What is more, the problem with his hip is not intrinsic, not a disease; it is the result of an accident. Someone caused it—kids who knocked him down and robbed him in front of his hotel on a cruise to Mexico. All this he gives out in short puffs of speech with no full stops. “Hip”—prods under jacket—“Pinned twice: replaced the thing: won’t heal—” I catch a whiff of cologne. This man would never say, “All of a sudden I was lying on my back looking up at the orange sun, and a voice was speaking, saying ‘dolor,’ and the pain was shooting everywhere.” On the other hand neither would he say, “I know it’s not a matter of deserving or not deserving this but I feel it has made me take a closer look at my life and I see that—” He has a Knights of Columbus monogram on his bag. Of Lourdes he has the businesslike expectation of an appointment to be kept by two. “Crutches: think I’ll leave ’em?” he says, nudging me, sensing a doubter. “I hope so,” I say. Perhaps there will be a cave-storeroom piled with crutches.
A man across the aisle crossed his legs and poked out a stump with a sock on it. I don’t believe one-breasted-ness produces in the viewer the immediate vicarious anguish of one-footed-ness. He licked his finger and flipped the pages of the airline magazine. Of course that man isn’t going to Lourdes to pray for a foot. At one time I would have said so, a while back, though that far back I would not have done a program on Lourdes. I would not have wanted to embarrass the good Virgin of my childhood or myself if, dazed with jet lag in the grotto, I heard myself ask for a miracle. But on the trip to Lake Powell I changed my mind. If you ask at all, why not for a miracle. Like the accidentals in music, the notes that are not in the key signature. It might not be the heaving water calmed, or anything so plain.
At Lake Powell we heard about a rabbit that fell out of the sky onto a tent, shook itself, and hopped away. People who had just come in from camping in the desert were telling us about it on the pier as we waited for our boats. An eagle dropped it, they reported. Who knows how many wonders befall animals. An animal would be more accepting, unable to marvel to begin with.
I thank the old man and turn to the woman on my right, the dazed woman. It seems she has been waiting; her cheeks are a hot veiny red. “No, excuse me, the gentleman—!” She leans forward to address him, not me. My boss Charlie calls this dating—as, “You let them date all through the show, you should have taken charge.” “Sir—sir? Those boys who robbed you in Mexico were in the wrong. But what if your own son did something like that?”
The old man is not to be ruffled. He stops her with a commanding palm. “Pardon me: this calls for—” The flight attendant has just reached us, that smiling big-eared young man I feel sure I know. We all smile back at him. His face is one of those mysterious human sights that refresh you. After a moment I see what it is, I see he looks like Alfred E. Neuman, if you can imagine that face groomed and somehow matured. The old man, who should properly utilize the attendant in the other aisle, calls out, “The burgundy, if you please, sir!” lifting a white eyebrow and holding up his fingers to indicate two. “And—” he rummages briskly—“the ladies.” He is going to treat us.
“Wonderful,” says the flight attendant—who must have been picked for this particular charter—in a pleased voice fresh as the celery he has ready in a glass of ice. “Sharon,” he calls, “I’ll take care of the gentleman here. Ladies? Red or white?” and this choice seems, as he offers it, such a pleasant one, so emblematic of all we have to choose from in life, that we sigh one after another, “Red.”
The woman won’t wait. “My son was responsible for a terrible crime!” On her sleeve the nun’s hand begins to pat. I’m ready; I know the way people will sometimes talk when the tape is running, the formal and even pious language they will summon up. Was responsible. Like orthodox: it means the same as its opposite. He was responsible for it.
“He needed money for speedballs.” Ah! Voice of brown permanent, glasses, little parish-council face, saying “speedballs.” “He was high. Very high. We don’t even know what it means, the rest of us.”
Who says we don’t? I’ve had enough Percocet to hurt somebody for fun. Sure. If the nurse with the wrong books had come in at just the right moment . . . when that octane was flowing in . . . who says I wouldn’t have drawn my knees up and let fly with both heels at her soft stomach?
