I’ll bet you think that barrels float, he said, that they bob along like corks. Well, they don’t, not at all. In fact, he told Claire, they tumble forward underwater, hardly ever rising to the surface. They would come at him like mice moving beneath a carpet, little swells in the current. Winter was even worse, he said. The barrels often drifted beneath ice floes headed downriver and were only visible as shadowy spots on the white plates of ice. And once a jumper made it past the patrol, chances were no one would ever see him or her again; the jumper would just vanish into the white curtain of the falls.
He told her everything. Staring up at her from the cushion of her lap, the stars visible behind her head, he told her about Dexter, his partner, the boulder of a man who always sat smoking at the tip of the island, with the long, hook-ended metal pole across his lap. Dex, whose son had been killed overseas, in the Argonne Forest. Dex, with that sad look to him, sitting there staring at the passing water all day. Pres explained how, when he did see a barrel coming, he’d ring the bell and Dex would spring to his feet and ready himself, holding the pole tightly in those hands of his, pouched and leathery as baseball mitts. While Pres radioed the crew of the
“Is this kind of how he hooks them?” Claire said calmly, before lunging at Pres, digging her fingers into his ribs, making him squirm and laugh.
Lying chest-to-chest beneath the blanket, the two of them spent long hours wondering why people went over the falls at all. For the life of him, Pres couldn’t figure out why anyone would do something so foolish, why they’d let themselves be so charmed by what amounted to a simple drop in the river. He told himself it was nothing more than hysteria. After all, he’d lived less than two miles from the falls his whole life and he’d never felt the slightest tug. But even so, Pres found himself deeply troubled, as though his failure to understand the lure of the falls pointed to some larger flaw.
“Maybe they just want to go somewhere,” Claire said one night toward the end of summer. “Like an escape. Maybe they don’t think about it.”
Pres was now deeply in love with her. He wanted to tell her so, but he refused to say anything until he could compose an adequate description of his feelings, which, frustratingly, he never felt able to do. The best comparison he’d come up with involved an exhibit on hydroelectricity he’d seen at a fair downtown when he was a child. The exhibit’s main attraction was a clear, life-size figure, a glass man filled with miniature wheels and paddles and belts hung with tiny wooden buckets. When water was poured through a hole at the top of the man’s head, the machinery inside him whirred to life and one by one a series of bulbs strung through his legs and arms and head lit up like the points of a constellation until, finally, a large heart-shaped bauble of glass in the man’s chest flickered on and shined brighter than the other lights, so bright that Pres was forced to shield his eyes. Best he could figure, that was how he felt for Claire, how he would always feel, aglow.
Pres brushed his fingers over her thigh. The hangar walls flashed, illuminating the figures in the trees.
“Maybe they just look at the falls too long and get hypnotized, like by a snake charmer,” Claire said. She put her arms out in front of her and stared at the blinking hangar like a zombie. Seeing her like that—her gaze focused yet eerily vacant—sent a slight chill through Pres’s chest. He didn’t like the naturalness of her pose or the facility with which she’d assumed it. It was how she’d appeared when he first laid eyes on her back in the wax museum; when, no matter how he tried to hold her eyes with his, they’d looked past him. Even as he was thinking this, though, she broke her pose, grabbing him and pulling him to her.
Pres woke to find the map illuminated in front of his face. It had somehow tumbled up from the backseat and spread itself flat against the windshield. The early sun lit the paper as though it were stained glass. There had been no sign of the blimp in Gum Junction and now he was two days’ drive outside the city limit, though where exactly he didn’t know. He’d fallen asleep while driving again, just passed out of consciousness. Since he didn’t feel ready to look out the windshield and find the car hammered into a tree or teetering on the edge of a cliff, he just sat and stared at the map for a while. Each of the forty-eight states was a different hue—Arkansas crimson, Texas mint- jelly green. The sun projected the map’s colorful design onto Pres’s chest and face. He found his pen lying against the inside of the door and drew a heavy black check mark where he assumed Gum Junction, Arkansas, to be.
Neighboring mountain towns like Holly and Bonanza Springs were rich off their mineral springs, so Pres had been surprised to find Gum Junction a shabby and cheerless place, as though the town’s own mountain were a sharp knee over which it had been snapped. The only building open the evening Pres arrived was the public bathhouse. When he opened the door and stepped inside, he’d found a single steam-clouded room lined with changing stalls. The wooden floor was pocked with deep holes fizzing with bubbling water, and inside each hole was an old man. Some, submerged up to their chins, bobbed up and down, their beards and the tips of their long white mustaches dipping in and out of the water. Others were spilling water over themselves from jars of poor- quality purpled glass. To Pres’s eye they looked like a garden of ruined fountains.
“Excuse me, sir,” Pres said to the man nearest him. “Did you happen to see an airship pass by here a little while ago? A flying machine?”
The man was frail, his chest kicked in by time. “You ought to wet those down, boy,” he said, gesturing toward Pres’s hands. When Pres looked down, he found that his hands had clawed up from gripping the steering wheel.
“Go on,” the man said. “It only costs to take it with you.”
“Six cents for the glass,” said a man in a hole near the window.
Pres knelt down and dipped his hands in the water. It was a hundred and fifteen degrees, easy, and within moments he felt the tightness in his knuckles melt away.
“Feels good, don’t it?” called a man too far back to see, a shadow behind the steam. “That’s arsenic and iron working on you.”
Pres nodded; the water felt so good he thought he might cry.
“What’s this airship look like?” said the man nearest him.
“It’s a long balloon with a kind of cabin attached to the bottom,” Pres said.
“A cabin hanging from an observation balloon?” said the man near the window. He was smirking in a way that made Pres’s heart sink; it was clear that these men were about to laugh at him. He’d been laughed at by so many people in such a number of places that he could feel it coming by now, could sense it rumbling up through a person before it erupted.
Pres sat back and studied the map for signs of where the blimp might go next. The few places he’d seen the blimp himself he’d dotted with a check on the map; everywhere the blimp had been spotted by others he’d talked to along the road, with a question mark. Still, the pattern eluded him. He’d chased the blimp down the icy New Jersey coast by trail of rumor, spotted it once near the Virginia border, rising from a marine hangar floating out in the middle of a lake, and assuming it was going down to the Carolinas or maybe even to Florida, he’d rushed south and overshot it, getting himself lost for nearly two weeks in the lush jumble of the Great Smoky Mountains. He finally caught wind of it again near Nashville, where he wound up spotting it near two in the morning, tunneling like a whale through the starry sky, the fins at its tail a spacey blue in the moonlight, only to lose it again in the bubbling hot springs towns of the Ozarks.
Pres traced the marks with his finger. Once connected, the sightings formed a kind of quivering, larger check mark starting high in the Northeast, dipping through the southern states, then swooping back up toward the country’s middle. But would the blimp continue north toward the Dakotas, or plunge back down toward the striped canyons of the western desert? What if he couldn’t find its trail again?
Worse than all this, though, was the plain fear that the blimp would make it to the West Coast ahead of him and head off over the Pacific, to Europe or Asia, somewhere he’d never be able to follow. And he knew somehow that this was its course, that it was trying to get to the ocean before he could catch it.
Pres steeled himself and tore the map away from the windshield. He found that he was parked in an endless
