Flights

BIDDY. Completing the Checklist

I saw things in my head. I knew they weren’t real but that didn’t make them any less important. I tried to talk to people about them and never got anywhere. It was like they were keeping something from me. If they’re not, am I the only one like this?

They were dreams I could go to whenever I wanted: except I started them, I made them up. They were mine. But even there I couldn’t always keep control.

Which could make it awful, like I was fighting myself, like what I thought was as hard to control as the way I threw a pass. When my punt was blocked or I threw the ball away on a double play, I got twice as frustrated: whose fault was that? It was like I knew myself and what I couldn’t do so well that I couldn’t even dream it right. I only wanted to do it right; to hold up my end, be part of a team, do a good job.

I didn’t think I was crazy. But my father used to say if I wasn’t, then I’d done a few things that needed explaining.

For a while I needed to see things in my head. But I learned that it didn’t do any good unless I took them out of my head and made them real. And even that, like the BB gun on the roof, or the sailboat, might not be enough. Because I finally figured out that when you’re through with all of that, you’re still in the same place you always were.

A fish jumped nearby, a ripple breaking the water.

He slipped across the surface without hesitation, the cold swirling over him. With his mask a tight seal on his face he submerged, pulling away from the land. The water warmed as he grew used to it and cleared as he dived deeper. He pulled with wide, sweeping strokes and the bottom drifted closer, firm and inviting. It was rippled and sculpted by eddies and currents, and he flippered in close, his mouth holding air pressure steady in the flooded snorkel and his chin inches from the sand. Shells swept by, and hermit crabs, jerking sideways; the occasional gray ghost of a fish disappeared like a magician’s illusion. He followed the slope easily, nosing swiftly along its contours with the confidence of an eel. At a horseshoe crab he stopped, kicking fluidly to stay down. He nudged it, hand on the smooth, hard carapace, and in its haste to escape it skimmed momentarily over the sand like a ray or a flatfish. The pressure in his lungs grew insistent and he looked to the surface, blue dazzling above him, and shot off the bottom, surging toward warmer and brighter levels, his momentum carrying him out of the water in the pleasing manner of a rocket.

“I wish you wouldn’t stay down so long,” his mother said from the shore. “Every three minutes I think I have to go after you.”

He paddled easily for the beach, turning on his back and letting his fins do the work. He floated to the very edge of the shoreline, tiny wavelets breaking over his shoulders. His shoulders rubbed on the pebbly sand. When he stood, the water flowed off his body in a noisy rush, and he took off his fins and mask and crossed to his mother’s blanket, shaking off water like a spaniel before sitting down.

“Well, it’s not something I can do anything about,” Ginnie said, sighing. She was wearing sunglasses and had white cream on her nose, and her face resembled a mask. “What bothers me so much is they won’t say why.”

Biddy’s mother smoothed lotion onto her arms. “I guess it isn’t really anyone else’s business, they figure.”

Ginnie nodded, grimacing slightly.

“And we knew they were having problems.”

She nodded again and lay back, unhappy.

“Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe it’s better they find out now.”

“All the preparations, the invitations, the hall—”

“It’s terrible, I know. But what are you going to do? A divorce or annulment is better?”

“These kids, they don’t know what they want,” Ginnie said bitterly. “They get married, they don’t get married — to them it’s like crossing the street.”

His mother glanced out over the water. A red-and-white Sunfish was going by, a boy at the sail and a girl at the rudder, her foot trailing in the water. “I still can’t believe it,” she said.

“You can’t believe it? Check out moi. She comes to me — I’ll never forget it — and says, ‘Ma, I’m not getting married.’ Like that.” Ginnie’s face was to the sun, eyes closed. “Like she’s not having dinner that night.”

“Oh, she was upset.”

“Oh, yeah, she was upset. You should have seen her mother, with two hundred and fifty invitations out. She’s upset, but who ends up feeling like a jackass?”

Biddy settled back on his elbows, looking down the beach. The water still on his shoulders and chest was already warm from the sun. He eyed a puddle in his navel. Opposite him two girls lay on their bellies flanking a cassette player like marble lions on the steps of a museum.

“And how about your cousin’s daughter? From announcement to wedding it has to be six weeks. I tell you, these kids are crazy. She’s getting married next week the same day Cindy was going to. And she’s friends with Cindy, and the groom’s friends with Ronnie. They’ll both be there. Lovely, huh? I can’t wait to see the seating arrangements for that one. I tell you, don’t get married, Biddy. Save your mother some heartache.” She rolled to her stomach, spreading her arms wide of the blanket to scoop sand as if she were swimming. “Or elope. Leave town and write us a note about it.”

For Biddy, Doug DeCinces had always been unalterably a Baltimore Oriole, in his imagination as fixed and immutable at third base as his own identity as a Catholic. DeCinces was a Baltimore Oriole and could no more have gone to another team than Biddy could have joined another family. Journeymen came and went occasionally, utility infielders and relief pitchers, but the central Oriole core remained unchanging, unlike other teams such as California or New York, which seemed filled with malcontents and strangers. The Orioles were stability itself. They made do, won or lost — mostly won — with what they had. To Biddy it had been a great shock when the Orioles traded Doug DeCinces.

On a beautiful Saturday he lay in the backyard in the sun, the Bridgeport Post propped against the sleeping Stupid. The print rose and fell gently with the dog’s breathing. The sports section was folded to isolate a piece analyzing the month-old trade of the Orioles’ DeCinces for the Angels’ Ford. The piece went into great detail: batting averages (.277 to.281), RBIs (11 to 10), home runs (6 to 1), and extra base hits (20 to 16), as well as intangibles. (DeCinces was a leader, Biddy read, willing to get his uniform dirty, gritty, a coach on the field, while Ford’s attitude was a question mark.) Ford was quoted as saying all he wanted was a chance. The article concluded that while the Angels seemed to have had the better of the deal, it was still too early to tell.

He rolled over, head on his arm, and let the paper fall lightly across the dog. Inside the house his father was watching the NBC Game of the Week, California at Baltimore. Stupid lay inert under the newspaper, his rear end and legs sticking out.

Baseball seemed no more a part of his present than World Cup Soccer. He wasn’t playing or following it. His father was worried and disappointed.

He had been a disappointment in many areas over the last few months, since Christmas. He hadn’t done anything unusual or worrisome enough to galvanize his parents into making that series of appointments with Dr. Hanzlik, but he had been unhappy, listless, and his work at school had suffered. His third report card had been mediocre, as had his second, and to a lesser extent his first. There had been an ultimatum issued for the fourth, which was only weeks away: no improvement and he was going into a special motivational training program for three weeks. It was new, met in the mornings at a smallish grade school nearby, and seemed less of a step than psychiatric help. If his grades plummeted still further, his ass, his father assured him, would be out of Our Lady of Peace so fast his head would swim. His parents were at a loss as to what else to do. He had quit the altar boys. Nothing seemed to be effective enough for him; nothing seemed to be creating any sort of change. As the weather improved, Mr. Carver’s Cessna, wet and alone in its parking space, seemed to taunt him. He spent long hours rereading his notes and manuals, and his father wondered if he was getting enough iron.

It seemed to him, lying in the grass with the sun warming his arms, that he hadn’t talked to anyone in a long time. Laura had a new friend and seemed distant. He hadn’t seen Ronnie since Christmas. He rose without waking the dog, walked past the house to the street, and stood at the end of the driveway. Nothing was moving in either direction. Four houses down, Simon sat on the curb, hands on his shoes.

Biddy walked over and said hello. Simon didn’t look up. “My mother went to the beach and I couldn’t go,” he said. There was not the slightest hint of sadness in his voice. His mother had a boyfriend, and they didn’t always want him with them.

“Is she right down here?”

“In Milford.”

“Well, you want to go down this beach?” Biddy said, pointing. “I’ll take you.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere.” He scuffed the pavement.

“Where’s your baby-sitter?”

“Watching TV. I don’t want to do anything. Leave me alone.”

“Want me to—”

Simon got up, moved farther down the curb, and sat again. Biddy straightened up, angry, and turned away. Sit in the street, he thought. Get your feet run over. He returned to his yard and, before passing behind the house, glanced back and saw Simon still sitting where he’d left him, stubbornly determined, in all probability, to be in that same spot when his mother returned.

Biddy’s math had been poor and was going downhill steadily. That was the gist of Sister Theresa’s talk.

“And you know what it is, Biddy? You know what it is, don’t you? It’s carelessness. You can do the work. You do do the work. And then you make stupid mistakes, from carelessness.” He nodded, let his eyes wander through the tangle of papers on her desk.

“It’s a lack of respect, Biddy. For yourself, especially, but also for the work, and for me.”

They were sitting in her office, off the main hallway. He was forfeiting part of his lunchtime. He was thinking only of the Cessna. Outside the sun beat down and waves of heat rose from the playground.

She pointed to a number on a sheet. “See this? This is your average right now. That’s pretty shocking, young man. Are you shocked?”

“I’m surprised,” he said.

She looked at him grimly. “We’re trying everything we can with you, but our patience has a limit, let me tell you. You have to do something, too. If you earn this grade, I’m telling you right now I’m going to give you this grade. Is that understood?”

He nodded.

“Now go eat your lunch. And I want to see some improvement starting tomorrow, mister.”

He nodded again and shut the door behind him on the way out.

The hall was empty. Teddy appeared from the niche for the drinking fountain. “Let’s go up to the roof,” he whispered.

It was possible. The class was left on its honor, as Sister liked to say, for lunch, so they wouldn’t be missed unless someone checked. There was a shed adjoining the outside wall in the back. It had a low roof that allowed access to the higher roof. It was possible, for a few minutes. They slipped out the side doors and scrambled atop the shed, quickly pulling themselves up onto the main roof. Biddy stood up.

Sister Theresa stopped, halfway down the sidewalk, staring up at him.

“What are you, crazy?” Teddy whispered. “Get down.”

“Young man,” Sister called. “I’m not really seeing what I think I’m seeing, am I? Not two minutes after we talked?”

“Oh, God,” Teddy said. He lowered his face to the roof, thumping his forehead on a shingle.

“Come on down,” Sister said. “And as soon as your feet touch ground you’re in serious trouble.”

Sister didn’t believe in suspensions. Missing school never helped anyone, and she wasn’t handing out vacations but punishments, she used to say. Sister believed in detentions, long strings of them; the longer ones students would sometimes imagine to be the worldly equivalents of Purgatory. His was for two weeks, which was, not coincidentally, all that was left of the school year. Teddy’s was for a week. Biddy’s parents did not take the news well.

