SECOND CHANCE by Jack Finney
Published in: The Third Level, Dell Publishing Co. Inc., 1959
Read Thursday 14 September 2023
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I can't tell you, I know, how I got to a time and place no one else in the world even remembers. But maybe I can tell you how I felt the morning I stood in an old barn off the county road, staring down at what was to take me there. 

I paid out seventy-five dollars i'd worked hard for after classes last semester—I'm a senior at Poynt College in Hylesburg, Illinois, my home town—and the middle-aged farmer took it silently, watching me shrewdly, knowing I must be out of my mind. Then I stood looking down at the smashed, rusty, rat-gnawed, dust-covered, old wreck of an automobile lying on the wood floor where it had been hauled and dumped thirty-three years before—and that now belonged to me.

And if you can remember the moment, whenever it was, when you finally got something you wanted so badly you dreamed about it—then maybe I've told you how I felt staring at the dusty mass of junk that was a genuine Jordan Playboy.

You've never heard of a Jordan Playboy, if you're younger than forty, unless you're like I am; one of those people who'd rather own a 1926 Mercer convertible sedan, or a 1931 Packard touring car, or a '24 W111s Sainte Claire, or a '31 air-cooled Franklin convertible—or a Jordan Playboy—than the newest, two-toned, '57 model made; I was actually half sick with excitement. 

And the excitement lasted; it took me four months to restore that car, and that's fast. I went to classes till school ended for summer, then I worked, clerking at J. C. Penney's; and I had dates, saw an occasional movie, and ate and slept. But all I really did—all that counted—was work on that car; from six to eight every morning, for half an hour at lunchtime, and from the moment I got home, most nights, till I stumbled to bed, worn out. 

My folks live in the big old house my dad was born in; there's a barn off at the back of the lot, and I've got a chain hoist in there, a workbench, and a full set of mechanic's tools. I built hot rods there for three years, one after another; those charcoal-black mongrels with the rear ends up in the air. But I'm through with hot rods; I'll leave those to the high-school set.

I'm twenty years old now, and I've been living for the day when I could soak loose the body bolts with liniment, hoist the body aside, and start restoring my own classic. That's what they're called; those certain models of certain cars of certain years which have something that's lasted, something today's cars don't have for us, and something worth bringing back. 

But you don't restore a classic by throwing in a new motor, hammering out the dents, replacing missing parts with anything handy, and painting it chartreuse. "Restore" means what it says, or ought to. My Jordan had been struck by a train, the man who sold it to me said—just grazed, but that was enough to flip it over, tumbling it across a field, and the thing was a wreck; the people in it were killed.

So the right rear wheel and the spare were hopeless wads of wire spokes and twisted rims, and the body was caved in, with the metal actually split in places. The motor was a mess, though the block was sound. The upholstery was rat-gnawed, and almost gone. All the nickel plating was rusted and flaking off. And exterior parts were gone; nothing but screw holes to show they'd been there. But three of the heels were intact, or almost, and none of the body was missing. 

What you do is write letters, advertise in the magazines people like me read, ask around, prowl garages, junk heaps and barns, and you trade, and you bargain, and one way or another get together the parts you need, I traded a Winton nameplate and hub caps. plus a Saxon hood to a man in Wichita, Kansas, for two Playboy wheels, and they arrived crated in a wooden box—rusty and some of the spokes bent and loose, but I could fix that. 

I bought my Jordan running-board mats and spare-wheel mount from a man in New Jersey. I bought two valve pushrods, and had the rest precision-made precisely like the others. And—well, I restored  that car, that's all.

The body shell, every dent and bump gone, every tear welded and burnished down. I painted a deep green, precisely matching what was left of the old paint before I sanded it off. Door handles, wind-shield rim, every other nickel-plated part, were restored, re-nickeled, and replaced. I wrote eleven letters to leather supply houses all over the country, enclosing sample swatches of the cracked old upholstery, before l found a place that could match it.

Then I paid a hundred and twelve dollars to have my Playboy reupholstered, supplying old photographs to show just how it should be done. And at eight ten one Saturday evening in July, I finally finished; my last missing part, a Jordan radiator cap, for which I'd traded a Duesenberg floor mat, had come from the nickel plater's that afternoon. 

