by James Hynes
Then they do, or anyway the plane does, the wheels screeching and smoking against the runway as all the Pringles lurch forward against their lap belts. (Some breakage may occur in shipping.) Kevin feels the jolt through his backside and up his spine, and he grunts in alarm. The braking engines scream, the overhead bins rattle, the whole plane shudders with relief. Joy Luck rocks in her seat but never lifts her eyes from the book, and out the window Kevin sees the flat Texas horizon looking greener edge on, while the strange little growths between runways—junction boxes on metal stems and unlit yellow lights like tulip bulbs and arcane little signs that say G3 or E1—glide by. Behind the plane the angry Stinger sputters out in exhaustion, shark-nosed no more, but red-faced with bulging cheeks and eyes rolled white like Thomas the Tank Engine or the Little Engine That Could, only this is the Little Missile That Couldn’t, doubled over gasping in midair, pooting out a last couple of comic little puffs of exhaust, comedy clouds for a cartoon rocket, before it tumbles fuelless and unfulfilled, bent and blunted, end over end down the runway behind the plane. Meanwhile the pickup full of glowering Saudi engineering students simply evaporates.
Kevin sags into his seat like a sack of meal. From the tiny speakers overhead comes the pilot’s syncopated Chuck Yeager drawl: “Welcome to Austin, folks, it’s eight forty-eight in the ay em, we’re juuust a tad early, the temperature is a balmy eight-tee-two degrees,” blah blah blah. Enough with the Right Stuff already, thinks Kevin, just park the fucking plane. All around him the other passengers rustle restlessly in their seats, stretching, collecting, cell-phoning, watch-glancing, yawning, all except Joy Luck, who will not lift her eyes from her book. Beyond the girl’s admirable clavicle he glimpses the low half shell of Austin’s terminal, blanched with morning light, airliners nosed up under the tall tinted windows, an accordion jetway affixed to each plane like a remora to a shark. Thrust up behind, the tail fin of each aircraft shimmers in the heat.
At last, at last, at last Kevin’s plane bumps to a stop, and with the clacking of unbuckled seat belts passengers surge into the aisle. Kevin’s one of the first up, tipping back on his heels from the swing of the overhead door, then rocking forward to snatch his suit coat. Waiting now with chin tucked to breastbone, Kevin finds himself looking down the front of his seatmate’s camisole. She’s already flipped up the armrest and stretched across both seats, her finger still stuck in the paperback, while reaching behind with the other to pull on her sandals. In the cool green shadow where the camisole droops away on its straps, Kevin can see her nipples, and perhaps even the shadow of a tattoo snaking up from under one of her velvety breasts. Her eyes are hidden under her bangs. Now he is the melancholy middle-aged guy copping a look, and as she scootches up onto the aisle seat, tucking one knee under her, Kevin drapes his jacket over his clasped hands and rolls his eyes upward, an altar boy contemplating a prank.
Inch by inch the snake of passengers unkinks up the aisle, making the floor panels thump. Kevin steps back to let Joy Luck ahead of him, and she unfolds herself into the aisle, still holding her place in the paperback. She’s nearly as tall as he is, and she pops open the next overhead compartment and, still holding the goddamn book, effortlessly hoists out a fat, cylindrical, olive-green duffle. It’s so big Kevin’s surprised they counted it as a carry-on, but she swings it over her shoulder and sways up the aisle like a sailor. Kevin treads right behind her, his nose a couple of inches from the bulging round bottom of the duffle. He shuffles up the aisle past the flight attendant with the crow’s feet, and he follows the girl through the gap between the plane and the jetway where the Texas heat leaks in like steam. Then they’re walking faster up the slightly cooler slope of the ramp, where he can encompass Joy Luck from head to toe in one glance. She’s long-waisted and slim-hipped, and she sways up the jetway with one bare arm curled round her duffle and her other arm swinging at her hip, the paperback pinched around her middle finger. The abbreviated hem of her top reveals the matching dimples at the small of her back and the small tattoo of a green apple between them, just over the beltless waistband of her jeans. Kevin cannot help but admire the enormously fetching way she moves, a sort of well-lubricated slouch by which she lets her shoulders droop and leads with her hipbones. It’s not an aggressive catwalk strut, it’s much less self-conscious and much more feral, and as Kevin follows her into the filtered light and cathedral echo of the terminal itself, into the delta of debarking passengers fanning across the carpet and onto the cool marble, he thinks, I know that walk, I’ve seen that walk before. And for one thrilling moment, his heart swells with the possibility that I know that girl! But of course, he couldn’t possibly—she’s twenty-five, maybe thirty years younger than him, he’s never seen her before in his life, and if he had, he’d have remembered. But by God he knows that walk, someone else used to walk that way, he’s felt that walk up close, he’s curled his fingertips around those hipbones from behind, and then his heart fills up again, only this time with honest-to-God, hundred-proof middle-aged melancholy. It’s Lynda, he realizes, Lynda used to slink like that, Lynda used to glide away from his touch just like that. Lynda on the dance floor, Lynda à la plage. Lynda on the railing.
