The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

by Polly Horvath

  “She’s not delirious, that’s what they called it,” said Jocelyn.

  “Huh!” said Dr. Houseman, considering. There was a pause, and I wondered if she’d left, so I opened my eyes and there she still stood. She had a large beaklike nose and a careworn face, dark eyes with deep crinkles at the corners, probably from squinting when she tried to see deeply into wounds, and an air of resolute calm, the air of someone who has learned to be this way after a lifetime of being exasperated with the type of things she had to see. Her hair was streaked randomly with gray as if a child had done it with a paintbrush. She wasn’t pretty. I’m not sure if she was even handsome, but she did have likable features. She looked like someone you’d never have to save. She was thin and looked strong, as if she was used to doing all her own lifting. I had the feeling doctoring had been her whole lonely life. You could tell she was one of those earnest people with a purpose that makes them kind of weary and tired in middle age from being always the only serious one in a roomful of people who took life a little easier. As if she knew this made her different and strange and loneliness went with it and it might not have been what she’d have chosen.

  “It would be so much easier if before we were born we could pick our temperaments. So we didn’t get stuck with one that made us unhappy,” I said, completing my long reverie aloud.

  Everyone looked down at me with worried expressions and I began to get a sense of what it must be like to be Uncle Marten.

  “Don’t you think?” I asked and then fell asleep again.

  I lay bedridden, in the worst of my illness, beyond reading or chatting or directing traffic. Unable to do anything but take a few spoonfuls of the soup Humdinger kept bringing me, with Mrs. Mendelbaum on his heels snapping away, “I told you, stop making soup behind my back, ahzes ponim. A tall, goyishe cadaver cannot, can not a proper chicken soup make. I never heard of such a thing. Oy vey, get me a chicken, get me some shmaltz, get me an onion, get out of my way, all of you,” she would say, running into my bedroom after him in her housecoat, her hair flying in six directions at once, her stockinged feet slipping on the floor, a knife in one hand and a chicken in the other. But Humdinger would just calmly take the knife and chicken back and suggest she go to bed. Suggesting people go to bed was becoming his little specialty. She was still very ill herself, said Jocelyn, and Dr. Houseman had prescribed bedrest and Tylenol. Then he’d settle down and make a perfectly reasonable chicken soup with the muttered outraged oaths of Mrs. Mendelbaum drifting down from the second floor.

  Once she came downstairs and looked into the soup pot and yelled “WHAT? NO DILL? What kind of farkuckt soup is this? You cannot have chicken soup without dill.” Mrs. Mendelbaum rolled up her sleeves and began to take the soup over to the sink to throw it out preparatory to starting over, but it was too heavy for her in her weakened state and she dropped the soup pot. I was downstairs getting a water bottle and watched in horror as the greasy soup flew all over the kitchen, flooding the floor and splashing the walls. Mrs. Mendelbaum screamed, and Humdinger pulled her swiftly out of the stream of hot liquid and, after determining that she hadn’t been burned, escorted her back to bed with promises that he would make the soup to her exacting specifications. All of this I watched with some fascination, remembering how Humdinger had just finishing cleaning the kitchen before Mrs. Mendelbaum’s arrival in it. He hadn’t said any of the things I would have been tempted to. When he came back downstairs and began mopping up soup I said, “Do you really think you can’t have chicken soup without dill? Who would notice?” I was trying to be sympathetic and apologetic for Mrs. Mendelbaum’s behavior, since I figured someone in the household should come to his defense, but he said, “It doesn’t matter. Mrs. Mendelbaum isn’t happy and we’re going to make it right for her.”

  MARTEN KNOCKERS

  YOU WOULDN’T THINK it would be so difficult to keep sick people in their rooms, I thought as I watched Mrs. Mendelbaum yelling chicken soup directions over the banister. While Mrs. Mendelbaum and Meline lay ill, I was spending an inordinate amount of time online with my credit card, going from site to site, searching for deep plum and gold Christmas ephemera, napkins and pillows and tree skirts and tablecloths. Especially tablecloths, because Humdinger, who always had well-thought-out timely advice, had suggested a spare might be a good idea in case someone spilled something and rendered the new velvet one unusable. This would not occur to someone like me who never did laundry. In the old days, before Mrs. Mendelbaum, I would just wear my shirts until even I could smell them, and then throw them out. I always bought cheap ones because I did not want to be accused of conspicuous consumption. Even though it was my own money, to do with as I liked, and at that time there was no one to accuse me of anything.

