Slide - Kyle Beachy [64]
“The airport,” I said. “We'll go watch airplanes take off and land.”
Because airplanes are massive and they fly and basically blow childish minds. I was confident about this.
“I'm not convinced this van is safe,” he said. “My dad always says that by the time you see rust, there's so much going on underneath you don't even want to know.”
“Rust is the common name for an extremely common chemical compound. Iron oxide. Ef-ee-two-oh-three.”
He nodded and continued around the van. He ran his hand along a dent in the van's sliding door. “Yeah, you got rust like this, something's wrong.”
Eventually Ian wandered back into the yard and picked up the hose, then went to the faucet and stopped the hose, then rolled it back up and left it by the foot of the porch before scuffling into the house. When he came out he was wearing a shirt and shoes.
“Come on. Look at this thing,” I said. “Safe as a tank.”
“It's like a van in the videos they show us at school. About kidnapping.”
“I'm not a kidnapper. Kidnappers are pale men with thick mustaches.”
He opened the door. “Yeah well, no one admits they're a kidnapper, do they?”
Today the kids in the yard were playing some variation of tag with tennis balls. I saw a blond girl level a brown-haired boy with a throw to the back of his head. Ian fastened his seat belt before I had a chance to tell him to.
I got us onto Highway 44 and took it westward. Ian reached forward for the radio, and there was the old, beloved play-by-play man saying, headed into the bottom of the fifth, score knotted at three. Ian opened the glove compartment and pulled out an empty pack of cigarettes, some napkins. He found the cheap plastic tire-pressure gauge and sat back in his seat.
“Dad says we fall six back of the Cubs and we're in trouble.” He flipped the tire gauge in his hands.
“Still plenty of time. Plus they're the Cubs, remember.”
“Says we have to stop swinging the bats like a bunch of pussies.”
Sometimes in etcetera, motion alone is a value in and of itself. It was early enough that we beat the traffic exile from the city. We passed small mountains of earth and rock, the yellow machinery that signaled change. Stacks and stacks of light-blue piping. The landscape out here evolved, always. The buildings themselves, huge, reminded me of models, a set of tabs and slots.
“Your thing is beeping,” he said.
“I usually ignore that.”
“And! You're going the wrong way. This isn't how you get to the airport.”
I reevaluated the plan, thinking for a minute to confirm that I did in fact know what was what.
“Not Lambert. The airport we're going to is smaller,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. Spirit of St. Louis, the small one.”
“Named for the silver prop that carried Lindbergh to Paris.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It's off Highway 40. We're on 44.”
“That's right. That's right. North of here. Minor adjustment. Hold on.”
Our path righted, soon we passed the network of fields where I'd played summer ball, and I thought of my mother sitting cross-legged in the stands, chatting with other parents while my father paced behind the dugout. How far back did it go? Could memory, if I looked hard enough, provide evidence of unhappiness even then? It was out here that I put the dent in the Z's roof. The foul ball I hit late one summer afternoon, how the moment it left my bat I knew it would land on his car. The tink of a barely tipped foul ball, the ball rising with menace, irrationally seeming to grow larger as it went, then the hollow moment of collision, the roof of a Datsun. Crowd response, ooh. I stepped out of the box, ostensibly for practice cuts, and my father and I shared a quick look rich with blurred meaning. And once the game was over and I had squeezed into the backseat, my parents lingered outside and I heard my mother's muffled voice travel overhead. And if I found the right dial, maybe I could adjust the memory's volume and discover what she said.
I exited 40 and followed a mile of frontage road along the side of the highway. Ian unfastened his seat belt so he could lean out the window. I imagined how it would look