Flight (17 page)

It was what made her enjoy the fact that she never knew what was coming next with Hoyt. Sometimes he came into the Dingo and reached over the bar, fingers tucked into the waistband of her pants, to pull Leanne toward him. Other times he would come in and barely speak to her, or look at her darkly, as if she had done him some wrong. On those nights he would leave before closing, and Leanne would walk home alone, dropping the change from her tips into the cups of Avenue A’s panhandlers, by that time asleep or staring straight ahead, lost in memory or blankness.

One night Hoyt took her to a party. It was the launch of a magazine called
Playground,
a fat, densely printed review of alternative culture edited by one of his customers. It was in a warehouse on Clinton, a street so far east and edgy that even Leanne avoided it. At the door, a large man with dreadlocks slid his eyes down her before stepping aside to let them in.

Inside the cavernous warehouse, the magazine people had set up an X-rated playground. There was a sandbox filled with sex toys and a jungle gym to which a man was being tied with nylon cord. At the center of the room, a long swing was suspended from one of the building’s rafters. A man in leather pants was swinging.

Leanne had seen a lot of interesting and strange characters at the Dingo, but she had never seen so many in one place. There were men in dresses and a woman with a real beard. There was a bald man with
a tattoo of a large hawk covering the back of his head. When he turned, Leanne saw that he was wearing a beak, melded so realistically with his face that it gave her a small shock. Other women were gotten up in gorgeous excess: corsets, leather dresses, sparkly evening gowns, plastic, space-age minis. One woman was completely naked except for a pair of silver boots. Blindfolded, she was following a man in black jeans who was ringing a tiny bell. He never touched the woman or spoke to her, just rang the tinkly bell every time he moved. She would lift her chin slightly and follow the sound.

Hoyt got them beers from the bar. They wandered around the party together, not speaking. Near one wall, a large, upended wooden box was punctured with round fist-sized holes. Attached to each hole was a long black cotton glove. People outside the box were putting their hands into the gloves. Leanne and Hoyt approached. He held out a hand, welcoming her to try it. Leanne reached her hand into a glove and extended it into the box. There was a person standing inside. Her hand landed on his or her hip. Feeling strange, she ran it up the person’s side. Other people were groping more freely. She could feel their hands, too, reaching in, slipping over her own hands in their excitement to explore the stranger.

Hoyt turned to her. “Let’s go on the swing.”

They got to the swing just as a woman in a black evening gown was finishing. She smiled at Leanne as she handed over the seat. It had a been a long time since Leanne was on a swing, and she had forgotten what a rush it was, the slow, smooth glide forward and up, the loosening at the top and then the swift drop back to earth. The swing was long, and she swung higher and higher, skimming through the crowd and up above it, into the rafters, then back down through all those bodies. She pumped her feet to go faster, higher. It was exhilarating. She found herself laughing out loud. Her heart had never felt so light.

It was a strangely happy time. Leanne went to work, walked home, went out at night with work friends or with Hoyt. She never made
plans, and she never worried about the future. The future was there, ahead, like a bubble or a sealed room, waiting patiently for the time when she would break the seal and enter it. Until then she could do as she pleased, be who she wanted. She dyed her hair blond, then red, then cut it all off and put a blue streak down the side. Each time she did it on impulse, looking in the mirror and walking right out to the drugstore to buy the dye. She wore a gorgeous flapper dress to work one day, frayed jeans and a Metallica T-shirt the next.

Slowly, almost unnoticeably, Hoyt’s visits to the Dingo grew less frequent.

“You should stop hanging around me,” he said one day as they sat having their coffee at noon. “You’re young, you’re pretty. You’re wasting your time.”

“Maybe I want to waste my time,” Leanne said.

He never mentioned the war, although once, looking through his kitchen drawer for a knife, she found a pair of dog tags with his name. She closed the drawer silently, never mentioning it. She liked their arrangement, wasn’t willing to risk it by trying to talk about things he wanted left alone.

Even so, he stopped coming to the Dingo. It was January. A week went by, then two, then three. Leanne told herself that this, too, was part of Hoyt’s attraction, that the uncertainty she loved had always included the possibility of his not coming at all. But she missed him. She didn’t have his phone number, and he’d never given her a key to his apartment. There was little she could do.

