FIVE

THE ADRENALINE SURGED again, the same blast as in Riverside Park, the sort that takes years off your life. It would be tough to maintain the deadpan. Jellyroll was peering up into my eyes. I scared him. He knew every nuance of my mood, and he didn’t like it. I turned to face the wattage—

It wasn’t for him! The cameras weren’t even pointed at us. They were aiming at someone else, apparently a notable or a group of notables deplaning in an entourage, and we were being hit by the light spill. The camera crews bustled about the edges of the entourage, poking into gaps to get a look at the object of all this fuss. I was curious. Who needed fifty people to carry his luggage? This entourage, made up of some very tough customers with stern faces and darting eyes, moved like a phalanx that parted the ways for the honcho inside. I liked the concept.

“That’s His Excellency,” said a thin man with a pencil moustache and a black suit standing nearby. He was obviously an admirer of His Excellency. He was bobbing his head with obeisance even as he mentioned Him. “This is His Excellency’s first trip to the Apple. He is very pleased. He has tickets to Les Miz.”

“Well, I hope he has a grand time,” I said. I was panting with relief. It was clearly time to get out of town, get way out of town.

All my major joints had turned runny by the time we took our seats on the airplane. But now we could relax. We didn’t even have fellow passengers to engage, because I had chartered the whole airplane. The world is not a fair place that I should have the wherewithal to hire a twin-engine aircraft while others must crawl, but there it is. We were aboard an Airstream by British Aerospace, I think, the one with the big wing strut running across the aisle. It was meant for about fifteen passengers. I hadn’t asked for such a big airplane.

The pilots turned in their seats, head to head, to wave at us. They wore starched white shirts with crisp epaulets. The pilot was dark, the copilot fair, but both had rugged outdoors faces. They were probably based in Crested Butte, Colorado, and Big Sky, Montana, respectively, where they liked to ski with their well-adjusted, tight-bodied wives. I’d like to have been a pilot of some kind, even though I don’t look the part. I look more like the navigator.

“Welcome aboard, Mr. Deemer. I’m Ron,” said the captain. “And this is Dave.”

“Call me Artie.”

“Well, it’s good to know you, Artie. We’ll be getting airborne right away, but before we fire ’em up, the FAA wants us to tell you a few things you probably already know.” Ron had fine pearly teeth.

Meanwhile, Jellyroll investigated the passenger compartment, sniffed everything as if he were considering acquiring the airline.

Ron recited from a plastic card, and I felt safe for the first time in days. I like airplanes. My father got killed in one before I was born. I used to read books about angles of attack, lift, drag, inertia, and thrust, but I don’t anymore. Nor do I read about air combat anymore. Maybe I’ve buried my father; though literally, there probably wasn’t much to bury, a smoking boot, perhaps. Had he lived, he might have looked something like Ron and Dave, tall, slim, stalwart, cool, sunglasses rakishly worn up on the forehead. At least that’s how he looked in the old photographs.

They started the engine on the left side, and the plane began to vibrate, then the right, but the noise was surprisingly light. I motioned Jellyroll to jump up on my lap for takeoff. I hugged him tightly against my chest. I’ve never been able to think of a better way. Seat belts just don’t work for dogs. He licked my ear as our wheels left the New York metropolitan area.

After we leveled off at about ten thousand feet, Captain Ron asked what my ultimate destination was—after we landed in Oglevie.

I felt a stab of suspicion. “Why, Ron?”

“Up north where you’re going, there aren’t many rules. We got some flexibility with regard to flight plan. Sometimes people like to overfly their cabin or whatever.”

“Oh, I see. I’d like that. It’s tiny, I hear. A place called Kempshall Island. Near a town called Micmac.”

“Let me see if I got the charts.”

“Okay.”

A door latch opened behind me. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else aboard, yet someone was coming out of the lavatory—Christ, it was Barry from the thirty-fifth floor!

