He told her everything. Staring up at her from the cushion of her lap, the stars visible behind her head, he told her about Dexter, his partner, the boulder of a man who always sat smoking at the tip of the island, with the long, hook-ended metal pole across his lap. Dex, whose son had been killed overseas, in the Argonne Forest. Dex, with that sad look to him, sitting there staring at the passing water all day. Pres explained how, when he did see a barrel coming, he’d ring the bell and Dex would spring to his feet and ready himself, holding the pole tightly in those hands of his, pouched and leathery as baseball mitts. While Pres radioed the crew of the Maid of the Mist, trolling below the falls, and warned them to prepare their rescue gear just in case, Dex would wait like that—pole across his thighs, feet planted at the rocky edge of the island—until the barrel was close enough to be seen. Then, in one swift motion, Dex would thrust the pole out into the driving water and yank it back, catching the hook deep in the wood.
“Is this kind of how he hooks them?” Claire said calmly, before lunging at Pres, digging her fingers into his ribs, making him squirm and laugh.
Lying chest-to-chest beneath the blanket, the two of them spent long hours wondering why people went over the falls at all. For the life of him, Pres couldn’t figure out why anyone would do something so foolish, why they’d let themselves be so charmed by what amounted to a simple drop in the river. He told himself it was nothing more than hysteria. After all, he’d lived less than two miles from the falls his whole life and he’d never felt the slightest tug. But even so, Pres found himself deeply troubled, as though his failure to understand the lure of the falls pointed to some larger flaw.
“Maybe they just want to go somewhere,” Claire said one night toward the end of summer. “Like an escape. Maybe they don’t think about it.”
Pres was now deeply in love with her. He wanted to tell her so, but he refused to say anything until he could compose an adequate description of his feelings, which, frustratingly, he never felt able to do. The best comparison he’d come up with involved an exhibit on hydroelectricity he’d seen at a fair downtown when he was a child. The exhibit’s main attraction was a clear, life-size figure, a glass man filled with miniature wheels and paddles and belts hung with tiny wooden buckets. When water was poured through a hole at the top of the man’s head, the machinery inside him whirred to life and one by one a series of bulbs strung through his legs and arms and head lit up like the points of a constellation until, finally, a large heart-shaped bauble of glass in the man’s chest flickered on and shined brighter than the other lights, so bright that Pres was forced to shield his eyes. Best he could figure, that was how he felt for Claire, how he would always feel, aglow.
Pres brushed his fingers over her thigh. The hangar walls flashed, illuminating the figures in the trees.
“Maybe they just look at the falls too long and get hypnotized, like by a snake charmer,” Claire said. She put her arms out in front of her and stared at the blinking hangar like a zombie. Seeing her like that—her gaze focused yet eerily vacant—sent a slight chill through Pres’s chest. He didn’t like the naturalness of her pose or the facility with which she’d assumed it. It was how she’d appeared when he first laid eyes on her back in the wax museum; when, no matter how he tried to hold her eyes with his, they’d looked past him. Even as he was thinking this, though, she broke her pose, grabbing him and pulling him to her.
Pres woke to find the map illuminated in front of his face. It had somehow tumbled up from the backseat and spread itself flat against the windshield. The early sun lit the paper as though it were stained glass. There had been no sign of the blimp in Gum Junction and now he was two days’ drive outside the city limit, though where exactly he didn’t know. He’d fallen asleep while driving again, just passed out of consciousness. Since he didn’t feel ready to look out the windshield and find the car hammered into a tree or teetering on the edge of a cliff, he just sat and stared at the map for a while. Each of the forty-eight states was a different hue—Arkansas crimson, Texas mint-jelly green. The sun projected the map’s colorful design onto Pres’s chest and face. He found his pen lying against the inside of the door and drew a heavy black check mark where he assumed Gum Junction, Arkansas, to be.
