A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (13 page)

THE NEXT
morning, I’ve got the day trip to Denver, the quick deposition, and back on the nine o’clock. Annie is cordial to me in the morning, well, stern. I have a cup of coffee and pick at some of Bobby’s scrambled eggs. Annie doesn’t offer to have the whole gang drive me to the airport, which would have happened if we weren’t fighting. I feel bad about it, kind of flat, but the boys will not have their fingerprints taken. I do not believe in it and it will not happen. Not my boys. It’s a rule.

The flight over is rocky. The plane pitches heavily up the slope and then down, across the mountains to Denver. Sitting in the window seat of my row, one empty seat away, is a pale blond girl. I’m trying to fill in all the forms so I can maybe make the early plane tonight, but she stops me. I have to study her. She huddles to the window, her fragile face poised there, watching the unchanging grayness. Her Levi’s are worn and the red plaid bag she clutches on her lap is years old. Her shirt is a blue stripe dress shirt that could have never, ever fit her; it is five sizes large. She sits in a linty, dark blue serape. I can’t stop myself from looking at her. Date of Birth: 1969. Age: 17; Height: 5 feet 9 inches; Eyes: brown; Hair: light blond; Weight: 120; Date Missing. . . .

The girl turns her face to me in the bouncing airplane and speaks, her lips barely moving: “Don’t,” she says. “Please. Just don’t.”

My deposition is a witness to a motorcycle accident, a sophomore in psychology, and I meet him at the University Union in Boulder just after noon. In our hour, I learn: both children moved to avoid the cycle, but they moved different ways and one, the victim, our client, was hit and injured. My witness was driving pizza delivery behind the motorcycle and saw it all. Daylight. Sun to his back. A simple story. After the witness leaves for class, I sit in the modular furniture mesmerized for a while by the young people streaming around me.

There are children everywhere. All the way down the highway from Boulder to Denver, I see them alone and in groups, kicking along in the gravel. They all seem to need haircuts. I check my watch: two o’clock on a school day. Why isn’t anybody where he’s supposed to be? I think about our case; it’s a given. I wonder what help the settlement will be to the parents of the hurt girl. I try to make the equation in my mind. We’ll ask for six hundred thousand and get two. The girl’s eleven years old and has one complete knee and six-tenths of the other. Let’s see: she’ll have that limp for sixty-eight years, if she lives her statistic. That’s three thousand dollars a year not to walk like everyone else, or play soccer, I guess, or tennis. I ditch my rental car at the Avis curb, and think: what a strange man I’m becoming. What’s happening to me?

The six o’clock is full so I hit the little sky-lounge near the gate and have a Manhattan. I used to love having an hour or two to ransack the magazines and have a Manhattan, my little joke living in the West, but now it’s not much fun. There seems some urgency about getting home. I can’t really settle down. I want to get home.

SOMETIMES, DRIVING
home alone in the last two blocks before our house, a feeling descends upon me like a gift. It is as if a huge door opens and I can breathe differently, see the entire scope of our lives, and it makes me unreasonably happy. It makes me want to rush into the kitchen and sweep Annie up and cry:
forgive me, forgive us, let’s never quarrel again, we have everything.
I don’t know where the feeling comes from or how real it is, but I have it tonight as I turn into the driveway.

My mother’s white Seville is parked to one side, something I didn’t really want to see, but there’s our house standing like a house in a story, an entire happy little world. The kitchen windows are beautiful yellow squares and a blue glow in the two small windows out front means they’re watching television.

I vow to go in cheerfully and join them, open a beer, chat openly with the two women about everything. This fingerprint thing doesn’t have to be such a big deal. We can agree. We can face the future without unreasonable fear.

In the kitchen, two blue Community Fuel Folders spill across the table. On the cover of each is a large white fingerprint the size of a head of lettuce. Underneath the print, it says:
COMMUNITY I.D.
/
PROJECT FINGERPRINT
. I can hear the women talking in the other room under the television noises. I open the first folder and there it is in Annie’s printing: Bobby Hensley. Date of Birth. Age. Weight. Hair. There is an empty square: place recent photograph here. And below: the ten smudges of Bobby’s fingers.

