Flights (6 page)

Dom came back down the aisle escorted by two policemen. He stabbed the air with his finger, looking back over his shoulder and saying, “And I'll tell you what. If that yim-yam says something like that again, I'll kill him. You tell him that.”

“Awright, siddown,” the policeman said. “And thank Christ you're still here.”

Ginnie and Judy were too embarrassed for anything but anger, and they didn't move or speak the rest of the game.

“Son of a bitch,” Dom said to himself.

The game limped on, the box quiet. In the seventh with the score 3–0 New York, Ben Oglivie blasted a home run into deep center field with two Brewers on base. Dom stood to applaud and sat back down. Biddy watched Oglivie round third, struck by the efficiency with which he had redeemed himself.

In the ninth Willie Randolph homered for the Yankees and they all got up to go, collecting bags and hats while everyone was still cheering.

“Those poor bastards aren't going anywhere,” Dom said, looking back at the disconsolate Brewer dugout. “No pitching.”

At the top of the aisle Biddy turned and saw the scoreboard in center blink and change, proclaiming a final in Cleveland:
CLEVE
5,
BALT
4, dropping the Orioles three back, and he turned to follow his family and friends down the exit ramp.

Kristi had two turtles, Foofer and Kid, and killed them both. Foofer had crawled onto a small stone she had put in the clear plastic terrarium where the turtles were kept and had gotten out, flopping onto his chin with a distinctly wooden noise as she watched. She had done nothing, allowing him to creep across the desk top until he came to the edge, and then had opened the drawer underneath and toppled him in, shutting it with a bang.

Biddy, who'd been in her room collecting more paper, had said, “Kristi, don't leave him in the drawer.”

“He always gets out,” she said.

“You can't punish a turtle,” he said. “Take the rock out of there and he won't get out.”

She'd replaced the turtle, but days later, seeing only Kid, he'd opened the drawer to find the dried Foofer, half buried under pens and small plastic rulers in his search for moisture or an exit.

Kid had disappeared a few days later.

Kristi, her father said, was erratic. Her mother worried about her. She had more trouble at Our Lady of Peace than her brother did, although he seemed to be rapidly closing the gap. Sister Theresa had long since decided and informed the Siebert family by letter and consultation that neither her conduct nor her effort was all it could be. In fact, she did not, ever, behave like a little lady. Biddy had at least been a very good student at her age.

She despised the nuns and disliked school generally. At times he would be called down from his classroom to help discipline his sister, although how he was expected to help he was never able to fathom. He would at those times look into her defiant eyes with embarrassment, irritation, and pride. She seemed beyond him then, the intensity of her anger and unhappiness revealing itself in fleeting words or gestures that seemed unnoticed or ignored by the others around her. He was never much help. To the Sisters she was as unpredictably ferocious as a cornered raccoon or a small, angry cat. At one point while he looked on she had wrenched herself free from Sister Mary of Mercy, tearing the sleeve of her habit, and had been slapped for her trouble. A kind of horrified and fascinated silence had ensued while they all stared at the black sleeve hanging loose and ragged away from Sister's arm, even the slap forgotten in the strange blasphemous image before them. Nuns were rarely touched and Kristi's assault on the taboo had made her famous throughout the school; to an extent it was as if they'd seen God bleed.

Lady, too, seemed edgy, unprepared, around her, and Kristi was the only human being Lady had ever bitten. Biddy had been present for that bit of history as well: she'd been nipped across the tips of her fingers one hot day after sitting on the dog as she lay in the shade. Lady had growled and Kristi had slapped her nose and she had spun around and snapped. She'd slapped back fiercely, the force of her hand spraying saliva from the dog's mouth, before erupting into tears. Lady had lain in the shade throughout all the following chaos, unrepentant. His father had yelled at Lady so loudly that her ears had flattened, but she had remained bristling and stubborn, as though she could not be blamed for an altercation with Kristi. When Biddy had seen the size of the needle at the doctor's, he'd thought it was some kind of awful joke, but his sister had remained grim and silent until the needle had gone in; then she had screamed.

