Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  ‘I want to go to where the plane crashed,’ he said. He wasn’t sure until he said it that this was what would come out, but it was the truth.

  ‘Cohassett Street,’ said the cab-driver. ‘But they got that closed off. They won’t let anyone near for a mile.’

  ‘My wife and my daughter were on the plane.’

  The driver looked at him in the rear-view mirror; Frank supposed he was looking in his eyes to see if this was true. Frank turned his eyes away, in case the driver would see something else in him, but that was also, he knew, some fear of what he imagined was a black man’s superior wisdom, that the man would see the grief, and also all the other things, the weakness, all the bad reasons for doing everything he did, and then the fear of losing his privileges.

  ‘There’s nothing that you’ll be able to see over there now – why don’t you go to where all the people in the neighbourhood who had their houses burned are? There’s a school near the crash, and they have it set up for helping the people.’ So the man believed him.

  ‘I want to go to the crash. I want to see it for myself.’

  The driver nodded, and then they were on the freeway, following the signs to the Mexican border.

  A few minutes of silence. There was the harbour, and battleships and an aircraft carrier. He wondered what it was about the species that needed grief. There was something so useless and old-fashioned about the grief he felt now, if this was grief at all, a thin layer of resentment and then another one of tenderness, and then longing, and then old pictures that came up to him from childhood, of losing something to a bully, or picking a fight for no reason with his mother, and slamming the door, that kind of violent, self-pitying love of loneliness, making a religion of his loneliness, biting into the windowsill and tasting the dust and dry paint, and the surprising freshness of the pine underneath, after all these years, after all these years, and hiding under a desk and hugging the reluctant dog.

  They left the freeway near Coronado and turned east. He knew the exit, one of Lowell’s new stores was near, in a mall on a parallel road. It was a small store, Lowell supplied it with only the most popular discs, no more than a hundred titles, for impulse buyers with pocket money. Frank liked the idea and wanted to design the racks that would hold the titles. Lowell wanted to buy a modular system from a catalogue, but Frank had insisted on his right to supervise the design. If the store did well, Lowell wanted to open more in every mall in southern California, and then sell the idea to people who would buy distribution rights for different territories in the country. Their mother told them that one of their cousins, Julia Abarbanel (mother’s sister’s daughter, middle of three, about thirty, attractive in that side of the family’s sullen way), had complained about this, that Lowell and Frank were doing something evil by selling only those records that were popular, by not supporting more obscure music, that they were fouling the whole idea of freedom of choice, if the choice offered was only the choice made by millions of others whose choices were established by a music industry that wanted to limit the choices to only a few, not to invest in so many unpopular records, so many dry holes. Frank and Julia had been best friends, as cousins, for a long time, since they were children, but then he and Lowell started making money, and something happened. The friendship ended. Julia became angry about things that shouldn’t have mattered to her. The colour scheme of the stores, grey and blue. She was angry with Lowell for not telling the record companies that the oversized packages in which the compact discs were sold wasted paper. Lowell had always hated Julia, and it was obvious to Frank why, because Julia had always favoured Frank. And then Julia turned on Frank. Because he had come under his brother’s shadow.

  He could have slept with Julia; one Thanksgiving in Yosemite, the two families stayed at the park’s grand rock and timber lodge. Frank and Julia watched the moonlight on the rocks after dinner. The pines made their whispering sounds, and the river made its own noises, and the two cousins were drunk. It would have been easy. And she was pretty then. He had a fabulous erection; it was maybe the last great erection of his youth. It would have been interesting to kiss his cousin, someone he had known for so long. She would have been the only woman he kissed whom he had liked as a friend first, whom he had thought of as a friend for a long time, and not as someone to get naked with. There was something disgusting, he thought, some sign of weakness, when all the women he had slept with had been women he had wanted to sleep with from the beginning. But he had done nothing that night. Lowell would have done everything. They would have laughed about it. But she didn’t like Lowell. Well, she would have if they had been under the Yosemite moonlight. She would have liked him more than Frank, if she had seen how really wonderful he was, how brilliant. She hated him for his faith in reality, in the basic truths of the marketplace, the laws of supply and demand. Lowell loved demand. He loved how people spent their money on things other than food and clothing and shelter. People made a necessity out of music. They could not live without the music they had heard on the radio. Now someone was inventing a store where a kid could grab a tape, could walk in blind from the street, could reach into a bin filled with tapes, and pull out music that lots of other people already liked. How could anyone not want to try this kind of business? It could make them wealthy, millions and millions.