“The roof,” his father said. “Can you imagine this? She calls him in to try and straighten him out and he ends up climbing around the roof. Biddy, just what is wrong with you?”

Biddy sat in the kitchen feeding the dog his supper bit by bit under the table. Sister had called home with all the details.

“I don’t know who’s more aggravating, you or your sister.”

His sister had recently thrown chalk at one of the lay teachers.

“I really don’t know what to do with you,” his father said. “I really don’t. What am I going to do? Ground you? You never go anywhere anyway. Tell you you can’t stare out windows?”

“He needs to see someone,” his mother said. “We don’t know what we’re doing. A professional.”

“I’ll tell you what I will do,” his father said. “If your grades haven’t improved on this last report card, you can kiss Our Lady of Peace goodbye. If you’re not going to learn, you might as well do it for free.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” his mother said.

“I’m not being an idiot. And I’m not pissing money away if he’s not interested, either. I can tell you that right now. Maybe the school has something to do with it, anyway. If they stopped working on his soul and tried working on his head we’d all be a little better off.”

His father went into the den and his mother tossed salad in a beige ceramic bowl in front of her. “Finish your supper,” she said. “Your father’s upset right now, that’s all.”

“I don’t need to see a doctor, Mom,” he said quietly.

“Well, what do you need?” she said, pausing over the salad. “We’d all like to know. Have any idea? What do you need?”

His parents, unfortunately, did not enjoy the luxury of being able to worry about him alone. His sister over the last four months had thrown chalk at a teacher, attempted to feed the dog tacks, shoved Sister Theresa on the stairs, started a fight at the water fountain, and tried to bury all of her school-books in the garden. She had racked up more detention time and earned worse grades at school than Biddy. And there was the matter of her temper. “Don’t ask me where she gets it,” her mother would say. “When she gets upset, it’s like Raging Bull.” Recently she’d had a fight with her friend Lisa, whose mother had called to complain that her daughter was “still bleeding” as of the time of the phone call. Kristi had remained unrepentant.

She sat in the backyard next to him, on a lounge chair she had pulled alongside his. Both of them were eyeing the dog, waiting idly for it to do something amusing or interesting. It stretched and rubbed the side of its head in the grass. “You stay around,” their father said, and the dog looked up apprehensively. “You stay around or you’ll really be on my shit list.”

The three of them had been in the sun too long and Kristi was growing dangerously bored. They had been spending a lot of time in the yard recently, owing in part to their various punishments but also of their own accord, to get on their parents’ nerves. Their father was setting the ladder up against the garage wall nearest them. They were getting rain in the garage, and he wanted to check the shingles. The ladder had a sliding arrangement that allowed it to extend to twice its storage height and two hook clamps that kept it in whatever extended position was required. He set it up carefully, working unhurriedly in the bright sun, and returned to the house.

Kristi had been watching all of this with a close interest. When the back door closed, she got up and crossed to the ladder and, reaching high on her tiptoes, one hand spread delicately against the garage for support, she flipped one of the locking clamps away from the rung it was to support. That accomplished, she returned to her chair.

“What are you doing?” he said.

She didn’t move, her eyes remaining on the ladder. He glanced toward the house. The dog’s tail wagged, stirring mosquitoes. His father banged out of the back door and walked over, dropping tools on the pavement near the ladder with a musical noise. He sorted through them, choosing two.

Biddy was as bored as Kristi was, and feeling resentful besides. How far would he fall? Ten feet? Twelve feet? He watched his father mount the ladder and begin to climb. Halfway up he reached the point where the two halves were joined by the clamps and Biddy saw clearly the strain suddenly exerted on the lone remaining one.

“Dad,” he called sharply. His father stopped, surprised by the tone. His sister looked at him.

“One of the things is undone.” He pointed. His father looked, and hastened down the ladder.

“Thanks,” he said, peering at the clamp. “I set both of them. How the hell’d that happen?”

Kristi looked away. “It popped off while you were climbing,” Biddy said.

His father looked unconvinced. “I never heard of that before.” Biddy shrugged. He reset the clamp and climbed carefully up to the roof.

“Jerk,” Kristi whispered. “Fool.”

He went over to the dog, who curled onto his back with his paws in the air at his approach. “We don’t care, do we, Stupid,” he said, scratching its belly just under the rib cage. Its rear paw began to thump against the ground. Abruptly it twisted to its feet and trotted to the garden, sniffing with concentration along the fence, having seen or imagined something. Biddy followed. He collapsed into his chair in boredom and it folded up jerkily around him, banging the back of his head and tipping him backward over the fence into the garden. His head lay in the soft turned earth near a tomato plant. Stupid barked and leaped about the wreckage, startled. His sister had half folded his chair while he was scratching the dog. He started to disentangle himself, one thigh scratched and his hair full of dirt. His sister was still laughing and his father was standing on the roof, peering over at him. “Are you all right?” he called.

He nodded, still trying to climb out. The chair seemed to be holding him down, trapping him in its folding mechanism like a mousetrap or a crab’s claw.

“Now we need lessons on how to sit in a chair,” his father said. “Mr. Abbott, meet Mr. Costello.”

His father held the phone in his direction as though it were for him. “Mr. Rotondo wants to know why you’re not going out for Little League this year,” he said.

“Tell him because I don’t want to,” Biddy said.

His father returned the phone to his ear. “Paulie?” he said. “He’s not showing much interest this year.” He listened for a moment. “I’ll tell him.” He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. “He says they really need good people this year and all the positions are wide open.”

Biddy shook his head.

“Still can’t sell him on it, Paulie. I know, I know. He was getting better and better.” He covered the phone again. “He says you’re a little Doug DeCinces at third.”

Biddy left the room.

“He may come around later,” he heard his father say. “Thanks for calling.”

They sat in the den watching Jason and the Argonauts. He had seen it before and liked the harpies.

“If that isn’t a bite in the ass,” his father said. “All last summer you wanted to be on the team, wanted me to work with you. All those hours Dom and I took you guys over to the dump and worked out. And here I am telling Paulie Rotondo all year you can’t wait.”

He refused to feel guilty.

“You’re losing interest in everything. What’re you going to do, hang around the house the rest of your life? Maybe your mother’s been right all along. Maybe we should be worried.”

“Maybe I’m depressed,” Biddy said.

“Yeah, you’re depressed. Twelve years old. You’re depressed.”

“Thirteen.”

His father didn’t respond. He answered a knock at the back door and returned to the den and stood by the television, ready to turn it off. “Your friend’s here,” he said. “Go out and do something.”

“Where we goin’?” Teddy asked.

“The airport,” Biddy said.

“The airport? Why the airport? You want to build a fort?”

Biddy said no, and denied he was intending to play guns or look for rats, either. They reached the hurricane fence at the end of Birch Street and knelt at the hole underneath it. Weeds surged up through the metal links. He held the fence up but Teddy refused to budge until he knew why they were going.

“I want to look at some stuff,” Biddy said, still holding the fence, considerable tension on his arm. “We can look at airplanes.”

“Look at airplanes?”

“Are you coming or not?” His tone surprised him.

“No, I’m not coming,” Teddy said. “Why do we always gotta do what you want to do?”

Biddy crouched low and slipped under the fence. Teddy followed.

They cantered down the slope to the basin of the airport, moving quickly and efficiently along paths they knew well. At the base they followed the perimeter west, skirting hillocks and standing marsh water. They worked their way through a thin path in the cattails, the reeds underfoot cracking crisply with each step. At points brown water oozed over the reed mat of the path, touching their sneakers. It filled the air with a musty smell.

“Where we goin’?” Teddy said. “There’s nothing over here but the runway.”

“I told you. The airport,” Biddy said.

“The real airport?” Usually when they spoke of “the airport” they meant the marshes and flatlands surrounding it, not the actual installation. “We’ll get in trouble.”

“No, we won’t.” The last thing he wanted was trouble. The reeds parted and the runway lay before him, the tarmac gray, smooth, and wide.

“We have to cross it,” he said.

“Cross it?”

He was already away from the cattails, checking the sky for incoming planes. Satisfied, he started to run, low to the ground, the heat off the paved surface dry and intense. On the other side he ducked into the weeds, crashing through the fragile yellow stalks. Teddy was right behind him.

“If you wanted to come over here, why didn’t you have your father drive you around?” he said, panting. Biddy ignored the question and struck out for the access road to the terminal.

The Bridgeport terminal was small and resembled a longish restaurant with a two-story tower. It was not very impressive on the best of days, and was even less so from their angle, surrounded by dark pavement and swimming in the heat waves of the afternoon. With the tower in sight Teddy grew appreciably more restive and lagged behind. By the time Biddy had reached the tower, Teddy had been lured off by a side attraction and was no longer visible. Biddy tested the door leading to the tower, but it was locked. A moment later, a man in white shirtsleeves opened it from the inside and asked what he could do for him.

“Could I go up in the tower for just a second?” Biddy said.

The man said no, and then changed his mind and said yes, what the heck, and led him up the stairs. At the top a man at a console, also in shirtsleeves, smiled at him. A fan whirred behind them. The man indicated to his friend that they’d better get him out. Biddy looked north to the hangars where he’d been with his mother and confirmed the blind spot. He pointed. “What’s over there?” he said. Just beyond the hangar he could make out the very tip of Mr. Carver’s Cessna, a sliver of white and blue.

“What, the hangars?” the man asked.

Biddy shook his head. “Behind them.”

“I don’t know,” the man said. “Can’t see behind them. A parking area.” He put his hand on Biddy’s back and led him down the stairs.

Teddy was waiting for him when he emerged into the glare. “God, why didn’t you wait for me?” he said. “You got to go up there! You knew I was out here!”

It wasn’t so great, Biddy assured him, the Cessna tail still vivid and hidden.

He gazed at Biddy in helpless amazement. “Why didn’t you wait?”

“I had something to do up there,” Biddy said. “You didn’t.”

Teddy swung and Biddy avoided the blow and held his ground. They stood facing each other before Teddy relaxed, too disgusted to fight. “I came all this way,” he said, and turned his back on Biddy and left the way they had come. Biddy didn’t follow. Halfway across the runway the yellow security jeep, on the alert because of their earlier crossing, emerged from hiding like a lazy four-wheeled spider. Teddy was piled into it and it circled back toward the terminal. Biddy watched it grow as it drew nearer before he trotted across the parking lot to the southern exit of the Burma Road and turned toward home.