Neighboring mountain towns like Holly and Bonanza Springs were rich off their mineral springs, so Pres had been surprised to find Gum Junction a shabby and cheerless place, as though the town’s own mountain were a sharp knee over which it had been snapped. The only building open the evening Pres arrived was the public bathhouse. When he opened the door and stepped inside, he’d found a single steam-clouded room lined with changing stalls. The wooden floor was pocked with deep holes fizzing with bubbling water, and inside each hole was an old man. Some, submerged up to their chins, bobbed up and down, their beards and the tips of their long white mustaches dipping in and out of the water. Others were spilling water over themselves from jars of poor-quality purpled glass. To Pres’s eye they looked like a garden of ruined fountains.
“Excuse me, sir,” Pres said to the man nearest him. “Did you happen to see an airship pass by here a little while ago? A flying machine?”
The man was frail, his chest kicked in by time. “You ought to wet those down, boy,” he said, gesturing toward Pres’s hands. When Pres looked down, he found that his hands had clawed up from gripping the steering wheel.
“Go on,” the man said. “It only costs to take it with you.”
“Six cents for the glass,” said a man in a hole near the window.
Pres knelt down and dipped his hands in the water. It was a hundred and fifteen degrees, easy, and within moments he felt the tightness in his knuckles melt away.
“Feels good, don’t it?” called a man too far back to see, a shadow behind the steam. “That’s arsenic and iron working on you.”
Pres nodded; the water felt so good he thought he might cry.
“What’s this airship look like?” said the man nearest him.
“It’s a long balloon with a kind of cabin attached to the bottom,” Pres said.
“A cabin hanging from an observation balloon?” said the man near the window. He was smirking in a way that made Pres’s heart sink; it was clear that these men were about to laugh at him. He’d been laughed at by so many people in such a number of places that he could feel it coming by now, could sense it rumbling up through a person before it erupted.
Pres sat back and studied the map for signs of where the blimp might go next. The few places he’d seen the blimp himself he’d dotted with a check on the map; everywhere the blimp had been spotted by others he’d talked to along the road, with a question mark. Still, the pattern eluded him. He’d chased the blimp down the icy New Jersey coast by trail of rumor, spotted it once near the Virginia border, rising from a marine hangar floating out in the middle of a lake, and assuming it was going down to the Carolinas or maybe even to Florida, he’d rushed south and overshot it, getting himself lost for nearly two weeks in the lush jumble of the Great Smoky Mountains. He finally caught wind of it again near Nashville, where he wound up spotting it near two in the morning, tunneling like a whale through the starry sky, the fins at its tail a spacey blue in the moonlight, only to lose it again in the bubbling hot springs towns of the Ozarks.
Pres traced the marks with his finger. Once connected, the sightings formed a kind of quivering, larger check mark starting high in the Northeast, dipping through the southern states, then swooping back up toward the country’s middle. But would the blimp continue north toward the Dakotas, or plunge back down toward the striped canyons of the western desert? What if he couldn’t find its trail again?
Worse than all this, though, was the plain fear that the blimp would make it to the West Coast ahead of him and head off over the Pacific, to Europe or Asia, somewhere he’d never be able to follow. And he knew somehow that this was its course, that it was trying to get to the ocean before he could catch it.
Pres steeled himself and tore the map away
from the windshield. He found that he was parked in an endless sea of yellow grass. It fanned out from the car in all directions—no trees, no buildings, just grassland, flat and golden. He felt a twinge of fear: this had to be Oklahoma; so far west already. He started the car and searched until he found a trampled path, then drove on into the baking afternoon.
The world was level forever. Pres felt like he was negotiating the arena of a giant board game, his car a luckless charm. Every few minutes a solitary farmhouse appeared in the distance, and at each one he stopped to inquire after the blimp. He asked through doorways held open just wide enough to see a wife’s frightened eye peering out. He asked men in heavy gloves, rolling barbed wire out against fence posts beside the road. He asked children playing with a spotted frog on their porch steps, tying its feet to the ends of a scarf and then tossing it so high that the scarf filled with wind and the kicking frog floated out over the yard before being rocked back down to earth.
