Skyscape (41 page)

The aircraft sputtered and made a little roller-coaster leap. The early morning thermals off the desert floor were rising, and the aircraft bucked the strata of heat.

As a pilot he was a little rusty, but he dipped the plane easily down, and rolled the aircraft over on its back and held it there. Camel-yellow desert swung over his head, and stayed there, quaking, a living thing.

This was where Margaret would find herself without a seatbelt, out of the cockpit, standing straight in the air that tore upward around her.

But nothing happened. With the blood ballooning upward into his head he realized that Margaret was not in the passenger seat, slumped down beyond his vision. She was not in the plane at all.

He must have lost consciousness again for a split second as he rolled the plane; he thought she must have fallen out during that moment. He reassured himself. Surely that's what happened.

He rolled the plane once more, doing a clumsy job of it, the plane standing on one wing, wanting to fall, aerodynamically about as fit as a ball rolling off a table. He got the aircraft on its back, losing direction, and getting upright again, the horizon slanted up, rocking back, Patterson tasting blood in his mouth.

He wanted to be sure.

It was time to stop the action, time to step out of the airplane, and stand on a wrinkle of air, freeze the frame and hold the plane upside down. He wanted to look into the passenger seat up ahead of him and see whether or not this agile and unpredictable woman was cowering there—or had she fallen out into the air like a cooperative passenger, or was there some other droll possibility.

He circled the estate, Owl Springs a dark jewel surrounded by a void. There were the red tiles of the roof, the dark sentries of the chimneys. There was the landing strip. He told himself that he couldn't see what was happening down there. Then—there was a figure, Loretta Lee looking up, her arm cocked.

The desert would not stay flat. One moment it was off one wing, the next it was off the other. The landing strip moved around, too. Left alone, desert would claim the runway in a few years. He sneezed and there was blood all over his hands.

It had been a surprise when he was learning to fly: it isn't all that easy to find a runway, approach it, descend, and touch the gear at the right angle. He descended now, below one thousand feet. He was still way too high. Owl Springs was eleven feet above sea level. He centered the landing strip, and then reduced the airspeed, almost to the point of a stall. It was one of the first rules of flight—
to go down, slow down
.

There was Margaret, not far from Loretta Lee. Poor Margaret was a crumpled figure on the strip. He aimed, ready to bring the plane down on top of her. It was going to be easy—he'd crunch her with the landing gear, smear her all over the asphalt, and take off again having barely kissed the floor. He steadied the plane, and let it slip downward.

Loretta Lee flung herself over Margaret's body. Patterson pulled up. The aircraft was about to stall. One wing tipped downward, nearly brushing the asphalt.

He climbed, swung wide, and was about to come down again when he saw Loretta Lee dragging Margaret away.

He felt the knife wound sucking air, and slate-gray lung solids sprayed from the hole and onto the fabric of his T-shirt. He spread the lips of the wound, and what he saw made him almost black out again.

There are many veins in the lungs, many arteries. And tubes for the passage of air. He could no longer pretend to himself that he was going to be all right without help. The Ryan's Menasco four-cylinder was far from the noisiest engine in existence, but it was loud enough to keep him from hearing the air whistling in and out of his side.

We have a special guest on today's show. Hold your applause until you see who it is, and then you'll not only want to applaud
—
you'll want to give your life to this man, your actual life so he can fulfill his destiny
.

This man knew power and what it could do, and he did something with it, ladies and gentlemen. Don't ask yourself to try not to love this man because you don't have any choice. Here he is, let's give him all our futures, everything we have so he can stand there with the Michelangelos and the Caesars and the Buddhas and everyone anyone has ever thought was divine
—
ladies and gentleman, on silver wings, Stephen Patterson
.

Patterson knew how to play this. The best plan was to make it over the San Bernardinos to Ontario and call the network to organize a press briefing by one o'clock, which would be in time for the late afternoon news on the East Coast. Or maybe make it to Vegas. That was a good plan, too. He'd be able to speak from a hospital bed with a nose tube, whether he needed one or not, minutes away from the operating room, maybe an IV rehydrating him, or by that time a transfusion—he wasn't sure how much type O he was losing down there in the abdominal cavity.

