Golden Age (18 page)

They left out of Midway. Spying on planes parked in the field or those he could see in the hangars helped Frank give up his fantasy—it was rather like trading in the Mercedes for a Bentley; why would you, but how could you not? In some places these days, if you showed up in a Mercedes, they made you park in the servants’ lot.

After they put their headsets on and took off, Jack started talking about how being in the Midwest reminded him of a side trip he’d made with his wife to a place called “The House on the Rock,” in southern
Wisconsin. Before he bought the plane, they had been driving from Madison to Minneapolis, where she was from, and decided to go past Taliesin, the place Wright had built near where his uncles lived, and where he had grown up. No getting into Taliesin, but then there was this parking lot full of cars, and a sign that said “The House on the Rock,” so they stopped. Craziest house you ever saw—perched on a two-hundred-foot-tall monolith, built in the supposedly Japanese style, and so full of junk and crap…

They were now out of Chicago, and this was the part Frank loved about a light plane: you flew fairly low. The earth rolled and bobbled beneath you; that you could see everything so clearly and yet pass over it so smoothly was a great gift to the senses. They were coming up on the river now, marking that line between Illinois and Iowa that Frank knew so well from every map he had ever seen but always found strange when he flew over it, as if a map had been given reality. The Mississippi was clear and attractive around here, almost blue. And then, past the greenery of the riverbanks and onward across the fields of corn—yes, he would talk to Jesse about the corn harvest and the bean harvest, but the rains were pretty good this year, not like the flooding the year before. Frank had sent Jesse a check for fifty grand in February; did Joe know about it? Frank was a realist about the farm: some years it paid for itself and some years it didn’t, and that was not Jesse’s fault, but Joe might be uncomfortable….

The storm cell appeared off to the northwest, as they were passing Cedar Rapids, at first an isolated fuzziness in the dusk—there were even stars to the west and southwest. It seemed unaccompanied by any associated cells, but they couldn’t really see—even Frank, whose eyes were if anything sharper now than they had been, couldn’t make out the edges or the shape of the cell. Jack said, “There could be more behind it; it’s hot here, and the line of storms usually runs northwest to southeast, especially across the plains.” He radioed Cedar Rapids. The tower there said they didn’t have much on the radar. They flew on, Jack changing course a little to the south.

When the cell hit, the plane jumped like a cat, up and to the side, and Jack leaned back, his hands tight on the yoke, which was quivering. He pressed down on the right rudder pedal to correct the yaw, which had been caused by the sudden turbulence. Night had come. Frank said, “How far are we from Ames?”

“About sixty miles is my guess.”

They would be over Tama, then. Forty miles southeast of the farm, where, he imagined, Jesse was glancing out the window, counting the seconds between flashes of lightning and the subsequent booms of thunder. He noticed that it was too dark to see much, and suddenly water was flowing horizontally over the windshield. He said, “I don’t remember there being a control tower or anything like that in Ames. You want to head to Des Moines?”

“That could be worse. Maybe this is just an isolated cell.”

Frank nodded. He wasn’t worried: he was so used to being in an airplane after all these years that he was still perfectly comfortable. He said, “The first time Jim ever took me up, he said he loved planes because a house was like a tomb and a plane was like a passing thought.” That wasn’t exactly what he’d said. Frank elaborated, “In a plane you could vanish.”

“That sounds like him. My grandfather is fourteen years younger than him. All the brothers would do this when his name came up at parties”—he spun his finger around his ear—“but they loved him.”

“He’s a charming man,” said Frank. “You look a little like him when he was your age.”

“That’s a compliment.”

Turbulence buffeted the plane again, a harder smack this time, and the nose dipped. Jack leaned way back, gripping the yoke, and then turned it to counteract the roll. Above the whine of the engine, Frank could hear the thunder, the claps getting closer together. Outside the window, lightning strikes had devolved into a steady flare. He wanted to say some idle thing about the strangeness of the weather, something that would reassure both Jack and himself, but the noise was too loud now. The plane rocked again. In the glaring light, Jack began to look worried, then laughed. He had hundreds of hours of flight experience, but, Frank thought, glancing at his profile, maybe not this exact experience.

