Max Collins - Fly Paper

Dream-Land was Florida land, too.

Swampland.

Uninhabitable damn swampland that could gag an alligator; dream land that was a nightmare. And Ken and all the other salesmen and the folks they’d sold the land to, all of them, were stuck in that swamp up to their rears.

The only happy aspect was that Ken himself, and most of the other salesmen, were in no way liable for the fraud perpetrated; they, like everybody in it (except the Dream-Land wheels) were the butt of the joke.

So there they sat, in Canker, Missouri, with over three years of their lives wasted, no savings, not a damn thing — except a mortgaged house and plans that had fizzled into nothing.

But you can always make new plans, and Ken came up with one. Carol hadn’t liked it from the outset, but what could she say? Ken was, after all, the man of the house.

But sometimes bowing to every wish of the “man of the house” could go too far. She shouldn’t be expected to do something she would hate herself for doing. Like helping him on this crazy skyjacking thing. Even aiding and abetting his silly, stupid shoplifting. There just wasn’t any sane reason for it; no logic to it. And besides, she didn’t for the life of her see how he was going to get the shoplifting done. He had picked the suitcase up first, actually just tucked it under his arm, then strolled around the store, and while she kept an eye peeled, he’d slipped the various items in: curly brown wig, some sunglasses, green corduroy shirt, and some jeans.

“How are you going to get past the registers?” she asked him.

“Just watch,” he said, and headed to the front of the store. There was a coffee shop up on the right, off to one side of the rows of check-out counters. They sat in a booth in the shop, and Ken carefully drew a folded-up sack from his pocket, a large sack with the discount store’s name on it. He put the suitcase inside. When that was done, she followed as he slid past the check-out counters, mixing in with the shoppers pouring out of them, and with the suitcase-in-sack snugly under his arm, went out the door.

Past several armed guards who were standing by that door for the express purpose of nabbing shop-lifters. No one questioned him. Nothing.

In the car, she found she was panting. Sweat was rolling down her cheeks, though the day was a cool, overcast one. “What would you have done,” she managed to ask, “if someone stopped you?”

“I was prepared for that,” he said, the tone of his voice implying he’d almost been hoping for that, as well. “I had a story ready.”

“What kind of story?”

‘That I’d seen a lady drop this package in the coffee shop and was going out into the lot after her, to give her her package.”

“But there would be no sales slip in the sack.”

“So what? It was her package, not mine.”

“Do you think they would have believed you, Ken? Do you honestly think they would’ve believed you?”

“Been interesting to find out, wouldn’t it?”

They drove fifty miles and then Ken stopped for lunch, but Carol didn’t order anything. Her stomach was still jumping. All the while, sitting in the car, she’d been expecting a highway patrol car to come screaming up behind them. The heavyset Broderick Crawford cop would say, “Okay kids, let’s have a look at that suitcase there in the back seat.” He had never shown up, of course, but he was there in her mind, the cop and his car and siren and gun.

Finally, she consented to a grilled cheese sandwich, which she nibbled at. She said, “I never stole anything before, Ken.”

And Ken looked at her, and there was something in his eyes, a damn twinkling in his eyes. He grinned and said, “Me neither.”

There it was: the reason. The secret purpose of the trip. The skyjacking he’d been planning, this new, obscenely dangerous project, this terrifyingly large-scale crime he was going to commit, was the first time he’d ever even contemplated breaking the rules.

Ken. Conservative Ken. Arrow-straight Ken. It was quite a leap from shoplifter to skyjacker, but an even bigger one from Eagle Scout to skyjacker. She understood that now.

She understood that in a crazy way the shoplifting had been a trial run, as well as an absurd ritual of self-initiation; that had Ken been caught and been unable to bluff his way out of the situation, he would have taken it as, well a sign , an indication from somewhere that he was in way over his head. That this should be another project left unfinished.

But he hadn’t been caught, and here they were, weeks later, the skyjack plan finally going into effect.

Ken seemed very calm, the late afternoon sunlight filtering through the filmy pink curtains of the bedroom window and bathing him in a golden, contented glow; he seemed almost peaceful, as he neatly assembled himself, climbing into the green shirt, which fit over the chute as though he had a paunch. It was as if he was assembling the components of one of his electronics gadgets. Could he really be so cool? Carol wondered. Did that silly afternoon of shoplifting free him so from worry?

She wouldn’t be free from worry, not until she had him back again, in their house, in this bed. Her only consolation was that the bomb in the stolen suitcase was a dummy. Carol wondered for a moment why Ken would have spent so much time building a mock bomb into the suitcase. This, like his shoplifting escapade, was almost eccentric aspect to the “project” that Carol would never completely understand. She just took comfort in knowing that her Ken could never really hurt anybody, let alone blow up a planeload of people.

She touched his shoulder, caught his eyes in the mirror, and held them. “Maybe something will happen. Something you haven’t thought of. Maybe... maybe we won’t ever see each other again.”

This time he really made a face. This time he said it out loud: “Don’t be ridiculous.”

And he looked away.

Fifteen minutes later, they were in the car, and she was driving him the eight miles to a town where no one knew them, where he could catch the bus to Detroit. She felt uncomfortable in the driver’s seat.

Like all airport restaurants, this one was lousy. The $2 hamburger was cold, the potato chips stale, the Coke flat and mostly ice. Jon looked out the window. The sky was overcast. Right in front of him, some men in coveralls were stuffing the belly of a 727 with luggage; behind them stretched an endless concrete sea of runway, planes taxiing around as if wandering aimlessly. It was a gray day. Jon’s was a gray mood.

The Detroit airport was a cold, monolithic assemblage that didn’t exactly cheer Jon up, its overall design a vaguely modernistic absence of personality, heavy on dreary, neutral-color stone, and its infinite intersecting halls converging on a toweringly high-ceilinged lobby in what might have been intended as a tribute to confusion. The only thing he liked about the place was that, compared to Chicago’s O’Hare, there were fewer people and, consequently, not as much frantic rushing around. But the less hectic pace didn’t do Jon any good, really; it only gave him time to reflect on things that were better left alone. It gave him time for a gray mood.

And he was tired. He’d been up all night practically, watching movies — not on the tube, but in a ballroom at the hotel, with hundreds of other voluntary insomniacs. The showing of old films (“from eight till dawn”) was a traditional part of a comic book convention, and when he got back to the hotel after the Comfort bloodbath, he figured he might as well enjoy himself, he wouldn’t be getting much sleep that night, anyway. Not after what happened.