On the Wing (24 page)

“I must have blacked out,” the fisherman said.

“I have been known to have that effect on guys,” the blonde admitted.

“One minute I was in that sleepy beanery—”

“Hey!” said the blonde. “I resent that remark.”

“Are these your friends?” asked the dark-haired girl.

“You're back,” I said.

“Was I gone?”

“I think so. I lost sight of you. I'm glad you're back.”

“That woman—” she said, with a tilt of her head in the direction of the blonde.

“You can see her?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, a suggestion of annoyance in her voice. “I can see her.”

“And the fisherman?”

“The man beside her? Are you asking whether I can see him? Yes, I can.”

“This is pretty amazing.”

“Is she your—girlfriend?”

“The smoldering blonde? My girlfriend? No, she's—”

“I'll take a turn at that work if you want,” said my father.

“I knew you must be around here somewhere,” I said.

He held out his hand. I gave him my knife. He started cutting brush.

“Where was I?” I asked.

“You were bringing me that issue of
Bold Feats,
” he said, “but you were dawdling over it, drooling over the illustrations of loose women in tight dresses.”

“‘Loose women'!” cried the blonde, running her hands over her tight dress. She elbowed the fisherman and said, “Are you going to let him get away with that?”

“See here,” said the fisherman to my father, “I think you owe the lady an apology.”

“Well,
is
she your girlfriend?” asked the dark-haired girl.

“Hey, toots,” said the blonde, putting a hand on her shapely hip, “do I look like I've got to go robbing the cradle to get a date?”

“Perhaps you and I should return to the—ah—high-class diner,” the fisherman suggested, daring to put a hand on the blonde's shoulder.

“That's a great idea,” I said. “The dark-haired girl and I have a lot to discuss, and—”

“This was the best I could do,” said my father, staggering into view under the weight of an enormous armload of cut brush. He dropped it on the ground, looked up, caught sight of the smoldering blonde, and said, “Oh, my god, I've died and gone to heaven!”

“Dad!” I said.

“I'm Bert Leroy,” said my father, advancing on the blonde with his hand extended. “Has anybody told you that your dress fits you like a coat of wet paint?”

“Gee, thanks,” said the blonde.

“See here, pal,” said the fisherman. “The lady and I resent that remark.”

“Speak for yourself,” said the blonde.

“I'm going to build a simple shelter out of that brush,” my father said to her confidently, “and when I'm finished I hope you will join me in it, get out of this rain, and—”

“Dad!” I said. “Go home! Mom is waiting for you. She must be worried.”

“You're married?” asked the blonde.

“Well,” said my father, “in a way.”

“What kind of girl do you take me for?” she asked him, cocking that shapely hip, tossing her wet hair, and thrusting her chin at him. She grabbed the fisherman's arm and said, “Come on, sweetie, let's go. I do not choose to consort with these people any longer.” They walked off in the direction of the road, dissolving as they went.

“Dad,” I said, “you should go back home.”

“Yes,” he said with a sigh in the direction of the vanished babe, “I guess I should.” He started on his way. After a few steps he stopped and said, over his shoulder, “You won't tell your mother about—”

“It's our secret,” I said, and he slipped from sight.

“I should go, too,” said the dark-haired girl.

“Please stay,” I said.

“My parents will be worried. They'll wonder where I've gone.”

“Will I see you when I get back home?”

“I hope so,” she said.

“Maybe you'll be in the crowd that gathers along Main Street to greet me when I come flying back into town.”

“I suppose I could manage that,” she said, already evanescing, adding a laugh that lingered long after she was gone.

*   *   *

IN REALITY, I lay beneath
Spirit
's right wing, huddled in the tent I'd made by draping my poncho over the wing, shivering in the rain, warming myself with memories of home and wishful visions of the dark-haired girl. I hadn't invited the fisherman and the smoldering blonde into my simple shelter. They had arrived courtesy of
Bold Feats.
I hadn't invited my father, either. He was there because he was a subscriber, I guess.

