Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (40 page)

I walk behind Ashmid, a scrawny seventeen-year-old with hairy arms. He’s dropping raw, red patties onto the broiler belt.

“Broil dem burgers, yeah, yeah,” he sings over and over under his breath.

If I say, “Go wash the tables, Ashmid,” he’ll say, “Yasuh, boss.”

“Tote that bale,” I say.

“Yasuh, boss.”

Janet Sims, staring absently into an empty fry bag, stands next to the shake machine.

“How’s the dining room?” I ask.

“Fine, sir.”

“Straw dispensers?”

“Filled, sir.”

A large mustard stain shaped like a breast discolors her uniform pant’s blue and white pinstripes.

“Go clean something,” I say.

“Yes, sir.”

For the moment the lobby and parking lot are empty. I send two of the boys out to sweep the sidewalks.

VJ says when I sit back down, “How tight’s the ship?”

“Tight. Lazy day.”

“So, tell me another dream.”

“I don’t want to,” I say. “Tell me one of yours.”

“I know what my dreams mean.”

“So do I.”

“No, you don’t.”

VJ is like this. He tells me I’m wrong, and I don’t get mad.

“Okay.” I remember another dream.

This one starts where I’m driving a bus in the fog and I see myself walking down a street, Orchard Avenue. The steering wheel is huge and horizontal. I lean over it and crank hard to steer up the hard bump of the sidewalk. The bus snaps off parking meters; slams aside parked cars. The me on the sidewalk looks up, turns, lumbers away, thighs too fat to run. Dead end. The me on the sidewalk turns, covers his face. I squash me into a blue dumpster. Big splash of hamburger grease on the windshield, just my hands visible at the bottom of the glass, like five-tentacled octopi.

I start laughing, and then someone touches my shoulder. It’s Tillie. She takes my hand and leads me down the aisle; the sun breaks through the fog and slants through the windows. Dust motes circle slowly. She stops at a huge bench seat, schoolbus green vinyl, sits down, lays back, pulls her skirt up. Her pubic hair is black, straight and vast, like a porcupine has curled up between her legs. But Tillie’s real hair is tightly curled and thin. I told her once she ought to just shave, for all there is.

She says, “Climb on the bus, sailor.”

VJ says, “Climb on the bus?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what else happens?”

“That’s it. That’s the end of the dream.”

“And that’s what’s bothering you?” He tilts his head off his right shoulder, moves in a complicated convulsion that switches his head tilt from the right to the left shoulder, a mirror image of his former position.

“Yeah. Sort of.” I can’t tell him about the other stuff that’s started happening when I’m awake. I mean, most people have dreams, but this other stuff seems crazy. Most people believe street people like VJ are insane, because they dress weird or they’re dirty or they mumble to themselves, but I’ve found them to be just like anybody else. I don’t want him thinking I’ve flipped.

He starts humming the Burger Land theme song. “You deserve a dream today,” he sings. I pour him some more coffee. A wind blows the back door shut with a loud squeak and rain splatters against the roof. “How come you don’t have Burger Land dreams?”

That’s scary that he would ask that, because Burger Land is part of what I can’t tell him about. So I say, “You don’t dream what you do. You dream what you want.”

“Exactly.”

“You think I want to kill myself and make love to a woman who looks like my wife but isn’t anatomically correct?”

“Maybe. What do you want?”

I think about Howard Fisk.

Howard Fisk took the night managing job when Mr. White promoted me. The night job is really a split shift and I was glad to give it up. Howard Fisk comes in every morning at nine and inventories produce. Takes an hour. Then we have a meeting and I go over the last night’s receipts with him and he takes the money to the bank. Sometimes he has to exchange cash for change and he brings that back. At four he comes in, eats dinner and starts his shift at four-thirty. I don’t know what he does in the middle of the day.

“Why aren’t our dinners bigger, Howard?” I asked once.

“The kids work hard.” He wouldn’t look up at me.

“Lunch was huge yesterday. Twenty-two hundred bucks. Biggest of the five stores, but you brought in eight hundred for the rest of the day.”

He shrugged his shoulders and hung his head. He’s a little guy, thirty-five, my age. Single. Ex-Navy man. He’ll never be day manager though. Too wimpy. Afraid of everyone.

I tried to get him fired.

