Chapter 12: Depressing
(March 1933)
Almost as soon as the twins woke up, the wall said, "Prepare for time shift."
And then came the disorienting dizziness and the quick fade-out and slower fade-in of time travel.
"Yikes!" Mabel said, staring at her brother. "You're some kind of farmer!"
Dipper wore faded overalls—the kind with the bib over the chest and two shoulder straps—what was the old-timey name? Galluses. Two suspenders that fastened onto brass buttons on the overalls bib and kept it up. Under it he wore a worn blue work shirt, long-sleeved, but the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He noticed patches, not very well sewn, on both knees of the overalls, and he took off his headgear, a straw hat, sweat-stained and showing a lot of use. He felt something wadded in the front pocket of the jeans and pulled out what looked like a canvas bag. He opened it and peered inside. A long way down—like five feet, impossible because the bag was less than a foot long—he saw a jumble of things, his findings from their earlier trip. "Bag of holding," he said, replacing it.
"What do I look like?" Mabel asked. "Where's a mirror?"
He looked at her. "Uh, you're wearing, like, a long pink dress with white polka-dots. It, uh, it's not new, Sis. Pretty faded out. It has a rounded collar—butterfly collar? With a darker pink border, and your hair bow is the same material as the dress. You have a shorter hairdo than normal. Wow, my boots and your shoes are really scuffed up."
"I guess we're poor," Mabel said.
"Looks like it. Let's see. I need a dollar." He reached into his pocket, and his pocket supplied—not a paper bill, but a big round silver coin. "Guess we won't starve. But where are we?"
That was a good question. They stood in knee-high dry grass in what seemed to be a roofless room, brick walls on either side, wooden fences at the narrow ends. "I think we're between two buildings," Mabel said. "In a narrow alley?"
"Let's find a way out."
"And breakfast!"
"OK, and breakfast."
At one end, the fence was solid enough to block them. They went down to the other outlet of the alley, passing a mound of ashes—as though someone had built a campfire there a few days earlier—and discovered that some boards in the fence at that end were loose and would swivel. Dipper moved them, Mabel climbed through, and he followed her. "Where is this place?" he asked. They were in a grim, gray urban street, with only boarded-up businesses across from them. "I hear voices," Dipper added.
"Yeah, I think this way," Mabel said, taking the lead. They turned a corner and saw a busier street ahead—some people were moving down there, anyway—and headed in that direction.
"Are you warm enough?" Dipper asked. They were underdressed for the climate—the air was nippy, and they had no coats.
"I'll be OK," Mabel said. "What are those people doing?"
Across the street a crowd had gathered in front of a shop. They were curiously quiet—and dressed no better than Dipper and Mabel, most of them in worn, shabby clothes. Outside a furniture store, a radio set, a big one the size of a small bookcase, stood atop a table and broadcasting in a scratchy, tinny kind of tone: ". . . and Charles Evans Hughes, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme court, is congratulating Mr. Roosevelt, now President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and you can hear the crowd cheering. Now President Roosevelt is preparing to address the microphones, and we will bring you his inaugural address. The crowd is becoming quiet . . . ."
"This is 1932," Dipper said. "No, wait, 1933, I think. Mabel, we're in the Great Depression!"
In a firm, rather high-pitched voice, the new President told the audience the only thing they had to fear was fear itself and assured them that his administration would work to solve the many problems facing the nation—and that the nation would endure as it had always endured.
And not three storefronts away, a straggling line of men, women, and children stood outside a doorway with a sign above it: Free Soup, Bread, and Coffee.
"There's a restaurant!" Mabel said, starting forward.
Dipper grabbed her arm and stopped her. "It's a bread line," he said. "It's just for people that are dead broke. We've got some money. We can't take their food."
"Oh. But, Dipper, there are so many of them—"
"It was a bad time," Dipper said. "Come on."
The inaugural address had ended, and the crowd broke up, the people looking vague and lost as they walked without any obvious destination in mind. Dipper and Mabel joined the drift down the street. A bony, ragged man leaned against a building as if for support. As Dipper and Mabel approached, he said in a weakly pleading voice, "Mister, can you spare a brother a dime? I got my wife and babies to feed, and we ain't eat in two days now."
"Oh," Mabel said again, a single word overflowing with pain.
"Here," Dipper said, handing over the silver dollar. The man took it, stared at it on his palm, and then, to Dipper's embarrassment, seized his hand and kissed it. "That's OK," he said. "Really, it's OK."
"God bless you," the man choked out. He turned and shuffled away, still leaning against the building as if he would fall without the support.
