“Come on!” he shouted at Byron, who seemed paralyzed, lying motionless, suspended above the ground by a hammock of cornstalks. On his feet, carrying the baby in the infant seat, Max was surprised that his own body worked so well. He glanced down at his jeans and white sneakers and saw no blood, no soot, nothing: he had escaped pure and untouched.
A man in a white T-shirt and jeans caught Carla as she jumped down from a part of the plane she didn’t recognize. Nothing made sense. The airport was gone. Behind the man and the other people running at her was a farm field, nothing else.
“My baby,” she told him and couldn’t talk, ashamed.
Sirens and people answered her. She couldn’t stand up. Carla slid down onto the T-shirt, resting her head against the belly massed above the belt.
He said something about her leg. But not to her.
“My baby!” she screamed hard, because of all the noise and because she couldn’t be sure of how much volume she was producing.
“Where’s your baby?” This question was asked by a different face, a young one, with shining brown eyes. He seemed to know the truth of what she had done.
“I don’t know!” she begged him to believe her.
“Move it. They’re going to douse her,” a different person answered.
Why? Why do that to me?
“My baby!” With this pronunciation she confessed her cowardice and also told him where to look. His brown eyes didn’t seem to get her meaning, but they grew lighter and forgiving.
“I’ll find him,” he said and was gone.
“From there,” said the belly carrying her, not talking to her. “Here, put your arm around—”
She was lifted above the green trash which had swallowed her feet. Now she could see more. There was the airport and everywhere there were people and cars and fire trucks and openness. She could see the sky and the buildings and soon the ground turned hard underneath and the fact came running at her…Racing alongside all the people was the fact—
Bubble is dead.
“No!” she doubled over. She pushed at the T-shirt and looked back at the horror.
The plane was smashed on the ground, broken in huge pieces like a great animal felled and dismembered and feasted on by insects. They crawled everywhere, spraying water and insinuating into its wounds.
“My baby!” she showed where he must be. In her head she could see Bubble trapped, perfectly fine and happy, but scared, caught inside the smoking tube surrounded by mangled corpses. The T-shirt and a woman in white didn’t pay attention. She pushed at them and ran back.
Only she couldn’t. There was a sharp tug in her left calf, a clean slicing stab, and she fell.
It’s broken, she knew. And she knew that her injury wouldn’t be enough, wouldn’t satisfy God at all. A broken leg was not enough and she sobbed at the woman in white and the T-shirt because nothing would ever make up for this.
5
Max carried the baby and urged Byron through the high rows of corn until they were past the smoking filet of plane and could see a mob of rescuers running at the wreck from their trucks and cars. The fire fighters raced at the mechanical corpse without hesitation, charging both on foot and in their vehicles.
How brave, Max thought. Passengers stumbled out of white and black snakes of smoke. A man whose pants were torn off and whose shirt was bloodied fell onto the runway as an ambulance reached him. Fire fighters scurried into the jet’s various wounds. It was all so sad and hopeless: they were pygmies unable to save their toppled idol.
Max had to restore the baby to its mother. He believed she was alive although he had no fact to support his faith or any idea who she was. The infant might belong to a number of couples he had noticed while boarding: there were at least a half dozen babies on the plane. Max also felt Byron needed to be restored to normal authority and life. The boy had been dangled over a limitless chasm; he ought to be yanked back to a flat safe world as quickly as possible.
Max carried the infant seat in the crook of his left arm and held Byron’s hand with his free one, guiding him out of the cornfield and onto the runway. There were dozens of tiny cracks in its gray surface that Max had never observed through an airport’s tinted glass or a plane’s plastic windows.
The baby made no sounds. It stared calmly at Max. Byron winced at the hot concrete. His shoes had been collected by the flight attendants. Max was protected by his sneakers. The sun inflicted its glare and heat everywhere, soaking into the pavement and flashing off windows and trucks.
“Ow,” Byron complained. He skipped on the balls of his feet.
Their progress toward the rescuers seemed to be in slow motion. Nobody noticed them. All eyes were on the three sections of the wreck. A long jet of foam peed from the top of a fire truck onto a smoking engine. Passengers continued to appear from the wounds of the DC-10. There were shouts and sirens and an ominous hiss from the plane.
“Look!” an ambulance man pointed at Max.
And then lots of people noticed him, only it couldn’t just be him and he turned to glance back. Behind him, like ghosts, walking at a slow stunned pace were maybe fifteen or twenty people, emerging out of the cornfields.
Quickly they were surrounded by a variety of helpers, in uniform and out. A man lifted Byron and it was only then that Max saw one of the boy’s legs had been scraped and he was bleeding.
“Whose baby is this?” Max shouted back at the other passengers. He called to one woman. “Is this your baby?” But she didn’t even seem to see him, much less hear what he said. He recognized her as one of the blond mothers he had noticed on the plane traveling with all those look-alike blond kids; None were as young as the baby he held. And none were with her.
“Help!” That was Byron’s voice.
Max turned and saw that Byron was reaching for him.
“Don’t worry,” the man carrying Byron said. “Your daddy is right here.”
