Phases of Gravity (6 page)

He dozed off for a while just before they took off. In his dream he was learning to swim and was bouncing lightly over the clear white sand of the lake bottom. He could not see his father, but he could feel the strong, constant pressure of his father's arms buoying him up, keeping him safe from the dangerous currents.

He awoke just as they took off. Ten minutes later they were far out over the Arabian Sea and they broke through the ceiling of cloud cover. It was the first time in a week that Baedecker had seen a pure blue sky. The setting sun was turning the clouds beneath them into a lake of golden fire.

As they reached their cruising altitude and ended their climb, Baedecker felt the slight reduction in g-force as they came over the top of the arc. Looking out the scratched window, searching in vain for a glimpse of the moon, Baedecker felt a brief lifting of spirit. Here in the high, thin air the demanding gravity of the massive planet seemed slightly—ever so slightly—lessened.

Part Two

Glen Oak

Forty-two years after he had moved away, thirty years after he had last visited, sixteen years after his week of fame walking on the moon, Richard Baedecker was invited to come back to his hometown. He was to be guest of honor during the Old Settlers Weekend and Parade. August 8 was to be declared Richard M. Baedecker Day in Glen Oak, Illinois.

Baedecker's middle initial was not M. His middle name was Edgar. Nor did he consider the small village in Illinois his hometown. When he did think of his childhood home, which was seldom, he usually remembered the small apartment on Kildare Street in Chicago where his family spent the years before and after the war. Baedecker had lived in Glen Oak for less than three years from late 1942 to May of 1945. His mother's family had owned land there for many years, and when Baedecker's father had gone back into the Marine Corps to serve three years as an instructor at Camp Pendleton, the seven-year-old Richard Baedecker and his two sisters found themselves inexplicably whisked from their comfortable apartment in Chicago to a drafty old rental house in Glen Oak. For Baedecker, memories of those times were as hazy and out of context as the thought of the manic paper and scrap-metal drives that had seemed to occupy his weekends and summers during their entire interlude there. Despite the fact that his parents were buried just outside of Glen Oak, he had not visited or thought of the town in a long, long time.

Baedecker received the invitation in late May, shortly before embarking on a month-long business trip that would take him to three continents. He filed the letter and would have forgotten it if he had not mentioned it to Cole Prescott, vice president of the aerospace corporation for which he worked.

"Hell, Dick, why don't you go? It'll be good PR for the firm."

"You're joking," said Baedecker. They were in a bar on Lindbergh Boulevard, near their offices in suburban St. Louis. "When I lived in that little Podunk town during the war, it had a sign that said POPULATION 850—SPEED ELECTRICALLY TIMED. I doubt if it's grown much since then. Probably gone down in population, if anything. Not many people there would be interested in buying MD-GSS avionics."

"They buy stock, don't they?" asked Prescott and lifted a handful of salted nuts to his mouth.

"Livestock," said Baedecker.

"Where the hell is this Glen Oak, anyway?" asked Prescott.

It had been years since Baedecker had heard anyone say the town's name. It sounded strange to him. "About 180 miles from here as the provincial crow flies," he said. "Stuck somewhere between Peoria and Moline."

"Shit, it's just up the road. You owe it to them, Dick."

"Too busy," Baedecker said and motioned to the bartender for a third Scotch. "Be catching up after the Bombay and Frankfurt conferences."

"Hey," said Prescott. He turned back from watching a waitress bend over to serve a young couple at a nearby table. "Isn't the ninth of August the beginning of that airline confab at the Hyatt in Chicago? Turner got you to go to that, didn't he?"

"No, Wally did. Seretti's going to be there from Rockwell and we're going to talk about the Air Bus modification deal with Borman."

"So!" said Prescott.

"So what?"

"So you'll be going that way anyway, pal. Do your patriotic duty, Dick. I'll have Teresa tell 'em you're coming."

"We'll see," said Baedecker.

Baedecker flew into Peoria on the afternoon of Friday, August 7. The Ozark DC-9 barely had time to climb to eight thousand feet and find the meandering path of the Illinois River before they were descending. The airport was so small and so empty that Baedecker thought fleetingly of the asphalt runway at the edge of the Indian jungle where he had landed a few weeks earlier at Khajuraho. Then he was down the ramp, across the hot tarmac, and was being urgently hailed by a heavy, florid-faced man he had never seen before.

