Each One a Nation, page 18
Mallory hugs her mother and departs, leaving Chrissy to the silence and the scent of the empty home, the one she longs to see more often. She has watched her daughter become, within her group of friends, the one tasked with bearing the weight of the secrets of the others, and although she believes her daughter is better suited for it than for anybody else, she worries about the role’s side-effects, its pressures, and its sores.
Outside Peyton honks, sitting leaned back in his car as Mallory scales the steps and moves to the passenger-side door. A particular sort of sourness has developed in her towards Peyton Crow, who she believes is getting away with something dishonest, dishonesty being the one trait Mallory detests the most. The trip to Bimini was an enlightening one in so many ways, having seen for the first time her group of friends, and their parents, in an element that wasn’t completely their own, where an ugly, reptilian way was set to shine away from the possibility of judgment, and now, thinking about her mother’s views on the people she is so often around, they with their own little nations, she wonders if she quite enjoys the people they are outside of those nations, and begins to reimagine what they are within them.
The summer had been intense, hinging on so many things at once including but not limited to: Devyn’s rapid ascent, the Del Rio legal woes, Peyton’s personal transformation, Seth’s apathy, and Sloane’s continued family crisis, now heightened by her mistrust of Peyton. Mallory has felt the weight of it all in the form of empathy, not knowing yet that the problems of other people are not her own, and that making them so at the level she does has its own consequences.
She lowers herself into the hand-me-down sedan. It shakes and rumbles in her driveway from loud music and Peyton, looking truly careless, is sitting with his long arm hanging out the driver-side window. She settles into the passenger seat without saying anything to him and he drives off, doing the same. They sit in the rumble of the music for a few moments before he says to her above the music,
“I can’t believe that Devyn’s going to Jr. Nats today.”
“She’s worked hard for it,” she says defiantly.
“Yeah but so have I.”
Mallory sits in the vibrating noise for another moment more, watching Peyton’s strong hand grip the steering wheel and his other hand grip the shifter though the car is automatic.
“Sloane’s really going all out for it too,” he says, “she brought all this stuff to set up in Devyn’s locker to send her off but the funny part is it doesn’t matter because Devyn doesn’t care about anything.”
“That’s not true,” says Mallory.
“Yeah, it is. She doesn’t care about any of this, she’s just natural. She doesn’t have the drive, doesn’t have the will. It’s God-given, that type of will, and she doesn’t have it. Trust me; I know.”
“How can you say that?” asks Mallory, above the music. “She works just as hard as you do and she deserves to be where she’s at.”
Peyton says nothing and keeps his eyes on the road but wiggles his fingers at the top of the wheel. They pull to a stop sign at the end of downtown, and he lingers there, turning down the music to say,
“You’re too trusting of her, Mal. You think that she’s different from her family but she’s just like them. There’s no way inside of Devyn, no way to get to the root of her.”
Mallory considers what he has said, and without any further hesitation, says with disdain,
“Just because she didn’t ever love you back doesn’t mean you have to talk that way about her,” says Mallory. “She deserves this more than you ever will.”
Peyton, again, says nothing; he only turns the music back up and drives. He drives like young men do, as if trying to prove that they have found some way around the truth that driving can be a very dangerous thing. She wonders what that might be.
When they arrive, the boys’ locker room is full of tired faces and sore, resentful, half-mobilized bodies. Seth McWhite, under a hoodie with headphones blaring, sees but does not acknowledge Peyton. The general conversation amongst the upperclassmen is the success of Devyn Del Rio, and upon hearing it, Peyton wants so badly to share that he had indeed that summer put his lips to hers, feeling that it would in some way discredit her advantage over him. Fighting his need, he remembers how easily things become news, and knows that Sloane is dressing just across the hallway with the girlfriends of so many of the guys.
Sloane has been at Devyn’s empty locker with bags full of streamers, banners, and other party favors, a set of helium balloons spelling “GOOD LUCK” swinging above her head. Mallory and Sloane’s relationship has, almost always, flown through Devyn, and the two find conversation with each other clunky and unnatural, especially when Devyn is absent. Sloane, having never forgotten her boyfriend’s history with Mallory, has developed the habit of complaining about him to her any chance she gets and wondering if Mallory will ever tell her what happened.
