, after I pushed all the keys into the trash basket on the corner. Every yuk in the world starts blowing his horn and nobody can move. The guy at the wheel looked around and saw me and I smiled pretty at him and he shut his eyes and turned pale white. So before he could open them, I turned everything off again and went and got all the keys out of the cars stacked up the other way, since the light had changed. Everybody in such a damn hurry, sugar, it’s good for them to take a little time out.”

“I’m sure they enjoyed it.”

“Then I got into the softball game, way down the beach. A big old muscly lunk was showing off for his girl, busted into a ball game of little kids, smacking that ball way down the beach. So I found me a girl way off and took her cute little short shorts and her little halter and come back and practiced some until I could stop everything when that ball was just out in front of the plate, and then I’d go out and push it up six inches or down six inches, and the little boy pitching turned out having the biggest-breaking curve strike you ever see, and the big bassar — he like to sprained his back swinging, his girl laughing at him — got so mad he slang the bat at the little pitcher. But I stopped it in time, pushed it back toward him too hard I reckon, and he hadn’t ducked would have whomped his head clean off whistling by. He shaky like an old man, his girl leading him away.”

“You kept busy.”

“I would have said it got to be way late in the middle of the afternoon, but a little bit of time here goes a long way there. Took food I wanted offen a picnic, taken it to a quiet place and ate fast. Found me a brute man cuffin’ his little wife around, and I sure God played hell with him.” She smiled in fond reminiscence. “Park fellas painting a restroom close by. Ended that brute man up buck naked, painted bright green, mouth packed full of sand, sobbing like a big old fat baby.”

“Good Lord!”

“Found me a big-jaw, mean-eye wife blasting her little husband for staring at girls, him lying on a woolly blanket nearby looking heartsick, so I give her something to work on for sure. Towed over a mess of pretty little girls, one at a time, and like to clean covered him up. Turned the world back on and that woolly blanket was like onto a bucket of worms afore they could all get untangled and take off ever’ which way. She screamed for sure, but I don’t think he heard a word, just sat there wearing a funny little smile. Got up and walked clean away from her, still smiling. Never had so much fun in my whole life entire.”

But all that came later. At the time she gifted him with the pipe, the ring and the roses, he wasn’t certain he’d ever see her again. And that very probably wasn’t what Uncle Omar had planned for him — if, indeed, the old man had arranged things in some pattern he had yet to discern. He put the ring in his pocket, flipped the pipe into some plantings and jettisoned the roses in a trash basket. The continuous blare of horns from the expanding traffic jam was making the day hideous. There seemed to be a lot of women in swimming, screaming instructions to people on the shore. Suddenly he realized that an impressive number of police had begun to appear on the scene, blowing whistles, yelling at each other and expressing confusion.

As a tall young officer came hurrying by, Kirby turned away too quickly. The cop stopped abruptly and came toward him, staring at him intently. “Take off them glasses, buddy,” he said.

“But I’m only—”

An ugly-looking revolver was suddenly poised, aimed at the middle of his chest. “Hand over some identification, real slow and easy. Make me nervous and I twitch. My whole hand twitches something awful. Trigger finger and all.”

Kirby placed his wallet in the cop’s hand, very, very gently. The cop flipped it open, took one quick glance at it and began to grin and bounce up and down on his toes. “Oh, you fine handsome ten thousand bucks! Oh, you pretty package, you! What you say is that Corporal Tannenbaumer collared you. You keep mentioning that, hah? Promise me now, or I bust those teeth off at the gum line. Can you remember the name?”

“Corporal Tannenbaumer.”

“Now grab the back of your neck with both hands. That’s nice. Harry! Hey, Harry! Come see what I got!”

Harry, too, was lean and bronzed, with that look of eagles marred only slightly, as was Tannenbaumer, by a minor look of adenoidal vacuity.

Harry glanced at the wallet identification and said, “Honest to God, Tanny, you could fall in a sewer and come up wearing a gold bridge. Want I should go get the Sergeant?”

“No, Harry. For one grand you ignore the Sergeant. For one grand we take him in all by ourselves, and let the Sergeant worry about all this other crap.”

“For two, Tanny.”

“One and a half tops.”