Baedecker groaned inwardly. He had planned to rent a car, spend the night in Peoria, and drive out to Glen Oak in the morning. He had hoped to stop by the cemetery on his way.

"Mr. Baedecker! Mr. Baedecker! Jesus, welcome, welcome. We're really glad to see ya." The man was alone. Baedecker had to drop his old black flight bag as the stranger grabbed his right hand and elbow in a two-handed greeting. "I'm really sorry we couldn't get up a better reception, but we didn't know 'til Marge got a call this morning that you were comin' in today."

"That's all right," said Baedecker. He retrieved his hand and added needlessly, "I'm Richard Baedecker."

"Oh, yeah, Jesus. I'm Bill Ackroyd. Mayor Seaton would've been here, but she's got the Old Settlers' Jaycees Fish Fry to take care of tonight."

"Glen Oak has a woman mayor?" Baedecker resettled his garment bag on his shoulder and brushed away a trickle of sweat on his cheek. Heat waves rose around them and turned distant walls of foliage and the half-glimpsed parking lot into shimmering mirages. The humidity was as bad as St. Louis's. Baedecker looked at the big man next to him. Bill Ackroyd was in his late forties or early fifties. He was sagging to fat and had already perspired through the back of his JC Penney shirt. His hair was combed forward to hide an encroaching baldness. He looks like me, thought Baedecker and felt a blossom of anger unfold in his chest. Ackroyd grinned and Baedecker smiled back.

Baedecker followed him through the tiny terminal to the curved drive where Ackroyd had parked his car in a space reserved for the handicapped. The man kept up an amiable stream of small talk that mixed with the heat to produce a not-unpleasant nausea in Baedecker. Ackroyd drove a Bonneville. The engine had been left running, air-conditioning blasting to cool the interior to an unhealthy chill. Baedecker sank into the velvet cushions with a sigh while the other man set his luggage in the trunk.

"I can't tell you what this means to all of us," said Ackroyd as he settled himself. "The whole town's excited. It's the biggest thing that's happened to Glen Oak since Jesse James's gang came through and camped at Hartley's Pond." Ackroyd laughed and shifted the car into gear. His hands were so large that they made the steering wheel and gearshift look like toys. Baedecker imagined that Ackroyd came from the kind of Midwestern stock that had used such huge, blunt hands to string up outlaws.

"I didn't know that the James gang ever went through Glen Oak," said Baedecker.

"Probably didn't," said Ackroyd and laughed his big, unself-conscious laugh. "That makes you the most exciting thing ever to happen to us."

Peoria looked like it had been abandoned or bombed. Or both. Storefronts held dust and dead flies. Grass grew up in cracks in the highway and weeds flourished in the untended medians. Old buildings sagged against one another and the few new structures sat like overscaled druid altars amid razed blocks of rubble.

"My God," muttered Baedecker, "I don't remember the city looking like this." Actually Baedecker hardly remembered Peoria at all. Once a year his mother had taken them to town to watch the Thanksgiving Day parade so they could wave at Santa Claus. Baedecker had been too

old for Santa Claus, but he would sit with his younger sisters on the stone lions near the courthouse and dutifully wave. One year Santa had arrived in a jeep with the four elves dressed in the uniforms of the different services. Baedecker remembered that the lawn of the city square had risen in a gentle arc to the elaborate stone gingerbread of the courthouse. He would play at being shot and roll down the grassy incline until his mother yelled at him to stop. He noticed now that the square—he thought that it was the same block—had been turned into a fussily landscaped sunken park near a glass box of a city-county building.

"Reagan's recession," said Ackroyd. "Carter's recession before him. Goddamn Russians."

"Russians?" Baedecker half expected to hear a torrent of John Birch propaganda. He thought he remembered reading that George Wallace had carried Peoria County in the 1968 primary. In 1968 Baedecker had been spending sixty hours a week in a simulator as part of the support team for Apollo 8. The year had held no meaning for him except in terms of the project deadlines. He had emerged from his cocoon in January of 1969 to find Bobby Kennedy dead, Martin Luther King dead, LBJ a memory, and Richard M. Nixon president. In Baedecker's office in St. Louis, on the wall above the liquor cabinet, between two honorary degrees from colleges he had never visited, there was a photograph of Nixon shaking his hand in a Rose Garden ceremony. Baedecker and the other two astronauts looked tense and ill at ease in the picture. Nixon was grinning, his upper teeth white and exposed, his left hand on Baedecker's elbow in the same salesman's grip Ackroyd had used at the airport.

