Fearless

by Rafael Yglesias

  Who’s Cleopatra? she asked him.

  The most beautiful woman who ever lived, he said.

  She forgot the plane, didn’t see the humps of blue fabric, the cave-like ceiling, or the recessed lights glowing from its curves. The sun warmed her face and she smelled Bubble’s hair (she had shampooed it this morning so that her mother wouldn’t right away criticize) and remembered her father:

  She saw Poppa’s coarse face, round and pockmarked; his nose was small and curved like a thumb, his tiny teeth were yellowed from the cigars he liked, his hair was all gone. He smiled at her, welcoming…

  Carla gasped and shunted the image away. Her father was dead.

  He’s calling to you.

  “No,” she answered.

  “I want it now!” Bubble told her; he thought she was answering one of his demands.

  “Okay, baby,” she said dutifully, too scared to be amused by their misunderstanding.

  Carla bent down to reach around her feet for her bag. She held Bubble in her lap while bending over, and the strain on her back made her groan. Luckily, the disposable juice carton was on top, bright yellow with slashing red letters, easy to spot and somehow exciting. All the new stuff for babies was great. Manny often complained enviously that when he was little toys were crummy compared to today. There was so much to buy, much more than they could afford, but she wanted to get all of it, not only so that Bubble wouldn’t be deprived, but because she liked the looks of the stuff, all the brilliant new gadgets; and she enjoyed the feeling, the excitement of giving him a new toy.

  But she wasn’t thinking of consumerism then. With her head lowered she could better hear sounds from the plane’s injured structure. The noises it made were scary. The thin floor rumbled, the seats creaked, and the sides seemed to roar, as if there were tigers behind the panels. Was that normal? Had to be, she told herself.

  “I want it,” Bubble said, grabbing for the juice container as soon as she brought it into view.

  “Let me open it,” she yanked the carton away.

  Poking the straw through the designated hole, she punctured the membrane of foil too hard and a jet of juice splashed her cheek. Fear and her baby made managing everything awkward. She had a squirming Bubble on her lap, her feet were unwilling to put their full weight on the floor for fear it would give way, and her squeezed legs were reluctant to rest against the sides because those roaring tigers might tear through any second. After she gave Bubble the carton, she glanced out the porthole window. They were low, close to the ground.

  Good. You see? Everything’s going to be all right. No problem.

  The flight attendants were suddenly on the move: wobbling in the aisles, talking and picking up…shoes? Lisa appeared a couple of seats ahead:

  “Take off your shoes if they have hard heels or soles. Remove all sharp objects from your pockets and stow them in the seat pocket. Eyeglasses also.”

  This is nuts, she thought, and kicked off her shoes, one of her best pairs. She tried to decide if her house keys were considered sharp objects.

  “Ma’am, baby better go in the seat.” Lisa took Carla’s dressy shoes and added them to the armful she was carrying.

  “Don’t want to!” Bubble stiffened his back.

  “We’re going to be landing soon,” Lisa said.

  “At an airport?” the man in front of her asked.

  As if he heard, the captain came on: “We’re cleared for landing at…” She couldn’t hear the airport’s name. “Flight attendants, prepare for emergency landing.”

  Right away Lisa began to yell at them. Carla could see two other flight attendants forward of Lisa do the same as her, shouting with their arms full of shoes—red, black, brown, white, yellow—like a bathtub full of Bubble’s toy boats. Lisa shouted: “Bend over, put your head in your lap. Stay down until the plane comes to a complete stop and then find the nearest emergency exit.”

  The plane took another dive down. Recklessly down. Carla yanked the squirming Bubble against her and winced at the proximity of the earth: “Too close!” she pleaded to the porthole.

  They swooped up from the land. But that was sickening also. Her stomach levitated up from her pelvis to her throat, while the rest of her was pinned down, paralyzed.

  “Cut it out!” Carla said, addressing her advice to the captain. She couldn’t help feeling that he was behaving like a macho teenager, intentionally doing crazy stunts in his souped-up car to scare the girls in the backseat.

