He came close to saying to Bernays, ‘God, I can’t believe it, I thought you were gay.’ And what would Bernays say? ‘Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, what’s it to you?’ And Frank would say, ‘Well, what are you doing with these women?’ And Bernays would say, ‘Would you pursue this if your brother were here?’ And Frank would collapse with shame. Frank felt himself wavering, and he needed to regain his balance.
‘Are you going back to Los Angeles tomorrow?’ asked Bettina.
‘I don’t know,’ said Frank.
One of the women said there was going to be another memorial in Los Angeles, and the other woman said it would also be a funeral.
’A funeral,’ said Frank, knowing that if he said nothing else the four of them would imagine that he was imagining the grim scene of all those caskets, some of them flag-draped, baking in the sun, dry-roasting the body parts inside.
‘We’ll be there,’ said Bettina. She played with her drink. The secret she carried, the truth about Frank Gale, was not, at this moment, the most important thing in her. She wanted to fuck Bernays, it was obvious, and she didn’t want to be reminded of her duties. Frank nodded to the bartender, and made a circle with his finger, towards the table, meaning: another round. Everyone at the table protested.
‘No,’ said Frank. ‘Please, you’ve all been so good to me.’ He reached into his wallet and took out a twenty dollar bill. Would it be enough? He added another ten and walked to the table, knowing that if he stayed, he would lose the game he had invented.
‘That’s too much,’ said Bettina.
‘We’ll give you the change when we see you,’ said Bernays.
This was such a ridiculous self-imposed mission that for a quick moment Frank wanted to say, ‘Fine, I’ll see you at the funeral,’ just to put Bernays through the trouble of holding on to the change, of keeping it in a separate envelope, but he had a better idea. ‘Don’t give it back to me,’ said Frank. ‘I don’t need it. But if there’s a charity, you know, for any of the children on the ground, or if the pilot had kids and someone sets up a trust fund for them, give them the money.’ And then the most diabolical sentence bubbled up, and he heard himself say, ‘Unless you want another round.’
Frank thought the last suggestion was so hilarious, such an insult, that he had to turn quickly and run from the room. Let them think he wanted to cry, but when he got to the elevator, and the door closed, he leaned against the wall and shrieked with laughter, cackling like the madman he had become. But it isn’t just insanity, he told himself. This is really very funny. What can they do now? They’ll buy themselves another round, with the change that remains, and if there’s not enough left over they’ll add to the money with a little extra from their own pockets, and they will, each of them, have to forgive themselves for stealing a few dollars from charity, while they’ll promise themselves, each of them, privately, to give, what, five dollars to the next bum they pass in a doorway, or maybe stuff five dollars into one of those collection cans with the coin slot, next to the cash register and the red strips of liquorice. And maybe a little extra to a collection plate the next time one is passed, if they ever go to church, but they’ll also know that when they next see that plate, they won’t put in any special supplement while thinking of Frank. Perfect, perfect, perfect.
Back in his room the message light flashed on his phone. He called the hotel operator, who told him that his brother had called, also someone from the National Transportation Safety Board, Guy Ingle. He left a number, but added that he would call in the morning. Frank supposed this was about the identification of the bodies, although the name was new, and wouldn’t that call come from the coroner? There was nothing he could do now except worry about it, and he would try not to. And his brother: did Lowell think he was asleep, or still deaf? What had he wanted? Don’t call him now, thought Frank. Write that poem about the pillow.
He picked up the notebook, to write the truth, and with the bad pen scraped into the page, I woke up and I was happy to hear the pillow. This was true, but he hated the way it looked on the paper. He crossed it out, and held the pen over the paper for a long time, and then closed the book. He opened it again and wrote, I do not have to do this. He liked that sentence more than the first one, and thought it might be a good first line for something, but he had nothing that wanted to follow.
He turned the television on, to the news channel, and a picture of Lonnie Walter. This is the man who murdered my family, thought Frank. Another letter had been discovered in the wreckage of the plane, the reporter said. Walter had written a message on an airsickness bag to the boss who had fired him. It said, simply, ‘Hi Nick. I think it’s sort of ironical that we end up like this. I asked for some leniency, remember? Well, I got none, and you’ll get none.’
Frank turned the television off, and reconstructed the story. Walter must have passed the note to the boss just as he was getting his gun out. He shot the boss, shot a flight attendant, and then went to the cockpit and shot the pilots, and shot out the controls. How long had it taken from the time he pulled the gun out of, what, a briefcase? ... until the plane started to go down? Had he shot himself, or did he stand in the cockpit, over the bodies of the crew, to watch the ground come up? It was daylight. He had time to think about things. He would have heard the passengers screaming. And how did he feel as the plane went down? Had a bullet exploded the windows of the cockpit? He would have been sucked out of the plane and killed in the air. But if the windows had held, and the pilots were dead, and the flight attendants were crying, and the passengers were wailing, might Lonnie Walter, for an instant, in his exhaustion, regret what he had done? Might he have turned to the passengers and said that he was sorry? The last time Frank had fucked Mary Sifka, how much had he hated her after he had come?
