The gate attendants stood about for another minute, and then they returned to their posts. Frank invented this story to explain what he had just seen: the crying woman had just heard that someone close to her had died. Her friends, her co-workers, out of sympathy, had rushed to her. Someone had called upstairs, although upstairs in this case probably meant a room somewhere below them, and management had quickly sent the woman in the jitney to restore peace. He might describe the scene to Anna, although he didn’t think she would care. She might ask him why he wasted his time telling her about something that bored her, and he would tell her that if something unusual happens, it’s nice to talk about it. In the spirit of his rededicated marriage he would rather talk about too many things than have to contain himself.
There was a flight ready to leave for San Francisco from Gate 51. A woman who had received her boarding pass before the breakdown at Gate 47 was yelling at the attendant. Everyone could hear her.
‘I’m not getting on that plane. I want my money back! I’m not getting on the plane.’
The attendant spoke quietly to her. Frank couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t imagine her problem, unless she’d just had a psychic vision of her plane going down in flames.
A blond guy in a T-shirt with a surfing logo sat down next to Frank. He was so typical that Frank could hardly see him. How old, thirty-five? He had a job he liked, just a job, somewhere in the city, it wasn’t his life. He made enough money. Was the shirt for a trip to Hawaii, or just his shirt?
‘I don’t blame her,’ he said.
‘For what?’ asked Frank.
‘Well, they’re not saying exactly, but it seems like the plane that left that gate at three’ – and he pointed to Gate 47 – ‘just went down.’ He seemed to like the way he said ‘just went down’, it gave him a measure of participation in the event; he said it with the sober experience of a flight deck commander on an aircraft carrier.
‘The plane to Acapulco?’ asked Frank.
‘Adiós, amigos.’ He held his hand parallel to the ground, and then, making the sound of a falling bomb, tilted his fingers towards the floor, over the falls, and the hand went down.
‘You’re sure?’ asked Frank.
‘That’s what I hear. Adiós, amigos.’
Of course he didn’t know that Frank had family on the plane, so Frank thought it would be unfair of him to strangle the man right there, to kick him in the face, to bite off his ears.
Frank wasn’t sure what to do. He thought of Anna and Madeleine, thought of a plane crashing, and his wife and daughter pitching forward, facing the nose as the plane pointed to the ground three miles down. Five miles. He said goodbye to the man in the Hawaiian shirt, and walked to Gate 51.
The gate attendant, a thin man with the damaged eyes of someone who had lost his last two good jobs for drinking, was getting a flight ready for Salt Lake City. He seemed to be homosexual, and Frank wondered how he guessed. What was it? So many small signs. Frank went to the front of the line.
‘Excuse me, I have to ask you something.’
The man didn’t look up.
‘What happened to the flight to Mexico? The one that left at three?’
The attendant said nothing for a moment, but looked at Frank, and now Frank felt himself liking the man. He wanted to tell him the truth, which he already knew, but he’d been ordered not to say anything, and he didn’t want to lose this job. ‘If you have any questions, sir, would you please wait. Someone will be here in a few minutes.’
‘My wife and my daughter were on the plane.’
Frank could see that the attendant wondered why Frank was still there if his family had left an hour ago. He held a finger in the air, to hold himself up, Frank supposed, the effort let him forget his feelings. ‘Just a second.’ But he looked sad. He got on the phone. ‘Hi, Betsy, there’s a gentleman here who says that his wife – whose wife and child were on flight two-twenty-one.’ He studied Frank with suppressed awe. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Frank Gale. And my wife’s name is Anna Klauber, and my daughter is Madeleine.’ He wanted to say ‘was’, but something held him back. He knew the plane was down, there was no mistake, and he knew his family was dead, but the moment demanded a certain form, and the time for the past tense had not arrived.
‘Frank Gale, wife Anna Klauber, daughter Madeleine.’ The woman working beside the gate attendant was young, with bad skin under a thin crust of make-up. She had listened to the conversation and she came around the desk. There was still some word necessary from the person on the other end of the line. Was it the woman in the suit? The gate attendant said a few noncommittal ‘OKs’ and then put the receiver down. ‘Amy, why don’t you sit down with Mr Gale. Someone will be here in a few minutes.’
Amy put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Come over here with me.’ She might have been enjoying the moment.
Frank asked her if the plane had really gone down. He felt something bubbling inside his heart, something giddy within the fire. He was starting to make a new relationship with time, which continued at its old beat while he was speeding up, separate from time. He probably had a temperature already, but there was no headache or pain. Amy took him to a seat and held his hand.
‘I was almost on the plane,’ he told her. ‘I was late. That’s why I’m here. I’m waiting for the six o’clock flight.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Do they know what happened?’
‘Right now I can’t even say for sure that there was a crash.’ ‘You mean you can’t because you’ve been told not to talk about it?’
