A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (47 page)

I could hear a high wind in the junipers, but it was quiet in our camp. The campfire fluttered and sucked, settling down. I stared into the pink coals and watched them pulse white. I could see the bright edge of light on the cliff tip that meant in an hour the moon would break over the canyon. The other noise that came along sure as sure was the soft broken sucking of Glenna crying. She had her hand over her face in a gesture of real grief. I watched her for a moment, holding myself still. I was going to cry too, but I was going to try to wait for the moon. Finally, I went around the dying fire and sat by her.

“Hey, Glenna. Glenna,” I whispered. “Did you bring any sunburn stuff?”

She shook her head no.

“Here,” I said, handing her my tube of aloe. “Use this tonight. Okay? Use plenty. You surely scorched yourself.” I could feel the heat from her sunburn as I sat by her.

“He’s a good kid,” she said.

“He’s a great kid.”

She shuddered and drew up in a series of short serious sobs. When that wave passed, I said, “What’s the matter?” We were both speaking quietly.

She shook her head again, this time as if shaking something off. She said, “You’re bright and young and you get married and you kind of always have money and then, bang-o, a thousand people later you’re sunburned and eating fish in the big woods with an old friend and only the smallest part of it seems like the center of your life anymore. What’s that about?”

I was beyond speaking now, lost in a widening orbit miles from our little fire. I knew she was going to go on. “There is a message, you know. From Lily. We saw her at the wedding.” It had taken her all day but she had finally said Lily’s name. “It’s terrible, of course. We were eating cake and she came over to our table and said to tell Jack hello. So,
hello.
”

Now I had to hold her. Someone offers you that kind of last hello and whether you’re camped by the river or not, you’ll probably hug her, feeling her pulsing sunburn, and sit there thinking it all over for a little while. I had forever turned some corner in my life this month (twenty-two days), but I hadn’t known it until Glenna said hello. Like it or not I was through being a boy.

So be it.

We sat there quietly and soon—over the steady low flash of the river—I could hear Toby, down in his tent, humming. It was something familiar, a sad ballad involving the devil’s cattle and a long ride.

OXYGEN

I
N
1967, the year before the year that finally cracked the twentieth century once and for all, I had as my summer job delivering medical oxygen in Phoenix, Arizona. I was a sophomore at the University of Montana in Missoula, but my parents lived in Phoenix, and my father, as a welding engineer, used his contacts to get me a job at Ayr Oxygen Company. I started there doing what I called dumbbell maintenance, the kind of makework assigned to college kids. I cleared debris from the back lot, mainly crushed packing crates that had been discarded. That took a week, and on the last day, as I was raking, I put a nail through the bottom of my foot and had to go for a tetanus shot. Next, I whitewashed the front of the supply store and did such a good job that I began a month of painting my way around the ten-acre plant.

These were good days for me. I was nineteen years old and this was the hardest work I had ever done. The days were stunning, starting hot and growing insistently hotter. My first week two of the days had been 116. The heat was a pure physical thing, magnified by the steel and pavement of the plant, and in that first week, I learned what not to touch, where not to stand, and I found the powerhouse heat simply bracing. I lost some of the winter dormitory fat and could feel myself browning and getting into shape. It felt good to pull on my Levi’s and workshoes every morning (I’d tossed my tennies after the nail incident), and not to have any papers due for any class.

Of course, during this time I was living at home, that is arriving home from work sometime after six and then leaving for work sometime before seven the next morning. My parents and I had little use for each other. They were in their mid-forties then, an age I’ve since found out that can be oddly taxing, and besides they were in the middle of a huge career decision which would make their fortune and allow them to live the way they live now. I was nineteen, as I said, which in this country is not a real age at all, and effectively disqualifies a person for one year from meaningful relationship with any other human being.

I was having a hard ride through the one relationship I had begun during the school year. Her name was Linda Enright, a classmate, and we had made the mistake of sleeping together that spring, just once, but it wrecked absolutely everything. We were dreamy beforehand, the kind of couple who walked real close, bumping foreheads. We read each other’s papers. I’m not making this up: we read poetry on the library lawn under a tree. I had met her in a huge section of Western Civilization taught by a young firebrand named Whisner, whose credo was “Western civilization is what you personally are doing.” He’d defined it that way the first day of class and some wit had called out, “Then Western Civ is watching television.” But Linda and I had taken it seriously, the way we took all things I guess, and we joined the Democratic Student Alliance and worked on a grape boycott, though it didn’t seem that there were that many grapes to begin with in Montana that chilly spring.