The next thing that happened was that lights on the ground appeared in the windshield and then disappeared again as Jack corrected the pitch of the plane.

“There it is,” said Jack, his voice steady.

Below and in front of them, the Ames airport, such as it was, stretched wetly to the northwest, dark, narrow, and short, a few trees
to either side, but no tower, only two parallel rows of dim runway lights, nothing welcoming. Now the plane was rocking and rolling, or, as Janet might say about a horse, bucking.

Jack radioed the tower in Des Moines. Through crackling static, they said that the storm cell seemed to be right over Ames—where were they? Jack said, “Landing in Ames.”

The voice said, “Good luck.”

Frank kept his mouth shut and stared at the runway. He could sense Jack beside him, intent, holding tight to the yoke as the plane shifted and bobbed, as the approaching earth bounced and shivered. Frank shoved his feet forward and leaned back in his seat, as if he could counteract all of these forces with just his weight. They touched down, safe for a moment, but then the plane swerved and went skidding past the dark buildings out Frank’s window, not seeming to slow down at all, reminding Frank that there were many ways to die in a plane crash, and nose-first was only one of them. But the turf at the end of the runway caught them, and the plane shuddered, halted. They sat quietly within the noise of the pounding rain for a long moment. Jack said only, “Oh, shit,” as he cut the engines.

Frank said, “Jim will be proud when I tell him about this.”

Frank could see that Jack’s hand was trembling on the yoke. His own hand, which came up to wipe the moisture from his lips, was trembling, too. Jack took several deep breaths. Frank checked his watch. It was eight o’clock. They had left Chicago at six-fifty. Amazing how long those seventy minutes felt, thought Frank.

Then the storm seemed to let up, and it was true, there did not appear to be another behind it, or, at least, right behind it. Jack got out of his seat and unlatched the door. He said, “I told my contact that I would call him to pick us up. He can put you up, too. They live right in town.”

“Did I mention that I went to college here?”

“Really?” Jack was struggling into his raincoat.

After near-death, practicalities.

Really, thought Frank. They were only a mile or so from where, at seventeen, he’d pitched his tent beside the Skunk River.

Jack said, “Be right back. We’ve got to figure out a way to get the plane off the runway—but we may be stuck in the mud.” He disappeared. Frank stared out the window, watching as Jack, hunched
over, ran toward the building where there probably was a pay phone. Then he decided to have a look around: the cabin was tight, and he needed to stand up straight and stretch his shoulders and hips. He had been tense. Yes, he was willing to admit that.

When he got to the bottom of the steps, he couldn’t see much—it was still raining fairly steadily. The fields to the south and west were not quite flat, and sloped away to a dark mass—probably trees and bushes along a creek. Frank walked toward the edge of the runway to take a piss, thinking how utterly familiar the landscape was to him, not only how it looked, but also the scent of the rain and the dirt and the summer vegetation. He unzipped his fly.

—

IN PALO ALTO
, Andy was in the kitchen when the phone rang, squatting before the open refrigerator. She was supposed to be getting some blueberries for Jonah, but, really, they were just staring into the lighted space, and Jonah was telling her the names of things he liked: “Duce, mik, buberries.” He was a mild-mannered, systematic child. Andy pointed to the catsup and said, “Catsup?” Jonah had eaten a dab of catsup on his turkey burger that day for lunch. The phone screeched twice, and Andy went on the alert—she hadn’t heard Janet’s phone so clearly before. Then there was silence, and then she heard Janet say, “Oh my God in heaven! Oh!” Andy stood up, picked up Jonah, carefully closed the refrigerator door, and went into the dining room. She knew it was Frank. She had agreed to the plane idea, but she hadn’t been happy about it—old plane, long trip, unknown pilot. It didn’t help that she had watched
Sweet Dreams
the night before on TV, and thought of Frank the moment that plane hit the cliff. She said, “There’s been a crash.”

