The Big Time

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

TROY AND HIS FATHER sped down not the interstate that led to the Atlanta airport but a back road that took them to the DeKalb Peachtree Airport, a place his dad said was less than a half hour from Troy's home.

"How'd you do it?" Troy asked.

His father shifted the sunglasses on his face, then smoothed the slicked-back hair that held its shape even with the top down.

"Magic," his father said.

"Come on," Troy said, stuffing a knuckle into his yawn. "My mom let me miss Home Ec yesterday and that went into the Guinness Book of World Records. She doesn't let me miss a day of school for anything."

"Anything except Seth Cole, who happens to own the New York Jets," his father said as he spun the wheel. They turned in through an open chain-link gate and came to rest outside a white concrete terminal with an air traffic control tower sprouting from one corner like the turret of a castle.

"It had to be more than that," Troy said.

"I can't teach you all my tricks," his father said, grinning.

Two glass doors yawned open as they stepped inside the terminal, following a red carpet to the desk where a young woman asked for their names. She showed them to a doorway where a man in a blue jumpsuit waited with a golf cart. They climbed into the backseat and the cart lurched forward, dodging through a jungle of jet airplanes whose tight white skins gleamed in the sunlight. Troy had to blink to study their different designs and the barrel-shaped engines each one of them sported in pairs.

Once through the jungle, they emerged on the edge of the runway near a bigger plane, with an engine the size of his mom's VW bug. Its stairs were down. The pilot next to them stood checking a clipboard. He tipped his hat to Troy and his dad before following them up the stairs and into the airplane.

A man in a different kind of uniform greeted them politely and told them to let him know if there was anything they needed. Troy lost his breath when he smelled the leather and saw the gleaming brass and the swirling grain of the dark wood. The cabin looked like an elegant living room, and Troy didn't know what to do, even when his father flopped down into a plush leather seat and extended his feet.

"Where should I go?" he asked, directing his voice away from the attendant and trying not to sound like a fool.

"Anywhere you want," his father said, removing a laptop from his briefcase and booting it up.

"What about everyone else?" Troy asked, looking about at the empty room.

His father glanced around, then smiled. "Oh. There isn't anyone else, buddy. It's just us."

The sound of the door being pulled shut from the front proved his father was right. Troy sat down in the other big chair, facing forward like his dad. While his father's fingers jittered across the computer's keyboard, Troy studied the big screen on the wall in front of them. Various maps and charts took turns filling the screen like a slide show. The attendant hurried to finish fussing in the small kitchen area by the front and ducked out to say that he'd be with them in just a blink.

The plane turned fast, and the engines howled, thrusting them forward. Troy felt the wheels leave the earth. Up they shot, nearly straight, engines groaning under the strain so that Troy's stomach clenched with the fear of dropping from the sky like a brick.

Instead, they sailed ever higher until they began to level out. As they approached the Georgia mountains, the earth below lay spread out like a rumpled blanket. His father didn't even look up.

"You can get internet service?" Troy asked.

"Yup."

"You working?" Troy asked.

His father glanced up and said, "For you, I am."

"Doing what?" Troy asked.

"Whipping them up."

"Whipping who?"

"Them," his father said, waving his hand at the world below. "The teams, the media, the fans."

Troy tilted his head, and his father's hands rose up from the keyboard to gesture as he spoke.

"Remember that hockey player who broke his neck, and they thought he'd never walk again but he did?" his father asked.

"The one from the Blackhawks?"

"Right, him," his father said. "I sold the movie rights to that story. Got him half a million dollars."

"I think I saw that movie on TV," Troy said.

His father's eyes gleamed. "The day after he took his first step, I had ten TV cameras at the hospital and twenty print reporters. After that I started whipping up the producers and the studios. I got five times what that story would have been worth if I'd just put it out there. You can't just put things out there; you have to whip them up. You make up a number and say you already got an offer from some big name. Then the rest get scared they're going to miss something. They get hungry. They stop thinking with their heads, and they let their stomachs take over. They drive the price up into the stars. That's when I ink the deal."

"Is that," Troy said, hesitating, "honest?"

His father shrugged, grinned, and said, "I don't know. That's being an agent."

He offered Troy a final nod before turning his attention back to the computer screen. Troy studied his dad's flurry of typing and then turned to look down at the wrinkled mountains below.

Troy watched the mountains, countryside, and small towns and cities slide by beneath them. Still, it was sooner than he imagined it would be when the buildings of New York City appeared in the distance, surrounded by water, closely packed together and stretching for the sky. Troy stared at the enormous city on their approach-marveling at its buildings, its bridges, and the pale green Statue of Liberty poking up from its harbor. His eyes couldn't get big enough to take it all in, and he craned his neck for one last glimpse of the skyline as they took the final plunge, then thumped down to land at the airport. The plane taxied to a stop just outside the terminal. They descended the steps and his father searched the area outside the chain-link fence, smiling with a satisfied nod at the sight of the cameras and the milling crowd of reporters who surrounded a long black limousine just outside the terminal.

"Is that for us?" Troy asked.

His father grinned and gestured for him to walk on. "Son, welcome to the Big Apple."