And then one night in her dorm room we went ahead with it, squirming out of our clothes on her hard bed, and we did something for about a minute that changed everything. After that we weren’t even the same people. She wasn’t she and I wasn’t I; we were two young citizens in the wrong country. I see now that a great deal of it was double- and triple-think, that is I thought she thought it was my fault and I thought that she might be right with that thought and I should be sorry and that I was sure she didn’t know how sorry I was already, regret like a big burning house on the hill of my conscience, or something like that, and besides all I could think through all my sorrow and compunction was that I wanted it to happen again, soon. It was confusing. All I could remember from the incident itself was Linda stopping once and undoing my belt and saying, “Here, I’ll get it.”

The coolness of that practical phrase repeated in my mind after I’d said goodbye to Linda and she’d gone off to Boulder, where her summer job was working in her parents’ cookie shop. I called her every Sunday from a pay phone at an Exxon station on Indian School Road, and we’d fight and if you asked me what we fought about I couldn’t tell you. We both felt misunderstood. I knew I was misunderstood, because I didn’t understand myself. It was a glass booth, the standard phone booth, and at five in the afternoon on a late-June Sunday the sun torched the little space into a furnace. The steel tray was too hot to fry eggs on, you’d have ruined them. It gave me little burns along my forearms. I’d slump outside the door as far as the steel cord allowed, my skin running to chills in the heat, and we’d argue until the operator came on and then I’d dump eight dollars of quarters into the blistering mechanism and go home.

The radio that summer played a strange mix, “Little Red Riding Hood,” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, over and over, along with songs by the Animals, even “Sky Pilot.” This was not great music and I knew it at the time, but it all set me on edge. After work I’d shower and throw myself on the couch in my parents’ dark and cool living room and read and sleep and watch the late movies, making a list of the titles eventually in the one notebook I was keeping.

About the third week of June, I burned myself. I’d graduated to the paint sprayer and was coating the caustic towers in the oxygen plant. These were two narrow, four-story tanks that stood beside the metal building where the oxygen was bottled. The towers were full of a viscous caustic material that air was forced through to remove nitrogen and other elements until the gas that emerged was 99 percent oxygen. I was forty feet up an extension ladder reaching right and left to spray the tops of the tanks. Beneath me was the pump station that ran the operation, a nasty tangle of motors, belts, and valving. The mistake I made was to spray where the ladder arms met the curved surface of the tank, and as I reached out then to hit the last and farthest spot, I felt the ladder slide in the new paint. Involuntarily I threw my arms straight out in a terrific hug against the superheated steel. Oddly I didn’t feel the burn at first nor did I drop the spray gun. I looked down at what seemed now to be the wicked machinery of my death. It certainly would have killed me to fall. After a moment, and that’s the right span here, a moment, seconds or a minute, long enough to stabilize my heartbeat and sear my cheekbone and the inside of both elbows, I slid one foot down one rung and began to descend.

All the burns were the shapes of little footballs, the one on my face a three-inch oval below my left eye, but after an hour with the doctor that afternoon, I didn’t miss a day of work. They’ve all healed extraordinarily well, though they darken first if I’m not careful with the sun. That summer I was proud of them, the way I was proud not to have dropped the spray gun, and proud of my growing strength, of the way I’d broken in my workshoes, and proud in a strange way of my loneliness.

Where does loneliness live in the body? How many kinds of loneliness are there? Mine was the loneliness of the college student in a summer job at once very far from and very close to the thing he will become. I thought my parents were hopelessly bourgeois, my girlfriend a separate race, my body a thing of wonder and terror, and as I went through the days, my loneliness built. Where? In my heart? It didn’t feel like my heart. The loneliness in me was a dryness in the back of my mouth that could not be slaked.

And what about lust, that thing that seemed to have defeated me that spring, undermined my sense of the good boy I’d been, and rinsed the sweetness from my relationship with Linda? Lust felt related to the loneliness, part of the dry, bittersweet taste in the lava-hot air. It went with me like an aura as I strode with my three burns across the paved yard of Ayr Oxygen Company, and I felt it as a certain tension in the tendons in my legs, behind the knees, a tight, wired feeling that I knew to be sexual.

