The Axman Cometh (8 page)

"Flaps retracted, gear up," Robert says, then taps the altimeter. "This shows our rate of climb. That gauge tells us how much fuel we're using relative to cruising speed—but we've got plenty to burn. Those pods on the wingtips are extra tanks, another forty-four gallons."

"This is great!" Shannon exults, already over her spate of nerves and not feeling at all queasy. She'd been concerned about what would happen if she had to throw up. In his oversized tool bag, probably.

"Somehow I knew you'd say that," he says, relishing her delight.

Within a few minutes they are at nine thousand feet, leveling off at cruise well below the commercial
flightpaths
across western Kansas. Rob has a cryptic (to Shannon's ears) conversation with the Wichita Center, filing a flight plan to Colorado.

"Four-
niner
Echo Charley."

"Echo Charley, good day," the Wichita air-traffic controller says into the headset

Shannon is holding to her ear. Morse code replaces his voice—a VOR station somewhere. Robert taps her on the shoulder.

"Want to take it now?" he asks casually.

"You want
me
to fly?"

"Why not? Slide the seat forward a little. Okay. Those are the rudder pedals under your feet. Left rudder to bank left, right rudder to bank right.
Bank
means turn. Easy does it— she's very responsive. You don't need both hands on the yoke—loosen your grip, you're choking it to death. Good. Let's bank left now, heading zero-three-five. Okay, you're doing fine—bring the yoke back level, keep the nose on the horizon. Shannon, you're a natural. Are those
goosebumps
on your arms?"

"Yes. You're sure you aren't doing anything—I'm really flying this airplane?"

"You sure are."

"Where are we?"

"You don't have to keep watching the nose, we won't go into a power dive." He studies a map on a clipboard. "Cruising 175 at 65 percent power and we've got a tail wind according to the weather operator, so—we should be thirty miles due west of Emerson and coming up on—well, in another few minutes you'll see the lights of Great Bend off your left wingtip, and Hays to the northwest.

Hang a right at the Pawnee reservation, maintain one-five-zero over the buffalo wallow, and we'll be smack in the middle of nowhere."

"Ha
ha
," Shannon says. "I love your sense of humor."

"A great night for sight-seeing. See that freight train on the Union Pacific? Four diesels. Must be a mile long."

"This sure does beat roller-skating."

Rob gets out a book of star maps and for half an hour, as they continue west on autopilot toward Colorado, the clusters of town lights beneath them becoming fewer as the sky seems to grow ever-more dense with nebulae, they search for constellations anchored by suns of immense magnitude. With their heads close together, dazed by infinity, by each other's breath, they kiss; and Shannon wonders what it would be like, her first time, up here where she feels far-flung, released from earthbound restraints, from common sense. But Robert's kisses are almost polite and he doesn't touch her suggestively; the momentary notion of recklessness fades with the heat around her breastbone.

Rob makes a course correction. On a whim he reaches behind him for the Stetson and places it on her head. Grinning, Shannon tilts the brim down toward her nose. They hold hands.

"My mother was a nut," Robert says. "I don't mean she was in an institution or anything, she just wasn't
conventional.
She had such enthusiasm, an intensity that just took her out of this world sometimes. And when she was like that, she said she was air-dancing. And I'd ask her what the music was like for air-dancing—Smetana? Berlioz? Tchaikovsky? Those are all my favorites. She'd just smile and say she didn't know, she hadn't heard it yet, but some day she knew she would. Mother either jumped or fell out of the gondola of a hot-air balloon at forty thousand feet; she fell about eight miles. Happened over the Provencal Alps in Southern France. They never located her body."

"That's awful."

"Is it? Awful is dying in bed when you're old and nobody cares anything about you
any more
. And you've lived your life but you don't know what for. I figured this out once. A body in free-fall travels up to two hundred feet a second. Which means she was air-dancing for almost three and a half, maybe four minutes. I hope she heard it—the music. At least God must have kept her company on the way down, talked to my mother, told her some of the secrets of the universe the rest of us will never find out as long as we're on this earth. That's only fair, don't you think? I believe my mother knew something, instinctively: God doesn't trust us until we trust Him. And we're willing to prove that we trust Him by doing something extraordinary, impossible—impossible for most people, I mean."

"I guess I've never thought of God that

way."

"Well, probably I'm—
unconventional,
like my mother was. I just got to thinking about her again, as soon as I met you. Mother would have liked you. I was only twelve years old when she died. Do you know what I did, for the first time, the night I heard she was dead? I shouldn't tell you—you'll be disgusted with me."

"No, I won't. But I think I know."

"After I did it I just lay in bed and cried and cried."

"I think you had a wonderful mother. What's your father like?"

"He's like my grandfather. They're both double-barreled pricks. The best I can say for either of them is, most of the time now they let me alone. I just don't leave any room for criticism. My mother and I used to arm wrestle. Boy, she was tough. She'd never give me an inch. I had to beat her. We sure had fun."

"How long do you think before we get to the mountains?"

Rob switches on the DME to get a distance reading. "Ninety minutes. I hope you're not bored."

"Oh, I'm not!"

"I had a girl once, she was a lot like you. I'm really attracted to your physical type. But she got bored with me, I guess that's what it was, and we broke up. I don't have any real close friends. Nobody who'd wonder about me if they didn't hear from me for a few months. Well, where I grew up you didn't just go out and knock around with a bunch of kids. Parents were afraid of kidnappers. Do you have trouble making friends?"

