They stand together, their arms around each other, bits of cartilage clinging to their skin, their legs and skirts dripping. Natalie is about to return to the car when Sophie’s hands tighten on her arms.
“Nat,” she says. “I’m going home.”
“What?”
“Just listen, okay? Stop looking at me like that and pretending you’re better and be my friend and listen.”
“Okay,” Natalie whispers. Merle on the radio, sweeping gently out the open driver’s side door. “Mama Tried.”
“I’ve been thinking about this. A lot. And what I’ve been thinking is—seriously, now, just wait, just hear me out—what better gift could a mother give her children?”
“Sophie…”
“Think about it, Nat. I am. I can’t stop. He’s all I think about. His little feet. God, his little feet. We could be back there in three hours. We could be with our children three hours from now, and never have to leave them again.”
“Sophie, please, you’ve got to—”
“What did you hope for when Eddie was born, Nat? What did you think you could do for him? What did you want for him? How about no worries, ever? How about no pain? Ever.”
“Sophie, you need to—”
“How about living forever?”
It was like a cobra strike, Natalie thinks seconds later, her teeth still buried in the softness under her best friend’s chin, Sophie’s dead, twitchless body flat beneath her. Like a goddamn bolt of lightning, Natalie thinks as she gulps and drinks. The only concern she’d had at the instant she’d acted was that it wouldn’t taste good. Would make her wretch and gag like the deer had.
And it was cold, alright. A little sour, not quite right. But it tastes fine. She’s still lapping away, burying her face deeper in Sophie’s throat, hips rocking side to side to Merle’s rhythm. It tastes fine.
The Nimble Men
“But the air, out there, so wild, so white…”
Thomas St. John Bartlett, in a letter to Robert Louis Stevenson from the Orkney Islands in the winter of 1901
Ever notice how Satie, played in the dark at just the right volume, can tilt the whole world? That night, I had Je te Veux on the tinny cockpit stereo, and even before the snow, the pines at the edge of the great north woods just beyond the taxiway appeared to dip and lean, and the white lines disappearing beneath the wheels of our little commuter seemed to weave around and between each other like children at a wedding dance as we made our way to the de-icing station. Then the snow started, white and winking, a drizzle of starlight, and even the air traffic control tower looked ready to lift its arms and step off its foundations and sway.
And then Alex, my junior co-pilot of four months, opened his thermal lunch box. The reek flooded the cabin and set the panel lights wavering in my watering eyes. I swear to God, the iPod gagged. Alex just sat in the steam, eyes half-closed and grinning, as if he were taking a sauna.
“God, you Gorby, tell me that isn’t poutine.”
“Want some, Old Dude?” said Alex, and lifted the container from the cooler.
Out the front of the plane, the world went on dancing, and the snow whirled through it. But I couldn’t stop staring at the mess in Alex’s container. A few limp, bloated French fries stuck out of the lava flow of industrial-colored sludge like petrified slugs. Congealed, gray lumps clung to their sides and leaked white pus.
“Is that meat?” I asked. “Cheese?”
Alex grinned wider. “It’s your country. You tell me.”
“Where’d you even find it? We had, what, three hours? Where does one even find poutine on a three-hour layover in Prince Willows Town, Ontario?”
“If you turn over control of the stereo, I’ll put it away for a while.”
We’d reached the de-icing station, and I pushed on the brakes and brought the coasting plane to a rolling stop. No matter how many times I did this, I was always surprised by the dark out here. At every other point within two miles of this tiny airport, manmade light flooded and mapped the world. But not here.
I peered through the windscreen and the wavering skeins of snow. It took a few moments, but eventually, my eyes adjusted to the point where I could just make out the de-icer truck parked a few meters off the taxiway in the flat, dead grass. Weirdly, it had its boom already hoisted, as though we were meant to make our way into the fields to get sprayed. I couldn’t see either the driver of the truck or the guy on the enclosed platform at the top of the boom, because both were blanketed in shadow. But the platform looked tilted to me, almost chin-to-chest with the rotating metal stand that supported it. It reminded me of one of the dead Martians from War of the Worlds.
