After the Plague

Friendly Skies

When the engine under the right wing began to unravel a thin skein of greasy, dark smoke, Ellen peered out the abraded Plexiglas window and saw the tufted clouds rising up and away from her and knew she was going to die. There was a thump from somewhere in the depths of the fuselage, the plane lurched like a balsawood toy struck by a rock, and the man in the seat in front of her lifted his head from the tray table and cried, “Mama!” in a thin, disconsolate wail. On went the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign. The murmur of the cabin became a roar. Every muscle in her body seized.

She thought distractedly of cradling her head — isn’t that what you were supposed to do, cradle your head? — and then there was a burst of static, and the captain’s voice was chewing calmly through the loudspeakers: “A little glitch there with engine number three, I’m afraid, folks. Nothing to worry about.” The plane was obliterating the clouds with a supersonic howl, and every inanimate fold of metal and crease of plastic had come angrily to life, sloughed shoes, pieces of fruit, pretzels, paperback books, and handbags skittering by underfoot. Ellen stole a glance out the window: the smoke was dense now, as black and rich as the roiling billows rising from a ship torpedoed at sea, and stiff raking fingers of yellow flame had begun to strangle the massive cylinder of the engine. The man in the seat next to hers — late twenties, with a brass stud centered half an inch beneath his lower lip, and hair the exact color and texture of meringue — turned a slack face to her. “What is that? Smoke?”

She was so frightened that she could only nod, her head filled with the sucking dull hiss of the air jets and the static of the speakers. The man leaned across her and squinted through the gray aperture of the window to the wing beyond. “Fuck, that’s all we need. There’s no way I’m going to make my connection now.”

She didn’t understand. Connection? Didn’t he realize they were all going to die?

She braced herself and murmured a prayer. Voices rose in alarm. Her eyes felt as if they were going to implode in their sockets. But then the flames flickered and dimmed, and she felt the plane lifted up as if in the palm of some celestial hand, and for all the panic, the dimly remembered prayers, the cries and shouts, and the sudden, potent reek of urine, the crisis was over almost as soon as it had begun. “I hate to do this to you, folks,” the captain drawled, “but it looks like we’re going to have to turn around and take her back into LAX.”

And now there was a collective groan. The man with the meringue hair let out a sharp, stinging curse and slammed the back of the seat in front of him with his fist. Not LAX. Not that. They’d already been delayed on the ground for two and a half hours because of mechanical problems, and then they’d sat on the runway for another forty minutes because they’d lost their slot for takeoff — or at least that’s what the pilot had claimed. Everyone had got free drinks and peanuts, but nobody wanted peanuts, and the drinks tasted like nothing, like kerosene. Ellen had asked for a Scotch-and-soda — she was trying to pace herself, after sitting interminably at the airport bar nursing a beer that had gone stale and warm — but the man beside her and the woman in the aisle seat had both ordered doubles and flung them down wordlessly. “Shit!” the man cursed now, and slammed his fist into the seat again, pounding it as if it were a punching bag, until the man in front of him lifted a great, swollen dirigible of a head over the seat back and growled, “Give it a rest, asshole. Can’t you see we got an emergency here?”

For a moment, she thought the man beside her was going to get up out of his seat and start something — he was certainly drunk enough — but mercifully the confrontation ended there. The plane rocked with the weight of the landing gear dropping into place, the big-headed man swivelled around and settled massively in his seat, and beyond the windows Los Angeles began to scroll back into view, a dull brown grid sunk at the bottom of a muddy sea of air. “Did you hear that?” the man beside Ellen demanded of her. “Did you hear what he called me?”

Ellen sat gazing straight ahead, rigid as a catatonic. She could feel him staring at the side of her face. She could smell him. And everyone else too. She narrowed her shoulders and emptied her lungs of air, as if she could collapse into herself, dwindle down to nothing, and disappear.

The man shifted heavily in his seat, muttering to himself now. “Courtesy,” he spat, “common courtesy,” over and over, as if it were the only phrase he knew. Ellen leaned her head back and shut her eyes.

