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  No Limit

  Hole in the Sky

  Invisible

  From Simon Pulse

  Published by Simon & Schuster

  www.SimonSaysTEEN.com

  pete Hautman

  MR.WAS

  Simon Pulse

  FOR SMED AND DINK

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  First Paperback edition March 1998

  Copyright © 1996 by Pete Murray Hautman

  Simon Pulse

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Also available in a Simon 8c Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.

  The text of this book was set in 10 point Sabon

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Hautman, Pete, 1952-

  Mr. Was : a novel / by Pete Hautman. — 1st. ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After his dying grandfather tries to strangle him, Jack Lund discovers a door that leads him fifty years into the past and involves him in events that determine his own future.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-81068-8 ISBN-10: 0-689-81068-7 (hc.)

  [1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction.]

  I. Title

  PZ7.H2887Mr 1996

  [Fic]—dc20 96-11822

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-81914-8 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 0-689-81914-5 (pbk.)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-439-11574-9

  Author’s note

  In the autumn of 1952, my father was walking the beach along Onslow Bay just north of Wilmington, North Carolina, when he saw something floating in the ocean. Bits of flotsam and jetsam often washed up on the beach, most of it of little value or interest, but when my father saw the silver-colored briefcase bobbing in the surf he waded out into the breakers and retrieved it. I remember the day he brought it home. He had never seen an aluminum briefcase before. They are common today, of course, but in 1952, aluminum was rarely used for anything other than aircraft parts.

  The briefcase contained four notebooks, which my father, being an inquisitive man, sat down to read. He described the contents of the notebooks as telling a “weird sort of a science fictional story. Something like H. G. Wells, only not nearly so believable.” At the time, I had no interest in a bunch of old notebooks, and I never gave them another thought until my father’s death in 1991. While going through his things I came across the briefcase in the attic beneath a pile of Christmas decorations. That night I sat down and read the story of Jack Lund.

  In transcribing and organizing the contents of these notebooks, I have taken a few liberties. Some of what follows is purely speculative, including a few passages describing events of which I have no firsthand knowledge. I truly believe, however, that I have captured the essence of Jack Lund’s story. Although at first I read the notebooks as a fantasy, my investigations over the past seven years have convinced me that the events described in Jack’s notebooks actually occurred.

  —P.H.

  THE FIRST NOTEBOOK:

  The Door

  This notebook described events occurring early in the subject’s life, yet the notebook itself was relatively modern: a cardboard-covered, spiral notebook of the type commonly used by high school and college students in the 1950s. The writing inside was shaky and faint, as if the writer were very old. He used a blue fountain pen.

  —P.H.

  Andrea Island, Puerto Rico

  July 30, 1952

  I don’t know where to start.

  It’s not that I don’t know what I want to say, but that I don’t know what to say first. Andie says I should begin at the beginning, but when was that? Or rather, when will that be? My story is like the surf outside our cottage. Each wave that ends its life on our white sand beach is reborn, again, far out to sea. Is it the same wave? Impossible to say. They are all different; they are all the same.

  Andie says to just start telling the story. Andie says it really doesn’t matter, as long as it gets told. She says to write until the notebook is full. So I’ll begin with the phone call that first brought me to Memory. I was thirteen years old then, but I remember it as if it were yesterday, and that is the way I will tell it.

  Meeting My Grandfather

  The ringing woke me up.

  I turned my head. The alarm clock’s glowing red numbers read 11:59. As the phone rang again, the red numbers changed to 12:00. So that is where we will begin, at midnight, February 17, 1993. It was a long time ago but, as you will see, the memories are still bright and clear.

  The phone went silent halfway through the third ring, and I could hear my mother’s low voice. I expected her to hang up right away, because a call in the middle of the night was almost certain to be a wrong number, but she didn’t. I heard my father grumbling about how was a guy s’posed to get a good night’s sleep around this dump. After a few moments I heard my mother hang up.

  Everything was quiet for a few seconds, then I heard the shuffling, creaking sounds of someone quietly dressing.

  Our rented house, a tiny two-story wooden house in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, was so small you always knew what everybody else was doing. I heard my parents’ bedroom door open. A bar of light appeared under my door. I heard footsteps on the tiny landing at the top of the stairs. I could tell by the sound that it was my mother, wearing her regular shoes, not her slippers. My door opened. I saw her framed in front of the brightly lit hallway.

  I didn’t know what was going on, but I remember getting this feeling in my stomach like something bad had happened. She walked over to my bed and sat down and put a cool hand on my forehead. Mom always woke me up that way, with the hand on the forehead. I loved the way it felt—soft, firm, and comfortably cool.

  “Are you awake, Jack?” she asked.

  I nodded, staring up at her silhouette, feeling my forehead move against her palm. She knew I was awake, of course, but she always asked.

