A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (21 page)

Burns could see the landfall that Batton had indicated, dark and vague beneath the fading rosy dusk, and as the little aircraft was bumped and lifted, he could sense the curvature of the earth from this height. Flying into the lost light made him feel again the sorrow he’d lived by for so long. The little plane descended in rocky strokes, lurching and gliding through the darkening frigid night. The men did not speak, but when the lights of Kotzebue glimmered on the horizon, a settlement in the void, Glen Batton spoke to the airport and then said to Burns: “Look. I know he was your son and he was a good kid, but the end was no good. He was a pain in the ass for everybody. Nearly drove Julie crazy.”

Burns just listened. He wasn’t mad anymore. He didn’t want to argue. The lights of the village grew distinct and Batton circled out over the frozen ocean showing the town as a sweet Christmas decoration, a model, the pools of lamplight on the snowpacked streets.

“And now you’re here, starting it all up again. You ought to get the flight to Anchorage tomorrow before this next weather really hits, and let Julie get on with her life.”

Burns could see an orange bonfire on the hill at the edge of town and the dark forms of sleds descended the slope. Batton banked sharply, moving for the first time all day with an undue haste, and then leveled, and as the icy runway approached Burns felt the bottom drop out. The plane dipped suddenly, wrenching him up against his seat belt, where he floated for a second before slamming down. His head hit the windscreen and the edge of the console and then he felt the plane riding hard on the ridged ice, shaking him to the spine.

Batton ran the plane to the end of the runway and then wheeled it around to the tie-downs. “Sorry about that,” he said. “It’s always a little rough, but we hit her pretty hard that time.”

Burns’ hand was in the blood on his hairline and he could feel the welt rising where his forehead was split.

“You okay?” Batton asked, turning off the plane and climbing down.

“What’d you do to him, Glen? What did you do to Alec?”

With the earphones off everything sounded flat. Batton was fastening the fixed cables to each wing. Burns opened his door and jumped down onto the ice and moved away from the plane. He was dizzy and there seemed to be blood everywhere. Head cuts were like faucets; he’d had plenty playing hockey.

Batton was struggling with the insulation blanket for the engine. “You bleeding?” he said. “Let me see that.”

“Were you after Julie before Alec moved?” Burns said.

Batton stopped fastening the snaps on the cover and came around to Burns. It was clear he wanted to hit him. The two men stood between the plane and the pickup on the rough sea ice. “Look,” Batton said. “You’re a smart guy. Julie said you went to Yale.”

“Glen,” Burns said, “I didn’t come up here for trouble. I came up here to see what Alec saw, something for myself. And now I want to know what you did to him.”

Glen came up to Burns and took a handful of his parka shoulder. In the icy light, Burns could see his face, angry and tight, and he felt himself being lifted. He didn’t care. He was bleeding. He didn’t care what Glen did. Burns saw Batton’s eyes flicker over the things he was going to do and then focus on him. “Get in,” Glen said finally, letting go of the coat. But Burns backed past the truck and into the dark toward the mounds of ragged plate ice between himself and the village.

NOT TEN
minutes later, Burns found himself on a dark side street disoriented and full of the old dread. He’d just walked and something—the cold, the gash on his head, the iron hardness of the packed roadway, the glimpse of the earth growing dark—had let it all gather in his heart. For years he had thought that the weight of it, the darkest part, was his drinking. He’d wake somewhere sick and feel it around his chest like a cold hand and not be able to swallow. But after he stopped drinking, it didn’t lift. It didn’t come every day, but when it came as it had tonight, it hit with a force that left him weak.

On their holidays when he and Helen would go to St. Johns, he was drunk by noon, usually, rum was such an easy thing to drink. You could drink it in anything, coffee, juice. You could drink it in milk, for chrissake. You could take warm mouthfuls right from the bottle.

You could drink vodka and bourbon from the bottle too, but not in balmy weather. In the islands it was rum. Manhattan was gin. Airplanes were gin too, the stiff chemical push in the face. Clients were scotch, something that bit and then slid in Burns, he could drink scotch for weeks. He had done it. But his rules were his rules: Manhattan was gin; St. Johns was rum; clients were scotch; and he drank vodka and bourbon those nights when the rules began to float. It was vodka the time he tried to die.

