The sky by then was the dark blue of high altitudes, and the atmosphere in the plane was as genial as a saloon. The white blouse the hostess wore came loose whenever she bent over to serve a cocktail. She tucked it in each time she straightened up. The seat backs were as high as the walls of an old box pew, and the passengers had a limited degree of privacy and a limited view of one another. Then the bulkhead door opened, and Coverly saw the captain come down the aisle. His color was bad, and his eyes were as haggard as the eyes of the stewardess. Perhaps he was a friend of the pilot and crew who had crashed a few hours earlier in Colorado. Would he, would anyone else, have the fortitude to face this disaster calmly? Would the charred bones of seventy-three bodies mean any less to him than they did to the rest of the world? He nodded to the stewardess, who followed him aft to the pantry. They did not exchange a word, but she put some ice into a paper cup and poured whisky into it. He carried his drink forward and closed the door. The old lady was dozing, and Joe Burner, having finished with his autobiography, had begun to tell his stock of jokes. Without any warning, the plane dropped about two thousand feet.
The confusion was horrible. Most of the drinks hit the ceiling, men and women were thrown into the aisles, children were screaming. “Attention, attention,” said the public-address system. “Hear this, everyone.”
“Oh, my God,” the stewardess said, and she went aft and strapped herself in. “Attention, attention,” said the amplified voice, and Coverly wondered then if this might be the last voice that he heard. Once, when he was being prepared for a critical operation, he had looked out of his hospital window into the window of an apartment house across the street, where a fat woman was dusting a grand piano. He had already been given Sodium Pentothal and was swiftly losing consciousness, but he resisted the drug long enough to feel resentment at the fact that the last he might see of the beloved world was a fat woman dusting a grand piano.
“Attention, attention,” the voice said. The plane had leveled off in the heart of a dark cloud. “This is not your captain. Your captain is tied up in the head. Please do not move, please do not move from your seats, or I will cut off your oxygen supply. We are traveling at five hundred miles an hour, at an altitude of forty-two thousand feet, and any disturbance you create will only add to your danger. I have logged nearly a million air miles and am disqualified as a pilot only because of my political opinions. This is a robbery. In a few minutes my accomplice will enter the cabin by the forward bulkhead, and you will give him your wallets, purses, jewelry and any other valuables that you have. Do not create any disturbance. You are helpless. I repeat: You are helpless.”
“Talk to me, talk to me,” the old lady asked. “Please just say something, anything.”
Coverly turned and nodded to her, but his tongue was so swollen with fear that he could not make a sound. He worked it around desperately in his mouth to stir up some lubrication. The other passengers were still, and on they rocketed through the dark—sixty-five or seventy strangers, their noses pressed against the turmoil of death. What would be its mode? Fire? Should they, like the martyrs, inhale the flames to shorten the agony? Would they be truncated, beheaded, mutilated and scattered over three miles of farmland? Would they be ejaculated into the darkness and yet not lose consciousness during the dreadful fall to earth? Would they be drowned, and while drowning display their last talent for inhumanity in trampling one another at the flooding bulkheads? It was the darkness that gave him most pain. The shadow of a bridge or a building can fall across our spirit with all the weight of a piece of bad news, and it was the darkness that seemed to compromise his spirit. All he wanted then was to see some light, a patch of blue sky. A woman, sitting forward, began to sing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” It was a common church soprano, feminine, decent, raised once a week in the company of her neighbors. “E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me,” she sang, “still all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to Thee. . . .”
A man across the aisle took up the hymn, joined quickly by several others, and when Coverly remembered the words, he sang:
Joe Burner and the old lady were singing, and those who didn’t know the words came in strong on the refrain. The bulkhead door opened, and there was the thief. He wore a felt hat and a black handkerchief tied over his face with holes cut for the eyes. It was, except for the felt hat, the ancient mask of the headsman. He wore black rubber gloves and carried a plastic wastebasket to collect their valuables. Coverly roared:
They sang more in rebelliousness than in piety; they sang because it was something to do. And merely in having found something to do they had confounded the claim that they were helpless. They had found themselves, and this accounted for the extraordinary force and volume of their voices. Coverly stripped off his wristwatch and dropped his wallet into the basket. Then the thief, with his black-gloved hands, lifted the briefcase out of Coverly’s lap. Coverly let out a groan of dismay and might have grabbed at the case had not Burner and the old lady turned on him faces so contorted with horror that he fell back into his seat. When the thief had robbed the last of them, he turned back to the bulkhead, staggering a little against the motion of the plane—a disadvantage that made his figure seem familiar and harmless. They sang:
“Thank you for your cooperation,” said the public-address system. “We will make an unscheduled landing in West Franklin in about eleven minutes. Please fasten your seat belts and observe the no-smoking signal.”
The clouds outside the ports began to lighten, to turn from gray to white, and then they sailed free into the blue sky of late afternoon. The old lady dried her tears and smiled. To lessen the pain of his confusion Coverly suddenly concluded that the briefcase had contained an electric toothbrush and a pair of silk pajamas. Joe Burner made the sign of the cross. The plane was losing altitude rapidly, and then below them they could see the roofs of a city that seemed like the handiwork of a marvelously humble people going about useful tasks and raising their children in goodness and charity. The moment when they ceased to be airborne passed with a thump and a roar of the reverse jets, and out of the ports they could see that international wilderness that hedges airstrips. Scrub grass and weeds, a vegetable slum, struggled in the sandy bottom soil that formed the banks of an oily creek. Someone shouted, “There they go!” Two passengers opened the bulkhead. There were confused voices, and when someone asked for information, the complexity of human relationships so swiftly re-established itself that those who knew what was going on pridefully refused to communicate with those who didn’t and the first man into the forward cabin spoke to them with condescension. “If you’ll quiet down for a minute,” said he, “I’ll tell you what we know. We’ve released the crew and the captain has made radio contact with the police. The thieves got away. That’s all I can tell you now.”