Before the Fall(27)

“Get me a Coke.”

Scott realizes he’s wearing scrubs.

“Lend me a twenty,” he says.

Magnus thinks about this.

“Okay, but promise we’re going to Mueller’s. I bet she’s got scotch in her cabinets that was bottled before the fecking Titanic.”

Scott looks him in the eye.

“Promise.”

Magnus pulls a crumpled bill from his pocket.

“And some chips,” he says.

Scott closes the passenger door. He is wearing disposable flip-flops.

“Be right back,” he says, and walks into the gas station convenience store. There is a heavyset woman behind the counter.

“Back door?” Scott asks her.

She points.

Scott walks down a short hall, past the restrooms. He pushes open a heavy fire door and stands squinting in the sun. There is a chain-link fence a few feet away, and behind that the start of a residential neighborhood. Scott puts the twenty in his front pocket. He tries to climb the fence one-handed, but the sling gets in the way so he ditches it. A few moments later he is on the other side, walking through a vacant lot, his flip-flops slapping against his heels. It is late August, and the air is thick and broiled. He pictures Magnus behind the wheel. He will have turned on the radio, found an oldies station. Right now he’s probably singing along with Queen, arching his neck on the high notes.

Around Scott, the neighborhood is lower-class, cars on blocks in driveways, aboveground pools sloshing in backyards. He is a man in hospital scrubs and flip-flops walking through the midday heat. A mental patient for all anybody knows.

Thirty minutes later he finds a fried chicken joint, goes inside. It’s just a counter and stove with a couple of chairs in front.

“You got a phone I could use?” he asks the Dominican guy behind the counter.

“Gotta order something,” the guy tells him.

Scott orders a bucket of thighs and a ginger ale. The clerk points to a phone on the wall in the kitchen. Scott takes a business card from his pocket and dials. A man answers on the second ring.

“NTSB.”

“Gus Franklin, please,” says Scott.

“Speaking.”

“It’s Scott Burroughs. From the hospital.”

“Mr. Burroughs, how are you?”

“Fine. Look. I’m—I want to help—with the search. The rescue. Whatever.”

There is silence on the other end of the line.

“I’m told you checked out of the hospital,” says Gus, “somehow without being seen by the press.”

Scott thinks about this.

“I dressed up like a doctor,” he says, “and went out the back door.”

Gus laughs.

“Very clever. Listen. I’ve got divers in the water searching for the fuselage, but it’s slow going, and this is a high-profile case. Is there anything you can tell us, anything else you can remember about the crash, what happened before?”

“It’s coming back,” Scott tells him. “Still just fragments, but—let me help with the search. Maybe being out there—maybe it’ll shake something loose.”

Gus thinks about this.

“Where are you?”

“Well,” says Scott, “let me ask you this—how do you feel about chicken thighs?”





Chapter 10


Painting #1



The first thing that catches your eye is the light, or rather two lights angled toward a single focal point, becoming a figure-eight flare at the center of the canvas. It is big, this painting, eight feet long and five feet high, the once white tarpaulin transformed into a smoky gray glitter. Or maybe what you see first is calamity, two dark rectangles slicing the frame, jackknifed, their metallic skeletons glowing in the moonlight. There are flames on the edge of the picture, as if the story doesn’t end just because the painting stops, and people who view the image have been known to walk to the far edges looking for more information, microscoping the framing wood for even a hint of added drama.

The lights that flare out the center of the image are the headlights of an Amtrak passenger train, its caboose having come to rest almost perpendicular to the twisted iron track that bends and waves below it. The first passenger car has disconnected from the caboose and now makes the trunk of a T, having maintained its forward momentum and smashed the engine dead center, bending its bread-box contours into a vague V.

As with any bright light, the headlight glare here obscures much of the image, but upon further examination a viewer might discover a single passenger—in this case a young woman—dressed in a black skirt and torn white blouse, her hair tousled across her face, matted by blood. She is wandering shoeless through the jagged wreckage, and if you squint past the illusion of light you can see that her eyes are wide and searching. She is the victim of disaster, a survivor of heat and impact, cantilevered from her resting position into an impossible parabola of unexpected torture, her once placid world—gently rocking, click clack, click clack—now a screeching twist of metal.

What is she looking for, this woman? Is it merely a way out? A clear and sensible path to safety? Or has she lost something? Someone? In that moment, when gentle rocking turned into a cannonball ricochet, did she go from wife and mother, from sister or girlfriend, from daughter or paramour to refugee? A fulfilled and happy we to a stunned and grieving I?