He would be more confident if he had some feeling in his hands.

The desert was pink, except where the rocks and alluvial fans cast shadows. Patterson knew where to look, but even so he couldn't see them, the couple on the camping trip there by the dead lake.

He had expected this, but it was still a surprise: You really couldn't see them from the air. The lost campers out by the dry lake had been just sitting there while we went on with our lives. We suffered disappointment and saw harm come to people we loved, regained hope and planned a future and, eventually lost it, in a world where to be immortal is to be gone.

Maybe he could see just a little wink of light off a side mirror or a window, although Patterson wasn't even sure of that as he pulled up the aircraft's nose, letting the altimeter's hands spin, that little clock face that told you how high you were, as though altitude and time were the same thing.

He let the altitude ride up to eight thousand feet. And then higher. It was cool up here, so far from the desert. When he was over ten thousand he could feel the thin air, the light-headed joy of the oxygen-poor sky.

The painting still existed. The fact that it was cut now—ripped, gashed—made it all the more authentic. Only important art was attacked, just as only important people were assassinated. And the painting was beautiful. The only thing in his life that mattered.

He'd get to Burbank, call Bruno Kraft, and the word would be out. Margaret Darcy Newns has just slashed the new, Patterson/Newns
Skyscape
.

Why did she do that, people would ask. Jealousy? Hysteria? She always was a little headstrong, wasn't she? Marrying the famous artist, insisting on forcing her way into Owl Springs, trespassing on the infinite patience of Red Patterson.

After all he tried to do. People would kill her. Absolutely destroy the poor girl. She didn't know what she was up against.

It was getting colder. Morning was a red sore, not a presence, an absence, a wound where something has been cut out. Patterson aimed into the rising sun.

47

Curtis was trying to open his eyes. That should have been easy, but it was like erasing the darkness. Light was imperfect, and the natural appearance of an hour was black. Color was added to the world, cosmetic, extra, like a radio left on in an empty room.

Margaret was not happy, but he could not tell what she was saying. He wanted to call out to her, like a man crying from an anchored raft in the middle of a lake.

“There's nothing to worry about,” he wanted to say.

But on waking, when Curtis tried to call out, he could not make a sound.

He could only think her name, and after awhile he knew he must have dreamed. The oak beams above him were all he would ever see, and they were handsome. He only wished that he could show them to Margaret, the way someone had hewn the stout timbers and how hands had hoisted them, lifted them as far as they remained to this day, keeping out the sky.

When he was a boy, staying with the woman who sold greeting cards by mail, he would go into Woolworth's and look at the goldfish. The fish lived in plastic bags, bags no bigger than sandwich wrappers. The individual fish, one in each bag, were each confined in a pouch of water so small every time they turned they stroked the side of the plastic container with their mouths.

The fish had fascinated him, so much that he felt somehow guilty about visiting the five-and-dime so often, and took to buying things he did not really want, a small multicolored tablet of scratch paper, or a miniature globe that was also a pencil sharpener. Curtis felt now how it would feel to stroke the plastic, turn after turn, the touch of dead confinement the only remaining pleasure.

He was working on a painting in his mind. Not a version of the painting that had burned. He no longer enjoyed the memory of that work, the famous “masterpiece,” painted by a young man who had never fully understood that he shared life with other souls.

This new painting, the one he created in his mind, was a painting of Margaret, nude, looking out of the canvas with an expression of recognition. It was the way she acted when he came home early, and she was sitting at her desk. His first thought was that he was interrupting her. But she had always given him this look of unmistakable welcome, surprise linked with happiness.

Ruskin had written that if you could draw a sphere you could draw anything. Curtis knew that a sphere was easy to render, charcoal on paper. What was difficult was absence, drawing a portrait so that the city outside the studio was implied, its sounds, the traffic, the laughter of children.

