After Bathing at Baxters (21 page)

Later Dorfman wandered back along passageways aflame with burning light to the car park. Around 2100 the local flights ended. The rest of the big coast-to-coast stopovers not expected until midnight, there was a lull in the drome's activities, a fall in the pulse-rate. Deserted except for the odd scrubbing janitor, the franchise booths reared up at him, their swathes of pantsuits and denims frozen behind plate-glass security grilles. Someone had taped a sticker to the convertible's rear window that said NUCLEAR WASTE – THIS STATE'S DISGRACE. Dorfman peeled it crossly away, sighing when the yellow paper stuck to his fingers. If there was one thing Dorfman hated more than kids it was bleeding heart Dudley Doright Democrats. He sometimes had visions of himself armed to the teeth with Uzis and Sten guns stalking the walls of a stockade housing drums of spent uranium rods and loosing off pot-shots at the seething longhairs thronging at the gate. As he swung out onto the freeway extension, the moon veered up suddenly from behind the distant control tower and he stared at it, baffled by the shafts of white, coruscating light. Book at Rockefeller Drive, the house was shrouded in darkness. Dorfman stowed the convertible carefully in the car-port and stumbled his way into the kitchen, where shiny milk cartons gleamed out of the murk and there was a smell of lavender water. Dorfman was used to these vagrant odours, by-products of Francine's aromatherapy habit, rearing up unpredictably to confuse him: the gypsophilia on the stairwell, flurries of burnt almond wafting over the back porch. He fixed a mug of coffee and sat in a high-backed chair to drink it, thinking of the crowded runways, bright metal wings shearing through an opaque sky, the Asian hostess's calm and welcoming smile.

Dorfman collected model airplane kits: Wellington bombers, Messerschmidt MEI09s, Heinkel IIIs with cigar-shaped fuselages. The boxes lay piled up in the lean-to shed at the back of the house where Francine kept her stores of sourgrass pickle, discarded exercise bikes and noxious experiments of Mrs Fogelberg's in see-thru carafes. Most evenings and nearly every weekend Dorfman spent a couple of hours in the lean-to, nostrils depressed against the overpowering reek of pickle and tiger balm lotion, streaking tiny tracks of glue onto aeliron hinges with a match head, painstakingly lowering into place the transparent covers of machine-gun turrets. Dried out and complete, markings and insignia patiently transferred, painted up according to approved box-lid colour schemes, they hung from ceiling wires or reposed in neat lines on Dorfman's work table: a proud, gleaming squadron ready to scramble at a second's notice and fly up menacingly on his behalf. There was family precedent for this hobby, and also for its historical focus. Old man Dorfman had flown Superfortresses out over Japan in the war. There was a picture of him hanging in the upstairs closet, in leather flying jacket, backed up against the hull of his plane, the Red Sox Express, next to the stencilled outline of a baseball pitcher. Staring at it, as he crouched balefully over the can, Dorfman felt only a vague, tremulous envy of the kind he experienced leafing through the mail order subscription copies of
Aircrew, Windsock
and
Flight Monitor
, the consciousness of an entire teeming universe out there beyond the horizon, distant yet beckoning, and eternally out of reach.

