Flights

by Jim Shepard

“Don’t ask me. Paulie Rotondo would love to have him.”

  “He’s a great guy, Paulie. Knows his baseball, Biddy,” Dom said. “Don’t kid yourself. Good man to play for.”

  “I’ve heard he’s a little wild,” Biddy’s mother said.

  “Wild? He’s berserk,” Dom said. “Listen: here’s a good Paulie Rotondo story. Me and Paulie, we go out a few years ago, we’re going somewhere, I don’t remember where. We’re driving down the road, we go past a bar, Paulie slams on the brakes. ‘Aw, look who’s here,’ he goes. I don’t see anybody. We pull over and go inside. There’re two Puerto Ricans playing shuffleboard—you know, that bar game, like bowling. Paulie says, ‘Beer and an orange juice,’ and then goes to the Puerto Ricans, ‘How you doing?’ They’re nodding and smiling, you know. Paulie picks up one of those shuffleboard discs and says, ‘Dom, don’t get excited. I’m gonna kill this guy.’ Then he goes to one of the Puerto Ricans, ‘Remember me? Sure.’ Paulie’s got this big grin, right? ‘Remember? You don’t remember? You took the wallet right out of my pocket. Remember? Right after you kicked me right here?’ And he points to his face. These guys had mugged him the week before. ‘Dom, watch the other one,’ he says to me.” Dom pantomimed himself at the time, stunned. Biddy’s father, already laughing, closed his eyes and shook his head. “And he goes, ‘Don’t you remember?’ and this guy starts backing away and reaches for the beer bottle and Paulie takes that metal shuffleboard disc and hits him like Warren Spahn right here”—he spread his forefinger and thumb across his sternum—“and the sound is like somebody just stepped on a rotten board. This guy goes down like he’s shot.”

  “That’s horrible,” Biddy’s mother said. His father was laughing so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes. “And that’s someone you think Biddy should be playing for?”

  “Well, shit,” Dom said, his smile fading. “He’s not Juan Corona. He’s just a crazy guy.”

  Ronnie Pierce found his seat at table 20, the table adjoining number 8. He could not have been closer to Cindy had he sat at her table. They were back to back with their left shoulders nearly touching. Dom put his hand over his eyes. Biddy’s mother wondered in a fierce whisper how they could have put them together like that.

  “They probably assigned them by number,” Ginnie said. “They probably figured eight and twenty were far enough apart.”

  “Somebody forgot to look at a floor plan,” his father said.

  When Sandy and Michael arrived, Biddy returned to his table and took his place beside Cindy. He would have liked to have said hello to Ronnie but wasn’t sure whether or not he should. As far as he knew, Cindy and Ronnie hadn’t acknowledged each other.

  Everyone rose to applaud the parents of the groom, who were making their way to their table with a cautious, gracious clumsiness, and then the parents of the bride, and finally the bride and groom themselves, introduced after a dramatic pause as one couple, using the bride’s new name.

  They remained standing for the toast, all eyes turned to the head table. Cindy and Ronnie stood shoulder to shoulder beside their seats. Neither moved or flinched. The best man, thin and awkward, adjusted his glasses and began by mentioning that he’d culled some quotes from Homer but now thought them inappropriate. Biddy’s gaze wandered to his parents’ table, where Dom was looking back in his direction, keeping an eye on Cindy and Ronnie. He had said after the breakup that if he saw Ronnie anywhere near his daughter he’d have both their asses on a stick. But he couldn’t blame them for this, Biddy reflected.

  They settled down to fruit cups and then smallish gray-and-white plates arranged with a slice of roast beef, a pile of green peas, and some sort of mushroom-and-onion mix. He ate quickly, the food unremarkable. Cindy ate as though she were very tired. Kristi ate the meat and spooned the rest into the sugar holder. Beneath the crystal, ribbons of onions and slippery sliced mushrooms began to fill the cracks between the sugar packets.

  “Kristi, you’re so gross,” Mickey said. She smoothed a leftover brown bit onto her finger and flicked it at him but hit Biddy instead.

