Flight Behavior (20 page)

“Mother and Dad feed the dogs,” he said.

“Roy spends half his life at our house, in case you didn’t notice. When I bummed some Purina off Hester last time, she let me know her feelings. So we need dog food.”

Cub studied the offerings and obediently hefted the store brand from the bottom shelf, priced at $4 for the fifteen-pound bag, undoubtedly made of garbage. Rather than the $10 name-brand bag placed at eye level. Cub had retained the lesson from the coffee aisle, she appreciated that, but she felt terrible skimping on Roy. He was a perfect dog, he didn’t deserve poverty rations. He should apply for a position in a better household.

“So that’s your boss,” she said.

“Yep, that’s Greg. Large and in charge.”

“You could take him,” Dellarobia said. “Blindfolded. I’d put money on you.”

Cub smiled. “Here’s what you need for Christmas.” He held up a ceramic mug that read, “Out of My Mind, Back in Five Minutes.”

She grinned back. Maybe this fight was over. Maybe they’d even have make-up sex. If they could get out of here without another go-round over the kids and their g-d Real Christmas. She wondered how many divorces could be traced directly to holiday spending. “You know what, hon? We need to face the toy aisle again.”

Cub followed her down the end zone and back into the mind-numbing array of unacceptable choices. She picked up a toy ax and jovially pretended to murder Mickey Mouse. Cub’s mind was elsewhere. He blew his breath out, looking worried. She put down her weapon. “What? Did Greg say something?”

“No, just . . . I’m thinking about that logging. How are we supposed to decide?”

“I don’t know. Look at the facts?”

“What are they?” he asked.

As if she knew. They both stood flummoxed before the T-Rex power squirt guns, sonic blasters, and light-up puffer worm-balls that smelled insidiously toxic.

“Well, for one thing,” she said, “when you clear-cut a mountain it can cause a landslide. I’m not crying wolf here, Cub, it’s a fact. You can see it happening where they logged over by the Food King, there’s a river of mud sliding over the road. And that’s exactly what happened in Mexico, where the butterflies were before. They clear-cut the mountain, and a flood brought the whole thing down on top of them. You should see the pictures on the Internet.”

She wished she hadn’t seen them herself, they haunted her so. There were children involved, a school buried. Her mind would not quit posing horror-movie images against her will, and questions she didn’t want asked. Would a village just flatten like a house of cards? Or would the homes lift and float, the way vehicles did, giving a person some time to get out?

“That’s Mexico,” Cub said. “This is here.”

“Yeah. You know what I keep thinking? Our house is
ours
,” she said. “It’s not much, and I’m the first one to say it. But we’ve made every payment since we married. The house is the one thing you and I have got.”

Her intensity got his attention. “Did you tell
him
about that business in Mexico?”

She knew who he meant. Ovid Byron. “No, I haven’t. It’s too weird. It’s like the butterflies came here, and we might be next. Like they’re a sign of something.” She was trying to keep the scientists out of her argument for keeping the mountain intact. Their wonder, their global worries, these of all things would not help her case with Cub. Teams had been chosen, and the scientists were not
us
, they were
them
. That’s how Cub would see it. Everyone had to play.

“This rain won’t keep up,” he said. “They’re saying it’s a hundred-year flood. So it won’t happen again for another hundred years.”

Dellarobia knew this was wrong, bad luck didn’t work that way. A person could have a long losing streak. But she didn’t understand that well enough to explain. “It just seems shortsighted,” she said. “If we log the mountain, then the trees are gone. But the debt isn’t. Does it make sense to turn everything upside down just to make one payment? Like there won’t be another one next month, and the month after that?”

“It’s just the one balloon. Things will perk up. Dad will get more contracts.”

“And meanwhile our house might get buried in mud, that’s the deal?”

“Dad says they wouldn’t log up there if there was any risk to it.”

“The hell they wouldn’t. You notice he’s not planning to do any logging up above his and Hester’s house.”

“Well, you try discussing it with Dad,” he said. “Would Preston like this?”