“We got to walk him a hell of a ways, Tanny.”

“So cuff him to me.”

“Why not to me?”

“Because for ten grand, Harry, you would sap me and leave me face down here in the cruddy sand, so don’t squirrel around with me. What’s going on down the beach there anyhow?”

“The report said there was a lot of naked broads, Tanny, and there are a lot of naked broads. And the other report said like forty guys lost their car keys in traffic, and the tow trucks are working on it. And there is one guy painted green they’re still trying to catch. But the way it figures, some smart-ass crowd set up all the confusion so as they could clean out them stores across the way. The hell with it, Tanny. We got a good day’s work right here.”

“I got a good day’s work. You got one and a half, after I get mine. Hustle them cuffs, Harry.”

Tannenbaumer moved beside Kirby and held out his left wrist. Kirby, by instruction, held out his right wrist. Harry got the cuffs out and looked at Bonny Lee’s clothing on the sand. “What’s that stuff?”

“Girl clothes, for God’s sake. So what? Maybe he was figuring on disguising himself. Are you stalling for the Sergeant to get into the act? He’ll take the full ten and give us a couple cigars and a day off. Hurry!”

Harry made as though to snap the cuffs on the two wrists and suddenly he was standing there with both his own wrists handcuffed. Tannenbaumer stared at him. “How the hell! Harry, you cruddy thief, you’re stalling!”

“What are you arresting him for?” Bonny Lee demanded.

Harry and Tannenbaumer turned and stared at her. Tannenbamer said, “We got an ordinance underwear ain’t allowed on any public beach in Dade County. You go get some clothes on, kid, or you get took in.”

“Get these off me, Tanny,” Harry said plaintively. “The key’s in my shirt pocket.”

“You run while I’m busy, Winter, and I blow one of your knees into a bag of pebbles.”

Tannenbaumer unlocked one of the cuffs, and then it was on his own wrist. “My hand musta slipped,” he said apologetically. “Where’s the key?”

“You got the key, Tanny.”

“I had the key.”

“It musta fell in the sand, huh?”

“Harry, I think the Sergeant is headed this way. You, kid, you got to go get out of that underwear.”

“I’m not bothering anybody,” Bonny Lee said.

“I wasn’t so busy, Tanny, she’d be bothering me. How about you?”

“Shut up. Look, Harry. What we do now is, we cuff him to my other wrist, and we go in like this.”

“Won’t it look a little funny, Tanny?”

“We can’t help that.”

“How will we drive the car, Tanny?”

“We’ll all sit in the front. Hold your wrist out, Winter. Harry, I hand you my gun?”

“You didn’t hand it to me, Tanny. Hey, girl, you see him hand me the gun?”

“Leave her out of this. Give me your gun, Harry.”

“Hell, they musta both fell in the sand. Tanny, we’re not making this arrest very good, you know?”

“If they fell in the sand, where are they?”

“We been moving around, Tanny. Maybe we kicked sand over them.”

As they were both looking behind them at the sand, Bonny Lee sidled quickly over to Kirby, put the watch and chain into his hand and said swiftly, “Carry me outa here, sugar. I can’t carry you.”

Tannenbaumer turned around and yelled, “Get away from—” And was suddenly a red statue in the eerie light of a dying sun. Kirby looked at the watch. He had flipped the silver hand back twenty minutes. He was impelled by a feeling of haste until, by an effort of logic, he realized he was occupying an instant of no-time, and thus had all the time wanted to take. He stuffed the watch into his pocket and bent the pocket back around it. He put his arms around Bonny Lee’s waist. She felt like a stone statue covered with a layer of tough rubber. With a slow and steady effort he was able to lift her off the ground. He lifted her a couple of feet into the air and released her. He went around behind her, braced both hands against the rounded rigidities under the blue-green nylon and, his feet digging into the sand, moved her a dozen feet away. He was gratified to know he could get her away from there, but it was a rather disheartening effort.

