The Great Forgetting (40 page)

“Hear, hear!” a man called out.

“We send with them one of our most legendary citizens, Dan Cooper, who, I believe, returns at great peril, as there remain several outstanding warrants for his arrest.”

The crowd laughed. D.B. lifted his hand in mock salute, smiling, gray himself now, far from the arrogant confidence man who'd pulled off one of history's most brazen heists.

Morris lifted his glass and the crowd did likewise, lifting arms to the skylights, one by one. “To Jack and his crew,” he said. “Godspeed and good luck!”

“Here, here!” they shouted. “To Jack!” they shouted. “To Dr. Sanders! To Cooper!”

And finally they were fed. Ceramic dishes filled with meat and potatoes and veggies were passed around. When the platters were emptied, they were promptly filled again by a staff of eager young men in dark tunics. They drank from never-ending mugs of wine and beer.

“Dude, check it,” said Nils, leaning his seat back to talk to Jack. He was holding a leg of roasted fowl. “Fuckin' dodo, man!” He bit into it and talked with a full mouth. “Tastes like chicken.”

Sam squeezed Jack's hand under the table. Tomorrow they would fly home. And the morning after that, they would separate into pairs for the coordinated attack.

“I can't pilot with you,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you gotta pair with someone else.”

“What are you talking about? Of course you're going with me.”

“No, Jack,” she said, and her tone caused him to set down his drink and look at her. “If something happens to you, I wouldn't be any use to anybody.”

“Nothing's gonna go wrong.”

“You can't say that. Don't promise me that.”

“Well, what if something does?” said Jack. “I'd want to be with you.”

“You mean if I died?” said Sam. “You'd want to die with me?”

“I'm not saying die. Nobody's saying that. If you got hurt or something. I'd want to be there.”

“I'm talking about dying. It's a real possibility.”

“Jesus, Sam…”

“Did none of you think about this?” And right away she knew they hadn't. Not one of them. “Jesus. Why can't you think ahead? Why can't you imagine repercussions?”

“Shh.”

“I can't be with you that day,” she said. “You have to switch with someone.”

“Okay,” he said. Though there was a very real part of him, instinctual, that desperately wanted to command her to obey him, that wanted to tell her to just shut the hell up and do what he said. Everything could be so smooth, so simple. There was such a thing as thinking too much. Sometimes you just had to take action even if you couldn't foresee the outcome, if only to make something happen.

“Okay?”

“I said okay,” said Jack, a little too harshly. “I'll fly with Tony. You can copilot on Nils's flight. Now would you just shut up and kiss me?” He pulled her to him and she smiled as she closed her eyes and parted her lips.

Pushing away from his empty plate, D.B. pulled a pipe from the inside pocket of his coat and packed it with dried green leaves he kept in a pouch tied to a loop in his jeans.

“What's that? Mu tobacco?” asked Nils, dislodging a bit of dodo gristle from his front teeth with a thumbnail.

“Nah, brother,” said D.B. “It's Peshtigo
gungi
.” He struck a match, brought it to the green, and inhaled deeply. He held it like a champ and exhaled a cloud of brown. Then he passed it to the Viking.

Nils took the pipe and inhaled. His body immediately warmed, a welcome rush of fire throughout his chest. It tasted like the earth after an August rain. In the dimness around him, the edges slaked off the world, rounding away every sharp corner there ever was. It was a world waiting to be touched.

“Good shit,” he said, passing it back.

“Before Mu was given to the Seven Tribes, it was occupied by the Nazis,” said D.B. “And before the Nazis, Mu belonged to the Mayans. I knew the Voice, Constance, when she was young and she told me some of their stories. She said there were people here even before the Mayans. A race of people called the Mestie-Belles.”

Cole leaned toward them, listening intently. Under the table, Becky held his hand. He let her.

