The Wishing Box: A Novel, page 11
It’s true Bill had always loved the queasy, upside-down sensation of turbulence and the bright forgiving eye of the open sky. He fell in love with the sky when he was only sixteen and started lurking around airfields, watching landings and volunteering to help the pilots wax their wings. After a time, a few of them took pity on him and let him ride along. They liked his eagerness and his bravado, and bit by bit they taught him how to fly.
In those days flying was a rugged venture, and the men who taught him thought nothing of taking off from a cow pasture and touching down on a frozen lake. They didn’t need radios or runway lights, and they taught Bill to delight in rough weather and the thrill of running just below the clouds. He earned his pilot’s license in two years, and when he could wrangle a little flying time he practiced daredevil tricks, taking the plane out over the ocean and swooping so low that wave-spray spattered the windshield.
“I think it has to do with the elements,” he said now. “Earth, fire, water, air. We live on earth; the earth is our home element, and there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t love the smell of soil and the feeling of solid ground. But there’s something about the other elements that pulls you to them, the way men are pulled to women and women to men. If you’ve ever watched a fire burning, you know what I mean. It seems that if you only knew how to walk through one of those doorways of flame, you’d find yourself in a fire-land where the trees throw off sparks instead of leaves. I’ve felt that way about water, too. When I lived in South America I’d go scuba diving and sometimes I’d find myself in a kind of blue cathedral, with beams of light slicing down and fish spiraling around me like angels. It felt like I’d come to a forbidden place, a place from which I could never go home.
“But the air was my element. It dissolved me into what felt like pure spirit—the most vigorous chilling-bright essence of aliveness I could ever be. Just to be up there in the sky, to be sky. Clouds are walls that turn into doorways when you dart through them, and in that misty alley you can lose everything that moors you to the earth, even your sense of which way is down.”
When war broke out in Korea, he joined the navy. He told the recruiter he was game to fly top cover, bombing missions, reconnaissance, anything, but instead of making him a pilot, the navy sent him to sea. He spent the whole war on an aircraft carrier, certain that his flight skills were rusting in the salt breeze. Whenever a jet lifted off, he felt like a jilted lover watching his girl walk down the aisle.
After the war ended, he took his bitterness home with him. He spurned the little airports where he used to fly and bounced from one line of work to another, never finding anything that suited him. He painted houses, sold insurance for a while, and after he was married he went into business with some friends from high school fencing stolen televisions and cars. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays he made a little run around the city, picking up the protection money the bars paid the police department. He was ashamed that he couldn’t tell his daughters what he did for a living, but he didn’t know what he wanted to do instead. So he simply waited for something to change. All the while the sky was inside him, a deep breath waiting to get out.
One afternoon he went into a bar called Paddy’s Lunch and found the devil sitting on a bar stool with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Rolling Rock in the other. This devil’s name was Terence Haskins, and he was a gap-toothed, freckly fellow who had served with Bill on the aircraft carrier in Korea. Haskins had been a pilot before the war as well, and the two of them used to pal around during their off-hours, swapping tales of airborne bravado.
“You still flying?” Haskins said after they had slapped each other on the back and resurrected a few long-forgotten nicknames. Bill shook his head, shrugged, explained about having a family to support. “But I sure would give anything to get in a plane again,” he said.
“Anything?” Haskins asked.
It seems that Haskins was a smuggler, carrying planeloads of marijuana into Miami and Galveston from South America and the Caribbean. There was plenty of work to go around, he said, and since Bill was an old buddy from the war, he was willing to help him get started in the business. “Tell you what I’m gonna do, my friend,” Haskins said. “I’m gonna lend you my plane while I’m on vacation in Puerto Rico. I’ll introduce you to the people you need to know, and by the time I get back, you’ll have earned enough to buy yourself a plane of your own.”
The two men shook on it and raised their bottles to having the last laugh on those golden-haired navy pilots who were now hauling bulky jetliners from one end of the country to the other. Even as he drank to his own sky blue future, Bill knew what kind of deal he had made. “But,” he told us, “you never know how good it feels to sell your soul until you’ve done it. Your soul feels so heavy and worthless, like an old Chevy engine you’ve been hauling around for years waiting to find the right body to stick it in. Any offer you get seems like the deal of a lifetime, and here’s the devil not only willing to take it off your hands, but offering you your heart’s desire in exchange.”
He cast an eye at Lisa, to see if she disapproved of her drug-running daddy. “This was the sixties, honey,” he said. “I mean, we didn’t think about drugs in the same way back then. To me it was just a new kind of opportunity, no different from what I did before. Just a little more money and a lot more fun.” He needn’t have worried. Lisa had fallen headlong for this tale of his pirate antics. She listened with her lips parted, a baby bird waiting to be fed.
Bill took her hand. “I was only planning to be gone for a couple of weeks,” he said. “I thought I could fly a few times, make some money, and come back with flowers and presents and a plane of my own to take my girls for rides in. I should have told you where I was going, but I thought it might be best if no one knew where I was going. I had just moved a load of hot TVs, and the store I sold them to was raided. Better to just disappear for a few weeks, I told myself. And that’s what I did.”
