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Fighter jets screamed over Diamond Head, then shot straight up in tight formation, the islanders below oblivious, for the most part. Climbing nearly out of sight, they split into four directions of billowing slipstreams, blossoming into a smoky hibiscus, a daily display of military might for those who might have secession on their minds.

Big Daddy grunted, foot bouncing lightly on the brake, rocking the old '66 Mustang forward. Some two million people populated the island of Oahu, and, I swear, most of them lived to clot the freeways with their cars around the clock. Where could they all be going on such a small island? The Mustang jerked, bobbled, again and again. I couldn't hold the newspaper still and gave up trying to read the article to him.

Big Daddy gunned the car again, and we sliced into traffic from the on-ramp. A beat-up Celica cut between us and the Nissan pickup ahead. Big Daddy gave a blast on the horn. The Celica spurted into the next lane and sped out of sight. Big Daddy nodded toward the newspaper in my lap. "Read some more." I tried again. In freeway traffic now, I was able to keep it steady. I found the place I'd left off earlier and, despite the fact that Big Daddy had read the article countless times himself, began to read.

Big Daddy had been a tinker of gadgets all his life, never formally educated in the ways of electronics, but joking from time to time that his small successes would eventually catapult him into riches and fame, though neither fame nor money mattered to him. The journey's the thing he cherished, not so much the goal. At best, his gadgets had proved little more than oddities, cute curiosities. But when Big Mama died, process suddenly took second seat to goal, each desired gadget now taking on importance he had never before imagined.

The headline--"Time Travel Now Within Reach?"--ran just below the fold, complete with a photograph of a short, bulky man standing next to the refrigerator-size contraption that had piqued Big Daddy's tinkering curiosity.

"Dr. Timothy Tanaka, University of Hawaii professor and research physicist," I read aloud, "has sent waves of doubt, dismay, and debate throughout the international scientific community with claims that, based on preliminary tests, time travel is not only possible, but within reach."

Whatever the reason for his interest, it was good to see Big Daddy excited about something, anything, again. Shortly after Big Mama died, Mom seized the opportunity to ease her worry on two fronts. She sent me to Alabama to live with Big Daddy, placing me in what she believed a more stable and physically safe environment while providing Big Daddy some company now that Big Mama had left him alone. For the last seventeen months, he and I had been room buddies in Red Level, a spit-in-the-road town about thirty miles north of the old Florida-Alabama state line.

"Keep an eye on him," Mom had instructed. "Mama could keep him in line, but she's gone now. Make sure he doesn't do anything foolish." She didn't define exactly what she meant by foolish, and I figured Big Daddy had a better idea of how to run his life than I did. Mom was happy--perhaps relieved is a better word--that I'd agreed without protest. She wanted me with her, of course, but, more, she wanted me safe, and back with Big Daddy in Alabama, she figured, was a lot safer than being with her. She'd always been worried about me, traipsing around the world with her and Dad. Then, after what happened to Dad in Palestine, worry over my safety played on her nerves even more than the weight of the negotiations she was involved in. Trying to save the world while being a single mom is not exactly the best work conditions a person can have.

Mom had served her country well, representing the U.S. position in Middle East conflicts throughout the region, mediating arms talks between countries whose participation changed based on the latest terrorist attack. Mom, Dad, and I had lived briefly in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Kuwait, Iraq, and Palestine. Dad liked the traveling, and he tried to mingle as best he could wherever we landed, but a white American face in the Middle East sticks out like a camel in a herd of gazelles. In those days, after years of U.S. domination in a region that craved to be left alone by the lumbering giant, being an American didn't exactly prove an asset. After Dad died, while I went to Red Level, Dad's ashes went with Mom, first to Geneva and then to Hawaii, bottled up in a small urn that she kept on her office desk and talked to when she needed someone to listen without judgment--more or less the same as when he was alive. Not a week after Dad died, long before she knew she'd end up in Hawaii, Mom announced that she didn't want to lose me, too, so off to Alabama she shipped me. "Take care of Big Dad," she told me.

Months after I landed in Red Level, Mom accepted a new assignment from the president, to take up residence in Honolulu as the Fed's official voice in what had become a new, though slight, boil on the president's butt. Hawaii, way off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, had decided she no longer enjoyed the perks of being a member of the United States, that time for autonomy had arrived, time to be a free and independent nation as it had been long before mainlanders rowed ashore. Mom's job would be to delay any action on the part of Hawaiians until the president was ready to deal with the situation.

When she got her travel orders to Hawaii, Mom considered having me join her there immediately, but I convinced her that it wouldn't be a good idea to leave Big Daddy alone. "You just don't know what he might do," I told her.

"I don't understand," she said. "You told me he was in good spirits."

"Yeah..."

"Well, if he's in good spirits, what's the problem?"

"You don't really..."

"What is it, Josh?"

I sighed. Best just to say it right out and be done with it. "He's started talking to Big Mama."

"Oh, good lord," she said with relief. "I thought it was something bad. Josh, I still talk to your dad."

"Yeah," I said, "but Dad doesn't talk back, does he?"

She went silent for so long I thought the line had disconnected. Finally, she let out a heavy sigh. "Okay," she'd said softly. "Maybe you're right. For now."

Big Daddy chuckled, settling back in the Mustang's seat. "I wonder what we're going to find at that university," he said.

I didn't think we'd find much of anything, but anything was possible, I suppose. According to a radio report on the local public station, Dr. Henry Tanaka, University of Hawaii physics professor, had been researching for nearly two decades into the possibility of time travel. Few scientists outside Hawaii took his research seriously, but, at home, he was considered one of the century's greatest minds, destined for recognition by all.

At any other time in history, Tanaka might have been taken more seriously outside his immediate neighborhood, but times were changing rapidly and not for the better. The declining union of the United States of America and the recent breakdown in Middle East and East Asian disarmament negotiations was on everyone's minds. No one had time to worry about time in general or traveling through it.

"Politics," Big Daddy spat, "is better left to politicians, not to honest folk. For the life of me, I don't understand why your mom puts up with it." Big Daddy was eighty-two and I was almost sixteen, my birthday lying only three weeks away. He glanced over at me and laughed. "Josh," he said, "I'm too old to worry about such nonsense, and you're just too young."

That was a long time ago.