I reach two bottles out of the fridge, one Nuk, one yellow nipple for Lee, and slip them inside my sportcoat. I tiptoe into the boys’ room. Lee is asleep in a knot of blanket; Bobby lies on his side with his thumb loosely in his mouth experimenting with sounds:
doya, doya, moya.
He looks up at me calmly and smiles and then rolls to a crawl and stands in his crib. I pick him up and park him in a shoulder and then lift Lee like a melon under my forearm. I sweep the boys noiselessly through the kitchen and out to the car.

I am calm enough to strap them in their car seats, Lee asleep in the back and Bobby on the seat next to me in the front. I coast back down the driveway before starting the car, and I am on the road half a block before I pull the lights on.

“Ba,” Bobby says as we pass a city bus in front of East High. “Ba.”

“Bus,” I say, the first word I’ve said aloud since my plane landed. “That’s right. It’s a bus.”

The streets are luminous, wet and shiny, ticketed with early leaves, and our tires make the friction I have always loved to hear after rain. So the streets whisper darkly as we slow at each bright intersection, the flaring Seven-Elevens, the flat white splash of a gas station. Then it is dark again, and we are driving.

Lee starts to squeak, which means he will babble for a while and then cry. He’s a little tongue-tied and is gradually tearing the cord underneath by stretching his mouth in low squalls which becomes real crying after about a minute. I stop at the light at Fourth and State and give both boys their bottles.

We turn left onto State and head south, cruising by the jillion colored lights the kids love. In the rearview mirror, I can see Lee settled now in his seat. He has learned to balance the bottle on the carseat arm-tray, so his hands are free. Right now, they extend off to each side, palms up, and Lee opens and closes his hands slowly as he watches them and sucks on the bottle.

Bobby has his head tipped right to witness the spectacle of neon from the bars and motels, the bright dragon above the Double Hey Rice Palace, the pulsing tire in front of Big O. He has his bottle clutched in both hands and set hard in the side of his mouth like a cigar.

WHEN I
was a boy I remember that my father would always pick up babies in restaurants. We’d go to Harmon’s on North Temple about every other Sunday as a treat. My brother and I always had the gorgeous shakes, strawberry and chocolate, too thick for the straw, my mother always wore one of her three pretty dresses and patted our faces with the corner of her napkin, and my father would always spot a baby three tables away. He would simply rise and go over to the little family and pick up their baby and bring it over to our table and talk to it, asking did it want to be ours and things like that, just loud enough for the parents to hear. I remember the parents always smiling, perhaps an older sister craning her neck to see where the baby had gone, and my father dipping a spoon into my strawberry shake for the child. Sometimes he’d keep the baby on his lap for half an hour, showing off, sometimes, he would return it right away, the baby squirming in his arms, fighting for a last glance at my strawberry shake. My father gave forty kids their first taste of ice cream at our table, and no one seemed to be scared of anything.

“
NAMMA
,”
BOBBY
says, lifting his bottle over the seat and dropping it. He places one hand on the window and says it again, “Namma.”

Somewhere out in this garish Disneyland of light, he has spotted a bear, and now he wants “Namma,” his bear, actually a stuffed toy raccoon. Namma is the one who taught us all
peek-a-boo
and
Where’s-your-nose.
In my haste leaving the house, I have forgotten Namma.

In the backseat, Lee is again asleep, his arms limp at his sides, his bottle still protruding from his mouth.

“Namma,” Bobby says, turning to me.

“Namma,” I say back to him, and he smiles. We will have to go home. Namma is at home peeking out of a corner of the crib. Bobby is still smiling at me coyly, waiting for me to say something else, so I sing his favorite song: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

“Ooh Wimoweh. Wimoweh, O Wimoweh . . .” I sing, nodding my head so Bobby will nod his too. “In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight. . . .”

Tired, he leans his head back against the car seat and watches me sing, his open-mouth grin never changing. I do a lot of extra “
O Wimoweh
”s, and the song ends somewhere in Murray. Bobby has closed his mouth now; his eyes are next. I look at my watch: ten to twelve; and I realize that this is the latest I’ve been out since the boys were born, and people are everywhere. We better go home.

I do a U-turn in the bright, crowded parking lot of a Seven-Eleven. A lone teenager leans against the phones, smoking a cigarette. He wears a Levi’s jacket and a blue bandanna around his neck. I look at his face, the eyebrows almost grown together, the pretty lower lip. Date of Birth: 1971; Age: 15; Height: 5 feet 7 inches; Weight: 125; Eyes: blue; Hair: dark brown; Date missing: I don’t know. On the milk carton there will be a date, but as I glance back at the boy, I can only see that it looks like he’s been out in the night a long time.