Teddy wasn’t speaking to him any longer. Laura told him in class, two days later.

“Can you come out today?” he whispered. They were communicating in short bursts while Sister wrote on the board.

“I have to go somewhere,” she said. “But tonight I’m sleeping out with Sarah Alice.”

That night he crept from the house at five after one. His father hadn’t gone to sleep until late. He trailed down the empty streets barefoot, in shorts and a T-shirt. The Ranseys had a screened-in patio set away from the house near the edge of their property. The property adjoined a vacant lot that was overgrown and unlighted, visually impenetrable at night. He felt his way through, remembering paths, and climbed the low wooden fence bordering their yard. He paused at the screened wall of the porch.

They were both asleep, twisted in light sleeping bags. He scratched the metal surface with his nail, the screen sounding like an emery board. “Laura,” he whispered. “Laura.”

She lifted her head abruptly and looked at him. Then she looked at Sarah Alice, still asleep. She got up, groggy, her covers falling away in a whisper, and came outside. She was wearing a white nightshirt with tiny green figures on it.

“What are you doing?” she said. “What time is it?”

“It’s not too late. Let’s go to the beach.”

“No.” She rubbed her eyes. “It’s late.”

“C’mon.” He took her wrist. “You wanted me to come over.”

She pulled toward the screen. “I should tell Sarah Alice.”

“Let her sleep.”

“She’ll wake up and find me gone.”

“No, she won’t.”

She hesitated. “Let me get my flip-flops.” When she returned, she sat in the grass to put them on. Then she stood, clearing the hair from her face, and took his hand and they ran to the fence and climbed over.

She was frightened in the vacant lot, the darkness alive with rustlings and insect noises, but he moved them swiftly through and they came out on the far side under a streetlight. He waited while she scratched the side of her calf thoroughly, and then they headed down the street, her flip-flops making rubbery, popping sounds.

He heard a car and saw a flash of headlights and pulled her quickly behind a hedge, crouching low. It edged closer.

“What are we hiding for?” she whispered but half understood, appreciating the heightened sense of imagined danger and suspense. Her palm was moist and warm in his hand. His shoulder brushed the hedge, picking up cool dew. The car’s engine idled past on the other side.

“He’s going so slow,” he whispered.

Her eyes widened. “What do you think he’s doing?”

He shook his head. In her crouch her chin was nearly between her knees. The car crept away.

After a short wait he raised his eyes above the hedge. The car was at a stop sign at the end of the street. It was a station wagon, with an odd license plate: LEMM. It turned left down the beach road.

“It’s gone,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“I want to go back,” Laura said. “I’m scared.”

“Come on.” He held his hand out. “He’s gone.”

They walked a bit faster, the beach dark ahead of them. Laura looked fearfully behind them every so often. He was happy to be with her and swung her arm as they reached the stop sign, the breeze cool off the sea. He had all sorts of things he wanted to talk to her about.

She said, “What’s that?” Her tone stopped him as though he were on the edge of a cliff. The station wagon was parked along the beach road to their left. The LEMM shone in the plate lights. He stood still for the briefest moment, stunned, before pulling her under a rhododendron in the nearest yard. They peered out at the car.

“What’s he doing?” she whispered. She was terrified.

“I don’t see anyone,” he said. His eyes covered every inch of the car. The interior was dark and he couldn’t discern any movement.

“Look,” Laura said. It was a choked whisper, a horrible sound. She was pointing to the right, at some bushes across the street black with their own shadows even under the streetlight. He couldn’t see anything.

He was going to speak but she continued to point. He looked again, and there was a man’s face in the bush, white, disembodied in the shadow, the eyes black dots. His forehead went instantly cool and he felt as though he’d lost his wind.

“What’s he doing, what’s he doing, what’s he doing?” Laura whispered. He took her arm, afraid she would bolt.

“We got to get out of here.” God, he realized, he’s looking at us.

He glanced behind them. There was nothing but fifty feet of lawn, with a white house to silhouette them. He looked around desperately.

“He’s moving,” Laura whispered, her voice rising.

There was nothing to do but run. “Laura,” he whispered, imagining he sounded calm. “Laura, listen. We’ve got to run. Take your flip-flops off.” He waited while she slipped her feet out of them. “Turn around and when I say run, run and don’t stop until you’re home. We’re going to run together, but if he catches us I’m going to let you go and you’re going to keep running, okay?”

She nodded, biting her lip.

“Ready?”

She edged around. He took a last look back. The face was gone.

“Go!” he said, and burst from under the bush with her hand in his, pulling it as hard as he dared, both of them flying down the pavement, Laura grabbing at her nightshirt in a frantic attempt to hitch it up. They heard the car start behind them with a roar and Laura shrieked and he immediately pulled her between two houses, cutting through yards, leaping a sandbox and a garden. They flattened along the wall of another house, panting. She sobbed quietly and he poked his head around the corner a few inches. The station wagon cruised past in the distance, still moving very slowly.

He put his head back against the wall. “We’re okay,” he said. “He won’t find us.”

“I want to go back,” Laura wailed quietly. “I told you I didn’t want to come.”

He took her hand and led her down the driveway to the next street, easing a tricycle away with a gentle push. A dog barked nearby and the wind made a soft, sweeping sound through the leaves of the trees. He heard the engine just in time and clapped a hand to her mouth, pulling her back; it was the station wagon, driving without headlights. They sprinted back the way they’d come, not speaking, not slowing down, staying in backyards, clawing their way over dividing fences and hedges, cutting their feet, scraping their knees, their running as headlong as it could be without total loss of control. Laura raced ahead of him, her hair alive in the wind. They swept through the vacant lot, crashing through vines and creepers, and near her yard Laura missed a turn and sprawled headlong over a bush with a great crash of wood and vegetation, her heel lashing the air in front of him.

He rushed to her, asking if she was all right, and she was crying harder, more from the shock than anything else, and she stood and knocked his hand away and continued down the path. As they approached the fence, she pushed him away again and he ducked back, sure she’d be safe at that point, with lights and anxious voices of people filling her yard, for Sarah Alice, tangled in her nightshirt and buried under the sleeping bag, had woken up to find her missing.

The Sieberts were in the Lirianos’ living room, pants pressed, hair washed, dresses ironed, and bearing presents, when Louis came downstairs and announced he wasn’t going to the wedding.

“You’re not going to the what?” Dom said, and Louis went back upstairs.

“He’s not going to the what?” he repeated to Ginnie, his tie half tied.

Ginnie shrugged. It was news to her.

They sat around the coffee table in a semicircle, slightly embarrassed, while Dom went up to talk with him. They heard Dom’s voice rise and fall. He came downstairs.

“He says he’s not going. He won’t tell me why.” He went into the bathroom and resumed tying his tie. “Christ,” he said finally. “Is the whole world going nuts? Is that it?”

Ginnie went up to talk with Louis.

“If he’s not going, then I’m not either,” Mickey said.

“Don’t start,” Dom said from the bathroom. “Just don’t start. Because if you’re staying home you’re staying home in traction.”

Ginnie came downstairs grim. “We’ll talk about it later,” she said. “He just says he’s not going.”

“Doesn’t that frost your ass?” Dom said. He was having trouble with his jacket sleeve. “These kids’re gonna drive us all off cliffs. If they haven’t already.”

Louis appeared at the top of the stairs. “Sorry I can’t go, Mr. and Mrs. Siebert,” he said. “I can’t, though.”

“Louis, what in the Christ is the matter?” Dom said.

“I can’t, Dad. Sorry.” He went back upstairs.

Dom remained where he was, staring after him. “Aw, let’s get out of here,” he said, shaking his head, “before I lose any more of them.”

The wedding itself was at Our Lady of Peace and the reception at the Red Coach Inn. It was Biddy’s third wedding and the ceremony was becoming familiar. Sheona, the bride, glanced around as if wondering if all of this were not some sort of elaborate hoax.

Father Rubino handled the Mass with dispatch, labeling the occasion joyous and celebratory as though he were narrating a travelogue. Biddy stood next to his mother, with Cindy and Mickey in the pew ahead of them. Cindy was wearing dark blue, like her father, with a deep red sash. Her hair was up and the thin gold chains were missing from her neck. They had been gifts from Ronnie, he remembered.

The sun came through the windows. Irises on the altar moved slightly in the breeze from the open doors, heavy on their stems. “If he gets any skinnier, they might as well leave the hangers in the shirts,” he heard Dom say about the groom.

Biddy rode to the reception in the same car as Cindy. She hadn’t said a word the entire day that he had been aware of. His father drove in silence, respecting her feelings, awkward.

At the Red Coach Inn they signed the guest register, his name following Cindy’s and hers reading Cynthia Amanda Liriano — for her, oddly formal. They piled silver-and-white presents on one table and searched for name cards with table assignments on the other. Biddy and Cindy would be at table 8, his father at table 9. They threaded their way past circular tables arranged with place settings and fruit cups waiting. Kristi and Mickey were already at table 8, with two teenaged cousins; Dom, Ginnie, and his mother were already at 9. They were early. Uncomfortable where he was and spotting empty chairs at 9, Biddy moved and sat next to Dom.

“This guy’s given up on Little League,” his father said.

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Don’t ask me. Paulie Rotondo would love to have him.”

“He’s a great guy, Paulie. Knows his baseball, Biddy,” Dom said. “Don’t kid yourself. Good man to play for.”

“I’ve heard he’s a little wild,” Biddy’s mother said.

“Wild? He’s berserk,” Dom said. “Listen: here’s a good Paulie Rotondo story. Me and Paulie, we go out a few years ago, we’re going somewhere, I don’t remember where. We’re driving down the road, we go past a bar, Paulie slams on the brakes. ‘Aw, look who’s here,’ he goes. I don’t see anybody. We pull over and go inside. There’re two Puerto Ricans playing shuffleboard — you know, that bar game, like bowling. Paulie says, ‘Beer and an orange juice,’ and then goes to the Puerto Ricans, ‘How you doing?’ They’re nodding and smiling, you know. Paulie picks up one of those shuffleboard discs and says, ‘Dom, don’t get excited. I’m gonna kill this guy.’ Then he goes to one of the Puerto Ricans, ‘Remember me? Sure.’ Paulie’s got this big grin, right? ‘Remember? You don’t remember? You took the wallet right out of my pocket. Remember? Right after you kicked me right here?’ And he points to his face. These guys had mugged him the week before. ‘Dom, watch the other one,’ he says to me.” Dom pantomimed himself at the time, stunned. Biddy’s father, already laughing, closed his eyes and shook his head. “And he goes, ‘Don’t you remember?’ and this guy starts backing away and reaches for the beer bottle and Paulie takes that metal shuffleboard disc and hits him like Warren Spahn right here”—he spread his forefinger and thumb across his sternum—“and the sound is like somebody just stepped on a rotten board. This guy goes down like he’s shot.”

