As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth (15 page)

T
here was highway ahead and highway behind.

Somewhere in the afternoon, while Del was behind the wheel, Ry noticed how the sun made funky shadows of the stairs curving up around a grove of giant cylindrical storage tanks.

He said to Del, “So, is Yulia, like, your girlfriend or something?”

So much time passed before Del answered that Ry thought maybe he hadn’t heard the question, and then he wondered if he had even said it aloud or only thought it.

Then Del said, “I guess you would say she’s my
ex
-girlfriend. She’s still a girl, and she’s still willing to be my friend, but not my
girlfriend
.”

“Do you still like her, though?” Ry asked. Because he got the feeling Del did.

“Once I’m smitten, I seem to stay smitten,” said Del. “At least until something else smites me. Or someone.”

Ry wanted to ask, So why did she dump you? But he thought that might be too personal. Del told him anyway.

“I guess I drove her nuts,” he said.

“Like how?” asked Ry. “What did you do?”

Del shrugged. “She thought I was too stubborn,” he said. “But I don’t see it that way.”

Ry didn’t see it that way either.

“I don’t think you’re stubborn,” he said. “At least, not in a bad way. Except maybe about pickles.”

Del’s face did its invisible smiling thing.

“That’s only because you haven’t known me very long,” he said. “I’ve been compared to a brick wall. Among other things.”

“So, you are stubborn?” asked Ry.

“I never said I wasn’t stubborn,” said Del. “I only said I wasn’t
too
stubborn.”

A number of pine trees whipped by. A mind-boggling number. Maybe an infinite number. An imaginary, abstract number. The dirt was red and the land was flat. There were billboards about pecans. This went on for quite a while: hours. Eons.

“So, is the airplane really homemade?” asked Ry.

Del smiled. “There are different levels of homemade,” he said. “It’s not like we’ll be riding bicycles and flapping our arms. Would you feel better if I said it was hand built by a brilliant and meticulous aerospace engineer?”

“Uh-huh,” said Ry. “I would.”

“Well, it’s not exactly like that, either,” said Del. “It’s somewhere in between.”

A few minutes later, he said, “Closer to the engineer than to the bicycle.”

And after another minute he said, “But maybe not by much.”

Palm trees and twinkling lights erupted from the gathering darkness. The stars that are always out there, even in the daytime, could now be seen in the dimming airy pool of the sky. Traffic ripped along around them, pushing and pulling. A full day of riding with the windows open had long ago blown away any crispiness; the morning had happened years ago. Still, they had to keep going. They weren’t there yet.

As much as Ry was tired of sitting in a car, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to get there. He wasn’t exactly sure about this next part, with the airplane.

The night air was humid, but not unpleasant. It was
soft, but insistent, caressing his face like the tongues of an infinite number of puppies. Ry closed his eyes and became one with the air, and the seat he was molded to, and the radio station that was playing. It was an oldies radio station, which he was not usually so fond of, but he became one with it anyway. He let it empty out his mind of everything but danceable field reports from the battleground of love. Plus some outliers on other topics—the science fiction future, cheeseburgers, haircuts. Del sampled his way up and down the dial, then switched it off. Ry became one with the absence of the radio. He became one with dozing off.

He was awakened by a change in velocity, then a stop. Ry squinted out the window, not willing to open his eyes the whole way. They were moving again, but they had left the highway. The missing roar of rushing air and traffic felt at first like silence, but it wasn’t. The relative stillness of the air meant you could smell things, non-automotive things: Growth. Efflorescence. Perfume of flowers. The sea. Musk of animals. Stench of decaying same. Alligators. Burgers.

At three
A.M
. they turned and crunched quietly into a gravel driveway. Del turned off the engine. Black nutrient-rich night poured silently into the car. The air was heavy
enough to pin a person down, but both Ry and Del had by now accumulated irrepressible desires to stand up, and they opened their doors and stood. That was all, for a minute or two. Standing, looking up, around, stretching the arms up overhead.