‘Mr Gale, I’m a Christian. I don’t want to lie to you and tell you that there wasn’t a crash if I know there was, but until the official word comes from upstairs, you know, it would be awful to tell you that there was a crash if there wasn’t.’ She didn’t mean upstairs literally. ‘The best thing to do is to pray.’
‘I’m not really religious.’
‘The Lord can be a tremendous comfort. He has been for me.’
‘Maybe some day.’
‘You have to be patient.’ He watched her, and she seemed now to be on television, she was a projection of herself into this space in front of him. What would I say to her if the situation were reversed? From whom did I inherit the obligation to be cordial? If this is true, what will I say to my mother and father? To my brother? To everyone? To Mary Sifka? If this is true, does that mean I will never again swim with my daughter in a hotel pool, never again give up the maraschino cherry?
He could hear the electric cart’s erratic whine again. This time it was driven by a white man in a suit. They were coming for him; something big was about to start. The corporate woman sat next to him. The gate attendant nodded in Frank’s direction.
Frank knew that by tomorrow he would be in the news, the husband who missed the flight of death. And they will suspect me, he thought. He hoped that the plane had hit another plane, anything but a bomb or an implosion from an indeterminate cause, so that no one’s doubts about him would linger. I have an alibi. I was here, waiting for the next flight. Or is that too perfect? And am I capable of such a demonic strategy?
The electric cart stopped about ten feet away. The man got out and walked to Frank.
‘Mr Gale?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name is Ed Dockery. I’m a vice-president of operations with the airline. This is Bettina Welch, my assistant.’ Now the woman in the suit had a name. Dockery looked like so many Americans, a persistent dumb guy promoted to a job with a little authority. Was he a lost man, a big baby with his big baby’s beer belly, or was he a man comfortable with his job, comfortable with his pleasures, who liked to eat and watch his belly grow? And Bettina Welch, there was something slightly diminished about Bettina Welch now that she was close. She wore a thin gold chain around her left ankle, and her suit was cheap, a light purple that matched her lipstick. Like Dockery, she seemed to be someone who would forever stay in the middle of the corporate bureaucracy. But why? Ano
ther one of those collections of indications, unsophistications, but what did that mean? He was right, he knew he was right, but how did he know? Because she looked dumb? What does that mean, dumb? Because her fabric was stiff? Because the colour was ugly? But why ugly? And how did senior management look at her? Frank imagined that if she ever went on weekend retreats with management, where the president and the senior staff would present the company’s goals to the airline’s regional managers, Frank was sure that in the competition for sex, she would go to the best-looking, highest-ranking executive, unless there was a band at the Saturday night cocktail party, in which case she would sleep with the bass player.
‘What happened to the plane?’
‘We don’t know yet. But the N. T. S. B. boys are terrific, and when they’re done with the investigation, they’ll know the whole story. You’ll just have to be patient.’
‘N. T. S. B.?’ asked Frank.
‘National Transportation Safety Board,’ said Bettina, in a voice that convinced Frank she voted Republican, something in her pride in knowing acronyms, and her superiority over those who don’t.
Frank took a seat in the cart, and Dockery drove them through the terminal. By now word had spread about the crash, people coming into the terminal had heard about it on their radios, and the gate attendants knew about Frank. People watched him, cooking up faces that tried to show their sympathy.
Dockery took them to an elevator for which he had the key. Frank recognized in himself the rush of grandiose anticipation he felt when he went backstage at concerts, when the girls who did anything to sleep with musicians looked at him, trying to gauge, by his clothes and his hair, what role he had in the concert. But no one ever offered him a blow-job to get backstage.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Frank. It occurred to him that they had no hold over him; he could leave now if he wanted. What if he made a joke, what would they do if he told them that he wouldn’t talk without his lawyer present, and that before he went anywhere else with them, they had to advise him of his rights? They would not laugh. He supposed that until the truth were known he should conform to ACCEPTABLE STANDARDS OF GRIEF. The woman at the gate, the attendant, her tears, the way she held back only her screams. Will I cry like that? he wondered. Not now.
They went up one floor and then walked down a hallway. He was taken to a heavy wood-panelled door, with a discreet button beside it on the wall. There was a small brass plate with the airline’s emblem on the door.
The woman who opened the door was about fifty, with carefully styled grey hair. Frank guessed she had been a flight attendant, because she had dry, lined skin on a youthful expression, and she was trim; there were so many women about her age who looked young, thought Frank. Did fifty-year-old women always look so young? Diet and exercise and a positive attitude. She was introduced to him. Mary Aberg. Another Mary. He was going to have to remember a lot of names.
They brought him through the lounge to another door, to a conference room with couches and telephones. Mary Aberg offered him a drink. He said no.
Ed Dockery and Bettina Welch nodded to Aberg, and she retreated. Now it was time to make the news official. It was Dockery’s job.
‘Mr Gale.’
‘Call me Frank.’