There was the usual wait on the ground, the endless taxiing, the crush of the carry-on luggage, and the densely packed, boviform line creeping up the aisles and into the steel tube that fed the passenger terminal. Ellen inched along, her head down, shoulders slumped, her over-the-shoulder bag like a cannonball in a sling, and followed the crowd out into the seething arena of the terminal. She’d been up since five, climbing aboard the airport bus in the dark and sitting stiffly through the lurching hour-and-a-half trip in bumper-to-bumper traffic; she’d choked down a dry six-dollar bagel and three-fifty cup of espresso at one of the airport kiosks, and then there was the long wait for the delayed flight, the pawed-over newspapers, the mobbed rest room, and the stale beer. Now she was back where she’d started, and a flight agent was rewriting her ticket and shoving her in the direction of a distant gate, where she would hook up with the next flight out to Kennedy, where her mother would be waiting for her. Was it a direct flight? No, the agent was afraid not. She’d have a two-hour layover in Chicago, and she’d have to switch planes. On top of that, there was weather, a fierce winter storm raking the Midwest and creeping toward New York at a slow, sure pace that was almost certain to coincide with her arrival.

She moved through the corridors like an automaton, counting off the gates as she passed them. The terminal was undergoing renovation — perpetually, it seemed — and up ahead plywood walls narrowed the corridors to cattle chutes. There was raw concrete underfoot here, and everything had a film of dust on it. She looked anxiously to the bottleneck ahead — she had only ten minutes to make the flight — and she was just shifting the bag from her left shoulder to her right when she was jostled from behind. Or not simply jostled — if it hadn’t been for the woman in front of her, she would have lost her footing on the uneven surface and gone down in a heap. She glanced up to see the man who’d been sitting beside her on the aborted flight hurrying past — what should she call him? Stud Lip? Meringue Head? — even as she braced herself against the woman and murmured, “Excuse me, I’m so sorry.” The man never gave her so much as a glance, let alone a word of apology. On he went, a pair of shoulders in some sort of athletic jacket, the bulb of his head in the grip of his hair, a bag too big for the overhead compartment swinging like a weapon at his side.

She saw him again at the gate — at the front of the line, a head taller than anyone else — and what was he doing? There were at least twenty people ahead of her, and the flight was scheduled to depart in three minutes. He was just standing there, immovable, waving his ticket in the attendant’s face and gesticulating angrily at his bag. Ellen wasn’t a violent person — she was thirty-two years old, immured in the oubliette of a perpetual diet, with limp blond hair, a plain face, and two milky blue eyes that oozed sympathy and regret — but if she could have thrown a switch that would put an instant, sizzling end to Meringue Head’s existence, she wouldn’t have hesitated. “What do you mean, I have to check it?” he demanded, in a voice that was like the thumping of a mallet.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Lercher,” the man behind the desk was saying, “But federal regulations require—”

“Ler share, you idiot, Ler share—didn’t you ever take French? And fuck the regulations. I’ve already been held up for two and a half hours and damn near killed when the goddamn engine caught fire, and you’re trying to tell me I can’t take my bag on the airplane, for Christ’s sake?”

The other passengers hung their heads, consulted their watches, worked their jaws frantically over thin bands of flavorless gum, the people-movers moved people, the loudspeakers crackled, and the same inane voices repeated endlessly the same inane announcements in English and in Spanish. Ellen felt faint. Or no, she felt nauseated. It was as if there were something crawling up her throat and trying to get out, and all she could think of was the tarantula creeping through the clear plastic tubes of the terrarium in the classroom she’d left behind for good.

Waldo, the kids had called it, after the Where’s Waldo? puzzles that had swept the fifth graders into a kind of frenzy for a month or two until something else — some computer game she couldn’t remember the name of — had superseded them. She’d never liked the big, lazy spider, the slow, stalwart creep of its legs and abdomen as it patrolled its realm, seeking out the crickets it fed on, the alien look of it, like a severed hand moving all on its own. It’s harmless, the assistant principal had assured her, but when Tommy Ayala sneaked a big dun trap-door spider into school and dropped it into the terrarium, Waldo had reacted with a swift and deadly ferocity. A lesson had come of that — about animal behavior and territoriality, and nearly every child had a story of cannibalistic guppies or killer hamsters to share — but it wasn’t a happy lesson. Lucy Fadel brought up road rage, and Jasmyn Dickers knew a teenager who was stabbed in the neck because he had to live in a converted garage with twelve other people, and somebody else had been bitten by a pit bull, and on and on and on. Fifth graders. Ten years of fifth graders.

