Flight Dreams (24 page)

In the car, between bites of another carrot, Manning tells Neil, “I hope this little outing doesn’t ruin your meal.”

“The lamb will be on the dry side, but I’m sure you’ll make it up to me.”

Manning reaches across the back of the seat to squeeze the scruff of Neil’s neck, winding a lock of Neil’s hair around his middle finger. Aroused by the contact, Manning leans over to kiss Neil’s ear, inserting his tongue.

“Down, boy,” Neil cautions him. “We’re here.”

The cable company sits near the edge of town in an anonymous building, probably a converted supermarket, with sections of its parking lot fenced off for satellite dishes, all staring blindly at the night sky. The front office is dark, so Neil drives around back, where a few cars are parked near a well-lit metal door bearing a sign:
AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY.

Manning muses, “We’ll soon find out if a Chicago Police Department press pass has any clout in Phoenix.”

Neil parks the car and asks, “Want me to wait out here?”

“Please.” Closing the door behind him, he adds, not entirely in jest, “And keep the engine running.”

“Mark,” Neil calls after him through the window, “if you find yourself behind the Holy Altar, don’t forget to cross a few wires.”

Manning gives Neil a thumbs-up, checks his own pockets for pen and notebook, then presses the button of an industrial-size doorbell bolted to the cement-block wall.

A tin-badged security guard opens the door a few inches. He’s paunchy and genial—hardly intimidating—but he does wear a holster. “Yeah, buddy?”

“Good evening,” says Manning. “I wonder if you could tell me if Miss Viola’s program has ended yet. I’d like to talk to her.”

“Yeah, they wrapped it up a few minutes ago. You don’t want a prayer cloth, do you?” The guard laughs. “Some other outfit handles those.”

“No. No prayer cloth.” Manning flashes his press pass. “I’d just like to speak to Miss Viola.”

The guard examines Manning’s credentials, impressed. “Sure, buddy. Hold on a minute.” The door thumps closed.

Manning turns to look back at Neil, whose expression asks, What’s up? Manning shrugs his shoulders. He’s so hungry that he feels weak, so he lights a cigarette, hoping it will slake his appetite. While inhaling the first drag, he notices Neil still watching him and wonders if he disapproves. Neil doesn’t smoke—they’ve never discussed it. Does Neil consider it a filthy, damning character flaw? Manning quickly drops the cigarette onto the asphalt. As he snuffs it out with his toe, the door swings open.

“Yes, sir? What can I do for you?” It is Brother Burt himself, waving Manning in, but just over the threshold.

“My name is Manning,” he begins to answer as the door closes with a thud behind him. They stand in a big open room—part warehouse, part garage—cluttered with lights, cables, props, and a couple of service vans.

“Of course,” says Brother Burt with an obsequious bow of his sweating head, “the esteemed reporter. Whatever brings you to Phoenix—business?”

“No, pleasure. I happened to catch your program tonight and wonder if I could speak to Miss Viola.”

“Miss Viola is a very busy and important lady, Brother Mark. Besides, Vi makes it a rule not to speak with the press. She doesn’t feel it’s in the best interest of her mission.”

“I’ll bet she doesn’t,” says Manning. “Let me level with you. I don’t give a damn about your ‘mission’—though it would certainly make a hell of a story. I’m here only because I have an interest in cats, and I want to talk to Miss Viola about that kitten on TV tonight. Let me see her, then I’ll go away. Otherwise, who knows?”

Brother Burt studies Manning with eyes drawn into tight slits, weighs the options, and decides that it will be prudent to cooperate. Wordlessly, he leads Manning off to another part of the building, thump-sliding across the waxed concrete floor. Arriving at the far side of the warehouse, he struggles with an oversize door. Manning tells him, “Let me get that. I’m sorry.”

Indignant, Brother Burt asks him, “For what?”

“Well … your leg.”

“It’s not my
leg,
” Brother Burt tells him, as if any fool could see. “It’s my
foot.
An accident during my youth. My right foot was crushed in a fight with Satan. It never really healed—can still cause excruciating pain.” He winces at the words. “A hard-learned lesson in the wages of perversion.”

Manning repeats, “I’m sorry.”

Brother Burt’s tone turns cynically philosophical. “Why dwell on the past? It can be so ugly.” As they stroll down a messy hallway, he stops at a door with a dog-eared foil star stapled to it. “Wait. I’ll tell Vi you’re here.” He slips inside the dressing room.

