Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  ***

  Okay, Queneau. Here's a true story and it's not about food. It's about Willa Desforge and Henryk Gniech, the Fords of Annunciation Street, and their befuddled, reclusive little son Benjamin, and maybe it's about love and maybe it's not but then who am I to say? I'm just a mordantly sober guy in an airport trying to avoid staring at his broken shoelace.

  The year was 1963. I was nine years old and mere days away from being ten, and was preoccupied that week, as I had been for months, with two issues: the horse I desperately wanted for my birthday, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The horse was any black-and-white paint horse similar to the kind ridden by Michael Landon's Little Joe on Bonanza. That particular horse was named Cochise though Little Joe more commonly called it "Cooch." ("Cooch," I might note, was Stella's codeword for her genitalia, which, while nicely circular, obviously made dirty talk an impossible exercise in nostalgia for me.) Cochise drank water out of Little Joe's hat and Little Joe also once shared his coffee with Cochise which I thought splendid. A coffee-drinking horse! Perfect for New Orleans—I presumed my horse would fancy our local chicory blend. Naturally I was too young to understand zoning laws and the spatial requirements of livestock but I felt certain my own Cooch would like our backyard just fine and would enjoy being ridden to and from school where I could tie him to the bike rack so long as I left him a bucket of water or a tall café au lait. My father barely acknowledged the idea—"Ah ... no"—while Miss Willa seemed vulnerably noncommittal. "Horses attract flies," she said, but that struck me as a manageable objection. I would blitz the backyard with a thousand sticky flystrips that would twist in the breeze like Tibetan prayer flags. I would keep a flyswatter holstered at all times, and my friend Harry Becker, who lived down the street, promised to do the same for little or no charge. Together, we would make sure the flies weren't a problem.

  There was nothing I could do, however, about nuclear death, which I felt certain was close at hand. Its looming shadow, in fact, was my unspoken rejoinder to my mother's other demur-ral—that perhaps I wasn't old enough for the responsibilities of a horse. But I'm as old as I'm ever going to be, went my thinking, what with nuclear winter blowing in soon. I felt its irradiant imminence every time we crawled under our schooldesks when the air-raid siren blew, my eyelids pressed against my left forearm, my other forearm shielding the back of my head, my jutting rump nevertheless fully exposed to the blast wave (that's how America's children would perish, ass-first)—and me wondering all the while whether I would see the fatal flash of light through the shield of my eyelids plus arm & if I would actually feel my hair burning which frightened me slightly more than death (on count two, the nuns said no). I felt that imminence, too, whenever Bonanza was interrupted by that dread test of the Emergency Broadcast System and the room temperature seemed to instantly drop by ten degrees. Is that how it would end? From Lorne Greene to a long chilly beep to the thundering Armageddon? "Had this been an actual emergency, you would have been instructed to tune in to your local radio station." I pictured myself running to the cabinet-sized radio/record player in the dining room and furiously dialing in WTIX-AM ("Fun-lovin' WTIX, the Mighty 690!") and listening to the end of the world surfing in on a commercial for Rex Root Beer or that Ponchartrain Beach jingle: At the beach, at the beach, at Ponchartrain Beach; you'll have fun, you'll have fun, every day of the week. "Come ride the Scrambler and the Flying Coaster and see the sixteen lively French poodles on the Poodle Expre—" Ka-boom! Come see the giant orange mushroom cloud! The end of everything, you, me, & sixteen lively poodles included! Because of its status as a port city ("a crucial port city," the nuns said), New Orleans would be obliterated in the first wave of attacks; this, we were told, was the price we had to pay for living in such an important town. Also it was rumored that the Russians hated Mardi Gras and/or for that matter all parades of a festive nature.

  Owing to this fear of mine, which caused even innocuous events like the sighting of a falling star to mutate into moments of fear & trembling (was that a missile?), my father and I tended to divvy up sections of the morning paper in an unorthodox way. The front page went to me and the comics went to him. (Neither of us ever had much use for the sports pages.) I would comb the headlines for clues of our impending doom—the Cuba problem was still sizzling that spring—while my father read the comics wearing precisely the same studious expression as me. If the state of the world confounded me, the state of American humor confounded him even more. Perhaps Lucy stealing the football away from Charlie Brown too closely mirrored Polish history to be funny, I don't know. Surely he found Andy Capp's dialect indecipherable (I did too). But then you need to understand that reading the comics wasn't leisure for him: My mother was constantly bemoaning his humorlessness, and he wanted to please her. For him, this was study—a concerted effort to break the code of funny, and perhaps make her laugh. Dagwood Bumstead was his Cyrano, his tutor in romance.

