The Slide: A Novel (21 page)

Eventually Ian wandered back into the yard and picked up the hose, then went to the faucet and stopped the hose, then rolled it back up and left it by the foot of the porch before scuffling into the house. When he came out he was wearing a shirt and shoes.

“Come on. Look at this thing,” I said. “Safe as a tank.”

“It’s like a van in the videos they show us at school. About kidnapping.”

“I’m not a kidnapper. Kidnappers are pale men with thick mustaches.”

He opened the door. “Yeah well, no one admits they’re a kidnapper, do they?”

Today the kids in the yard were playing some variation of tag with tennis balls. I saw a blond girl level a brown-haired boy with a throw to the back of his head. Ian fastened his seat belt before I had a chance to tell him to.

I got us onto Highway 44 and took it westward. Ian reached forward for the radio, and there was the old, beloved play-by-play man saying,
headed into the bottom of the fifth, score knotted at three.
Ian opened the glove compartment and pulled out an empty pack of cigarettes, some napkins. He found the cheap plastic tire-pressure gauge and sat back in his seat.

“Dad says we fall six back of the Cubs and we’re in trouble.” He flipped the tire gauge in his hands.

“Still plenty of time. Plus they’re the Cubs, remember.”

“Says we have to stop swinging the bats like a bunch of pussies.”

Sometimes in etcetera, motion alone is a value in and of itself. It was early enough that we beat the traffic exile from the city. We passed small mountains of earth and rock, the yellow machinery that signaled change. Stacks and stacks of light-blue piping. The landscape out here evolved, always. The buildings themselves, huge, reminded me of models, a set of tabs and slots.

“Your thing is beeping,” he said.

“I usually ignore that.”

“And! You’re going the wrong way. This isn’t how you get to the airport.”

I reevaluated the plan, thinking for a minute to confirm that I did in fact know what was what.

“Not Lambert. The airport we’re going to is smaller,” I said.

“Yeah, I
know
. Spirit of St. Louis, the small one.”

“Named for the silver prop that carried Lindbergh to Paris.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s off Highway 40. We’re on 44.”

“That’s right. That’s right. North of here. Minor adjustment. Hold on.”

Our path righted, soon we passed the network of fields where I’d played summer ball, and I thought of my mother sitting cross-legged in the stands, chatting with other parents while my father paced behind the dugout. How far back did it go? Could memory, if I looked hard enough, provide evidence of unhappiness even then? It was out here that I put the dent in the Z’s roof. The foul ball I hit late one summer afternoon, how the moment it left my bat I knew it would land on his car. The
tink
of a barely tipped foul ball, the ball rising with menace, irrationally seeming to grow larger as it went, then the hollow moment of collision, the roof of a Datsun. Crowd response,
ooh
. I stepped out of the box, ostensibly for practice cuts, and my father and I shared a quick look rich with blurred meaning. And once the game was over and I had squeezed into the backseat, my parents lingered outside and I heard my mother’s muffled voice travel overhead. And if I found the right dial, maybe I could adjust the memory’s volume and discover what she said.

I exited 40 and followed a mile of frontage road along the side of the highway. Ian unfastened his seat belt so he could lean out the window. I imagined how it would look through his eyes, this world. The control tower, the paved lot with fading parking spots, the swath of green separating the lot from the penitential fence that circled the place. The spirals of barbed wire proved that this was a place of serious consequence. I turned up the radio and we got out of the van to sit in front of the fence. Eight or nine planes were in a staggered line to the side of the tarmac, with blocks wedged under their wheels.

He said, “I don’t understand. How does anyone make money selling tickets for these dumb little planes?”

“They don’t. These are privately owned. There aren’t tickets; it’s just a pilot and a few passengers. No peanuts or pretzels.”

He looked at me. “What kind of person owns an entire plane?”

Mr. John Hurst, father of three. Divorcé. Payer of settlement. Marrier of his secretary. Driver of: Jaguar XK8, Mercedes CLK, Land Rover Discovery. Maker of very much income. Secretary adulterer. Owner of private jet, Cessna.

“They must be Jewish.”

“What? No. That’s not important.”

A jet appeared from out of a hangar and taxied around the others before turning onto the runway, facing more or less exactly where we sat, waiting for clearance. I watched Ian watching the plane and firmly believed the process of takeoff was going to be of great satisfaction for the kid. We waited. After several minutes the plane turned and left the runway completely, back to the row with the others.

He stood and went to the fence briefly before moving off to my left. I was beginning to fear that we’d come on an off day and that we might end up sitting here staring like cows at this tableau of overgrown blacktop and fence and small unimpressive machine. I got up and followed him at a distance, stopping when he stopped and watching him bend to pick something from the grass. I took a step closer as he held it up to his face with both hands, worried that he was going to eat something little boys should not eat. He dropped it and bent for something else and I realized what was happening. You stretched the grass between your two thumbs and brought your hands up to your face, and if you blew just right it made a sound like a tiny woodwind instrument.

My father buzzing grass and walking through grass, playing catch in and among grass. Good old Dad, my father who only ever wanted what was best for those of us he still had left. Ian turned to face me and blew into his hands. No sound came out. He dropped the grass and leaned to pick a fresh blade.

“My mom showed me this. If you do it right it’ll buzz.”

“I like the one where you take that long grass with the fuzzy bulb on the top, and you wrap the stalk around itself and use it to shoot off the top.”

“Buck
weed,
” Ian said. “It’s not grass. Yeah, Mom likes that one too. Mom knows all sorts of things to do with grass.”

