Two If by Sea (10 page)

Jesus Christ, what a piece of work he was, Frank thought, looking back on the last two weeks—the scurrying and prodding, the obeisances and formalities, the rude time-lapsed dismantling of a life. What if the goddamn plane crashed in this pounding storm and Frank had plucked this child from the flood and from his own land (and possibly his own people, somewhere) only to treat him to a dreadful, horrifying, conscious death?

“We're going to be serving some food in a few minutes,” said the flight attendant, interrupting Frank's reverie of distress. It was Francie, Ian's new best friend. “Will he eat steak? We can bring him a hotdog.”

“He'll eat anything,” Frank said, proud (proud?) that this was true. Perhaps Ian's family had been chefs. Perhaps they had been beggars who ate out of restaurant dumpsters. Either way, the boy was happy to eat anything from fish and chips to eggplant Parmesan.

“He'll have steak, then, won't you, mate?”

As Ian nodded, several of the other flight attendants gathered around again, like so many sleek waterbirds in their black uniforms with slashes of pink and orange.

“Later on, we'll play Go Fish, Ian,” said one of the younger flight attendants, a guy, who was still pale about the lips—assurances about “lightning engineers” notwithstanding. He still didn't look entirely sure he wanted to be on this dark highway in the sky. Frank watched as the boy put down his drawing pad and touched the man on the shoulder, and how the young man's shoulders visibly unpleated.

There it was again.

Kidnapping? Surely, that's just a legal thing
.

What was it?

If he'd doubted the kid's effect on Cedric and Tura, he'd seen it plainly with his lawyer friend Charley, who wanted no part of black-market passports until he shook hands with Ian, and who then helped Frank obtain one anyway. Once or twice, Frank could have put it down to Ian's waifish charm, a kid being little and cute and alone and blond as a dandelion. But it had happened with Glory Bee. Little and cute and charming didn't count with a horse.

Patrick was now motioning urgently to Frank, who realized he was thinking slowly, woozy from the cocktail of ibuprofen, prescription painkiller, and Benadryl he'd stuffed down in order to try to sleep in his pod. He must have heard the boom of the lightning slash with the inturned ear of sleep, at the moment in his dream when Natalie stepped into the steep shaft of boiling water.

Settle down, he lectured himself. Breathe.

Lightning veined the clouds outside the window again, and Frank thought of his grandmother saying, “The bad ones are struck by lightning . . .” which was no more than another ladle of Irish fantasy. If lightning really struck down bad-deed doers, the prison guards at the big maximum-security prison at Joliet would report each morning for work with shovels and dumpsters to dispose of the previous night's crispy corpses.

The kid didn't seem fazed at all.

Glory Bee, Frank thought then.

His senses switched on, one by one. Fear had heightened all the body smells in the cabin, as it will, from cologne to digestive disruptions. The flight attendants were carrying around cups of water and tea and a few ice packs. Francie handed Ian a tiny box of chocolates.

“He's doing just great,” Frank said to the woman, and watched as Ian abstractedly touched the sleeve of every flight attendant who passed. He is being careful to spread it, Frank thought. What the hell was he seeing?

He told the kid, “You stay here. Unless you need to go to the bathroom? I do.” If everyone else was having the same reaction to the lightning strike as Frank was, the bathroom should be a hellhole. He thanked again the last-minute purchase of business-class seats. High-priced shit was still shit, but there would be less of it.

When Frank came back, after using a dozen tiny, antiseptic towels to bathe his face, he stretched, massaged his leg, and took the drawing pad Ian was holding up for him to see. There was Glory Bee's dark face, the slabs of her cheeks skillfully sketched, her lashed, side-seeing eyes flicked forward. It was primitive, but clearly sketched by someone who could see things the way artists see things.

“Who made that?” Frank said.

The boy's face said clearly that he had. How could a kid three years old draw like that? The doctor put him at just three and a half, maybe not quite, and Frank, saying he was the boy's uncle, the kid's parents having been victims of the flood, gave him an arbitrary birthday.

How did the real Glory Bee look right now? She would not just be shivering and shaking, as was her custom, but fighting with all her considerable might. She would snap her leg.

Frank's father had told him how, back in 1960, before Frank was born, the great Olympic jumping horse Markham had to be shot just for this reason, when he went berserk, probably because he couldn't tolerate the confinement of the quarters on the flight to the games in Rome.