Half-past seven the next morning found Dorfman in his lean-to, brooding over the construction of a Fiesler Storch, a weird kind of late-period Nazi scout plane, which for some reason had a blunt fuselage and the cockpit shifted way down near the wing-engine.
Special care should be taken in the alignment of the tailplane
, the instructions cautioned, and Dorfman, who had already spilled half a tube of glue over his grey handyman's apron and lost a propellor blade somewhere in the floor's inch-thick coating of sawdust, could believe it. Outside pale midsummer mist dispersed airily off the backyard lots and gardens. From the kitchen Dorfman could hear the brisk, purposeful sounds of Francine fixing herself a cup of acorn coffee or a bowl of hi-fibre wheaties. Dorfman, who had breakfasted an hour earlier, felt the three bratwurst sausages and their attendant garnish of mustard and corn-bread hang heavy on his stomach. From further away, but not that far, he could hear the
ticka-ticka-ticka-thump
of Enzo Manzoni, eldest son of the neighbouring Manzoni household – globular wops who ran a restaurant in town – listening to rap music. Dorfman's brow creased over. Frowning at the twin sections of the Storch's fuselage, gleaming up at him like the two halves of the cod steaks Francine sometimes grilled on Sunday nights, he used his free hand to stir the pile of proposal forms that lay on the chair. Not much of a harvest for a week's hard calling, Dorfman had to admit. A woman out in the corn country wanting to insure her vacation. A gay couple in Sioux City enquiring about health insurance (it wasn't even worth processing the forms, Dorfman knew). A few premium top-ups from previous clients who'd bought their wives jewellery or splashed out on a new car-port. That left Mr Kopechnie. Sometimes Dorfman wondered why he carried on visiting Mr Kopechnie, who at eighty-one must have been the worst risk for a life policy any ABO salesman had ever encountered, knowing all the while that the explanation had nothing to do with insurance. Like Dorfman's old man, Mr Kopechnie was an airforce vet. Hell, the guy had flown Wildcats in the South Pacific, idled on the carrier foredecks waiting for the Kamikazes to come blazing out of the sun. Together they embarked on long, serious conversations about the way a B-25's undercarriage retracted or the exact shade of paint you might colour the underside of a Mustang bent on a night mission. Dorfman had tried asking Mr Kopechnie about the Kamikaze attacks. ‘You mean they just … blew themselves away?' ‘That's right,' Mr Kopechnie would nod. ‘Only took enough fuel for a one-way trip. This weren't no baseball game.' And Dorfman would bow his head, uncertain whether the figure of speech was a rebuke to one who had not experienced the tumult of the South Pacific or simply Mr Kopechme's own awe at his spangled youth.

Outside in the yard there was an anguished, turbulent commotion that sounded like someone who weighed a hundred and eighty pounds falling over a stack of empty kerosene cans. A bit later Francine's mild, innocuous – but not for that reason any less infuriating – voice came quavering through the door. ‘You in there, hon?' By way of an answer Dorfman shifted the alignment of his feet, the better to peer down at the tiny plastic homuncule wedged between his fingers, and stuck out his tongue. ‘Come on, hon.' Francine's voice came again, the half-coaxing, half-exasperated tone reminiscent, Dorfman realised with bitter disgust, of other, more intimate encounters. ‘What you doing in there?' ‘Beating off,' Dorfman mouthed noiselessly. Straightening up, he flicked the doorcatch with his thumb. ‘Heck is going on here?' he enquired with what was meant to sound like belligerence but in fact ended up way down on the scale of craven timidity. Staring at Francine's plump, guttering face, the features even at this hour giving the impression of melting away into her Eco-Freak sweatshirt, Dorfman was struck by how many times in their six-year relationship she had confronted him in this way, looming menacingly before him as he drowsed over late-night TV, pawing him awake from the airy valleys and deltas of the night to recount dreams about Charlie Manson and Sharon Tate. ‘Hey look,' Francine said seriously. I have to talk to you OK?' Bridling instinctively at the blank, serial killer's stare, she went on: ‘About tonight, yeah? Only Mrs Fogelberg figured I might like to have supper after the class. Is that OK or do you want to think it over?' Bending to dab a tiny fleck of flesh-coloured paint onto the homuncule's upturned face, Dorfman thought about it. Francine having supper with fat klutz Fogelberg meant an extra-curricular trip to Mr Kopechnie. Or a visit to the airport. Or, if he kept himself to a pretty tight schedule during the rest of the day, a trip to Mr Kopechnie
and
a visit to the airport. Dorfman straightened up. The day was looking good. The day was looking shit-hot. ‘Could take in a burger at the drive-by,' he said doubtfully. Francine gazed back, intent and solicitous. ‘Well if that's what you want, hon. Else I could leave you something. You fancy some of Mrs Fogelberg's home-made pastrami we had the other night? Or maybe I fix you some bean chowder?' Dorfman shook his head. Looking down at the body of the German airman, thirty seconds later, he was alarmed to find that in his annoyance he had somehow managed to wrench the head clean away from the torso. Guilt flaring in his eyes, the gabble of Enzo Manzoni's rap music pounding in his head, he bent reverently to repair the damage.

