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Still wrapped in thought at my strange turn of
events, I turned onto I-95, heading south towards Baltimore. As I began to
accelerate down the on-ramp, George Washington cleared his throat besides me. I
glanced at him and was surprised to see something close to fear showing through
his calm features, or maybe disturbance is a better word, because the
president's commanding face seemed almost incapable of expressing fear. His hands, white-knuckled, tightly
clenched the sides of his seat. I raised an eyebrow at him, and noticing that I
was watching him, the president made a weak attempt at regaining his composure.
He quickly released his hold on the chair and fell instead to straightening his
vest, then, clearing his throat again, said, “Your carriage moves remarkably
fast, lad.”
I smiled, and Washington continued, “My throat is
suddenly dry; may I?” He gestured towards the bottle of root beer lying between
us.
My smile disappeared. In the strange events of
the past few minutes, I had naturally
forgotten about the snacks I had planned to consume on my ordinary travel home.
Now that they were brought back to my attention, though, I was not sure that I
was ready to share anything with these strange men. I figured sharing one root
beer wouldn’t hurt, though, so I gave the go ahead. I would only be in the company of these men
for a fraction of an hour, anyway. Or so I thought.
After politely thanking me, George Washington
picked up my A&W Root Beer. He looked the bottle over for a minute, then
pulled at the cap. Surprise showed on his face when this first pull failed, and
he tried again. My smile returned as I watched him. He tugged at it several
times, but finally he said to me, “The cork seems to be stuck. Do you have a
mechanism I could extricate it with?” This was the closest to grumbling that I
ever heard from George Washington.
“Twist it,” I offered, trying hard to keep from
laughing.
The president followed my advice and finally got
the “cork” off. He took a sip from the soda but coughed and nearly spit it back
out. “Very“—he hesitated—“interesting.” He passed the drink back to Benjamin
Rush. “Taste this, doctor. It bubbles in my throat as if it were
alive.”
I don’t
know what it was, but it seemed as though there was a catch in George
Washington’s voice when he addressed Benjamin Rush. It seemed to me that there
had been a tension between the two men from the start of my brief time with
them. I wondered at this and at first had credited it to the strangeness of the
world they had been thrust into, but now I guessed that there was perhaps
something more. They were by no means hostile towards each other, but
nevertheless, they seemed to hold themselves at a
distance.
Benjamin Rush set down his medical book and took
the root beer, calmly raising it to his lips, but he too choked on his first
mouthful. He then turned the plastic bottle over in his hands as he studied it.
“root beer,” he said at last from where he sat behind me. “Is this beer made out
of some kind of herbal root?”
“Uh, no.”
The doctor shrugged and passed it to Benjamin
Franklin, who eagerly took the bottle. “I hope that is not your primary drink
here in America now, for I doubt not that the health benefits are much better in
the beer of our taverns than that drink.” Without another word, Dr. Rush turned
back to his book.
Benjamin Franklin took a sip and was able to hold
it down. In fact, he tipped the bottle back and drained about half of the
contents. His friendly gray eyes twinkled as he handed the drink back to the
front, and he said, “Ethan, I hope you have not been offended by the mean
comments of my comrades towards your drink. I find it to be very refreshing.”
The rotund man let out a contented sigh, which was cut short by a
burp.
I laughed. “No, I was not offended.” I returned
Benjamin Franklin’s smile, and it was then, I think, that I realized it: like it
or not, I was gaining a sort of fondness for these three men.
Our conversations still failed to last all that
long, though, for I didn’t know what to say to the men, and the three founding
fathers couldn’t really get a good grasp on any of the aspects of my life to use
as a springboard for a conversation. So scarce was our interaction, that I even
turned the radio on, but before I could find a station, I had turned it off
because of the rapid stream of questions that again started pouring from Mr.
Franklin. As I listened to one of the corpulent inventor’s long and detailed
questions, Benjamin Rush caught my eye in the rear-view mirror and smiled wryly
at me as he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. Tearing two strips from the
kerchief, he stuffed the strips in his ears and resumed his reading.
