They approached the fenced territory of Arundji's at a back entrance, away from the main gate. Turk fished a key out of his pocket and swung open a chain-link gate, saying, 'You might want to stay inconspicuous from here on in. The terminal shuts down after ten o'clock, but we've got a maintenance crew on site and security guards out where they're grading the new runway.'
Lise said, 'Don't you have a right to be here?'
'Sort of. But it would be best not to attract too much attention.'
She followed Turk and Diane to an aluminum-sheet hangar, one of dozens lined up at the rear of the terminal. Its huge doors were chained shut and Turk said, 'I wasn't kidding about that crowbar. I'll need something to spring this.'
'You're locked out of your own hangar?'
'Kind of a funny story.' He walked off, apparently looking for a tool.
Use was sweaty and her calves ached from the walk and she needed to pee. She no longer owned a change of clothes.
'Forgive Turk,' Diane said. 'It isn't that he distrusts you. He's afraid for you. He—'
'Are you going to do this from now on? Make these guru-like pronouncements? Because it's getting kind of tiresome.'
Diane stared, wide-eyed. Then, somewhat to Lise's relief, she laughed. Lise said, 'I mean, I'm sorry, but —'
'No! Don't apologize. You're absolutely right. Its one of the hazards of great age, the temptation to pronounce judgments.'
'I know what Turk is afraid of. Turk is burning his bridges behind him. My bridges are still there. I have a life I can go back to.'
'Nevertheless,' Diane said, 'here you are.' She smiled again. 'Speaks the guru.'
Turk came back with a piece of rebar from the construction site and used it to lever off the latch, which was flimsier than the padlock attached to it and came away from the door with a concussive twang. He rolled open the big steel doors and switched on the interior light.
His plane was inside. His twin-engine Skyrex. Lise remembered this aircraft from their abortive flight across the mountains—ages ago, it seemed.
Lise and Diane used the grimy employees' restroom while Turk did his preflight checks. When Lise came back from the rear of the hangar she found him in a heated discussion with a uniformed man. The man in the uniform was short, balding, and conspicuously unhappy. 'I have to call Mr. Arundji,' he said, 'you
'I'm advising you that this is not allowed.'
'Fine. No problem. Fifteen minutes, then you can call anybody you want.'
'I'm giving you notice here. Nobody can say I let you get away with this.'
'Nobody'll say any such thing.'
'Fifteen minutes. More like ten.' The guard turned and walked away.
In the old days, Turk said, an airport was anywhere in Equatoria you could carve out a landing strip. A little four-seater prop plane would get you places you couldn't otherwise go, and nobody worried about filing a flight plan. But that had changed under the relentless pressure of the Provisional Government and the air-travel conglomerates. Big business and big government would drive places like Arundji's into the ground, Turk said, sooner or later. Even now, he said, it wasn't exactly legal to be making this kind of after-hours departure from a closed strip. Probably it would cost him his license. But he was being squeezed out anyhow. Nothing to lose, he said. Nothing much. Then he pivoted the plane onto a vacant runway and started his takeoff run.
This was Turk doing what he claimed to do best, Lise thought: putting on his shoes and walking away from something. He believed in the redemptive power of distant horizons. It was a faith she couldn't bring herself to share.
The aircraft left the ground swaying like a kite, its huge feathered props pulling them toward the moonlit mountains, the engine purring.
Lise watched the arc of the coast tilt to starboard and the distant smudge of Port Magellan grow even smaller. She waited patiently for Turk to say something, maybe even to apologize, but he didn't speak—only pointed once, abruptly; and Lise looked up in time to see the white-hot trail of a shooting star flash over the peaks and passes of the mountains toward the emptiness of the western desert.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Brian Gately wasn't prepared for the violent image that popped out of his mailbox that morning. It provoked an unpleasant memory. In the summer of his thirteenth year Brian had done volunteer work at the Episcopal church where his family worshipped. He had not been a particularly devout teenager—doctrinal matters confused him, he avoided Bible Study—but the church, both the institution and the physical building, possessed a reassuring weight, a quality he later learned to call 'gravitas.' The church put a sensible boundary on things. That was why his parents, who had lived through the economic and religious uncertainties of the Spin, went to church every week, and that was why Brian liked it. That, and the pinewood smell of the newly-built chapel, and the way the stained-glass windows broke the morning light into colors. So he had volunteered for summer work and had spent a few drowsy days sweeping the chapel or opening doors for elderly parishioners or running errands for the pastor or the choirmaster, and in mid-August he was recruited to help set up tables for the annual picnic.
The suburb in which Brian lived was graced with a number of well-maintained parks and wooded ravines. The annual church picnic—an institution so quaint the words themselves had a sort of horse-and-buggy aura about them—was held in the largest of these parks. More than a picnic, it was (according to the flyer in the Sunday bulletin) a Day of Family Communion, and there were plenty of families there to commune with, three generations in some cases, and Brian was kept busy laying out plastic tablecloths and lugging coolers of ice and soft drinks until the event was well under way, hot dogs circulating freely, kids he barely knew tossing Frisbees, toddlers underfoot, and it was the perfect day for it, sunny but not too hot, a breeze to carry off the smoke of the grills. Even at the age of thirteen Brian had appreciated the slightly narcotic atmosphere of the picnic, an afternoon suspended in time.
Then his friends Lyle and Kev showed up and tempted him away from the adults. Down through the woods there was a creek where stones might be skipped or tadpoles captured. Brian begged a break from his volunteer work and went off with them into the green shade of the forest. Down by the verge of the creek, which flowed in a shallow ribbon over gravel tilled by ancient glaciers, they found not just stones to throw but, surprisingly, a habitation: a scrap of canvas tent, all awry, and plastic grocery bags, rusted cans (pork and beans, animal food), empty bottles and brown flasks, a corroded shopping cart, and finally, between two oak trees whose roots had grown out of the ground and twined together like a fist, a bundle of old clothes—which, examined more closely, was not a bundle of old clothes at all, but a dead man.
The dead homeless man must have been there for days, undiscovered. He looked both bloated, a tattered red cotton shirt stretched taut across his enormous belly, and shrunken, as if something essential had been sucked out of him. The exposed parts of him had been nibbled by animals, there were bugs on his milky-white eyes, and when the wind came around the smell was so bad that Brian's friend Kev turned and promptly vomited into the glassy water of the creek.
The three of them ran back to the friendly part of the park and told Pastor Carlysle what they'd found, and that was the end of the picnic.
The police were called, an ambulance came to retrieve the body, and the suddenly somber gathering broke up.
Kev and Lyle, over the course of the next six months, stopped showing up for Sunday services, as if the
