Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

Hot Air Balloon Ride for One

People are always asking her if she’s the F. O. Betts. She’s not.

“Then who am I talking to?” The man on the other end of the phone line asks her this.

She shouldn’t have answered the phone. She doesn’t know why she did. She could have locked the doors and been gone an hour ago. Her boyfriend is probably waiting for her downtown with an apple martini and a basket of garlic bread.

“I’m the other F.O.,” she says. “His daughter. Fiona Orlean. My father was the real F.O.” The F was for Frank. The O was for Oliver. He taught French and Latin at the high school for twelve years, piloting trips on the side for extra cash before starting the F. O. Betts Hot Air Balloon Company. Unfortunately he was also a sucker for online poker. Fiona officially took over the business five years ago when they discovered the extent of his debts.

“Is it safe?” the man on the phone asks. “Does it sway a lot?”

“I’ve been up a thousand times and not one accident,” she says. “And no, it doesn’t really sway.”

The man says he wants to book a trip for one, please.

“For one?”

“Yes, for one.”

“Usually we send larger groups up. Seven. Eight. Twelve. It’ll cost extra for just one person,” she says.

“I’ve got money.”

“That makes one of us.”

“How much for a solo trip tomorrow morning?” he asks.

She names an exorbitant sum, more than she’d usually charge, but he says okay, and she gives him the exact address where they can meet. The next morning, there they are, together in a hazy field at dawn, her tennis shoes and jean shorts wet from the tall grass and morning dew, the hulking balloon taking shape behind her. The passenger watches from a safe distance with his arms crossed. He doesn’t like the look of the basket. He asks if he should be hooked in somehow.

“To what?”

He points at the red metal crossbar that keeps the propane tanks in place.

“You’ll be fine,” she says. “Really.”

When they’re ready to go, she motions for him, but first he wants to get something out of his car. He digs around in the backseat and produces a boom box and a small black metal cage. Inside the cage is a green-and-yellow bird.

“What’s this about?” she asks.

“This is Magnificent,” he says. “The parakeet. I thought she might enjoy the ride.”

“We don’t usually do this sort of thing,” she says, though in truth she has seen and permitted much stranger. She makes good money off the eccentrics. This one time a couple wanted to go up naked and Fiona tried to be funny by asking if she needed to go up naked too, but the couple didn’t laugh. They said, sure, if she wanted to, but Fiona stayed clothed and did her best not to look. This other time Fiona let a woman take up her easel and paints and Fiona had expected the woman to produce a beautiful landscape painting but when she snuck a glance at the work-inprogress, in fact it was a bowl of cherries. The high mountain air, the woman explained when Fiona inquired, was full of good ions and encouraged creativity.

And so, looking at the parakeet, Fiona sees a new business opportunity. The bird will cost extra. Nothing personal, she says. It’s an issue of liability, of insurance.

“That’s fine.” He doesn’t even ask how much. He hands her the cage and then the boom box, and then he swings his long legs up and over the lip of the basket even though there’s a door that can open. He’s in jeans, and his shirtsleeves are rolled up tight around the elbows. He could be an accountant. Small wire glasses hover at the end of his thin, ruddy nose.

When she hits the blast valve, flames and exhaust shoot up the throat of the balloon, and he grips the edge of the basket with both hands. The balloon is a yellow one with blue horizontal stripes that Fiona bought almost five years ago from a company in South Dakota. She has two other balloons but all of them should probably be replaced soon.

Tom is her man on the ground today, her chaser. He has been around since her father ran the company. She gives him the signal, and he lets them loose. The balloon rises up fast into the warm morning air. Tom waves goodbye with a gloved hand. As the chaser, he will follow in the truck. The flame whooshes loudly overhead.

Fiona loves this part, the initial breakaway from the earth, from its interstates and box stores, from its pop songs and headlines with question marks in them, from jorts and jeggings and every other commercial portmanteau. All of it falls away, and you are suspended, divided from it by — well, not much. A little bit of wicker.

According to her mother, Fiona was conceived up here, two thousand feet above the mountains. Counting nine months backward from October would place this momentous event — momentous for her, anyway — in January. She imagines snow on the mountains, her parents’ pink hands in gloves, boots on their feet. She imagines quilts on the bottom of the basket, their breath visible in the crisp and chilly air as they come together. The story might not be true. It doesn’t matter. Fiona likes it. Whenever she asks her father about it, he says he doesn’t remember but he says it with a smile that suggests he remembers every single detail and is just not willing to share. Usually her mother only brings it up when Fiona isn’t listening. When she acts far away. When she’s got a head full of hot air.

