The Man Who Ate the 747 (4 page)

The rest of the pile would have to wait for his response, but he thumbed through, loving the misspellings and funny grammar, hoping to find something, anything, worth pursuing.

He felt as if he knew each one of these kids. He wished he could make their dreams come true and put them all in The Book. But it was getting late. He was out of luck this time. He flipped through the last few letters.

As he closed the file, he noticed one letter had slipped onto the floor. It was written on a piece of lined, hole-punched paper.

On its face, the submission deserved an automatic rejection. For starters, anonymous submissions—
The Guy Who Knows
—turned out to be hoaxes most of the time. There were plenty of practical jokers out there, and the record keepers had to be vigilant. Furthermore, The Book had officially banned gluttony records in 1989 for a simple reason: It couldn’t afford the legal exposure with all those gourmands choking on hot dogs, goldfish, lightbulbs, and once even a Cadillac Seville.

Still, he reread the letter. There was something authentic about it. He searched the penciled lines for clues.
I know someone eating a 747.
It was ludicrous but delicious, absolutely too good to be true, the kind of record Peasley craved. Lumpkin and Norwack would be put in their places. Gastronomical feats had always been the most popular in The Book until the ban, and J.J. had inventoried plenty of them.
⁶

The blank gray face of the computer stared at him. He slid his mouse over the pad, tapped his password on the keys. In a moment, he logged on to the Internet. There were a few easy traps to run. If a man was eating a 747 in America, no matter where, someone, somewhere must have written about it. He entered key words to form a search request, but nothing came up.

Hope faded and the bleakness of the meeting with Peasley descended over him. In the gloom, he inspected the letter again.
Superior, Nebraska.
He clicked the map finder on his computer. There were 23 towns and cities in America named Superior, not including two South Superiors and one North Superior. It was hardly notable. Midway held the U.S. record with 212, followed by Fairview with 202.

With a few more mouse clicks, he located Superior smack in the middle of the country, right on the border with Kansas. The town was exactly 1,499 miles from New York and 1,519 miles from Los Angeles. It called itself the Victorian Capital of Nebraska, whatever that meant. Then he found the town newspaper,
The Superior Express.
He rummaged through its archives. There were articles galore on grain prices, the Future Farmers of America, and high school football, but nothing, not a mention of a man eating a 747.

As he turned the idea around, it seemed more and more impossible. The problem really wasn’t consuming an airplane. God knows, people ingested all sorts of things. In fact, J.J. verified the record for the worst compulsive swallowing. A woman with “slight ab-dominal
pain” turned out to have 2,533 objects in her stomach, including 947 bent pins.

Gobbling a grocery cart, golf clubs—no sweat. Even an airplane was feasible. The biggest obstacle would be getting your hands on a jumbo jet. It certainly didn’t come cheap, and they weren’t exactly giving airplanes away on the Great Plains.

An idea. He turned to a database of newspaper and magazine articles. He entered a new combination of words and waited while the computer chewed on the request. Then, a flashing light on the screen. One hit. He tapped a key and scanned the story.

Bingo. A 747 had crash-landed in a farmer’s field. Abandoned there as junk. J.J. fell back into his chair. It was conceivable—albeit preposterous—that someone actually had a jet in his backyard and was trying to eat it. Perhaps the whole idea was the product of an overly active imagination, the cruel invention of a young letter writer. Or maybe, the record of all records. J.J. knew what he had to do. If it turned out to be bunk, he could certainly stir something up. Somewhere out there in Nebraska, there was a farmer with the biggest ear of corn or a schoolboy with 13 toes.

He booked the next Dollar Jet to Omaha.

T
he wind hurried over the vast flatness as if it wanted to get somewhere, fast.

J.J. felt the same impatience, but kept his rented Taurus at the posted 75-mile speed limit. The drive from Omaha took three hours, a straight shot west on Interstate 80, past Lincoln, south at Exit 332 Aurora onto Route 14. It was early morning, the sun glancing off the rearview mirror. The highway led to the middle of absolutely nowhere or the middle of absolutely everything, depending on how you looked at it.

