On the Wing (12 page)

Everyone looked at the book. Then everyone looked at me. Then everyone looked at one another. Then everyone looked at Judge Whitley. Then Judge Whitley looked at me.

“Let's go outside, boy,” he said, lifting himself up from his corner seat and occasioning a rapid shuffling of the underlings to give him passage from the booth.

He conducted me outside. The others must have known by his manner that they were not to follow. If you have ever been in a similar situation, you will know that I expected to be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a ditch.

Instead, he walked around
Spirit
a couple of times and then said slowly, deliberately, raising the book, raising his considerable eyebrows, “So you are one of the chosen few.”

“Well—” I said, with a shrug, since I didn't know what he was talking about.

“You have sailed in the doctor's boat, across the Squitty Sea?” he asked, in a voice that I might have described as envious if it hadn't come from him.

“Um—I have done some sailing—”

“You have sojourned in the Land of Lace?”

“My great-grandmother was very fond of antimacassars—”

“And you have dallied in the Forest of Love?”

“Well—I don't want to brag—”

“You have spent the night in the Castle-Errant.”

I caught the shift in his tone, a shift away from interrogation, but I wasn't sure how to respond to it. “Um—” I said, stalling, “—not yet.”

“You have ascended the great staircase of black marble, felt the surge of the land-tide, and heard the musical jet!”

He was no longer asking me what I had done; he was telling me that he knew what I had done, even if I hadn't. I smiled noncommittally.

“You are a congregant of the Great Church of Snoutfigs!”

To my knowledge, I was not, but I wasn't about to contradict him.

“And you know the meaning of the words
ha-ha
as spoken by Bosse-de-Nage!”

At last I felt on firm ground. Boldly, confidently, with a comradely wink, I asked, “Are you trying to be funny?”

For a few horrible moments, I thought I had ruined everything. Then, at last, he said, as if he were passing sentence, “Ha-ha.”

I said, “Ha-ha.”

He said, “You'd better be on your way.”

I was stunned. I was also a little disappointed. “You mean you're not going to throw me into the hoosegow?”

“No,” he said. “I wouldn't want to stand in the way of the adventures of a young Panmuphle.”

Panmuphle? Did he mean Panmuphle, the bumbling bailiff from
Faustroll
? Did all that nonsense about the Squishy Sea and the Forest of Lace and the Castle of Love have something to do with
Faustroll
? Maybe. Maybe all of that was in the parts I hadn't read yet.

“Before you go on your way, though,” he said, “I'd like to give you a few words of advice.”

Of course.

“Listen, son, I want to give you a warning, a word to the wise.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, trying to appear interested.

He took the cigar from his mouth. His hand was trembling. He waved the book at me and said, “You don't want to go waving this book around. People are going to take it the wrong way. They—they—they—”

For quite a while, he didn't say anything. Then he said, holding the book in front of him, “This kind of thing can get you into trouble. I think it would be best if I held on to it for you, kept it in protective custody, kept it in my custody for your protection. Do you have any objections to that?”

I had objections. It wasn't my book, for one thing. It belonged to my French teacher, Mr. MacPherson, and I was sure that he expected me to return it when the summer was over. For another thing, I had promised to translate it. How was I going to translate it if I didn't have it?

“Well?” he prodded.

“I don't have any objections,” I lied.

“You're lying, aren't you?” he said.

“Yes.”

He grinned. He handed the book to me.

“Keep it out of sight,” he counseled.

“Okay. Thanks.”

“You got any other subversive literature?”

“No,” I lied again.

He gave me a long look. He snorted. He spat on the ground. Then he gesticulated with his cigar hand in the direction of
Spirit.
Gratefully, I mounted her and started her.

“Goodbye,” I said.

“Ha-ha,” he said.