One night, walking home, she went by his building. She couldn’t say exactly what she wanted. To see him or touch him, yes, but there was something more. When she lay in bed at night, it seemed to her that she wanted to hear him say her name.
Leanne.
She stood on the street looking up at his window. His light was on. A couple came out of the building, and Leanne grabbed the door as they left. Once inside, she decided to go up to Hoyt’s apartment and say hello.

But when she got to the door, she stood outside, unable to knock. Who was she to Hoyt, after all? Just some girl he had picked
up a few times, hung out with a few more. She didn’t know anything about him. She had no right.

She was turning to leave when the door opened. A woman stopped, startled, when she saw Leanne. She didn’t look like anyone Hoyt would know. She was older than Leanne, probably in her late thirties, with high, heavily sprayed hair. She was wearing acid-washed jeans and a T-shirt with a sequined flag.

“Who are you?” she said, unfriendliness in her face and voice.

“Oh, just …” Leanne stumbled, unsure how to answer, taken aback by the woman’s hostility. “I’m a friend of Hoyt’s. I was looking for him.”

The woman glared at her. “Hoyt’s dead,” she said, cold and slightly wild at the same time. “You druggies keep coming around asking for him. Don’t you have a phone network or something?” Leanne knew she must have looked shocked, because the woman modulated her tone slightly, looking back over her shoulder and lowering her voice as though someone in the room might hear. “He overdosed, okay? Why don’t you take that as a sign from God and get yourself to the methadone clinic.”

Leanne was speechless. The woman stood there, waiting for Leanne to leave.

“I’m sorry,” Leanne squeezed out. The woman shifted on her feet, and Leanne saw that she was holding a garbage bag. She must be cleaning out Hoyt’s apartment. Her face had a family resemblance. A sister, maybe. She didn’t look old enough to be his mother. Suddenly, it was too hot in the hallway. Leanne stared at the half-open door. Hoyt would never walk through it again. She turned and fled.

All the way home, she searched her heart. Had she known? She had seen marks on his arms and legs. But she’d never known a junkie before—she didn’t know what tracks would look like. Hoyt was skinny and ate badly. He smoked and drank. Bad skin just seemed like part of his general unwholesomeness.

Then again, she hadn’t wanted to see it. It was hardly a surprise. He sold drugs, and he was a vet: lots of guys got hooked on heroin
in Vietnam. But if so, he had been addicted for years. If he had overdosed, it must have been on purpose. She clutched her arms around herself. The worst of it was, she’d had no idea Hoyt was that much on the edge. She just hadn’t known him that well.

She went home and drank a whiskey, then another. The numbness that began to spread through her felt almost like peace. She sat on her floor, the way she and Hoyt had always done, and worked her way through half the bottle before crawling into bed and falling into a heavy, overheated sleep.

Her life wasn’t much different with Hoyt dead. She went to work at the Dingo, came home, drank herself to sleep. She didn’t answer phone calls from Julie or her mother. Occasionally, she had drinks with the bar manager, Mike. They would end up in bed back at his place, but Leanne felt none of the excitement she had felt with Hoyt. Once Mike asked her what had happened to Hoyt, and she shrugged and said she didn’t know, he had just disappeared.

Spring came, then summer. As the days got longer, Leanne found she was unable to fall asleep without enough to drink. That August she went to Margaret’s wedding, and her mother decided to visit her in New York.

Carol didn’t lecture Leanne. She set about helping her figure out what to do next. She didn’t mention the possibility of Leanne going back to school, even though that was surely her own secret wish. When Leanne proposed opening a crafts store, Carol immediately started looking into locations. They stumbled upon Cold Spring on a friend’s recommendation, and Leanne found the town oddly appealing in its old-fashioned simplicity. She wasn’t worried about whether she would live the rest of her life there. Like her trip to New York, the move to Cold Spring was a reaction, not a plan. It was a place to get away for a while, somewhere she could sort things out and figure out what she really wanted to do with herself.

Leanne never told her mother about Hoyt. Once she mentioned a friend who had died, but she didn’t go into the details. It would be
too hard to explain her attraction to him. Sometimes she thought about the naked woman at the
Playground
party, following the bell. She imagined herself, blind and exposed, following that tiny but clear sound through a room crowded with things to see.