But of course it didn’t work out that way. Bill wasn’t as deft a pilot as he thought, or maybe he was just out of practice. He made it through the first two runs, but on his third he found himself taking off from a narrow, potholed runway in the Colombian jungle, the plane overloaded with fumy cargo. Just as he lifted the plane’s nose off the ground, one of his wheels sank into the mud, pulling him hard to the right. When he tried to pull back to center, his wingtip snagged in the vines hanging over the airstrip, and the next thing he knew he was buzzing through the underbrush, tossing up a spray of foliage. By the time he came to a stop, Haskins’s white Piper was missing both wings. It took him three weeks to find a way back to Miami.
Replacing Haskins’s plane took nearly all the money he’d stowed away, and then he had to charm his new employers into lending him a plane he could use himself. He worked a little longer and a little harder, and after a year had passed, he had saved enough money to buy himself a Piper of his own. He named her Demon after his old friend Terence Haskins.
But by then he was hooked. He liked the long flights over water, and he liked coming in low, flying in the nap of the earth where the radar couldn’t find him. He was caught up in the writhing currents of the air, and there seemed no reason ever to touch down. “I stayed away until I could have some profit to bring home,” he told us. “And I guess it’s that old story—the longer I stayed away, the easier it was to keep staying.”
Listening to Bill talk, I thought of an old nursery rhyme I’d learned in school: “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost.” For want of a plane, the family was lost. For want of a family, the man was lost.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t miss you,” he said to Lisa and Carolina. “You know I did; I thought about you all the time. Every little girl I saw reminded me of my girls back home. But after a few years passed I thought Carolina would have remarried and you girls would have a new life and a new daddy, and if I came back it would just mess everything up. How was I to know that a beautiful woman like Carolina wouldn’t marry again? God, it’s too hard sometimes having a memory for all the stupid things you’ve done in your life. If I could change it, I would, but the past is gone forever. I never found a thing in the air I couldn’t have found with my own family. Every time I landed it was with a thud and a heartbreak.”
I’ve heard better lines in country music. But once he’d hit this maudlin note, the story wrapped up quickly. He stopped smuggling marijuana in 1975 and lived on his savings in Mexico and Brazil. In the eighties he came out of retirement to join a new enterprise that involved flying guns and cocaine in and out of Costa Rica. When that grew too dangerous, he sold his plane and started wandering again. “I’ve been circling and circling, waiting to get cleared for landing,” he said. “It’s only now that I’m with you again that I feel I’m on the ground. Now I remember how elemental the earth is, the earth of my own family. I know that I can’t ever get back the years I lost when I left you, but Carolina, I’d like to be your husband again, and Lisa, I’d like to be your daddy.”
Flight (Julia)
I wasn’t as brave as I planned to be. On Monday I cowered and scurried about all day, until Ralph came in at five-fifteen and asked if the manuscript was ready.
I steeled myself. “I lost it.”
Ralph said, “Come again?”
I didn’t answer him. It was painful enough once; I wasn’t going to say it twice.
“You lost it?” Ralph said. Why do people always ask you to repeat things they’ve heard perfectly well? “What the fuck are you talking about?”
I told him. He listened, nodding his head vigorously as if the whole thing confirmed everything he had always known about me. “It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t knocked over the flowers by my desk,” I finished.
“I wouldn’t have knocked them over if you hadn’t put them there, Julia. I want you to write down, ‘I accept responsibility for my actions.’ Write it down now. Write it down!”
If anyone had been taking nominations for person most likely to spontaneously combust, I would have known whom to suggest. Ralph was turning crimson. “Is there any fuck-up you’re not capable of?” he shrilled. “Is there any colossal error that’s beyond the grasp of your incompetence? Just tell me, in your whole pathetic, dim-witted life, is there any cretinous move you haven’t made?”
“I don’t need this,” I said, surprising myself. It was a murmur I had meant to make under my breath. The knots in my shoulders were killing me.
“You don’t need this? What about me? I have really tried to be patient with you, Julia, but I’ve fucking had it. Do you know how many hours it’s going to take to reconstruct that manuscript? Your next job better be a high-paying one, because you owe me. You owe me, Julia!”
“Shut up!” I shouted. I was afraid he was going into cardiac arrest, and I wasn’t looking forward to the ethical dilemma I would have to face if he needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “You’re spitting on me and you have bad breath!” I took a shaky breath, remembering that I had promised Steven those play-off tickets. “Don’t yell at me. It’s . . .” I floundered and trailed off. “It’s negative languaging.”
“Negative languaging? You don’t want negative languaging? Then let me state it in the affirmative for you: You’re fired.”
It took me a moment to grasp what it was he was saying, but when I did, my tongue loosened. “Wiping Shantra’s book off the face of the planet would be doing humanity a service,” I said. “It doesn’t work! None of these books work! You know how I know? Because if affirmations and spirit guides and all that other crap worked, you wouldn’t be such a complete asshole.”
Ralph’s heavy eyelids lowered a fraction, cloaking the tops of his irises.