Now Burns felt the goose egg on his forehead. The blood had stopped, but the flesh was too tender to touch. He looked around and couldn’t find a landmark. Four or five buildings, warehouses or churches, stood over him. He wasn’t sure of the way he’d come and he couldn’t tell north from south. He felt drained. He turned around searching for a clue, even a snowbank to sit on, but he could only see how much, how very much, of his own life he had missed.

Between buildings he thought he caught sight of the bonfire on the hill, and then someone took his arm. He looked down at Blazo, his grin showing the missing teeth, a man who by the wrinkles in his brown face could have been a hundred. With a firm grip on Burns’ arm, Blazo marched him to the corner, out of the shadows, and pointed at the sledding fire.

“I saw them sledding,” Burns said, but Blazo pointed again. A flare of powdery red light rose in the sky and then dissolved as a wave of yellow swelled and faded. “This place,” Burns said. He felt dizzy. “These nights. This place is something else.” He stepped away from Blazo. “Thanks,” he said. “Julie’s place is that way, right?”

Blazo nodded. He seemed to be examining Burns’ face.

Burns started down the street and then hesitated. “I need to get to Kolvik. Soon. I need to see where Alec Burns lived, where he had a trapline. South of town.”

“He was your boy,” Blazo said.

Above them, the sky was relentless, the random vast armatures of colored light wheeling up and then vanishing, sometimes printing themselves from nothing on the darkness like bright stains. “He was,” Burns whispered. The cold air cut at his nose as he breathed, and he could feel his pulse aching in his wound. “You can talk,” Burns said.

“Not really.” Blazo quickly pointed down the snowpacked lane, and Burns saw a figure trotting swiftly under the lamplight, a dog, some kind of husky, moving as with purpose. “But we’ll go out there,” Blazo said. “Tomorrow morning. It’s going to snow, but we’ll get half a day of good weather.”

THE TRAILER
was dark. Burns opened the door quietly and heard a strange sound which he then recognized as the violin. He felt the warmth and it made him catch his breath. He almost wept.

As he passed through the mud room without removing his coat, he felt Molly’s nose fit into his palm in the dark. His legs were trembling. Julie was playing something sharp, full of energy and angles, it filled the space completely, and Burns saw her as he passed through the living room. She sat on the ottoman in her underwear, playing by the light of two candles. He saw the shine of sweat on her forehead and breastbone, and then he was in his room, suddenly warm himself and pulling at his coat and sweater.

There was a knock at his door, and Julie was there, tying her robe. “Hi,” she said. “Sorry about that. . . . What’s all this blood?”

“Nothing,” he said. He was sitting on the bed. “You play very well.”

Julie took his chin in her hand and pulled at the cut with a thumb. “Oh, yes, it’s nothing,” she said. “Looks like Glen hit you with an ax.”

“It was an accident,” Burns said quietly. On the warm bed, with his head in a woman’s hands, he felt himself letting go. Julie was standing very close. He was a serious and controlled man, and he clenched his jaw, but his eyes welled.

“I’m going to have to stitch this closed, Mr. Tom Burns, or you’ll return to the East Coast with a genuine Alaskan tattoo.” And in a moment she came back with a warm wet cloth and a small kit. “You want something to eat?”

“No,” he said. “I’m all in.” He could feel his voice unsteady. “We didn’t make it. Glen couldn’t land.”

Burns leaned back and looked at Julie and he saw her read his face. She stood beside him and put her arm around his neck. Burns held perfectly still. “What are you doing in Alaska? I’m not so sure this is a good idea for you.” She began dabbing at his forehead with the cloth.

Then Burns’ head began to ache and he could feel her working at the skin with the black thread. He was pulled into the open front of her robe where freckles rose from her cleavage in warm, vertiginous constellations inches from his face and he could smell her skin and the sweet Wild Turkey on her breath. His right ear was full of dried blood and his hearing came and went. He had both of his hands on her hips and he could feel her moving against him, the warmth and pressure of her legs.

“Are you all right,” Burns whispered.

He heard her say, “I know what I’m doing.”

