Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (39 page)

When finished, he contemplated the length of the Ark. In the middle, the sun glared, intolerably bright, nearly a third of its daily distance across the sky. Around it, trees pointed toward the axis; cliffs, hills, bluffs, stretches of meadow, streams (water pumped from the lakes at their bottoms to springs at their tops) surrounded the light. An unbroken landscape, a whole one—no horizon separating any one part from another. He found this vision comforting, a perfect visual metaphor for life’s unity, and he couldn’t feel Dr. Roam’s despair, or any of the others. Thinking of the children, Martin wrote invitations to a Christmas party at sunset, Christmas Eve. He set the place, the central-Ark observation area, then sent them. He turned back to his equipment. There was work to be done; he had a party to prepare.

Martin arrived early, an hour before sunset. He took a tube transport that traveled on the Ark’s outside. An elevator carried him and the supplies to a flat, sandy clearing overlooking a small cirque. At the hollow’s bottom a lake reflected darkly. A startled mountain goat scrambled from the water’s edge, tumbling small rocks as it leaped to the top. Most splashed through thin ice into the lake, and the goat disappeared into a boulder field.

He’d pressed the kitchen to make candy canes, and hung them from leafless bushes surrounding the clearing. As he hung the last one, the early guests stepped out of the elevator.

Four-year-old Elise, the youngest child aboard, found the first candy. She held the cane out for everyone to see, and soon the other children busied themselves finding more of the sweets, even the Nyuen twins who were thirteen. Talk was muted. Almost mournful. Martin remembered Dr. Roam’s pronouncement, “We have no reason to celebrate.” The adults clustered around the radiant heaters, warming their hands. Robyn solemnly poked through brittle branches, looking for the last of the candy.

Martin crouched beside her. “Where’s your mom?”

Robyn tucked a cane into her shirt pocket. She looked down, scuffing dirt with the toe of her shoe. “She went to see the wolves. She’s been gone all day. I told her it was Christmas Eve, but she had to work.”

“Ah, that’s too bad.” Martin gave her another candy cane from the extras he kept in a pouch. She added it to her collection.

“Thank you. I’ll save them until later.”

“There’s hot chocolate in the thermoses,” he said.

Robyn sighed and headed for the crowd. Now that the candy had been found, all stood near the heaters.

Hilliert, an older biologist, called his son, Brad. “We really have to go, Martin. This was nice of you, but I don’t think we’re in the spirit.” Other scientists nodded their heads. “It’s cold, and we ought to get the kids home.”

Martin glanced at the sun. It had reached the western wall and begun its dimming cycle. Chill stung his cheeks. “I have a surprise, but we have to wait a few minutes. There’s a thermos with hot chocolate that’s mostly rum in my bag over there, if you want to break that out.”

Hilliert raised his eyebrows and put his hand on his son’s head. “We’ll stay a bit longer, Brad. Maybe we could sing a carol.”

Gradually the sun faded out. Long shadows became less and less distinct, and soon the only light came from the heaters glowing orange in the clearing’s middle. Martin stood behind the circle of parents and children, hands thrust deep into his pockets. Robyn tucked her hands into her armpits and didn’t join the singing. They finished two verses of “Good King Wenceslas” before someone said, “It’s pretty darned dark out here, Martin. Where’s the moon?”

He checked his wrist monitor. A counter clicked to zero. To the east, a point of red light appeared. “What is that?” the same voice asked.

Martin turned. At the west end, a green light flickered on. The scientists and their children turned from the heaters and looked up. The first two lights floated quickly to the center of the sky to stop a few degrees apart like a red and green star. Then new lights appeared at each end, a blue one to the east, and an orange to the west. Soon, a line of colored points reached from end to end, much smaller than the moon or sun, not nearly as bright. Martin barely made out his own hands in the diffuse light, and then, following the program he designed, they began to pulse individually from bright to dark and back again.

The elevator door opened, its white light silhouetting Dr. Kette as she stepped out. Robyn cried out, “Mom, look. Christmas lights!” The door closed, and only the colored lights illuminated the world.

A hand touched his leg. “Is that you, Martin?” Robyn said.

“Yes.”

“Mommy came. She came to your party.”

Vaguely Martin could make out Dr. Kette standing beside him; he mostly saw the colors in her eyes as she looked up.

