THE TERMITE QUEEN OF TALLULAH COUNTY

by Felicity Shoulders

Felicity Shoulders’ first collaboration, a story written with Leslie What, was recently published in the anthology Is Anybody Out There? The author tells us that the following story “owes a great deal to my grandmother and her recent termite home invasion.”

Granddad tugged a banana off the bunch and waved it at me. “You still planning to change the company name?”

“You bet. I never liked ‘Tidwell and Daughter.’ “

Granddad’s eyebrows did one of their caterpillar tarantellas. “So you say, but I see no action. It’s been five months, Lacey-girl. Change the name. Hire somebody to go with you on calls. Your pop’s not coming back.” This was a little harsh even for him, so he added, “To work.”

I could tell he was watching me, so I worked on buttering my toast all the way to the edge. He was waiting to see if I’d glance over at Pop in his armchair, but what was there to see? Pop had spent the first few months staring at nothing, so I’d moved a couple shelves of family pictures into his eye-line. He stared at those now.

Granddad abandoned his vigil and started slicing the banana over his bowl of cereal. “You should go back to the name I used! ‘Tidwell the Termite King’!”

I made a face and stuffed it with toast.

“Termites built this house,” he said, which I’d heard so many times it didn’t even give me cognitive dissonance anymore.

“Yeah, yeah.” The house was new when my pop was a six-year-old only child, but Granddad would never move to anything bigger or, now that he was old, single- storied. We had to stay in the house that termites built.

He rubbed the banana peel over his gnarled knuckles, leaving them glistening and glutinous. This supposedly relieved his arthritis, and I figured at eighty-eight, you’ve earned the right to play with your food if you want to. He dropped the peel on the floor and called, “Mazzu! Mazzu, get in here.”

“Christ, Granddad, it’s five feet to the trashcan. I can do it if you don’t want to.”

“Don’t deprive an old man of his only joy.” The care-bot whirred in, a squat thing in robin egg blue. “Pick up peel! Put peel in trash!” he barked.

“It understands natural sentences. And yesterday peanut brittle was your only joy.”

Granddad raised one of his banana-scented hands and gave the royal wave. “Don’t you have work to do?”

I checked my watch. “Shit, yes. And no time for coffee.”

“That’s my little Termite Queen,” he cooed as I made for the van in the driveway. He resumed yelling at the care-bot, probably getting it to mush some banana for Pop.

* * * *

I was only a few blocks from my appointment when Elly piped up. The electronic secretary had been Pop’s only technological upgrade to the business since getting our Temporal Accreditation twenty years ago, so I should have been pleased. But “Elly,” however nominally devoid of human flaws, was kind of a nosy nag.

“The client specified the vehicle be unmarked,” she said from the van’s console. “Have you covered the vehicle markings?”

“You couldn’t ask before I started driving?”

Elly didn’t respond to rhetorical questions. Or insults. I hadn’t tested threats yet. I pulled over by the high school’s soccer field and wiggled the magnetic rectangle out from under my seat. Unfurled, it just covered the van’s legend. It was a pretty tasteful logo, all told, although between “Tidwell & Daughter” and the Temporal Intervention Bureau seal it did read “Termite Trouble? You Can Turn Back Time!” There was an outfit down in California that sported a man with an outsized hammer chasing a cartoon roach, so our van looks pretty classy in context. But the client is, if not always right, usually happier when jollied along, so I slapped the thing on.

“If you’d updated the van with screen signs as I suggested, you could have done that with the push of a button,” Elly said as I climbed back in.

“And if I’d done that, today you’d be asking me to run animated ads on the side of my van and cause traffic accidents. Forget it.”

This neighborhood was all post-World War Two bungalows, home to decades of black widows and grand termite families of many generations’ standing. My pop and I had visited so many houses on this block the neighbors would know my van in a blink, magnet or no.

As if to prove my point, the next-door matron stopped deadheading late roses to wave as I pulled up. I jumped down and she called, “Lacey Tidwell! How’s your dad doing?”