Three blocks later, Bobby’s asleep. It’s late. The traffic is thick and bright. I pass a twenty-four hour Safeway and the parking lot is full. Behind me the headlights teem. A man cruises by us smoking a cigarette in a large Chevrolet. Two couples on motorcycles, the girls holding on, their faces turned out of the wind into their boyfriends’ backs. A new station wagon, three girls bouncing in the front seat. Two boys in a Volkswagen bug, their elbows out the window as if summer weren’t really over.

At home Annie has checked on the children by now and found them gone, and she has found my valise, and she has given my mother another drink and calmed her down. She knows I’m coming home. We have been safe all our lives. We’ve traveled: London, Tokyo, Paris, where we saw a diplomat shot down the block from us. Annie has broken her leg skiing. Our Cherokee was totaled by a street department truck two summers ago. We have always felt safe until the boys arrived, and now I am afraid of everything.

I start to sing. We’re locked in, the windows are up. These are my boys. I sing softly: “Ooh Wimoweh. Wimoweh, O Wimoweh, Wimoweh,” and on, even at a stoplight. I can feel people looking at me, and I lower my face onto the back of my hand on the steering wheel. It’s so late. What is everybody doing up so late?

BLOOD

And Its Relationship to Water

T
HE NOISE
Eddie makes when he first wakes for his two
A.M.
feeding is closest to a fanbelt slipping, a faint periodic squealing, which like a loose fanbelt doesn’t signal an emergency; it just means that if not looked to soon, there is going to be real trouble. In Eddie’s case, if we linger in our bed too long, the sound becomes a wail similar to that of straining power steering in some late-model Fords. Some Fairlane will try a U-turn on a side street and you hear that low scream near the front axle.

At six weeks, Eddie’s also developing a strange growl that he uses primarily when we try to burp him; it is as if he’s trying to fake one so as to get back to the bottle. And at night sometimes, as the fanbelt slips into the power steering wail, he’ll throw in a little growl as counterpoint, just to show us he’s beginning to do things on purpose.

He also has a four-note nasal coo, which is the sweetest noise ever created. He coos whenever the bottle is plugged in his mouth, and sometimes he coos for a moment or two after he’s eaten, as his eyes roll sleepily back in his lids.

We know his every peep, every soft snort (he has two), and we listen to him and study these noises because like any parents, we take them as signs of life. We go to the crib at all hours and listen for the feather breath, the muted sigh, some small sound. But we are also keen because Nancy is looking for a sign of love. She hangs on his every glance, tic, start; he’s smiled a couple of times now and when he has, Nancy has called me into the room where she stands with his little head in her hands, while she sobs and sobs. “He smiled,” she says. “He smiled at me.” She has fallen in love with Eddie so profoundly that our house seems a new place, and she needs some small sign of love in return.

I know she’s going to get one, but she is not so sure. Eddie came to our house in the arms of my lawyer’s wife, Bonnie, when he was two days old. Bonnie, who has four children of her own, was weeping, and repeating again and again: “He’s so beautiful, so perfect.” It was the moment of transfer that changed Nancy, utterly. She had been cool. She had been hopeful, surely, but also steady and reasonable, and then when Bonnie put Eddie in Nancy’s arms, it was as if the infant carried 50,000 volts of some special electricity. Nancy sat down with her eyes on his little face, and her mouth became a scared line. I stood there wishing she would just cry instead of looking like she was about to start crying.

And it’s been that way for six weeks. A solemnity has crept into our lives as my wife, the dearest soul I know, waits to see if this adopted child will love her. Hey, I’ve talked to her, and obviously, logic has no place in the deal. So my wife listens to the baby and watches his face the way astronomers stare into the deepest heavens for the first sign of a new star.

TONIGHT, WHEN
Sam came over, in fact, was the first time Nancy has relaxed enough to drink a beer, and I think by the time he left after midnight, she’d had four. Sam loves kids and just the way he held Eddie and how obviously happy he is for us to have a baby put Nancy at ease.

I brought a chair in from the dining room and we sat in the kitchen and Sam tried to remember when Robbie and Juney were babies. He told a funny story about how Rob wouldn’t stop crying at night and the doctor had told them just to let him cry. But a neighbor, suspecting child abuse, had called the police. It had happened twice. Now Robbie is fifteen and works for me weekends, mowing the lawn and washing the cars. He lives with his mother.

