Robert Crews (2 page)

“Are we ready to rumble?” It was Spurgeon, boarding at last. In the service of his lifelong quest to be a regular guy (which unfortunately seemed to work with a lot of people, e.g., Beckman and Comstock), he had through the years employed the idiom currently in yahoo vogue: at the moment, it was probably taken from some contact sport, perhaps professional wrestling.

Speaking of which, Comstock was the perfect model of a pencil-neck geek. He now broke off the monologue about his daughter and her career aims to cry a phrase so long out of date that it should have appalled the trendy Spurgeon. “And
away
we go!”

Before taking his seat, Spurgeon looked at Crews. “How about you, Bobby? Bet you can't wait till we get upstairs.”

Crews shot him with a forefinger. “You bet.” He had never given Spurgeon the satisfaction of hearing of his fear of air as a medium of transport and had been amazed the first time he was needled about it. It had taken him all of three minutes to realize that Dick had surely got the information from Michelle, who had been so comforting to Crews once on a commercial flight that he had subsequently made her wife No. 2. This was back when such female functionaries were still called stews. Of course she quit the job when they were married, but kept all of her former colleagues as friends, including one who was subsequently caught by the DEA on an incoming flight from Caracas with a stash of coke behind the built-in mirror in her makeup case. Michelle also remained close with a pilot who was discharged from the airline for drunkenness but was immediately hired by some tramp carrier and worked with a forged license. Crews had no sympathy for this kind of drunk: an honest one stayed unemployed. Also, as it turned out before long, Michelle was defiant about continuing to go to bed with this guy. Yet she managed to take Crews for plenty in the divorce, if only because he could match her outrages two for one, any old day. All in all, his memories of Michelle were fond ones. She had a natural ebullience, beyond the synthetic stewardess act, and the most beautifully shaped nostrils he had ever seen on a human being. She was too good-natured, however, to believe the negative had any fundamental status in the way things ought to be, and thus had little sense of humor. She was actually hurt if Crews, as was his wont, gave her a joke gift at Xmas before presenting the real one, e.g., a sheepskin-upholstered toilet seat.

Crews drained the cup while Spurgeon was starting the engines. The trouble with always being drunk is that in case of emergency you can't
get drunk
. Perhaps drugs worked, but Crews had ever observed a personal prohibition of them, seldom taking even an aspirin. He was restrained by a horror of addiction. You could pollute your life that way.

The engines were making a maniacal noise, and the craft under him felt as insubstantial as a construction of matchsticks. While emptying the mug, he bit its rim, but the clash of teeth against china, usually skin-crawling, was reassuring now. Had he sufficient strength, he could have leaned forward, put his hands around the headrest, and throttled Spurgeon, so taking all energy from the airplane, a device of great immanent power but purposeless without human direction. Remove the pilot and what was left was junk. But this should have been done long since, certainly before they were rolling down the runway of this suburban airport. Crews's timing had been deranged for years. He was now diverted by anxiety as to where to find his next breath. His nose was sealed, and his mouth congested with a large ball of spongy matter, which he identified as his tongue only as his head was pressed back and his chin elevated by an unnatural force inimical to life. The takeoff was in progress even before he could adjust to the taxiing! He tried to distract himself with indignation but failed and was abandoned by every feeling other than terror as the little winged box and its frailer cargo were hurled into the sky.