"Is he drunk?" Mabel whispered.
"He's starving, I think," Dipper said. He saw a tear slip down Mabel's cheek.
They came to a place with a trickle of customers going in and coming out, these people a little better dressed than most others they had passed. On the glass window a sign had been painted in gilt letters: HORN & HARDART AUTOMAT.
"I've seen movies with these places in them. We can get some food here," Dipper said, reaching into his pocket. "The whole place is like a giant vending machine!"
They walked in. Small square tables with seats for four filled the floor space. A cashier manned a register just inside the door. Dipper paused, looking at the walls, lined with compartments, like post-office boxes. People were opening them and taking food out. Dipper coughed and said to the cashier, "Excuse me, my sister and I are in from the country and this is the first time we've been inside a restaurant. Uh, how do we do this?"
The cashier, a kindly-looking woman in her fifties, said, "Each menu item costs from five cents to fifty cents. The doors take nickels. Put the right number of nickels in the slot, turn the handle, and open the door and take your food." Quietly, she added, "You do have some money, don't you?"
"Yes, we do," Dipper said. "Thank you."
He told Mabel, "I'm going to take some nickels out of my pocket." His hand came out with a fistful. "OK, we're going to have breakfast, but we can't overdo it. Just get enough, no seconds and no doubling up on anything. We don't want to stand out."
"Could we take some outside to the hungry people?" Mabel whispered.
"We'll do what we can. I don't think they let you take food out, though."
The process was really easy. By now they had realized that breakfast time had passed—it was at least early afternoon—so they settled for pretty basic food, a couple of sandwiches, two pieces of apple pie, and two cups of surprisingly good coffee—at a nickel a cup!
They found a table away from the others and settled in there. "So—where are we?" Mabel asked.
"We'll find out as soon as we get outside." Dipper bit into his sandwich and then gagged.
"What's wrong?" Mabel asked, pounding on his back. "Are you OK?"
Dipper pulled a slip of paper from his mouth. Except it wasn't paper, but some paperoid substance. With writing on it. "This was inside my sandwich," he said.
"Inspected by Number 1313!" Mabel guessed.
"No. I think it's a clue." Dipper passed it to Mabel, who read the strange message:
771 777 / 7 777 / 771 1711 17 111 111 / 111 1111 17 171 711 / 7111 1 17 7171 1111 / 71111 17777 77711 / 17 7 1711 17 71 7 11 7171 / 111 7 / 1171 11 71 711 / 17 71 777 77 17 1711 7177 171717
"This isn't a code," she said.
"Finish eating and we'll figure it out."
Mabel dried the damp slip with a napkin. The black ink didn't run. "Yep, this is something all future-y," she said, handing it back.
They ate their sandwiches. They ate their pie. They drank their coffee. And they left the restaurant, leaving behind a twenty-five-cent tip for the busboy.
Outside, they looked for a policeman but didn't see one. They finally walked into a newsstand, where Dipper bought three chocolate bars (ten cents total!) for Mabel and, as he paid for them, he asked the clerk, "Excuse me, sir, but my sister and me walked in from the country and don't know where we are exactly. What is this town?"
"Glass Shard Beach," the man said.
"Thank you."
Outside, they passed more people begging. Dipper gave each one a dollar, astonishing most of them. "Couldn't you give them more?" Mabel asked.
"Not without making people suspicious," Dipper said. "I think a dollar means a lot to them. You could buy a lot of things for a dollar in 1933."
They passed an amusement pier and found it was doing almost no business. At a baseball-toss game, Dipper spent a quarter and managed to win a stuffed toy—a caveman-era Mickey Mouse—for Mabel. She carried it until they passed a family of three, dad, mom, and little girl, begging for gas money. They were dressed like farmers, too. Dipper gave the dad two dollars, and Mabel gave the little girl the stuffed toy and her last candy bar.
"I should feel good," Mabel said as they went on. "The way the little girl's eyes lighted up and all. But I'm just sad."
"Because we're helping a little, but we can't solve their real problems," Dipper said. They found a small park and sat shivering on a bench while Dipper studied the odd message of sevens and ones.
"It's crazy," Mabel said. I mean, what could it say if you substituted letters? AAB AAA and so on? Two numbers aren't enough!"
"Could be if they were ones and zeroes," Dipper said. "Binary code, like for computers. But I don't know the ASCII table by heart, and there's no place to look it up in 1933. Still, Blendin wouldn't give us something impossible to solve. Maybe it's not a cipher, but a code."
"Huh? What's the difference?" Mabel asked.
