Dead Things (3 page)

“Yes.” Anne’s eyes are downcast. She looks up. “And no.”

Why yes? And why no?

“Mom, I saw the meteor last night. Right on schedule.” Anne sighs. She knows what it portends, and that answers both questions.

Mayberry smiles behind the remnants of lips. She soaks in this moment with her daughter, realizing this is the instant her child makes the jump from being a girl to being a woman.

Stella Mayberry has pinched pennies for five years so Anne can take this trip. She started saving when Roger Gerome’s discovery of Padre Island was announced by the Church, and she learned of her own mother’s survival.

The island fared well like many other islands, the inhabitants largely protected by a natural moat. The survivors on Padre Island were especially enterprising, blowing the lone bridge and filling the bay with offal—human and marine—to attract a host of hammerheads and bull sharks, even some great whites, to keep the ghouls at bay.

But Mayberry has taken terrible risks to pay for Anne’s flight, earning money clandestinely, in ways the church deems profane. And she should know better. She wears the church’s rebuke permanently on her skin, something like a scarlet letter, but more horrifying. Should the inquisitors ever learn of her return to the old ways—ways practiced by the ancients, the Babylonians, the Greeks, and the Mayans, ways taught by Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and Jung—they will take more than just her skin.

**

Ian hears the final boarding announcement for Flight 183 to Brownsville. Then the air marshal says, “Time to go.”

She has observed Ian for an hour, watching him glance at his watch every few minutes as if he might be able to stop time with his mind. Then the pacing started. He could take just ten strides in the modest gate before he had to spin and repeat his steps. At each turn, he paused and looked for…someone.

The air marshal wonders if it is a girl. She sees it every year, young lovers, their marriages newly minted, escaping their families and friends to steal precious and final moments together before leaving for the front.

It is not unusual for an air marshal to accompany a flight. In fact, they travel on most, especially those making passes over, or even approaching, the forbidden zone. Air marshals provide safety instruction and security. But in the forbidden zone, or “the wilderness,” as some call it, they provide something else: insurance.

She takes a surprised Ian by the elbow and ushers him across the tarmac toward the twin-prop Eagle designated as Flight 183.

Ian dissents. “Look, Ms.—” he locates her name on her chest, “—Wright. I’m just waiting for my friend.” He tells her that he should be here in just…a bit.

She can’t help but be intrigued by the “he” part. No girlfriend? She guessed that wrong. But otherwise Wright doesn’t care. Her grip is firm as she escorts him across Stanford Field.

“A bit.” It’s a relative concept, Wright tells Ian. Twenty passengers on this flight alone, air traffic controllers, who might need to modify flight vectors because of constantly changing weather patterns; flight 353 from Chattanooga, hanging in the air right now, directly above, burning fuel, unable to land until 183 has departed; and dozens of schedules in disarray, all impacted by “a bit” of delay, some kid’s selfishness, and a need to vacation with his friend.

Ian cannot argue with her logic, but “kid?” He is at the age of majority, and she is only a handful of years older.…

Wright tells him to have a seat in 5A, and to enjoy his flight.

Confounded, Ian does as he is told. He shambles to his seat, accidentally making eye contact with a man four or five rows back. The man is in his forties. He sports a
Phantom Menace
baseball cap and grins at Ian through a thin red beard.

The Phantom Menace
? Ian hates the film, and “film” stretches suitable use of the term. First,
Menace
wasn’t even printed on celluloid. It was digital, technically not a film at all. Second, only good movies should be called films.
Menace
is an aberration, the bastard child of George Lucas’ incestuous rape of his first three installments…or episodes four, five, and six…or whatever. Ian couldn’t watch any of Van’s other
Star Wars
movies after viewing that pile.

So Ian can’t smile back at the ginger man. He just sighs, shakes his head, and aims his attention toward less demanding tasks. He stows his luggage, spreads the creases from his faded jeans, picks a piece of lint from the sleeve of his “Punk’s not Dead” T-shirt. Accomplishing these monumental chores, Ian focuses on the forward door and tries to will Van’s arrival.

The plane is an Eagle J-150, a miniature of the metallic dragons that used to traverse the globe in leaps and bounds. It is an antique, just a single row of ten seats running along each side of the cabin. There aren’t many planes left, just a handful of puddle jumpers maintained with cannibalized parts. Ian’s ticket was expensive, paid for by two summers of mowing lawns, his last hurrah before conscription.

He watches the air marshal ready the cabin. She moves like a panther, lean and confident. The cockpit door opens, the captain smiles, says a few words. Wright nods politely, but Ian detects something else, like annoyance, before she secures the hatch.