“Look at this, Mr. White.” I held up a chart with a night receipts graph that looked like a pyramid starting at the bottom when I took over the nightshift, peaking the week before I changed to days, and dropping off since Howard Fisk took over. “We’re losing money.”

He said, “
You’re
not losing a thing.” I shut up about Howard Fisk. Mr. White will figure it out eventually.

Above the door into the back room, just out of the customers’ sight, a sign says NO PERSONAL MUSIC PLAYERS IN THE PREP AREA. That’s my rule, but I know Howard lets the night crew use them anyway.

Howard Fisk is a doormat. He makes me queasy. He looks at me when I’m not paying attention, but I’ve never caught him at it.

I pushed him into a corner. He tried to stand up straight, but I kept bouncing my hands off his chest. I’ve got this problem with physical confrontations. I mean, I like them. So I go to a group counseling session once a week. It’s part of my separation agreement.

“Howard,” I said, “if you don’t enforce this rule, then what will the employees think?”

“I don’t know.” He tried to sidle away from me. I pushed him again. I must outweigh him by a hundred pounds.

“They’ll think I’m a fool, Howard. We don’t want that, do we?”

“No,” he said.

I wanted to hit him, I mean really belt him, over and over, but I backed off. “Good,” I said.

VJ’s waiting for me to answer.

“Oh, you know, the usual stuff: make a million dollars, get laid a lot, kill Howard Fisk,” I say.

“What does Howard Fisk want?” he says.

“Who cares?”

“What does he dream about?”

I don’t know how to answer that. He finishes his coffee.

VJ says, “I’ve got to go now. It’s almost four o’clock.” If he’s not at the shelter by nightfall, they won’t let him in. I fill a thermos with coffee for him. He fills his pockets with sugar and ketchup packets.

Howard comes in and orders dinner. I see him talking to Rideth at the register. Rather than saying anything to him, I inventory the walk-in freezer. Wisps of steam waterfall off the sides of the fifty pound boxes of fries. I’m hot, and the cool air feels good. In the semidark I start a daydream, which is what I wasn’t able to tell VJ about. My vision doubles, like a migraine, and then I hallucinate.

I’m sitting in the dining room and I can see my hands cradling a burger. I’m bringing it up to my mouth. My fingers are skinny, bony and small, like a child’s. I know that I’m really in the freezer, but I’m also eating a burger. The red checkered print on the Formica table top picks up the red in the molded plastic bench seats. In my hallucination the dining room is empty. I’m thinking about Burger Land’s latest television commercial. The camera pans the walls of a cluttered apartment kitchen where a middle-aged man works on a blueprint of a house, his house, on a tiny table. His pregnant wife tiptoes in behind him carrying a Burger Land takeout tray with two Styrofoam Big Burger boxes and two drinks on it. The camera cuts to the blueprint where the man is penciling in a word, “nursery,” on one of the rooms. The wife looks over his shoulder and sighs. She puts down the tray and they embrace. The focus softens and “Let our dream be your dream” scrolls on the screen.

In my hallucination I think, “People who can’t dream deserve this.” I look up from my burger and my tiny hands and into the rainstorm that is pelting the darkened parking lot. My face is reflected in the glass. It’s Howard Fisk’s face.

I’ve been dreaming Howard Fisk’s dreams.

I shake my head and fall backward against the wall of the freezer. My shirt sticks for a second, pulling out of my pants, as I slide down to sit on the woodslat floor. I toss my clipboard away from me. I shiver, then roll onto my hands and knees and retch loudly once. Nothing comes up. My cheek presses against the frosted wood. In my earphone someone says, “Two Big Cheeses, two large fries and an apple pie to go.” My elbow is pushed up against a cardboard box stiff enough that when I move away it crackles. My breath fogs the air each time I exhale. I imagine my body stiffening, so much meat.

I’m really cold. The employee door creaks open and I hear Tillie ask in the prep area, “Have you seen Carter?”

I push myself up, tuck my shirt in, check my fly. This stuff that’s inside my head, I’ve got to deal with it. It means something.

I’ll go into the dining room and have some onion rings with Howard. Tillie can find me there. Maybe the three of us can talk. I’m not very likable—I know that now—but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.

