Flights

by Jim Shepard

  Biddy sat opposite him, and fiddled with the sugar bowl. He looked at the clock. He could hear Kristi in the den with the Saturday morning cartoons.

  “Kristi, Louis is out here,” he called.

  “So what?” she said. In the silence that followed her answer, Road Runner beeped.

  Louis shifted, a glove sliding to the floor. His nose was still red from the cold.

  Biddy got up and went to the refrigerator. “Sure you don’t want anything? Did you have breakfast?” He looked again at the clock.

  “No, thank you. Do you have to go somewhere?”

  “No. Someone’s coming over, though.”

  “Oh.” He gazed at the cabinets, not in any rush. “I just wanted to talk.”

  The doorbell rang. Biddy let Laura in and led her back to the kitchen, uncertain what to tell her. Louis nodded at her.

  “Laura, this is Louis,” he said.

  “Hi, Louis.”

  “Hi.”

  She stood awkwardly half in, half out of the room, and he pulled a chair out and motioned for her to sit. She made the long silences that seemed to punctuate discussions with Louis even more uncomfortable than usual for him.

  “Let’s go out or something,” Biddy said. “Let’s fix the snow fort.”

  Louis shrugged.

  Biddy could tell she thought something was strange but wasn’t sure what. She didn’t know Louis was retarded and Biddy had blown his opportunity to tell her. Maybe she would figure it out, he thought.

  “What do you want to talk about?” Biddy said.

  Louis looked at him.

  “It snowed a lot last night,” Laura offered. “I saw buried cars that you couldn’t see almost on the way over.”

  “I had to help my father dig out this morning,” Louis said. They were silent, Biddy thinking of nothing as a rejoinder. Louis ran his fingers along the edge of the tabletop. “I don’t usually come over here. I came because Biddy’s my friend and I wanted to talk.”

  Biddy waited, and finally asked again what he’d like to talk about.

  “Are you a football player?” Laura said.

  Louis nodded and rubbed something from his eye.

  “You look like a football player.”

  “Thank you.” He looked at the fruit bowl before him. “Can I have a pear?”

  The back door opened with a merciful bang and a bag of groceries tumbled in. A foot edged it forward and then his parents followed with additional bags, stepping over the one on the floor.

  “Here we go, here we go, here we go,” his father said. “Hey, Louis. Long time no see. Where’s Mom and Dad?” They swept to the counter and set everything down with a gentle crash. “Help us with the bags in the trunk, Biddy. Hey, Laura. How’re you today?” Laura smiled.

  His mother was outside pulling more bags from the open trunk. Biddy went out and took a big one from her arms. She asked about his coat and he said he’d only be out a second. He brought two bags in.

  His father was putting cheese away in the refrigerator. “So you both fell a little short last night, huh?”

  “We’re glad for Sarah Alice,” Laura said. “I missed a dumb one.”

  “How about this guy? He got all the hard ones, and then he goes in the tank on one I could spell.”

  Biddy set the bags on the counter with a clank: cans inside.

  “So how’s Mom, Louis?” his mother said.

  “Okay.” He got up, still holding his coat, hat, and gloves. “I guess I’m gonna go now.”

  “Hey, stick around,” his father said.

  “No. I have to go.” He put his hat on. “I feel better now.”

  Laura smiled up at him. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “It was really nice meeting you.” He walked to the door, stepping over a jar of peanuts, getting his arm caught in his coat. Biddy followed him, stooping over the tumbled bag and closing the door behind him.

  His father ran a finger down the long white receipt. “What’d he want? Why’d he say he feels better?”

  Biddy shrugged.

  “Did he feel bad when he came?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He probably feels bad about that job,” his mother said. “He was supposed to have part-time work by this point.” She was collecting things for the freezer in one bag.

  “Hey, I’m doing the best I can. It’s not like placing Frank Borman, you know. If it’s at all possible to get the kid a job, we’ll get him a job.”

