Apprehensions and Other Delusions (11 page)

“I suppose not,” said Philips, who decided her conversation was a welcome distraction after all; it muted the gathering sense of disquiet that Dry Plains International roused in him.

“I did a little traveling when I was younger. I wanted to go to India, but I ended up getting six weeks in Spain and Portugal, right before I dropped out of college. I did two years, and my grades were good enough, but it didn’t seem relevant to what was going on in the world. You know how it was, back then?” Her hands moved quickly and delicately, reminding Philips of small, industrious birds. While she talked she rearranged the jewelry display, shifting price tags and merchandise into an arrangement that drew more attention to the case. “I had friends who were killed in the Vietnam war, and one of my cousins was shot during a riot. He wasn’t even part of it, he was just watching the news people set up their cameras, and bang. I didn’t think that getting a degree in English Literature and then getting my teaching credentials made much sense. There had to be another way, you know?”

“And you ended up here, instead of teaching,” said Philips, being careful to make this not seem to be critical of her.

“After about four years of just checking out the country, yes. There was a
feel
to this place. I felt I could live here because of the feel. I’d be in touch with something important.” Her chuckle was self-deprecatory. “I know how that must sound to you, but—”

He interrupted her. “No. I agree. Dry Plains has something about it.” That was as far as he was willing to go.

She rewarded him with another winsome smile. “You’re real nice,” she said with earnest sincerity. “It
does
have a feel, and I couldn’t get away from it, you know? I tried a couple of times—I spent a year in New Orleans when my kids were little—but I came back here.”

Philips was mildly startled to learn she had children. “How many ... kids do you have?”

“Just one now,” she said, with a trace of sadness. “My daughter. My son died of AIDS three years ago. He was twenty-two. He worked here with me for two summers when he was in high school. Doing loading and unloading in the back, stock work, that kind of stuff. He got injured in one of those freak accidents that ... The paramedics got here right away but they had trouble stopping the bleeding. It turned out the transfusion they gave him was bad. It’s funny, you know? We thought at the time it was saving his life.” The lightness went out of her, and she struggled to recover it. “My daughter’s twenty. She’s in college in Oregon, where her father lives. She says she’s going to get an engineering degree.” Now her smile was puzzled; as if she could not imagine any child of hers wanting to be an engineer. “I thought she’d want to be an astronomer. As a kid she liked the stars so much. She knew where all the constellations were. She would sit out at night and watch the sky, making up stories about what she saw up there. Some of them were pretty far-out. Monsters and massacres. You know how kids love gore.”

“Not really.” Philips, who had lost touch with his ex-wife fifteen years ago, shook his head. “I don’t have any kids.” He could not imagine raising children anywhere near this place. The thought of what they might see in the sky around here made him wince. “Your kids grew up ... ?”

“Mostly around here. I settled here just before Kirsten was born. Her father got a job at the local newspaper as a photographer, but it didn’t work out between us.” She looked a little sad and more nostalgic. “He left the area twenty years ago. He said the place was wrong for him, that it made him want to get violent, and he was a pacifist. When we had those bomb threats five years ago, he said I should get out of here, too. He said that there were too many dangerous people using airplanes—terrorists and crazy people. He’s not a very open person.”

“And you raised the kids?” said Philips. “Here?”

“Sure. He helped some, taking the kids during the summer and all, and sending money when he could. He got married about four years ago.” She shook her head in remembered incredulity. “I never thought Bram would get married.” She left the jewelry alone and turned to the shelves where a number of hardback gift books were for sale. As she rearranged the titles so that the ones dealing with Indians and Indian lore were most prominent, she went on, “Some friends of mine and I got a place out toward Santo Muerto—it’s not far from here.”

The name made Philips start. “Santo Muerto?”

