On the Wing (11 page)

“Talking about the superb chocolate she intends to eat when she takes that tasting tour through Belgium, France, and Switzerland,” said Albertine. A note of wistful distance had come into her voice, too, so I took her by the hand and led her away from all that.

*   *   *

AS SOON AS we were in our room, Albertine looked through all the drawers in our bedside tables, and then picked up the phone. “Front desk?” she said cheerily. “This is room four forty-five. There's no dictionary in our room. I think it might have been stolen.… What do you mean, you don't put dictionaries in the rooms? There's a Bible here. There ought to be a dictionary. All the better caravansaries supply them, I'd like to think.… Well, let me speak to the concierge.… Thank you.” A moment passed, then she said, “This is room four forty-five. I need to know everything you can tell me about
egoist
and
egotist.…
No, they're not a band. They're words.… That's what I said: words.… I've just been talking to some people in your cocktail lounge, and I want to verify their assertions about them. I would have looked them up myself, but there's no dictionary in our room. If you would check the
OED
for me, I'd be very grateful.… What?… You're kidding.… Well, what's a concierge for, I'd like to know.” She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “This is quite a hotel.”

“Ask him to connect you to room service,” I said. “I'm starving.”

*   *   *

IN THE MORNING, when we were checking out, the couple we had met in the bar were also checking out. We exchanged pleasantries. After that, we stood in awkward silence. Then, inspired by the memory of my earlier trip, I broke the silence.

“Albertine and I are re-creating a cross-country trip that I made when I was a teenager,” I said. “On that earlier trip, nearly every morning, someone in the town where I had stopped for the night would take me aside and offer me a bit of advice before I got back onto the road and resumed my travels. Would you care to participate in the re-creation of that trip by offering me a bit of matutinal advice?”

“Us,” said Albertine.

“Would you care to offer us a bit of advice?”

“I gave you my advice last night,” said the woman. “I told you to remember the significance of that little
t.
”

“Actually,” I said, “that was more like advice to yourself. You said that
you
always tell yourself to remember the significance of the
t.
You didn't actually advise
us
to do that.”

“Well, I'm advising you now,” she said.

“And you?” I asked the man.

“Don't talk to strangers,” he said, and he turned his attention to the clerk.

When we were back in the car and on our way out of the parking lot, while we were paused for a moment, waiting for a break in the traffic, it took only a look to elicit the morning's advice from Albertine: “If they're giving out samples of chocolate, take all that you care to eat.”

“Not all that you can eat?” I asked.

“No, no. You don't need a river of chocolate. Enough is enough.”

Chapter 9

Frontier Justice

WHEN WE WERE ON THE ROAD AGAIN,
Spirit
coughed once to get my attention, then cleared her throat and asked, “‘Piloted'?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, though I knew perfectly well.

“I very distinctly heard you tell the sheriff back there in Mallowdale that you ‘piloted' your aerocycle into town.”

I guess I was running out of patience with her. I pulled her to the side of the road, set her on her kickstand, took my copy of
Elements of Aeronautics
from the little luggage bin where it lay beside
Gestes et Opinions du Dr. Faustroll,
found the relevant passage, and read it to her:

Piloting,
as a general term, means merely steering a vessel or flying an airplane. The term
piloting
has been used technically, however, to denote the kind of navigating one does in getting to one's destination with the help of a chart or map; by following a highway, railroad, transmission line, river, or other such course; or by flying from one landmark to another which can be seen, as flying first to a mountain, then to a lake which can be seen from the mountain, then to a city which can be seen from the lake, and so on. Piloting as a method of keeping track of one's position and of getting to one's destination hardly needs comment as a science. It is like finding one's way by map while motoring.

“Or like finding one's way without a map while motoring,” I said triumphantly. I stowed the book, mounted
Spirit,
and roared onto the road again.

“Just a minute! There is nothing in there that says that piloting
is
motoring, only that it is
like
motoring.”

We might have continued in good-natured contention along those lines for some time, but we were interrupted.

Red light swept across
Spirit
's wings, light from an old bubble-top cop car, a light with revolving innards like those of a lighthouse, primarily a mechanical device, not unlike the revolving light that I had made from a camper's lantern and an old windup record player years earlier, back in Babbington, back at home, for a game.

After I saw the light, I heard the siren, just a short burst or signal, a whine, briefly rising, quickly falling, to let me know that I was the object of the cop's interest, to tell me to pull over. I did. I twisted on my seat, and looked toward the rear, into the headlights. The car was black and white, clean, shiny. The cop, when he got out and walked toward me in the light, looked clean and shiny, too. He wore high boots, gleaming black.

“What kind of contraption is this?” he asked, examining
Spirit
with exaggerated contempt.

“It's an aerocycle,” I said. “I built it myself.”

He eyed me suspiciously.

“With help,” I admitted, cracking under the force of his professional skepticism.

“You're going to have to see Judge Whitley,” he said.

“Judge Whitley?” I asked, struggling to calm my twitching lips.

“That's what I said.”

“That's an interesting coincidence.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to smooth the waters. “You see, there was a Mayor Whitley in my home town. There have been several of them, in fact.”

“You're probably making that up to try to get friendly,” he said.

“No, honest,” I said, as friendly as can be, “Mayor Whitley, Andy Whitley—”

“It's no use, kid. Judge Whitley has warned me against taking the statements of a prisoner at face value.”

“A prisoner?”

“I'm going to lead the way to Judge Whitley, and you're going to follow me.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Just follow me—and don't try any funny business.”

