Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

When she hits the blast valve, flames and exhaust shoot up the throat of the balloon, and he grips the edge of the basket with both hands. The balloon is a yellow one with blue horizontal stripes that Fiona bought almost five years ago from a company in South Dakota. She has two other balloons but all of them should probably be replaced soon.

Tom is her man on the ground today, her chaser. He has been around since her father ran the company. She gives him the signal, and he lets them loose. The balloon rises up fast into the warm morning air. Tom waves goodbye with a gloved hand. As the chaser, he will follow in the truck. The flame whooshes loudly overhead.

Fiona loves this part, the initial breakaway from the earth, from its interstates and box stores, from its pop songs and headlines with question marks in them, from jorts and jeggings and every other commercial portmanteau. All of it falls away, and you are suspended, divided from it by — well, not much. A little bit of wicker.

According to her mother, Fiona was conceived up here, two thousand feet above the mountains. Counting nine months backward from October would place this momentous event — momentous for her, anyway — in January. She imagines snow on the mountains, her parents’ pink hands in gloves, boots on their feet. She imagines quilts on the bottom of the basket, their breath visible in the crisp and chilly air as they come together. The story might not be true. It doesn’t matter. Fiona likes it. Whenever she asks her father about it, he says he doesn’t remember but he says it with a smile that suggests he remembers every single detail and is just not willing to share. Usually her mother only brings it up when Fiona isn’t listening. When she acts far away. When she’s got a head full of hot air.

Her passenger doesn’t seem to be enjoying the view. He’s down in a crouch on one knee talking to the parakeet.

“What are you telling it?”

“It’s a she,” he says. “And I’m asking how she likes it up here.”

He presses play on the boom box, and bouncy notes from a xylophone pop and clink in the air. Each tinkle dissipates a few feet away from the speakers. It sounds like music you hear during a massage. She can almost see the little desk waterfall, the massage table, the crisp white towel. Atmospheric music : a joke she probably heard her father tell on some trip.

The man sticks his pinkie finger through the flimsy bars of the cage and wriggles it near the bird. The basket creaks under him as he switches knees. He looks around uneasily, frozen for a moment, and then returns his attention to Magnificent. He whistles to the bird in a secret language.

Fiona is afraid to ask what they’re discussing, so she gives him the full F. O. Betts Hot Air Balloon treatment instead. Perhaps he would like his photograph taken in front of the beautiful panorama? Can he believe how pretty the mountains are from this height? Would he like to hear the history of this region? How about an explanation for that bowl-like depression up ahead? Scientists think that it’s a crater but she likes to pretend it’s a footprint. Maybe he’d appreciate a hot cup of coffee from the thermos? How about a ham biscuit? Did she mention that they also sell videos of the trip? That’s right, there’s a camera on the bottom of the basket. If he wants, he can buy the video when he gets back to the office and relive the adventure at home whenever he wants, again and again.

“No,” he says. “No, thank you.”

The balloon is fully over the mountains now. The sun crests the farthest ridge, its bright rays spilling across the dark green canopy in misty light.

“You should see this,” she says.

He steps toward her, peers over the edge. “What am I looking for exactly? I just see mountains.”

“Okay,” she says. “Never mind, then. It was the mountains.”

Magnificent hops across her wooden dowel with twiggy feet. The newspaper at the bottom of the cage is crusty with dry shit. Fiona will not let his attitude bother her. She can only do so much to make people happy. If floating a thousand feet over one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world doesn’t give him a thrill, then what will? She pours herself a cup of coffee and does what she always does when the passengers can’t seem to appreciate the experience: pretend to be alone.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just that, this trip really isn’t for me.”

“It’s for the bird?”

“No, for someone who couldn’t be here. The bird was hers.”

“Ah,” Fiona says, and now understands completely. She gets this sometimes: the recently bereaved in search of perspective, in search of meaning, fulfilling some promise.

Directly below is Route 91, a two-lane highway that connects with the parkway. She points, thinking that large things made small might make him feel more powerful or important or significant, though it can have the opposite effect too, depending on your mood. You can feel detached too. The earth can appear all at once distant and vast, like all of it was made for something but not for you. You are not of it. You are separate. She thinks maybe that’s how angels feel: all this creation — this land, this vastness, this lushness, this wildness, this unfolding — all of it for a punier, less deserving collection of organisms. Not that Fiona is a higher form of organism. Not that she believes in angels. She doesn’t, or hasn’t since childhood. But sometimes aboveness and belowness are more easily expressed and understood using the older modes. We can now measure the distance to the sun, but all the computers in the world can’t tell you the weather next Tuesday with 100 percent accuracy, and why is that? What is it exactly that can’t be charted, modeled, known?

She is in the wrong mood this morning. The smallness is having the wrong effect on her. She should probably look up instead but doesn’t. The passenger peers over the edge of the basket, lips parted slightly. Together they watch a motorcycle scuttle like a cockroach down the highway. A truck slides like a slug. Her passenger now appears to be moved by the smallness, by the aboveness.

She fires off the propane again and the balloon lifts them higher. “You know,” she says, “I took a similar trip after my father died last year,” and then explains the shape his ashes took when they scattered in the breeze, the way they umbrellaed and then cascaded, the way they disappeared below, how wonderful and heartbreaking that felt, and as she is describing the moment to him, so rich with letting-go symbolism, she almost forgets that the story is completely and utterly false, that she has never scattered her father’s ashes because her father, F. O. Betts, is still very much alive.

Maybe it’s the lonely clack of the xylophone or maybe it’s guilt for charging this man so much money for his solo journey, but Fiona wants her passenger to be changed by his hot air balloon ride. She wants him to feel something, be transformed, even if it means pretending that she scattered her poor father over the side. The passenger removes his glasses, scrubs the lenses with the hem of his shirt.

In five minutes, she warns him, they will begin the descent. With the ascent comes the breakaway, and with the descent… it’s like stepping into a pair of heavy, muddy boots after hours of walking around barefoot and free.

She finishes her coffee and stows away the cup. When she turns around again, he has the birdcage off the floor of the basket. For a moment she wonders if he’s about to toss the whole thing overboard. He presses his lips to the bars and whistles again. Magnificent’s tiny square mirror pops loose and disappears somewhere around their feet. The bird is lunging and hopping madly. The man opens the cage door and sticks his hand inside. The bird leaps to a high back corner to avoid him, but he manages to grab hold of her. He brings her out. Magnificent looks uneasy out of the cage. The man kisses the back of her ruffled green head, and Fiona can guess what comes next.