  After a while we would trade sections and there would be no sound save the clinking of our spoons and the slurping of mushy cornflakes. I always started with the Family Circus which, however corny, tended to soothe & console me. I felt a kind of voyeuristic delight in viewing, through the keyhole that its round border evoked, the quiescent hijinks of a "normal" family—Jeffy's cute-isms, the dopey antics of Barfy the Dog, the dad's frazzled cheeriness. I read somewhere once that scholars had concluded that the cave paintings at Lascaux etc. do not, as previously thought, depict actual events, or animals that the painters had actually seen—what they portray, instead, are animals the painters wanted to see, events they wished had happened. Is it overreaching to suggest an aesthetic link between prehistoric cave drawings and Bil Keane's Family Circus? The kid munching cornflakes says no. The Family Circus was my fatty mammoth, my glimpse of the idyll.

  Anyway, 1963. It was a Friday, I remember. My birthday was coming on Monday. Finished with the comics & cornflakes, I asked my father about my horse. The backyard had not been properly prepared and I was worried about the work still needing to be done. Transforming a garage into a stable seemed like no minor feat. Would there be time?

  "You cannot have no horse in New Orleans," he said.

  "There are horses at the fairgrounds," I said.

  "Those are racing horses."

  "My horse can race. He'll be fast."

  "You cannot have no horse in New Orleans," he repeated. On most mornings Miss Willa tended to sleep in, leaving my father and me to outfit ourselves for work & school, so I was mildly surprised that morning when she breezed sing-songy into the kitchen. Not entirely surprised, though, since she'd been on one of her blissful streaks lately—what I would later come to understand as "manic episodes." She'd returned to her painting and she'd enrolled in a flower-arranging class; the result was a house overgrown with dried cattails, goldenrod, celosia, purple flax, pepperberries, statice, baby's breath. Every corner was spiked with parched flora. Three magnolia wreaths overlooked the upstairs toilet alone and even my bedroom had been invaded—by bushels of French lavender that perfumed the room so strongly that I reversed the box fan in my room to blow out the window.

  My father always left for work fifteen minutes before I left for school, which was when I'd sneak in some television. On this day, however, after he left, my mother sat down at the table with me.

  "Benjamin," she said. "Would you like to skip school today?"

  Even then I was savvy enough to be suspicious. "Why?"

  "Why? What kind of answer is that?" She sounded a mock harrumph. "Well, I was thinking we might should look at some horses."

  You can imagine the detonation of my glee, the way it blew apart my reservations—and, too, my volley of sputtered yes-yes-yesses. My own Cooch! Hot diggety it was happening. The horsemen of the apocalypse would not find me without a steed. I made for the door but she stopped me.

  "We'll need to pack you some clothes," she said. "And go pick out some books and toys you'll want to take along."

  Naturally I was thrown off
by these comments but the last thing I wanted to do was to splash the opportunity with cold questions. I should note that she'd skipped off with me before: twice to Florida, once to New York (we got as far as Atlanta). But children are inherently optimistic, and, of course, brimming with greed. To employ a horsy metaphor: I purposefully donned blinders as I packed up random belongings and hauled my suitcase to the garage and into the backseat of our three-year-old Ford Fairlane. I knew enough to fear my mother's plans and potential delusions but if they yielded me a horse like Cochise, so be it. Eyes on the prize, baby. Hi-ho Silver. I must have waited in the front seat for more than an hour—fiddling with the glove compartment, rolling the window up and down, chewing the corners off my fingernails. Every so often my mother would load something else into the trunk and happily promise "one more minute." While I tried to stay sanguine about it all I'll admit my heart dropped an inch or so when I saw her stuffing all those dried flowers into the trunk along with her easel and her collected works on canvas. Clearly we were doing something more than driving to Jefferson Parish to scout horses. The trunk wouldn't close so she tied it with kitchen twine.