“About as well as can be expected,” I said, which I’d settled on as an acceptable yet honest formula. The woman shook her head and decapitated a rose with such moral force it flew onto this side of the fence.

A thin young man, twenty or a bit older, had been watching our exchange from inside the house, and now he flapped the screen door open by way of hurrying things along.

I shut the van on Elly’s voice: “Client name: Vivian Sower. 194 North—”

“Mr. Sower?” I said to the kid at the door, who was genuinely wringing his hands. He ushered me into the house and a welcome smell of dark-roast coffee.

“Anthony Sower. It’s my grandma’s house. I’m just visiting from the Bay Area, and then this happened.”

I raised an eyebrow, as Elly hadn’t made the call from Grandma V. sound nearly so urgent. Anthony raised a pointer finger, and I looked where directed. “This” turned out to be a fairly standard plume of winged termites fluttering out from behind a flowered sofa.

Anthony looked at me pleadingly, so I said, “Ah yes.”

“Termite queens!”

“Well, not exactly. Alates. Both genders. But termites, certainly.”

“How bad is it?”

“It’s impossible to tell from up here. I’ll have to go under the house and check it out.”

I hunkered and peered at the lace of cobweb and termite wings between the wall and sofa, then looked up as the coffee entered the room, ushered by an old lady in

canary separates.

“I thought I’d bring the man some coffee,” she said, negotiating a step down, then looking up from the tray. “Oh.”

“It’s okay, Grandma,” Anthony said. “She knows her stuff.”

Apparently knowing a word that he didn’t was all the qualifications young Anthony required, but Vivian was still dubious.

“I’m Lacey Tidwell, president of Tidwell Exterminators.”

“Vivian Sower.” Anthony relieved her of the tray and failed to find anywhere thinly enough knick-knacked to put it.

“Is this room an addition by any chance?”

“Why yes! My parents built it before I was born.”

“These termites are swarming up the seam between the concrete slab they built on and the foundation proper. That’s why you’re seeing them right here.”

The old woman smiled and offered me coffee from the tray Anthony was barely holding. “Cream and sugar, dear?”

“Neither,” I said. I take both in private life, but I’m not above doing a tough-gal routine if it’ll help with a client.

The entrance to the crawlspace was a square shaft in the carport concrete, right up against the yellow shake siding of the house. I squatted to pull off the wooden hatch and the board came away in my hand, trailing a thick beard of sawdust-choked cobweb. I tore the wood loose and dropped it, gnawed side up.

“Is that bad?” asked Anthony from the sliding door.

“It’s not good, and it’s not safe either.”

He stepped out and eyed the dark hole. “That’s awful! What if Grandma had fallen in?”

He wasn’t such a bad kid, really. “I’ll pick up some 2x4s and knock a new cover together when I’m done here.” I picked out the rest of the decrepit boards and wiped the swags of webbing away from the entrance with a gloved hand.

I went back to the van for my underground kit: coveralls that cinch over my gloves and boots, a stocking cap and a little neck protector like an inside-out dickey. That keeps the inside of my clothes a vertebrate-only region.

“Why won’t you let me interface with you when you examine crawlspaces? There’s a headset in the glove box,” Elly said.

“You wouldn’t like it down there.” I grabbed my LED floodlight from its charging slot and rummaged for my headlamp.

“The device you use to make audio memos is crude. Hearing your notes would facilitate my organization of the photos.”

“I’ve said no every time. I’m tired of repeating it.”

“I would make your business more efficient.”

“This business was so efficient without your input that it had money to waste on you. Puzzle on that.” I closed the door. There had to be some user preferences somewhere, some big dial marked “Meddling” I could turn down.

I lowered a ladder into the narrow hole in the concrete and tried to shake my annoyance. As a child I had longed to follow my father down into these mysterious depths, and I could still capture some of that excitement.

“It’s like a Lara Croft game,” I had said, and Granddad, leaning against the van in his supervisory capacity, had laughed.