Eventually, the houses stopped coming altogether and there was nothing to the landscape but Pres and the occasional prairie dog poking its head up from the ground to look quizzically at him. The expressions on their faces were hardly different than the ones he encountered everywhere he told his story. Why are you still chasing her? the eyes said. Why go on? Even after he’d stopped mentioning Claire altogether, everyone he spoke with seemed to know that he was chasing after a woman who’d left him, a woman who probably didn’t want to be found.
But that’s not how it was, Pres thought as the grass changed to dirt beneath the wheels of the car. He might not know why Claire had left, but what he did know, beyond a doubt, was that she wanted him to bring her home.
Since that first summer on Pipe Island he’d watched a number of jumpers pulled live from their barrels, and it always went the same way. First, the lid would come off with a suck of air not unlike a gasp, and Dex would reach into the barrel and try to loosen whoever was curled up inside. He’d gently take them by the elbows and hoist them up, blue-lipped and blinking in the sunshine. Then, whap! He’d slap them across the face with those enormous hands of his, and again: thwap! After that, Dex propped them on their wobbling feet, still in the barrel, while he and Pres waited for the thank-yous to start.
Because no matter how hard the jumpers had tried to make it over the cataract, once caught, they were grateful. Days after the person had recovered and resumed teaching chemistry or policing the streets, Dex and Pres would invariably receive a note or gift or even a visit at the falls. Joe Greeble had sent them hats from his men’s store. Mrs. Mishara had met them herself on the rickety hanging bridge to Pipe Island—she still had stitches above her eye where she’d taken a bump in the rapids—and she’d kissed them both and taken their hands and blessed them right there, with the same water that had almost killed her rushing not five feet beneath the bridge’s creaking boards.
When Pres turned his thoughts back to the road, he found that the prairie had become endless desert, the grass cooked down to a fine pink sand. The sky was powder blue, too bright to look at. A hot wind kept up outside, butting against the car, rocking it on its wheels and causing it to give off frightened squeaks. Pres realized he must have been staring into the light for some time, as a steady rain of colored spots was falling at the edges of his vision, drops of blue and orange and black. He kept his hat low and drove on, ignoring them until only one lingered in the corner of his eye. He glanced at the spot, figuring it would scatter or vanish altogether, but it remained fixed on the horizon. He turned the car toward it, and still it stood its ground.
The air swayed with heat, but as Pres approached, the spot took on shape: it grew a boxy frame, its roof rose in a point. He knew what it was, the thing in the distance. A chill climbed the knuckles of his spine. A fence appeared around the property—a sign warned that the site was still under construction—but the gate stood wide open, and Pres raced through. Though he’d seen two hangars so far, he was never able to get close enough to get a good look. From a distance, they’d all looked the same to him, like giant barns or garages. But the binoculars hadn’t accounted for their sheer size. As he neared this hangar’s gaping entrance, its true proportions became apparent and he found himself trying to blink away his incredulity. It was at least fifteen stories tall, the highest structure he’d ever laid eyes on. There were no other buildings around, save some shacks out back. No trees in the area, just scattered bunches of desert four-o’clock and some tongue leaf cactus.
Pres skidded to a stop just outside the hangar’s mouth. High, spidery scaffolding buttressed its walls on both sides, and though there were no men working now, Pres could see pails and rags scattered along the planking. A pair of overalls draped over a banister whipped back and forth in the wind. Pres pulled his suspenders up over his undershirt and slipped the .38 into his pocket.
As soon as Pres stepped into the hangar’s shade, he was hit with a soft shower of water. He glanced around for a leaky pipe or someone hosing down a piece of machinery, but when he looked up, he saw that above the hangar’s highest rafters there floated a soupy gray cloud from which a quiet rain was falling. Dex had shown Pres postcards his son had written from Europe, in which he told of churches so tall that air sometimes condensed up in the rafters and created miniature clouds, but Pres had not been able to picture such a thing.