I’ll do a voiceover on the pause where we let down our trays for plastic glasses and wine, and screw open the little snapping lids. Maybe I will. Let the voice fade into the background noise and come back up farther down the line.
“He didn’t know what he was doing. People died. A young couple.”
That’s enough. I don’t want to be told. I don’t want the rumors of earth up here, I’ve left its cities behind, I’m flying to Lourdes. At my most earthbound I don’t do crime stories.
“I’m just . . . I’m just about . . . because my son . . .” She groans, loudly enough to make people turn around. “This young couple . . . and he came through the window. And there, there, there . . . !” Her hands make that up-held gesture from paintings of the martyrs.
We fill our glasses. The old man keeps sipping and nodding, as if what the woman has said comes as no surprise to him, merely confirms his own experience. The nun is shaking her head. Seeing the woman’s distress, and the recorder, the attendant has paused to listen, turning his big semitransparent ear to us.
“So”—she draws a deep breath—“he did that. He did.” She squashes the paper-covered pillow to her face and scrubs the skin with it. Then she jams the pillow against her belly and doubles over with another sound, this one harsh, explosive, and absolutely abandoned, more a belch than a groan, a noise a cow or a horse might make in the barn.
I brought this on, with my little mike. I thought she was going to stick with “responsible.” It’s my fault. After a minute I say, “I’m sorry and I see what you mean about those kids in Mexico. I have a son. I’m sorry.”
“Nossir: mama’s right there!” The old man hastens to set me right. “Selling trinkets! We’re nothing but tourists to them! American tourists! Parents put ’em up to it.” Forgetting, because he is old, everything the woman has been saying about her son. She doesn’t look at him but her companion does, with a wondering distaste. A deep, surprising rumble, the voice this sister produces at last. “I believe that’s a popular myth about crime in poor countries.”
The woman has pulled herself erect and allowed the cushion to be slipped behind her, and she rolls her head on it. “You have a son.” She’s talking to me. “Let me tell you something. If you see drugs you take him to the hospital.” Each time she says “you” she points at me, right up near my collarbone. I am sure she was once a woman who would never have pointed. “You make them lock him in. If they won’t, you don’t leave. Oh, God. No wonder I’m in an institution.”
“You’re not, you’re in Martha House.” The nun glares across the thrashing woman at me.
“You make them. You don’t let them tell you, Go home. You tell them. Or you’ll never, never . . . you’ll be like me. I can’t read a book any more. I can’t pray the rosary! I can’t drive a car.” All together we drink, as if there has been a toast.
“Never mind that. Why not tell them a bit about your son,” the growl-voice says calmly, with no sentiment at all. “He liked to read, didn’t he? He was good at drawing.” She’s setting up a known routine; she speaks as though the woman’s son, long dead, can show himself decently as a child.
“There was a fairy tale he liked,” the woman begins obediently, her forehead smoothing out with that look that goes with the repeated, the taken-out-and-unfolded, the engraved stories. “A little pig found a marble that turned him into a rock . . .”
“Sylvester and the Magic Pebble!” But I stop myself; this is no time for yelling out, “That’s not a fairy tale, everyone knows that book!” Instead I say quietly, “It was actually a donkey.”
“Are you sure?” she says dreamily. “Well, this—donkey’s parents went out to look for
him. They looked everywhere and years and years went by . . .”
I know this story. I have read it to my son, regretting that it is not one of his favorites. It’s a book parents read aloud at night with tears in their eyes.
Staring in front of me at the seatback, where there is a phone, I am lost for a minute in missing my son at bedtime, unmoved though he has always been by the boy turned into a rock and, worse, by the parents—who are somehow old in the illustrations—as they search and search. Unmoved by any of it. The despair of it. The hopeless decision the parents make one spring day to go on a picnic.
Unmoved. It is good that he is so. A sign, a small sign, of strength. I say to myself, there’s a phone right here, I can call him.
The woman’s son had another reaction altogether. “Every time I would read it, he would hum. He couldn’t stand to hear it! You see? This was a boy they said was heartless. Heartless, they said, at the trial. He’d put his hands over his ears and hum the whole time the pig was a rock.”
