Inside, there was piped-in music and the bartender wore military livery. Coverly took a stool and ordered a beer. The man beside him was swaying comfortably on his stool. “Where you going?” he asked.
“Denver.”
“Me, too,” the stranger exclaimed, striking Coverly on the back. “I’ve been going to Denver for three days.”
“That’s right,” the bartender said. “He missed eight flights now. Isn’t it eight?”
“Eight,” the stranger said. “It’s because I love my wife. My wife’s in Denver, and I love her so much I can’t get on the plane.”
“It’s good for business,” the barkeeper said.
In the gloom at the end of the bar two conspicuous homosexuals with dyed yellow hair were drinking rum. A family sat at a table eating lunch and conversing in advertising slogans. It seemed to be a family joke.
“My!” the mother exclaimed. “Taste those bite-sized chunks of white Idaho turkey meat, reinforced with riboflavin, for added zest.”
“I like the crispy, crunchy potato chips,” the boy said. “Toasted to a golden brown in health-giving infrared ovens and topped with imported salt.”
“I like the spotless rest rooms,” said the girl, “operated under the supervision of a trained nurse and hygienically sealed for our comfort, convenience and peace of mind.”
“Winstons taste good,” piped the baby in his high chair, “like a cigarette should. Winstons have flavor.”
The dark bar had the authority of a creation, but it was a creation evolved independently from the iconography of the universe. With the exception of the labels on the bottles, there was nothing familiar in the place. Its lights were cavernous, its walls were dark mirrors. There was not even a truncated piece of driftwood or a coaster shaped like a leaf to remind him of the world outside. That beauty of sameness that makes the star and the shell, the sea and the clouds all seem to have come from the same hand was lost. The music was interrupted for the announcement that Coverly’s flight was boarding, and he paid for his beer and grabbed his briefcase. He stopped in the men’s room, where someone had written something exceedingly human on the wall, and then followed the lighted numbers down the long corridor to his gate. There was still no plane in sight, but none of the passengers had been moved by the delay or the news of the crash to change their plans. They stood there passively as if the sullen clerk had in fact sold them humility with their tickets. Coverly’s topcoat was too warm for that climate, but most of the other passengers had come from places that were colder or warmer than here. From a duct directly overhead, the continuous music poured gently into their ears. “It’s going to be all right,” an old lady beside Coverly whispered to an even older companion. “It isn’t dangerous. It isn’t any more dangerous than the trains. They carry millions of passengers every year. It’s going to be all right.” The fingers of the older, knobbed like driftwood, touched her cheeks, and in her eyes was the fear of death. Death was what the scene meant to her—the frisky mechanics in their white coveralls, the numbered runways, the noise of an incoming 707. A baby cried. A man ran a comb through his hair. The objects and sounds around Coverly seemed to group themselves into some immutable statement. These were the facts—this music, the fear of death endured by the old stranger, the flatness of the field, and way in the distance the roofs of some houses.
The plane came in, they boarded, and the stewardess seated Coverly between an old lady and a man whose breath smelled of whisky. The stewardess wore high-heeled shoes, a raincoat and dark glasses. Coverly saw under her raincoat the skirts of a red silk dress. As soon as she had closed the plane, she went to the toilet and reappeared in the gray skirt and white silk blouse of her profession. Her eyes, when she took off her glasses, were haggard, and she peered out of them in pain. “Joe Burner,” said the man on Coverly’s right, and Coverly shook his hand and introduced himself. “I’m pleased to meet you, Cove,” the stranger said. “I have a little present here I’d like to give you.” He took a small box from his pocket, and when Coverly opened it he found a gilt tie clip. “I travel a lot,” the stranger explained, “and I give away these tie clips wherever I go. I have them manufactured for me in Providence. That’s the jewelry capital of the United States. I give away two or three thousand clips a year. It’s a nice way of making friends. Everybody can use a tie clip.”
“Thank you very much,” Coverly said.
“I knit socks for astronauts,” said the old lady on Coverly’s left. “Oh, I know it’s silly of me, but I love those boys, and I can’t bear to think of them having cold feet. I’ve sent ten pairs of socks down to Canaveral in the last six weeks. They don’t thank me, it’s true, but they’ve never returned them, and I like to think that they use them.”
“I’m taking a few days off, to see an old friend who’s dying of cancer,” said Joe Burner. “I have at this date twenty-seven friends who are dying of cancer. Some of them know it. Some of them don’t. But not a one of them has more than a year to live.”
They were wrapped then in a heard and unheard convulsion of sound and pushed roughly back against their seats by the force of gravity as the plane went down the strip and began its strenuous push for altitude. A large panel fell out of the ceiling and crashed into the aisle, and the glasses and bottles in the pantry rattled noisily. When they had risen above the scattered clouds, the passengers unbuckled their seat belts and resumed their lives, their habits. “Good afternoon,” said the loudspeaker. “This is Captain MacPherson welcoming you to Flight 73, nonstop to Denver. We have reports of a little turbulence in the mountains but we expect it to clear by scheduled landing time. We are sorry about the delay, and wish to take this occasion to thank you all for your patience in not doing nothing about it.” The speaker clicked off.
Coverly could not see that anyone else was perplexed. Was he mistaken in assuming that navigational competence implied a rudimentary grasp of English? Joe Burner had begun to tell Coverly the story of his life. His style was nearly bardic. He began with the characters of his parents. He described his birthplace. Then he told Coverly about his two older brothers, his interest in sandlot baseball, his odd jobs, the schools he had attended, the wonderful buttermilk pancakes that his mother used to make and the friends that he had won and lost. He told Coverly his annual grosses, the size of his office staff, the nature of his three operations, the wonderfulness of his wife and the amount of money it had cost him to landscape his seven-room, two-bath house on Long Island. “I have something very unique,” he said. “I have this lighthouse on my front lawn. Four, five years ago, this big estate on Sands Point was auctioned off for taxes, and Mother and I went down there to see if there was anything we could use. Well, they had this little lake with a lighthouse on it—just ornamental, of course—and when it came time to buy the lighthouse, the bidding was very slow. Well, I bid thirty-five dollars, just for the heck of it, and you know what? That lighthouse was mine. Well, I have this friend in the trucking business—you have to know the right people—and he went down there and got it off the lake. I don’t know to this day how he did it. Well, I’ve got this other friend in the electric business, and he wired it up for me, and now I’ve got this lighthouse right on my front lawn. It makes the place look real nice. Of course, some of the neighbors complain—you find clinkers in every gang—so I don’t turn it on every night, but when we have people in to play cards or watch the television, I turn it on, and it looks beautiful.”