Usually in neutral on his way to a record event, J.J. was in high gear today, like his early days with The Book. A procession of country singers drawled on the radio:
“If
the phone don’t ring, it’s me.”
At the top of his lungs, he joined the chorus. The windows were down, the air warm and dry. He liked to drive and certainly knew about roads. His father, John Smith, had worked his whole life for the Department of Transportation, 40 years as a route marker in northeast Ohio. He painted stripes on every road in District Four all the way to Lake Erie. Every marking, perfect and precise. Each line exactly 4 inches wide. Each dash precisely 10 feet long. Each imprint exactly 15/1000th of an inch thick. “Son,” he liked to say, “I’ve learned one thing in life: Stick to the straight and narrow and stay in your own lane.” His father did just that, kept to the slow lane, until a Mack truck jackknifed outside Akron and he was gone.

To honor his dad, J.J. proposed and created a whole section on roads in The Book. He measured the longest, the worst, the highest, the lowest, the widest, the steepest. He traveled to Ripatransone, Italy, to verify the narrowest: Vicolo della Virilita, 1 foot 5 inches wide. He visited Bacup, England, to inspect the shortest: Elgin Street, 17 feet long.

J.J. knew the merit of his father’s philosophy and he, too, stayed in his own lane. No point going fast, no point slow. He drove that way as the road, a smooth two-lane affair, passed through the town of Clay Center. A sign pointed the way to the Roman L. Hruska Meat Animal Research Center. J.J. knew his American history. Roman Hruska, the late senator from Nebraska, was infamous for defending a lackluster Supreme Court
nominee, declaring, “There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?”

The mediocre are entitled to a little representation and a little chance?

J.J. knew the answer. Here, in this utterly ordinary countryside, he hoped to find the greatest record of them all. The map on his lap indicated he was entering the Republican River Valley—hardly a valley at all, more like a little dent in the plains. Pressing forward, as the blacktop became narrower, squeezed on both sides by the fields, he had a sensation of living in a closed loop. Born in one of these interchangeable towns off the interstate, he fled Ohio as soon as he could drive. Yet no matter how far he traveled, to Australia, Zanzibar, and beyond, he always seemed to end up on a road to a small town, measuring the biggest watermelon or the longest clothesline.
⁷

Today it was Superior, population 2,397. The sign on the outskirts of town was simple:
NEBRASKA—THE GOOD LIFE.
He drove slowly, past the tallest landmark, a blue water tower, and down streets lined with brightly painted Victorian homes, well-sprinkled green lawns, and flower beds of blooming zinnias and orange lilies. He explored the business district, four blocks of tidy storefronts. The windows were sprayed with messages:
GO WILDCATS.
The only sign of intrusion from the outside world was a Pizza Hut.
The streets and sidewalks were empty. The white sun flattened what was already flat enough.

He pulled to a stop in front of the Hereford Inn, a red-shingled saloon on Main Street, got out of the car and stretched his legs. The wind streamed across his face, a warm wind, different from the sharp, quick gusts on the East Coast. This was an old wind, roaming the plains, covering hundreds of miles, taking with it, speck by speck, the towns and lives along the way. The wind seemed to welcome him to Superior.

The Hereford Inn was deserted. The room was long and dark and smelled of frying pans and beer. A policeman under a big hat read the newspaper in the corner.

“Morning,” said the woman at the bar. She was short, squat, and stuffed into her red and white uniform. The pin on her blouse said:
MABEL.

“Can I help you?”

“Cup of coffee, please.”

“Sure, anything else? Eggs? A doughnut? We make ’em fresh.”

“You got glazed?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “You passing through?”

“Not sure yet.” J.J. took a bite of the doughnut.

“That’ll be a dollar even.”

“Got a question for you,” J.J. said. “You happen to know a guy around here eating an airplane?”

“Guy eating a what?” Mabel glanced over at the policeman, who looked up from his newspaper. “Why would anyone in his right mind do something like that?”

“Good question,” J.J. said.

“Hey, Shrimp,” Mabel called out. “You hear about anyone eating an airplane in these parts?”

The policeman sprang from the table. He was as short and skinny as a Slim Jim, his slight stick figure overwhelmed by the folds of a well-starched uniform. His gaunt face was hidden under the shadow of an enormous hat. Strapped to his slender waist, his Colt .45 automatic looked more like a cannon.

“Who’s asking?” the policeman said.

“J.J. Smith. From New York City. I’m with
The Book of Records
and I’m here to—”

By the look on their faces, he knew he had their attention.