Her passenger doesn’t seem to be enjoying the view. He’s down in a crouch on one knee talking to the parakeet.

“What are you telling it?”

“It’s a she,” he says. “And I’m asking how she likes it up here.”

He presses play on the boom box, and bouncy notes from a xylophone pop and clink in the air. Each tinkle dissipates a few feet away from the speakers. It sounds like music you hear during a massage. She can almost see the little desk waterfall, the massage table, the crisp white towel. Atmospheric music: a joke she probably heard her father tell on some trip.

The man sticks his pinkie finger through the flimsy bars of the cage and wriggles it near the bird. The basket creaks under him as he switches knees. He looks around uneasily, frozen for a moment, and then returns his attention to Magnificent. He whistles to the bird in a secret language.

Fiona is afraid to ask what they’re discussing, so she gives him the full F. O. Betts Hot Air Balloon treatment instead. Perhaps he would like his photograph taken in front of the beautiful panorama? Can he believe how pretty the mountains are from this height? Would he like to hear the history of this region? How about an explanation for that bowl-like depression up ahead? Scientists think that it’s a crater but she likes to pretend it’s a footprint. Maybe he’d appreciate a hot cup of coffee from the thermos? How about a ham biscuit? Did she mention that they also sell videos of the trip? That’s right, there’s a camera on the bottom of the basket. If he wants, he can buy the video when he gets back to the office and relive the adventure at home whenever he wants, again and again.

“No,” he says. “No, thank you.”

The balloon is fully over the mountains now. The sun crests the farthest ridge, its bright rays spilling across the dark green canopy in misty light.

“You should see this,” she says.

He steps toward her, peers over the edge. “What am I looking for exactly? I just see mountains.”

“Okay,” she says. “Never mind, then. It was the mountains.”

Magnificent hops across her wooden dowel with twiggy feet. The newspaper at the bottom of the cage is crusty with dry shit. Fiona will not let his attitude bother her. She can only do so much to make people happy. If floating a thousand feet over one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world doesn’t give him a thrill, then what will? She pours herself a cup of coffee and does what she always does when the passengers can’t seem to appreciate the experience: pretend to be alone.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just that, this trip really isn’t for me.”

“It’s for the bird?”

“No, for someone who couldn’t be here. The bird was hers.”

“Ah,” Fiona says, and now understands completely. She gets this sometimes: the recently bereaved in search of perspective, in search of meaning, fulfilling some promise.

Directly below is Route 91, a two-lane highway that connects with the parkway. She points, thinking that large things made small might make him feel more powerful or important or significant, though it can have the opposite effect too, depending on your mood. You can feel detached too. The earth can appear all at once distant and vast, like all of it was made for something but not for you. You are not of it. You are separate. She thinks maybe that’s how angels feel: all this creation — this land, this vastness, this lushness, this wildness, this unfolding — all of it for a punier, less deserving collection of organisms. Not that Fiona is a higher form of organism. Not that she believes in angels. She doesn’t, or hasn’t since childhood. But sometimes aboveness and belowness are more easily expressed and understood using the older modes. We can now measure the distance to the sun, but all the computers in the world can’t tell you the weather next Tuesday with 100 percent accuracy, and why is that? What is it exactly that can’t be charted, modeled, known?

She is in the wrong mood this morning. The smallness is having the wrong effect on her. She should probably look up instead but doesn’t. The passenger peers over the edge of the basket, lips parted slightly. Together they watch a motorcycle scuttle like a cockroach down the highway. A truck slides like a slug. Her passenger now appears to be moved by the smallness, by the aboveness.

She fires off the propane again and the balloon lifts them higher. “You know,” she says, “I took a similar trip after my father died last year,” and then explains the shape his ashes took when they scattered in the breeze, the way they umbrellaed and then cascaded, the way they disappeared below, how wonderful and heartbreaking that felt, and as she is describing the moment to him, so rich with letting-go symbolism, she almost forgets that the story is completely and utterly false, that she has never scattered her father’s ashes because her father, F. O. Betts, is still very much alive.

Maybe it’s the lonely clack of the xylophone or maybe it’s guilt for charging this man so much money for his solo journey, but Fiona wants her passenger to be changed by his hot air balloon ride. She wants him to feel something, be transformed, even if it means pretending that she scattered her poor father over the side. The passenger removes his glasses, scrubs the lenses with the hem of his shirt.

In five minutes, she warns him, they will begin the descent. With the ascent comes the breakaway, and with the descent… it’s like stepping into a pair of heavy, muddy boots after hours of walking around barefoot and free.

