The engine was loud, and cold air leaked into the cabin of the little seaplane in squealing fissures through the fuselage. Dad turned to me with a conspiratorial smile. “Your mother would never have gone flying like this.” He said it as if she were dead.
“You’re right,” I agreed. But I also knew that he never would have invited her.
“I’m glad you could come.” He had to shout this over the noise of the engine and the wind coming into the plane.
“Have you ever taken Eric up here?”
“He’s always too busy to visit,” my father said. “The big brain surgeon has more important things to do than visit his old dad.”
“How much more flying,” I asked, “until we get there?”
My father mocked me. “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”
“Well,” I laughed, “are we?”
He turned his wrist so he could see his watch. He wore it military style, face on the inside. “A couple of hours,” he said. “Can you handle the wait?”
Patricia leaned toward us, saying, “If you guys are hungry, I mean, if you’re hungry right now, I packed some sandwiches and sodas for the ride. I have everything handy. Plus, there’s coffee.” She was leaning over me, directing this mostly to my father, and as she did so she pressed her right breast against my left shoulder. It felt surprisingly large and soft. Was she even wearing a bra? I had never thought of Patricia’s breasts before. She turned to me, as if acknowledging my thoughts. “Pilot,” she said, “would you like something?”
“Coffee,” I said. “I’ll have some of that.” For once, I had skipped it this morning. I had been trying to stay away from any stimulants for a while. It had been Katherine’s suggestion, actually. But now I thought I needed some. I watched Patricia, my neck craned around, with the new thought about her body under her clothes, as she poured from the thermos into the cap.
“It’s black,” she said. “Is that all right with you?”
“Perfect.” She looked so uncomfortable back there, surrounded by all the things we had packed. “Do you want to switch seats?” I said. “Are you sure you’re all right back there? You’re not all scrunched up?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m just fine. I ride in this crazy airplane of his all the time.” She smiled warmly. “You sit up there and enjoy the view.”
I took the thermos cap of coffee and sipped. It tasted like bitterness itself. We flew in silence, then, the propeller roaring in our ears, the fissures of air screaming through the little cabin. The waves of the ocean flattened out below us as we climbed higher and higher into the atmosphere, and the coastline receded further and further into the distance. I couldn’t help it, I tried not to, in fact, but I thought of Patricia and my father in bed, her on top of him, her breasts hanging down, her hands on my father’s shoulders. It was not an erotic thought. Rather, it was scientific. They’re just two people, I said to myself. They must do it. They must have sex, at least every now and then. The air inside the cabin seemed to get warmer somehow. Maybe it was the coffee. “There it is,” my father said. When he pointed it out to me, it was an infinitesimal speck on the distant horizon. “Our very own private paradise.”
I laughed. That tiny little place. “How can you even see it so far out there?” I said to him. “Your eyes must be amazing.”
“I’ve got good eyesight,” he said. “But I’ve learned to anticipate it. I know exactly when it will appear.” He made a popping sound with his mouth. We came closer, and I could begin to see the contours of the little speck of land, the tiny cove in which he intended to land.
“It’s beautiful,” Patricia said over my shoulder. “Isn’t it beautiful, Pilot?”
“It is.” I turned to face her, and saw at the same moment that the coast had disappeared completely from sight, as if it had been swallowed by the ocean. I thought of the medication I carried in my backpack, the amber plastic bottle of pills with the child-proof cap. I turned back, and the little island had come even closer now, was actually a distinct green and brown shape in the middle of all that blue.
The blue of the ocean had grown considerably lighter, the sky less cloudy, the sun more yellow.
“We’ll be landing soon,” my father said in his airline pilot voice. “Make sure everything’s put away.”
I teased him, saying with a nasal voice, “Please make sure your seat belt is securely fastened and that your tray table is in its upright position.”
He laughed.
“Also, make sure your carry-on luggage is stowed safely beneath the seat in front of you. Thank you for flying Airie Airlines.”
As we came toward the island, Dad gradually lowered the trajectory of his plane so it would set down in the still water adjacent to the small patch of sandy beach at the island’s periphery. When we hit the surface everything changed—suddenly we seemed to be going much faster than we had been—with a hard swish into the waves and a few bumps as we bounced off, and then the final approach to the little beach.
Patricia clapped.
“It’s not always this smooth,” my father confessed, turning off the engine and opening the door.
Dad and I waded out into the cold sea water and pulled the little plane closer to shore. We anchored it firmly to a large palm tree with a long nylon rope, and then he went back to carry Patricia, piggyback, onto the dry ground. It was noticeably warmer here. “I can’t believe it,” I said, my face to the sun. “How is this possible?” I hadn’t even noticed the sky clearing. It was cobalt blue overhead, crystalline clear.
“How is what possible?”
“The weather. How is the—”
“Warm winds,” Dad said. “We’re just inside the gulf stream. We’ve traveled to a different part of the world, into a whole different weather system.”
Nowhere Island.