  "There," she said, sliding behind the wheel. "Are you ready?"

  "Where are we going?"

  The car was rolling out of the garage when she said, "New Mexico."

  For the most part I processed this in silence, until we were well outside New Orleans and following Highway 61 on its straight-arrow course toward Baton Rouge. Miss Willa had the peculiar and discomfiting habit of speaking to me as if I were a contemporary, and she chatted and chattered as we passed through those little swamptowns: about Mrs. Marge next door whose husband was in debt to some gangsters; about Charlotte Deviney who was in the hospital for reasons relating to her "uterus" which for all I knew was the technical term for a unicorn's horn; but mostly about the painter Georgia O'Keeffe who I soon gathered was the inspiration for our journey. According to my mother, O'Keeffe had carved herself the perfect artist's existence in New Mexico, a place she (and thus my mother) called "the Faraway." New Mexico was stark and haunting and blessed "with the most amazing light," as opposed to Louisiana where, she claimed, there was "no sky." This was baffling to me: What was all that blue in the windshield? Our native landscapes, she told me, were visually impenetrable—nebulous monochromes of moss and muck, devoid of angles and color and light. "Look at it out there," she said. "It's mud. We live in mud. How can you paint mud? How can you live in mud?" In "the Faraway," she said, it was different. Dawn's light dousing the desert was a miracle that would squeeze tears of awestruck joy from our eyes. The sun there was close enough to touch with a fingertip.

  I spied a roadside fortuneteller—Highway 61 used to be rife with those—and begged her to stop. "That's ridiculous, Benjamin," she said. (I've never been Bennie to her, always Benjamin—and, I should note, to her alone.) "Those people are charlatans and anyway darling we don't need our fortunes told. We know exactly what lies ahead for us. Things are going to be different for you and me. They're going to be better."

  "What about Dad?" I finally asked.

  She sighed: Oh, him. There was a silence while her arms tensed against the steering wheel. "Do you love your father, Benjamin?" she asked.

  Did I? The question had never occurred to me before. Of course I did. Was it possible not to? He was my father. He poured my cornflakes and shared the paper with me and at night spoke crazywords to me that I clung to like bobbing life-rafts. "Yes," I told her.

  She sighed again and fetched a Salem from her purse. Publicly, Miss Willa was always quitting smoking, or about to be quitting. She'd announce to us that she was done with cigarettes but then immediately retreat to the bathroom to sneak one. We were always finding filters floating in the toilet bowl, trailed by a tea-colored stain. "Willa!" my father would say. "Someone's cigarette has floated up from the sewers again! We must call plumber."

  "Your father is a good man," she said, cracking the window to draft off her smoke. "He is. He's a gentle man. I'll give him that—he wouldn't harm a fly. But he doesn't understand people like you and me. He doesn't want the same things we want. He wants food on the table and a job to go to and he doesn't care what the food tastes like or what the job is. Do you know he's never asked for a raise from Mr. Prejean? Never. He's just too different from you and me. Maybe it's what he went through during the war—that was a hard time, you know."

  She took a contemplative drag on the Salem. "He just wouldn't understand the Faraway," she said. "You can have horses there and I can paint. As many horses as you like. That's the life we were meant for, Benjamin. That's what we're headed for."

  It was brutally cunning, I realized later: By weaving my desires into hers, by brushing my horses onto her chimeric landscape, she made me an accomplice. Why were we abandoning my father? Because he refused me a horse. Because he was different from us. For one hundred miles she belabored the point: A boy needed wide-open spaces; a woman needed freedom and romance and life; the two of us were sun-craving flowers planted in the damp shade; "your father" wouldn't miss us, would barely notice our absence; she'd left him dinner in the icebox plus there were leftover porkchops; God bless the Faraway, Benjamin; the Faraway is our destiny. A thousand LIVE CRAWFISH signs whizzed past. Tourist courts with algae-scummed swimming pools. Spring cotton fields fuzzed with tender green growth that you could only see from certain angles. Crushed, buzzard-picked armadillos that went unk beneath our tires. Skinny black kids playing too close to the road, stilled by our passing; for a few inscrutable seconds their hard stares would meet mine as my mother gassed us westward.

