The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

Crickets chirped slow: could-be, could-be.

Against that wall of stone my evening crashed to its end. If that's what they say, I growled to myself, they're wrong.

I wondered if she'd agree, wherever she was this minute. Are they wrong, my dear unknown?

Wherever she was, she didn't answer.

By the time the frost was melted from the wings next morning I had engine-blanket, tool-kit, grocery-box and cookstove dumped neatly on the front seat, cover brought down and fastened tight. The last of the breakfast cereal I left for the raccoon.

Sleep had found my answer: Those advanced and perfect ones, they can suggest, they can hint whatever they want, but it's me who decides what to do. And I've decided that I am not going to live my life alone.

I pulled on my gloves, swung the propeller, started the engine for the last time, settled down into the cockpit.

What would I do if I saw her now, walking through the hay? On silly impulse, a queer chill in my neck, I turned and looked.

The field was empty.

The Fleet roared up from the earth, turned east, landed at Kankakee Airport, Illinois. I sold the airplane- within the day, eleven thousand dollars cash, and stuffed the money into my bedroll.

Touching the propeller for a long minute alone, I told my biplane thanks, told her goodbye, walked swiftly out of the hangar and didn't look back.

Grounded and rich and homeless, I hit the streets on a planet of four billion five hundred million souls, and in that moment I began looking full-time for the one woman who, according to the best people who ever lived, wasn't there at all.

two

WHATEVER ENCHANTS, also guides and protects. Passionately obsessed by anything we love-sailboats, airplanes, ideas-an avalanche of magic flattens the way ahead, levels rules, reasons, dissents, bears us with it over chasms, fears, doubts. Without the power of that love . . .

"What are you writing?" She looked odd puzzlements at me, as though she had never seen anyone work a pen and notebook, passenging south on the bus to Florida.

Somebody interrupts my privacy with questions, sometimes I answer without explaining, to frighten them silent.

"I'm writing a letter to the me I was twenty years ago: Things I Wish I Knew When I Was You."

In spite of my miffment, her face was pleasant to see, lit with curiosity and the bravery to satisfy it. Deep brown eyes, hair a dark brushed waterfall.

"Read it to me," she said, unfrightened.

I did, the last paragraph to where it broke off.

"Is it true?"

"Name one thing you've loved," I said. "Liking doesn't count. What one driving obsessive uncontrollable passion . . ."

"Horses," she said at once. "I used to love horses."

"When you were with your horses, was the world a different color from other times?"

She smiled. "Yeah. I was queen of south Ohio. My mom had to lasso me and drag me out of the saddle before I'd go home with her. Afraid? Not me! I had that big horse under me-Sandy-and he was my friend and nobody was going to hurt me as long as he was there! I loved horses. I loved Sandy."

I thought she had stopped talking. Then she added, "I don't feel that way about anything, now."

I didn't answer, and she fell into her own private time, back with Sandy. I returned to my letter.

Without the power of that love, we're boats becalmed on seas of boredom, and those are deadly . . .

"How are you going to mail a letter to twenty years ago?" she said.

"I don't know," I told her, finishing the sentence on the page. "But wouldn't it be terrible, the day comes we learn how to ship something back in time, and we've got nothing to send? So first I thought I'd get the package ready. Next I'll worry about the postage."