Lady, too, seemed edgy, unprepared, around her, and Kristi was the only human being Lady had ever bitten. Biddy had been present for that bit of history as welclass="underline" she’d been nipped across the tips of her fingers one hot day after sitting on the dog as she lay in the shade. Lady had growled and Kristi had slapped her nose and she had spun around and snapped. She’d slapped back fiercely, the force of her hand spraying saliva from the dog’s mouth, before erupting into tears. Lady had lain in the shade throughout all the following chaos, unrepentant. His father had yelled at Lady so loudly that her ears had flattened, but she had remained bristling and stubborn, as though she could not be blamed for an altercation with Kristi. When Biddy had seen the size of the needle at the doctor’s, he’d thought it was some kind of awful joke, but his sister had remained grim and silent until the needle had gone in; then she had screamed.
“How’d Louis get retarded?” she asked. She was flipping cards, bored with diamonds and spades.
They sat at the redwood table in the backyard, swishing their bare feet back and forth through the grass, slapping mosquitoes, scratching bites. Biddy was looking back over the Brewers-Yankees scorecard.
“He was born that way,” he said.
“So he’s never going to get better?”
“No.”
“Do you like having him around?”
He looked up. “Why? You don’t like him?”
“It’s funny,” she said, squinting. “I feel bad for him, but it’s kind of creepy.”
“Louis is nice.”
She didn’t reply. “I remember him looking down at me when I was little and honking and scaring me,” she finally said. Biddy made a face and she added, “He honks when he talks.”
His father came out and sat next to them, drink in hand.
“What’s that?” Biddy asked.
“Milk of Magnesia,” his father said. “What’re you, a cop?”
They were quiet as it got darker, and Kristi slapped at another mosquito. Her father said, “You guys’re going to get eaten alive out here. Why don’t you sit in the porch?”
“How come Louis plays with little kids?” Kristi asked.
“Are you a little kid?” her father teased. She ignored the comment and he cleared his throat. “Well, you know Louis doesn’t always get along that great with kids his own age.”
“He’s retarded,” she said.
“Now I don’t want you throwing those words around. Either of you. Do you say that to him? Are you mean to him?” He looked at Biddy. “Is she mean to him?”
“No,” Biddy said.
“I don’t want you being mean to him, now. The poor son of a bitch’s got enough problems. He’s a good kid.”
“Does everybody make fun of him?”
“It isn’t easy for him. You should feel sorry for him.”
Kristi collected her cards into a pile. She’d gotten a little sun at the game and her nose and cheeks were pink.
“There’s nothing wrong with him playing with you guys. Or with all of us.”
The house was becoming simply a shape in the gloom. Biddy sat staring into the darkness beyond it, trying to imagine what it would be like to be Louis.
“He’s a good kid,” his father repeated, getting up to go. “That Mickey’s harder to take than he is. I don’t want you kids bothering him.”
Biddy shook his head to agree not to, his eyes still focused out into the distance, but in the gloom all but the most emphatic gestures were lost.
The next few days were spent in preparation for school as much as for the Air Show. Biddy was fitting into a new uniform, Kristi had outgrown her shoes, and they both needed school supplies and enough other shit to choke a horse, as his father put it. So the announcement that they were flying to the Hamptons for the weekend, getting a free ride with a friend who commuted to Sikorsky by Cessna, surprised everyone, and excited only Biddy.
“What’re we going to do in the Hamptons,” his mother said, spooning out peas.
“Nothing. Hold our hand on our ass,” his father said. “The vacation spot of the East, and she wants to know what we’re going to do there.”
“Where’re we going to stay?”
“We’ll stay with the Carvers. Look, if you don’t want to go—”
“I’d love to go. I have my heart set on going. Your friends are my friends,” his mother said.
His father took the spoon from her hand and piled more peas onto his plate. “You bring a lot to the party, you know it?” he said.
“I know it,” his mother said. “Sometimes I’m not all I’m supposed to be. I know that, too.”
Late that Friday afternoon they drove around Lordship to Bridgeport Airport. It took, he thought as they drove through the main gate, longer than it would have had they just walked to the end of their street and gone under the hurricane fence.
Mr. Carver pulled up in a little Datsun and hurried over, a short heavy man in a white shirt with a dirty collar. He switched hands with his briefcase and gave Biddy’s hand a firm single shake. He did not look like Biddy’s idea of a pilot, but the very idea of that much spatial freedom — the ability to go, almost literally, in any direction one wanted, to be free of the confining limits of even roads or tracks — excited Biddy so that he could not keep back his desire to want to admire this man, peering at his physical exterior as if searching for evidence of the marvelous skill underneath. Carver was introduced to everyone and seemed polite and noticeably impatient. He was visibly unhappy about Kristi, and Biddy wondered guiltily if his father had even mentioned her. She’d sit in her mother’s lap, next to Biddy in the back.
The Cessna seemed a tiny car with wings. The cockpit was cramped. Biddy pressed his face to the glass, unable to completely believe this machine and that man would take them off the face of the earth.
From the back seat he asked a series of questions. Because of the weather they’d be flying VFR, navigating visually, Mr. Carver related. What he was doing at this point was the preflight checklist. It was no more difficult than it seemed, he said. Biddy sat back, bewildered by the simplicity of the process. Carver went on explaining, but his words were lost in the roar as the engine kicked over.
They took off slowly, banking sharply around to the left toward the Sound, Biddy feeling a shock and excitement as the wheels left the ground and his neighborhood and street swept away and below. Everyone looked out windows, and he waited for the plane to sideslip abruptly and smash into the ground after a fluttering spin. The reeds of the salt marsh flashed by below and then the thin stretch of beach, and then they were over the ocean, blue and choppy. No one spoke. Mr. Carver said something to his father now and then.
Biddy watched the man’s hands on the controls. It seemed inexpressibly marvelous that a human being could do this. Carver seemed to be paying no more attention than his father did when he drove. Like the car, the Cessna seemed to need only an occasional gentle correction.