The engines were not so obstreperous once cruising altitude was reached, but it was still too noisy for conversation, as Crews was pleased to believe when he made the transition from heart-stopping crisis to the routine dread of being suspended thousands of feet in sheer air, while being heavier than it and thus abrogating every physical law that could be confirmed by the body: even a buoyant boat made of tons of steel, containing its own nightclub and swimming pool, made more apparent sense. He was never apprehensive on water, regardless of the weather or the size of the vessel. If it was large enough to have a bar, it was there that he defied vertigo no matter how high the seas ran beyond the portholes. On smaller craft he might well offer to lend a hand, though a captain like Dick Spurgeon became even more obnoxious than usual when under sail, and Crews's footing was hardly surer on a wet deck than it was ashore. If he went overboard it was usually though not always by accident. He swore that Ardis, his first wife, pushed him at least once. Technically speaking, she was the only well-born woman he had ever married but also the foulest-mouthed and the only one whose capacity for liquor approached his own. Ardis's choice of men had continued to be poor even after she divorced him: her second husband was an impoverished Italian nobleman who, so went the malicious story, was wanted in his homeland on a charge of having sexual congress with underaged boys and whose title was bogus.

Comstock proceeded to challenge the theory that the ambient noise would rule out conversation in the cabin. To do so required his leaning as near Crews as his seat belt permitted and raising his voice.

“Heart's always in my mouth in these little puddle jumpers.”

Funny how this expression of a shared fear instantly altered much of Crews's aversion to the man. He nodded vigorously at Comstock and even smiled in the off-center style that dated from the time of the worst of the several wounds his jaw had sustained from steering wheels and fists. He felt allied to a fellow sufferer, even one with whom he had had nothing else in common. But even under the best of conditions (if such could be imagined), he did not consider words an adequate means of expression for any emotion deeply experienced. For example, so far as anyone else had ever known, he had not mourned for his mother. Because he never told anyone of his grief, he was believed to have none. It was assumed that what was never spoken of did not exist. But he believed he was being loyal to his feelings by concealing them from others, or misrepresenting them through rudeness.

So he said nothing to Comstock, but did produce and offer the flask.

Comstock patted himself on his gaunt chest.
“Don't use the stuff. Health reasons.”

Yet he would travel by puddle jumper. Crews himself never failed to astonish his doctor and, he knew, to disappoint him with a blood pressure that, despite all, was never too high, and neither were his cholesterol and triglyceride counts, nor did he ever show a symptom of cirrhosis or any of the other deplorable systemic effects of excessive drinking. He would not have seen a doctor at all were it not for external damage. To placate the trustee (what a joke: that was the one who later decamped), he had once been interviewed by a psychiatrist, but made short work of that practitioner by insisting he lacked utterly in what was essential for a change of ways: viz., the least wish to be sober.

Comstock was swallowing dramatically, with a jaw even more elongated. He cried,
“Ears hurt? Mine are killing me. I forgot gum.”

If by now, as was being proved, alcohol had lost its efficacy as a fear-killer, one thing could be said for it: Crews's inner ears were not affected by the ascent. Once again he offered the flask to Comstock, and in view of his new partiality for the man, went so far as to lean as near him as the belt permitted and shout,
“It really works. Try it: too little left to hurt you.”

But Comstock fended the vodka off again.
“Got a wife and three kids.”
For the second time he tapped himself pectorally.

Crews was aware that some people had that kind of idea about booze. That one sip to steady the nerves or relax the inner ear could lead to the utter destruction of an animal large as a human being. It took a lot to ruin a life, on which subject he was surely the best authority on board.

At that moment the plane struck a bump, and clutching the bottom of his seat should this be the first in a series, he sought distraction by staring at Comstock, but was disappointed when he saw no evidence that the other had registered the impact with what could be imagined as either a gaseous boulder or, worse, a pothole, which, being in the sky, had no bottom all the way to the earth. Huge commercial aircraft sometimes met such and fell helplessly straight down for thousands of feet in a shaft of vacuum, seat belts breaking and all loose objects, including passengers, pressed against the cabin ceiling. Crews was perversely fascinated by the details of all miscarriages of air travel, just as when a child he was addicted to the movies that were certain to give him nightmares. Now he regretted not having taken the seat alongside the pilot, because in that position he could at least have been aware when Spurgeon talked on the radio and got warnings of oncoming thunderclouds in which the little plane could be hit by lightning, exploding into fragments that the wind would distribute across several counties below. Or watched as Spurgeon, in the grip of a heart attack or stroke, steered into a mountainside of sheer granite.