"Well—a cipher substitutes letters or symbols. Like Z stands for A and Y stands for B and so on. Or that number cipher, every number is a letter. But a code uses a symbol or set of symbols to stand for whole words. Like if you used the word rat to mean enemy and trap to mean arrest, "The rat is in the trap" might mean "the enemy is under arrest."
"Huh. That would be hard to solve."
"It could be that a code would be just numbers, like this. Let's say that you and whoever you're communicating with have copies of the same book. A number like 21-220 might tell you to look on page 21 of the book and count to the 220th word. This doesn't look like that, though. This is more like—two numbers, two symbols, not ones and zeroes . . . wait, I think I've got it!"
An hour later, after a long walk through a labyrinth of streets, they stood on a sidewalk looking across at a two-storied building nestled—nearly wedged—between two taller neighbors. To the left stood a closed Chinese restaurant. To the right a dry-cleaning business was still open for business. And smack in the center—
"Pines Pawns," Mabel read from the awning sign.
Dipper had deciphered the numbers, deciding their message was "Go to Glass Shard Beach 618 Atlantic St find anomaly."
Mabel said, "This is where Grunkle Ford and Grunkle Stan's dad lived. Our great-grandfather, what's his name."
"Filbrick. But he'd be too young to run a business in 1933," Dipper said. "So, it's probably not Filbrick, but—"
A smaller sign on the door told them: Jacob Pines, Prop. They opened the door and went in, a bell above the door jangling. A heavyset man sat on a stool at a counter. He looked a little like their Grunkles—but not that much. And his features didn't match photos they'd seen of Filbrick, either. "What can I do for you?" he asked in a bored way.
"Uh, just, you know—shopping," Dipper said. "Just want to look around."
"Look around, look around," he said. "Only don't expect to buy a gun, you hear what I'm saying?" He held up a finger. "Times are tough, you young punks think 'Knock over a bank, easy street! Well, it don't happen that way, kid! You try that, you end up dead in the street. I don't sell no gun to nobody I don't know."
Mabel screwed up her face as if trying to work through the triple negative. "Are you Mr. Pines?"
"Who wants to know?"
"Marabel Alcatraz," Mabel said. "And this is my brother Stanley. We're farmers. We live on a farm."
"Whoopie for you," Jacob Pines said with no enthusiasm. "Go ahead, look around, lookin's free. You find something you like, we talk business."
Dipper felt acutely conscious of the locater, which he'd concealed in the chest pocket of his overalls. "Just, you know, looking for useful stuff."
"Yeah, yeah, I heard the song and dance." Gruffly, he added, "You kids eatin' all right?"
"Well—" Mabel began.
Dipper cut her off: "We're doing pretty well. Raise a lot of our own food. On the farm. Where we live."
"New Jersey is the Garden State!" Mabel said brightly.
"OK, only I get people in, break your heart, don't wanna admit how hard up they are, sellin' their grandfather's watch so's they can buy a few days of food."
And, Dipper thought, you'd offer us a meal if you thought we were desperate. Their grumpy-seeming great-great-grandfather's genes must have surfaced again in Stanley, the grouchy old guy with a soft gooey center.
Dipper found a compact tool kit, three screwdrivers and a small monkey wrench and a tack hammer. "How much for this?" he asked.
"That? Buck. Worth two-fifty, I'll take a buck, it's been here so long it could grow whiskers."
"Maybe," Dipper said, but he put it back for the time being. He found a guitar, a lot like his first acoustic version, tuned it, and strummed a few bars of "Home on the Range."
"Nice," Jacob Pines said. "Only I don't care so much for this modern music. You want that? Two dollars, it's yours."
"Got one like it," Dipper said.
"Back on the farm," Mabel added. "Where we live. In New Jersey."
"Now, listen, you two kids really got a place to live?" Jacob asked, again in that gruff tone.
"We really do," Dipper said.
Jacob shook his head. "Yeah, lucky you, only watch out the bankers don't foreclose, am I right?"
Dipper nodded. He turned—and felt the locater vibrate. A shelf in front of him held more tools—a sign of true desperation, when a carpenter sold off all his saws, an electrician his wire strippers, men throwing up a hopeless, frail, final barrier against crushing ruin.
But among the jumble, Dipper spied a yellow tape measure.
He touched it and felt the vibrating locater intensify. "I could use this," he said. "How much?"
"That? Fifty cents I was asking. But I gotta tell ya, kid, it don't work right. The tape sticks bad. You can't even pull it out unless maybe you could take the case apart, find what's wrong, maybe fix it, maybe it's busted forever. Me, I got no skills at that. OK, OK, it don't work, so—twenty-five cents?"