  Outside Opelousas we stopped for gas and lunch. I remember I ordered boudin sausage which repulsed her. "I think there's pig's blood in those," she warned. "Anyway it's not a good idea to trust the food outside New Orleans." She let me buy bubble-gum cigarettes and I chainsmoked them into Texas, my window cracked to exhaust the powdered-sugar smoke. I thought twice about ditching the gum out the window, wondering if such discarded sweets were what lured doomed armadillos onto the highway. So instead I gobbed the spent pieces together with my hands and wrapped them in newspaper. By Huntsville I had a baseball-sized wad.

  "Is New Mexico important?" I asked her.

  "Important?" she said. "To us? I think it's terribly important."

  "No," I said. "To the Russians. Do they think it's important?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "Well, New Orleans is important because it's a port city and that's why the Russians are going to bomb it. Are they going to bomb New Mexico, too?"

  "Oh, honey, no. Where do you get all this? You don't need to be afraid. The Russians wouldn't bomb New Mexico. It's too beautiful and there's no one there anyway. You won't need to worry anymore."

  I found this information hard to digest—and weirdly disappointing, too. For all my nightsweats about nuclear attack, there was something mesmerizing and exciting about it as well, something that felt the way a dangerous bout of lust would strike me later in life—an amalgam of dread and desire that made my heart race, that injected my veins with the sizzle of doom. I wanted to worry about it.

  We ate dinner at an Old West-themed restaurant where the waiter wore a cowboy hat and a string tie and called me pad-nah. "You see, honey?" my mother said. "We're in the West now. It's different." She suggested I order sarsaparilla which she claimed was the soda of choice for cowboys but it tasted just like root beer to me. When the jukebox played Marty Robbins's "El Paso" my mother sang along until I begged her to stop. Her church-pew soprano on "wild as the west Texas wi-ihhhhhh-nnnnn-d" was drawing stares. "Oh, don't be so serious," she said. "For heaven's sake, you're just like your father sometimes." To keep myself occupied I drew a sloppy crayon portrait of the waiter on the back of the kids' menu. "Oh, how wonderful," my mother said. "Let me show him." I protested, lividly, but she showed him anyway. "Ain't that some'n, pad-nah," he said with an unmistakable air of bullshit. "My son is very talented," my mother said, clasping my hand. When the
waiter was out of earshot she asked me if I didn't think he was handsome. I shrugged.

  "Oh, you don't know, you're a boy," she said. After glancing at the nearby tables, she leaned in toward me, speaking as softly as a wartime confidante. "Benjamin," she said. "Let me ask you something. Would it bother you if there was a new man around?"

  "What kind of man?"

  "Not so loud. Just someone to take your mother dancing once in a while. And maybe to play with you. Throw a ball, that sort of thing. Why, maybe a man who knows something about horses."

  "I don't know."

  "But it wouldn't bother you?"

  We spent the night in a cabin-court room at a motel my mother chose because of the huge white steer horns that crowned its roadside sign. "How fun," she said. The blankets on the beds were decorated with the same horns. There was a black-and-white TV in the room but the antenna was broken and it didn't get any channels, so I dipped into the Gideon Bible I discovered in the drawer of the nightstand between our beds. Midway through the Book of Revelation—I've always started books at the end—my mother ordered me to turn off the light. After that I lay awake listening to the purr of highway traffic and watching the glow from passing headlights roam the walls of our room. "This is nice, isn't it?" my mother said to the dark. It wasn't obvious she was talking to me. "Goodnight," is what I said back. "Yes," she went on. "It's good that it's nice."

  ***

  Pardon the interruption but guess who was just here? The Munchkin! (Cribbing from Alojzy, and his upgrade from niedźwiedź to Niedźwiedź, I have promoted her from munchkin to Munchkin.) Surely you remember: the one with the handheld slot machine and the comatose husband and that packet of Kleenex currently tucked in my satchel. I was "scribbling away" (to use Oshkosh Bob's phrase) at the above, adrift in my own mental Texas, when I felt a finger jabbing me in the chest. Rather hard, too: a barfight-quality poke. "Hey, buster," she said to me, flashing a bridgeworked smile. "I was heading out for some air and saw you sitting here."