“Barry, what are—” Then I saw that Barry had an ax in his hands, a big two-blade Paul Bunyan ax.

“Look, Artie, I don’t want to do this, but the board insisted. I tried to talk them out of it. I got two daughters in the Ivy League. Do you know how much that costs?” Barry was advancing on us down the short aisle. “I’m going to have to kill him for family values.”

“Don’t kill him, Barry. You said yourself it wasn’t him, it was me they object to. Kill me.”

“I’m sorry, Artie, but I have no choice in this thing—”

“Haw!”

The copilot—what was his name?—was tapping my forearm. “I’m sorry, Artie, I guess you were dreaming.”

“Yeah, I guess I was.”

“Ron found Kempshall Island. Wondered if you’d like to see it from forward.”

“Oh, great. Thanks a lot.”

“I’ll sit back here and pet the star dog, if that’s okay with you.”

“You stay, pal.” He hated those words, and he gave me the stink eye, but sometimes he has to stay.

I slid over the throttles and into the right-hand seat without kicking anything vital to level flight.

The azure ocean was spattered with green islands. The largest were about the size of a New York City block, and the smallest nothing more than barren rock piles and exposed ledges around which waves broiled. Humans played no part here, only the long slog of geologic time. Even the verdant, forested islands looked forbidding. Few had protected coves, none had anything like a natural harbor. The ocean clawed constantly at them. Maybe the ledges and rock piles had once been islands, but the elements had reduced them to their essence—rock.

“There it is,” said Ron.

At this speed, geography took form quickly and flitted away under our wings even faster. “Where?”

“The nose is on it…now.”

Two domes formed Kempshall Island. Both were wooded on their flanks, bald on the very top. The naked rock had a pinkish hue that glinted in the sun. The domes were soft and, compared to the other craggy and truncated islands we’d flown over, sensual, almost gentle. And then it was gone.

“No roads. You notice that?” said Captain Ron.

I hadn’t, no. How does the islander move about a roadless island? By boat, I guessed. Or he just stayed put. I liked that prospect. “Could we go around again, Captain?”

“Sure.” He called back to Dave, “Hang on, we’re going around again.”

“Okay,” called Dave. Then Dave told Jellyroll that we were going around again.

From the new angle, I saw that one of the domes had twin peaks with a low saddle joining them. In fact, the island was made up of three, not two, domes, the sides of which plunged almost vertically into the surf.

“Look at that!” said Ron as we completed the turn.

It was a huge crack. Something had cracked Kempshall nearly in half. One dome lay to the south, the twin peaks to the north. What can crack a solid rock island? Volcanos? Time? The rift cut deeply enough into the island to form a long, narrow harbor. There were a few boats and docks inside. I could see stairways zigzagging down the rock face to the docks. And then Kempshall Island ducked under the nose. There were no more islands ahead.

We were over open water for about ten minutes before the mainland came into sight. I mused on isolation and solitude. Life out there on the island would be very different from that on the island Manhattan. There would be nothing on the islands to distract one from the inner life. You would need a well of inner resources to tolerate yourself in such solitude. You’d need something other than controlled substances to fall back on. Part of me wanted to retire Jellyroll, chuck in the whole career and make do with things as they are, tinker, plant, observe nature’s ways. Jellyroll would dig it, but would I turn sullen, distant, angry in the solitude, given to weird eccentricities and sudden psychotic outbursts? I didn’t know.

The mainland was equally unpopulated, evergreen forests right down to the black rocks and the white surf. Somewhere around here was a town called Micmac from which I was to catch a boat to Kempshall Island, but I didn’t see a single roof or road as we crossed the coast.

Captain Ron was talking about a summer camp he’d attended as a boy in this area. Apparently there were a lot of mosquitoes and bullies, but I couldn’t really hear. I nodded and grinned and longed for Crystal. The sun was going down, and I would be dependent on my own inner resources in the dark.