The Mustang lunged, swerved, then abruptly slowed under Big Daddy's determined grip. A tractor-trailer brimming with fresh pineapples tried to squeeze into our lane. Big Daddy banged the horn, and the truck veered back into the other lane. Several pineapples tumbled off, exploding onto the highway. An arm jutted out the window and confirmed that Hawaiian drivers were just as adept at delivering standard highway sign language as anyone on the mainland. Big Daddy grinned and waved to the trucker.

A rainbow arched toward the University of Hawaii off downtown's tallest, most prestigious building, the Amfac. Big Daddy pulled into the exit lane and tapped his horn again as the pineapple truck rumbled further down the freeway. The truck driver shook his fist at us as the Mustang descended the ramp. Ten minutes later, Big Daddy and I entered the UH physics building.

Big Daddy rapped on Dr. Tanaka's door, slipped his hands into his pockets, and stepped back, ready to introduce himself. A moment later, he rapped again. And again. He took the doorknob in hand and turned. Big Daddy gave it a gentle push, and the door swung fully open. He stepped inside.

"Geeze, Big Daddy..."

He put a finger to his lips and nodded for me to follow. With a sigh, I stepped quickly in and closed the door, hoping no one else would open it before we were long gone.

Two stacks of pasteboard boxes, three high, each labeled "Fragile: Electronic Parts," sat against the back wall. To the left, a case rose from floor to ceiling with books on physics and chemistry and computing and laws of nature crowding every inch of shelf space, but Big Daddy zeroed in on one thing, the monstrosity that consumed an entire corner of the cluttered room. It was definitely the same contraption pictured in the newspaper, a box as tall as a coffin and about twice as wide, with wires snaking in and out and around, each curling to or from a diode or crystal or transistor or microchip--a confused, chaotic mass of junk. But for Big Daddy, that higgledy-piggledy piece of junk was the closest thing to heaven he'd seen in a long time. With a slight limp, he crossed over to the machine. He knelt down and opened the two primary plates, fingers following first one wire, then another, from point of origin to destination.

I cracked open the office door and peered out, checking the hallway, relieved to find it still empty. "Big Daddy," I said, gently closing the door, "that thing really a time machine?"

He glanced around, mind taking a moment to catch up, to shift thoughts from the machine to my question. "Maybe, maybe not," he grinned. "But it's a good start."

"Don't you think we should wait for Dr. Tanaka in the hall?" I asked in a loud whisper.

"Don't need him," he muttered. He twisted around for a look up into the bowels of the device. Five minutes, tops, and Big Daddy had traced every wire, flipped every switch, checked every circuit, committing every aspect of the machine to memory. He hoisted himself up, grinning to the point of giggles. He ushered me out ahead of him, pulling the door closed silently behind us as he came into the hallway.

"What about the professor?" I asked.

He started down the hall, motioning me to follow. "He did a good job. I've seen all I need to see."

A fifty-year veteran of tinkering with TV tubes and radio transistors, Big Daddy could take a hobby box, some microchips and wires, and design a gadget to satisfy a host of needs, but he never patented any, never tried to market one, perhaps because he didn't have enough confidence in himself, not enough education to claim his gadgets were as good or better than those of some college-educated so-and-so. As far as I knew, he'd never tried to copy anyone else's invention, not until Tanaka's. I couldn't be sure why, but I suspected it had everything to do with Big Mama. After Big Mama died, he lost most of his interest in life.

"I remember being your age," he said to me one day back in Red Level. I didn't understand then, but I certainly do now. "It wasn't all that long ago, to tell the truth, even though, at your age, it probably sounds like the Stone Age." He laughed. "All my life, I have felt like the same teenager I was decades ago. I still have the same ideas, same beliefs." He sighed heavily. "I never felt old, not until your granny died. And now..." He looked over at me, eyes growing heavy with the years, red with memories. "Don't waste your life, Josh, not like I've done."

Thing is, he hadn't wasted his life, not at all. He wasn't rich, certainly, nor was he the smartest guy in the world, but he'd lived comfortably and happily with his wife and he'd fathered a wonderful, caring human being who might--you could never tell--save the world. But when Big Daddy looked back on his life, all he saw were lost opportunities, times when his decisions could have taken him in other directions, directions that would have resulted in extremely different circumstances. Why hadn't he chosen to go to college, he wondered? Why hadn't he applied for a good job, perhaps down in Pensacola with Civil Service? Why hadn't he attempted to make one gadget to improve life in a way nothing else had, something that could have helped humanity in some way? Why, why, why? After Big Mama died, life lost its appeal. He began to drift through the days, as though he was part of a movie audience bored with the film.

Then came Tanaka's device. I don't believe Big Daddy's interest had anything to do with furthering the human race's technological capabilities through time travel, but I am certain it had everything to do with Big Mama, at least in the beginning, a means to flee back in time to be with her once more.

Bone-thin and two inches shorter than me (I stood a good five-ten back then, but I now look a lot like him--thin face, high cheeks, wrinkles everywhere, a head full of curly white hair), Big Daddy suffered a light stroke six months before Big Mama passed away, leaving him with a tenuous limp in his left leg and an apparent susceptibility to colds. Mom said he should continue seeing a doctor, if for nothing more than advice on building up resistance against the colds, but Big Daddy refused after Big Mama died. "If I die, fine, but ain't no doctor going to prod around in me anymore."

With Big Mama gone, Mom feared that Big Daddy would soon follow her to the grave, if not from disease, then from longing for his wife. After doctors discovered Big Mama had advanced liver cancer, Big Daddy could do nothing but bring her home to provide the care she required until the end. He didn't have enough money to keep her in the hospital. Mom tried to hire home care for Big Mama, but Big Daddy refused and wouldn't allow anyone else to care for his wife. He lost a good thirty pounds as long hours and worry hung heavily on his haggard face.

The night before she died, Big Mama reached over and patted Big Daddy's thin old hand and smiled at him. "'Member that old cat?" she asked.

Big Daddy's lips cracked a smile, and he nodded.

"I could've put a knot on your head for that," she wheezed. Tears came to the old man's eyes.