Just for the fun of it, I put the old plates back on then; Illinois license 11,206, for 1923. And even the original ignition key, in its old leather case-oiled and worked supple again—was back where I'd found it, and now I switched it on, advanced the throttle and spark, got out with the crank, and started it up. And thirty-three years after it had bounced, rolled and crashed off a grade crossing, that Jordan Playboy was alive again. 

I had a date, and knew I ought to get dressed; I was wearing stained dungarees and my dad's navy blue, high-necked old sweater. I didn't have any money with me; you lose it out of your pockets, working on a car. I was even out of cigarettes. But I couldn't wait, I had to drive that car, and I just washed up at the old sink in the barn, then started down the cinder driveway in that beautiful car, feeling wonderful. It wouldn't matter how I was dressed anyway, driving around in the Playboy tonight. 

My mother waved at me tolerantly from a living room window, and called out to be careful, and I nodded; then I was out in the street, cruising along, and I wish you could have seen me—seen it, I mean. I don't care whether you've ever given a thought to the wonderful old cars or not, you'd have seen why it was worth all I'd done.

Draw yourself a mental picture of a simple, straight-lined, two-seater, open automobile with four big wire wheels fully exposed, and its spare on the back in plain sight; don't put in a line that doesn't belong there, and have a purpose. Make the two.doors absolutely square; what other shape should a door be? Make the hood perfectly rounded, louvered at the sides because the motor needs that ventilation. But don't add a single unnecessary curve, jiggle, squiggle, or porthole to that car—and picture the radiator, nothing concealing it and pretending it doesn't exist. 

And now see that Playboy as I did cruising along, the late sun slanting down through the big old trees along the street, glancing off the bright nickel so that it hurt your eyes, the green of the body glowing like a jewel. It was beautiful, I tell you it was beautiful, and you'd think everyone would see that. 

But they didn't.. On Main Street, I stopped at a light, and a guy slid up beside me in a great big shining, new '57 car half as long as a football field. He sat there, the top of the door up to his shoulders, his eyes almost level with the bottom of his windshield, looking as much in proportion to his car as a two-year-old in his fathers overcoat; he sat there in a car with a pattern of chrome copied directly from an Oriental rug, and with a trunk sticking out past his back wheels you could have landed a helicopter on; he sat there for a moment, then turned, looked out, and smiled at my car! 

And when I turned to look at him, eyes cold, he had the nerve to smile at me, as though I were supposed to nod and grin and agree that any car not made day before yesterday was an automatic side-splitting riot. I just looked away, and when the light changed, he thought he'd show me just how sick his big four-thousand-dollar job could make my pitiful old antique look.

The light clicked, and his foot was on the gas, his automatic transmission taking hold, and he'd already started to grin. But I started when he did, feeding the gas in firm and gentle, and we held even till I shot into second faster than any automatic transmission yet invented can do it, and I drew right past him, and when I looked back it was me who was grinning. But still, at the next light, every pedestrian crossing in front of my car treated me to a tolerant understanding smile, and when the light changed, I swung off Main. 

That was one thing that happened; the second was that my date wouldn't go out with me. I guess I shouldn't blame her. First she saw how I was dressed, which didn't help me with her. Then I showed her the Jordan at the curb, and she nodded, not even slightly interested, and said 1t was very nice; which didn't help her with me.

And then-well, she's a good-looking girl, Naomi Weygand, and while she didn't exactly put it in these words, she let me know she meant to be seen tonight, preferably on a dance floor, and not waste her youth and beauty riding around in some old antique.

And when I told her I was going out in the Jordan tonight, and if she wanted to come a1ong, fine, and if she didn't-well, she didn't. And eight seconds later she was opening her front door again, while I scorched rubber pulling away from the curb. 

I felt the .way you would have by then, and I wanted to get out of town and alone somewhere, and I shoved it into second, gunning the car, heading for the old Cressville road. It used to be the only road to Cressville, a two-lane paved highway just barely wide enough for cars to pass. But there's been a new highway for fifteen years; four lanes, and straight as a ruler except for two long curves you can do ninety on, and you can make the seven miles to Cressville in five minutes or less. 