  “Something has happened.” Her voice had a tightness to it, like the sound it had when she was too mad to yell, but this time there was no anger in it. There was something else. “It’s your grandfather,” she said. “Your grandpa Skoro.”

  I thought I knew then what she was about to tell me, because I knew that her father, my grandfather Skoro, was getting very old, and his heart was going bad. He lived in a town called Memory, way up in Minnesota, and he was rich. I hadn’t seen him since I was a baby. My mother said that since my grandma had disappeared he’d turned into sort of a hermit and didn’t like visitors, especially kids. I didn’t remember him at all. Every few months Mom would drive up to see him. She said it was to make sure he had enough kipper snacks, rye bread, and corned beef hash. And to give him a chance to yell at her. She would always laugh when she said that.

  I had always stayed home with Dad, who also liked to yell at her. While she was gone, Dad and I would eat a lot of pizzas and he would drink a lot of beer. He told me that Skoro didn’t care for our sort of company. Once when Dad was in a bad mood from drinking too much he told me, “Your grandfather is a cheap, mean, hard-hearted old miser. Well, he can have his money. I hope he chokes on it.” I always remembered that, because when he said it
he threw his beer bottle across the room and broke one of Mom’s favorite collector plates. He gave me ten dollars to tell her I’d been the one who broke it, and I did, but I think she knew I was lying.

  “Your grandfather is dying,” my mother said, her voice going all high and funny on that last, final word. Her hand was still on my forehead, but it was no longer cool and comfortable. It had become hot and moist and she was squeezing. I twisted my head away and sat up. She locked both her hands together, pushed them down into her lap, and looked away. The light reflected off tears on her cheek. I didn’t like to see her that way.

  “Mom? Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. “We have to drive up to Rochester,” she said. “They have him in the hospital there.”

  “We? You mean we’re all going?”

  She shook her head. “Your father’s staying here. He’s not feeling well.”

  “You mean he’s drunk.”

  She looked away.

  “Why do I have to go?” I asked.

  “He wants to see you, Jack. He hasn’t seen you since you were a little baby.”

  “What if I don’t want to see him?”

  “I need the company, Jack,” she said quietly. “Please don’t make a fuss.” Her eyes were filling up with tears again, so I decided not to argue anymore.

  My mother drove as if she expected to be hit any second. When a big semi would blow by us she would duck her head and swerve toward the shoulder. My father refused to ride with her. He said she was a public menace. But Mom wasn’t the one whose car was in the body shop every few months. Mom wasn’t the one who had tried to drive through the back of the garage. She wasn’t the one who’d got drunk and run over the mailbox.

  I watched her cringing and ducking and swerving her way out of Skokie, the 1 A.M. traffic zooming by, the defroster in the little Honda rattling, straining to clear the frosted windows. I huddled in the passenger seat, hands inside my down parka, my head scrunched down into the collar like a turtle. After a while, the traffic thinned out and the windows cleared and it got warm enough inside the car so I could relax. I had the feeling that Mom didn’t want to talk, but it was pretty boring watching the mileposts flash by.

  “I thought Grandpa Skoro didn’t like kids,” I said.

  She flinched, just like she did when Dad yelled at her.

  “Now Jack, that’s not it at all. It’s just. . . he’s had a hard time being around people . . . ever since your grandmother . . . left.”

  My grandmother had disappeared about two years after I was born. Some people said she left on her own, others believed something terrible had happened to her. It was a long time ago. My dad said she was probably dead. My mother didn’t like to talk about it.

  “So how come he wants to see me now?”

  “He’s dying, Jack. Maybe he’s sorry he never got to know you.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  That hurt her. She drove in silence for a few minutes, then said, “He is a lonely old man.”

  “Dad says he likes to be alone.”

  She shook her head. “That’s because your father never knew him. They’re a lot alike, you know. Angry.” She laughed, a high-pitched laugh that I’d never heard from her before.

  We didn’t talk much after that, and I think I fell asleep.

  • • •

  My whole life, I’ve always hated hospitals. When I tell you what happened, and when you get to know more about me, you’ll understand. This hospital in Rochester was one of the modern kind where they have colored stripes on the floors so you don’t get lost and they try to make things cheery by putting in lots of fake plants in the halls and cheap prints on the walls and the nurses wear bright colors. But it still smelled like a hospital, full of pain and germs and people hooked up to machines.

  Grandpa Skoro was hooked up to at least three of them. He had a tube in his nose, another one in his arm, and this thing attached to his chest that led to a complicated-looking video display like you see in the movies with the jagged green line going across a screen.

  I could hear my mother suck her breath in when she saw him. He looked like he was dead, but the line on the screen was showing these little blips. His bald, crinkled head was white and powdery-looking, a forest of stiff white hairs shot out from his brow, and his open mouth was rimmed with dried spit. The only part of him that had any color was a long, pink scar running along the line of his jaw. Mom moved in closer, leaned over him, whispered, “Daddy?”