He had a high hollow feeling and his mouth tasted sweet and dry the way it did before a drunk, and Julie cinched each stitch with three short tugs and this became part of the litany, her shifting breasts, the freckles riding there, his eyes half closed in the warm room, and the steady and expected tug-tug-tug. He ran his hand inside her robe and lifted his face to kiss her. She kissed him back, pausing for a moment to move the dangling needle on its black thread out of their way. She came over onto him on the bed. “Isn’t this why you’ve come?” Her eyes fixed him as she continued to move with each word: “Isn’t it?” Burns could feel the needle riding in his ear now and Julie lifted it away. “Watch out for me. I’m not what you think.”

“What do I think?”

“You think I’m some coping person. A nurse. Something. I don’t even know anymore what they do in your world, but here we take comfort where we find it. Glen came after me like a dog in heat. It’s like that, Tom.” Julie moved against him and Burns knew she could feel that he was aroused. “I’m like that.”

“No you’re not,” he said. Even as he heard the words, he realized he didn’t know what he was saying. He’d decided who she was yesterday, standing in her kitchen. The whole journey to Alaska had seemed mad to him at first, but once he was committed, he’d decided what he would see. He had written a kind of scenario without knowing it and now it was coming undone. It was a long moment for Burns, as if he had dived into the ocean and was waiting to turn and ascend. He was airless and without will.

Julie had lifted herself and was looking into his eyes, waiting for something. She looked much older here, harder. When he didn’t move, she said, “You really don’t get it, do you?”

“What? What is it?” he said to her. “What am I missing? Did Glen hurt Alec?”

“You’re hard to believe, Tom,” Julie said, rolling off him and standing by the bed. “You’re too old to be that innocent.” She took his head in her hands once again, but she held it differently. “Yes, Glen hurt Alec. So did I. So did this place. And probably you did too. Alec went mad. He did. But when he moved out there, Glen didn’t help him. I know that. They hated each other by then, you can tell that. I knew he wouldn’t land with you. I’m trying to be honest here. What happened would have happened. Glen didn’t kill Alec.”

“He didn’t save him.”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Tom.” Julie stood back, tugging sharply at the thread in Burns’ forehead, and she looked at him frankly. “None of us did.”

BURNS WAS
walking in the snow. So this is where it was, he thought. He tried to see the valley as Alec might have, and began picking his way across the meadow. The surface of the snow was crusted and his snowshoes only cut a few inches with each step. He worked into a warm rhythm of small steps up the incline, breathing into the gray afternoon. It was wonderful to move this way after being on the snow machine all day. The clouds had come down and Burns felt the air change as he marched. It lifted at him somehow, not a wind but some quickness that was sharper in his nose, and it grew darker suddenly and he saw the first petals of snow easing down around him.

At the top he turned, breathing hard, and put his hands on his hips to rest. He felt the old high thrill in his chest just like the winter days at Yale, the flasks in the stands at the rink, and crossing campus at midnight wired tight with alcohol, his coat open to the sharp tonic of the air. Now his head was almost against the somber tent of clouds and below him the snow fell as it does at sea, ponderous and invisible at once, disappearing except where it fell on his sleeves, his eyebrows. The snow was falling everywhere.

His knees burned faintly as he stepped along the crest of the hill and descended into the draw where Alec had trapped. Here the small pines were thicker and there were game trails in the snow between the clumps of trees.

The year he quit drinking, that June, he and Alec had sailed from Martha’s Vineyard to the Elizabeth Islands and an exhilaration had set in that Burns remembered keenly. Alec had been on loan from Helen. They had anchored off the islands and swum the hundred yards to shore and then lain on the deserted sand, laughing and panting, and the boy had said to him, “This is it, Dad. This is the best day of my life.” Burns thought at that time: I am as close to being happy as I will ever be. And he did feel happy, proud to be a good sailing coach and pleased to have captured the Elizabeth Islands on the most beautiful day in the year, but the other thing was always with him. He didn’t say it before they stood and began to swim back, but Burns had decided that day to live. He would live.

Halfway up the draw, Burns stopped. This was it. He fell back in the snow, flinging out his arms. He lay there and let his heart pound him deeper. He could hear it crashing in his ears. The pin-dots of snow burned across his forehead, and his arms and legs glowed. Julie was right about Alaska: it was too warm. Burns closed his eyes. This was where Alec died. When he opened them, he stared up into the falling snow until he felt the lift of vertigo. The roaring silence was nicked by a new sound now, the snow machine buzzing closer and then—as he felt the snow fix and himself rise into the sky, weightless—a face appeared above his head.