6 Intersections
So much hinged on such little things, the minor habits of the people, the rules and assumptions of the times, the customs, aspirations, fears, all the small unnoticed things that made up the mosaic of everyday life. An agent for TPAES had to remember these and immerse himself or herself in them, like a person plunging into a raging, storm-torn sea.
Agents Pines and Northwest had spent virtual months (virtual in the sense they had been passed in a time bubble that held them in place during the flow of time elsewhere) learning about all sorts of trivia. For example, a fact crucial to their plans was that Illinois did not require a drivers' license until the 1930s. Until then, anyone who could drive, well, could legally drive. And that included sixteen-year-olds like Charles Reichart, a classmate of Angelique's who had been driving—out of family necessity—for nearly a year now.
Everyone called him "Chazz." A boy a little taller than average, shy, but both smart and strong, Chazz was just the type of high-school student whom everyone, including teachers, overlooked. He needed glasses but didn't wear them often—spectacles were expensive to replace, so unless he was seated and reading or writing, they stayed in the case.
He played a so-so game of football. Chazz was farsighted and sometimes had trouble if the ball came his way, but he did not often handle the ball, and was just good enough to be on the Bradbury Bandits team as a second-string lineman. He never joined in the locker-room banter, never boasted about girls he had kissed, and kept quiet when the other team members grew raucous. He had a fondness for crossword puzzles. He was the editor of the high school newspaper, the Blazon, and though he wrote well, for the most part he simply edited and corrected stories that the reporters turned in. He was in the tenth grade, and a gifted English student, so he had no problem correcting the grammar of seniors.
He and Angelique had been in the same classrooms since first grade. And, as Mabel had discovered, Chazz had long had a crush on Angelique but—
She didn't know it. And unless events changed in this time line, she would die before learning about it.
You see, his family lived on Lake Street, in a rental house. His dad worked for the White Blossom Flour Company as a floor foreman. Chazz had two younger brothers. All three boys slept in the same room, because it was a small house and there were no other rooms. His family owned an automobile, a 1914 Willys-Knight that sometimes ran and sometimes didn't. His father had bought it third-hand. Chazz had learned to drive it and used it when a necessity arose—taking Mom to the doctor, driving her to the grocery store, and things like that.
In short, the Reicharts were poor. Not hardscrabble, dirt-poor, but bottom-rung-of-the-middle-class poor. The Flannigans were Greentown aristocracy—they owned a big house and rental properties and a half interest in the Luminary Theater, where for a dime kids could see Tom Mix as a cowpoke and James Pierce as Tarzan of the Apes and Laurel and Hardy as two inept but well-meaning loafers, and Charley Chaplin as an acrobatic tramp and Louise Brooks, with her smoldering eyes, and a thousand other shadows on the screen. Mr. Walter Flannigan was the chairman of the Greentown Savings and Loan Bank. He was a somebody.
Chazz Reichart felt as if he were nobody. He would have loved to walk Angelique home after school (though he would have to walk a mile in the wrong direction and then re-walk it to get home again, he would have done it every day). He would have loved to share a soda with her at the counter in Holtzclaw's Drug Store (except the Reichart boys rarely had nickels to squander on sodas). He would have loved to dance with her—if only just once (but he was from the far side of the Illinois Central tracks). So, even though they were in the same classroom, he almost never even spoke to her.
Nobody knew about this except him—no one in 1927, that is.
But years later, when he became a newspaper columnist, he had once written a melancholy, sweetly sad "From the Lookout Post" Sunday column—it had appeared in more than a hundred U.S. newspapers on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941—in which he reminisced about his long-lost love, Angie (as the column called her).
The column became popular and was reprinted in many other newspapers and in books. E.B. White referred to it in a story in The New Yorker. Five years later, in 1946, Frank Capra turned the story into a film, Angie, that became a holiday staple even later, when TV came along. The column even won Chazz a major award, but since other things happened on that column-publication day away off in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, other news soon overwhelmed his success. However, his reputation as a newspaperman did get Chazz, who was forty that year and too old to be drafted, an appointment as a front-line war correspondent, beginning in 1942.
