Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins) Read online

  I take a few cautious steps toward the shoes. Down by the water, the bird—whose eyes I clearly remember remaining locked on mine until he flapped away—whips his neck in my direction. My movement toward the shoes must have caught his attention.

  And then I’m staring straight into my own face, twenty meters away.

  Our eyes lock. It’s the strangest feeling, almost like a feedback loop. With considerable effort, I finally force myself to look away. As soon as I do, I grab the shoes, and blink home to 2136.

  When I arrive back in the living room, I stare down at the carpet, confused. It looks different. Before, there were clumps of sand everywhere from when I landed on my knees. Now, the only sand is on my feet. The carpet where I’m standing, however, is definitely damper than before.

  “What the hell?” Jack says.

  “I’m fine,” I tell him, even though that’s not entirely true. I guess this is what June meant by it not being worth the headache to cross your own path. My head is indeed pounding, and I’m very, very glad I haven’t eaten dinner yet.

  That feeling multiplies exponentially when I look up to see a second version of myself staring back at me.

  FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID (MAY 3, 1969)

  Four Klan Leaders Sentenced for Contempt of Congress

  (Raleigh, NC) Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, has been sentenced to one year in prison for contempt of Congress. Bob Jones, Grand Dragon of the North Carolina Klan, and Robert E. Scoggin, Grand Dragon of the South Carolina Klan, were also sentenced to serve one year. Calvin F. Craig, Grand Dragon of Georgia, was fined.

  Three additional Klan leaders were cleared of charges. The indictments are the result of a 1966 investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee, during which the men refused to produce subpoenaed Klan records. They also refused to answer questions from the committee concerning Klan activities, invoking the Fifth Amendment.

  ∞5∞

  TYSON

  CHESTER, SOUTH CAROLINA

  AUGUST 11, 1966

  The wind shifts toward us, carrying a plume of black, oily smoke as flames snake upward. Within seconds, they ignite the cardboard rectangle the man in the green silk robe nailed to the vertical beam when the ceremony began. And then, with a faint whoosh, the fire fans out to light up the arms of the cross.

  This again.

  Hoping for a bit of untainted air, I take a few steps backward. But clearer air brings with it a clearer view. My mouth goes dry, and my heart begins pounding so hard that it almost drowns out the music blasting from the giant speaker mounted on the flatbed truck behind us. I have to fight the urge to tell Richard and Katherine to get back in our rental car so we can get the hell out of here.

  My reaction is completely irrational. I am a member in good standing of the Pitt County, North Carolina chapter of the United Klans of America. Glen Barrett, our southern US specialist and my primary trainer, was embedded with that group for several years before his retirement from fieldwork. He introduced me as his nephew, Troy Rayburn, and then I attended two years’ worth of Klan meetings and various events with him during my last four months of training.

  It was really difficult to stay objective at first. When they’d start with the racist comments, I’d just repeat over and over again in my head the CHRONOS mantra that we are only in the field to observe. I nearly chewed a hole through my tongue from biting it so often, and I clenched my fists so hard and so regularly on those first trips that I was worried my knuckles would cut a groove clean through the skin on the back of my hands. My poker face, as they say, must be decent, though, because the members of the klavern never questioned me. Most of their comments were about my bright blue eyes and suntan. One of the younger guys kept calling me Hollywood and said I’d better not bat those baby blues in the direction of his girlfriend. He was joking. Sort of.

  Luckily, we weren’t expected to be at every event, because I supposedly worked with Glen as a traveling salesman for a kitchen-knife company. The whole knife thing was Glen’s idea, and I’d like to kick him for it, because it means I’m stuck lugging around a knife display case on any jump where I’m likely to encounter members of the Klan. Seems like he could have come up with something a little less bulky. But the traveling-sales side of the cover has worked out really well otherwise. Glen was asked on two different occasions to carry documents to leaders in other states. Klan leaders don’t trust the US Postal Service. A few of them suspect their phones are tapped, too.

