The wheels, stoppers, gears, and shafts had been precisely machined by men long dead. “Back then,” to hear the boys say it, “way back then.” But that’s the boys, the ones who line the wall below its face. “Only clock of its sort,” they say between drags on their smokes and throws of the dice. Powered, as it is, by the spin of the earth, wind resistance, and seismic vibrations too weak to feel, it’s not too hard to believe the claim.

“High Quality ain’t nothing but a faggot, anyhow,” one might say after a roll of double ones, but he’d be just as quick to take it back. There are some things you don’t joke about, no matter how tough you might be, some things that stand just a little taller than sacred in a town like this.

The old folks say he used to sell oil filters. “First job,” they say. “First time folks called him by his old man’s name, at least. Used to call him Junior, before that.”

To see that clock, though, to know the challenges presented in its engineering and construction, it was pretty hard to imagine calling the man who’d seen it through Junior, regardless of his age when it was so. The notion that it’d never felt a human hand in its works since its completion was enough to give a speaker pause.

They say something else, too, the old timers, something quiet, something the boys don’t. They say time moves a little slower in these parts. It’s the sort of thing people say in little towns like this, little places off the main roads where the old timers still split the street with the boys. Only here it’s a whisper, a confidence spoken with looks to the side and a lead that defies nostalgia as much as it chills. They say time moves just a little slower in these parts and that it’s all on account of that clock, how it’s more for making time than marking it, and on account of the author of its design.

“Young God,” they’ll say as they lock your king in check or play a domino, “a little present before he quit us, a little present for HQ.”

It’s just old men talking, though, just the sort of thing they say sometimes. Never mind if they mean it. It’s just that sort of thing. But the curious fact remains that the clock tower has no doors, no access from the street or the roof. Likewise, there’s the absence of its plans in the hall of records. There’s only the clock to speak for itself, locked from the inside, silent.

The street clears when the minute hand locks noon into place, lunchtimes in towns like this being as sacred as anything. The foot traffic stripped away, the shoes and clothes of the common era with it, it’s not hard to see things the way they must have looked, back then. It’s not even hard to strip out that clock, to picture High Quality, himself, the town’s son, grinning as he walks the workmen through their tasks.

“A thing of beauty,” he might have said. “Make no mistake, boys. We’re building a wonder.”

If the plans existed, if the annotations could be compared to Young God’s recorded samples, it would be easy enough to dismiss the matter, to know that time moved at the same clip here as it did anyplace else. That wouldn’t stop the old folks from talking, though. It wouldn’t do anything but give some outsider a sense of rightness to which he probably wasn’t entitled. Besides, the story’s probably better than any truth so mundane.

It’d been a year to the day since he’d parted with Professor Hawthorne at the base of Mount Mystery—Young God, that is. It’d been a year to the day since he and the other boys had stood in their circle around the broken body of August DiNova, a year to the day since he’d spoken his final words to them of, “I’ve done too much, already,” and set off toward his absence. It’d been a year of wandering, a year that ended here in this town, his eyes heavy, that day, his skin brown.

The barbershop across from the clock is where it happened, where he sat in Nat Bugle’s chair and said, “I’d like a shave.” That’s the whole of it, a little shave before the end, most normal thing in the world, a little something to feel human for just a little longer. Nat didn’t know him from anyone, not that it would’ve made a difference. He was just some stranger from out there, just a customer in need of a job well done.

They say he ran the back of his hand along his chin when Nat was done—Young God, I mean. “Hell of a shave,” he said. “Best I’ve known in my years.”

They say old Nat just smiled, running his blade up and down his strap as he did. “Right tools,” he said. “Right hands. That’s all. Just the way we do things in these parts, I suppose.”

As for the tools, they were the trade of HQ, a little pricier than most but the work of true masters. The truth came out soon enough. A slice of pie at The Highlight: “Best I’ve known,” said Young God. The transistor radio at the five and dime: “So clear,” he said. Even the paper and pen he’d used to draft his schematic were things of beauty. At every stop he was confronted by the truth of a name and the worthiness of a town.

The ribbon-cutting was held until the Mayor’s Day celebration, that year, according to the story—a story lacking in dry eyes by this point in its telling. They’ll tell it if you’ve got the time. They’ll tell it in whispers, but, if you’re patient with them, with their jokes and their digressions, they’ll tell it to its end. It’s just a little story about a little clock in a little town, no more magical than anything else but a good enough sign of times that are passing, whether more slowly or quickly in this place or that.

Timestamp: 02.10.08 at 05:16 PM. Filed under: Fiction.