by Scott Frank
“Morning, Mr. Haas.”
“You on today, Roy?”
“No, sir. Just showing my boy around.”
The man looked at Roy, then back at his father. Uncomfortable or annoyed, it was hard for Roy to tell which. “You sign in at Operations? Talk to the desk there?”
“Was just about to.”
“The kid can’t be out here without a badge.”
“We’re just leaving.”
The man nodded, looked at Roy another moment, then turned back and followed the pilot on his rounds.
Roy and his father parked at the end of runway 19R in a patch of dirt outside the cyclone fence and watched the planes take off and land. The jets screaming overhead one after another while the two of them sat on the hood of the El Camino, their backs to the windshield, Roy’s father naming each aircraft as they touched down in puffs of rubbery smoke a hundred yards away.
The man had wanted only to be a pilot. He spent his childhood hiding in his room making models and watching planes land at the airport. Flying was all he thought about. In high school, he built a working glider in his backyard. On his eighteenth birthday, he joined the Air Force only to be told that his eyesight wouldn’t cut it, so he became a mechanic repairing helicopters.
He hated helicopters almost as much as he hated helicopter pilots. They were cocky and didn’t respect their aircraft the way fixed wing pilots did. They were cowboys. His eyes got worse. Contacts bothered him, so he wore those thick glasses. Smudging them with oil and grease until he could barely see through them. Watching the pilots climb in and out of the fighters all day. There was something the same about them all. Even the pilots he saw today. They all had this thing that he didn’t have. An easy way about them. It was a connection they had, all of them being able to do this thing that very few other people could do.
That he would never do.
“Lockheed L1011. Most advanced plane ever built.”
They watched the plane touch down. “Can practically fly itself. They got an elevator in there, goes down to the galley. You imagine that? An elevator? In an airplane?”
Another jet taxied into position right in front of them, the tail nearly above them as it sat waiting to take off. His father had made sandwiches for today’s visit, egg salad, and brought along a couple of Dr Peppers.
In the last year or two, his mother stopped letting Roy have soda. Said it was bad for his teeth. Like pouring acid on them. This, of course, pissed off his father, who thought that little pearl of wisdom came from the fucking dentist and should, therefore, be ignored. So whenever he was with his father, there was always soda.
Roy could taste the jet fuel with the egg salad as the plane in front of them started rolling down the runway. His father watched it, saying “Rotate” a split second before the nose lifted and the plane rose into the sky on its way far the fuck away from here.
An American Airlines 727 touched down, his father explaining yet again that with the flaps all the way down like that, they can fly slower. And then a USAir 737, his father waving at that one, prompting Roy to ask, “Do you know who’s flying that plane?”
“They know me.”
His father claimed to know all of the pilots. Roy knew this wasn’t true, but let his father find his connection any way he could.
“You really think I could be a pilot?”
“Captain, I think you can be whatever you want to be.”
They were silent for a few minutes then. His father letting a Delta DC-9 land without comment, until out of nowhere, he asked, “Are you afraid of me?”
Roy turned to see his father looking at him now.
“Because I don’t want you to be.”
Roy looked back at him. “Why do you hurt her?”
“I don’t know. Your mother thought she was going to marry a pilot. Have this nice life. Travel all over the world. Instead, she has to live here, work for some dentist. All on account of I can’t see. Even though there’s nothing I can do about that, it still makes me mad.”
He turned back to the runway as he said, “I wish it didn’t, but it does.”
A small general aviation plane taxied into position in front of them. A sleek six-seater with a tail in the shape of a “V.” It was the strangest thing Roy had ever seen.
“Beechcraft Bonanza.” His father smiled. “The Doctor Killer.”
“The what?”
“V-tailed Doctor Killer. That’s what pilots used to call it.”
“How come?”
“Bonanza will do a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour at ten thousand feet, and that’s only using a hundred and fifteen horsepower. But with that tail, it’s more stable in a pitch than a roll. You hand fly that airplane in the clouds, you better be on top of it, as that plane wants to spiral. Down.”
He looked at Roy. “And what do we say about a VFR pilot in the clouds?”
“He’s autodead.”
His father nodded and turned back to the plane. “If you know what you’re doing, it’s an amazing plane. If you know what you’re doing. But doctors, they think they can do anything. They have the money, they get their license and they go out and buy one of those. Only they can’t fly it. And they end up crushed and burned inside of it.”
Roy watched the plane take off now, rotating in half the time of the big jets, Roy wondering if the man at the controls was any kind of physician. Wanted to ask, what about dentists, but didn’t. Plus his father had now sat up and was looking at him with a strange look on his face.
“Don’t ever try to be something you’re not.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious. You are who you are. You have to live with that. If you fight it, if you try to be someone you can’t ever be, you’ll never be happy. The trick is in knowing who you are. And accepting it. You understand?”
“I think so.”
“Good.” He watched another 727 land without comment, then planted his palms on the hood, swung his legs off the car, and said almost to himself, “Let’s go home.”