  That seemed weird, my mother calling this half-dead old man Daddy.

  He opened his eyes, pale blue on bloodshot yellow. A grayish tongue crawled across his lips, leaving a glistening layer of spit. He whispered, “Betty.”

  She pushed her head in past all those tubes and wires and kissed him on the forehead. I stayed back behind her, wishing I was someplace else. I didn’t want to get any closer. I was afraid. Afraid of the old man and afraid of the nearness of death. I took a step back, thinking that if I could get out into the hall I could lose myself in the corridors and make my excuses later.

  But my mother turned around just then and said, “Jack, come say hello to your grandfather Skoro.” She stepped aside so I had a clear view of the old man, and he had a clear view of me.

  Grandfather Skoro was smiling, if you could call it that, and reaching out a veiny hand. I started toward him. As I reached his bedside and opened my mouth to say hello, his face changed, as if his flesh were clay in the hands of a mad, invisible sculptor. It began with his mouth falling slack, showing his two remaining peg-like teeth. Then his eyes sort of pushed out of his head and he jerked back away from me like I was a ghost.

  “You!” he said, his voice cracking.

  I thought, What did I do?

  He looked like he was going to die right then and there, but the mad sculptor was not yet done with Skoro. His wide, horrified eyes suddenly went small and glittery. His spiky eyebrows snapped together above his long, twisted nose. His mouth went from round to a bat-shaped snarl, and his pale cheeks bloomed fiery red. I don’t remember how he got his hands around my neck, but I remember not being able to breathe, his thumbs sinking deep into my neck, and that face, bright red now from forehead to chin, bearing down on me, my mother screaming, the old man’s horrid breath in my face, his wet lips writhing, saying, “Kill you. Kill you. Kill you again.”

  When I opened my eyes I was flat on my back on the hard linoleum floor, a nurse pressing something cool against my forehead, my mother sobbing hysterically, my grandfather hanging half out of his bed, eyes open and vacant, a bubble of spit frozen on his mouth. The monitor displayed a flat green line, howling its mechanical grief.

  Memory

  You’d think that when somebody dies it would be a simple thing to dig a hole in the ground and stick them in it, but I soon found out that life wasn’t simple, and neither was death. It was going to take three days to get everything taken care of, three days in Memory, Minnesota, where Skoro had lived his life and where he wanted to be buried.

  We left Rochester in midafternoon, drove northeast to Wabasha at the southern tip of Lake Pepin. Lake Pepin is actually a wide spot in the Mississippi, a lake twenty miles long and three miles wide. We followed the shore north. In that part of southeastern Minnesota the river bluffs rise so high you’d almost think you were in the mountains. The road twisted in and out of the narrow valleys, sometimes climbing to the top of the bluffs, then snaking back down to follow the riverbank. Mom drove with her chin pushed forward over the wheel.

  “I hate these roads,” she said.

  We pulled into Memory at four that afternoon. A sign at the edge of town read:

  WELCOME TO

  MEMORY

  POP. 40

  I said, “I suppose now they’ll have to make it thirty-nine.”

  “I suppose they will,” she said dully.

  After what had happened back in Rochester it had taken awhile for her to calm down, but she seemed to be fine now. In fact, she seemed
more relaxed than I’d ever seen her. Now she was calm, but sad. “You know, when your grandfather was a boy, there were almost a thousand people living here.”

  “I suppose all the smart ones left,” I said.

  Mom smiled. She wasn’t going to let me get to her. It was as if when Skoro died a huge weight had come off of her.

  She said, “When I was your age, there were still about three hundred. It was a good place to grow up. I had a lot of friends.” She slowed the car. We were driving past a bunch of old buildings. Most of the windows were boarded up, and the signs were faded and unreadable. “I guess they all decided to leave. Some of their parents still live here.”

  We came to a traffic light. She brought the car to a stop, even though the light was green.

  “They put this stoplight in when I was a little girl. It was supposed to make the tourists slow down so they’d spend their money at the businesses in town. These days there aren’t many places left for them to spend it.”

  “Is everything here closed?”

  “There’s Ole’s bar,” she pointed at a low building. OLE’S QUICK STOP was spelled out across the dingy yellow wooden sides of the building in script, the green letters faded and peeling. The two small windows glowed with neon beer signs.

  “But that’s about it, Jack. The Memory Insurance Company moved their offices to Red Wing, and so did the only bank in town. There was a café up until about five years ago. The co-op is gone. So’s the gas station. There’s still a little post office, and there’s the Memory Institute over there.” She pointed at a small, flattopped wooden building next to the railroad tracks.

  “That used to be the depot, but the trains don’t stop here anymore, they just roar on by. Now it’s used as a kind of museum.”

  “Where’s Grandpa’s house?”