Phases of Gravity (19 page)

Outside, the snow falls more heavily.

Baedecker arrived in Salem in early October. He hobbled off the train, set his luggage down, and looked around. The small station was fifty yards away. No bigger than a large picnic pavilion, it looked as if it had been built in the early twenties and abandoned shortly thereafter. There were clumps of moss growing on the roof shingles.

"Richard!"

Baedecker looked past a family exchanging hugs and could make out the tall form of Dave Muldorff near the station. Baedecker waved, picked up his old military flight bag, and moved slowly in his direction.

"Damn, it's good to see you," said Dave. His hand was large, the handshake firm.

"Good to see you," said Baedecker. He realized with a sudden surge of emotion that he was happy to see his old crewmate. "How long has it been, Dave? Two years?"

"Almost three," said Dave. "That Air and Space Museum thing that Mike Collins hosted. What the hell did you do to your leg?"

Baedecker smiled ruefully and tapped at his right foot with the walking stick he was using as a cane. "Just a sprained ankle," he said. "Twisted it when I was up in the mountains with Tom Gavin."

Dave picked up Baedecker's flight bag and the two began the slow walk to the parking lot. "How is Tom?"

"Just fine," said Baedecker. "He and Deedee are doing very well."

"He's in the salvation business these days, isn't he?"

Baedecker glanced at his ex-crewmate. There had never been any love lost between Gavin and Muldorff. He was curious about Dave's feelings now, almost seventeen years after the mission.

"He runs an evangelical group called Apogee," said Baedecker. "It's pretty successful."

"Good," said Dave and his voice sounded sincere. They had reached a new, white Jeep Cherokee and Dave tossed Baedecker's flight bag and garment bag in the back. "Glad to hear that Tom's doing okay."

The Jeep smelled of new upholstery heated by the sun. Baedecker rolled the window down. The early October day was warm and cloudless. Brittle leaves rustled on a large oak tree just beyond the parking lot. The sky was a heart-stoppingly perfect shade of blue. "I thought it was always raining out here in Oregon," said Baedecker.

"Usually is." Dave pulled the Jeep out into traffic. "Three or four days a year the sun comes out and gives us a chance to scrape the fungus out from between our toes. The cops, TV stations, and local Air Force base hate days like this."

"Why's that?" asked Baedecker.

"Every time the sun comes out, they get three or four hundred calls reporting a big, orange UFO in the sky," said Dave.

"Uh-huh."

"I'm not shitting you. All over the state vampires are scurrying for their coffins. This is the one state in the Union where they can go about their business in daytime without encountering any sunlight. These few sunny days are a big shock to our Nosferatu population."

Baedecker lay his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. It was going to be a long visit.

"Hey, Richard, can you tell that I've recently had oral sex with a chicken?"

Baedecker opened one eye. His old crewmate still resembled a leaner, craggier version of James Garner. There were more lines on the face now, and the cheekbones were sharper against the skin, but the wavy black hair showed no hint of gray. "No," said Baedecker.

"Good," said Dave in a relieved tone. Suddenly he coughed twice into his fist. Torn-up bits of yellow Kleenex fluttered into the air like feathers.

Baedecker closed his eye.

"Real good to have you here, Richard," said Dave Muldorff.

Baedecker smiled without opening his eyes. "Real good to be here, Dave."

Baedecker had sold his car in Denver and taken the train west with Maggie Brown. He did not know whether the decision was wise—he suspected that it was not—but for once he attempted simply to carry out an action without analysis.

The Amtrak California Zephyr left Denver at nine A.M., and he and Maggie breakfasted in the dining car while the long train burrowed under the continental divide through the first of fifty-five tunnels awaiting them in Colorado. Baedecker looked at the paper plates, paper napkins, and paper tablecloth. "The last time I traveled by train in America, there was real linen on the table and the food wasn't microwaved," he said to Maggie.