Kit rolls over next to her. For a second Leanne thinks he’s awake and about to speak. His heavy breathing resumes. She listens to it rise and fall. Kit is the opposite of Hoyt. He offers her not surprise but certainty. If Leanne wanted that from anyone, it would be him. But she’s not sure she wants it at all.

There’s a crisp, wheaty smell drifting into the room. Quietly, Leanne gets up and finds her thin robe. Kit is still fast asleep when she slips out.

Her mother is at the kitchen table with coffee and toast. The dishwasher is running. They did last night’s dishes after dinner, so it must be the party glassware. As Leanne comes in, she is sitting still, staring out at a deck dark with rain.

“It’s still raining,” Leanne says, and Carol turns her head. Seeing her mother’s face in profile, Leanne is struck by how it has changed. Carol looks thinner and sharper, her cheeks more defined, her nose the blade of a knife. On the handle of the coffee cup, her knuckles are like bony marbles.

“Shhh,” she says. “Your father’s still sleeping.”

WILL IS FLOATING ON HIS BACK, LOOKING AT THE SKY.
The water feels warm. He worried all the way down about getting tangled under his chute, about the heavy anti-G suit dragging him down and drowning him. But everything worked as it was supposed to. His chute released, his life raft actually inflated, and now here he is, arms thrown over it like a kid with a pool toy, gathering the strength to climb in. He rests his face on its side and stares up at the blue Asian sky. It’s funny about sky. No matter where you are on earth, it’s the one thing that looks the same.

There’s an ache in his right leg. He knows it’s broken. He knows he’ll discover before the end of the day that his right arm is also broken, that within two weeks he’ll be on a C-130 transport out: Saigon to Yokota in Japan, Yokota to Hawaii, where Carol is sitting out the war. “Say goodbye to Vietnam, Captain,” the young doctor will tell him. He already knows that, too; his whole path is already mapped out—it fell into place the instant he heard the metallic
chink,
brief and purposeful, that meant he’d been hit. Immediately, he punched the button to turn off his air-conditioning. If there was going to be fire outside, he didn’t want it coming in.

Within minutes there was fire, plenty of it. His wingman told him to jump.

“Cobra One, you’re burning bad,” he cried. “You better ditch now.”

“Negative” was Will’s reply. He didn’t have time to talk. He shouldn’t have to explain why he didn’t want to touch down in the middle of a jungle full of guys who wanted him dead. Better to get his feet wet. He was heading for the coast, thirty miles away.

The Thud lurched and coughed. It was a tough plane, known for its ability to limp home. He knew he had it made when he saw blue shimmering ahead like a mirage. There was a thick trail of smoke behind him, and it got worse when he used his afterburner. He avoided the afterburner until he could see the water, then he laid on it with all he had. The plane shot forward, and as soon as he figured he was a safe distance from shore, he blew his canopy. Noise rushed in like water. Papers, screws, sand, and dust, even a few loose cigarette butts blasted into his face. A map of Route Pack Six covered his mask for two seconds before vanishing with the rest. Things caught fire. He’d made a mistake. He was going too fast for a safe ejection, but it was too late. The next thing he knew, he was hurtling backward through the air, and he could see his plane shooting off ahead of him like a horse that had thrown its rider. He hadn’t even had time to get his feet in the stirrups; he felt his right leg whack the side rail as he went. Then his neck snapped back when the chute opened, and he thought,
Shit, my neck’s broken,
but before that thought could stick, he was heading for the water and his neck was forgotten and it was time to worry about touching down. Knees together, feet together, eyes on the horizon. Lose the chute at the last moment so it wouldn’t drag him down.

Now he’s floating and rerunning the whole thing in his head, and it feels as if several key parts are missing. Where did the plane go down, for instance? He can’t remember seeing it after that initial look, because he was focused on how to hit the water. Somewhere, it’s sinking to the bottom of the Tonkin Gulf, all forty thousand pounds of it, surprising the fish with its flashy silver gleam. He imagines it settling into the mud, becoming part of this foreign place. Sea turtles will glide through it like one of those little plastic wrecks at the bottom of a fish tank. Octopuses will grope its slippery sides; eels will hide in the cockpit.