“During the time of the Mestie-Belles,” D.B. continued, “Mu was invaded by a fierce warrior-king from a faraway land who came to the island on a great wooden ship, a square of lumber fifty miles wide. He brought a whole city with him. They called this warrior-king Tsar Niev. He challenged the Mesties and won control of Mu. But even ruling an entire continent did not make Niev content. He was jealous of the powers the Mesties possessed. He wanted to see sound like they could, to taste color, to hear the music of the sunset. So Niev commanded the Mesties to teach him their tricks. But they could no more teach him what the color blue feels like than a bird could have taught him how to fly. Niev became furious. If he could not possess this knowledge, then no one could. And so he forbade the Mesties to speak of these powers. And he burned the great library at the center of Peshtigo, where the stories of the Mesties' culture were stored. In less than a century, the Mestie-Belles forgot themselves, what they were. And soon they died out altogether and their magic abandoned this world.” D.B. looked at them, one by one, in turn. “We have one last chance to keep that from happening again.”

Nils sighed. “I'd like another hit now,” he said. “If you don't mind.”

Dessert was served—fruit from the jungles in heavy cream. Everyone ate their fill and more. When they finished, a rotund man with a gray pompadour and thick white sideburns took a seat in front of the great table and strummed old tunes on a battered guitar. His voice was low and full of bass, a black man's voice in a white man's body. His hips jiggled atop his perch and he remembered how he used to dance.

And there was dancing. Jack and Sam. Cole and Becky. The Captain, too. It was a fine send-off.

 

THREE

THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD

1
    By the time the nine of them squeezed into the back of Earhart's Electra, the morning sun had risen from the sea. The cabin was cramped and had no seats, stuffy and hot like breath inside. From where he sat, Jack watched the Captain climb down into the pilot's seat from the hinged door in the cockpit ceiling.

The Captain checked the various gauges all around him. He looked out the window at both wings, then began to fiddle with the dial that regulated the engine's mix of oxygen and fuel. They'd found a bladder of gasoline in the ground just west of the runway and siphoned enough to fill the tanks.

“If you're the praying type…,” he began. But he didn't finish. He pushed a white button and the propellers began to twist. At first there was a grating sound, like the scraping of a muffler against an undercarriage, and then whatever was sticking gave out and the aircraft hummed loudly around them, shifting back and forth, a racehorse behind the gate.

The Captain found a pair of aviator glasses tucked into a binder resting on the jump seat and slipped them on. He peered out the windshield. The robots had finished their job and the runway continued through the park now. That section wasn't paved, but the gravel was tightly packed.

The Captain opened the throttle and the aircraft lunged forward, picking up speed. Through the porthole, Jack looked out at the city of Peshtigo three miles to the west. It gave no commentary on their departure, but its silence was judgment enough. As they accelerated, the plane jostled side to side. Jack's ass bounced against the cabin floor. Nils's big frame squished Cole against the wall. D.B. and Becky tried to pull him free.

The Captain shouted something, but Jack couldn't make it out. He looked down the length of the plane, out the windshield. He could see the end of the runway now, a wall of bong trees, their tops chopped off.

“Hey!” Jack shouted. “There isn't enough room! Let's try again!”

But the Captain didn't slow. He adjusted a dial and pushed the throttle as far as it could go.

“Hey! Goddamn it! Stop!”

The Captain grabbed the wheel and pulled hard. The plane pitched up and everyone tumbled over one another to the back of the cabin, where the compartment narrowed into a cone. There was a bump and then a violent shudder as the wheels touched down again, tilting to the right. The Captain cursed and pulled back hard again. The trees loomed. They were up. Higher. A gnarled tree reached out with white claws, but it was too late; they were in the sky, in the blue, and Mu was shrinking beneath them, that incongruous capital city and its treasury of forgotten stories marking their retreat like a giant eye.

2
    It was Monday morning, September 10, and Paige was late for school. Jean brushed her hair out, teasing out the nappy parts that had formed in the night, a bobby pin in her teeth. “Hold still, dear,” she said.

Paige stuck her tongue out at the mirror's reflection of her mother.

The bus had come five minutes ago. The whine and hiss as it stopped at the end of their drive had awakened her. This was getting to be habit. Jean was finding it difficult to adjust to her new routine—though she had never been happier.