“I’m not his daddy.”
Byron still had his hand out, yearning for Max.
“Take care of him,” Max told the volunteer. “Who are you?” he added lamely.
“Red Cross,” the man said. Max was surprised by the speed of their arrival until he remembered there had been about twenty minutes while the jet was in trouble in the air. Plenty of time for all the services to be prepared on the ground.
“He’ll get you back to your parents,” Max told Byron and the boy actually had me presence of mind to nod his agreement. “He was traveling alone,” he told the Red Cross man.
They reached the ambulances and trucks. Max leaned against a green station wagon. Three bags of groceries were loaded in the rear. He noticed a box of Rice Krispies. Byron was carried off toward the airport buildings. Max wanted to close his eyes but he thought he would die if he did. He pushed off the car and moved toward the other collection point of surviving passengers—a pair of ambulances parked near an open hangar.
He walked holding me infant seat outstretched, offering it to each person he approached. “Is this your baby?” he called to a woman who was in hysterics, but he realized the moment his question was out that she was in her sixties.
A few rescuers blocked his path. “Are you okay?” one said.
“I got this baby out,” Max answered. “Maybe we can find the mother.”
“You weren’t in the crash?” a paramedic in white uniform asked. She bumped shoulders with him and looked closely into his eyes.
Max shook his head no, hoping she would ignore him. “I found this baby,” he repeated. He just wanted them to make an announcement or something so he could relieve the mother’s anxiety.
“Over here!” a fire fighter shouted at him and bounced up and down. A hatchet on his belt danced. He looked fake, someone in costume. “This way!”
Max was urged along until he reached a woman seated on the edge of a station wagon’s back panel. Her head was bowed and the hair cut in a pageboy style; the bangs obscured her face. She was small; her feet dangled without reaching t
he pavement. As she lifted her face to look at him he was impressed by her youth. She was hardly older than a teenager.
“Is this your baby?” he asked his forlorn question.
For a moment she stared lifelessly. Then she was on him, frantic. She grabbed the infant seat as if Max had meant to do her baby harm. She knelt on the ground, unstrapped her child, and clutched it desperately, repeating its name in between wild kisses.
Max was crying. The tears came down his cheeks. He felt them hang and drip off his jaw. One curved around his chin. When he tried to wipe it away his palm slid off into the air.
The doctor in the hangar injected Carla with something, something that made her feel she was atop a mass of large cushions, that every muscle could give up and leave the living to these giant pillows, each one devoted to relieving her of the slightest effort. In fact, she lay on a portable cot beside a number of other injured passengers.
She told the T-shirt man Bubble’s age and size and general appearance. She knew he was thirty-seven inches and weighed thirty-four pounds because he had gone for his twoyear-old checkup last week.
“I’ll find him and bring him to you,” T-shirt said. After he left, Carla decided he must have had a reason for being sure that he could succeed. Maybe very few passengers were dead. She knew some were because…
There was a nausea that accompanied any recall of the sights she had passed while running out of the plane, especially of the body she had fallen on. If she forced the ghastly images away then her stomach settled. She made a great effort to raise herself up and look at her right arm to check whether that corpse’s blood was still there. No. Maybe she had imagined it. Maybe things weren’t so bad.
Her leg was in a cast, or a kind of cast, something that the doctor had been able to put around her calf instantly. It was inflated and held in place by straps fastened with Velcro. She felt a dull sensation, not pain really, right below her knee. The doctor told her it was broken although there hadn’t been an X ray—
Why wasn’t she thinking of Bubble?
She was a horrible person. Selfish and scared. She had learned that in the plane.
The hangar had a tall ceiling, vast and curved like an old-fashioned train station or a cathedral. Her head fell back on the pillows. She stared into the receding dark of the roof.
Please bring him back, she asked God meekly. I’ll do better next time.
She waited for someone to answer. She wasn’t dumb or crazy, she knew God wouldn’t. But wouldn’t He send someone? Or was Jesus himself scared?
She felt hot although the hangar was cool. She shut her eyes.
She was floating on waves. She opened her eyes and saw a man carrying her into an ambulance.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Going to the hospital.”
“Get your leg fixed up,” a voice from behind added.
“What about my boy?” It took all her energy to speak. She couldn’t lift herself either. A weight had her pinned, as if someone were sitting on her.
“Everybody’s going to the hospital.”
They slid her into the ambulance. She saw sky out the window, that soft perfect blue sky which makes people say, “Oh, it’s such a beautiful day,” and she thought—
He’s dead.
The thought hurt. She wept. The tears rained on the cruel fact and she just didn’t care, didn’t care where they were taking her or whether she would ever get up from lying down.
She couldn’t stop crying. One of the medics held her hand. He had a plump face, small dark eyes, and messy brown hair. She noticed all that but she kept on crying. She wanted her head to feel, not think about what happened, not judge, not hope.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“New York,” she stammered between sobs.
The medic nodded and covered her hand with his other. “Does the leg hurt?”
She had forgotten all about it. “My baby,” she bawled.
That made him look away. He knew something. He knew Bubble was dead.