“That kind of thinking will take you far, Julia,” he said with a reptilian smirk. “Now pack up your desk and get the fuck out.”
It was twilight when I left the office. The clouds were low and pink, and as I walked to the BART station, I imagined unfolding the crimped, painful wings beneath my shoulder blades and flapping into the sky. I was free. I cocked my head back and gazed at the flaming clouds, and in spite of everything, I had to smile. I was fucking free from Enhancement Press.
A moment later I heard someone running behind me and felt a sharp tug on the strap of my purse. I whirled and found my face in a man’s chest. It smelled of hot adrenaline and beer.
I clenched my fist around my purse, and the man leaned back and pulled at the strap like a dog playing tug-of-war with a leash. To my astonishment, I began to yell and then to beat at the mugger’s head with my free hand. The purse strap was wrapped around my wrist, and as he pulled, it chafed the skin. I had time to notice this and even to think that it felt like that old childhood prank: Indian Sunburn. Time had flattened into a series of squashed, slow moments.
Then, finally, I saw someone running toward us in fleet-footed cheetah strides. “Help! I’m being mugged!” I shouted and kept beating at the purse-snatcher. He dug his nails into the pulse point of my wrist, trying to pry the strap out of my hand.
Then the rescuer was standing in front of me with a gun in his hand. “Step back, you crazy bitch,” he said.
I let go of the strap. Time shook itself and resumed. In an instant the two men had climbed into a car at the end of the street and driven away. I stood there with my hands empty and my wrist flaming and I began to cry.
The police gave me a ride home and used the opportunity to warn me not to sleep at my apartment that night since the muggers had both my house keys and my address. They also, it turned out, had my car, because when we pulled up in front of my building, I saw that my little blue Honda was missing from its usual spot out front. The sight of the empty parking place made me start sniffling again, and the two officers crossed their arms and affected a look of extreme world-weariness.
“These guys are professionals,” one said and offered to come up to make sure no one was in my apartment. I got a spare key from my landlord and the police took big leathery strides through all the rooms, jangling keys and handcuffs with every step. Their presence was so overbearing that I was relieved when they finally left.
As soon as they were gone, I drew the safety chain across the door and lay down on my bed. I was woozy from adrenaline, and every time I turned my head, kaleidoscope fragments maundered across my vision. But when I shut my eyes, images of the struggle kept returning. The man who was supposed to help me had pointed a gun at me. I had looked at him with my face open and trusting and he had pointed a gun at me. I felt very small and miserable.
I lay there feeling sorry for myself for a while and then I remembered that I was supposed to be at Lisa’s hours ago. They were probably wondering what the hell had happened to me. But when I called Lisa’s apartment, all I got was the answering machine. I didn’t want to sound too alarming in case Steven heard the message, so I ummed and ahhed and finally ended up saying only that my purse had been stolen, which made it sound as if it hadn’t necessarily been stolen from my person. But then I asked if Steven could spend the night there since it was late and I didn’t feel safe having him at home until I’d changed the locks. That, I realized, probably sounded quite alarming, but there was nothing I could do about it once I’d said it, so I merely added that I was going to go get something to eat and not to worry if I wasn’t here when they called back.
Once I was on my feet, I knew I had to get out of the apartment. It was too creepy to sit there going over what had happened and waiting for the sound of my muggers tugging at the door. I needed to go out and have a drink and then see if I could spend the night at Dawn’s. Outside, the wind had risen, ever so slightly. I could hear it rattling the blinds.
I found a twenty-dollar bill I had stowed in my desk for emergencies and then changed into a pair of black leggings and a rayon minidress splashed with yellow and purple pansies. Before I left, I put a note on the door that I hoped would scare away any thieves: butch—hank and i are downstairs. we’ll be back in five minutes.
My bicycle was chained to the back steps, covered with cobwebs. I brushed it off and rode it to a nearby café. It was an arty little place located in a converted warehouse and decorated with enormous, abstract canvases. Lisa used to work there, so I knew both of the waitresses on duty: Melissa, a chunky, foul-mouthed art student, and Janine, who was pale and English and very serious.
“You would not believe the day I’ve had,” I told them and proceeded to recount my tale of woe. They squealed and swore at all the dramatic parts, and then they brought me two free glasses of wine. By the time I’d drunk them both and had some dinner, I was beginning to feel a little better. I had lived to tell the tale, after all. I leaned back in my chair and looked around the room.
A young man with dark eyes and a closely kept goatee was reading and drinking tea in the corner. At first I was just trying to figure out what he was reading, but once I started looking at him, I had to admit that he was easy on the eyes. He had thick black hair and brown, almost penny-colored skin. When he caught me looking at him, he smiled. His smile lasted long enough to acknowledge that our eyes had met, and a second longer. Then he went back to reading.
Melissa brought me my third glass of wine. “Do you need a place to stay tonight?” she asked, and then noticed I was still looking at the man in the corner. “Or have you already picked out the bed you want to climb into?”
I laughed and shook my head. “My days of café conquests are long over,” I told her. “I think I’m going to stay at my friend Dawn’s.”