There was still no activity on the runways. There was a man in an orange vest holding a set of those noise-canceling earmuffs, but he was just standing there, speaking into a walkie-talkie. I remained incapable of coming up with anything to say to Ian about his mother.

“What about that girl you used to sit with by the creek?”

“Yeah. Two days ago she showed up at my house wearing a backpack and said she was running away because her parents wouldn’t buy her a pony. She asked if I wanted to go with her.”

I was surprised to hear little girls still wanted ponies.

“What did you say?”

“I told her running away from your problems doesn’t solve anything. Really it just hurts the people who count on you. Then she came inside and we watched DinoChamps until my dad came home and made her leave.”

We turned and moved back to the van. One of the planes began moving onto the runway. After a few minutes, it accelerated toward where we were sitting, front wheels lifting without ceremony and the rear soon after. Takeoff. But the whole thing was too quiet; I wanted explosions of sound I could claim as my own. To say,
Listen, Ian, to the massive noise. Cover your ears. This is bigger
than all of us.

“Does she ever talk about faeries, this girl?”

“Fairies? She’s eleven. Not six.”

“My girlfriend cut off all her hair, and now she and this robot girl named Carmel are scouring the European countryside in search of faeries. They have moved from Germany southward with faerie nets strapped to their backpacks.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

“That’s right! Jesus, it’s good to hear you say that.”

“Fairies won’t have anything to do with robots. And you shouldn’t say
Jesus
like that! You only get two a year and you just wasted one for no reason.”

How laid-back this God of his to forgive blasphemy up to twice a year. I wondered if the same rule applied to the other commandments and whether the parents had created this version of religion together.

“This is kind of boring,” he said.

“But you love planes. Planes are awesome.”

“Sort of. I mean, I’m not six.”

“The first flight on record only went one hundred and twenty feet,” I said. “In Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.”

“Yeah, and when he was young, Orville had typhoid. Wilbur had to take care of him.”

“Alright. But I bet you a Coke you can’t tell me what they worked on before planes.”

“Bikes,” Ian said. “We did all of this in fourth grade.”

“Alright. One Coke.”

We continued along the frontage road back toward the city and Ian flipped the tire gauge in his little fingers while I looked for somewhere more interesting than a gas station to buy his Coke. When I saw a diner ahead, I signaled and pulled into a large old vacant lot.

“Wait, stop. Stop, stop, stopstop
stop
!”

I stopped the van a good thirty yards from the restaurant. Ian looked carsick and confused, face white and eyes glazed. He bounced shoes on the rubber floor mat and passed the tire gauge from hand to hand.

“I’ll wait here,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“I don’t want to go in there. My mom and I used to come here sometimes.”

I scanned the lot and wondered if I was allowed to leave him here alone. I had seen enough local news to know of the city threats, the poor and desperate victims of the world. But this was practically the country.

“I’m okay by myself,” he said, and held up the tire gauge. “I got this thing.”

So I left him there and went into the diner. When I got back, Ian had the hood of the van open and was looking inside. I handed him a forty-two-ounce Coke and he stepped back and together we stared at the filthy old engine.

“It’s a V8,” he said.

And in the next few minutes while we drank our Cokes, I did not mention his mother or his father, or my own father or mother, or discuss with him what we were supposed to make of marriage, ask how either of us could ever believe in the porcelain institution we’d both seen crumble. And I most certainly did
not
reveal that I’d aged twenty-two years without knowing what the V stood for in V8.

Through the ride home, Ian stared out the window and clenched the tire gauge. It was a willed quietness, one he believed in. And if silence was what he wanted, I would let him have it. Soon I was steering us back onto Waldwick Drive. I was surprised when he finally broke the silence.

“I got a postcard in the mail the other day. I’ll show you if you want. It’s not like she left forever or is gonna leave me alone forever with Dad. I just don’t want you thinking she like forgot me or something. Because she didn’t.”

Ian slipped out and closed the door without turning. I watched him walk back to the house. If I kept going at this pace, by September I’d be in love with the whole Midwest.

july

six

t
here are stages of swelter, and as summer progresses, each stage trumps the last. Around mid-July the heat reaches the sort where mere digits lose meaning and even the heat index, that fetish of meteorology, fails, leaving the city’s elderly as our de facto authorities, both for their spookily accurate ability to rank current conditions against history and their tendency to expire in these conditions. A city of seniors, already withered, further withering in their un-air-conditioned rooms, stoically riding out a heat wave that can’t hold a flame to the Great Heat of 1968, fanning themselves with an old framed photograph or church program until they quietly give in to exhaustion or stroke. One more dead. But then, these are people so old that their passing requires little explanation. They’re OLD, is the thing, and the journey from old to dead is one so brief it’s hardly worth packing.

Five of these elderly died of heat-related causes during the second week of July, only two short of the record. I myself stuffed cargo pockets full of twelve-ounce bottles each morning before leaving the warehouse, though a part of me secretly adored the possible irony of falling down in pathetic drama, succumbing to dehydration while working for a water company.

My other employment brought a sweat that simmered only within. Cool basement sealed away from outside world, cool color of walls and furniture, cool air pumping through vents. What was it about the Midwest and our furnished basements? The heat of the angel surrounded on all sides by the cool of subterranean academic pursuance.

“Begin,” the official timekeeper said.

I would not have claimed to be a good tutor. My illusion of authority was thin and translucent, and it was therefore semimiraculous to watch Zoe listen attentively and take occasional notes. I marveled at the innocence of it all, the purity of intention. The mother happily opening the basement door. Zoe with hair and eyes and bare arms, shoulders. Neck.