“Looks like it’ll be Tidwell and Daughter!” he had called after Pop. Since my brother Benny grew up to be arachnophobic and six feet tall, it ended up a good bet. I saw three black widows just dropping into the Sowers’ crawlspace, and the headlamp’s beam hit at least half a dozen more glossy females as I looked down the passage. Probably the Sowers were never more than a yard away from one. If they only knew. “Don’t get up, ladies,” I muttered, and thumbed the big button on my “clumsy” recorder. “Recommend spider spray.”

Even without the impetus of planning a spidercide in front of the intended victims, I found I spoke softly in these underground spaces. No matter how dirty and infested, they were peaceful, the air cool but too still to bite the skin, the walls somehow aware that I—my father and I—were the first humans to see them in years.

That’s in most cases: if someone had been down there, they might have seen the first termite tubes or trapped the first breeding pairs of mice. Unlike ancient tombs and hidden treasures, the undersides of houses take kindly to being disturbed.

Mrs. Sower’s house looked as though it hadn’t been. There were wispy traces of cardboard underfoot, and the delicate skin of plastic or wax that had backed some food wrapper. The paper was no more, food for bygone generations of termites. I stepped over the tunnel-ridden corpse of a plank, and winced when my foot plashed into a layer of water. “Remove debris.”

The mud scent would already be rising from my boot treads, through the vents and into the house. Vivian and Anthony would be disoriented, eyes telling them they were in their home while their noses insisted they were outdoors. The water was bad news for them, good for termites and therefore my paycheck. Granddad says the only thing softer than my heart is my head, but I always hope for the best when I go into a house. An easy job for me, good news for the house and homeowner. That wouldn’t be the case this time.

I clicked the floodlight on. The concrete foundations were striped with mud shelter tubes like long dribbles, taking the colony from the happy hour appetizers on the floor to the meal of the house above. Like the house had grown a new, parasitic circulatory system, parallel to and distinct from its plumbing and ventilation.

Plumbing. I groaned. “Locate leak, remove standing water.” I’d have to figure out where the water was coming from—examine every inch of the pipes if I was lucky, or analyze the drainage if I wasn’t. I don’t mind the methodical or muddy parts of my job, but I hate meticulous. Probably Elly could assemble a 3D model and pinpoint a drainage issue in minutes, but I wasn’t ready to bring the mechanical marvel down here. I didn’t want to share this childhood dream of dark creepy spaces, the adolescent memory of my pop knocking off work to eat a box of Fiddle Faddle in someone’s filthy attic or basement with his clean, de-gloved hands. Elly might remind me, God help us, of my mother, but she wasn’t family.

Mud was cementing the debris of paper and lumber to my boots, but it wasn’t worth kicking it off yet. I fumbled my camera out of my coverall pocket and leaned over to get a photo of a bloom of mold. I steadied myself with a hand up to a floor joist, and felt my fingers sink in. The cellulose had been eaten away and only the long grains of lignin remained, loose in my glove like straws. I hopped back, splashing muddy water up, then took a picture of the bite my fingers had taken. How much of this house’s framing was made up of ghost wood, only keeping its shape out of habit? “Bait termites, remove shelter tubes . . .”

I climbed back up my ladder and found Elly already halfway through the report, borrowing captions and language from reports my pop and I had written since her tenure. She did have her points. I sighed. “You can’t write the whole thing. I doubt there’s been a case with such extensive damage since we got you.”

Anthony Sower rapped on the van window and I opened up. “Well? How is it?”

“It’s not good news. I’m putting together a report now.” I pointed to the console screen where Elly was flashing photos and paragraphs.

“I thought it might be bad,” he whispered. “Grandma says she usually just sprays them and vacuums up the bodies. How many years has she been doing that?”

The report ended up 10 pages long. Mrs. Sower swiped past photos of the leaking pipe, the termite infestation, the mold. Every problem except the spiders was illustrated—I find clients don’t need or want photos of the spiders in order to justify paying for the spray.

I stopped her as she was about to bring up the estimate page on her screen, trying not to imagine her having a heart attack when she saw the amount. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

“Of course.”

