He suddenly wonders why he didn’t bring his father’s old Luger pistol along with him. He could have used it on the hijacking; surely it was around the old home place somewhere?
He wouldn’t have been doing such an awful thing if he had become a priest. His mother would have been pleased; she believed in the Church. His little sisters and older brother would have been proud. Perhaps he wouldn’t have felt the need to drink so much.
The sweet, young Italian boy props his feet up in the cockpit. He’s sure the aged navigator is smiling at him, surely thinking the would-be priest might have been his own son. The captain is crying hysterically in the corner. The stewardess looks grim, but is stroking the Italian boy’s forehead, surely finding him enormously attractive. The co-pilot flies the plane, making exaggerated winks at the Italian hero. A better life awaits in Italy, the mother country, when they arrive. Money, fame, political power for the handsome Italian youth. Modeling jobs for the stewardess. It was so easy, the Italian boy thinks, and if they had refused to give up their silly airplane—silly to think of it now—he was going to commit suicide. The stewardess smiles as if she is reading his thoughts.
He had been a mouse while his father was alive; he had been worthless. But then his father died, and in this act of hijacking, this focusing of all his latent powers, he had taken charge of his life in the way that had been his father’s only virtue.
He had had difficulty walking; now he had regained his equilibrium.
His had been a futile rage; now it was released. He had become omnipotent, rising above all restrictions.
He had gambled with fate and won.
The handsome Italian boy from the Bronx gazes out of the window, down through the clouds, to his father stretched out naked and obese below. The old man groans and sputters in his sleep, and his useless sex organ seems to become increasingly wrinkled with each of his hesitant breaths. The Italian boy notices mountain lodges and recreation centers sprouting between the tough ridges of abdominal skin. He orders the plane’s baggage be dumped on the recumbent form, hoping to rattle the old man’s nerves.
The stewardess brings another tray of drinks as ordered. He downs them hastily.
The plane rips into the upper reaches of air, the Italian boy thinking how there is no turning back, ousted for good, the whole world down there, his father groaning beneath the weight of excreted baggage, and he, just a handsome Italian boy from the Bronx, free, free and on his way to Mother Italy.
But then he snaps out of his reverie, sure he will be caught. Some brave member of the crew, perhaps even the co-pilot, will daringly grab his wrists, forcing him to the ground, while the cunning stewardess disarms his vest of dynamite. Or perhaps he’ll land in Italy, only to be greeted by several divisions of the Italian army, their massive guns trained on him. In any case, it would be one more failure added to the many failures of his life. He would be transferred to a stateside hospital, put into a psychiatric unit, and when he got out he would have to try all over again.
He is amazed by the grayness of the plane’s inner walls. He runs from the cockpit and dashes back through the plane’s fuselage, but he finds no crew, no passengers, not even the cunning but beautiful stewardess. The odor of rotting flesh gags him. He looks out a window and sees the pale gray, outstretched arm of his father, simulating a wing. He can hear his father’s heartbeat, thundering behind fleshy walls where the plane engine should be.
Again he wakes from his sleepwalking, now realizing that his bomb has gone off while he dozed. Dark corpses sit rigidly in their seats. He recognizes a cluster of burnt forms as the captain and crew, another as a family grouping complete with two toddlers. He recognizes the dark form of the stewardess from her smile. Roughly three-fourths of the plane has been blown away. But still, he thinks, still he has succeeded. He holds out his transparent gray arms at shoulder height. He makes droning noises in his throat, staring forward, guiding his passengers into the new freedom of the deep blue skies.
OUT LATE IN THE PARK
Once again, Clarence Senior has let the ball get away from him. The other men gasp when it rolls out of the shadowed circle formed by our beloved trees and into the brilliant sunlight baking the sand paths where the beautiful young people stroll. Jacob, one of our oldest, scowls bitterly. I raise an eyebrow in warning—or I believe I do. Facial control has been more difficult these past few months. Often I’m not sure whether my thin line of mouth is smiling or twisted into some shape less agreeable.
As has been typical for him, Jacob ignores me. “He’ll spoil it!” he growls through a swallow of phlegm. “He’ll spoil it for all of us!”
I raise my hand to stop him, but too late because I can feel the stirrings of the angled things that dwell at the edges of the sun-lit path. It’s terrible, worrying that every spat of anger might cause your heart to seize, and then the whole of your body comes tumbling down and there’s no more light in you than a dark stone at the bottom of a pond. Finally Jacob recognizes my warning and stops, takes a deep, savored breath as if it’s to be his last one. Which it might be, of course. In this park of the world, suddenness is the business of the day.
Clarence Senior, as usual, appears to be somewhat lacking in orientation. He trots playfully after the volleyball. I envy the looseness of his stride, something my own arthritis denies me. But I am pleased that one of our own can still play with such reckless abandon.
“He’ll get hit by a car!” George cries nonsensically. “We’ll all get hit by cars!” This has been George’s signature warning since he first started coming to the park. I assume his family has some tragic history related to the automobile, but of course I do not inquire. Men of our age trust each other well enough not to ask. We all assume tragedy and imagine disaster. Perhaps this makes us less sympathetic—certainly it makes us impatient. And burying the curiosity of our youth has become a measure of the respect we have for one another.
Although, if truth be told, I would say we respect nothing more than the dark, and the half-remembered things that move there.
Now the others are yelling. Of course I have seen this phenomenon before—all of us are quick to panic. It is something that happens to the nerves, I suppose, as the nervous system constantly monitors to determine if the flesh is still alive. Men my age understand the process. There is nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night to discover that a favorite extremity has died.
“Get him back!” Joseph sobs. He is a weepy thing, old Joseph, more so than the rest of us, even though as a group we are a weepy bunch indeed. “Get him back!” Again, with that disturbing flail of movement-limited arms. Some sort of stroke, I believe. Strokes are as common among our kind as flies on newly harvested meat.
“Just stop it! Stop it!” I complain, unable to bear their old guy whining a second longer. “Can’t you just let him play? We have plenty of extra balls—grab a couple and toss them around! Nothing’s going to happen to him, or any one of us because of him!”
I do not believe any of this, of course, but it gets their minds off Clarence. He retrieves the ball from a beautiful young woman who has been watching us from the edge of one of those sunny paths. I stare at her for some time, even after Clarence Senior has jogged happily back into our little circle. The other men quickly close around him in case he’s been followed.
The young woman is unusual in that she has noticed us. We are not used to being noticed at all, especially by beautiful young women. I wonder if those of us with daughters—Jacob, Samuel, perhaps one or two others—feel the same confused anticipation when a young woman looks at them. I wonder if they suffer from the same temporal dislocation of desire the rest of us experience.