A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (48 page)

“I’m through with accidents,” I told him. “Don’t worry. This is my third. I’m finished.”

The next day I was drafted to drive one of the two medical oxygen trucks. One of the drivers had quit and our foreman, Mac Bonner, came out onto the dock in the morning and told me to see Nadine, who ran Medical, in her little office building out front. She was a large woman who had one speed: gruff. I was instructed in a three-minute speech to go get my commercial driver’s license that afternoon and then stop by the uniform shop on Bethany Home Road and get two sets of the brown trousers and short-sleeved yellow shirts worn by the delivery people. On my way out I went by and got my lunch and saw Victor. “They want me to drive the truck. Dennis quit, I guess.” This was new to me and I was still working it over in my mind; I mean, it seemed like good news.

“Dennis wouldn’t last,” Victor said. “We’ll have the Ford loaded for you by nine.”

The yellow shirt had a name oval over the heart pocket: David. And the brown pants had a crease that will outlast us all. It felt funny going to work in those clothes and when I came up to the loading dock after picking up the truck keys and my delivery list, Jesse and Victor came out of the forest of cylinders grinning. Jesse saluted. I was embarrassed and uneasy. “One of you guys take the truck,” I said.

“No way, David.” Victor stepped up and pulled my collar straight. “You look too good. Besides, this job needs a white guy.” I looked helplessly at Jesse.

“Better you than me,” he said. They had the truck loaded: two groups of ten medical blue cylinders chain-hitched into the front of the bed. They’d used the special cardboard sleeves we had for medical gas on all the tanks; these kept them from getting too beat up. These tanks were going to be in people’s bedrooms. Inside each was the same oxygen as in the dinged-up green cylinders that the welding shops used.

I climbed in the truck and started it up. Victor had already told me about allowing a little more stopping time because of the load. “Here he comes, ladies,” Jesse called. I could see his hand raised in the rearview mirror as I pulled onto McDowell and headed for Sun City.

At that time, Sun City was set alone in the desert, a weird theme park for retired white people, and from the beginning it gave me an eerie feeling. The streets were like toy streets, narrow and clean, running in huge circles. No cars, no garage doors open, and, of course, in the heat, no pedestrians. As I made my rounds, wheeling the hot blue tanks up the driveways and through the carpeted houses to the bedroom, uncoupling the old tank, connecting the new one, I felt peculiar. In the houses I was met by the wife or the husband and was escorted along the way. Whoever was sick was in the other room. It was all very proper. These people had come here from the midwest and the east. They had been doctors and professors and lawyers and wanted to live among their own kind. No one under twenty could reside in Sun City. When I’d made my six calls, I fled that town, heading east on old Bell Road, which in those days was miles and miles of desert and orchards, not two traffic lights all the way to Scottsdale Road.

Mr. Rensdale was the first of my customers I ever saw in bed. He lived in one of the many blocks of townhouses they were building in Scottsdale. These were compact units with two stories and a pool in the small private yard. All of Scottsdale shuddered under bulldozers that year; it was dust and construction delays, as the little town began to see the future. I rang the bell and was met by a young woman in a long silk shirt who saw me and said, “Oh, yeah. Come on in. Where’s Dennis?”

I had the hot blue cylinder on the single dolly and pulled it up the step and into the dark, cool space. I had my pocket rag and wiped the wheels as soon as she shut the door. I could see her knees and they seemed to glow in the near dark. “I’m taking his route for a while,” I said, standing up. I couldn’t see her face, but she had a hand on one hip.

“Right,” she said. “He got fired.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. I pointed down the hall. “Is it this way?”

“No, upstairs, first door on your right. He’s awake, David.” She said my name just the way you read names off shirts. Then she put her hand on my sleeve and said, “Who hit you?” My burn was still raw across my cheekbone.

“I got burned.”

“Cute,” she said. “They’re going to love that back at . . . where?”

“University of Montana,” I said.

“University of what?” she said. “There’s a university there?” She cocked her head at me. I couldn’t tell what she was wearing under that shirt. She smiled. “I’m kidding. I’m a snob, but I’m kidding. What year are you?”

“I’ll be a junior,” I said.

“I’m a senior at Penn,” she said. I nodded, my mind whipping around for something clever. I didn’t even know where Penn was.

“Great,” I said. I started up the stairs.

“Yeah,” she said, turning. “Great.”