Then something tangles round his ankles and he staggers forward, the fat treads of his shoes sticking at the icy floor. In that pre-accident moment of crystal-clear slo-mo, he realizes that his jacket has slipped off his clasped hands and fallen to the floor between his feet. In a desperate little tap dance he kicks the jacket free, and it slithers across the marble floor like the cloaked shadow of a Ringwraith. He hops and pirouettes and catches himself with both hands on the top of a trash bin, while the other folks streaming out of the jetway step briskly around him as if he were a dog chasing its tail. He’s blushing, he can feel the heat rising off his face, and he pushes himself erect from the trash can, stiffening his back and lifting his chin. Then he stoops to the limp jacket, which is laughing at him from the floor, and jerks it into the air. Of course the carefully assembled contents of his left inside pocket all tumble to the floor: his notebook with a loud slap, the letter inviting him to the job interview gliding like a paper airplane, his pen and sunglasses skittering end to end. Clutching the jacket to his chest, he stoops red-faced again to snatch everything up, smiling sheepishly at no one in particular. A young mother pushing a slack-jawed infant—young Winston at rest—twists the stroller in a sharp angle to avoid him. The terminal’s arctic air-conditioning clamps around him then, and he shakes the jacket out by the collar as if disciplining a child. His heart hammers from embarrassment, his hands tremble a little as he slots the notebook, the pens, the glasses, and finally the letter back into the jacket’s inside pocket. He puts the jacket on and glances around to see if anyone has noticed his spastic little routine, but all he sees are a couple of men dozing in the black leatherette chairs and an old woman paging through a magazine. By now the plane is empty behind him and the rest of the passengers are trailing away down the long cathedral arcade of the terminal through the pillars of light streaming in the windows: silhouettes fat and lean, major and minor, limping, striding, slouching, swinging briefcases, dangling backpacks, towing wheeled suitcases, in twos and threes, or weaving through the crowd, alone. None of the silhouettes ahead is swaying. None of them is carrying a duffle. None of them is dangling a book at her hip and holding her place with a finger. Kevin can no longer see his slinky seatmate, Ms. Joy Luck Club, the girl in the camisole, the girl with the tattoos, the girl who walks like Lynda.
On the concourse Kevin allows himself only one glance at a dangling television, where a soigné, cheekboned überblond on Fox mouths silently over a banner that reads, with characteristic subtlety, 666: IS THIS THE END? Christ, thinks Kevin. Then, worried that he’s going to see the round, abstractly familial face of the Other Kevin once more, which will only rattle him further, he resolves not to look at a TV again, not until he’s back home in Ann Arbor. He has enough to worry about, and anyway, he’s on the ground in Texas, and Austin doesn
’t even have a subway. Get thee behind me, Osama.
In a men’s room halfway down the concourse Kevin micturates, his nerves thrumming like wires. As relieved as he is to be on the ground and not in pieces all over central Texas, he’s still anxious about the interview this afternoon. He’s taking a flyer here, after all, applying for a private-sector job he picked almost at random out of the back pages of Publishers Weekly; to his astonishment, they responded by inviting him down to Austin for a brief interview, rather than interviewing him over the phone. “We’ll pay for your ticket,” said the woman on the phone, Patsy something of Hemphill Associates, whoever they are, and Kevin was too surprised to ask if maybe they could put him up for a night in Austin. He knows that businessmen and women fly twenty-four hundred miles roundtrip in a single day all the time to take an hour-long meeting, but this is sort of new in Kevin’s experience. Still, here he is, twelve hundred miles from home at 8:30 in the morning, draining his bladder into a Texas urinal, with no luggage or traveler’s checks, just his interview suit, a little extra cash in his wallet, and a pair of e-ticket boarding passes. Welcome to the global economy.