He looked around and noticed some heavy fans aimed up at the cloud from the catwalks zigzagging the hangar’s walls. Whoever was working on the hangar must have been taking a break while they waited for the moisture to dissipate. He stared at the square of clear blue sky framed by the doorway at the other end of the hangar, at the shacks and tents burning with light in the distance, but he saw no one. He wondered if the hangar was even operational yet. He didn’t see any hydrogen or helium tanks, no main line anywhere. A runway of mooring rings had been anchored in the cement floor, but there were no cables hooked to them. Perhaps the blimp hadn’t come this way at all. For the thousandth time in the last couple of months, the picture of what it would be like to return home without Claire crept up on him: opening the door on a dark house; finding her dresses still hanging in the closet, her empty side of the bed, a hair curled up on her pillow. He forced the image from his mind and headed through the rain toward the far end of the hangar. He would get some information from whoever was working there. He touched the cold bulge in his pocket. He could taste his sweat through the sweet water running down his face.
Something twinkled from the ground, catching his eye: when Pres walked over, his heart seized: Claire’s compact. He picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand for a moment. He’d bought it for her six months ago, after hers was stolen at the museum. Claire had been sitting on her bench, powdering her forehead, when a girl came around the corner and surprised her. Claire had been forced to quickly resume her pose, hands gripping the edge of the bench, frozen like that, neck craned down the tracks. The compact fell to her lap, and the girl snatched it up and ran down the hall before Claire had time to react. So Pres had bought her this one. It was white with gold webbing and shaped like a mitten. He’d picked it because it reminded him of winter, which was when they were going to be married. When he flipped it open now, a tiny puff of powder rose from its dish, and for a moment he could smell Claire in the hangar with him. Behind the puff he thought he saw a design in the powder well. At first he figured it was just a smear left by a quick dip of the fingers, but no, it was a traced letter, a V or a W, he was sure of it. Suddenly, though, a fat raindrop hit the compact, and then another, and before he could snap it closed the compact was a puddle of cream. No matter, he thought, racing back through the hangar to the car. The message had been a W, for west—there was no doubt in his mind.
Pres had been working at the falls the afternoon Claire vanished. The day was clear and bitter cold, with chunks of ice spinning through the black water. He and Dex sat at the island’s rocky tip, waiting for the ambulance to appear across the bridge and take Dex to the hospital. Dex had falle
n into the water making a grab at a girl floating by, and though he was calm, he could not stop shaking beneath his heavy blanket. He refused to let Pres move him inside the tower. “I’m fine, Pres,” he said, his voice ragged with tiny gasps. Frost sparkled in his beard. “Let’s just wait here by the falls.”
“Your funeral,” Pres said, and clapped Dex on the back. He knew that the water here was shallow, and he knew that Dex was too strong a swimmer to be pulled far from the shore. But no matter how many times he watched it happen, seeing Dex fall into the river never failed to terrify him. It was the moment just after Dex hit the water that always scared him most, the instant when the current first tugged Dex toward the edge of the rock as though he were the one being hooked. But the falls could get you like that, Pres thought. He looked at the southern shore where a tree had been grabbed by the ice and moved fifty yards downriver, just plucked out of the ground with its roots intact.
“I took a couple swallows of that water and I can feel it sitting right here,” said Dex, moving his trembling hand to his stomach. “It’s like a frozen pond at the bottom of my gut.” In Dex’s lap was the girl he’d saved from the river, who, it turned out, wasn’t a girl but a girl’s doll. She had three faces, and they turned beneath a wig fastened in place: happy, sad, and tired, with her eyes drawn half-closed.
Looking at the doll now, Pres could hardly believe that he hadn’t seen it for what it was. But he’d argued with Claire until late the night before and he was exhausted; his eyes ached in their sockets. The fight had erupted over a present. Their wedding was approaching, and as a gesture of congratulations, Claire’s old boss, Earl Flatt, had offered to use the two of them to make molds for a new pair of background figures at the museum. Pres was excited about the idea.