Nine Women (3 page)

He drove out Perkins Road, past miles of new yellow-green cornfields, hazy with night fog. He turned down Bingham Lane, a small blacktopped road that ran through old pasture fields just west of the airport. By night this stretch of road was the most popular lovers’ lane in the county. There were car tracks running into the brush on both sides and piles of beer cans and bottles half covered by Johnson grass.

Maybe there was a story in that, he thought automatically, absentmindedly: Alcohol and Youth. The news director was a prohibitionist at heart; maybe he’d go for something like that.

He slowed in a heavy patch of fog and then moments later rose into bright sun at the top of a hill. The fog was always bad out here. It would burn itself off in strips and shreds and the area wouldn’t be clear until nearly noon. He thought: They build airports in these low waste areas and then wonder why they have so many instrument approaches.

Back into the fog. He turned on his headlights and started the windshield wipers. Nothing to do but creep along.

Because the windows were closed against the morning chill, he heard the impact as a dull thud. He blinked, uncertain, seeing nothing. Another muffled sound. He opened the window and leaned out into the wet air. A couple of loud pops: he wasn’t sure of their direction.

The fog seemed thicker than ever. He turned on his car’s emergency flashers and drove with his head half out the open window. Nothing. He pulled off the road and got out: still nothing. He hesitated; there was a faint smell of something in the air and the fog itself seemed to tremble and dance. A few spatters of rain splashed his face.

He drove on again, puzzled and curious. A mile farther and he noticed a faint glow to his right, the fog darkened suddenly and he smelled oily smoke.

He held his breath and blinked rapidly. His jaw quivered, he stopped it with his hand. He glanced at his watch without actually seeing it. Then, carefully, methodically, he let the words form in his mind: an incoming flight has crashed short of the runway.

His eyes still on the distant glow, he reached for the radio to call his office. He was precise and slow: “… Near the north end of Bingham Lane, visible from the road. Would you repeat that to me?” The electronic voice cackled it back to him. “Right. You got it. I’m going over there now.”

It was farther than he thought, much farther. His run slowed to a trot as he made his way along a series of gullies, stumbling, sliding on the wet leaf mold, splashing through green-skimmed pools. When the overhead mist gleamed bright yellow and drops of fog sparkled like points of ice, he left the gully and began climbing a steep pine hill. His leather shoes slipped on the needle-covered ground, he grabbed trunks and branches to pull himself crosswise up the slope. There was an overhang at the top, soft and yielding. He scrambled across.

From here he looked directly down at the broken fuselage and the towering feather of black smoke, flame-edged.

He shivered in the gleaming heat, his knees buckled and he crouched animal-fashion on the ground. The flames seemed to reach to him, to beckon him. And he heard clearly: pealing bells, bells of jubilation.

In panic he rolled and stumbled back down the slope, to hide in the thickest pines. To wait for the fire trucks and the company of other live men.

By the time the first emergency vehicles arrived and the crews filled the air with their shouts, he’d noticed something a couple of hundred yards away through the thin bare trunks: a bright spot. He climbed toward it, moving slowly, gingerly, as if the ground might explode with his weight. He found an airplane seat wedged into the soft earth of a small rainwash. And in the seat a woman in a pale yellow dress. She lay on her back, arms stretched out, palms up. Her face was blackened and there were large smudges across her dress; her shoeless feet hung limply, toes down. She was so still he thought she was dead, until her wide-open eyes blinked, very slowly. He moved closer and saw the tiny rhythmical movement of small shallow breaths.

Overhead a mockingbird chattered and began to sing. Sam Flanders scrambled toward the top of the ridge, shouting for help.

For Nancy Martinson time came and went in a pattern of overhead fluorescent tubes, crisscrossed by faces. Some white, some dark, some blood red. Some with glasses circling their eyes. Some bearded like pirates. Some wearing white sails on their heads, set to drive them on the wind. (She heard the wind whistling and the steady clank of buoys and the sound of surf. What shore was that?)

The faces bobbed across the fluorescent-streaked sky like balloons on a string. Their hands were hooks, they propped her up, put food into her mouth, massaged her jaws and stroked her throat, and dragged her stumbling up and down closed tubes of space.