But it's a dozen winding miles on the old road, and half a mile of it, near Cressville, was flooded out once, and the concrete is broken and full of gaps; you have to drive it in low. So nobody uses the old road nowadays, except for four· or five farm families who live along it. 

When I swung onto the old road-there are a lot of big old trees all along it—I began to feel better. And I just ambled along, no faster than thirty, maybe, clear up to the broken stretch before I turned back, toward Hylesburg, and it was wonderful.

I'm not a sports-car man myself, but they've got something when they talk about getting close to the road and into the outdoors again—the way driving used to be before people shut themselves behind great sheets of glass and metal, and began rushing along super-highways, their eyes on the white line. I had the windshield folded down flat against the hood, and the summer air streamed over my face and through my hair, and I could see the road 

just beside and under me flowing past so close I could have touched it. The air was alive with the heavy fragrances of summer darkness, and the rich nostalgic sounds of summer insects, and I wasn't even thinking, but just living and enjoying it . 

One of the old Playboy advertisements, famous in their day, calls the Jordan "this brawny, graceful thing," and says, "It revels along with the wandering wind and roars like a Caproni biplane. It's a car for a man's man-that's certain. Or for a girl who loves the out of doors." Rich prose for these days, I guess; we're afraid of rich prose now, and laugh in defense. But I'll take it over a stern sales talk on safety belts. 

Anyway, I liked just drifting along the old road, a part of the summer outdoors and evening, and the living country around me; and I was no more thinking than a collie dog with his nose thrust out of a car, his eyes half closed against the air stream, enjoying the feeling human beings so often forget, of simply being a living creature. "'I left my love in Avalon,'" I was bawling out at the top of my lungs, hardly knowing when I'd started, " 'and saaailed awaaayl' " Then I was singing "Alice Blue Gown," very softly and gently. I sang, "Just a Japanese Saaandman!" and "Whispering," and "Barney Google," the fields and trees and cattle, and sometimes an occasional car, flowmg past in the darkness, and I was having a wonderful time. 

The name "Dempsey" drifted into my head, I don't know why-just a vagrant thought floating lazily up into my consciousness. Now, I saw Jack Dempsey once; six years ago when I was fourteen, my dad, my mother, and I took a vacation trip to New York. We saw the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, took s ride on the subway, and all the rest of 1t. And we had dmner at Jack Dempsey's restaurant on Broadway, and he was there, and spoke to us, and my dad talked to him for a minute about his fights. So I saw him; a nice-looking middle-aged man, very big and broad,

But the picture that drifted up into my mind now, driving along the old Cressville road, wasn't that Jack Dempsey. It was the face of a young man not a lot older than I was, black-haired, black-bearded, fierce and scowling. Dempsey, I thought, that snarling young face rising up clear and vivid in my mind, and the thought completed itself: He beat Tom Gibbons last night.

Last night; Dempsey beat Gibbons last night-and it was true. I mean it felt true somehow, as though the thought were in the very air·around me, like the old songs I'd found. myself singing, and suddenly several things I'd been half aware of clicked together in my mind. I'd been dreamily and unthinkingly realizing that there were more cars on the road than I'd have expected, flowing past me in the darkness. Maybe some of the farm families along here were having some sort of Saturday-night get-together, I thought. But then I knew it wasn't true.

Picture a car's headlights.coming toward you; they're . two sharp· beams slicing ahead into the darkness, an intense blue-white in color, their edges as defined as a ruler's. But these headlights—two more sets of them were approaching me now—were different. They were entirely orange in color, the red-orange of the hot filaments that produced them; and they were hardly even beams, but just twin circles of wide, diffused orange light, and they wavered in intensity, illuminating the road only dimly.

The nearer lights were almost upon me, and I half rose from my seat, leaning forward over the hood of the .Jordan, staring at the car as it passed me. It was a Moon; a cream-colored nineteen-twenty-two Moon roadster.