“That’s horrible,” Biddy’s mother said. His father was laughing so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes. “And that’s someone you think Biddy should be playing for?”

“Well, shit,” Dom said, his smile fading. “He’s not Juan Corona. He’s just a crazy guy.”

Ronnie Pierce found his seat at table 20, the table adjoining number 8. He could not have been closer to Cindy had he sat at her table. They were back to back with their left shoulders nearly touching. Dom put his hand over his eyes. Biddy’s mother wondered in a fierce whisper how they could have put them together like that.

“They probably assigned them by number,” Ginnie said. “They probably figured eight and twenty were far enough apart.”

“Somebody forgot to look at a floor plan,” his father said.

When Sandy and Michael arrived, Biddy returned to his table and took his place beside Cindy. He would have liked to have said hello to Ronnie but wasn’t sure whether or not he should. As far as he knew, Cindy and Ronnie hadn’t acknowledged each other.

Everyone rose to applaud the parents of the groom, who were making their way to their table with a cautious, gracious clumsiness, and then the parents of the bride, and finally the bride and groom themselves, introduced after a dramatic pause as one couple, using the bride’s new name.

They remained standing for the toast, all eyes turned to the head table. Cindy and Ronnie stood shoulder to shoulder beside their seats. Neither moved or flinched. The best man, thin and awkward, adjusted his glasses and began by mentioning that he’d culled some quotes from Homer but now thought them inappropriate. Biddy’s gaze wandered to his parents’ table, where Dom was looking back in his direction, keeping an eye on Cindy and Ronnie. He had said after the breakup that if he saw Ronnie anywhere near his daughter he’d have both their asses on a stick. But he couldn’t blame them for this, Biddy reflected.

They settled down to fruit cups and then smallish gray-and-white plates arranged with a slice of roast beef, a pile of green peas, and some sort of mushroom-and-onion mix. He ate quickly, the food unremarkable. Cindy ate as though she were very tired. Kristi ate the meat and spooned the rest into the sugar holder. Beneath the crystal, ribbons of onions and slippery sliced mushrooms began to fill the cracks between the sugar packets.

“Kristi, you’re so gross,” Mickey said. She smoothed a leftover brown bit onto her finger and flicked it at him but hit Biddy instead.

“You better put some cold water on that,” Cindy said, and he decided against retaliation and left the table for the men’s room.

He stopped at the door to let a busboy with a tray get by. The band was playing “Sunrise, Sunset,” and the bride was dancing with her father. The air smelled vaguely of melon and urine.

In the men’s room he stood at the sink washing his hands, gazing at the spot on his shirt in the mirror. Two busboys stood at the urinals, heads turned toward each other. Their white coats were dirty. Their voices filled the bathroom. “It don’t matter,” one said. “God’s God. He can do whatever he wants to.”

“Yeah, well, I think like he hasn’t got complete control yet,” the other said, shaking his hips, finishing up. “There’s too much bad in the world.” He crossed to the sink next to Biddy and gave his hands a perfunctory splash.

“Well, my brother’s studying to be a priest and he don’t think so,” said the one at the urinal.

The one at the sink wondered what that had to do with anything.

It was fascinating and incongruous to Biddy, God at the urinals, God while checking the part in their hair. He was encouraged and discouraged at the same time.

“Something wrong, kid?” one of them said, and he realized he’d been staring, and shook his head.

When he returned, most of the tables were empty. The dance floor was crowded with couples shifting back and forth, moving in different directions.

Ronnie leaned back in his seat, turning his head, and tapped Cindy on the shoulder. She jumped.

“How you doin’?” he said.

She said she was fine. After a moment he turned away.

“‘For us there can never be happiness,’” she said.

Ronnie’s head turned. “What?”

“‘For us there can never be happiness.’”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh. ‘We must learn to be happy without it.’ What’s-her-name, from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“What’s her name?” Cindy twiddled a knife, still with her back to him.

“Annette Andre.”

She smiled.

The bride and groom swept by, doing some sort of waltz. “‘Some things are not forgivable,’” Ronnie said, clearly and distinctly. “‘Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.’”

Cindy paled, lowering her eyes to the tablecloth. “Vivien Leigh,” she said. “Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire.” There was a long silence, the two of them sitting as if they’d never spoken.

His mother leaned over him, her perfume cool and not unpleasant. “Dance with me,” she said. “Your father won’t.”

His alternative was staying at the table. They walked to the dance floor and eased into an open space. She showed him where to put his hands and they shuffled back and forth. The floor was the same deep maroon as the floor of the piano room at school. Relatives occasionally drifted into view, smiling with approval. His mother asked him if Ronnie and Cindy had been fighting and he said no.

The reception was well past the point at which table distinctions and seating arrangements broke down, and those he had been sitting with or near were scattered in every direction, Dom by the head table, his father at the bar, his sister outside. (He’d seen her flash by the dark window, a ghost in her white dress, while he was dancing.) At tables 8 and 20 only Cindy and Ronnie were left, still in their original seats. When the dance with his mother had ended, he joined them. The tables were emptying around them, some people leaving, others dancing. The three of them remained, listening to “Color My World.” The band segued into “Heat Wave.” Ronnie got up and crossed to the head table, congratulating everyone and saying goodbye before leaving by the far door. Biddy wasn’t sure Cindy knew he was gone.

They left before the Lirianos, agreeing to meet at the party that his aunt, the mother of the bride, was having after the reception. From the door he could see Cindy where he’d left her, alone in a sea of tables, her dark blue dress solid and unmoving against the clutter and scattered chairs.

“Drinks,” the mother of the bride said. “Who couldn’t use a drink?” They were sitting around the living room, adults tired and drunk, children tired and bored. The bride’s father was spread over a chair and two hassocks. He looked boneless.

Disappointingly few had been able to come, a ragged few besides the Sieberts and Lirianos. Louis had refused even this second chance. Cindy was in the den. Biddy’s sister and Mickey sat on the sofa nursing sodas, having long since given the day up for lost.

“Well, Sheona should be halfway to the airport by now,” the hostess said. Some of the guests nodded vaguely.

“It was a beautiful wedding,” his mother said.

“Beautiful,” Ginnie agreed.

Someone said that Sheona had looked marvelous.

“Well, we weren’t sure about the gown at first,” her mother said from the kitchen.

“Oh, Christ, were we not sure,” said the father of the bride. Biddy had assumed he was asleep. The guests laughed, and then the room was as uncomfortable as before. There was some desultory talk about the choice of honeymoon spots. Biddy got up, hearing the piano, and went into the den.

Cindy was sitting straight-backed on the piano stool, her hands hesitating over the white and black keys. She flipped a page or two of the worn music book, intent on the notes. As far as he knew, she couldn’t read music. She tested a few notes, singing softly, and ran through it again. She was awful.

He moved closer and stood by the piano, the open interior and lid like black-and-tan jaws. She did not acknowledge his presence and he stood quietly content with that decision.

The music book was swinging shut as she tried to play, and he reached out and held it, belly across the corner of the cabinet. Her eyes never left it. She played a bit more and then cried, her sobs full and low as she fought to control them. “Goddamnit,” she said. “Oh, goddamnit.” She closed the key cover sharply and the keys made a startled dissonant sound.

“You all right in there?” Dom called from the living room.

They hadn’t heard her crying, he thought, they couldn’t have, or they wouldn’t have stayed where they were, calling in a question. They couldn’t have left her to cry alone. He wanted to help, and was absolutely helpless: someone without pump or patch watching the boat go down. She straightened up, blinking and miserable, and shook off his attempt to lay his hand between her shoulder blades. Then she opened the key cover and shut it again, uncertain what to do with herself. He watched her for a short time before easing into a nearby chair in a kind of vigil, heartbroken.

Afterward the Lirianos’ car refused to start. On the way home, with everyone in their car, his father mentioned that it was a shame Louis hadn’t come.

Dom shifted in back, his blue suit rumpled, collar open. They were packed in tightly. “Yeah, it’s too bad,” he said. There was an edge to his voice. Biddy detected it immediately and his father seemed to miss it altogether.

“Well, Louis is a good kid,” his father continued. “I’m sure things’ll work out. If there’s any real problem, I’m sure it’ll come out.”

“Walt,” his mother warned. Even she sensed some sort of thin ice.

“Yeah, there’s a problem,” Dom said. He was drunk, and angry. Biddy was gradually beginning to perceive that the car was a hideous trap of a sort, eight people in a locked closet with an explosive. “There’s a problem all right. The problem is he still doesn’t have a job.” There was a silence, Biddy holding Kristi more tightly on his lap as if to protect her physically from the awfulness of the situation. They had passed the airport minutes ago, and the blue-and-white Cessna had stood out, tail erect and wings catching light. Biddy’s father had been promising to find Louis a part-time job for thirteen months. He had not succeeded.

“Look. I’ve told you I’ve been working on it.”

“Yeah, you’re working on it. Meanwhile the kid stays home and begins to wonder if retards ever get jobs in this world.”

“Dom,” Ginnie said.

“He’s working on it. The kid tells her he can’t go to the wedding, he feels like a bum, he’s not working. We tell him he’s still a student, he don’t want to hear it. All he knows is that he’s been trying to get a job for over a year. And he wants to work at Sikorsky. Anywhere. Don’t ask me why. He likes Walter here.”

“I told you these things don’t happen overnight,” his father said, also angry. “They’re not hiring. We’re all in the same boat.”

“No. You’re in the boat. He’s in the water,” Dom said. Biddy wanted to jump out of the car. “Yeah, times’re tough. You’re working your fingers to the bone for him.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence and let the Lirianos out at Ryegate Terrace. As they drove away, Biddy closed his eyes and tried prematurely to begin the process of ending, once and for all, a day that had already dragged on for far too long.