  Lisa was almost flipped by the plane’s action. Her knees gave out. She stayed on her feet by grabbing the headrests. The shoes spilled all over, under and around the nearby rows.

  “Come on, baby,” Carla said and pulled at Bubble, trying to get him off her and into the empty seat. His hands and sneakers clung to her clothes like pasta drying on the edges of the boiling pot. There was no one available to help. Lisa and the passengers nearby were preoccupied by picking up the scattered shoes. People made their motions in a quick and jerky manner, nervous that the plane was about to take them for another dip on the roller coaster.

  “Come on, Bubble!” She pried one of his gluey hands off. But when Carla reached for the other hand, he stuck it to her again. “I don’t have time for games!” she yelled into his chubby determined face.

  “No,” he said calmly.

  She shoved him into the seat rudely.

  “Ow!” he complained and kicked at her with his tiny sneakers.

  She grabbed the heavy buckle of the seat belt and pressed it into his puffy belly, pinning him down while she hunted for its mate. What good is this! she yelled silently to herself so as not to scare her son. It’s no infant seat. He’ll get cut in half. She found the other end and locked him in.

  Bubble kicked out his legs, scrunched his shoulders, and let himself slide down, wriggling so that his legs and his stomach slithered off the edge of the seat and the belt came up to his chest and neck.

  “No!” Carla cried in despair. She pushed at his dangling feet to move him up. It was as hopeless as attempting to put toothpaste back into the tube. His rubbery two-year-old body squashed together for an instant, oozing back down the instant she stopped.

  Another swoop…down…

  Carla twisted her neck to glance out the window. A highway—looking very hard and firm—rushed at her…

  The plane swooped up and the gray pavement was gone. Carla flopped back and lost Bubble altogether. He slid until hooked by the armpits. There was frantic activity in the plane. The flight attendants were shouting, pointing. The shoes they had gathered were gone. Where?

  Hurry! she scolded herself. She didn’t have much time. God knows what disaster would happen next. Problems jumped at her out of nowhere, the way they do in nightmares, and there seemed to be a diabolic presence thwarting any progress. She was back at the beginning: the seat belts were endangering Bubble, not protecting him.

  Carla decided to try another method. She pulled Bubble up by the arms.

  “No!” he shouted. His cheeks were bloated with stubbornness; his tiny lips disappeared into a pout of refusal.

  She slammed Bubble against the seat, pinned him with her left hand and pulled at the loose end of the seat belt to tighten it all the way, despite the horrible images of Bubble being sliced in half.

  This is no good.

  “Shut up!” she said.

  “I don’t wanna!” Bubble answered.

  Her plan was fine except that the belt didn’t tighten all the way. She had him immobilized, ready to pull everything taut and secure him, and it was stuck.

  “Fuck!” she said and didn’t even bother to feel bad that she had cursed in front of Bubble. It was a vice she had promised not to indulge before her baby. Not that she had any hope he wouldn’t eventually learn to use bad words: just that he wouldn’t associate them with her.

  “Need help?” Lisa had leaned in. She was a kid, Carla realized, seeing her up close. Her lipstick had been smeared down one cheek and it made her seem even younger, l
ike a little girl who had gotten into her mommy’s makeup. She couldn’t be more than twenty-one.

  “I’ll hold him,” Carla said and allowed Lisa to work on the belt, glad to have both hands for restraining Bubble, who was fighting with every muscle to break free. “Stop fussing,” she said mildly, impressed by the total commitment of his effort to escape. Bubble’s fat cheeks puffed out, his brown eyes bulged, his porcelain nostrils flared, his shoulders narrowed. Carla had to use all her strength and both hands to hold him in position. “You’re crazy,” she told him, cheerful at the thought that she didn’t have to worry about how he would manage in the big world against all the other tough guys. “You’re so stubborn,” she lectured him, but in a mother’s wondering singsong of praise.

  “Damn,” Lisa said after several tugs. She had succeeded somewhat more than Carla, but there was plenty of slack for Bubble to slide through. Lisa paused and seemed to hear something. Had there been a chime? “That’s the best we can do,” she leaned back.

  “That’s no good,” Carla said.