“And then he’s released!” I say. Uh-oh. The nun has a repertoire of black looks. She thinks I mean the son. The woman knows, though. Surely she remembers the ecstatic ending of this story. She must remember that. I remind her, I urge her on: “They spread the tablecloth on him! They find the pebble and put it on him by chance while he’s wishing!”
“Never was he heartless,” she replies in a dry, tearless whisper.
“No, no,” the nun, who seems blessed with no skill but patting with her hand, concludes the matter with a last scowl at me.
I can’t do anything with this anyway; I’ll have to start all over again in another direction when we get to Lourdes. The woman squeezes her eyes tightly shut when I thank her, and weakly waves me away as she lets her head fall on the nun’s shoulder.
I switch off the recorder and lean back. There in the seatback in front of me—the sight of it filling me with an almost intolerable desire to wake my son up so that he can speak to me—is the phone.
I didn’t want to think, on this trip. It’s as simple as that. But it’s too late. My mind, steered by force away from my son’s sleeping form in the dark bedroom where my husband must have finished reading to him hours ago, wanders and fidgets over his routines, and alights on his school. I can’t stand his teacher. I say this to myself with deep, poisonous pleasure, up here in the sky. Not just because of her “Mom,” her “Let us take care of everything.” She’s the only teacher, so who is this us? The living? The little Flores boy, this snub-nosed young woman says with an apologetic grimace, just pollutes the classroom. That’s her word, pollutes. I wonder if she would say it on tape.
It’s Rafe, the boy my son is afraid of, of course. Ms. Lemoine is recommending that Rafe be steered to a more suitable school, where there are other children with a similar learning style.
“That’s Rafe,” my son says with pride, indicating with his shoulder, afraid to point at him. No one plays near Rafe. He kicks over the Lego buildings, pees in the sand pile. Of course he does. Tortures the cat saved from the pound to show the kindergarten birth.
He is heading for major trouble. He’s heading for the pound himself.
Under the shadow hairline the little beast-face. Poor little devil. An idea rises in me rather grandly and stupidly, unsure it has been untied, like a hot-air balloon. One of those large ideas that sometimes exert a force on you in an airplane. Ah. No. Not at all what it says in The Problem of Pain! It says, if I remember . . . that the pain of animals, their tearing each other to ribbons, their dying, does not figure into the equation. But if anything is left out . . . if pain . . . or rather evil, if they are not the same thing . . . if anything is left out . . . But it’s no use. As fast as it came to me the whole contraption bobs and drifts away. I can’t get it back.
FIRST there was the head appearing, coming up the ladder. My husband carrying something under his arm like a bedroll. Bringing it up from the dark beach.
It was our son. The sight copied itself on the way to me, coming by degrees as if I were blinking. This is the way the lightning of reason blinks through the mind, too swift, too hot for one steady cut. He was dead, drowned, and I would soon be dead! With an awful thrill, I inhaled the cold green air and held it. In a rigor of pity for my husband I dragged my eyes to his. But he knew our son was not dead.
A sound echoed out over the wind. I reached up. My boy was ice cold, wet, laughing. “I went swimming! I got my head wet! Dad didn’t but I did!” He shook his wet hair onto me. I reached up. His cold skin sanded my palms as he planted his freezing kiss on me. “I swam!”
In the middle of the night the boat yawed, bumped—what were these intermittent thuds coming from the underside of it, like a huge stymied heartbeat?—and strained at the ropes. We were all three frozen in the wet sleeping bags. Miraculously, two had gone to sleep.
I did not notice right away that the wind had stopped and that I was hearing the water lap against the hollow pontoons with a chop-licking sound. I had pulled way back, up into the night, and was looking down at a walled ocean with tiny rocking huts sheltered in every inlet.
I unfolded my sour limbs and got up unsteadily, my bare soles squishing on the indoor-outdoor carpet, to rummage for the tape recorder. In the dark I whispered the date to it. I was ready to continue but nothing came to me. I sat there, sliding against the wall and slumping forward, back and forth, with the boat’s movements. I sat there for a long time, maybe an hour.
