Читать книгу Gliding Flight - Anne-Gine Goemans - Страница 15

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5

Gieles read the story three times. Who were Ide and Sophia? Had this Super Waling written the story? Impossible. He was way too fat to write about certain things, about sex.

On her hands and knees. Her bottom, sticky with sand. Impatiently pressing against his erection. Her tongue in his ears and nostrils.

The tongue part was disgusting, Gieles thought, but it excited him.

He put the story in his desk drawer. There amid all the junk he saw a crumpled up ticket. It was admission to the air show of Christian Moullec and his wife Paola that he had gone to the year before with his father and Uncle Fred. His mother had been spending two weeks in some bone-dry Sahel country at the time.

Gieles picked up the ticket and looked at the photo of Moullec in his magical flying two-seater motorbike surrounded by the lesser white-fronted geese. Moullec had grey hair, just like Captain Sully. Gieles had been looking up with thousands of other spectators, but he felt as if he were the only one—as if Christian Moullec were putting on the show just for him. Music by Ennio Morricone swept across the grounds and a guy at a microphone was blaring a story about Moullec that Gieles already knew, but it didn’t bother him. He was enjoying the spectacle.

When the guy bellowed through the loudspeakers that geese always return to the place where they had learned to fly, his father had said, ‘Let’s hope Ellen does the same.’ Uncle Fred said soothingly that quarrels were a fact of life.

It was at that moment that Gieles first realised that things were not going well between his parents. He put the admission ticket on top of the story about Ide and Sophia Warrens and closed the drawer.

He decided to skip the appointment he’d made with Super Waling (Gieles really didn’t want to be seen with a walrus like that) and turned his attention to the game board that was lying on the desk. Using white masking tape he had made a runway across the full width of the board, and had pasted a yellow and a blue goose on the runway. Then he had stuck pins in the cardboard that were topped with little coloured balls. The pins were the security cameras. Naturally he’d have to make sure that the cameras didn’t film him leading his geese onto the runway for Expert Rescue Operation 3032. That was a crime. But they would have to show him later on as he, Gieles Bos, chased his birds away from the runway. That was an act of heroism.

Gieles had once seen a platinum blond TV reporter ask Captain Sully, ‘But how did you do it?’ How do you safely land an Airbus in which both engines have been disabled by a couple of geese?

The woman looked at Sully as if he were a sex machine who had also invented the electric light. WWSD was emblazoned on T-shirts and caps. ‘What Would Sully Do?’ Americans asked themselves when faced with a problem. Sully had become a compass for making life choices.

Gieles stood in front of the mirror above the sink in his room and combed his hair, which was always standing on end. Then he put on the new sunglasses with mirror lenses. ‘Gieles,’ he said, with the same rapturous tone as the platinum blond reporter. ‘How did you do it? How did you manage to get those geese out of the way at the very last second?’

‘Well, let me tell you,’ said Gieles nonchalantly, thrusting his chin forward. ‘I was standing near the runway waiting for my mother. She had never been away so long before and I wanted to wait for her at home—so we’d be able to wave to each other. But suddenly I saw two geese out on the runway.’

The reporter would gape at him with fear and adoration. Of course he wouldn’t tell her that he had ordered the geese to go there himself.

Gieles crossed his arms. ‘By now everyone knows how dangerous geese can be for airplanes. Do you know Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger? The pilot who parked his plane on the Hudson on January 15th, 2009?’

The reporter would nod enthusiastically and exclaim, ‘But of course I know him! Who doesn’t? Now we finally have our own Dutch Sully!’

‘Gieles!’ he heard his father call. ‘We’ve got to go!’

Gieles took off his glasses and hid the game board behind a partition where his old toys were stored.

His father was already outside, in the barn. He was standing at a workbench that had a row of fox tails hanging above it. The fox tails were russet with white tips. Killing birds was painful for Willem, but he had no problem hunting foxes and rabbits. After he shot a fox he would cut off the tail and dip the raw flesh in denatured alcohol to keep it from rotting. Then he would tie off the tail with a piece of string to allow the flesh to dry and have fur hats made from the pelt. Everyone got a hat, even his fellow bird controllers. But no one ever wore them.

His father held one of the tails under his nose and turned it around as if it were a glass of wine. Then he hung the amputated body part up again and walked out of the barn.

They got in the car and headed for the demonstration of the robot bird, listening in silence to the monotone radio conversations between the cockpit and air traffic control. Every plane was directed through the air space affably and efficiently by an unknown voice. ‘Eight-zero-nine, you can land.’

Gieles had downloaded the conversation between Captain Sully and air traffic control. Spectacular! ‘We can’t do it. We’re going to be in the Hudson.’

