Onion Songs

THE HIJACKER

He thinks that the stewardess is pretty enough to be a high-fashion model. “You’re pretty enough to be a high-fashion model,” he tells her in a cheery voice. She smiles at him, although he knows she must think him a pathetic youth with his greasy hair and vaguely foreign accent—obviously she has heard this many times before—and her expression tells him everything. She’s incapable of secrecy. He almost asks her to go out with him after they land—a fleeting insanity—he has never, ever, asked a woman for a date before, though he is almost thirty, and this would not be the time to begin.

He spreads his overcoat wide to show her the twenty sticks of dynamite, the coiled wire, and timer strapped to his flat, Italian belly. She falls to her knees in submission and once again he tells her she might be a model, she needn’t be here at all—in the clutches of this mad man, this human bomb—she could be modeling expensive gowns at fifty dollars per hour, courted by actors, recognized by the most casual passer-by as a real live “cover girl.” She takes this proposition more seriously now, nodding her head stonily as he dances up and down the aisles of the plane, his dynamite jiggling lewdly.

He listens to the sound of his own voice. It always amazes him, so soft and gentle. Not the voice of one who might commit so desperate an act. But, he had failed his religion, he knew that. He hadn’t had it in him to become the priest. And perhaps his friends were right; perhaps he was homosexual? What would his mother think?

His body feels very, very heavy.

He had been followed—that much was obvious. Explosives had been wired to his automobile ignition, poison laced through his broccoli and mint tea. The saboteurs were men like his father, violent drinkers, hostile toward every good impulse in mankind. He sorely wished he could have made it to the priesthood.

He thinks back to the night before. He couldn’t sleep. He knew something awful was about to happen.

The captain begs and pleads with him, a nobody, the sickly Italian lad, although a son of hearty stock who might have become a prize fighter if this had only been the fifties, to sit down, let him turn the plane back before it’s too late. The young hijacker knows that the captain has been through many such hijackings, but now he is old, his hands shake, his wife has left him, or so the young hijacker imagines, his children hate him—in short, he has lost his nerve. The co-pilot, who despises this disgusting coward, surely must envy the Italian boy from the Bronx. He must realize that the hijacker now controls the entire plane; he controls the destinies of two hundred people. The handsome Italian boy smiles, and offers the co-pilot the position of Air Force general when they land.

He leans against an empty seat, closing his eyes and reliving momentarily the great exhilaration he felt upon breaking free of the ground, like an enormous balloon popping, as he escaped into thin air.

Perhaps he would land in Cuba. Perhaps the godless Communists would put him to death. They would bear down on him with tanks and flamethrowers, and he would be unable to move. His feet would be glued to the spot. He would weigh ten tons.

He had been a good boy. He didn’t use bad words and he didn’t laugh at dirty jokes. His only vice was sleepwalking.

He suddenly wonders why he didn’t bring his father’s old Luger pistol along with him. He could have used it on the hijacking; surely it was around the old home place somewhere?

He wouldn’t have been doing such an awful thing if he had become a priest. His mother would have been pleased; she believed in the Church. His little sisters and older brother would have been proud. Perhaps he wouldn’t have felt the need to drink so much.

The sweet, young Italian boy props his feet up in the cockpit. He’s sure the aged navigator is smiling at him, surely thinking the would-be priest might have been his own son. The captain is crying hysterically in the corner. The stewardess looks grim, but is stroking the Italian boy’s forehead, surely finding him enormously attractive. The co-pilot flies the plane, making exaggerated winks at the Italian hero. A better life awaits in Italy, the mother country, when they arrive. Money, fame, political power for the handsome Italian youth. Modeling jobs for the stewardess. It was so easy, the Italian boy thinks, and if they had refused to give up their silly airplane—silly to think of it now—he was going to commit suicide. The stewardess smiles as if she is reading his thoughts.

He had been a mouse while his father was alive; he had been worthless. But then his father died, and in this act of hijacking, this focusing of all his latent powers, he had taken charge of his life in the way that had been his father’s only virtue.

He had had difficulty walking; now he had regained his equilibrium.

His had been a futile rage; now it was released. He had become omnipotent, rising above all restrictions.

He had gambled with fate and won.

The handsome Italian boy from the Bronx gazes out of the window, down through the clouds, to his father stretched out naked and obese below. The old man groans and sputters in his sleep, and his useless sex organ seems to become increasingly wrinkled with each of his hesitant breaths. The Italian boy notices mountain lodges and recreation centers sprouting between the tough ridges of abdominal skin. He orders the plane’s baggage be dumped on the recumbent form, hoping to rattle the old man’s nerves.

The stewardess brings another tray of drinks as ordered. He downs them hastily.

The plane rips into the upper reaches of air, the Italian boy thinking how there is no turning back, ousted for good, the whole world down there, his father groaning beneath the weight of excreted baggage, and he, just a handsome Italian boy from the Bronx, free, free and on his way to Mother Italy.

But then he snaps out of his reverie, sure he will be caught. Some brave member of the crew, perhaps even the co-pilot, will daringly grab his wrists, forcing him to the ground, while the cunning stewardess disarms his vest of dynamite. Or perhaps he’ll land in Italy, only to be greeted by several divisions of the Italian army, their massive guns trained on him. In any case, it would be one more failure added to the many failures of his life. He would be transferred to a stateside hospital, put into a psychiatric unit, and when he got out he would have to try all over again.

He is amazed by the grayness of the plane’s inner walls. He runs from the cockpit and dashes back through the plane’s fuselage, but he finds no crew, no passengers, not even the cunning but beautiful stewardess. The odor of rotting flesh gags him. He looks out a window and sees the pale gray, outstretched arm of his father, simulating a wing. He can hear his father’s heartbeat, thundering behind fleshy walls where the plane engine should be.

Again he wakes from his sleepwalking, now realizing that his bomb has gone off while he dozed. Dark corpses sit rigidly in their seats. He recognizes a cluster of burnt forms as the captain and crew, another as a family grouping complete with two toddlers. He recognizes the dark form of the stewardess from her smile. Roughly three-fourths of the plane has been blown away. But still, he thinks, still he has succeeded. He holds out his transparent gray arms at shoulder height. He makes droning noises in his throat, staring forward, guiding his passengers into the new freedom of the deep blue skies.