Chapter 10

Caught

WE WERE CAUGHT IN A PACK, somewhere east of Friendsville, Maryland. We had been trapped in the pack long enough to get to know its cars and drivers. Ahead of us were the thoughtless, the witless, the thankless, clueless, and careless. Beside us were the blameless, harmless, and aimless. Behind us were the loveless, helpless, luckless, useless, and inconsolable. We felt boxed in, hemmed in, confined, imprisoned, as if society, symbolized or personified by the two dozen examples clotted around us on the highway, moving in lockstep, had decided to deny us our individuality, the full expression of our unique being, the opportunity to be all that we could be, a shot at the open road. We were impatient. They were inescapable.

I was on the verge of entertaining Albertine by expatiating along the foregoing lines when—eloquently, briefly, precisely—she rendered it superfluous.

“People!” she cried.

They couldn't have heard her, but they seemed to. Something disturbed the field. A bit of separation occurred, a space where there had been none, and the space began to grow as if it held within it an expansive force.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh,” said Albertine, with undiminished eloquence.

The gap grew until it became an opportunity. Albertine rushed into it, through it, and into the open, out of the pack, free of the pack, ahead of the pack, in the clear, and climbing a long, gentle hill. Our Electro-Flyer hummed and sang. She howled with the pleasure of release, and her willing motor wound. We crested the hill at exhilarating, electro-flying speed—and there, on the other side of the hill, a couple of hundred yards ahead of us, was a police car. Standing beside it was a cop, holding a radar gun. Even at that distance I could see him grin when he glanced up from the radar readout to see us coming at him.

“Oh, shit,” said Albertine, a woman who has her way with words.

She slowed, and she pulled over, just ahead of the cop car.

I began staring at the side of the road, and I continued to stare at the side of the road throughout the cop's interview with Albertine, because I knew that if I looked at her or at the cop I would burst out laughing and at least one of them would ask me what I thought was so funny.

“License and registration, please,” said the cop.

“Is something wrong, Officer?” Albertine asked. I could almost hear her lashes fluttering.

“Wrong?” he said. “Let me check. Hmm. Well, golly, you seem to have exceeded the speed limit by quite a bit.”

“I did?”

“Lady, you came over the top of that hill airborne. I thought you were a low-flying plane.”

“Maybe there's something wrong with my speedometer.”

“That could be, or it could be that sunspot activity made my radar gun wildly inaccurate.”

“I think you're being sarcastic, Officer.”

“Really?”

“I can't have been going as fast as you say. This is an old car. Technically, it's an antique.

“An antique.”

“Okay, a replica of an antique.”

“For a replica of an old car it's quite spry.”

“I suppose it is, but I don't think that I could have been speeding. After all, I was just keeping up with the pack.”

“Miz—ah—Gaudette—here comes the pack now.”

I allowed myself a glance in the mirror. He was right.

Albertine sighed. She must have glanced in the mirror, too.

There was a period of quiet. Then I heard the cop click his pen closed and tear a ticket from his pad.

“Let me give you some advice,” he said.

I bit my lip.

“Yes, Officer?” said Albertine.

“Get a radar detector,” said the cop.

His boots crunched away. The pack rumbled by. The cop got into his car and trundled off behind them. Albertine flipped the switch and pulled the Electro-Flyer onto the highway.

“Don't you worry, honey,” she said, patting the dashboard. “We're going to take that advice.”

“Ha-ha,” I said.

Chapter 11

Real Diner Cooking

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

Fernando Pessoa as Bernardo Soares,
The Book of Disquiet

I CAN'T REMEMBER the name of the town. It was in West Virginia. I remember that. I also remember that the day's ride was a particularly pleasant one. I no longer had much hope that
Spirit
would lift me into the clear blue sky, but on that day I didn't particularly care whether she did or not. I was happy to roll along, feel the miles unroll beneath her wheels, watch the scenery slide by, and cover the day's distance.

In the evening, riding into the light of the setting sun, I began to feel tired and hungry, as usual, so when I saw the sign welcoming me to the place I'll call Forgettable, West Virginia, “America's Home Town,” I decided to stop and spend the night.