With the sunlight mirrored in undulating patterns on the water ahead of him, he cruised just on the surface, the lower half of his mask below the water and the upper half above, the waterline wavering across the glass in front of his eyes like the bubble in a level. He struck out straight from shore and dipped down with the control of a sand shark, slipping through the colder water near the bottom and leveling out just above the sand, kicking hard and gazing at the various tiny landmarks of the sea floor as they reeled by.

He was in a thermocline, and the effect was striking: six inches above his head, the water, markedly warmer, held so many particles in suspension it seemed opaque, and the separation was so distinct the effect was that of a brown ceiling, a long, low tunnel, brown sand inches below him, brown water no less penetrable to the eye above him. Through it he soared, kicking away from the land with still plenty of air in his lungs, the water itself a corridor for him, showing him a way, setting him on a specific track.

Taking Off

Things are not the way they should be. I keep complaining, and Kristi’s right: I’m too scared to do anything about it. We have to be better to each other, and we’re not. We have to think about each other, and we don’t. I don’t do enough and what I do doesn’t work. If I’m not such a fool, I should prove it. Things get worse and worse, and doing something isn’t so scary anymore. I’ve been playing kids’ games all this time like it would help and it won’t. All that planning and work I was doing and I just had to ask myself: Who are you kidding? Really, who are you kidding? Because I knew I was just playing games. I knew then that I had to make it real and not chicken out, to stop being such a baby about everything. Who was going to help me if I didn’t? Who was going to change me if I couldn’t? I think if you don’t do something about things you don’t like, you get what you deserve. I’ve been stupid all along. When my father told me either to shit or get off the pot, I should have listened. He was right.

A cardinal lighted nearby, a marvelous red against the backdrop of green, and was gone, the branch swaying in its absence. Biddy sat on the corner of the cellar door in the backyard, the dog’s leash in his hand. The dog was in the house. He thought about nothing. Flies crisscrossed over the tomato plants in the garden. There was no reason for him to be holding the leash.

His father was cutting the grass. The engine housing on the lawn mower was loose and it added immeasurably to the racket. The mower crossed back and forth before him, edging nearer each time, his father trudging along behind, arms sweaty and flecked with grass.

A newspaper lay near his foot, luminous in the sun. In it Biddy had read how to come up with cool alternatives to summer suppers and had seen a UPI photo of a German shepherd curled on the shoulder of a highway near its mate. Its mate, one leg sprawled at an odd angle, was dead. The caption, entitled “Lonely Vigil,” related that the dog had refused food for three days. The lawn mower rolled to the side of his foot and stopped.

“Lift your feet,” his father said. He lifted his feet.

His father bent over the engine housing, and the mower idled down and went off, the blades spinning with an empty, stuttering sound. He pushed it a few feet away and sat down.

“Little distracted today?” he asked, looking at the mower as though it bothered him.

“Mmm.”

His father shook his head, sweeping grass from his pants. “Biddy and his magic violin.” He sighed.

Biddy looked at him. “Where’d you get that?” he asked. “What’s that mean?” His father had used it for years and it had always seemed a kind of nonsense or catchphrase, interesting or funny, if at all, only in its meaninglessness.

“Get what?”

“That—‘magic violin.’”

He seemed startled by the question. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s years and years old.” A distant lawn mower started, a ghostly echo of the one silent before them. “Maybe it was a lead-in to a radio show.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what the big interest here is, either,” he said. He squinted as if the outlines of the memory were taking shape in the hazy sky to the north. “I have an impression of an all-girl orchestra, for some reason, but I’m not sure. They’d introduce them in those days like they did more than just play or perform, like they did magic things with their instruments.” He rubbed his nose. “What was funny was that they were usually terrible. You know, Joe Blow and his magic xylo-phone. I guess I just remembered somebody with their magic violin.”

Biddy spread his toes in the grass, tearing up strands.

His father stood, flapping the back of his shirt to cool himself. “That’s the best I can do, guy. Try and make sense out of everything that comes out of your old man’s mouth and you’ll really be in trouble.”

He bent over the mower to restart it while Biddy wrapped the dog’s leash around his arm, rolling it tightly in an idle attempt to create the effect of chain mail. His arm from wrist to elbow wrapped in metal, he got up and returned to the house, testing his new armor by banging it against the drainpipe on the way in.

That Wednesday the report card came: they sat in their chairs, twenty-eight shining examples of self-control, while Sister called their names, one by one, alphabetically. And one by one, alphabetically, they went up to receive their card, thanked Sister, returned to their seats, took a breath, girded themselves, and opened it. Biddy, an “S,” was near the end. Every student, having watched others before him, tried to keep a poker face; every student failed. Teddy Bell had been one of the first, and after sitting down he’d given a stifled cry as if he’d been bitten.

Biddy had taken Sister Theresa’s remarks to heart, studying diligently for the final math test, and had suffered through it nonetheless, having fallen too far behind. It was possible he got a good grade, he reminded himself, watching her. Nothing, in fact, would have surprised him more.

“Eustace Siebert,” Sister said. He went up and took the card from her hand, murmuring his thanks. She looked directly at him and he was unable to read her face. He sat back down and unfolded the white card deliberately, his eyes slipping down the column of letter grades to Pre-Algebra at the bottom, across from which was printed, in blue pen, an F. It was gracefully done, the spine reinforced with a double line and the upper arm disappearing in a smooth wisp of a curve. His eyes roamed back up the column: B and B and B and B. For the first time, no A’s. For the first time, an F. He closed the card.

Laura had received her grades. She was an exception to the class rule: he couldn’t tell with any assurance how good or bad they were, although he guessed good. He wouldn’t find out, because she wasn’t talking to him anymore, either.

All the students were settled, flipping their cards open or closed in various stages of despair or relief. Sister sat forward, clasping her hands.

“Let me say that I was not satisfied with the grades this year,” she said. “Some of you, I know, did very well — you know who you are — but even those who did could have done better. There’s always room for improvement. God knows you’ve heard me say that enough times. And some of you could have done much better.”

While she spoke, the consequences of the card on his desk began to seep in like an oil stain slowly becoming visible through layers of fabric.

“In many ways it’s been a good year, but in many ways some of you are letting yourselves down, not realizing your fullest potential. Next year you’ll have Mrs. Duffy and you’ll be in eighth grade. You won’t be able to get by with any more nonsense at that point. You all have great potential — remember this — and should never accept second best. Now keep in touch and have a good vacation.” The class jolted from their seats in a body, ready to bolt free of Our Lady of Peace for another year, but Sister held up her hands, freezing them more or less in their positions. “Wait, wait, wait. Don’t neglect the reading lists you’ve been given, and the Sisters and I hope we see you this summer.” She spoke louder, her voice ringing over the noise and scramble. “If there are any questions about the grades, I’ll be around this afternoon and tomorrow. But I think most of them are pretty straightforward.”

The noise became overpowering, with students whooping and rushing to the doors, and while he felt in no rush he found himself in the middle of the pack, and as he was swept out the door he remembered Sister’s last words being “If your parents have any questions, they can call the convent.”

His mother shrieked at the math grade. The noise startled him. He’d left the report card on the counter as he always did, as if in a daze, as if there were nothing unusual about it. She’d opened it expecting the same thing.

“An F!” she exclaimed. “An F! Oh, my God, he got an F!” There was scuffling in the kitchen, Kristi apparently wanting to see and trying to grab the card from her mother. A pot fell over, cascading dirty dishes into the sink. Stupid ran back and forth, barking ecstatically.

He shut the bathroom door and slumped on the toilet seat. This was even worse than he had expected.

His mother pounded on the door, demanding he come out of there. It swung open violently when he didn’t respond.

“Do you hear me?” she said. “What in God’s name have you done now?”

He remained where he was, arms at his side. His sister peered cautiously into the bathroom, and the dog calmed somewhat, trotting from kitchen to hallway.

His mother stood before him, the card wagging in her hand. She did not, they both realized, know how to deal with this.

“Well?” she said. His response to all of this plainly disconcerted her and was beginning to frighten her as well. Her anger dissipated but the F remained in her hand, and she looked back and forth in the tiny space, frustrated, as though something in the room might help. Finally she turned, Kristi and Stupid moving quickly out of her way, and stalked into the kitchen.

“It’s as though he did it on purpose,” she said, half to herself, as she opened the dishwasher. Spoons clattered and dishes clanked against each other. “You heard your father’s threat about taking you out of Our Lady of Peace. What am I supposed to tell him now? And you didn’t just go down a notch. No, sir. Not our Biddy. You dropped through the floor. An F. Your father’s going to go into shock.”

He pushed by Kristi and went upstairs and sat on the bed, staring stupidly at the floor. Then he revived, crossing to the desk and pulling a folded Hefty trash-can liner out of the top drawer, his movements beginning to resemble those of well-drilled emergency personnel: mechanical, assured, swift. Things flew into the trash bag. Mr. Carver’s manual was swept up, and pages marked and ready were torn from The Lore of Flight and stapled together.

He heard his mother at the foot of the stairs, still frustrated: “If I were you, I’d pack my things. I’d hate to be in your shoes when your father gets home.”

He had planned on writing notes, and in fact began the first one, to Cindy, maintaining as best he could the fine line between speed and legibility, but he stopped, unable to communicate what he wanted to say in any adequate way, and, feeling time rush away from him like a spent wave on a beach, he thrust the paper aside. He had a list of people assembled: Cindy, Laura, Teddy, Simon, Louis, Kristi, Ronnie, and his parents, and he finally simply circled each name on the list, a single circle joining his parents’ names, as if that would communicate enough, or would have to do. With the list now a column of stacked ovals, he cleared his desk top of all other clutter so that it might be left centered and alone under the window.

He left while his mother was in the den. His bicycle was piled along the wall in the garage behind some fencing and the lawn mower, and he pulled it out, new cobwebs drifting across his arms. He’d checked the bike three days before and had found that, beyond some grinding and rattling noises, everything worked as well as ever. He’d stopped using it more than a year ago because it was too small, a child’s bike with its long handlebars and banana seat, embarrassing in a neighborhood of statuesque racing frames, but now it was invaluable because of that very lack of size. He swung onto the seat and pushed off, pedaling out of the gloom into the sunlight, and stopped to pick up the Hefty bag he’d left near the door.

Kristi appeared at the screen. “What are you doing?” she asked.

He flinched, determined to look nonchalant. “Taking some stuff over Teddy’s.” She watched him tie the bag securely to the handle on the back of the banana seat, positioning it on top so that it would rest behind him.