“It’s one of those little villages that’s turning into a suburb, about a mile and a half from here. It used to be off on its own ten, twelve years ago. We ran a thirty-acre farm there for a couple years about ten years back; it’s the richest soil in this part of Texas, and we wanted to use it right, at least at first.” She felt evident pride at this. “We studied all the old ways, the way the Indians did it, planting the right kind of crops and raising them with all-natural fertilizers and like that. But we had some hard luck. It happens to farmers when they’re not in tune with the earth, you know, and Kevin lost sight of that. He began using pesticides after the first two years because we had a lot of insect damage to our plants, and it kept getting worse. And something went wrong with the stuff he used. He got sick, and some of the people who ate our produce got sick. So we had to close the farm down and sell off half the land. Kevin’s got cancer now. He’s been in the hospital for the last five weeks.”

“That’s too bad; I’m sorry,” said Philips, his heart thumping. This place is rotten, he thought, rotten to the core. And it pulls on me like an unholy magnet.

Senta looked up suddenly. “I’ve been prattling at you. I’m sorry.” She gave him a direct, uncomplicated stare. “You’re a pilot. That’s got to be a lot more interesting than working at a gift counter at an airport.”

Philips almost said, Not
this
airport, but managed to stifle the remark. “It’s a job I’m good at,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for what feels like forever.”

“Have you always worked for Trager?” she asked, concentrating on his answer.

“Pretty much. I flew for TWA when I started out, but Trager made me a better offer after my second year, and I took it.” He glanced toward the waiting area, and noticed that there was an indistinct figure at the far side of the cavernous space. The sight of that lone figure made him apprehensive.

She saw where he was looking, then showed him a reassuring smile. “It’s just one of the airport staff. They have to check all the stations out before the airline people arrive.”

“Oh,” said Philips, with the unsettling feeling that this facile explanation was not entirely accurate.

“It’s funny how the eyes play tricks on you,” she went on, soothingly. “I thought I saw an Indian out there, late one night about six years ago. It was probably one of the security people checking out where the 747 crashed earlier in the day. It was because of the storm, they say. A terrible thing, you know? The storm knocked out all their instruments and they never realized how
close
to the ground they were as they came in. Almost everyone in the plane was killed, and two of the fire fighters too. I wasn’t here when it happened, but I saw some of the wreckage, and it was on the news.” She saw the revulsion in Philips’s eyes. “Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t think. You pilots probably don’t like to hear about crashes, I guess.”

“Don’t things like that ever get to you?” Philips asked, suddenly appalled by her.

“Oh yes,” she said. “If I’m not careful, any sad thing makes me lose my centering, you know? And I have to work hard to restore my balance, my proportion. I have to think of all the other people who die in senseless accidents and put that behind me before I can clear the negative things from my mind.” She glanced in the direction of the shadowy figure again. “Sometimes, when I’m here alone at night, I use the time to meditate, to get in touch with my higher centers.”

It struck Philips that there were few places in the world he would like less to meditate in than this airport, if he were into meditation. “I hope it helps,” he said to let her know he was listening.

“Sometimes,” she answered, and switched her attention to him again. “So I guess you don’t live around here?”

“No,” he said, adding silent thanks to himself.

“Where do you live?” she persisted, her bird-like hands now picking through the gum and candy, restoring order and improving the display.

He hesitated. “Not much of anywhere, really, except on Trager planes,” he said. “The corporation rents apartments for their pilots in a dozen cities. Most of the time I stay in one of them. I’m registered to vote in San Diego and I carry a California driver’s license. I get most of my mail through Trager’s Chicago office. I get three weeks’ vacation every year; usually I go deep-sea fishing.” He admitted this apologetically, as if his way of life required it.

Senta’s eyes were bright again. “That sounds like a wonderful way to live, just going anywhere in the world you want to.”

“Not quite that,” said Philips. “I go where Trager orders me, and I go when they tell me. It’s a pretty rootless—”

“But still, they’re all over the world, aren’t they?” She did not wait for his answer. “I bet you’ve been to India.”

“A few times,” he said, and did not add that the poverty of the people and the unfamiliarity of the culture bothered him. “To Calcutta and New Delhi. Trager has projects in both places.”

“That’s wonderful.” Her hands were more animated. “Have you ever been to China?”