I was thankful for the rush-hour traffic I got
snarled in as we came in sight of Baltimore, for I almost regretted having to
leave the men so soon. I also was fighting an inner battle, for I knew that
reaching the car-dealership meant that a pretty embarrassing confrontation was
soon forthcoming. Though the men were sincere in their intent to buy a
“carriage” to transport them back to their home city, I knew that it was very
unlikely that they could buy a car. Even if they had sufficient funds (which I
knew they did not), they probably did not have a driver’s license or any of the
other necessary requirements. Unless they really were not who they said
they were, which I found more and more unlikely, the three men were powerless to
buy a car. I had known this from the start, but it hadn’t particularly troubled
me. My plan had been to escort the three to the car dealership and leave them
there with a smile and a hearty farewell, effectively dumping
them.
This plan
bothered me now.
We arrived at the dealership, and the three men
thanked me heartily as they climbed out of my car. Through all of this I
remained silent, the battle within me reaching a feverish pitch.
Benjamin Rush went around the back of the car and
made as if to help the other Benjamin out of the car, but the inventor held up
his hand. “Never mind me,” he said. “Give me a second.” The portly founding
father rocked back and forth several times, gaining enough momentum to heft
himself from the seat of my car. He managed to stand upright and flashed the
doctor a smug smile.
“Gabby old gentleman,” Dr. Rush said under his
breath, not looking all that pleased with Benjamin Franklin’s charade.
George Washington bent down and shook my hand
before he closed the passenger’s door to my car. “Thank you, Ethan, for your
service to me and my companions.” He handed me several silver coins. “Here, take
these as payment for your most gracious help. I am glad to have met you, for you
proved yourself a trustworthy companion. Our Lord’s blessing be upon you.” He
stepped back and closed the door.
The sound of the door closing and the president’s
last words rang in my ears, and I looked down at the coins in my hands. Like
everything else about the men, they were odd. I felt sure they were not from
this century—and they were real. As I looked at the Spanish dollar coins, a
primary money of the early Americans, something finally clicked inside me. The
coins were real, and the men were real! They had done nothing to discount who
they claimed they were, quite the opposite.
I almost frantically opened my car door and stood
up, calling after the founding fathers, “Wait!”
The three of them had walked some twenty feet away
from me and were looking around at the many cars displayed before them. Already
a salesperson was heading towards them, like a shark bearing down on its
unsuspecting prey, as the men stood with hands in their pockets, looking very
out of place. They turned towards me, and President Washington said, “Are you
all right, lad?”
I motioned for them to come back. “I need to ask
you something.”
“Certainly.” George Washington and his two
companions walked back to my car, standing in a half circle around me.
“Friends—if you don’t mind me calling you such,” I
said, as surprised with myself for calling them “friends” as they must have
been. “I need to ask this: are you really who you say you are? Please tell me
the truth.”
Benjamin Franklin, with a bemused look on his
face, was the first to respond. “Yes, did you think we were
playacting?”
George Washington shook his head and spoke levelly,
“Ethan, I do not blame you for not crediting it as possible that we were actual
at first. Indeed, if I had been in your place, I would have scoffed at the very
idea that someone from a different age could stand before me, but here we are.
We are who we claim to be. But a short time ago these two gentlemen and I were
in Philadelphia in the year 1789, my first as president over these United
States.”
“I am sorry I doubted you.” I meant it. Glancing
away from George Washington, I saw that the salesman was striding towards our
group with a broad smile on his face, a smile that kept the shark metaphor
intact as I imagined a Great White opening its jaws to receive its prey. “Please
get back in my car.” I quickly returned to my seat inside the car, and my three
friends did the same.
The salesman, now nearly running, reached my car as
my engine coughed to life. He tapped on my window, almost wildly gesturing for
me to roll it down. I did, and a sale’s pitch poured from his mouth like a
well-oiled machine starting to life. I almost felt sorry for the clearly
desperate man, crushing his hopes of a needed commission in such a way. But not
sorry enough to cut off his sale’s pitch.
