The John Varley Reader (88 page)

My idea of a
really
great time was to go to Houston Hobby Airport and stand out on the observation platform watching the
big
jets. You could do that back then.

Another example: I found out that every decision they made could be appealed, and all
that
paperwork had to shuffle around, too. Years were eaten up that way.

Most ridiculous example: I was ordered to report to the Oakland Induction Center for the Big One, the One Step Forward that would send me into basic training. A man outside the center told me the commanding officer of the place was so
insanely angry
at the goddamn pinko peaceniks demonstrating outside that if you took anti-draft literature
inside,
you would be ordered to surrender it,
before
you were in the army,
before
they had the authority to order you to do a damn thing. I took it in, was told to surrender it, and then was sat down at a table and ordered to sign twenty different forms, surrounded by gorillas who looked like they would like to do nothing more than wring my scrawny hippie neck. I signed nothing, didn't surrender the literature, and was told to go away, that the District Attorney would be contacting me. No one ever did. That ate up a year, right there.

But I kept resisting because I'd read
Catch-22,
and knew I could never survive one aspect of the military: officers. I knew I was destined to be a private, and I don't take orders well. So I fought.

 
 
I don't really know where this story came from. Even after 9/11 air travel is not quite this inconvenient, though I'm planning to take the train the next time I take a trip. I don't like having my shoes searched. I think I was simply tinkering with the notion that Hell might not be guys with pitchforks herding people into pools of molten brimstone . . . that there might actually be worse things. . . .

IT WAS DARK when the plane reached O'Hare, three hours late. Snow swirled in white tornadoes over the frozen field. The plowing crews had kept just one runway clear. Planes were stacked up back to New Jersey. Flights were being diverted to St. Louis, Cleveland, Dayton, and other places people didn't really want to go when they
intended
to go there.

The 727 hit the icy tarmac like a fat lady on skates, slued to the left, then straightened out as the nose came down and the thrust reversers engaged. Then the plane taxied for thirty minutes.

When the jetway finally reached them and the Fasten Seat Belts sign went off, Peter Meers stood up. He was immediately bumped back into his seat by a large man across the aisle. Somebody stepped on his foot.

He struggled to his feet again, reached for his carry-on bag under the seat. When he jerked on the handle, it snagged on something. He pushed at it with his foot, being jostled from behind and almost falling into the man from Seat B, waiting for Meers to get out. He yanked again, and heard a sound that meant there was a new, deep scratch on the expensive leather.

He looked up in time to have a filthy duffel bag fall from the overhead compartment into his face. A filthier hand appeared and yanked on the canvas strap, and the bag vanished into the press of bodies. Meers glimpsed a ragged man with a beard. How had such a man got aboard an airplane? he wondered. Could you buy airline tickets with food stamps?

Retrieving his briefcase and his laptop computer, he slung everything over his shoulders. It was another ten minutes of shuffling before he reached the closet at the front of the plane where a harried flight attendant was helping people reclaim their garment bags. He found his, grabbed it, and slung it over his shoulder. Then he waddled sideways toward the door and the jetway. On the way out he barked his shin against a folded golf cart leaning against the exit door. Then he was trudging up the jetway into O'Hare.

O'Hare. ORD. On a snowy night with one runway operating, an inner circle of Hell. Meers shuffled down the concourse with several million other lost souls, all looking to make a connection. Those who had abandoned all hope—at least for the night—slumped in chairs or against walls or just stood, asleep on their feet.

At O'Hare, connections were made not on shadowy street corners, cash for tiny baggies, but at the ends of infinite queues shaped, twisted, and re-doubled by yellow canvas bands strung between stainless steel poles, under lights as warm and homey as an operating theater. Meers found the right line and stood at the end of it. In ten minutes, he shoved his garment bag, his carry-on, his briefcase, and his laptop forward three feet with the tip of his shoe. Ten minutes later, he did it again. He was hungry.

When he reached the ticket counter the agent told him he had missed his connecting flight for home, and that there would be no more flights that night.

“However,” she said, frowning at her computer screen, “I have one seat available on a flight to Atlanta. You ought to be able to make a connection from there in the morning.” She looked up at him and smiled.

Meers took the rewritten ticket. The departure gate was a good three miles from where he stood. He shouldered his burdens and went off in search of food.

Everything was closed except one snack bar near his gate. Airport unions were on strike. The menu on the wall had been covered with a sheet of butcher paper, hand lettered: “Hot dogs $4. Cokes $2. No coffee.” Behind the counter were two harried workers, a fiftyish woman with gray wisps of hair straggling from her paper cap, and a Hispanic man in his twenties with mustard and ketchup stains all over his apron.

When Meers was still a good distance away, the counterman suddenly threw down his hot dog tongs, snatched the hat from his head and crumpled it into a ball.

