Best for Flight
by Liz Radford

Late June, Curt and Myra drove from the city with her boy. On their way out of town in the heat and hard light and under the cloudless blue bearing down, the apartment buildings, the cars parked end to end, and people on the sidewalks looked overexposed and humbled. Each person had an attitude of discomfort Curt hoped concerned someone. Each person on a sidewalk diminished in his rear view, and then disappeared when he turned a corner. It was an eleven hour drive southwest to Diamond, Missouri, where Myra said a boy had plenty of room to run and play.

They were out of Chicago by ten-thirty. In the passenger seat, Myra sat looking ahead, her hands resting on a paperback. Her hair kinked in the humidity. Her mood had settled around her mouth. She seemed a dimmer version of who she had been a year before, but not, Curt thought, really changed. She was still beautiful—skin pale, hair dark, like a retro movie star.

“Check that out,” he said as an SUV passed them fast on the left. “Gas guzzler.”

“Well,” she said. “You had that horrible van.”

“That was for my drums and my gear.” Curt smoked as he drove.

The boy shouted from the back seat. “Gas guzzler! Candy fun!”

“Oh no,” Myra said, putting her fingers to her brow.

“Trevor, don’t say candy fun.” In the rear view Curt watched him reorganize his small frame—pulling up a leg and angling his shoulder against the upholstery. The reedy quality of Trevor’s shout was always concerning. Curt could never hear him in a crowd.

“Okay?” Curt asked her. He flicked ash from the window. “Well I guess there’s not a best time to say this. Jerry forgot I asked for the time off.”

Myra licked a finger and rubbed at a greasy spot on the plastic dash. On a trip like this she kept the car picked up. There was a paper bag at her feet for empty chips wrappers and soiled napkins. “Or did you just not tell him?” she said.

“Okay, we might have to cut the trip to just the weekend. We’ll have to drive back on Monday. But that’s just one day less,” he said.

Myra stopped rubbing but kept her hand positioned. “You know we need more than two days to talk it out with my mother.”

In the back seat, Trevor was humming.

“You said she was already okay with everything. Him. Staying. If you want it.” Curt’s whisper was a rough sound.

“What do you think I should do?” Myra said.

For a long while, Myra’s indecision had conjured a tenderness that Curt was grateful to feel—her over-explaining, her comic double steps around him when she wasn’t sure what direction he was headed, her alternation between worry and resignation about Trevor’s infractions. Early on, he’d found a picture of her during her pregnancy. In it, she held her arms awkwardly from her belly. At the time, the image had made him want to be generous and capable and this was more than he’d ever expected of himself—a late shift guy who spent his off time at bars and jamming with a band that hadn’t played out in two years.

She said: “Maybe you just don’t want to get involved.”

“Come on, Myra.”

The boy kicked the back of her seat.

“Trevor, please don’t,” Curt said.

Trevor had been kicking since Chicago. He did each time he saw something he liked: a park, an ambulance, and—when they turned onto the Interstate and got past Joliet—the power lines that seemed to undulate in the sky as their car sped alongside.

Curt frowned at the boy’s reflection in the rear view mirror. Trevor was already in trouble. In the grocery store with Myra the day before, he’d run off while she was in line, and then she’d had to back out with her full cart through the people behind her and spend ten minutes up and down the cookie aisle, the soda aisle, the freezer section before she found him in seafood, looking at live lobster in a tank. He was eating an ice cream bar he had gotten from no one she knew. Its wrapper was carefully torn and folded back. The chocolate coating had multicolor sprinkles that Trevor called candy fun. After Myra snatched it away to hold it upside-down, straight-armed from her body, Trevor refused to tell her any more about the man who had given the ice cream, other than that he had worn a blue striped shirt and talked like a grandpa, but more slowly. Were the stripes thick or thin, part of a plaid? Did the man stay for just a minute or longer? Did he touch? To Curt, the boy’s fine white skin was concerning.

Curt looked over at Myra in her seat. She was thumbing the edge of her book.

“If you don’t want to help decide, at least listen to this,” she said. “What I’m thinking is kids go away to camp, right? This is like camp. This will be only be until August, tops.”

“I never went to camp,” Curt said. Far down the highway cutting through the rows of squat soybean plants, a state police car waited on the shoulder.

“You guys growing up in the city never went anywhere.”

“Yeah, even when we were six years old, it was only music and girls, sitting on our ass,” Curt laughed.

“You never went anywhere,” she said.

“Okay, well, where else is there to go?”