As instructed, Manning waits, hands shoved into his pockets. Hearing a din of activity around the next turn of the hall, he steps to the corner and looks out into the main studio.

A crew of technicians and stagehands scurries about, dismantling the Holy Altar and setting the stage for tomorrow morning’s garden show,
Cactus Chat.
Entire sections of the altar, huge slabs of “marble,” are turned to reveal panels of a desert landscape painted on the other side of the canvas. A pair of angels—swords poised, cords dangling—lurch toward the warehouse on the prongs of a forklift. Another forklift stops in front of Manning. Whining, it lowers a metal-cased control cabinet, depositing it at his feet, blocking his view of the commotion. He stares directly into the back of the device.

Its innards are a jumble of resistors and other arcane electronics interconnected with a tangle of cords. At the end of each cord is a plug—some black, some red, some yellow—inserted into color-coded sockets. Manning glances heavenward, wondering if maybe someone
is
smiling upon him. Then he checks over his shoulder, whistles nonchalantly, and switches the plugs in a red and a yellow socket.

“Mr. Manning?” calls Brother Burt from the dressing room door. As Manning reappears from around the corner, Brother Burt tells him, “Vi will see you now,” and ushers him in.

Miss Viola sits in front of her makeup mirror, its glaring bulbs surrounding her like a halo. Some of the bulbs, though, are burned out or missing, lending to the room’s general seediness. She fluffs a matted blue feather boa, thrown on over a dressing gown stained with coffee and rouge. Her hair is in a turban, her reddish wig on the vanity. Curled atop the wig, sleeping, is the kitten.

“Good evening, Miss Viola. My name is Mark Manning.”

“Smile-God-loves-you, Brother Mark,” she singsongs, offering her hand to be kissed, but he shakes it. “You’re here about my Angel?”

“What?” he asks, wondering if she’s “on” something—or just nuts.

“My Abby-cat.
Angel.”
She eyes the kitten warmly for a moment. “Isn’t she precious? She had a bit of the
devil
in her tonight, though.” She laughs maniacally at her play on words.

“Probably just a phase. Nothing that can’t be exorcised, I’m sure,” says Manning, deliberately ingratiating himself.

“How
clever,
Mark,” she twitters. “I must remember that.”

Manning steps forward to stroke the forehead of the kitten, who barely stirs. “I’ve become an unabashed cat fancier myself in recent months. You’ve got a spectacular Abyssinian here. When did you get Angel?”

Brother Burt’s pupils shift beneath his eyelids, following the dialogue with reptilian precision.

Miss Viola tells Manning, “Just this week. I’d been looking for a special pet for a long time, hoping to find a little friend that would match the rather extraordinary color of my hair.” She primps, stuffing a telltale lock of gray back into her turban, unaware that the cat, purring at Manning’s touch, is kneading its little claws in her wig. “Then I saw a picture of an Abyssinian and
knew
I had to have one. But they’re so terribly difficult to find.”

“Yes, I know, Miss Viola. I’ve been looking for just such a pet myself. Could you tell me where you got Angel?”

Brother Burt clears his throat, and Miss Viola glances at him before answering, “I’m so sorry. I’d like to help you—and I know this must sound terribly odd—but I’ve taken a solemn oath not to identify Angel’s breeder.”

“I wouldn’t think of asking you to break your promise, Miss Viola, but perhaps you could tell me just this much: Did Angel come from a town named Assumption?”

Miss Viola pauses. Then, with a happy, relieved voice, she says, “I suppose I can tell you
that
much, Mark—especially since you already seem to know. Yes, Angel came from Assumption.”

Brother Burt’s eyes widen with disbelief.

Manning’s heart pounds in his ears, but his voice does not betray the importance he attaches to his next question. “This may sound stupid of me, Miss Viola, but where
is
Assumption?”

The woman again bursts into her maniacal laugh. “Oh, Mark,” she says, as if slapping her knee, “you
are
a wit. Where is Assumption, indeed!”

“I’m sorry, Miss Viola. I don’t understand the joke.”

Her laughter breaks off. “Really? I mean, you
asked
about Assumption, and you’re
here,
so I presumed… Mark, you’re practically
in
Assumption. It’s out beyond the other side of town, about an hour off the interstate.”

Catching his breath, Manning thanks her, nods to Brother Burt—who says nothing—and quickly leaves the room, closing the door behind him.

