Chapter 3
Three
DENVER
Although she couldn’t explain what was going on, Goldie wasn’t accepting it, either.
At this early hour in the day, she would’ve preferred to have awakened in a hospital room, pumped up on drugs and incapacitated.
At least that was logical. Expected. What was happening now was too strange.
Too weird. She got it in her head that if she could just get out of this small town called Sparkledove, everything would somehow be rectified.
She was still clinging to the belief that the community had to be a living history town like Colonial Williamsburg.
If that were the case, the sooner she got out of town, the sooner a more reasonable explanation would be revealed.
“Everything alright, Miss Maraschino?” Maddie called out as Goldie hurried through the lobby. “I hope you’re not upset that I phoned Sheriff Johnson. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Goldie ignored the explanation and hurried up the stairs, remembering that when she left her room, she hadn’t even thought to look for a room key or lock her door.
But she needn’t have worried. When she tried her door, she discovered it was unlocked, and everything inside was just as she had left it.
Apparently, Sparkledove was a place of low crime.
Seeing the purse sitting on the overcoat that had been placed on the seat of the chair by the desk, she shut her door, went over to it, and opened it.
Inside, she found her room key, plane tickets, sixty dollars and twenty-two cents in cash, and several business cards that read: Karen Maraschino, Senior Writer, Adventure Escape Magazine with a Columbus, Ohio address.
“Columbus?” she said to herself, looking at the cards. “I don’t know anyone in Columbus. I’ve never been to Ohio. I’ve never even liked that song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. And why a writer?”
Goldie never had any aspirations to be a journalist, although she enjoyed writing in her diaries.
She started when she was twelve, and it was a leftover habit from her pre-teen days.
Digging deeper into the purse, she found an operator’s license for a car that required no picture, a compact, lipstick, hairbrush, bobby pins, several folded-up Kleenex, and a small notebook with two sharpened pencils.
She looked at the plastic case sitting on top of her narrow table that was serving as a desk. Opening it, she found a Remington Envoy portable typewriter with fifteen pieces of carbon-backed typing paper inside.
“This just makes no damn sense,” she sighed.
Leaving her suitcase and typewriter behind, she put on her overcoat, grabbed her purse, then left her room, locking the door with her room key.
Going back downstairs and through the lobby, she saw that Maddie was behind the counter talking to another customer, so she hurried out the front door, hoping her departure wouldn’t be noticed.
The bus was still idling, waiting to take on any passengers.
It was dark red with white mountains painted on the side, and like everything else in town, it was vintage.
Goldie paid the driver one dollar for her fare.
The bus left promptly at 9:10 a.m., and there were only four other passengers on board.
She breathed a sigh of relief when the vehicle turned onto Highway 70 heading east, but if she hoped to literally drive out of November 1942 and back into the present, it wasn’t happening.
The highway was a two-lane, and she saw one old car after another drive past, going in the opposite direction.
It was too many vehicles to be part of some theme town.
Then there were the houses, stores, and occasional billboards she passed.
Everything was consistent. Everything was from the 1940s or earlier.
Goldie’s arms bristled with another wave of goose bumps, and she fought back tears as she realized that somehow, through some unexplained phenomenon, she’d been transported back in time.
Even when the Denver skyline came into view, there were no sprawling traffic cloverleafs, cell phone towers, and the skyscrapers weren’t much taller than ten stories.
It was a totally dated world filled with painted signs on the side of barns for Nehi Soda Pop and Barbasol Shaving Cream.
The interior of the Denver bus terminal was a flurry of activity.
When Goldie came through the arrival door, people were coming and going for the holiday.
Men wore suits and ties, women wore dresses, and soldiers on leave were in dress uniforms. Everyone wore or carried a winter coat.
The place was large and spacious. It had a twenty-foot-high ceiling with big circular light fixtures hanging down on metal poles, and there were several sets of wooden benches where six people could sit facing one direction, while six more seated behind them could sit facing another.
The place was upscale and cosmopolitan, and strikingly different from the seedier bus stations of the current day.
It was also smoky. Cigarette smoke drifted high in the air throughout the place as people puffed away on Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields.