THE LOADING
dock at Ayr Oxygen was a huge rotting concrete slab under an old corrugated-metal roof. Mr. Mac Bonner ran the dock with two Hispanic guys that I got to know pretty well, Victor and Jesse, and they kept the place clean and well organized in a kind of military way. Industrial and medical trucks were always delivering full or empty cylinders or taking them away, and the tanks had to be lodged in neat squadrons which would not be in the way. Victor, who was the older man, taught me how to roll two cylinders at once while I walked, turning my hands on the caps and kick-turning the bottom of the rear one. As soon as I could do that, briskly moving two at a time, I was accepted there and fell into a week of work with them, loading and unloading trucks. They were quiet men who knew the code and didn’t have to speak or call instructions when a truck backed in. I followed their lead.

The fascinating thing about Victor and Jesse was their lunches. I had been eating my lunch at a little patio behind the main building, alone, not talking to the five or six other employees who sat in groups at the other metal tables. I was the college kid and they were afraid of me because they knew my dad knew one of the bosses. It seemed there had been some trouble in previous summers, and so I just ate my tuna sandwiches and drank my iced tea while the sweat dried on my forehead and I pulled my wet T-shirt away from my shoulders. After I burned my face, people were friendlier, but then I was transferred up to the dock.

There were dozens of little alcoves amid the gas cylinders standing on the platform, and that is where I ate my lunches now. Victor and Jesse had milk crates and they found one for me and we’d sit out of sight up there from eleven-thirty to noon and eat. There was a certain uneasiness at first, as if they weren’t sure if I should be joining them, but then Victor saw it was essentially a necessity. I wasn’t going to get my lunch out of the old fridge on the dock and walk across the yard to eat with the supply people. On the dock was where I learned the meaning of
whitebread
, the way it’s used now. I’d open my little bag, two tuna sandwiches and a baggie of chips, and then I’d watch the two men open their huge sacks of burritos and tacos and other items I didn’t know the names of and which I’ve never seen since. I mean these were huge lunches that their wives had prepared, everything wrapped in white paper. No baggies. Jesse and I traded a little bit; he liked my mother’s tuna. And I loved the big burritos. I was hungry and thirsty all the time and the hefty food seemed to make me well for a while. The burritos were packed with roast beef and onions and a fiery salsa rich with cilantro. During these lunches Victor would talk a little, telling me where to keep my gloves so that the drivers didn’t pick them up, and where not to sit even on break.

“There was a kid here last year,” he said. “Used to take his breaks right over there.” He shook his head. “Right in front of the boss’s window.” It was cool and private sitting behind the walls of cylinders.

“He didn’t stay,” Jesse said. “The boss don’t know you’re on break.”

“Come back in here,” Victor said. “Or don’t sit down.” He smiled at me. I looked at Jesse and he shrugged and smiled too. They hadn’t told the other kid where not to sit. Jesse handed me a burrito rolled in white paper. I was on the inside now; they’d taken me in.

That afternoon there was a big Linde Oxygen semi backed against the dock and we were rolling the hot cylinders off when I heard a crash. Jesse yelled from back in the dock and I saw his arms flash and Victor, who was in front of me, laid the two tanks he was rolling on the deck of the truck and jumped off the side and ran into the open yard. I saw the first rows of tanks start to tumble wildly, a chain reaction, a murderous thundering domino chase. As the cylinders fell off the dock, they cartwheeled into the air crazily, heavily tearing clods from the cement dock ledge and thudding into the tarry asphalt. A dozen plummeted onto somebody’s Dodge rental car parked too close to the action. It was crushed. The noise was ponderous, painful, and the session continued through a minute until there was only one lone bank of brown nitrogen cylinders standing like a little jury on the back corner of the loading dock. The space looked strange that empty.

The yard was full of people standing back in a crescent. Then I saw Victor step forward and walk toward where I stood on the back of the semi. I still had my hands on the tanks.

He looked what? Scared, disgusted, and a little amused. “Mi amigo,” he said, climbing back on the truck. “When they go like that, run away.” He pointed back to where all of the employees of Ayr Oxygen Company were watching us. “Away, get it?”

“Yes, sir,” I told him. “I do.”

“Now you can park those,” he said, tapping the cylinders in my hand. “And we’ll go pick up all these others.”

It took the rest of the day and still stands as the afternoon during which I lifted more weight than any other in this life. It felt a little funny setting the hundreds of cylinders back on the old pitted concrete. “They should repour this,” I said to Victor as we were finishing.

“They should,” he said. “But if accidents are going to follow you, a new floor won’t help.” I wondered if he meant that I’d been responsible for the catastrophe. I had rolled and parked a dozen tanks when things blew, but I never considered that it might have been my fault, one cockeyed tank left wobbling.