  Because Humdinger encouraged me to buy another tablecloth I ordered three more. On the same site, I ordered large golden angels with flowing blond hair and wreaths of gold filigree to hang on all the doors. These angels gave me more pleasure than anything; they represented something if only I could put my finger on it, some softness associated with virtue, not fire and brim-stone but nurturing. I hadn’t had any religious background or study myself, but the Catholics seemed to have captured something, and all those Italians with their Renaissance Madonnas. I liked the idea of some womanly figure hanging on the walls blessing the house for the holiday season. And then at the end of Christmas packing her into a box again and putting her in the attic. It seemed to me that women were better at this type of thing, this house-blessing thing, than men. But perhaps not. That Humdinger was good at making things run smoothly. Certainly better than Mrs. Mendelbaum. What you wanted was an air of calm confidence and a certain serenity. It was hard for me to believe than anyone was serene a good portion of the time, let alone all the time. I found it a most elusive state myself. I bought shiny golden prisms to hang from the already rococo chandeliers and Victorian lamps. The whole house was beginning to glow with the golden light I was purchasing for it. I filled the inside with the deep plums and the dark piney greens of the woods. The light sank into the velvets and bounced off the glittering sparkling decorations. And every night I saw Jocelyn leave the house, flashlight in hand. Leaving all this light I was creating and going into the dark pouring rain. It was really very odd behavior.

  One night at dinner she wanted to know about animals on the island. “Well,” I said, racking my brain because this wasn’t something I paid much attention to. “Deer and raccoons, of course. Hmmm, what else? Ah!” I said, cutting into the perfectly grilled steaks that Humdinger had put before us, “Bulls! Or rather, a bull!” I remembered Humdinger had mentioned saving a Christmas box from a bull. And now that I thought of it, this was a very surprising thing for Humdinger to have said. “Am I remembering right? Did Humdinger say we had a bull? He must have been mistaken. He must have seen a largish squirrel.”

  The truth was that I was spending far more time these days buying Christmas things than I was working on negative density even though I pretended to myself otherwise. The way the Internet had a hold on me was that I would ponder infinite space for a few seconds and then put a call in to some company selling crystal icicles to hang on trees and then try to keep both things in my mind while I talked to the clerk, which made ordering things by phone take much longer, as the clerk had to separate the physics that crept into the ordering information. I very seldom found a clerk who could talk physics worth a darn. If I had just admitted to myself that it was more fun to order Christmas ornaments than it was to study negative density, the clerks and I might have been spared all this. But no, I kept revisiting the Internet every ten minutes. And I was having more and more trouble with negative density; I did not understand it, so it was becoming something of a bore. The problem, I finally decided, was not that I didn’t understand negative density, it was that I didn’t understand what other people had written about it. Then I had the pivotal revelation that everyone else was just absolutely wrong and I was just absolutely right. That, it turned out, was a
principle that stood me in good stead. Oooo, but speaking of negative density, I said to myself, as I proceeded ahead with my own hypothesis, I wonder if Neiman Marcus has any plum or gold accessories in its online Christmas catalog? And the problem with negative density took a backseat again. My mind now went from the bull Humdinger said he saw to a set of very cute plum floor cushions and a hassock that I could use to replace my current leather one. The plum-colored one was tufted. “And I do so love tufts,” I said.

  “I wish I could have a dog,” said Jocelyn. “Aren’t bulls supposed to be afraid of dogs?”

  “No, tufts, not dogs, tufted hassocks,” I said.

  “No, a dog,” insisted Jocelyn. “You know, a greyhound or a basset hound or a bloodhound.”

  “Don’t get stuck on hounds,” I advised her.