She took the flat, shrink-wrapped package he handed her. A dinosaur puzzle. “Not really,” she said. “That’s kind of for younger kids.” Not for the first time, she thought of Mako and Bonnie, wondering if they’d played with toys like these, or if their parents gave them educational things for a head start. If Preston wanted to go to college someday, he was already behind. That, too, went with playing on Cub’s team. She looked up from the puzzle.

“Do you know what they’re saying about the butterflies being here? Dr. Byron and them? They said it means something’s really gone wrong.”

“Wrong with what?” Cub asked.

“The whole earth, if you want to know. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff they said, Cub. It’s like the End of Days. They need some time to figure out what it all means. Don’t you think that’s kind of important?”

“Well, if the butterflies fly off somewhere, the doctor and them can go park their camper behind somebody else’s barn.”

“What if there’s no place else for them to fly away to?” she asked.

“There’s always someplace else to go,” Cub said, in a tone that said he was signing off: Worries like that are not for people like us. We have enough of our own. He wasn’t wrong.

“But what if there isn’t?” she persisted quietly.

“How about this, for Preston? I had these,” Cub said. Tinkertoys, or a plastic version of that, in an enormous boxed kit. It was not your father’s Tinkertoys, so to speak. Now they had countless extras, including a little motor to run your creations around on the floor until someone stepped on them and punctured an artery.

She and Cub both inhaled at the price. He put it back.

“So your dad says take the money and run. What do you say?”

“I don’t know.” Cub blew out his breath, looking at the ceiling. “It would just be nice to have some room. To have a real Christmas for the kids.”

It would be. Of course. She wanted the world for Cordie and Preston. But what did that even mean? “What’s
real
?” she asked. “Anything in this store? We should just buy them each a box of the most sugary cereal there is, and go home. They’re so young, would they really know the difference?”

Cordie might actually go for the sugar-pop Christmas, but Preston wouldn’t. Everyone got children so jacked up about Santa Claus. Preston had told his kindergarten teacher that Santa was bringing him a wristwatch, information that Miss Rose passed on to Dellarobia with a conspiratorial grin, as if she’d done the hard part. Now the parents only had to make the thing materialize. This afternoon she’d kept her eye out for a toy one, but what a letdown that would be, a plastic watch from Santa. She could already see her son’s brave Christmas-morning face, trying not to be disappointed. The watch he coveted was Mako’s, an outsize black thing with tiny yellow buttons, timers and such. Mako had let him play with it. Those students were sweet to Preston, nothing like television geeks, actually the opposite, surprisingly astute about a child’s interest and abilities. So now Preston had a killer crush on the whole bunch, dying for their notice. He spent afternoons lurking around the trailer pretending to turn over rocks, working his angles, provoking Dellarobia into a protective defensiveness. He shouldn’t throw himself on his sword out there. Why should he even see things he couldn’t have?

Cub was studying a large packaged thing that looked like a toy television, with appendages. “You know what he really wants. Super Mario Brothers and Battletron.”

“He just hears about those from other kids,” Dellarobia argued. “He doesn’t really know what they are yet.”

“We should get him a Wii.”

“So you could play with it,” she said, feeling exasperation rise.

“It’s educational,” Cub maintained.

“If you’re interested in your son’s education, get him a computer. If you happen to find a wallet full of money. He’s getting on the Internet over at Hester’s, looking at pictures. He can just about read, did you know that? He knows a bunch of words.”

“Great. If he turns out smart like you I’ll be outnumbered for good.”

She felt blindsided. “Being
smart
, you’re going to hold that against me? What kind of message is
that
sending the kids?”

“You tell me. If you want them to have a computer and stuff, we need the logging money. Or”—he spread his hands—“we can keep our trees. And be hicks.”

“Right. We cut down the trees and get ourselves buried in mud like a bunch of hillbillies, because we’re afraid of raising our kids to be dumb hillbillies. Really you’re saying we just do it because
that’s who we are
,” she said, too loudly. “Who
are
we?”

“Dellarobia, for Christ’s sakes, do you have to make everything hard?”

“Hester agrees with me,” she said. “Your mother doesn’t think it’s right to clear-cut the mountain. She told me that, the day she came to the house.”