“How'd Louis get retarded?” she asked. She was flipping cards, bored with diamonds and spades.

They sat at the redwood table in the backyard, swishing their bare feet back and forth through the grass, slapping mosquitoes, scratching bites. Biddy was looking back over the Brewers-Yankees scorecard.

“He was born that way,” he said.

“So he's never going to get better?”

“No.”

“Do you like having him around?”

He looked up. “Why? You don't like him?”

“It's funny,” she said, squinting. “I feel bad for him, but it's kind of creepy.”

“Louis is nice.”

She didn't reply. “I remember him looking down at me when I was little and honking and scaring me,” she finally said. Biddy made a face and she added, “He honks when he talks.”

His father came out and sat next to them, drink in hand.

“What's that?” Biddy asked.

“Milk of Magnesia,” his father said. “What're you, a cop?”

They were quiet as it got darker, and Kristi slapped at another mosquito. Her father said, “You guys're going to get eaten alive out here. Why don't you sit in the porch?”

“How come Louis plays with little kids?” Kristi asked.

“Are you a little kid?” her father teased. She ignored the comment and he cleared his throat. “Well, you know Louis doesn't always get along that great with kids his own age.”

“He's retarded,” she said.

“Now I don't want you throwing those words around. Either of you. Do you say that to him? Are you mean to him?” He looked at Biddy. “Is she mean to him?”

“No,” Biddy said.

“I don't want you being mean to him, now. The poor son of a bitch's got enough problems. He's a good kid.”

“Does everybody make fun of him?”

“It isn't easy for him. You should feel sorry for him.”

Kristi collected her cards into a pile. She'd gotten a little sun at the game and her nose and cheeks were pink.

“There's nothing wrong with him playing with you guys. Or with all of us.”

The house was becoming simply a shape in the gloom. Biddy sat staring into the darkness beyond it, trying to imagine what it would be like to be Louis.

“He's a good kid,” his father repeated, getting up to go. “That Mickey's harder to take than he is. I don't want you kids bothering him.”

Biddy shook his head to agree not to, his eyes still focused out into the distance, but in the gloom all but the most emphatic gestures were lost.

The next few days were spent in preparation for school as much as for the Air Show. Biddy was fitting into a new uniform, Kristi had outgrown her shoes, and they both needed school supplies and enough other shit to choke a horse, as his father put it. So the announcement that they were flying to the Hamptons for the weekend, getting a free ride with a friend who commuted to Sikorsky by Cessna, surprised everyone, and excited only Biddy.

“What're we going to do in the Hamptons,” his mother said, spooning out peas.

“Nothing. Hold our hand on our ass,” his father said. “The vacation spot of the East, and she wants to know what we're going to do there.”

“Where're we going to stay?”

“We'll stay with the Carvers. Look, if you don't want to go—”

“I'd love to go. I have my heart set on going. Your friends are my friends,” his mother said.

His father took the spoon from her hand and piled more peas onto his plate. “You bring a lot to the party, you know it?” he said.

“I know it,” his mother said. “Sometimes I'm not all I'm supposed to be. I know that, too.”

Late that Friday afternoon they drove around Lordship to Bridgeport Airport. It took, he thought as they drove through the main gate, longer than it would have had they just walked to the end of their street and gone under the hurricane fence.

Mr. Carver pulled up in a little Datsun and hurried over, a short heavy man in a white shirt with a dirty collar. He switched hands with his briefcase and gave Biddy's hand a firm single shake. He did not look like Biddy's idea of a pilot, but the very idea of that much spatial freedom—the ability to go, almost literally, in any direction one wanted, to be free of the confining limits of even roads or tracks—excited Biddy so that he could not keep back his desire to want to admire this man, peering at his physical exterior as if searching for evidence of the marvelous skill underneath. Carver was introduced to everyone and seemed polite and noticeably impatient. He was visibly unhappy about Kristi, and Biddy wondered guiltily if his father had even mentioned her. She'd sit in her mother's lap, next to Biddy in the back.

