Читать книгу Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire - Poe Ballantine - Страница 19

11.

NOBODY SEEMS TO WANT A VEGA, ESPECIALLY ONE THAT so bigheartedly burns oil and (why didn’t I examine it more closely upon purchase?) has obviously been in a wreck. The few who come to look at it offer me peanuts for it, junker prices. That isn’t enough to buy my TICKET, I want to explain. Look, they say, the windshield’s cracked. It looks like somebody rolled the thing. I’ll have to get new tires for it. How much oil does it burn? (Only about a quart every time I fill it up, I concede.) But eventually a man who knows very little about cars offers me four hundred (I’m asking six) and I sign it over to him before he can change his mind, cracked windshield, crumpled hood, Gumby doll still folded obscenely in the glove box, and a half-case of Quaker State thrown in for good measure.

I should be giddy at the prospect of my lifelong adult dream of escape from America coming true and the chance to reconstruct and master my consciousness in the garden where my innocence was lost, not to mention meeting up with Mountain again, but instead, from the moment my plane lifts from the tarmac of Stapleton Airport, I am unable to quell this whirligig of dull panic suspended just above my diaphragm. I feel as if I am making some grave and irreversible error. It isn’t that I’ve spent all my money on a pipe dream or the possibility that the island may be a bust or that I continue to take risks without reward as if some firm, catastrophic pattern beyond my ken is in place. It’s something about that damn island, an unshakable foreboding, an instinct that foul play awaits. If something goes awry, I won’t have the money to bail out. If I’d picked the place myself, made plans, saved more money, it would be different. The lurking premonition of doom blossoms into full-lipped certitude as the nose of the plane breaks through its first membrane of clouds. Ridiculous, I think, trying to shake it off. The inevitable traveling-alone-to-a-strangenew-place jitters. Too late to turn back anyway. I’ve got $232.32.

In the round decorative mirrors adhered to the hat of the old woman sitting next to me I catch several greenish, wincing reflections of myself.

“First time flying?” she says.

“No,” I say.

“If you’re going to be sick,” she says, jingling her mirrors, “they have the bags in the pouches in front of you.”

“Thank you,” I say, smoothing the wrinkles on my shirt. “I’m not sick. Just a bit nervous.”

She studies me with a mixture of pity and concern. “Where are you going?”

“Poisson Rouge.”

“What is that?”

“It’s a tropical island in the Caribbean.”

“Oh really?” she says, revolving her mirrors. “Are you on vacation?”

“No, I have a home there, a wife. I’m a geologist.”

Her eyebrows levitate above the frames of her glasses. “You seem young to be a geologist.”

“I got my GED when I was sixteen,” I say, beginning to leaf through the seat pocket before me, looking for that airsickness bag. Instead I find a Rocky Mountain News folded back to a pagethree article about a girl who killed her boyfriend in Florida and disappeared. Now they’re looking for two other missing boyfriends. I study the grainy photo of the murderess. She looks like a man. Her name is Janie Flame. In green ballpoint ink in a distinctly feminine hand, someone has written, “Go Janie Go.” This is exactly the sort of thing I’m leaving, the formal rules of selfishness, ritualized enmity between the sexes, a society that turns its monsters into pop stars. I return the article. The old woman stares at me. I realize I should not have told her I was nervous if I was returning home. I need to stop misrepresenting myself so liberally. It’s time to stop being ashamed of what I am. I’m ashamed of myself for being rude, for compounding the problem. Thankfully the stewardess is almost upon us with her cocktail wagon.