by Jack Finney
McCall's, April 1960, LXXXVII(7):74-75, 182-184, 186, 188, 190
An Old Tune
On the sixth day he was home alone, Charley Burke walked out onto the patio, nodded at the empty chairs, saying, Hello, everybody. Don't get up, and dropped into a lounge chair. He was wearing the tan wash pants and brown loafers he'd just changed into, and the white shirt he'd worn that day in San Francisco, at the office. Now he tilted far back in the chair, his feet rising higher than his head; it was August, still daylight, and he lay staring up at the clear blue sky. He was conscious of the emptiness of the suburban house beside him, but absently so, used to it now. Then his jaw dropped, his eyes widened, and he lay motionless, staring up at the sky, paralyzed by the strength of a strange new emotion.
His house, across the bay from the city, in Marin County, lay in a miniature valley; the street wound between two rows of hills. Fifty yards above the hills that rose behind the patio, a hawk hung in the air, high in the sun. He was there often, hunting field rodents; Charley had seen him before. But now he saw him, actually, for the first time. The big bird didn't move. Wings out, he lay on an invisible column of air that pressed against the sides of the hills, to be deflected upward. He lay there magically, neither rising nor falling, moving neither forward nor back, no least movement of his wings necessary to sustain him. Then the wings tilted, the bird dropped in a sudden swift and graceful arc and soared up again. The wings tilted back once more, and again the hawk hung in the summer sky, belonging to it; and all that Charley Burke wanted of the entire world was somehow to be able to do that, too.
It was no idle wish. It was an overpowering seizure, a wild and passionate necessity. Its intensity drew him to his feet, and he walked the patio, smiling, trying to laugh the feeling away. But there was no escape. He was possessed by an irresistible urge to rise in silent, effortless detachment from gravity, up into the blueness till he could feel the sky around him touching his skin. And it occurred to him that he could do what he wanted to do — not in a plane fighting the air, but in a balloon.
Stepping between the open glass doors, he stood in the living room, neat in the gathering darkness — ashtrays emptied, magazines stacked — but when he snapped on a light, the room looked dusty. He stood thinking over all he knew about balloons. Mostly this was just a picture in his mind of a large, rounded object, shaped like a giant punching bag, upside down in the sky. It was made in vertical panels of contrasting colors; a long ribbon pennant fluttered from its top; and under it hung a trapezelike bar, on which sat a man wearing tights. He wore his hair parted in the center, had a large mustache, and sat smiling, ankles crossed, legs dangling gracefully, a hand negligently holding to one rope of his perch. Stitched to the chest of his tights was an American flag. This picture was supplanted by another very much like it, except that now a square basket with high sides hung under the balloon. A man stood in the basket, staring out at him; he wore a black silk hat, black frock coat, square-cut beard, pince-nez, and had a brass telescope tucked under one arm.
That was all Charley knew about balloons. He took down volume two of the encyclopedia on the livingroom bookshelves, found the article on balloons, and sat down at one end of the davenport, crouched over the pages. Balloon, the article began, a bag of impermeable material which, when inflated with a gas lighter than air, rises from the ground. This had almost the lilt of poetry, he felt, the last four words especially, and he read it through several times, glancing up each time to smile.
Then he read everything in the article about how and why a balloon rises, descends, and is controlled, and it seemed to him as simple and effective a device as man has yet invented. Filled with a gas lighter than the volume of air it displaces, a balloon must rise. Release some of the gas, and its ascent is checked or reversed. Spill ballast, and its rise will resume. The open book on his lap, Charley sat back, hands clasped behind his head, at peace with this explanation.
