21. Russell Hastings
By the time Russ Hastings arrived at the airport Saturday morning, he was in a state of depressed anxiety that bordered on paranoid rage. In the past twelve hours the world had smitten him from every direction with petty, maddening annoyances. His shoelace had broken; he had tripped on it and practically brained himself tumbling into the elevator, the floor of which was four inches below where it should have been. After he had plunged to the back and narrowly regained his balance, the bored elevator operator had said, “Watch ya step, buddy,” and Hastings had wanted to strangle him. Later, thinking about it, he had burst out laughing on a crowded street corner, where passing pedestrians gave him startled glances and edged away from him.
Too restless to go straight home from Carol McCloud’s last night, he had gone walking; somehow he had found himself, near midnight, on upper Broadway on the fringes of Harlem, buying an early edition of the Times and watching a workman on a ladder fix new letters on a movie marquee. On the dark side streets around him took place the transactions of night commerce: burglaries, furtive exchanges of money and narcotics. The lonely outcries in the hot night might have been those of people being bitten by rats in the sullen wretched tenements. He walked slowly down the gray sidewalks, avoiding refuse and shuffling bums; he passed a clutch of fags on parade, cruising for a mark, and a Spanish streetwalker wearing a loose, flowing cotton dress-he tried to ascertain her figure, but the dress made it hard to tell; she gave him a smile, and he went on, an innocent victim among innocent victims. A police van crossed Broadway, moving slowly, collecting the corpses of the ones who died in the tropical night. He felt foolish, disturbed, cowardly-like a pale dude among cowboys. If only he had seen action in the Army, he thought-it had been peacetime during his two years’ service. If only he had seen the worst. I am still naive. He knew these hard black faces under the Harlem street lights-violent ones, dope peddlers, muggers, thieves-but in his guts they were only dull black faces, Yassuh boss Nigras-shif’less and got rhythm, but violent? Impossible: he had never himself seen that kind of violence, and therefore he did not believe in it.
That had been last night. This morning he had gone into a coffee shop for breakfast, and a waiter had spilled coffee on his cuff. There was hardly time to rush back and change into an old tweed suit which he hadn’t packed because it was too warm. Then, breakfastless, he had stood on a corner in ten minutes’ growing panic before a taxi appeared.
Now there was the long hassle at the check-in counter-it seemed the airline had sold the same seat to another passenger as well, as airlines were wont to do. He had to pull rank by showing his government I.D. before they would let him on the plane. He knew full well the airlines had as much feeling toward their passengers as an armed robber had toward his victims, but it still enraged him. The eternal innocent. He made the half-mile walk down the echoing corridor, changing his carry-on suitcase from hand to hand every few hundred yards, going past the sign No Smoking Beyond This Point thinking of Jennys with struts and doped fabric-nostalgic for an era he hadn’t even known. He reached the gate in time to hear the obligatory public-address announcement that the flight would be delayed twenty minutes “due to frammissoshemlorbesan,” and he glared at the check-in man while someone stepped on his foot and left a scuffed dent on his shoe. The high, shrill whine of a plane moved past outside, and the peculiar stench of jet-engine exhaust stung his nostrils.
In time the plane boarded and taxied four miles to a runway where eighteen jets stood in line waiting to take off. He tried to adjust himself in the seat, which, neither sitting nor reclining, had clearly been designed with something other than a human body in mind.
Seventy minutes after its scheduled departure time the plane got off, launched by fifty thousands pound of pollutant thrust. He closed his eyes and drowsed. But of course every six minutes a stewardess woke him up to inquire if he wanted a magazine or a drink, or insist that he uncross his legs so she could tip down the folding table, which sat empty above his cramped knees for twenty minutes before she set before him a meal reminiscent of fried concrete garnished with fossil ferns, served on a wood-grained plastic tray. “I don’t mind plastic,” he said unreasonably, “but why does it always have to look like something else? Why can’t they just let it look like plastic?”
“Is anything wrong with your lunch, sir?”
He waved her away.
