Between the Bridge and the River Page 6

  With such a horrible high-school experience, the boys were set for greatness when Leon nearly blew the whole thing.

  The Universe came to a fork in the road and for a second it was Saul’s turn to drive.

  Saul’s Astronomy Club had been meeting in one of the classrooms off of the senior study hall for three months. The kids in the club were for the most part like Saul, outcasts in one way or another, either hideously disfigured by acne or extremely smelly, or had stutters or embarrassing parents. These were the kids on the outer rim of the high-school universe. The Plutos in the nerd galaxy. As most astronomy clubs are, this one was less about star gazing and more about solace and company for these poor souls who huddled in mutual consolation around high-powered optical equipment.

  The Astronomy Club met in the evenings for obvious reasons. On one evening, as Saul was picking at a weeping doubleheader on his cheek and looking at Orion in Taurus through a Pathfinder 40x telescope and Lashanda Brightwell, Ted’s fourth victim, lay cooling in a dumpster behind the International House of Pancakes in Buckhead, Leon was in detention in the senior study hall for failing to complete an essay on the American Civil War.

  In a strange twist of fate, Deborah Thornhill and Julie Peters, the two most beautiful, most popular, and most desirable girls in school, had also received detention, for smoking in the girls’ bathrooms. If that weren’t enough, Django Ryerson, the beatnik muso kid who just oozed cool and even had a little soul patch beard, was also in lockdown for saying, “Because no one else gave a shit, man,” when Mr. Hancock asked him why the Hittites had developed the world’s first sophisticated metropolitan sewage system.

  The other regulars of detention were also present: Geary McFar-lane, a painfully thin young man with the body of a consumptive with rickets, who was always in trouble for his undiagnosed narcolepsy; Todd Bledsoe, the graffiti artist; and Millie Watson, who was forever writing articles in the school paper denouncing the fascist junta the teachers were part of.

  Mrs. Cameron, who was meant to be supervising this punishment session, had left to take another long phone call from her hysterical sister in Des Moines, who had just broken up with her husband for the eighth time in two years. She told the students to continue to read quietly, and for the most part they did so apart from Django, who was noodling on the ancient upright piano that Mrs. Cameron used to murder Broadway standards for her drama group.

  Django’s genius transcended the old instrument’s failings and he made it sound cool, like they were in a speakeasy or the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria.

  Leon, lost in the music, gazed out the window, across the soccer field to the school fence and the woods beyond. He watched a jet travel across the clear winter sky, and even though it was only six P.M., it felt like all the world was asleep but those in the room and the pilot of the jet. Leon thought of his mother, as he did often in quiet moments, his love for her still a pain in the pit of his stomach.

  In the half-light bleeding out of the window, he watched a fat bee hover above a purple thistle underneath the sill.

  Django’s soft playing had a powerful impact on everyone there, everyone felt good. Cool. Relaxed. Somehow, air-conditioned. Before Leon knew it, his father stirred in his soul and the voice was out, unconsciously doo-be-doing over Django’s tinkling.

  The others looked over at Leon. He was still lost in reverie, not really aware he was singing out loud. He had forgotten where he was.

  Django, with the ease of a born musician, played along instinctively, feeling that something weird and groovy was occurring.

  Leon turned and looked directly into the eyes of Deborah Thorn-hill. He kept on singing, feeling the passion his father had felt for Ava when they first met.

  Deborah flushed crimson. She felt an amyl nitrate–like rush. Her heart went boom boom. Leon almost buckled under his embarrassment, similar to the time he had inadvertently called Mrs. Cameron Mom when he had been asked a question in the middle of a daydream. He nearly stopped but he saw something in Deborah. The unattainable girl, especially to him, one of The Bastards, the outcasts.

  He saw what his voice had done to her, he knew that it had gone to places on her body that he wanted to go with other parts of his body. He saw surprise and the beginning of something else.

  Fuck it, he thought. Here goes nothing.