Big Mama had been a patient woman throughout her marriage to Big Daddy, and she loved him with all of her being, but Big Daddy had gone too far with his gadgets when their calico cat, Leon, died. Instead of ending up in a grave in the backyard, Leon turned up in the living room two days after he died, accompanied by a bill from the taxidermist. Big Mama set the cat to one side of the TV in the same spot he had slept for the past four years. Both Big Mama and Big Daddy were amazed by the taxidermist's work. The cat looked as though it would meow at any moment. Then Big Daddy got one of his ideas.

One early Sunday morning, the old man flipped a small, newly installed switch between the claws of the stuffed cat's left back paw, nodded satisfaction, and headed for the workshop. As he reached the workshop door, he heard Big Mama scream. The old man raced back inside to the living room to find Big Mama, her face chalk-white under a pad of curly, blue-tinted hair, clutching a broom drawn back over one shoulder, quaking with fear and rage. Big Daddy followed her glare across the room to where the cat's stuffed, decapitated body crackled and sparked. The head lay ten feet away under the edge of the couch, its mouth locked in mid-mew.

"You old fool," she growled. "Did you do this?"

Big Daddy swallowed hard and gave a reluctant nod.

"I thought the devil'd done come to stay," Big Mama seethed. "Don't you ever do anything like that again!"

Big Daddy stripped the cat of parts he could use in the future, then buried Leon in a proper grave in the backyard. It took two brand new kittens, meowing and scratching under the power of their own blood-driven motors, and an entire week of silence before Big Mamma warmed up to Big Daddy again. When those two kittens became cats, then adult cats, then dead cats--one, squished on the highway by neighbor Johnny Hodges, who would drive his car onto the shoulder of the road just to hit a cat; the other, stomped to death by Joe Stevenson's mare--Big Daddy let them remain naturally dead and buried them alongside Leon.

Big Daddy's marriage to Big Mama had been a myriad of mistakes, forgiveness, and laughter, experiences that bind two people to one another for a lifetime. They were extensions of one another, and, when Big Mama died, it would have been natural for the old man's "fragile, weird mind," as Mom put it, to snap. I didn't want to go to Red Level initially. I had no desire to be sequestered in some redneck town in south Alabama where being cultured meant eating your venison with a fork instead of your fingers. Big Daddy didn't need a babysitter, I argued, especially not me. After the first few days with him, however, I began to change my mind about both Red Level and Big Daddy. The place wasn't so bad, and perhaps Mom had been right in her concern.

For the most part, life with Big Daddy went along normally, but not always. A few times when I passed his bedroom door or came up the drive on my way in from school, I would hear muffled conversation from inside. Then it would suddenly go silent, and Big Daddy would open his bedroom door or appear on the porch, grinning with a big "howdy" as though he knew he would find me there. One day, I ducked around the corner of the house before he came out.

"Josh...?" He called from the porch a couple of times before shrugging and turning back inside. I eased back around the corner and onto the porch, crouching low, out of sight below window level. That's when I heard him say inside, "You were wrong, Becky. Josh ain't out there."

Silence replied to him, but that's' the way it is with dead people.

"Becky?" Big Daddy's old voice rattled.

You just can't go around talking to folks who're dead, especially if you think they're talking back. I thought I was doing everyone a favor when I called Mom that night. If anyone could, I figured she would straighten him out, and things would return to normal. Instead, she threw life into even greater disarray.

"I can't afford to support two households anymore," she told him "You'll just have to move out here, the both of you." Within a week, Big Daddy and I were on a plane to Hawaii.

Big Daddy steered the Mustang into our apartment building's massive parking garage and parked in the designated space. We rode the elevator up the twenty floors to our apartment where Big Daddy went straight to his room to stay for the next two days, coming out only to eat, pee, and bathe.

"Josh...?" Mom called from the kitchen as we came in. I glanced toward the couch as I'd done a million times in other apartments, other towns, half-expecting to find Dad stretched out, headphones on, John Lennon lulling him to sleep with songs about peace and love. Frederick Howard Rigsby, my dad, had dreamed of being a best-selling author. God knows how many stories, poems, articles, and unfinished novels he'd written. He'd garnered some success along the way, a few short fiction pieces published and a poem or two, but the success he craved never came. He worked more than twenty years, pursuing a dream, completing and submitting a dozen novels to publishing houses, and yet success eluded him. "Not quite right for us," the editors would say. "Too different." Heaven forbid a novel be too novel. Eventually, those novels ended up in the rubbish bin. Was his writing so awful? I didn't think so. I'd read some of his fiction and then some of his early journals, journals that amounted mostly to letters he'd written to me when I was nothing but a glop of developing goo inside Mom. He was a good, gentle man, a man with talent but ill-equipped for the competitive tenacity of publishing or any other field. And yet, he was a man who wanted his life to mean something. By his late forties, regret began to set in, and hope and determination slipped away by degree.

God, how I missed him.

Still in her running shorts and jogging bra, Mom braced with her hips against the kitchen counter as I came in. She spread with artistic precision thin layers of peanut butter and jelly onto a slice of all-natural bread. Standing nearly six feet tall, she was blessed with muscular, slender legs that turned heads whenever she allowed a glimpse. Sweat glistened on her sharp, red face, even though she'd completed her run a half-hour earlier. She hated the act of running, but she was on the jogging path at least five days a week, huffing and sweating usually before dawn, before going downtown to the capital building for negotiations. Running helped her to relax, to burn the tension and stress, not to mention the calories. By this time of day, she was usually gone, already in some meeting, but negotiations had dragged on late into the night before, and she'd slept in, deciding to take a mid-morning run before secession sessions resumed at two that afternoon. Unlike Dad who had taken his time in all matters--perhaps a bit too much time--Mom attacked her daily run as fervently as she had once attacked her career: Do the job, do it well, move on. The only difference between running and working was that she had at one time loved her job as a negotiator for the United States Government. She had never loved running.

"Hungry?" she asked.

I glanced at the sandwiches. I still hate PB&Js. "No thanks," I said, and was down the hall before she could ask anything else. I wasn't so lucky in getting away later when, after lunch and a cool shower, she called me into her room. She slipped a belt through the loops of a stone-gray skirt, buttoned the sleeves of her pink blouse. She twisted her white-streaked auburn hair into a tight bun atop her head. Her hands worked deftly, checking, straightening--bra, collar, panty hose.

"Excited about school?" she asked me. She lifted her skirt hem to mid-thigh and twisted her hose straight.