“Chicago passengers only,” a flight attendant was saying, and the line melted away as Ellen found herself in yet another steel tube, her heart racing still over the image of that flaming engine and the fatal certainty that had gripped her like the death of everything. Was it an omen? Was she crazy to get on this flight? And what of the prayer she’d murmured — where had that come from? Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Prayers were for children, and for the old and hopeless, and she’d grown up to discover that they were addressed not to some wise and recumbent God on high but to the cold gaps between the stars. Pray for us, now and at the hour of our—

Up ahead, she saw the open door of the plane, rivets, the thin steel sheet of its skin, flight attendants in their blue uniforms and arrested smiles, and then she was shuffling down the awkward aisle like a mismatched bride—“The overhead bins are for secondary storage only…. A very full flight … Your cooperation, please”—and she was murmuring another sort of prayer now, a more common and profane one: Christ, don’t let me sit next to that idiot again.

She glanced down at her boarding pass—18B — and counted off the rows, so tired, suddenly, that she felt as if she had been drained of blood. (“Anemic,” the doctor had said, clucking her tongue, that was the problem, that and depression.) The line had come to a halt, Ellen’s fellow passengers slumped under the weight of their bags like penitents, and all she could see down the length of the aisle was their shoulders, their collars, and the hair that sprouted from their heads in all its multiethnic variety. The lucky ones — the ones already settled in their seats — gazed up at her with irritation, as if she were responsible for the delays, as if she had personally spun out the weather system over the Midwest, put the lies in the pilots’ mouths, and flouted the regulations for carry-ons. “All right, all right, give me a minute, will you?” a voice raged out, and through a gap in the line she saw him, six or seven rows down, blocking the aisle as he fought to stuff his bag into the overhead compartment. Force, that was all he could think to use, because he was spoiled, bullying, petulant, like an overgrown fifth grader. She hated him. Everyone on the plane hated him.

And then the flight attendant was there, assuring him that she would find a place for his bag up front, even as an amplified voice hectored them to take their seats and the engines rumbled to life. Ellen caught a glimpse of his face, blunt and oblivious, as he swung ponderously into his seat, and then the line shuffled forward and she saw that her prayer had been answered — she was three rows ahead of him. She’d been assigned a middle seat, of course, as had most of the passengers bumped from the previous flight, but at least it wasn’t a middle seat beside him. She waited as the woman in the aisle seat (mid-fifties, with a saddlebag face and a processed pouf of copper hair) unfastened her seat belt and laboriously rose to make way for her. There was no one in the window seat — not yet, at least — and even as she settled in, elbow to elbow with the saddlebag woman, Ellen was already coveting it.

Could she be so lucky? No, no, she couldn’t, and here was another layer of superstition rising up out of the murk of her subconscious, as if luck had anything to do with her or what she’d been through already today or in the past week or month or year — or, for that matter, through the whole course of her vacant and constricted life. A name came to her lips then, a name she’d been trying, with the help of the prescription the doctor had given her, to suppress. She held it there for a moment, enlarged by her grief until she felt like the heroine of some weepy movie, a raped nun, an airman’s widow, sloe-eyed and wilting under the steady gaze of the camera. She shouldn’t have had the beer, she told herself. Or the Scotch, either. Not with the pills.