“Yes, sir.”

He returned to his car, got in, and pulled slowly ahead of me. I started
Spirit
and followed, following him, following orders.

“Wow,” I whispered to
Spirit.
“We're under arrest.”

“You sound pleased by the idea.”

“I may be. I'm not quite sure. I've already experienced my first roadblock, and my first night in jail, and now I'm experiencing my first arrest. It's a momentous occurrence.”

“Try to control yourself.”

“I will, I will.”

“And don't try any funny business.”

“I won't, I won't.”

*   *   *

I EXPECTED to be taken to City Hall. To be completely truthful, I expected to be taken to the Supreme Court building, if they had one in town. I expected the full treatment, and I expected to get it in a building with columns and a pediment and a Latin slogan chiseled in granite. Instead, the building that the cop led me to looked like a bar.

“It looks like a bar,” I said to
Spirit.

“It is a bar,” she said, “judging from the sign that says ‘Judge Whitley's Bar and Grill.'”

“It's not even chiseled in granite,” I grumbled.

Judge Whitley's was a smoky den. The bar itself ran more than half the length of the narrow room, along the right side. Booths lined the left wall.

We entered and began slowly walking toward the back. The daytime drinkers and chatterers took note of the boy being urged along by the cop, but only in the most desultory way. Their heads turned, but then they lost interest. I had the impression, and recollection gives me no reason to change it, that the men in the bar were doing business of one kind or another, that a lot of business was being done there, that a lot of business got done there. I think that the experience of seeing all those smoking, drinking men bent to their business has stayed with me all these years, forever coloring my impression of—and my opinion of—the kind of business that involves meetings and deals: it made me feel that there was something furtive and dirty and dark about it. It was best done, if done at all, in hiding. And it was so distasteful, so bitter a pill to swallow, that it required liquor to get it down. I could see that it wasn't anything I wanted to be involved in.

In the rearmost area of the bar, in the left rear corner, there was one large booth with a round table. Seated there, on the far side of the table, in the deepest, darkest corner of the bar, was a large, florid man, smoking a cigar and squinting through his own smoke as he watched me approach. His size; his position; the lackeys who sat on either side of him; the sense that the others in the bar were there to speak to him, that they were supplicants waiting their turn, waiting to be called to an audience at the round table; the ambience of smoke and awe—all of that made me understand that this must be Judge Whitley, the big man, the guy who called the shots in Coincidence, Pennsylvania.

“What's this?” asked one of the lackeys, meaning me.

“Kid,” said the cop. In his voice I detected deference—and concern. I understood that if he did or said the wrong thing it would not go well for him.

“I see that,” snarled the lackey. “Whadja bring 'im here for?”

The cop looked at me. His eyes welled with regret. Clearly, he considered me one of his mistakes. He would have been better off if he had just sent me on my way, and he knew it. I gave him a reciprocal look. I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for both of us. We were looking big trouble in the face, through a cloud of cigar smoke.

“Driving a motorcycle without a license,” mumbled the cop, his eyes down.

“You got a license, kid?” asked the lackey.

“No, sir.”

“And were you driving a motorcycle?”

“No, sir.” I glanced at the cop, hoping he would detect the note of apology in my glance. I was sorry to contradict him, but if one of us was going down, it wasn't going to be me.

“You weren't driving a motorcycle?”

“No, sir. I was piloting an aerocycle.”

“A what?”

“An aerocycle. It's a flying machine.”

“An airplane?”

“Oh, no. No. Not an airplane. I'd need a pilot's license for that.” I tried laughing, but what came out of me couldn't really be called a laugh, and it had none of the infectious quality that laughter ought to have.

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“Yes, sir,” I admitted.

“This is no laughing matter.”

“I was just trying to ease the tension.”

Everyone found that funny, no one more so than the judge. From that response, and from the memory of that response, which has returned to me unbidden from time to time over the years, I learned that you never can tell what people will find funny.

“If I could go out to
Spirit,
sir—”

“You trying to be funny again?” the other underling asked.

“No, sir. Not this time.”

“‘Go out to spirit,' what is that, some kind of religious thing?”

“No, sir.
Spirit
is my aerocycle. That's her name.”

“Oh, I see,” said the judge, speaking for the first time. “You would like to go outside to your airplane—excuse me, your aerocycle—
Spirit.
Is that it?”

“Yes. If I could just—”

“If you could just go out to
Spirit,
hop on board and fly away, leaving us sitting here like a bunch of rubes, asking ourselves how we could have been so stupid as to let you go out to
Spirit,
when it should have been obvious that you were trying to escape, everything would be just swell, am I right?”

“No, sir! Honest! I wanted to get a book—”

“I knew it was a religious thing,” said the second lackey. “There's always a book,
the
book.”

“This book is—”

“This book is the truth, I suppose.”

“Well, I think so.”

My intention, as you will have guessed, was to use the passage on piloting from
Elements of Aeronautics
to convince Judge Whitley to release me on a technicality. “If I could just—”

I wanted to assert myself, and to assert the authority of Pope and Otis, but my throat was thick and my eyes were moistening, and I thought it wise to say nothing for a while.

The judge waited, and while he waited he stared hard at me, and then he snorted and said, “Officer Lockwood, you go get the good book.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It's in the small baggage compartment behind the seat,” I explained. “Just twist the handle and you can open the door.”

Of course Officer Lockwood brought the wrong book. Instead of Pope and Otis, he brought my copy of
Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll.
When he dropped
Faustroll
in the center of the table, I thought I was doomed.