Page 50

SIXTEEN

I f you were to ask Eddie how he and Francis got from the downtown piers in 1943 to the marina all the way up on Seventy-Ninth Street along the Hudson River in 1930, and did it all in the course of just a few minutes (hours, decades, lifetimes), this is the answer he would give you:

First, they walked through 1943, from the pier over to Houston Street, where, after the boys narrowly missed a loud but not especially destructive collision between two bicyclists, it was suddenly 1892. Francis waved down a hansom cab, and the driver slowed the horse just enough for him to boost Eddie aboard and scramble on himself. They rode up bumpy Sixth Avenue, its dirt heavily grooved by endless carriage wheels, all the way to Eighth Street, where a pothole knocked the boys out of the cab and onto the ground.

When they dusted themselves off it was 1909, and a hand-cranked motorcar came careening around the corner, narrowly missing the boys. The driver, a young man with deep red curls and a deeper brogue, apologized and gave them a lift to Fourteenth Street, where he sputtered out of gas and it was 1963.

Francis and Eddie, like athletes on a football field, darted through the Sixth Avenue traffic, weaving and dodging all the way up to 1938, Twenty-Third Street, where Francis shouted, “Bus!” and the boys leapt onto a moving city bus, grasping at the window frames to hang on for as long as they could.

They held on as far as 1952, Thirty-Fourth Street, when the bus came to a grinding halt at the end of its line, 1977, Herald Square. The air was filled with disco music and the sidewalks were thick with bellbottom slacks and stack-heel sandals.

And so on, and so on, up through the city and through the years. To 1940 on Forty-Second Street, to 1916 on Forty-Ninth Street, to 1968 on Fifty-Seventh, where they caught a lift on the roof of a camper van.

They hopped across the city like frogs across a pond of lily pads, leaping through neighborhoods and time as lightly as dancers. Finally, at Seventy-Seventh Street, Francis yelled, “Jump!” and the boys tumbled off the back of the milk-delivery truck they’d boarded at Amsterdam Avenue. Francis laughed as they landed and rolled, breathless but unharmed, in 1930.

“Welcome home,” Francis said as he swept dust from Eddie’s shoulders.

And now here they are, standing by the Hudson at the end of Seventy-Ninth Street, breathing in the humid evening air. They stand with their arms by their sides, knuckles faintly grazing each other’s, looking out over the unusually calm water at the half-moon over the shadowy Palisades rising across the river.

Francis breaks the silence. “I have an idea,” he says, pointing at a small skiff tied up at one of the docks in the marina below.