Janet whipped around and held out her arms for Jonah. This moment, when she handed Jonah over, was the last moment of her normal life, so Andy did it slowly, carefully, kissing Jonah on the cheek, as if she were kissing him goodbye. Had she kissed Frank goodbye? Or had she run to her gate at Newark, late as usual, just turning and waving? She couldn’t remember.

Janet said, “Mom, he was struck by lightning.”

Andy’s first reaction was a quick, rueful laugh, just at the rightness of it. Janet turned away, and Andy felt the rest of her life entering her
body, along her nerve endings. So many times she had thought Frank could die—in the war, in his plane, in his restless perambulations here and there—and then he hadn’t, and now he had. She got dizzy; she placed the palms of both her hands against the wall and closed her eyes.

Andy agreed that they would have the funeral in Denby, that Frank would be buried next to his uncle Rolf, down the line from his mother and father, even though this meant that she would then be without him. Frank had never said whether he wanted to be cremated or interred, or where. When other people their age started talking about their burial plans (ashes tossed into the Atlantic, composted, marble slab, whatever), Frank always said nothing. Maybe, she thought, he really did think of himself as immortal, or maybe he just didn’t care.

Andy flew into Des Moines, then rented a car. She drove straight to the funeral home, walked in, and had an immediate argument with the funeral-home director about whether, that very minute, she would be allowed to see the body. The director said that it was not a good idea, that she would be too strongly affected. He was about forty-five, smooth, and good-looking. Andy said, “I am not leaving until you show me the body.”

He shook his head a little, but turned and walked toward the back of the room; she followed him through a door. Frank was lying on a triangular, tilted table, his head lower than his feet. He was naked, with a sheet over everything except his face. The funeral director stopped, expecting Andy to stop, too—wasn’t this enough for her? But, no, it wasn’t. She walked over and put her hand on Frank’s forehead. It was icy cold. She pushed away the sheet. He was not disemboweled or anything, if she had been expecting that. He looked like a wax effigy of himself, except that a fan of red lines proliferated, a slender tree, from his hairline above his right cheek, down the side of his face and his neck, then along his shoulder, and down his abdomen. Andy knew that most people survived lightning strikes, sometimes more than one, but the red vine seemed to encompass his entire body, to claim him for another world. The Upjohn boy, whom she hadn’t met before, said that he had heard the clap of thunder, seen the lightning, but not realized that anything had happened until he climbed back into the plane and saw that Frank was gone. He’d been looking
out the windshield, and by the light of another flash, he saw Frank stretched out on the grass beyond the pavement of the runway. Why Frank had gone there, no one knew—there was nothing there but dirt. Andy ran her hand down the chilled corpse, head to toe, sensed with her fingers the fact that Frank was dead. She leaned over and kissed him. She thought, this is what a girl who grows up expecting Ragnarök, madness, freezing deaths on the prairie, who is not at all surprised by the Rwandan genocide, might consider a happy ending.

1995

W
HEN JANET
brought in the mail, she saw that there was a letter from a law firm in New York, and she knew that there was something in it about her father’s estate. Her mother had been very vague about her father’s death and all the surrounding questions; Janet found out more in his
New York Times
obituary than she did over the phone. She had, in fact, bought the
Times
that day, cut out the obituary, and put it in a drawer. Before opening the letter from the lawyer, she read it again:

FRANCIS LANGDON, PIONEERING DEFENSE CONTRACTOR, DIES AT 74

Francis Howard Langdon, who was known among the group of secretive defense contractors who came of age during World War II for his willingness to explore ideas that some among his colleagues considered more in the realm of science fiction than of usable weaponry, died Tuesday in Ames, Iowa, where he had flown with a friend. Local officials say that he was struck by lightning while standing at the edge of the airfield.