The plane quieted. The aisles cleared. She fought down her exhaustion and kept her eyes fixed on the far end of the aisle, where the last passenger — a boy in a reversed baseball cap — was fumbling into his seat. Surreptitiously, with her feet only, she shifted her bag from the space under her seat to the space beneath the window seat, and then, after a moment, she unfastened her seat belt and slipped into the unoccupied seat. She stretched her legs, adjusted her pillow and blanket, watched the flight attendants work their way up the aisle, easing shut the overhead bins. She was thinking that she should have called her mother with the new flight information — she’d call her from Chicago, that’s what she’d do — when there was movement at the front of the plane and one final passenger came through the door, even as the attendants stood by to screw it shut. Stooping to avoid the TV monitors, he came slowly down the aisle, sweeping his eyes right and left to check the row numbers, an overcoat over one arm, a soft computer bag slung over the opposite shoulder. He was dressed in a sport coat and a T-shirt, his hair cut close, after the fashion of the day, and his face seemed composed despite what must have been a mad dash through the airport. But what mattered most about him was that he seemed to be coming straight to her, to 18A, the seat she’d appropriated. And what went through her mind? A curse, that was all. Just a curse.

Sure enough, he paused at Row 18, glanced at the saddlebag woman, and then at Ellen, and said, “Excuse me, I believe I’m in here?”

Ellen reddened. “I thought …”

“No, no,” he said, holding Ellen’s eyes even as the saddlebag woman rolled up and out of her seat like a rock dislodged from a crevice, “stay there. It’s okay. Really.”

The pilot said something then, a garble of the usual words, the fuselage shuddered, and the plane backed away from the gate with a sudden jolt. Ellen put her head back and closed her eyes.

She woke when the drinks cart came around. There was a sour taste in her mouth, her head was throbbing, and the armrest gouged at her ribs as if it had come alive. She’d been dreaming about Roy, the man who had dismembered her life like a boy pulling the legs off an insect, Roy and that elaborate, humiliating scene in the teachers’ lounge, her mother there somehow to witness it, and then she and Roy were in bed, the stiff insistence of his erection (which turned out to be the armrest), and his hand creeping across her rib cage until it was Waldo, Waldo the tarantula, closing in on her breast. “Something to drink?” the broad-faced flight attendant was asking, and both Ellen’s seatmates seemed to be hanging on her answer. “Scotch-and-soda,” she said, without giving it a second thought.

The man beside her, the new man, the one who had offered up his seat to her, was working on his laptop, the gentle blue glow of the screen softly illuminating his lips and eyes. He looked up at the flight attendant, his fingers still poised over the keys, and murmured, “May I have a chardonnay, please?” Then it was the saddlebag woman’s turn. “Sprite,” she said, the dull thump of her voice swallowed up in the drone of the engines.

The man flattened himself against the seat back as the flight attendant leaned in to pass Ellen her drink, then he typed something hurriedly, shut down the computer, and slipped it into his lap, beneath the tray table. He took the truncated bottle, the glass, napkin and peanuts from the attendant, arranged them neatly before him, and turned to Ellen with a smile. “I never know where to put my elbows on these things,” he said, shrinking away from the armrest they shared. “It’s kind of like being in a coffin — or one of those medieval torture devices, you know what I mean?”

Ellen took a sip of her drink and felt the hot smoke of the liquor in the back of her throat. He was good-looking, handsome — more than handsome. At that moment, the engines thrumming, the flat, dull earth fanning out beneath the plane, he was shining and beautiful, as radiant as an archangel come flapping through the window to roost beside her. Not that it would matter to her. Roy was handsome too, but she was done with handsome, done with fifth graders, done with the whole failed experiment of living on her own in the big, smoggy, palm-shrouded city. Turn the page, new chapter. “Or maybe a barrel,” she heard herself say, “going over Niagara Falls.”

“Yeah,” he said, laughing through his nose. “Only in the barrel you don’t get your own personal flotation device.”

Ellen didn’t know what to say to that. She took another pull at her drink for lack of anything better to do. She was feeling it, no doubt about it, but what difference would it make if she were drunk or sober as she wandered the labyrinthine corridors of O’Hare, endlessly delayed by snow, mechanical failure, the hordes of everybody going everywhere? Three sheets to the wind, right — isn’t that what they said? And what, exactly, did that mean? Some old sailing expression, she supposed, something from the days of the clipper ships, when you vomited yourself from one place to another.