“How long have you lived in the house?”

“All my life! My father and mother bought it brand new after the war, before I was born. My mother’s health was never strong, so I stayed with her after I grew up. When I married Alfie, he moved in too.”

“Did anyone ever go into the crawlspace that you recall?”

“Heavens, no! There was a bench across that trapdoor when I was little, and Alfie wasn’t a man for dirty jobs.”

“Was anyone ever hired to go down there? To update plumbing, or—”

Anthony laughed. “She doesn’t even have a garbage disposal.”

Vivian knitted her fingers. “Did we do something wrong?”

“Well, yes. There was a lot of material left underground when the house was built—” Granddad used to do home construction, so I like to use the passive voice, not get too harsh on the builders—”left right on the ground where the termites could smell it and come up. If someone had been down there to clean up, or even to notice their tunnels . . .”

“I really don’t want to see this estimate, do I, Ms. Tidwell?”

“You can look at it, but I want you to know there may be a less expensive option.”

She paged to the estimate, ran down the columns to the total, and closed her eyes.

“What does ‘plus reconstruction’ mean?” Anthony said, looking about as moist and pale as the mold beneath his feet.

“It means Tidwell’s isn’t a construction company, so I can’t give you an estimate for replacing the wood in the structure once the termites are gone. But I can give you some recommendations, and it really needs to be done. Unless you go with my other option.”

“What is it?” Vivian asked, eyes still shut against the multitude of zeros on the screen.

I selected the Temporal Intervention Bureau brochure on my tablet and sent it across.

“Because your crawlspace has been largely undisturbed, we may be able to get a TIB permit for a temporal intervention.”

Vivian looked blank, but Anthony regained some life. “Time travel?”

“They really prefer we call it temporal intervention. Time travel sounds as if we were doing it for fun. TI technology is only cleared for industrial and ecological use, not for tourism.” I felt pretty pompous, but I had only finished the training three months ago, so the party line was clear in my mind. I hadn’t done a temporal intervention yet myself, but I wasn’t about to tell the Sowers that.

“Is it expensive?” Vivian asked, pinching her sweater closed at the neck.

“Yes,” I said, “but a lot less expensive than repairing all this damage. There’s a fixed intervention fee, and my labor removing all the detritus from under your house. I’d also prevent the sink leak from occurring and treat all the exposed wood with micronized copper. If someone does look down there in the intervening years, there won’t be any traps or anachronistic plastic to see, but it’ll be protected. I’ll come back here and reassess. And do that spider spray.”

Vivian clapped her palms on the table. “My house will never have been eaten!”

Anthony frowned. “If the termites never became a problem, won’t we not have called you? Or paid you? How will you know anything happened?”

My mom used to say that no one would ever think I had a speck of intelligence if I killed bugs for a living, but somehow when temporal intervention comes up, people ask me thesis questions in advanced physics. “It doesn’t work that way. I’ll be here to check up and get paid. We’ll all remember this, I promise. And if we don’t, it’s my pocket not yours, right?”

Vivian gave a faltering smile. “Isn’t there any way to kill all the termites? Make sure they aren’t there to smell out the wood to begin with?”

“My granddad likes to say it would take a bunker buster to get rid of all the termites in town. I’ll go ahead and submit the request. I’ll have to play up the historical value of your house—got anything to add on that score?”

Vivian sat up straight. “My father planted the only redwoods within Granite Valley city limits! They’re downtown, though, next to the golf course.”

I shrugged. “I’ll do what I can.”

* * * *

The Temporal Intervention Device was probably more expensive than the rest of Tidwell Exterminators put together. The training isn’t cheap either, which is why only one of us at a time was trained. Pop had already been planning to retire, so I was partway through the course when he had the attack. I never understood why he put so much money into TIB certification in the first place. A small town only has work for one or two exterminators, so I doubted any competitor would get TI and undercut us on the worst infestation jobs. We were undercutting ourselves, and that at great expense. Didn’t seem like Pop. Maybe he had an adventurous, boyish streak I never observed—maybe he just wanted to travel through time.

