by Scott Frank
Roy’s house was a split-level wrapped in brick wainscot below and dark brown siding above. Not a friendly house. There were no longer any shrubs in the yard, just a brown lawn, a circle of dirt in the center where an elm once stood. Roy was running across that circle when he heard her voice.
“Hey, handsome.”
She was sitting on the front step, in pale blue cotton shorts and one of his dad’s white shirts, legs folded to one side, an open Redbook magazine across her lap. She rocked the white bassinet containing Roy’s baby brother with one bare foot, and Roy saw she had recently done her toes in the same blue as her shorts. It wasn’t cold out yet, but it wasn’t warm either. Still, there she was, dressed for the Fourth of July. She looked past Roy and watched the other boys now, the two of them skidding to a stop on the sidewalk, practically running cartoonlike into each other when they saw her.
For a brief moment, nobody moved. Roy hoping the fear on his face wasn’t too obvious when his mother put her brown eyes on him. Nobody talks about brown eyes the way they do blue or even green. But she had some kind of brown Roy had never seen before. There was black in there that under normal circumstances would have made them dead, but on his mother only made them deeper, like that suede leather coat she once bought and modeled for Roy until Roy’s father came home and made her take it back.
“Easy, boys,” she said barely above a whisper. She smiled and pointed at the bassinet. “His nibs is sleeping.”
“Hello, ma’am,” Jim McDonald whispered back. Only Jim McDonald could speak. Brent was staring at her. The way they all stared at her.
“What’s with this ma’am stuff?” she said. “Evelyn. Please.”
The two just nodded. Roy didn’t know where to look.
“How’s your dad feeling these days, Jim?”
“He’s back at work.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I’m still doing the cooking, though.”
“No wonder you look so good.”
Jim McDonald inflated as if he’d just been kissed. And, in a way, he had. The two of them watched stupidly as she stood then, carefully gathering the bassinet as she uncoiled from the step. She turned back, gave them another smile over her shoulder. Like she was posing for a picture.
“You boys coming in?”
“Okay,” Brent blurted before he could stop himself. But Jim McDonald quickly came to his rescue.
“We gotta be somewhere.” And then he looked at Roy. “We’ll see you later, buddy.”
And they turned and started back the way they came. Brent looking back at Roy’s mother one last time. Roy watched them go, feeling worse now than he did before.
—
It was cool inside the house for so late in the afternoon. But then Roy saw that she still hadn’t opened any of the drapes and had probably only just woken up a little while ago. When she wasn’t working, she and the Captain always took their afternoon nap together.
“How was your day, sweetie?”
“Fine.”
“You should go wash that out of your hair.”
Roy reached back, felt Jim’s tobacco juice. When he turned to her, she wasn’t looking at him, too busy now carefully setting the bassinet on the coffee table where she could keep rocking it with her foot while she watched Phil Donahue.
“I’m just gonna say hi to the Captain first.”
“Don’t call him that.”
Roy looked down at the baby, eight months now, smiling all the time. The only one in the house who did.
“He likes it.”
“I don’t.”
“Was what Dad used to call me.”
“Yes. I was there.”
Roy turned and looked at her over his shoulder. She was lighting a cigarette. After the shorts, that would be the second major infraction of the day. She went back and stood in the doorway, looking out at the street. At least she didn’t smoke near the baby.
She stood there a good while, having some conversation inside herself while she slowly drew on the cigarette.
Roy knew she hated it here. There was nothing here for someone like her. She just woke up one day from one of her naps and here she was.
Stuck.
They all were.
Her back still toward him, she said, “I’m thinking of working full-time for Dr. Toomey.” She shifted so that she leaned with her back against the door frame. “Maybe you could help out some after school, with your brother.”
“Is Dad okay with that?”
“I haven’t asked him.” She turned to him then. “I know it’s not how you want to spend your after-school time, but we could use the extra money.”
“I don’t mind.”
And he didn’t. Now he had a real reason to stay home. He looked once more at his brother.
“I don’t mind at all,” he said. “Do I, Captain?” Low enough so that she couldn’t hear him.
—
Roy was upstairs giving his brother a bath when he heard his father pull into the driveway. He could hear the El Camino a full block away. The muffler busted and making a racket that made the car sound more powerful than it was. Before his baby brother was born, Roy would run outside to meet his father as he got out of the car. Roy grabbing him around the waist and smelling the jet fuel on his coveralls. His father making a big deal of stumbling back against the car and saying every time, “Man oh man, Captain, you’re getting strong!”
Roy’s father would then haul Roy onto his shoulders as he headed up the walk, Roy holding on to the man’s ears to “steer,” careful not to knock off his thick glasses. He could see the tiny cuts from where Roy had nicked him with the razor a few days before. Roy couldn’t understand why his father continued to ask him to cut his hair. His mother did it better. But his father thought it was something every man should know how to do. And he liked it short. The same length it was in the Air Force before he had to leave.
