This was Rex. He’d blown into town a year or so earlier with Nevada, and it was true, as Maynard supposed, he’d worked for John for a time, sitting in as an apprentice joiner with John’s construction company, then driving a truck for the lumberyard for a while. John had taken a liking to him, or so it seemed, soon moving him out to his private airport as a kind of janitor and handyman, not the worst gig Rex had ever had. John met a lot of women out at that airport, Nevada among them, and Rex had the idea he staffed the place with trusties who kept their traps shut about his fucking around. Okay by him. Though he was no pimp, Rex was cool about Nevada’s operations, she had what she had, her own bod her ax, and she did what she could with it, professional as a dentist or a computer programmer, he respected that and helped her unwind when she came back from one of her hustles, all stained and rumpled and wired from the tension of it. She needed him then, or said she did, and so she took him along with her wherever she went, and he needed that, needed the needing, it got him up like nothing else did, except maybe a wailing horn, and made more bearable what he’d come to call the daily grunt, stealing the line from somewhere, a tabloid or a music mag probably, the least of his thefts. So being in the neighborhood when an old guy nearly twice his age was punching out his woman didn’t bother him, far from it — go to it, kid, pump the sucker dry, then come on home and lay your weary little chassis next to mine — no, what burned Rex’s ass was the way John yelled at him one day when he caught him tinkering around inside one of his private planes. Wasn’t even trying to steal anything, just trying to see how the fucking thing worked, trying to improve himself, as you might say, no call for John to get on his high horse like that, bawling him out and swatting at him with a rolled-up operator’s manual when he crawled down out of there, like you’d do to a dog that had just shat on your rug. Right in front of old Snuffy the schnozz, Rex’s windbag boss, and a bunch of the other dudes, grinning like fucking monkeys with grease guns up their butts. So then Rex did steal something after alclass="underline" he copped some keys. And gave John the finger, went off to work as a mechanic in Stu’s Ford garage, where he soon found himself servicing more than the old juicehead’s cars.
That airport was John’s own special baby, literally his pride and joy, loved more than his offspring, no surprise he was touchy about it. It was the first thing he ever built on his own without Barnaby interfering, just a cleared sod strip on a piece of his dad’s land at first, not far from the new highway then being built, an arc of corrugated roofing tin added to an old collapsing barn for a hangar and a couple of construction trailers parked about, but as beautiful as anything he’d ever made before or since. Bruce had taken him up for the first time in his own Piper Cherokee a year or so before and, in midair, had handed him the controls, and John had experienced a rush unlike anything he’d ever felt before. This was on a visit to his old friend and fraternity brother up in the city, ostensibly a business trip, their first weekend together since John’s recent wedding, and though Bruce had laid on a lot of entertainments, including a crazy party at the mansion of a young porno entrepreneur, featuring a glass-walled bar below pool level with naked nymphets swimming by, a hot new British band out on the terrace, and a contortionist in the upstairs lounge who could lie on her back, put her knees by her ears, and finger a tune on a flute blown by her ass while smoking a cigarette with her cunt, nothing could top that morning in the air. By the time of Bruce’s first marriage a few months later, John had his first plane, a Sky-hawk bought secondhand with Bruce’s advice, Bruce joking that since he’d bought a secondhand bride with John’s advice, their consultancy fees canceled each other out, and so John and his wife were able to fly up to the wedding, Audrey and Barnaby fit to be tied of course, their only daughter put at such risk, John telling them not to worry, he’d stay out of the war zone. He wanted to fly all the way to Paris for their second honeymoon not long after that, but Audrey nixed it, buying him off with money for an electricity generator for the airstrip and a proper hangar with a paved apron. Over the years, she herself began to fly with him, and liked it, even took some lessons before she died, though she continued to beg John to leave her daughter on the ground.
Gordon had one photo of John’s wife taken at the airport, long ago, a chance opportunity. He’d thought, on the day, he’d got more, but when the developing was done, one was all he had. He had gone out there on a routine Crier assignment from Ellsworth to get shots of the new generator and the laying of the concrete foundations for the hangar being built, John agreeing to meet him there at noon to show him about. Ellsworth was giving him a lot of work for little pay in those days, but he was an old friend and Gordon did not complain. Must have been mid-February or so, the fields barren, but the day bright enough and not too cold. Not much to shoot at, even for a man who favored bleak abstractions, the new airport just another ugly scratch in a much-scarred landscape, but the occasion turned out to be a family event of sorts, Barnaby the only in-law missing, Mitch with a chewed-up unlit black cigar in his jowls, strolling about with his thumbs in his belt, admiring the premises, Opal and Audrey hovering maternally around John’s wife, heavy then with her first child, and Gordon was able to convince them that a kind of family portrait out there in front of John’s plane was in order. John’s wife protested shyly, placing her hands lightly on her belly as though restraining a balloon about to fly away (Gordon, to his deep regret, did not get this photo, his unloaded camera hanging heavily at his side), but all the grandparents-to-be laughed her protests away, insisting they’d never seen her more beautiful. Indeed, she was almost childlike in her beauty, Gordon thought, though perhaps he was only seeing in her the beautiful child he once knew and, back in those days as a tagalong at the games his schoolpal Ellsworth played with her, drew. Once, somewhat frivolously, with a pregnant tummy, a secret sketch. There was a young man helping John with the hangar construction, a greasy-haired beer-bellied fellow famous for his Saturday night binges called Norbert or Norman, who got drafted not long after, went into the army engineers and stayed in, never looked back, gone like so many from this town for good, and together he and John rolled the plane out of the old hangar, which was little more than a tin canopy attached to an ancient gray barn whose roof was caving in (piece of history, that barn, gone three weeks later), and moved it over beside the new hangar-to-be’s freshly spread concrete floor, still too wet to walk on. (Audrey had got them all to leave their handprints in the fresh cement, another photo Gordon had missed, having arrived too late, though he did photograph the handprint, the one he believed to be hers, many times over.) Gordon set about lining them up beneath one sleek white wing, worried a bit about the possible glare from the slanting sun off the shiny fuselage and trying to coax John’s wife out from behind the others. He’d just got something like the pose he wanted when the whole session was interrupted by another airplane swooping by, a racier model, wagging its strutless wings, then circling around for a landing, everyone in John’s party laughing and running out onto the packed-dirt airstrip to meet it, Gordon left with no one to photograph except the greasy-haired assistant, who stood alone beside the tail smirking stupidly. The new arrival, stepping dashingly out of his plane with a fistful of champagne bottles and a picnic basket, was one of John’s rowdy university friends, Gordon recognized him from the wedding. He also had a woman with him who, unlike John’s wife, wanted to be, front and center, in every photo Gordon tried to take, such that in the one photo he managed to get of John and his wife, there she was, throwing her arms around John and kicking one leg back, flapper-style, John’s wife a shadowy blur, vaguely smiling, behind her. Later, John and his friend went up for a spin with the young woman, John’s expectant wife declining, at the rather sharp bidding of her mother, the invitation to join them, giving Gordon hope that he might have her alone to his lens at last. But while, at their whooping insistence, he was photographing the three young people clambering up into the plane, the friend’s hand playfully cupping the woman’s behind, her mouth in a theatrical O, eyebrows bobbing and eyes crossed, the other two laughing back over their shoulders and waving champagne bottles at Gordon, the rest of the party made their exit: all he saw when he turned around was Mitch’s car pulling up off the dirt shoulder onto the road into town. Well. His camera was loaded. He photographed the barn. The handprints in the wet cement.