The next car, those two orange circles of wavering light swelling, approached, then passed. as I stared and turned to look after it. It looked something like mine; wire wheels, but with the spare on a side mount, and with step plates instead. of running boards. I knew what 1t was; a Haynes Speedster, and the man at the wheel wore a cloth cap, and the girl beside him wore a large pink hat, coming well down over her head, and with a wide brim all around it.

I sat moving along, a hand on the wheel. in a kind of stunned ecstatic trance. For now, the Saturday-night traffic at its peak, there they all came one after another all the glorious old cars; a Saxon Six black-bodied touring car with wood-spoke wheels, and the women in that car wore chin-length veils from the edges of their flowered hats; there passed a gray-bodied black-topped Wills Sainte Claire with orange disc wheels, and the six kids in it were singing "Who's Sorry Now-"; then I saw another Moon, a light blue open four-seater, its cut-out open, and the kid at the wheel had black hair slicked back in a varnished pompadour, and just glancing at him, you could see he was on his way to a date.

Now there came an Elcar, two Model T Fords just behind it; then a hundred yards back, a red Buick roadster with natural-wood spoke wheels; I saw a Velie, and a roadster that was either a Noma or a Kissel, I couldn't be sure; and there was a high-topped blue Dodge sedan with cut flowers in little glass vases by the rear doors; there was a car I didn't know at all; then a brand-new Stanley Steamer, and just behind it, a wonderful low-slung 1921 Pierce-Arrow, and I knew what had happened, and where I was. 

I've read some of the stuff about Time with a capital T, and I don't say I understand it too well. But I know Einstein or somebody compares Time to a winding river, and says we exist as though in a boat, drifting along between high banks. All we can see is the present, immediately around us. We can't see the future just beyond the next curve, or the past in the many bends in back of us. But it's all there just the same. There—countless bends back, in infinite distance—lies the past, as real as the moment around us. 

Well, I'll join Einstein and the others with a notion of my own; just a feeling, actually, hardly even a thought. I wonder if we aren't barred from the past by a thousand invisible chains. You can't drive into the past in a 1957 Buick because there are no 1957 Buicks in 1923; so how could you be there in one? You can't drive into 1923 in a Jordan Playboy, along a four-lane superhighway; there are no superhighways in 1923

You couldn't even, I'm certain, drive with a pack of modern filter-tip cigarettes in your pocket—into a night when no such thing existed. Or with so much as a coin bearing a modern date, or wearing a charcoal-gray and pink shirt on your back. All those things, small and large, are chains keeping you out of a time when they could not exist. 

But my car and I-the way I felt about it, anyway, were almost rejected that night, by the time I lived in. And so there in my Jordan, just as it was the year it was new, with nothing about me from another time, the old '23 tags on my car, and moving along a highway whose very oil spots belonged to that year-well, I think that for a few moments, all the chains hanging slack, we were free on the surface of Time. And that, moving along that old highway through the summer evening, we simply drifted-into the time my Jordan belonged in. 

That's the best I can do, anyway; it's all that occurs to me. And-well, I wish I could offer you proof. I wish I could tell you that when I drove into Hylesburg again, onto Main Street, that I saw a newspaper headIine saying, PRESIDENT HARDING STRICKEN, or something like that. Or that I heard people discussing Babe Ruth's new home-run record or saw a bunch of cops raiding a speak-easy. 

But I saw or heard nothing of the sort, nothing much different from the way it always has been. The street was quiet and nearly empty, as it is once the stores shut down for the weekend. I saw only two people at first; just a couple walking along far down the street. As for the buildings, they've been there most of them, since the Civil War, or before—Hvlesburg's an old town-and in the semi-darkness left by the street lamps, they looked the same as always, and the street was paved with brick as it has been since World War I. 

No, all I saw driving along Main Street were-just little things. I saw a shoe store, its awning still over the walk, and that awning was striped: broad red and white stripes, and the edges were scalloped. You just don't see awnings like that, outside of old photographs, but there it was, and I pulled over to the curb, staring across the walk at the window. But all I can tell you is that there were no open-toed shoes among the women's, and the heels looked a little high to me, and a little different in design. somehow. The men's shoes -well, the toes seemed a little more pointed than you usually see now, and there were no suede shoes at all. But the kids' shoes looked the same as always. 