"Who pawned it?" Mabel asked.
"I dunno, read me the number, I'll look it up in the book."
"Uh—33-2-14-3."
"This year, February 14th, third customer of the day, let me see." Jacob opened a green-bound ledger and found the right page, then ran his fingers down a column of numbers. "Got it. Benjamin Valentine. Gave him fifteen cents, he was satisfied, didn't bargain, even. Huh. Valentine on Valentine's day. Go figure."
"Do you remember him?" Dipper asked.
"Who remembers?" But Jacob frowned. "Big baby-faced guy, I think. Stammered a lot."
"Not the guy I'm thinking of," Dipper said. "Here you go. Two quarters." He reached into his pocket and handed them over.
"I said a quarter."
"No, you first asked for fifty cents," Dipper said. "It's worth that to me. Fifty cents."
Jacob shrugged. "I should argue? Wait, I'll write the receipt."
He did, and Dipper and Mabel took their purchase outside. "It's a time tape, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Dipper said. "But I think Blendin jammed it somehow. He obviously wanted us to find it, and nobody else—that's why he brought it here, to our family's shop. I'm thinking he really did leave a back door open in case he got stuck in the Old West."
Mabel nodded. "Which he did. He told us in that letter what happened. His own time tape got run over by a train."
"If we were meant to find this," Dipper said, "then it might work—for us. Want to give it a try?"
"I'd really like to get out of this place," Mabel said. "Get somewhere warmer. Somewhen."
Dipper looked thoughtful. "Come on," he said. "Let's make just one stop first."
They retraced their steps to the place where they had listened to the inaugural address. The soup kitchen was still open, with a long line of people slowly entering as others left after a scanty meal eaten while standing at waist-high tables with no chairs. The aroma of some kind of vegetable stew hung heavy in the air. Dipper and Mabel found a woman—a nun—at the door and asked her if they could talk to whoever ran the place. "There are four gentlemen," she said. "A priest, a rabbi, a minister, and a businessman."
"Wouldn't it be funny if they walked into a bar!" Mabel said.
The nun just looked at her.
However, she found one of the men who ran the kitchen—the businessman, Michael Malone—and he saw them in a tiny back office that might once have been a largish broom closet. "Can I help you?" he asked. His blue suit hung on him loosely, as though he'd lost a lot of weight since buying it.
"My sister and me are farmers," Dipper said.
"We live on a farm," Mabel confirmed brightly.
"And we're doing all right ourselves, but we've heard how tough folks have it here in the city."
"Unemployment's so terrible," Mr. Malone said with a sigh. "So many men who want to work, so few jobs to go around."
"It'll get better," Mabel said. "Trust me. I've got a good feeling about it."
"Meanwhile," Dipper said, overriding her, "our farmers' association wants to help you."
Mr. Malone's face lit up. "If you can offer a donation of any vegetables or—"
"Not that so much," Dipper said. "But would a thousand dollars help?"
"A thousand dollars? That would keep us going for a month," Malone said, blinking.
"Here's the thousand dollars we collected," Dipper said. He pulled out ten oversized bills—a hundred dollars each—and handed them over. "We hope things improve for you soon."
"God bless you, son," Malone said. "Who do we owe this to?"
"The Farmers of the Garden State Farmers Association of New Jersey!" Mabel said. "It doesn't spell out anything."
Malone spread the money on his desk. "Well—I can only thank you. You truly don't know how much this means to us." He shook his head. "When I worked on Wall Street, I never expected this. I tell you young folks, these last years have been so hard—I haven't really worked since our brokerage failed, but some friends of mine helped me organize this relief effort, and I'm getting by and getting a whole new appreciation for the kindness of Americans. I hope to see you again."
"If you don't," Dipper said, "just keep doing kind things for strangers." He and Mabel shook hands with Malone and then left.
"Whoosh!" Mabel said when they had left. "Broseph, you're a shiny example."
"Yeah," Dipper agreed reluctantly, "but—I'm doing it out of guilt. We never stop to think of how good we have it, do we?"
"When we get back—if we get back," Mabel said, "I'm gonna try to think of it more often."
They returned to the shabby, nearly abandoned street where they had first showed up, found the loose fence boards, went back into the narrow alley—
"Ready to try it?" Dipper asked.
Mabel linked her arm through his. "Ready. See if it'll work. Onward and backward!"
Dipper pulled the tab on the tape. It came out about an inch or so and stopped. "Here goes nothing," he said, and he pressed the button.
The tape clicked, and the world of the Great Depression went away.