Not a hint of emotion. As if Captain Sully had said, ‘Hey, I’m stuck in traffic. I’ll be getting home a little late,’ while he and a hundred and fifty-five passengers were flying straight to their deaths. And then the air traffic controller had said drily, ‘I’m sorry.’ (‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll put your dinner in the microwave.’)

A couple of hundred metres further on they passed Dolly’s house. Gieles remembered the smell of her messy bed and thought of Super Waling’s story. It got him agitated. Her tongue in his ears and nostrils.

Imagine Gravitation or Dolly pushing her tongue into his ears. How would that feel?

He had sent her a photo of himself posing in front of his father’s service car. In another one he was standing with his geese. He had plastered his hair down with gel. The sunglasses did the rest.

Gravitation had reciprocated with a photo of herself pressing her rabbit against her pale white upper body. He regarded this provocative pose as a sign of approval. Something like: You look pretty good.

His father was leaning against the car window in his leather jacket, peering into the sky. Then he looked down at the road. He did that all the time, even when he wasn’t on patrol. His eyes went up and down, from the sky to the road, from the road to the sky. He possessed the rare talent of being able to see things from a bird’s perspective. Why does a bird do what it does? That one question formed the basis of his thinking and defined his behaviour. According to his mother, his father had been a bird in a previous life.

They passed the fence that was under camera surveillance and for which Willem Bos had a special pass. In the distance they saw a couple of seagulls flying against a pale sky hung with grey clouds that looked like ice floes.

Willem Bos held the walkie-talkie to his mouth. ‘Gulls in midfield. I repeat: gulls in midfield.’

‘Runway free,’ came the reply after a pause. ‘Situation under control.’

The car’s dashboard was a bag of tricks. Press the button and a panic-stricken starling shrieked across the farmland. That farmland, according to Willem Bos, was a very big problem, apart from the infinite number of invisible intersections in the sky. When the runway was built, the experts had condescendingly shrugged their shoulders over the fact that agrarian areas tend to attract birds.

Standing in the midfield between the two runways were his father’s fellow bird controllers and the robot man. Unlike his father, the bird controllers were dressed in green. They looked like forest rangers. The robot man was wearing a faded turtleneck and jeans and was standing a couple of metres away from the group.

Willem Bos parked next to the other yellow cars and walked up to his colleagues, sauntering like a cowboy. They greeted him and gave Gieles a few brotherly slaps on the back.

Then Willem Bos walked up to the robot man and introduced himself, and Gieles shook the man’s hand in turn. He forgot his name immediately. Lisping and inhaling deeply through his nostrils, the robot man launched into a description of the invention he had worked on for three hundred and fifty hours.

‘Just show us the bird,’ Willem Bos interrupted. He had crossed his arms. The robot man was disconcerted by the interruption but quickly recovered and went to work. He opened a chest in the trunk of the airport service car and took out his invention. They all shrank back. The robot was a gigantic bird of prey with cold eyes and a hooked beak. Its dark brown wings spanned at least a metre and a half.

The robot man held the monster over his head, making his own body look even punier. One of the bird controllers whistled through his teeth. ‘Whoa,’ he said, deeply impressed. ‘You can hardly tell it from the real thing. A perfect white-tailed eagle.’

‘A golden eagle,’ corrected the robot man. ‘Notith the tail.’ He turned the bird halfway around, still holding it over his head. ‘It hath a black terminal band,’ he lisped.

‘We don’t get any golden eagles around here,’ said Willem Bos. ‘Plenty of buzzards, goshawks, kestrels and falcons. But no golden eagles.’

The robot man began sweating under the weight of his invention.

‘I saw a white-tailed eagle once,’ said one of his father’s colleagues, rubbing his moustache. ‘Above the dunes. But that was a long time ago. We’re talking about the end of the seventies. And from that distance it could have been a great spotted eagle. You can never be sure.’

The other bird controllers nodded in agreement. ‘I once mistook an escaped turkey vulture for a buzzard. But you don’t expect to see big ones like that out here. Buzzards can be very aggressive.’

The bird controller now turned to Gieles. His colleagues knew the anecdote by heart. ‘I know this farmer. He was out haying once on his land and suddenly this buzzard attacked him. The buzzard planted its claws into his hair and scalped him right then and there. Pieces of scalp this big.’ He created an implausibly large shape with his hands. ‘Really. Pieces that big.’

‘Okay,’ said Willem Bos, looking up into the dark sky. ‘Get going with that thing.’

‘It’th called Golden Eagle,’ the robot man said, slowly dropping to his knees. Gieles wanted to help, but the robot man absolutely refused.

‘Thith ith no toy,’ he said. Very carefully he placed the golden eagle on the ground and pulled the wings out further. Gieles saw that the feathers had been painted with the utmost precision. There must have been a thousand of them. The robot man stroked the wings, then took the remote control out of the trunk.

