Carla put Bubble in her lap, nuzzled in his black hair, wrapped her thin muscular arms around his soft squirming body, and squeezed him with pleasure, eager for the scare to be over. We’re safe. Carla hugged him and took another look at the land below. She smiled at its promise of safety.
3
While Max took care of Stacy, he saw Lisa across the way, tending to the business traveler in the seersucker suit. He was the man in 33A, but he wasn’t having a heart attack. His shortness of breath was panic; the pain in his chest was fear. Lisa helped him out of his jacket and loosened his tie. He hung onto the Journal, although it drooped in half. In his white short-sleeved oxford shirt he looked older. Lisa seemed young enough to be his daughter.
Max learned from Mary that the businessman was okay when she joined him in ministering to Stacy. En route she had paused by 33A and Max asked her right away: “Is he having a heart attack?”
“Are you a doctor?” she asked eagerly.
“No,” Max said and he felt a profound regret.
“Oh…I don’t think so. Just scared.” She focused on Stacy. “How you doing, hon?” Mary greeted her colleague with an informality that touched Max; speaking to one of her own she switched off the harsh public-address voice. “Sorry I couldn’t hold on to the cart.” She lifted the bandanna and winced in sympathy: “Ow!”
“Doesn’t hurt,” Stacy said and moved to rise.
Mary touched her shoulder. “Don’t be crazy, honey. Everything’s okay. We got it under control.”
“I can help,” Max said.
Mary’s virtual crew cut of graying blond hair seemed to harden into a shell as she stared at Max with a lot of suspicion and a little outrage for his making this offer. He had no sexy feelings toward her and this was a relief. “You can help by returning to your seat and buckling up. We’ll be on the ground shortly.”
Max laughed a little. A sardonic, doomed chuckle.
“Go back to your seat, sir,” she insisted, turning her public-address microphone back on. She ignored him by calling out to this section of passengers: “Please remove all sharp objects, pens, eyeglasses, and take off any hard-soled shoes. The flight attendants will collect them.”
Max crossed over to Jeff and his seat. He listened to the plane. Although they were presumably descending there was no whine of back-thrust, no letup in the engines. The machine was fighting just to stay aloft.
Jeff had the dungarees on. He was stowing a bulky blanket in their overhead compartment. “I put the pants in there,” Jeff explained with a mixture of feverish pride and shame. His partner’s narrow face often resembled a high-strung pedigree, a wary greyhound. The scare Jeff had been through sharpened his angles. His eyes bulged a bit and moved from side to side as if checking for enemies. His mouth hung open, exposing his biggish teeth and their slight overbite; he was almost panting. “What the fuck do they want our shoes for?”
“So the heels don’t puncture the emergency slide. It’s inflated. They want the pens and other stuff in the seat pocket so we don’t stab ourselves. Move over,” Max said, indicating he wanted Jeff’s seat. He had intended to say something pleasant instead of his gloomy explanation but every time he looked at Jeff he was reminded of their argument at the airport, of Jeff’s contempt for his fear, and that made him want to punish his friend.
“Why?” Jeff might be scared, but he was still contentious and paranoid. “Is this side safer?”
“No,” Max said. “But the middle row is. So it doesn’t make any difference. Just move so I can be on this side.” Max wanted this change in order to sneak up to the boy traveling alone and check on him once Mary had finished collecting all the shoes.
Jeff shifted seats. Max glanced down to see whether the fabric had been soiled by Jeff’s spasm of fear. It was clean. Max settled in and buckled up.
This is where you’re going to die, Max, he told himself, merely as a matter of fact, satisfying a lifelong curiosity. There was something comforting in this execution of himself: this certain knowledge of when and how.
Maybe that’s what had me so scared, he thought. Maybe it was the uncertainty of the appointment, not the fact that it had to be kept.
The captain lost control again. The plane fell. Jeff grabbed his arm. He heard a child’s scream. Was it that boy traveling alone?
“Get her up,” Max said into the wheezing noise, struggling to live even if he was ready to die. He thought he felt movement under his feet from the mechanisms that should be stilled if the hydraulics were gone.
They swooped up, just as out of control as when they fell, but at least it was away from the deadly ground.
“That was bad,” Jeff hissed.
We can’t land, Max thought. The captain can’t land it with no way to steer. He could imagine the frantic upset in the cockpit, the fury the pilot must feel at instruments that refused to yield to his skill.
Max looked toward the windows across the aisle. Two rows ahead Mary knelt at the feet of a male teenager, trying to pull off his pink boots. His leather jacket was trimmed with chains and buckles. They trembled with each attempt at freeing his foot from the boot. Above Mary’s head Max saw that the effect of the downward and upward swoops had left the DC-10 lower, perhaps no higher than a few thousand feet. He could see a chain of buildings and silos off to the right, maybe the outskirts of a city.
But the captain can’t get us down smoothly, Max reasoned. What could he do? Wait until they ran out of fuel? Unable to steer, the pilot would have to chance the first cleared space. He might have to attempt a landing any second, without warning. Max glanced out the windows again. He saw a mall with a Sears pass them in the distance. The store was several floors high and they were way above it. No, they weren’t low enough for a sudden landing.
“I should have let you buy us the flight insurance,” Jeff said.
“What are you talking about?” They didn’t look at each other while speaking. They kept their heads facing forward, braced for the worst. The sun slanted across Max’s jaw and neck, heating him.
“When you found out this was a DC-10 you wanted to buy some.”
“I wanted to take another flight!” Max sighed, exasperated not by Jeff’s manipulative alteration of the facts (that was typical) but because he couldn’t hold himself back from being drawn into an argument. I’m about to die and I still can’t ignore him, he thought bitterly.
“Oh? Yeah…but you also wanted to get some insurance, right?”
“Are you actually worried—”
The plane flopped in the air again, dropping into the hollow of the wave and riding up its back, an awkward surfer. They were silent until it was level. Mary had gotten one of the teenager’s boots off and was at work on the other as they took the wave. She ended up with her head between his knees. When she rose from this position she had a pained expression on her face. Max assumed she had been inadvertently kicked in the stomach by the pink boot. She got to her feet and moved away without the second boot. The teenager hurried to work on removing it himself.
Jeff banged Max with his elbow: “What were you going to ask?”
“What do you care about the insurance?”
“We have wives and children, remember? When it seemed like we were going to crash that’s all I could think about. I mean, if we die, there’s no business. How are they going to make it?”
Max relished this moment. He moved his head to see the effect: “Jeff, I got news for you. I overheard the co-pilot talking to the head flight attendant. We’re not going to make it.”
The greyhound was stilled. Jeff’s mouth stayed open, his teeth exposed to the air, but the panting was arrested and his eyes no longer nervously scanned the periphery. “What’d they say?”