He left her there and reviewed the situation. A natural caution made him wary of leaving a nothingness for the two cops to stare at. There might be a reduction of future trouble and future questions if he could give them a chance to talk each other into it being a case of mistaken identity. He walked to where red statues stood by a red refreshment stand and walked among them and selected a girl first. She was Bonny Lee’s size, and blonde, and would have been very lovely except for her deplorable lack of chin. The less inertia, he decided, the easier she would be to manage. She had on a wraparound skirt, and taking it off was like unwinding sheet tin from around a fence post. The halter top was a little more complicated. She had been caught in a frozen toothy smile. The underthings were lacy black below, uplift white above. By the time he had covered the fifty yards with her, he had, by trial and error, discovered the easiest way — to arrange her horizontally, hug her feet into his armpits and tow her. He stood her where Bonny Lee had been, rewarding Harry and Tannenbaumer with her dental smile. He remembered to leave his shoes behind when he went and selected a man. The effort was like pulling something which was being simultaneously pulled from the other direction. The moment effort stopped, the forward motion stopped. By the time he’d reached the scene with the stranger who resembled him in size only, his breath was creaking and his legs were weak with effort. He rotated the man and positioned him. He went wearily over to Bonny Lee and turned her into a horizontal position, ready for transit. He rested and reviewed the details. He recovered his wallet from Tannenbaumer’s shirt pocket, inserted one of his cards in the stranger’s wallet and put it in Tannenbaumer’s pocket. He picked up Bonny Lee’s clothing and wedged it under her arm. He shoved her purse and shoes and his shoes into the front of his shirt. He grasped her feet, hugging them under his right arm, and, leaning far forward, began to tow her toward the parking lot, two hundred yards away. He rested several times. Finally he tried to make the job easier. He pulled her feet apart, carefully bent her legs at the knees, then hooked her legs over the tops of his shoulders, plodded on, holding her wooden ankles in his hands.

Suddenly the world went bright. Bonny Lee slammed him with a tremendous impact, seat first, right against his shoulders, and banged him headlong into the sand and went tumbling end over end beyond him, with a yelp of pain and fright and a welter of flying garments. He sat up, spitting sand, and looked back. The chinless girl stood screaming, and the manacled cops were in tandem, chasing the substitute.

“Whyn’t you watch it!” Bonny Lee shrilled at him.

“Are you hurt?”

“You didn’t do me any good, you silly bassar! What the hell are you—”

He spun her into red silence. He got up, saw that he had given himself a half-hour, arranged her for transit again, and took her to the parking lot. He found a small maintenance building with a wall screening it from the road. The building itself stood between them and the beach. He straightened her legs and stood her against the wall. The look of indignation and anger was frozen on her face. He tried to brush the sand out of her hair, but the small particles remained in the air near her head. He looked in all directions to be certain they were safe, then pushed the watch stem.

“—trying to do?” she said, catching her balance. She looked around. “Oh.”

“The time ran out on me.”

“You shoulda checked, Kirby. You could get somebody hurt. You move something and then turn the world on, and it goes like hell. I seen a fella comes to Rio’s and gives me a bad time, just walking out of the ocean, so I give him a good lift up and back, like to sprain a gut, then pushed that dingus and he went on up like out of a cannon, roaring and going end over end and landing back in the water fifty feet out.”

“Are you hurt?”

She fingered her shoulder and her hip. “You like to brush-burn half the hide off me, sugar. What do we do now?”

“Let’s start by you putting your clothes on.”

“Fair enough. Shees marie, I’m pooped for sure. Where’s the cops?”

“Chasing the wrong guy.”

“You put another guy there?”

“And a girl.”

“Lot of work, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but we shouldn’t be careless with it, Bonny Lee. If too many things happen which can’t be explained, somebody is going to figure out that—”

She buttoned her blouse and slapped the rest of the sand out of her hair. “What you don’t know about people, Kirby, anything they can’t explain, they make up something suits them. If suddenly a guy can fly just like a bird, he’d know for sure it was clean living and deep breathing.” She opened her purse and fixed her mouth. “Sugar, let me have that big old watch a minute.”

“Sorry. We’re getting into the car and getting out of here.”

“Getting bossy, hey?”

They got into the little Sunbeam. The parking lot did not exit on the same street as the traffic tie-up. She stopped at the exit to the lot, the motor running. She frowned at him.

“What’s the matter, Bonny Lee?”

