The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [55]
“Day after tomorrow, probably.”
“Are you going to be on that radio show?”
“No, I’m not.”
He went back to The Iliad. “You should get on it. You’d blow them away. You’re really good at making stuff up.”
I was? That was news to me. I shut the door softly behind me. I walked past the hallway table just beyond the bathroom whose light I had carelessly left on, down the stairs on whose lower landing I inspected a framed picture of a high school girl whom Jeremy had sketched in art class, out onto the street where the morning papers were being delivered, thrown from the passenger-side window of a creeping car. I greeted the dawn before getting into my car and starting the engine to drive myself to the airport. I remembered a prayer I had said years ago on behalf of Jamie, before I had blacked out. These days, I had lost the ability to pray or to bless. That gift had abandoned me. It was like throwing words down into a ditch filled with corpses.
On the airplane, I was seated far back in steerage class, two rows up from a disabled lavatory smelling of caustic lye. Before boarding, I had eaten a hasty breakfast in the airport restaurant, ominously named the Afterburner Lounge. I was just now beginning to feel the consequences. The food I had ordered—scrambled eggs that looked concocted from powder out of a tin—had been served with ill-disguised jocular contempt. The eggs had disagreed with me, so that when I sat down in my assigned seat, I was almost immediately afflicted. My gut gushed and gubbled.
My seat was next to that of a young mother accompanied by her squalling son, who appeared to be about a year old. He clutched a teddy bear with a music box inside. The bear’s head rotated, demonlike, as the music played. Several nearby seatmates gazed steadily at the teddy bear as if they planned to dismember it. Meanwhile, the screaming child, in the full flower of his own hysteria, grew as red as a turnip and as loud as a megaphone.
The child’s mother seemed powerless to stop the sheets of sound produced by her son. Indeed, she seemed charmed and surprised by his decibel production.
“Noisy, isn’t he?” she laughed. She tried to plug her son’s mouth with a pacifier. He spat it out onto the floor as the plane banked to the left, and the pacifier tumbled out of reach.
“Well, they do scream at that age,” I said. This was a lie: Jeremy and Michael had never screamed in this infant-sadistic manner; their cries had always been pointed and specific. The child screamed again, an infant Pavarotti bellowing up to the third balcony.
“Do you have kids?”
“Two sons,” I said. “Mostly grown.”
The flight attendants pushed the drink carts up the aisle. I kept my attention on the ice cubes. “What did you do with your boys when they were crying?” she asked. “You must have done something. Back then? Men always seem to know about these things. The fun things. How did you make them stop?” I assumed she meant the child’s outraged cries.
“Oh,” I shrugged. “The usual. I dandled them. I bounced them on my knee. I did some peekaboo. I did some bleeump-bleeump.”
“What’s that?”
“Bleeump-bleeump? Oh, what you do is, you hum the William Tell Overture and you bounce them on your knee like they were the Lone Ranger, on Silver.”
“Show me?” She lifted up her son and dropped him into my lap. So surprised was this child at finding himself in a stranger’s care that his face took on an expression of shock, and he instantly grew silent. I took his hands, positioned him on my knee, and began bouncing him.
To the side, his mother watched this dumb show with admiration. I wondered whether she was pretty. I hadn’t really looked at her. I played with her wicked toddler for another few minutes, and when I glanced over at her, I saw that, out of sheer exhaustion, she’d fallen asleep on me.
37
ALTHOUGH MOST AIRPORTS seem