I drove on, and passed a little candy and stationery shop, and on the door was a sign that said, “Drink Coca-Cola” and in some wav I can't describe the letters looked different. Not much, but—you've seen old familiar trademarks that have gradually changed, kept up to date through the years, in a gradual evolution. All I can say is that this old familiar sign looked a little different, a little old-fashioned, but I can't really say how. 

There were a couple of all-night restaurants open, as I drove along, one of them The New China, the other Gill's, but they've both been in Hylesburg for years. There were a couple of people in each of them, but I never even thought of going in. It seemed to me I was here on sufferance, or by accident; that I'd just drifted into this time, and had no right to actually intrude on it. Both restaurant signs were lighted, the letters formed by electric-light bulbs, unfrosted so that you could see the filaments glowing, and the bulbs ended in sharp glass spikes. There wasn't a neon sign, lighted or unlighted, the entire length of the street. 

On West Main I came to the Orpheum, and though the box office and marquee were dark, there were a few lights still on, and a dozen or so cars parked for half a block on each side of it. I parked mine directly across the street beside a wood telephone pole. Brick pavement is bumpy, and when I shut off the motor, and reached for the hand brake—I don't know whether this is important or not, but I'd better tell it—the Jordan rolled ahead half a foot as its right front wheel settled into a shallow depression in the pavement. For just a second or so, it rocked a little in a tiny series of rapidly decreasing arcs, then stopped, its wheels settled snugly into the depression as though it had found exactly the spot it had been looking for-like a dog turning around several times before it lies down in precisely the right place. 

Crossing over to the Orph, I saw the big posters in the shallow glass showcases on each side of the entrance. Fri., Sat. and Sun., one said, and it showed a man with a long thin face, wearing a monocle, and his eyes were narrowed, staring at a woman with long hair who looked sort of frightened. GEORGE ARLISS, said the poster, in "The Green Goddess." 

Coming Attraction, said the other poster, Mon., Tues. and Wed. "Ashes of Vengeance," staring Norma Talmadge and Conway Tearle, with Wallace Beery. I've never heard of any of them, except Wallace Beery. In the little open lobby, I looked at the pictures in wall cases at each side of the box office; small, glossy, black and white scenes from the two movies, and finally recognized Wallace Beery, a thin, handsome, young-man. I've never seen that kind of display before, and didn't know it was done.

But that's about all I can tell you; nothing big or dramatic, and nothing significant, like hearing someone say, "Mark my words, that boy Lindbergh will fly the Atlantic yet." All I saw was a little, shut-down eleven-o'clock Main Street.

The parked cars, though, were a Dort; a high, straight-lined Buick sedan with wood wheels: three Model T's; a blue Hupmobile touring car with blue and yellow disc wheels: a Winton; a four-cylinder Chevrolet roadster; a Stutz; a spoke-wheeled Cadillac sedan. Not a single car had been made later than the year 1923. And this is the strange thing: they looked right to me. They looked as though that were the way automobiles were supposed to look, nothing odd, funny, or old-fashioned about them. From somewhere in my mind, I know I could have brought up a mental picture of a glossy, two-toned, chromium-striped car with power steering. But it would bave taken a real effort, and-I can't really explain this, I know-it was as though modern cars didn't really exist; not yet. These were today's cars, parked all around me, and I knew it.

I walked on, strolling down Main Street, glancing at an occasional store window, enjoying the incredible wonder of being where I was. Then, half a block or so behind me, I heard a sudden little babble of voices, and I looked back and the movie was letting out. A little crowd of people was flowing slowly out onto the walk to stand, some of them, talking for a moment; while others crossed the street, or walked on. Motors began starting, the parked cars pulling out from the curb, and I heard a girl laugh.

I walked on three or four steps maybe, and then I heard a sound, utterly familiar and unmistakable, and stopped dead in my tracks. My Jordan's motor had caught, roaring up as someone advanced the spark and throttle, and dying to its chunky, revving-and-ticking-over idle. Swinging around on the walk, I saw a figure, a young man's, vague and shadowy down the street, hop into the front seat, and then—the cut-out open—my Jordan shot ahead, tires squealing, down the street toward me.