Jean ran Nostalgia now. Had since late June. It was hard work. Not just the refab of the dressers and curios, but the day-to-day inventory and Internet sales. That first month had been killer, but she felt as though she was getting the hang of it. If September went as well as August, she might get the store back in the black. Anyway, it was nice to have a job again. It felt good to honor Sam's memory.

Paige was tying her shoes when the phone rang. Jean almost ignored it. But it was a little too early for a telemarketer. She picked up the receiver on the third ring.

“Hello?” she said.

“Jean,” said Jack. “It's so good to hear your voice.”

3
    It was late when Sam returned to the motel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a twelve-passenger van she'd snagged from a shady rental company outside Logan, her last task for the day. They'd gotten into Boston at five o'clock, on a commuter plane from Seattle they'd hopped after ditching the Electra in a hangar at a muni airport outside Ariel. Jean and Paige would be arriving at the motel soon. It was all coming together.
Too easy
, she thought, and shivered. She was only being paranoid.

In their room, Sam showered with Jack. He washed her hair. He kissed her wet shoulders. After a bit, he sat on the bed, wrapped in his towel. He rang the front desk for a wake-up call and flipped through channels until he found CNN. The screen was locked on a shot of women and children holding candles in a park in Newtown.

Sam came to him, dripping wet, and pushed him down against the mattress. Her hands found his towel and tugged it off. Her thin fingers slid across his thighs and his body reacted. It was a refined lust, their lovemaking, varying between favorite positions and ending in caresses and laughter. When she finally came, she held him tightly.

“You okay?” he asked, after.

“Of course not.” Sam curled an arm behind her head. She looked up, chewing on her bottom lip. “I'm afraid I might fuck it all up.”

“What? You? You're probably the best fake pilot on our team,” he said, forcing a laugh.

“I thought about just shutting the fuck up, because I thought if I said something, it might undo all this. But I'm going to tell you anyway, because you need to know in case something bad happens tomorrow. So you have to promise right now that no matter what, you're going to do what we came here to do.”

“Sam, there's honestly nothing you could say that could change my mind.”

“I'm pregnant.”

4
    “Hey,” said Tony when Jack stepped out of his motel room. Tony was sitting on the stoop, a twelve-pack of Miller Lite between his legs. He handed one to his old friend. Something had changed, Tony thought. Jack suddenly looked five years older.

“Thanks,” said Jack. He sat on the concrete beside Tony and twisted off the cap, chucked it into the parking lot. “What are you doing?”

“Organizing,” said Tony. He pulled his suitcase around and unzipped the top. Inside were sixteen boomerang belts, each without its buckle—they'd left the buckles back on Mu. There was one for each of their crew and the hijacked pilots. He had spent the last hour writing names on each with a wax pencil. “So what's eating you? She throw you out or something?”

“Nah, just needed some air.”

“Spill it.”

“Not tonight.”

Tony let it drop and looked over to Nils, who leaned against the brick wall under a sodium arc light, talking to his wife on the pay phone. “Poor bastard,” said Tony. “I wonder how you explain disappearing the way he did.”

“You should know.”

“Touché.” He stood, stretched his back. “Hey, man, watch these, will ya? I need a smoke. I saw some Swisher Sweets at the gas station. You want one?”

Jack shook his head.

“Cheer up, Jack. We're saving the world tomorrow.” He walked away then, leaving Jack alone. A few minutes later, Cole came out of his room and shuffled over.

“What's the first thing you're going to do tomorrow, after we're done?” the boy asked.

“I haven't thought about it,” said Jack. “I might just find a place to take a good, long nap. What about you?”

“I'm going to ask Constance for a copy of that book.”

“What book?”

“The one my dad got rid of. The one with the funny name. I'm going to make a million copies and give one to everybody I meet for the rest of my life.”

“Tell me the story,” said Jack.

Cole did. And as he finished, Jean pulled into the lot. Paige waved excitedly from the backseat. They were a long way from Franklin Mills, but they were finally home again.