Uncrashable Dakota (3 page)

An immaculately groomed hound sniffed its way across the deck, clearing the lane for a young couple and their twin daughters.
Dr. and Mrs. Jacob Wellspring
. Hollis was proud of himself for the speed of his face-to-name association.
And their children …
but before he could think of the girls’ names, his mother was calling out, “Junie! Jessie! How wonderful of you to join us!”

One of the girls ran over and curtsied. Hollis watched his mother
oooh
and
ahhh
at the stupid bow in Junie or Jessie’s hair, air-kiss her pudgy cheeks, and make a theatrical fuss over how pretty and grown-up she looked. Jefferson Castor beamed, placing a hand on his wife’s waist. Their eyes met. Hollis was struck by something he had never considered: his mother could be planning to have a child with Castor. A new baby to unite their fractured families. His collar suddenly felt like it was choking him. He took a deep breath and tried to reassure himself.
She’s still Lucy Dakota. She kept my father’s name.

The other twin hung back, making some kind of inscrutable face.

“She looks like a little schemer,” Rob said.

The girl pulled a toy pig from her pocket and twisted its curlicue tail until a tinny melody filled the air: “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

Hollis shuddered inwardly. He didn’t like that toy one bit, although he would have been hard-pressed to explain why. Voices of the boarding passengers seemed to rise in pitch, an onslaught of nonsense syllables grating against his nerves.

“You ever seen a mulberry bush?” Rob asked.

Hollis and the little girl locked eyes for a moment.

“I wish she’d quit it with that pig.”

*   *   *

LATER, AS THE SUN
crept past its highest point, the boarding ramps were withdrawn into the empty sky-dock. Hollis watched the last of the first-class passengers—a group of single men who’d made a big show of waiting until women, elderly folks, and families were aboard—cross the deck and disappear down the Grand Staircase beyond the bar. From there, they would disperse into a labyrinth of thickly carpeted corridors and funnel into their staterooms, where they would remain until the ship had safely launched.

Hollis and Rob followed their parents through the shade of the overhanging sundeck in time to see the final passenger make his way down, ushered by a patient steward. They rested for a moment, silently basking in the splendor of the Grand Staircase, which had been designed to evoke the sumptuous interior of an Italian prince’s villa.
De’Medici
, Hollis thought.
Or maybe da Vinci
. His brain was scrambled from the day’s forced chatter. It was a prince who favored solid gold, at any rate—the railings alone looked as if they weighed several tons. Hollis wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Jefferson Castor mopped his with a monogrammed handkerchief.

“One of these days, I’m going to hire a substitute family to stand in for us as the welcoming committee,” Jefferson said. “We’ll put out an advertisement for look-alikes, or some such. One more clammy handshake from a perfect stranger, and I’ll abandon ship.”

Hollis almost chimed in—
same here!
—but caught himself before he could give his stepfather the satisfaction of a shared moment.

“You were positively charming, Jeff,” Hollis’s mother said as she collapsed into a bulky, overstuffed sofa that reminded Hollis of Miss Betzengraf. “The passengers value the personal touch.” She nodded at Hollis. “On the other hand,
you
looked like you were ready to stick your head in the propeller.”

Jefferson knelt and helped his wife pull off her steel-lined boots. He placed them in a cubbyhole beneath the sofa and retrieved a pair of soft white slippers, then waited until she’d curled and cracked her toes before sliding them onto her feet.

“Thank you kindly.”

Jefferson stood and rested his long fingers on his son’s shoulder. “Rob, give me a hand with a bit of last-minute scheduling, and we can watch the launch from my office.”

“Top flight,” Rob said without much enthusiasm.

“Or the prop tower,” Jefferson offered.

Rob shrugged. His father was chief operating officer, which mostly seemed to involve writing letters, reading contracts for supply shipments, and handing envelopes to people. To Hollis and Rob, this was scarcely more exciting than one of the Pea’s droning lectures.

“Catch up later,” Rob said. Hollis joined him in studying the frescoed walls that lined the staircase while their parents kissed good-bye. Then he watched Rob and Jefferson get smaller as they crossed the deck.

Hollis’s mother took him by the elbow. “Now you may join the lady on the bridge.”