I was frozen; I just stood there stupidly, staring at my car shooting toward me, my brain not working; then I came to life. It's funny; I was more worried about my car, about the way it was treated, than about the fact that it was being stolen.

And I ran out into the street, directly into its path, my arms waving, and I yelled, "Hey! Take it easy!" The brakes slammed on, the Jordan skidding on the bricks, the rear end sliding sideways a little, and it slowed almost to a stop, then swerved· around me, picking up speed again, and as I turned, following it with my eyes, I caught a glimpse of a girl's face staring at me, and a man my age at the wheel beside her, laughing, his teeth flashing white, and then they were past, and he yelled back, "You betcha! Take it easy; I always do!"

For a moment I just stood staring after them, watching the single red taillight shrinking into the distance; then I turned, and walked back toward the curb. A little part of the movie crowd was passing, and I heard a woman's voice murmur some question; then a man's voice, gruff and half angry, replied, "Yeah, of course it was Vince; driving like a fool as usual." 

There was nothing I could do. I couldn't report a car theft to the police, trying to explain who I was, and where they could reach me. I hung around for a while, the street deserted once more, hoping they'd bring back my car. But they didn't, and finally I left, and just walked the streets for the rest of the night. 

I kept well away from Prairie Avenue. If I was where I knew I was, My grandmother, still alive, was asleep in the big front bedroom o[ our house, and the thirteen-year-old in my room was the boy who would become my father. I didn't belong there now, and I kept away, up in the north end o£ town. It looked about as always; Hylesburg, as I've said, is old, and most o£ the new construction has been on the outskirts. Once in a while I passed a vacant lot where I knew there no longer was one; and when I passed the Dorsets' house where I played as a kid with Ray Dorset, it was only half built now, the wood of the framework looking fresh and new in the dark. 

Once I passed a party, the windows all lighted, and they were having a time, noisy and happy, and with a lot of laughing and shrieks from the women. I stopped for a minute, across the street, watching; and I saw figures passing the lighted windows, and one of them was a girl with her hair slicked close to her head, curving down onto her cheeks in sort of J-shaped hooks. There was a phonograph going, and the music—it was "China Boy"—sounded sort of distant, the orchestration tinny, and ... different, I can't explain bow. Once it slowed down, the tones deepening, and someone yelled, and then I heard the pitch rising higher again as it picked up speed, and knew someone was winding the phonograph. Then I walked on. 

At daylight, the sky whitening in the east, the leaves of the big old trees around me beginning to stir, I was on Cherry Street. I heard a door open across the street, and saw a man in overalls walk down his steps, cut silently across the lawn, and open the garage doors beside his house. He walked in, I heard the motor start, and a cream and green '56 Oldsmobile backed out—and I turned around then, and .walked on toward Prairie Avenue and home, and was in bed a couple hours before my folks woke up Sunday morning. 

I didn't tell anyone my Jordan was gone; there was no way to explain it. Ed Smiley, and a couple other guys, asked me about it, and I said I was working on it in my garage. My folks didn't ask; they were long since used to my working on a car for weeks, then discovering I'd sold or traded it for something else to work on. 

But I wanted—I simply had to have—another Playboy, and it took a long time io find one. I heard of one in Davenport, and borrowed Jim Clark's Hudson, and drove over, but it wasn't a Playboy, just a Jordan, and in miserable shape anyway. 

It was a girl who found me a Playboy; after school started up in September. She was in my Economics IV class, a sophomore I learned, though I didn't remember seeing her around before. She wasn't actually a girl you'd turn and look at again, and remember, I suppose; she wasn't actually pretty, I guess you'd have to say. But after I'd talked to her a few times, and had a Coke date once, when I ran into her downtown—then she was pretty. And I got to liking her; quite a lot.

It's like this; I'm a guy who's going to want to get married pretty early. I've been dating girls since I was sixteen, and it's fun, and exciting, and I like it fine. But I've just about had my share of that, and I'd been looking at girls in a different way lately; a lot more interested in what they were like than in just how good-looking they were. And I knew pretty soon that this was a girl I could fall in love with, and marry, and be happy with.

