On the Wing (30 page)

“I have a sympathetic soul,” the second young woman claimed.

At that moment, the doors burst open again and we all turned toward them. The woman in the crisp suit stood there, and beside her was the woman with the rat dog. The doors closed behind the woman and her dog, and she surveyed the available chairs. She chose one that was a mere two chairs to my right. She plopped the rat dog onto the one that was immediately to my right.

“Rrr,” said the dog cordially.

A small man, meek and bald, raised his hand.

“Yes, Mr. Tripp?” said Johnny.

“I just want to say—if nobody minds—that this most recent arrival has provoked in me a reaction that I would have to describe as a completely new instance of pre-traum that I hadn't been suffering before now.”

“And that is?” Johnny prompted.

“I'm feeling how painful it would feel if I were bitten by that dog—and not just the bite—but the anxiety I would feel after being bitten when I would be asking myself, ‘My god, what if the dog had rabies?'—and now, now I'm beginning to feel the anticipation of the feeling of the rabies needle. I'm told that they inject you with an enormous needle in the stomach—”

“Oh, I can't stand it,” said the girl on Stan's right. “I hate hospitals! The smell! I'm anticipating it. It's making me sick! Get the dog out of here!”

“My dog is a certified emotional-support dog,” said the rat dog's owner. “He is highly trained, and his presence is essential to my well-being.” She began rummaging in her purse again, as she had when she was crossing the street, and eventually she produced a document, which she unfolded and handed to Mr. Tripp. He perused it.

“This seems to be legitimate,” he said sadly.

“What do you mean ‘seems to be legitimate'?” said the dog's owner. “It most certainly is legitimate.”

“It's just that I never heard of an emotional-support dog before.”

“Rrrr,” said the dog. Its hackles began to rise.

“Sorry, fella,” said Mr. Tripp. To the woman, he said, “A guide dog, yes. A service dog, yes. But an emotional-support dog, that's a new one on me.”

“Rrrr,” said the dog with undisguised contempt.

“Perhaps our visitors would like to let the group know what it is that has brought them here to the Algan Institute,” said Dr. Wylie, turning pointedly toward Albertine, me, the dog, and the dog's owner.

“After you,” I said to the dog's owner.

Everyone stared at her in anticipation. So did her dog.

“I think Dr. Wylie wants to know what sort of pre-traumatic stress you are suffering from,” I said.

She gave me a long look. I think she was asking herself where she had seen me before. I disguised myself with a look of deep concern.

She looked at her dog and then put her hands over its ears. The dog looked puzzled.

“I'm suffering from pre-traumatic stress induced by the anticipation of the inevitable death of Mr. Pfister.”

“Someone close to you?” asked Dr. Wylie.

The woman inclined her head in the direction of the dog.

“Your dog?” said Mr. Tripp.

The woman nodded yes.

“A triviality!” declared Tripp.

“Hardly!” said the woman.

“The death of your dog?” scoffed Tripp. “I'd call that next to nothing compared to the suffering of an entire generation of children as yet unborn.”

“When Mr. Pfister dies,” the woman lamented, “I don't know what I'll do. I don't see how I can possibly go on. And yet I know that he must die. The day will come. I can envision that day as if it were today. I can feel the grief that I will feel as if I were feeling it now. I'm a basket case. That is, I will be a basket case. When it happens. And it nearly happened today. I had just arrived in town, and I was crossing the main street, trying to find my way here to the Institute, when a car came upon me suddenly, silently, as if it had sprung up out of nowhere, headed straight for Mr. Pfister. I had to yank him out of the way with a sharp tug of his leash—and I nearly killed him. What if I had? Oh, my god, my god, what if I had?”

“Life is a grim farce,” groaned the woman who hated hospitals.

Voices were raised around the group. A lively debate seemed about to begin. Al and I saw the opportunity for a getaway and decided to take it. We had reached the door when Dr. Wylie called out to us, across the developing fracas, “Wouldn't you care to contribute something before you leave?”

