Among the Dead (16 page)

‘Stop,' said Frank.

The driver turned around to look at him. ‘What are you going to do?'

The meter was now at forty dollars. Frank took out his wallet, wondering if the driver would reject the money. Frank had a fifty and four twenties. He gave the driver seventy, and said, ‘Keep the change.' The driver kept the money.

‘I have to see the plane,' said Frank. ‘I just have to see it, I have to know.'

‘Good luck,' said the driver, and then he gave the money back to Frank. I can't,' he said.

The cab went away, leaving him on the sidewalk, and Frank walked up the path to the nearest house. He rang the bell and heard a two-bell chime, high-low, and then he heard someone walking.

A man inside the house said, ‘Who is it?'

‘My name is Frank Gale,' said Frank. ‘And my family was killed
in the plane crash. The police have the neighbourhood blocked off, but I have to get through, and I was wondering if I could climb over your back fence, so I can get to the next street, so I can be inside the police line.'

‘And the police won't let you through?'

‘No,' said Frank, ‘they want me to go to the high school.'

‘Dear God. Haven't they let you through to your house yet?'

It took Frank a second to understand the question. The man thought that Frank lived in a house that had been hit. If Frank went along with this, it would be easy to make up a story about the confusion of the police, but he wanted to tell the truth. ‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘but I don't live in the neighbourhood. My family was on the plane.' He felt odd calling Anna and Madeleine his family; two seemed a small number for family. He would have needed two children to have a full family, or better, three. More connections.

The door opened. The man was younger than Frank expected, thirty, probably, and slim. A five-year-old boy was at his side, holding on to the man's belt, and swinging his weight from it.

‘You really should go to the high school,' said the man, and he studied Frank before telling him to come into the house. He introduced himself, ‘Dan Burack. And this is Dennis.'

‘I know this is crazy,' said Frank, ‘but I don't know what else to do. I just want to see where they crashed, it makes a difference to me, I need to see it, to know that it's real.'

‘It's real. Dennis was home when it happened.'

There was no mention of Burack's wife; Frank supposed she was at the market. Maybe with their other child, if they had one.

‘He lost a friend. We lost a few friends. But friends aren't the same thing as family.'

‘If you love people, what's the difference?' asked Frank, but he was sure there was a difference.

‘Come on through,' said Burack. It was a comfortable and undistinguished house. Frank would not have noticed it, but Anna always made fun of wall-to-wall carpets in a living room; she thought there was something too suburban about them, that a wood floor with even a mediocre rug, something with an uncomplicated design, was better than carpet. Frank thought that above all reasons, it was for just this kind of distinction that he needed her, because her eyes were set on the world, and his were so clouded with his own shit. Or did he hate her because this kind of distinction
left him with a catalogue of sins against which he measured everyone, and without the guidance of his now dead wife, would he have halted his affection for Dan Burack because he had a carpet?

Burack took him to the back yard. ‘Can you smell it?' asked Burack.

‘Yes,' said Frank. It was there, clearly, the smell of a fire, of gasoline and wood.

‘It's about five blocks to where the plane hit.'

‘Why do you believe me?' asked Frank. ‘How do you know I'm not going to break into an empty house?'

‘Are you?'

‘No.'

‘There you have it.'

The back wall was only five feet tall, and the lights were off in the house beyond it.

‘Thank you,' said Frank. He pulled himself over the wall and dropped to the other side. There was only a patch of lawn at this far end of the yard, and then a long swimming pool surrounded by a fence. Frank trotted beside the pool, and when he came to the driveway found a lock inside the gate. The gate was wood, and about six feet tall. He hoisted himself once again, this time bracing himself against the house. He stood up on the gate. There was a window just beyond it. He bent over to reach the sill, and with a firm grip on the window he jumped to the ground, with only a light insult to his ankles. Now, on the other side of the police line, all he had to do was follow his nose.

There was a pale half-moon. Cypress trees with dry needles moved in a light wind, which came with the rumble of the heavy engines of fire trucks on the next block. The sound of the trucks passed away, but the light wind continued. No matter what the weather, he thought, it would feel appropriate. Full moon, no moon, crescent on the wax or wane, light wind or typhoon, he could have read into any of them a fitting judgement on his grief, on the universe, on his silly goal to see the plane. What did the light wind mean, was it indifference or comfort? Did the passing fire trucks play a threnody just for him, or even not just for him, but for everyone? The sound reminded everyone of what had happened.