Eleven hours later found Dorfman goading his convertible up the sharp incline that led to Mr Kopechnie's bungalow, one among a plateau of retirement homes populated by potbellied ex-insurance salesmen and their loaf-haired wives. Weak early evening sun catching on the wing mirror flashed into his eye and made him jam the visor down hurriedly with his hand. It had been a bitch of a day. No, Dorfman corrected himself, a
motherfucker
of a day. First there'd been a flat tyre two miles outside of Hudsonville. The vacationing farmer's wife had disappeared someplace leaving an idiot son who declined the pink proposal form Dorfman had tried to press upon him. The meeting with the gay couple in Sioux City – two leathery forty-year-olds with peg teeth and beaten-in faces, had turned into a funeral parlour nightmare of blood counts and haemoglobin deficiencies. Finally, something he'd had for lunch had disagreed with him and he'd spent twenty minutes with his pants round his ankles in a layby outside of Tidewater squirting ochre shit into a drainage ditch. As ever the sight of Mr Kopechnie's front porch, gained after the usual clenched-teeth clanging of gears, had a sedative effect. There were times, Dorfman thought, when Mr Kopechnie's bungalow, like the airport, had assumed the status of a fixed point in his, Dorfman's, life. Other things might alter, as indeed they had continued to alter during the five and a half years Dorfman had paid calls in this part of town, but Mr Kopechnie's front porch with its single parking space next to Mr Kopechnie's venerable chevy, remained the same: sprinklers drenching the lush, virid lawn, the line of motionless cypresses, Mr Kopechnie's dog comatose under a tree. Mr Kopechnie himself cross-legged in his garden chair with a copy of the
Iowa Free Citizen
stretched out over his lap. Watching the old guy lever himself out of his chair and come hastening lopsidedly over the grass – Mr Kopechnie had had a hip replacement three years back which imparted a queer circularity to his gait – Dorfman bent his head in what he supposed was a kind of respect. Mr Kopechnie, eight-two next Fall, had seen it all: Capone, Prohibition, Hoover, the Old Deal, the New Deal, the Japs strafing Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt dying, and on into the monochrome hinterlands of e fifties: Monroe, ‘Nam, the Moon landings, Nixon, Reagan and the barbarities of the startling present. Jesus, the guy was a walking almanac of American history, a man who always remembered what he was doing at those significant moments in time, the day the big bomber headed east into the Nippon sun, the afternoon the presidential motorcade sped into Dallas. To Dorfman, who had tried self-laceratingly to determine what he had been doing when he heard the news about Lennon getting shot and narrowed it down to getting fired from a travelling salesman's job in Albany or failing to make out with a girl called Cissie Matupelah, these were stern credentials. Still more awesome was the fact that, indubitably, Mr Kopechnie looked the part. Six foot tall and ramrod-straight, with white, side-styled hair, facial skin still holding up, and none of your Reagan-era vanity tucks and creases, he looked how Dorfman imagined an ageing rancher in a Gary Cooper movie ought to look: invincible, ironical, tough.

As Dorfman blundered into the arc of the sprinkler, felt the sting of icy water rip through his pants leg and hurriedly blundered out again, Mr Kopechnie moved easily out of the deep shadow of the cypress tree. ‘Figured you might drop by,' he said seriously. Take a Coke, maybe, or a beer?' There was a pitcher of ice on the garden table, Dorfman noticed, and a couple of tall glasses with lemon twists. ‘Got a six-pack of Bud in the chiller,' Mr Kopechnie went on. ‘Just say the word.' Oppressed by the memory of his twenty-minute stakeout athwart the drainage ditch, Dorfman settled for Coke. Seated in one of Mr Kopechnie's spindly garden chairs, the thin stanchions digging into his buttocks, stretched polyester crowding out his bulky thighs, he felt simultaneously elated and cast down, cheered by the grave reservoir of peace that would lap around him for the next half-hour, depressed by the inevitable professional dead-end. From the vantage point of the insurance salesman, Mr Kopechnie was a walking disaster area, a kind of LA faultline snaking across Dorfman's career. Once, two years back, he'd actually got as far as figuring out a quotation for Mr Kopechnie, based on Mr Kopechnie's living until ninety and receiving the minimum death benefit, and the premiums had weighed in at four hundred dollars a month, leaving aside the thrice-yearly medical check. Plus they hadn't liked it at the office either. ‘Jesus, Dorf,' Guyland had whistled, as he cast his eye over the panels of neatly framed statistics. ‘Quit fooling around with eighty-year-olds, huh? I mean, what's in it for him, with the premium at five grand a year? Ten to one the guy has a fucking actuary for a nephew and they'll sue us for entrapment. Just forget it.' But Dorfman, who had worked out that the salesman's commission on a ten-year policy of the kind suggested to Mr Kopechnie would raise approximately ten thousand dollars, didn't feel like forgetting it. Not quite. Awareness of the policy and its occasional resuscitation fell across their conversation like the cypress shadows.