“I’m sorry,” I said, beginning to roll my window
back up. “There’s been a misunderstanding; I was just letting these old
gentlemen stretch their legs. Poor fellows, they were pretty cramped after two
centuries of residing in a casket. Goodbye.”
Now my shark looked more like a fish out of water,
his mouth opening and closing as if he was unaccustomed to the air. “Sir?” he
managed at last, but by that time I had my window rolled up and was driving past
him.
*****
“You would not have been able to purchase a car
with any of your money. You see,” I said, holding up a ten dollar bill, “this is
what our currency looks like now.” We were parked on a side street in Baltimore
a few minutes after leaving sharky behind.
“Is that the likeness of the gentleman Alexander
Hamilton?” George Washington asked, looking closely at the face on the
bill.
I shrugged. “I guess
so.”
George Washington looked up at me sharply, surprise
showing on his face. “You seem to know about me and my two comrades, but you
don’t seem to know of Mr. Hamilton?”
I shuffled my feet. “Well, I probably heard of him
in school, but after taking my history test, I just kind of forgot about him I
guess.”
George
frowned as he handed the bill to Benjamin Rush. “You would do well to learn of
him, Ethan. He was a great man.”
“So how much does a carriage cost in America now?”
Benjamin Rush asked as he studied the bill, reverting the conversation back to
it. “Could not a handful of these ten dollar notes buy a sufficient
carriage?”
I stared at the doctor, then laughed. “No, you can
barely buy a used car for three thousand dollars.”
All three of the gentleman stared back at me now.
“Three thousand dollars,” Benjamin Rush replied in an almost awestruck tone.
“Surely no one can buy such lavishly priced things.”
“No.” George Washington shook his head. “It must be
the dollar; it has depreciated very much like the continentals of our age.”
Concern showed now on the president’s face. “Ethan, what is the state of the
economy in America today?”
I thought for a while, not sure how to answer this
question. My parents had talked, of course, of the collapses of our economy in
the past few years, and I had heard the grumblings of my older relatives at the
prices of this and that and of how they used to be able to buy things at a
fraction of the price, but this really hadn’t personally bothered me. To me it
was just the way things were, as I had not lived long enough to know anything
different. “I . . . I guess I don’t really know,” I said. “My parents talk of
things like the ‘fiscal cliff’ or our ‘national debt’, of how our nation is
headed for hard times, but I don’t really know much about
that.”
George Washington looked at me gravely. “Son, if
America is headed for rough times, it is not something to be taken lightly.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say in reply, but
thankfully Benjamin Franklin spoke up, “Mr. President, if I may, let us turn to
other things. We must come up with some accommodating plan or another to get us
back to our abodes or to somewhere useful. The township of Baltimore has grown
to remarkable proportions, but nevertheless, it is still useless to
us.”
“I can take you wherever you would like,” I said
evenly.
George Washington’s grave appearance dissipated as
his calm composure again took over. “Ethan, we thank you for your services and
friendship, but we cannot require anything more from
you.”
“No, it is okay. I want to help you.” I was
surprised at the almost earnest tone of my voice.
“If our young friend truly wishes to bear us for a
while longer, I propose we head either to Philadelphia or to the land where the
president of our beloved nation now resides,” Benjamin Franklin proposed. “I am
sure that at the remarkable speed of our friend’s carriage, we could reach
either place before many hours have passed, possibly even before nightfall.”
With these last words, Benjamin Franklin looked at the sun, which was still a
good distance from the western horizon.
Benjamin Rush and the president agreed to this
plan. “But let us let Ethan decide as to which of the two destinations he would
like to transport us to,” George Washington added.
“Well, Washington D.C. is about an hour closer than
Philadelphia, so taking you there would be more convenient,” I offered.
George Washington nodded. “So be it. Bear us
there.”
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