Below, through the window, he could see a section of superhighway crawling with trucks and cars. I used to like to drive, he complained to himself, thinking of the awful turnpike food at overcrowded One Stop Service Areas, the stalled cars with their hoods lifted in the smoggy heat, the insulting stink of diesel exhausts, the construction- RIGHT LANE CLOSED 1 MI AHEAD-the unmarked cop cars and periodic bloody wrecks, the surly chargings of cars full of restless screaming kids, all of them bound to or from the great nerve center, Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson, the predatory megalopolis where eight million crushed bodies supported the weight of a handful of People Who Counted, who endlessly played games in which they fought to win, and having won, used victory-earned power to change the rules of the game to their own advantage. Rats, birds, fish, humans-it was all the same: crowd too many into too small a space and they lost their biological inhibitions and turned into mindless cannibals. It was no good trying to make decisions in those surroundings; he could no longer tell if he was still sane: in the city there was no norm, no way to judge.
At the end of the flight lay the open land-miles between beings. He harked back to male weekends in a damp duck blind, birds calling over the water. I have got to make up my mind to get out of it. Why care if someone played basketball with NCI? How could it possibly matter to those teeming ants down there? He had a vague recollection of last night’s whimsical conversation with Carol McCloud. “All you have to do is make things matter.”
Air travel always depressed him; ultimately the ordeal ended. Through the hair-oil-greasy plastic inner window he saw the desert mountains moving up. He felt the changing pressure in his ears and recognized the San Pedro Valley, the towns, the right angle formed by the two ranges of mountains north and east of Tucson. The pilot’s voice announced the temperature at Tucson International Airport was 103 degrees and the local time was 2:25 P.M. Hastings set his watch back and closed his eyes for the landing.
When he walked into the terminal, he did not expect to be met, but still he found himself seeking familiar faces; he saw none, and walked up the long ramp to the terminal center, silently congratulating himself on having survived yet another adventure.
He spent twenty boring minutes at the Rent-A-Car counter, signed a dangerous-looking document in exchange for a set of car keys, and stopped at a phone booth on his way out. His ring was answered by an alert baritone voice that belonged to Lewis Downey, Judd’s longtime private secretary, who gave him an affably courteous greeting and added, “I’m afraid Mr. Judd still isn’t taking any phone calls, Mr. Hastings-my orders are specific, and he made no exceptions.”
“I’m in Tucson,” Hastings said. “I’ve got a car, and I’m on my way up there. I should be there by five. Will I be admitted?”
He heard, distinctly, the suck of Downey’s indrawn breath. Downey said, “Hold on a minute, will you?”
The operator presently came on the line and asked for an additional fifteen cents. Shortly thereafter Downey returned. “Sorry to hold you, Mr. Hastings. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I only work here, you know. Mr. Judd hasn’t been seeing anyone. But the gate will be open when you arrive. We’ll prepare a room for you. How long were you planning to stay?” The voice rode on a tone of distant politeness, but nothing more.
Hastings said, “That has to depend on Mr. Judd. I’ve got a tentative booking on a return flight tomorrow evening.”
“Very good, sir. We’ll expect you around five?”
“Is he all right, Downey?”
“Sir?”
“I don’t want to disturb him if he’s not well.”
After a beat Downey said, “Mr. Judd is in excellent health, sir. You’ll see for yourself. Good-bye, then.”
Frowning, he went outside into the brass blaze of sunlight. He found the gray Plymouth in the vast parking lot and unlocked it. The windows had been left rolled up; he opened them and tossed his suitcase in back and switched the engine on, and stood in the shade while the engine and air-conditioner got working. Even then, when he got into the car the vinyl seat covers blistered his back and rump. The steering wheel was too hot to hold; he drove with his fingertips, finding it hard to breathe. The radio informed him again that it was 103 degrees-“A nice mild day today, folks, after the hundred-and-twelve we had yesterday.” He switched off the infuriating voice and squirmed on the seat, driving out along the familiar streets to the interstate highway.
