* * *
Dolly tried to stop us, but I had Timmy in the car after dinner, wrapped in a fleece jacket, navy blue. We found the trail from Nick’s hand-drawn map, no problem, and we used flashlights to get us to the fence. “You’re gonna get arrested,” Dolly protested, but she didn’t do anything more to slow us down. Maybe she thought Nick’s idea would work, or maybe she thought a quick arrest would renew my trust in authority. The summer light had yet to extend itself too far into evening, and I hoped we would be hidden by the dusk of springtime.
Timmy slid under the fence, easy. My frame didn’t make it on the first try.
“C’mon, Dad,” Tim said. “Holy crap, Dad. Hurry up.” Tim pointed, and—even lying down, half under the fence—I could see the wing lights of a 767 turning and taking aim at the runway that ran closest to the fence. Tim tugged on my sleeve, then my hand, too, and I dug my shoulder down into the dirt to buy myself another half inch for my chest and belly. And I was through.
Timmy took my hand, and we walked tentatively toward the runway. Just as I’d always known, it was basically a huge road, a wide slick of asphalt with a stripe down the center, not likely to be the site of a minor miracle—an act of levitation that could turn a half-million pounds of metal and flesh into helium. It was lined on both sides with lights, making it a good target from the sky. My son and I passed the lights and stepped onto the pavement. I wanted it to feel soft, cushioned, but it was hard as algebra—stony and cracked, though the night made it seem like a black river.
“Here it comes,” Tim said.
We were almost at the end of the runway, just as Nick had promised, leaving only 50 yards of road behind us as we faced the beams and blinkers on the leading edge of the 767 wings. At first, Tim grabbed my leg and waist as the plane pivoted and stared at us from a distance. Then he let go, even of my hand, as the screaming of the Rolls Royce engines wound upward in pitch. I looked down at him, ripping my eyes from the nose cone of the plane. His eyes hadn’t budged.
The engines were mounted on the wing, two great mouths, one for each of us, wide open. They shouted toward us with what should have been unbearable force. But Timmy didn’t flinch. He was there to answer a question, and he wasn’t leaving without a sure conclusion. So we stood our ground and asked it: Are you going to rise above us?
The plane got louder and faster. We watched the wheels on the landing gear skip up and down against the dusky asphalt. The plane seemed too close, and I looked away for another split second, down at Timmy, but he was intent, his head fixed forward. Maybe he sensed my leg muscles flinching, because he grabbed me and held me there, still. The plane was barely 100 yards in front of us, screaming.
And then it rose. The wheels pulled free of the Earth. The belly eased into an angle with the ground and, in the time it took me to breathe inward, it shimmied over us and blanketed us with riveted metal. It started to curl off to the left as it climbed, but it stayed over us from toe to tail and was gone. The runway before us was silent and blank.
I started to turn, to see the plane on its way, but Timmy stopped me. He kneeled down on the runway and pulled me down also, close to his face. He looked at me with the shadowed seriousness of old age. He was shivering even in his fleece.
“Dad,” Tim said. I tried to look back at him without betraying the cavern of worry that had opened up inside me.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He stared at me and, in the almost-gone light, his face became a nose cone.
“Let’s go,” he said.
My knees were pressed to the runway, and I thought I could still feel the rumble of the plane’s landing gear as it shimmied through the asphalt. I wondered where the plane was headed, where it hoped to land. Timmy, finally thoughtless, never stopped staring at me.
“OK,” I said to my son. “Let’s go.”
Will Layman teaches writing and music at The Field School in Washington, D.C. He is the jazz critic and columnist for PopMatters.com and frequently provides criticism and commentary to National Public Radio and WNYC’s “Soundcheck.” His fiction and humor have been published by Opium Magazine and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Layman also plays piano and saxophone with the band Ten Feet Tall. He lives in Bethesda with his wife and two children.