“I think we're in the wrong place,” I said as I opened the double doors. “It's my fault. I got the wrong impression—somehow—I don't know—I guess I'm just a muddleheaded dreamer.” I closed the doors behind us.

Chapter 25

The Second Most Remarkable Thing in the Life of Curtis Barnstable

Travel has the serious defect of taking one away from the stimulus and criticism of contemporaries.… One is too much alone, too much the passing stranger.

V. S. Pritchett,
Midnight Oil

THE TOWN was called Cornfields. The road that led to it, and through it, and away from it, was straight. At intervals, that road was crossed by other straight roads, each of them cutting across it in precise perpendicularity. It was an unremarkable place, but it got me thinking. It got me thinking about the naming of places, about paucity and plenitude, and, of course, about Babbington.

“What's with you?” asked
Spirit.

“I was just musing, ruminating. Why do you ask?”

“I thought I heard you mutter something like ‘paucity and plenitude.'”

“Well—I—I might have.”

“You'd better stop for the night,” she said. “You need a break.”

I saw, ahead, to the right, a single farmhouse.

As I made my way up its driveway, a boy about my age came out the front door and stood on the porch, watching me approach. When I stopped and put
Spirit
on her stand, he called a greeting: “What in the world are you doing here, of all places?”

“I'm on my way to New Mexico,” I explained. “I was hoping that I could spend the night here.”

“Here? With us?”

“Yes, if you're willing to put me up.”

“This is very unusual,” he said. “Remarkable.”

“Can I stay?”

He opened the front door and called into the house, “Mama, there's a boy here who arrived on an airplane and wants to know if he can stay overnight.”

A great rumbling laugh rolled out the door, followed by a gleeful declaration: “Curtis Barnstable, I swear you are the most imaginative child there ever was! A boy on an airplane! Where do you get your ideas! Why, of course he can stay! We put up all the aeronautical boys that come our way! Oooh, I tell you, Curtis, you are going to wear me out with laughing. You drive away the dullness of the day!”

“You can stay,” he said. “Have a seat.”

“Thanks,” I said.

We sat in rockers, side by side. Quite a long time passed. The day was hot. Insects buzzed in the cornfields. Nothing happened.

Then, across the buzzing silence, a bus appeared, on our right, far down the road, and lumbered toward the intersection. With a wheeze, the bus sighed and settled to a stop, and we could hear its door open though it was on the opposite side from us.

Curtis looked at me. “This is a big event,” he said. “Hardly anybody ever gets off the bus there.”

The bus rumbled, shook itself, and pulled away, leaving behind, in the hovering dust that it had raised, a dapper man in a well-tailored suit. He squinted in the glaring light and looked around, evidently trying to get his bearings, as if the place where he found himself was not at all where he had expected to be. He looked out over the cornfields, and he looked out over the plowed fields. He looked briefly in our direction, then looked away.

Time passed. The man began to look increasingly uneasy, and increasingly annoyed. I began to wonder if chance had played a trick on him, sending him to this place in the middle of nowhere as a joke.

Now and then a car passed. The man regarded each car as it approached, leaning slightly toward it quizzically, apparently wondering whether it might hold the reason for his having stopped there, the someone he expected to meet.

A truck roared by, and the well-dressed man recoiled slightly at its approach. As it passed, it raised a cloud of dust that settled onto the man. He began brushing at his suit. He was still brushing at it when another car approached, on the side of the road opposite him, slowed, and stopped. The man stopped brushing the dust from his suit and peered at the car querulously. A thin man, almost scrawny, with a prominent Adam's apple, got out of the car. The car drove off. The thin man was also wearing a suit, but it wasn't as well tailored. It hung on him. He was wearing a hat. The first man was not. The two men stared at each other across the intervening width of the roadway. The second man put his hands in his pockets. For a while, the two men kept looking across at each other, as if neither was willing to speak first. It almost seemed like a game, some school-yard game that the first of them to speak would lose.