  Apparently Jocelyn told Humdinger that I said she could have a dog and Humdinger had Sam pick up a puppy from the SPCA. When the dog crate was lowered in a harness from Sam’s helicopter a few days later, I, who was looking out my window and didn’t remember anything about the conversation from dinner a few nights before, thought, Is that a dog coming onto the island? Another creature? My God, why don’t they just put up condominiums! It’s too crowded here already. I swear to God I’m going to have to move myself if this keeps up. And I put my dresser in front of my door and forgot all about them until I got hungry and then couldn’t find a way to get out of my room because I couldn’t find the door and had forgotten that the dresser now stood in front of it. At the time, I thought my door had simply, inexplicably disappeared.

  “What,” I moaned plaintively, “is happening to all the doors in this house?” and I sat on my bed eating soda crackers in bewilderment all night from a box next to my bed. It’s a good thing I keep crackers by my bed, I said to myself comfortingly. And then I couldn’t remember for the life of me why I kept soda crackers there and, in fact, couldn’t remember having put them there at all, and all I could think to offer to myself as explanation was that things around here were getting very strange in general. Very strange. I wished I had the cat to curl up with, but she had detected that her usual means of egress was no longer open to her and had gone out the window some time before. A full moon was shining in the sky, illuminating the fields, and I gazed out idly, searching for the rumored bull I kept forgetting to ask Humdinger about.

  I saw Jocelyn out with a flashlight and the puppy. “Out and about at this hour? But they have doors in their rooms,” I said, greatly disgruntled, and fell asleep, exhausted by my unsuccessful attempt to find a door.

  JOCELYN

  “THIS PUPPY THING is not going to work,” I said out loud as I crossed the meadow with the puppy leaping around and straining at the leash. “I need a dog. I wonder how long it takes a puppy to turn into a dog? Probably too long for our purposes. Why did Humdinger get me a puppy? I asked for a dog.” I was talking feverishly to myself. I had discovered that that was what I did when fearful. When I awoke and was alone in the train car, the car leaning on its side, the outside full of fire, I called for my mother and, when no one answered, started walking slowly down the empty train corridor. At some point I started talking to myself, gibbering away a mile a minute, things like “I do not know what I will find. I do not like this all the people are gone and there should be people why did no one come and get me what are those fires out the window they are probably not something very bad.” I kept it up until I saw the first body parts, and after that I did not talk again for a very long time. Now I was in the dark again talking to myself, and I wondered if I would always be in the dark feverishly talking to myself from now on.

  I had never liked being out at this hour, especially not alone. But Meline hadn’t lifted her head or even awakened from her sick sleep any of the times I went into her room to peer anxiously at her. I had been hoping that if I spoke to Meline, she would beg me to wait until she was well enough to join me in the hunt for airplane parts, but for three days Meline had been so sick that it was apparent that she wouldn’t be able to communicate with me at all for a while and that it was now up to me. I didn’t really believe we would find all the airplane parts we needed, and didn’t believe that even if we did, Meline could actually build a plane, but I needed that bit of hope and I needed to be convinced over and over. With Meline ill, I did not have this luxury. I had to believe on my own. And I wasn’t sure I could. I didn’t really understand why we were building the plane in the first place. Meline was so intent on it, she could make me believe in it, too. But without Meline, I wasn’t sure what we were doing to begin with. Tonight, in the dark, it just seemed daft. And the puppy wasn’t helping. He was supposed to be protecting me, but now I found myself worried that a bull would eat him. Did bulls eat small animals?

  “I’m going to have to go farther afield, away from the house, and then what?” I said. Uncle might not believe in the bull, but Humdinger was more reliable than Uncle when it came to, well, almost anything. “I’ll never find the airplane parts. But on the other hand, if I don’t look, what will I do with my time? Alone, rattling around that house with nothing but my thoughts. What will I do at night except dream?” The puppy gave a great tug on the leash. I lost my grip and it raced off. “Oh no. Is it chasing something? Would a puppy be stupid enough to chase a bull? Probably. This on top of everything else. Now I won’t be able to go back until I find the puppy. I can’t leave a puppy out in the rain. And a puppy is going to be even harder to find than airplane parts because it doesn’t reflect light. I haven’t even named it yet. If I call ‘puppy,’ will it come? Why should it? I’m not the one who feeds it. It will run off and get gored. And why do bulls have to go around goring everything? What kind of life is that, to be born wanting to snort and ram everything with your horns? No wonder there are bullfights. As far as I am concerned, that is the bull’s fault.”

