Flight to Darkness (13 page)

“
Think it’ll do you any good down
there?”

He smiled tiredly, stirring his orange-juice
highball with a well-manicured little finger. “Does it
ever?”

Chapter 9

His name was Hatchell and the pretty
stewardess and I had a difficult time pouring him off the plane. He
knew he had to catch another plane in two hours for
Miami.

“
Think you can take it?” I
said.

Hatchell groped blindly into the afternoon,
winked obscenely at the stewardess, and said, “Most assuredly.”
There wasn’t much left of the fifth. Hatchell had a tremendous
capacity. “No difference,” he argued. “Fi’teen minutes I could
diagnose your case.”

“
Am I a case?”

“
We all are,” Hatchell said. I left
him standing quite straight and stern and neurotic on the front
steps of the building in front of the parking lot.

He was headed for a fine place to take the
cure.

Then it was afternoon. A lonely afternoon. And
I suddenly knew it had been a fool gesture, wiring Norma to meet me
at the airport. She wouldn’t be here.

Suddenly, through the tightening fumes of what
whisky I’d been able to steal from Hatchell, California and the
hospital became the peace I wanted. Home was an abrupt, ludicrous
return to hell.

I moved on across the sunny street to where
the cars were parked. Out on the field a transport’s engine
bellowed.

“
Eric!”

It was something like fear. Maybe that’s what
it was. They hadn’t radioed to hold me at the airport, or they’d
have been here long before this. It was something else. Something
from before the bad time I’d had in Sordell. Norma’s voice and the
part of the country you’d grown up in, and knew, that was unknown
now.

She hadn’t changed much. She came across the
street, walking fast as always, her tawny blonde hair all over the
place. Then she started running. She wore a tight blue skirt, white
blouse, and loafers.

“
Eric! My God, you came. You really
came back.” She stopped running about six feet from me, stood there
breathing hard. She took another step toward me, smiling, then not
smiling.

“
Sure. Told you I would.” We stared
at each other. Probably there were a lot of things that went unsaid
insofar as a passerby might notice. But plenty was said in the way
we looked at each other.

“
I thought you were kidding,” she
said.

“
No time for that.”

“
Oh.” She nodded, swallowed. “I
took a chance, anyway. Thought maybe you were just blinded by an
Alabama moon.”

I took off my hat, sealed it at an ash can. I
missed. Home was like that. . . .

The transport bellowed plenty as it turned on
the runway. I wondered how Hatchell was doing. Norma had put on
some weight. It looked fine in exactly the right places as an
adjunct to what she’d had some years ago. It had been fine then
too.

“
Are we just going to stand here?”
I said.

“
No.” She watched me intently. “No,
of course not. My car’s right over here.”

“
Good.” I followed her over to a
dust-covered black Chevy sedan. The left front fender was crumpled
and I recalled another crumpled fender. But this was
different.

“
Still heading for other cars’
lights at night?”

“
Uh-huh. Habit now. Get in. Sure
seems funny, Eric. It’s been a long time.” She gave me another
intent, quick glance.

We got in. She drove away from the airport. I
saw the way she watched me. Trying not to let me see all the
questions, with her eyes big and brown and her teeth gnawing her
lower lip. Hell. She’d been my girl. Only now she was more woman
than girl. It came to me she might be married even, maybe with
kids, too. It could happen.

I’d been through a war, gone crazy, been tied
up in strait jackets, fallen in love with a woman who walked out on
me the first rough time we had, and I was still hanging onto a
dream. That Norma Dean was still my girl.

And there was another wild dream, too—the wild
one that cropped up that day in Korea all full of blood and dark
damnation. So go on home to the old home where your mother’s dying
and see for sure if you want to kill your brother. See if you’re
going to kill him now. Go ahead, find out. . . .

And Allen had withdrawn the charges. So there
may as well not have been any hit-and-run. Why? Why had the man,
Allen, withdrawn charges after being hospitalized? Why had I been
tossed into the booby hatch? Why had Leda gone away?

Leda. It was like having warm syrup poured
over your head, hot down your sides, flowing along the veins.
Outside and inside, too. Leda. Leda and Norma—two very dissimilar
women. Only maybe not. I no longer knew Norma Dean. Once I’d known
her very well.

“
We won’t talk much for a while,
will we?” Norma said.

“
No.”

“
I decided that would be best. We
just’ll sit here and not talk.”

“
Yeah.”

“
Okay.”

“
Sure.”

She drove for a time and I didn’t think about
anything except how dirty she let her car get—how she didn’t care
about things like that. She only cared about people and trying to
do what’s right. Norma.

“
You’ve been gone a long time,” she
said.

We turned onto the main highway toward Tampa,
then took a cutoff that headed toward the coast down below St.
Petersburg.

“
I wasn’t sure you’d show up,” I
said.

“
Neither was I.”

“
But you did.”

“
I did.”

Her blue skirt was hiked above her knees. She
wore nylons, and her legs were round and good to see. She had a
nice body, better now than when I knew it last. Her breasts were
fuller and they had more round firmness. Her thighs were thick and
solid, but trim, and she had very slim, neat ankles. Her body was
perfectly proportioned with a solidness not often seen. Her arms
were like her legs and she had a seductive throat. I used to kid
her about that. I always told her that her throat was like her
thighs and sometimes it got you that way. There was nothing soft
about her; nothing pale. But her skin was an olive, maybe, an off
tan that was rich, and when you touched her skin it made you hold
your breath. Because you didn’t know for sure what you were
touching. Her hands were like that, too. Norma was quite a
girl.

Leda was quite a girl. Quite.