I drew the dolly up the carpeted stair carefully, my first second story, and entered the bedroom. It was dim in there, but I could see the other cylinder beside the bed and a man in the bed, awake. He was wearing pajamas, and immediately upon seeing me, he said, “Good. Open the blinds, will you?”

“Sure thing,” I said, and I went around the bed and turned the miniblind wand. The Arizona day fell into the room. The young woman I’d spoken to walked out to the pool beneath me. She took her shirt off and hung it on one of the chairs. Her breasts were white in the sunlight. She set out her magazine and drink by one of the lounges and lay facedown in a shiny green bikini bottom. I only looked down for a second or less, but I could feel the image in my body.

While I was disconnecting the regulator from the old tank and setting up the new one, Mr. Rensdale introduced himself. He was a thin, handsome man with dark hair and mustache and he looked like about three or four of the actors I was seeing those nights in late movies after my parents went to bed. He wore an aspirator with the two small nostril tubes, which he removed while I changed tanks. I liked him immediately. “Yeah,” he went on, “it’s good you’re going back to college. Though there’s a future, believe me, in this stuff.” He knocked the oxygen tank with his knuckle.

“What field are you in?” I asked him. He seemed so absolutely worldly there, his wry eyes and his East Coast accent, and he seemed old the way people did then, but I realize now he wasn’t fifty.

“I, lad, am the owner of Rensdale Foundations, which my father founded,” his whisper was rich with humor, “and which supplies me with more money than my fine daughters will ever be able to spend.” He turned his head toward me. “We make ladies’ undergarments, lots of them.”

The dolly was loaded and I was ready to go. “Do you enjoy it? Has it been a good thing to do?”

“Oh, for chrissakes,” he wheezed a kind of laugh, “give me a week on that, will you? I didn’t know this was going to be an interview. Come after four and it’s worth a martini to you, kid, and we’ll do some career counseling.”

“You all set?” I said as I moved to the door.

“Set,” he whispered now, rearranging his aspirator. “Oh absolutely. Go get them, champ.” He gave me a thin smile and I left. Letting myself out of the dark downstairs, I did an odd thing. I stood still in the house. I had talked to her right here. I saw her breasts again in the bright light. No one knew where I was.

Of course, Elizabeth Rensdale, seeing her at the pool that way, so casually naked, made me think of Linda and the fact that I had no idea of what was going on. I couldn’t remember her body, though, that summer, I gave it some thought. It was worse not being a virgin, because I should have then had some information to fuel my struggles with loneliness. I had none, except Linda’s face and her voice,
“Here, let me get it.”

From the truck I called Nadine, telling her I was finished with Scottsdale and was heading—on schedule—to Mesa. “Did you pick up Mr. Rensdale’s walker? Over.”

“No, ma’am. Over.” We had to say “Over.”

“Why not? You were supposed to. Over.”

The heat in the early afternoon as I dropped through the river bottom and headed out to Mesa was gigantic, an enormous, unrelenting thing, and I took a kind of perverse pleasure from it. I could feel a heartbeat in my healing burns. My truck was not air-conditioned, a thing that wouldn’t fly now, but then I drove with my arm out the window through the traffic of these desert towns. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Should I go back? Over.” I could see going back, surprising the girl. I wanted to see that girl again.

“It was on your sheet. Let it go this week. But let’s read the sheet from now on. Over and out.”

“Over and out,” I said into the air, hanging up the handset.

Half the streets in Mesa were dirt, freshly bladed into the huge grid which now is paved wall to wall. I made several deliveries and ended up at the torn edge of the known world, the road just a track, a year maybe two at most from the first ripples of the growth which would swallow hundreds of miles of the desert. The house was an old block home gone to seed, the lawn dirt, the shrubs dead, the windows brown with dust and cobwebs. From the front yard I had a clear view of the Santan Mountains to the south. I was fairly sure I had a wrong address and that the property was abandoned. I knocked on the greasy door and after five minutes a stooped, red-haired old man answered. This was Gil, and I have no idea how old he was that summer, but it was as old as you get. Plus he was sick with the emphysema and liver disease. His skin, stretched tight and translucent on his gaunt body, was splattered with brown spots. On his hands several had been picked raw.

I didn’t want to go into the house. This was the oddest call of my first day driving oxygen. There had been something regular about the rest of it, even the sanitized houses in Sun City, the upscale apartments in Scottsdale so new the paint hadn’t dried, and the other houses I’d been to, magazines on a coffee table, a wife paying bills in the kitchen.

