Raveling (46 page)

My father mocked me. “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

“Well,” I laughed, “are we?”

He turned his wrist so he could see his watch. He wore it military style, face on the inside. “A couple of hours,” he said.
“Can you handle the wait?”

Patricia leaned toward us, saying, “If you guys are hungry, I mean, if you’re hungry right now, I packed some sandwiches and
sodas for the ride. I have everything handy. Plus, there’s coffee.” She was leaning over me, directing this mostly to my father,
and as she did so she pressed her right breast against my left shoulder. It felt surprisingly large and soft. Was she even
wearing a bra? I had never thought of Patricia’s breasts before. She turned to me, as if acknowledging my thoughts. “Pilot,”
she said, “would you like something?”

“Coffee,” I said. “I’ll have some of that.” For once, I had skipped it this morning. I had been trying to stay away from any
stimulants for a while. It had been Katherine’s suggestion, actually. But now I thought I needed some. I watched Patricia,
my neck craned around, with the new thought about her body under her clothes, as she poured from the thermos into the cap.

“It’s black,” she said. “Is that all right with you?”

“Perfect.” She looked so uncomfortable back there, surrounded by all the things we had packed. “Do you want to switch seats?”
I said. “Are you sure you’re all right back there? You’re not all scrunched up?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m just fine. I ride in this crazy airplane of his all the time.” She smiled warmly.
“You sit up there and enjoy the view.”

I took the thermos cap of coffee and sipped. It tasted like bitterness itself. We flew in silence, then, the propeller roaring
in our ears, the fissures of air screaming through the little cabin. The waves of the ocean flattened out below us as we climbed
higher and higher into the atmosphere, and the coastline receded further and further into the distance. I
couldn’t help it, I tried not to, in fact, but I thought of Patricia and my father in bed, her on top of him, her breasts
hanging down, her hands on my father’s shoulders. It was not an erotic thought. Rather, it was scientific. They’re just two
people, I said to myself. They must do it. They must have sex, at least every now and then. The air inside the cabin seemed
to get warmer somehow. Maybe it was the coffee. “There it is,” my father said. When he pointed it out to me, it was an infinitesimal
speck on the distant horizon. “Our very own private paradise.”

I laughed. That tiny little place. “How can you even see it so far out there?” I said to him. “Your eyes must be amazing.”

“I’ve got good eyesight,” he said. “But I’ve learned to anticipate it. I know exactly when it will appear.” He made a popping
sound with his mouth. We came closer, and I could begin to see the contours of the little speck of land, the tiny cove in
which he intended to land.

“It’s beautiful,” Patricia said over my shoulder. “Isn’t it beautiful, Pilot?”

“It is.” I turned to face her, and saw at the same moment that the coast had disappeared completely from sight, as if it had
been swallowed by the ocean. I thought of the medication I carried in my backpack, the amber plastic bottle of pills with
the child-proof cap. I turned back, and the little island had come even closer now, was actually a distinct green and brown
shape in the middle of all that blue.

The blue of the ocean had grown considerably lighter, the sky less cloudy, the sun more yellow.

“We’ll be landing soon,” my father said in his airline pilot voice. “Make sure everything’s put away.”

I teased him, saying with a nasal voice, “Please make sure your seat belt is securely fastened and that your tray table is
in its upright position.”

He laughed.

“Also, make sure your carry-on luggage is stowed safely beneath the seat in front of you. Thank you for flying Airie Airlines.”

As we came toward the island, Dad gradually lowered the trajectory of his plane so it would set down in the still water adjacent
to the small patch of sandy beach at the island’s periphery. When we hit the surface everything changed—suddenly we seemed
to be going much faster than we had been—with a hard swish into the waves and a few bumps as we bounced off, and then the
final approach to the little beach.

Patricia clapped.

“It’s not always this smooth,” my father confessed, turning off the engine and opening the door.

Dad and I waded out into the cold sea water and pulled the little plane closer to shore. We anchored it firmly to a large
palm tree with a long nylon rope, and then he went back to carry Patricia, piggyback, onto the dry ground. It was noticeably
warmer here. “I can’t believe it,” I said, my face to the sun. “How is this possible?” I hadn’t even noticed the sky clearing.
It was cobalt blue overhead, crystalline clear.

“How is what possible?”

“The weather. How is the—”

“Warm winds,” Dad said. “We’re just inside the gulf stream. We’ve traveled to a different part of the world, into a whole
different weather system.”

Nowhere Island.

It was somewhere, however, somewhere not far off the coast. It was an empty island, though, bereft, completely unclaimed,
according to him, and probably owned by the government. I guessed it was too small and not far enough out in the ocean to
be used as a resort island and a bit too far out here for people with boats to get to. We walked the entire
perimeter as if on a military inspection, Dad pointing to this and that. The foliage in the center was deciduous, it seemed,
not tropical. There were regular trees here, the same kind I’d seen in North Florida, their leaves still mostly green. On
the shore were a few old palms leaning in their languid, lazy way toward the water. The earth itself was hard, dry island
dirt, trampled and dusty.

“Do real people come here?” I asked my father. “I mean, you know what I mean.”

“You don’t think I’m real?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“There are other people who know about it,” Dad said, laughing a bit. “But there aren’t many folks with their own seaplanes.”

Inside the little island’s center was a clearing. Some stones had already been placed in a ring. I thought of the clearing
in the woods behind our house, sitting with Eric and smoking my first joint. Vaguely, I remembered sitting there more recently,
frozen between wanting to rescue Hannah on the highway and wanting to hide from everything, completely catatonic. I walked
out of the clearing, going to the highway—

“This is where we’ll camp,” my father said.

I nodded. “Okay.”