Myra turned to him and lowered her voice. “You know Curt, it’s like I can finally get some rest and now I don’t ever want to get up again. I don’t know why it’s like this now. But I’m so tired after all of it, it’s like now I can’t get up. I’ve got to just come back and rest on my own for while. We’ll rest. Am I so horrible to say it?”

“When you think about it like camp,” Curt said, “I guess it seems alright.”

Myra’s book was stamped Barbara B’s Book Club—she read all of Barbara’s recommendations. Her wrists and hands were delicate resting on the book. Even when Myra wore him out, Curt was still attracted to her body’s amalgam of delicacy and roundness. He held the wheel with his left hand so he could put his right on her thigh.

“I’m sorry. You’re so good to me,” she said. “It’s a good trip. It’s so flat and country and awful, but anything else is nice.” She pulled her shoulder belt and turned in her seat to see the boy. She reached back and touched his hair, which Curt knew to be coarse like a fistful of straw. On the highway they passed a blue sign with logos of restaurants and gas stations and Curt thought of coffee, even in the day’s heat—coffee black and acidic in a streaked glass hotplate pitcher. He drummed a rhythm on the steering wheel. At twenty-nine, he was lean, tanned; he still had a habit of looking around any place he didn’t know as if he was a man at a new beginning.

“Did you know,” he said to Myra. “That you only really see an exit sign when you need it, and when you need it, you see it?”

“Okay,” she said. “Like when you have to eat, pee. What?”

“Like when you have to get a coffee,” he said. “You get an urge, then the sign shows up, then that’s it. You turn off the road. Easy.”

“Charmed life,” she said.

A friend of Curt’s had hooked up with a mother once and said he ended up liking the kid. He said with a good kid it wasn’t a lot of work as long as you kept a distance. Curt had always been the type to be with a woman for a while. He had to admit he liked a woman who stuck around. Myra hadn’t asked Curt outright to take them in, but when during the same month she lost her roommate and her job (they’d wanted too many hours), Curt figured he might offer. Myra’s job was doing hair. Myra’s hair was long and dark in a tub drain. In a year, Curt had gotten used to the hair in the drain and to toys on the kitchen floor. He’d gotten used to routines: hers of making breakfast, and when she got work again, leaving the breakfast for him on a covered plate; his of picking up Trevor from kindergarten before she got home at two-thirty and he went off to the print shop at five. Coming out of sleep or falling into it, when the vigilance in his mind lost its hold was the only time he really questioned anything. Then, the discomfort of his questioning always woke him fully and he would lie conjuring the particular protectiveness he’d never felt before the boy and Myra, the feeling of being something good and reliable.

Alongside the highway, the soybeans had yielded to a blur of dry corn stalks. Myra lifted her book, holding it out from her body to get a good look at the page. She read aloud, although neither Curt nor Trevor had asked her to do it. Neither ever did, but when she read, Myra’s voice was lovely, fluid, and soft. In the back seat, Trevor moved from the window and lay down. She was a third of the way through, but started up without saying what had already happened in the book. Then, her narrative was patch-worked and strange, because, for Trevor’s sake she said, she skipped words and passages—the lust, the despair. Her voice submerged with certain lines:

“her skin was tan and bare…

“he gripped her wrist tightly…

“they finally ended it when Joey turned ten…”

During the pauses, as Myra searched for the next passage to read, Curt imagined the missing scenes as ordinary or sexed-up. Back in Chicago, Curt had asked her to only read kids’ books out loud. Back in Chicago, Curt had come home from work early one night to find her sleeping through her alarm in the bedroom. On the TV in the front room, a Disney DVD had played to its end. It took him ten minutes of checking behind and under furniture and hissing Trevor’s name before he thought to go up the hall to knock on neighbors’ doors. There he was, at Mrs. Odessa’s, sitting on her couch with a storybook. He stopped eating from a plate of cookies when he saw Curt in the doorway. Mrs. Odessa’s couch upholstery was torn. On her coffee table, the cardboard cookie box had faded lettering and worn edges—were the cookies bad or did she refill the box? There were cats in and out of the room and the room smelled of cats. Trevor’s legs were covered with a ratty pink child’s quilt, which Curt realized was tucked into his pajama waistband. When Trevor got up from the couch, Curt yanked the blanket away in a quick motion, but before they could leave, Mrs. Odessa stopped him and whispered that she’d seen the boy in the hallway other times, crouched down to the thin crack under another neighbor’s door, looking for a light on before he knocked. On their way back down the hall, Trevor told Curt that Mrs. Odessa had read to him about a prince on a journey and about a family of rabbits scheming in their burrows. Mrs. Odessa’s eyes are just like my black marbles. They’re black, he said, then: She always thinks things are so funny. Curt held Trevor’s hand tightly, feeling the fineness of the boy’s bones and the sharpness of his own care.