His middle-aged bladder at last more or less empty, he shakes, tucks, and zips up. Then he takes off his jacket again, carefully, and hangs it on a hook as he washes his hands and face. The dazzling white tiles of the lavatory are studded with colorful intaglios of Texas iconography—an armadillo, a cactus, a bright green jalapeño pepper—and the Muzak here isn’t Muzak, but Texas swing: Asleep at the Wheel, playing “Miles and Miles of Texas.” Kevin was a record store clerk once, back in the age of vinyl, at Big Star Records in Ann Arbor, and peering at his dripping face in the mirror he remembers how, whenever it was Mick McNulty’s turn to pick the music, it was always Asleep at the Wheel, until everybody on the afternoon shift knew all the words whether they wanted to or not, or could imitate the singer’s sleepy bass-baritone drawl. “Ray Benson’s a genius,” McNulty’d say in his own sleepy, midwestern mumble, “the new Bob Wills.” McNulty had a gift for stating the obvious about an artist as if it were revealed truth, though everything he knew was culled from the liner notes. Kevin blots his face with a couple of paper towels, then runs the damp towels under his collar and over the back of his neck. He lifts his jacket off the hook and watches himself in the mirror as he puts it on. Meanwhile the goddamn song penetrates his lizard brain: “I saw miles and miles of Texas”—now it’ll be stuck in his head all goddamn day—“Gonna live here till I die.”
Where’s McNulty now? he wonders as he steps out onto the echoing concourse again. Whatever happened to McNulty? Back when Kevin knew him, McNulty had been in his early forties, a tall, slope-shouldered guy with a round little belly and a slouching, easy, keep-on-truckin’ walk. He had wispy blond hair turning already to gray, which he kept short like a Beach Boy’s, and heavy-lidded eyes, and his manner was part aging stoner and part aging athlete. Improbably, for his age and general lassitude, he was the best player on the Big Star softball team, where he played first base with his glove on one hand and a cigarette in the other. Somehow, whenever the ball wafted into his general vicinity, he managed to pull it into his gravitational field by sheer karma, reeling it into his mitt without even stepping away from the bag. Then he’d put the smoke between his lips, throw the ball unerringly wherever it needed to go, take a drag on his cig, and return to his original slouch. He could make a double play without even losing the ash from his Marlboro. Not a great employee, though, Kevin recalls. McNulty took fewer shifts at the register than everybody else because the manager knew he’d screw up every third or fourth transaction. Instead he spent a lot of time restocking, which he did very, very slowly, with obsessive but idiosyncratic accuracy, lingering for ten minutes at a time over a particularly difficult decision.
“Fairport Convention,” he’d say. “Not really rock. Not really folk.” He’d shake his head slowly. “I just don’t know.”
“The sixties were very, very good to Mick,” the manager told Kevin once, when they were taking a break in the alley behind the store. Though the circumstances of the observation strike Kevin as ironic now—they had been sharing a joint at the time—the disjunction between the remark and its context went unnoted back then. In a hip, regionally famous, independent record store in Ann Arbor in the late seventies—long gone now, of course, strangled by the chains and the Internet and iTunes—reliability and even competence weren’t necessarily the first things you looked for in an employee. Entertainment value counted for a lot, and McNulty had entertainment value to burn. During the long reaches of slow, midweek, midsummer days when Big Star was nearly empty, Kevin would stand with McNulty behind the counter or in the back of the store by the jazz section, and McNulty would smoke and slouch and, from the depths of a heavy-lidded midafternoon coma, relate fantastic stories from his youth.