I pulled my dolly into the house, dark inside against the crushing daylight, and was hit by the roiling smell of dog hair and urine. I didn’t kneel to wipe the wheels. “Right in here,” the old man said, leading me back into the house toward a yellow light in the small kitchen, where I could hear a radio chattering. He had his oxygen set up in the corner of the kitchen; it looked like he lived in the one room. There was a fur of fine red dust on everything, the range, the sink, except half the kitchen table where he had his things arranged, some brown vials of prescription medicine, two decks of cards, a pencil or two on a small pad, a warped issue of
Field & Stream
, a little red Bible, and a box of cough drops. In the middle of the table was a fancy painted plate, maybe a seascape, with a line of Oreos on it. I got busy changing out the tanks. You take the cardboard sleeve off, unhook the regulator, open the valve on the new tank for one second, blasting dust from the mouth, screw the regulator on it, open the pressure so it reads the same as you came, sleeve the old tank, load it up, and go. The new tank was always hot, too hot to touch from being in the sun, and it seemed wrong to leave such a hot thing in someone’s bedroom. Nadine handled all the paperwork.

The cookies had scared me and I was trying to get out. Meanwhile the old man sat down at the kitchen table and started talking. “I’m Gil Benson,” his speech began, “and I’m glad to see you, David. My lungs got burned in France in 1919 and it took them all these years to buckle.” He spoke like so many of my customers in a hoarse whisper. “I’ve lived all over the world, including the three A’s: Africa, Cairo, Australia, Burberry, and Alaska, Point Barrow. My favorite place was Montreal, Canada, because I was in love there and married the woman, had children. She’s dead. My least favorite place is right here because of this. One of my closest friends was young Jack Kramer, the tennis player. That was many years ago. I’ve flown almost every plane made between the years 1938 and 1958. I don’t fly anymore with all this.” He indicated the oxygen equipment. “Sit down. Have a cookie.”

I had my dolly ready. “I shouldn’t, sir,” I said. “I’ve got a schedule and better keep it.”

“Grab that pitcher out of the fridge before you sit down. I made us some Kool-Aid. It’s good.”

I opened his refrigerator. Except for the Tupperware pitcher, it was empty. Nothing. I put the pitcher on the table. “I really have to go,” I said. “I’ll be late.

Gil lifted the container of Kool-Aid and raised it into a jittery hover above the two plastic glasses. There was going to be an accident. His hands were covered with purple scabs. I took the pitcher from him and filled the glasses.

“Sit down,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here, young fella.” When I didn’t move he said, “Really. Nadine said you were a good-looking kid.” He smiled, and leaning on both hands, he sat hard into the kitchen chair. “This is your last stop today. Have a snack.”

So began my visits with old Gil Benson. He was my last delivery every fourth day that summer, and as far as I could tell, I was the only one to visit his wretched house. On one occasion I placed one of the Oreos he gave me on the corner of my chair as I left and it was right there next time when I returned. Our visits became little three-part dramas: my arrival and the bustle of intrusion; the snack and his monologue; his hysteria and weeping.

The first time he reached for my wrist across the table as I was standing to get up, it scared me. Things had been going fine. He’d told me stories in an urgent voice, one story spilling into the other without a seam, because he didn’t want me to interrupt. I had
I’ve got to go
all over my face, but he wouldn’t read it. He spoke as if placing each word in the record, as if I were going to write it all down when I got home. It always started with a story of long ago, an airplane, a homemade repair, an emergency landing, a special cargo, an odd coincidence, each part told with pride, but his voice would gradually change, slide into a kind of whine as he began an escalating series of complaints about his doctors, the insurance, his children—naming each of the four and relating their indifference, petty greed, or cruelty. I nodded through all of this: I’ve got to go. He leaned forward and picked at the back of his hands. When he tired after forty minutes, I’d slide my chair back and he’d grab my wrist. By then I could understand his children pushing him away and moving out of state. I wanted out. But I’d stand—while he still held me—and say, “That’s interesting. Save some of these cookies for next time.” And then I’d move to the door, hurrying the dolly, but never fast enough to escape. Crying softly and carrying his little walker bottle of oxygen, he’d see me to the door and then out into the numbing heat to the big white pickup. He’d continue his monologue while I chained the old tank in the back and while I climbed in the cab and started the engine and then while I’d start to pull away. I cannot describe how despicable I felt doing that, gradually moving away from old Gil on that dirt lane, and when I hit the corner and turned west for the shop, I tromped it: forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, raising a thick red dust train along what would someday be Chandler Boulevard.