I won't be fooling around with old cars all my life; it's just a hobby, and I know it, and I wouldn't expect a girl to get all interested in exactly how the motor of an old Marmon works But I would expect her to take some interest in how I feel about old cars. And she did—Helen MCauley, her name is. She really did; she understood what I was talking about, and it wasn't faked either, I could tell.

So one night—we were going to the dance at the Roof Garden, and I'd called for her a little early, and we were sitting out on her lawn in deck chairs killing time-I told her how I wanted one certain kind of old car, and why it had to be just that car. And when I mentioned its name, she sat up, and said, "Why, good heavens, I've heard about the Playboy from Dad all my life; we've got one out in the barn; it's a beat-up old mess, though. Dad!" she called, turning to look up at the porch where her folks were sitting. "Here's a man you've been looking for!" 

Well, I'll cut it short. Her dad came down, and when he heard what it was all about, Helen and I never did get to the dance. We were out in that barn, the old tarpaulin pulled off his Jordan, and we were looking at it, touching it, siting in it, talking about it, and quoting Playboy ads to each other for the next three hours. 

It wasn't in bad shape at all The upholstery was gone; only wads of horsehair and strips of brittle old leather left. The body was dented, but not torn. A few parts, including one headlight and part of the windshield mounting. were gone, and the motor was a long way from running, but nothing serious. And all the wheels were there, and in good shape, though they needed renickeling. 

Mr. MCauley gave me the car: wouldn't take a nickel for it. He'd owned that Jordan when he was young, had had it ever since, and loved it; he'd always meant, he said, to get it in running order again sometime, but knew he never would now. And once he understood what I meant about restoring a classic, he said that to see it and drive it again as it once was, was all the payment he wanted. 

I don't know just when I guessed, or why; but the feeling had been growing on me. Partly, I suppose, it was the color; the faded-out remains of the deep green this old car had once been. And partly it was something else, l don't know just what. But suddenly standing in that old barn with Helen, and her mother and dad-suddenly I knew, and I glanced around the barn, and found them; the old plates nailed up on a wall, 1923 through 1931. And when I walked over to look at them, I found what 1 knew 1 would find; 1923 Illinois tag 11,206. 

"Your old Jordan plates?" I said, and when he nodded, I said as casually as I could, "What's your first name, Mr. McCauley?" 

I suppose he thought I was crazy, but he said, "Vincent. Why?" 

"Just wondered. I was picturing you driving around when the Jordan was new; it's a fast car, and it must have been a temptation to open it up." 

"Oh, yeah." He laughed. "I did that, a11 right; those were wild times." 

"Racing trains; all that sort of thing, I suppose?" "That's right," he said, and Helen's mother glanced at me curiously. "That was one of the things to do in those days. We almost got it one night, too; scared me to death. Remember?" he said to his wife. 

"I certainly do." 

"What happened?" I said. 

"Oh"—he shrugged—"I was racing a train, out west of town one night: where the road parallels the Q tracks.I passed it, beading for the crossroad—you know where it is—that cuts over the tracks. We got there, my arms stared to move, to swing the wheel and shoot over the tracks in front of that engine—when I knew I couldn't make it."

He shook his head "Two three seconds more: if we'd gotten there just two seconds earlier, I'd have risked it, I'm certain, and we'd have been killed, I ±now. But we were just those couple seconds too late, and I swung that wheel straight again, and shot on down the road beside that train, and when I took my foot off the gas, and the engine rushed past us, the fireman was leaning out of the cab shaking his fist, and shouting something, I couldn't hear what, but it wasn't complimentary." He grinned. 

"Did anything delay you that night" I said softly, "just long enough to keep you from getting killed?" I was actually holding my breath, waiting for his answer. 

But he only shook his head. '1 don't know," he said without interest. "I can't remember." And his wife said, "I don't even remember where we'd been." 

I don't believe—I really don't—that my Jordan Playboy is anything more than metal. glass, rubber and paint formed into a machine. It isn't alive; it can't think or feel; it's only a car. But I think it's an especial tragedy when a young couple's lives are cut off for no other reason than the sheer exuberance nature put into them.