Their meals had come. The broad-faced flight attendant was again leaning in confidentially, this time with the eternal question—“Chicken or pasta?”—on her lips. Ellen wasn’t hungry — food was the last thing she wanted — but on an impulse she turned to her neighbor. “I’m not really very hungry,” she said, her face too close to his, their elbows touching, his left knee rising up out of the floor like a stanchion, “but if I get a meal, would you want it — or some of it? As an extra, I mean?”

He gave her a curious look, then said, “Sure, why not?” The flight attendant was waiting, the sealed-in smile beginning to crack at the corners with the first fidgeting of impatience. “Chicken for me,” the man said, “and pasta for the lady.” And then, to Ellen, as he shifted the tray from one hand to the other: “You sure, now? I know it’s not exactly three-star cuisine, but you’ve got to eat, and the whole reason they feed you is to make the time pass so you don’t realize how cramped and miserable you are.”

The smell of the food — salt, sugar, and animal fat made palpable — rose to her nostrils, and she felt nauseated again. Was it the pills? The alcohol? Or was it Roy — Roy, and life itself? She thought about that, and the instant she did, there he was — Roy — clawing his way back into her mind. She could see him now, his shoulders squared in his black polyester suit with the little red flecks in it — the suit she’d helped him pick out, as if he had any taste or style he could call his own — his eyes swollen out of their sockets, his lips reduced to two thin, ungenerous flaps of skin grafted to his mouth. Shit-for-brains. That’s what he’d called her, right there in the teachers’ lounge with everybody watching — Lynn Bendall and Lauren McGimpsey and that little teacher’s aide, what was her name? He was shouting, and she was shouting back, no holds barred, not anymore. So what if I am sleeping with her? What’s it to you? You think you own me? Do you? Huh, shit-for-brains? Huh? Lauren’s face was dead, but Ellen saw Lynn exchange a smirk with the little teacher’s aide, and that smirk said it all, because Lynn, it seemed, knew more about who he was sleeping with than Ellen did herself.

The man beside her — her neighbor — was eating now. He was hungry, and that was good. She felt saintly, watching him eat and listening to him chatter on about his work — he was some sort of writer or journalist, on his way to Philadelphia for the holidays. She’d renounced the pasta and given it to him, and he was grateful — he hadn’t eaten all day, and he was a growing boy, he said, with a smile, though he must have been in his early thirties. And unmarried, judging from his naked fingers. When the drinks cart came by, Ellen ordered another Scotch.

They were talking about movies, maybe the only subject people had in common these days, when Ellen glanced up to see Lercher, his face twisted in a drunken scowl, looming over them as he made his unsteady way to the forward lavatories. She and her companion — his name was Michael, just Michael, that was all he offered — had struck a real chord when it came to the current cinema (no movies with explosions, no alien life-forms, no geriatric lovers, no sappy kids), and she’d begun to feel something working inside her. She was interested, genuinely interested in something, for maybe the first time in months. Michael. She held the name on her tongue like the thinnest wafer, repeating it silently, over and over. And then it came to her: he was the anti-Roy, that’s who he was, so polite and unassuming, a soul mate, somebody who could care, really care — she was sure of it.

“You see that man?” she asked, lowering her voice. “The one with the hair? He was sitting right next to me on the last flight, the one where, well, I was telling you, I was looking out the window and the engine caught fire? And I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

The wind shrieked along the length of the fuselage, the lights dimmed and went up again, Michael poured himself a second glass of wine and made sympathetic noises. “You actually saw this? Flames? Or was it like sparks or something?”

She went cold with the memory of it. “Flames,” she said, pursing her lips and nodding her head. “I was so scared I started praying.” She glanced out the window, as if to reassure herself. “You’re not religious, are you?” she said, turning back to him.

“No,” he said, and he raised his hand to cut the throat of the subject before it could take hold of him. “I’m an atheist. I mean, we had no set religion in our house, that’s just the way my parents were.”

“Me too,” she said, remembering religious instruction, the icy dip of the holy water, her mother in a black veil, and the priest intoning the sleepy immemorial phrases of her girlhood, “but we went to church when I was little.”