"No, I still see the same guys I started kindergarten with. We've always known each other and probably always will."

"That's what I like about small towns— maybe I'll settle down in one. But I don't know—I get restless."

Shannon says, thinking she sees tears, "Is it your mother?"

"You can imagine that shook me up. I didn't talk to anybody for a year. I mean, I
wouldn't
talk. All I wanted to do was listen to music. It was all I could do. Symphonies. Oh, a lot of Beethoven. The sound way up. Blasting. I lost about thirty percent of my hearing."

"You must have been—really angry."

"Uh-huh. But I got over it." His eyes are puffy. He takes out a handkerchief. "Sinusitis," he explains, after blowing lustily. "Everybody from Chicago has bad sinuses, it's the weather. Anyway, we have to get over things, don't we? Except for—what happened, I haven't had it so bad. When I turned twenty-one, there was a lot of money. I can do anything I want to do. I'm a lucky guy." Yet he seems confounded, outwitted by a tricky fate that punishes by rewarding. He smiles gamely. "I guess I'm a little hard to understand."

"I don't know that much about you," Shannon says softly, sketching lightly with a forefinger on the back of his hand. Such big hands, but they seem too old to be a part of him: broken nails, an ugly blood blister under one of them. The skin nicked and rough. His hobby: stones, the hammer, the chisel. "I want to know more."

"There's not much left to tell," Rob says, and, as if made speechless by the bitter truth, doesn't try to talk at all for a while.

"I know I want to be an artist," Shannon ventures, thinking it might help to speak of her own deepest concerns. "But lately I've been thinking, maybe that's a selfish attitude. So I'm giving serious thought to the Peace Corps. It's a chance to, you know, broaden my horizons. I've been stuck in the middle of Kansas all my life. But by joining the Peace Corps, it would be like paying tribute to President Kennedy's memory—oh, I know how
stupid
that sounds, but it's what I
feel."

Her fists are clenched; Robert studies her admiringly, and nods.

"What I can't forget," he says, "Is the look on Jackie's face. His blood on her clothes that she had to wear for hours."

"My mother says she didn't have to wear them if she didn't want to. But that's what my mother
would
say. The assassination just didn't seem to faze her. She has this fatalistic view of things. A church roof falls in on the congregation, a cyclone blows a town apart, oh well. It's almost as if she knows something real bad is going to happen to her, it'll be
her
turn
some day
. But I couldn't stop crying. Imagine, all that happening on
television?"

"You know what? The world turned bad the day he was shot. And it's not going to get better for a long, long time. Think about all the stuff that's going on in Mississippi and Alabama. We're going to have another Civil
War."

"Oh, God, I know," Shannon says, sniffing. "It's really scary."

"Hey. Want some music?"

"
Yeh
. We're both getting in some kind of mood, aren't we?"

"Do you know
Dance of the Sylphs?"
"I've never heard it. Fine. Whatever you like, Rob."

And at last, the Rockies— In the light of the full moon, most of the peaks still bearing the snows of winter, traces of snows immemorial, the Rocky Mountains command the horizon. At first it appears to Shannon that they can skim across with ease, but as they approach the mountains loom, darkly forested except for isolated gleams of villages, the plane seems to be sinking although the altimeter needle is steady: they are flying at a little over nine thousand feet. She looks up, trying to imagine forty thousand feet. A small and lonely figure falling, with the quickness of a shooting star, toward the white mountain peaks.
God doesn't trust us until we trust Him.
She glances at Rob, who seems different to her, rigid; he is staring straight ahead and the flesh of his face is so pale and close to the bone, could he be searching too, for his mother? And aren't the mountains getting awfully close, blotting out all of the sky? She shivers from a thrill of compassion and, faintly, alarm.

"Rob?"

He is unresponsive. Shannon rubs the back of his hand with her fingertips and that thaws him, frees him from an icy shackle of the mind.

"Are we going to fly over them?" she asks with a timid smile.

Rob's chest lifts, falls. He takes over control of the airplane.

"No. We'd have to go to fifteen thousand feet, almost, and we're not pressurized. You might get a headache, or a nosebleed."

"I used to get those all the time when I was a kid."

"I suppose we could doodlebug the passes through the
Sawatch
range, but that's tricky at night. I don't like taking chances. I don't like the crosswind we're getting already. Time to go back to Kansas."

On the way home Shannon falls soundly asleep, waking up on touchdown at the Emerson airport.

She smiles at Robert, embarrassed.

"I'm not very good company, am I? What time is it?"

"Four minutes after twelve."

The foyer light is on at the house when they arrive. Hearing them come in, Ernestine calls from the top of the stairs.

"It's us," Shannon says, taking Rob back to the kitchen. "We're just going to get something to eat."

"What did you see?"

"The Rocky Mountains," Shannon answers, smothering giggles.

"Oh. Goodnight. Don't stay up too long."

Shannon feeds Robert the walnut brownies she made earlier. They each have two with big glasses of milk, and when it's time for him to go back to the Holiday Inn she switches off the kitchen light and clings to him in the dark. He pulls gently at the bent lobe of her ear. There's a crumb of brownie at one corner of his mouth that she licks away.