The Man Who Ate the 747

  Wally didn’t recognize all of the people, but there were many familiar faces. Tom Fritts, the banker who loaned him money, and Doc Noojin, the veterinarian, were visiting with the mayor and the county attorney. He couldn’t believe they were all there, the town’s finest, spiffy in their Sunday best.

  Wally examined his brand-new overalls, right from Country General, all crisp and blue. His good white shirt was starched and ironed thanks to Rose, who had stopped by earlier. She had helped him pick out his clothes for the big event, told him he looked as handsome as a prince, and planted a mushier than normal kiss on his cheek before leaving.

  “Will you help me with my tie?” Wally asked.

  “Sure,” J.J. said. “Now remember, if you feel nervous, you don’t have to say a thing. Just smile and eat the plane. They’ll shout a lot of questions. But you don’t have to answer.”

  “You think Willa’s here?”

  “Definitely. I saw her on the way here.”

  “She sure is pretty, isn’t she?” Wally said.

  “Yes, beautiful.”

  “Prettiest girl in the world. You got a record for that?”

  “Nope, too subjective,” J.J. said, “but I’ve done some research in this area. I know a thing or two. Turns out symmetrical features are the key to human attraction. Men with well-proportioned facial bone structure have sex four years earlier on average than asymmetrical men.”

  Wally looked in the mirror. Big fuzzy cheeks, untamed eyebrows, and reddish brown eyes his mother once said were the color of clay from the bottom of the river. There certainly wasn’t anything symmetrical about his face. Maybe that explained everything.

  J.J. nudged his way in front of the mirror and examined himself.

  “I’m nothing special to look at,” he said, “but I do have a perfectly symmetrical nose.” He ran his finger down the two-inch pathway. “No dips or bumps, the spread exactly two-thirds the distance between my eyes. The slope of the dorsum from bridge to tip exactly 45 degrees—”

  He turned away from the mirror.

  “Sorry to get carried away,” he said. “Anyway, facial symmetry means fewer genetic mutations. Of course, men also want women with waists 40 percent smaller than their hips. The hourglass figure is biological proof of fertility and fitness.”

  He put his hand on Wally’s massive shoulder.

  “You see,” he said, “beauty is about attraction, and attraction is about survival.”

  Wally felt as if he had been whacked by a windmill. “Come on. What about feelings? What about true love?”

  “Love?” J.J. said. “I hate to break it to you, but it’s all brain chemistry. You see a pretty girl and you get a blast of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. That’s why you feel excited. Same with happiness. It’s just an electrical impulse from your left prefrontal cortex.”

  Wally had no doubt that his left prefrontal cortex was spinning, but he was also sure that the impulse came straight from his heart. The man from The Book of Records knew his science, but he didn’t know beans about love.

  J.J. straightened his jacket, smoothed his hair, squinted into the lights. In 14 years with The Book, he had never seen so many reporters. He faced a wall of cameras. Red lights on. Beyond them he could see the white masts of the satellite trucks.

  No doubt back at headquarters, Peasley, Lumpkin, and Norwack had gathered in the airless conference room to watch, while at the home office, the Lords of The Book had surely tuned in to monitor the announcement.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” he began, “I’m pleased to welcome you—”

  He saw Willa in the front row, surrounded by journalists from the big and little city papers and TV stations all over the world. She wore dark sunglasses, her long legs were crossed, and she wiggled one foot in a little circle. God, she was beautiful.

  If only he could impress her …

  Unmistakably, she frowned at him, scrunching her nose and shaking her head, and it was enough to make him fumble with the pages of his remarks.

  He felt perspiration on his back, a trickle between his shoulders, and he took the quick way out. “We’re here today to begin the official certification of Wally Chubb’s attempt to eat this Boeing 747.”

  “How dangerous is this record—” a journalist shouted.

  “We’ll take questions in a moment,” J.J. said, “but with no further ado, I present Mr. Wally Chubb.”