  He opened up and Django went right along with him. An old standard about how champagne was no thrill and cocaine was boring.

  This kind of song was not what most teenagers wanted to hear at that point in the history of popular music but the effect of the combined talents of Django and Leon knocked over that prejudice with ease. The sheer cool of what they were doing, the corniness of the number, made it even better.

  Saul heard his brother singing from the room next door. So did the rest of the Astronomy Club. They left the telescope and walked cautiously as if toward a landed spacecraft, in the direction of the voice.

  What he saw made Saul’s blood run cold with terror.

  The kids in detention were already under Leon’s spell. By the time Mrs. Cameron came back from her phone call, the Astronomy Club, the detainees, and Mr. Petrov, the effete Russian janitor, had gathered round the piano where Leon stood next to Django.

  Leon had moved through “It Happened in Monterey” and was on “Summer Wind,” singing directly to Deborah, who was already wet.

  Mrs. Cameron stood and listened. She didn’t say anything, she looked like she might cry. Mr. Petrov actually was crying. The looks on the faces of the girls, Saul saw that. He knew that he’d better do something soon or he would lose his brother forever and he would be totally alone for the rest of his life.

  ALTITUDE ATTITUDE

  FRASER HAD BEEN WORRIED ABOUT FLYING long before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. In 1988, just before Christmas, he had been in London interviewing for a job as on-camera reporter for Thames Television. What they actually said they were looking for in the ad in Media magazine was a “Wacky Outside Broadcast Personality,” which would mean he’d get to do the corny little news stories that went at the end of the local London broadcasts to cheer people up after the hatchet deaths in Peckham. The duties would involve interviewing “local eccentrics,” which meant that Fraser would get to speak to syphilitic farmers who dressed their livestock as the Supremes etc. etc.

  Thames, after seeing his demo reel, had offered to fly him there and back from Glasgow but he chose to drive the nine-hundred-mile round-trip for two reasons:

  1. He had just purchased a new car—well, not exactly new, it was four years old with forty thousand miles on the clock but it had been well kept by an anally retentive cash-register salesman from Mother-well. It was a cream-colored Mercedes 200 that rattled a little but it made Fraser feel very successful and mysterious. He thought it looked like the kind of car that would belong to a highly paid assassin; in reality it looked more like it belonged to an ambassador from a smallish African country, but Fraser loved it and wanted to take a road trip in it.

  2. Jack Trampas had told him about a sensational massage parlor called Ladyfingers in Preston that he wanted to try out. Preston is situated halfway between Glasgow and London and therefore is the ideal spot to stop for a rub and a tug to alleviate the stiffness brought on by prolonged driving and a sporadically hyperactive libido. Fraser had resisted the temptation to stop in Preston on the way; he wanted to feel clean and virtuous for his big interview in London. As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered. The interview was conducted by three ex-Cambridge television executives who had already agreed to give the job to an old friend of theirs from university, Richard Kelton-Peters, who had been a leading light in the Cambridge Footlights Review, the campus amateur dramatic society that put the children of the wealthy on the fast track to show business.

  Fraser felt depressed after the interview; he knew it had gone badly. All three men kept pretending to not understand his accent.

  Fucking English, thought Fraser as
he walked out of the Thames building in Teddington. He wasn’t the first Scotsman to think this.

  Why the fuck would they bring me all the way here just to fuck with me?

  He wasn’t the first Scotsman to think this either.

  The reason he had been brought to London was so that, if charged with nepotism, the executives could quite honestly point to the countrywide search for the ideal candidate before stating that “Dickie was simply, when all’s said and done, the best chap for the gig.”

  Fraser walked across the car park and out onto the main street. He was headed toward the Underground station when he saw a middle-aged woman sitting by the doorway of an out-of-business fried-chicken franchise. The place could not have been closed for long, as it still smelled strongly of warm, dead poultry.