We walked back to the plane and to Patricia, who had been sunning herself on the little beach, and we began unloading, getting
ourselves completely wet in the chilly surf as we carried everything on our shoulders to the shore. A tent, two coolers of
food, my father’s fishing gear, a little radio, cooking supplies—there seemed to be enough here for a year on the island,
significantly more than enough for the two weeks we intended to stay.

“Jesus Christ,” my father said finally. He looked at Patricia. “Fuck me.”

“What?” I said.

“It’s my fault,” Patricia said. “What is it?”

“
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
”

“Dad,” I said. “What?”

“Where are the fucking sleeping bags?”

I looked around, as if I would find them lying on the ground nearby. “It’s all right,” I said. “We’ll go back and get them.”

“No.” This was firm.

“Then what are we going to do?” I said.

Patricia said, “It gets cold here at night. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I—”

“I’ll go,” Dad said, his expression resigned.

“By yourself?” I looked at him like he was the crazy one. “Why don’t we all go?”

“It’s better if I go by myself.”

“You shouldn’t fly alone,” Patricia said. “Jim, you really—”

“Help me push the plane back out,” Dad said to me, “and when I get back you’ll have the camp all set up and everything will
be fine, all right?”

“You’re going to be too tired,” Patricia said, “way too tired to make that whole trip and back. We should all—”

“It’s not that far.”

My father made a gesture with his hands, putting them in front of his face, palms inward. He closed his eyes. This body language
meant
shut up or I will kill you
. I remembered this gesture from childhood. So we untied the plane from its mooring and pushed it back out into the water,
where my father jumped in. I was totally wet.

Before he got on the plane, he said, “I guess you’re wondering how I’m going to fly with wet pants, right?”

“Well,” I said, “it does seem like it would be kind of uncomfortable.”

“I’ll tell you a secret.” He came closer to me and lowered his voice. “I fly with no pants on.” He got on the plane, then,
saying, “and once I get near the shore, I put them back on. So if you want a good laugh, think of me out there, flying with
no pants.”

I waded back to the shore and said to Patricia, “He asked me to tell you not to worry.”

“I can’t help it,” she said. “Why does he even say that?”

I realized, then, that I had left my backpack, with my bottle of pills inside it, on the plane—which, at that moment, was
rising into the sky.

A former air force pilot, an airline pilot for many years, my father cursed himself in his small, single-engine seaplane somewhere
not far off the coast of Florida. He cursed Patricia, too. And me. He had two three-hour flights ahead of him, one home, one
back to the island, and he wouldn’t have any time to rest if he wanted to get back before dark. Thankfully, it was still early.
The sky was clear out, too, a fine day for flying, he thought. And more often than not, it was true, he preferred flying solo.
Dad thought of me now, his second son, the crazy one, the failure and disappointment, and considered my handicaps, my mental
frailties, social awkwardness, physical inabilities. He’d always supposed that our mother was neurotic, and he felt that,
through no fault of my own, I’d inherited these traits from her. He may have been right.

Alone in the sky, my father thought the plane seemed more quiet than usual. Too quiet? With someone else up here, it was all
engine and propellers, the popping of air pressure in his ears, shouting over the roar and the fissures of squealing air.
He kept a box of cigars in a secret place under his seat, and he reached for it now. At least he could have
some time by himself. Hell, it wasn’t so bad. He wondered if I was getting any better, if the medication was taking hold,
smoothing over the rough edges. Finding the cigars, he righted himself, groping inside the box for the cutter and matches.
He couldn’t seem to get his hands on the cutter, so he placed the round end of the cigar inside his mouth and bit down, tearing
a small hole. The tobacco was acrid on his lips. He spit some of it onto the floor. He found the matches and, taking his eyes
away from the window momentarily, lit up, sending clouds of puffy gray-blue smoke into the cabin’s interior. It tasted wonderful.
He’d only stopped smoking in the first place because Patricia had threatened to leave him.

He hoped she and I had started to work on setting up the tent by now, and was sure that by the time he got back with the sleeping
bags we’d have everything ready, including dinner.

It was perfect, actually. All he had to do was fly.

Eventually, the coast of Florida came into view. My father could see it as a point of land first, just a bit of green rising
off the blue in the far distance, and then it grew larger incrementally, the beach sweeping upwards and above him like an
enormous wave of earth to that solid layer of clouds which had been there earlier. He had only to follow the land north for
another hour, and he would arrive at the little landing area on the small cove where we had taken off earlier this morning.

He considered Eric now, and my accusation. Would Eric really do something like that? Would he have killed his own sister?
My father thought of Eric as a little boy. He remembered the football games, the science fairs, the academic achievements.
Eric had become a neurosurgeon, a man with a highly developed mind, capable of tremendous complexities. Morality was a function
of intelligence, my father thought to himself. It must be. Then he remembered
some of my brother’s experiments, the way Eric dissected animals in the garage and left their carcasses rotting on the table,
the smell of disintegrating flesh out there. Once, the boy had opened the skull of a field mouse while it was still alive,
asking himself how long can a mouse survive without a brain? So Eric had tortured animals. Okay. A lot of boys do that. He
had done that himself when he was young, hadn’t he, trapping muskrats and minks in the woods and selling their coats to Sears
and Roebuck. He had done it for money. Eric had done it for science. It was still torture.

Dad thought of me in comparison. I had too much imagination. I was too much inside my head. As a kid, I drew pictures—sensitive,
symbolic images. Later, I wrote romantic songs on my guitar. I cried easily, weeping whenever other kids made fun of me. I
was never good enough at sports to learn anything from them, to know about teamwork, about controlling my emotions, about
sportsmanship and honor between men.