Good enough.
Travis left the image still and waited. Two seconds passed. Three. Then, sensation. Not the soles of his feet but the entire front of his body: his legs and chest and elbows, all seeming to hover at static-spark distance above the bed.
He let himself drop.
The change was so jarring he flinched. On his previous use of the Tap he’d gone back only two years; his body had been indistinguishable from its forty-four-year-old state.
Ten was different—startlingly different—and his size and shape were the least of reasons.
The reasons were everything else.
His senses. The richness of the world came through them like a high. Had he really felt this way all through his childhood? This alive and feral? Had he lost it so gradually he’d never noticed it going away? He took a breath of the humidity coming in through the screen. He tasted cut grass and damp pavement and the pulp stock pages of the book lying open beneath him. A blue hardcover with no dust jacket. He flipped it shut. The Hardy Boys Number 2: The House on the Cliff. He set it beside the lamp and listened to the night. Crickets, katydids, distant tires hissing on asphalt. His hearing had to be half again better than what he was used to. His vision, too, though not in its clarity—at forty-four he still didn’t need glasses. It was more about the depth of colors. The saturation, maybe. Whatever it was, plastic lenses wouldn’t give it back to you once you’d outgrown it.
Beneath all the sensations lay something else, harder to name but more powerful. Some mix of hormones and oxygen-rich blood and uncluttered emotion. The simple, wild energy of being a child. It made him want to swing from the trees. If there’d been a drug to make a grown-up feel this way, it would’ve put to shame all the shit his parents were probably already selling in 1978.
He looked through his doorway into the room across the hall, and saw his brother Jeff asleep in the blue-white glow of his Captain Kirk night-light. Jeff was seven and already a certified Trekkie. Travis resisted the urge to wake him and tell him the movie version was coming out next year.
Further away was the sound of the TV in the living room, cranked down almost to silence for a commercial break. His father had done that all his life, even before he had a remote control. Now the floor creaked and the volume rose. Trumpets swelled and cut out, and then Johnny Carson was talking.
Travis killed the light, rolled onto his back, and lay waiting.
His father went to bed at 1:07.
Started snoring at 1:12.
Travis waited five more minutes, then got up and dressed.
He’d expected walking to feel strange in this body, but it was fine—the same unconscious act it’d always been.
He took his dad’s keys from their hook in the kitchen, pocketing them so they wouldn’t jingle. He opened the silverware drawer, slid aside the compartmentalized tray and found the envelope that’d lain beneath it all through his childhood. Inside was a quarter-inch stack of tens and twenties. He took them all, then returned to his bedroom and eased the window screen from its frame.
The car was a 1971 Impala, shit brown and already rusting around the wheel wells. Travis had actually driven it lots of times—as late as 1984 it’d been pretty reliable. It was parked on the street; there was no garage. He slipped in and racked the seat forward and got his foot on the gas without a problem.
He hit Kmart and bought everything he needed. Bread, chips, cookies, crackers, peanut butter, a twelve-pack of Pepsi. It all looked absurd in its ancient packaging. He got a coil of clear plastic tubing from the hardware department, and a five-gallon drum with a pouring spout. The last two things he bought were a wire coat hanger and a slotted-head screwdriver.
The checkout girl gave him a look when he walked up alone.
He nodded toward the parking lot. “Mom’s feet are killing her.”
The girl shrugged and started keying the prices by hand.
He found what he wanted in the fourth nightclub parking lot he searched: a Chevelle, maybe five years old, lime green with a white racing stripe down the middle.
And heavily tinted windows—including the windshield.
It took thirty seconds to defeat the door lock with the coat hanger, and another thirty with the screwdriver to break open the ignition and hotwire it. Ten minutes later he was heading east on I–94, the needle dead on 55 and the night air rushing in through the windows.
Chapter Fifteen