Meanwhile, there were other, sunnier bowers where he and Mr Kopechnie could linger. ‘Hey,' Mr Kopechnie said sharply. ‘Knew there was something I means to show ya. Here now.' Reaching into the big metal chest beneath the table, he pulled out a squat, oblong cardboard box. ‘What do ya reckon of that?' Dorfman turned the container over gingerly in his hands, eyeing the four-colour illustration and the red and white AIRFIX logo in the corner. That was another thing about Mr Kopechnie. Dorfman knew that no matter how many collectors' conventions he attended, no matter how many ads he placed in
Windsock
or the
North American Aeromodellers' Association Journal
, the chances of him walking off with a first issue World War II RAF Blenheim fighter bomber for under two hundred dollars were rather less than Tom Harkin's in the Democrat primary. ‘It's beautiful,' he said slowly, struck by a pang of envy so intense that for a moment he stopped looking at the box and gazed upward beyond the trees, as if he expected the Blenheim's real-life equivalent to sail into view above his head. ‘It's a special kind too,' Mr Kopechnie went on. ‘Night fighter markings and camouflage. Silver-grey on the undercarriage. Flying low to beat the radar. Catch that baby over your shopping mall just before dawn and you'd wonder what hit ya.' And for a second Dorfman imagined the scene: the forest of upturned faces, tracer bullets zinging across the tiled patios, the sluice and spatter of spilled blood; opened his eyes to find calm Iowa sunshine sinking away into the foothills of the fading day. ‘Hey,' he said unconfidently, just before he got up to go. ‘Don't suppose you had time to think about … about what we discussed last time I was round or nothing?' Mr Kopechnie, regarding him stoically, shook his head. ‘Sure. I done some thinking, and, fact is Dorf, I don't see the reason for it.' ‘No?' ‘Surely not. If Wilma was alive, then maybe there'd be some point to it. But seeing as …' He made a tiny gesture with his hand of the kind Dorfman encountered a lot with his elderly clients: it meant terminal illness, funeral parlours, widow's weeds. ‘You got kin though ain't you?' Dorfman found himself saying. It was an old trick from out of the. salesman's manual:
make your target feel guilty about any dependent relatives he or she may have
. ‘Thought you said you had a kid?' Mr Kopechnie frowned, the keen-eyed rancher seeing smoke signals along the trail. ‘Sure,' he admitted. ‘But Spence now, he ain't shown up in years. Jesus, if I went and left him life insurance the lawyers wouldn't even know where to address the cheque.' Dorfman smiled his careful salesman's smile, the smile of reduced rates, absent signatures and unforeseen death. At the car Mr Kopechnie bobbed awkwardly and thrust the cardboard box through the open window onto the passenger seat. ‘Here,' he said, ‘I'd like you to have this.' ‘Hell no, Mr Kopechnie,' Dorfman heard himself saying. ‘You can't give me a thing like that.' But Mr Kopechnie was inexorable. ‘You're a kind of guy I like, Dorf,' he explained. ‘You got respect for old people like me, guys that served our country in its time of trial. I want you to know that I appreciate that.' Still Dorfman found himself prodding the box back in the direction of Mr Kopechnie's long, curved fingers. In the near distance, beyond the carport, he could see the arc of the sprinkler beating down on the sodden turf, Mr Kopechnie's dog slinking off to some bolthole by the trees, empty glasses side by side on the table. ‘Go on, take it,' Mr Kopechnie commanded. Revving the convertible's flatulent motor, waving one hand negligently out of the nearside window, the box glistening up at him from the seat, Dorfman found himself crying tears of mingled pride and shame.