"Not exactly," I muttered. I wasn't sure why I had to start a new school one day before spring holidays the following week, but Mom was set on getting me into school that Friday. She dropped the hem, smoothed the skirt, and smiled.

"Have you met anyone in our building who goes there?" she asked.

I shook my head. I'd spent most of my free time bumming around with Big Daddy. As far as Akamai High, I wasn't exactly thrilled. The best thing the school had going for it in my mind was location, only a few blocks from our condo in the Salt Lake subdivision.

"You worry too much," Mom said. "You'll like it. More than I like secession talks." She sighed and glanced around, as if trying to remember some accessory. "And it's better here than it was in Geneva." She turned back sharply, nailing me with her eyes. "Don't you think so?"

I shrugged. What did I know about Geneva? I'd been in Alabama. For Mom, though, anywhere would've been better than Geneva. She'd once adored that place--the glamour, the perks that came with the job of being the U.S.'s lead negotiator, the late-night concessions, the power give-and-takes. The last time she'd been sent there, she'd been charged to set forth the U.S. position in arms negotiations that had shifted from Baghdad to Tel Aviv, then back again every few months. Observers and representatives from every nation on earth attended. That fact in itself had been quite an accomplishment. But somewhere in all the shuffling, the pictures of children dying daily in the skirmishes between terrorists and governments and insurgents made something snap in Mom. Before it had been my country 'tis of thee, but suddenly her outlook broadened, and the phrase became my world 'tis of thee as she saw every person on earth connected in some way. Six months into the process, the Syrian, United Korean, and Durban representatives jumped to their feet, cursing, pounding the table, taunting each other, growing dangerously close to striking out--not the best negotiating stance to present at a peace conference, especially by countries with the capability of annihilating each other, even if they were countries so physically far from one another, you had to ask, what's the deal? The other delegates threw up their hands and leaned back to enjoy the show--all but Melissa Stewart Rigsby. The Durban delegate abruptly clawed out for the Syrian, but his hand stopped in mid-air between him and the robe-clad Moslem as Mom hoisted herself onto the table and plopped down to her knees between the two men, her skirt sliding high on her thighs. The Durban representative's hand hovered before Mom's breasts as if weightlessly suspended, trying to decide to reach further or draw back. Few people--okay, no one--would have gotten on the table that way, but Mom's always been different. Maybe she figured it was the only way to get their undivided attention. Maybe she just lost her head. Or maybe she had finally found it.

"Look," Mom said, "this has gotten ridiculous. Think about it. Most of the people in this room represent countries that either have already developed or are in the process of developing nuclear capability. Any one country could bring on Armageddon, for God's sake. Is it so damn much to ask?" she said, a hand going to each opposing shoulder, "for you and everyone else here to agree on one thing, that this is madness, that it's time to reduce weapons stockpiles instead of making more? My God, we could destroy weapons for the next two decades and still have enough left over to blow the world into space dust. Why's this so difficult to understand? Just one power hungry president, one prime minister, one premier--that's all it takes to start the end."

She looked around the room, caught the Russian smirking, and her own assistant's mouth open in dismay. She turned back to the Durban representative. "After Apartheid and everything else the founders of your country went through, after overcoming all of that to secure a piece of this god-forsaken place once known as Afghanistan, why is it such an impossible task to stop research on new weapons? What you've already got's enough to act as a deterrent, isn't it? After all, you don't possess the most desirable property on earth, you know."

The Durban representative squirmed, eyes glancing nervously around the room. Mom had touched a chord, especially with the bit about the founding of the country. Durban wasn't on firm ground in age or in size. Its creation had been arranged in back rooms between the UN Secretary General and U.S. president, providing dozens of handouts to countries on the various UN councils to pass resolutions to establish the new country. A few thousand dispossessed politicians and military personnel from South Africa, Uganda, and other countries too numerous to mention were finally allowed to take possession of some of the rougher outland areas of Afghanistan if they could keep the local warlords in line. The group had a wad of money backing them and were armed well by the conservative U.S. and British governments, just as other terrorist and fascist groups had been armed in the Twentieth Century, only to turn on their benefactors in the end. The group eventually occupied a country about the size of Rhode Island. And yet they had amassed an arsenal any world power would have been proud of.

"I...I don't know what you're talking about," he muttered to my mom. Typical political response, even today, so many years later. Politicians love their weapons. Go ahead, see if you can get a politician to eliminate even one grenade without having it replaced with something more powerful, more deadly, more accurate, more destructive. Weapons are power, and politicians crave and nurture power. Giving up even the smallest portion just isn't going to happen.

Mom turned to the Palestinian. "And you, what's the problem with reducing your missile stockpile? You could probably blow away every country in the region already. What's one more overkill?" She glanced around at the others, lingering on the Israeli representative. She shook her head in pity. "The nations of every representative present have the power to begin the end of civilization as we know it. And yet that's not enough."

Looks of dismay and shock slowly melted into grins and chuckles. The politicians had never heard anyone dare to speak the obvious before, and they weren't about to accept it as legitimate in any context, especially in arms negotiations. At that moment, Mom's career as an effective arms reduction negotiator ended. Who wants to hear the obvious, the simple solution? Who wants to play it fair and square?

Washington recalled Mom within the hour. The president would have canned her then, but he feared a fickle press would portray the firing as a blatant attempt to silence the "only negotiator who has been serious about arms reduction treaties." So the president sent Mom on a more important diplomatic mission, to Honolulu to negotiate the U.S. government's position on Hawaii's bid to secede from the Union.

"You?" her Hawaiian counterpart had laughed when he first met her. "They sent you?"

Mom smiled cynically. If only he knew. The U.S. government had no intention to force Hawaii to remain part of the Union. She had been sent to secure exactly what she proposed to eliminate in Geneva, the maintenance and augmentation of the U.S. weapons stockpile in Hawaii. Hawaii would always have a strategically critical base in the Pacific. The question, the real negotiation, was what did Hawaii want from U.S. in terms of cash and assistance to allow the bases to remain after secession? She figured she had two months to find out. That's when a statewide referendum would decide whether Hawaii would continue as a dependent state or independent country.

Mom ignored the Hawaiian delegate, and set her sights on doing her country's bidding, despite the self-disgust she felt for defending what she wanted to eliminate. "Do you know the real reason the president yanked me out of the negotiations?" she asked me one night.