Like the Battle of Bertrand Russell. In 1960, McNulty had been stationed at Althorpe Air Force Base near the east coast of England, and one day the base had been besieged by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the gate stormed by the cream of the British left: doughty old pacifist women wearing sensible shoes and wielding signs; ruddy, strapping vegetarians who wore socks with sandals and sported fantastic beards like William Morris; humorless, porcelain-skinned Communist girls in black turtlenecks; their scrawny boyfriends with unkempt hair and toggle coats covered with badges; reedy academics in woolen waistcoats and baggy trousers; and in the vanguard the elfin philosopher himself, a wave of white hair atop an elegant black overcoat. The assault had all the menace of a warm spring rain, but the base went on full alert anyway, with klaxons blaring and jeeps roaring everywhere and all personnel recalled to duty. Except for McNulty, who was off duty at the time and didn’t hear the klaxons because he was in his favorite spot at the far end of the runway with his shirt off, vainly trying to get a tan from the pale English sun. As the base, unbeknownst to him, hustled to repel the gentle barbarians of the CND, McNulty alternated between dozing and reading Naked Lunch and watching B52s lumber over his head.
“Naked Lunch,” he’d said, his eyes almost shut. “It was a new book at the time.” And Kevin, who was twenty-two or twenty-three when McNulty told him this story, almost swooned with admiration. This was the apotheosis of cool for him, and it still is, even now, as he trudges middle-aged down the concourse in Austin past the food court. It had the all elements to awe an impressionable young dilettante of a bohemian bent: irreverence, contempt for military authority, catching some rays while bombers glided overhead, and the happy conjunction of William S. Burroughs and Bertrand Russell. Even better (at least for the purposes of the story), once McNulty’s inadvertent dereliction had been discovered, he had been busted from sergeant back down to airman, and McNulty had turned the demotion to his advantage, boldly walking in uniform into a local pub (The Frog and the Scorpion) to chat up one of those intense, porcelain Communist girls, telling her that he’d offered up his career in the United States Air Force as a sacrifice to nuclear disarmament.
“Did it work?” Kevin had said, as wide-eyed as a kid. Daddy, tell me about the sixties again.
“God, yes,” said McNulty, almost energetically, and he went into some detail about a bloodlessly pale girl named Judy who had led him through a twisting maze of redbrick houses set close as teeth, each street narrower than the last, the raw night air full of coal smoke, until they came to Judy’s bedsit, where they took off their shoes and crept up the stairs past her landlady. In her tiny, unheated room they grappled silently on her narrow, swaybacked bed while she whispered to him about Althusser and Lukács and E. P. Thompson and he tried to peel off her black turtleneck. She consented at last, not so much out of lust as out of a grim determination to show that she wasn’t bourgeois, but even so she dug her ragged, bitten fingernails painfully into his shoulders whenever she thought the bed was creaking too loudly. She had a point, McNulty told Kevin; the floors were so thin they could hear the landlady snoring directly below them, but once again McNulty made le
monade and turned Mrs. Allenby’s honking to his advantage, murmuring to Judy that as long as her landlady didn’t stop snoring, they were probably all right. Soon McNulty was balling—that was his word for it, balling, Jurassic-era hipster slang—in that lovely, loose-hipped American way the English girls loved (said McNulty).
“But my mind wandered,” McNulty told Kevin, “it always does when I’m balling, I can’t help it.” Propped up on his strong American arms over the self-consciously ardent Judy, he started to think about the names of the streets they’d passed on the way to her bedsit: General Gordon Road, Gallipoli Lane, Sebastopol Row. “Nobody celebrates their own military disasters like the British,” McNulty said, and he told Kevin he’d begun to laugh, right there in the saddle, as it were. Judy looked more puzzled than hurt, perhaps she wasn’t used to laughter during sex, McNulty didn’t know, but he said “Sebastopol” out loud, puzzling her even more, and to make it up to her he began to thrust in a breathless, galloping, Tennysonian rhythm—half a league, half a league, half a league onward, forward the Light Brigade! Judy went stiff as a two-by-four when she came, her eyes wide, her lips a wordless O, and for an awful moment McNulty thought he’d killed her or something, because at the same moment, eight feet below, Mrs. Allenby stopped snoring, and in that instant he seemed to be the only one in the house with a beating pulse. Then Judy melted with a whimper, Mrs. Allenby began to trumpet again, and McNulty collapsed happily in Judy’s pale, undernourished arms. Afterward, she explained Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to him while he stretched out and lit a cigarette and silently recollected how the French called an orgasm le petit mort. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred, thought McNulty, blowing smoke rings at the oppressive floral wallpaper and trying not to laugh.