  Anyway, my cover with the group is solid. I’ve popped in for a couple of meetings since Glen retired from active fieldwork—or, from the Klan’s perspective, since he got a promotion with the knife company and moved to Chicago. I know the passwords, the challenges, the latest on the federal investigation into the Klan, and all of their truly ridiculous nomenclature. Two weeks ago, I dropped off a letter from one Grand Dragon named Bob to another—from Bob Jones, the North Carolina Grand Dragon, to Bob Scoggin, the green-robed, square-jawed man currently feeding teen magazines into the fire. We drank coffee down in his basement and ate his wife’s peach pie while we talked about the federal investigation and shared recruitment strategies. His wife even insisted on buying a couple of Cutco knives from me when Scoggin told her what I did for a living.

  Scoggin didn’t recognize me, even though my skin isn’t any lighter than when I worked at Ida’s place. Eye color and hairstyle are the only changes they made in costuming. That wasn’t even six weeks ago for me, so I’m the same age—early twenties—as the young man Scoggin and Phelps tried to intimidate in front of the Spartanburg County Courthouse. But that man didn’t have blue eyes that met theirs directly. That man’s eyes were dark, and he kept them locked on the sidewalk. His hair was longer, and it wasn’t slicked down with Brylcreem. He kept his voice soft and nonconfrontational.

  Scoggin and Phelps hadn’t considered that person a man at all. He was just boy, and he’d have been just boy even if he’d been thirty years older.

  Rich, Katherine, and I drove through Spartanburg on our way down here today. The Southside Diner is closed, its wide front window boarded up. At some point during the three years between my visit in 1963 and now, Miss Ida must have decided it was too risky to keep fighting. The Dixie Chicken, however, is doing just fine. Integration seems to be coming gradually. I didn’t see any black patrons at their tables when the three of us went in, but several were standing in line for takeout. And even though I really didn’t want to give them my money, I had to know.

  The chicken wasn’t bad, but it was still nowhere near as good as what we served at Southside. Those hush puppies, though, were definitely Miss Ida’s recipe. Pretty sure the biscuits were, too.

  Richard nudges me. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” I step back again as the wind shifts the smoke our way. “Just . . . a bit of a flashback.”

  “Be sure to put that in your official report,” he says dryly. “The committee will be ecstatic.”

  He’s right. I’m certain my reports get scanned not just for historical information, but also to assess my personal reactions. Will he side with the oppressed or the oppressor? I haven’t made a big deal out of it, but Rich knows I don’t much care for being their social experiment.

  Scoggin leans forward to add an oversized poster to the pyre. Four dark-haired young men, photographed against an orange background, smile back at us. The edges of the poster curl and blacken, and then the entire thing is engulfed in flames.

  A whoop goes up from the crowd, which is a bit larger than I’d have expected for a Thursday-night rally. Scoggin has another, potentially more lucrative, fundraiser in Raleigh over the weekend, so it had to be a weeknight. But it’s August. No school tomorrow and people are always looking for something fun to do with the kids on hot summer nights.

  The mood is now far less solemn than it was ten minutes before, when several dozen men in robes and hoods held their torches out in unison to light the fire and marched in a wide c
ircle around it as a woman sang “The Old Rugged Cross.” Her voice was high and thin, almost as hard on the ears as the feedback from the amp. She must be the regular singer at these events, because one kid standing in front of us stuck his fingers in his ears before the first note even sounded.

  Katherine dropped Rich and me off earlier today, around three. The men in white robes—then dressed mostly in jeans and T-shirts—had just finished nailing together the beams of the cross. Richard and I helped them wrap the damn thing in burlap, sharing stories from the klavern I’m part of in Pitt County, North Carolina, and the one that Richard is supposedly trying to start in rural Ohio. That’s the cover story we came up with for him and Katherine so they didn’t have to constantly worry about getting the accent right.

