Looking out the window, Kenny saw the lanes of the highway that led straight up the valley through towns like Willows and Orland leading to Iron Bend and beyond. Just two days ago he and his mom had been down below on that highway. Now, he was miles above it.
After Kenny had flown the plane he had to pop his ears, yawning widely and blowing his nose with his mouth closed. It didn’t hurt. The plane was descending, the engine sounding louder as the ground grew closer and the landmarks of Iron Bend showed themselves. There was the logging yard south of town, then the two motels off the highway, the old grain silos that held no grain, and the parking lot of the Shopping Plaza with the Montgomery Ward. Kenny had never been told there was an airport in Iron Bend, but there it was, beyond the Union High football field.
The plane jiggled and shook as Mr. Garcia came in for the landing. He did something to the engine that made it go soft and nearly silent just before the wheels squeeched on the concrete runway. He drove the airplane like a car and came to a stop a few feet from where other planes were parked. When he shut the engine off, the propeller kept going around a few times until seizing up with a jerk. Without the engine, the quiet was odd, making the unclicking of the seat belts sound crisply clear, like something from a movie at the State Theater.
“Cheated death again,” Mr. Garcia said without having to shout.
“Honestly,” said Kenny’s mom. “Do you have to put it that way?”
Mr. Garcia laughed, leaned back, and kissed her on the cheek.
The airport had a very small coffee shop. There were no customers and, it appeared, no staff. Kenny, still wearing his dark pilot glasses, sat at a table, the pink suitcase on the floor at his feet while his mom put coins into a pay phone on the wall. She dialed, waited, then hung up and put the same coins back into the phone. She dialed another number before she was able to talk to anyone.
“Well, the line was busy,” she said into the phone. “Can you come get him? Because we have to get back. How long? All right.” She hung up and came over to the bench. “Your dad is coming from work to pick you up. Let’s see if there’s some hot cocoa for you and coffee for me.”
Kenny could see through the glass coffee shop door into the office of the airport. Mr. Garcia—still wearing his dark glasses, too—was talking to a man who was sitting at a desk. Kenny heard a loud whirring noise that turned out to be a machine that made hot chocolate. When his mom brought it to him in a Styrofoam cup, one sip told Kenny the cocoa was too watery. He didn’t finish it.
His dad came, driving the station wagon. He left the motor running as he got out of the car, wearing his cook’s pants and heavy shoes. He shook hands with Mr. Garcia, said a few words to Kenny’s mom, then picked up the small pink suitcase and carried it out to the car.
Kenny sat in the front seat, just like he did in the airplane. As they drove out of the parking lot, his father asked him about his dark glasses.
“Mr. Garcia gave them to me,” Kenny said.
Kenny told his father about aiming for Mount Shasta, then about going to the zoo and the peewee golf and seeing the old house.
“Ah,” his father said. He said it again when Kenny told him the Callendars had moved away.
As they rode into town and back to the Blue Gum Restaurant, Kenny looked out the window, his eyes tinted a deep blue by his metal-framed sunglasses, scanning the sky. Mr. Garcia had probably taken off by now, and Kenny hoped to see the plane up there. His mom would be sitting in the copilot’s seat.
But there was no sign of them. None at all.
These Are the Meditations of My Heart
She was not looking to buy an old typewriter. She needed nothing and wanted no more possessions—new, used, antique—not a thing. She had vowed to weather her recent personal setbacks with an era of Spartan living; a new minimalism, a life she could fit in her car.
She liked her small apartment west of the Cuyahoga River. She’d tossed away all the clothes she’d worn with him, the Knothead; she cooked for herself almost every night and listened to a lot of podcasts. She had enough money saved to see her to the New Year, allowing a lazy, agenda-free summer. January would freeze the lake and probably burst the pipes of her building, but by then she would be gone. New York or Atlanta or Austin or New Orleans. She had options galore as long as she traveled light. But the Lakewood Methodist Church on the corner of Michigan and Sycamore was having a Saturday Parking Lot Sale, raising money for community service programs like Free Day Care, twelve-step program meetings, and, she didn’t know, maybe Meals on Wheels. She was neither a churchgoer nor a baptized Methodist, but she was fairly certain that sauntering through a parking lot full of card tables brimming with yard sale debris was not an act of worship.
As a hoot she almost bought a set of aluminum TV dinner trays, but three of them showed signs of rust. Boxes of costume jewelry revealed no treasures. But then she saw a set of Tupperware ice pop makers. As a kid, she had been in charge of pouring Kool-Aid or orange juice into the molds and inserting the patented plastic handles, which, when the freezer had done the physics, made for inexpensive icy treats. She could almost feel the hot wind of summer in the foothills, her hands sticky from melting, fruity ice. With no haggling, she got the set for a dollar.
On the same table was the typewriter, the color of faded Pop Art red—not an attraction. What got her eye was the adhesive label glued to the top left corner of its housing. In lowercase letters and underlined (by using the Shift and 6 key) the original owner had typed
The words had been typed as many as thirty years ago, when the machine was brand new, just out of the box, perhaps a gift on a girl’s thirteenth birthday. A more recent owner had typed BUY ME FOR $5 on a piece of paper and rolled it into the carriage.
The machine was a portable; the body was plastic. The ribbon was two-tone, black over red, and there was a hole in the lid where the name Smith Corona or Brother or Olivetti had once been plugged. There was also a reddish leatherette carrying case with a half-sleeve opening and push-button latch. She punched three of the keys—A, F, P—and they all clacked onto the paper and settled back again. So, the thing worked, sort of.
“Is this typewriter really only five dollars?” she asked of a Lady Methodist at a nearby card table.
“That?” the woman said. “I think it works but nobody uses typewriters anymore.”
That was not the question she had asked, but she didn’t care. “I’ll take it.”
“Show me the money.”
And just like that the Methodists were five bucks richer.
At her apartment, she prepped a supply of pineapple juice ice pops for later that night. She’d have a couple when the day cooled, when she could have her windows open and watch for the first fireflies of the evening. She pulled the typewriter from its cheap case, set it out on her tiny kitchen table, and rolled in a piece of printer paper from the feed of her LaserWriter. She tried each of the keys—many stuck. One of the four rubber feet on the bottom of the body was missing, so the machine rocked a bit. She pounded each of the keys from the top row straight across, shifting to caps as well, trying, with some degree of success, to shake loose the stickiness. Though the ribbon was old, the letters were legible. She tried the spacing of the carriage return—single and double—which worked, although the bell did not. The margin sliders scraped and then jammed in place.