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Authors: Eric Kraft

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BOOK: Taking Off
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“My goodness!” she exclaimed. “Albertine! Look at you, girl. You're gorgeous!
Still
gorgeous, I should say. What did you do, make a pact with the devil?”

“How sweet of you—”

“Come here,” said Cynthia, taking our drinks and leading us away from the bar to the table farthest from it. When she had us arranged as she wanted us, she leaned toward the center of the table, dropped her voice to a hoarse whisper, and said, “Let's get to the point.” She glanced from side to side to see if anyone was listening. “They're turning this town into a theme park,” she said. “It's enough to gag a maggot.”

“They?” I asked.

“The BRA.”

“The Babbington Redefinition Authority,” I said.

“You've done your homework. Good. You see those people at the bar? They're actors. Playing the part of residents. Paid by the BRA.”

“Are you saying that they're actors?” I asked.

“Birdbrain—”

“I mean, are they professionals?”

“I was speaking in the broadest sense,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Of course,” I said. “Forgive me. From time to time, my keen and hard-won adult acumen is replaced by the naïveté of a boy who lives somewhere within me, a child, or the remnants of a child, who yearns for things to be simpler than they are, and I forget that people rarely mean quite what they say.”

She gave me a very odd look. Then she went on. “They are actual residents of the town—when they're offstage, so to speak—but right now they're actors,
playing
residents of the town,” she said.

“I see,” I said. “Of course. You were speaking in the broadest sense, figuratively, not literally.” I paused. Then I said, “I don't have any idea what you're talking about.”

“Did you walk through the ‘Historic Downtown Plaza'?”

“A bit.”

“What did you think?”

“It looks—the way I remember it—pretty much the way it was when we were kids here.”

“Peter,” she said, shaking her head at my denseness, “it's
exactly
the way it was when we were kids here, when we were in high school.”

“Exactly?”

“As close as they could make it.”

“Well, they seem to have done a good job—”

“They chose one day, the most fully documented day in the history of mid-twentieth-century Babbington, the one with the most available snapshots, news clippings, and anecdotes. In the Historic Downtown Plaza, they relive that day every day. Over and over. Ad nauseam.”

“What day is that?”

“It's the day you flew back into town in that little airplane you built.”

“It is?” Unbidden, a feeling of pride began to spread through me, and I think I may have blushed.

“That's what I said.”

“So it's a form of historical drama that they're staging,” I said, off-handedly, as if nothing I had ever done were involved in any way. “It seems harmless enough to me.”

“You don't understand,” she said, and she was almost pleading now. “It's spreading. It's spreading beyond the Historic Downtown Plaza, infecting the entire town, and all the residents in it. The BRA's efforts to make the town a more marketable version of itself have not been lost on residents outside the district of the re-enactment. They see the way the town is going, and they're eager to get in on the act. Babbington is not going to remain just-plain-Babbington. It's already well on the way to becoming Babbington™, Gateway to the Past
®
.”

“What happened to ‘Clam Capital of America'?” asked Albertine.

“It was officially declared ‘unattractive.' I wish you could have been at the town meeting. I was eloquent. I invoked the Bolotomy tribe, shell mounds, wampum—”

“To no avail, I take it,” I said.

She shook her head sadly, and turned a thumb down.

“They could have replaced it with ‘Cradle of Teenage Solo Flight,'” I suggested.

Cynthia didn't laugh. With her eyes, she appealed to Albertine for support, and Al frowned at me.

Cyn rubbed her brow as if her head ached and said, “People all over town are coming to feel that in such a place as Babbington—that is, such a place as Babbington is becoming—it is not enough to be Jack Sprat, the local butcher; one must be Jack Sprat, Garrulous Butcher of Bygone Babbington, Gateway to the Past.”

“I see,” I said, wondering how she would describe herself in the list of town characters, what epithet she would attach to herself. “You said ‘paid by the BRA,'” I reminded her.

“That, too, I meant in the broadest sense.”

“Of course.”

“The BRA is seeing to it that the only real business left in this town will be the business of being itself, though not really itself but an image of itself as it never was. To their credit, they have chosen a Babbington that's more like the earthy images of Brueghel the Elder than the kitsch of Norman Rockwell or Thomas Kinkade, but still they are turning the town into a simulation, and because that simulation is to be the engine of the town's economic recovery, everyone who agrees to participate in it is, in the broadest sense, on the payroll of the BRA.”

“I see,” I said again, thoughtfully, “and you say that all this is centered on my solo flight, my triumphant return, the parade—”

“Don't go feeling proud of yourself,” she said. “You ought to be ashamed.”

“You're right,” I said. “I am.” Still, in my silent thoughts I couldn't help wondering if it might not be possible to return to Babbington, become an actor in the BRA pageant, and play once again the part of Peter Leroy, Daring Flyboy. No. Of course not. Whoever played the Daring Flyboy would have to be considerably younger. A boy.

“Look,” Cyn said suddenly, gathering her things, “I've got to go. There's a meeting of the Friends of the Bay that I've got to attend. But do me a favor. Take a walk around and look at the walls.”

“The walls?”

“Haven't you noticed the walls here?”

“Here in the restaurant?”

“No, all over town. Of course I mean here in the restaurant. What's happened to your mind, Birdbrain?”

“He's often distracted,” said Albertine. She may have been speaking in my defense.

“He's always been like that,” said Cyn.

“And always will be,” Albertine predicted.

“Drag him around the place to look at the walls, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” said Albertine, woman to woman.