Once a month, on Sunday, his father would open a beer and sit down at the table and call out, “Hey, Doc! Ready for surgery!” Roy would climb up on a chair behind him and work the razor back and forth. His father laughing when he nicked him. Both of them laughing until Roy’s mother came in and looked at the clumps of hair on the floor and then in horror at his father, wondered why the fuck they couldn’t just go to a barber like regular people.
Because, his father explained, they weren’t regular people.
The two of them would then sit in the kitchen for the rest of the afternoon. This was their church, his father would say, while Roy watched him design the airplane they’d eventually try to build in the garage. Roy would later learn that it wasn’t really his father’s design, but something he’d found in a magazine. Still his father would spend hours narrating every move of his mechanical pencil to Roy, sometimes using the blade of his hand to describe the shape of the wing.
It was still out there, covered in a black tarp. “The Wrong Brothers” is what Roy’s mother called them whenever she stuck her head out the door to find out what all the damn noise was. It was better when it was just a blueprint. Just an idea they could talk about until his mother told them to talk about something else, for Christ’s sake.
Roy loved sitting at that table, the one place he wasn’t afraid. He felt as if he could do anything on those Sunday afternoons. He didn’t want to be anywhere else but right next to his father, listening to the man talk about flying.
But that was all before the headaches.
The first time Roy witnessed one was late one night, out in the garage. They were working on the ship as Roy’s father called it, a BD-5 Micro plane the size of a Datsun that came in a kit. Roy’s father claimed that he’d had a company design the parts from his drawings. But the truth was, his father had bought the whole thing off a guy at work who had himself bought it through the mail in the mid-seventies, but never bothered taking it out of the crate. The company had gone out of business a few years later. The manual stated right at the top that it would only take a thousand hours to bu
ild, but Roy and his father were closing in on three thousand and nowhere near finished.
There was also the matter of the seventy-horsepower engine, no longer manufactured since the company went bust. But Roy’s father heard about a group of BD-5 owners that had a fly-in once a year in Placerville, California, and told Roy they’d drive out there and get some hints as to where to find an engine along with any other pertinent information they currently lacked. Roy’s job was to plan the trip, even though it was never actually said when they would go.
The plane was designed for one, but Roy’s father came up with a “modification” so that Roy could sit in front of him, toboggan style, while he flew. The fact that Roy’s father never finished his flight training and had never flown a plane like this didn’t seem to bother him. So there they were one night, trying for hours without success to fit the prefab Plexiglas canopy from the kit onto the newly modified, and now slightly enlarged, cockpit, when Roy noticed that his father’s head was shaking. Roy was sitting inside the plane at the time, holding the bubble in place and looking up through the plastic when he saw a drop of sweat fall from his father’s face. It was then he noticed that behind his dark-framed glasses the man’s eyes were closed and seemed to be vibrating on their own, like an old dog having a bad dream.
“Dad?”
He opened his eyes and stared at Roy for a moment, and then at the mallet in his hand, as if he’d just noticed it was there. He then bit down on the big rubber head.
Roy could see his father’s teeth penetrating the rubber, could hear the man screaming as he suddenly began to beat on the Plexiglas with his other fist. Roy quickly bent over and covered up, but it didn’t take long for him to feel the plastic shards on his neck as the canopy began to crack. He yelled for his father to stop, but was drowned out by the man’s pathetic howling. It was only a matter of moments before the man broke through and, Roy assumed, stove his son’s head in.
But it was over as suddenly as it began. The garage was suddenly silent. Roy took his hands away from his head, carefully looked up and realized that his father was gone. Roy sat up and saw through the crack-blossomed plastic that the man was sitting on his haunches, sobbing it looked like, Roy’s mother crouched beside him, holding on to him, as both of them collapsed onto the greasy floor.
Roy’s mother put her husband to bed. An hour later, she came out of the bedroom and found Roy standing in the hall, shaking. She kissed him on the top of the head, then led him into his own room, helped him undress, and then got into bed with him. Roy fell asleep to the rhythm of her heart hammering against his back.
The next morning he found his father calmly moving about the kitchen making waffles. His mother sat at the table watching him over a cup of coffee, both of them smiling.
“Hungry, Captain?”
Neither of them ever said a single word about the night before. Nor would they ever about the nights that followed.
—
Roy listened to the El Camino shut off and rattle for a moment. He pictured the man taking off his glasses and rubbing his temples for a moment or two before he got out. He heard the car door first, followed a few seconds later by the front door as his father came inside.
And then his voice, loud, as he called out to everyone and no one, “Smells great in here!”
He was always in a good mood. That’s what was so disconcerting. He was never upset or angry. He would just turn. In a single instant, he would become another man. A shadow would pass over his face and he would do something or say something that his father only an instant earlier would never have done or said. But there he was, somebody who looked and sounded like his father sticking a fork into a pot of boiling water and smiling at Roy as he speared a potato and stuck the whole scalding thing into his mouth.