We sat and we waited. The truck didn’t move.
“Peculiar,” I murmured, and Alex passed his poutine container right under my nostrils. My eyes watered, and I turned on him. “What was that for?”
“You were muttering, Old Dude. Just making sure you were conscious. Now about control of that stereo. You ready to deal?”
For answer, I clicked on the intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We hope all six of you have settled comfortably in your seats, that your luggage is crammed effectively between your knees and the seat in front of you—” Alex snorted at that—”and we look forward to having virtually no time to serve you during our brief skip-hop to Toronto. We will be cleared for takeoff shortly. In the meantime, sit back, relax, be happy this flight is not bound for Winterpeg, and please pay no attention to the gigantic, alien-shaped creature about to swoop down upon us. It comes in peace, to de-ice the wings. Also, we do apologize for the odor escaping into the cabin under the doors of our cockpit. It came with my co-pilot, and I’m afraid there’s little we can do about it. If you need assistance of any kind, please don’t hesitate to call on Jamie, our charismatic, experienced, and resourceful in-flight technician, at any time. We should be in the air shortly.”
Alex laughed. “Come out with me tonight,” he said. “Let’s do Hogtown.”
“Do it?”
“Paint it. Rock it. Suck it dry. Come on, Old Dude. You keep saying you’ll let me show you my Toronto. I say it’s time. You told me it’s been three years, right? It’s—whoa. What was that?”
He had his cap turned backward on his head, the container in his lap, and a gravy-soaked French fry halfway to his lips. For the thousandth time in the past four months—but the first tonight—I remembered how much I liked him.
“I think we just painted Prince Willows Town, Young Polyp. Milked it, licked it, whole works.”
“You’re babbling again, Old Dude.”
“Northern lights, Alex. You’ve heard of them, maybe.”
He shook his head. “Wrong time, right? Also too low.”
As usual, he was correct on both counts. I turned back to the windscreen, peering down the tarmac toward the tops of the trees, where we’d both seen a spiraling flash of green, then aquamarine.
But there was nothing now except the snowflakes, settling in their millions onto the branches of the pines as though completing some massive, unmarked winter migration. We watched that a while, and then I glanced again toward the de-icing truck. It sat silent, and the snow shrouded the high platform’s window glass.
“The Nimble Men,” said Alex, savoring the words.
“What?”
“Is that the coolest name you’ve ever heard for the aurora, or what?”
“The Nimble Men?”
“It’s catchy, no?”
“How many other names do you know, Alex?”
“Well, there’s chasmata. That’s from Ancient Rome. They thought the lights were cave mouths. For sky caves. Come on, Old Dude. Trump me. What you got?”
I would have smiled if not for the de-icer, hunkered in the dead grass like a junked car on a lawn.
“Well, there’s one story…” I said.
“That’s the Old Dude I know. Lay it on me.”
“There are several versions. Usually, it goes that sometime dur
ing the Depression, a poor woodsman went out in those woods—”
“Those woods right there?”
“Whichever Ontario woods you happen to be closest to. Didn’t anyone ever tell you a ghost story?”
Alex nodded. “Carry on.”
“So the woodsman was out.” This time I did smile. “Rockin’ the forest.”
That earned me a salute with a sludgy fry.
“And while he was out, he saw the lights.”
“The Nimble Men,” said Alex.
I held up a finger. “But not in the sky. In the trees. The woodsman had an inkling. He raced home. When he got there, his wife said their old, sick dog had got out, and their daughter had gotten frantic and gone after him. The dog came back. But the daughter didn’t. She was never seen again. The woodsman went looking with his lantern every night for the rest of his life, but he never found so much as a trace. According to some, he’s still looking, and those are his lights. Hey, Alex, I don’t like this.”
He’d been nodding and chewing, but now lowered the cardboard fry-boat back into his lunch box and wiped his hands on his uniform pants. “You’re right, Old Dude. Why are we just sitting here?”