  “You better put some cold water on that,” Cindy said, and he decided against retaliation and left the table for the men’s room.

  He stopped at the door to let a busboy with a tray get by. The band was playing “Sunrise, Sunset,” and the bride was dancing with her father. The air smelled vaguely of melon and urine.

  In the men’s room he stood at the sink washing his hands, gazing at the spot on his shirt in the mirror. Two busboys stood at the urinals, heads turned toward each other. Their white coats were dirty. Their voices filled the bathroom. “It don’t matter,” one said. “God’s God. He can do whatever he wants to.”

  “Yeah, well, I think like he hasn’t got complete control yet,” the other said, shaking his hips, finishing up. “There’s too much bad in the world.” He crossed to the sink next to Biddy and gave his hands a perfunctory splash.

  “Well, my brother’s studying to be a priest and he don’t think so,” said the one at the urinal.

  The one at the sink wondered what that had to do with anything.

  It was fascinating and incongruous to Biddy, God at the urinals, God while checking the part in their hair. He was encouraged and discouraged at the same time.

  “Something wrong, kid?” one of them said, and he realized he’d been staring, and shook his head.

  When he returned, most of the tables were empty. The dance floor was crowded with couples shifting back and forth, moving in different directions.

  Ronnie leaned back in his seat, turning his head, and tapped Cindy on the shoulder. She jumped.

  “How you doin’?” he said.

  She said she was fine. After a moment he turned away.

  “‘For us there can never be happiness,’” she said.

  Ronnie’s head turned. “What?”

  “‘For us there can never be happiness.’”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh. ‘We must learn to be happy without it.’ What’s-her-name, from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

  “What’s her name?” Cindy twiddled a knife, still with her back to him.

  “Annette Andre.”

  She smiled.

  The bride and groom swept by, doing some sort of waltz. “‘Some things are not forgivable,’” Ronnie said, clearly and distinctly. “‘Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.’”

  Cindy paled, lowering her eyes to the tablecloth. “Vivien Leigh,” she said. “Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire.” There was a long silence, the two of them sitting as if they’d never spoken.

  His mother leaned over him, her perfume cool and not unpleasant. “Dance with me,” she said. “Your father won’t.”

  His alternative was staying at the table. They walked to the dance floor and eased into an open space. She showed him where to put his hands and they shuffled back and forth. The floor was the same deep maroon as the floor of the piano room at school. Relatives occasionally drifted into view, smiling with approval. His mother asked him if Ronnie and Cindy had been fighting and he said no.

  The reception was well past the point at which table distinctions and seating arrangements broke down, and those he had been sitting with or near were scattered in every direction, Dom by the head table, his father at the bar, his sister outside. (He’d seen her flash by the dark window, a ghost in her white dress, while he was dancing.) At tables 8 and 20 only Cindy and Ronnie were left, still in their original seats. When the dance with his mother had ended, he joined them. The tables were emptying around them, some people leaving, others dancing. The three of them remained, listening to “Color My World.” The band segued into “Heat Wave.” Ronnie got up and crossed to the head table, congratulating everyone and saying goodbye before leaving by the far door. Biddy wasn’t sure Cindy knew he was gone.

  They left before the Lirianos, agreeing to meet at the party that his aunt, the mother of the bride, was having after the reception. From the door he could see Cindy where he�
�d left her, alone in a sea of tables, her dark blue dress solid and unmoving against the clutter and scattered chairs.

  “Drinks,” the mother of the bride said. “Who couldn’t use a drink?” They were sitting around the living room, adults tired and drunk, children tired and bored. The bride’s father was spread over a chair and two hassocks. He looked boneless.

  Disappointingly few had been able to come, a ragged few besides the Sieberts and Lirianos. Louis had refused even this second chance. Cindy was in the den. Biddy’s sister and Mickey sat on the sofa nursing sodas, having long since given the day up for lost.

  “Well, Sheona should be halfway to the airport by now,” the hostess said. Some of the guests nodded vaguely.

  “It was a beautiful wedding,” his mother said.

  “Beautiful,” Ginnie agreed.

