Jane Smiley - Golden Age

The voice said, “Good luck.”

Frank kept his mouth shut and stared at the runway. He could sense Jack beside him, intent, holding tight to the yoke as the plane shifted and bobbed, as the approaching earth bounced and shivered. Frank shoved his feet forward and leaned back in his seat, as if he could counteract all of these forces with just his weight. They touched down, safe for a moment, but then the plane swerved and went skidding past the dark buildings out Frank’s window, not seeming to slow down at all, reminding Frank that there were many ways to die in a plane crash, and nose-first was only one of them. But the turf at the end of the runway caught them, and the plane shuddered, halted. They sat quietly within the noise of the pounding rain for a long moment. Jack said only, “Oh, shit,” as he cut the engines.

Frank said, “Jim will be proud when I tell him about this.”

Frank could see that Jack’s hand was trembling on the yoke. His own hand, which came up to wipe the moisture from his lips, was trembling, too. Jack took several deep breaths. Frank checked his watch. It was eight o’clock. They had left Chicago at six-fifty. Amazing how long those seventy minutes felt, thought Frank.

Then the storm seemed to let up, and it was true, there did not appear to be another behind it, or, at least, right behind it. Jack got out of his seat and unlatched the door. He said, “I told my contact that I would call him to pick us up. He can put you up, too. They live right in town.”

“Did I mention that I went to college here?”

“Really?” Jack was struggling into his raincoat.

After near-death, practicalities.

Really, thought Frank. They were only a mile or so from where, at seventeen, he’d pitched his tent beside the Skunk River.

Jack said, “Be right back. We’ve got to figure out a way to get the plane off the runway — but we may be stuck in the mud.” He disappeared. Frank stared out the window, watching as Jack, hunched over, ran toward the building where there probably was a pay phone. Then he decided to have a look around: the cabin was tight, and he needed to stand up straight and stretch his shoulders and hips. He had been tense. Yes, he was willing to admit that.

When he got to the bottom of the steps, he couldn’t see much — it was still raining fairly steadily. The fields to the south and west were not quite flat, and sloped away to a dark mass — probably trees and bushes along a creek. Frank walked toward the edge of the runway to take a piss, thinking how utterly familiar the landscape was to him, not only how it looked, but also the scent of the rain and the dirt and the summer vegetation. He unzipped his fly.

—

IN PALO ALTO, Andy was in the kitchen when the phone rang, squatting before the open refrigerator. She was supposed to be getting some blueberries for Jonah, but, really, they were just staring into the lighted space, and Jonah was telling her the names of things he liked: “Duce, mik, buberries.” He was a mild-mannered, systematic child. Andy pointed to the catsup and said, “Catsup?” Jonah had eaten a dab of catsup on his turkey burger that day for lunch. The phone screeched twice, and Andy went on the alert — she hadn’t heard Janet’s phone so clearly before. Then there was silence, and then she heard Janet say, “Oh my God in heaven! Oh!” Andy stood up, picked up Jonah, carefully closed the refrigerator door, and went into the dining room. She knew it was Frank. She had agreed to the plane idea, but she hadn’t been happy about it — old plane, long trip, unknown pilot. It didn’t help that she had watched Sweet Dreams the night before on TV, and thought of Frank the moment that plane hit the cliff. She said, “There’s been a crash.”

Janet whipped around and held out her arms for Jonah. This moment, when she handed Jonah over, was the last moment of her normal life, so Andy did it slowly, carefully, kissing Jonah on the cheek, as if she were kissing him goodbye. Had she kissed Frank goodbye? Or had she run to her gate at Newark, late as usual, just turning and waving? She couldn’t remember.

Janet said, “Mom, he was struck by lightning.”

Andy’s first reaction was a quick, rueful laugh, just at the rightness of it. Janet turned away, and Andy felt the rest of her life entering her body, along her nerve endings. So many times she had thought Frank could die — in the war, in his plane, in his restless perambulations here and there — and then he hadn’t, and now he had. She got dizzy; she placed the palms of both her hands against the wall and closed her eyes.

Andy agreed that they would have the funeral in Denby, that Frank would be buried next to his uncle Rolf, down the line from his mother and father, even though this meant that she would then be without him. Frank had never said whether he wanted to be cremated or interred, or where. When other people their age started talking about their burial plans (ashes tossed into the Atlantic, composted, marble slab, whatever), Frank always said nothing. Maybe, she thought, he really did think of himself as immortal, or maybe he just didn’t care.

Andy flew into Des Moines, then rented a car. She drove straight to the funeral home, walked in, and had an immediate argument with the funeral-home director about whether, that very minute, she would be allowed to see the body. The director said that it was not a good idea, that she would be too strongly affected. He was about forty-five, smooth, and good-looking. Andy said, “I am not leaving until you show me the body.”

He shook his head a little, but turned and walked toward the back of the room; she followed him through a door. Frank was lying on a triangular, tilted table, his head lower than his feet. He was naked, with a sheet over everything except his face. The funeral director stopped, expecting Andy to stop, too — wasn’t this enough for her? But, no, it wasn’t. She walked over and put her hand on Frank’s forehead. It was icy cold. She pushed away the sheet. He was not disemboweled or anything, if she had been expecting that. He looked like a wax effigy of himself, except that a fan of red lines proliferated, a slender tree, from his hairline above his right cheek, down the side of his face and his neck, then along his shoulder, and down his abdomen. Andy knew that most people survived lightning strikes, sometimes more than one, but the red vine seemed to encompass his entire body, to claim him for another world. The Upjohn boy, whom she hadn’t met before, said that he had heard the clap of thunder, seen the lightning, but not realized that anything had happened until he climbed back into the plane and saw that Frank was gone. He’d been looking out the windshield, and by the light of another flash, he saw Frank stretched out on the grass beyond the pavement of the runway. Why Frank had gone there, no one knew — there was nothing there but dirt. Andy ran her hand down the chilled corpse, head to toe, sensed with her fingers the fact that Frank was dead. She leaned over and kissed him. She thought, this is what a girl who grows up expecting Ragnarök, madness, freezing deaths on the prairie, who is not at all surprised by the Rwandan genocide, might consider a happy ending.

WHEN JANET brought in the mail, she saw that there was a letter from a law firm in New York, and she knew that there was something in it about her father’s estate. Her mother had been very vague about her father’s death and all the surrounding questions; Janet found out more in his New York Times obituary than she did over the phone. She had, in fact, bought the Times that day, cut out the obituary, and put it in a drawer. Before opening the letter from the lawyer, she read it again: