Max had a sweeping view of all the passengers as he returned. There were so many kids. He saw an Indian sister and brother, about ten and twelve years old, traveling without an adult. They both had shiny black hair and rich, almost purple skin. The girl had put her head on her older brother’s shoulder and had reverted to an old habit, sucking her thumb. She stared fearfully out the plastic porthole window as if she were having a night-terror and saw monsters in her closet. To comfort her the boy caressed his sister’s long hair with his small hand. But he was also scared. He kept his eyes shut and aimed at the ceiling, as if he wanted to be sure, in case he forgot and opened them, that he would see nothing dramatic.
Max touched the brother’s head as he passed, rustling his hair, aware that his casual touch was a cliché and probably would do nothing to calm the boy. The boy didn’t react. Max, however, felt more in command; he believed that because of the contact he knew the child better and could protect him.
Two aisles behind them sat a young black couple with a baby. The mother was calm. She concentrated on rocking the infant seat from side to side to lull her child. The young father had sweated big ovals under the arm of his blue shirt. He was partly out of his seat to get a view of the cockpit. He looked as if he felt inadequate to some internal demand of manhood. He met Max’s eyes and almost seemed to plead: give me something to do.
“Baby okay?” Max shouted at them.
The young father frowned and nodded. The mother smiled her yes.
Across from them were two mothers traveling with four kids, presumably two each, although it was difficult to say who belonged to whom because of their blond sameness. Each child had the same row of yellow bangs and pair of pale blue eyes underneath apparently hairless and yet heavy brows. Three of them were boys, bouncing in their seats with nervous energy and anticipation; they could have been waiting for an amusement park ride. The girl meanwhile shouted, not scared, but angry: “Mommy, my ears are hurting!” Neither mother answered her; they had their eyes on the co-pilot, who moved down the other aisle at a faster pace than Max’s.
“Tell me we’re okay,” one of the mothers said to the co-pilot as he passed.
The co-pilot smiled and winked but he said nothing.
At the co-pilot’s failure to reassure, one mother cursed. The other winced, pulled one of the blond boys to her chest, and hugged him hard.
It was heartbreaking. Max was angry that God had made this choice, when he could have picked out a planeload of rich people, smashed the Concorde into the Savoy Hotel, for example, instead of killing a bunch of kids put on planes by parents meeting a tight budget.
Max copied the co-pilot and used the headrests as crutches, alternately placing a hand on the next forward one as he moved down the aisle. The plane had definitely lost some part that lent it stability, something roughly equivalent to a car’s shock absorbers. Either that or they had turned onto a poorly maintained paved road of the air with nothing but bumps and potholes. Insulation seemed to have been lost all over: the noise from the two remaining engines was fierce. Max’s muscles clenched against the insecure machine, especially his legs: their springs were fully contracted, prepared to make a great leap. Don’t fight it, he lectured his body, and consciously tried to relax them, allowing all his weight to settle into his feet before he took the next step.
Jeff was out of his seat. He had gotten one of the blankets (vomited out of the gaping overhead compartments by the dozens) and wrapped it around his waist. As Max reached him he understood what his partner was doing: Jeff was wriggling out of his soiled underwear and pants.
“Can you find my bag?” Jeff demanded. “Get me the dungarees.”
Max had to open their compartment to get Jeff’s overnight—theirs was one of the few that had remained shut. He dropped Jeff’s bag on the seat. “Get it yourself,” he said, still furious at him for insisting they fly this deathtrap.
“Sir!” the injured flight attendant called out from the seat where Max had put her. She still had a tiny drink napkin, completely soaked with her blood, pressed against the cut on her temple. “Sir!” she insisted sternly to Jeff. “The captain has put on the seat-belt sign. You should be seated.”
“Are you nuts?” Jeff answered her.
“She’s hurt,” the elderly man next to her explained.
Max went past Jeff and stopped at the flight attendant’s seat. He didn’t want to watch Jeff change his clothes, although he wondered what he was going to do with the soiled pants.
“How are you doing?” Max asked Stacy, after checking her badge and verifying that was her name.
“You should be seated, too,” Stacy answered. She removed her hand to take a look at the napkin. Only half of the tissue came away. The rest stuck to her temple. Stacy stared at what she held of the bloody paper, too saturated to be of any further use.
“I don’t have any more,” the older male passenger commented and gestured at several soaked cocktail napkins tossed onto the floor.
“Remove all sharp objects from your clothes. Pens, combs. Also take off your shoes and eyeglasses,” Stacy said, her eyes on the bloody tissue, squinting and blinking, trying to focus. “The flight attendants will gather them.”
“Un huh,” Max said. He picked up a fallen pillow, removing the pale blue cover, and tore it up. The muscular effort of ripping the fabric was satisfying. Activity soothed his nerves: helping with the cart and touching the boy’s head had also made him feel good. He was able to fashion a crude bandanna. He tied it around her head, covering the wound.
While he tied it their eyes were only a few inches apart. He studied the tiny blond hairs of her mustache and wanted to kiss her lips, painted a brilliant red, but again he was sad to be feeling sexy.
“Why doesn’t it stop bleeding?” Stacy asked him.
“I think it is,” he told her.
Out of the corner of his eye Max saw the co-pilot hurrying back to the forward cabin. Because of his haste Max understood that what the co-pilot had been able to discover from his visual check terrified him. Well, what the fuck did you expect? Max argued with him silently. You said yourself that number three blew up and the hydraulics were out. Did you mink you were going to be able to Krazy Glue it back together?
Max knew enough about planes to understand that if they had lost all the hydraulics, not only was there no way to steer, there was never going to be. Unless a runway happened to be directly in their path, where could they land safely? A highway? An empty field? Max wasn’t even certain that a controlled descent would be possible.
A small, cold welling of fearful saliva blocked his throat: the coward come to life. But when he straightened and saw the packed crowd of kids and businessmen and the occasional mother, he felt sorrier for them. After all he deserved death. He had plotted to avoid it, quit cigarettes, forsaken red meat, jogged and power-walked, loaded up on vitamins so that his urine looked almost psychedelic—yet it had stalked him anyway. And into its bland merciless face what did he have to show as his proof that he deserved to live?
Nothing but that he was afraid to die.
2
Carla’s little boy, two-year-old Leonardo, named for Leonardo da Vinci, but called Leo the Lion by his father, and Lenny by his aunts and uncles, and Bubble by his mother (because as a suckling infant, after a meal of Carla’s milk, he manufactured them by the dozens: little shimmering bubbles that slid along his puffy lips), was asleep in the seat next to her when the explosion happened. He had collapsed only minutes after takeoff, his head sagging onto the spongy armrest, the rest of him crumpled up with the spineless compactability of babies—and Bubble was still a baby, even though two. His sleep was so deep that he drooled out of the side of his mouth, darkening a circle of the light blue fabric into navy. The initial jerk of the explosion lifted his unconscious head up—Carla’s eyes went to him immediately—and then bounced it down again on the armrest.
That woke Leonardo with a meow of complaint. Carla twisted in her seat and used her h
ands like earmuffs to protect the sides of his head. She peered toward the front of the plane and waited for what was next.
It didn’t occur to her that they might crash. She vaguely assumed they had hit unexpected turbulence, something inconvenient, not tragic. She called out in the direction of the cockpit: “What’s going on!” But there was a lot of noise from the engines and the confusion of other passengers and then…
A big fall. Nothing below. She was dropping and Bubble fell also, sliding out from her grip and down through the seat belt until he was caught by the armpits. He seemed, for one horrible second, to be choking: his legs and torso hung from the seat and the belt was taut across his chest and throat, more a noose than a safety device.
Carla reached to free Bubble. But she couldn’t fight the plane’s roll. It was like trying to walk in water against the ocean’s undertow: her body sank into the foam cushions while her arms seemed to separate from her as they flailed for forward momentum. She struggled as hard as she could to reach her son. Bubble’s dark eyes gleamed with fear. She imagined he called to her, but the noise was too loud to hear him.
At last, with a jolt, she was unstuck from gravity’s quicksand. She yanked Bubble away from the killer seat belt. He bawled into her neck. She clutched him to her, in a rage at the plane and distrustful of allowing any part of it to touch her son.
“What the fuck is going on!” she demanded into the noise of the engines and, almost as if answering, they were abruptly quieter. Their sudden calm, like the end of a temper tantrum, was a profound relief.
But Leo was screaming without surcease or any suggestion that there ever would be. He didn’t like to get up from naps anyway, and this method of waking hardly improved his reaction. She tried to rock him from side to side, but the constraints of the seat limited her swivel. Her comforting did reduce Leo’s hysteria to sobs. While he cried she clutched the back of his sweaty head, kissing the moist skin of his neck, a hot cream she loved to taste. “Stop necking with my boy,” her husband complained from time to time. It pissed her off that he made something sexual out of what was pure and innocent love. After these two years raising Bubble, it seemed to her that was the difference between men and boys: boys understood only love and men understood only sex.
The plane fell again. Jerked backwards and then dropped. She became a cage around her baby: the long muscles of her tall skinny body felt as stiff and as hard as metal. She had a crazy belief that she could cushion him if they hit the ground, that she would die and he would live.
This drop wasn’t so bad. More like what she remembered of turbulence from the time she flew to Florida and they passed through a storm.
“Is your baby hurt?” a flight attendant asked while on the move up to the front of the plane. Her name was Lisa. She had been friendly and helpful during boarding; she figured out how to fold up Bubble’s new stroller, which seemed to get stuck just at the worst times, such as today when Carla was in the aisle trying to manage Bubble and his bag of things and answer his endless questions or notice what he was exclaiming about. Carla nodded no to Lisa, assuming that if Leonardo was able to scream then he was okay.
Bubble yawned some words through his bawling. She couldn’t understand him. She yelled back, trying to puncture his loud grief and also get through the noise of the plane’s engines, its air vents, and the overhead compartments being reclosed. “Stop crying!” she begged and scolded. “Please, Bubble. I can’t understand you. Did you get a big boo-boo? Stop crying, for Chrissake, for one second and talk so I can understand.”
He’s a baby, Carla, shut up and give him a break.
She often talked to herself in a scolding voice to keep her temper in control. She was famous in her family for her sudden and quickly dissipated rages. From when she was a little baby to her maturity as a wife and mother, everyone who knew her had seen her stamp her right foot, flash her black eyes, and clench her fists so that the muscles and veins in her arms popped the smooth skin. “You look like Popeye with tits when you’re pissed off,” her husband, Manny, teased on their honeymoon. That answered a mystery: the wonder of Manny wanting her. Then she understood that her anger—what scared the hell out of most men—actually turned her husband on.
She hugged Bubble tighter, squashing her breasts. She distracted herself from Bubble’s assault on her right ear (he was crying right into it) by scanning what she could see of the passengers. That wasn’t much, given her angle: her sight was narrowed both by her proximity to the window and because her periphery was blocked by Leo’s bobbing red face. Nobody seemed hurt. Someone had thrown up. A couple of people must have crapped: the smell was disgusting. Out her window she saw land, a flat checkerboard of brown and green squares. The captain had come on. She heard the phrase “…emergency landing…” although Bubble continued to bawl, because the speaker was positioned just above and behind her free left ear. She was crowded by all the noise and glare from the window and the rows of pale blue fabric and the low cream-colored ceiling. Also, the whole body of the plane creaked and rattled, as if all the screws were loose. She wanted out.
“Just get us on the ground,” she answered the captain.
“That’s right,” the man in the seat in front of her said.
The fields below were empty: it looked safe to land there. She thought about what a story this was going to make. Uncle Sal had the scariest airplane story in the family: landing in Las Vegas, his jet’s tires blew out and it had skidded off the runway a few hundred feet. There was lots of excitement in his account: sliding down emergency chutes, fire trucks, TV crews interviewing them later, their choice of a free flight home or a free night in a hotel, compliments of the airline. But if you paid attention you realized most of the danger was in Uncle Sal’s mind.
And that’s what this is going to be: just a good scary story to tell.
But Carla’s plane rolled down…dropping without any hint of a brake…and then swooped up violently.
They all gasped. Bubble’s tears stopped, shut off totally, as if he were a toy. Someone shouted, “Oh God!” That was all there was to it: a sudden ride on a roller coaster, a fast dip down and a quick climb up. It was nothing compared to what had happened before, only it seemed to mean there was something still broken, that their troubles were far from over.
A pilot passed her, heading for the back, where the problem must be. Maybe he could fix it, she hoped, although she knew better. After all, he had no tools and how could he reach whatever was broken?
But with each shiver of fear, the scolding voice in her head told her it was ridiculous to believe that they were in serious trouble: When planes crash they go down right away. This was the big outside world where people weren’t hysterical or stupid like some of her relatives. That pilot who had just gone by looked like a hero; with his sandy blond hair and sharp chin he would figure out how to get them down okay.
“Mommy.” Bubble’s voice was alert. He had straightened in her arms, his heels kicking down, poking her in the stomach.
She was heartened by the clarity and strength in his voice. She was impatient with his crankiness after naps; this was the Leo she adored. “Yes, baby,” she said and squeezed the tall length of his body. Bubble stood on her lap, pressing his tiny sneakers into her, trying to peer over the seats.
“I want a drink,” he said, enunciating so clearly he could have been twenty years old.
“I got some juice. How about that?”
“No!” He disciplined her with the word, like someone instructing a disobedient dog. She recognized that tone as the way she spoke when trying to stop Leo from doing something either dangerous or very destructive.
“Hey! Don’t talk to me that way.”
“Don’t want juice.” He whined this a little.
“Baby, I can’t get you anything else right now. I got some juice in the bag. You want it?”
Bubble didn’t answer. The mess of the plane had gotten his attention. He cocked his head to study the passengers retrieving scatte
red bags, clothes, blankets, pillows. “I smell poop,” he said.
It happened again. Another roller coaster ride. Her stomach flipped and Bubble flopped back: his stumpy legs kicked out, his head crashed into the seat. Carla exclaimed and grabbed him. As the ride came up from the valley she tasted her breakfast at the back of her throat. Get me the fuck out of here, she begged.
“Bubble,” she called to his little face. His eyes were shut tight. “Bubble,” she said and gathered him.
He laughed. From his belly. The way he did when she tickled his feet, a laugh of his whole body. “Funny!” he called out between his hissing laughter.
“Come on,” she lifted him and swung him around so that he would be secure in her lap.
“Do that again,” he said.
“No, no. We got to sit still.”
“Do that again!”
“You want your juice?”
Bubble butted his head back. Carla wasn’t sure if he meant to whack her in the nose (which he did) or if it was simply his willfulness pulling against her lead. For a moment, while her sinuses tingled and her head buzzed she couldn’t talk.
That pilot passed again, heading back up to the front.
“Excuse me,” the man in front of her called to the pilot. “What’s going on?”
But the pilot rushed past, in a nervous hurry.
“Play! Play!” Bubble bucked in her lap. She had to dodge his head, which threatened her with more blows.
“Cut it out!” She hugged him close, crossing her arms in front of his chest. She buried her face in Bubble’s black hair. He needed a cut; it was curling up the back of his neck. He had her hair, or her hair when she was young: so black and shiny your eyes couldn’t accept the color and they would see velvet or glints of amber, but it was only rich black hair, dark and straight. Made Carla think of an Indian in Bubble’s case; her poppa used to say Carla was Cleopatra when she was little.
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