“This is lovely, Martin.”

They stood for a long time. Behind them one of the kids said, “Let’s sing ‘Silent Night,” and they did; their voices filled the clearing.

“Did you see the wolves?” asked Martin.

“Yes,” said Dr. Kette. She held her daughter’s hand. Their breath steamed in the frigid air. “The mother whelped,” she said. “Four perfect pups. They were mutagen free.”

Martin couldn’t tell if she were crying.

In the darkness, in the sky beyond, he saw glitters like stars, and realized the icy ponds and streams on the roof of the world reflected the display. It was an effect he’d never seen. The moon didn’t reflect this way. In the day the sun revealed land and vegetation, but in this light, there were sparkles, red ones and green, blue and orange. Multicolored tinsel strings; long, glass blue lines shading into the orange of frozen creeks; red fog rising into green, rising into blue; green snowy meadows blushing red then yellow; orange mountain ridges transformed; star glisters blinking everywhere—a thousand stars over Bethlehem—shards of Christmas light, changing in the changing night.

The wolves were born whole.

He’d never seen the Ark so beautiful.

Working PushOut

Our dream is your dream

—Burger Land advertisement

I
don’t trust my dreams anymore; I don’t believe they’re mine. A busy lunch with customers lined up outside the door and me sliding my hip down the aluminum prep counter’s rounded edge, bagging burgers and fries, grabbing drinks and pushing them out, that’s real. I can trust a lunch rush but not these dreams. Not the stuff inside my head.

Lunch is over. Two o’clock to three-thirty. Orders will pick up after this until we’re into the dinner crowd. Of course, I’ll be home. That’s Howard Fisk’s shift. I’m sitting in back by the newly delivered produce talking to VJ. The green smell from hundreds of heads of freshly cut lettuce overpowers the old burger grease and detergent odors. He’s sipping coffee that he sweetened with half a dozen packs of sugar. I offered to pay for it. As always, he said, “Put it on the Visa,” pulled from his frayed overcoat a card that’s held together with masking tape, and put it on the table between us. I’m listening to the orders through my earphone in case they need me up front: “Ten Bigs down, please,” says someone. The reception is tinny; voices indistinguishable. “Four with cheese.” Someone else says, “Six cokes, two diet, one no ice.” A long pause. The dead air hisses quietly. Then, “Carter’s a hog.” I grimace. Seven employees have transmitters. Four of them come from Lincoln High where I taught history last year. I can’t tell who said it.

VJ says, “Voices in your brain, Carter?” He hunches his right shoulder up and rests his ear on it. A gray-streaked lock of hair hangs over his eyes.

“Always,” I say. He may be a bum, but I can tell him anything. What will it matter? He listens. Lots of times he asks questions, too. Always interesting ones. Nothing about how many sixteen ounce cups I’ll need for the next week, or how many gallons of fry oil. Most of the street people I give coffee to are good listeners.

I tell him about Howard Fisk, about how much I hate him. I tell him about the stuff inside my head.

VJ asked me about the dreams before I ever mentioned them. A month ago, right after they hired Howard, VJ said, “What’d you dream last night?” And that was kind of funny, because I never dream, but when he asked I remembered that I
had
dreamed that night. I’ve dreamed regularly since then, too.

In the dream I am sitting by the cases of lettuce, like I am now, doing preinventory, marking my sheet with a pencil, which Howard Fisk will erase before he writes his count in pen, and then I’ll signature each total in ink after I’ve confirmed his work. Triple check. I purposely miscount sometimes to find out if Howard actually does his job. Only, in the dream, I’m seeing myself rather than being myself. My hair is thinning on top. My shoulders are brutish, hands fat, fingers grossly squat, belly sagging onto my lap, white shirt greasy, black pants greasy, black shoes greasy. A funhouse mirror version of myself. A troll me. In real life I’m . . . husky, not like this vision.

I hit the dream me with the lyepit pole, a heavy steel rod with a hooked end we use to pull the broiler parts out of the lye each morning. My head wraps around the pole. No blood but lots of hamburger grease. I strike myself again and again, pounding myself into a flat, slickly shining blob.

I woke up, my T-shirt bunched under my armpits, my blankets tangled around my feet. I went into the bathroom and toweled the sweat off my chest and back. I put baby powder between my legs to keep them from sticking together.