  “Let me go!” Bubble kicked out with his sneakers.

  To illustrate the problem Carla let go of Bubble. Immediately, without shame, he stiffened his back and shoved with his ass. That propelled him down until the belt caught him at the chest and threatened to choke him.

  “It’s going to choke you, Bubble! Sit up!”

  He didn’t care: he wanted to be free at all costs.

  “Hold him in your lap,” Lisa said. “That’s the drill, anyway.” Lisa seemed to hear something, something Carla couldn’t, or didn’t know she was hearing. Lisa ducked her head to get a view out the windows. “Runway,” she whispered passionately.

  Carla followed her glance.

  There was an airport straight ahead. A long gray path with broad painted lines and small flashing lights, blinking their welcome. They were safe.

  Bubble cried out.

  Even as she rescued Bubble, Carla chuckled: he had worked himself so far down that now he was being hung by the neck like the outlaw he was.

  “He’ll be okay in your lap,” Lisa said, moving up the aisle, obviously surer of the situation. “Everyone keep your head down,” she called out as she moved up toward the front. The authoritative and casual tone of the routine had returned to her and the other flight attendants’ voices: “And remain seated until the plane comes to a complete stop. We’ll be on the ground in a few minutes.”

  Carla put Bubble in her lap, nuzzled in his black hair, wrapped her thin muscular arms around his soft squirming body, and squeezed him with pleasure, eager for the scare to be over. We’re safe. Carla hugged him and took another look at the land below. She smiled at its promise of safety.

  3

  While Max took care of Stacy, he saw Lisa across the way, tending to the business traveler in the seersucker suit. He was the man in 33A, but he wasn’t having a heart attack. His shortness of breath was panic; the pain in his chest was fear. Lisa helped him out of his jacket and loosened his tie. He hung onto the Journal, although it drooped in half. In his white short-sleeved oxford shirt he looked older. Lisa seemed young enough to be his daughter.

  Max learned from Mary that the businessman was okay when she joined him in ministering to Stacy. En route she had paused by 33A and Max asked her right away: “Is he having a heart attack?”

  “Are you a doctor?” she asked eagerly.

  “No,” Max said and he felt a profound regret.

  “Oh…I don’t think so. Just scared.” She focused on Stacy. “How you doing, hon?” Mary greeted her colleague with an informality that touched Max; speaking to one of her own she switched off the harsh public-address voice. “Sorry I couldn’t hold on to the cart.” She lifted the bandanna and winced in sympathy: “Ow!”

  “Doesn’t hurt,” Stacy said and moved to rise.

  Mary touched her shoulder. “Don’t be crazy, honey. Everything’s okay. We got it under control.”

  “I can help,” Max said.

  Mary’s virtual crew cut of graying blond hair seemed to harden into a shell as she stared at Max with a lot of suspicion and a little outrage for his making this offer. He had no sexy feelings toward her and this was a relief. “You can help by returning to your seat and buckling up. We’ll be on the ground shortly.”

  Max laughed a little. A sardonic, doomed chuckle.

  “Go back to your seat, sir,” she insisted, turning her public-address microphone back on. She ignored him by calling out to this section of passengers: “Please remove all sharp objects, pens, eyeglasses, and take off any hard-soled shoes. The flight attendants will collect them.”

  Max crossed over to Jeff and his seat. He listened to the plane. Although they were presumably descending there was no whine of back-thrust, no letup in the engines. The machine was fighting just to stay aloft.

  Jeff had the dungarees on. He was stowing a bulky blanket in their overhead compartment. “I put the pants in there,” Jeff explained with a mixture of feverish pride and shame. His partner’s narrow face often resembled a high-strung pedigree, a wary greyhound. The scare Jeff had been through sharpened his angles. His eyes bulged a bit and moved from side to side as if checking for enemies. His mouth hung open, exposing his biggish teeth and their slight overbite; he was almost panting. “What the fuck do they want our shoes for?”