  Once the cross was wrapped, they doused it with gallon after gallon of fuel and we hoisted it upright. Around five in the evening, a hot-dog vendor arrived, followed by an ice-cream truck and a steady stream of vehicles, including Katherine in the Ford Fairlane we’d rented up in Charlotte this morning. The local klavern’s Ladies Auxiliary then went to work setting up tables for a bake sale, stacking piles of plastic-wrapped brownies, cookies, and thick slices of pound cake. Richard and Katherine were both slightly disgusted by my hot dog piled with relish, onions, and neon-yellow mustard, but I was hungry. And neither of them turned down the Rice Krispies square I offered. Yes, the dollar I spent will go into the legal-defense fund for that green-robed, race-baiting charlatan, but it won’t matter. I already know that he’ll be in a federal prison in a few years.

  Scoggin drops another batch of magazines onto the fire. He seems immune to the stench of burning petroleum, burlap, and vinyl. Of course, this is far from his first cross burning. It might be his first record burning, though.

  The only good thing about being close to the fire is that the smoke does a decent job of warding off the mosquitos. They’re not a problem in terms of disease or discomfort, since we were coated with insect repellent before we left the costume unit, but I’m tired of hearing the horrid little bloodsuckers buzz past my ears. That’s one extinct species no one has mourned.

  “Did you see which album it is?” Richard asks, craning his neck to see the record Scoggin nailed to the cross before he set it on fire.

  “Meet the Beatles.”

  He nods solemnly. “That’s the one I’d have picked, too. If you play ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ backward, you can clearly hear John and Paul singing all hail Satan in that last verse. It’s spelled out in one of the footnotes at the end of that pamphlet you’re holding.”

  The tract in question had been shoved into my hands by a gangly teenage boy when we walked out to meet Katherine earlier. Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles. A sickle-and-hammer, a large garish eye, and a crude drawing of the Fab Four decorate the front. The pamphlet was published a year ago by a group known as Christian Crusade. They must have distributed the booklets widely, because there are multiple copies in the CHRONOS archives, some with red covers, some with blue. And the fact that it was published a year ago, in 1965, makes it abundantly clear that the current furor isn’t really due to the comment John Lennon made a few months back about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus.

  The other clue that something else is going on under the surface is that anyone who bothered to read the full quote, in context, could see that Lennon wasn’t saying this was a good thing. Back in England, where the interview was originally published, most ministers were honest enough to admit that he had a valid point. In the summer of 1966, the quartet of John, Paul, George, and Ringo drew much larger and more enthusiastic crowds in Great Britain than the churches’ standard quartet of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

  Here in the US, however, where evangelical fervor is stronger, Lennon’s comment prompted Pan-American Airlines to rebuke the band silently by leaving copies of the Bible in their seats when they boarded the plane. Deejays, most of them in the South, refused to play their songs, and ministers around the country altered their weekly sermons to address the evil influence of rock ’n’ roll.

  But Lennon’s comment alone wouldn’t have inspired the Grand Dragon of the South Carolina branch of the Ku Klux Klan to have his hooded minions dig a hole out here in the middle of nowhere, erect a giant cross, and turn a pile of Beatles memorabilia to ash. All four Beatles have made their views on racism quite clear. On their previous American tour, they refused to play to segregated audiences or stay in segregated hotels. And rather than just insisting quietly that the various venues obey federal law, they issued a press release on the matter.

  This isn’t about John Lennon’s views on Jesus Christ. It’s about his interference with Jim Crow.

  “I’m just glad he didn’t burn Revolver,” Rich says, even though I think it’s a safe bet that at least one copy of the band’s latest release is currently melting in the toxic heap at the base of the cross.

  “Revolver is good,” I admit. “But not as good as Abbey Road.”

  He snorts. “You know nothing.”

  Admittedly, I’m not a music historian. But I am his roommate, and after the past few months, mine should count as expert opinion. The Beatles’ entire discography played pretty much nonstop while Rich wrote this research proposal.

  Scoggin calls out to the crowd, “Okay, I think we got a decent blaze goin’ now, so come on, kids. Step up and send those records back to the hellfire they came from. Who do you pick? John, George, and those others, or Jesus?”