“I was figuring out something. Don’t mess with that watch while we’re moving, sugar. The car would stop cold dead and you’d keep on going. I’d have to clean you off the dash and the windshield with a sponge.”

“Uh — thanks. What were you doing that was making all that confusion?”

“Lots of things. Tell you later.”

“Where are we going?”

“We need a safe place, don’t we? I’m busting my biggest rule. No man was ever going to set foot in my place. Ever’body knows about it, and you can sure get in without being seen.”

“How?”

“Sugar, sometimes you’re right stupid.”

“Oh. Of course. Sorry.”

“What time is it?”

“Twenty after eleven.”

“In the morning!”

“In the morning, Bonny Lee.”

She had a garage apartment in an old part of the city, behind a stately old house of Spanish-Moorish design which, she told him, had been cut up into small apartments and was occupied almost exclusively by old ladies with small incomes. “Coming and going at all hours, and the kind of work I do, I give ’em something to cluck over,” she said. “But it keeps the men scared off from bothering me here, and I get along with them, most of them. And they bring me cakes and stuff.”

She explained how he could get in, and dropped him off a block away. He gave her ten minutes and spent the time strolling along the narrow quiet street on a shady, overgrown sidewalk. He leaned against an iron fence and, when he was not observed, he stepped into the red world. It was easier to carry shoes than to wear them. He went back to the house she had pointed out. In a lawn across the street a sprinkler made a static pattern of shining pink droplets hanging in the silent air. A small dog paused for its moment of forever, staring intently up into a tree, ears forward.

He walked along the driveway. Three old ladies sat at a metal table in the back yard in the shade of a beach umbrella, mouths ajar, knitting needles rigid. He went into the open door of the garage and turned to the right as she had told him, and up the stairs. Pulling the screen door open at the top of the stairs was like opening the weighty door of a vault. Indoors, the redness seemed more oppressive, but he could see that by normal light it would be a tiny cheerful place with bright draperies, straw furniture, gay rugs and pillows. There were framed publicity pictures of her on one wall and he peered at them with approval through the bloody murk.

She was in the small bedroom, sitting on the dressing table bench. She had pulled her blouse down from her right shoulder and was stopped in the moment of rubbing something into the abrasion from her fall. The room had a three-quarter bed, ornamental iron bars on the window, a deep window seat, a bamboo chaise, a vase of wilted flowers. He stood behind her and started to pop into her world and then hesitated. He had almost fifteen minutes left. And too much had been happening too fast. Her head was turned sharply so she could see her shoulder. He kissed the side of her throat. In this world it had the rigid somewhat waxy texture of polished wood. He went over and sat on the bed. The unyielding rigidity of it startled him for a moment before he remembered that in the redness everything was fibrous, toughened, yielding reluctantly to forces and pressures.

He looked at her, sitting erect, six feet away. Her back was arched, her shoulders good, the waist slender, the lime slacks plumped to the pleasant tensions of her ripeness. There was a tantalizing familiarity in the back of his mind and after a moment he identified it. He had seen a television play — two years ago? — a fantasy about a department store dummy, played by a blonde actress — Anne Francis? — and after she had been free for a little while, they had forced her back into the store, and in the final scene she had become rigid and waxen again, frozen in position, displaying a summer frock.

Bonny Lee seemed just as unreal, just as unalive, but he could move his thumb a quarter of an inch and bring her to glowing life. He had not had time to think about her, actually. But now he could take time which was no time at all, because it was time the world was not using. He felt toward her a vast and tender gratitude. She had cut briskly through a thousand dreads and fears and mysteries and had brought him joyously to his delayed maturity. It would be all too easy, he sensed, out of his new-found confidence and arrogance to devaluate the gift, to use cheap and easy words — shallow, ignorant, amoral, much as the swaggering adolescent feels obligated to jeer at the girl he so clumsily seduces.

The revelations of Bonny Lee gave him a new perspective on himself and on the world. Having thought himself uniquely inadequate, he now wondered how many other Kirby Winters there were, milling about in the world, winking at the right times, laughing at the punch lines, handling the little flirtations very well indeed, but poised to run in terror if it appeared the lady was trying to say yes.

