Machine Dreams (26 page)

Billy looked: on the other side of the room, where his father slept, the twin bed was made, the red bedspread perfectly turned down under the pillow.
You learn in the Army, private: make your bed as soon as you stand up; then it’s done, see, for the day.
The engine of the Chevrolet revved, then purred as he backed out the driveway. The house was silent, but if Billy listened hard he could hear the others sleeping: Danner in the small room next to his, and his mother in the bigger room at the end of the hallway.

He stood and pulled the covers up, then walked to the bathroom. His father’s leather toilet kit was zipped shut; the razor was put away. Out the window Billy saw crows circling over the field, over the tall seed corn that was choked with wild grass. He peed, thinking. He was twelve, almost thirteen. Three years until his learner’s permit, then his license—he’d have a car. He’d have to buy it himself but Mitch would help him. Billy looked again into the fields; near the fence the mown grass was glinting with dew that caught the sun. The sky was already blue. When he was a man, he’d have an airplane of his own—a Cessna, he figured, with floats so he could land on a lake. He tried to imagine a lake appearing far below him, a flat blue shape neat as the lakes on maps. But the blue would spread as he got closer, and the water would look rougher; there would be pine trees all around like there were in Canada. And snow on mountains in summer. He’d seen pictures of fishing trips in his father’s
Sports Illustrated
magazines. Could they ever go to Canada in an airplane and catch trout?
Takes money
, Mitch had replied shortly.

How would Billy get money? He’d begun to consider working for an airline. Students filled out information sheets on the first day of seventh grade; in September Billy planned to write
commercial pilot
under “possible career interests.” But you had to be a certain height to pilot a passenger jet, and maybe he wouldn’t make it. Mom said it was silly to worry; anyway, seventh graders had no business filling out forms about careers, and the school
system should concentrate on algebra. All last winter, they’d sat at the kitchen table over his math homework. Long division. Billy did one problem after another while Jean checked them laboriously. He had the numbers in his mind, but all the while he was aware of her face over his shoulder, her attention completely focused. His father watching television, Danner playing 45s on her record player, were only background noise. Daytimes and evenings, the house belonged to Jean; the kitchen was hers, the sink, the stove, the table; the garage, where she kept the washer and dryer, the overflowing baskets of shirts and clean underwear; the living room, where she sat at night to grade papers from her first-grade class, endless mimeographed sheets of clowns and numbers. She taught at the same grade school he and Danner had attended; he was accustomed to seeing her in the lunchroom, drinking coffee with the other women at the teachers’ table, or on the playground with her class. He wouldn’t be seeing her at the junior high next year. The big old building was so crowded he’d seldom see Danner; she was two grades ahead of him. Classes changed according to bells; he liked the idea of being anonymous in the wide hallways while the bells rang like alarms. Still, some evenings when he built models in his room, the look of his mother’s face as she’d counted numbers came back to him. He sat wrapped in a familiar calm, handling plastic pieces that, unassembled, seemed a series of small, meaningless fragments. His collection of model airplanes ranged from Japanese Zeros to Spitfires to F-14s, and they were all to scale; Billy built them slowly and carefully, applying clear viscous glue with the tip of a toothpick. The tiny pilots were frozen in the act of fastening caps or tightening straps; they were already seated on nothingness, knees bent to fit into a cockpit. Billy looked closely at the details of their molded uniforms and remembered the short, black lashes of his mother’s unadorned eyes.

Standing now outside the bathroom door, he saw Jean sleeping. She lay on her side in the high antique bed, her hand at her mouth. Her dark hair had loosened and fell back from her face. Her lips were still reddened; there was a faint rose smear on her pillow. She slept so soundly she barely moved with her breath. He could wake Danner up; they could ride out to the airfield on their
bikes and be back before their mother woke. By nine-thirty she’d want them dressed for church. Billy grimaced; if he said he was staying home she’d never let him spend the whole afternoon at the air show. There’d be planes from all over the state, taking off in succession and circling, flying banners, or performing simple stunts.