Notes
From
the
Field

S
o much human language is untranslatable. After I’d scanned and tagged my latest subject, she talked non-stop.

She started by saying, “I don’t do this often. It’s my rule to get to know someone before we . . . you know . . . sleep together.” And she continued as she pulled up nylons, wiggled into a short-skirted black dress and adjusted her hair. My equipment recorded it, of course, for later analysis and synthesis with the rest of the field data. She told me about her sisters and how they were married, “Except Susan, who has been living with this realtor in Seattle for two years, so she’s practically engaged,” and then went on about her job while she reapplied makeup. When she went into the bathroom, I checked the tag’s status; the monitor showed it had already attached itself to the Fallopian tube, where it would stay, transmitting data for about six months until it broke down into undetectable biological components.

Upbeat, bright, until she was ready to go, she asked me what about half of them do. “Will I see you again?” Her face seemed poised, carefully blank.

I shrugged. A useful gesture, communicating messages in a wide range.

She took a deep breath, a shuddery one, and looked away, which often means the subject is on an emotional edge. I hadn’t seen it coming. I hardly ever do. Reading human facial expressions is my hobby, not part of my mission, but I don’t feel I’m very good at it. She looked around my apartment, at the art prints in frames, at the expensive stereo equipment, at the new furniture, which reinforced my masquerade as a young business executive, and said, “Don’t mind me. It’s all blather.”

I’ve discovered humans in the bars are often lonely, a little desperate. The sex is an amelioration.

Blather: In this context, probably meaning language that covers or replaces the message the sender would prefer to communicate. Although all human languages possess words used in this way, there is no Lasarént equivalent.

The last
Lasarént
abduction of a human for examination and tagging occurred in 1967 near San Antonio, Texas. The three other extrasolar races quit the practice before 1964. They attracted too much attention. Memory adjustments weren’t perfect. That’s the nature of technology, imperfection. So the plan to study humanity entered its second phase, infiltration. Still, abduction stories appeared in the tabloids. For a while there was considerable bickering among the four races about who was cheating, but it became evident that human behavior is often delusional.

My first field experience coincided with our last abduction. The human lived in Tremaine, an hour’s drive from San Antonio along a twisting, graveled road. We stalled his truck, anaesthetized him and moved him to an exploratory vehicle. Some tests require a lively nervous system, however, so he was brought near consciousness. He looked at us from the table, eyes half closed. “Jesus, Mary, son of a bitch. It’s the goddamned Rapture.”

I’ve been in the field ever since, over thirty years.

Rapture: In this context, probably meaning a religious experience of being transported to heaven. Some confusion here over his use of the article “the” instead of the more commonly expected, “a.” Other terms for this include “the final reward,” and “coming home.” See “euphemism.” Beyond that, the utterance resists translation.

For three weeks I’d been collecting information and tagging specimens in singles bars in the Old Town area of Sacramento when I ran into a
Trosfrilla
operative. My bioenhancements and cosmetic surgeries, some of them quite radical and painful, allowed me to pass as a male human. I had the more difficult task of studying females.
Lasarént
field operators disguised as females, using similar techniques in tagging males, reported as many as three or four specimens a night. One evening I attracted two females to my apartment at the same time, which nearly overloaded my scanning equipment, but other nights I only collected notes. In other countries, of course, we use practices appropriate for their cultures.

A converted riverboat, the Sleepy Jean Grill and Suds, permanently docked near the Port of Sacramento, was the next bar on my schedule. A place couldn’t be visited too often, or I might have to deal with a previous contact a second time. There is no scientific need to scan the subject twice once it has been tagged, but females I’d met previously often ruined my chances for a new encounter by talking until the bar closed. I parked in the lot, and crossed a gang-plank over the water to enter.

Inside, the bar stretched the length of the narrow room and was made of weathered barn planks, heavily varnished. Neon beer signs flashed behind Venetian blinds. No cover. A local hangout. Hard to get to if you didn’t know it was there. Grill behind the bar to the side, where a cook flipped burgers and fried potatoes. Lots of cooking odors, beer and a mossy undertone from the river. Red lights. A small dance floor flanked by large speakers at one end, a pair of pool tables at the other. Tables in between. In a larger singles bar I’d have better luck attracting someone, but I had plenty of data from those venues. Now I was more interested in atypical cases.