  But now he was going to be wealthy from the plane crash. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, the airline’s security was so remiss that a fired worker with a gun ... etcetera, etcetera. It would be worth a few million dollars to him. Three or four.

  ‘There,’ said the cab-driver. There were fire trucks beyond a barricade, and two policemen waved traffic away. A crowd stood at the barricade, watching the street. The cab-driver brought the car to one of the policemen.

  ‘You have to move the car,’ he said.

  ‘His wife and daughter were on the plane,’ said the driver. The policemen gave Frank a closer look.

  ‘My name is Frank Gale,’ said Frank, in the voice he used to announce himself to the maitre d’, going up at the end just a little, as though reminding the policemen of his lapse in forgetting the name of someone he should have recognized. ‘I just drove down from Los Angeles,’ said Frank. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t mention the train.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Can we go through?’ asked Frank.

  ‘We’ve evacuated half the neighbourhood,’ said the policeman, ‘and there’s no traffic’

  ‘I’ll walk.’

  ‘Your wife and daughter.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We don’t know how many people have died,’ said the policeman. ‘The plane tore into the middle of a block, and took about fifty, maybe sixty houses with it, and an apartment house, fifteen units. There might be three hundred dead.’

  These were the bleak facts, the facts that Frank had avoided all day, the facts that he had turned away from when he was in a room with a television, the facts that he had not wanted to know.

  The policeman continued, ‘Go to the Red Cross command centre at the high school. There’s people there to take care of you, Frank.’

  It touched Frank that the policeman had remembered his name.

  ‘That’s the best thing for now,’ said the driver. ‘You should be with other people who have the same suffering now, to comfort your heart.’

  ‘I wanted to see the plane,’ said Frank.

  ‘You can’t get into the neighbourhood. And there’s a really nothing to see. Go to the high school.’ He asked the driver if he knew where it was. The driver said that he did. ‘I’m really sorry,’ said the policeman. The driver turned the car around.

  On the other side of the line, beyond the fire trucks, Frank watched people walking in the middle of the street, and he thought of block parties or street fairs, with everyone given freedom to walk wherever they wanted, on the sidewalk or in the middle of the street, and how much fun it is just to do that, just to step off the sidewalk as though the sidewalk is nothing very special, how walking in
the middle of a street, with a crowd, is a way of feeling rich. Wasn’t the entrance to Disneyland nothing more than a street? So you could step off the kerb in the middle of the block and no one would punish you. The city as playground. Join the parade!

  There was a crowd on his side of the line, and he was aware of them looking at him, something in the policeman’s posture told them that Frank was in some way important. Before he was turned back they would have wanted him to be someone whose house had been destroyed, someone whose family had been killed. And were they disappointed when the car left? The people who live in the houses on the border of the crisis must be jealous of the people who lived inside.

  ‘We’ll go to the high school now,’ said the driver.

  ‘No,’ said Frank. ‘Take me around the corner.’ His flowing tenderness was dissolved in the heat of a plan.

  ‘Mister Gale,’ said the driver, ‘let me take you to the high school.’

  ‘No,’ said Frank. ‘Just drive me to the middle of the next block.’ They were around the corner from the barricades now, and there was another barricade at the next intersection.

  ‘Stop,’ said Frank.

  The driver turned around to look at him. ‘What are you going to do?’