“
Were you hurt badly—in the
war?”

“
All how you look at
it.”

“
You seem a little more—well,
sober, maybe.”

I took the fifth of whisky from its paper bag
and held it up for her to see. “Have one?”

“
Maybe.”

The whisky had blurred everything as I’d hoped
it would, but somehow things suddenly needed more blurring. I
uncapped the bottle and handed it to Norma. She turned, winked at
me, and took a long, healthy slug. She handed the bottle back, I
took one, put the bottle between my feet on the floor.

We began to pass familiar landscapes, though
we were some distance from Cypress Landing. Norma drove fast, with
her chin stuck out a little.

“
Seems funny, coming home,” I said.
It was more frightening than funny, but I couldn’t tell Norma
that.

“
Does it?”

“
It’s been a long time.”

“
Give me some more of that.” She
motioned toward the bottle on the floor.

After she drank and I drank, I said, “You seem
to like it better than you used to.”

“
I’m a professional drinker now.
I’ve got my photography shop. Drinking helps me not to see the old
biddies I have to photograph. They never want to look what they
are.”

“
Good for you.”

“
No.”

“
All right. No, then.”

We drove on in silence for a while. Norma and
I had gone to school together. We had played together when it was
too early for anything else. Then we’d fished together when it
wasn’t too early, only we didn’t know yet. Then we got to know and
we only pretended to go fishing. You can’t fish on a blanket in a
field of clover beneath a live oak’s shade. It was fun pretending
to go fishing.

“
I suppose you met lots of women?”
Norma said.

“
Sure, hundreds. I didn’t go
fishing with any of them though,” I lied.

She motioned toward the bottle. I handed it to
her. We drove quietly on through the afternoon with the sun
splashing in patches or brilliant white lakes on the highway. The
bottle tilted three times.

“
I haven’t been fishing either,
damn you,” she said.

“
All right.” The whisky was
touching her. “Why did you come?”

“
Goddamn you.”

“
All right.” We drove on for a
while. It had been a long time not to go fishing and it was hard to
believe. Only Norma was like that.

The bottle tilted again and flew out the
window. It shattered on the highway. Norma wiped her mouth with the
back of her hand, glanced at me quickly, then away.

“
You punk,” she said. “You didn’t
even write. You didn’t answer one of my letters. There, now I’ve
said that. I’ve acted like any dumb bitch and it’s out of my
system. It’s all right now.”

“
Don’t be vulgar,” I said. “You
didn’t have to come.”

“
Don’t I know it.”

“
I’m sorry I wired you.”

“
Don’t be sorry.”

We drove on for a while. Even through the
whisky the dream pursued me. Close to home. It became worse. I
didn’t know my way around anymore. I was a pioneer. A slightly
tight pioneer who was scared, who had too many things for one man
to worry about. Much too many.

And Leda was right there in the car with us.
Between us, like a hot brick wall. . . .

The sign read: “POP’S LIQUOR
STORE.”

Norma stopped the car. “Go ahead,” she said.
“Get another one.”

“
Bottle.”

“
Shut up and go ahead.”

I went on in and bought a fifth and came back
to the car and we drove off toward Cypress Landing. Pretty soon we
were in the country again.

Norma’s skirt was riding higher now. We were
both riding higher. She had started in on the new bottle, taking
small nips.

“
How was she? What did she look
like?”

“
Who?”

“
Hell.” She reached over and
touched my arm, then put her hand on the wheel again. Her hair was
sunny and she looked clean and good there in the car.

Maybe if I get real drunk, I thought. Maybe
then I can forget there ever was a Leda. Maybe forget that my
life’s been going to hell fast with all the dams breaking up, too.
I knew I couldn’t forget any of it.

I was hungry for Leda and I was going all off
inside without knowing what to do about it. I was wound up
tight.

This girl beside you. She was your girl. What
do you think she feels now? Why do you think she drove to the
airport and met you? Why?

The car swerved a little on the road. Norma
pulled it back, glanced at me, hiked her skirt up to her stocking
tops. “Are my legs as good as those women’s you were
with?”

“
Better,” I said truthfully.
“Better than ever.”

Norma wouldn’t be like this without the whisky
and somehow I knew she wouldn’t be like this with anybody else. I
began to feel rotten about Norma now. As though I didn’t have
enough to feel rotten about. I wished quietly it was just the
feeling rotten and not something else, too.

“
Do you feel anything for me
anymore?” She twisted in the seat and looked straight at me. “Damn
it, I’m drunk. I want to know things. We’ve been talking like a
couple of fools, Eric. We’ve known each other all our lives and did
things and you wired for me to meet you like that and now. . .
.”

“
Sure,” I said. I patted her knee.
It was warm and solid and the nylon was slick beneath my hand. My
hand touched the warm flesh and Norma drove faster.

Then I began saying, damn, damn, damn, in the
back of my head. Are you trying to be true to anything at all?
Leda, Leda, but my hand remained on Norma’s knee and she held her
lower lip between her teeth.

I took a long drink and the sky and horizon
blended, then sharpened, then blended. I was drunk. There was a
lake off there to our left and the car suddenly bumped over a dirt
road. Spanish moss flopped heavily against the top of the car and
pieces flew in the window while Norma and I jounced together, and
she smelled good and was warm with my arm around her when the car
stopped by the lake shielded by bushes and trees and moss with the
engine dead, and Norma’s face next to mine was lazy wild with her
eyes half open her mouth red and damp through all the
tears.

“
Eric. God, Eric.” She began
crying, not harsh outside, but inside there, stricken with it,
choking on it. “Make it business, then,” she said.