Anyway, that morning parked across the street from my house was a black Jaguar identical to the one my father had owned. A landslide of memories thundered down my head as I stared at it. But there were things to do, so I only pointed it out to Gee-Gee and said, “Looks just like Dad’s Jag, huh?”

“It is Dad’s Jag, pal. I saw him get out of it before.”

Before I could answer, a forest-green Studebaker Avanti drove slowly by. There was a woman at the wheel. Although dark in there, from what I could make out of the driver she looked familiar. I hadn’t seen an Avanti in twenty years. This one looked like it just came off a showroom floor.

Two kids slouched down the sidewalk toward us. Around sixteen, they had shoulder-length hair and their sloppy clothes were all tie-dyed. Hippies thirty years too late. In front of the house, both flashed us the peace sign and said, “Hey, McCabe!”

Both Gee-Gee and I said hey. Then we looked at each other. Then the hippies looked at each other but kept on truckin’ along like stoned characters in a R. Crumb comic strip. Happy at the site of these living anachronisms, it took another moment for me to realize who they were. “Was that Eldritch and Benson?”

“No other, brother.”

“How is it possible?”

Gee-Gee’s voice was all sarcasm. “Well, let’s think about this a minute. There’s Dad’s Jaguar across the street. Eldritch and Benson just passed. Andrea Schnitzler drove by in her Avanti—”

“That was Andrea?”

“No other, brother.”

My father was dead. Andy Eldritch died thirty years ago in Vietnam. Andrea Schnitzler moved from Crane’s View after our junior year in high school and was never heard from again. Her father owned a green Avanti. We used to talk about which we desired more—Andrea or her car.

“It’s the sixties? We’re back in the sixties?”

“Yup.”

I thumbed toward the house. “But back inside, Pauline and Magda are—”

“Exactly, back inside the house. Out here it’s the sixties. Welcome to my world.” He hopped up and perched himself on the wooden railing that went around the porch.

Before I could say anything, a door slammed across the street. My father came down the walk toward his car. He was in his forties again and still had some hair left. He wore a beige summer suit I remember going with him to buy. He always wore a suit to work, always wore a tie. Usually it was one solid color– black or maroon. Stripes or crazy designs weren’t him, ever. For his birthday I’d once given him a tie designed by Peter Max with Day-Glo-colored elephants and spaceships on it. He dutifully wore it to please me, but it was plain he was mortified. This man dressed like he didn’t want to be seen, like the less the world noticed him the better. When I was Gee-Gee’s age I loved my Dad but had little respect for him. We may have lived in the same house but not on the same planet.

This was in the sixties. We wore buttons on our jean jackets that announced (idiotically) never trust anyone over thirty. Or really anyone who had a regular job, wore a suit, carried a mortgage, believed in The System ... I was never a hippie because I thrived on violence, selfishness, and intimidation. Pacifism would have deprived me of fun and opportunity. But I sure did like the drugs and free sex that were such an essential part of the movement. Which predictably made matters geometrically worse between Dad and me. Only later, after being to Vietnam and seeing people like Andy Eldritch get their heads blown off, did I realize how much of what my father said and lived was correct.

Gee-Gee shouted out, “Hey, Dad! Over here!” as the Jaguar passed. But the driver, a man I had buried with my own hands, didn’t look our way, although it was definitely him—Dad. Alive again.

We watched the car until it was out of sight. I turned to the boy and asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

“My guess is someone fucked up. Astopel or one of the people he’s with.”

“Meaning?”

He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. “Meaning someone needs Frannie McCabe to do something for them. You’ve got a one-week time limit to get it done. But for whatever reason they can’t tell you what it is. So first they start off by giving you hints—the buried dog coming back, the feather, the empty Schiavo house ...”

“And Pauline’s tattoo, which was a picture of the feather. But now even that’s disappeared. Wait a minute—she had the newspaper in her hand. She must have stepped out here this morning when things were changing!”

He blew one smoke ring and nodded. “Which exactly fits into what I’m thinking. None of those hints got you to do what they wanted. So I bet they got desperate and brought me here to help. If grown-up Frannie can’t do it, bring in Frannie the kid. But that didn’t work either so they pushed both of us to the future.”

I took the cigarette from him, had a puff, handed it back. “Who’re they!”

“I got no idea. That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. But it almost doesn’t matter. We know how powerful they are. They can mess around with time and parts of our life and other stuff. But so far they haven’t been able to make you do what they want. So how powerful can they be? If they were God they’d just say, ‘Do that!’ But they don’t because they can’t.”

“Maybe they’re small gods,” I mumbled, thinking out loud.

Stubbing out the cigarette on the bottom of his boot, he flicked the butt into Magda’s mums. “Small gods, that’s right. But look around, man—they really screwed up this time. You were in the future and were supposed to return to your time. Instead you came back to both yours and mine at the same time.”

“Gee-Gee? Where are you?” Pauline’s voice floated out of the house.

He slid off the railing and started for the door. I caught his arm and asked, “How did you figure this out?”

He undid my fingers. For the first time his voice became soft and vulnerable. “It’s the best I could come up with. You think I might be right?”

“I think you probably are right.”

He brightened and encouraged, leaned in close to tell me his next brainstorm. “And you know something else? I think they brought me back because whatever it is they need, you can’t do it by yourself. You need me along because otherwise you’re going to blow it.”

“Why do I need you?” I asked too loudly.

The bad boy voice, attitude, everything slipped instantly back into place. “Because you been tamed, Chief McCabe. You dry your face with pretty pink towels and don’t even realize it ‘cause you’re used to it. But me? I’m still the caveman version of Frannie McCabe. I kick ass and piss out the window. I swing on vines in the jungle. I hunt with a club on the fucking veldt.”

I had to have a look. No matter how little time remained to figure out what “they” needed done, I had to call a short intermission and see Crane’s View rewound thirty years. I went back into the house for a pair of pants and shoes. Gee-Gee and Pauline were in the kitchen talking and laughing. They ignored the old guy in the boxer shorts as he passed. It was a pleasure to see Pauline looking so happy, even if it was due to Mr. Hot Pants and his sleazy ways.

In a pair of jeans and a T-shirt I went out the door again and down the porch stairs. As I began walking toward town I stopped and looked across the street. Why was my father coming out of that house so early in the morning? I tried to think back to who had lived there three decades before but came up blank. I would have to ask Gee-Gee later.

What I did remember was that as he grew older, Dad had increasingly bad insomnia and used to go out walking or driving around at all hours. My mother and I grew used to his coming and going at the strangest times. Once Mom even said the Jaguar and the insomnia were the two things that made him different from every other Tom, Dick, and Harry. My father’s name was Tom.