He shook the flask. The engine noise obscured the sound of the sloshing liquid, but his fingers were sufficiently sensitive to gauge the vodka that remained as not much more than a fluid ounce. If he finished it now, and rougher weather was encountered later on, he would have to resort to the bottle in the duffel bag he had, against Spurgeon's objections, insisted on bringing into the cabin. However, he had not been able to keep it close enough to reach while seated. Along with the big wicker picnic basket, it was stowed in the rear, not far away, but to get there would be especially hazardous in the rough air to survive which he needed the vodka in the first place. Here was another of those absurdities of the kind that as an undergraduate and still a reasonably good student he assumed was confined to the history of philosophy (how could you prove without looking that an object was there when no one was looking at it? etc.), but that had proved so characteristic of his life at large. For example, the only way he could have endured thinking about giving up alcohol was to drink more of it.

He leaned toward Comstock.
“I guess we're hitting that rough stuff?”

The other smiled faintly and shook his head in the floppy-brimmed fishing hat.
“Naw. Long way yet.”

The worst thing about this information was that it made Crews not only realize the little bump was so insignificant that Comstock, by his own assessment no hero, had failed to register it, but also admit to himself that the real turbulence, which after all he had encountered back when one or another of his wives had forced him to travel on big airliners, was massively more than this minor thud, which was probably only the retraction of the landing gear.

Comstock was staring at him.
“Didn't mean to upset you. Dick just told me we might run into a few bumps: knows I get queasy. If you expect what's coming, a lot of things aren't so bad.”

Now that there was no danger, Crews returned to his earlier disdain for the man, which was intensified by hearing this sophistry. As if anything bad was made good by learning it was on its way! He never looked ahead, unless of course obliged to do so by his companions. But in fact such people were always at hand. And whose fault was that? Yet he could not stand to be alone, without a distraction from himself. In such a situation he invariably became occupied by thoughts in which the desirability of suicide was countered by a conviction that he would do a bad job of any attempt: use a gun that jammed, hit the wrong vein when slashing the wrist and just make a nonlethal mess. Yet he could not bear the thought of anything so certain as leaping from an upper floor or plunging in front of a speeding car.

It must have been at this point that, in spite of all, he fell sound asleep. True, he had drunk more than usual at this time of day, after staying up all night, drinking, rather than even consider going to bed and trying to get up early. It was also the fact that fear bored him after a while, and when it was particular, must give way eventually to a general lack of hope that was soporific. Sleep is good, said the German poet, and death is better, but best of all is never to have been born. The last cannot really be considered if one is alive to think on the matter, and thus far he personally seemed incapable of doing away with himself. Which by default left sleep.

It was while sleeping that, as he remembered later, he felt the onset of the promised rough air and realized that it was not so hard to take unless one awakened: the reverse of the situation with a bad dream, in which at the heart of your terror is the fundamental sense that you can escape it by waking up. He could not be touched by what was real so long as
he
was not, and vice versa. This seemed an all-purpose formula that could not be challenged. Thus he slept harder as the turbulence grew worse, and the more violently the aircraft was agitated, the more gratifying his immunity became.

How long the rough sky lasted was irrelevant, for time and sleep notoriously lack a common standard of measurement and are given to attempts to hoax each other, but it could have been the calm air that woke him. He had been slumping within the security of the seat belt. He now reassumed the tension of consciousness, straightening his spine, and discovered, with a hand to his mouth, that he had lately drooled. Embarrassment for him was rare nowadays, but this was one of the few effects that might evoke it. Another was pissing in his pants, humiliating even when done in private, but he looked down now and saw that at least he had spared himself in that regard.

Comstock was staring at him woefully.
“Sorry.”

“For what?”
The general noise seemed louder than before, requiring them to raise their voices even further.