‘Frank, flight two-twenty-one crashed about an hour ago. It exploded in mid-air just south of San Diego, and crashed into a crowded neighbourhood. Everyone in the plane was killed, and we don’t know how many people on the ground were killed, possibly fifty or sixty more, possibly many more. The plane was at twenty-eight thousand feet when it went down. I’m sure they never knew what happened.’ He stopped. Frank could see that this kind of speech had been rehearsed, and research must have proven that the best way to handle the survivors was to tell the truth quickly, and to let the questions come. Frank could have asked Dockery how he knew that no one suffered, but what would have been the point? Unless they were killed in the explosion, if that’s what it was, they fell with the plane. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand. Even if the plane hit the ground five seconds after the event, there was time to have a few dreadful thoughts. Five seconds is a tennis ball from an office building. This is twenty-eight thousand feet. Five miles? Almost. Thirty seconds? The plane flying. Seatbelts already unfastened. People walking. Madeleine standing on the seat. The flight attendants with the drink carts in the aisles. Free-fall. And then what? A wing tank explodes, an engine falls off.
What is the rate of a falling object? Thirty-two feet per second per second.
What does that mean? Faster and faster.
‘Do they know what happened?’
‘Not yet.’
Bettina Welch sat beside him and took his hand. ‘We all lost people on that plane, Frank. The airline is a family too. I knew the co-pilot, and one of the girls, I was her bridesmaid last year.’ One of the girls – that meant one of the flight attendants. At that moment he could have fucked Miss Welch on the carpet; he had an erection and the feeling that at this moment, if he gave in to all of his impulses, he could taste immortality, no one would punish him for anything, he had the king’s right to take whomever he wanted, because he was superior in ways only dimly imaginable to someone as common as this cheap groupie in a dead-end job. He could have fucked her, and she would have let him. He forced himself to hold a steady gaze until her eyes brushed his, and she felt it, because he’d seen that look before, it was Mary Sifka’s when they’d first met. But Welch wasn’t as smart as Mary Sifka, so she couldn’t elaborate the sexual moment, and Frank let the hurricane of possibilities pass away. Did Miss Welch know that this had been a flicker of rape? She relaxed; her shoulders had been tense and now they fell. He tried once more to see himself pulling down her pantyhose and twisting her pubic hair, but there was no pressure behind the fantasy; the image seemed borrowed.
‘I want to make a phone call.’ He said this without knowing whose voice he wanted to hear, but he didn’t want to deal with Miss Welch any more. Had she felt anything of what he’d been thinking?
She gave him a phone. ‘Just dial nine to get an outside line.’ He dialled 9, and then Lowell’s number in San Diego. The phone wouldn’t let him complete the call; a recording told him that he couldn’t dial that area code.
‘I can’t dial that area code,’ he said.
Ed Dockery took the phone. He tried a number. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘There’s a block on this phone. It’s to keep anyone from calling long distance without paying for it. You’re supposed to use this only for local calls.’
‘This modern age,’ said Frank.
Dockery dialled another number. He spoke to someone and then asked Frank what number he was calling. Frank told him and then Dockery hung up. ‘They’ll get it for us,’ said Dockery.
The three of them looked at the phone for the minute it took to complete the call. Dockery answered and then gave the phone to Frank.
‘Hello?’ Frank wasn’t sure whom he’d be speaking to.
‘Yes?’ said the woman on the other end.
‘Is this Lowell Gale’s office?’
‘You have the wrong number.’
Frank hung up. ‘It was a wrong number. Let me call collect.’
‘Maybe that would be better,’ said Dockery. ‘And then submit the bill to us, we’ll reimburse you.’
In the other room, the main lounge, Frank could hear a woman screaming. Welch got up to see what the problem was while Frank pushed the 9 and then the operator button.
Lowell’s secretary accepted the call.
‘Is Lowell there?’ Frank asked.
‘He’s in La Jolla.’
‘Could you connect me?’
‘I think he’s in his car.’
‘Then you can definitely connect me.’
‘Just hold on. What number are you at if there’s a break?’
There was no number on the phone, just an extension number, 3. ‘I don’t think you can get through to this line. If it do
esn’t work, I’ll have to call you back.’
She put him on hold but it didn’t take long.
‘Why aren’t you in Mexico?’ asked Lowell. Frank heard the sounds of traffic in the background, his brother’s voice was surrounded by a wall of noisy air.
‘I was late for the plane, Lowell. I missed the flight. And it crashed, they say it crashed in San Diego.’
‘Wow,’ said Lowell. ‘Talk about luck.’ So Lowell thought that Anna and Madeleine missed the flight, too.
‘I said that I missed the plane,’ said Frank. ‘I was late to the airport, I was meeting Anna and Madeleine, but they made it.’
‘What?’ asked Lowell. He understood.
‘They were on the plane, Lowell. They’re dead.’
‘Anna, Madeleine?’
‘They’re dead, Lowell.’
‘It was that crash south of the city?’
Among the Dead Page 5
