The Man Who Ate the 747 (19 page)

They drove up the dirt path into Wally’s field, and he was about to say “Let’s have dinner, so we can talk,” when he saw her expression freeze. There, amid a throng of reporters, standing head and shoulders above the tallest, was Wally. He was coming toward them.

He looked mad.

The television masts had fallen like timber. The banners had been yanked from their moorings. Tent poles were strewn like pick-up-sticks with clumps of canvas bunched around them. Wally had watched with befuddlement as the journalists and corporate sponsors decamped, and then he saw the old green truck roll to a stop in his mashed cornfield.

Willa and J.J. were in the cab. Together. That was strange.

Wally stalked out to meet them.

J.J. rolled down the window. “Morning.”

“Where’s everyone going?” Wally asked.

“What do you mean?” J.J. said.

“Look around. Everyone’s packing up. Pulling out.”

“I really don’t know,” J.J. said, getting out of the truck.

“Tell the truth. What’s going on?”

Finally J.J. mumbled, “There was a snag back at headquarters. Reporters come and go. They’ll be back.”

“What about this?” a journalist said, right behind Wally. He held up
The Omaha Herald.
A banner headline ran across the front page:

Wally grabbed the newspaper. He stood just inches from J.J., casting a shadow across the smaller man’s face. He began to read: “‘Because of concerns about liability,
The Book of Records
announced it will not recognize the 747 eating attempt. Nigel Peasley, a high-ranking official with The Book, urged all record seekers in the inorganic category to cease and desist.’”

The reporters closed in on J.J. and Wally.

A young correspondent waved the
Chicago Tribune.
“When did this happen? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“You know why,” Wally said. “He doesn’t care. It’s just another record to him.”

Willa was standing by the truck. There were tears in her eyes.

Wally walked over to her. “What are you doing with him?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

Why was she so upset? Did she care about him or the record that much?

Then he realized exactly what had happened. He understood why she looked so devastated. He turned back to J.J., stretched out a meaty arm, and grabbed his shoulder. Spun him around.

“What did you do to her?” he shouted.

J.J. didn’t have time to say a word. Wally pulled back his fist and let it fly.

Bone snapped. Blood spurted. J.J. staggered back and fell down hard.

“There,” Wally said. “So much for your perfect nose.”

“You knew last night the record was canceled,” Willa said, eviscerating J.J. with her look. She jerked the gear shift, and the truck lurched down Wally’s road. She took the corner without slowing, throwing him hard against the door.

His nose throbbed.

“I wasn’t sure.” His voice was muffled by a thick wad of paper towels stanching the flow of blood. Every bump and turn, every rut under the wheels sent new pain radiating across his face.

“That phone call at dinner. You didn’t tell me.”

He could barely breathe. “I’m sorry.” He
measured each word, one syllable at a time. “I fought hard for the record, but there’s no way to reverse the decision. It’s final.”

He waited a moment, then said, “Now they’re sending me to Greece.”

“When?”

“Today.”

“You used me,” she said.

“No. I didn’t—”

“You broke your promise to me and the whole town.”

She didn’t sob, but tears fell down her cheeks. He reached out and touched her arm. She shook off his hand.

“You think I wanted it to turn out this way? I didn’t know how to tell you last night. I thought I could save it—”

They were on Highway 8 just outside of town. An empty two-lane road. Willa braked hard in front of the Animal Hospital, a small cinder-block building. The truck rocked on its springs. “You’re here,” she said.

“Willa. Please.”

“Get out.”

She wouldn’t look at him. He opened the door and slid from the truck. Stood on asphalt and watched her screech away.

“Willa!” he called.

The truck kept going, and his heart ached even more than his battered nose.

A poster on the wall showed the respiratory ailments most commonly associated with poultry. Another gave the five critical criteria for diagnosing a bovine hernia. The examination room was big, tiled in white, with a stainless steel table in the middle.

J.J. sat on the cold surface, legs dangling over the edge. Doc Noojin wore a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck.

“If a cow’s nose was broken,” Doc said, “this is what I’d do to it.” He put two big hands on J.J.’s face. “This would hurt the cow, so—”

With a quick, jerking movement, he wrenched the busted nose.

J.J. let out a primal scream that silenced the hospital and the kennel. Not a beast stirred.

“There,” Doc said. “Cow’s nose would now be reset.”

Cow’s nose would now be reset….

J.J. dreaded how he would look when the swelling was gone. He feared the nose that once savored the exotic aroma of Bedouin camel would never work properly again. His perfect nose.

“What about painkillers?” he said.

“Well …” Doc scratched his beard. “A cow with a broken nose would take phenylbutazone. It comes in a big pill.”

He reached into a drawer and found a bolus the size of a salami.

“Let’s see, you’re about one-fifth the size of a cow, if you get my drift. You do the math.”

J.J. tried to follow through the haze in his head.

“Everything will be fine in a few weeks,” he heard Doc say. “Although this cow we’ve been talking about won’t win any beauty contests for a while.”

J.J. looked in the mirror. He was barely recognizable. His eyes were slits encircled by black-and-blue rings.

“Thanks, Doc,” J.J. said, his voice as flat as his face.