Planes were better now.

Horses, however, hadn't changed much.

Frank didn't like to think about how much he'd paid to get Glory Bee on the airplane in the first place. The passage had cost him the equivalent of what a good used car (a very good used car) would have cost in Madison, and the whole setup had a shaky ad hoc feeling (not unlike everything else about Frank's current cosmology) that would never have passed muster in the absence of the natural disaster. Valuable horses usually were transported overseas on specially fitted-out cargo planes, or even on freighters, with experienced handlers paid for the purpose—not in makeshift stalls ordered from veterinary catalogues in Sydney. Frank knew better than to watch Glory Bee loaded: the sight would have wrung out his guts. Crates and kennels were fine for dogs and cats, and perhaps even smaller exotic creatures, but not for livestock.

Patrick had a tagged, approved syringe of light sedative in his backpack. There were several loaded rifles on board, and Frank assumed one was down in the hold, for such situations and other situations he didn't like to think about. Had anyone ever shot a hole in the wall of an airplane? He could tell, just from their posture and their shoes, that at least four of the passengers were police, which made him feel alternately comforted and queasy.

“Guys, excuse me,” he said to the resting pilots, who had just tucked into a full-fledged meal. “I have a request. I need to see if my horse is okay.” The pilots were demolishing steaks so uniform in shape that they looked to have been stamped out of a kind of colloid. “I know you probably don't usually let people do this. She's a champion, and she's valuable. She could die unless we sedate her.” Frank saw the shrug in both guys' eyes. “You don't usually have lightning strike the aircraft either.”

“You brought your horse?” one of the pilots asked. He was an American.

“I train horses. We're going back home to Wisconsin. Now, sure, horses normally travel on specially fitted planes—” Frank stopped. The pilot clearly could not care less. So far, no one single part of this was a lie, although lies were now Frank's medium. He swam in lies, and drank them.

“I grew up in Wisconsin,” said the other pilot, and Frank knew he was in. “Whereabouts are you from?”

“Outside Madison, near Spring Green. My grandfather started the farm. He's still there. Ninety-six years old.”

“I'm from Rhinelander. Up north. I'll show you,” the Wisconsin pilot said, then noticed the child. “I can't take responsibility for the kid going in the hold. Francie will watch him.”

“He won't leave my side,” Frank said. “His mother died on Christmas Day. And my groom has to come, too.” Frank nodded to Patrick, who was at his side in a breath.

Later, Frank hoped to Christ it wouldn't become a legend, what happened down there. If he prayed, he would have prayed that no one would take it on himself to talk to a TV station about the human-interest angle of the time lightning struck Flight 500.

In the same way people assume that hospitals are clean and schools are safe, Frank had assumed, despite having watched cargo handlers throw luggage into the guts of airplanes with the same care and skill as garbage collectors, that the holds of planes were at least somewhat orderly. He could not have pictured how much of a formless, planless mess the cargo hold of a plane really was. With this system, no one's baggage should ever arrive or get matched to the people who hopefully checked it. Nothing should ever remain unbroken. Suitcases and trunks and boxes were strewn across the floor, in no order, not on shelves or set between stanchions or grids, simply tossed in piles on the floor of a bare, dark, metal cavity. The pilot turned on a dim light. It was not a track light, but a single pair of bulbs, like something in a cellar. Frank could see more then . . . of the same. Among that welter of boxes and duffels were kennels and crates that held animals, but not in any sequestered place. Some kennels sat all wonky on top of the suitcases; some had slipped off and lay on their sides or even on the grated fronts that were supposed to allow animals to see. To get to any one crate or kennel, anyone would have had to tunnel through or clamber over the luggage. Large animals, it seemed, were against the sides. Wedged on the far back curve was cargo—goods of some kind, Frank assumed, although what sort of exports were leaving Brisbane right now? It must be household furniture of people like him, getting out of Dodge. Big metal containers were stacked at the far end of the plane's belly and secured by straps. Fortunately, there did not seem to be much cargo, but the airplane was full, and the luggage was piled ten high in places, and on the tops of some of those piles, Frank could see pet crates.