  Someone said that Sheona had looked marvelous.

  “Well, we weren’t sure about the gown at first,” her mother said from the kitchen.

  “Oh, Christ, were we not sure,” said the father of the bride. Biddy had assumed he was asleep. The guests laughed, and then the room was as uncomfortable as before. There was some desultory talk about the choice of honeymoon spots. Biddy got up, hearing the piano, and went into the den.

  Cindy was sitting straight-backed on the piano stool, her hands hesitating over the white and black keys. She flipped a page or two of the worn music book, intent on the notes. As far as he knew, she couldn’t read music. She tested a few notes, singing softly, and ran through it again. She was awful.

  He moved closer and stood by the piano, the open interior and lid like black-and-tan jaws. She did not acknowledge his presence and he stood quietly content with that decision.

  The music book was swinging shut as she tried to play, and he reached out and held it, belly across the corner of the cabinet. Her eyes never left it. She played a bit more and then cried, her sobs full and low as she fought to control them. “Goddamnit,” she said. “Oh, goddamnit.” She closed the key cover sharply and the keys made a startled dissonant sound.

  “You all right in there?” Dom called from the living room.

  They hadn’t heard her crying, he thought, they couldn’t have, or they wouldn’t have stayed where they were, calling in a question. They couldn’t have left her to cry alone. He wanted to help, and was absolutely helpless: someone without pump or patch watching the boat go down. She straightened up, blinking and miserable, and shook off his attempt to lay his hand between her shoulder blades. Then she opened the key cover and shut it again, uncertain what to do with herself. He watched her for a short time before easing into a nearby chair in a kind of vigil, heartbroken.

  Afterward the Lirianos’ car refused to start. On the way home, with everyone in their car, his father mentioned that it was a shame Louis hadn’t come.

  Dom shifted in back, his blue suit rumpled, collar open. They were packed in tightly. “Yeah, it’s too bad,” he said. There was an edge to his voice. Biddy detected it immediately and his father seemed to miss it altogether.

  “Well, Louis is a good kid,” his father continued. “I’m sure things’ll work out. If there’s any real problem, I’m sure it’ll come out.”

  “Walt,” his mother warned. Even she sensed some sort of thin ice.

  “Yeah, there’s a problem,” Dom said. He was drunk, and angry. Biddy was gradually beginning to perceive that the car was a hideous trap of a sort, eight people in a locked closet with an explosive. “There’s a problem all right. The problem is he still doesn’t have a job.” There was a silence, Biddy holding Kristi more tightly on his lap as if to protect her physically from the awfulness of the situation. They had passed the airport minutes ago, and the blue-and-white Cessna had stood out, tail erect and wings catching light. Biddy’s father had been promising to find Louis a part-time job for thirteen months. He had not succeeded.

  “Look. I’ve told you I’ve been working on it.”

  “Yeah, you’re working on it. Meanwhile the kid stays home and begins to wonder if retards ever get jobs in this world.”

  “Dom,” Ginnie said.

  “He’s working on it. The kid tells her he can’t go to the wedding, he feels like a bum, he’s not working. We tell him he’s still a student, he don’t want to hear it. All he knows is that he’s been trying to get a job for over a year. And he wants to work at Sikorsky. Anywhere. Don’t ask me why. He likes Walter here.”

  “I told you these things don’t happen overnight,” his father said, also angry. “They’re not hiring. We’re all in the same boat.”

  “No. You’re in the boat. He’s in the water,” Dom said. Biddy wanted to jump out of the car. “Yeah, times’re tough. You’re working your fingers to the bone for him.”

  They drove the rest of the way in silence and let the Lirianos out at Ryegate Terrace. As they drove away, Biddy closed his eyes and tried prematurely to begin the process of ending, once and for all, a day that had already dragged on for far too long.

  With the sunlight mirrored in undulating patterns on the water ahead of him, he cruised just on the surface, the lower half of his mask below the water and the upper half above, the waterline wavering across the glass in front of his eyes like the bubble in a level. He struck out straight from shore and dipped down with the control of a sand shark, slipping through the colder water near the bottom and leveling out just above the sand, kicking hard and gazing at the various tiny landmarks of the sea floor as they reeled by.