"Because of what you said, I guess."

"Not so much what I said, but what I proved," she replied quietly. "No country will ever give up its military might willingly, especially the U.S.. But giving up power's not what I meant at all. God, most nations have more than enough military power to destroy the world a hundred times over in under an hour if they so will it. All I was trying to do..." She shook her head in exasperation and rolled her eyes with a sigh. She stared down at the floor for a few moments, and I thought she had lost herself again in her own world. Finally, she looked up. "For whatever reason, they decided to send me here. They don't really care about Hawaii staying in or out of the Union," she said. "In fact, the U.S. would be happy without so many dependent states draining its reserves. The president said as much to me himself. The only thing he's worried about is the military."

If Mom's bosses thought she would cause no problems in Hawaii after the Geneva fiasco, that she'd follow their whims to the letter, with authority, conviction, loyalty, and eager finality, they didn't know my mother very well. Mom was too much like her father. No one could predict what either would do, not in five minutes, not in five hundred years.

"There's the stadium; over there, administration; offices of the principal and vice-principal are down that way; and," the woman said with a bored wave toward a dark hall about as inviting as a cave, "your homeroom's down there, last room on the left."

Although the counselor did her job of introducing me to the school in general, she neglected a few bits of information that would have served me well, especially on this particular Friday, the day Mom had insisted I begin school. Schools are schools, but each has its own special way of doing things, its own special qualities. In Alabama, you'd eventually run smack into racism against blacks no matter how much people denied its existence. In a New Jersey inner school, racism against whites. In Arizona, native Americans. Texas and California, Hispanics. You could ignore it, participate in it, or fight it in whatever way you thought best. Not every way was a good way. In Hawaii, white skin wasn't exactly the most prominent in my school, and it was by no means a badge you wanted to flaunt. Most schools have special celebratory days--football homecoming, Sadie Hawkins Day, field day, whatever--but only Hawaiian schools had a day like this one. On this day, most Hawaiian school kids like me chose to stay home, not because they were new to the system like I was, but because they knew the system well enough to choose a wiser course than attendance.

The counselor glanced at her watch. "Well, I have an appointment." She looked back up at me, feigned a tired smile. "Good luck," she said. The sad, apologetic sound to her voice wasn't exactly reassuring. She left me in the hallway, first to locate my locker, then homeroom. I'd arrived early enough that the school was still mostly empty, but a few kids had begun to show up and clump together in small groups around particular lockers or water fountains, speaking in the local pidgin dialect, eyes flickering around for a glimpse at the new kid. A few smirked as I finally located and opened my locker. Three local girls who'd been jabbering a few lockers down giggled and started past. The shortest of the three--maybe four-eleven, if that tall--jabbed me above the kidney with her elbow.

I cringed and half-turned to her. She cocked her head around as if to say Well?

"Oh, sorry, haole-boy," she cooed.

Haole?

Her hair was so black it shimmered with a bluish hue over her shoulders and down her back, her lips full and dark, eyes the color of richly brewed tea, set in a narrow, taunting face etched with a slightly uneven line that emphasized the ancient beauty of Japanese ancestry.

The look on my face must have been prime. The two girls flanking her giggled as the three turned and walked away. The girl who'd jabbed me glanced back a couple of times, her eyes mysterious and searching. I smiled. Maybe it wasn't going to be so bad at this school after all. I'd been there for less than a half-hour, and already a girl had flirted with me.

Little did I know.

I arrived in my homeroom before first bell and found myself the only person there. A bookcase ran along part of the back wall. I located a Hawaiian-to-English dictionary on one of the shelves and flipped through the pages. The word the girl had called me--haole--I wanted to know what it meant, whether it was a compliment or condemnation. Nothing under the "howl" section, so I tried various other spellings, finally coming up with Haole: Caucasian, of European ancestry, sometimes considered derogatory.

"Wonderful," I muttered.

I placed the book back on the shelf as first bell rang. Several students drifted in, pausing when they spotted me, curious grins crossing their faces. I took the second seat from the front, middle aisle, situated directly before the teacher's desk. If haole was an indication of how I'd be viewed by most here, I preferred a seat close to authority. Students wandered in, half-aware of anything but their conversations until they spotted me. Loud and animated talk suddenly turned to whispers, playful glimpses, and giggles. No one took a seat near me in either side row or directly behind me. These kids, whether they knew it or not, were teaching an important lesson about actions I'd witnessed dozens of times back in Alabama, actions never my own, but actions I was beginning to understand in a whole new light, the light called experience. The girl who'd jabbed me in the hallway came in and sat closest to me, two seats back in my row. I felt a tap on my shoulder as the tardy bell rang and the teacher entered. I turned, and the girl winked at me.

"Brave boy, eh, brah?" Giggles rippled around her.

"Okay," the teacher called out. "Listen and answer." He called roll, marking at least six people absent. After the last name, he walked over to me and took the admission slip I'd brought from the office. He looked it over, gave a nod as he handed it back to me. "Welcome to Akamai High, Joshua," he said. "I hope you like it here." I expected at least a half-smile, but the look on his face, a mixture between confusion and pity, didn't do much to inspire confidence.

Dismissal bell rang, and desks scraped on the floor, footsteps filled the hallways. I started up, but a local boy bumped me, so I eased back into the seat and decided that waiting a couple of minutes might be a good idea. The room emptied quickly, dozens of eyes glancing back at me before vanishing into the hallway. I didn't understand completely, but I began to figure it out when I emerged from the classroom. Every face that passed in the hallway was that of a local boy or girl, no white or black skin anywhere except for teachers. Something was up, and first period told me exactly what it was.

"So," the guy behind me said to the instructor, halfway through the lesson, "I understand how European haoles' diseases killed so many of our ancestors, but I don't understand why the Europeans thought we were animals that had to be trained, that had to be saved by their religions because our gods weren't good enough. They thought we were savages," the boy snapped.

"Yes, they thought your ancestors were savages," the instructor said. "But they thought that about anyone who wasn't the same as they were. It's taken time, but people in general have come a long way. We're not as savage or as quick to call others savage as we once were."

Tell that to my mother, I thought with a smirk.