  The woman was grubby and tubby and obviously had lost numerous rounds with extremely inexpensive alcohol products but she had a kind of matronly look about her even though she had been living on the street for no little while. She reminded Fraser of his mother and suddenly he felt very guilty indeed.

  “Spare change?” the woman growled, her look more accusatory than pleading. There was no question in her voice; it was a statement of fact, monotone and aggressive.

  “Spare change?”

  Fraser walked quickly by, but the look of the woman, her predicament . . . Not only to be poor but to be a middle-aged woman and poor—Jesus!

  He felt the wad of cash heavy in his wallet, which he had stuck in the arse pocket of his suit trousers. His Ladyfingers stash.

  He only made it ten steps before he turned around and went back to the woman. He removed all the money from his wallet and handed it to her. Two hundred pounds.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s money. For you.”

  The woman looked at him with utter contempt.

  “Fack orf. Kint!”

  This was not the tearful outpouring of gratitude that Fraser had expected.

  “Don’t you want money?”

  “Fack orf. Kint!” explained the woman.

  Fraser was mystified. What had he done? He had made a genuine attempt to be charitable, even though he’d just had an unpleasant experience.

  “What is your problem?” he barked at her, a little more forcefully than he meant. He saw the tiniest glimmer of fear in the woman’s eyes and he knew that that look would haunt him till his dying day. He took a breath and tried again.

  “I’m just trying to help you. Why won’t you take my money?”

  She looked at him warily, then grumbled.

  “Snot reel.”

  “Snot reel?” Fraser repeated, trying to make sense of the ludicrous exchange. Then it dawned on him. They were Scottish banknotes. The woman thought it wasn’t real money. (Scottish notes, although legal tender in England, are sometimes not recognized by the uneducated or recent immigrants.)

  “Oh no, it’s real money. It’s Scottish. If you take these notes to a bank, they’ll give you English ones, if that’s what you want.”

  “Leave me alone,” she said.

  “But—”

  The woman started screaming, “Elp! Roip! Roip! Ee’s gorris cack aht!”

  Fraser judged it was time to go. He stuffed the money into his pocket and walked smartly away, not looking back as the woman kept up her yelling.

  “Ee troid t’ roip me! Ee troid t’ roip me!”

  She started crying, her heart breaking on every exhale.

  Fraser elected to keep the money for a lucky employee of Lady-fingers in Preston. He assumed whoever she was, she would be more grateful for his largesse.

  He was right. Sandra was another, different middle-aged woman, who worked in Ladyfingers on some evenings while Derek, her severely handicapped son, was at the community center Reach Out to the Disabled program. She was delighted when Fraser left her a hundred-pound tip after a truly breathtaking one-hour massage and French.

  “That’s for you,” he said as he kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you.”

  “Bloody ’eckers, if I’d known you were so generous, I’d have put my finger up your bum, love,” she purred.

  “Another time,” said Fraser as he left her in the semen-smelling cubicle and sauntered out of Ladyfingers and across the street, satisfy-ingly spent, to the assassinmobile.

  It was late as he drove from Preston, and it was nearly ten p.m. by the time he got to the Scottish border. He ran into traffic. Not slow traffic, stopped traffic. No movement. A snake of stationary red taillights winding off into the distance as far as he could see. He sighed and ejected the cassette tape he was listening to, the BBC radio comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  He flipped around for a radio station and finally found Borders Radio, where a shocked announcer who was more used to giving livestock reports told him that a plane, Pan Am 103, en route from London to New York, had crashed into the Scottish border town of Lockerbie and that a lot of people had just died.

  The A74 is the main road between Scotland and England; it passes just east of Lockerbie. The town is clearly visible from the highway. Fraser guessed the traffic was stopped because of the crash. He didn’t mind, though, because when he heard about it he didn’t feel like going on.

  He listened to the radio overnight. He slept fitfully in his car. He didn’t dream.

  He awoke as the traffic began to move in the early light. He drove bumper to bumper, at funeral speeds, until midmorning when, hungry and tired and desperate for a shite, he reached the crash site.