I took the control unit out of the wall safe at the office and used a little hydraulic lift to load the device and probe into my van.

If Elly hadn’t so often informed me that she had no personality for me to object to, I would have sworn she was excited. “How long do you plan to remain in the past?” she asked.

“Five hours ought to be enough. I can go back twice if I need a little more time.”

“How was the insertion point selected?”

“Vivian says she was born October 3, 1954, and it was a long labor. No one will be home for hours.”

“No siblings?”

“Staying with an aunt on the other side of the river. I know what I’m doing, Elly.”

“If I am to help, I must learn every aspect of the business.”

“Must you?” I got out, arranged the warning pylons, and lifted down the probe. It’s small, a wheeled contraption just big enough to be a pain to carry down a ladder into a crawlspace. I left it a few feet in and returned to the van. I studied the device. Just like in class. Time controls, mode, and a counter: thirty-one trips made.

I entered October 3, 1954, 7:30 pm and pressed “Probe Mode.” The programmed time backed up six minutes to allow the little rover to do its stuff. I entered my combination. There was an alarm bell from the crawlspace, then a snapping sound. I had manned the van for several of Pop’s interventions, but I couldn’t help a thrill this time. I sent a bot back across the decades. I would be going there, too.

The screen showed everything was fine: the probe’s light picked out walls, a spider, even an intact crawlspace cover. No signs of human activity. No trouble. The probe lowered its angled broom arm and swept a circle around itself, so I wouldn’t materialize with a nail through my boot. I pressed “Sequence Complete” and waited for the noise of the thing returning, a more subtle sound like a toy being put on a shelf.

“All clear,” I told the device, and it directed me to the touch screen. Most of the buttons were conventional, for use with gloves, but in order to send myself I had to touch about a thousand checkboxes. I buckled on the TID belt and asked for five hours. Wrench, work gloves, copper spray, portable soldering kit, mask, collapsible bin. I had forgotten to get the probe out, so I had to drop everything, lug that, and start again. I carried my gear down to the bottom of the ladder. The probe had swept a matching circle in our time, so I hunched in the center.

I realized I was actually scared, my excitement winnowed away by the checklist. The machine was supposed to be safe, as long as you didn’t use it too often. The government-mandated max of forty trips per person was very conservative, they said. No effects at all under eighty uses. But of course, it was exterminators, toxic waste cleaners, and the like using it, not the bureaucrats and politicians who set the rules. I shoved the thought aside and pressed the big red button on my belt.

Temporal intervention isn’t as glamorous as you might think. There’s no bright light, just a momentary dimming, like a blink. It doesn’t seem like anything’s that different for a second, while you breathe the air you brought with you. Then the old air hits your nose and it is different. 1954 had no mold and a faint pleasant scent. I heard a drumming outside, and I realized the smell was rain, yards away. Rain that fell before my father was born.

I shivered and started down the passage. The builders had been incredibly sloppy. Dropped cigarette packs, odd remnants, and wood corners, yes, but also 2x4s they could have salvaged just piled around like termite lures. Where I’d seen the wisp of a long-ago food wrapper, sure enough, there was an empty Fiddle Faddle box. I swallowed a chuckle and pulled out my soldering iron. Five hours of labor. I’d better get to it.

I was barely done cleaning up the detritus when the device pulled me back. I’d been told it could grab you even if you didn’t return to the insertion spot, but I was posed diligently on that swept place as if it was a transporter pad. Blink, back to my own time.

I pushed the overfull bin of lumber and scraps over the lip of the opening and went back over the crawlspace, marveling at the change. No termite tubes. Fewer spiders, since there was less food about. No standing water, no mold. On the once-decayed joist, I found only my muddy glove-print.

I took some photos and returned to the surface. I lugged the trash to the van and let it fall heavily into the back.

“What will you do with the debris?” Elly asked.

“Take it to a TIB-approved dump site and send it through by dead of 1954 night.” Some of the crap had gone flying when I dropped the bin, so I had to collect it again. On general principle, 1954 stuff had to go back to 1954.