In the hall, he pauses to collect his thoughts and jot a few notes. Not a half minute later, his concentration is broken by Brother Burt’s voice, screaming inside the dressing room: “Stupid
cunt
—I told you not to tell him a fucking thing!”

D
RIVING NEIL’S CAR, MANNING
turns off the interstate and heads down the rural two-lane highway that leads to Assumption. There’s never much traffic out here, and even less this Saturday morning, the day after Christmas. The road is his alone.

Both he and Neil awoke early today. They had considered driving to Assumption from the TV studio last night, but it was late, and they were so hungry that Manning couldn’t trust his own judgment. Better to eat, sleep, and start fresh. Neil guessed that Manning wouldn’t want company on this excursion, so he offered his car, asking Manning to drop him at his office on the way out of town—Neil could get some work done, uninterrupted, on an important project that was “due yesterday.”

A road map is spread open on the empty passenger’s seat. Miss Viola was right; Manning located, with no difficulty at all, the dot that is Assumption. As he races across the unbending stretch of highway, the whir of the engine blends with the rush of air streaming over the contours of the car—a comforting sound, man-made, assuring. But Manning hears it only subliminally, for his mind is busied by uncertain thoughts. What sort of confrontation might await him out here? Might he at long last find Helena Carter? His preoccupations join with the monotonous landscape to make the trip pass quickly. A road sign sweeps past him announcing a reduced speed limit. He is entering Assumption.

The highway is the main street of the town. A dog strolls along one of the buckled sidewalks, but Manning sees no people. He drives slowly, approaching the crabgrass plot of the town square, the church, the school. Three children walk together near the square.

“Excuse me?” he asks from the window, stopping alongside them.

The youngest of the three, a girl about four years old, hides behind the other two—apparently her brother, about eight, and her sister, about twelve. Manning figures that they don’t see many strangers here, and he is charmed by the girl’s apprehension.

“Yes, sir?” the boy says boldly.

Manning says, “I’m looking for someone, and maybe you know where I can find her. It’s a lady—she’s kind of old—and she raises lots of cats. Do you know anyone in town like that?”

“That’d be Mrs. O’Connor,” the boy offers at once. Everyone in town knows about Mrs. O’Connor’s “funny cats,” though few have seen them.

“Can you tell me where she lives?”

The boy opens his mouth to give directions, but a jab from his older sister’s elbow silences him. She tells Manning, “You’d better talk to Father McMullen about it.” She explains that Manning can find the priest in the rectory, pointing to the big house next to the church.

“Thanks, kids,” Manning says with a wink, then he drives around the square and parks in front of the town’s only brick house. He gets out of the car and closes the door with a quiet slam that seems to violate the tranquility of this secluded place. Walking up the stretch of sidewalk that leads to the porch of the house, he tries not to shatter again the peace of this little town, measuring his steps deliberately, almost stealthily, as if on tiptoes.

The shady porch is strewn with worn wicker furniture. Windows gape open. Through the screened door, the smell of something in the oven meets Manning’s nostrils. What is that?—something he hasn’t smelled in years. Then it floods back to him. Tuna casserole. Manning twists an old-fashioned doorbell mounted in the jamb, sending a rusty clatter through the house, making him again feel like an intruder, an invader.

“I’ll get it, Mrs. Weaver,” a man’s voice calls from within. A moment later, Father McMullen appears at the door wearing black priestly slacks and a collarless white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His years are apparent to Manning from the shuffle of his walk, but his magnificent waves of graying golden hair impart to the man’s face a timeless aura that defies description. Saintly, Manning thinks. No, he reconsiders, it is more the look of a martyr, the look of suffering, smugly endured.

“Ah!” says the priest. “Good morning, Mr. Manning. Won’t you come in?” He swings the door open.

Baffled by the greeting, Manning asks, “Have we met, Father?”

“Only on the phone, when we spoke a couple of months ago. I’ve seen you on television since.” He leads Manning into his office and motions that they should sit on either side of the cluttered desk.

Settling in, Manning wonders aloud, “But you seemed to
expect
me.”

“Really?” His tone is coy. “Perhaps I did.” He gazes at his visitor through the milky blur that clouds his eyes. Picking up a paper clip, he begins to unravel it. There is a long pause. Then the priest closes his eyes and drops his head in a gesture of resignation. The kinked silver wire slips from his fingers and bounces with a tick on the sheet of green-edged glass that covers the desk. Without looking up, he asks, “Why are you here?”