At the Bloomington/Normal exit, Curt pulled the car off the highway for the coffee; by that time it wasn’t too early for lunch. Then back in the car the day for them on the road unwound long and flat, marked by miles driven and pages read. Curt looked out at the crops and deserted old barns and people in cars on Interstate 55 South: a guy with a mustache and Cubs cap in a pick-up, a man and six kids packed into a rusted-out El Dorado, a couple arguing in their Honda. Four-thirty in the afternoon, they neared the highway bridge over the brown Mississippi. The water delineated the state border, served as a sort of sluggish city moat. Across the bridge in St. Louis on the waterfront was the silver catenary curve, soaring six hundred feet in the air, resplendent in the sun.

“What’s THAT?” Trevor said.

“It’s a big statue that people who live there put up so they know it’s St. Louis,” Curt said. “It’s the St. Louis Arch.”

“I don’t know if that’s really what it’s about,” Myra said.

“It’s about what it’s about.”

“I want to go up IN IT!” shouted Trevor, jolting Myra’s seat.

“Who told him you could go up?” Myra said. She touched Curt’s jeans. “Will you?”

“There’s not enough time to get there and wait and then to go up,” he said.

“I can’t believe you’re saying that today!” She wiped her fingers down her cheeks. “What good are we if we can’t take him up today?”

“Myra,” he said. He had the odd, idle notion that, although there was no road for it, if he drove beneath the sparkling metal Arch, between the legs of it, there was a chance they would all emerge different—at least sure of something.

In the back seat, Trevor spread his fingers wide on the car window. “The Arch is hot because of sun, Curt.”

Curt looked in the rear view. “You know what’s goin’ on, little man.”

“I know what’s goin’ on!” Trevor laughed as long as Curt did. Curt couldn’t help but laugh.

Diamond, Missouri was almost to Arkansas, and it wasn’t until nine forty five that they saw Myra’s mother’s home from the road. Except for the gas station, less than a quarter mile from the house, where the pavement turned to gravel, the rest of Diamond, population 875, seemed dark. At the gas station, two men leaned up against a wall, one holding a bag around a bottle, the other poking the blacktop with a stick. Curt looked hard at them.

The night air was heavy with the scent of pines as their car wound up the drive. The old mechanical garage door jerked up, revealing Myra’s waiting, waving mother, inch by inch, from boots to hairdo.

“It’s about time!” she shouted. Her hair was bottle-brilliant. She’d had Myra young, also without the man around. Curt pulled over the gravel into the garage and he could see behind Sheila into the house. It was bright with yellow light. The car ticked and cooled.

“It’s a long trip,” Myra said as a greeting as she got out.

Sheila went to her and they embraced. “We’re gonna work it all out again, honey. Get you back on track. My baby Myra gets the blues.”

Curt popped the trunk and unloaded the bags. He reached into the back seat for the dozing boy and set him down in a half-crouch. There was a vigorous smell of fertilizer, hay, and gasoline. Dogs barked from the pen in the back, fenced in close to the house. A breeze picked up to rustle the grasses and trees all around and to Curt, the crickets were louder than any night traffic in the city. Curt figured Sheila to be in a decent mood. He knew enough about Sheila. He watched her go to Trevor and kneel by the sleepy child.

“You ready for a good visit with Gramma? You remember me? Hah? You remember when I visited you in Chicago?”

Trevor shook his head sharply at his grandmother and her house.

“Aw, he’s too tired to talk,” Curt said. “Time for bed.”

“I’ll do it,” Myra said. She looked at Curt. “I can do it.” She picked up two bags and she and the boy started for the long hall that led to the back bedrooms. Curt and Sheila stood by the car, looking in after them. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to be.

“Well let’s go sit,” she said. Sheila’s resolve made her unlike her daughter. She wore a yellow tennis skirt and a T-shirt with the beat-up brown boots. The boots she liked to just throw on. “I’ll get beers,” she said. “We’ll watch some TV.”

“I’m never home for TV.” In the den, he sat down on the flowered couch.

Sheila called from the kitchen: “Go ahead and smoke!”

“So how are things?”

“Oh,” she said. “You know!”