“What is time travel like?” Elly asked, I think. I was distracted by the trash I’d just picked up. “Ms. Tidwell?”

Our lives are pretty full of trash. Scrolling livefeeds, brand names, logos: visual noise. Somehow on first glance this image hadn’t sunk in. Elly’s inquiries had gotten fairly personal by this point, and I managed to answer.

“No, don’t call the paramedics. Look something up for me. When did they start making Fiddle Faddle?”

* * * *

Pop was just where I’d left him, though now there was a spot of sun shining through his sparse hair to his scalp. Granddad was sitting next to him now, though, doing a paper crossword in erasable pen. I threw the grimy Fiddle Faddle box down on the coffee table.

“What the hell’s that? Mazzu, pick up—”

“Mazzu, go recharge,” I said. I was still wearing my coveralls, my hat, that ridiculous dickey. “That’s a Fiddle Faddle box, Granddad.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot? This is a Friday puzzle I’m doing, you know!”

“I pulled this box out of the basement of 194 North Oak Street. In 1954.”

Granddad blinked. “Don’t look at me, I was a little boy at the time.”

“They didn’t make Fiddle Faddle in 1954. It came out in 1967.”

“Maybe it’s an off-brand! Fiddle-Fiddle.” He picked up the flattened box.

“Now I get to ask if you think I’m stupid.”

“Well, it’s strange. So what? Why should I be able to explain it?”

“I can explain it myself. Pop left it there. Pop used the TID, went back in time, and seeded that house with wood scraps to attract termites. And he brought a snack.” I thumped my fist on the table. I wanted Pop to jump. I wanted him to look guilty, to explain himself. He just stared.

“That’s ridiculous. Why would your father do that? He had plenty of business.”

“Aren’t you the one that says there’s no such thing as too much business, Granddad?”

“Take off your boots, you’re grinding mud into the carpet.”

“Don’t change the subject! We’re talking about Pop defrauding the entire town of Granite Valley. We’re talking about an exterminator that breeds termites, for fuck’s sake!” I looked down at Pop, trying to reconcile this scheme with the gentle, hard-working man he’d been. “Why’d you do it?” I yelled.

“He was just trying to support his family,” Granddad muttered.

“Weren’t you even listening in the classes, Pop? It’s a Federal crime to use the thing without a permit!”

“Too many laws these days.”

“Anything could have happened! You could have run into somebody setting mousetraps, or fouled up history or something.”

“Never did no harm.”

I looked at Granddad then, all pinched in on himself, frowning at a spot of mud on the floor. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Oh god,” I said, suddenly dizzy. I stumbled back into a chair. “He did. He hurt himself. How many times did he use the TID, Granddad?”

“Enough to show your mother and her snooty parents they underestimated the Tidwells!”

“This was about Mom? About Grandma and Granddad Trelane?”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I just meant it served them right.”

“Sure, you didn’t mean that. The guy that got us drivable cars he couldn’t afford for Christmas just to show up the other grandparents.”

“Your father just wanted enough money to keep you and Benny comfortable, that’s all.”

“We didn’t need the money, Granddad! Do you know how much I found in the bank, never touched? Christ. We needed Pop, not the money. You have to tell me what you know. How many times did he go?”

Nothing.

“How many times, Granddad? A hundred? Seventy-five? Every house in Granite Valley that has outdoor crawlspace access? How many times did he go?”

“He went enough,” the old man muttered.

I stared at my boots, covered with dirt from two time periods, indistinguishable. The carpet was old, my muddy footprints falling on top of half-removed stains and the texture of Mazzu’s tread tracks. “All this time, I’ve been telling myself that what happened to Pop was a fluke, you know? One of those things that happen to someone else, until it happens to you. Now I come to find out he did it to himself, and you sit there justifying it. Saying it’s for me. Well, who asked for it?”

I stood up and walked back out the front door. For once Granddad didn’t have anything to say.