The Cessna seemed a tiny car with wings. The cockpit was cramped. Biddy pressed his face to the glass, unable to completely believe this machine and that man would take them off the face of the earth.

From the back seat he asked a series of questions. Because of the weather they'd be flying VFR, navigating visually, Mr. Carver related. What he was doing at this point was the preflight checklist. It was no more difficult than it seemed, he said. Biddy sat back, bewildered by the simplicity of the process. Carver went on explaining, but his words were lost in the roar as the engine kicked over.

They took off slowly, banking sharply around to the left toward the Sound, Biddy feeling a shock and excitement as the wheels left the ground and his neighborhood and street swept away and below. Everyone looked out windows, and he waited for the plane to sideslip abruptly and smash into the ground after a fluttering spin. The reeds of the salt marsh flashed by below and then the thin stretch of beach, and then they were over the ocean, blue and choppy. No one spoke. Mr. Carver said something to his father now and then.

Biddy watched the man's hands on the controls. It seemed inexpressibly marvelous that a human being could do this. Carver seemed to be paying no more attention than his father did when he drove. Like the car, the Cessna seemed to need only an occasional gentle correction.

The diminutive East Hampton Airport was in the middle of nowhere, a flat tan strip surrounded by the dark green of a pine forest. As they banked around to their approach pattern he could make out a path through the pines leading away from the runway they'd be coming in on. He could see children on bicycles riding along it toward a connecting road before the gray of the runway abruptly swung up to meet them and he had a sense of hurtling onto a paved strip with only Mr. Carver to deliver them. The gray swept past them and they touched down, Carver steady and unperturbed at the controls, the pavement reeling past the wing hypnotically as he watched.

They drove to a house off the road and hidden by bushes and trees, a big yellow irregular box that looked as if they could work on it for weeks, painting, fixing screen doors, and refastening gutters, and still have much to do. The Carvers had no children, so Biddy and Kristi would sleep on cots in the spare room upstairs. From the window he could see the farmland bordering the backyard, neatly arranged in huge mosaics almost all the way down to the water, a half mile away.

Everything went well. They drove up to Sag Harbor Saturday morning, following the black two-lane road to the end of the North Haven peninsula and taking the short ferry ride to Shelter Island. They played golf at Gardiners Bay, Biddy and Kristi trooping along behind the adults over the beautiful misty fairways, hacking away at their golf balls, delighting in the springy feel of the greens beneath their feet. Afterward, they drove along Ram Island Drive with the windows open, the sea smell filling the car and the bay quiet and wide and huge to the west. They stopped along docks at the water's edge, nosing around dingy small boats tied nearby. Mr. Carver talked of the islands to the east, Plum Island and Great Gull Island and others, and of their beauty and solitude. The quality of the light conferred a special clarity on the land and sea in the distance, making the water fresh and blue. Gulls' cries echoed over the surface and the boats quietly thumped one another with the arrival of an occasional wave from a far-off speedboat. They bought dinner in a seafood restaurant with nets hanging over the tables. On Sunday they lay in the hot sun and crested and splashed in tumbling breakers at the beach when it got too hot. That evening they showered and sat in lounge chairs in the back, cool and relaxed in the breezy darkness, unbothered by mosquitoes. He slept luxuriously on the cot, a hand or foot draped over the sharp-cornered edges.

They flew back early Monday morning. Carver pumped Biddy's hand goodbye and Biddy found it difficult finally to lift his other hand from the smooth metal of the fuselage. His parents saw their host off in his Datsun, thanking him repeatedly and insisting they get together soon, and then exploded into argument once he'd left. Something his father had done or not done or gotten or not gotten was the cause of it all. His mother had said nothing until safely in Stratford. She was, his father said as they crossed behind the Sikorsky hangar to their car, an Italian land mine.

Later in the week, Biddy and Louis were picked up by the yellow security jeep at the airport for playing too close to the runway. Biddy had been drawn back to the Cessnas and they'd strayed too far from the edge of the salt marsh, daring each other onto the tarmac. Louis had been staying over for the day and his father had expressed the hope that they'd find something sedate to do.