Forgettable was an attractive little town. Though it was small, it seemed substantial and well established. Many of the buildings downtown were made of stone, including the handsome train station. All that stone impressed me. It suggested solidity, history, and permanence of an order beyond Babbington's. Forgettable seemed like Babbington's older brother, or a Babbington built by a wiser little pig, who knew that stone would resist a wolf's huffing and puffing better than wood could.

Just across the street from the train station, there was a diner called Vern's. A sign in the window boasted “Real Home Cooking.” How could I resist? I was a long way from home. Real home cooking might shrink that distance, might make me feel at least for a while the comforts of the home that now lay far behind me.

The entrance to Vern's was in the middle of its long front wall. A number of booths stretched along that wall to the left and right, a long counter with stools ran the length of the diner opposite the entrance, and the kitchen was on the opposite side of the counter, exposed to the view of the patrons. The layout and general appearance reminded me of Porky White's clam bar and the Night-and-Day Diner, back home in Babbington. Vern's was working for me. I hadn't eaten a bite, but already the place was reminding me of home. However, something wasn't quite right. I wasn't feeling the comfort that I had hoped I would feel. Instead, as soon as I was reminded of Porky's and the Night-and-Day, I began to miss them—and their setting, my home town—even more.

Standing in the entrance, I looked around, and I saw many happy diners, people who clearly felt at home there, who knew that in this place they were in their place, just as many diners back at home must have felt at the same moment, and I felt more acutely the distance between Forgettable and Babbington, the place where I belonged, where I would have been at home. There at Vern's, hesitating in the entrance, I suddenly recognized that the crepuscular melancholy I felt every evening on the road wasn't caused by hunger or fatigue, or by the gathering darkness, but by displacement, the feeling of being out of the place where I belonged, so far from home, awkwardly placed in someone else's place, in someone else's home.

“Welcome to Vern's,” said a weary waitress. “Sit yourself down.”

Still I hesitated. I wasn't sure that I could take any more of Vern's. I thought of returning to the parking lot, mounting
Spirit,
and heading back to Babbington, but I reminded myself that I was an adventurer, and adventurers pressed on; they did not turn back, not even in their thoughts. I did what the waitress had told me to do. I sat on one of the stools at the counter.

I chose a stool that would give me no neighbors, out of shyness, I suppose, or maybe because I already suspected that Vern's real home cooking was going to make me feel miserable, so miserable that I wouldn't want anyone to notice.

The waitress tossed a menu in front of me, and I began to feel more uncomfortable as soon as I opened it. Listed on it were many of the dishes that my mother made at home, from Salisbury steak and meat loaf to macaroni and cheese. Instead of the comforting warmth of familiarity, the names of these dishes brought the chill of loneliness. I allowed myself to glance cautiously around the room. No one seemed to take any notice of me at all. Maybe it was going to be all right. I could eat, keep my feelings to myself, and go.

A man sitting a couple of stools away had a different idea.

“Where you from?” he asked, leaning toward me. He was, I think, about fifty. He was smoking. A coffee cup was on the counter in front of him. He hadn't shaved in a day or two. His hair was stringy.

“Babbington,” I said.

“Never heard of it.”

“That's okay.”

“So you came to Vern's to get some real home cooking, did you?”

“I guess,” I said. I really didn't want to talk to him.

“What's it going to be?” asked the waitress, pouring more coffee for the man with the stringy hair.

“I'm not sure,” I said, and I discovered that although I didn't want to talk to him I did want to talk to her. “You've got a lot of things here that make me think of home,” I told her, “back in Babbington.” I waited, hoping for some response, but she just stood there. “He never heard of it,” I said, jerking my head in the direction of the man with the stringy hair, who had now moved two stools to his left, making himself my neighbor. “Maybe you've heard of it?” I asked.

“Nope.”