Gus Waddell will have brought him the newspaper by now. He pictured the Chief lowering his coffee. His son, a World of Darkness employee! But a “hero,” now. Did those two facts cancel one another out? Possibly the Chief would take the bus to the World of Darkness to look for him, he had to be prepared for that. Maybe the Chief was rolling toward him right now with a slow, inexorable rage, like a bowling ball …
Kiwi caught himself smiling at the thought. He smiled so hard that his eyes narrowed into crescents and began to water. And it was this grin that broke the news to the rest of him — Kiwi realized then that he would really love to see his father.
Attendance at the Leviathan spiked by 20 percent during the week following the “Hell’s Angel” story. People wanted to meet him, to pump his hands and thank him for some reason, as if he had saved them personally. They posed for snapshots in front of “the Lake where it happened.”
“Are you religious?” Lost Souls asked him. “Do you believe in angels?”
“No,” Kiwi replied seriously. It was his kid sisters who believed in ghosts, angels, life after death, conjuring spells. “I am not. I do not. Who knows what Emily Barton thinks she saw down there, but I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that I am not a literal angel, no.”
He gave several dozen autographs as Kiwi Bigtree, Hell’s Angel. As he signed he’d feel the bones inside his back clench against these credulous people, unaccountably furious.
“Ticket sales are up twenty-two percent this week,” Mr. Jenks reported grudgingly on Friday, reading off an enormous legal pad that said MEMOS. Many of Mr. Jenks’s managerial accessories were labeled in a font sized for the legally blind.
“So enjoy your fifteen minutes, Bigtree …,” Carl grunted through the roll of tape in his mouth. Back home a roll of duct tape in your mouth meant you had an alligator’s jaws in your fists, but Carl Jenks was just taping up cardboard.
“Can I help you, Carl?”
“No. I know how I want my things.”
Carl was moving, or “being removed,” by his own boss, the Carl of Carls, to the other side of the World. Lamentably, he said, he would still be Kiwi’s supervisor. Orcs and pencils disappeared into the box.
“I hope you know how lucky you are,” Carl Jenks muttered. “The training alone is a huge company investment. They’ve hired a private CFI who brags that he taught his semideaf nine-year-old niece how to fly. Promises even you can pass the check ride. If you ask me you’re a bad investment — who is going to remember this Lake of Fire story a week from now? — but Tom Barrett saw your picture in the paper this morning and he’s just giddy about it. Thinks we’re going to get all this free publicity, and new clients from the ‘crystals-are-my-medicine’ crowd. New Agers.”
“Right. All that miraculous bullshit.” Kiwi felt the stab that accompanied all thoughts of Osceola. He could see her face smiling under the goofy puple turban.
“Barrett doesn’t get many ideas, so when he has one he likes he throws a lot of money behind it.”
“Yes. Got it. Ideas need money to become a reality.”
Kiwi rocked way back on his red-and-black sneakers ($22) with his hands in his pockets, as if he were vying to become a Human Slingshot. He had no idea what Carl was talking about.
“What I’m telling you, Bigtree, is that HR is casting against type. The Loomis directors want you as one of the Four Pilots. They think it’ll be cute—” Carl’s smile went taut. “That girl Emily Barton is going on all the news outlets and calling you her ‘angel.’ So that’s how they want to bill you.”
The office was almost empty now, the walls bare except for glue and pegs. A World of Darkness calendar was the last thing left to pack, and Kiwi felt a rueful stab as he thought of the Bigtrees’ own calendar. Kiwi’s face was always the mascot for July, and for one month each year he grinned out at himself from the gift shop’s walls with a ferocious self-hatred, desperate for August to come.
“To be honest, I doubt they’ll let you fly in the end. What are you, twelve? I’m shocked it’s even legal for you to get a pilot’s license, frankly. Probably they’ll use you as a stewardess. Give you a little beverage tray and a catcher’s mitt to nab the Lost Souls’ vomit, you’ll excel at that. I’m just telling you for your own sake: Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t let your hopes get higher than your girlish hips.”
Kiwi reddened; it was true that he’d become a little pear-shaped. Burger Burger portions. All the pizza.
“Excuse me, Bigtree.”
Carl patted Kiwi’s wingless back and picked up a large box.
That afternoon, Kiwi conducted an intake interview with the Take to the Skies flight school on Carl Jenks’s new office phone, with Carl Jenks’s forehead visible behind the computer. Kiwi felt an incredible power over this man. To be envied was a new experience. Just the sound of Kiwi dialing made Carl’s forehead wrinkle and smooth. His boss’s skin was the pasty, poreless color of cake batter. Sad evidence, the Chief would have said, of a lifetime spent indoors. And when the Chief sees me skyed inside a cockpit? What will he have to say about that?
“You’re that Hell’s Angel kid?” a voice was saying. “The one that saved Teddy Barton’s girl?”
“I’m Kiwi Bigtree.”
“Well, you sure screwed up these forms that you faxed us pretty good, Kiwi Bigtree. They’re just about illegible. You’re how old, son?”
“Eighteen. Almost.”
“Almost. So that would make you seventeen, correct?”
“Right.”
“Excellent. You can fly solo at fourteen, but older is better. How tall?”
“Six five,” Kiwi lied, shifting his weight onto his toes in Carl’s office.
“What on earth are you doing, prima ballerina?” Carl muttered from behind the computer.
“How’s your vision? You got your medical certificate yet?”
“No, sir.”
“You need to get that. High school diploma?”
“I’m attending the Rocklands High nontraditional student program, sir. Night school.”
“Degree expected?”
“Oh!” said Kiwi, misunderstanding the question. “Yes, definitely. I want to get several. The MA, and the PhD as well.”
“What year will you receive your high school degree?”
Kiwi was silent. Somehow he could more easily imagine his graduation from Harvard University in five years than any of the intervening steps. The prospect of actually passing Miss Arenas’s final exam next month and transferring his single credit to Rocklands High School was so overwhelming to him that it temporarily short-circuited his brain.
“It’s sunny out today, Mr. Bigtree, why not be optimistic? I’m going to put down ‘September.’ Okay, you’re all set in the computer. First class is Tuesday. Three thirty. You can do the lesson modules at the public library. I’ll put your Reach for the Skies! packet in the mail.”
Life was a phonograph in an empty room. The World was a silent record, turning. Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing. Such was Kiwi’s stoned thinking on a rainy Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., with five hours and fourteen minutes of his shift left to go. He was back to pushing the vacuum again, filling in for Leonard.
“Cover for me,” Leo had commanded Kiwi that morning. “My thumb feels wrong.”
“Your thumb?”
“Both of them,” Leonard said slyly. As a dedicated malingerer Leo set a new standard; even his lies were lazy. “Both thumbs hurt now. I think I slept on them or something. You have to cover for me.”
Which was fine by Kiwi, because now he’d have ten hours of overtime this week. After taxes, this boosted his salary by $43.12.