Frank had an idea. The day’s papers were on an end table. He looked for the article about Lonnie Walter.
Lonnie Walter was a forty-five-year-old native of Los Angeles. His parents had come to the city from Louisiana. His father, a plumber, died when Lonnie was fifteen. Lonnie had joined the Marines and had served in Vietnam. He was divorced, with a son and a daughter who lived with their mother in Phoenix. He had two sisters. His older sister (forty-seven), Teresa, lived in Los Angeles. His younger sister (thirty-one), Lovie, lived in Seattle. Frank thought of black children on a hike in the Cascade Mountains, their freedom, black faces, red parkas, green trees. And their uncle, who had destroyed an airplane, a Boeing, made in Seattle.
After leaving the Marines, Lonnie Walter’s first job was with the airline, and he’d stayed with them until he was fired two weeks ago.
Frank picked up the phone and called Information in Los Angeles, and asked for Lonnie Walter’s phone number. It was listed! There he was! He could call and see if anyone was there.
He dialled. Someone answered! A woman!
‘Hello,’ said the woman.
‘Is Lonnie there?’ asked Frank.
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Larry Levy,’ said Frank, taking the name of one of the dead from the list in the paper.
‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘I’m calling from New York, it’s six in the morning here. Lonnie and I used to talk at this time, all the time.’
‘And you’re in New York, and you haven’t read the news.’
‘No, ma’am,’ said Frank. ‘And you must be ...’ Frank wanted her to complete the sentence.
‘If you know Lonnie so well, you should know who I am.’
‘You must be his sister, Terry.’
‘Yes. Terry.’ Could she imagine that out in the world someone so diabolical would take her name from the Los Angeles Timesand use it so coldly?
‘Where’s Lonnie?’
‘Lonnie’s dead.’
‘What?’ asked Frank, sounding bewildered. ‘No.’ ‘You don’t know?’ she asked.
Frank pretended not to understand that she was asking him if he knew about everything, and limited himself to acting as tho
ugh she just meant that his not knowing about the death surprised her, not because the whole world knew, but because no one had called him yet, to tell him of the passing of a friend in such an awful way. He could let her think that he thought the death was ordinary, something at work, or a car crash. ‘Oh, my God,’ said Frank. ‘I can’t believe it. That’s awful, what happened?’
‘I can’t talk about it,’ she said, and she hung up the phone. Frank waited a second and called her back.
‘It’s me again, it’s Larry.’
‘I can’t talk now.’
‘Wait!’ he shouted. There was all the command he had ever had in his life, in that one shout. No one could have refused him. Finally he was stronger than his brother. ‘I have a terrible feeling about this right now. After he was fired, he was really upset.’
‘Yes,’ said his sister.
‘Oh, my dear sweet Lord,’ said Frank. ‘He used to joke about it, but did he kill himself?’
‘Yes,’ said the sister. She was crying again.
‘Oh God, oh God, oh God,’ said Frank. He was smiling now. Fuck the writing, thought Frank, I should be an actor!
‘I don’t know who to talk to,’ said Walter’s sister. The part of her accent that was black, or the South, also had a brittle quality, and if she weren’t tired, and her brother hadn’t done what he had done, and she were just talking to Frank under whatever circumstances were normal in her life, she would have sounded arrogant.
‘You can talk to me. I spoke to him last week. I was away on vacation until last night. We’d talked about him coming with me. I went to Jamaica.’
‘He said something about that,’ said his sister. ‘About a vacation with a friend.’
‘That was me,’ said Frank. And if it was someone else, let them call her. He was sure that no one else in the entire world had his wacko courage.
‘So you haven’t read the papers, or seen the news.’
’The news is not my strong suit,’ said Frank. ‘I used to have Lonnie tell me who to vote for, even in New York elections, you know, the mayor and stuff. He was always up on that.’ This was such a specific lie that if she had never seen her brother read the paper, now she would add this to the collection of THINGS SHE NEVER KNEW ABOUT HIM, that he had a friend in New York, that they talked politics, that Lonnie had someone in the world who looked up to him, a white man, a Jew.
‘Did you hear about the plane crash?’
‘The one in Argentina?’ He didn’t know if there really had been a crash in Argentina, but it seemed like the thing to say, to keep the flow of credibility going. And don’t the planes in Argentina always crash?
‘The one in San Diego.’
‘What are you saying?’ asked Frank.
‘They say Lonnie shot up the plane.’
‘With the Colt?’
‘You knew about the gun?’
‘Goddamn it. I told him not to get that gun.’
‘He got it.’
‘My God.’
‘The plane was full. A seven-three-seven.’
‘A seven-three-seven, standard configuration, eight rows first-class, thirty-two in coach?’ He made a crazy face, this was the most fun he had ever had in his life.
‘A seven-three-seven, a lot of people. And it went into a crowded neighbourhood.’
‘Oh my God. And they think Lonnie shot down a plane from the ground, with his gun?’