  The pasture was full of folks Wally had known all his life, the people who barely raised a finger from the steering wheel to greet him when their trucks passed on the road. Now they wanted to be part of what he was doing. His father had told him someday people would finally understand him, appreciate his gifts, and recognize why he was special.

  It had been a long time coming.

  It all began, really, the night the plane dropped from the sky. He was sitting on the porch at dusk with a glass of milk, watching one of God’s great light shows. The sky was nearly black with thunderclouds. Lightning sliced the sky every few seconds. The rain came next, in torrents, drowning the fields. Arf’s doghouse—lovingly glued together—disintegrated in the downpour.

  Then a flash illuminated a shiny speck across the cornfield. In the next bolt, the fleck was bigger. It looked like a meteorite or a shooting star heading straight toward the house.

  The sound intensified, outrumbling the thunder. Arf ran to the corner of the porch and barked like crazy.

  Then he saw it. An airplane screaming down, blocking out the sky. It hit the ground at a shallow angle, cut across the fields like a plowshare, rending a deep gash in the earth. It skidded toward the house and, as if meant to dock there, slid to a stop, no more than an arm’s length from the second-floor bedroom window.

  The air stank of jet fuel and the hot skin of the plane sizzled as it cooled in the rainfall. He worried if anyone was alive inside the huge aircraft when the emergency door popped open and an inflatable orange chute unfurled. Two men in jumpsuits scooted down the slide, their movements herky-jerky in the jagged light of the storm.

  One of the men introduced himself as the captain and asked to use the phone. The second man, the copilot, drank some water, petted Arf, and said “Oh man, oh man” a few dozen times. The storm was the worst he’d ever seen. He couldn’t believe he was alive.

  An hour later the thunderhead was just damp air and water dripping off the eaves. The two men offered their good-byes and walked down the dirt drive out to the road. It was as if they’d just dropped in to say hi and now the visit was over.

  “Hey,” Wally called out. “I think you left something.”

  “It’s all yours,” the captain said. “Just a pile of junk. We were flying it to the scrapyard in Arizona. Maybe you can get something for it.”

  How many mornings had he awoken in his bedroom staring out at a cockpit where the sun once came up? How many days had he spent tracing the plane’s great hump? How had this incredible object come to dominate his thoughts? How had he let so many acres of hay go without cutting?

  He didn’t know. But he was absolutely certain that the lightning storm had been heaven-sent, that the 747 was a gift, a windfall, and that he had to use it in a way that would lift up his life.

  When he decided to eat the plane to prove his love for Willa, he thought it would be his own private business. He never told her what he was doing—he just hoped that sooner or later she would come to know. Now hundreds of people were watching and waiting with cameras that would tell the whole wide world how he felt about Willa.

  He was ready. He hauled a chunk of honeycomb sheeting over to the chute, dropped it in, and pushed the red button. The grinding noise carried across the field, and instead of turning away and ignoring the sound, as people always did, the crowd cheered.

  He climbed down from the rafters and walked proudly to the front of his contraption. The great grinding sound was heard all around Nuckolls County, broadcast live to the whole country, in bedrooms and boardrooms, and beamed via satellite to every corner of t
he world.

  Wally reached into the machine and pulled out a bucket of metal grit. He moved over to the little place that had been cleared for him in front of the press.

  “Mr. Chubb, Mr. Chubb,” a reporter called out to him. “Is this the first glass and metal you’ve ever eaten?”

  “Nope,” he said. “When I was a boy, my ma once put a thermometer in my mouth. I swallowed it by accident, and it didn’t hurt me at all.” He chuckled a bit.

  “Mr. Chubb,” said a reporter in a fancy blue suit. Wally thought he had seen him on TV. “How long have you been eating the 747?”

  “About as long as it’s been in my backyard,” he said.

  He picked up the bucket, brandished it like a trophy, smiled for the cameras, then poured some grit into an electric blender that had been set up on a card table nearby. He added a few scoops of vanilla ice cream and some milk, pressed “blend,” and made himself a thick shake.