It may have been the siren call of exposed-armpit aroma that beckoned to the mosquitos. More likely they were just a standard ingredient of the air here. They seemed to account for roughly 10 percent of it. Definitely enough to qualify as a pollutant in the form of suspended particulate. Or even a plague. Probably not a plague.

One window glowed faintly. Ry walked closer to peer inside, through the horizontal slats of old-fashioned venetian blinds. The window was open. Moths fluttered from the screen as Ry came near, then made their returns to it. The back side of someone’s head, lit by a shaded lamp, was half obscured by the back of an easy chair, like the sun half hidden at the horizon. An electric fan hummed on a nearby tabletop. It fluffed the hair on the head, then let it fall as it oscillated to and fro, left and right, side to side. Fluff, fall, fluff, fall. A hand reached for a glass on the table, then replaced it and disappeared. Ry tiptoed back.

“Someone’s awake,” he said, smearing yet another
soft-bodied insect blood-wise across his face. A sharp, quiet slap sounded from the direction of Del, who said, “I hope Everett’s house has an air lock.”

As they headed for what they could make out as the door of the house, it was suddenly illuminated by a porch light. A buzzer went off somewhere inside. The door behind the screen door was open, and the click of dog toenails on a linoleum floor came toward them. Followed by the silhouette of a man, back lit by motion-activated recessed lights in the ceiling of a hallway. The lights didn’t come on until he had already passed under them, so they didn’t see his face until he reached the screen door. Even then, the porch light mainly lit up the screen itself. He remained mostly in silhouette. He was shortish. And he was wearing shorts. That’s all Ry could tell.

Along with activating the porch light, the sound of the car doors and/or their approach had activated a couple of bug zappers at the corners of the porch. They zapped sharply, in quick succession. Ry jumped as if he had stepped on a live wire, turning as he did to see and hear the glowing violet zappers take down two more victims.

When he landed and thought to turn back, Everett had opened the door and was inviting them in. He and Del exchanged “hellos” as if it were only mildly surprising
to appear on someone’s doorstep from out of nowhere, in the wee hours of the morning. Ry trailed behind them down the hallway, which had gone dark again but now relit as they passed. He saw that the lights were aimed at pictures that hung on the walls on one side. But if he stood still to look at them, the lights went out. He had to kind of shift back and forth to keep the light on.

There were four pictures, four lights in the ceiling. The first light shone on a painting of a shipwreck. It was a real painting, and it looked old. Maybe because the frame looked old; it was golden and ornate, and pieces of it had broken off. But the painting looked old, too. The colors had a nostalgic yellowed cast, and a lot of it was just dark, one part indistinguishable from the next. But some of the water around the boat was catching the light. The waves heaved up in a translucent emerald that suggested the darkness below was cold and deep and wet and forbidding. A few people huddled on the end of the boat that still protruded from the water, waiting their turn to ride the breeches buoy, the bucket with leg holes sliding along a thick rope knotted onto a mast. Would they get their turn? Hard to say. Within the painting, they were doomed to huddle and wait forever.

Ry shuffled sideways to the next one. This was an
engraving, also old, of a train derailment. Hey, Everett, cheery theme. To be specific, the engraving showed the front part of the train dangling from a bridge. A trestle. Passengers were disembarking from the part of the train that was still earth based, still on the track, like ants when the anthill is flooded. In the foreground a few of them had opened a picnic basket and spread a cloth on the ground. One of them, a woman in a voluminous dress covered in tiny stripes going every which way as the fabric folded on itself, gazed pensively at the dangling engine as she sipped a glass of wine. In her other hand, she held a drumstick of the poultry variety. She was coping.

Light off, light on. The third picture was a black-and-white photograph of an erupting volcano. Ry thought it was erupting. Maybe it was just smoking. Immense puffy gray clouds hovered in the air, obscuring the mouth, the crater. A village lay scattered over the slopes at the base of the mountain. Lights were on in the village; the clouds of ash had darkened the sky. Ry drew closer to see if people were fleeing, but the motion-sensor spotlight didn’t like that and cut him off. He stepped back. Couldn’t tell, too far away. He danced sideways to the last picture. What would it be? The Fire of London? The San Francisco Earthquake?