  He was in a thermocline, and the effect was striking: six inches above his head, the water, markedly warmer, held so many particles in suspension it seemed opaque, and the separation was so distinct the effect was that of a brown ceiling, a long, low tunnel, brown sand inches below him, brown water no less penetrable to the eye above him. Through it he soared, kicking away from the land with still plenty of air in his lungs, the water itself a corridor for him, showing him a way, setting him on a specific track.

  Taking Off

  Things are not the way they should be. I keep complaining, and Kristi’s right: I’m too scared to do anything about it. We have to be better to each other, and we’re not. We have to think about each other, and we don’t. I don’t do enough and what I do doesn’t work. If I’m not such a fool, I should prove it. Things get worse and worse, and doing something isn’t so scary anymore. I’ve been playing kids’ games all this time like it would help and it won’t. All that planning and work I was doing and I just had to ask myself: Who are you kidding? Really, who are you kidding? Because I knew I was just playing games. I knew then that I had to make it real and not chicken out, to stop being such a baby about everything. Who was going to help me if I didn’t? Who was going to change me if I couldn’t? I think if you don’t do something about things you don’t like, you get what you deserve. I’ve been stupid all along. When my father told me either to shit or get off the pot, I should have listened. He was right.

  A cardinal lighted nearby, a marvelous red against the backdrop of green, and was gone, the branch swaying in its absence. Biddy sat on the corner of the cellar door in the backyard, the dog’s leash in his hand. The dog was in the house. He thought about nothing. Flies crisscrossed over the tomato plants in the garden. There was no reason for him to be holding the leash.

  His father was cutting the grass. The engine housing on the lawn mower was loose and it added immeasurably to the racket. The mower crossed back and forth before him, edging nearer each time, his father trudging along behind, arms sweaty and flecked with grass.

  A newspaper lay near his foot, luminous in the sun. In it Biddy had read how to come up with cool alternatives to summer suppers and had seen a UPI photo of a German shepherd curled on the shoulder of a highway near its mate. Its mate, one leg sprawled at an odd angle, was dead. The caption, entitled “Lonely Vigil,” related that the dog had refused food for three days. The lawn mower rolled to the side of his foot and stopped.

  “Lift your feet,” his father said. He lifted his feet.<
br />
  His father bent over the engine housing, and the mower idled down and went off, the blades spinning with an empty, stuttering sound. He pushed it a few feet away and sat down.

  “Little distracted today?” he asked, looking at the mower as though it bothered him.

  “Mmm.”

  His father shook his head, sweeping grass from his pants. “Biddy and his magic violin.” He sighed.

  Biddy looked at him. “Where’d you get that?” he asked. “What’s that mean?” His father had used it for years and it had always seemed a kind of nonsense or catchphrase, interesting or funny, if at all, only in its meaninglessness.

  “Get what?”

  “That—‘magic violin.’”

  He seemed startled by the question. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s years and years old.” A distant lawn mower started, a ghostly echo of the one silent before them. “Maybe it was a lead-in to a radio show.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what the big interest here is, either,” he said. He squinted as if the outlines of the memory were taking shape in the hazy sky to the north. “I have an impression of an all-girl orchestra, for some reason, but I’m not sure. They’d introduce them in those days like they did more than just play or perform, like they did magic things with their instruments.” He rubbed his nose. “What was funny was that they were usually terrible. You know, Joe Blow and his magic xylo-phone. I guess I just remembered somebody with their magic violin.”

  Biddy spread his toes in the grass, tearing up strands.

  His father stood, flapping the back of his shirt to cool himself. “That’s the best I can do, guy. Try and make sense out of everything that comes out of your old man’s mouth and you’ll really be in trouble.”

  He bent over the mower to restart it while Biddy wrapped the dog’s leash around his arm, rolling it tightly in an idle attempt to create the effect of chain mail. His arm from wrist to elbow wrapped in metal, he got up and returned to the house, testing his new armor by banging it against the drainpipe on the way in.