It was easily understood without special training — like most of the mechanical devices of the previous century. Men understood the things they used then; they were masters of the machines that served them. He felt sure that passengers riding in hydraulic elevators of the time knew how they worked, and that most of them — a forefinger on a sharp-etched woodcut diagram — could trace through the workings of a horsecar mechanism. Of the thousands of years men have been civilized, it is only in the last fifty, Charley thought, that things we use daily have gone beyond the understanding of most of us — our television sets, jet planes, even our automobiles today. Most of us use them in helplessness, no longer their masters, no longer masters of very much at all any more. So that to understand the balloon was a solid satisfaction, and Charley stood up and began to sing. It was an ancient song he hadn't thought of in years, and the house being empty, he shouted it full voice. Come, Josephine, in my flying machine, and it's up we'll go, up we'll go! he yelled in sudden exuberance, and walked quickly to the garage, where he began hunting for things he needed, such as his wife's plastic clothesline and two old tennis nets.
Through that and the following two evenings, working hard and steadily, Charley made a balloon. He cut the panels from two rolls of lightweight, rubberized cloth — one was blue, and one was white — which he bought in San Francisco, and stitched them together on his wife's sewing machine. With odds and ends around the house — a wire coat hanger, an aluminum pot lid, his wife's clothes pole — he completed the balloon, then hung it from a rope over the patio.
It could turn chilly after the sun was down, here in the San Francisco Bay area, and Charley changed into brown ski pants and jersey, light in weight but snug-fitting and very warm. Looking down at himself, it occurred to him that they somewhat resembled a balloonist's tights, and he smiled. Finally, well after eleven at night, Charley stood on the patio beside the brick barbecue, tending a bed of coals. The electric blower was on full, the coals white hot and flameless in the forced draft, and a steady rush of hot air roared up through a stovepipe resting on the grill and into the balloon hanging overhead.
Almost instantly, the long blue-and-white wrinkles of hanging cloth rising up into the night over Charley's head had begun to stir; now they were visibly distending. From a long, wrinkled prune, the balloon swelled into a thin pear, then rounded into a smooth-skinned sphere. At eleven-forty-five, the bag, round and tight, began to lift. Within minutes, it seemed alive. Tugging at the anchor rope tied to the barbecue, it swayed in the air; fat, buoyant, and eager. Two tennis nets hung draped over it; tied to their ends by short lengths of clothesline hung a trapezelike seat made from half a clothes pole. Several dozen paper bags filled with sand hung in the netting.
Charley switched off the barbecue blower, and sat on the trapeze. Like a child slowly untying a gift to prolong the anticipation, he began, pulling the drawstring that would release his balloon from the anchor rope. At that moment, the moon, which had been rising for some minutes, lifted an edge over the uneven horizon of hills. Hanging under the balloon in his snug dark ski suit and a pair of heavy navy-blue wool socks, Charley saw the pale wash of light touch the windows of the empty house beside him and turn them opaque, dimly reflecting himself and the bottom of the balloon, like a faded poster from a forgotten circus. Looking up, he watched the moonlight slide up and down the striped sides of the balloon as it swayed, and he felt a surge of pride stronger than any he'd felt in years. Of all the things he owned, it suddenly occurred to him, this was the only one he'd created, the only thing he hadn't bought. Of all his possessions, this was uniquely his own, and while he knew that what he was about to do could be dangerous, he didn't believe in the danger. His heart beat from joy, not fear, as he yanked hard at the rope in his hand.
Instantly, the wooden bar on which he sat pressed deep into the undersides of Charley's legs, and he was looking down onto his moonlit roof. Immediately, the roofs of his neighbors came sliding into view from the sides; then he was looking at the street in front of his house — growing in length, shrinking in width
— winding through the hills between two rows of rooftops, which were diminishing as he stared into smaller and smaller rectangles and squares.
Up through the moonlight, he rose into the night, in glorious silence. His only motive power was air itself, air being lifted by air; he was a weightless part of the element he was in, mingling with its breezes. Now he rose above the level of the low Marin County hills, and here occasional puffs of air touched him, and he drifted a little, like a ball of dandelion fluff, over the light-speckled patches and great dark areas of town and countryside spreading below him. A hand tightly gripping each support rope, Charley sat on his wife's clothes pole, swinging slightly, pleasantly, and felt the gentle lift of the bar under his legs slacken and then stop. Mouth slightly agape, eyes wide and heart pounding, he hung in the air then, staring down between his dangling feet at the tiny roofs and narrow, moonlit black ribbon that was the street he lived on.