Chazz covered the fighting in North Africa and in Italy. He was in the second wave landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day in June 1944. Not long after that, still unmarried, he died in a farmer's field in France. He is buried in the Normandy American Cemetery, his marker one of 9,387, and indistinguishable from the other crosses over the graves of those who followed his faith. No one has ever once visited that grave. After his death, the newspaper syndicate he worked for collected his stories in a book, Under Fire: Stories of Men at War. It hit the best-seller list briefly. And then people forgot.
However, the book and all the rest of his columns, peacetime and wartime, in the yellowing pages of old newspapers, remained as a sort of memorial. Long after his time, librarians microphotographed them and recorded them on film and microfiche and then still later other technicians digitized them, and that is how the TPAES happened on the one for December 7, 1941. Mabel realized that Chazz had never married, and she found two dozen later articles by him that briefly referenced his angel or his Angie.
And that fact was the reason why a brunette woman with big round spectacles and wearing a severe gray dress with a matching hat knocked on the Reichart door on the afternoon of October 31, 1927.
Oddly, at the moment she was doing this, across town the same woman, or rather a different and younger version of her, was also encouraging Angelique Flannigan to unburden herself of her fears and worries and doubts. That is possible when one is a time traveler.
Mrs. Reichart, who had been preparing a chicken for roasting, came to the door wearing an apron. "I'm sorry," she said. "We don't need to buy anything—"
"Is this where Charles Reichart lives?" Mabel II asked her.
"He's—my son. What's wrong?" the woman asked with the quick fear of a woman used to troubles.
"Nothing," the stranger said with a reassuring smile. "I'm Molly Brown, and I work for the Farmers' Guardian." That was a state-wide newspaper, printed three times a week, and sold mostly by mail subscription to people too poor to pay for a big daily paper to be tossed on their doorstep. "I may have a writing job for Charles, if he's interested."
"Oh, I—well. Come in, please. The place is a mess."
It wasn't a mess. It was simply poor, with a sofa that looked a little saggy and a little threadbare, a battered wood-cased radio on a bookcase, some cheap, unframed reproductions of art on the walls. Mrs. Reichart called her son, and Chazz came in, looking worried, peering through spectacles at the visitor. His face was pimply—not badly so, though—with brown hair parted dead center and slicked down. He was not handsome, but not ugly, either. And not exactly average. His face had character, and a girl could get interested in it.
Mabel II introduced herself as Molly. "The Guardian," she said, "wants to introduce a page of high-school news. We'll have young writers composing columns for us in which they talk about what it's like to be a high-school student in today's world. Just the little everyday things, you know. Football games and pep rallies, cramming for exams, hanging out at the soda parlor, dances, troubles and triumphs. We'd like you to write one of the first columns. If it goes over, we might hire you to do one a week."
"I—I'm not much of a writer," Chazz said.
"Yes, he is," his mother told Mabel, putting a hand on her boy's shoulder.
"I know he is," Mabel replied with a smile. "I've read some of his pieces in his school newspaper. Charles, you have a way with words. Now, I understand your school is having a fall dance tonight."
He took a deep breath and adjusted his glasses. "Uh—yes."
"So, I'm asking you to attend the dance, dance at least once with a girl, and then by next week write a column about school dances and how students feel about them. We'll need no less than two and a half typed pages, double-spaced, and no more than three. You'll need to drop it in the mail—I'll give you an envelope for that—by Wednesday of next week. Will you do that for us?"
"Sure, he will," Mrs. Reichart said.
"I—I wasn't planning to go—I don't have a date."
Mabel laughed. "As I remember high school, that isn't a problem. About half the boys and girls came without a date. Can you go?"
"Uh, well—sure, I could. I guess."
Mabel reached into her purse. "Here is five dollars," she said. "If the Guardian goes for your stuff, you'll get five dollars for each column they run. If they don't like it, you get to keep this first payment anyway. Is that fair?"