  Biddy sat back down next to Laura. “Who’s Frank Borman?” she whispered. He didn’t know. They watched more of the unpacking—fish, five or six packages of it, and club soda—before going outside to explore the new drifts the wind and snow had created the night before and was reshaping even as they played.

  He’d put off going to Confession for three weeks and his mother wasn’t having any more of it. That was it, she said. No more screwing around. She was going over this afternoon and he was going with her.

  Confession was between four-thirty and six on Saturdays, and it was now four-fifteen. Laura’s mother had picked her up earlier, honking the horn and waving from the car. He sat on the back porch, his rear end and knees wet and his feet cold. The dog lay on the floor nearby, dozing. One ear was flapped out as though he were listening through the floor for something.

  His mother came into the kitchen from the bathroom, a lipgloss brush between thumb and forefinger. “Come on. Change your pants and shoes. I want to get back.”

  He got laboriously to his feet and stepped out of his boots. As he passed through the kitchen he asked if Kristi was going.

  “Kristi went last week.” His mother’s voice echoed faintly in the bathroom. “If you’d gone with her you wouldn’t have to go now.”

  Upstairs he dug around in his closet and found his other pair of boots. They were olive drab but his pants could cover them.

  “I don’t have any sins anyway,” his sister said from her bedroom.

  “You got big ears, you know it?” He sat on the bed and pulled on his black pants.

  “You got big everything,” she said.

  He buckled his boots and left without answering. His mother already had the car warmed up. “Give ’em hell,” his father called from the den. “Don’t tell them about your old man’s drinking.”

  The wind died at the church door, leaving them in a hushed quiet, the brightness of the afternoon shut out behind them. “Don’t rush your penance,” his mother said, and after that they were quiet, not to speak again until they were safely out of church.

  There were five or six others present in a rough line in the pews, one behind the other. Biddy and his mother sat together. They swung the kneeling benches down and knelt, the creaking obtrusive but expected. He folded his hands in the adult manner, fingers interlocked casually. Only the young and the very pious folded them palm to palm with the fingers aligned. His mother bowed her head, and he tried to compile a list of sins at the last minute, vaguely uneasy at his lack of remorse. He had long since stopped believing he could accurately recount all of them, and had settled on one of Sister Theresa’s concessions during a discussion: whatever you can remember, as long as you don’t willfully leave anything out.

  He glanced at his mother. Her head remained silent and still above her hands, her eyes gazing into the floor as if for support. Her intensity shook him. His eyes traveled to the Novena candles and from there to the Virgin Mary. He found himself taking stock, reviewing whether or not he was worthy to receive the grace and mercy that a Sacrament, even Confession, the most casual of sacraments, represented. He wondered if he was worthy of this church and these things around him.

  He leaned back, surprised at his own sudden intensity, solemnity. Yet he was certain that all of this was in some central way good and that he had to in some way earn it, that he couldn’t simply continue to wander into the building and expect to be a part of it all. He shivered, rubbing the sleeve of his coat. He was taking stock of himself whether he wanted to or n
ot, out of the blue, kneeling in the darkness beside his mother, and he wasn’t sure he knew how to do it.

  He looked into the face on the crucifix. People shifted in the pews and an odd snort or gagging sound lingered in the silence. He didn’t know where he stood in the eyes of God.

  He wasn’t, he knew, even sure God was present at times. Where did somebody who wasn’t even sure stand?

  His mother rose as if in response and padded to the confessional curtain, pausing before slipping in. He was next, and his thoughts crowded against one another with urgency: he was basically good, he felt. He rarely willfully hurt anyone. He did what people said. He broke a minimum of commandments. So why was he not happy? The simplicity of it shook him. If he was good, why was he so unhappy? Why was he only sure of God on Christmas, if then? Why couldn’t he do more with Louis? Why did he always aggravate his parents?

  His mother emerged from behind the curtain and passed silently into the nave for her penance. He hesitated until he heard the people behind him shifting expectantly, and then he got up and moved past the curtain into the dark.