He didn’t ask what church, and a silence fell between them as the plane rocked gently and the big man oscillated back from the lavatory. Ellen closed her eyes again, for just a moment, the swaying of the cabin and the pills and the Scotch pulling her down toward some inky dark place that was like the mouth of an abandoned well, like a cave deep in the earth….

She was startled awake by a sudden explosion of voices behind her. “The fuck I will!” snarled a man’s voice, and even through the fog of her waking she recognized it.

“But, sir, I’ve already told you, the plane is full. You can see for yourself.”

“Then put me up front — and don’t try to tell me that’s full, because I was up there to use the rest room, and there’s all sorts of space up there. This is bullshit. I’m not going to sit here squeezed in like a rat. I paid full fare, and I’m not going to take this shit anymore, you hear me?”

Heads had begun to turn. Ellen glanced at Michael, but he was absorbed with his computer, some message she couldn’t read, some language she didn’t know; for a moment she stared at the ranks of dark symbols floating across the dull firmament of the screen, then she craned her neck to see over the seat back. Lercher was standing in the aisle, his shoulders hunched, his head cocked forward against the low ceiling. Two flight attendants, the broad-faced woman and another, slighter woman with her hair in a neat French braid, stood facing him.

“There’s nothing we can do, sir,” the slight woman said, an edge of hostility in her voice. “I’ve already told you, you don’t qualify for an upgrade. Now, I’m going to have to ask you to take your seat.”

“This is bullshit,” he reiterated. “Two and a half fucking hours on the ground, and then we get sent back to LAX, and now I’m stuck in this cattle car, and you won’t even serve me a fucking drink? Huh? What do you call this?” He flailed his arms, appealing to the people seated around him; to a one, they looked away. “Well, I call it bullshit!” he roared.

The women held their ground. “Sit down, sir. Now. Or we’ll have to call the captain.”

The big man’s face changed. The crease between his eyes deepened; his lips drew back as if he were about to spit down the front of the first woman’s crisp blue jacket. “All right,” he said ominously, “if that’s how you want to play it,” and he was already swinging around and staggering toward the rear of the plane, the flight attendants trailing along helplessly in his wake. Ellen shifted in her seat so she could follow their progress, her hips straining against the seat belt, her right hand inadvertently braced against Michael’s forearm. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she murmured, even as Lercher disappeared into the galley at the rear and she turned her face to Michael’s. He looked startled, his eyes so blue and electric they reminded her of the fish in the classroom aquarium — the neon tetras, with their bright lateral stripes. “Did you see that? I mean, did you hear him — the man, the one I was telling you about?”

He hesitated a moment, just staring into her eyes. “No,” he said finally, “I didn’t notice. I was — I guess I was so absorbed in my work I didn’t know where I was.”

Ellen’s face darkened. “He’s the worst kind of trash,” she said. “Just mean, that’s all, like the bullies on the playground.”

And now there was the sound of a commotion from the rear of the plane, and Ellen turned to see Lercher emerge from the galley on the far side of the plane, the flight attendants cowering behind him. In each hand he wielded a gleaming stainless-steel coffeepot, and he was moving rapidly up the aisle, his eyes gone hard with hate. “Out of my way!” he screamed, elbowing a tottering old lady aside. “Anybody fucks with me gets scalded, you hear me?”

People awoke with a snort. A hundred heads ducked down protectively, and on every face was an expression that said not now, not here, not me. No one said a word. And then, suddenly, a male flight attendant came hurtling down the aisle from the first-class section and attempted to tackle the big man, gripping him around the waist, and Ellen heard a woman cry out as hot coffee streamed down the front of her blouse. Lercher held his ground, bludgeoning the flight attendant to the floor with the butt of the wildly splashing pot he clutched in his right fist, and then the two female attendants were on him, tearing at his arms, and a male passenger, heavyset and balding, sprang savagely up out of his seat to enter the fray.