  I walked on, straining to hear any sound at all over the rain. “And now I won’t know whether a sound I hear is a bull in the bushes or a puppy. I can’t run from rustling sounds either in case it is the puppy. This is precisely why you should never take on the care of a small defenseless animal. What I really had in mind was a large, mean Doberman. Why did I think I wanted a hound? What good would a hound do in an emergency? Howl the bull to death? But even a hound makes more sense than a puppy. It was very ill thought out on Humdinger’s part. I would go back and tell him right now except I’m soaking wet and—” I cried out. My flashlight picked up the gleam of something in the bush and my first thought was that it was two staring bull’s eyes. “Bull’s eyes, bull’s-eyes.” I fled back across the furrows, getting my feet caught in holes and falling over mounds, scrambling back up without even registering I had fallen. “Bull’s-eyes, where had I seen them? Oh yes, target and archery classes. Targets are so hard to hit. They place them against hay bales. Hay bales would be sodden in this rain. Good thing Saskatchewan doesn’t get rain like this, but I’ll never live in Saskatchewan again. I hadn’t thought of that before. I am never going home.”

  I stopped, as if this thought had activated brakes in my legs, and I stood with my mouth open in the pouring rain, tears flowing down. I was never going home. There was no home. I started running again, fleeing the thought, but my foot caught and I tripped and the wind was knocked out of me. Blissfully, I could think of nothing for several moments but getting my breath back. When I got it back and nothing came galloping out of the dark to gore me, I realized it hadn’t been eyes I had seen. It was metal. I had run all the way across the field from the thing I was seeking.

  MELINE

  THE NEXT MORNING when Jocelyn knocked on my door I could see that she was relieved to find me awake. She dragged something into the room that was covered in an old ripped sheet.

  “Look what I found,” she said proudly.

  I sat up excitedly. “I can’t believe you found something on your own.”

  “Yes, of course I did,” said Jocelyn, sounding irritated.

  “Well, you shouldn’t be dragging
it inside where everyone is going to see it. Why didn’t you just leave it in the barn?”

  “Because I knew you’d want to know what it was and I don’t know how to describe it.” She took the sheet off.

  “Oh,” I said. I could see her problem. It was part of a horizontal stabilizer, but so twisted it was practically unrecognizable. “Well, put it in the barn and we’ll see about straightening it out later. It’s a stabilizer.”

  “I’m leaving it here. I’ll take it out to the barn tonight. I just want to go to bed.”

  “You were out all night until you found this?” I asked because frankly this didn’t sound much like Jocelyn. It was more her speed to go out for ten minutes, decide it was too wet, and come in for hot chocolate and cookies.

  “I found this almost immediately. I spent nearly the rest of the night afterward looking for the darned puppy.”

  “Can we say ‘darned’ if we can’t say ‘crap’?” She looked at me with a stricken face but I was too ill to care. I did not want new friends. I did not want new beginnings.

  MARTEN KNOCKERS

  I PASSED JOCELYN looking like a drowned rat as usual. Well, if she would go out in the rain at all hours. She squinted at me with something like disdain when I spilled my tea. I was trying to walk down the hall with a cup of tea in one hand while reading a book with the other; periodically I would slosh tea and then stop and wipe it up with the corner of my dressing gown. But apparently she wasn’t a girl who properly appreciated the multiple uses of a dressing gown. I had bought myself a deep plum velvet one and some carpet slippers and fancied I looked very distinguished and Victorian. I was practically a Christmas ornament myself! Every time I wiped up tea I’d ask, “What are all these scratch marks all over everything? There are grooves in the floor like someone was dragging something. Why would they do that? It’s that Mendelbaum woman. Oooo, I must give her my list of Christmas goodies to bake.” I marched immediately upstairs to Mrs. Mendelbaum’s bedroom and knocked on her door.