  Angry, emotional policemen were waving the traffic through the one lane they had opened. They were shouting at the drivers, trying to get them to move faster.

  “Come on, pick it up, don’t look. Get a fucking move on.”

  Fraser felt his body contract, then flush hot with shock as he saw half of a plane cockpit sitting sideways in a sheep-grazing field. An image that was already becoming world famous. He drove on for ten miles before he became aware of his tears.

  The traffic opened up but Fraser had to pull into a service station. In the car park he wept uncontrollably.

  Huge tsunami sobs rolling in from his soul.

  He gulped in air when he could but his heart was breaking on every exhale.

  When he got back to Glasgow he went to the Press Bar to get drunk. Everybody got sad drunk for a while. After a few days some sick jokes started and people began to get normal drunk again but every time Fraser got on a plane he thought about Lockerbie. That’s why he had already had four whiskies and a milligram of Xanax by the time his plane took off from Glasgow and headed southwest over the Atlantic.

  * * *

  Fear makes people unreasonable and unpleasant to deal with, and given that the flight attendants of American Airlines were unreasonable and unpleasant to deal with before that dreaded September 11, it would be silly to think they would be any better after it. Fraser knew this but the passenger seated next to him in the small first-class cabin (slightly bigger seat, different upholstery, cheesy nibbles on departure) did not. She was a professional of some sort, thought Fraser through his tranquil, boozy fog, perhaps a lawyer, all pens and gadgets and PowerBook and phone. A tiny phone the size of a small potato, to prove she meant business. Before the women’s movement phones were large and obvious Bakelite gentlemanly affairs; now they were discreet and ruthless.

  Like stilettos.

  The flight attendant, a blond Gorgon, pounced on her like an alarmed cat.

  “You can’t make calls during the flight. Shut it off, now!”

  The professional woman didn’t look up. Didn’t move. Did not engage with the bitter harpy in the nylon dress.

  “I’m not making a call, I’m checking my schedule. It’s also on my phone.”

  “Shut it off, now!”

  The woman still didn’t look up, or stop what she was doing.

  “Please don’t use that tone when you talk to me.”

  Furious, the Gorgon turned and stormed off to get her supervisor.

&
nbsp; Fraser smiled at his fellow passenger’s victory. He almost congratulated her but then remembered she might recognize him and know him to be a disgraced sexual deviant. He sunk further into his chair, guilty under his Lawson’s Sausages baseball cap. Congratulations would have been premature anyway because the Gorgon returned a moment later with her supervisor, Colin. Colin was going to be fifty in two weeks, his lover Barry had just left him for a younger, prettier, richer man, he had hemorrhoids and an in-grown toenail. No bitch was going to back-talk him or any of his girls today.

  “Excuse me, no phones are allowed during the flight. Please shut it off,” spat Colin, the apoplectic Gorgon peeping over his shoulder.

  “I explained to your colleague, although this is a phone, it is also a small personal computer and it is in that capacity that I am using it now.”

  Fraser pretended to be asleep.

  “If you don’t turn it off, I will inform the captain that we have an unruly passenger and he will make an unscheduled landing at the nearest airport.”

  “We’re halfway across the Atlantic, the nearest airport is probably Miami, and we’re going there anyway.”

  “That is up to the captain. If I make the report, you will be arrested upon arrival no matter where we land. Please turn off the phone.”

  The woman closed her phone and put it in her bag. Colin and the Gorgon inhaled their victory.

  “If you use it again, I’ll report you.”

  “All right,” said the woman as she looked up and read his name tag. Colin and the Gorgon turned and walked away. The woman called after him.

  “Colin?”

  He turned.

  “May I have some peanuts and a glass of Chardonnay?”

  Colin thought for a moment, then nodded to the Gorgon and they both headed to the galley to fetch the nuts and wine before they did something really stupid.

  The woman sighed and opened the in-flight magazine.