settling back into place like a clay figure hardening under a flame.
“Fine with me. I got a real job to get to, anyway, a serious job.” Pres spoke a little too loudly, as though she were already out of earshot. But he wanted to stop her from retreating. “I work at the Falls of Niagara. I’m on the new patrol. I watch for people trying to go over in barrels.”
She blinked a few times and then looked at him like she’d only just noticed him standing there. “Oh, you’re still here? Get going already. Someone’s coming.”
Pres heard the brush of shoes against carpet coming from around the corner. “They use young guys like me to spot barrels because we got good eyes, see?” he said, and crossed his eyes at her.
“Fine, fine, you goon. Now shut it. I need to concentrate.”
“If I don’t warn the guy on hook before the barrel gets into the rapids, that’s it. Whoever’s inside is going over.”
“Shh,” she hissed through the corner of her mouth. “I can’t stay steady with you talking. You’ll get me fired!” She cocked her head to peer down the tracks again.
“I mean they’re dead. Swept right—”
She grabbed his hand and pulled him down to the bit of bench between herself and the man with the pocket watch and then she was kissing him. It wasn’t a good kiss; she mashed her whole face against his straight on— jammed her nose into his, her forehead into his brow. He could feel the ridge of her teeth behind her lips. But Pres liked it, the feeling of being pressed into this girl, of having collided with her. He was about to kiss her back when he became aware of someone else in the room, watching them, and he froze. He stayed with his lips pressed to hers, his wrists pulsing in her cool hands, and waited for the person to leave. It occurred to him that whoever was looking at them probably assumed that Claire was kissing him good-bye before leaving on the train, and it felt dizzyingly strange to think of someone standing there, saddened by the portrait of parting lovers who were really only kissing hello.
All that summer, on bright evenings, Pres would drive through the city to Claire’s parents’ home. When he reached the yard, he would slow the car to a quiet roll and open the passenger-side door and then Claire would creep from the hedge and jump in. The two of them would speed off through town with the headlights off, taking the unlit streets, some of them old gravel horse paths, until they arrived at the forest at the northern city limit. There, Pres would tuck the car behind a screen of bushes and they’d get out and follow the railroad tracks through two miles of woods to the clearing where the blimps were made.
A high gate blocked them from getting close to the facility, but through gaps in the trees they could see the fireworks of construction blazing across the hangar’s translucent walls—arcs of bouncing blue sparks, loops of flame. Pres and Claire spread their blanket on the grass by the fence and watched along with the other lovers who’d come from town, visible to each other only during particularly fierce bursts of light from inside the hangar. Claire often brought snacks, while Pres offered up a jelly jar of apple wine bought from one of the men who made it in his tub at the boardinghouse near Pres’s place. As they sipped and ate, the two of them whispered guesses back and forth as to who the other spectators were, who those two glowing cigarette tips belonged to, who that woman was being kissed there with her hands above her head, her fingers laced through the fence links. Pres figured that all the people at the clearing were from nearby, people they knew, but Claire liked to pretend they’d ventured there from the kinds of places she read about in travel magazines.
“I bet she’s from Spain. See how her hair’s pulled to the side? That’s a Spanish style.” Or “That man beneath the trees, he’s got fat on him like a Russian. They need it because of the tundra.”
She knew things about places he’d never heard of, cities with rivers for streets, countries where for part of the year the sun never dropped below the horizon, where a single day lasted for weeks.
Pres had trouble visualizing such places. He’d never ventured more than fifty miles from Niagara. His parents had died in bewilderingly quick succession, and the single greatest comfort to Pres, the sole comfort really, was knowing that the city in which he lived contained all the artifacts of their lives: their friends, their haunts. Two streets west of the house was the tannery where his father had worked. Three blocks toward the river was Harbor Lights, his grandparents’ restaurant, above which his mother had grown up. Here was the chapel where his parents had been married. There, the cemetery where they lay. The city was like a private museum that Pres could tour whenever he pleased.
Even now, nearly a year after their deaths, Pres had trouble imagining himself going much of anywhere at all. But sometime early in the summer Claire started using
The summer seemed full of secrets. In the moonlit forest, blimps were being built for reasons that, though clearly explained by the city’s naval officers as part of a national “contract,” still were hooded in mystery. Every few months another blimp emerged from the woods, glided over city hall, and moored on the high school baseball field for a brief celebration. The blimps had summery names:
The blimps’ architects and engineers had come from Germany, and in the spring the city’s naval officers had moved them into a house on Jemmison Street, right near the city center. They were large, blocky men, these Germans, broad-shouldered as umpires. And yet they seemed so helpless, so lost all the time, startled by the passing clatter of a police horse, frightened into apologetic fits of nodding and waving by a simple hello from someone passing on the sidewalk. One of them, a man named Heitmeyer, never went anywhere without a parasol to keep off the sun. Pres knew his name because he’d gone into the diner right behind Heitmeyer one morning and seen him write it in the guest book. As Pres ate his breakfast, he kept glancing over at Heitmeyer, who sat in a booth against the far wall. He was studying what Pres guessed was some kind of blueprint spread before him on the table. Every now and then Heitmeyer took up his pencil and began working on whatever it was, bending close to the paper, creating a little fort around it with his arm. Pres got so curious that he pretended to have to go to the men’s room just to catch a glimpse. What he saw, though, when he passed the booth wasn’t a blueprint at all, but a drawing, a fanciful sketch of a sky filled with blimps of all shapes and sizes: fleets of blimps layered one on top of the next, stretching up into the atmosphere. An elegant network of ladders and rope bridges and spiraling tubes connected the blimps, creating a city in the sky, a floating metropolis protected by a vast, blue moat. How wild to get to live someplace like that, Pres thought. But even as the sketch disappeared behind Heitmeyer’s arm, Pres found himself wondering how great it would really be. What if lightning popped one of the blimps? What if they ran out of fuel? What if someone living up there wanted to come down?
There were other secrets that summer, too. More people than ever before were going over the falls. For years no one had done such a thing, simply stepped into a barrel and shoved off toward the rapids, but now there were jumps all the time. The jumpers were always local people, too, not daredevils from Buffalo or Albany, not publicity hounds or stuntmen, but people everyone had known for years: Gideon Wells, who delivered milk and ice and butter every week, and pretty Laura, who kept minutes at city hall. No one knew why they did it, but all around the city, people wondered who would be next.
Claire loved Pres’s stories of working on the patrol. She loved them so much, it made him blush with pride there in the pinescented darkness. Over and over he told her about Pipe Island, where he worked, a slender strip of land shaped like a corncob pipe at the edge of the falls. He told her about the squat stone tower at the bowl end of the island, where he spent his days scanning the river for barrels. He even taught her how to spy jumpers. First thing, he explained, laying his head on her leg, was to watch the shore. Barrels were cumbersome, and the hedging along the riverbanks was leafy even in winter. More often than not, people could be spotted before they made it within a hundred feet of the water. It happened all the time, he said. He’d be looking through the binoculars, scanning the American, then the Canadian side of the river, and he’d catch a rustling in the bushes near the top of one of the banks. All of a sudden, a lady in bathing trunks and a frilly swimming cap would be rolling a fat, brown barrel down the bank and splashing it out into the river. Occasionally, though, the barrels were already in the water by the time he saw them rushing toward him.