After his ten o’clock bottle, Eddie went to bed, bunching himself on his arms and knees like a bug. When I returned to the kitchen, Nancy had opened another beer and had her feet up under herself on the chair. Sam had opened the window and pulled out his cigarettes. Something was up.

Well, with our old friend Sam, it’s always Vicky. They’ve been divorced over three years, but he feels that she still conducts her life around a massive and undiminished hatred for him. “It’s no Sun Valley this summer,” he said, blowing smoke like a strong secret out the window. He smokes differently since we’ve gotten the baby. “It’s her option, as always, and she says that she and Jeff are taking the kids to San Diego for five weeks after the Fourth. She’s known since Thanksgiving about my time off and my plans to let Juney learn to ride, but all of a sudden, she’s got this craving to take the kids on her honeymoon. Rob and Juney are acting funny, like it was my fault, like if I’m really their father why don’t I just make it happen.”

Sam lifted an empty beer can and deposited his cigarette, tilting the can to extinguish the butt. I remember Vicky smirking when he did that; she always called him a “bo-ho,” her joke for
bohemian.

“Rob sure is getting to be a handsome young man,” Nancy said.

“Now that is undisguised flattery,” I said to Sam. “He looks just like you.” And Rob does. What is most affecting, however, is that Rob
walks
just like Sam, and when we play one on one in the driveway, Rob has the same fake-left-go-right move that Sam uses. I haven’t told him about it yet, because with my age, I need the little advantage.

“I wonder if Eddie will look like us,” Nancy said, hugging her knees in her chair.

“He already does,” Sam said. “The poor little guy has that problem already.” He reached for his cigarettes, showed them to us. “How we doing with the smoke?”

“You’re all right, Sam. None’s blowing in here,” Nancy said.

“I look more like my father than my brother Tim does,” Sam said, lighting up and shaking the match in front of the window opening. “Tim’s even six inches shorter than both of us.” He laughed. “I think it pisses him off.”

“It sure forced him to become an outside shooter,” I said. I reached behind Nancy into the fridge. “Beer?”

“One more, then I gotta go,” Sam said. “Last hearing on the rate hike tomorrow; the public defender better be sharp.”

“Tim’s not adopted,” Nancy said, taking the beer from me. “Is he?”

“No. He and Irene came along after Mom and Dad had adopted me and Carrie.”

I took a chance. “Nancy’s a little worried, Sam.” I said. “How . . .”

“How do you feel about
your
parents?” Nancy said.

Sam looked up, his face confused, and then he looked over at Nancy, huddled on her chair. His face rose into a large grin. “You’re kidding,” he said. “Nan, you’re worried? Come on. She’s kidding, right?” Sam leaned on his elbows toward Nancy. “Well, don’t worry. He’s your little boy and he’ll always be your boy. Look at me. I love my parents and I love my kids; it’s my wife I can’t abide.” Sam laughed and stuck the cigarette back in his mouth. “She’s the one who grew up to hate me.”

Sam stood up. “I gotta go. Thanks for the beer. I’ll call you late tomorrow and give you the play by play of the hearing.”

“What will you do if you can’t take the kids to Sun Valley?”

“Plan two. Stay around here. Drink beer with you guys. Teach Eddie about women and how to ride a bike.”

“Go on,” Nancy said. “You’re not finished. What’s the punch-line?”

Sam shrugged and opened the door. “Once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget.”

After Sam left I asked Nancy if she felt better.

“Sam’s a good guy,” she said. “And I should probably drink more beer; this is the first time my back has let go since the baby got here.”

“What about this. You go to bed and I’ll listen for the baby,” I said, clearing the counter.

“My son,” she smiled briefly hugging me, her head against my chest. “Please listen for my son.”

IT WAS
twelve minutes after two when the fanbelt began to squeal, just a short touch and then another, then the real sound of a fanbelt slipping. I mean, it is so close I could tape it and convince people of car trouble. Nancy was out so cold with the worry and fatigue of six weeks that in the half light we have from the hall she could have been the definitive photograph of sleep deprivation.