I flicked on the radio and called the tower. “This is Northwoods Air 2-8-4.”
The response was immediate, the voice so clear it might have come from inside the cabin. “Northwoods 2-8-4, go ahead.”
“Bill, that you?”
“What is it, Wayne?”
“We’re at the de-icer. The de-icer isn’t moving.”
I don’t know what I expected. We’ll wake him up, maybe. Or, How’s that? Or, since Bill had a little of Alex’s puckishness, Moon him.
Instead, there was a long silence. I was about to repeat myself when Bill’s voice came back.
“Sit tight,” he said. “Don’t move.”
“What—” I started, and the link closed. Went off. I tried talking into the communicator again, but it was like yelling into a fist.
“Hey, another one,” Alex said, but by the time I turned, there was just the faintest blue streak, a smear on the snow-curtain.
On normal nights, the de-icer springs awake the second a plane rolls to a stop. The truck maneuvers close, and the driver makes contact over the com-link. The pilot shuts down all systems and closes the vents so no fluid gets inside the cabin. Then the platform jockey swoops in with his pod, unfolds its nozzle-arms, and engulfs the wings in a blast of bright purple antifreeze. The whole process takes less than five minutes. Sometimes less than two.
But we’d already been here quite a while. I could make out the platform jockey now, or at least his shadow. He was hunched or slumped in his pod, fifteen meters off the ground. I couldn’t see his face, because he had nothing illuminated. I couldn’t hear his voice, because the truck hadn’t plugged into us and made contact. As far as I could tell, the truck still wasn’t running its engine. This time, the glimmer in the trees flashed red, and the redness hung a moment at the very edge of the forest before winking out.
“See, I don’t get it,” Alex said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s what I’m—”
“Your story. I mean, what’s the deal, Old Dude? The lights came to warn him? Or they’re his daughter’s soul at the moment of her death? Or a presentiment of his future as the Wood-Wandering Lantern Guy? You’ve got to get more specific, here.”
The lack of movement on the taxiway was really starting to get to me. I almost clicked on the intercom and called Jamie in to take a look. But that would only have triggered a new round of Alex-hits-on-Jamie. Not that Jamie seemed to mind.
“It’s not my story. And the lights were probably all of those things, depending on the telling,” I said. “You know how those stories work.”
“I know that one could work better.”
“What does he mean, sit tight, don’t move?”
“Let’s go see,” Alex said, unhooked himself from his belts and stood.
That at least drew my gaze from the taxiway to his face. “Go where?”
“Out. Tell me you’ve never wanted to go out there. You ever done it? We’ve got a perfect excuse.”
“We can’t go out there.”
“Why not?”
I thought about that. “Aren’t there regulations? There’ve got to be regulations.”
“And yet there you are, already unhooking your belt.” His grin was an eight year-old’s, and lit him all the way to his moppy curls. And there I was, unhooking my belt. “Old Dude,” he said approvingly. Then he threw open the cockpit door and marched into the tiny cabin of our commuter plane, chanting, “Oh, Jamie…”
By the time I emerged, he was standing as if onstage with his arm around our blond, too-thin flight attendant, who was without doubt closer to my age than his, and facing our six passengers. All of them were apparently traveling alone, since they’d each claimed their own row—we called them rows, though they were really only sets of single seats on either side of a narrow aisle—leaving only the front empty.
“What’s going on?” called an exhausted-looking grad-school type in a green McGill sweatshirt from a couple rows back.
“Who’s up for hide and seek? Come on, I’ll count ten,” Alex said, and Jamie dropped her head and shook it and laughed.
“Excuse him, ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “He’s American, he’s just eaten his first poutine, and it’s made him punchy.”
“Avez-vous poutine?” said a white-haired woman three rows back, perking up as though she thought we might offer her a plateful with her complimentary ice water.
“Je l’ai fini,” Alex said, patting his non-existent gut. I couldn’t see his face, but I was sure he’d winked.