A breeze touched the balloon momentarily, and it slowly revolved. As he turned in the air, Charley suddenly saw over his shoulder the great shiny-black expanse of San Francisco Bay far ahead and far below. From ground level, it lay behind rows of hills and could not be seen; but hanging up here in the sky, he saw it all, saw the mysterious lights of its great bridges — dotted lines of luminous orange-juice-color lights curving across the shiny blackness. A path of moonlight silvered the water between the bridges, silhouetting Angel Island, humping up out of the bay, lusterless black and lightless. White mast lights and green side lights, the ship itself invisible, moved across the ink-shiny blackness, and beyond all this, rising up in light and splendor, was the glorious glitter of San Francisco. The shining city, crisscrossed by the pattern of its streets, and the vast black bay edged in light on the Oakland rim, were a great living map far below his hanging feet. It was an awesome sight, incredible and beautiful. Charley shouted in delight.
The slow revolution of the balloon continued, and when Charley again faced south, the bay had disappeared, the tops of the hills that concealed it rising beyond his head. The heated air in the balloon cooling in the night air, the balloon was sinking, and within minutes, he knew, it would gently collapse in the street directly below him. He tried to make it stop by an effort of will, tried to make himself lighter on the bar he sat on. But like an ancient, slow-moving elevator, it descended steadily until, well below the level of the surrounding hills, a breeze suddenly took it.
Nearly every night during the summer, beginning just after sunset, an easterly breeze flowed down his street, channeled between the hills like a river. Charley moved with it now, along the curving street toward home, perhaps ten feet above the street lamps moving past him on either side of the road. Down here between the bases of the hills, the breeze narrowed and quickened, and now he moved swiftly, the trapped current carrying him silently along the wide street, precisely over the white-painted center line, following its curves and windings exactly.
Slipping through the night just over the roofs of the familiar houses, he glanced from one side to the other as he passed. He knew or at least spoke to the people in most of these houses. But now the houses were dark, the cars parked before them dead and silent, their windows blind with dew, and Charley thought of his own empty house and felt suddenly depressed. A cat darted across the street through a circle of light from a street lamp; it stopped suddenly, crouching motionless in the gutter to stare up at him over a shoulder as he swung past.
Just ahead, the road curved, and now the breeze curved with it, and Charley swung around the bend, nearing his house. His dangling legs swinging from the turn, Charley rounded the curve, and a movement ahead caught his eye. Then he saw the big Dalmatian dog trotting briskly beside the curb and just entering a circle of lamplight. This side of the circle, he caught the slower movement of a woman in a tan polo coat. He knew who she was. Once or twice, driving home late at night, he had seen her walking this dog; she was a Mrs. Lanidas, who lived a dozen houses down the street from his.
There was nothing he could do; there was no time to spill ballast. His feet and half his body were below the level of the glass-shaded street lamp now, and his shadow flashed across the circle of light on the lonely asphalt road as Mrs. Lanidas walked into it. She stopped, her chin lifting quickly, and for the space of a heartbeat, she and Charley, looking back over his shoulder, stared into each other's eyes; then Charley swung on around a final bend. Just before his driveway, the balloon sinking fast, his stockinged feet touched the road, and he ran, tugging at the tennis nets to bring down the collapsing balloon.
Still running, he swung into his driveway, dragging the balloon through the air on the very last of its buoyancy. Then it melted onto the concrete before the garage door in a rustling mass of striped cloth. Stooping quickly, his hand on the door handle, Charley paused for an instant, listening. In the almost complete silence of the late-at-night street, he heard the slight grate of leather on pebbles; the steps were hurrying, he thought, and he heaved the garage door up. Tugging, yanking, he dragged the balloon in alongside the car, then grabbed for the garage door. But even as it slid down again, the footsteps stopped, and he knew the woman was standing in the street at the end of his driveway, staring at the door as it closed.