When Roy carried his brother downstairs, he found his father and mother with their arms around each other, their mouths locked together. His mother grabbing the back of his head, pulling him into her. This happened a lot. They would find themselves in a room and just crash into each other. She was always the first to break it, backing away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and smiling at him.
Roy sensed they had real desire for each other. But with his mother, it was desire fueled by something else, something he couldn’t yet understand.
She winked at Roy, then headed into the kitchen as Roy placed his brother inside the playpen that sat in front of the TV and waved to his father, who now paused, his arms having not yet shed the light blue windbreaker from his coveralls.
“A wave,” his father said. “That’s it? That’s all I get?”
Roy walked over and hugged him, the man tossing the coat and giving his son a hard squeeze that felt like it might break his spine, followed that up with a strong pat on the back before he walked into the kitchen and took a drippy pull from the beer his mother had just opened.
“What’d you learn in school today?”
“Nothing.”
They played this one every night at the same time. His father smiling as he passed the beer to his mother so she could take her own sip, and then asking, “Then why’d you bother to go?”
And Roy would shrug and answer, “I don’t know.”
It was becoming less and less of a game for Roy. Why did he bother to go? He wasn’t so sure anymore. He sat in the back of the classroom, day in and day out, in constant fear that someone might notice him. Look at him. Speak to him. It wasn’t hard to pick up that he was afraid. Always afraid. And no wonder, given the asshole he had to live with. Probably got smacked on the head once too often. Best if they all gave him lots of room. If he wanted to eat his shitty little lunch in the parking lot by himself, who cares? Let him.
Once the headaches started, the only time he was ever truly relaxed was when he was alone with his baby brother. The Captain made him forget. Especially when the headaches got worse.
“Scusez moi,” his mother now said as she reached into a cupboard for a stack of plates.
“No,” his father said as he came off the counter, Roy catching the small flinch his mother gave as his father then held up his hands.
“Excuse moi.”
Smile. Kiss. All good.
Even though Roy never saw him hit her, she was hand shy, the phrase his father used on a stray Irish setter they once found in their front yard and kept for a few days before his father put the dog in the car one morning and took him to work. He came home alone that night, told Roy that another fueler lived on a few acres out in Iola and had given the dog a better home.
Roy thought she was right to be nervous around him. The man always seemed to be watching her. Ever since she started working for that fucking dentist, Dr. Toomey, answering his phones. She never used to wear much makeup, or spend much time on her hair. But now she was getting up a full hour before she had to catch the bus to Dr. Toomey’s office downtown.
Dr. Toothy, his father called him. He didn’t know him, didn’t know a thing about him other than he hated him.
—
What would later be billed as the third worst windstorm in Missouri history happened to blow through Raytown the same week that Roy killed his father.
The near-tornado-like gale snatched the roofs off a dozen houses in Roy’s neighborhood alone. Across the street, the forty-foot ash that had stood guard over the Fitzgeralds’ house for over thirty years broke in two and came down on top of Annie Fitzgerald’s new Rabbit convertible. Roy had watched from his window as the little white VW got creamed by a chunk of the tree, a giant foot crushing a German soda can.
It all seemed like a dream to Roy. But then everything that happened that week was like a dream.
A few days later, on the drive out to the airport, his father was still dodging the debris that had fallen onto the roads.
“Guess they’re just gonna leave it all on the ground until some poor slob runs into it,” he said.
A half hour from their house in Raytown along Route 435, no real traffic this early on Sunday
morning, Roy stared out the window at the cement percolation ponds that ran along the highway. The blue squares of water dotting the even, brown landscape like one of his father’s shirts. Normally, Roy found the drive comforting. This flat world was the only place he’d ever been. Missouri becoming Kansas at some invisible point along the way. And then before he knew it, the gray wheel-shaped terminals of the Kansas City International Airport.
Their other church.
—
“What we do,” his father was saying, “is we walk around the aircraft, check that everything that should be there, is; that what should move, does; and what shouldn’t move, doesn’t.” They were on the tarmac, looking up at the undersides of a USAir 737, his father explaining the art of the preflight.
“Try to develop a routine, and stick to it every time you check your aircraft, inside or outside.”
He pointed up at a luggage door. “Is this compartment really latched?”
“Looks like it.”
“Check it,” he said as he hoisted Roy up to the door.
Roy jiggled the latch and said, “All good!”
His father then lowered him back down so fast that Roy felt it in his balls. The man now crouching down to say, “Sometimes we see things the way we expect them to be instead of the way they are.”
“Morning, Roy.”
They both turned and saw a tall, silver-haired man in uniform, captain’s bars on his shoulder, ducking under the wing. He smiled at Roy’s father, nodded to Roy.
“Now that good-looking kid couldn’t possibly be yours.”
“You bet he is.”
“Teaching him the trade?”
“No way. He’s gonna fly ’em. Not fuel ’em.”
The pilot smiled at him, then began his own, actual preflight. He was then joined by another man, this one in coveralls. A walkie-talkie on his hip. Clipboard in hand. The pilot said something and the man now looked at Roy and his father, who waved.