Hollis was speechless. No one but his mother, the captain, and the navigational officers were allowed on the bridge. Supposedly not even Jefferson Castor, although Hollis didn’t know of a crewman who would stop him. The bridge was crammed with the sensitive machinery that stabilized the ship, along with the eighty-phone switchboard that connected the flight crew with the propeller technicians in the tower and the lift engineers belowdecks.

Hollis tried to make words come out of his mouth. “Bridge…,” he managed. “Here? The
ship’s
bridge?”

“Well I’m not referring to the architectural marvel in Brooklyn,” his mother said. “Unless you’d rather spend the afternoon in the stateroom, helping the maid dust the drapery.”

“The bridge,” Hollis said one more time. He’d just bungled the simple act of tilting a vial of dirt. Maybe the delicate nerve center of the ship wasn’t the best place for him to be. But his mother laughed and handed him a pair of shiny black shoes. Of course he was going to the bridge. She’d have him examined by some Austrian head doctor if he refused. And despite his nerves, Hollis wanted more than anything else in the world to see the bridge of the
Wendell Dakota
.

He yanked off his boots so fast he almost removed his feet at the ankles, then laced up his shoes with trembling fingers.

“There’s something I want to make very clear first,” his mother said. “You have Miss Betzengraf at three. If I find out that you’ve skipped lessons again, I’ll hire her as your personal tutor, and you’ll spend all day in her stateroom, conjugating Latin verbs until we dock in Southampton. I don’t care what Rob Castor does—you’re a Dakota. You have to think for yourself sometimes, you know.”

3

THE GREAT BELLY
of the
Wendell Dakota
hung in the sky like the scoop of a pelican’s beak, and the bridge was its glass-walled smile. This long mouth spanned the entire bow—two hundred feet, according to the blueprints tacked up in Hollis’s mother’s office—and curved around the port and starboard sides, where it became an indoor observation deck.

The center of the bridge was devoted to the ship’s wheel, which looked just like the wooden wheel of a sailing ship but was—much to Hollis’s amusement—purely decorative. Radiating out from the wheel was a maze of blackboards and easels displaying bumpy topographical maps and blue sky-charts with names like
ATLANTIC CORRIDOR
and
ARCTIC PASSAGE
. Beyond them, aisles of sprawling, rattling machines exhaled smoke through a web of metal pipes that pierced the ceiling like an overgrown church organ. Sky Captain Quincy, a gruff, white-haired man whose nose was perpetually crimson and whose mouth was frozen in a scowl, barked orders to officers scrambling back and forth between machines.

The black sheep of a New England whaling family who took to the skies in a fit of youthful rebellion, Arthur Quincy had a reputation for getting his airships to their destinations ahead of schedule. Besides his formidable glower, decades of pipe smoking had turned his voice into a combustion engine. Hollis had never seen him have to repeat an order.

Two of the captain’s attendants lowered shades to cover the floor-to-ceiling windows. Hollis supposed that harsh, unfiltered sunlight wasn’t conducive to reading gauges and instrument panels. Out of courtesy, the attendants left the window near Hollis and his mother unblocked. He lost himself in the view. The vastness of the sky made even the most terrible problem seem unimportant. He imagined the stubborn pile of dirt scattering into tiny grains, skimming the curved surface of the earth on the horizon, disappearing from the back of his mind forever.

A patch of wispy fog drifted up past the window.

“First cloud I’ve seen today,” Hollis said.

His mother shook her head. “It’s smoke from the shipyard.” She nudged Hollis closer to the glass, which broadened his view to include more of the earth. With his nose pressed against the window, Hollis looked down across the grid of factories leaking dark streams of smoke. Long hangars pointed like splayed fingers across the New Jersey lowlands toward hazy Manhattan. Here and there, the skeleton of an unfinished airship poked halfway out of a hangar or rested in the dirt.

It was an ugly stretch of landscape that reminded Hollis of the other shipyards sprawled outside Philadelphia and Boston. He couldn’t help but picture the day they would grow together, forming a single, massive blob of soot-stained architecture. He wondered if it would be in his lifetime. His mother seemed to read his thoughts.

