Strong Motion

  Her tongue curled as she added up the figures on the check. Renée was glowing as if she’d been through a snowstorm. Back on the planet of ceaseless car traffic, in front of the hotel, she asked for money for a cab. Melanie opened her purse on her hip and dug a twenty out. “I’m sure you think it’s silly of me to keep asking. Perhaps it doesn’t even matter. But—”

  Renée’s fingers closed on the bill. “But.”

  “Well, only whether there is some involvement between you and Louis.”

  She took Melanie by the shoulders. “What do you think?”

  “I suppose I’m still inclined to think there is.”

  “Really.” She pulled Melanie closer and kissed her on the mouth, the way any woman might kiss the person who’d wooed her over lunch with pearls and wine.

  Melanie wrenched free and dusted herself off. “I’m going to have to reconsider this, Renée. We’ll assume you’ve had a little too much to drink. But I’m afraid I’m still going to have to reconsider.”

  “Sliding scale. Security. Immediate terms.”

  “I’ll talk to you on Tuesday morning.”

  “See you then.”

  The rain had turned to a fine warm mist, agreeable to the skin. As soon as Renée was in a cab, she stretched out on the seat.

  “You OK there?” the Haitian driver said.

  “Yes,” she said loudly.

  Water trickled and made lenses on the window above her, a twisted aspect of the city in every droplet. The soaked façades upside down, the utility wires dipping and dividing. She was feverish. Three in the afternoon, drunk off her ass and lying in a cab. Romance, romance. Three in the afternoon, the warm rain, she’s coming home from seeing herself. She can still feel her warmth inside her and on her skin. She can smell her own nose, she can taste her own mouth.

  “That’s twelve dollars, sixty cents.”

  “Go up the hill here on Walnut.”

  Her stomach upset by the carpaccio and wine, she lay on her bed until the windows stopped getting darker and became a little lighter and the rain turned to steam and silence. It was as if a tent had descended on the street, its damp canvas flaps coming to rest behind the houses; as if the street were a film lot hosed down for a nighttime shoot, with a loud, busy world beyond the houses. A near neighbor was cooking waffles. Girls and boys on the porch across the street turned on a heavy-metal anthem. It might have been playing in the next room, not outside. She plugged in her telephone and dialed a number. “Howard Chun, please.”

  “He not here,” came the answer.

  She changed her clothes and went down to the street. One of the porch girls—the fat one; there were also two skinny ones—turned up the music. Maybe they thought she was going to complain about it. She mounted the stairs. “Does somebody here have a joint I could buy?”

  They turned the radio down, and she repeated the question, looking from skeptical face to skeptical face. The younger boy was ten or eleven. “Are you Jewish?” he said matter-of-factly.

  “No.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  She smiled. “Smith.”

  “Bernstein,” the boy countered.

  “Greenstein,” said a girl.

  “Shalom!”

  Renée waited.

  “How long you been living there?” the fat girl asked.

  “Five years,” she said. “How long have you been here?”

  “Where’s your Chinese boyfriend?”

  “She’s got a bald one.”

  “Hey. Hey. You got any beer?”

  She crossed her arms. “How old are you guys?”

  The older boy, silent until now, rose stiffly from a broken Adirondack chair. His puffy high-tops were carefully unlaced. “You gotta buy us some beer,” he said.

  “All right. How much?”

  The girls conferred, the older boy taking pains to appear uninvolved. “Ten, but they gotta be taw-boys,” the fat girl announced positively.

  “They have to be what?”

  “Taw-boys.”

  “Taw-boys?” Renée smiled, not understanding.

  “TAW BOYS. THE BIG CANS.”

  “The sixteen-ounce cans!”

  “The fucking taw cans!”

  “Doy, doy, doy.”

  “You know what sixty-nining is?”

  “Steven, shut up, you little jerk.”

  “Doy, doy, doy.”

  Standing apart, the older boy rolled his eyes. Renée descended the steps to cries of Shalom! A smell of infrastructure was stealing from the bushes, and she could hear her own telephone ringing, another pro-lifer calling.