“Biddy’s running away, Mom,” she announced.

He remained motionless.

“I would too if I were him,” his mother said from the other room.

He kept his eyes on Kristi, meeting her even gaze.

“Where you gonna go?” she said.

He gave his head a perceptible shake. “Don’t say anything.” His sister was a shadow on the sunlit screen, impossible to interpret. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

“Take care.” He pressed his hand to the screen.

“You too,” she said.

He surged forward on the pedals, building speed quickly down the driveway and out into the street. Sikorsky was four miles away. He had measured it. He had ridden it the previous week. He turned left onto Prospect Drive, and again, onto Stratford Road, grateful for the shade trees lining its edge. It was still very sunny, with patches of thick white clouds, and already sweat tickled his breastbone under his shirt. In the bag behind him on the banana seat, he carried extra pairs of underwear, shorts, and sneakers, a pair of jeans, an extra shirt, a lightweight poncho, his mess kit, tent, flashlight, compass, the pages from The Lore of Flight, the Cessna manual, and thirty-seven dollars in savings. He was going to steal Mr. Carver’s Cessna 152 and fly it to East Hampton, Long Island.

He followed Stratford Road in a great lazy curve to the north around runway 29 and flew along the straightaway between Avco and the fenced-in hangars and planes on his left. Avco’s outbuildings and parking lots stretched for blocks as an irregular series of flat ugly buildings and pavement, which finally gave way to the shade of the heavy oaks and hemlocks of Ferry Boulevard, the air cooling him as it rushed past. He swooped by the entrance to the Shakespeare Theatre no longer noting landmarks, maintaining his speed despite the pressure that fatigue was building on his thigh muscles; he was on the final leg, Route 110, before he finally realized it. The road was a narrow blacktop twisting along the Housatonic, with the river on one side and a state park, a green hedge of young trees and aggressive understory, on the other. As he swept around curves he caught glimpses of the arched Merritt Parkway bridge spanning the river, cluttered and glittering in the sun, with Sikorsky Aircraft, A Division of United Technologies, right behind it.

At the outer guardhouse, a security officer was gazing into the middle distance and seemed not to see or care that he went by. He cruised down the long ramp to the visitors’ parking area, finally resting, his feet light on the pedals. At the front doors he got off, took a breath, let down his kickstand, and went inside, soaked with sweat.

A uniformed guard waited opposite the door at a desk. He smiled. “Well. Just swim over?” he said.

Biddy swallowed, trying to subdue his panting and chilled by the air conditioner. “I’m Biddy Siebert,” he said. “Mr. Siebert’s son. Could I see my father a minute?”

The guard made a mock serious face. “I think we could arrange that,” he said. He punched three buttons on the phone before him. “Who’s this? Shirley?” he said suddenly. “Shirley, is Walt Siebert in? Where is he?”

He was at lunch, Biddy knew. He ate lunch early, almost always in the cafeteria.

The guard hung up. “Out of luck, guy. She says he’s at lunch.”

“I think I know where he might be,” Biddy said. “I could go get him.”

“I can’t let you wander around alone, sport. You’re welcome to wait, though. If it’s an emergency maybe we can page him.”

Biddy assured him it was no emergency.

“Well, here, I can give you your security badge while you’re waiting.” He held out a yellow-and-white plastic card, with a clip on the end of it, that read GUEST — SIKORSKY AIRCRAFT. Biddy hung it from the neck of his T-shirt.

“And you can fill out this visitor’s card, too.”

He filled in the information hurriedly. Under “Reason for Visit” he wrote “Social,” and sat back in the chair, fidgeting, while the guard returned to the skimpy paperwork in front of him. The lobby was very plain: a few chairs, a table with some worn magazines, a plant in the corner. Spaced along the room evenly were framed 8″ x 10″ photographs of Sikorsky helicopters in action, carrying logs over fir forests, recovering astronauts, ferrying infantry and jeeps. In one a man remarkably like his father stepped from a smallish corporate S-76 with elegant red and black stripes running its length.

Biddy tapped his foot and wiped his head with his hands. Every so often men in short-sleeved shirts with jackets over their arms came by in groups of twos or threes, laughing and heading to lunch. He stood and wandered to the interior door to the plant.

“Oh, there he is,” he said, and opened it. “I see him,” and he glanced back and saw the guard’s startled face before slipping through. He turned an immediate corner, rushed up the stairs lightly on the balls of his feet to keep the noise down, and followed the hallway to Marketing, opening the door to find himself face to face with a woman, blonde and pretty, her hair pulled away from her face.

“What’re you looking for, honey?” she said. “Lose your way?”

“No, my father’s right over here,” he said, maneuvering past and gesturing down the corridor vaguely. He didn’t look back. The rooms to his left were all part of one great room, which had been divided into smaller units by high beige partitions, and he passed offices on his right, his eyes skimming the nameplates on the doors. He turned in to the fifth office and knocked as he entered.

“Mr. Carver?” he said.

Carver glanced up from his desk, surprised. “Biddy. How are you. What’s up?”

“Nothing much,” he said, trying not to rush. “Just visiting my father.” He held his breath. “He asked me to ask you if he could borrow your keys to the IFA file. He can’t find his or something.”

“What the hell is the IFA file?” he said. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Biddy hesitated. “I don’t know either, but he said you had them. He said they were the same key as something else.”

Carver made a disgusted noise, pulled out his key ring, and began to search through it. Biddy froze.

“Here, take the whole thing,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. So much stuff comes and goes around here — And tell your father not to hang on to them all day. I’m going to lunch soon and my car keys are on there.”

Biddy thanked him and backed swiftly out the door, mentioning as well that it was nice to see him again, and swept back down the corridor and through the Marketing door, fearing the return of the blonde woman. He rounded a corner and ran head on into his father.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he said. “Something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong.” Biddy smiled as though he’d just stepped in manure. “I just came to visit.”

“You just came to visit?”

“I rode over to Roosevelt Forest. I was right nearby.”

His father took his arm. “Well, wait. Where are you going now?”

“I’m gonna go back, I guess.”

“Well, what happened to your visit? How’d you get in here, anyway? Where’d you get the tag?”

He leaned against the staircase railing. He knew he couldn’t rush now, but he also knew Carver wouldn’t stay in his office forever. “The guard gave it to me. And I thought I saw you, so I came to look.”

“And now you’re going.”

“I have to. I left Teddy in the forest.”

“Nice visit.”

“Bye.”

But his father said he’d come down with him. At the lobby the guard looked visibly relieved. “Jesus, son, don’t do that to me again,” he said.

“I won’t,” Biddy said. “Sorry.”

His father held the outside door for him. “Okay, good luck. What’s all that shit on the bike?”

Biddy put a hand over it. “Gloves and stuff. We may throw the ball around.” He got on the bike and started to pedal away.

“Whoa, whoa,” his father said. Biddy stopped and looked back over his shoulder, fighting the urge to make a break for it.

“You get your report card today?”

He nodded.

“Was it up to your expectations?”

He nodded again.

“All right,” his father said. “We’ll see it when I get home. Go ahead, I won’t keep you.”

Biddy was off like a shot, cresting the hill onto Route 110 with an excess of momentum and bearing down and pedaling with rhythmic fury back the way he’d come.

His idea had been buttressed month after month with information from The Lore of Flight, the Cessna manual, from the public library, from conversations with Carver, from hours spent hanging around the airport, and from the Rand McNally road map of Long Island. The working out of its details and problems had completely taken the place and function of dice baseball, growing in intensity as it became less and less of a game, as his other alternatives fell away and lost their power or potential. Whether it was cause or effect of the death of his Oriole and Viking visions, he didn’t know. He had watched Mr. Carver take off. He had discussed the process with him. He had absorbed the manual. He had never successfully driven a car before, but was convinced he could fly the plane. He could take off, he could maintain level flight, and he was willing to bet — although it was the chanciest part by far — that he could land as well. The Cessna 152 was, as both The Lore of Flight and the Cessna manual had assured him, an exceedingly simple aircraft, a trainer of sorts, a beginner’s machine. He’d gone over and over the procedures in his head night after night, imagining and remembering the plane’s responses, the pictures in his head allowing flights from his desk chair. He’d taken all questions to Mr. Carver or the library and had been satisfied with the answers.

The weather was ideal and he’d be flying VFR, navigating visually, so his radio contact with the tower would be minimal and voice identification impossible. He could bluff his way onto the runway with only the few phrases Carver had used. His bike with the front wheel turned around would fit in the front passenger’s seat. According to the specifications in the Cessna manual, there was room. He’d checked his bike with a tape measure.

He was already on Ferry Boulevard, sweeping from shadow to sun to shadow as he flew past the widely spaced trees. He wasn’t sure how much time he had or when the alarm would be sounded. And he wasn’t sure — he forced the thought from his mind as he pedaled, ducking and leaning forward and pumping furiously — if he could even go through with it, sitting in the cockpit with the engine roaring and the runway stretching flat and terrifying before him.

He would fly to East Hampton. If all went as expected, there would be no notice taken of his flight until too late, nothing considered unusual. Once in the air he would simply cross the Sound and Long Island and bear east along its southern coast. If he appeared from the south, with the wind the usual prevailing westerly, they would tell him to land on runway 28, at the end of which was the dirt path to the road he had glimpsed on his earlier trip. Rand McNally had identified it as Wainscott Road, which after 1.3 miles turned into the East Hampton Turnpike, which passed through Sag Harbor going north 3.3 miles later. He would set the plane down, run the entire length of tarmac to the tree line, engage the parking brake, leave the engine running, and disembark with his bike on the side away from the Hamptons’ service building. There was no tower there and he would not be visible behind the fuselage. He’d take the bike and bag and leave the plane where it was, unharmed, a decoy, a ghost ship. He’d ride to Sag Harbor and then North Haven, take the ferry to Shelter Island, ride to the docks along Ram Island Drive, wait until dark, and take one of the rowboats he had seen so casually tethered to Long Beach Point across less than a mile of bay. At night it would be north-northwest on the compass. It was over a mile long and would be hard to miss. He’s never rowed a boat before for any distance; but, then, he’d never flown a plane before, either, he’d reasoned when that part of the plan had been taking shape. From there he’d go to Plum Island, northeast, and from there if possible due east across another mile or so of Sound — lonely, wild water — to Great Gull Island, devoid of any civilizing symbols and marks on the Rand McNally map and distant and alone out beyond the jaws of eastern Long Island’s north and south peninsulas.

