Coverly could not see that anyone else was perplexed. Was he mistaken in assuming that navigational competence implied a rudimentary grasp of English? Joe Burner had begun to tell Coverly the story of his life. His style was nearly bardic. He began with the characters of his parents. He described his birthplace. Then he told Coverly about his two older brothers, his interest in sandlot baseball, his odd jobs, the schools he had attended, the wonderful buttermilk pancakes that his mother used to make and the friends that he had won and lost. He told Coverly his annual grosses, the size of his office staff, the nature of his three operations, the wonderfulness of his wife and the amount of money it had cost him to landscape his seven-room, two-bath house on Long Island. “I have something very unique,” he said. “I have this lighthouse on my front lawn. Four, five years ago, this big estate on Sands Point was auctioned off for taxes, and Mother and I went down there to see if there was anything we could use. Well, they had this little lake with a lighthouse on it—just ornamental, of course—and when it came time to buy the lighthouse, the bidding was very slow. Well, I bid thirty-five dollars, just for the heck of it, and you know what? That lighthouse was mine. Well, I have this friend in the trucking business—you have to know the right people—and he went down there and got it off the lake. I don’t know to this day how he did it. Well, I’ve got this other friend in the electric business, and he wired it up for me, and now I’ve got this lighthouse right on my front lawn. It makes the place look real nice. Of course, some of the neighbors complain—you find clinkers in every gang—so I don’t turn it on every night, but when we have people in to play cards or watch the television, I turn it on, and it looks beautiful.”
The sky by then was the dark blue of high altitudes, and the atmosphere in the plane was as genial as a saloon. The white blouse the hostess wore came loose whenever she bent over to serve a cocktail. She tucked it in each time she straightened up. The seat backs were as high as the walls of an old box pew, and the passengers had a limited degree of privacy and a limited view of one another. Then the bulkhead door opened, and Coverly saw the captain come down the aisle. His color was bad, and his eyes were as haggard as the eyes of the stewardess. Perhaps he was a friend of the pilot and crew who had crashed a few hours earlier in Colorado. Would he, would anyone else, have the fortitude to face this disaster calmly? Would the charred bones of seventy-three bodies mean any less to him than they did to the rest of the world? He nodded to the stewardess, who followed him aft to the pantry. They did not exchange a word, but she put some ice into a paper cup and poured whisky into it. He carried his drink forward and closed the door. The old lady was dozing, and Joe Burner, having finished with his autobiography, had begun to tell his stock of jokes. Without any warning, the plane dropped about two thousand feet.
The confusion was horrible. Most of the drinks hit the ceiling, men and women were thrown into the aisles, children were screaming. “Attention, attention,” said the public-address system. “Hear this, everyone.”
“Oh, my God,” the stewardess said, and she went aft and strapped herself in. “Attention, attention,” said the amplified voice, and Coverly wondered then if this might be the last voice that he heard. Once, when he was being prepared for a critical operation, he had looked out of his hospital window into the window of an apartment house across the street, where a fat woman was dusting a grand piano. He had already been given Sodium Pentothal and was swiftly losing consciousness, but he resisted the drug long enough to feel resentment at the fact that the last he might see of the beloved world was a fat woman dusting a grand piano.
“Attention, attention,” the voice said. The plane had leveled off in the heart of a dark cloud. “This is not your captain. Your captain is tied up in the head. Please do not move, please do not move from your seats, or I will cut off your oxygen supply. We are traveling at five hundred miles an hour, at an altitude of forty-two thousand feet, and any disturbance you create will only add to your danger. I have logged nearly a million air miles and am disqualified as a pilot only because of my political opinions. This is a robbery. In a few minutes my accomplice will enter the cabin by the forward bulkhead, and you will give him your wallets, purses, jewelry and any other valuables that you have. Do not create any disturbance. You are helpless. I repeat: You are helpless.”
“Talk to me, talk to me,” the old lady asked. “Please just say something, anything.”