  He poured a big glass of gray sludge and raised it high into the air. He had thought long and hard about what he would say to the world, but as he gazed at Willa, the words just vanished. He let out a giant smile. This was the beginning of great things.

  “Question, Wally. Over here. Why are you doing this? Why are you eating the airplane?”

  Wally didn’t answer. Willa was right there in the front row.

  He grinned at her, then cast his eyes over this world of newfound friends. He took a gulp, burped.

  “What’s it taste like?” someone shouted.

  “Not bad,” he said. “A bit metallic. Reminds me of diet soda. Like Tab.”

  Then he drained the glass with a few more glugs, finishing off the 46-blade fan assembly of the 747.

  EIGHT

  In her whole life, Rose had never seen so many flowers.

  Even at the hospital maternity ward, there were never so many bouquets. These weren’t the familiar carnations and pompons from Superior Floral. These were showy, expensive arrangements of strange, exotic blossoms, flown in from big cities, then driven all the way from Lincoln or Omaha.

  She primped the flowers and pushed her nose into the roses. They smelled fancy even in Wally’s grubby living room. She poked her finger down into the stems to test the water level.

  Rose had stopped by to check up on him, as she often did on her way to the hospital. She had brought along one of her prize angel food cakes, top blue-ribbon winner at the State Fair in Lincoln in 1986. Wally was in the kitchen fixing lunch. Arf snoozed at his feet.

  “You hear about Shrimp?” she asked.

  “What?” Wally said.

  “Got blown off the road again. State Patrol says it’s going to yank his badge unless he puts on some weight real fast.”

  “Well, I saw him eat three Herfburgers at the inn yesterday,” Wally said.

  “Jeez. Is he trying to gain weight or kill himself?”

  They both laughed. Rose opened the card on the newest bouquet. It came from a TV anchorwoman in New York. It said she admired Wally, thought he was cute, wanted to know his innermost thoughts, asked if he’d fly to New York City, all expenses paid, for an exclusive interview.

  The phone rang.

  “Please hold for—” a peppy person said, too fast for Rose to understand. Then she heard an instantly recognizable voice.

  “Hi there,” a sultry woman said. “Who’s this?”

  “Rose Lofgreen,” she said.

  “I’m calling from New York and just wanted to make sure Mr. Chubb got our basket of fruit.”

  “Yup. Got it right here.”

  “Well, I hope it mixes well with the airplane.” She laughed. “So tell me, Rose, how can I convince him to go on my show?”

  Rose looked toward the kitchen. Wally was biting into a peanut butter and wing torsion box sandwich.

  “I don’t think he really wants to talk to anyone right now,” she said. “He’s happy just the way things are.”

  “Are you his girlfriend? You’re a very lucky lady—”

  “No, I’m not,” Rose said. “He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

  And that was the shame of it. Wally needed a woman in his life. Needed her. Rose hadn’t always felt this way about him. Like everyone else, she once thought he was a great big goofball. Then she sat next to him in church one day and heard him sing “Amazing Grace.” He was too loud and way off-key, but the hymn rumbled out of him from some deep place. It touched her. He got to her again at the 4-H potluck picnic when he ate nearly a whole tub of her potato salad. Later, when her marriage to Bad Bob unraveled, Wally was the one who sat her down at Jughead’s and told her she’d be better off happy and alone than miserable with a bully.

  Rose’s divorce taught her a lot—mostly that love could start with a spark, a twirl on the dance floor, but could grow only with understanding and acceptance of the other. That true love meant knowing someone the way they know themselves. And that was why she could watch over Wally, love Wally, even as he pined for Willa. It wasn’t easy. Especially now with an acre of flowers in his living room, each petal, every single bloom, encouraging him to keep going down exactly the wrong road.

  “No girlfriend? But I thought—” the TV woman’s voice broke into her thoughts.