It was somewhere, however, somewhere not far off the coast. It was an empty island, though, bereft, completely unclaimed, according to him, and probably owned by the government. I guessed it was too small and not far enough out in the ocean to be used as a resort island and a bit too far out here for people with boats to get to. We walked the entire perimeter as if on a military inspection, Dad pointing to this and that. The foliage in the center was deciduous, it seemed, not tropical. There were regular trees here, the same kind I’d seen in North Florida, their leaves still mostly green. On the shore were a few old palms leaning in their languid, lazy way toward the water. The earth itself was hard, dry island dirt, trampled and dusty.
“Do real people come here?” I asked my father. “I mean, you know what I mean.”
“You don’t think I’m real?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“There are other people who know about it,” Dad said, laughing a bit. “But there aren’t many folks with their own seaplanes.”
Inside the little island’s center was a clearing. Some stones had already been placed in a ring. I thought of the clearing in the woods behind our house, sitting with Eric and smoking my first joint. Vaguely, I remembered sitting there more recently, frozen between wanting to rescue Hannah on the highway and wanting to hide from everything, completely catatonic. I walked out of the clearing, going to the highway—
“This is where we’ll camp,” my father said.
I nodded. “Okay.”
We walked back to the plane and to Patricia, who had been sunning herself on the little beach, and we began unloading, getting ourselves completely wet in the chilly surf as we carried everything on our shoulders to the shore. A tent, two coolers of food, my father’s fishing gear, a little radio, cooking supplies—there seemed to be enough here for a year on the island, significantly more than enough for the two weeks we intended to stay.
“Jesus Christ,” my father said finally. He looked at Patricia. “Fuck me.”
“What?” I said.
“It’s my fault,” Patricia said. “What is it?”
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
“Dad,” I said. �
�What?”
“Where are the fucking sleeping bags?”
I looked around, as if I would find them lying on the ground nearby. “It’s all right,” I said. “We’ll go back and get them.”
“No.” This was firm.
“Then what are we going to do?” I said.
Patricia said, “It gets cold here at night. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I—”
“I’ll go,” Dad said, his expression resigned.
“By yourself?” I looked at him like he was the crazy one. “Why don’t we all go?”
“It’s better if I go by myself.”
“You shouldn’t fly alone,” Patricia said. “Jim, you really—”
“Help me push the plane back out,” Dad said to me, “and when I get back you’ll have the camp all set up and everything will be fine, all right?”
“You’re going to be too tired,” Patricia said, “way too tired to make that whole trip and back. We should all—”
“It’s not that far.”
My father made a gesture with his hands, putting them in front of his face, palms inward. He closed his eyes. This body language meant shut up or I will kill you. I remembered this gesture from childhood. So we untied the plane from its mooring and pushed it back out into the water, where my father jumped in. I was totally wet.
Before he got on the plane, he said, “I guess you’re wondering how I’m going to fly with wet pants, right?”
“Well,” I said, “it does seem like it would be kind of uncomfortable.”
“I’ll tell you a secret.” He came closer to me and lowered his voice. “I fly with no pants on.” He got on the plane, then, saying, “and once I get near the shore, I put them back on. So if you want a good laugh, think of me out there, flying with no pants.”
I waded back to the shore and said to Patricia, “He asked me to tell you not to worry.”
“I can’t help it,” she said. “Why does he even say that?”
I realized, then, that I had left my backpack, with my bottle of pills inside it, on the plane—which, at that moment, was rising into the sky.
A former air force pilot, an airline pilot for many years, my father cursed himself in his small, single-engine seaplane somewhere not far off the coast of Florida. He cursed Patricia, too. And me. He had two three-hour flights ahead of him, one home, one back to the island, and he wouldn’t have any time to rest if he wanted to get back before dark. Thankfully, it was still early. The sky was clear out, too, a fine day for flying, he thought. And more often than not, it was true, he preferred flying solo. Dad thought of me now, his second son, the crazy one, the failure and disappointment, and considered my handicaps, my mental frailties, social awkwardness, physical inabilities. He’d always supposed that our mother was neurotic, and he felt that, through no fault of my own, I’d inherited these traits from her. He may have been right.
Alone in the sky, my father thought the plane seemed more quiet than usual. Too quiet? With someone else up here, it was all engine and propellers, the popping of air pressure in his ears, shouting over the roar and the fissures of squealing air. He kept a box of cigars in a secret place under his seat, and he reached for it now. At least he could have some time by himself. Hell, it wasn’t so bad. He wondered if I was getting any better, if the medication was taking hold, smoothing over the rough edges. Finding the cigars, he righted himself, groping inside the box for the cutter and matches. He couldn’t seem to get his hands on the cutter, so he placed the round end of the cigar inside his mouth and bit down, tearing a small hole. The tobacco was acrid on his lips. He spit some of it onto the floor. He found the matches and, taking his eyes away from the window momentarily, lit up, sending clouds of puffy gray-blue smoke into the cabin’s interior. It tasted wonderful. He’d only stopped smoking in the first place because Patricia had threatened to leave him.
He hoped she and I had started to work on setting up the tent by now, and was sure that by the time he got back with the sleeping bags we’d have everything ready, including dinner.
It was perfect, actually. All he had to do was fly.
