Chapter 41

April 25, 1978

Reading the newspaper, Robert Kane sat behind the desk at the pawn shop in his high tech wheel chair. This one, the latest of many, had a motor that pushed it along and a little knob that he could use to steer it. He had lots of things that allowed him to overcome any difficulties posed by his lost legs. It wasn’t that he was lazy, but it did allow him to move around while holding things in his hands.

He heard the jangle of the cowbells above the door and lowered the paper to see who had entered the store. He looked at the buzz cut and figured he knew exactly who had just entered his shop. It was his shop now. He had bought his father out and now ran it alone.

“Your name is Ben ... Benny ... Bill...”

“Benny Baker.”

“You gave me five hundred dollars and told me to invest it.”

“What stock did well in 1968?”

“IBM, Xerox, Polaroid, and Kodak were among the so-called glamor stocks or Houdini Issues. You couldn’t go wrong holding those stocks. In 1968, one of the bigger winners would be Milgo. They were into something called modems. Their stock doubled almost right after it went public.”

“Good. You did your homework.”

“I guess you came to pick up the results of your investment.”

“What investment?”

“That five hundred dollars. I’ll admit I took a little of it as commissions. I did keep it well within the lines of standard broker fees.”

“That’s your money. I gave it to you.”

“No, it’s your money.”

“Sorry. You got that wrong. I gave it to you to win or lose.”

“Well, I’ve been treating it like it was your money.”

“That was nice of you. I hope that it distracted you from your other problems.”

“That’s the amazing thing. It did.”

“Good.”

“When you walked out of here after dropping that money on my desk, I wanted to kill you. First there was that whole bit about getting my legs back, which I still can’t figure what you meant by that. The $500 really pissed me off. How dare you think that a stupid $500 could solve my problem? Then I realized, you weren’t talking about me spending the money, but using it to learn about the stock market. You were telling to get my mind off my problems.”

“No. I was telling you to learn about the stock market during the sixties.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was pretty sure that I had the solution to your problem, but I lacked the data to support it. The other day, I got the data I needed. I can tell you the solution to your problem. I can tell you how to get your life back to how it was before you lost your legs.”

“Are you screwing with me?”

“No.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

Benny pointed to a chair and asked, “Do you mind if I sit down? This is going to take some time.”

“Have a seat.”

Benny sat down and crossed his legs. He took a deep breath and then exhaled. He wished Tim was here to do the explaining, but Tim was stuck in school. Tim was so much better at dealing with people and, at heart, this was a people issue.

“It is said that a person’s life flashes before their eyes at the moment of death. I don’t know if that is true for someone killed in an automobile accident or experiences a sudden death as a result of a heart attack. I do know it isn’t true for someone dying a long slow painful death from lung cancer brought about as result of 43 years of smoking cigarettes. Instead of a flash, a person’s life crawls past through months of quiet reflection and anguished examination of memories, good and bad, happy and sad, significant and trivial.

“I died on August 21, 2017.” Benny held up a hand to forestall Robert from saying anything. Robert looked like he was about to burst.

“I know what you’re thinking. This asshole is screwing with me. He’s sitting here talking about dying in 2017. Doesn’t he know that it’s 1978? I do know, and you need to hear the rest of my story.

“Do you remember when I told you the names of three presidents?”

That reminder put a little damper on Robert’s reaction. That was one of Benny’s parting shots when he had stopped by that first time. He’d been shocked when Carter was elected president. He’d never heard of the man before the election.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“You were right. Nixon, Ford, and Carter. The first two were easy guesses. I never even heard of Carter until he ran for president.”

“There was another event on August 21, 2017 that is relevant to our discussion. There will be a total eclipse of the sun. The region of totality will cross the entire United States, from Oregon all the way to South Carolina. What does the eclipse have to do with my death? Well, I died at the moment the cone of totality swept through the place where I was living ... well, I guess you could say where I was dying. The next thing I knew, I was fourteen years old and back in 1972. I remembered everything quite clearly up to that day in 2017, as if I had just lived it. I also remembered everything after that day with the same clarity that I remembered it in 2017, which to be honest wasn’t all that clear. Do I know what year the Hunt brothers planned to corner the silver market? No. I do remember that they did try, and got clobbered when the Feds changed the laws on them.”