  When she came back from Highland Avenue, the older boy led her into the front room of the first-floor apartment and broke two cans off one of the six-packs she’d bought, returning them to the paper bag. He showed her his dope. “It’s very fresh,” he said earnestly. “Steven, close the fucking door.” The door closed. “Which one you want? Take the big one. My name’s Doug.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Almost sixteen. I’m gonna get my license. You go out with me sometime?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  On her kitchen table she set out the joint, a pack of matches, and a saucer. She positioned a chair in front of them and turned off all but one light. She had a cassette marked dance that had been broken for five years. Training her desk light on it, she opened it up and spliced out the mangled stretch with Scotch Magic tape and nail scissors.

  The dope tasted like April in college; like the music on the tape. She danced to “London’s Burning” and “Spinning Top” and “I Found That Essence Rare,” her arms and legs mixing the last faint banks of smoke into a haze. She thought she was crying when “Beast of Burden” played, but when she opened her eyes there were no tears and it seemed that she’d only imagined it.

  Outside the kitchen window she lay down on the wet, sloping shingles. They were made of real slate.

  In the morning she tracked down a mineralogy professor who liked her and had lent her one of his cars several times before. She also appropriated a departmental camera, with a zoom telephoto lens. The sun was blazing on Route 128. As methodically as she could, she drove every road and street in Danvers, western Peabody, northern Lynn, and South Lynnfield, stopping often to trace her route on a map with a red pencil. There were zero cars in the parking lot of Sweeting-Aldren corporate headquarters, a white Monticello-inspired structure set into a green hillside. From a Boston & Maine railroad bridge, from the back of an unfinished office complex, and from the rear corner of a cemetery, she surveyed company installations—regiments of horizontal tanks like giant caplets, towers with iron vines with iron tendrils spiraling up them. The corrugated siding of the major buildings was a certain pale blue she didn’t think she’d ever seen; on a color chart, the shades all around it were probably pleasing, but this particular blue was not. Dreamy fumes of acetone were native to the place.

  By Monday the heat had reached full, white force. She dressed in cutoffs, sandals, and a tank top that she’d never worn except to sleep in. At the Peabody City Hall, on the ground floor outside the Assessor’s Office, she found listings for eight smaller, noncontiguous parcels of land owned by Sweeting-Aldren. The six of them that she could tour by car had nothing more interesting than horses on them; she didn’t try to reach the others. She was driving as fast as she dared, and still it was almost four o’clock by the time she got to Beverly airport.

  A girl in the coffee shop was lifting a wire basket of french fries out of oil. She told Renée to talk to a man named Kevin in the hangar.

  “I should just go right in?”

  “Yeah, you’ll find him.”

  As soon as she went through the hangar door someone whistled at her, but all she could see at first was a blinding square of white sky at the far end. Near where she stood, the cowlings had been removed from a Cherokee and from an eight-seat turboprop with a boxy grasshopper body. Two grease-blackened twosomes in blue coveralls were working o
n their shiny guts, reaching up with tools. Asked about Kevin, they pointed to a young man on a ladder by a baby jet farther down. He was spraying aerosol cleaner on the jet’s windshield.

  “Are you Kevin?”

  “That’s right.” He was in his early twenties, had sky-blue eyes, a crew cut, and straight-arrow posture. Across the corridor, the inside of another baby jet was being vacuumed, country music wafting out and an extension cord dangling from the door.

  “I was told to talk to you about being taken for a ride.”

  “Where to?”

  “Just around the neighborhood.”

  He came promptly down the ladder, leading her to think they’d be airborne in a matter of minutes, but in fact she had to breathe exhaust gases and fuel gases for nearly an hour. She handed over money and filled out and signed an insurance waiver. Kevin disappeared for a while and came back minus his coveralls, spent ten minutes determining that he didn’t like something about the oddly upside-down-looking plane he tried first, fiddled and diddled with an ordinary plane, a Cessna, and finally parked it outside the mouth of the hangar. He’d put dark shades on. “Where we going?”