And I can't stop myself from feeling, true or not true, that when that old Jordan was restored—returned to precisely the way it had been just before young Vince MCauley and his girl had raced a train in it back in 1923—when it had been given a second chance, it went back to the time and place, back to the same evening in 1923, that would give them a second chance, too.

And so again, there on that warm July evening, actually there in the year 1923, they got into that Jordan, standing just where they'd parked it, to drive on and race that train. But trivial events can affect important ones following them—how often we've all said: If only this or that had happened, everything would have turned out so differently.

And this time it did, for now something was changed. This time on that 1923 July evening, someone dashed in front of their car, delaying them only two or three seconds. But Vince McCauley, then, driving on to race along beside those tracks, changed his mind about trying to cross them; and lived to marry the girl beside him. And to have a daughter. 

I haven't asked Helen to marry me, but she knows I will; after I've graduated, and got a job, I expect. And she knows that I know she'll say yes. We'll be married, and have children, and I'm sure we'll be driving a modern hard-top car like everyone else, with safety catches on the doors so the kids won't fall out. But one thing for sure—just as her folks did thirty-two years before—we'll leave on our honeymoon in the Jordan Playboy. 

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Author Jack Finney

Walter Braden "Jack" Finney (born John Finney; October 2, 1911 – November 14, 1995) was an American writer. 

Mr. Finney specialized in thrillers and works of science fiction. Two of his novels, The Body Snatchers and Good Neighbor Sam became the basis of popular films, but it was Time and Again (1970) that won him a devoted following. The novel, about an advertising artist who travels back to the New York of the 1880s, quickly became a cult favorite, beloved especially by New Yorkers for its rich, painstakingly researched descriptions of life in the city more than a century ago.

Mr. Finney, whose original name was Walter Braden Finney, was born in Milwaukee and attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. After moving to New York and working in the advertising industry, he began writing stories for popular magazines like Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post and McCall's.

His first novel, Five Against the House (1954), told the story of five college students who plot to rob a casino in Reno. A year later he published The Body Snatchers (later reissued as Invasion of the Body Snatchers), a chilling tale of aliens who emerge from pods in the guise of humans whom they have taken over. Many critics interpreted the insidious infiltration by aliens as a cold-war allegory that dramatized America's fear of a takeover by Communists. Mr. Finney maintained that the novel was nothing more than popular entertainment. The 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was remade twice.

Mr. Finney first showed an interest in time travel in the short-story collection The Third Level, which included stories about a commuter who discovers a train that runs between New York and the year 1894, and a man who rebuilds an old car and finds himself transported back to the 1920s.

He returned to the thriller genre in Assault on a Queen (1959) and tried his hand at comedy in Good Neighbor Sam (1963), a novel based on his experiences as an adman, played by Jack Lemmon in the film version.

In The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1968), Mr. Finney once again explored the possibilities of time travel. The dime of the title allows the novel's hero to enter a parallel world in which he achieves fame by composing the musicals of Oscar Hammerstein and inventing the zipper.

With Time and Again, Mr. Finney won the kind of critical praise and attention not normally accorded to genre fiction. Thomas Lask, reviewing the novel in The New York Times, described it, suggestively, as "a blend of science fiction, nostalgia, mystery and acid commentary on super-government and its helots." Its hero, Si Morley, is a frustrated advertising artist who jumps at the chance to take part in a secret project that promises to change his life. So it does. He travels back to New York in 1882, moves into the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West and experiences the fabulous ordinariness of a bygone age: its trolleys, horse-drawn carriages, elevated lines, and gaslights. This year Mr. Finney published a sequel to the novel, From Time to Time.

Mr. Finney also wrote Marion's Wall (1973), about a silent-film actress who, in an attempt to revive her film career, enters the body of a shy woman, and The Night People (1977). His other fictional works include The House of Numbers (1957) and the short-story collection I Love Galesburg in the Springtime (1963). He also wrote Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories (1983) about sensational events of the 19th century.

Excerpts from Wikipedia and GOOD READS