“…and he said he’d help is the annoying part, but he never helps with anything,” says Sloane. “He’s either too busy or doing homework or at a church thing. I just asked for a small bit of help to celebrate our friend and he couldn’t even help me this morning. He wouldn’t even drive me which is annoying because I know that he just drives himself and would easily be able to drive me.”
Realizing that Sloane doesn’t know about her rides with Peyton, Mallory is suddenly locked in a position of dubious disclarity. Like earlier in the morning with her mom, she knows that the conversation is being curated rather than had, and decides to alter it for safety.
“At least Dev’s going to love this,” she says. “I’m sure she’s nervous and it’s going to make her feel better when she sees it. When is she supposed to get here?”
Sloane, biting off the end of a streamer, shrugs and says, “hopefully soon,” before moving to her own locker to change. Mallory cannot help but think of Sloane and her way of communicating as something so alien, and she worries that all along she’s known and said nothing about Peyton. The door opens slightly and Bobby Catman Jr.’s voice comes from behind it.
“Girls,” he says, “can you bring me Devyn’s bag? She’s not going to make it before her flight.”
The door closes and Mallory looks to Sloane who is just pulling the straps of her suit over her shoulder. Her entire demeanor changes, but she returns to Devyn’s locker, takes the bag out of it, and moves to the arena.
…
After a long day the GAT athletes return to the GAC for second session, their minds dead and dull, their bodies only knowing to repeat the memorized motions of propellants through a fluid. They look, but are unaware that they feel like automatons. Bobby Catman Jr. is en route to Austin with Devyn, leaving Senior himself to oversee the underclassman session, which quickly turns into a tortuous item of old-testament love. Bob Sr. has little patience for anyone not already adept to his methods, having ascended to a position of not having to actually define them anymore, and is furious to learn that the younger kids have been slacking under his forward-thinking son. He sits, leaning forward in a metal chair on the balcony above, red-faced and raging that only one of them had the stuff to compete nationally, screaming at the kids.
“I oughta call Bobby tonight and tell him to stay his ass in Texas if this is all he can do. If this ain’t the sorriest group of nothings to ever dip their little pussy-footed toes in my pool. One of yus! Only one of yus was good enough to show up and qualify. Why, I’ve sent whole teams of freshmen before, whole teams! Well, it ain’t gonna go like this from now on! From now on, we’re going back to the old regime!”
The kids aren’t used to practicing this sort of disorder, all of them flooding the lanes at once pulling drag belts in a situation that seems more like punishment than preparation. Peyton’s confidence has vanished under the thumb of the old man, and he’s hunched over the side of the pool silently weeping into his forearms. Sloane has twice already had her drag belt caught on that of a passing teammate causing them to catch at the end of the belts slack, pulling them both violently backwards in a flailing fit of controlled drowning.
“Absolute generational crisis if you ask me, these soft ass little ninnies. Softest bunch of losers I’ve ever seen come into this place. We used to train outside for Christ’s sake. Outside!”
From POOL 2, Seth McWhite watches the massacre with the rest of the upperclassmen, knowing their pain but never once considering trading places with them. He keeps his eye specifically on Peyton, seeing his friend crack under the rigor of the elder Catman, knowing what’s in store for him when the man becomes his primary coach. Max and Michelle Crow, Peyton’s twin senior siblings watch with him and laugh at their brother struggling.
“He has no clue,” says Max.
“You’re so right,” Seth says, “he doesn’t.”
“It’s about time someone exposed him,” says Michelle.
“Otnow!” screams Catman, “I know we ain’t idling, old folks. I know my eyes deceive me.”
The three plunge back into the pool and return to thrashing as Catman redirects his tyranny again to the underclassman pool.