I moved to the door, unlocked it, and Jamie swung toward me in surprise.
“Wayne?”
I made a waving gesture, casual as I could make it. “We’re just…”
“Checking something,” Alex said. “Right back, y’all.”
“Checking,” I said quietly to Jamie. “It’s not the plane. Not to worry.”
Before she could ask, and before I had time to reconsider, Alex pushed the door outward. Frigid, resin-scented air gushed into the cabin, sweeping tendrils of snow around our ankles as the folding stair lowered itself to the ground.
Jamie took an immediate step back. Because of the cold, I realized, only the cold. But Alex hesitated, too, just momentarily. In thirty-one years as a pilot, I’d never once left my plane except at a gate. Certainly not on a taxiway or runway. I stared into the blackness, the snow cocooning the world. A high, industrial whine rode the air-currents, seeming to burrow uncomfortably into my ear canals.
I glanced over my shoulder. The only passenger not watching was the chubby, middle-aged guy in the seat closest to the open door. He had his head against the window, his tie still knotted tight at this throat, his eyes closed too tightly to be sleeping. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. His skin looked pale and wet as the window-glass.
“He okay?” I murmured to Jamie.
She shrugged. “He’s been like that since we boarded. I don’t think he’s having a heart attack or anything, if that’s what you’re asking. Are you okay, Wayne? This doesn’t seem…”
“You’re right,” I said. “Hey, Alex, why don’t we just go check in with Bill again.”
“Because, Old Dude,” he said. “We’re the Nimble Men.” And with his hands artfully tucked in the pockets of his ridiculous thrift-store bomber jacket, he strolled out of the plane, down the steps to the tarmac.
Why did I go? I’ve wondered that ever since. Because the lifeless de-icer bothered me, sure. Because Alex’s enthusiasm for everything had stirred the embers of my own, dead not so long then. But there was something else. A need. Sudden. Overpowering. Was it mine? I still don’t know.
I went down the steps. Behind me, I heard a single, saw-edged gasp or sigh from the not-sleeping guy. I heard another sound, too, or thought I did. That high, electrical whine, though w
e were the only plane out here.
When I reached Alex’s side, he smiled. “One small step for Nimble Men…”
To my surprise, I smiled back. “See, now you’re doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“Are the lights the Nimble Men? Are we?”
“You know you’re the coolest pilot I’m ever going to work with in my life, right, Old Dude? You know you’ve ruined cockpit chatter for me forever.”
“Why, thank you, Alex. Sometimes, I feel the same.”
“When we get back inside, could we at least put on a Gymnopedie? One of the Gnossiennes?”
Now I stared at him. “You know Satie, too?”
“I know Je te Veux makes you morose.”
“For a punk kid, you know a hell of a lot of things, Alex.”
“That’s what things are for. Right?”
“Some things,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t.
“Hey, man,” Alex said.
Ignoring him, trying to ignore myself, I looked across the tarmac at the de-icer. There really didn’t seem to be anybody in the truck. There was someone on the platform up there, alright, but as far as I could make out, he still hadn’t even noticed us. Unless the driver had left his keys in the ignition, or we could find a good stone to throw, we were going to have a hard time getting the platform jockey’s attention. The whining was louder out here, too. Or, not louder. Closer. More shrill. If it hadn’t been January, I’d have thought there were gnats in my ears.
Jamie’s low-heeled shoes clicked on the folding staircase, and she appeared between us. Alex put his arm around her. Lights blossomed in the closest treetops, a scatter of turquoise and Kelly green and deep pink, as though someone had scattered a handful of marbles up there. The branches rippled with the color, then swallowed it.
“Jesus,” said Jamie.
Alex put an arm around her waist. “Wacky north woods beautifulness. My favorite kind.”
“Is that ice, do you think? Airport lights reflecting in the branches?”
Of course, that was right. Why hadn’t I thought of it? I gestured back toward the plane. “Seriously, is that guy alright?” I asked. “The passenger in 2B?”
The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Page 19