They were distracted by the approach of a crop-dusting plane. It appeared in the distance, lowly humming, and came on in a lazy way, crossing the fields of corn without dusting them, then moving closer over the plowed fields, the pilot then dropping white dust as the plane came nearer. Both men watched it. The second man, the skinny one, commented on it. Calling across the road to the well-dressed man, he said, “Funny that a plane should be dustin' crops where there ain't no crops.”

Another bus came along, from the left this time. It stopped where the skinny man stood. The skinny man boarded the bus. The door closed. The bus pulled off. All of us who had been left behind watched it go until it was out of sight.

The plane made a turn at the end of its dusting run and came back, veering this time closer to the road, then drifting farther still, until it was over the road rather than the fields, and headed right toward the well-dressed man.

He saw it coming at him. He stood there and watched it coming at him. He didn't seem to believe what his eyes were seeing. He leaned toward the plane for a moment, as if to get a better look at it, to see if he could decide whether it was really doing what it seemed to be doing. Then he leaned back from it, as if he might avoid it. The plane dropped lower, until it was nearly at ground level.

Then the pilot of the plane began firing at the man. I recognized the staccato crackle of machine-gun fire from all the war movies I'd seen at the Babbington Theater.

The well-dressed man crouched, as if he might make himself invisible or dodge the bullets. He quickly realized how futile ducking was, though, and he began to look for somewhere to run, moving quickly, not frantically, but urgently, ducking and dodging. The plane passed over him. The pilot had missed him.

The plane made a lazy circle, as easy and unhurried a maneuver as if the pilot really were dusting crops and didn't care much whether the job got done or not, then came back at the man from the other direction, firing again.

A car appeared in the distance, approaching. The man dashed into the road, waving his arms, trying to signal the driver to stop. The car swerved, and it swung around the man. He seemed for a moment as if he might be about to lunge at it, grab a door handle and let himself be dragged away, but he didn't, and the car continued on, useless.

The plane completed another turn. The man looked this way and that, hesitated a moment, and then ran into the cornfield.

The plane followed.

If the man had expected a safe haven in the corn, among the stalks, he didn't find it. The plane came directly on, toward him, slowly, a biplane especially fitted out to be able to fly so slowly, and began dusting. A cloud of dust began streaming from the plane, spread in the air, and settled onto the cornfield.

Another truck appeared in the distance, barreling along purposefully. The legend on the side of the truck read Magnum Oil. The dapper man burst from the cornfield, driven by desperation now, taking a chance that must have seemed to be his only chance. Waving his arms, he ran directly into the path of the truck. He wasn't going to let this ride get away as the car had earlier. The truck driver must have thought he was crazy, but he wasn't going to hit him, so he hit the brakes, hard, and the truck began to slide to a stop, the brakes struggling against the momentum of so large a truck with so heavy a load. It looked as if the truck wouldn't stop in time. The man would be hit. What he had hoped would be his salvation would kill him instead.

The plane came on.

The plane was coming from one direction, the truck from the other.

The man was in the middle.

At the last moment the man threw himself to the ground, flattened himself, and the truck rolled over him, harmlessly, its big wheels holding it above the prostrate man.

Still the plane came on.

The pilot had gone too far. He'd made a fatal error.

The plane struck the truck. There seemed to be a moment when time held its breath. Then there was an explosion. The plane exploded, or the truck exploded, or both. The plane was on fire. The doors of the truck swung open, and two men flew out—the driver and the guy who had been riding shotgun for him. They ran from the truck shouting.

A couple of other cars and pickup trucks came along, and their drivers stopped to rubberneck. They got out of their cars and trucks to get a better view. The well-dressed man saw his chance. He slipped into the driver's seat of one of the pickup trucks, shifted it into gear, and drove off.

Then everyone began to make a fuss. Curtis's parents came running from inside the house. His father wanted to know what the hell had happened. His mother wanted to know if we were hurt. The truck drivers came running up the long driveway to the house, pounded up the steps to the porch, and asked to use the phone. The porch grew crowded. Curtis's mother brought a pitcher of lemonade. His father offered bushels of corn at what he said was a good price.