Cindy accompanied Max to the airport in a limousine. He found it all interesting and comfortable: the interior of the limo and the new sights en route. At the terminal Cindy told Max another airline employee would be seated next to him on the plane. “His name is William Perlman. He’s had a lot of experience with people who’ve been through what you’ve been through. You’ll like him, he’s a great guy.”
Max was impressed. He thought: They found a Jew in the baggage pile to keep me company.
Cindy asked Max once again if he wanted to phone his wife before boarding.
“Do you know my wife?” Max asked, trying to figure out why she was so insistent. They were heading toward the gate. The telltale, usually unsettling smell of burning kerosene fuel penetrated the glass windows. In the distance a big-bellied 747 stumbled upward into a curved blue sky.
“Me…?” Cindy was astonished.
“I almost get the feeling she’s asked you to get me to call her.”
Cindy looked as if she’d been caught doing something underhanded. “I talked to her briefly,” she mumbled. They had reached Gate 5, which evidently was the departure point for his flight. “Want to board early?” she asked.
“First class boards early anyway,” Max answered.
“Of course,” Cindy said, “that’s right. Anyway, I told Mr. Perlman we would be right at the gate,” Cindy added. She guided Max toward the ramp. Max noticed the plane attached to it was a 727, which, like the DC-10, was another old jet.
“You folks at TransCon ought to upgrade your fleet.”
“Pardon me?” Cindy said, in exactly the tone Max thought she might use if he reached over to unbutton the top button of her navy vest.
“All your planes are twenty years old,” Max nodded at the 727. The burning kerosene was stronger here. He smelled the acrid death of the DC-10’s smoldering seats. He could see the infant seat suspended among the plane’s dissected electronic veins. He felt Byron pulling at him to hurry. “How come you don’t buy new planes? Too much junk-bond debt?”
“Sir,” Cindy rebuked him, showing her profile as she gestured toward the 727 with a righteousness that suggested Max had slandered it, “the design is twenty years old, but that plane has been completely rebuilt several times. I don’t know the exact figures on this particular 727, but the average TransCon 727 has no part older than eight years.”
“That’s not strictly true, Cindy,” Max answered, imitating her travel-brochure style of polite argument. “I’m sorry they told you a lie and I understand that you’ve repeated it to me innocently, but it’s not really accurate.”
“Mr. Klein, it is true,” Cindy was upset. She opened her folder and peered inside as she spoke: “I wish I had it here. In my office I could show you the repair records for the entire fleet and you’d see that no part is older than eight years.”
Max admired her pride and felt sorry for her commitment to TransCon’s integrity. She had that most vulnerable of human possessions: a faithful heart. Sadly, she had given her love to a corporation. He put his hand on hers, on the hand that had spread her folder open. Her fingers were cold. “Not everything. Just the engine parts. The skin of that plane, some of the bolts, some of the welding, little things here and there are original and more than twenty years old. Trust me. I know. And as for your maintenance crews and the records in your office, I guess you’ve never had construction done in your home or spent any time on a job site. What’s in everyone’s repair files and what’s out there is the difference between high school civics and Washington politics.”
“You must be Max Klein,” a male voice said behind him. The sound terrified Max. The voice was his dead father’s. As if a murderous hand had grabbed his throat, he shivered and couldn’t swallow or breathe. Max shut his eyes. He certainly couldn’t turn and face the ghost’s greeting. He reminded himself that his father had been dead for thirty years. He argued to himself, I don’t really remember what Dad sounded like. “Mr. Klein?” the specter insisted.
“This is William Perlman,” Cindy said softly in Max’s ear.
Max opened his eyes and saw a big frizzy red-haired man. He stood well over six feet and had the weight and thickness of a football player. His eyes were pale blue, his forehead as flat as if someone had meticulously starched and ironed it. “Did I startle you?” Perlman asked.
Perlman was a big cheerful man, a clown without makeup. Max relaxed. “I guess I’m still a little on edge,” Max apologized.
“Who wouldn’t be?” Perlman said.
Cindy said, “I’ll be going now, Mr. Klein.”
“Thanks for everything,” Max said and offered his hand. He imagined she had very small breasts, that her freckles trailed down from her long neck until just below the bra line, where her skin was probably pure white. He had a conviction her nipples would be pink. “You were really nice,” he lied.
“My pleasure,” Cindy said. “And I hope someday you have a little more faith in people.”
“Me too,” Max said. He smiled but there were tears in his eyes.
Perlman watched Max the whole time they sat strapped into their first-class seats, sipping complimentary drinks and listening to the captain’s dutiful accounting of their position in the line for takeoff. Perlman also talked, cheerfully, about where he had grown up and so on, but his eyes were not in harmony with the light conversation. Instead they observed Max coolly, flickering only when Max seemed interested in the plane’s movements.
Such interest prompted Perlman into self-interruptions of his banter with curt bulletins of obvious information. “I used to love to travel. When TransCon hired me as a consultant — we’re taxiing now — they of course offered unlimited free travel for me, but they got me flying back and forth so much — that’s just the captain keeping the engines up to speed — that now my idea of a vacation is to stay put. Besides, TransCon doesn’t — we’re turning to be in position for takeoff — fly to Venice, which I’m romantic enough to want to go to again and again.”
“I’m not scared,” Max said. “But I’d like another drink when we’re airborne.” He smiled and elbowed Perlman. “Or should I say, if we’re airborne.”
“We’re beginning takeoff,” Perlman said as the large hands of the jet’s engines started to push from behind, giving them the bum’s rush out of Pittsburgh.
Max smiled at the window. “Look at us go!”
Perlman frowned, puzzled. “Your wife said you’re terrified of air travel.”
“Everybody seems to know my wife,” Max said. He leaned forward and across Perlman’s lap to watch the speeding runway. “Go, baby, go!” The front wheels released the earth with a slight thud of regret and the land tilted.
“I called her before meeting you—”
The pilot banked away from the areas of noise abatement, up through what he, the tower, and the passengers hoped was a cleared corridor to his flight path. “This is the most dangerous time,” Max interrupted Perlman with a bulletin of his own. “Right now every bolt on this plane is stressed, and the air is full of deadly obstacles, each one moving as blindly and as quickly as we are.”
“We’re safe.” Perlman’s voice was soft and smooth as a loving parent singing a lullaby.
“Why did you call my wife?”
“To gain some insight into who you were before we met.” Perlman had his head back, looking straight ahead. His hands were holding the armrests. Not desperately, but with a firm and worried grip. “I didn’t know, tell you the truth, whether you were going to be communicative or what. They told me you were the one who was stressed, not the bolts.”