—
Roy recognized the change and kept quiet. His father had moved into that silent, focused place where you could not speak to him or reach him in any way. Usually, these trances happened at home where Roy could simply take his baby brother and go hide in his room. But there they were, doing close to eighty on Route 435 with the rapidly setting sun off to their right. It would be dark soon and Roy didn’t want to be alone with his father at night. Not when he was like this. Roy knew that the man was in a lot of pain. That some invisible asshole was inside his head at this very moment pounding nails into the backs of his eyes.
During these times, his father would sometimes cry. Would sometimes speak nonsense words. Would hammer his fists or break something. At home, they’d developed a system: Roy’s mother would quickly help the man up into the bedroom and lay him down on the bed, while Roy quickly pulled the heavy blackout drapes, trying not to look at his father writhing on the bed like a sick child. If he was at work, his father would go sit in one of the toilet stalls and bite down on a small rubber ball he carried with him, his face pressed against the cold metal partition, and wait for the cloudful of white-hot pins to finally pass through his skull.
But at this moment, they were in a moving car. And even in the gathering dark, Roy could see something was wrong. The man now leaning his head hard against the glass. His eyes wide open behind the thick glasses, the passing lights like little stars in the lenses.
Roy leaned over, careful not to move too suddenly, and watched the needle on the speedo wipe past ninety.
“Maybe we should pull over.”
Nothing. Just a slight moan from the dark shape beside him.
“Dad.”
“Fuck her.”
“Who?”
His father sat up straight. The car slowed down. Roy felt relief that it was already over. His father took one hand from the wheel and rubbed one temple with a thumb and whispered, “She’s killing me.”
“Mo
m?”
He turned to Roy slightly. It was hard to say whether he was actually looking at Roy or looking at anything for that matter. There were tears in his eyes, and then he vomited.
Roy recoiled, pushed up against the door, and could feel the car leaving the road. His father threw his head back against the seat and the car lurched forward along the shoulder before Roy felt his side of the car dipping as the El Camino started sliding down the embankment. The car lost speed as it plowed through the soft dirt and Roy waited for it to stop altogether. But, somehow, the El Camino surged onward. There was a splash and before he knew what was happening, Roy’s door opened and he fell out of the car.
He hit the forty-degree water and immediately sucked the icy green liquid into his lungs. Roy thought he was drowning, until his feet hit the muck and he stood up, the pond less than five feet deep, the surface hitting him just below his chin. Even so, he couldn’t catch his breath, couldn’t stop coughing, and thought he might drown anyway until he saw the El Camino fifty feet away and stopped panicking, finally took in a lungful of air.
The car was in the pond with him, its rear end toward Roy. It was leaning heavily to the driver’s side, but had remained upright. The passenger door was slightly ajar, so the dome light was on and Roy could see the back of his father’s head, the man leaning against the door.
“Dad!” he shouted. “Over here!”
His father didn’t move.
Roy tried to walk toward the car, but with the first step his shoe caught in the muck on the bottom and came off. His other shoe came off with the second step. His third step, his foot slipped and he went under once more. He stayed under and swam a bit in the dark, until he hit the back of the car and he popped up and grabbed his now bleeding head. Dazed, he hung on to the bed of the El Camino, and pulled himself up over the back and into the bed.
“Dad?”
He could see that water had risen and that his father’s head was halfway underwater. The car shifted under his weight and Roy realized that it was sinking deeper into the mud. He jumped back into the pond and tried to open the driver’s door, but the list and the mud prevented it from budging. He looked inside and watched as the water rose up to his father’s mouth. He saw the huge black slice in his forehead, the blood roaring from it mixing with the water on his face creating a runny mask. Roy pounded on the window.
“Dad! Wake up!”
But Roy looked at the red face and knew there was no answer coming.
He climbed back into the bed of the El Camino, then jumped out the other side and tried to get the passenger door to open wider. Roy wasn’t strong enough to fight against the mud and the weight of the water. He tried to reach through the small opening, tried to grab his father’s windbreaker and pull his head up but he was too small, a full foot shy of getting his hand on the blue nylon.
It was dark now and he could see the headlights of passing cars up the dirt embankment, the drivers on Route 435 oblivious to what was happening barely ten yards down the hill. Roy couldn’t believe it. Didn’t anyone see them go off the road? He began shouting…
“Help! Down here! Somebody!”
But the cars up there kept moving.
He swam to the cement bank and pulled himself up. Exhausted, he turned and looked back at the pond, the dome light still illuminating the man hunched over inside the car, his head still facedown in the water.
Roy yelled up at the passing cars.
“PLEASE! SOMEBODY! HELP US!”
His voice was raw already, and he couldn’t get enough air to be loud enough. So he just started screaming.
His voice was about to go when he saw the beam of a flashlight at the top of the embankment. A man stood there, his features lost to the black. He shone the light down at the pond, then at Roy.
“My dad’s drowning!” His voice hoarse, barely rising above the traffic.
The man started down the hill. Slowly. Roy watched as he tested the earth beneath each and every fucking step before putting his whole weight on it. It was maddening.
“He’s under the fucking water!”
But the man kept the same slow pace. As he got closer, Roy could see that he wore coveralls and heavy work boots, but his face remained hidden in the dark until he finally got to the pond and handed the light to Roy, and said in a voice only slightly above a whisper, “You stay right here, son.”
Roy took the light and crouched down as the man then carefully slid down the bank into the water and looked back at him.
“Son, I can’t see in this dark,” he said, no panic in his voice. “You need to keep that light on me the whole way.”
Roy raised the flashlight and for a split second the beam caught a face wrinkled from the sun, flesh hanging loosely around the man’s chin, deep dark bags under the eyes. The man rescuing Roy’s father had to be at least eighty years old.
He waded into the water, took long, strong steps toward the El Camino. He got the passenger door open wide enough to reach inside and drag his father from the seat. He shifted his weight, slipped in the mud, and went down in the water on his ass, got himself up again and reached his upper body into the car. He grabbed Roy’s father by the hair and pulled his face out of the water. He then maneuvered the unconscious man into his arms. The old man got him free of the car, stood up slowly, and walked back with him to the bank, Roy tracking him the whole way with the light. He finally dropped Roy’s unconscious father on the cement, leaned over him and immediately started blowing air into his bloody mouth.
Roy crouched down beside them and stared at his father’s closed eyes. He found himself thinking that it looked as if the old man were kissing him. As soon as he thought it, he hated himself. He reached out and held his father’s hand. It was cold and dead in his own and he wanted to let go as soon as he touched it, but he held on. Squeezed it tighter.
Another light hit them from above and Roy looked up the embankment and recognized in the silhouette the tall hat of a state trooper.
“Anybody hurt down there?”
And in that moment, Roy’s father sputtered and then coughed. The old man quickly turned him onto his side and for the second time that day, Roy’s father vomited all over him.
—
It was a stroke. Something, according to the doctor, that was already there inside his brain waiting to happen. It had nothing to do with his eyesight or kerosene fumes. The headaches were merely a sign that something had been long cross-wired, fucked up and ready to blow deep inside the man’s head.
Roy’s father came home from the hospital a week later. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, the doctor declaring him “basically a vegetable.” Roy wondered about the necessity of the word “basically” as the two ambulance attendants carefully set him down on the hospital bed his mother had rented from a surgical supply house in Belton. His father looked like he had been stuffed inside a sack made out of his former self.
Too big to make it up the stairs, the big metal bed was placed in the middle of the living room. Roy held his brother in the kitchen doorway, out of the way while the men from the surgical supply house helped the ambulance attendants, all under the supervision of his mother, get his father settled in. She stood halfway up the stairs, in denim shorts and pale pink blouse, smoking a cigarette as four sweating men gingerly tucked her turnip of a husband into what could accurately be described as his final resting place.
And then they were gone. Just like that, the house was silent save for the machine that monitored Roy’s father’s vital signs. None of which at the moment appeared to be visible, let alone vital.
She stared at the man in the bed, exhaling smoke in his direction as she now started down the stairs. She moved to the side of the bed and reached down to move some hair out of his face. There was a row of stitches just below the hairline. A low moan came from his half-opened mouth and she stepped back. Walked back around the bed, giving the man a wide berth even now, in this condition. She noticed Roy and the baby in the doorway and just looke
d at the two of them, her expression empty of anything comforting or loving in any way, her voice flat as she said, “You should have let him die,” and then walked back up the stairs.
—
Roy listened to her door close and then carried his baby brother over to the bed. He watched his father breathe in and out. When he’d come back to life beside the pond, he’d looked at Roy and said, “I found a nickel,” and then his face seemed to freeze and he said nothing more.
Roy looked at the hospital bed and wondered how long it would remain in the living room.
As it happened, not long.
He had just put the Captain into his crib and was himself dozing fully clothed on the floor beside it when he heard a THUMP downstairs and sat up.
For a moment, all he heard was the baby snoring. Then again:
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Roy got up and opened the door. THUMP THUMP. A pause. Then THUMP THUMP THUMP. He started down the stairs, saw one of his father’s bare feet, now uncovered by the sheet, half off the bed, kicking the wall: THUMP THUMP. Roy took another step down and saw his mother straddling his father’s chest, holding a pillow over his face, her nightgown hiked up and Roy could see that she wore nothing underneath. Her arms strained and her face contorted as she fought to keep the pillow in place, Roy’s father thrashing beneath her in some bizarre parody of sex. Strange, muffled sounds were coming from under the pillow as his hands flailed like a dying fish, his body bucking and twisting before all at once, like a switch had been flipped, the man went still.
She held that pillow in place for another five minutes. She didn’t trust him even in death. When she finally pulled it away, the underside was wet and bloody. She considered his frozen face. His eyes were wide open and his mouth was full of blood from biting his tongue.
She sighed and shook her head.
“Goddammit.”
She looked up and saw Roy on the staircase.
“He chewed his tongue off.” She climbed off of him and tossed the pillow aside. “Fuck.”
Roy came the rest of the way down the stairs, staring at his father’s horrible, panicked face while his mother lit a Salem and sat down on the couch, folded her legs to one side, and considered the scene through a long exhale.