What Curt knew was that she was formulating questions. When she caught him on the phone, she asked questions about his job, his plans; in person, she asked about his intentions.

On TV, it was the news; he figured after the news, it would be Letterman. When she came into the den and set down the beer, Sheila pulled the rocker close to the flowered couch. She smelled of sweet soap and fried onions. She said: “So what do you think?”

Curt knew it was useless to pretend not to understand her. “Well Myra says it would only be until August?”

Sheila extended her arm so her beer bottle almost touched his shoulder. “The point is, Curt, the point is this one. What do you think about Myra leaving him behind? What do you, Curt, think of something like that? I’m asking you this because I know from experience that what the man thinks about her makes a big difference.”

Curt fumbled his cigarette.

“Oh,” Sheila said. She got up and came back and put an ashtray next to him on the couch. She sat back down in the rocker.

Curt tapped his smoke. “All I can say, I guess, is I miss how she used to be before she got so down like she is. She was always a little down and I didn’t mind it, but not down like this.”

“It’s happened before,” Sheila said. “It happens to women. Men don’t really understand.”

Curt wanted to finish. “And I think of Trevor here, running around the yard all pigeon-toed all by himself. He gets into a lot of trouble you know.”

Sheila rocked forward, braced her feet on the floor, and rested her forearms on her knees. Her yellow skirt was shorts, too, in the same puckered fabric, underneath. “Well first of all,” she said, “he won’t be running around all by himself. He’ll help me with some chores. He’ll go to my sister’s when I work. At her house, she’s got three grandbabies and two of the grown ones that had the grandbabies, so there’s always people there. Buck’s always outside working on his car.”

Curt thought of Trevor in the back seat of Buck’s busted vehicle, his pale face in the window like a reflection. Curt could feel the lengthening distance in his gut. He thought about eating something.

“You know,” Sheila said, “it doesn’t matter how bad they act up or make a mess of things, you still do everything you can for your kid.”

“They can make a mess of things,” Curt said. He put out his cigarette and picked up his beer and pushed into the couch. “Don’t I know that now.”

“I’m talking about Myra,” Sheila said.

The two of them sat. They made their drinks last.

When David Letterman ended, Sheila said: “Well I guess it’s time for bed. They must be back there conked out. What do you want for breakfast tomorrow?”

“Oh, man,” Curt said, yawning, getting up. “Trevor likes that junky stuff you probably don’t even have.”

“I have what he likes,” Sheila said.

“Okay,” Curt said.

Down the hall to the back bedrooms, Curt passed the front door and it was open. He wondered why. He kept going and found where he and Myra had slept before. When he didn’t see her there, he didn’t worry. He hoisted the suitcase she had carried back earlier and unzipped it on the bed. He laid out shirts, then stopped unpacking and went to the bathroom. When he came out, he looked down the hall and saw the lights were all off in the den, but on in Sheila’s room. He couldn’t see the full depth of the foyer from where he was, so he walked back down the hall to check the front door and was glad he had—it was still open. Jeez, Curt said. Trusting. But instead of locking up, he stepped onto the porch to see the starry sky and the wide swath of grass and the full trees that bordered the yard. There was a heavy mist—mysterious and full of promise like the kind, he thought, in a fairytale book for a kid. A breeze blew up the scent from a bank of flowers against the house.

Curt stretched his arms high and his voice cracked with fatigue. “Oh, man,” he said to nobody. “Too much driving!”

He dropped his arms and looked to his right. Through a break in the trees he could see the gas station at the end of the road. The sign was lofted much higher than it would be in the city. The station was still lit up—Curt figured so a patrolling country cop could see in. He figured the two men were long gone. The movement he noticed then—a stray dog or a goat or a child crossing the blacktop—registered in his stomach as much as it did in his mind. Curt went back into the house. He found the room where the boy should have been and Myra was sleeping there in a patterned wingchair pulled to the head of the twin bed.

“Myra,” he said from the doorway. “Where is he?”

She startled awake, jerking her arms.

“He’s run off again!” He stepped toward her and back and punched the side of his fist against the door frame. “ Myra, wake up! Check the house! I’m going out in the yard.”

“Oh no,” she said. “The empty refrigerator in the basement.”

“What? Refrigerator? Check it Myra!” he shouted.

