Craig Dudley stared out from behind the windshield at the endless line of cars in front of him. They snaked their way up the mountain on the 103 Freeway. Like every weekday, he had been up since five, had been out the door by quarter of six, and had traveled 10 miles in an hour. He was about 1/3 of the way to his job at John F. Kennedy High School.
To his left, Craig could see the ocean bay, which the 103 ran roughly parallel to. Small waves were caressing the sand of the beach.
“Screw this,” he said.
Craig inserted the front corner of the bumper of his 10-year-old beat up Toyota Corolla in a gap between two cars to the right of him, causing drivers in that lane to honk with outrage. He tried to avoid eye contact with annoyed drivers as he negotiated his car across the four lanes it would take to exit. Although it would have taken him another hour and a half to get to work, the exit for the Boardwalk was right there.
As other drivers behind him shook fists or issued middle finger salutations, Craig kept one hand on the steering wheel, while he opened his flip phone with the other. He dialed a number with his thumb, pressed send, and held it to his ear. It rang a few times before a woman answered on the other end.
“Hey Grace, it’s Craig Dudley. I think I’ve come down with something, and I need you to see about getting me a sub for the day.”
“Craig, you can’t do this again. It’s your third time in less than 2 weeks.”
“I’ve just been feeling really bad lately.”
“You’re already in hot water with Principal Chauncey.”
“I’m sorry. I know it looks bad. If you can just help me out this time, I promise I won’t miss any more work for the rest of the semester. Please, Grace, just this last time.”
There was a momentary pause on the other end. Grace was 20 years Craig’s senior, and she had taken a maternal interest in him when he had first started working at the school.
After the accident, when it was clear that Craig wasn’t moving on with his life, she had done her best to protect him from their mutual boss, but as a secretary, her power to blunt Principal Chauncey’s wrath was limited to gentle reminders of how neither of them could understand what Craig must be going through. After 6 months, that excuse was starting to run thin.
“Just this last time, I’ll smooth it over with him, but no more, okay?”
“Okay, thanks Grace.”
“Craig, I know it must be hard, but you’ve got to try to move on.”
“I’m trying.”
By the time he finished talking to Grace, Craig had muscled his way to the freeway exit. He drove down a short access road, turned left, crossed under the 103, and parked in a nearly empty lot on the other side.
He left his phone in the car as he stepped outside.
Move on? She has no idea what it’s like to lose a child, he thought as he walked down to a wide sidewalk with a yellow line running down the middle.
Locally, the concrete path was known as “The Boardwalk”, and it ran parallel to the beach for miles in both directions. After a few minutes of walking, his anger at Grace turned to guilt. She was the only reason he hadn’t been fired yet. He and Principal Chauncey had never gotten along, and when he started missing work, even after the “appropriate mourning period” had ended, their relationship had deteriorated almost to the point of no return.
It was November, overcast, and a workday, so the Boardwalk was mostly deserted except for the occasional homeless person sleeping under a closed lifeguard tower. The Ferris wheel stood idle, like a hibernating beast, awaiting the return of spring. The garage doors of the open-air shops on the Boardwalk, the ones that sold T-Shirts and other tourist swag, were all closed.
Grace had made it clear that he couldn’t miss any more work, but Craig hadn’t cared all that much about his teaching job prior to loosing Danny. Now he cared even less. He also suspected if he got fired, it might be the last straw for Trish, but, at that moment, it didn’t seem to concern him. Danny had been their only child, and Craig wondered if their son had been the one thing they still had in common.
“Screw it,” he said to no one in particular as he walked. He’d figure it all out later.
About a mile into his purposeless trek along the Boardwalk, Craig ascended a group of wide, white stair steps on a little hill that overlooked the beach. At the top was an oval-shaped concrete platform, about a third the size of a basketball court, with a metal railing around the edge. At approximately six-foot intervals around the perimeter of the platform were devices that looked like a two-foot-long inverted teardrop of chrome with two small cylinders projecting out. Each cylinder had a glass lens in the end. Each of these devices sat on a Y-shaped metal bar that extended out of a four-foot-long metal pole set into the concrete of the platform he was standing on.
Below the two cylinders on each device was a coin slot, and the words: “50 cents for 10 minutes,” and below that it said: “Tower-Scope, Ltd. Proudly Made in the USA. A Family Owned Company since 1935.”
The platform was empty except for a man at the opposite end. He was mostly bald with his remaining short gray hair encircling the lower part of his skull. He wore neat denim overalls that had creases ironed into them and shiny maroon work shoes. He was sitting on a little folding chair with half of the teardrop portion of a tower-scope in his lap, its internal workings exposed. He was adjusting something with a screwdriver. He hadn’t looked up when Craig had ascended the stairs, and he continued to peer down into the device as Craig walked over to one of the other tower-scopes and dropped two quarters in the coin slot.
Further down the Boardwalk, Craig could see a pier. He swiveled the tower-scope in that direction and put his eyes a few inches away from the lenses in the end of the cylinder. At first he could only see black. He lowered his head further down, and leaned closer to the eyepieces, then blinked once.
Craig’s field of vision compressed and turned into a narrow tunnel, as everything swept past him, like the “Millennium Falcon” going to light speed. It was over in less than a second –then he looked down. He wasn’t on the platform at the Boardwalk anymore.
Craig could see between the boards of the pier to the blue ocean below. He was wearing flip-flops. He looked up and felt the heat of the sun on his face, but it was okay because he could smell the zinc oxide on his nose. He was surrounded by people -all making their way on or off the pier. A few of them carried fishing poles like he did, while others were walking to the restaurant on the pier that gouged tourists with low-grade seafood but made up for it with a spectacular view of the bay.
“Hey Dad! I found us a spot!” Danny said as he stood up on the first horizontal bar from the bottom of the railing of the pier and waived at Craig.
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Read the rest at Smashwords.com or Amazon.com:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1120616
https://www.amazon.com/Tower-Scope-Other-Stories-Speculative-Fiction/dp/1549874942/