Avco slipped by hardly noticed, as did the airport fence, sunlight beading along its links in rapid succession, and just past stacks of steel drums and an Army trainer he turned onto the access road, bumping over the patched and broken concrete. The small brick Bridgeport Flight Service sat at the terminus of the dead end, and halfway down was the melancholy Windsock Restaurant, its windows broken, seemingly abandoned. He swung a sharp right opposite it through the opening in the interior fence to the hangar area. He slowed as the space opened in front of him.

Planes of all shapes and colors stood tethered and silent before him, set at random angles in a wide arc. From their wing struts and tails, ropes stretched to metal bars sunk in concrete. He eased to a halt straddling the bike, sweat running into the corners of his eyes. There was no sound, no movement. At this time of day he knew there might be only two or three men in the area, and they would almost certainly be seeking refuge in the manager’s air-conditioned office. He slipped the key ring from his pocket and located the Cessna keys, the firm’s name embossed in raised letters on the bow of the key. Then he untied the bag and pulled out the manual and checklist, no bigger together than the monthly missalette at church, retied the bag, and pedaled silently through the grove of struts and wings, quickly weaving his way to the blue-and-white Cessna parked with its tail to him and its nose to the runway. He glided up to its fuselage as if on rails, and was off the bike and fitting the key to the passenger door in seconds.

The handlebars caught and grabbed on the metal skin of the fuselage, balking at the smallish cavity of the door, but he angled them around, hefting the bicycle frame waist-high. The delay was agonizing. Finally it slid in and lay reasonably stable, and he shut the door and moved quickly to the tail. He had the preflight checklist memorized so completely he could visualize the pages in his head. He had them visualized so well — he knew them so well — that he could take shortcuts, save time. He unhooked the rudder gust lock, a metal band around the tail resembling a giant bobby pin, by impatiently spinning the wing nut off that held it together, and set it on the pavement behind him. He disconnected the tail tie-down, unlooping the knots, his fingers fumbling next to the smooth aluminum underside of the tail. He checked the control surfaces for freedom of movement and disconnected the wing tie-downs, flipping the freed ropes from the struts. He gave the tires a shove and hurriedly rolled a nearby stepladder up to the wings to check the fuel quantity visually, then rolled it away. He pulled the canvas cover from the Pitot tube: with the cover on, there would be no ram air input, and with no ram air input, his airspeed indicator and altimeter would not function. The cover still in his hand, he unlocked the other door and clambered aboard, flooded with relief to be finally off the tarmac, but still moving quickly, his hands shaking, pulling out the manual and double-checking the exterior checklist. He’d skipped some checks — oil, landing lights, air filter — gambling somewhat but feeling as though he were pressing his luck to the limit with every moment he stayed outside the plane. From his seat the instrument panel spread before him precisely as expected, the flight controls stabbing upward in a pair of elegant bull’s horns. It was a three-dimensional model of the manual’s full-page black-and-white photograph. That’s all, he told himself. Yet he still shook, and his hand jittered across the plastic surface of the flight control when he reached out to touch it, his sweat leaving a momentary mist of a trail.

Keep moving, he thought. Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, or you’ll never do it. His hands flew.

1. A. Remove control wheel lock.

B. Check ignition switch OFF.

C. Turn on master switch and check fuel quantity indicator; turn master off.

D. Fuel selector valve on BOTH.

E. Check door security; lock with key if children are to occupy any seats.

He gazed through the windshield, the sun glaring it in streaks. It all seemed too easy. He fought the terrifying feeling that he had forgotten or bungled a single fatal detail. He folded the manual open to page 1–4 and propped it up on the seat beside him.

STARTING THE ENGINE

1. Mixture — rich.

2. Carburetor heat — cold.

3. Primer — two to six strokes as required.

The mixture knob was at the right center of the console, a white plastic knob a bit bigger than a thimble. He turned the indicator to “Rich.” The carburetor heat control was its symmetric twin. The primer was on the lower left of the panel just above his left knee. He slipped two fingers behind it and pulled, half expecting it not to give. It did. He pumped it in and out twice more, priming the engine with fuel.

4. Throttle — Open 1/8″.

It was right where his diagram had placed it. He crept it out an eighth of an inch.

5. Master switch on.

6. Propeller area — Clear.

It had better be, he thought, not even looking up.

He swallowed. Outside the windshield the runway stretched silent under the sun, oblivious. He felt cold. He threaded the brother of the door key into the ignition — number 7 on the checklist — and turned it firmly, and the engine caught, coughing, terrifying him, the noise an explosion in a church, and gained power and volume with a steady surge. Events seemed to accelerate and he wanted to get off the runway and into the air as soon as possible, fearing last-minute police cars or security guards, remembering his sail collapsing in the storm so many months ago, unable completely to believe that he wasn’t overlooking something, some fundamental, foolish detail. Stay with the checklist, he told himself. Move fast. Don’t fool around. Shit or get off the pot.

TAXIING

When taxiing, it is important that speed and use of brakes be held to a minimum and that all controls be utilized (see Taxiing diagram, figure 2–4) to maintain directional control and balance.

The wind sock fluttered orange and fragile in the distance, indicating the wind direction and his next move, as outlined by figure 2–4: right-wing aileron slightly up, elevator neutral. He eased his toe off the brake, the arches of his feet still firm in the rudder stirrups, and opened the throttle. The plane began to roll.

He experienced at first that moment of sheer terror when he felt completely inadequate to the task of controlling the vibrating, deafening machine he was setting into motion, but it responded, he began to see, to the gentlest deflections of the flight controls. He wobbled steadily forward, jerking a bit from too much brake, learning by trial and error as he rumbled along how to guide the twelve-hundred-pound plane smoothly. He braked at the turn onto the access road that fed the runway.

The tower stood squat and imperturbable in the distance, an occasional bird crossing behind it. He switched on the receiver, lifted the microphone from its hook, closed his eyes, and pressed the button. He’d already be on the tower frequency.

“Tower, this is 9–0 Zulu,” he said. “Request clearance for taxi.”

He released the button and the cockpit filled with static; He waited and there was no answer. His ears were hot and his fingers slippery on the black plastic.

“Roger, Zulu,” crackled a voice. “Take off runway 24.”

He rehung the microphone and wiped his forehead. There was no alarm, no sudden activity, no yellow jeep. The sun beat down on the pavement. A Funny Bones wrapper, identifiable at forty feet, blew across the tarmac.

He turned left, following the painted yellow lines; the sun slipped behind him, and the shadows of his wings crossed the pavement before the plane like cool ripples. Runway 24 was the closest to him, the longest, and stretched to the south, which meant he’d take off over the marshes and Burma Road and be above the Sound in seconds. He rolled cautiously to the very end of the runway, the white “2” and “4” sweeping away from him majestically, and set the parking brake. His finger skimmed the checklist columns of the manual. He checked the flight controls, the fuel-selector valve, elevator trim, suction gauge, magnetos, and carburetor heat. He ran the engine up to 1700 rpm and past it, up to full throttle, or as near as he dared go—2100 rpm — and back down. He rechecked the locks on the doors. He buckled his seat belt. He was ready to go.

“Tower, this is 9–0 Zulu asking takeoff clearance,” he said, the microphone brushing his lips. His gums felt dry.

Roger Zulu, 24 cleared for takeoff.” The answer was prompt, listless: just another day at the airport.

He released the parking brake and edged onto the runway, pivoting to his right before braking to a halt with the tarmac vast and endless before him, rushing straight-edged off to a single point over his cowling. He nudged the wing-flap switch until the indicator read 10 degrees up. His feet firm on the brakes, he opened the throttle fully.

The takeoff is a simple procedure: lining the aircraft into the wind, the pilot gives full throttle and releases the wheel brakes. As the aircraft accelerates, airflow over the wings begins to generate lift. When the lift nearly equals the weight, the pilot eases back the control column.

With his toe off the brake, yet hovering near, he felt the surge and rush of the Cessna down the tarmac even as the flat repetition of images in his peripheral vision seemed to indicate little or no movement, and he remembered to keep the nose of the plane on the horizon as it bumped and shook over the cowling, and he stayed straight on, keeping the centerline centered in front of him, the pavement blurring by, and he felt the wings trying to leave the ground and he was up, prematurely, having waited too long on the control column, and he bounced, hard, frightening himself, but continued to sweep forward and this time pulled the control surface back smoothly and firmly, having the impression from the corner of his eye of the tower and parking lot to his right as colored streaks, and the plane swept off the ground, the left wing dipping a bit with runway to spare, the marshes appearing below, when he dared to look to his left, as yellow and soft as a wheat field with the black shadow of the plane speeding across them. He whooped and cheered, pounding the dashboard, his laughter mixing with the noise of the engine.

He flashed low across the wetlands, the clouds above and land below recalling to him a fleeting memory of the thermocline corridor at the beach, and he continued to climb as he passed over the strip of sand and road that was Long Beach, noting a running child, the dot of a beach ball, a cyclist at rest with one foot on the ground. Then the beach was behind him and the Sound ahead, blue and choppy. The triangular rainbow of a catamaran sail slipped by. And ever more to his left, away from him, was Port Jefferson, his first navigational objective.

In flight the pilot will also want to turn. This is not accomplished by merely turning the rudder as is the case with a ship, but by a combination of aileron, rudder, and elevator movement and an adjustment of engine power.

Trying to remember everything at once and apprehensive, he turned the flight controls, pulling them back slightly as he did and easing out the throttle. The horizon reeled slowly in front of him, the twin stacks of the heavy industry in Port Jefferson harbor centering themselves over his cowling, and he applied opposite rudder and leveled out, elated. He was flying, two thousand feet off the ground without the benefit of a lesson.

Small boats appeared and disappeared below, flecked across the dark water. He allowed himself only the briefest glimpses, concentrating on the altimeter. In minutes he seemed to be coming up on the harbor at Port Jefferson, a small spit of land rising from his left to a steep bluff. Hundreds of boats were sheltered in its lee like orderly flotsam. There was a long knife edge of breakwater and then the darker blue of the channel and a freighter of some sort, maroon and black with its rust visible even from his height. He passed over the town as it climbed the hills from the harbor as if in an attempt to meet him, and he began to have the vague impression of trees and roads below, his eyes fixed on the compass and altimeter. The engine roared reassuringly and he made constant minute adjustments, concentrating. The cockpit hung pendulum-like beneath the great wings and the sun swept in the canopy and glittered on the fuselage. Ahead of him, rising like a sheer wall to an awesome height, was a snow-white anvil-shaped cloud filling his field of vision as he hurtled into it, having kept his eyes too long on the instruments. The sun disappeared and he was in a world of gray, all sensation of movement gone and the engine racketing abstractly in the half gloom. He fought panic and kept his eyes on the altimeter as it dipped and rose, thinking, Maybe it will stop, it’s got to stop somewhere, and as it continued his fear mounted and he was no longer sure of his compass headings. He had to try something else and he had to trust his memory and ability.