  He knelt on the wooden bench in front of the screen as his eyes adjusted. Father Rubino was picking at his eyebrow with his thumb and forefinger, looking off to his right.

  “Bless me Father for I have sinned,” he said. “I haven’t been to Confession in three weeks.” He spoke in a whisper and Father Rubino wasn’t supposed to know who he was, but that was a fiction. He steadied himself on the partition. “I don’t know, Father. I was going to tell you all these things like lying and swearing. But that’s not right.” The boards beneath his knees groaned.

  “What?” Father said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He was close to tears and felt foolish because of it. “I don’t know,” he repeated, and started to cry and hold it back at the same time. “I don’t think about God except at Christmas, I don’t help my sister at all, and sometimes I don’t like to be around my friend Louis and I know that’s wrong. I make my parents unhappy all the time.” He stopped, still not having heard any sort of response at all, having taken a chance and still not certain how to proceed.

  Father was silent. Then he said, “Biddy, we all have those kinds of feelings. We all think maybe we could do more for other people. All we can do is try.”

  Biddy knelt in the dark, wiping an eye with his hand.

  “We can’t torture ourselves about it. All we can do is resolve to be better, to try harder.” Father paused. “Now tell yourself you’re going to work harder at it and try to live those words.” He moved around, apparently waiting for some response. “And Christ should certainly live in you always, not just at Christmas.”

  Biddy looked down. “He doesn’t,” he whispered.

  There was an awful silence. He waited for expulsion, public exposure, shouts, flashing lights. For the roof to lift off and God to pluck him away.

  He could feel Father looking at him and he swallowed, ready to absorb whatever he deserved.

  “Say twenty-five Our Fathers and twenty-five Hail Marys,” Father said. He absolved him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

  He stumbled to the altar, the air cool on his cheeks and ears, alternating the prayers while his mother waited at the back of the church. He was going to get out of here, he thought. He was going to change things or get out of here, because he was inadequate and everything around him was inadequate and no one seemed to care one way or the other. What was his penance? Did God expect only fifty prayers, as well? He finished his penance in the car on the way home, the houses reeling past as he avoided his mother’s gaze, feeling spiritually fraudulent beside her.

  Ronnie sat across the table from him, his hat still on, losing at War. Something was bothering him and he was flipping the cards on his turns with irritation.

  “Your turn, sport.” He tapped the table impatiently.

  Biddy pulled a jack. Ronnie turned his card face up. A jack as well. Biddy laid three face down off the jack and turned over a two, sagging, trying to build up the foundations for some sort of drama. Ronnie was playing as if he were waiting for a train.

  Ronnie flipped over his card after three face down: two as well. Biddy spread three more and turned over a nine. Ronnie did the same.

  “Whoa,” Louis said. The rows of stalemated cards reached almost to the end of the table. Biddy was grateful for the extraordinary, and anxious to acknowledge it. He wanted an outside observer to lean over them and ask Ronnie if he realized the odds against what had just happened. But there was only Louis watching, attentive to everything and reacting to almost nothing. They sat around the Lirianos’ kitchen table, Ronnie waiting for Cindy, Biddy for Mickey.

  Ronnie was drinking dark beer. They had themselves a little standoff here, he said. He laid three more out and edged the tip of his next card off the top of the pile and dropped it back, teasing. He put a head on his beer.

  “C’mon,” Biddy said.

  He smiled and flipped his card, looking at Biddy as he drank. It was a queen.

  Biddy turned his over slowly, and then with a yelp as the image leaped at him: queen.

  The door banged open, cold air filling the room.

  “Don’t even ask,” Cindy said, sweeping into the kitchen. “I don’t even want to talk about it.” Her nose was red and her pants wet from the knees down, and she went right to the stove and put a kettle on. She pulled a mug out of the cabinet and dropped a tea bag into it.

  “Have trouble with the car?” Ronnie asked.

  She pulled at her scarf. “I’d like to push it off a cliff.” She piled her coat, hat, and scarf on the hamper in the hallway. “My legs are soaked. I’m gonna take a shower. Get the water when it boils, all right?”