He remembered the sound of the rain on the tin roof of the old Hudson, and the feral graspings and gabblings of Hazel Broochuk, and how weeks of plotting and importunings all came to a ghastly inconclusive end in the incredible clumsiness of those few minutes. He could have gotten as much excitement and almost as much pleasure by falling into a hay baler. And he remembered her thin pocked face in the faint light, twisted with contempt as she wriggled back into her skirt, and remembered the dreadful words which had remained forever in his mind, written in a puckering of scar tissue. “You not worth a goddamn, boy. You done me no good. Owning a hammer don’t make nobody a carpenter, boy, so you better leave me off down in the middle of town. I’ll say where.”

And there had been no one to hustle the crashed pilot into another aircraft, and the nerve was gone, and he spent thirteen years on the ground — until Bonny Lee erased the myths, peeled the scars away, showed him the bed was a picnic shared, rather than a lonely stage, where instinct was the only value and the only necessity.

Five minutes remaining.

He hefted the watch in his hand. It was the only object in the red world which did not have that odd sticky drag of inertia. And he felt an overwhelming awe at all the things it represented, at all the temptations implicit in its ownership. Here was absolute power, and total corruption. Here was a freedom so complete it became not freedom at all, but enthrallment to the witchery of being able to dislocate time itself. Here was invisibility, voyeurism, invincibility, wealth — in fact, all the night dreamings of adolescence, in one-hour subjective packages. Here was, in a specialized sense, immunity.

The possibilities of it gave him a sense of reckless, dizzy elation, yet at the same time made him distrust himself. The obligations implicit in the possession of such a device were severe. Use of it had to be related to some responsible ethical structure. And a good part of the responsibility was to conceal the power and the purpose of the device from the world.

Suppose, he thought, there were fifty of these in the world, or five hundred? Chaos, anarchy, confusion and fear. It would be as though a new mutation had occurred in mankind, a time of the superman, making privacy meaningless, making all ownership conditional.

Suddenly he was filled with an awed respect for Omar Krepps. For twenty years he’d had this edge, this advantage, and he had kept it as quiet as possible. Had he displayed the abilities this gave him, other men might have conducted research in this same direction. Apparently Uncle Omar had decided that this device would turn the world to a shambles were it released. He could see a pattern in the things Omar had done. He had quieted the publicity about his gambling winnings by returning and purposely losing an amount almost as great as the amount he had first won. He had made amateur magic his hobby — to help cover any slip he might make. He had avoided all personal publicity. And he had hidden behind great wealth, acquired quickly — yet so short was public memory, it was as though Omar Krepps and his ancestors had been rich since an earlier century.

The noise and brightness and movement of reality came into the room, and within the first two seconds he turned the silver hand back, halting reality. Bonny Lee’s hand had moved higher on her shoulder. Her head had turned slightly. He had sunk into a sudden softness of the bed and then it became rigid again, but in a more comfortable contour.

How, then, had Uncle Omar acquired the money? Wealth, he realized, is a strange abstraction concerned with the exchange of bits of paper, signing them, filing them, recording them at the right times, in the right places. Stock manipulation would not be too difficult, once the procedures were understood. He could imagine Uncle Omar trotting busily through a red hour, inserting the proper orders in the proper files, using the red time to give him the same advantage as hindsight. Once acquisitions had been made, control could be turned over to Krepps Enterprises, and money had a knack of multiplying, when there was enough of it.

But if Omar Krepps had been so aware of the potential menace of the device he had created, why hadn’t he let it die with him?

The reason, possibly, was a kind of egotism. Someone had to know. And, long ago, Uncle Omar had apparently selected Kirby as the inheritor of this fantastic power, had judged him capable of using it well, had seen to it that Kirby acquired the academic background which would enhance a judicious use of the device. The courses which his uncle had insisted he take, and which had seemed so impractical at the time, now made increasing sense. Sociology, psychology, philosophy, ancient history, comparative religions, ethics and logic, anthropology, archeology, languages, semantics, aesthetics. And then eleven years of the exercise of judgment in a context which required no competitive instinct, and made secrecy, reserve, evasion and rootlessness a habit of life.

He now sensed that it was an ideal background for the new owner of such absolute power. It created a minimum risk of the device being used for violent, random, frivolous, acquisitive purposes. It directed the new owner to use it for the maximum good of mankind.