"M-more than fair," Chazz said. He accepted the five-dollar bill and stared at its portrait of Benjamin Harrison. "Thank you."
"Here is the envelope. It's already stamped. Just put your column in it and drop it in the mail so it will go out on Wednesday. Thank you, and good luck!"
Mabel II said her goodbyes and walked out of the house. A few blocks away, Pacifica, also in period disguise, leaned over to open the passenger door of a 1925 Model T Ford. "How'd it go?"
"He's hooked," Mabel said. "You sure you can drive this thing?"
"Oh, sure."
"Can he, if we need him to?"
Pacifica chuckled. "It's easier than a golf cart. Except for starting it when the engine's cold. Then you have to get out and wind it up with a crank!"
"But can Chazz drive it?"
"Sure, he can!" Pacifica said. "That's why Major B. picked this one. You have the letters for the Reicharts and the Flannigans?"
"Yep. It's gonna seem strange to them when they're delivered in two years."
Pacifica said, "This is the biggest risk we're taking. This could really alter the time line."
Mabel replied, "We have to do it, though. Otherwise, they wouldn't know to liquidate some of their holdings—Mr. Reichart has about a thousand dollars in stock that comes as a Christmas bonus from his company every year—and invest in General Dynamics Electric Boat and the Container Corporation before the markets crash in October of '29. You saw the simulations. They'll both get through the crash fine, and the Reicharts will wind up comfortably well off, if they follow the suggestions—and they probably will, because they'll both think the advice came from a savvy old Army buddy from World War I. The Flannigans won't lose their silk shirts. Oh, they'll be less rich than they are now, but they'll cushion the blow with the investments."
Pacifica fiddled with levers, turned the key, and stepped on a silvery button on the floor of the car, and the engine chugged to life. "Now we have to make sure Chazz gets the key to this thing."
"I'll have Dipper hold it for him."
"Here's hoping we pull this off," Pacifica said.
"Yeah." Mabel II reached for a seat belt that wasn't there and then settled back and sighed.
"What's wrong?"
Mabel shrugged. "Just—if everything goes perfectly, if it clicks, then you and I get a re-set. You won't be in the TPAES. We won't have worked together for ten years. I mean, I think I might still become an agent—but I'll miss our ten years."
"Me, too. But you know, at least Major B promised we'd both remember everything. Even if we re-set to being nineteen years old, we'll have all this. Uh—do you really think you'll join the TPAES when you're twenty again? I mean, my only reason for joining was that Dipper—our Dipper, I mean—well, because he didn't make it."
"I'm thinking about it," Mabel II said. "Right now, I'm dating a cutie from 5,412. And maybe I'm supposed to do that. I don't know. Somehow I think I've got a great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson who might be kinda dependent on that relationship working out."
"Ew, I don't like guys who are that much older," Pacifica said.
"Younger," Mabel corrected.
"Whatever." Pacifica turned onto Parkside Street. "Funny how in the alternate time line you and Dipper came back to Gravity Falls that next summer, but in ours you didn't get back until you were both fifteen and Wendy had had that big fight with her dad and she moved away to Portland and dropped completely out of sight."
"I know," Mabel said. "Dipper finally got over her, though they were still texting each other when, you know, it happened."
Pacifica hesitated and then asked, "Do you think—oh, forget it."
"Do I think that if our Dipper survives, you and he might have a chance?"
In a small voice, Pacifica said, "Yeah."
"If you don't," Mabel said with assurance, "my brother is a dumb-dumb. And he's never been that in any time line yet." She sniffled. "I used to call him Brobro," she whispered.
"You will again," Pacifica said.
They chugged down the street toward the high school at the sedate speed of twenty-five miles per hour. Maybe the car wouldn't be used at all, maybe it would. One thing Blendin Blandin had learned in this time line, when he struggled to reconstitute a broken TPAES after Weirdmageddon, was that all time everywhere was in constant flux. When it wasn't working right, when it had to be repaired, plans to fix it had to be flexible, too.
If only they could foresee every potential problem, that is.
And of course, no one, not even Time Baby, could possibly do that.