* * * *

I drove out of the driveway too fast, forced myself to slow down. I turned into the riverside park and stopped the van under the trees. Some children were chasing each other down by the bank, others ripping up bread for the ducks. I bent my head over the steering wheel and closed my eyes. I listened to the river, the kids shrieking.

After a few minutes, Elly said, “Is there anything I can do to help?” I swear she spoke more quietly than usual.

I sniffed, and turned my head. “What records do you have? Business records, I mean?”

“I have access to all the computerized files. Everything since 1998.”

“But you didn’t know anything about this?”

“He didn’t keep any records.”

“Of course, he wouldn’t.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know when he started this. The very first time.”

“He received the Temporal Intervention Device on August first, twenty—”

“First of August?”

“Is there some significance to the date?”

“It would have been my parents’ silver wedding anniversary. If she hadn’t divorced him the year before.” I twisted the vinyl on the steering wheel and went over everything Granddad had said. “Did we ever do a termite call at 240 McCullough?”

“Five years ago. Minor damage, standard termination.”

“That was it. That was the first house he baited.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s my grandparents’ house. His in-laws.”

“It says here the homeowners are a Zach and Edward Farmer.”

“Yeah, my grandparents moved to Florida right after my mom did.”

“But they lived there when he received the TID?”

“Yes.”

“Why would he choose that house?”

I stared out at the dark needles of the firs and cedars, trying to phrase it so a computer could understand. “Because he was never enough,” I said finally, “not for them.”

“What are you going to do?”

I blinked, surprised she hadn’t guessed. “I’m going to stop him. Are you going to help me?”

“Of course.”

“You realize it’s against the law, even if I’m doing it for all the right reasons?”

“All I want to do is help.”

I felt some of the tension in my gut relax, and I leaned back in my chair to laugh. “Somehow, I had managed not to realize that, Elly.”

* * * *

Zach Farmer was willing enough to have a free crawlspace inspection. “I have to admit, I haven’t been down there since you and your dad cleaned it up. I keep meaning to—you said I should check every couple of years—”

“Not to worry, Mr. Farmer. I’ll make sure nothing’s gone wrong under there.” The tense might be inaccurate, but that was sort of what I was doing.

“I was just about to go to the store, but if I need to stay . . .”

“Not at all, unless you’ve put a padlock on the crawlspace.” He laughed gamely. “I’ll just put a note on your door when I’m done.”

I checked the windows to make sure no one else was home and watching before I carried the probe down. I carried it through the crawlspace—didn’t want to drop it, and myself, right on top of Pop—and gave the place a once-over. No termite infestation, just a lot of cobwebs. We’d done good work, Pop and I. Of course, it was unnecessary work, and we’d basically swindled the Farmers out of their fee. If everything turned out right down here, would they suddenly get the fee back plus interest, while remembering having paid us? What if they had gotten termites naturally in the intervening period, termites we had done nothing to stop? I dropped the probe and groaned. Focus on the parts you understand, Lacey-girl, I told myself. What Pop is doing—did—is about to do—is wrong.

“How are you picking the time?” Elly asked when I got back to the van.

“He had just taken the Temporal Intervention class, remember? They teach you the best way to choose an insertion point is to determine a major event that would have kept the residents away on a specific day, like a holiday or a wedding.”

“August first?”

“You got it. It’s probably how he got the idea. And he can’t have gone too far back, or the damage to the house would have been worse.” I programmed in August 1, 1991, my parents’ wedding day. I pressed the button to send the probe, and let out a breath when the device complied. It wasn’t supposed to work without a fresh permit code. Add tampering with a Temporal Intervention Device to my pop’s rap sheet.

The probe checked out, and I started down the ladder. “Good luck,” Elly called from the open van.

I turned off my headlamp before I pressed the button on my belt, and I arrived in 1991 in total darkness. Eventually I had to stop holding my breath, but I was still listening and straining my eyes. What if Pop wasn’t here? What if he hadn’t done this house? Maybe this had been about money from the first trip, not revenge or stupid pride, and his first trip had been to one of the dozens of termite-mangled places we’d cleaned up over the years.