I told VJ about the dream, and he said, “Tell me something mean about yourself.” I thought about it for a while, then said, “The nice thing about managing a Burger Land is I can fire sixteen-year-olds for being immature.”

I learned about sixteen-year-old immaturity in my brief teaching career. “You’ve got to learn from the past,” is what I said my first day in American History at Lincoln. I was wearing a suit that I’d bought just for teaching. Thirty-two sophomores sitting at their desks stared right through me. That was my best day at the school. At the end of the third week, someone had written my name under the hugely fat caricature of Boss Tweed on the bulletin board. The principal asked me to quit at the end of the year.

I fired my first employee the third day after I took the day manager’s job. Her name was Femi and her parents were Nigerian. She had burned a basket of fries.

“But, Mr. Carter, you told me to fill the napkins.” Her huge lower lip trembled. Her hair net pulled kinky hair tight away from her forehead. Her dark skin looked dusty to me. She would be a junior at Lincoln High in the fall. I’d seen this act before, the quivering voice, the sincerity, the dropping of the head. All high school students adopt it when they blow a responsibility.

“Food in the fryer comes first,” I said. We went back and forth for a couple of minutes, then she got belligerent. That’s step two in the immature person’s repertoire of tactics.

She shouted, “You tell me to do one thing and I’m doing another. Am I supposed to be telepathic?”

Some of the lunch crew on break were watching us. Howard Fisk had come in to pick up his paycheck. He held his little woman, hands up to his mouth, and looked pained. There’s got to be respect. I fired her.

She said, “I hope you can’t sleep at night,” and flipped me off when she stomped out the back door.

In the summer the day crew has thirty to thirty-five teenagers working. I fired one every four or five days. At the time, nights were great.

VJ says, “How is your wife?” His face is dirty, but the coffee has cleaned his top lip, which is red and chapped. I tell him.

Tillie and I don’t make love. She shares an apartment with a nurse, and I see her twice a month when she picks up her check at the end of my shift. I’ll see her tonight. I’m tense, thinking about seeing her. I check my fly all the time, as if I’m afraid she’ll come in and I’ll be exposed. Usually she comes through the employee door, doesn’t smile, talks in monosyllables, wears nice clothes I didn’t buy her. She’s lost weight since we separated.

Last time we talked I said, “How are you doing, Tillie?”

“Fine.”

“Car running okay?”

“Yes.”

“I was thinking of taking some graduate courses at the university. Maybe something towards an M.B.A.”

“Good for you.”

“Do you want a burger?”

“No. Thanks.”

She went out through the dining room, talked to Howard Fisk, who was eating his dinner before the night crew came in. She always talks to Howard. I watched her through the one-way mirror in my office. She ate one of his onion rings. He didn’t look at her. Kept his head down. When she went out the front door, he smiled at her and half-waved. She smiled back. She hasn’t smiled at me for years.

VJ says, “I stay away from women.”

Despite the almost palpable odor of lettuce, and the underlying hints of lye, cooking meat, old grease, soaps, Styrofoam, cardboard and plastics, VJ smells like an alley, a reminder of trashcans, a wetgutter. I think the women stay away from him.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I say, and I go up front to see how they are doing.

The secret to running a fast food franchise is knowing what the customer wants before he can think to ask you for it. Most of the time I work pushout. The rush adrenalizes me. People lined up out the door. Green-screened television monitors filled with orders. Voices whispering in my earphone. My hands flying. Burgers out from under the heat lamps and into the bags (mayonnaise makes the waxy paper wrappings slick). Fries fresh from the vats hot enough to blister if I held them that long. Drinks all in order, all in a row.

I’ll say something like, “That’s two quarter pound Burger Land burgers, three small fries, a small coke, a small lemonade and a coffee.” I’ll place the two bags on the counter. The order might have flickered onto the monitor eleven seconds ago. I’ve timed myself. During the rush I
average
fourteen seconds an order.

I’ll say, “Would you like some ketchup with those fries?” I throw a package in. Some people want the condiments, some don’t. I’ve got a feel for condiments. Hardly anyone asks me for something before I ask them if they want it. The owner, Mr. White, told me that I’d have to read their minds if I was going to be good. In the rush, when I’m on automatic and my analytical side has shut down, I can. I’m good at clearing my mind.