  “I’ll add your name to the list.” Rose made a note in the composition book that was filling up with messages. She printed the woman’s name next to Ted Koppel and Geraldo Rivera.

  “Who’s called already?” the woman asked.

  “The phone hasn’t stopped ringing.”

  “Should I fly out to meet him in person? A quiet dinner, maybe?” Her voice was soft and flirty.

  “Not really,” Rose said. “He’s not that kind of guy, and you probably won’t like the food.”

  “Well, please tell him I’d do anything to have him on the show.”

  “Okay, will do.”

  And she hung up.

  “Who was that?” Wally asked, entering the living room.

  “Just another reporter.”

  “Has Willa called?”

  “No,” Rose said. “She hasn’t called.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “No.” She knew her tone was snippy; there was no hiding it.

  “Hey? What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve been here all day, getting the door every ten minutes for another box of chocolates from some celebrity. I’ve answered phone calls from Brazil, Japan, and Germany. I’m tired, and I’ve got to go to work now. My shift is about to start.”

  “Thanks for helping,” Wally said. He put his thick hand on her shoulder. “You want to take some of the flowers?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want your flowers.”

  Rose stuck her arms through the sleeves of her white nurse’s coat, buttoned it across her chest. No matter what she did—no matter how much she cared—no matter how many cakes she baked—he didn’t notice her at all. She was invisible. There was no use.

  “I better get to work.” She lifted herself on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. His beard was prickly and he smelled like damp earth.

  She might as well have kissed Arf.

  Willa rolled down her window and drove slowly along East Third. A crowd had gathered in front of The Express. The guys who usually hung out at the Gas ’N Shop or the B.S. Café at the grain elevator in Webber had converged on the curb to watch all the TV reporters. The townsfolk were reveling in all the attention, beaming innocence to anyone with a mind to exploit them.

  Normally she was proud to be a journalist, but today her fellow reporters looked like predators, hunting for delicious bits of flesh and blood, alert for the next story even as they picked this one clean. They didn’t give a hoot about the town and its people. This was about survival, their survival. She would have no part in helping any of them.

  She took a right at the end of the block, parked, and walked up the narrow alley where she could watch the circus, unnoticed. She listened to a blonde with a bad dye job overemoting into the camera.

  “We?
??re here where the mystery woman works,” she was saying. “All we know about Willa Wyatt is that she’s the editor of this little paper. She was born in this town, educated at the University of Nebraska.”

  The reporter stopped midsentence.

  “This wind is killing my hair,” she said. “Let’s do it again. Take two.”

  The mystery woman. Yes, indeed, she definitely needed to remember to be mysterious. The thought of it made her laugh out loud and cringe at the same time. Reporters always chased the juiciest angle. Willa slipped down the alley and entered the Superior Publishing Company building through the loading dock door.

  “Where’ve you been?” Iola said, looking up from her desk. “You’ve gotten 35 telephone calls. The New York Times wants to talk with you.”

  “How’s tomorrow’s paper?” Willa asked, walking to the pasteup room. The pages were there, arranged neatly on the layout tables, awaiting her approval. There was the huge 60-point headline: SUPERIOR MAN EATS 747 FOR WORLD RECORD. She had to put the story on the front page, damn it. There was no choice. What else could she do?

  “The New York Times, Willa! They want to talk with you.”

  “Tell Barney to hold page two for an hour. And the Times can read what I have to say in my editorial.”

  Willa closed her office door. When she needed to write fast on deadline, she usually worked with the old computer on her desk, but when the words came from the heart, she went straight to her father’s Underwood No. 5. It made comforting sounds, well-worn keys striking the platen, a little bell when the carriage returned. Sure it was harder pushing those old key tops, but the effort connected her to the thoughts flowing from her mind.

  She rolled a clean sheet of paper into the old typewriter. For a long while, she stared at the photograph on the wall—a streak of lightning in a black sky—