  A chorus of Jesus rises up, and then about a dozen kids step forward with their offerings. One girl, who looks to be around thirteen, hangs back. As the others toss their items into the fire, she clutches the small stack of 45s to her chest and looks at a woman on the edge of the crowd, clearly hoping for mercy. But the woman’s frown deepens, and she jabs her finger toward the cross, so the girl just sighs and adds her treasures to the flames.

  “That’s right,” Scoggin says. “We ain’t gonna give ’em our money or our attention. We got a reporter here tonight who will make sure our message gets out. Here in America, we don’t need no Communist agents blasphemin’ and tellin’ us how to run our country. We don’t need this McCartney kid calling America a lousy country because we don’t believe in race mixin’. And I can promise you that at least here in South Carolina, there ain’t nobody more popular than Jesus.”

  That’s apparently the prearranged cue for the woman with the bad voice to start singing again. We move away from the staticky speaker in self-defense, and I scan the crowd for Katherine. She’s hard to spot, mostly because she’s short, but also because her hair is puffed up and lacquered in the prevailing style, like most of the other women. I finally locate her over near the table with the baked goods, where the Auxiliary women are talking. One of them is Scoggin’s wife. Judging from the closed expressions the Klan women are wearing, I doubt they’re going to open up to a stranger, especially one who isn’t from the South.

  I lean toward Rich. “I’m going to try and give Katherine a boost with the Auxiliary. But if they don’t start talking to her, get over there. You busted your ass to get her included in this project so you could have some time alone without Saul distracting her. Don’t waste your chance mourning over a pile of melting vinyl.”

  He gives me an annoyed look. “I don’t want to seem obnoxious. Or pushy.”

  “Just go, okay?”

  All evidence to date suggests that Katherine is actually into obnoxious and pushy; otherwise she’d steer clear of Saul. But I skip that part of the lecture, and cross over to where the women are standing. The girl who held on to her record collection a few seconds too long is next to one of the tables. She’s staring down at her penny loafers, probably dreading the “seat warming” she’s likely to get after the festivities are over for not being the first in line.

  Katherine’s back is to me, so I tap her on the shoulder.

  “Hey. I’m gonna take care of some business real quick, and then we prob’ly oughta hit the road. Miz Scogg
in, I should have introduced the two of you earlier. I don’t know if Kathy here mentioned it, but her husband”—I nod toward Rich—“is planning a new klavern up near Lima, Ohio. I know how important it is to get the ladies on board, so any tips you might have would be much appreciated. And, Kathy, I see Miz Scoggin still has one of her pies back there. Rich will want to marry you all over again if you’re smart enough to buy it.”

  I’m surprised to hear Mrs. Scoggin laugh. “I’ll get her address, Troy, and mail her some literature. Bob said y’all are plannin’ to be in Raleigh this weekend?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We’ll have the whole klavern out.” I can state this with absolute certainty, since it happened nearly a year ago for me. That was one of my field-training trips with Glen.

  “Are you coming up to North Carolina, too, Mrs. Scoggin?” Katherine asks. “Rich and I haven’t quite decided whether to stay in Raleigh or head back up to Lima.”

  “Oh, no. I’ll stay here with the kids. Bob says there’ll probably be trouble.”

  I nod, understanding that by trouble she means a counterprotest.

  “And,” she continues, “he’ll be holed up with the attorneys the next day, figurin’ out how they’re gonna deal with these contempt charges. I still think they did the right thing by refusin’ to cooperate, but I’m not as certain as Bob that the feds will back down.”

  “I’m sure it’ll all work out fine,” I tell her with a sympathetic smile.

  And it does, in my opinion, but Mrs. Scoggin and I probably have very different views of what work out fine means. The contempt charges she mentioned were levied against seven United Klans leaders, including her husband, earlier this year when they refused to divulge membership lists and other information subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the wake of several murders of civil rights activists last year. Scoggin and two others will serve a year in jail. And as icing on the cake, Scoggin will return home to find somebody has snatched leadership of the South Carolina Klan away from him while he was incarcerated.