“The Hunts haven’t tried to corner the silver market.”

“Not yet. They will,” Benny said dismissively. “It’ll be ‘79, ‘80, or ‘81. We can’t remember if Carter was in office or Reagan.”

Robert wondered if he was talking about Ronald Reagan the actor or not. It was possible since the guy had run for office several times in the past. He just couldn’t see the country electing an actor as a president.

“Okay.”

“I’ll tell you the truth, coming back to the age of fourteen did freak me out a bit.”

Robert wasn’t believing a word he was hearing. “I can imagine.”

“No, you can’t. I was sixty years old, and dying of cancer. Suddenly, I found myself in a fourteen year old body. No one can imagine that.”

“I suppose.”

“I had known Tim since I was fifteen, the first time through life. We had been through everything you can imagine. His first wife, Joyce, was a drug addict and a whore. She tore him up like you wouldn’t believe. He was my best and only friend. I honestly didn’t know how I could have made it through life without him. I trudged through a year of life in sheer misery.

“There I am, a sixty year old man stuck in the body of a fifteen year old. I see Tim at school and I think: ‘I’m a sixty year old man. There’s no way I can relate to a fourteen year old kid. Tim approached me and called me by a nickname that we had come up with together when he was sixteen and I was seventeen. You could have knocked me over with a feather. It turns out that he died during a total eclipse of the sun in 2024. He also died of lung cancer and he was also sent back to the age of fourteen. He also came back with all of his memories.”

“Lucky you, you got your friend.”

“We met you and it dawned on me that you could die at a total solar eclipse of the sun, and come back at fourteen. You’d be whole, just like you were when you were fourteen, but knowing what you know now, you could make very different life decisions. So I suggested that you learn and memorize stocks from the previous decade.”

“So I just go to where there’s a total eclipse of the sun and die.”

“Yes.”

“Just how am I supposed to die.”

Benny looked a little sheepish and answered, “To be honest, that was the part of solution that I didn’t know. I was afraid that cancer had a little something to do with it.”

“I take it you know, now.”

“Yes. Tim and I met another person who came back to when she was fourteen. She died in Portland during a total eclipse of the sun and returned to 1930.”

“Let me guess, she died of cancer.”

“No. She committed suicide.”

“So you’re saying that I should go to where the next total solar eclipse of the sun will occur and commit suicide at the moment of totality.”

“Yes, if you want your legs back and a chance to live your life over again.”

“When should I do that?”

“February 26, 1979, August 21, 2017, and April 8, 2024 are the next total eclipses over the United States; or, you could travel overseas and hit an eclipse there.”

“Okay.”

“I’m pretty sure that you really don’t trust me, so you might want to skip 1979. That’s next year. You could easily make it to 2017. You’d be about 68 or so. That’s when I suggest that you jump back and try again.”

“I’d go along with that.”

Benny said, “It’s a damned shame that we can’t remember any dates of significant events. There are some pretty significant ones that affect the stock market. I’m talking about the market going crazy type of thing.”

“Like what?”

“The Shah of Iran flees his country, the Ayatollah Khomeini takes over Iran, and the people working in the American Embassy are taken hostage. Because of the events in Iran, the price of oil goes crazy. We’re talking about a doubling of the price of gasoline. Then the Hunts try to corner the silver market and the price of silver goes up to over $40 an ounce. We think, but we’re not sure, that it hits $47 an ounce.

“We can’t remember if those things happened before, during, or after 1979. We’re not sure which one was first, the oil crisis or the silver deal. For all we can remember, they could have happened at the same time.”

“That’s a lot of details considering that you can’t remember much of what happened.”

“It’s not that we can’t remember what happened, it’s that we can’t remember the dates on which they happened.”

“That’s convenient.”

Benny looked at Robert for a second trying to come up with a convincing argument. He wished once again that Tim was there. He’d handle this much better than he was doing. He got a glimmer of inspiration.

“What was the date the Pentagon papers were released?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know it happened, right?”

“Yes.”

“It’s kind of convenient that you don’t the remember the date.”

“I get it. You made your point. You really don’t remember the dates.”

“Right. I do remember one thing. Reagan gets them to release the hostages, but only after Carter is out of office. That we know is in 1981.”

“Well, I’m not going to kill myself just on your say so.”