If Angels Fight by Richard Bowes Page B

up,” said an old lady with way too much lipstick peering into the alley.
    All Sean wondered as he got up was how long it would take Graham and the rest to notice he was gone. He dusted himself off, buttoned his jacket to hide the dye on his shirt front, and wiped his face clean with a pocket handkerchief.
    It was a five story city and the sun shone directly from across the Hudson. Everyone got out of his way as he walked down the alley. He stuffed the gun in his pocket.
    “Anyone follows me,” he gestured to it. He doubted that anyone in Hell’s Kitchen was going to call the police. But he moved quickly, got on Tenth Avenue and started walking.
    Cars and clothes gave only a hint of the year. A corner newsstand had a big display of papers dated May 19, 1957.
    His father would be about half his age and still in the army in Germany. His mother would not have moved here from Buffalo. His grandfather and grandmother lived up on Fordham Road in the Bronx. The avenue was lined with pawn shops. The gun was a fake but he figured it would be worth a buck or two.
    Black Jack Quinlan and he would be about the same age. If he was here. He had to be here. Once he explained things, once he showed this face, Sean Quinlan couldn’t imagine them denying this fugitive a welcome.

Alternate Worlds floating in the Time Stream have been an interest (obsession?) of mine. Warchild , my first novel and the first piece of speculative fiction that I wrote, begins in New York but has all Time as its setting.

Part Two:
    ACROSS WORLDS AND TIME

The Time Stream is the back story for my novelette, “
The Ferryman’s Wife .” The setting is suburban Westchester in the mid-1950s.
    A favorite short story author of mine, John Cheever, was known in his lifetime largely as a New Yorker writer and chronicler of the social mores of the mid-20th century American suburb. An article on Mad Men , the TV series set in 1960s Madison Avenue, mentioned that the producer has Cheever’s Collected Stories on his bookshelf as a reference tool. Recent biographies reveal that Cheever himself was more complicated socially and sexually than was generally known at the time (more like a Mad Man character, in fact).
    His style, normally naturalistic in The New Yorker manner, could unexpectedly shift into magic: a suburban evening might evoke nymphs and gods. Some Cheever stories, “Torch Song,” “The Enormous Radio,” “The Swimmer,” are overtly fantastic. Death is a lady in Manhattan; a radio broadcasts the private lives of the residents of an apartment house, a young man on a whim swims across his suburb by going from one backyard pool to the next. In the course of a day he travels into the neighborhood’s decline and his own old age.
    Around 2000, I began writing Alternate World/Time Stream stories. For one of the first I used a Cheever setting. This was my first story to be on a Nebula short list.

THE FERRYMAN’S WIFE

    1.
    A t 7:40 on the first warm day of April, on a Tuesday, that least remarkable of days, the platform at Grove Hill train station was all but deserted. Cars soon arrived, a Country Squire first, a Desoto V8 next, then a flood of fins and chrome. Commuters disembarked.
    As 7:49 approached, Oldsmobiles jockeyed with Pontiacs; sunlight gleamed on waxed finishes. A few women got out of autos and waited on the platform. But mostly it was husbands who gave goodbye kisses to wives with hair still in curlers and babies with zwieback-stuffed mouths.
    For in that year, 1956, the great nation of the West was reinventing itself, changing from a land, part urban and part rural, into something not seen in the world before.
    Linda Martin sat behind the wheel of the blue and white Chevy Bel Air and savored her favorite moment of the day. She rolled down her window as Roy slid of out the passenger seat beside her, passed before the car making goo-goo eyes at six-year-old Sally in the back seat.
    He doffed his narrow brimmed hat, ducked his head to the open