  “Just around Peabody a couple times. There are some things I’d like to look at.”

  He brought the mike to his lips and muttered nothings into its plastic grooves. There was a small spiral notepad in a pocket below the instrument panel. He flipped the laminated pages one by one, raising and lowering flaps, feeding the engine until the propellers became invisible, muttering into the mike again, flipping switches. Cabin temperature rose twenty or thirty degrees. The engine noise reached screaming heights as they bounced along softened asphalt and firm concrete and swung out onto the runway, neatly astride the center-line stripe. Heated air and the scaly heads of weeds were the only things moving in the acres of vacancy around them.

  They swung right and left and bounced on the air like a jeep on a hillside.

  “There’s a control space right southeast here,” Kevin shouted. “I’m going to swing north of Danvers if that’s all right with you.”

  “Sure.”

  No noise in particular stood out, but it was hard to hear. Kevin kissed the mike and hung it up. “You can turn that lever there now, get a little air.”

  It was an ugly day for flying, the rivers an evil turbid yellow, the glare inescapable. The atmospheric soup extended far above the altitude they were maintaining, and everything on the ground dissolved in blue unless she looked straight down. Lakes and rivers were like spills of shiny lead on the blue-black land, stretching towards a blue-brown horizon. Each time they flew over water the plane dropped like a yo-yo. Each plummet was followed by an upward rebound that could be expected but not prepared for. Kevin set a paper bag on Renée’s bare knee.

  “You’re cute,” she essayed, at a shout.

  “So are you. Not as cute as my wife, though.”

  She nodded judiciously. “What’s your job?”

  “I fly for a tool company in Lynn. They’ve got a jet and a couple planes. I’m number two, I don’t fly the jet much. I take the president to Maine a lot. Vacation house. His guests too. How about you?”

  “I’m a photographer.”

  “For—?” He pointed at the label on her camera. “Harvard Geophysics?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You interested in earthquakes?”

  “No,” she shouted. “Land forms.”

  “I thought you might be looking for faults or whatever. Lot of seismologists around here. Guy I know took one up last month, all up and down the coast.”

  “Can I show you where I want to go?” She held up a map on which she’d circled in red the main Sweeting-Aldren property and the two smaller plots she hadn’t seen yet. Kevin put it on his lap, studied it a moment, and then looked straight ahead through the windshield. The plane leaped drastically into another thermal. The sound of the engine changed and stayed changed.

  “Is this OK?” she shouted.

  It was a while before he answered. “What do you want to look at Sweeting-Aldren for?”

  She craned her neck, pretending to check the map. “Oh, is that what those are?”

  “You got some special reason?”

  “I’m looking at land forms.”

  “I can’t take you any lower than three thousand feet.”

  “How high are we now?”

  “Three thousand feet.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause they don’t like it. They’re a company. They’ve got secrets.”

  “What if I see something I want to see?”

  “About half the corporate business at Beverly Municipal is Sweeting-Aldren. They’ve got six jets there. You know what I’m saying?”

  “No.”

  “I’m saying that’s where I work.”

  “You work for Sweeting-Aldren?”

  “I work for Barnett Die. But I’m at the airport. You know what I’m saying?”