He walked back up the hallway, watching wooden strips of the parquet floor under his bare feet. He knew approximately what Jean did every day. While he and Danner were riding back from the airfield, she’d be waking up; she’d pour herself two cups of coffee, one right after the other. On summer Saturdays she worked in the flower beds before cleaning the house and doing laundry, but on Sundays she slept in until nine and went to church at ten. Weekdays during school semesters, he guessed she did exactly what the other teachers did, only for little kids: reading and social studies before noon, science and math after. What Mitch did was almost a mystery. His work was a vinyl-covered notebook filled with order forms and diagrams of the metal buildings he sold to construction sites. He’d shown Billy the notebook, just as he’d once shown him the engines of concrete mixers. He’d owned the concrete company with Uncle Clayton then. The trucks were no mystery, their hoods thrown up to reveal hard interiors of throbbing blocks and hoses. The parts were crusted with age and smelled of cooked dirt. The notebook his father carried now smelled clean, barely disturbed, like a new text. Danner had probably never even looked inside.

He walked into her room. The pink-checked curtains were drawn, the small room dim in the bright morning. For a moment the bed was only a high dark shape in tangled space.
Stirred with a stick
, his mother called Danner’s room. Billy walked over magazines and books and cast-off clothes and stood waiting. She’d wake up if he stared at her, unless she was only pretending to sleep.

She lay on her stomach, limbs outstretched as though she’d reached the bed in free-fall and clung to what she occupied. Her hands held the curved edges of the mattress.

“Danner,” he whispered, certain she was awake, “get up.”

She opened her eyes immediately. “Why?”

“Ride out to the airfield with me before Mom is awake.”

She turned over and pulled the sheet up to her chin. “The hangar isn’t even open yet. There won’t be anything to see.”

“I can get into the hangar,” Billy told her, “but we have to hurry.”

“You can?” She paused, considering. “Dad told you not to go out there again until after the air show. Is it true there’s a guard with a gun at the hangar now?”

“Just old Cosgrove. He’s always had a gun—he shoots groundhogs on the landing strip.” Billy leaned closer to her. Somewhere near them he heard a minute whispering. He reached under her pillow and held up the transistor radio. “Do you sleep with your radio?”

She smiled, embarrassed, and took it from him. “I forgot. I fell asleep.” She turned the sound off and on to make sure the batteries still worked, then held it to her ear. “Last night after we got home from the pool dance, I heard WLS. Now there’s only air.”

“What’s WLS?”

“Chicago. Hundreds of miles away.” Her eyes moved to the obscured windows above her bed. “I hated that dance,” she said then, almost to herself.

“You told Mom it was okay.”

Danner turned the radio off. “Well, it wasn’t. I’m not going anymore.” She looked at him quizzically. “You never told me you know how to slow-dance.”

“I don’t. I just moved my feet.” He shifted his weight, remembering uncomfortably the crowded floor, the lights strung up above like carnival lights. “It doesn’t matter now. Hurry and get up. We have to leave right away, and don’t make noise.”

Crickets sounded up and down the road in the fields, as though it were still night. The wheels of the bicycles skimmed along the smooth cement. He rode beside Danner, wishing she’d go faster but observing a tacit etiquette.

“Listen how loud the crickets are,” Danner said. “They’re down in the thick grass near the dirt and don’t know it’s daylight.”

“Sure they do. The sun just isn’t hot enough yet to make them stop.”

She glanced at him, leaning more forward on her bike. “You don’t know why they don’t stop.”

“I know how to get into the hangar. I’ll show you, but you have to do like I say so Cosgrove won’t see us.”

“Doesn’t he live beside the airfield, in that white house?”

“That’s why he’s the caretaker. He’s just an old retired guy.” Billy leaned back, steering with one hand. “We go around the other side of the hangar—he can’t see from the house.”

They rode, without talking, up the hill. There were no cars on the road and no movement around the infrequent houses, but the fields themselves looked alive. Their colors brightened in swatches as the sun got higher. Crows flew. The hoarse calls of roosters ricocheted.

“When Polly got lost, Cosgrove was the old man we talked to at the airfield.” Danner spoke without turning her gaze from the road.

“Did Dad bring us out here? Are you sure?”