SEVEN
Bowen Margeaux receives Eric Del Rio on church grounds in the garden of the stations of the cross, a small, semi-wooded cutout on the edge of church property refurbished with great detail and expense at the urging of Father Bowen and the funding of Pat Crow. Eric arrives in the late morning to find Father seated patiently and quietly with his hands in his lap. There is a later-summer peace to the garden, a deeply southern sort of slightly-disturbed silence and a breeze that does not bend, but rather folds and binds itself to the light it inhabits. Eric is suited, sleeves rolled and tucked, sweating under the arms and on the forehead. Father senses, as soon as Eric closes the car door, impatience and fear. He does not stand to greet him when Eric enters the garden, but instead, simply motions to the empty spot on the bench next to him.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” Eric says, “I’m sorry I only have a few minutes.”
Father smiles and nods.
“Where are you off to?” he asks.
“Austin,” he says, “for Devyn’s thing and then to St. Louis for mine.”
“Yes,” says Father Bowen quietly, hoping to build comfort in the situation. “I have kept with the news.”
Eric sits on the stone bench and digests the garden, how its stones and icons seem to carry a new shine and a new quality. He thinks about its resilient silence and how no other place in his life has the same sort of silence.
“Oh,” he says, “well.”
“We don’t have to,” says Bowen, placing a hand on Eric’s knee.
“Actually that’s what I’m here to talk to you about,” says Eric. “I’ve got concerns for my soul and the souls of my family and friends, and I’m finding that these concerns occupy me in ways that other things don’t. It’s decapacitating me slowly.”
“Well,” says Father Bowen, as the predictions he made prior to the meeting are rendered correct, “I can’t imagine what you are going through.”
Eric claps his hands together and holds them outwardly as if he’d been waiting for someone to finally understand.
“Exactly!” he shouts, piercing the calm of the garden. He feels naughty for having done so and continues in a lower tenor. “Nobody can but everyone pretends to.”
Father Bowen winces at the clap, recovers himself, and responds, “What do you know about the soul, Eric?”
Eric thinks for a moment before saying, with full confidence, “I know that it’s a drying sheet and that the world is a kid with a BB gun, and that mine is shot to hell by now.”
Father Bowen smiles courteously and nods. The silence of the garden returns and solidifies within its boundaries.
“Look,” says Father Bowen, “we can do confession if that is what will make you feel better, but as far as your soul is concerned, I’m afraid we do not offer a quick solution.”
“No, no,” says Eric quickly, “a quick solution is not what I’m here to ask for. I’ll be honest, Father, I’m not sure that I am even that concerned about the status of my soul, truth be told. I’m concerned for what my soul might do to the people who are of my soul, those whom I share parts of my soul with.”
Bowen nods knowingly.
“We do not believe in the genetically shared soul,” he says, “but in individual souls conjoined only by the body of the church.”
“That’s not what I mean,” says Eric. “I don’t mean that I am worried about passing my misdeeds along, but that there are consequences in this life that may be shared.”
Father Bowen, only half inclined to listen when people speak on topics he knows they know nothing about, disappears into himself and looks for strategies rather than answers. When again the silence returns, he opens his eyes and looks directly to Eric’s tie.
“I see,” he says. “Would it help if you told me everything?”
Eric had not considered the possibility that he could tell the absolute truth to somebody without having to answer for it legally or financially, and so as Father Bowen’s words pass across his face he feels a lightening of the spirit and is quick to reply,
“I, um. Legally, cannot say much.”
“Neither can I,” says Bowen, pointing a finger to the cloudless sky. “He and I only.”