Damn Van. Probably got caught sneaking weed on the plane.

Ian ponders sleeping on a cold, damp beach for two weeks. He thinks about how, for months to come, he’ll find sand in areas of his body he doesn’t yet know exist.

The air marshal begins talking about flight safety. She’s interrupted by a yelp from the tarmac.

She peers through a saucer-sized port, shakes her head in disgust and smirks. There’s a passenger down there.

Wright leans into the cockpit, tells them to halt preparations for takeoff. Ian clearly reads the curse that crosses her lips.

Another cry, this time louder.

She pops the door, shouts: “Let’s go, Molasses. Move it.”

Van bounds aboard, frantic, like a cat that’s bitten into an electrical cord and found the marrow. He bounces about, looking wildly from side to side.

Wright tells Van to take his seat. Now.

A Cheshire grin flashes across Van’s face when he spots Ian. He stomps to his seat, his giant army green duffle slapping the faces of passengers he passes. A heavyset man rubs his temple and stares at Van icily.

Ian tries to become invisible, but avoiding embarrassment is a difficult task considering Van is talking to him right…now.

“That was close,” Van starts. “Hey, this container’s pretty small, huh?” He palms the walls of the plane on either side of him.

Wright shakes her head. Does this kid have ADD? She has to tell him to take his seat again. The captain cannot start the engines until he complies.

Van swings halfway around, nearly decapitating Ian with the duffle. “Oh, yeah, sure.” He spins back, this time catching Ian square in the shoulder and pressing him hard against his seat.

“Sit down,” Ian urges under his breath, shoving the bag from his chest.

Van drives the pack into the storage compartment under the seat before him. It does not take a geometrician to compute the volume of the bag exceeds that available under the chair, but Van is resolute. He grunts and kicks it like some mad punter, and the flurry has the intended consequence. Inch by inch the duffle squeezes into the storage bin, the woman in the seat before Van bouncing with every jolt.

“Dude,” Van calls, prodding Ian from across the aisle. He shows Ian some old
Playboy
s. They’re from Roger Gerome’s personal collection, published sometime in the 1990s, maybe something he owned prior to Van’s mother dying, but probably something he picked up since. Men have needs, after all. “Do you want Miss March or Miss August?”

Ian ignores him, ignores the danger the mere possession of these magazines would pose to most, by feigning sleep. He prays for actual sleep to take hold, and soon.

**

Ian awakes to a thunderclap. It takes a moment for him to get his bearings, to understand that he is here in the air in the present and not a kid in a closet eighteen years before.

Van winces upon hearing Ian’s theory. “That’s a prepared statement if I’ve ever heard one.” Van has a different theory. Of course, he’ll share it. If punk’s not dead, it may as well be. If punk’s not dead, then it’s in a coma and on life support, hidden away in some forgotten hospital.

Flash.

Ian takes the bait. “Punk’s about questioning authority. It’s about not taking things at face value…not accepting the status quo.”

Boom.

Van scoffs. “That shit is totally Christian now. It must be really hard for the disenfranchised youth of today, their mommies styling their pink Mohawks before their daddies drive them to the church parking lot for the sound check. Face it, bro. The punk message is dead, and the so-called punk aesthetic has been co-opted by a bunch of snot-nosed, Jesus-hugging brats.”

Everyone has a hang-up about an extremely personal matter, his or her “thing.” The lucky ones are driven by ideology, like politics, charities, religion, or ethnicity. The less fortunate are guided by trivial concerns. Did you hear about that pig Altha Phelps entered in the fair? I can’t believe it was corn fed…Clint Cooper brought down two bucks with one shot. One of them had an image of the Virgin Mary in its hide, so you know it was a miracle! Aren’t we lucky that Elder Sarah Palin was campaigning in Frankfort when the plague hit…and where did she get those amazing boots?

Ian’s thing, trivial or not, is punk. Save for an old striped tie, all Ian has left to fill a vacuum are a few of his father’s old compact discs found under the seat in his mother’s defunct car. They speak to Ian, revealing to him something about his father that others, even his mom, could never know or understand. He imagines his father playing the Clash maybe for the first time, reading while singing along to the lyrics. This is Ian’s only connection to his past, this and his nightmares. His mother decided long ago to let the memory of his father slip away…all but the tie and the music. Ian’s face contorts into a grimace.

Van sees that he has driven the shovel too deep, unearthed too much, and he beats a hasty retreat. “Punk’s not dead? It doesn’t even matter, anyway. ‘Dead’ doesn’t even have the same meaning. Not anymore.”