Yes. My name is Phyllis McElroy and I am the one who captured the Greek fugitive at the Fayetteville airport. I’m not the one he threatened. He was threatening my fellow worker, Dale, but I’m the one who called the police. “Nine-one-one, there is a man at the American Airlines counter at the Fayetteville airport threatening us with a gun.”
“What airport?” she asks.
“Drake Field,” I answer. Can you believe that? The operator asked me what airport. This is a town of sixty thousand people, give or take the students and not counting all the new people moving here to escape real estate taxes.
Dale had come in about five that morning to work the early flights and was in a bad mood anyway. I’d come in at seven. I’ve only been working the counter for four months. Talk about a crummy job. Listen, this Greek fugitive is not the first person to threaten us. Mostly they threaten us with writing the management and so forth when we let them check in and then the planes don’t take off due to weather. It is a crummy way to treat customers, but what can I do? I’m going to be a photographer or a dancer if I ever get out of school and pay off my school loans and get a house and a life. For now, the check-in counter at American Airlines.
So Dale is just standing there, checking people in as fast as he can when anybody with a brain could look out the windows and see that the ceiling is too low for these little planes to take off. Saab Turbo Props, that’s what American Eagle flies out of Fayetteville. Northwest and Delta and TWA have counters too. Listen, this is a very busy airport for a college town of sixty thousand people. The world offices of Wal-Mart are twenty miles away at Bentonville and this is where the salesmen land. There are a thousand of them a week, all dressed in black and slick-looking clothes, with their shoes shined, carrying heavy briefcases and looking worn. The Waltons and their cronies are building a new airport twenty miles from here, thank God. Who needs airplanes full of salesmen flying over their houses at night? We’ll be glad to get rid of them and hopefully I won’t need this crazy job by then.
Back to this fugitive. He was here as an interpreter for a Russian poultry buyer. The poultry buyer was trying to buy chickens from Tyson Foods, our other big industry. The fugitive was mixed up in the Iran-Contra scandal and was convicted ten years ago of trying to smuggle missiles out of the United States. Then they let him out of prison while an appeal was going through and he disappeared. Can you believe it? I called the police and now he’s been sent to Atlanta with federal marshals. This poor buyer guy from Russia didn’t know what to think. The police came running into the waiting room and grabbed up his interpreter and took him along for questioning. I mean, this guy had lived in Communist Russia and he was at least sixty years old. I suppose he thought his number was up. I’m the one who went over and told the police the buyer hadn’t done anything. It was only the Greek guy who threatened us.
There was an archaeologist from the university in the airport who spoke a little Russian. He came over and tried to calm down the Russian and then they called the Tyson corporate headquarters and they sent someone out to rescue him and get him on his flight to Russia. He missed the one he was scheduled on but they got him on one later in the day. I mean, the Russian wasn’t in on it. He was just in town to calm the waters about a Russian poultry deal that had gone sour. The Tyson folks are having a hard time with their foreign sales because in many countries the refrigeration isn’t dependable enough for storing chickens.
One of the policemen is a guy who’s on my boyfriend’s basketball team. Everyone in Fayetteville plays basketball or watches it. It’s how we make it through the winters, and this winter has been especially bad. These are the Ozark mountains and you put snow and hills together and you’ve got some people in a bad mood. Plus, last week it was so cold again, right at the beginning of March, when there should have been some relief.
Plus, I think my boyfriend’s running around on me with my best friend. I’m not sure and I can’t prove it but he takes her out when I have to work at night. There ought to be someone you can trust but there’s probably not, except your family and that’s another can of worms. You can trust them to suck off of you when you are healthy and making money. You can trust them to think you’re always supposed to lend them your car.
If he’s running around with her, what am I supposed to do? Kill them or kill myself or be surprised? Listen, I took this drama course last year and every play we read was about something that happens every day in Fayetteville. So what else is new? When I had to write a paper for it, that was my theme.
In other words, if this is going steady, I’m a woodpecker. One of the cops that came out to the airport, his name is Hadley Townsend, puts his arm around my waist and asks me if I’m coming to the basketball game that night at the youth center.