He climbed off the examining table, grabbed the giant pill, and headed for the door. Every dog barked at him as he left the hospital and walked slowly back into town. Cars and trucks ignored him as they passed.

At the corner of Central and Fourth, he stopped and touched his nose. The pain was justified, even satisfying. It was punishment for the suffering he had caused.

He heard his dad’s voice. “Stick to the straight and narrow, son. Stay in your own lane.” For the first time in his life, he had ignored the advice and single-handedly caused a multicar wreck. How had he managed to screw everything up so badly?

Would he ever like himself again?

It was time to leave this forsaken place where the sky was gray and the old wind blew. J.J. looked down the empty expanse of Main Street. All the flags and banners had been carried off, the souvenir stands carted away. For a moment, Superior had tasted greatness, but now everything was back to normal. Except everything was changed forever.

E
rushed from his bed, threw on his overalls, and went straight to the barn. He didn’t bother to stop and look out on his empty fields. He didn’t spend a moment studying his pasture, grass all flattened where the news organizations had built their pavilions. He was glad they were gone. They only muddied what was once crystal clear. Never mind all that. No time to look back.

There was serious work to do.

He went straight to the great contraption in the barn. He spent the morning meticulously examining every part, oiling the gears, changing the belts. He had taken the machine for granted. It ground down a 747
without so much as a squirt of oil in appreciation. Now it needed care and attention.

He scrubbed grit from the gear box, washed dust from the fans. The work was cleansing. It was, in the purest sense, a labor of love. He never wanted the record in the first place. He just wanted to show Willa he would do anything for her. And that was what he would do.

As a boy, he’d gone with his father to see the Cornhuskers play football at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln. He remembered the inscription over Gate 4, carved in stone: “Not the victory but the action; not the goal but the game; in the deed the glory.”

They were fighting words. Winning words.

The record didn’t matter. Only the love did.

He changed the spark plugs and filters. When he was finally done with every crank and lever, the sun was straight overhead and it was so hot, it hurt. Arf watched from the shadows of the barn as Wally marched out to the last remaining section of the 747, the vertical and horizontal stabilizers. It was all gone but the tail fin, covered with a 20-foot wooden scaffold. He climbed up with his saw and began working on the rudder and dual hydraulic actuators. It wouldn’t take long to polish off the fin. If he really chowed, without interruption, he would be done. Finally.

No matter what they did to him, no matter what they thought or said about him, they would never be able to take this away.

He would eat the plane, no matter what.

He found her by the river, sitting on the mossy trunk of an old cottonwood that had toppled into the water. She heard him coming down the path.

“I wanted to see you before I left.”

“How’d you find me?” she asked.

“I made Iola talk.” He smiled as best he could given the wad of a bandage across his nose. “Something to be said for looking scary.”

“There’s really nothing left to say.”

“Sure there is. Please, may I join you?”

Willa shrugged. He sat down on the trunk not far from her. She was still wearing the shorts and T-shirt from the morning, but she’d kicked off her shoes and was dangling her toes in the water. The stream was flat and low. Crickets buzzed, and birds quarreled in the trees. Her face was streaked from crying.

“You didn’t have to come,” she said. “I’ll be fine. It’s better if we just forget what happened.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “I’m sorry about everything.”

Willa raised her eyes. “Yeah, well, it was my mistake too. I thought we were falling in love.”

She reached for a stone, skimmed it across the smooth stream. Then another rock.

“The record is 38 skips,” he said. “Wimberley, Texas. It was quite a—”

She motioned with her hand. Stop it.

Then she said, “I looked up the Taj Mahal. You said it was the greatest place in the world because of the architecture, the symmetry, the style.”

“I remember.”

“That’s the difference between us. You see the statistics, the surface. I see something else.”

She threw another rock.

“It’s love, not marble, that made the Taj Mahal,” she said. “A prince loved a princess so much he built it for her as a monument when she died.”

J.J. ached as he looked at Willa. She was beautiful in ways that had nothing to do with the distance between her eyes or the ratio of her waist and hips. She saw deeply where he did not. She would have led him to those places, shown him those feelings.

“You only see the statistics and the tonnage,” Willa told him. “Maybe that’s why you and I were never meant to be.”

The breeze picked up and sent fluffs from the cottonwood trees down onto the water.

“You’re right,” he said. “Wally’s building you the monument. He never wanted a world record, he never wanted the attention. He only wanted to show you how much he loves you.

“I ruined something pure and beautiful,” he continued. “I barged in with The Book, didn’t listen to him, didn’t listen to you. I destroyed something truly great.”

Dragonflies zipped over the grass.

Willa’s voice, when she spoke, was strained. “You should go.”

J.J. took one last look at her. Memorized her face, her eyes, her halo of wild hair.

“I won’t forget our time together,” he said.

He wanted to kiss her, but she turned away, set her gaze on a rock far downstream. As if she were erasing him, as if he had simply stopped existing. He wanted to die.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

Then he began the long, sad climb up the path and away.

She stayed by the river all afternoon. It was her sanctuary, where she had fished with her father, floated on inner tubes with her friends. Now she had to cope with this memory: J.J., his face swollen and bruised, telling her he was leaving, that he would never forget her. The words came from him as if they made perfect sense. Leaving, remembering, good-bye.