"Not really their fault," grunted Ackroyd. "Caterpillar's fault for dependin' so much on selling to 'em. When Carter pulled the plug on heavy equipment exports after Afghanistan or whatever the hell it was, it all went downhill. Caterpillar, GE, even Pabst. Everybody was getting laid off for a while. It's better now."

"Oh," said Baedecker. His head hurt. He still felt the motion of the plane as it had banked in over the river. If he couldn't fly an aircraft this day, he wished that he at least could have driven a car to work the cramps out of arms and legs that ached to control something. He closed his eyes.

"You wanta go the quick way or the long way?" asked the big man at the wheel.

"The long way," Baedecker said without opening his eyes. "Always the long way."

Ackroyd obediently took the next exit off I-74 and descended into the Euclidean geometries of cornfields and county roads.

Baedecker may have dozed for a few minutes. He opened his eyes as the car stopped at a crossroads. Green signs gave direction and distance to Princeville, Galesburg, Elmwood, and Kewanee. There was no mention of Glen Oak. Ackroyd swung the car left. The road was a corridor between curtains of corn. Dark seams of tar and asphalt patched the road and provided a rhythmic undertone to the air-conditioner. The slight vibration had a hypnotic, equestrian quality to it.

"Into the heart of the heart of the country," said Baedecker.

"Hmmm?"

Baedecker sat up, surprised he had spoken aloud. "A phrase a writer—William Gass, I think—used to describe this part of the country. I remember it sometimes when I think about Glen Oak."

"Oh." Ackroyd shifted uncomfortably. Baedecker realized with a start that he had made the man nervous. Ackroyd had assumed that they were two men, two solid men, and the mention of a writer did not fit. Baedecker smiled as he thought about the seminars the various services had given their test pilots prior to the first NASA interviews for the Mercury program. If you put your hands on your hips, make sure your thumbs are toward the back. Had Deke told him about that or had he read about it in Tom Wolfe's book?

Ackroyd had been talking about his real estate agency before Baedecker had interrupted. Now he cleared his throat and make a cupping gesture with his right hand. "I imagine you've met a lot of important people, huh, Mr. Baedecker?"

"Richard," Baedecker said quickly. "You're Bill, right?"

"Yeah. No relation to that guy on the old Saturday Night Live reruns. Lot of people ask me that."

"No," said Baedecker. He had never seen the program.

"So who was the most important, you think?"

"What's that?" asked Baedecker, but there was no way to steer the conversation a different direction.

"Most important person you ever met?"

Baedecker forced some life into his own voice. He was suddenly very, very tired. It occurred to him that he should have driven his own car from St. Louis. The stopover in Glen Oak would not have been much out of his way, and he could have left when he wished. Baedecker could not remember the last time he had driven anywhere except from his town house to the office and back. Travel had become an endless series of airhops. With a slight shock he realized that Joan, his ex-wife, had never been to St. Louis, to Chicago, to the Midwest. Their life together in Fort Lauderdale, San Diego, Houston, Cocoa Beach, the five bad months in Boston, had been near the coast, all in places where the continent clearly ended. He was suddenly curious about what Joan's impressions of this great expanse of fields, farmhouses, and heat haze would be. "The Shah of Iran," he said. "At least he was the most impressive. The court show they put on there, the protocol, and the sheer sense of power he and his retinue conveyed, they put even the White House and Buckingham Palace to shame. Little good it did him."

"Yeah," said Ackroyd. "Say, I met Joe Namath once. I was at an Amway convention in Cincinnati. Don't have time for it since I got involved in the Pine Meadows deal but used to do real well at it. Thirteen hundred one month and that was without really working at it. Joe, he was there for another thing, but he knew a guy who was real good friends with Merle Weaver. So Joe, he told all of us to call him that, he spent the whole two days with us. Went down to the combat zone with us and everything. I mean, he had commitments, but every time he could, he and Merle's friend would go out to dinner with us and pick up a round of drinks and all. A nicer guy you wouldn't want to meet."