They began speaking to her. A full-rigged sailing ship said, “Nancy, Nancy, can you hear me?”

The sails sped off into the distance and became a small triangle of starched cap. “Do I know you?” she said politely.

Under the cap was a round face with dark eyebrows graying like frost. “Dr. Thigpen will be so delighted. Everybody will be so delighted.”

“Why will they be delighted? Who are they to be delighted?”

The round face smiled a gentle doll’s smile. And the porcelain smile hardened and froze.

Eventually another smile hung in its place. Then another. There was never a moment when a shiny polished face was not watching and smiling.

Sometimes she spoke to them and sometimes she didn’t. She discovered bit by bit they were real, that they smelt of perspiration and perfume and tobacco.

She learned that they all wanted to talk to her. Carefully, so very carefully, so slowly.

Do you know who you are? they wanted to know. And when were you born? And when did you marry?

She grew irritated at their childish probing and refused to answer, saying: I have never heard anything so silly.

They looked confused and a little hurt, so she changed her mind and said only: Don’t ask such stupid questions. I’m not feebleminded.

Do you know what has happened? they asked. Yes, she said, the plane crashed. There were trees banging against the window. Like people wanting to get in.

Dr. Thigpen—he came very often, he had thick gray hair and the long sad face of an old horse—said, “Do you remember that your husband and your two daughters were on that plane with you?”

“Yes,” she said and then: “You’ve changed the questions. Before you would say: Was there anybody on the plane with you. Perhaps you think I don’t remember, but I do.”

“It was my mistake,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

He continued as if he hadn’t heard: “They were on the plane with you.”

“I will tell you what you want to know,” she said, “or what I think you want to know. I know who I am and I know that I am in a hospital, though I don’t know exactly where. I know that my husband and my two daughters, whose names are Anna and Marsha, were killed. I saw them die. I saw the whole plane die.”

“Yes.” He polished his glasses, replaced them. She read in his eyes uncertainty and calculation. “You were thrown free, some hundred feet, they tell me, and down a very steep slope. Do you remember anything of that?”

“There were mockingbirds singing,” she said, “and a wind blowing.”

“Other people, the rescue crews, remember birds singing,” he said.

She shrugged; other people were nothing to her.

“The wind of course was the flames. Do you remember anything more, how you got there?”

“I fell out,” she said. “I slipped right out between one second and the next—there was a little hesitation, a little opening, and I fell through.”

The thought in his eyes ended, like doors closing. “There’ll be a formal hearing, there always is, they tell me. Normally you might be asked to testify. But under the circumstances I’m going to recommend very strongly that you not be contacted in any way.”

She shrugged. “It is nothing to me whether I talk to them or to you or to any other of God’s creatures.”

An appraising look from the glasses. “Do you know you were the only one to survive?”

Again she saw the pillar of flame, tattered streamers flying. She saw it sweep down the aisle, gleaming.

Survive. She looked into his two shiny rounds of eyeglass held together by a strip of gold. No, I didn’t, she said silently. No, I didn’t.

Now Nancy Martinson sat by a window and watched a flat expanse of rooftops sprinkled with trees and speared by telephone poles. In the distance there was a bridge with traffic moving slowly across it, at night the cars became fireflies crawling up her windowpane. She listened: horns and sirens, urgent, complaining, angry; mumbling engines and tires hissing on asphalt; coughs and shouts and mutters and curses; dogs barking and babies crying and the soft singsong of cats on the prowl.

Her brother Stephen came, and his wife, Lois. Nancy watched their tears and wondered if their grief would add appreciably to the general noise level outside in the world.

“There’s nothing I can say, Nancy, what can I say?”

Lois sobbed and choked and ran from the room. They could hear her heels down the corridor, getting smaller and smaller, until they sounded like a distant woodpecker.

“It was an accident,” Nancy said.

“But, my God!”

“Accidents happen,” Nancy told him, explaining slowly, carefully. “According to the laws of probability, a predictable number of people die in a predictable number of ways during any given time period.”

He stared at her, silent, tears making shiny smears on his cheeks.

“Airline fatalities are one for each eight million passenger miles.”