“Hollis, everything you see down there is what makes this flight possible.” She gestured toward the empty sky. “We take what we need from the earth because one day—a day that maybe you will get to see—we won’t need her anymore. Your father used to say that the skies were the end of one kind of manifest destiny and the beginning of another.”

“I remember.”

Sky Captain Quincy stopped giving directions to his men, and the sudden absence of his gravelly baritone was jarring. Hollis watched as the captain huddled with two senior officers beside a chart labeled
GULL MIGRATIONS
. Quincy’s right hand pressed the receiving piece of a telephone into his ear. A long cord snaked across the floor to join the nest of coiled wire at the base of the switchboard.

His mother lowered her voice. “Have you heard Jefferson’s imitation of Captain Quincy? The inflection isn’t quite there, but the scowl…”

At the mention of his stepfather, Hollis’s mind drifted. He pursued a thought that had been torturing him for days. It was the stuff of funny-books: a world much like this one, except Hollis was with both his mother and father on the bridge of the most magnificent airship in the world, the
Lucy Dakota
—its original name, restored. A life in which events had taken their proper course instead of a detour into something dismal and strange.

“I hope the daydream you’re having is spectacular, Hollis.”

“What?”

“Is something the matter?”

Caught off guard, he tripped over several answers at once—
no, I don’t know, I’m fine
—and ended up saying nothing at all.

“Mrs. Dakota!” Quincy beckoned with a single quick wave. Hollis’s mother joined the men in front of the chart and placed the telephone receiver against her ear. Quincy dismissed the two officers, and they disappeared behind a row of tall metal cylinders that vibrated and sputtered like water boilers. Hollis’s mother drew herself up until her back was as straight as Quincy’s. Her face was blank as she listened. Something about his mother’s stillness made Hollis feel prickly and uncomfortable. When she spoke into the mouthpiece, which she held in her hand like a tall candle, Hollis strained to hear, but the bridge had become noisy with chatter as operators coordinated phone lines.

And we’re off
, thought Hollis. A lifetime of launches had given him a sixth sense for that final tethered moment before an airship freed itself from the sky-dock.

The
Wendell Dakota
heaved a great shrug. Hollis staggered two steps back but didn’t fall. Several officers rushed to the stabilization gauge, an immense maze of delicate glass tubes in which ball bearings the size of musket shot were suspended in pure argon gas.

An officer yelled, “Sir! Permission to spin props two and three!”

“Spin ’em,” Captain Quincy growled, without taking his eyes off Hollis’s mother, who looked pale and slightly sick, as if this were her very first ride on an airship. She handed the telephone back to the captain, who passed it to an operator. Hollis left his post in front of the window and joined them.

“Would you like to give the order to spin number one, Mrs. Dakota?” the captain asked.

But Hollis’s mother was lost in thought. She stared back at Captain Quincy as if she didn’t recognize him. Up close, she didn’t look sick after all—she looked disconnected from reality, as if she’d just awakened from a bad dream. Finally, she took a deep breath and let it out.

“I leave that to you, sir.”

The captain turned to an officer who’d been watching him expectantly.

“Spin number one, Mr. Fitzroy.”

The officer repeated the order to an operator. Hollis imagined the words streaming through the long wires and bursting out into the ears of the men in the prop tower.

“We’ll find out who it is,” Quincy assured Hollis’s mother, who smiled weakly.

“I have no doubt that you will.”

Hollis said, “Find out who
who
is?”

“One of the stokers deserted,” Quincy said. “Nothing to worry about.”

The captain was right: a runaway stoker was a minor annoyance. Hollis gave his mother a curious look, but she had already composed herself.

The
Wendell Dakota
shuddered again as the turbines that drove the propellers began their coal-fired churn. A rumble from deep within the ship clacked Hollis’s teeth. His mother grabbed his shoulder.

“Watch with me,” she said.

In a cloudless blue sky, with nothing but empty space zooming past the windows, it was sometimes hard to tell if you were moving or just hanging in the air. But when Hollis pressed his nose to the glass and looked down, he could see the shipyard disappearing beneath the ship. It was easy to imagine the
Wendell Dakota
as a mouth swallowing the earth, house by house and tree by tree, leaving a blank path of emptiness in its wake.