Their dog, Polly, a retriever mix, had disappeared two years before. Jean had announcements made on the local radio; Mitch had driven up and down dirt roads branching off Brush Fork, while Danner and Billy called the dog’s name from the car. Months later, Billy found an animal skeleton in a ditch, deep into the field behind the house. He’d almost stumbled into a depression where the bones lay, creamy-colored, their sheen dull. The perfect fan of the ribs held an oval egg-shaped space in the concave bed of the ditch; the long tail was stretched out, each vertebrae particular and unbroken. The bones were a stencil of a vanished dog. If it was really Polly, where was her collar? But the bones themselves seemed to finalize her disappearance. Billy never told anyone he’d found them. He covered them with long grass. Sometimes men found things with airplanes—they flew over vast lands looking for signs from the air. But even with an airplane he couldn’t have found Polly.

“I would have remembered the airfield,” Billy said.

Danner smiled, a little out of breath. “You didn’t like airplanes yet, so you don’t remember.”

The sky was brightening to a sharp indigo. Dew still dried in the fields, and the rich smell of the ground was barely evident.
Later on, the heat would fill the air with the weedy odor of soil and plants and pollen. Now, far off, there was the high whine of a locust.

“It’s a perfect day,” Billy said. “I don’t want to go to church.”

Danner sighed. “She can’t go by herself. No one goes to that church alone except old ladies whose husbands are dead.”

The road leveled; Billy pedaled faster. He hated wearing a coat and tie; he hated seeing all the seated, hushed people. He’d sat through hour-long Methodist services since the age of six, watching his mother’s gloved hands. If he was fidgety she’d let him work the short, tight gloves off her hands, finger by finger, then put them back on.

“We can’t spend long at the hangar,” Danner said. “We have to be back before she wakes up.”

Over the crest of the last hill, the weathered tin of the big hangar stood out against the field, the silver roof painted with a giant white circle.

“Ride a little past the airfield,” Billy told Danner. “Stop when I do and we’ll put the bikes down flat, off the road. We can walk across the meadow on the other side of the hangar—even if Cosgrove is awake, he won’t see us.” Billy passed her and rode farther ahead.

The old hangar was dilapidated. The wood frame was covered with tin sheeting; the ribbed sheets were dented, pocked in places with BB holes. The sharply sloping metal roof had been patched, but swallows had gotten in under the sheeting and nested under the eaves. Billy led Danner across the high-grown meadow to the side of the building. Behind it was the empty landing strip: long, yellow dirt the width of a two-lane road. Billy stepped close to the hangar and touched a piece of the metal sheeting near a seam, pressing it in. He rattled the big panel until it slipped slightly, then pulled one edge out a couple of feet.

“Go through sideways,” he said. “Watch me first.” He wondered if she could do it; she was bigger than he was.

Inside there was a smell of damp earth. The light was gray. Long, dim beams slanted from two high windows. Billy stood still as his eyes adjusted, and Danner stumbled behind him, rattling
the panel. The planes were parked closer together than he’d ever seen them, in two shadowed rows. The numbers on the wings were clearly legible even in near darkness. He crouched and turned to his sister. “Bend over so you stay below the wings.”

“Wait, I can’t see. It’s so big in here.” She bent down, feeling the ground. “There’s no floor, just dirt.”

“Water comes in when it rains,” Billy whispered. “Come on now.” He moved quickly, scuttling under wings, and heard Danner behind him trying to keep up. He’d always been alone in the hangar before; hearing her made him feel he was leading an expedition. One of the oldest planes was never locked and seemed never to be flown; he could show her that one, he was sure, and the special box on the copilot’s side.

“Don’t go so fast,” she called after him.

He could have walked down the middle of the two rows but he led her in and out, weaving around and circling the planes. Finally he stopped near the rear of the hangar, beside the old Beechcraft. Danner stood, watching. He opened the door of the airplane and stepped up. She was below him then, looking up expectantly. “Get in. On your side.” He shut the door gently and heard her moving under the nose of the plane, then the smooth click of the other door opening. She looked in, pleased, and stepped up. After she latched the door shut, they both sat still.

The Beech was a two-seater in good condition. The seats were specially covered in dark, cracked leather and the instrument panel was wooden. Billy imagined Cosgrove polishing the glossy surface, rubbing it with a rag. Once, the plane had been used often; though the wood of the panel gleamed, the clocks and dials set into it looked old, their metal rims dull. Billy touched the pilot’s stick. The room within the plane was completely familiar; Billy knew every detail.