“That sucks,” the pilot said, moving to take down the few kennels teetering on the highest piles. Eyes peered from kennels wedged in the middle of heavy pyramids of luggage. The stink alone could have killed people—shit and piss and vomit. How had it been before the lightning hit? Frank was willing to bet not good. At least it was relatively warm; and, according to the behavior of his ears, the pressure was the same as the cabin. It was louder, though, infinitely louder, as though the sound of the engines was magnified, when, in reality, it simply was not blocked.

From somewhere outside the circumference of the light's halo, he could hear Glory Bee, shrieking and plunging, her hooves clattering the floor and sides of the flimsy stall. He could hear the rasp and split of wood.

“Do you have a flashlight?” Frank asked the pilot.

By the focused beam of a medium-sized Maglite, like his own when he was on the job, Frank took a few steps deeper in and saw Glory Bee. She couldn't get all the way up on her back legs—she was cross-tied and wore a tie-down—but she was certainly about to kill herself and anyone who got near her. Those straps wouldn't hold forever. Patrick, looking ever more the size of a twelve-year-old, stepped forward, his young and somehow Wizardof-Oz shrunken voice desperate, chanting, “Steady on, girl. Just steady now.” To Frank he said, “I don't blame her. When we ran into something . . . I thought I'd shit myself, actually. Sure that we were crashing.”

“You heard what they said,” Frank said. “Lightning hit a wing. Not much.”

“Enough for me, Frank. I never was on a plane. If I get near her now, it's my death.”

“She's like this. It was a chance bringing her.”

Sweat foamed her neck and sides. Her eyes were blue-white with terror and rage. She strained, her whinny a pure and unceasing scream. He would be surprised if even he, who could always gentle her, could get close enough to give her a shot.

A score of dogs howled, and Frank spotted the muscled blackness of some kind of big, caged thing. A panther? And another . . . a tiger? The boom of the big cats' roars seemed to come from inside his chest. The sides of a tall Plexiglas terrarium with two feet of wire at the top were befouled by big flying foxes.

They were in some kind of nightmare ark.

Who shipped a bat?

Frank remembered now: the big park zoo in Brisbane was drowned; how the navy got out what animals they could, to send them places, in-country and across the world, where they could be looked after. These must be some of them. All this chaos, the exigency of the flood.

He would have to kill Glory Bee.

In his hubris, he had brought the gorgeous filly onto the plane as a thousand pounds of exquisite horse who, even if she could never conquer her anxiety enough to perform, would throw beautiful babies one day. In humility, he would see Glory Bee taken off as a thousand pounds of meat. Now he was a widower with a stolen child and a crazy horse that would have to be shot.

Of course, until
he
died, Frank would remember the flash of Ian's red sweater as he broke away and ran to Glory Bee. Time went over to a recording, unplugged and slowing down, down, down to a guttural groan. The pilot took down a rifle, and, as if reconsidering, handed it to the groom. Patrick put it up to his shoulder.

Frank stepped forward and said, “Wait.”

The boy had to jump back after the first time he touched Glory Bee's leg through the wide-spaced metal bars and wooden slats of the makeshift stall Frank had purchased for the passage. She was roaring, cantering in place. But the second time Ian touched her, she stopped, and if she were a woman, Frank believed he would have seen her stand there, sobbing. He exhaled. As the groom and the pilot watched, not sure how to move or what to say, Ian came back and reached up for Frank's thumb.

Together, slowly, they circled the hold, the pilot following them, Frank waiting while the kid climbed over bags or slid across them on his butt.

Ian squatted to pet each of the dogs that nosed up against the doors of their crates, and then, afterward, lay down. When a kennel was out of reach, the boy waited patiently until one of the adults set it on the floor or lifted him. There must have been twenty dogs, and ten cats. The boy put his hand on each of them. A huge, bat-eared cat continued hissing, but then backed away balefully, silencing herself in a ball on a high shelf in her elaborate cage, which had been thrown sideways, scattering her foul-smelling food. Ian then made a break for some kind of huge crate Frank couldn't see well enough to know what the contents were. As the boy approached, a Frisbee-sized palm came up—great, pale, and weary. Ian laid his hand on it. Frank squinted. He saw smudges of bronze fur. It was an ape, an orangutan who, unfurled, would be about the height of a regulation basketball hoop. Ian stayed a long while with the orangutan, shrugging his shoulders, shaking his head, wiggling one of his fingers, which, of course, the ape did in return, entirely with human affect. Not one word came from Ian's lips. Then, with a whirl and a skip, he headed for the tiger's cage.