Jane Smiley - Golden Age

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FRANK ACTED ON impulse more often now that he had no career to focus on, but even Andy didn’t see how he could resist this opportunity. Their trip to Greece had been such a success that it had given him a renewed taste for flying. He’d sat in the copilot’s seat between Athens and Crete and between Olympia and Athens, and decided that, yes, the best view was always up front. He didn’t want to buy another plane — the thought was so bittersweet and seductive that he made himself contemplate it as long as it took to recoil from it once again — expense, inconvenience — but he did contemplate it every few days.

And then Jim Upjohn, who, even though he never left the cranberry farm in South Jersey, seemed completely up-to-the-minute about everything, called and said a cousin of his, Jack Upjohn, maybe forty, who had an old twin-engine four-seater, was heading for the West Coast, where he lived, which was why Frank had never met him, but he was making several stops. Frank needed to get out, said Jim — he should go along for at least part of the way. One of the stops was Pittsburgh, one Chicago, one Ames, one Denver. Andy could go on ahead to Palo Alto, and Frank could join her. He was eager to see Janet and Jonah, and Emily and Jared, too, for that matter — Andy didn’t need to laugh behind her hand at him, he was willing to admit that mistakes had been made, should be unmade. Frank would join her; they would stay for a week at the Stanford Inn and fly back together.

In Pittsburgh, he whiled away his time at the Carnegie Museum of Art, beguiled that you could find such enjoyment in a place you had never thought of before. In Chicago, he stayed with Henry and Claire — or mostly Henry, since after breakfast Claire went to her boyfriend’s place for the weekend. Frank and Henry walked along the lake; Henry seemed a little lonely, and talked primarily about some Welsh guy he was resurrecting, only a little about how Frank seemed relaxed, happy, not quite himself. Jack was delayed in his meeting, so they didn’t get away until after dinner, but they were only going to Ames, which wasn’t much more than an hour’s flight even in an old twin-engine.

They left out of Midway. Spying on planes parked in the field or those he could see in the hangars helped Frank give up his fantasy — it was rather like trading in the Mercedes for a Bentley; why would you, but how could you not? In some places these days, if you showed up in a Mercedes, they made you park in the servants’ lot.

After they put their headsets on and took off, Jack started talking about how being in the Midwest reminded him of a side trip he’d made with his wife to a place called “The House on the Rock,” in southern Wisconsin. Before he bought the plane, they had been driving from Madison to Minneapolis, where she was from, and decided to go past Taliesin, the place Wright had built near where his uncles lived, and where he had grown up. No getting into Taliesin, but then there was this parking lot full of cars, and a sign that said “The House on the Rock,” so they stopped. Craziest house you ever saw — perched on a two-hundred-foot-tall monolith, built in the supposedly Japanese style, and so full of junk and crap…

They were now out of Chicago, and this was the part Frank loved about a light plane: you flew fairly low. The earth rolled and bobbled beneath you; that you could see everything so clearly and yet pass over it so smoothly was a great gift to the senses. They were coming up on the river now, marking that line between Illinois and Iowa that Frank knew so well from every map he had ever seen but always found strange when he flew over it, as if a map had been given reality. The Mississippi was clear and attractive around here, almost blue. And then, past the greenery of the riverbanks and onward across the fields of corn — yes, he would talk to Jesse about the corn harvest and the bean harvest, but the rains were pretty good this year, not like the flooding the year before. Frank had sent Jesse a check for fifty grand in February; did Joe know about it? Frank was a realist about the farm: some years it paid for itself and some years it didn’t, and that was not Jesse’s fault, but Joe might be uncomfortable….

The storm cell appeared off to the northwest, as they were passing Cedar Rapids, at first an isolated fuzziness in the dusk — there were even stars to the west and southwest. It seemed unaccompanied by any associated cells, but they couldn’t really see — even Frank, whose eyes were if anything sharper now than they had been, couldn’t make out the edges or the shape of the cell. Jack said, “There could be more behind it; it’s hot here, and the line of storms usually runs northwest to southeast, especially across the plains.” He radioed Cedar Rapids. The tower there said they didn’t have much on the radar. They flew on, Jack changing course a little to the south.

When the cell hit, the plane jumped like a cat, up and to the side, and Jack leaned back, his hands tight on the yoke, which was quivering. He pressed down on the right rudder pedal to correct the yaw, which had been caused by the sudden turbulence. Night had come. Frank said, “How far are we from Ames?”

“About sixty miles is my guess.”

They would be over Tama, then. Forty miles southeast of the farm, where, he imagined, Jesse was glancing out the window, counting the seconds between flashes of lightning and the subsequent booms of thunder. He noticed that it was too dark to see much, and suddenly water was flowing horizontally over the windshield. He said, “I don’t remember there being a control tower or anything like that in Ames. You want to head to Des Moines?”

“That could be worse. Maybe this is just an isolated cell.”

Frank nodded. He wasn’t worried: he was so used to being in an airplane after all these years that he was still perfectly comfortable. He said, “The first time Jim ever took me up, he said he loved planes because a house was like a tomb and a plane was like a passing thought.” That wasn’t exactly what he’d said. Frank elaborated, “In a plane you could vanish.”

“That sounds like him. My grandfather is fourteen years younger than him. All the brothers would do this when his name came up at parties”—he spun his finger around his ear—“but they loved him.”

“He’s a charming man,” said Frank. “You look a little like him when he was your age.”

“That’s a compliment.”

Turbulence buffeted the plane again, a harder smack this time, and the nose dipped. Jack leaned way back, gripping the yoke, and then turned it to counteract the roll. Above the whine of the engine, Frank could hear the thunder, the claps getting closer together. Outside the window, lightning strikes had devolved into a steady flare. He wanted to say some idle thing about the strangeness of the weather, something that would reassure both Jack and himself, but the noise was too loud now. The plane rocked again. In the glaring light, Jack began to look worried, then laughed. He had hundreds of hours of flight experience, but, Frank thought, glancing at his profile, maybe not this exact experience.

The next thing that happened was that lights on the ground appeared in the windshield and then disappeared again as Jack corrected the pitch of the plane.

“There it is,” said Jack, his voice steady.

Below and in front of them, the Ames airport, such as it was, stretched wetly to the northwest, dark, narrow, and short, a few trees to either side, but no tower, only two parallel rows of dim runway lights, nothing welcoming. Now the plane was rocking and rolling, or, as Janet might say about a horse, bucking.

Jack radioed the tower in Des Moines. Through crackling static, they said that the storm cell seemed to be right over Ames — where were they? Jack said, “Landing in Ames.”