DRIVING AROUND THE airfield, every dirt turnout has a sign reminding me that the area is under surveillance and I need to keep moving. I wind up a quarter mile away, in the parking lot of a Jo-Ann Fabrics. It’s farther away than I’d like, but it’s under the approach path and no one is going to give me trouble for being there.
Cross is just one person, but he’s surrounded by a huge, grinding machine and that machine sometimes telegraphs its intentions. I think that’s why, some nights, I can guess which song he’ll play next — it doesn’t happen often, but when it comes to me I’m never wrong.
Sitting in the parking lot, I get the feeling that Jimmy is about to appear.
I glass the runway with my binoculars; my eyes pass over the Cessnas guy-wired to the ground, the tiny little control tower studded with radio antennae, and one of those whirligigs they use to gauge the wind. A man stands beside a Piper Cub; the engine cowling is folded back. An orange pickup makes a slow circuit inside the control fence. Near the tower, an old-timer astride a girl’s bike rides circles around a tied-up mutt. I check my watch. It’s a little after six. The doors open in less than an hour.
MY PHONE RINGS. It’s Patricia. She knows I have to answer because we have a child together.
“Hello, Arthur.”
“Did you have another dream?” Back in August she called to tell me that she’d dreamed that I’d died “alone in a hotel room” and she wanted me to make arrangements so, if I did pass away, Gabby wouldn’t be the one to be notified by the police — in Patricia’s dream, the police had called our daughter at work.
“Don’t be a curmudgeon. Are you in Buffalo?”
“Is that why you called, to ask where I was?”
“Promise me you’re going to see Gabrielle when you get down to Kentucky.”
“I talked with Gabby yesterday.”
“I know that. Why do you think I called you? I want you to promise me that you will see her. Don’t screw this up.”
Two blocks away, I spot a black limousine waiting at a traffic light.
I promise her that I’ll see Gabby.
“It appears you were off for a couple days. How’d that go?”
She’s needling me.
“Yesterday I told someone I was married.”
I have her attention, because all of a sudden she’s quiet.
“It was a slipup.”
“I hope you’re not losing your marbles.”
The limousine pulls up in front of the airfield’s gate. I watch the gatekeeper pedal over.
“Is there anything else?”
“Give Gabrielle your approval.”
“Don’t I need to know what I’m approving?”
“No,” Patricia says, almost yelling.
The orange truck jounces across the infield.
“Repeat after me: I will give her my approval.”
“I will give her my approval.”
“You sound distracted.”
I recite my line again.
“I got my hair cut last week,” Patricia says. “I’m too old to wear it long. Maybe if I were a public intellectual.”24
I tell her she’s not that old.
“You’d probably say I look like a lesbian.”
“That doesn’t sound like me.”
A small jet roars overhead. The tires kiss the runway and leave a puff of white smoke. I tell Patricia I have to go.
“For a person who does nothing, you stay awfully busy. Aunt Liddy would be so proud.”
Patricia specializes in the parting shot. Sometimes it feels as though she’s giving herself an alibi in case anyone ever accuses her of caring about me. It doesn’t escape me that she knew I was in Buffalo — she bothered to check.
30
Albert and Peter had taken up seats in the front row of the auditorium. Tilting their heads back, they watched the new Kev as she crawled around the catwalks above the stage.
“What happened to the old Kev?” Peter asked.
Albert shook his head. “Vertigo. He couldn’t climb a stepladder.”
“Did he see a doctor?”
“Bluto diagnosed him as unemployable. We left him in Boston. You don’t know how to play mah-jongg, do you?”
Peter conceded that he didn’t.
“He and Sutliff used to play before we’d go on.”
“Figuring out things to do with your downtime must be a challenge.”
“You’re talking to a musician. Downtime is my preferred medium.”
People walked across the stage, flaking out coils of electrical cable, arranging guitars like weapons in an armory. A guy in camouflage cached water bottles beside every piece of stationary equipment.
FLETCHER TAPPED PETER on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to sit behind the boards while the band ran through their sound check.
If he stayed where he was, Peter thought he would feel a lot like an audience member, so he followed the technician to a control booth at the back of the room.
“Welcome to the doghouse,” Fletcher said, holding the door for the doctor.
The room reminded Peter of a poster that had hung on the wall of his boyhood home, a fish-eye perspective of the space shuttle’s cockpit. But while the space shuttle required a pilot and copilot, Fletcher flew solo.
Judith had given Peter the poster as a birthday gift and then hung it in their living room among her things. Judith didn’t care about boundaries. All their clothes shared a closet, for example. And she refused to close the door to her bedroom, because she thought that on some level he would perceive that as a rejection. They’d been inseparable. Judith had always been his best friend, even when it was embarrassing. She let him know that his favorite things to do were her favorite things. On spring days, while the whole town smelled of ferns, she would take him down to a stream where they’d turn over rocks and hunt for salamanders. He remembered summer afternoons in the town’s arcade, the parquet floor slippery with sawdust from the tabletop shuffleboard, his mother bumping her hip against a pinball machine. He’d been seven and ten and fourteen and Judith was always there. She used to wear a leather bracelet with his name tooled in red. No museum is better guarded than the human heart.
•••
WHEN THE SOUND check started, the band played on top of one another, a tangled dissonance. Fletcher moved over the board, tweaking the settings on his switches, slides, and dials. At times he’d ask the band to take five while he investigated the source of a particular buzz or echo. When they weren’t playing, the musicians basked in the stage lights, as cold-blooded as lizards.
Fletcher wore a pair of headphones around his neck, not unlike a stethoscope. Every so often he’d lift them to his ears.
He made a hundred inscrutable adjustments to the board before asking the band to move on to another song. The musicians barked requests in jargon: cool it down, less edge, drop the ceiling, add some rust. After repeating the opening, they lifted their thumbs. The guys swapped guitars before repeating the process.
“How do you know what to adjust?”
“Before this gig, I ran the boards for a Monsters of Metal tour,” Fletcher said. “Back then I had to reinvent the wheel every night, but these guys are professionals. If I’m feeling bored I’ll tweak one of the midrange frequencies and we’ll play our version of Battleship. Dom can usually pinpoint the issue after two or three notes.”
Peter confessed that Albert was the only band member he knew.
“Don’t sweat it,” Fletcher said. “I ran the board for fifteen months before anyone bothered to learn my name.” He pointed to a thickset man wearing a brown, flat-brimmed fedora. “Dom’s the one who looks like a Cuban exile. The skinny tree next to him is Sutliff.”
At the back of the stage there was a guy wearing two guitars, one almost up to his armpits and the other down over his knees. “Who’s that?”