But here it seemed Everett had abandoned his theme. This one was a photo, too, but it was just a candid snapshot of a woman looking over her shoulder at the camera, laughing. Almost like a motion-sensor soundtrack, the sound of laughter came to Ry’s ears. But it was male laughing. Everett and Del. Where were they? He peeked around a doorway into the room he had observed through the venetian blinds, but it was empty.

On the far side of the room, another doorway opened onto what turned out to be a screened porch. Ry could see Del’s foot at the end of what he deduced would turn out to be Del’s leg. He headed on over. The room he passed through was a living room. The fan oscillated, with a light variable drone, sending vague wafts of warm air around its ninety-degree purview. The breezes that distributed the dust and dog hair on the floor were a science fair–sized version of the forces that shape sand dunes. But the room was dim and Ry walked, in shoes, over a portion of the surface swept bare by the winds. He didn’t notice the drifts forming elsewhere.

He did notice a sharp pungency reeking in from the left and was surprised to see, when he turned, that it came from a kitchen. A teakettle boiled merrily on the stove top. Ry stepped in and turned it off. A mug with a
tea bag waited on the counter. So he filled it with boiling water and carried it along with him.

On the porch, in the dark, Everett and Del were discussing Everett’s methane digester. Everett had a couple of pigs, Rob and Inga, and he was using their manure as a source of gas for his stove and his water heater. But he had taken a shortcut in the venting part of the process. Hence the aroma. It didn’t really bother him. He wasn’t in a hurry to fix it. It did what he needed it to do.

Everett’s voice was jolly. He laughed wholeheartedly at his own jokes, at Del’s jokes; he laughed when Ry brought him the mug of tea. Each time Everett laughed, or anyone, though it was Everett who laughed the most, a sound-activated light flickered on overhead and stayed on for about ten seconds. Probably it wasn’t designed to be about laughing; probably it was for coming out with your hands full, maybe carrying a tray of food, and you could make a noise, the light would turn on, and you could see where you were going. But for now it was triggered by Everett laughing. It was like watching a series of blackout sketches called “The Everett and Del Show.”

The first few times the lights flashed on, Ry looked
at Everett, because he hadn’t seen him clearly yet. He looked bearded and sunburned, kind of shaggy. One hand absentmindedly scratched the head of his dog, who lay next to him, its head on Everett’s thigh.
Her
head. Her name was Lulu. She was a mutt with a collie-esque profile.

Ry gathered that Everett and Del had known each other for a long time. They had climbed mountains together. They had jumped out of airplanes and down into caves. Rafted churning rivers.

That was all a long time ago. But those are the kind of things that, once you do them with someone, you can show up on their doorstep anytime during the rest of your life and ask for an airplane ride.

“You’ll have to help me put a new wing on,” said Everett. “Actually, I’m glad you’re both here to help with that. I’d have a hard time doing it by myself.”

“What happened to the wing?” asked Del.

“Oh, I had a small mishap,” said Everett. “I was coming back from Yulia’s, and I ran into some weather. The engine started acting up, and I had to make an alternate landing in a field. It was getting dark, and I was concentrating on avoiding some utility wires. I didn’t even notice this old water tank in the middle of the field. Took the wing right off.”

He laughed, and the lights flickered on.

Ry had not said much. He had been listening, half listening, really, waiting to receive his couch assignment. Maybe he would just sleep in this chair, sitting up. Now. Or wander back into the living room and assess the couch situation there.

This story caught his attention, though. His chin lifted right off his chest. It was the kind of story where your first reaction was, Holy crap. Were you okay? And then your second reaction might be, And this is the plane we’re going to be flying in? And you’re driving?

But Del just said, “From Yulia’s?” It seemed to Ry that Del’s voice, and his features, were carefully neutral. Probably he didn’t want Ry to panic about the plane, thinking about all the things that could go wrong. Probably he was trying to change the subject.