He dreamed again. There was a boy's toy, an airplane with a propeller driven by a rubber band. You wound the rubber band by turning the prop, and when the rubber band was twisted and knotted with tension, the thing was ready to fly.

When he woke, he wondered if he could hear an airplane. Eventually he would sleep and not awaken. That was how far this path led. And it was a path, as definite as the heart-line in a palm, as clear as lace, as the living mapwork of ivy.

He wanted to see her once more.

It was cold, and he could not move his arms to pull up a blanket.

He fought against what held him, puzzled as before at how far he had fallen from a height he could no longer recall.

“What's he doing?” said Loretta Lee.

Margaret lay still on the airstrip. There was the sound of an airplane, a metal mosquito. The noise was getting louder.

“Bishop, what's he doing?” said Loretta Lee.

There was no answer. Maybe I'm hurt, thought Margaret, maybe I'm not.

The airplane noise was very loud.

Loretta Lee fell over Margaret, holding on to her, saying she was sorry but she had to.

The airplane was on top of them. There was shadow when the aircraft blocked the light. There was a whisk of wind. The engine noise filled her body. Then the sound of the motor receded, climbing.

Loretta Lee got to her feet. Margaret stayed where she was, sprawled on the asphalt. It had a smell, this plain of sandpaper. It was clean and sun-cured. She was not sure where she was, only that shadows stretched from the palm trees almost all the way to where she lay.

There was a comic strip in her head, one of those episodic narratives, talking faces, frowns, urgent calls. She had hung from the airplane, clinging, and when it rebounded off the airstrip she had let go.

“He's coming back,” said Loretta Lee.

Margaret's mind was full of color. She was on her feet. She left blood on the asphalt. There was the sound of the airplane, sweeping back, around, approaching again.

They hobbled to the shelter of the trees.

Bishop touched Loretta Lee on the arm to get her attention, and gave her a canteen. Loretta Lee drank, water flowing down the corners of her mouth, dripping onto the asphalt. Margaret drank, too.

Margaret leaned against the stone wall. She was conscious and she was breathing. She sniffed and she tasted blood, her sinus cavities, her throat, full of fluid. She spat and there was blood on the sun-bleached surface.

Margaret's vision was still bleary from the spray that had crippled. The sound of the airplane swung wide, diminished. Loretta Lee left her side, and stood gazing upward. Margaret limped out of the shadow to look upward, too. The silver aircraft looked bright and innocent, something a child would delight in.

The plane faded into silence.

“He's going to come back, and I'm going to have to shoot him,” said Loretta Lee. She began to weep. “He shouldn't have done that.” Her voice was torn. “He shouldn't have put me out in the desert.”

“He's cut pretty bad,” said Bishop. “When he gets a chance to think about it he'll come back here.” He spoke like someone who did not so much understand things as balance them out.

Loretta Lee drank from the canteen again, and then let it drop.

“I'll pack the wound,” Bishop was saying. “And I'll fly him out myself. To Palm Springs. They have the best hospital.”

“You're basically just a boy, aren't you Bishop?” said Loretta Lee. “Just a boy, forty-eight years old.”

Bishop did not answer.

“He doesn't need you anymore,” said Loretta Lee.

Bishop rubbed one arm thoughtfully. Loretta Lee, dark and blistered, looked up at the empty sky.

Margaret found her way to the gate. Her legs were only partially under her control, wobbly, unsteady.

Her left arm was weak. She kept it close to her body as she tried to run. The pool was calm in the morning light, several fronds lying at the bottom of the pool like large black feathers.

Margaret was in the house. Bishop followed her.

“I didn't take her all the way out into the desert,” Bishop was saying. “Because I wanted her to survive. If I took her all the way out where Paul Angevin was, she wouldn't have made it.”

Margaret only partly understood what Bishop was saying. She turned and took hold of the man's shoulder with her good hand.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“People don't understand what it's like out there,” said Bishop.