Shortcut in Time

1964 This story began with a broken promise. It began in water over my head. It began with me, Josh Winkler, flying through the streets of the only town I had ever known, Euclid Heights, Illinois, six zero zero zero one. I was in a hurry because I didn't want to disappoint my kid brother. Again. I was old enough to know that you don't get a lifetime of second chances with people. Especially with people who don't really need you. And Kurt didn't need me. He'd jumped out of bed at dawn to complete an Eagle Scout project with his best friend, Vaughan Garner. They were teaching retarded children to swim and Kurt had asked me to steer the kids back if they wandered away from where he and Vaughan mimed the Australian crawl in the shallow end. I'd heard my brother get up that morning before his alarm clock went off, heard him wash, organize his clipboard, nudge me, whisper, "Josh, it's time," and hurry away in the dark. Next thing I knew, mom was shaking me, knocking the sleep out of me, the sun so high it shined on the floor of my basement bedroom. "You promised him, mister," she said. The Euclid Heights community pool was next to the American Legion baseball diamond and as I tore on my bike across the outfield grass I looked ahead through the chain-link fence for some sign of my brother, or Vaughan, or the retarded kids, some way to gauge how badly I'd let them down this time. But no one was in sight. Before I could worry or even think about this, Jack KetchJock Itch to those of us who hated and feared himcame toward me on his bike from around back of the poolhouse, riding with his head down, pumping so furiously that a rooster tail of dew sprayed out behind him. He was a flat-topped bully, all blackheads and cruelty. He'd made more boys cry thanOld Yeller. Jock Itch answered to no one. He had the law on his side. His father was Sheriff John "Jack" Ketch Jr., himself the son of a lawman of the same name. Imagination was not a Ketch family trait. Wielding power was. Itch's dad was half again his son's size and treated the town kidshis son includedwith glancing disdain, like a lion that had just eaten. In that year, an election year, Sheriff Ketch was running unopposed for a third term. He gave his son the pick of the town's impounded bikes and that morning Itch was on a spaghetti-tired English racer, his mindsuch as it wasevidently elsewhere. I was pretty sure he hadn't seen me. He was producing this weird squeaklike he needed oilingand we were about to pass each other without incident when he swerved his confiscated bike in front of me. My front tire slid across his rear wheel. I went down head over handlebars. On my knees, my mouth full of grass clippings, I recognized the squeak he'd been making. It was "Wink. Wink. Wink." He turned up the volume as he circled me. "Wee-ink! Wee-ink! Wee-ink!" I righted my bike. "Is Winker all wet now, too?" He threw somethinga small, blue stickat my feet. I stepped on it without bothering to determine what it was. It snapped under my foot. I took a step toward him but we both knew it was nothing serious. No one really wanted a piece of Jock Itch. He was bigger and stronger than any two kids, and impervious to pain in that way the thickheaded and unreflective were. That morning his T-shirt was damp and wrinkled, like someone had recently grabbed a fistful of it and held on for a while, then thought better of the enterprise. "You're too late, Wink," Itch said, then he was on his bike and gone. Coming up on the poolhDickinson, Charles is the author of 'Shortcut in Time' with ISBN 9780765306395 and ISBN 0765306395.