You see a kid that small in his crib and it looks like someone sleeping on a jailhouse floor and you don’t wonder about
any
sound he may make. I slipped my hand under Eddie’s head just as the fanbelt was rising into power steering trouble and we ducked quickly into the kitchen. He quieted for the ride into the new room, and the quick flash from the fridge door turned his head in curiosity for the moment that allowed me to retrieve the bottle and stick it in the warmer. Since we’d had the baby, I’d become used to standing naked in the kitchen at night with Eddie in my arms.

The standing-zombie fatigue was worst the third week and now in the sixth it had settled to just my eyes and knees, a low burning. My head rocked slightly and I kept my eyes closed, drifting through the routine.

While Eddie was still too amazed at being whisked around to cry, I changed him, and when I pulled the heavy wet diaper away from under him, he swam happily in the air for a moment, punching softly into the dark. By the time I had him powdered and diapered, he was squealing again, each breath a wonderful, powerful compression, focused and building.

In the kitchen, the bottle was ready. I found it without reaching twice, unplugging the warmer as an afterthought, the kind of motion that in ten years I would forget I had committed a thousand times. With a quick flip I had milk on my wrist, and then of all the easy connections and coincidences in the universe, the baby’s mouth found the nipple easiest of all. And as I walked around my own house naked as they say Adam was, holding my son, I heard cooing, edged by a kind of purring slurp, and one or two real, honest deep breaths.

In the dark living room, I sat in the corner of the old couch, holding Eddie, and listened until he snorted two or three times and then gasped, a sharp little gasp, and I knew that two ounces were down, and we could try for a little air. I stood him against my chest and patted his back while he squirmed and growled, his head bobbing in search of the bottle. Then he grew quiet, which always is a good sign. He stood, head away from my body, as if he was listening for something, and then it came: a belch, a good two-stage belch, which he delivered partially in my ear and which sounded exactly like a lawn mower coming around the corner of a house. After that, his head bobbed some more, poking me about the face, and he was ready for more dinner.

I had already fallen asleep twice during the feeding, but some-time during the second burping, Eddie really woke me up with his head. He was bumping against my face softly, working his mouth like a little fish, whining a little bit, when I felt him swing back into space. I had a good hold of him, so I wasn’t too worried, when
wham!
his forehead hammered my nose. I saw a quick flash and my eyes filled with tears that burned and burned. I must have started or moved somehow, because I felt Eddie wet me right through the diaper leg, which—out of a kind of misguided concern—I always leave a little loose.

Eddie was fussing and I stood and walked him around the room for a minute, too tired to change him, too tired to go to bed. My head felt strange, kind of empty. And finally I gave up in the middle of our second lap and sat back on the couch. Leaning there I burned with fatigue, wet and warm, and headed toward three o’clock.

Once or twice I thought about getting up, drying us off, and going back to bed, but my head was light and I was tired to the bone. Eddie began to sleep there on my chest, evenly against me, each breath a bird wing in the night sky. I pulled the TV quilt over us and leaned back into warm sleep myself.

It’s funny about love, about how you think you’re in love or how you may think you know your capacity for love, and suddenly somebody like Eddie comes along and shows you whole new rooms in your heart. I never thought Nancy would be nervous about making this baby belong to us; and when I saw that she was, that she wanted fiercely for him to be ours in every way, I started getting nervous, because I didn’t know how to help her.

When I woke there was crying. This was no gentle revving of the small engines of crying. This was roaring, and then I opened my eyes and it was Nancy. She had a hand on my forehead and all I could see in her face was her open mouth in a gasp so full of horror and fear as to seem counterfeit. Her eyes were wide, crystalline, unblinking. In the late dawn light, she looked as though she had bad news for me.

Then I looked down. Eddie lay on my chest in a thick mess which included the blanket, both my hands, my side, and a good portion of the couch cushion. It was blood. I reached up and felt the crust of blood on my neck and chin. My head ached slowly, a low-grade ice-cream headache, and I felt my swollen nose with my fingers. All the time, I realized, my other hand had been feeling Eddie sleep.

“It’s okay, Nan,” I said in a thick voice. “I had a bloody nose.” She sat on her heels next to me, her hands now clasped in her lap, her lower lip clipped fast in her teeth. “Eddie’s okay. He’s still sleeping, see?” I tried to lift Eddie up just a little to show his breathing face to her, and when I tried that, I realized we were stuck. My nose had bled over everything, blood that would be on the couch for generations, and now a thin layer of blood had glued Eddie to my belly and chest.