A tear reached his lip, his tongue hesitantly licked it away.

“Robert and I looked that up once.”

He dried his cheek with his fingers. “Poor Robert.”

“We decided we would fly together, the whole family. So no one would survive alone.… Do you remember when we were little, Stephen, we’d pull the tails off lizards, they’d run off, and the tails would be left behind, jerking and twitching.… Do you remember when we played under the chinaberry tree by the swing?” Sweet pale purple flowers and thousands of seeds on the ground. “We’d play marbles with the seeds,” she said.… Those houses she saw from her window, they must have chinaberry trees, and children playing under them. She could still feel the dry sandy soil between her fingers.

“Will you live with us now?” her brother asked.

“No, of course not.”

Dr. Thigpen came in the room. “You move so silently,” she said. “Are all psychiatrists so quiet? I’ve never had to do with one before.”

“I wear rubber-soled shoes.” His smile flashed on, then settled to a half-speed glow.

“I’ll go home now,” she said. “To my house.”

Dr. Thigpen nodded. “Your brother will see that everything is taken care of for you.”

“Yes,” said Stephen eagerly. “Anytime you want to go home, we’ll drive you. I know you don’t want to fly.…”

How silly he was, she thought. Even as a child, she hadn’t liked him very much. “Of course I’ll fly. I’ll have to fly a great deal now. It will be tiresome, but I’ll have to.”

In the months that followed Sam Flanders worked unusually hard. He got a job offer and a raise to stay where he was. He did some good stories: a holdup at the National Bank of Commerce on Main Street; financial irregularities in the food stamp program; an explosion in a grain elevator. And he wanted to do a follow-up on the crash survivor.

“Jesus,” the news director said. “You know better than that. We didn’t do a story on the hearings because nobody wants to think about pilot error. And that woman doesn’t even live in town.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “Okay.” He put the woman’s name and address in his desk. “I’ll forget it.”

But the images wouldn’t go away, they seemed to get brighter and clearer. When he’d looked straight into the fire, and he’d heard bells like Easter bells in Rome… And the mockingbirds singing so close to the wreck… He’d wake up at night hearing those birds.

He decided to look for upbeat stories. He did one about drug rehabilitation through diet and exercise. He interviewed a prostitute who’d found salvation in Charismatic Catholicism. He did a two-part story on the Animal Rescue League and adopted a large fuzzy Samoyed.

He decided that he wanted to marry his girl friend at the same time she decided she didn’t want to marry anybody. He bought a pure-bred Siamese, found that it didn’t get on with the Samoyed, and gave the cat to his mother. He joined a health club and played racquet ball almost every evening. He went to his sister’s wedding and signed the register with a great flourish. He even planned his vacation six months ahead: he decided he would go to Aspen.

And still that woman would not leave him alone. Almost every night, just the other side of sleep, she waited for him.

Just as he’d first found her: tossed against a curl of mud bank. Safe as Moses in the bulrushes. Arms holding up the sky.

At two thirty one morning Sam Flanders made up his mind. He would call her, and he would go see her, if she would let him.

He fell asleep then, dreamless heavy sleep, didn’t hear his alarm clock, and was almost an hour late for work.

Nancy Martinson came home from her regular eleven o’clock appointment at the Royal Beauty Salon to find Sam Flanders waiting, his car parked at the curb.

“Oh dear,” she said, “I’d forgotten you. You’re that young man from Clarksdale.”

She shook hands quickly and firmly; beauty shop scents of shampoo and hair spray swirled in the air. “Do you know you’re the first person to mention the accident to me since I left the hospital.”

“If you could give me just a few minutes.”

“That’s about all I’ve got, I have a two o’clock flight. But come in.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Will you have a drink?” A polite lift of eyebrows. “I only have Scotch—that’s what I drink—I so rarely have company.”

“If you’re having one, I will too.”

“On the porch,” she said. “I always have my lunchtime drink out there.”

The porch was glass-enclosed and comfortable, all white wicker and striped canvas cushions.

“Robert always came home for lunch,” she said. “That’s one of the advantages of a small town. We would have a drink out here. Even in winter, even when it was snowing, he liked this porch.”