Also there was hardly any resistance in his pedals. They were turning the same chain together, and she was pumping away furiously, more than enough for both of them. And they were shuddering through little sideslips every time she pounded a point home. Kevin swallowed, determined not to interrupt her thoughts with mundane worries.
“I mean you can’t help but wonder!” she was saying, waving a hand. “I know Alfredo did. I’m not all that interesting, I suppose—”
“What?”
“Well, there’s only a few things I really care about. And Alfredo is interested in everything.” Bang. Right above the flaps. “There’s so many things he’s into that you can’t even believe it.” Bang! “And he was always so God-damned busy!” BANG BANG BANG!
“You have to be, to be a hundred,” Kevin said, watching her hands and cringing. With the slips they were losing altitude, he noted. Even pumping as hard as she was.
“Yeah, sure you do. And he could be two hundreds! He could be a millionaire if they still had them, he really could! He’s got just what it takes.”
“Must take a lot of time, huh?”
“It takes your whole life!” WHAM.
Kevin pedaled hard, but he was just spinning around, as if his pedals weren’t connected to a chain at all.
“At least that’s what it felt like. And there we were not going anywhere, high school sweethearts at thirty-two. I don’t care that much about marriage myself, but my parents and grandparents are Catholic, and so are Alfredo’s, and you know how that is. Besides I was getting ready to have a family, you know every day I’m helping out with the kids in our house, and I thought why shouldn’t one of these be ours?” Bang! “But Alfredo was not into it, oh no. I don’t have time! he’d say. I’m not ready yet! And by the time he’s ready, it’ll be too late for me!” BANG! BANG! BANG!
“Uck,” Kevin said, looking down at the treetops apprehensively. “It, uh, it wouldn’t take that much time, would it? Not in your house.”
“You’d be surprised. A lot of people are there to help, but still, you always end up with them. And Alfredo… well, we talked about it for years. But nothing ever changed, damn it! So I got pretty bitchy, I guess, and Alfredo spent more and more time away, you know….” She began to blink rapidly, voice wobbling.
“Feedback loop,” Kevin said, trying to stick to analysis. A relationship had feedback loops, like any other ecology—that’s what Hank used to say. A movement in one direction or another could quickly spiral out of control. Kind of like a tailspin, now that Kevin thought about it. Harder than hell to re-stabilize after you fell into one of those. In fact people were killed all the time in crashes caused by them. Uncontrolled feedback loop. He tried to remember the few flying lessons he had taken. Mostly he was a grinder when he went flying….
But it could work both ways, he thought as some resistance returned to his pedals. Upward spiral, a great flourishing of the spirit, everything feeding into it—
“A very bad feedback loop,” Ramona said.
They pedaled on. Kevin pumped hard, kept his eye on the controls, on Ramona’s vehement right fist. He found her story rather amazing in some respects. He didn’t understand Alfredo. Imagine the chance to make love with this beautiful animal pumping away beside him, to watch her get fat with a child that was the combination of him and her…. He breathed erratically at the thought, suddenly aware of his own body, of his balls between his legs—
He banished the thought, looked down at Tustin. Close. “So,” he said, thinking to go right at it. “You broke up.”
“Yeah. I don’t know, I was getting really angry, but I probably would have stuck it out. I never really thought about anything else. But Alfredo, he got mad at me too, and… and—”
She started to cry.
“Ah, Ramona,” Kevin said. Wrong tack to take, there. The direct approach not always the best way. He pedaled hard, suddenly doing the work for both of them. Enormous resistance, she didn’t seem to be pedaling at all now. Not a good moment to bother her, though. He gritted his teeth and began to pedal like a fiend. Their flyer dropped anyway, sideslipping a bit. Incredible resistance in the pedals. They were dropping toward the hills behind Tustin. Directly at them, in fact. Ramona’s eyes were squeezed shut; she was too upset to notice anything. Kevin found his concern distracted. Fatal accidents in these things were not all that infrequent.
“I’m sorry,” he panted, pumping violently. “But… uh…” He took a hand from the frame to pat her shoulder, briefly. “Maybe… um…”
“It’s okay,” she said, hands over her face, rubbing hard. “Sometimes I can’t help it.”
“Uh huh.”
She looked up. “Shit, we’re about to run into Redhill!”
“Um, yeah.”
“Why didn’t you say something!”
“Well…”
“Oh Kevin!”
She laughed, sniffed, reached over to peck his cheek. Then she started to pedal again, and turned them towards home.
Kevin’s heart filled—with relief, certainly—but also with affection for her. It was a shame she had been hurt like that. Although he had no desire to see her and Alfredo achieve a reconciliation. None at all. He said, very cautiously, “Maybe it’s better it happened now, if it was going to.”
She nodded briefly.
They circled back in toward El Modena’s little gliderport. A Dragonfly ahead of them dropped onto it, heavy as a bee in cold weather. Skillfully Ramona guided them in. The afternoon sun lit the treetops. Their shadow preceded them toward the grassy runway. They dropped to an elevation where the whole plain seemed nothing but treetops—all the streets and freeways obscured, most of the buildings screened. “I fly at this altitude a lot,” Ramona said, “just to make it look like this.”
“Good idea.” Her small smile, the trees everywhere—Kevin felt like the breeze was cutting right through his chest. To think that Ramona Sanchez was a free woman! And sitting here beside him.
He couldn’t look at her. She brought them down to the runway in a graceful swoop, and they pedaled hard as they landed, as gently as sitting on a couch. Quick roll to a stop. They unstrapped, stood unsteadily, flexed tired legs, walked the plane off the strip toward its berth.
“Whew,” she said. “Estoy cansada.”
Kevin nodded. “Great flight, Ramona.”
“Yeah?” And as they stored the plane in the gloomy hangar, she hugged him briefly and said, “You’re a good friend, Kevin.”
Which might have been a warning, but Kevin wasn’t listening. He still felt the touch. “I want to be,” he said, feeling his voice quiver. He didn’t think it could be heard. “I want to be.”
El Modena’s town council had its chambers in the area’s oldest building, the church on Chapman Avenue. Over the years this structure had reflected the town’s fortunes like a totem. It had been built by Quakers in 1886, soon after they settled the area and cultivated it in raisin grapes. One Friend donated a big bell, which they put in a tower at the church’s front end; but the bell’s weight was too much for the framing, and in the first strong Santa Ana wind the whole building fell down, boom! In similar fashion grape blight destroyed the economy, so that the new town was virtually abandoned. So much for El Modena One. But they changed crops, and then rebuilt the church, in the first of a long sequence of resurrections; through the barrio and its hidden poverty (church closed), through suburbia and its erasure of history (church a restaurant)—through to the re-emergence of El Modena as a town with a destiny of its own, when the council bought the restaurant and converted it into a cramped and weird-looking city hall, suitable for renting on any party occasion. Thus it finally became the center of the community that its Quaker builders had hoped it would be nearly two centuries before.