She stopped crying and felt cold. The perspiration covering her was chilled; she felt as if a thin blanket of ice had been thrown over her. She shivered.
The medic’s attention returned. He noticed her condition and fussed, covering her with another blanket and taking her pulse. Her head lolled toward the window. Outside the sky remained empty and pretty. She couldn’t find a single cloud, not even a wisp. In the plane she remembered they flew above a puffy floor of them.
She felt Bubble in her arms again, his sweaty head bouncing underneath her chin, his stomach pushing against her hands.
Why couldn’t she remember losing him? She had him and then he was gone and she couldn’t remember. Why?
She was uneasy about herself and her actions. She shouldn’t have allowed them to carry her off. She shouldn’t have left the airport.
Carla braced her elbows against the stretcher and pushed up.
The medic said, “Whoa,” and gently stopped her progress with a hand, coaxing her to lie down.
“I can’t go to the hospital without my son. I got to go back and help them find him.”
“Everybody’s out of the plane. They’re taking everybody to the hospital, okay? You’ll see him there.”
He was lying. He didn’t know a thing about Bubble.
She was nauseated suddenly, so powerfully that she threw up all over the blankets without giving a thought to how disgusting she was being.
“I’m sick,” she told them after it was out.
“Jesus,” one of them muttered.
She fell back and watched the blue sky while they cleaned her up.
Max accepted a drink of orange juice from a Red Cross volunteer and watched the mother and baby enjoy their reunion. He moved away from them, however, in order not to overhear whether they had been traveling with the father. He didn’t want to learn that she had been widowed.
He caught sight of the blond mother standing beside a fireman, intent on the people and bodies they brought out of the wreckage.
A man wearing a uniform and a name badge and carrying a clipboard with what Max presumed to be the DC-10’s passenger manifest stopped at his elbow. “Were you on the plane?” he asked breathlessly, pen ready to check him off.
Max disliked this fellow. Although the airline official was in his twenties, his hair had thinned, his belly had grown, and he had the nervous sweaty manner of a middle-aged bureaucrat. Max crumpled the half-sized paper cup and shook his head no.
The airline man frowned at this response and hustled over to the blond mother. She answered him, her mouth moving angrily. She gestured at the plane, pointing.
Where had she been sitting? Max tried to find which of the three sections of destroyed plane had been hers. It was the first part. A bite had been taken out of the right side of that piece. It was charred and disintegrated, scarring the cornfield. Max turned away.
I’m alive, he thought without shame. He looked at the glass walls of the terminal. A gang of people had stayed indoors to watch. He walked toward them.
His face was very hot. Nobody stopped him from entering the terminal. He didn’t know what airport this was, although it was obviously somewhere between New York and Los Angeles. He found a water fountain just inside the building’s doors. A reporter and a cameraman came through jangling equipment and went out onto the runway while he splashed himself with cold water.
Jeff is dead.
That was a complicated thought and he had no desire to consider its implications.
He walked away from what had everybody else’s attention, making a reverse commute into the heart of the building. The baggage carousels were bare and still. The car rental counters were deserted. The ticketing terminals flashed green at nobody.
He found a newspaper vending machine. The local paper inside told him he was in Canton, Ohio. If he remembered correctly then he was at the home of the Football Hall of Fame. That seemed funny.
“My big chance,” he said alo
ud.
Max went out the airport building entrance. He saw a few empty cabs. Farther along, standing at the edge of a chain-link fence, were a number of men who might be drivers. They were watching the wreck and the rescuers. A bench against the wall invited Max to sit, and he was tired enough to accept, but he wanted to keep going, to move away from the crash and its cover-up, the steady accumulation of details all designed (he knew this now, understood the process so much better) to reassure the rest of humanity that it couldn’t happen to them.
He walked up to the men and asked if they were taxi drivers.
Two said yes, one a haggard young man with long unkept hair, the other a fat elderly man wearing an electric-green short-sleeved shirt.
“Is there a good hotel nearby?”
“Sheraton’s the best,” said the young man.
“Give me a ride there?”
The young man looked at the scene: at the trucks, still spewing liquid; at the smoking slices of plane; and farther back, at the hangar where a semicircle of survivors limped into the arms of volunteers or peered back in shock or wept beside the ambulances and cars. “Think I should stick around,” he said, leaning his elbows into the fence.
Max noticed that a man on the other side of the driver was recording the scene with a home video camera.
“I’ll take you,” the fat man said.
Max followed the shimmering green shirt to a white station wagon.
“No bags?” the old man asked Max before getting in.
The interior had been cooked by the sun. Its upholstery smelled of manure. “Sheraton?” the driver asked.
Max nodded. He felt guilty, as if he were fleeing a crime.
With tantalizing slowness and grace the old man drove around the circle that led them out of the airport. He had to dodge a number of cars stopped at random, presumably abandoned by rescuers in too big a rush to park properly. “Were you in that crash?” he asked as they straightened out and exited onto a regular road.
Max denied it with a vigorous shake of his head. “Thank God,” he added.
Fearless Page 5