When he tried to crawl over her, she grabbed his wrist. The force of her grip startled him, and he looked at her, truly taking her in for the first time. She was prettier than he’d thought. Her face was soft featured and pale, almost translucently white, but her eyes were a warm, clay brown. They stared back at him in a way that was neither desperate nor pleading. Just determined.
“You owe me this,” she said. “You ruined my wedding.”
John jerked his hand back, but she held on to him.
“I’ll yell,” she said.
“Miss,” John said, “why are you doing this?”
“That’s my business,” she said.
John sighed. “Look, even if I agreed to take you, I don’t have enough petrol to get us both to the next town. We’re too heavy together.”
She nodded at the garage to the east of the house. Stacks of green-and-white petrol cans stood in rows behind the cars.
The girl let go of John’s wrist but kept her eyes trained on him.
“Have at it,” she said.
John rubbed his wrist. A nice fix he’d landed in this time. He glanced at the house; a lamp was already lit in one of the windows. He knew taking the girl was a bad idea, but he felt too weak to argue. He was hungry; his head hurt. His body felt like an empty pouch.
“I’ll take you to the next town,” he said. “Then you’re on your own.”
The sky was clear and calm, totally windless, perfect for flying. But the whole way to Gunnison, John couldn’t relax. He hated that the girl was suddenly there, in his cockpit, uninvited; he kept his eyes fixed on the back of her head, watching for any signs of trouble.
He never knew how a passenger would react once the plane took off, and he had a bad feeling about her. She was wearing a wedding dress, for fuck’s sake. Plenty of perfectly normal-seeming customers went to pieces in the air. Out of nowhere. Regular men and women cringing and shaking, huddling inside the cockpit. Some got sick. Some fainted. A few even seemed to go completely crazy. An old man in Minnesota, for example, had pulled a .32 on him two hundred feet above the earth. The man had threatened to shoot if John didn’t land the plane immediately. Another woman had stood up in the cockpit and undressed mid-flight. She was a large person, and John could still see the pale flag of her body rippling in the wind.
And all this had happened on $2 rides, rides that lasted five minutes and never rose more than a few hundred feet off the ground. Now, with this girl as his passenger, he flew at a steady altitude of nine hundred feet, high above the thinning clouds. The cold blasted them, but the girl seemed so calm, sitting primly in the front cockpit, staring out at the empty sky through her oversize goggles. Too calm, to John’s mind. It was unsettling; she never pointed or turned to him to ask a question. Never leaned out of the cockpit to swim a hand through the wind. She acted as relaxed as someone riding on a bus. Probably she was holding it all in, he thought. Any moment now she’d burst into hysterics. And why not? Why not one more disaster? Lately John’s luck had only been getting worse. He’d made some good money back in Michigan, some in Iowa too, but that was weeks ago. Soon it’d be the heat of summer, blazing sun, the engine overheating. Barnstorming three months and already he was getting tired.
Just look at yourself, he thought: broke, injured, exhausted, responsible for the total ruination of a wedding. And now saddled with a weird, runaway girl. All at once, the old worries came rushing back. Maybe he was wrong to have bought the plane. Maybe being a pilot was a ridiculous idea. Maybe he should give up now, before something truly awful happened. He could sell the Jenny for parts, go back to New York. He still had a job waiting for him at Sweet Fizz, the soda bottling plant where he’d worked with his father, Rollie Barron, before enlisting. Rollie had told him so just a few days ago.
“Dale keeps asking me when you’re coming back,” Rollie had said. “I told him I don’t know, but he keeps on about it. Says he’ll hold you a place as long as he can.”
“Good to know,” John had said.
“You’ve got his telephone number, John? The number to his office?” Rollie had a slow, sleepy way of speaking. John could picture him in their small apartment in Williamsburg, sitting on the stool by the telephone. He could see his father’s face as they talked, round and pink and dimpled, a boyish face despite the gray hair. But a sad face, also. With a weariness hanging about the eyes.
“I don’t need Dale’s number,” John said.
“It’s no trouble to find,” Rollie said. “I wrote it down somewhere around here.”
John heard his father rummaging around the desk. “Thanks anyway, Rol.”
“Here it is.”
“I’m fine.”
“Just take it. In case.”
“No pen.”
John was calling from a farmhouse where he would spend the night. The owner had seen John land in a nearby field and invited him in for dinner. As John spoke, the man and his wife washed dishes together over the sink basin. They stood with their hips touching. Every now and then the man would say something to make the woman laugh and she’d smack him with a dish towel. Watching the two of them irritated John. His father was an old man alone in a dingy apartment.
“I have to go,” John said into the phone. “I’m sending you some money.”
“No, no. Don’t be silly. I’m fine.”
“Guess,” John said.
“Oklahoma?”
“North.”
“Kansas?”
“East.”
“Missouri?”
“Bingo.”
“Missouri. I’m looking forward to seeing the postcard.”
Along with money, John sent his father postcards from every state he visited. “Maybe I’ll fly you here after I get back.”
John’s father laughed. “I’m fine where I am.”
“I’m going to kidnap you. You’re not going to have a choice.”
“Talk to you soon, John.”
“Okay.” John waited for a moment, listening as the line went dead.
The train tracks below the plane began to edge west, and John pushed on the rudder, following the curve. He wondered if he should call Rollie from Gunnison, get Dale Morton’s number. There was no harm in giving Mr. Morton a ring after all, just to check in. But as soon as John began to imagine his conversation with Mr. Morton, he could hear, in the background, the sounds of the plant: the hiss of the soda water tanks, the tamping down of crown cork caps. The clink and rattle of bottles moving down the line. Worst of all, he could hear the floors, the terrible peeling noise they made whenever anyone lifted a boot. Sweet Fizz specialized in fruit-flavored sodas, and the plant’s floors were always sticky with dried syrup—cherry, grape, lemon. No matter how many times custodial hosed them down, the floors stayed gluey. They gummed onto John’s boots, sucking at the heels, the toes, making every step a tiny act of violence, a ripping back of himself. And the residue remained on his boot soles long after he clocked out. Walking home from the plant, alley cats would often slink out from the shadows to follow him and lick at his footprints.
John pushed the memory from his mind. He didn’t want to think about Sweet Fizz or Rollie or any of it. He took out the map and opened it against the cockpit’s rim. Look at that, he thought to himself, staring at the grand sweep of the country. Forty-eight whole states to explore. He could visit any place he wanted to. All he had to do was call ahead, get some telephone operators on his side, and that would be that.
He glanced at the girl sitting in the front cockpit, loose strands of hair flying around her head. He’d be glad to be rid of her.