But nothing could have kept him from going up again. He got through the next day at the office. At home, even before he changed clothes, he was prowling through the garage, the attic of the tract house. There he found the little kerosene brazier he'd once bought for a camping trip he'd never taken. After eating a can of salmon and half a jar of black olives, he made a bracket of wire for the brazier, bending its ends into hooks. That finished, Charley sat on the davenport, now wearing his dark ski suit and socks, waiting for full dark.
It was past ten when he had the balloon strung up on its rope over the brick barbecue and stood tending the coals. Occasionally, he glanced up at the balloon, watching its sides unwrinkle, puff out, and gradually swell into roundness. Then he heard some light sound, a sigh or little movement. Eyes squinting, he searched the blackness, then found the faint blur of a face a dozen yards out in the night; but even before he found it, he knew who it would be. And when she knew he'd found her, Mrs. Lanidas walked slowly toward him, and Charley saw a movement at her feet, a sudden dilution of the darkness, and realized that her dog was with her and had sat silently watching him, too.
In her tan polo coat, Mrs. Lanidas walked into the little circle of firelight, and for a moment, they stood staring at each other. I've got to go up, too, she said then, quietly but quickly and desperately. I want to come with you. Please. I've got to. I've simply got to. You must take me. You must, you must. Please!
She continued, the words spilling out, and all the reasons for refusing came rising up in Charley's mind. But he didn't speak any of them; he knew the truth when he heard it. For whatever reasons — and what they were didn't matter — she, too, had to do what he'd known he must do the day he lay out here staring up at the hawk in the sky. And because Charley understood that feeling of absolute necessity, he couldn't refuse it and didn't bother going through the motions of protest. Reluctantly but accepting it, he nodded, and said, All right, then gestured at the dog. What about him?
I'll tie him up here. He'll sit quietly. She spoke anxiously, afraid he'd change his mind. I'm out with him every night, sometimes till one, two, even three o'clock. No one at my house ever waits up or even notices I'm gone. They'll never know.
It's dangerous. Charley glanced up at the balloon, but he spoke perfunctorily, and she simply nodded to acknowledge that she'd heard and accepted the warning.
The balloon was puffed tight now and tugging hard. Charley turned off the blower switch, then threw a bucket of water onto the coals, and the cloud of smoke turned milk-white in the moonlight. He hooked the wire bracket holding the kerosene burner into the netting, and the brazier hung under the open neck of the balloon, several feet below it. Charley lighted it, then thrust the stovepipe up into the balloon neck, and let it slide down over the brazier,
and now the heat from the intense blue flame poured up into the balloon.
Mrs. Lanidas had tied her dog's leash to the barbecue, and he lay on the patio watching them, head cocked. Charley gestured politely at the swinglike seat hanging just over the flagstones. Mrs. Lanidas nodded, took off her coat, and Charley saw that she was not, as he'd thought, wearing black stockings; Mrs. Lanidas had on a skintight black leotard.
She sat down on the bar, holding the support rope, legs straight out over the pavement, ankles gracefully crossed. Charley sat beside her, glanced at her, and she nodded. He pulled at the rope, and they rose instantly into the moonlight.
They rose swiftly, the houses, street, and hills contracting beneath them, and when he looked at Mrs. Lanidas, the fear was gone from her eyes. They were half closed in pleasure now, the breeze rippling her hair, and she smiled at Charley in delight, and he grinned back. Tonight the balloon didn't drift; somewhere above hilltop level, a high-up breeze took them, carrying them south, the balloon slowly revolving. As it turned, Charley watched Mrs. Lanidas' face. She caught sight of the bay, a vast blackness striped by a great swath of shimmering moonlight; and of the jewel-bright orange dots of the bridge lights; and of the clustered white towers of the lighted city rising in glittering splendor beyond the black water, and she gasped in pleasure, and said, Oh, my lord! Charley laughed aloud, his pleasure reinforced by hers. The balloon completed its revolution, and their backs to the bay now, they moved over the land, watching it slide out from under their feet.