“I'm through with this shit!” he shouted. “I quit.
No mas!
” He continued to scream in Spanish as he ran through a door in the back. The woman was shouting his name, which was Eduardo, but the man paid no attention. He hit the red emergency bar on a fire door and an alarm sounded as he scrambled down stairs outside.

Meers could see a little through the glass. The Hispanic man was short and stocky, but a good runner. He charged away from the building. From somewhere beneath, two uniformed security guards charged out, guns in their hands. Eduardo was nowhere to be seen. The guards kept going. There was a flash of light. Gunfire? There was too much noise from jet engines for Meers to be sure. He shivered, and turned back toward the snack counter.

He was still ten people back in line when they announced his flight to Atlanta. He was three back when they made the second announcement. The gray-haired women, still distracted by the flight of Eduardo, slapped a hot dog into his hand and spilled a third of his Coke on the counter as another call came over the public address. Meers hurried to a stand-up counter. There were no onions, no relish. He squeezed some mustard out of a plastic packet, half of it squirting cleverly onto his tan overcoat. Cursing, dabbing at the mustard, Meers took a bite. It was lukewarm on one end, cold on the other.

Gulping Coke and choking down cold weenie and stale bun, Meers hurried to the boarding area, Down the jetway and into the 727. Most of the passengers were seated except a few struggling with crammed overhead compartments. He sidled down to seat 28B. In 28C was a woman who had to be three hundred pounds, most of it in the hips. In 28A was a man who was more like three-fifty, his face shiny with sweat. Meers looked around desperately, but he already knew this was the last, the absolute last seat on the plane.

The woman glared at him as she stood. Meers got his carry-on under the seat, then popped the overhead rack. There was about enough space to store a wallet. The next one was just as full. A flight attendant took his briefcase and laptop and hurried away.

He wedged himself into the seat. The lady wedged herself into hers. He felt his ribs compressing. From his right came gusts of a sickening lilac perfume. From the left, waves of stale terror.

“My first flight,” the fat man confided.

“Oh, really?” Meers said.

“I'm real scared.”

“No need to be.” The fat lady scrambled in her purse for a box of tissue, then blew her nose loud enough to frighten a walrus. She crumpled the noisome tissue and dropped it on Meers' shoe.

They were pushed back, they taxied, they waited two hours and taxied some more, they were de-iced and waited another hour. All of which took much longer than it takes to tell about it. Then they were in the air. The fat man promptly threw up into the little white bag.

 
Atlanta. ATL. They landed under a thick pall of black smoke. Somewhere to the west, a large part of Georgia was tinder-dry and burning. Hartsfield International sweltered in hundred-degree heat, and soot swirled across the runways. It was dark as night.

The fat man had filled barf bags all through the flight. In spite of this, he had eaten like a starving hyena. Meers had been unable to eat. He could barely get his hands to his mouth. He had stared at the meal on his tray table, as immobilized as if bound to his seat, until the stewardess took it away.

Just before they reached the gate, the flight attendant arrived for the fat man's latest delivery. Meers eyed the bulging bottom of the bag in horror as it passed over his lap, but it didn't break.

The heat slammed him as he left the plane. It didn't abate when he entered the terminal. The air was thick, hot syrup. The forest fires had downed power lines, and the air conditioning was off. So were the lights. So were the computers and telephones.

Somehow the ticketing staff were still working, though Meers couldn't imagine how. He joined the endless line and began shuffling forward. He shuffled for five hours. At the end of that time, when he was nearing starvation, the agent told him he hadn't a hope of a connection to his home, but he could put Meers on a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth, where his chances would be better. The flight would leave in nine hours.

Meers roamed the ovenlike interior of the airport. None of the restaurants and snack bars were open. With no refrigeration and no electricity to run the stoves, there was no point. The bars were open and serving warm beer, but had not so much as a pretzel. People sat wilted in their chairs, stunned by the heat, looking out over the ashen landscape. A nuclear holocaust might look a lot like this, Meers thought.

A few profiteers were selling ice water at five dollars a bottle. The lines were enormous. Meers found a clear space against a wall and sat down on his luggage. When he leaned forward sweat dripped off his nose.

He heard a commotion, and saw a man approaching with boxes on a hand truck. He was the pied piper of Atlanta, trailed by a mob of jostling people.

He stopped at an empty vending machine. When he opened the front someone in the crowd started pulling at a box. Someone else grabbed the other end. The box burst and spilled Snickers bars on the floor. In moments all the boxes had been torn open. When the tide ebbed away, the delivery man sat on the floor, feeling himself cautiously, amazed he hadn't been ripped to shreds. He got up and wandered away.

Meers had snagged a bag of peanuts and a Three Musketeers. He ate every bite, then made himself as comfortable as possible against the wall and nodded off.

 
 
A lost soul was screaming. Meers opened his eyes, found himself curled up over his possessions, a rope of drool coming from his mouth. He wiped it away and sat up. Across the concourse a man in the remains of a suit and tie had gone berserk.