I edged lower in my seat, the instructor's words getting lost in a discussion of the social and physical ruin early settlers wreaked upon the Hawaiian island chain. I agree that island descendents had a right to be upset by history, by what Europeans did in the name of God and exploration, but, at the same time, those abused ancestors, guided by power-hungry chieftains who ended up chopping Captain James Cook into little haole pieces, taking his cannons to conquer each other in quite the European fashion, had encouraged western immigration, facts that got lost in time and hate.

A boy with stripes of fluorescent green running through his greased-back black hair leaned toward me from his seat in the next row, tapped my shoulder, and whispered in pidgin English, "You either stupid or crazy," he said. "Don't you know kill-haole day?"

I should have cleared out after history, should have taken a chance on being suspended for skipping my first day, but, like a fool, I stayed. I wasted no time in the hallways between classes, lugging around my increasing load of books instead of taking a chance at getting clobbered at my locker while putting them away. Twice on my way to class, an arm snaked under mine to scatter books and papers across the floor. Someone would ram me, say, "Oh, sorry, brah," or tap me on the shoulder, back up, prance like a cocky middle-weight and bark, "You like beef?" then jeer at me as I hurried away in the opposite direction.

When last bell rang, I stayed in my desk long after the other students filed out of the room. I lived three blocks from school, but the challenge was to get out of the building and off campus without getting creamed. Waiting until most, if not all, kids had left campus seemed like the wisest choice I could make. When the halls had finally fallen silent, the teacher asked, "You planning to sleep here tonight?"

I gathered my junk and fled, stopping short in the hallway when I spotted two local boys at the end-of-hall exit into the parking lot. One nudged the other and both straightened as they turned to face me fully, grins spreading. The teacher came out of the room behind me and stopped. He glanced down the hallway at the boys at the exit, then looked back at me. He gave a nod that he'd wait, and I took off at a jog, the book bag bouncing against me.. I hurried past the boys, breaking into a full run as soon as my feet hit the sidewalk outside. I made it to the gate.

And someone screamed.

Two more steps, and I'd have been clear. Two steps. All I had to do was to keep my eyes straight ahead and leave. But I couldn't because someone screamed. With a groan, I stopped. If you come from a family whose business it is to mind everyone else's business, especially when screams are involved, you have only one choice, and running away isn't it. I turned back, and, there, across the parking lot, a group of about twelve kids had knotted around a stocky boy, sporting a purple Mohawk, faded jeans, and a tie-dyed T-shirt. Before him, the girl who'd elbowed me in the hallway now had that same arm raised in defense. The boy slapped her, his hand glancing off her forearm as she twisted away.

I dropped my backpack and ran back into the building, up the hallway to the main office, and crashed against the front counter, gasping for breath. The counselor who'd shown me to homeroom that morning looked up from behind her desk as though the effort to raise her eyes exhausted her completely. "Call the cops," I panted. "Some guy's beating up a girl in the parking lot!"

Her eyebrows arched questioningly. "You don't have a phone?"

"Would I be asking you to call if I did?"

Her eyes betrayed the slightest hint of irritation. "I'll get the principal," she said, rising. She crossed over, placed a telephone on the counter. "Go ahead," she said. "Make the call." And she started away.

Three minutes later, I hung up just as the girl outside screamed again. "Ma'am...?" I called, but the counselor had vanished, and no principal or anyone else had appeared in her place. I ran back outside. The knot of kids had tightened around the couple. The boy had the girl by the wrist with one hand. He yanked her toward him and slapped her.

Purple Hair looked as thick as a miniature Green Hulk, face solid with muscles, undoubtedly built up by draping a rope between his teeth and lifting fifty pound weights along with his ego each night. His eyes were set so deeply at the base of his flat nose, they appeared permanently crossed. He had a tattoo needled into his left shoulder, but I wasn't interested in art at the moment.

"Hey!"

The knot of students turned their heads in unison.

"Moron!" I shouted.

Muscle face straightened slowly, his eyes finding mine, a slow grin forming. The girl's wrist twisted in his hand.

I had a plan, I swear. I'd use logic, cool and collected words of wisdom, get the guy to calm down. Bradley Joshua Rigsby, the great social psychologist. Maybe moron wasn't the best way to start things off, but I figured I had to get his attention. I walked toward him.

"Almost sixteen," I muttered to myself, "and I'm going to die."

I drew a deep breath. "If you got a problem with her," I called to Purple Hair, "maybe you should try talking it out." I may have been a half-foot taller than the guy, but he was a good forty pounds of muscle heavier, a fact that didn't escape me as I stopped at the edge of the circle.

It could have ended then. All he had to do was laugh and let her go, and everything since then would have been different. But Purple Hair cocked his head in mocked innocence. The girl's wrist wrenched free of the boy's grip. He grabbed her again and drew back.

A tackle would have been a better choice, but I went for his fist and caught it. He spun, the girl scurrying back, and I felt the soft spray of air as I pulled back, my hands going up to protect my face. A couple jabs broke through. Dark stars exploded before me, and I felt the warmth of blood washing over my lips. The principal appeared in the building's side doorway, then vanished back inside. The girl tried to run away, but Purple Hair tackled her around the hips, scrambling to his knees and rolling her on her back to straddle her.

"Lighten up!" my voice cracked. I wiped blood away, desperately trying to regain my bearings.

He started up, but the girl grabbed him by the shirt. "George," she pleaded. "He's new..." George slapped her.

I set to lunge, but the crowd splintered as a prune-black Grand Am slid to a stop only a few feet from me and George. A dark-skinned man with thick arms bulging at the seams of his Honolulu Police Department uniform pulled himself from the car.

Purple Hair glanced at the man's hand, the nightstick. He got quickly to his feet and jabbed a finger at me, eyes bouncing back and forth between the cop and me. "Brah messed in my business, wanted beef."

Again with this beef.

The cop looked over at me, eyes narrowing, taking me in, figuring me probably for what I was, the new kid, the not so-well-informed kid. "That true?" he asked me.

"He was hitting the girl," I said. "I was just trying to stop him."

The girl sat on the ground about five feet away from Purple Hair, eyes down, chin on her knees, arms wrapped around her folded legs.

The cop told Purple Hair to wait in his cruiser. The boy hesitated. "Now," the cop barked. The boy spat and went to the car, sat down in the backseat. The officer knelt beside the girl, said something I couldn't hear. She nodded, gave a shrug. He rose, came over to me. He turned me toward the gate, hand pressed gently against the small of my back, urging me to walk. "The girl's okay," he said. "She your friend?"