  The meter was now at forty dollars. Frank took out his wallet, wondering if the driver would reject the money. Frank had a fifty and four twenties. He gave the driver seventy, and said, ‘Keep the change.’ The driver kept the money.

  ‘I have to see the plane,’ said Frank. ‘I just have to see it, I have to know.’

  ‘Good luck,’ said the driver, and then he gave the money back to Frank. I can’t,’ he said.

  The cab went away, leaving him on the sidewalk, and Frank walked up the path to the nearest house. He rang the bell and heard a two-bell chime, high-low, and then he heard someone walking.

  A man inside the house said, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘My name is Frank Gale,’ said Frank. ‘And my family was killed in the plane crash. The police have the neighbourhood blocked off, but I have to get through, and I was wondering if I could climb over your back fence, so I can get to the next street, so I can be inside the police line.’

  ‘And the police won’t let you through?’

  ‘No,’ said Frank, ‘they want me to go to the high school.’

  ‘Dear God. Haven’t they let you through to your house yet?’

  It took Frank a second to understand the question. The man thought that Frank lived in a house that had been hit. If Frank went along with this, it would be easy to make up a story about the confusion of the police, but he wanted to tell the truth. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I don’t live in the neighbourhood. My family was on the plane.’ He felt odd calling Anna and Madeleine his family; two seemed a small number for family. He would have needed two children to have a full family, or better, three. More connections.

  The door opened. The man was younger than Frank expected, thirty, probably, and slim. A five-year-old boy was at his side, holding on to the man’s belt, and swinging his weight from it.

  ‘You really should go to the high school,’ said the man, and he studied Frank before telling him to come into the house. He introduced himself, ‘Dan Burack. And this is Dennis.’

  ‘I know this is crazy,’ said Frank, ‘but I don’t know what else to do. I just want to see where they crashed, it makes a difference to me, I need to see it, to know that it’s real.’

  ‘It’s real. Dennis was home when it happened.’

  There was no mention of Burack’s wife; Frank supposed she was at the market. Maybe with their other child, if they had one.

  ‘He lost a friend. We lost a few friends. But friends aren’t the same thing as family.’

  ‘If you love people, what’s the difference?’ asked Frank, but he was sure there was a difference.

  ‘Come on through,’ said Burack. It was a comfortable and undistinguished house. Frank would not have noticed it, but Anna always made fun of wall-to-wall carpets in a living room; she thought there was something too suburban about them, that a wood floor with even a mediocre rug, something with an uncomplicated design, was better than carpet. Frank thought that above all reasons, it was for just this kind of distinction that he needed her, because her eyes were set on the world, and his were so clouded with his own shit. Or did he hate her because this kind of distinction left him with a catalogue of sins against which he measured everyone, and without the guidance of his now dead wife, would he have halted his affection for Dan Burack because he had a carpet?

  Burack took him to the back yard. ‘Can you smell it?’ asked Burack.

  ‘Yes,’ said Frank. It was there, clearly, the smell of a fire, of gasoline and wood.

  ‘It’s about five blocks to where the plane hit.’

  ‘Why do you believe me?’ asked Frank. ‘How do you know I’m not going to break into an empty house?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There you have it.’

  The back wall was only five feet tall, and the lights were off in the house beyond it.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Frank. He pulled himself over the wall and dropped to the other side. There was only a patch of lawn at this far end of the yard, and then a long swimming pool surrounded by a fence. Frank trotted beside the pool, and when he came to the driveway found a lock inside the gate. The gate was wood, and about six feet tall. He hoisted himself once again, this time bracing himself against the house. He stood up on the gate. There was a window just beyond it. He bent over to reach the sill, and with a firm grip on the window he jumped to the ground, with only a light insult to his ankles. Now, on the other side of the police line, all he had to do was follow his nose.