When Frank passed the corner of the front of the house, he saw the barrier from which he had been turned. He was in the middle
of the block, and he walked to the next corner and then made a right turn up an empty street. Ahead to the next block, some fifteen or so houses away, he saw a knot of people in the light of something large that was hidden around the corner. The light shifted, and then he heard the sound of a crane or bulldozer. He walked, but then he found it easier to run.

Men shouted directions and responses, and gears were shifted, and engines changed pitch, and as he came to the corner he could smell a dead fire, water on charcoal making the air damp. Around the corner he saw that two houses had burned almost to the ground. The nearest house was half destroyed; the wall closest to him was fine, but the roof was off, and a section of the second storey was still complete. The fire had been at the next house, and there was nothing left of it. The bulldozer was prodding at the rubble while a crew of workers took it apart more gently with shovels. Each wore a white mask that covered his mouth and nose. There was an ambulance parked across the street, and a table with a tall steel coffee jug. Frank walked to the edge of the circle of light. The ambulance driver watched, coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He was about fifty, with deep creases and dry, freckled skin. Frank hated him. He had the look of those Californians, those San Diegans, for whom boredom and hostility blend together into smug silence. He flicked his cigarette with such practised attention to the ash that it was not beyond possibility that this tic was a large piece of the man's character.

‘One of the engines went down here,' said the driver. ‘The first house burned and set the second on fire. And this is three blocks from the worst of it. There's bodies in some trees out of the evacuation zone, but the real bad part is up ahead.'

‘The plane exploded in the air?' asked Frank.

‘Not completely, the engine may have ripped off as it was coming down, but more than likely it flew off the wing when the plane hit Cohassett. Have you been over there yet?'

‘No,' said Frank.

‘What a mess.'

‘Why are they digging here now?' asked Frank. ‘Can't this wait until morning?'

‘There's three bodies left in the house. The guys with the masks got the masks on because of the smell.'

The men with the masks sifted through a layer of dry-wall, smashed furniture, and what remained of a second-floor bathroom.
Satisfied that nothing, or rather no one, was in there, they let the bulldozer pick it up. When the bulldozer moved the pile to the lawn, they went at the rubble again.

‘Does anything survive the fire?' asked Frank.

‘Oh yeah,' said the driver. ‘The fire doesn't last that long or burn that hot. It's not like a car crash. A car crash is rough. If the gas tank is full when it explodes, you can get a concentrated fire, and they have to go back to dental records to make the ID. But with this kind of fire, usually what kills is the smoke. The bodies from the plane, some of them are all fucked up, the ones that fell from high up, people out of their seats, but the ones that were in seats, or were in the sections that hit intact, they're broken, but they're not cut up. The people on the ground look worse than the people from the plane. I just finished a run from Nimitz Street, and that was bad. There was this family getting out of a car just when the plane hit. The joke is, they'd just come from the airport. The tail section skidded down the street right into the garage as they were getting out of the car.'

‘How do they know?' asked Frank.

‘The little girl across the street saw it happen. The whole house came down, there was nothing left of it, but it didn't burn. What a mess. Pieces of bodies.' The driver flicked his ash and then repeated his last words: ‘Pieces of bodies.' This time he lowered his voice, because, Frank thought, he was suddenly aware that Frank was probably not on official business, and that if he was on this side of the barrier he was from the neighbourhood, and for him this was not an opportunity to test the strength of his professional detachment.

Frank realized that there was no law compelling him to stay. He wanted to see if they would uncover the three bodies, but he knew that there would be others, and better. He said goodbye to the ambulance driver.

‘Have a good one,' said the driver.

He wanted to see the plane. He wanted to see the dead. But which dead? A flight attendant stuck in a tree, or a postman crushed by the tip of a wing? As he thought of the dead, he discovered himself grading the dead, giving them more points if they were passengers, giving them no credit if they were on the ground. The passengers were the ones to blame, of course, but if there was something noble in their deaths, there was also something stupid and annoying about the deaths of the people on the
ground. What was noble? The sudden catastrophe immediately recognized by everyone on the plane. But did he mean noble, why noble? Because of a better vantage point, higher station. Elevation. In the air. And what was seen from the vantage point? Why, life, of course. And what about life? Its brevity. And from this knowledge of life's brevity, what lesson are we then free to take to heart? Why, to act on impulse, to act without fear, the freedom of the nobility, the freedom of power, of seeing through the collective futility of the masses.