  He pointed out the two small properties, a pair of fields split by dirt roads. They hit another bump. The engine coughed as they banked, sun spilling crazily across Renée’s lap and out the other window. A hillside vomited smashed cars and clots of rusted waste. Proud mansions spread their green velvet skirts on land wedged between the old brick phalluses of industry and the newer plants—flat rectangles with gravel on the roof and trailers crowding to feed at troughs in back. The most permeable of membranes separated a country club from acres of bone-colored slag piles streaked with sulfuric yellow, like the pissings of a four-story dog. Low-rise condos with brand-new parking lots and BayBank branches were perched above algae-filled sinkholes littered with indestructibles. Everywhere wealth and filth were cheek by jowl. Before it gave way to Sweeting-Aldren’s property, the landscape seemed to hesitate, real-estate development dwindling to undernourished neighborhoods of flat, small houses, some mobile homes, lone taverns, and unpaved streets skirting woods and dying in front of a futile house or two, half-finished, with refuse cascading down embankments. On the company side of the woods, pipes and rails on low piers made beelines across wetlands, passing through industrial suburbs of identical circular pods, crossing over beltways of tangled pipes, plunging into downtown and then out along spokes to satellite developments. Vehicles crept through the ranks of ten thousand color-coded barrels; steam dribbled from the tops of silver tiparillos. There was an impression of good management, a logic to the coding and the movement. The black ocean sparkled just beyond.

  Kevin dipped a wing so Renée could snap some pictures. “Seen enough?”

  “No,” she shouted. “You have to take me lower.”

  “You’re looking kind of gray.”

  “You have to take me lower.”

  “I’ll give you one pass at fifteen hundred. Then we go back.”

  “Two passes at a thousand.”

  He shook his head. The plane shot upward like a helium balloon.

  “What can I give you?” She did her best to smile nicely. The plane fell so hard her teeth clicked.

  “You don’t understand,” Kevin said. “They’re very, very touchy.”

  “I’ll give you more money.”

  He shook his head. “One pass at fifteen hundred. And I want to see your driver’s license or student ID or whatever. Something with a picture.”

  He took her license and verified her name and image as they circled counterclockwise. “You’re thirty,” he said.

  She nodded, lowering her head between her knees. She got her bag open just before a wave of motion ran up her back and shook her shoulders. The bag stiffened with the new weight inside it. Kevin handed her a fresh one.

  “Throw that in the back seat. We’ll go up the western side, cut around east, and head back. It’ll all be out your window. Sun behind you. You gonna survive?”

  The only thing that kept her upright was leaning on the camera with the lens against her window. She shot at everything, working the zoom. They were already past the central installation when she realized that she wa
sn’t seeing anything, that she should have just been looking.

  They had to circle Wenham while a jet landed ahead of them and another one took off. She kept her eyes shut and her face pressed to the air vent. Each bump, even the smallest, deepened her misery. It appalled her that Kevin continued to give her information to digest. Facts were as unwelcome as a tuna salad sandwich.

  “We’re into rush hour. They just cleared an inbound Sweeting-Aldren jet and there’s another one behind it. They should have their own little airline.”

  The plane went up and down. The engine droned.

  “Three minutes, you’ll be on the ground. A day like this will do it to almost anybody.”

  Through one eye Renée glimpsed the runway spreading out in front of them. She didn’t open her eyes again until they’d taxied to a stop. “Check this out,” Kevin said, nodding at the hangar. Two men in suits, one of them wearing a hard hat, were standing just inside the entry.

  “You didn’t believe me, did you?”

  “Wait wait wait.” She was rewinding the camera.

  “I’m not seeing this. I’m slowly getting out the door.”

  Head down, she reloaded and fired twenty shots at nothing. The men were now standing on the apron. When she climbed out, one of them looked inside the plane and the other led her into the hangar.

  “You’ve got to let her sit down,” Kevin said. “She’s very sick.”

  She leaned mutely against a wall in a corridor while, behind her, her shoulder bag was searched. In the coffee shop she was allowed to slump into a booth that had a long, thin smear of ketchup running across the table. The man in the hard hat was holding her bag on his lap; his face was red and ingrown and astonished, a cervix with beady eyes. He remained silent for the entire interview, tirelessly assessing her breasts and shoulders.

  The other man had a tonsure, thick straight hair the color of pencil lead bunching onto his shirt collar, and an eagle’s smart brow. He turned her IDs over in his fingers. “Renée Seitchek, 7 Pleasant Avenue, Somerville. Harvard University.” He pinned her with a look. “Renée, we hear you photographed some facilities. We’re frankly dying to know what moved you to photograph those particular facilities.”