Maggie smiled. "When was that, Richard, during World War II?" She meant it as a joke—a not-so-subtle jibe at his constant mentioning of their age difference—but Baedecker blinked in shock as he realized that it had been during the war. His mother had taken his sister Anne and him from Peoria to Chicago to visit relatives over the holidays. Baedecker remembered the train seats that faced backward, the hushed tone of the porters and waiters in the dining car, and the strange thrill that passed through him as he peered out the window at streetlights and the orange-lit windows of homes in the night. Chicago had been constellations of lights and rows of apartment windows flashing by as the train moved along elevated tracks through the southside. Despite the fact that he had been born in Chicago, the view had given the ten-year-old Baedecker a sense of displacement, a not unpleasant feeling of having lost the center of things. Twenty-eight years after the trip to Chicago, he was to feel the same sense of uncenteredness as his Apollo spacecraft passed out of radio contact with the earth as the rough limb of the moon filled his view. Baedecker remembered leaning against the small window of the command module and wiping away condensation with his palm, much as he had four and a half decades earlier as the train carrying his mother, his sister, and him pulled into Union Station.

"You folks done?" The Amtrak waiter's voice bordered on belligerence.

"All done," said Maggie and swallowed the last of her coffee.

"Good," said the waiter. He flipped the red paper tablecloth up from opposite corners, enclosed the paper plates, plastic utensils, and Styrofoam cups in it, and tossed the entire mass into a nearby receptacle.

"Progress," said Baedecker as they moved back through the shifting aisle.

"What's that?" asked Maggie.

"Nothing," said Baedecker.

Late that night, while Maggie slept against his shoulder, Baedecker watched out the window as they changed engines in a remote corner of the switching yard in Salt Lake City. Under an abandoned overpass, bounded about by tall weeds made brittle by the autumn cold, hobos sat by a fire. Are they still called hobos? wondered Baedecker.

In the morning both he and Maggie awoke just before dawn as the first false light touched the pink rocks of the desert canyon through which the train was hurtling. Baedecker knew instantly upon awakening that the trip would not go well, that whatever he and Maggie had shared in India and rediscovered in the Colorado mountains would not survive the reality of the next few days.

Neither of them spoke while the sun rose. The train rushed on westward, the rocks and mesas flying by, the morning wrapped in a temporary and fragile hush.

Dave and Diane Muldorff lived in a well-to-do suburb on the south side of Salem. Their patio looked down on a wooded stream and Baedecker listened to water running over unseen rocks as he ate his steak and baked potato.

"Tomorrow we'll take you over to Lonerock," said Dave.

"Sounds good," said Baedecker. "I look forward to seeing it after hearing about it all these years."

"Dave will take you over," said Diane. "I have a reception at the Children's Home tomorrow night and a fund-raiser on Sunday. I'll see you on Monday."

Baedecker nodded and looked at Diane Muldorff. She was thirty-four, fourteen years younger than her husband. With her tousled mane of dark hair, startling blue eyes, snub nose, and freckles, she reminded Baedecker of all the girls-next-door he had never known. Yet there was a solid streak of adult in Diane, a quiet but firm maturity, which was now emphasized as she entered her sixth month of pregnancy. This evening she wore soft jeans and a faded blue Oxford shirt with the tails out. "You look good, Di," Baedecker said on impulse. "Pregnancy agrees with you."

"Thank you, Richard. You look good, too. You've lost some weight since that party in Washington."

Baedecker laughed. He had been at his heaviest then, thirty-six pounds over his flying weight. He was still twenty-one pounds over that weight.

"Are you still jogging?" asked Dave. Muldorff had been the only one of the second generation of astronauts who did not run regularly. It had been the point of some contention. Now, ten years after leaving the program, he looked thinner than he had then. Baedecker wondered if Dave's illness was the cause.

"I run a little," said Baedecker. "Just started up a few months ago after I got back from India."

Diane carried several icy bottles of beer to the table and sat down. The last of the evening light touched her cheeks. "How was India?" she asked.

"Interesting," said Baedecker. "Too much to take in in so short a time."

"And you saw Scott there?" asked Dave.

"Yes," said Baedecker. "Briefly."

"I miss seeing Scott," said Dave. "Remember our fishing trips off Galveston in the early seventies?"

Baedecker nodded. He remembered the endless afternoons in rich light and the slow, warm evenings. He and his son would both return home with sunburns. "The redheads return!" Joan would cry out in mock dismay. "Get out the ointment!"

"Did you know that what's-his-name, Scott's holy man, is coming to stay full-time in that ashram of his not far from Lonerock?" asked Diane.