I shook my head. "My first day here. Need me to fill out a report?"

He drew a deep breath as we reached the gate. He looked up at the sky and adjusted the waist of his pants. "Report's not necessary," he said with a sigh. "This kind of thing happens all the time. Two hours, they'll be apologizing and kissing and promising each other it'll never happen again. Two weeks from now, same thing all over again. Some folks just settle their arguments this way. We call it local love."

Local love. In Alabama, some saw it as a man's Christian duty to run his home the way he saw fit, his god-given right to be boss. By whatever name, whatever justification, stupidity is stupidity. The last time I looked back, the cop was talking to Purple Hair as the girl waited nearby. "Leave now," I muttered, wishing she could hear me at this distance, but I knew that, even if she had heard me, she wouldn't have left. People are little more than domesticated animals. Our masters may beat us, starve us, withhold affection, and we nearly always go back for more.

When I arrived home, Big Daddy was on his way to the kitchen. He stopped cold when he saw the blood. He cocked his head, face matting with concern as he limped over to me. "What happened to you?"

I shrugged, didn't know exactly how I looked thanks to Purple Hair. Big Daddy raised a withered, unsteady hand to my forehead, his long, crooked fingers gently tracing the outline of a bloody bump looming above my eye. I winced.

"Welcoming committee," I said. I explained the local ha-ha tradition of kill-haole day--loads of fun and laughter, yes sir--the parking lot fiasco, the cop. He nodded every now and then, but offered nothing until I had finished the story. Finally, he patted me on the shoulder and urged me toward the kitchen.

"Let's get some food in your stomach," he said. "Don't worry about that kid. Everything'll be fine."

Mom went to work the next morning as if it were just another weekday instead of Saturday, unaware of my problem the day before. Why bother her with it? For someone who claimed the Hawaii secession negotiations were a waste of time, she'd certainly sunk herself up to her quadruple-pierced ears in the process. She didn't discuss the specifics of negotiations with me, and that was just as well. I had about as much interest in politics back then as I do now. Without politicians in charge, life would arguably be better. Of course, any politician will tell you that I'm completely insane, that they are necessary to maintain social order and progress, and perhaps the politician would be right. Judging by what they did to folks back in my day, though, I think not.

Around ten, I knocked on Big Daddy's door. He hadn't emerged all morning, and I was hoping that he and I could go for a drive or something, anything to get out of the apartment, to get away from the sinking feeling that I would be stuck in Akamai High for the rest of the semester. Big Daddy said he'd be out shortly. He emerged finally around two in the afternoon, breezing through the living room, headed for the kitchen. I followed him in.

"You know," he said, as he opened the refrigerator and began scrounging around, locating out the milk, "Your dad thought I was crazy." He closed the door.

I glanced down with the memory of Dad and the last time he and Big Daddy had been together. Two years before, we'd taken a week's vacation in Red Level. Mom was inside Big Daddy's house, on the phone to someone in Washington, always on the job even when she was taking a few days off. Big Daddy, Dad, and I were at the picnic table in the backyard, an eight-pound watermelon on the table between us, ripe and luscious. Big Daddy slipped out his pocket knife and opened the melon, juice spilling across the table.

"Resurrected any cats lately?" Dad asked. Big Daddy's faced had flushed as red as the melon's meat. He'd chuckled.

Big Daddy poured himself a glass of milk. "He used to ask me..."

"...if you were building bombs yet," I finished.

Big Daddy grinned. "He knew the question was nonsense. Not once have I ever contemplated such nonsense. This world's got enough killing contraptions without my contribution. The world needs a little more creativity. With bombs, you know what you're going to get--a lot of chaos and death. What kind of thing is that?"

Big Daddy retrieved the baked carcass of a chicken from the refrigerator and peeled off breast meat for a sandwich. He twisted around for a moment, grinning at me. "What this world needs is a device that deters without destruction. Know what I mean?"

I shrugged, gaze dropping to his hands, then rising again, as if to say, Make your sandwich.

He grinned wider, turned back to his task. "You and that girl of mine might think I've gone completely over the edge."

"Won't be the first time," I muttered, and he glanced around with a "Ha!" "If it has something to do with that professor's time machine..."

"Well..." he said coolly, and spread a glob of mayonnaise onto a slice of bread. "As a matter of fact, it does."

"Big Daddy," I said softly, hesitantly, "are you trying to be with Big Mama again?" His hand fell still, his eyes glazing with memory.

What a wonderful tool a true time-travel machine would be in the right hands. You could transport back and forth in time, meet great figures in history, watch the dinosaurs, maybe even alter the way things go if you have a mind to do it, which is perhaps the major reason not to have such a machine available for use. Of course, those possibilities mattered not a whit to Big Daddy. He cared little for history, said it was filled with the same types of idiots that filled the present. He had no desire to meet anyone in the past or to try to shape events differently. What mattered to Big Daddy more than anything else was Big Mama. If he could zip into the past, then he could be with his wife instead of pretending to talk to her through some after-life communicator. Of course, if he were to accomplish such a feat of time travel, his device would have to be far more advanced than the professor's. Dr. Tanaka's machine, as the professor had hinted in the news article, may have been capable at most of sending small objects a few seconds or minutes only into the future. The past was gone, lost forever. But Big Daddy was tenacious and centered. If he wanted to develop a device to transport him back in time, in time he would.

"Big Daddy," I persisted, "is it? Is it about Big Mama?"

"No," he said softly. He drew an abrupt breath of air and resumed his sandwich preparation. "Not yet at least." He placed the knife in the sink and turned to face me, sandwich in hand. He took a bite and chewed, trying to smile around each bite.

"Then what?" I asked.

He grinned, pushed off the counter, and started for his room, glass of milk in one hand, sandwich in the other. "Give me a few more hours, young buck," he said with a wink, "and all will be revealed."

A few more hours dragged on and on and bled into late night. I fell asleep on the couch, waiting for Mom to get home. I woke the following morning, expecting to find her in bed only to discover that she hadn't been home at all. I immediately called her office.

"Josh," she said, her voice breathy with embarrassment. "I'm so sorry. I just realized...I'm so sorry. I lost all awareness of time."

"Why didn't you come home?"