Chapter 20

Sound Effects

CUE THE LIGHTNING. “Crrrrr-ack!” Cue the thunder. “Brrumble. Thuboom.” Cue the rain. “Pitat. Pitatat.” More rain. “Shlapalap. Rushalap.” More rain. “Blububduba—”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to re-create the atmospheric conditions and the ‘atmosphere': the rain, the lightning, the thunder.”

That was true. But it was not the whole truth. I had thought that I heard, in the distance, but keeping pace with us, the sound of a helicopter,
whup-whup-whup-whup,
and I was obscuring that sound, muffling it with a blanket of atmospheric effects, so that Albertine wouldn't hear it. There was the chance that if she did she would bring the Electro-Flyer to a screeching halt, jump out into the road, and begin waving her arms above her head, signaling the flyguys to swoop down and carry her off.

“It's getting late,” she said. “I think we ought to head for our motel.”

“Just a little farther, okay? I have a feeling that we're very close.”

“Peter, we're looking for a patch of ground with a couple of twisted trees, a field—”

“Or meadow.”

“—a wooded area off in the distance, and a rail fence at the roadside. I don't think we're going to find it.”

“I just have a feeling that—”

Was that the helicopter sound again? Cue that alarming noise that had come from
Spirit
's engine years earlier. “Pitipootipit, pitipootipit.” Cue the stuttering, the hesitation, the shuddering, the—

“Now what?”

“I'm trying to reproduce the sound poor
Spirit
made when she began wheezing and coughing, just before her gradual collapse, when she became too weak to go on.”

“You're scaring me,” she said. “I'm heading for the motel. Directly for the motel.”

“Probably a good idea.”

“You're going to love it. It's the Paradise Pines Motor Court, an amazing piece of ‘motel moderne' architecture, a place that once promised the touring motorist ‘everything that is new and ultra-modern' and tonight promises this particular pair of touring motorists a comfortable retreat—uh-oh.”

We had arrived at the motor court. Under towering pines lay a cluster of tiny bungalows that had once been new and ultra-modern. Now, they were old and ultra-decrepit. In front of the bungalows was a small office in a separate building with an angular roof and a soaring sign that still held some of the neon tubing that spelled the name, but it was dark. The whole place was dark.

“It looks closed,” I said. “As in out of business.”

“Do you think maybe they just forgot to turn the lights on?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Why don't you check?”

“I can see that it's closed—”

“Just check, okay?”

“Okay.” I opened the door and stepped out from under the shelter of the Electro-Flyer's clear plastic top. “Crrrrr-ack! Brrumble. Thuboom. Pitat. Pitatat. Shlapalap. Rushalap. Blububduba—”

“Stop that!” she said.

I tried the door to the office. It was locked. I peered inside. The office was nearly empty. It had been deserted long ago. I felt Albertine's disappointment, and I felt a bit of disappointment myself, because I would have enjoyed staying there if it had been in good repair or nicely restored. For a moment, I thought about our taking the place on as a project, restoring it, and running it, but I shook the thought off with a shiver and banished it forever. As I started back toward the car, I realized that I was smiling.

“They're out of business,” I said.

“Oh,” she moaned.

“Let's hit the road and see where chance leads us,” I said.

We started off, into the night and the unknown. I began rubbing my hands in gleeful anticipation. We were going to have an adventure.

Struggling to find our way back to the highway, both of us peering into the dark, I could feel the tension rising in the car. Albertine was not happy about this turn of events, and I was. I admit it. The dark night, and the dark road, made the perfect setting for a breakdown or a slide off the highway into a ditch. What fun! I was on the edge of my seat, and enjoying the perch. The only thing lacking was a storm, but life has taught me that one cannot have everything.

When I glanced at Al, though, and saw her knuckles white with the pressure of her grip on the wheel, I felt the difference in our situations. She was doing all the work. I was having all the fun.

Then I seemed to hear that damned helicopter again, its relentless
whup-whup-whup-whup,
behind us. It had to be those flying EMTs in pursuit of Albertine, or Giggles, as they had taken to calling her.