“I guess so,” I answer.
“How are you and Dan getting along?” he says. “If you ever break up with him, you know who to call. You sure do look great in that uniform. I like that little skirt.”
“Are you here to collect this fugitive, or not?” I answered, or something like that. Of course, I didn’t know he was a fugitive yet. To tell the truth, he looked like a drug runner to me. All haggard and mean and half crazy. We get all kinds here at the counter.
“I hope you come,” Hadley said and gave me another squeeze.
Well, it was Friday so as soon as I got off work I went home and did my Computer II homework and then got all dolled up and went down to the youth center to watch the guys play ball. There was a new moon in the sky and a pretty little planet right above it. Venus, I bet it was. I had astronomy last semester and I made an A in it. Venus will be lucky for me, I decided. I don’t care if I have two guys showing off for me at a basketball game. Let’s see if Dan, my boyfriend, picks up on me and Hadley making a connection. He deserves it, the bastard, not to mention I will probably have my name and maybe my photograph in the morning paper.
By the time I got to the youth center, the story of the capture of the fugitive had been on the five o’clock and the six o’clock news. My boyfriend, Dan, was jealous. Nothing like that ever happens to him. He’s in drywall construction. All he’s doing all day is fighting his allergies and lifting things. When his back goes out that will be the end and he knows it. He’s only twenty-five. “Stop drinking beer and go back to school,” I tell him when he bitches.
Anyway, he was a really good athlete in high school and he can shoot and he was really hot Friday night. We beat the McElroy Bank about sixty-two to twelve. I’m a McElroy but not the ones that used to own the bank. The Waltons own it now like they do half the stuff in town. We never did own it so it’s nothing to me. My dad was a carpenter until he drank himself to death.
Back to Dan and me and Sergeant Hadley Townsend trying to show off for me. After the game we all went down to George’s to hear the Cate Brothers play.
“So what happened?” everyone is asking me. “He really had a gun?”
“No, he didn’t have a gun. I just thought he had a gun. He told Dale he was going to kill him if the plane didn’t take off, so I called nine-one-one.”
“We got there in six and a half minutes,” Hadley puts in. “I was way out by the university when I got the call. We had two squad cars there in less than seven minutes.”
“I saw the cars going there,” a girl kept saying. “I was on my way to the beauty parlor when I saw the police cars with their sirens on.”
“So are you going home with me or not?” Dan whispered in my ear and I said yes, and the rest is secret. I will say this: If it takes a fugitive showing up in town to make Dan Fairly get that interested in me, I’d like to have one come by every day.
About two in the morning he asked me to marry him. I told him I’d think about it.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “If I decide I want some kids, I will.”
“I want them,” he said. “I want us to have a baby.”
“You always think that when we’re making love,” I answered. “But you don’t know how much it costs to keep them. People with kids don’t have a thing but kids. They get trapped by them. I’ve seen it all around me. I don’t know if I want to be in that trap. I don’t even know if I want to stay in Fayetteville.”
I don’t know why I was so philosophical when I had just had a proposal of marriage from the best-looking guy I had ever dated. As I say, it’s been a long winter and I’ve been reading too many books.
Maybe it was because Hadley had put his arm around my waist and told me to call him. Maybe it was because I read this book about how men have only one purpose and that is to have as many children as they can by a lot of women and get their DNA passed down. According to this book, the only reason they even try to be faithful to us is so they can protect the children.
Maybe we are only on the earth to breed. That might be it. But I’m only twenty-two. I don’t have to believe that yet. I don’t have to marry the first guy who asks me and stick my feet in the concrete and watch it harden. I want to try out for a dance class next semester. I want to set up a studio for my photography and make something happen. I want to get on one of the Saab Turbo Props and go somewhere.
“We’ll have three or four boys and maybe a girl,” Dan was saying as he went to sleep. “Hell, I’ll have a basketball team. I’ll build them a full-size court in the backyard. It’s easy to do. All you have to do is pour concrete.”
“Go to sleep,” I told him. “I haven’t even said I’ll marry you yet.” And I might not.