Baedecker blinked at her. "Full-time? No, I didn't."

"What was the ashram like in Poona where Scott was staying?" asked Dave.

"I don't really know," said Baedecker. He thought of the shop outside the main building where one could buy T-shirts with images of the Master's bearded face on them. "I was just in Poona two days and didn't see much of the ashram."

"Will Scott be coming back to the States when the group moves over here?" asked Diane.

Baedecker tasted his beer. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe he's here now. I'm afraid I'm out of touch."

"Hey," said Dave. "Want to come inside to the billy yard room for a fast game?"

"Billy yard room?" said Baedecker.

"What's the matter, Richard," said Dave, "didn't you ever watch The Beverly Hillbillies back during the golden age of the tube?"

"No," said Baedecker.

Dave rolled his eyes at Diane. "That's the problem with this lad, Di. He's culturally deprived."

Diane nodded. "I'm sure you'll fix that, David."

Muldorff poured more beer and carried both mugs with him to the door of the patio. "Luckily for him, I've got twenty episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies on tape. We'll start watching as soon as I thrash him in a fast but expensive game of pool. Come wiz me, mon sewer Baedecker."

"Oui," said Baedecker. He picked up some of the dishes and carried them toward the kitchen. "Einen Augenblik, por favor, mon ami."

Baedecker parks his rented car and walks the two hundred yards to the crash site. He has seen many such sites before; he expects this one to hold no surprises. He is wrong.

As he reaches the top of the ridge, the icy wind strikes him and at the same instant he sees Mt. St. Helens clearly. The volcano looms over the valley and ridgeline like a great, shattered stump of ice. A narrow plume of smoke or cloud hangs above it. For the first time, Baedecker realizes that he is walking on ash. Under the thin layer of snow the soil is more gray than brown. The confusion of footprints on the hillside reminds him of the trampled area around the lunar module when he and Dave returned from their last EVA at the end of the second day.

The crash site, the volcano, and the ash make Baedecker think of the inevitable triumph of catastrophe and entropy over order. Long strands of yellow-and-orange plastic tape hang from rocks and bushes to mark locations that investigators had found interesting. To Baedecker's surprise, the wreckage of the aircraft has not yet been moved. He notices the two long, scorched areas, about thirty meters apart, where the T-38 had initially struck the hill and then bounced even while disintegrating. Most of the wreckage is concentrated where a low band of rocks rises from the hillside like new molars. Snow and ash had been flung far out in rays that remind Baedecker of the secondary impact craters near their lunar landing site in the Marius Hills.

Only vague and twisted remnants of the aircraft remain. The tail section is almost intact; five feet of clean metal from which Baedecker reads the Air National Guard serial number. He recognizes a long, blackened mass as one of the twin General Electric turbojet engines. Pieces of melted plastic and shards of twisted metal are everywhere. Tangles of white, insulated wire are strewn randomly around the shattered fuselage like the discarded entrails of some slaughtered beast. Baedecker sees a section of fire-blackened Plexiglas canopy still attached to a fragment of fuselage. Except for the colored tape and footsteps concentrated there, there is no sign that a man's body had been fused into these broken pieces of baked alloy.

Baedecker takes two steps toward the canopy, steps on something, looks down, and recoils in horror. "Jesus." He raises a fist in reflex even as he realizes that the bit of bone and roasted flesh and singed hair under the concealing bush must be part of a carcass of a small animal unlucky enough to have been caught in the impact or ensuing fire. He crouches to look more closely. The animal had been the size of a large rabbit, but the unsinged remnants of fur were strangely dark. He reaches for a stick to prod the tiny corpse.

"Hey, no one's allowed in this area!" A Washington state trooper is wheezing his way up the hill.

"It's all right," Baedecker says and shows his pass from McChord Air Force Base. "I'm here to meet the investigators."

The trooper nods and stops a few feet from Baedecker. He hooks his thumbs in his belt as he struggles to catch his breath. "Hell of a mess, isn't it?"

Baedecker raises his face to the clouds just as it begins to snow again. Mt. St. Helens is gone, hidden by clouds. The air smells of burnt rubber even though Baedecker knows that except for the tires, there had been very little rubber aboard the aircraft.