Over by the double front doors, she saw a wooden scaffolding where two painters were starting to paint with five-gallon buckets of light-orange paint.
She weaved through the people and most of the station, then sat down at the end of one of the long wooden benches close to the front doors and scaffolding.
Now what do I do? she thought. “This can’t be real?” she muttered. “No TikTok, People Magazine, no Keepin’ Up With The Kardashians.”
She noticed she was sitting next to a three-foot-tall can-like ashtray and, in it, was a broken piece of glass from a discarded soda bottle. Formulating a desperate idea, she picked up the piece of glass and gazed around.
“I’ve got to be dreamin’,” she said quietly, shaking her head. “I’ve gotta be in a coma… time to wake up, girl.”
Without hesitation, she took the piece of glass in her right hand and quickly brought it across the palm of her left. The pain was immediate, and the blood followed a moment later.
“Shiiiit!” she cried. “That hurt!”
Several people turned and looked at her, but she ignored them, dropped the glass to the floor, and hurriedly dug into her purse for the stash of Kleenex she’d seen earlier.
As she was doing so, she saw someone in her peripheral vision offer her something.
She looked up to see a white handkerchief being held by an African American maintenance man who worked at the bus station.
She could tell he was maintenance by his gray uniform, lack of an outdoor coat, and the push broom he held in his other hand.
“It’s clean,” he said.
She took the handkerchief, mumbled “Thanks,” and wrapped it tightly around her bleeding palm.
“Go to the bathroom and clean that off,” he said. “I’ll go fetch the first aid kit.”
He didn’t order her so much as simply announce the next steps that needed to be done. He was in his mid-thirties, had a little gray in his hair, and seemed neither overly friendly nor uncompassionate.
Reconciled to her situation, Goldie rose, went to the ladies’ bathroom, and returned a few minutes later. When she did, the African American man was sitting in the seat next to where she’d been sitting with a metallic box that had a red cross on it.
“Sit yourself down,” he invited, “and I’ll fix you up.”
She said “Thank you” again, sat down, and held out her left hand. The stranger produced a silver tube of antibacterial cream.
“This might smart some,” he warned.
He gently removed the bloody handkerchief, then tenderly applied some white cream. As he did, he spoke quietly so others wouldn’t hear.
“Saw what you did,” he said. “Why’d you cut yourself like that?”
She winced from the sting of the cream, but he blew on her palm to relieve it.
“You’ve heard of the expression: ‘Pinch me, I must be dreamin’?’” she asked. “Same idea.”
He nodded slightly as he produced a roll of gauze from the kit and started to carefully wrap her hand.
“I’m in a nightmare,” she admitted. “Yesterday, I was in one world, and today I’m in this. It’s like a time-shift reality.”
“I see,” he replied.
He continued to wrap the gauze firmly until he thought the wound was properly protected, then got a small pair of scissors from the kit and cut it.
“It’s okay if you don’t know what I’m talkin’ about,” Goldie offered. “You’re a nice man, and I appreciate the help.”
Right at that moment, there was an announcement over the PA for a bus departing for Boulder, Loveland, Fort Collins, and then Cheyanne. The maintenance man finished dressing Goldie’s wound and didn’t speak until the announcement was over.
“Some years ago,” he finally said. “I served in the Great War. Went from Denver to Mississippi for basic trainin’, then on to France.
Before I knew it, I was crouchin’ in a mud-filled trench, with men screamin’, dyin’, and other men tryin’ to kill Germans.
I said to myself: ‘Yesterday, I was in one world, and today I’m in this.
It’s like a time-shift reality.’ I might’ve even cut my hand with my bayonet just to make sure everything was real. ”
Goldie looked at him, intrigued.
“So, what’d you do?”
“I adapted to my surroundings, learned from others around me, and decided to survive, to beat the hell I was in. I don’t know what’s goin’ on with you, young lady. But I know if you want to, you can adapt and survive, too.”
She looked at him appreciatively. “I’m Goldie. What’s your name?”
“Gerome!” a man’s voice called. “What do you think you’re doin’?”