mean, Pearl’s a special lady, you know?”
“Yes,” I said, though, much as I’d have liked to just then, I supposed I didn’t know. I didn’t know much about her at all.
“Bygones and buried hatchets, right?” Dick laughed, so cheerful all of a sudden. “So you have to stay out here all night, huh? Your boss told Pearl you’d be here till morning. That is one bad bitch.”
I explained that it wasn’t so bad.
“Still, that’s a lot of downtime,” he said. He reached into his back pocket and took out a CD. “This might be ridiculous, but I thought that maybe, if you’ve got nothing better to do, you could take a listen.” He handed it to me.
On the cover was a picture of him with that same dazed expression on his face.
“Will do,” I said.
Dick nodded. “Well…I’m going to get back,” he said. “Listen, I’m glad we talked, brother.”
He patted me on the shoulder with his better hand, and then turned and walked back to his car. As he got in, I cast a last look at Pearl, watching me from the driver’s seat. I wanted to talk to her, to apologize,
I walked back to my car. Inside, I took the CD from its case and slipped it into the player. The first song was about two truck drivers, a man and a woman, who meet over the CB radio. They start talking to each other one night, while driving their routes, just two lonely voices in the darkness.
It was a beautiful song and I hoped that I’d get the chance to listen to it with Joan the next day. I imagined myself lying on the couch with her, listening to the story together. The man and woman keep driving right past each other’s trucks, barely missing each other without even knowing. In one verse the truckers come close to meeting: The woman eats at a truck stop, and the man comes in so soon after her that when he unknowingly sits down on her stool, her tip money is still on the counter. The change is still warm from her pocket.
JOHN CIRCLED BACK OVER THE PUMPKIN PATCH, BRINGING THE plane lower this time, just to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. He’d been flying for over two hours straight; he felt dizzy from engine fumes and his goggles were smeared with gasoline. But as he brought the plane around, he spotted them again: forty, maybe even fifty people gathered among the pumpkins—a whole party waving at him, shouting and cheering, waiting for him to land. They were dressed formally, the men in sack suits and bright silk ties, the women in smart summer hats of pink or cream straw. They’d even laid out a runway, a long strip of white cloth that cut a clear, straight path through the pumpkin vines.
John wondered for a moment if he had the wrong town. He pulled his map from beneath the seat, unfolded it, and pinned it with his forearm against the leather rim of the cockpit. The map’s edges whipped about as he did his calculations: he’d taken off from Poth, Missouri, at nine in the morning and followed the railroad tracks west across the grasslands until about eleven o’clock, when he’d landed to refuel. It was near two thirty in the afternoon by the time he’d lifted off again, and now it was just after five, which would put him at—John scanned the wrinkled expanse of eastern Kansas—yes, this had to be Bunting. It was the only town for a hundred miles in either direction, and when John looked up from the map he saw, as though to underscore the obviousness of his deduction, a water tower standing just to the south with BUNTING, KS painted across its tank.
He refolded his map and glanced again at the crowd assembled below, the tiny white blossoms of their faces. He slowed down to let them read the lettering painted on the bottom of his wings. On the left wing: JOHN BARRON. EXPERT PILOT. On the right: RIDES JUST $2!!!
Then he leaned out of the cockpit to watch the reaction. Some of the men saluted and a few women waved as his shadow streaked over them.
John waved back, beaming. As he turned to the controls to ready his Curtis JN “Jenny” for landing, he felt an electric joy thrum through him: he had an actual welcome party. People had dressed up in fine clothes and hiked out to the middle of an empty pumpkin patch to welcome him to their town. He’d been barnstorming for three months now, since just after his twenty-first birthday, in February of 1919; so far he’d visited over thirty towns scattered throughout the Midwest, from Minnesota to Iowa to Nebraska and now down into Kansas, and never, not once, had there been a real welcome party waiting for him. Now and then he’d arrived in a new town to find some aviation enthusiasts standing out on the sidewalks, their Kodak Brownies aimed up at the sky. Sometimes a group of children, drawn outside by the Jenny’s approaching whine, chased after him as he flew past. But most often, John flew into a new town to find no one waiting for him or cheering him on. Nobody even expecting him, save a telephone operator or two.
Now, as he started his descent—pushing on the Jenny’s elevator, nosing her down toward the pumpkin patch—he tried to guess which of the women below was Marlene, the Bunting telephone operator he’d spoken with. Maybe the girl in the sleeveless dress at the back of the crowd? Waving a glove at him? John felt a small thrill at the thought of meeting her. He got along well with telephone operators. He made a habit to call ahead to every town he planned to visit and introduce himself to at least one telephone operator first. The women who worked the telephone lines in the kinds of towns John visited—country towns where a plane was still big news—usually spent their afternoons connecting the same people over and over again, knitting and reknitting familiar patterns: plugging Mr. Gray into Mrs. Beige. Wiring Mrs. Beige to Dr. Brown, and so on. A new voice on the line excited these girls. They joked and flirted with John. It was easy to get them on his side, to get them to help publicize his arrival. All it took was the promise of a free plane ride and they were swearing up and down that as soon as they hung up they were going to tell everyone they knew that an expert pilot was coming to town. And they were fun girls, too. Outgoing and social. The type to show him a good time, take him out to movie theaters and dance halls.
He’d called Marlene twice while he was still performing in the town of Poth, two hundred miles to the east.
“You owe me one,” she’d said the last time they’d spoken. “I got the whole town waiting for you. You better be cute.”
“I’ll wipe off some of the grease. Just for you,” said John.
“Well, try not to make me look bad. Everyone’ll be out there when you fly in.”
John had taken “everyone” to mean a couple of Marlene’s friends standing outside the telephone offices, yelling hellos or whistling at him or maybe waving a scribbled paper sign. Nothing like this.
The women’s lawn dresses shimmered in the sun, pale green and yellow and tangerine. At the back of the pumpkin patch stood a table lined with bottles of champagne. John tried to think up something extraordinary he could do for Marlene to thank her for preparing all this for him. He could make a banner for her: MARLENE, MARLENE, BUNTING QUEEN. Something like that, and fly it over town. Or he could buzz her house at sunset, shower her yard with flowers.
John took the plane low as he crossed the edge of the pumpkin patch. Green, unripe pumpkins rushed by beneath his wheels. He tilted the tail down, dragging in wind to slow the plane. The levers trembled in his hands. Through the blur of the propeller he could see the men and women part, moving away from the makeshift runway to give him room.
The Jenny hit hard, knocking John against the controls, but then it bounced, rising and leaping forward. John shoved on the elevator and brought the plane back down. Pumpkins burst against the wheels with dull, sickening thuds. The sour odor burned his nose as bits of pumpkin meat splattered across his face, getting in his mouth, slapping across his goggles. The pulp fouled up the wheels too. The plane skidded and spun, tossing John around the cockpit, the world a cyclone of shouts and colors, until finally the Jenny whipped to a jarring halt.
John tried to catch his breath, but his chest hurt where the lever had punched into him.
“Hello?” said a woman’s voice. “Are you all right in there?”
John winced and pulled off his goggles. “Just part of the act,” he said, wiping the pumpkin from his face.
He ran a hand through the sticky tangle of his hair and looked around. What a dream-like vision, all of these men and women dressed in fancy clothes, gathered around him in the middle of a pumpkin patch. Each woman carried a single pink rose. A large house stood off in the distance, just beyond the edge of the field. The sight sent a