It was then I received the augury. I saw birds, four of them, long-billed shorebirds of a tawny pink color, and transparent, like tinted cellophane. A foamy tide ran in and out around their feet. One, slender and high-stepping, stretched its neck and flapped its wings. All of this with no sound. That one was young and was, I knew as you do in dreams, my son. About the others—the adult ones, the three adult ones—something could not be put into words at all, but I knew it. That I passed over, in the dream.
So my son would make it through adolescence, into a long-legged, proud stage. He would get that far.
Off to one side and above the beautiful, backlit sandy reach on which these birds were stepping, hovered, or actually sat in midair—its wings were folded—an owl. It was smaller than a spotted owl. It did not really have the implacable eyes of owls, but half-closed, rather sleepy, childish eyes. Words came from it. I saw, or read, or almost heard them, words of the deepest comfort. Not the words themselves but a hum, a bird-signification. Some note at a very low frequency was aimed toward me and meant . . . I don’t know what it meant.
I knew at the time but I lost it when I woke up. I felt wonderful. I was at home. I thought, I’ll call Tracey, she’ll love this, and I did, but she had died. Then I really woke up, and saw that I was on the houseboat.
It was palest morning. Not a single bird. Orange-tinted boas of cloud were lying on nothing, above the water and halfway up the stone chimneys. All around us the air had a faint tremble and a taste, like air in a room where the TV has blown out. The thorny weeds had exhausted themselves against a shelf of rock; the sky was a swept-clean floor.
THE sister sighs. She is too old, older than the old man; she has worn herself out in Martha House, cleaning up after sick, messy, dislocated women with somber grievances. The old man is even now—accepting no rebuff, squinting out of one eye in the quickly achieved tipsiness of age—making an effort to bring things to a satisfactory conclusion. “Now, sacrifice . . . Now, the Blessed Mother . . .” I know this old man; he is a lordly old Midwestern tithing Catholic of a disappearing kind, apt to fall into teasing reference to saints and sacraments on the golf course or at the dinner table. He’s the type, with his expensive shoes, his “if you please,” to have some right-wing justification for capital punishment in the back of his mind, that he’s too chicken to mention openly to the mother of a criminal son.
On the other hand he could be simply comparing the confused grieving woman to the Blessed Mother.
I don’t know. There’s no way to know.
I
won’t ask anybody anything for the rest of the flight. Why do I have to? I don’t have to. I’m going to make a telephone call and then I’ll rest. I’ll go to sleep.
We bank sharply, perhaps avoiding something, some unimaginable night-sky traffic, and for a time I can see the crescent moon gliding from window to window as the plane slowly rights itself.
Someday my son’s kindergarten class will laugh at the elephantine maneuvers of jets. They will have their own wonders, as I have lived to see the day when a telephone call can be made from an airplane.
In India the face you see immediately after looking at the new moon—is this the new moon or the old? I have forgotten how to tell. How few I have actually stored, of these alchemical facts! If the face you see is the face of a good man, it will bring you luck the whole year. Don’t look down on luck, bedraggled though it may be when you pull it up out of the jumble and see it is yours, all tangled with planets, clouds, wind, inventions, dolls, pebbles, birds going left or right.
The face of a good man. Oh, where is the flight attendant with his tender smile? But it’s too late, I’ve glanced at the old man, who has gained no satisfaction from the sister and is opening his third burgundy. All right. So be it.
I excuse myself in a businesslike way, and pull my card through the slot. I know the number. I have something to say to that young woman, my boy’s teacher, advocate of stability, of security, that she is. Take back what you said. Pollutes is a serious word, at St. Joseph’s school. You can’t expel that boy, the Flores boy! His name is Rafe. You have a lot to learn.
No one answers at the school, because it is night.
Please leave a message. I will. I’ll leave a message.
Not so long ago the answering machine, “machine” now everywhere on earth, belonged to very few. All that was required was the assembly of separate inventions to call it into existence, and already it is giving place to something else. Soon if you are not there, there will be a hologram of yourself to deliver your messages, simple enough for a child to operate, and even if he stretches his hands right through it, it will not go away.
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