And what was so insipid about the deaths on the ground? To be on the plane was to be part of a bomb, to be the bomb, to be the killer. And to be on the ground? Was to be another stupid innocent victim. Another victim of massacre.

And if someone on the plane was sleeping when the plane exploded? Or is nobility reserved only for those who see their deaths coming to them?

Yes, only that.

Frank walked back to the street he had come down on, the name stencilled on the kerb, Dana Street. So he continued along on Dana, parallel to the main road, the next block. There were big dump trucks rumbling along in formation, and overhead there were helicopters searching the ground with strong lights. It was impossible not to feel excited by all of this, and in the excitement, which was the sheer thrill of being a part of something large, something military, something that was better than entertainment. The little run he had given himself had awakened something in his body, and the numbness of his sorrow and the boredom of the train trip were small now, disappearing. There was smoke in the air, and the sounds of a hundred different engines. People shouted to each other. There was purpose to everything around him. No further danger could touch anyone inside this zone now, no other planes would crash, and so everyone was like a surgeon, brilliant with determination in this operating room that was also a neighbourhood. And if it was like his neighbourhood, it had never really been that, either, it had just been a place with a lot of houses next to each other, but it hadn't been a community. That would change. Everyone who came back to their houses would be friendly with their neighbours now, they would treat them with respect, and if they saw each other in distant parts of the city they would wave, stop, chat. There would be a community here after the crash. Frank
was happy with his thoughts; they were clear and moved forward with an agility he had forgotten. He was having a good time.

He heard himself say, ‘Madeleine, Anna,' to bring them back.

Dana Street led him to Cohassett, two blocks away. He thought of the house destroyed by the engine as a small junior college compared to this great university, this Harvard of lights and noise ahead of him. Dana had been spared, and there were families at home, some of them eating dinner, others watching television. The older children were out with their fathers, and the fathers were talking to each other in their driveways.

Frank fell in beside a few men and women. One of the men looked at him with doubt. ‘Are you from here?' he asked. Frank understood. The man didn't recognize him, and knew, didn't guess, that Frank had jumped a wall somewhere to get past the police, that he was here to see the gore. But Frank held a better card than this man's pseudo-cop pose, no one could trump him tonight.

‘My name is Frank Gale. My wife and daughter were on the plane.'

Behind him he heard a woman say to someone else, ‘His wife and daughter were on the plane.'

‘Dear God,' said the block's protector. He said it with force, and Frank thought that the man must be a Christian, a true believer.

Frank wanted them to introduce themselves, but no one did. Maybe they think I'm lying, he thought. It was odd, all that suspicion, the preparation for a fight, or a lynching –
This man is not from here!
- or would they have just denounced him to the police: ‘Officer, arrest this man, we don't know him!' The officer says, ‘Who are you?' Frank says, ‘Frank Gale.' The officer says, ‘So what is that to me?' And Frank repeats the story of the day, but already the story sounds old to him, and the policeman, hearing Frank's stale delivery, seeing Frank's annoyance at being trapped in this story, doubts it, and doubts Frank. The policeman screams at him, ‘You prey on our sympathy!' And Frank says, ‘Pray?' And the policeman hits him. ‘No,' says the policeman, ‘you come here to see what you have no right to see.' ‘And what is that?' asks Frank. ‘That is all this death,' says the policeman. ‘This death is our privilege! It belongs to the people who live inside the police barricades.' ‘But those lines were drawn arbitrarily,' says Frank. ‘They could have been a block further or closer in each direction, and the plane hit the neighbourhood randomly, did not choose to fall here.'
The policeman hits Frank again. The neighbours put away their video-recorders. A group of children chants: It is our luck to have been spared, and if it is our luck, then we must be deserving!' And Frank asks them, ‘And did my wife and daughter deserve to die?' And the children chant, ‘It is our luck to have been spared, and if it is our luck, then we must be deserving!' In this mild reverie the street disappeared for a moment, but the trance passed, and Frank settled again into his body.