"Talks are at a critical point, and I just couldn't leave," she said softly. "Too much to do, so much to prepare for." Her voice hinted something more than simple talks between a rebellious state and its federal father. An hour later when I turned to the editorial section in the morning Honolulu Advertiser, I saw what the extra something was.

"Had it not been for the irrational display by U.S. negotiator Melissa Rigsby," the editorial read, "the United States would not have been embarrassed as the leader in global arms control. This planet is at a critical point in history, a time at which one nation could begin a global conflict that could lead to the annihilation of civilization. As it has been for decades, the Middle East threatens to explode on a daily basis, plunging the rest of the world into a conflict that would devastate, if not destroy completely, modern society. The central player in this conflict, however, isn't the terrorists of the late 20th Century. Nor is it some psychopathic dictator once the darling of U.S. foreign policy gone rogue. Nor is it a U.S. president who believes he has a direct line to God. The central figure, the critical link to stability or chaos is one nation, a newcomer on the weapons field of play. Durban, once proclaimed a glowing gem of democracy in the Middle East, has become exactly what others were warned it would become, a state whose arsenal grows grotesquely more dangerous with each passing day. If it were not for Durban and its leaders implying that the country is nearing the completion of a mysterious new weapon of mass destruction, the current crisis might have been avoided.

"Leaders of other nations in the region and, indeed, the world would not feel threatened to the point of beating their chests like apes in the wild. Durban's leaders haven't been long on detail, and the U.S.'s intelligence agencies--most under the Homeland Security umbrella--haven't been forthcoming with any new information on Durban's claims and abilities. The fact that a nation as young and as small as Durban is so willing to goad the world toward war poses a frightening possibility that major regional conflict will break out at any time, even without the existence of weapons of mass destruction. We need only one president or prime minister with the gift to lie convincingly to plunge the region into all-out war. And if war breaks out in that region at this time in history, it will, inevitably, spread.

"The questions that need to be asked and answered are critical. Who has weapons of mass destruction? Who is developing them? Who would use them in the event of a conflict? Instead of approaching these questions and the threats that they pose with political savvy and ability, the U.S., through its mouthpiece Melissa Rigsby, reduced negotiations to the schoolyard mentality of 'I will if you will.'

"And now Ms. Rigsby is in Hawaii, representing the U.S. in secession talks. To what purpose? Further schoolyard banter?"

How painfully embarrassing that attack must have been for my mother. But no matter what the editorialist thought of her, he agreed with her on one point, that the world could collapse into war soon, a fact that no one could forget as Civil Defense sirens screamed twice monthly and instructions were broadcasted weekly, detailing what to do "in the event that this were an actual emergency."

At mid-morning, Big Daddy came into the kitchen where I was drowning a grilled-cheese sandwich in syrup. He gently placed on the counter a rectangular, black metal box, about the size of a CD deck. He stepped back and, with a grin, nodded at the box. He slid his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. "That, my boy, proves the professor had a good idea. And I've made it better."

I cocked my head at the device for a better look. "This is supposed to be a time machine?"

He grinned.

"The professor's was as big as a refrigerator," I said.

He shrugged, the grin deepening.

I sighed, looked away.

"What?"

I shrugged.

"You thought I was doing something because of the kid at school," he said. "That it?"

Another shrug of the shoulders.

"Well, I did." He grabbed the box. "Come on," he said. He was out the door and at the elevator before I could catch up. He winked at me, punched the lift's button, his face flushed with excitement.

When we reached the car, he set the gadget in the backseat, and we started off to buy a couple of small flashlights. He said he needed the reflectors to complete the gadget. "And then, my boy, "we'll give it a test drive."

We bought the flashlights, dismantled them, glued and taped the open tubes together at the small end, forming a single long tube that flared at both ends, each reflector intact. Then he connected one end to the box, leaving the other end open. "Now to test it out," he said.

"On what?"

He looked around, concern crossing his face. "Well, can't really do it in here. Might cause everything to come crashing down."

Not for one minute did I believe the device would work, but I played along. "So where, what?"

He turned the ignition key. The engine gunned to life. "Let's try the beach. Maybe give a tourist the ride of his life." He laughed and shifted into drive. We pulled out of the parking garage into a mauka shower, a misty rain that blew out of the mountains each day just to make the air even more humid. He headed for the freeway. A double rainbow stretched over Tripler Hospital, that pink, mountainside building-block structure that overlooked our neighborhood.

As usual, traffic was heavy, but at least it was flowing well. A four-by-four Toyota pickup pulled alongside the Mustang and nosed ahead in taunting spurts. Bright magenta paint-job, equipped with tires better suited to a John Deere tractor, the truck had a low front windshield mounted under a customized roof that sloped dramatically toward the hood.

The truck spurted forward and sliced into our lane, forcing Big Daddy to swerve off the pavement to avoid collision. His eyes narrowed in anger, but did he curse or swear? Not even once. He reached into the backseat for the device and set it on the dashboard with the reflector pointed over the hood toward the pickup.

"Big Daddy..." Not for a moment did I believe the gadget would work, but, based on the track record for Big Daddy's past gadgets, I feared it could do damage, serious damage.

He eased his foot down on the accelerator, keeping pace with the Toyota. He slid his hand to the back of the box and flipped the gadget's toggle switch. The box hummed.

"Big Daddy," I said, pushing back in the seat, away from the device. "Turn it off!"

He grinned. "Not exactly the test I was counting on, but it'll do, it'll do." He pressed a small red button beside the toggle switch. Yellow and sapphire light streaked out from the box, through the Mustang's windshield to crackle and snake around the four-by-four. The driver glanced dumbly side to side. Then, the truck and its pilot vanished. Nothing but clear air and asphalt remained.

Big Daddy whooped like a Tiger fan on a good day at the Iron Bowl.

"Big Daddy?" I whispered. "Wh-what happened...?"

He slowed and pulled the Mustang onto the shoulder of the road and stopped. Cars raced past, drivers apparently oblivious to what had just happened. He twisted around in the seat, staring back at the spot where the truck had vanished, waiting as if he expected something to happen. But nothing did.

"Big Dad...?"

More cars passed. We waited. And waited. His grin faded away.

"It should have reappeared by now." He turned back in the seat, his face pale with worry, and whispered, "What have I done?

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