  “So the heels don’t puncture the emergency slide. It’s inflated. They want the pens and other stuff in the seat pocket so we don’t stab ourselves. Move over,” Max said, indicating he wanted Jeff’s seat. He had intended to say something pleasant instead of his gloomy explanation but every time he looked at Jeff he was reminded of their argument at the airport, of Jeff’s contempt for his fear, and that made him want to punish his friend.

  “Why?” Jeff might be scared, but he was still contentious and paranoid. “Is this side safer?”

  “No,” Max said. “But the middle row is. So it doesn’t make any difference. Just move so I can be on this side.” Max wanted this change in order to sneak up to the boy traveling alone and check on him once Mary had finished collecting all the shoes.

  Jeff shifted seats. Max glanced down to see whether the fabric had been soiled by Jeff’s spasm of fear. It was clean. Max settled in and buckled up.

  This is where you’re going to die, Max, he told himself, merely as a matter of fact, satisfying a lifelong curiosity. There was something comforting in this execution of himself: this certain knowledge of when and how.

  Maybe that’s what had me so scared, he thought. Maybe it was the uncertainty of the appointment, not the fact that it had to be kept.

  The captain lost control again. The plane fell. Jeff grabbed his arm. He heard a child’s scream. Was it that boy traveling alone?

  “Get her up,” Max said into the wheezing noise, struggling to live even if he was ready to die. He thought he felt movement under his feet from the mechanisms that should be stilled if the hydraulics were gone.

  They swooped up, just as out of control as when they fell, but at least it was away from the deadly ground.

  “That was bad,” Jeff hissed.

  We can’t land, Max thought. The captain can’t land it with no way to steer. He could imagine the frantic upset in the cockpit, the fury the pilot must feel at instruments that refused to yield to his skill.

  Max looked toward the windows across the aisle. Two rows ahead Mary knelt at the feet of a male teenager, trying to pull off his pink boots. His leather jacket was trimmed with chains and buckles. They trembled with each attempt at freeing his foot from the boot. Above Mary’s head Max saw that the effect of the downward and upward swoops had left the DC-10 lower, perhaps no higher than a few thousand feet. He could see a chain of buildings and silos off to the right, maybe the outskirts of a city.

  But the captain can’t get us down smoothly, Max reasoned. What could he do? Wait until they ran out of fuel? Unable to steer, the pilot would have to chance the first cleared space. He might have to attempt a landing any second
, without warning. Max glanced out the windows again. He saw a mall with a Sears pass them in the distance. The store was several floors high and they were way above it. No, they weren’t low enough for a sudden landing.

  “I should have let you buy us the flight insurance,” Jeff said.

  “What are you talking about?” They didn’t look at each other while speaking. They kept their heads facing forward, braced for the worst. The sun slanted across Max’s jaw and neck, heating him.

  “When you found out this was a DC-10 you wanted to buy some.”

  “I wanted to take another flight!” Max sighed, exasperated not by Jeff’s manipulative alteration of the facts (that was typical) but because he couldn’t hold himself back from being drawn into an argument. I’m about to die and I still can’t ignore him, he thought bitterly.

  “Oh? Yeah…but you also wanted to get some insurance, right?”

  “Are you actually worried—”

  The plane flopped in the air again, dropping into the hollow of the wave and riding up its back, an awkward surfer. They were silent until it was level. Mary had gotten one of the teenager’s boots off and was at work on the other as they took the wave. She ended up with her head between his knees. When she rose from this position she had a pained expression on her face. Max assumed she had been inadvertently kicked in the stomach by the pink boot. She got to her feet and moved away without the second boot. The teenager hurried to work on removing it himself.

  Jeff banged Max with his elbow: “What were you going to ask?”

  “What do you care about the insurance?”

  “We have wives and children, remember? When it seemed like we were going to crash that’s all I could think about. I mean, if we die, there’s no business. How are they going to make it?”

  Max relished this moment. He moved his head to see the effect: “Jeff, I got news for you. I overheard the co-pilot talking to the head flight attendant. We’re not going to make it.”

  The greyhound was stilled. Jeff’s mouth stayed open, his teeth exposed to the air, but the panting was arrested and his eyes no longer nervously scanned the periphery. “What’d they say?”