In the hall, Curt pushed past Sheila coming from her room. She started to follow him, but stopped and turned when Myra started yelling on her way down to the basement. Outside, Curt’s knees jarred when he hit the divots and bumps of the lawn. He thought of cop shows when the chase ended up in the woods, where the perp had the kid. If Trevor wasn’t at the gas station, he would search behind the house where the dogs were penned. He’d wake the neighbors. Curt looked for the shadow again, of animal or boy. He thought of the men he’d seen again, and their booze and their stick.

When Curt broke through the line of trees, he saw Trevor standing in his blue pajamas, at the base of the lit-up gas station sign, his sleeves too long and hanging limp past his hands, his head tilted up to study the blocky black numbers. The illuminated boy stood absorbed and independent. When Trevor looked, Curt was only a second from snatching him up, and Trevor screamed when he did it. Curt turned his head from Trevor’s ear to lessen the sound of his breathing and then looked close at him. “Where did you go? You just can’t do this.”

The boy ducked his head and talked into the soft cloth of Curt’s shirt.

“Trevor. Look here.”

The boy’s face was flushed, but otherwise calm. “I wanted to see the big sign,” he said.

“You should have asked or something.” Curt shifted his grip under the skinny legs, taking a step back on the blacktop. He felt as though the two of them were on embarrassing display, although no cars drove out of the dark to pass the station.

“Someday you’re going to get in big trouble,” Curt said. “Someone’s going to take you or hurt you next time you run away. Somebody’s got to watch you better.” He jostled the boy’s weight again to emphasize his words. Trevor held the tops of Curt’s shoulders. After everything, he seemed only pensive.

“Curt?”

“What?”

Trevor touched Curt’s hair with a damp, pink finger.

“What, Trevor?”

“I don’t want you to leave me here.”  

Curt shook his head and Trevor’s hand away. He looked up to the $3.00/$3.25/$3.55 and heard the sign’s intolerable buzzing. Trevor rested slack in Curt’s arms as he carried him distractedly around the pumps and then to the front window of the station. They both looked in to see the cash register counter, the soda machines, the candy and gum tucked into silent rows. Curt kissed Trevor’s hair as he set him down.

“Who would leave a boy at a gas station?”

Trevor opened his mouth. “I meant.”

Then all they could do was look at each other and each push their doubts far back—Trevor’s doubts in Curt, Curt’s in himself. Curt stepped on a candy wrapper blown across the blacktop.

“What do you want for breakfast? Is it too early for breakfast?”

“Yes,” Trevor said.

“Not Cocoa Puffs. No junk for you. Cheerios and milk.”

“Okay,” Trevor said.

“Come on. Let’s go.”

They left the gas station and Trevor kicked at sticks in the grass so making progress took longer than it had to. After awhile, he stopped kicking and they just walked.

“Where are all the buildings?” Trevor said.

“We’re in the country here. Tomorrow we will see what there is to do with Gramma.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I know you don’t.”

The night air around Curt and Trevor was filled with the day’s moisture and sweat but Curt had the thought that it could hold more, and he allowed himself disappointment and guilt—two full, round drops swelling to the size of a watery sun and a blue, trailing moon. He heard Myra and Sheila yelling for the both of them—Sheila’s demanding cry, Myra’s voice sodden. Curt wished he could keep their voices from bridging the distance Trevor had crossed. Curt thought of their voices and of Trevor’s fearlessness.

“Found him!” Curt shouted back into the night. “It’s okay!”

Curt took the boy’s hand and felt the lightness of it, but this time he had the thought that under the skin were a bunch of bird’s bones—hollowed out, best for flight. That the boy had come to no harm, again, was not Curt’s strongest comfort—it was that Trevor knew how to leave. He would know that he could leave, as others in his life let him and themselves down, as things did not go as expected.

Curt felt as if he was caught for a moment in the wind of a different season, sure that he felt some sudden, clear coolness. He let it pass around and through him and as he did so, he believed in the possibility of the safety of boys, in the possibility of their understanding, and that if he left, Trevor would come one day to find him. Curt wanted someone to find him.

He pulled Trevor’s hand. “Listen,” he said, his whisper rough. “You just have got to, got to be good.”

In Trevor’s gaze, as always, was his curiosity.

“He’s okay!” Curt lifted his face to the damp dark and called out again. “It will all be okay!”

Myra’s boy smiled up as Curt walked him to the gravel road so that the route back to Sheila’s house would take a little longer. Curt thought of Myra and wondered, as he had at the end of things with other women, exactly when it had started to turn.

Liz Radford lives in Chicago where studies short fiction at Story Studio and is a member of a twice-monthly writing group. She attended Washington University as an undergraduate and is a professional writer/editor.

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