  There was a pale half-moon. Cypress trees with dry needles moved in a light wind, which came with the rumble of the heavy engines of fire trucks on the next block. The sound of the trucks passed away, but the light wind continued. No matter what the weather, he thought, it would feel appropriate. Full moon, no moon, crescent on the wax or wane, light wind or typhoon, he could have read into any of them a fitting judgement on his grief, on the universe, on his silly goal to see the plane. What did the light wind mean, was it indifference or comfort? Did the passing fire trucks play a threnody just for him, or even not just for him, but for everyone? The sound reminded everyone of what had happened.

  When Frank passed the corner of the front of the house, he saw the barrier from which he had been turned. He was in the middle of the block, and he walked to the next corner and then made a right turn up an empty street. Ahead to the next block, some fifteen or so houses away, he saw a knot of people in the light of something large that was hidden around the corner. The light shifted, and then he heard the sound of a crane or bulldozer. He walked, but then he found it easier to run.

  Men shouted directions and responses, and gears were shifted, and engines changed pitch, and as he came to the corner he could smell a dead fire, water on charcoal making the air damp. Around the corner he saw that two houses had burned almost to the ground. The nearest house was half destroyed; the wall closest to him was fine, but the roof was off, and a section of the second storey was still complete. The fire had been at the next house, and there was nothing left of it. The bulldozer was prodding at the rubble while a crew of workers took it apart more gently with shovels. Each wore a white mask that covered his mouth and nose. There was an ambulance parked across the street, and a table with a tall steel coffee jug. Frank walked to the edge of the circle of light. The ambulance driver watched, coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He was about fifty, with deep creases and dry, freckled skin. Frank hated him. He had the look of those Californians, those San Diegans, for whom boredom and hostility blend together into smug silence. He flicked his cigarette with such practised attention to the ash that it was not beyond possibility that this tic was a large piece of the man’s character.

  ‘One of the engines went down here,’ said the driver. ‘The first h
ouse burned and set the second on fire. And this is three blocks from the worst of it. There’s bodies in some trees out of the evacuation zone, but the real bad part is up ahead.’

  ‘The plane exploded in the air?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Not completely, the engine may have ripped off as it was coming down, but more than likely it flew off the wing when the plane hit Cohassett. Have you been over there yet?’

  ‘No,’ said Frank.

  ‘What a mess.’

  ‘Why are they digging here now?’ asked Frank. ‘Can’t this wait until morning?’

  ‘There’s three bodies left in the house. The guys with the masks got the masks on because of the smell.’

  The men with the masks sifted through a layer of dry-wall, smashed furniture, and what remained of a second-floor bathroom. Satisfied that nothing, or rather no one, was in there, they let the bulldozer pick it up. When the bulldozer moved the pile to the lawn, they went at the rubble again.

  ‘Does anything survive the fire?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said the driver. ‘The fire doesn’t last that long or burn that hot. It’s not like a car crash. A car crash is rough. If the gas tank is full when it explodes, you can get a concentrated fire, and they have to go back to dental records to make the ID. But with this kind of fire, usually what kills is the smoke. The bodies from the plane, some of them are all fucked up, the ones that fell from high up, people out of their seats, but the ones that were in seats, or were in the sections that hit intact, they’re broken, but they’re not cut up. The people on the ground look worse than the people from the plane. I just finished a run from Nimitz Street, and that was bad. There was this family getting out of a car just when the plane hit. The joke is, they’d just come from the airport. The tail section skidded down the street right into the garage as they were getting out of the car.’

  ‘How do they know?’ asked Frank.

  ‘The little girl across the street saw it happen. The whole house came down, there was nothing left of it, but it didn’t burn. What a mess. Pieces of bodies.’ The driver flicked his ash and then repeated his last words: ‘Pieces of bodies.’ This time he lowered his voice, because, Frank thought, he was suddenly aware that Frank was probably not on official business, and that if he was on this side of the barrier he was from the neighbourhood, and for him this was not an opportunity to test the strength of his professional detachment.