  The bathroom door shut and they heard the thump of her empty boots on the tile floor. After a few moments the shower went on.

  Ronnie finished his beer and set the glass down carefully. The two queens still lay face to face atop the table-long lines of cards. “Whose turn is it?” he asked. He started a new line of three face down and turned over a seven. He seemed to be listening to something in the sound of the shower.

  Biddy waited, not for the sake of dramatic tension, but for Ronnie’s attention to refocus on the game. He turned over the fourth card off his deck. It was a three of clubs.

  “Three,” Louis said. “Ronnie wins.”

  Biddy waited, and then pushed the long rows together into a pile in front of them. “I quit. I don’t feel like playing anymore.”

  Ronnie looked at him. “No, let’s play. I win, right? My turn.” He turned over another card. Biddy watched him for a moment before continuing.

  The teapot was whistling. Ronnie concentrated on the cards and they sat listening to it until Louis got up and turned off the heat and poured the water into the mug.

  He won three or four in a row before the shower stopped. Ronnie’s concentration on it had affected Biddy and Louis as well, and they too were waiting, ready, as if Cindy’s emergence from the shower had a special significance.

  The bathroom door opened and she appeared wrapped in a bath-sized white towel. A big orange cat on it looked at Biddy sideways. MOMCAT was written over its head, the large letters running down Cindy’s left side. She shuffled into the kitchen in her father’s slippers, big maroon things, and sat down at the table, hair dripping.

  Ronnie’s eyes were on the cards. “You gonna sit here like that?”

  She looked over for her tea. “It’s pinned.” She lifted the mug from the counter without rising and set it in front of her. “Who’s winning?”

  No one answered. “Ronnie is,” Biddy said finally.

  “What’s wrong with you today?” Cindy asked. She blew on her tea. “What’re you, mad because I’m late? How fast am I supposed to change a tire in thirty below?”

  “I stopped by on the way home from the Tap last night,” Ronnie said, flipping over a six. “You weren’t here.”

  She flinched. Ronnie, with his eyes lowe
red, missed it.

  “So what time’d you come by?” she said. She tried to sip her tea but it was too hot.

  “Two. Two-thirty. We closed the place.”

  Louis stood up. “I’m gonna go watch TV,” he said uncertainly.

  “What are you doing here today, guy?” Cindy asked Biddy, smiling. “Just come over to play cards with the Cincinnati Kid here?”

  “My mom says I got to make up with Mickey,” he said. “He’s supposed to be back by now. I don’t even know why he’s mad at me.”

  She lowered her chin to the hot mug and slurped some tea without picking it up. She focused on the beer glass. “You drinking in the morning now?”

  Ronnie looked at her. “You don’t want to talk about it?”

  She lowered her eyes. “It’s stupid. It’s not worth talking about. And it’s cold sitting around like this,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She took her tea with her.

  “I’m gonna go,” Biddy said, standing before Ronnie could react. He didn’t seem to hear. “Tell Mickey I waited awhile.”

  Ronnie stirred. “You going to walk all the way home?”

  “It’s not too far. Bye.” He pulled on his hat and coat, holding both gloves in one hand in his rush to the door. “Bye,” he repeated.

  “Uh-huh,” Ronnie said, looking at the sink. “Take it easy.”

  He shut the door, the cold rushing through his open coat. He was two houses down when Dom’s car turned onto the street, and he ducked behind a tree instantly, not wanting to go back. He made certain no one in the car had seen him before edging around the other side of the trunk and starting down the street, kicking up snow as he went, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets.

  The twentieth was a school day and when he woke up he padded downstairs to see if anyone had remembered his birthday. They hadn’t. His father was shaving and his mother sat in her robe at the table with the paper from the day before and some black coffee.

  “What are you doing up so early?” she asked. “You can sleep for another half hour.”

  He shrugged. “I know.” He put some water on, and a teaspoonful of Sanka into a cup with some sugar.

  “You want something hot? Some farina?”