Cyn left in a rush. Before Albertine and I left Legends, we did as Al had promised we would do. We took a walk around the place and looked at the walls. They were covered, and that is nearly the truth, with caricatures of people who had been designated by the management of Legends as legendary figures in Babbington's past. I recognized many of them, and among them I recognized myself. Actually, Albertine recognized me first.

“Oh, no!” she squealed. “It's the Birdboy of Babbington.”

There I was, celebrated and exaggerated, and there I stood, exhilarated and exasperated.

Albertine linked her arm with mine and hugged herself to me.

“Oh, that takes me back,” she said warmly.

“Yes,” I said, with considerably less enthusiasm. “It takes me back, too.”

Chapter 4

Straight

MY SOLO FLIGHT. I have quite a mental scrapbook devoted to that flight. To be truthful,
flight
isn't quite the right word;
flights
would be more accurate, because it was not one continuous flight, though in the minds of most of those who remember it, or think that they remember it, it has come to be a continuous flight. I even think of it that way myself sometimes, as a nonstop flight from Babbington out to Corosso and another nonstop flight back. When I was interviewed upon my return, I tried to be honest about what I had accomplished and what I had not, but the interviewers had their own ideas about what the story ought to be, and nothing that I told them was going to change those ideas, so I began to go along with what they wanted. The account published in the
Reporter
was typical, an account that made the flight seem more than it actually was.

Babbington Boy Completes Solo Flight

Flies Cross-Country on His Own

Home-Built Plane Functions Flawlessly

Babbington—Peter Leroy will sleep in his own bed in Babbington Heights tonight, for the first time in more than two months, but you can bet that he'll have dreams of flying, as he has for as long as he can remember. We all have those dreams, said by some to be the remnants of our species' memory of swinging through the trees when we were apes, but most of us remain earthbound. Our flying is confined to our dreams. Not so for young Peter Leroy. This is a lad who makes his dreams come true.

“I found some plans for a plane in a magazine,” he says, with disarming simplicity, “and I thought it would be fun to build it and fly it across the country.”

The modesty of Babbington's aeronautical pioneer is charming. (Local politicians, please take note.) When asked by C. Nelson Dillwell, publisher of the
Reporter,
how he got to Corosso, New Mexico, some 1,800 miles from home, he responds, “Well, I flew,” with a shrug, as if the feat were really nothing much more than a bike ride to the corner store to pick up a quart of milk for his mother. And how did you get back? “Flew,” he says, with another shrug. When it is proposed to him that flying nearly 4,000 miles in a plane that he built in the garage of the modest Leroy family home is a significant feat, he grins the grin that has already won the hearts of all the secretaries at the
Reporter
's spacious new downtown offices and says, “Well, I didn't fly all the way.” What? You didn't fly all the way? “No,” he says, shaking his head, apparently all seriousness. “I did some taxiing, before takeoffs, and then after landing, when I rolled along the ground for a way before coming to a stop.” Ah, yes, let's set the record straight. Young Leroy did not fly all the way to New Mexico and back. He did some taxiing and rolled along the runways a bit on landing. Noted.

*   *   *

YES, let's set the record straight. During my return trip, from Corosso to Babbington, I thought a lot about what I was going to say when I got home, and about the impression that my story would make, and I decided, quite deliberately, that I would be honest but not accurate. I would be honest overall but vague about the details. I intended to say that I had flown part of the way but not all the way. I don't recall when, in rehearsing my remarks, I began to refer to the earthbound portions of the trip as taxiing, but it was well before I came within sight of Babbington.

When I reached Babbington, I rolled into town along Main Street, coming from the west. There are people in Babbington to this day who will tell you that they saw me
fly
in from the west, make a lazy circle in the sky over the area now occupied by the Historic Downtown Plaza, and touch down near the park before rolling to a stop at the intersection of Bolotomy and Main, where the reviewing stand had been set up. Some of them honestly believe that they saw that landing, just as some people honestly believe that they have seen the ghost of a beloved aunt climbing the back staircase at midnight and others think that they have seen the silver spaceships of interstellar travelers flash in eerie swift silence across the night sky.

I was paraded up and down Main Street in the back seat of a convertible, with the mayor at the wheel and Miss Clam Fest at my side. People screamed my name as I passed. They threw streamers and confetti. I was given the key to the city. The high school band played “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow” again and again. Feeling like a jolly good fellow indeed, I went where I was led, into the building where the
Reporter
had its office, and found myself the subject of a press conference. All of the Babbington media were represented: the
Reporter,
of course; and the radio station, WCLM; as well as the Babbington high school paper, the
Esculent Mollusk.
All eyes were on me. My audience hung on my every word. I was the boy of the hour. I was completely intoxicated, drunk on fame, besotted with adulation.

The first question directed to me wasn't really a question at all. The publisher of the
Reporter,
who assumed control of the proceedings, said, as a preliminary to taking questions from the floor, “Peter, it is an honor for the
Reporter
to have you here today, and we all want to hear how you got from Babbington to New Mexico.”

He paused, and I took his pause as my cue. Feeling even more full of myself than I ordinarily did, I said, “Well, I flew—”

I meant to add “part of the way.” I really did.

However, when I said, “Well, I flew—” the response was immediate and overwhelming. People laughed. Then they applauded. Miss Clam Fest blew me a kiss from her seat in the front row. I added nothing to what I had said. I just shrugged. They loved it. They loved me. Miss Clam Fest in particular seemed to love me, even though she must have been a mature woman of twenty-two. I wasn't going to let the truth come between us. I told a version of the truth, as I had intended to, but it became a version that allowed people to believe what they so clearly wanted to believe, and what they wanted to believe was far from the version of the truth that I had planned to tell them.

BOOK: Taking Off
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