‘They say he got on the plane and shot the pilot.’
‘No! Lonnie? No! But you don’t believe that. I don’t believe that. Lonnie? No! Not Lonnie.’
He let her stop his rant. ‘That’s what they say.’
‘No.’
‘Mr Levy, I think it’s true.’
‘But you can’t get a gun past security. The girls who run those machines may not look it, but they’re awfully sharp. And call me Larry.’
‘They say he did. They say he used his old pass to get into the airport, where they didn’t have a metal detector.’
‘And you believe this.’
‘I’m afraid it’s impossible not to. How long did you know him?’
‘I’ve known him,’ said Frank, not wanting to speak of Lonnie in the past tense, ‘for about five years. I lived in LA for a while. I worked with him.’
‘How well did you know him?’
‘Well, he did have his demons,’ Frank said, shaking his head, remembering, as did his sister, the man described in the papers, a man who could drink all night, a man who started fights for no reason, a man whose wife left him because of his pathological jealousy.
‘That’s no comfort to the families of all the dead.’
‘Terry, I can’t know how you feel, but I’m not talking to the families of the dead. I’m talking to you. And you need to remember the man we both knew as someone who was troubled, but also capable of love. You need to remember the love he had for you. I know I will. And you didn’t pull the trigger, he wasn’t you, he was your brother. Someone has to remember him, you know, as he was, most of the time, when he wasn’t, you know ... I mean, he never killed anyone before.’
‘It’s a terrible burden.’
‘He was a good friend, that’s what I want to say.’
‘No one else has called.’
‘Bastards.’
‘You can’t blame them,’ said Terry.
‘But he was a friend. I haven’t read anything, so I don’t know. And maybe he did this just as they say he did, maybe it was even worse, but he was a friend. And whatever happened to him, whatever happened to his mind, he was in a lot of pain. Maybe we could have given him more help, more love, maybe he wouldn’t have done this. So he was lonely. He needed me, and damn it, I failed him. I don’t know about his other friends, but I know about me, and I can blame myself.’
‘No,’ said Walter’s sister.
‘Yes. I knew how upset he was. He told me about the gun. He had fantasies. I heard him, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t listen with my third eye.’ What? thought Frank. Hear with my eye? Is his sister listening to me? He went on. ‘I just don’t know if I ever told him. Told him that I really liked him. Damn it.’
She started to cry again. The sobs built to something too painful for Frank to hear, and he was ashamed of his joke.
‘Maybe you could call another time. I need someone to talk to. I need a friend.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said. He didn’t know if she could hear him, but he hung up.
What wrong did I do? he asked himself. I gave her comfort just now. Has anyone else been nice to her in the last week? Maybe she can sleep now. Maybe I can finally sleep.
He turned off the light. It was quiet in the hotel room. It wouldn’t have been quiet like this in Mexico. If there really is a heaven, he thought, and if my wife and daughter are angels now, and belong to God, can they see me? Did they watch me call Terry Walter? Are they watching her now? Do they forgive me?
It was 3 in the morning, and he wanted to let his family know that his voice was back. He called his mother’s room. The phone rang five times, and then she answered, with sleep in her voice.
‘Hi,’ said Frank.
‘Lowell?’ she asked.
‘No, Frank.’
‘Frank,’ she said. He thought she was trying to remember if she knew any Franks. ‘Frank,’ she said again, after a frightening pause, and then again, ‘Frank,’ and this time her voice indicated the surprise he expected.
‘Yep, it’s back,’ he said, pleased with the creepiness of his ‘yep’, which was too full of excitement, as though his voice were a puppy returned from a day’s exploration. If his family was turning on him, he would make them pay for it, with an unpleasant friendliness that would make them worry that this ugly, forward part of his character was something so deeply a part of his structure that he was revealing to them something they all shared, something fundamental in the Gale genetic design; the thing that marked them, and now was revealed by their son, would be the thing they would all, against their will, express to the
world, this oily, insistent blindness to the privacy of others, to their hatred of the Gales and their Gale-ness. He was sure that his mother was so scared that in the morning she would call Bettina Welch and ask her what she really thought of her.
‘Well, I just wanted to say that I was OK.’
‘The doctor said you were.’
‘Yes, but doctors are wrong sometimes. I mean, I could have really been deaf.’
‘But they said there was no physical reason for that, nothing caused it.’
‘But maybe it could have been something unrelated to everything that’s happened this week. Maybe it could have been some kind of virus, or microbe, that had been growing for a long time, and had cut the optic nerve.’
‘That’s to the eyes.’
‘Maybe that could have been next. To the ear canal, you know. Something inside the ear. It could have been that.’
‘But it wasn’t. Because you’re fine now.’
‘For now, yes. But how much longer? Maybe it’ll come back.’
‘The doctor was certain.’
‘Are you taking his side or mine?’
‘Frank, he’s a doctor, he ran the tests.’
‘Oh, and was he the world’s expert on S-H-L-S?’
Among the Dead Page 25