Thinking quickly, with the resourcefulness of a desperate man, I remarked in a lighthearted way, “If we were in an old movie now, something black-and-white and grainy, there would be a storm, in addition to all this darkness. We would turn the car radio on and hear a report about an escaped killer on the loose, believed to be wandering the dark roads near the area of the ultra-modern Paradise Pines Motor Court.” I reached for the radio. “Kkkhhhshhwaukkhh,” I said, in a fine imitation of static. “We interrupt this program to bring you a police bulletin: be on the lookout for an escaped lunatic with an irrational animosity toward electric cars—”

“Turn it off!”

“Click!”

“Whew.”

“As soon as we heard that report,” I said, “lightning would split the sky—crrrrr-ack—thunder would rumble over us—brrumble, thuboom—and our low-battery warning light would begin to flash, intermittently illuminating our faces with an eerie glow.”

“You mean the way it is now?”

“Pretty much like that.”

“It would make us extremely anxious,” she said.

“So I would say, ‘Let's stop at the next place we see, whatever it's like, even if it's—crrrack—brrumble—thuboom—that place.'”

*   *   *

IT WOULD BE a large Victorian house, dark and imposing. A sign on the lawn would advertise it as

The Scary Old House

Bed and Breakfast

We would park in front and climb a long series of loose steps to the front door. A busy little woman in a mobcap would answer our knock.

“Oh, my goodness,” she would say when she saw us standing there with our suitcases in our hands, “more travelers seeking shelter from the storm. Come in, come in. There's always room for one more.”

“We are two more,” I would point out.

“What?” she would ask, nonplussed.

“He's trying to be funny,” you would say. “It's best just to ignore him.”

“Oh. I see,” the woman would say. “Ha-ha.”

You would give me one of those elbow pokes in the ribs that you've perfected, and we would begin hauling our bags inside.

“Don't bother with those,” the woman would say. “You just take yourselves into the parlor, warm yourselves by the fire, and get acquainted with the other guests. I'll have my son Snort take your bags upstairs. He's a bit of an idiot, but he's strong as an ox, and he's not dangerous unless he gets out of sorts. Snort! Snort, you idiot bastard, get out here and carry these folks' bags upstairs.”

A large young man would lumber out of a room at the end of the hallway. Beetle-browed and hulking, he would growl, grab our bags, and stomp up the stairs.

“Did he seem out of sorts to you?” I would ask you as we entered the parlor.

“Hard to tell,” you would say. “Maybe he was just trying to be funny.”

“Ha-ha,” I would retort.

There would be quite a little crowd in the parlor, and they would be engaged in an agitated conversation. You and I would slip in as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, so as not to interrupt the congenial social intercourse of strangers thrown together by a storm, seeking comfort in friendly companionship, a warm fire, and sherry. Our stealth wouldn't work. The conversation would stop as we made our way through the group to get near the fire. By the time we had claimed a couple of warm spots for ourselves, we would have the feeling that we were not as welcome as we might have wished to be.

A buxom woman, fiftyish, dressed in a long velvet dress accessorized with a diamond necklace that spread across most of her imposing front, would turn to a wild-haired old fellow in a baggy suit and say, “Please go on, Professor. What you were saying was so very interesting. I hope the interruption hasn't derailed your train of thought.”

“Please accept our apologies,” I would say. “We were forced to seek shelter from the rain, very much as I was forced to seek shelter in this area many years ago when I was traveling to New Mexico—”

“I was saying that I have been studying the caramba-mamba,” the professor would say.

“Gosh, that's the world's deadliest snake, isn't it, Professor?” a fresh-faced lad with sandy hair would ask.

“Indeed it is, young man,” the professor would say. “Are you interested in herpetology?”

“Nah,” Sandy would say with a flip of his hand, “I just like snakes.”

“I see,” the professor would say with a chuckle, sending a wink in the direction of the buxom woman. “If the caramba-mamba is a snake that interests you, I have a specimen in my room that you might like to see.”