EMERGENCY PROCEDURES: Disorientation in Clouds.

Executing a 180° turn in clouds.

Upon entering the clouds an immediate plan should be made to turn back as follows:

He located the clock and put his finger physically on the glass over the minute hand, trying to calm himself. When the sweep second hand indicated the nearest half minute, he banked to the left, holding the turn coordinator — a small white symbolic airplane wing on a black field — opposite the lower left index mark, waiting, waiting, for the second hand to complete its revolution. When it did, he leveled off, checking the compass heading to insure it was the opposite of the previous one and climbing to restore altitude. He could hear himself breathing, panting like a dog. Outside the cockpit everything was still softly opaque. He fought the urge to dive or climb. The gray remained, fog or wool, and his fear grew and he was ready to call on God when the gray swept away and sunlight flooded him, glancing blindingly off the cowling. He whooped even as he blinked and averted his eyes.

After a few moments he swung the plane around to the left again, returning to the cloud but letting the altimeter slip until it read 2000 and he was passing underneath the flat white ceiling, the light losing some of its warmth, bumps and irregularities appearing on the underside and rushing past. He passed a highway, ribboned with moving cars. A shopping center like an arrangement of low boxes. Clusters of towns. More highways. He found himself out from under the cloud, in the sun again, with the shore and the Atlantic uneven strips on the horizon. Towns, trees, roads, fields. Farmland. Low fences with animals (cows?) spotting the land. A bridge across a narrow bay. Marshes and beach houses. The white lines of sand and breakers and he was back over ocean again, banking up and around with blue sky and white clouds spinning across the windshield. When he leveled out, the compass on the dash was reading E-NE and he was following the long thin strip of land to his left between a large bay and the Atlantic, the land a joyous tan in the sun and a directional indicator to East Hampton Airport.

He seemed to be safely south of the clouds and flew level, free and happy. He laughed aloud again in delight, bobbing his wings a bit to echo his feelings.

The radio crackled, harsh and startling. “Aircraft 9–0 Zulu, are you on frequency?”

He stared silently out the window, everything falling apart in front of him.

“Aircraft 9–0 Zulu repeat are you on frequency?”

The tone recalled Sister Theresa seeing him on the roof, his father hearing of the detention. Broken windows, ruined dress pants, late arrivals, and poor report cards. They knew the plane was missing, they knew he had it and they knew it was still in the air.

He sat immobilized by the shock of his failure. It had been crucial that he land undetected, to allow for his unnoticed disappearance on the bicycle, but he couldn’t land undetected anywhere now with the designation he was sporting on the side of his fuselage. His plan had been destroyed, that quickly, that easily. He wiped his eyes furiously. He had to think. It couldn’t be all over after everything he’d been through. Below him breakers ran a jagged white track along the shore, curving and growing in distant foamy lines. He was passing a very large airport to his left, and the land below opened into a great irregular bay closed to the sea by a long spit crested with dunes. If it was Shinnecock Bay, as he guessed it was from the map, Southampton was directly east, and he would be approaching East Hampton Airport in minutes.

He couldn’t land there, he thought. He couldn’t just quit. But where else could he go? What other airport could he find from the air without navigational aids? Montauk had an airport, he knew, but that was as good as giving up: they’d be waiting there as well, and it was exposed and isolated, with nowhere to go once he landed.

“Biddy. Biddy, this is your father. What the good Christ do you think you’re doing?”

He stared at the radio, stunned. The engine’s roar changed in pitch to signal he’d let the nose drop, and he corrected it.

“Biddy, tell us where you are.” His father sounded as though the lifeboats were sinking or he was hanging from a cliff. On the radar screen his blip would be indistinguishable from any others. “Biddy, you got up all right but how are you going to get down? Biddy! Let them talk you down!” His father’s last cry shook him, and he reached for the microphone. The crackling continued.

“Aircraft 9–0 Zulu, are you on frequency? Aircraft 9–0 Zulu, are you on frequency? Acknowledge.”

The coast was flowing steadily under the cowling as the Cessna’s nose ate up space and distance. There was literally nowhere to go. He began to cry, from frustration and tension. I could go right to Great Gull Island, he thought. I could go right to it and land in the water.

But he recognized the absurdity of the idea: he’d destroy the plane, kill himself. Or hurt himself and drown. And how could that possibly go undetected?

The voice on the radio asked again if he was on frequency. His father’s voice broke in. “Biddy,” he said. “Please.”

The blue sky hung unbroken before him. The extent to which he’d hurt people had been reflected in his father’s final cry, and it had been much more than he had guessed. Every action he was taking was connected to others and hurting in ever-widening circles and ways and there was no longer any hope of preserving the illusion of his actions enjoying a total independence in the world, of his escape taking place in a vacuum. Was any of this going to make him, or anyone else, or anything about his life; any better?

East Hampton Airport rolled into sight over the drum of the horizon. He lifted the microphone and pushed the “Send” button. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’ll be right down.” He lowered it to his lap at the answering gabble of voices and shut off the receiver. He turned the frequency to 132.25 for East Hampton. He glanced into the distance in the northeast, trying for a glimpse, at least a glimpse, after having come this far, of the north fork and Plum or Great Gull Island in the haze. But it all remained indistinct and imprecise, however beautiful. He switched the receiver back on and raised the microphone.

“East Hampton, this is 9–0 Zulu,” he said. His back hurt and his head ached. “What’s your active runway?”

“Ah, Roger, Zulu, we have traffic taking off and coming in on 28.” There was a pause. “Ah, 9–0 Zulu, do you want to be talked down? Acknowledge.”

He pressed to answer, the radio silence hissing expectantly. “No,” he said. “No, thank you.” He switched off the receiver.

He was approaching from the southeast. There were no clouds over the airport, and no traffic he could make out. A far-off V of birds stroked across the sky toward the land.

Below him houses and gray roads rolled by, breaking the irregular green of the trees: he was away from the coast. The airport grew larger, the three runways a gray triangle pointed at him, the service area as vivid against the dark green pines as he remembered. Far below he could make out tiny multicolored ovals drifting up toward him — balloons, he realized with a start, their threadlike strings undulating behind. The sun caught on a random car windshield, sparkling like a diamond.

He pushed left rudder hard and went into a bank, thrusting the control column forward and the nose down as he did. The sky went over the top of the canopy and the ground centered itself on the windshield and began to climb slowly to meet him. The altimeter was dropping, the needle retreating from 3 past four calibrated notches to 2 and still descending when he checked the airspeed indicator, just leaving the green arc of normal operating range at 130 mph and making its way through the yellow, labeled CAUTION. He eased back on the throttle, keeping the indicator away from the red line, and the triangle of runway shook gently and grew in size in his windshield, tilting from the level as his wings did, and when he felt he couldn’t go any lower he began to pull up, the ground rushing along under him like a film out of control, vague shapes and colors streaking by, blurring and disappearing in an instant. Tree after tree swept past and roads and a hill and the airport suddenly loomed in front of him from out of the trees like someone rising from tall grass, the central buildings rushing at him, and he was too low too low the wheels his belly would hit surely and he was over, skimming the billowing carpet of treetops again, the altimeter creeping higher as he pulled up and around.

Climbing, he turned on the receiver. There was a loud burst of static. “Uh, 9–0 Zulu, have you lost your mind? Acknowledge.”

His climb and bank were carrying his nose around to the sun, which flooded white and blinding across the canopy. He leveled out east of the airport, the plane sideslipping a bit as he did, and came around again, on line with the runway. He eased the nose up and the throttle forward and his airspeed began to drop.

He lifted the microphone from his lap. “This is 9–0 Zulu. Can I have landing clearance?” he said.

A voice crackled back. “Jesus Christ, by all means, Zulu.”

He was already on his approach. He extended his flaps. A utility right-of-way flashed by beneath him, the power lines and treetops closer than he expected.

“Watch your airspeed, Zulu,” the radio said. Things seemed to slow. Trees drifted by. The curve of a road. A field with a white dog outlined against tall weeds.

“Keep your nose up, Zulu. Keep it on the horizon. Stay level. Watch your airspeed.” He did. It read 90. Everything was spinning by him. He was so low he saw only trees and then they stopped and it was flat and wide before him, gray streaked with black, and the white number 28 glided up to meet him and he could hear the radio as if it were in someone else’s cockpit—“Ease back! Ease back!”—and, keeping the top of his cowling in line with the horizon, easing the nose still farther back, cutting the power still more, he caught one last glimpse of the airspeed indicator, vaguely remembering it as too high, before he hit.

He bounced, jerking forward and upward in the seat as if catapulted, his shoulder harness straining against him, the wings outside the cockpit swaying against the level ground flashing past. And he lifted the nose still more and cut the throttle almost to nothing, and the plane seemed to hesitate in the air before dropping again, like a sofa, to the runway, the concussion nearly shaking his hands from the wheel but leaving him on the tarmac, rolling instead of flying, with quite a distance of safety margin still to go. He rolled and rolled and began to slow and his toes found the brakes again, a little too soon, but again, learning quickly, and he taxied to the very edge of the runway and bumped off onto the access area, turning until trees and trunks filled his vision and the plane rolled to a stop. He reached forward to switch the engine off and the propellers began to materialize, blurs cutting a half circle in front of him before hacking and chopping to a halt, gleaming and smooth. He wasn’t used to the silence, and small noises seemed out of proportion, welcome.

Across the long bisection of runways to his right he could make out a lone police car, a bar of red-and-blue lights on its roof, approaching on the access road from the parking area, its tires audible on the gravel. There had been no foam on the runway, no battery of rescue vehicles, no SWAT team. And no crash. There was just a lone police car, in no discernible hurry. As it grew closer, he unbuckled his harness, anxious to get the bike and the bag out of the cargo area himself. He wanted no help at this point. He’d come this far, he had a way to go, and he wanted to be ready by the time they arrived.