For a moment, they achieved a sort of equilibrium, surging forward and falling back again, but Lercher was too much for them. He stunned the heavyset man with a furious, slashing blow, then flung off the flight attendants as if they were nothing. The scalded woman screamed again, and Ellen felt as if a knife were twisting inside her. She couldn’t breathe. Her arms went limp. Lercher was dancing in the aisle, shouting obscenities, moving backward now, toward the galley, and God only knew what other weapons he might find back there.

Where was the captain? Where were the people in charge? The cabin was in an uproar, babies screaming, voices crying out, movement everywhere — and Lercher was in the galley, dismantling the plane, and no one could do anything about it. There was the crash of a cart being overturned, a volley of shouts, and suddenly he appeared at the far end of Ellen’s aisle, his face contorted until it was no human face at all. “Die!” he screamed. “Die, you motherfuckers!” The rear exit door was just opposite him, and he paused in his fury to kick at it with a big booted foot, and then he was hammering at the Plexiglas window with one of the coffeepots as if he could burst through it and sail on out into the troposphere like some sort of human missile.

“You’re all going to die!” he screamed, pounding, pounding. “You’ll be sucked out into space, all of you!” Ellen thought she could hear the window cracking — wasn’t anybody going to do anything? — and then he dropped both coffeepots and made a rush up the aisle for the first-class section.

Before she could react, Michael rose in a half-crouch, swung his laptop out across the saddlebag lady’s tray table, and caught Lercher in the crotch with the sharp, flying corner of it. She saw his face then, Lercher’s, twisted and swollen like a sore, and it came right at Michael, who could barely maneuver in his eighteen inches of allotted space. In a single motion, the big man snatched the laptop from Michael’s hand and brought it whistling down across his skull, and Ellen felt him go limp beside her. At that point, she didn’t know what she was doing. All she knew was that she’d had enough, enough of Roy and this big, drunken, testosterone-addled bully and the miserable, crimped life that awaited her at her mother’s, and she came up out of her seat as if she’d been launched — and in her hand, clamped there like a flaming sword, was a thin steel fork that she must have plucked from the cluttered dinner tray. She went for his face, for his head, his throat, enveloping him with her body, the drug singing in her heart and the Scotch flowing like ichor in her veins.

They made an emergency stop in Denver, and they sat on the ground in a swirling light snow as the authorities boarded the plane to take charge of Lercher. He’d been overpowered finally and bound to his seat with cloth napkins from the first-class dining service, a last napkin crammed into his mouth as a gag. The captain had come on the loudspeaker with a mouthful of apologies, and then, to a feeble cheer from the cabin, pledged free headphones and drinks on the house for the rest of the flight. Ellen sat, dazed, over yet another Scotch, the seat beside her vacant. Even before the men in uniforms boarded the plane to handcuff and shackle Lercher, the paramedics had rushed down the aisle to evacuate poor Michael to the nearest hospital, and she would never forget the way his eyes had rolled back in his head as they laid him out on the stretcher. And Lercher, big and bruised, his head drunkenly bowed and the dried blood painted across his cheek where the fork had gone in and gone in again, as if she’d been carving a roast with a dull knife, Lercher led away like Billy Tindall or Lucas Lopez in the grip of the principal on a bad day at La Cumbre Elementary.

She sipped her drink, her face gone numb, eyes focused on nothing, as the whole plane murmured in awe. People stole glances at her, the saddlebag woman offered up her personal copy of the January Cosmopolitan, the captain himself came back to pay homage. And the flight attendants — they were so relieved they were practically genuflecting to her. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. There would be forms to fill out, a delay in Chicago, an uneventful flight into New York, eight hours behind schedule. Her mother would be there, with a face full of pity and resignation, and she’d be too delicate to mention Roy, or teaching, or any of the bleak details of the move itself, the waste of a new microwave, and all that furniture tossed in a Dumpster. She would smile, and Ellen would try to smile back. “Is that it?” her mother would say, eyeing the bag slung over her shoulder. “You must have some baggage?” And then, as they were heading down the carpeted corridor, two women caught in the crush of humanity, with the snow spitting outside and the holidays coming on, her mother would take her by the arm, smile up at her, and just to say something, anything, would ask, “Did you have a nice flight?”