He looked at her, uncomprehending. Dellarobia watched as he rearranged the whole game in his head, and saw his features slacken, defeat rising through to the top. The women who ruled, against him. Of course he would see it that way. They faced each other, a towering, morose man and his small, miserable wife, both near tears. How could two people both lose an argument?

“All I’m asking is just one simple thing,” he said. “For the kids to have their Christmas.”

People wrecked their worlds for less. She knew that. She’d been so keen on her one great day in the sack, she almost threw away everything, kids included. What a hypocrite, feeling sorry for herself now because she couldn’t buy them yuppie-grade toys. She suddenly felt so allergic to Chinese plastic she couldn’t breathe. “When you get your one simple thing figured out, let me know,” she said. “I’ll be out in the parking lot.”

Having a seventy-five-cent smoke, she thought bleakly. She headed for the exit lane, but something stopped and held her eye. Of all things, a cloth potholder shaped like a monarch butterfly. Unbelievable. It was hanging in a display of incidental items, jar openers and such, as if it had been passing through and landed there for a moment’s rest. The colors made it stand out. She reached on tiptoe to take it down and found that it was surprisingly well made, really like nothing else she’d seen in here. The black stripes were accurately placed, right down to the two black dots on the lower wings. Did they even
have
monarchs in China? She did not know. But somewhere far from here, someone had taken the trouble to get this exactly right. She smoothed it in her hands and pictured a real person, a small woman in a blue paper hairnet seated at a sewing machine. Someone her own size, a mother most likely, working the presser foot up and down to maneuver the careful lines and acute angles of that stitching. Scrolling out a message, whatever it might be.
Get me out of here.

And what if there was no other place?

She strode to the checkout lane and flipped the potholder on the counter. The yellow-apron lady picked it up for a closer look, observing the quality. “Now that’s real pretty,” she said, sounding surprised. “That’d make a nice hostess gift.”

“Actually it’s for my son,” Dellarobia said, rounding up four crumpled dollars from her coat pockets. The lady took her money and tilted her head back to look through the close-up part of her glasses, examining the nut-case customer.

Dellarobia shrugged, pointing at the little black dots. “Not that anybody probably cares. But it’s a male.”

T
hanks to Dovey, she went through with the Christmas party. Dovey was keen to check out this Ovid Byron figure, and scolded Dellarobia for her reticence. “When did you get to be such a wimp?”

“Am I a wimp?” She racked her brain for evidence to the contrary. She thought of herself opening the door that day when Crystal had cowered behind it, hiding from a family of Mexicans averaging less than five feet in height. But common sense did not equal courage, and neither did wearing a fox stole to church. She did recall what it felt like to turn heads every time she walked into a room, as small as she was, empowered somehow with solidity. Confident that she had everything in her that larger people contained, with no wasted space, and a whole lot more in mind. She and Dovey used to drive over to Cleary and hang out in bars pretending to be airline stewardesses or software engineers, whatever they’d cooked up en route. It had still seemed possible they might become these things, which gave credence to their constructions. No matter how outrageous the story, men believed them. Once Dellarobia put on her glasses and claimed to be Jane Goodall’s assistant. She and Dovey had seen a show on this lady scientist, and had plenty of chimp facts at hand. The guy who’d been hitting on Dellarobia turned around and asked if she could get him a job. He didn’t even pause to wonder what Jane Goodall’s executive team would be doing in Cleary.

Today Dovey made her a deal. She would make the grocery run for the party when she got off work at three, while Dellarobia dug around in the junk drawers of her former valor, trying to locate the nerve. Somewhere between outrage and giving up, that was where she found it. She was sick of begging for ornaments to hang on a tree, as part of some year-end conspiracy of alleged joy and goodwill arriving from heaven with no hard currency as backup. Fed up with stories about poor people with good hearts raising their damn cups of kindness. Sick of needing permission to throw a party in her own home, and not asking, because she was too proud to beg favors in this family. That’s how the simple folk lived, in her particular Christmas story. It was overdue for a rewrite. After taking half a tablet from her ten-year-old Valium bottle to keep from losing her nerve, she tromped out to the trailer and stuck a note on the door, inviting them all to come over when they got back from their day’s work.