Eventually, the coast of Florida came into view. My father could see it as a point of land first, just a bit of green rising off the blue in the far distance, and then it grew larger incrementally, the beach sweeping upwards and above him like an enormous wave of earth to that solid layer of clouds which had been there earlier. He had only to follow the land north for another hour, and he would arrive at the little landing area on the small cove where we had taken off earlier this morning.
He considered Eric now, and my accusation. Would Eric really do something like that? Would he have killed his own sister? My father thought of Eric as a little boy. He remembered the football games, the science fairs, the academic achievements. Eric had become a neurosurgeon, a man with a highly developed mind, capable of tremendous complexities. Morality was a function of intelligence, my father thought to himself. It must be. Then he remembered some of my brother’s experiments, the way Eric dissected animals in the garage and left their carcasses rotting on the table, the smell of disintegrating flesh out there. Once, the boy had opened the skull of a field mouse while it was still alive, asking himself how long can a mouse survive without a brain? So Eric had tortured animals. Okay. A lot of boys do that. He had done that himself when he was young, hadn’t he, trapping muskrats and minks in the woods and selling their coats to Sears and Roebuck. He had done it for money. Eric had done it for science. It was still torture.
Dad thought of me in comparison. I had too much imagination. I was too much inside my head. As a kid, I drew pictures—sensitive, symbolic images. Later, I wrote romantic songs on my guitar. I cried easily, weeping whenever other kids made fun of me. I was never good enough at sports to learn anything from them, to know about teamwork, about controlling my emotions, about sportsmanship and honor between men.
My father’s memories of Fiona, I believe, were even cloudier than mine. He remembered, mostly, her smell, the way her skin felt when she was a baby, incredibly soft and velvety. He remembered how soft her hair was, too, how fair. He remembered the week before her last Christmas when she was six, and the Barbie doll and Barbie house she’d wanted. Like me, my father remembered her as a still image, the background barely shifting behind her. He saw a close-up of Fiona’s freckled, dimpled face. He recalled the thin straps of her little red bathing suit on her sun-pink shoulders. He saw the light in her eyes from the flames of the torches by the pool. My father remembered Fiona on that last night through a haze of drunkenness. He hadn’t been watching his own children. He remembered, mostly, flirting with some stupid woman, what was her name? Doris Schott. He remembered that he had made plans to meet her later on, at a hotel, and that the meeting had never taken place because Fiona was gone, and after that nothing mattered at all. He remembered calling Doris from a pay phone on the side of Sky Highway, saying he wouldn’t be coming, but he knew she understood. His daughter had disappeared for Christ’s sake.
Quite steadily, my father turned the plane, banking it just slightly against the coastal wind.
With some difficulty, Patricia and I managed to set up the tent. Mostly it was her telling me what to do, and me doing it awkwardly. I had never been very good with my hands. Patricia had dark hair and skin that had been tanned so often in the outdoors that it retained the permanent color of parchment. She had large, brown freckles across her collarbone. She had a reddish nose and ears and cheeks. Her smile was warm. Her eyes were deep brown. “Your father usually starts the fire right away,” she said. “It’s not a camp until there’s food.” She wore an old pair of blue jeans and a soft flannel shirt. She was nothing like Hannah.
It occurred to me that Patricia and I had never been alone together before. “Do you want me to start a fire?” I asked her. “Is that what you mean?”
“If you can,” she said.
“I can try,” I said. “I just hope I don’t set the entire island in flames.”
&
nbsp; “Like Lord of the Flies?” she said laughing. “Don’t worry. We’ll put plenty of rocks and sand around you.”
“Just don’t call me Piggy.”
It was still before noon, early enough, and I felt normal. Things appeared normal, anyway. I knew my medication was in the plane, and that the plane would not be back until later, probably early evening. I had been taking less of the medication, cutting the tiny pills in half, as Katherine had indicated. But I had yet to go an entire day. I kept checking the treeline around the little clearing. If I noticed it moving, if I thought it was ready to reach out for me, then I’d know I was going crazy again.
Then I’d know.
Patricia and I gathered as much wood for the fire as we could hold in our arms. We found a patch of relatively dry driftwood on the other side of the island and we carried it in two trips back to the little clearing. “I’ll bet he did this on purpose,” Patricia said finally.
“Left the sleeping bags at home?”
She was nodding, arms folded, her feet resting on the woodpile. “Just so he could go flying by himself.”
“Sounds plausible.” I started to stack an arrangement of wood. We were encircled by the sea, by the island itself, by this little clearing, I thought, and now I was making a fire in this circle of stones.
“He likes to be alone,” Patricia said, smiling apologetically. “Are you like that, too? You probably are.”
“I guess so,” I said. “I find myself alone pretty often.”
Her face softened. “He’s really worried about you. He probably doesn’t say it, but he cares about you a lot. He really—”
“Is there a newspaper or something? How do we get this started?”
“We have starter fluid.”
We had stacked the wood the way I imagined my father would have done. Patricia went to get the starter fluid and some matches. When she returned, she handed them to me ceremoniously. “The man should do this.”
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