They returned to an aerial shot of a desert, with the wreckage of a plane strewn across a gully of some sort. Some figures were moving around it. Jimmy Stewart stood in the sun, with George Kennedy nearby. They looked terrible. Stewart’s cheeks were covered with a white stubble and his lips were cracked. Kennedy looked dazed and grim. They were arguing with Ernest Borgnine, who was sitting against a torn piece of fuselage in the shade. The plane had had a twin boom tail assembly, and one of the booms with its accompanying engine seemed intact. Jimmy Stewart wanted to build an entirely new plane from that, with their help, and try to fly out of the desert. It was all up to a young German engineer with wire-rimmed glasses and filthy blond hair.
“Who’s that?” Biddy asked. He could feel the men’s suffering and imagined going so long without water.
“Hardy Kruger,” his father said. “I’m trying to watch.”
Hardy Kruger said Stewart’s idea was possible, that anything was possible. Stewart, arguing for the attempt, said that Kruger had built planes before.
He built model airplanes before, Borgnine raged. He’s a model airplane builder!
Hardy Kruger shrugged, his glasses dusty in close-up. The principles are the same, he said.
Stewart stood in the sun, wiping his hand on his lower lip, and began to speak so eloquently, as he paced and the sun beat down on the dust around them, that Biddy wanted to help, to search the cellar for tools.
It was impossible. All right, it was impossible. And they had a choice: try the impossible or stay in the desert. And I don’t know about you, he said, but I’ve had enough of the desert. He explained: one choice was doing what you thought you couldn’t, the other was giving up. George Kennedy swayed slightly in the heated air behind him. They couldn’t do more than was possible, someone said. They’d have to change what was possible, Stewart said.
The group gazed at the wreckage. Biddy shivered under the terrycloth. Where would they get a tail, an undercarriage, the other wing? His father looked on, absorbed.
A commercial appeared and they shifted together, the spell half broken by the intrusion of giant hands and Spray ’n Wash.
“Look at this cast,” his father said. The pages of the TV Guide flapped like layers of wings. “Attenborough, Kennedy, Borgnine. Peter Finch. What do we got now? Now it’s sex or you gotta lop somebody’s head off.”
The movie returned. The crew strained against huge silver slabs of metal in the sunlight. Borgnine grunted and pulled, ropes around his shoulders. Stewart lifted and pushed, his sad eyes strained and desperate. Hardy Kruger rigged up a pulley system. They struggled on, overcoming problem after problem, spanning two commercial breaks.
The plane, finished, was christened “Phoenix” by the men. They circled it, unable to speak, and Biddy was moved by what they’d accomplished. “It’s such a good story,” his father murmured, and the plane, with a surge and sweep of music, took off, bumping clumsily over the flat, hard sand and just clearing a dune ridge, its wings flexing and swaying dangerously. The men were whooping and cheering. Stewart was grinning. “They got it,” his father said, eyes on the plane as it lifted high over the barren slopes. “Just take off. You don’t like it, change it. Make it possible, like he said. I’ll be a son of a bitch if I wouldn’t’ve been better off listening to stuff like that.”
He recrossed his feet on the hassock. They could hear the crickets outside, musical and distant. “I feel sorry for you kids,” he said. “You don’t get stuff like this anymore. Now what do you get? Psychos with masks. People’s heads exploding. What do we expect? We show kids that and we expect them to grow up like Bobby Kennedy.”
The plane continued to rise, an oasis now in sight. Stewart hunched against the wind behind his tiny windshield, eyes slits, hair buffeted. They were going to land safely, an even greater accomplishment, and Biddy stayed on the sofa, wanting to share their release and achievement, watching the credits, and waiting for more long after the commercial break.
He played Wiffle ball the next morning in the backyard and called for them to hurry, as he waited in the outfield, the grass smell fresh in his nostrils. His back was to the bushes. The sun warmed his hair and his foot itched near the heel. His father whizzed in a drooping curve and his sister swung her bright yellow bat and the ball arced high above them, slowing fast, curling in the air as it spun, and he edged back and turned and lunged, the weightless ball slapping into his hand as he came down into the prickly support of the hedges.
While he lay sagging close to the ground, his father and sister laughing, the branches moved. The face of a kitten emerged, mottled in tan and gray, its green eyes alert. Somewhere a bird twittered. For a moment the kitten and Biddy and the space between them remained as silent and still as a photograph. He waited, wondering at a kitten at home in the middle of a bush, but it refused to stir. He waited, and his hand, as if approaching an extraterrestrial object, opened and moved cautiously through the hedges toward it. At the intrusion, the kitten slipped away with a single movement, sinuous, disappearing with an impossible hop into the shadowy tangle. The leaves of the bush shook and whispered in the breeze. His hand remained where the kitten had been, evidence of the ghost.
“Listen, whenever you’re ready,” his father called. “Or is this your way of saying you’d like to quit?”
He struggled forward, Wiffle ball still clutched in his other hand, and steadied himself before rising to toss the ball back in.
In a three-month-old essay on an assigned theme accepted on the twenty-third of May by Sister Mary of Mercy, sixth-grade teacher at Our Lady of Peace School, Biddy had written:
MY FAMILY
My family is not a big one. There is my father, my mother, and Kristi, my sister. My father works at United Technologies (Sikorsky) where they make helicopters. We have a dog, Lady, who is white and part Dalmatian and does some tricks. My father and I taught her the tricks when she was a puppy. My mother says our family is a big one, because of all our cousins and uncles. I have twenty-seven cousins. They are all Italian. But I don’t think they count. I’m twelve and Kristi is seven. My father says he is forty-four and my mother says she is as old as the hills.
Sister Mary of Mercy had given the paper a B-minus and had added a note, scrawled across the top right corner: “Good, Biddy, but could you have said more?”
Creeping around the outside of the paper in the margins were dark double rows of box scores. Along the top an extra-inning game had been played between Balt. and N.Y., the extra innings spilling across comments and grade. New York had won, 13–9, with four runs in the top of the sixteenth.
Biddy was playing bent forward over the desk, the high-intensity lamp cutting a yellow arc from the gloom. He rested his cheek on his fist, rolling and scooping up dice with his right hand. Baltimore was ahead in this, the fifth game of the series, 7–3.
His hair drifted into the light over the supporting hand on his cheek. It had just been washed and seemed finer than his mother claimed it to be. It was brown under the high-intensity lamp’s harsh attempt to lighten it, and where the strands separated — at many places, since his mother had been able to comb it out only once before he had bolted — it appeared so fine as to be indistinct. It was long for a boy with his neck, and his father occasionally told him across the supper table that he looked like the wrath of God.
His mother insisted his eyes were his dominant feature. They had been at his birth, she liked to continue, at which point he had looked like nothing so much as a little frog. The image did not flatter him. His father, mixing a whiskey and water, would glance up occasionally and say, “Good God. Look at the eyes, will you?” Or his sister, slamming a door or slapping the dog’s nose, would hold up a hand, as if to block his vision, and protest he shouldn’t look at her like that.