She finishes her coffee and stows away the cup. When she turns around again, he has the birdcage off the floor of the basket. For a moment she wonders if he’s about to toss the whole thing overboard. He presses his lips to the bars and whistles again. Magnificent’s tiny square mirror pops loose and disappears somewhere around their feet. The bird is lunging and hopping madly. The man opens the cage door and sticks his hand inside. The bird leaps to a high back corner to avoid him, but he manages to grab hold of her. He brings her out. Magnificent looks uneasy out of the cage. The man kisses the back of her ruffled green head, and Fiona can guess what comes next.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks. “Can parakeets even live in the wild?”

He holds Magnificent over the edge of the basket and opens his hand to free the bird. It doesn’t explode from his grip the way Fiona expected it might. Instead it just rolls off the end of his fingers. They both move to the edge of the basket and watch it fall, watch it spin, both of them waiting for it to do what birds do. She wills it to flutter and to fight back.

“What happened?” he asks. “I lost sight of her. Which way did she go?”

She points east uncertainly. “I’m pretty sure that way.”

The man nods. “Good,” he says. “For a split second I got worried her wings were clipped. My daughter never mentioned it, but still. You sure you saw her fly?”

“I’m fairly certain,” Fiona says.

Thirty minutes later, the balloon comes to rest in a park west of town, and not long after that Tom arrives in the truck. They pack up the balloon and then give the passenger a lift back to his car.

“What about that video?” he asks. “Do you think it caught her flying away? I wouldn’t mind having a copy of that.”

“Let me check it.” She unhooks the small black box from the bottom of the basket and removes the camera. She pushes a button and taps its side. She holds it up to her ear. She pushes another button. Possibly she’s overperforming. The man watches with interest. She doesn’t know how to explain it, she says, but the machine malfunctioned. Maybe it has faulty wiring. Or maybe she forgot to press record. She can be that way sometimes: a head full of hot air.

“Shame,” he says, but writes her a big check anyway.

• • •

That night she visits her father, the real F.O., at his apartment, an out-of-the-way building on the north side of town. The view from his second-story balcony is of a Suds ’n Rinse. He makes spaghetti for them with sauce from a can and spins the noodles tight around his fork. He wants a full report on her mother and what’s-his-face, his perpetual name for the man Fiona’s mother has been seeing for eight years now, ever since the divorce. Her mother and what’s-his-face just got back from a trip to Disney World with what’s-his-face’s grandkids, Fiona tells him. What’s-his-face is now busy constructing a pond in his backyard with a black tarp and a garden hose. What’s-his-face knows the scientific names of all the frogs in the Southeast, and Fiona’s mother finds that just adorable.

“Okay,” her father says, “I get the picture.”

They’re rinsing dishes now. Between the bristles of the scrub brush Fiona sees remnants of scrambled egg. Her father coughs into his armpit and rubs his nose with the back side of his mottled hand.

“How’s it up there?” he asks, and nods up to the ceiling, his usual way of asking about the business — and of filling any awkward silence with words.

“It’s so-so.”

“What’s eating you?”

“The business is fine,” she says, and then tells him about her morning, about Magnificent, about how strange it was to watch a bird fall like that, to see it swallowed up by gravity. She leaves out the part about his ashes.

They move to the couch in the den. Her father offers her a peppermint candy from the green dish on the coffee table. He props his feet up, the bottoms of his athletic socks brown and threadbare.

“Here’s the thing,” he says. “Birds are dying every day. There are probably a billion birds in the United States at this very moment. Think about that. You’d think we’d see them drop dead more often. You’d think there’d be bird bodies all over. Where do they go?”

Fiona has never really considered it. She tries to imagine not just one bird falling but a thousand. Then, instead of birds, she imagines people — her mother, her father, the man with the parakeet — all of them twirling down, featherless, naked. She bites down into her candy.

“I only saw it happen once,” he says. “It was a bluebird, I think. Your mom and I were on our way somewhere. Dinner, maybe. It hit the pavement ahead of us. It must have fallen from a long way because it popped right open. It was a mess. Came down over my shoulder. I thought someone had thrown it at me, that it was a joke. I actually looked around to make sure it wasn’t.” He sucks on his peppermint and reaches for the remote. Their plan is to watch whatever movie is on cable, but Fiona can’t stay long. She’s supposed to stay over at her boyfriend’s place tonight. “But it was for real,” he says. “The bird really did fall right out of the sky. Your mom was nervous about it. You know how she can get. She said it was a bad omen.”

He flips through the channels, looks forward.

“What happened next?” Fiona asks, certain he’s withholding crucial details, that there’s more to say about this story.

“I don’t remember,” he says, distracted. “We walked around it, I guess.”