But, in that case, why had Uncle Omar not explained the whole situation long ago? Perhaps because Uncle Omar had thought him lacking in strength and resolution, had been impatient with him, had even told Mr. Wintermore that his nephew was a ninny. And then, after the warning attack, Uncle Omar had apparently prepared for death by setting up a curiously random situation. The watch first and — a year later — the letter. He knew the letter would relate to the watch. What if he had put it in a drawer and forgotten it? What if he had been in a moving vehicle, a car, train or plane when he had fiddled with the silver hand? Why had Uncle Omar so instructed both Kirby and Wilma Farnham that immediately after his death they would be in grave difficulty? Surely Uncle Omar could have anticipated what would happen.

It all seemed to be some kind of a test, but he could not see any consistent pattern in it.

For the first time he examined the watch with great care. The ornate initials OLK on the back were worn thin. There was a catch near the stem so the back could be opened. He hesitated, put his thumbnail against the catch and snapped it open. There was a second case inside, of smooth gray metal, with absolutely no way to open it. On the interior concavity of the gold back was engraved something else, almost as ornate as the initials, unworn. He translated, with some difficulty, the Latin words. “Time waits for one man.” It had that ring of slightly sour humor so typical of Omar Krepps. He snapped the case shut and for the first time he began to wonder about the power source. It would seem plausible to assume that distortions of space, time and energy could be achieved only through expenditures of vast power. The watch seemed to be permanently sealed. It had an old-fashioned bulkiness. Certainly the distortion of time could not be achieved through purely mechanical means. He held it to his ear and again thought he heard the faint musical note, in a minor key, like a faraway wind in high tension wires. And he wondered if its capacities could be used up, if it would work only for so long, or for so many times. That sort of information would probably be in the letter.

What if Wintermore had fiddled with the extra hand?

He felt exasperated at his uncle. It did not seem possible Omar would have left so many things to chance.

What next? The watch, properly and carefully used, with sufficient advance planning, would enable him to solve the problems of the various criminal actions and civil actions. But it would have to be done in a way which would quiet public interest rather than enhance it. A total notoriety — as Uncle Omar had realized — would make life impossible. One would be sought at the ends of the earth by nuts, monsters, shysters, maniacs, fanatics, reporters.

He knew he had started badly. Letting it get into the hands of Bonny Lee had been an inadvertent violation of the implied trust and responsibility. It should be treated with as much gravity, care and respect as a cobalt bomb. Four times he had tried to escape from Uncle Omar’s control into a life of normality, of the small goals and pleasures of the average life. He knew that chance was gone, unless he denied the responsibility by smashing the watch, or dropping it into the sea. That was one possible decision, but he could not make it until he had used the watch to remove all pressures, regain anonymity.

Again there were five minutes left. He looked at Bonny Lee and felt a great galloping rush of desire for her. But electric as the urge was, there was a strange placidity about it, an assured and comforting smugness. In Rome last year he had desired the woman named Andy just as much, but there had been no flavor of happiness to it. And because it had made him wretched, it had distorted desire into too significant a thing. So now something new had been discovered. Frustration bloated the role of sex, kept it in the center of the stage and gave it all the lines. It had stunted the other aspects of his life through its false importance. Release had suddenly put it in proper context. It was dwindled, and could now share the lines with the other actors — essential to the play but not obsessional, suitably dramatic but linked to reality, capable of comedy as well.

I was a legless man, he thought, and watched everyone in the world walking and running and climbing, and the attribute of leglessness colored every reaction to some degree. I pretended I had legs, so no one would notice. Now I have legs, and though walking is a joy, legs are now just a part of living, and the awareness of them comes and goes. I accept the fact of having legs.

He went over to Bonny Lee, bent and put his lips against the rigidity of her mouth and pressed the world back to life. The warmth and softness came in a twinkling and she gave a convulsive leap of fright, a small squeak of dismay. The brown eyes narrowed.

“That’s right sneaky,” she whispered. “Like to jump clean outa my skin, you bassar. It’s not a kind of thing anybody is ever going to get used to, sugar.”