Seated closely, the two face and consider each other with little but the August light between them, that rare, shaded light of a certain time and place and season. The words carry a repeating frequency in Eric’s mind, rolling around in a circle on the insides of his skull. He and I only. He and I only. The words continue to roll until that stop abruptly, nestle themselves into his consciousness, and begin to sprout something useful. He understands, seemingly all of a sudden, the meaning of the faith he’d so long neglected and he decides to tell Father Bowen everything. He explains in great detail the night of the incident, about the calls he’d made and the people he’d involved. In detail he profiled Zurig, outlining everything he’d learned about him and every way that Pirado had used the facts to build a new truth. Then he told him about Chimen and how long he’d been harboring her. Then about Devyn and how oppressive and tyrannical he’d been in raising her. Finally, he explained that he loved his wife but that he could not stand her and that he did not know how to tell her that it wasn’t necessarily her that he did not care to be intimately connected to, but anyone, and that he would rather walk completely alone through life doing what is useful than to be someone that someone is supposed to love. When he was done, Father delivered his penance with grace, much to Eric’s misfortune.
“The prayers I can do,” says Eric, “but tell them all the truth?”
EIGHT
That afternoon, on a nearly-empty Astra flight from Atlanta to Austin, Eric Del Rio paces the plane, chatting with the customers and employees who are still willing to fly Astra, as fear has not yet dampened from the tragedy. Value, however, being the American opiate, has kept the company’s operation churning throughout the summer, through the stock-forecasters foreseen danger zone and set to see profit in the fall. Eric has kept the company steady through it all, and shareholders have begun to buy back in. The general mood in the cabin though, is that of unsure cats, the flight attendants feigning smiles, having already updated their resumes, and the few passengers, the most frugal of airline customers, wondering if they’ve pushed their ways a kept-penny too far.
Devyn and Bobby Catman Jr. lay across their rows opposite one another in the aisle while Eric chats with the flight attendants in the back, doing his best to persuade his people to keep working through the storm. One of Eric’s early concessions upon taking the helm at Astra, one that made him popular among the ranks, was to enthusiastically embrace day-one unionization of pilots and flight attendants. Eric’s corporate stance, as well as his personal belief, is that any deficiency with his airline can be countered by premium in-flight comfort and care. He has, time and again, sacrificed expenses in operations, ticketing, and finance to increase the safety, salary, and sanity of the in-flight crews. Since the accident though, and throughout the legal battle, his claim that it was indeed a single pilot, rather than the company as a whole, who was to blame pilots and flight attendants have become silent, jittery, and unresponsive.
“…well if anything, you both are a testament to the fact that our fleet is safe,” Eric says, stirring a cocktail in a plastic cup with his finger. “I mean it’s reasonable, I get it. I get why folks aren’t choosing to fly with us at the moment but we’ll recover. Trust me, we will recover. See, the thing about this industry is that nobody—the customer I’m talking about—thinks about the dangers of it and that’s because we’ve made it so safe that they virtually don’t need to. We’ve flown several times and there’s been one mistake. I think the public is going to respond to that.”
The senior flight attendant of the two is a worn, constantly chewing woman who has been with the company for sixteen years. She has seen executives come and go, has devoted a good portion of her life to the airline, and regardless of recent events, is starstruck by Eric, having never once spoken to one of the company’s executives in person. The other flight attendant, an employee of only four months, only continues coming to work because her senior partner had assured her over a tear-filled phone call that the old fleet was fit to fly.
“What’s the plan for the new fleet, though?” asks the older woman. “Something obviously ain’t right with them planes.”
“Well,” Eric says, having been through months of litigation already and hardened with the skill of redirecting a question, “we’ve done extensive research and are quite sure it wasn’t the plane.”
In their seats near the front, Devyn and Bobby are trying to flick peanuts across the aisle into each other’s cups, Bobby keeping score on an Astra napkin. He can tell Devyn is nervous, and knows that the best way to buttress her from nerves is to get her to compete, to do something with a score, a clock, etc. They are somewhere above Shreveport, approaching the Dallas-Houston corridor, one of the busiest airspaces on the planet, flying low. For a few years, Devyn has harbored a love for Bobby Catman that she is both mature enough to recognize as brotherly and young enough to allow herself to feel. Bobby is aware of this, and handles his time with her delicately, knowing well both the aloof nature of a young girl’s heart and the primary source of his income. Devyn, he knows, is a person, yes, but also a thing, an object to so many peoples’ subjects so valuable, precious, and rare—something to preserve and defend with highest regard.