‘Golden Eagle ith ready,’ said the robot man, lifting the bird up over his head again with one hand.

‘Make sure you stay away from the runways,’ warned Willem Bos as the robot man ran onto the field. Gieles watched a plane taxi by. Maybe he was seeing things, but he could have sworn that the passengers were craning to look out of the little windows. Willem Bos and the other bird controllers chuckled at the scene before them. There stood his father—big, secure and completely relaxed. Gieles wanted so much to be able to stand like that someday.

‘You know who he reminds me of?’ said the man with the moustache. Now the robot man was running back in their direction. ‘That environmental bunch that came here and cut holes in the fences. They were just as lanky and nervous.’

‘Maybe he’s an activist, too,’ Willem Bos suggested.

‘Or a terrorist,’ said his colleague. ‘With a bird as a thuithide bomber.’ He burst out laughing.

They made a few more jokes about the lisping robot man, and just when they thought his technology had let him down, the invention took to the skies.

The majestic wings whooshed like windmill blades. The yellow-tinted body gained altitude with ease. Once it was high enough, the bird began gliding through the atmosphere. Anyone who didn’t know better would have sworn that the golden eagle was scanning the earth for cadavers.

The robot man had his bird fly toward a pole mounted with runway lights. A kestrel had settled on one of the lamps. A kestrel was one bird you didn’t want in an airplane engine. Recently a Boeing 747 had crashed in Belgium because of a kestrel. No fatalities, but the plane had snapped like a dry twig. The kestrel looked up at the unfamiliar assailant, gauged its chances and fled.

The golden eagle drove off a couple of seagulls, six partridges, a group of magpies and dozens of starlings. The bird controllers began to reassess their opinion of the robot man.

‘Can I give it a try?’ asked Willem Bos after an hour. A few drops of rain had fallen and no one felt like getting drenched.

‘Thertainly not,’ said the robot man. His nostrils had become one big imploding nerve. His eyes shot back and forth from the golden eagle to the bird controller. ‘I’m the only one who can handle the controlth.’

‘What a load of crap,’ said Willem Bos. ‘Even a kid can make this trinket work.’

The rain put an end to their discussion. ‘The bird’s getting wet,’ warned one of the bird controllers.

‘Rain ith no problem!’ cried the robot man.

It began to rain harder. The controllers ran to their cars for shelter. Gieles stood beside his father, who remained outside.

The robot man made his bird fly even higher. Gieles threw back his head and peered into the sky as the rain streamed down his face. The golden eagle must have been at least sixty metres off the ground. Its wings glided on the wind.

‘Too high!’ shouted Willem Bos. ‘You’re going too high! You’re losing control!’

The robot man set off at a run and went after his bird, which was no longer flying in a straight line but lurching dangerously in the direction of the runway. Airplane headlights could be seen approaching in the wet airspace. Willem Bos took off in pursuit.

‘GOLDEN EAGLE: LAND IMMEDIATELY’ came the announcement from the speakers in the service car. ‘FINAL WARNING. GOLDEN EAGLE: LAND IMMEDIATELY.’

The robot man did not respond. Leaping like a gazelle, he tried to catch up with his invention. But it was impossible. One of the bird controllers stepped out of his service car with a flare gun. He stood with his legs astraddle and aimed at the golden eagle, which was buzzing the edge of the runway threateningly. Gieles screwed up his eyes against the brightness of the approaching airplane lights. He followed the flare as it raced toward its target. But the golden eagle banked to the left, away from the bang and the smoking powder. The bird floated on outstretched wings as if it were borne up by an immense updraft. Suddenly it plunged forward and began losing altitude. Its mechanical body came spinning downward. The robot man jerked at the remote in an effort to regain control.

Panting and leaning over with his hands on his thighs, Willem Bos watched the gyrating bird. Just as the tyres of the airplane hit the asphalt, the golden eagle crashed into the grass. The robot man ran up and hurled himself onto the bird. There was little left of it. Its styrofoam body had broken in two, spewing out its metallic entrails of screws and wires. There were nasty tears in the wings. The yellow beak and head were shattered beyond recognition.

Moving with great strides, Willem Bos approached the robot man. Gieles had never seen him like this before. His father did not anger easily.

‘You imbecile!’ he roared, planting a hiking boot on one of the wings. ‘You’ll have everybody after you now, asshole! The entire airport!’

Then he turned around and walked away.

The soaking wet robot man stared at his bird, his nose frozen in a painfully inhaled grimace. Gieles sat down next to him and picked up the shattered head. He placed all the parts in one of the battered wings. Then using a detached piece of string he tied the eagle up into a manageable package.

Gieles fervently hoped it wouldn’t rain on the day of his rescue operation.

Rain was disastrous.