She wiped her fingers on a tissue and went into the other room and closed the heavy plank door and bolted it. She moved casually into his arms, kissing him lightly on the chin, and gave a huge, shuddering yawn. “I’m pooped entire, Kirby.” She trudged over and sat heavily on the bed and yawned again and knuckled her eyes. “Don’t you go near the window so any of those biddies can see you.”

“I’ve got a lot of problems to think about, Bonny Lee.”

She kicked her sandals off and stretched out on the bed. “Can’t think of a thing until I get some sleep. Aren’t you bushed too?”

“Yes, I guess I am.” He went over and sat on the edge of the bed and leaned over her and kissed her with considerable and lengthy emphasis.

She chuckled. “Man, you’re not as sprung as I am.”

“Bonny Lee?”

“No, sugar. It would be a waste of talent for sure. Please let me sleep, sugar, and then we’ll see. You oughta sleep too. Whyn’t you go on out on the couch where you can quieten down nice?”

“I shouldn’t waste time sleeping, with all that—”

She silenced him with a sudden gesture, bit her lip and said, “Gimme the watch, sugar.”

“I really don’t think you ought to—”

“I wanta try something, stupid! I’m not going to get cute. I’m too gawddamn tired to get cute. You gotta trust me, or we are going absolutely no place at no time. Hand it over.”

He hesitated, gave it to her reluctantly. She grasped the stem of the watch. In something that seemed like a flicker of movement just a little too fast to be visible, she was in an entirely different position, the watch on the bed a few inches from her slack hand, her eyes closed, breathing slowly, deeply, audibly through her parted lips. He spoke to her and she did not answer. He shook her and she whined. When he shook her again she reached for the watch. An instant later she had flickered into a slightly different position, and she was completely bare. One instant she was wearing her clothes. The next instant they were in midair beside the bed, falling to the floor. He woke her again and she mumbled and growled and took the watch and flickered into a different position. He touched her shoulder and she came awake quite easily. Her eyes were slightly puffy with sleep. She yawned and stretched luxuriously. With the awakenings, the entire procedure had taken just a couple of minutes.

She smiled at him and said, her voice soft and husky, “Three whole hours. Mmmmm. Now you.” She wriggled over to the wall. “Get comfortable first, sugar, cause the damn bed and pillow get hard as a stone. Better strip on account of clothes feel sorta like cement.”

He stretched out and turned the world red. He made the full twist, turning it back the maximum of one hour. She was sculptured of smooth dark red wood, propped on one elbow, smiling at him. He was in the rigid hollow in the bed his weight had made. He tried to go to sleep, but the clothing was oppressive. He got up and tried to take it off, but it was as stubborn as thick lead foil, so he clicked back into the world and stripped rapidly, his back to her, his face hot with the confusion of modesty, of a daylight intimacy he had never known before. In haste and an awkward confusion he stretched out again and flipped into redness and soon drifted into sleep. Suddenly he was awakened and her head was on the pillow, facing him, a few inches away.

“Take another hour, sugar,” she whispered. “Take two. I can wait.”

He went back into redness and into sleep, and was awakened with her smiling at him as before. “Doesn’t it work good?” she whispered.

He yawned, marveling at her quick instinct for the utility of the device. It was something he would never have thought of — or at least not for a long time.

“That was one strange thing about Uncle Omar. Sometimes he seemed to be able to get along on no sleep at all. We wondered about it sometimes.”

“That old man had it made, Kirby. It’s like only a couple of minutes since I woke up for the last time. You want a little more sleep?”

“N-Not at the moment.”

“You know, I din think so, somehow,” she whispered. “This must be my day for breaking all the rules there are.” She moved closer. She hooked a warm firm silky leg over his. She was so close all he could see was the single huge brown eye, moist and bright, feel the heat and weight of her breath. “It’s so nice to love you,” she sighed. “Because you’re sorta shaky and scared, kinda. And sweet. What you do, you make it important, Kirby. And that makes me go all funny, like marshmallows and warm soup, and my heart is way up here going chunk chunk chunk, and I almost wanta cry, and let’s make this time all slow and sweet and dreamy and gentle and closer than anybody ever got to either one of us, and be talking to me. Be saying the nice things, and I shall say them back, ever’ one.”