A crunching sound. I crept forward, feeling the wall with my gloved hand, and saw a faint glow ahead. I peered around the corner and saw Pop sitting on an overturned bucket, tipping back a box of Fiddle-Faddle to get the last crumbs. His back was to me.

“Pop?” I said softly, and he jumped, hit his head on the low ceiling and spun around, shining his headlamp in my face.

“Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?” he yelled.

“Pop, calm down! It’s me, Lacey.” I realized as I said it how ridiculous it must sound. To him, Lacey was a teenage girl he’d left at home listening to mopey music. “I’m grown up, I know it’s a lot to understand, but I’ve come from the future. The future future, I mean.”

He took a few steps toward me and blazed the lamp more closely on my features. “By God, it could be.”

“It is, Pop. Look.” I plucked at my coveralls and stretched out the embroidered patch so it was easier to read: “Tidwell and Daughter.”

He sat down heavily on the bucket, and I turned on my own flashlight. Even sitting, he seemed bigger than I remembered, his barrel chest wider. His ramrod posture made him seem tall, immovable. But I’d come to move him.

“Pop, I know why you’re here, and you can’t do it.”

He set his jaw. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I know you’re luring termites to this house, and you have to stop.”

He swept his brow with his hand. “That’s why you’re here?”

“Yes, Pop. I don’t know why you think you’re doing it—”

“For you! For you and Benny. The termite business has been slowing a bit, and I need to be able to provide for you.”

“By cheating?”

“However I have to!”

“If this is just about money, why are you here now? Why 1991, not 1960, so the termites could really dig in? It’s never just money in our family, is it? This is about respect, and proving to yourself that you aren’t ‘just an exterminator.’ “

Pop shook his head, but he didn’t say anything. I went down on my knees in the dirt and threw my arms around him. I could smell him even over the crawlspace smells: the peanut-popcorn, the aftershave that he used. Now Granddad shaved him and used his own stuff. I shut my eyes to keep from crying.

“You’re not ‘just an exterminator’ to me, or to Benny. You’re our Pop, and that’s all we need from you.”

“No,” he muttered. “I need to leave you provided for.”

“You need not to leave us at all.” I looked up, and saw the look of confusion in his strangely young face. “They weren’t kidding about temporal interventions being hard on your brain, Pop. You’ve been doing these side trips for decades—in my time—and five months ago you had an attack. Okay? You’re not dead, but you’re not with us any more. You think you’re giving us this big golden future, but all you’re doing is taking away our Pop.”

“What do you want me to do?” he said.

“I want you to take your lumber and all your things and go home. Back to your time, and never do this again.”

“But if I’ve been doing it for decades . . .”

“I’m not saying there won’t be problems. Maybe there will be questions, maybe some doctors or accountants will fuss, but we’ll get through it together, with a clear conscience. I’d rather have a pile of problems with you than a pile of money without.”

Pop held my face out at arm’s length, callused fingers on my chin. “I believe you, Lacey-girl. Tell me one thing, and I’ll promise to never take this thing on another field trip. Just tell me, why are you an exterminator?”

I blinked. “Because I wanted to be. I wanted to help people, work in the dirt, see the places other people don’t see. Why the hell wouldn’t I want to be like you?”

* * * *

When I got back to my time, I was relieved to see there weren’t any major termite problems in the Farmer crawlspace, no matter how much I’d bent, folded, and spindled the timeline. I told myself it was my duty to spray and knock down the few tubes that were there, but my arms and legs were shaking, and I could hardly wait to close that crawlspace up and hop in the van.

“How did it go?” Elly said.

“I think it worked,” I said. “But there’s only one way to be sure.”

I pulled the van up in front of our house, noting with mounting excitement that it now needed a new coat of paint. I stopped with my hand on the doorknob and listened. There was my Granddad’s voice, raised in alarm or dudgeon. And then, patient and low, there was the soft music of my Pop’s voice. I kicked off my boots and walked into the house that termites built.

Copyright © 2010 Felicity Shoulders