“Yes,” he said, finding her fascination flattering and amusing. He had not thought of his life as adventurous in a long time.

“And Tibet? Or Katmandu?” She leaned forward for his answer.

“Neither; sorry.” He hated to disappoint her. That sudden realization shook him and he watched her more closely. “I’ve been to Sri Lanka once, does that help?”

“I’ll bet it was beautiful.” She directed her gaze at him with such intensity that he thought she was trying to absorb his memories of the place with her eyes.

“It was very hot,” he said. “I didn’t see much of the place; I was taking a couple of company vice presidents to a meeting there, that’s all.”

“I met someone from Sri Lanka once, when I was working over in the international arm. That was before they moved the customs area, so I got to see more of the foreigners. Now all you find in that part of the terminal is returning Americans and people getting things at the duty-free shop before they leave.” She braced her elbows on the counter and stared at him. “You’ve been everywhere, haven’t you?”

He shrugged. “Mostly I’ve been in the cockpit of a plane,” he said.

She clearly did not believe this. “But you get to see things, to watch the whole world.”

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “When there isn’t too much cloud cover, or it isn’t dark.” Or when he was not approaching such godforsaken places as Dry Plains International Airport with the electrical system on the fritz and the controls sluggish as they were tonight when he landed, he added to himself.

The figure at the far side of the waiting area had vanished.

“You must have a copilot,” she said suddenly.

“Yeah,” he said, “and a navigator.”

She looked around as if she expected to find them. “Aren’t they with you?”

He sighed. “My copilot went into the city to get some sleep and my navigator’s down at the medical station. He’s been having stomach trouble.” Poor Conrad had been bent nearly double when he got out of the plane, breathing in gasps because of the pain. “He thinks it’s a bad case of turista. Maybe it’s a bad case of flu.” As he said this, he found it harder to believe than he had when they landed: Philips had seen lots of cases of turista over the years, but none as severe as the case Conrad had. It was this place, he thought, this damned airport.

“I hope it isn’t anything worse,” said Senta, picking up some of his anxiety. “We had an outbreak of food poisoning here last year. There were hundreds of people getting sick.”

There were so few times that he had the luxury of unscheduled rest, thought Philips. Why did he have to be here when the opportunity struck? It didn’t surprise him that there had been an outbreak of food poisoning here. He would not have been amazed to hear that the airport had anthrax, or bubonic plague. “What did you do?”

“We had to quarantine part of the airport, and some of the planes that had left reported that their passengers were sick. In fact the whole flight crew of one KAL came down with it.” She heaved a gentle sigh. “There was an investigation, but nothing was ever proven. Accidents like that happen.”

And they happen here more than any place he had ever been, thought Philips. “Doesn’t that ever worry you? A place like this is so ... unprotected. Someone could come through with a deadly disease and the only way you’d know would be when people start dying.”

She did her best to look philosophical. “I don’t like to let that bother me. I mean, if you think about it, anything might happen. Last week a guy lost control of his car on the upper deck and it smashed into the rail and crashed onto the road below. There was a big fire when the gas tank exploded. A couple of people said that he’d swerved to avoid a man standing on the road, but ...” She shrugged. “It could have been that or a flat tire or anything. It was right during rush hour, and I was late to work because of the traffic. I didn’t know what happened until I got here and the afternoon girl told me.” She lowered her eyes. “I hate it when bad things happen. I just hate it.”

Philips wanted to know why she worked here, of all places, if that was how she felt, but he managed not to speak his thoughts aloud. “I know what you mean.”

Suddenly she looked at him, and there was a fanaticism blazing in her faded eyes. “I want to be more like them, you know? Like the Indians who lived here. They were good people, and they ... they were
better
than we are. If you go out in the fields at night, in Santo Muerto, you can feel them all around you, strong and ... real. Sometimes they seem more real than most of the people getting off planes. You know?”

He dreaded to think that he did, and yet he could feel some of her yearning in himself; he recognized it with repugnance. “I’ve noticed something like that around here.”