When the Boeing 727 takes off from Mitchell Airport, the bolts that hold the landing gear door in place are already unwinding. Eight miles away, Tucker Knoebel is making his way home early to the suburb of Oak Creek to be with his wife, Della. He loves entering the subdivision from the city when the streets turn from straight gray creases to lilting curves meant to mimic the flow of hills and rivers. Tucker sometimes feels like he is in his childhood train set among the metal models of the post office, the butcher shop, the station. Even the people are like his brightly painted figures—everyone posed with a prop: boy and ball, girl and jump rope, woman and garden shovel, man and lawnmower. It’s almost as though he can just move a pair of children and a pool to his own backyard.
Even if Della hadn’t gotten sick, they may not have had the children they’d spoken of through their courtship in such detail that Tucker had imagined attending tee-ball games and ballet recitals. He saw them in everything that he did: walking along beside him, picking dandelions, wondering at the way ants carved single-file tracks across the sidewalks, leaping over cracks in the street, falling to scrape knees that he would kiss better. They tried for years to get pregnant. Then came the headaches that Della was sure were seizures, or tumors, or blood clots racing to her brain. The doctors could find nothing, but Della professed that she was dying. Tucker tries to dedicate himself to her and her illness, but sometimes she catches him smiling and says, “Don’t you care about me?” Things might be different had Tucker gotten that job in Florida, or the promotion a few years back, or been accepted into the architecture program when he was in college. He has not yet “made his mark,” as Della says—another thing that ails her.
Della worries that she will die before she has time to make her mark. She is not a mother, didn’t start a book club, teach herself Italian cooking, or canoe in the Boundary Waters. Tucker once suggested they join the Save-A-Child program advertised on television where people support children in Africa for only five cents a day. Although it would not be like having a child of their own, they would receive photographs and reports. It seems, for Della, both too much and not enough.
Tucker turns on a needlessly sharp curve in the subdivision and nearly hits the ice cream truck that’s running the stop sign in pursuit of a yellow school bus. Children spill out onto the sidewalk like candy. The ice cream truck driver rings his bell. A few freckled faces glance longingly in his direction, but none is right to him—they are all in groups and pairs, met by mothers who lead them away.
Far from sight, the plane is still climbing, the vibration increasing, the bolts sliding out of the landing gear door one by one, aided by the weight of the door itself. Tucker Knoebel stops at the bakery and runs in to buy Della’s favorite cream puffs: chocolate-covered with cherry filling—in spite of her illness she has not lost her appetite—and a sugar cookie for himself. When he gets back to his car the landing gear door is shimmying furiously, battering the many-ton craft. The ice cream truck has followed the school bus to the very last stop where, finally, a soft-lipped, honey-haired boy steps off alone.
The driver studies him. He grasps the steering wheel to keep his hands from shaking and calls, “Ice cream?”
The boy’s lips are so red—red like he sucked all the food coloring from a snow cone. The driver uses a line that has worked before, “The freezer conked out. I’ll have to throw it away.”
In the moment the landing-gear door shakes itself free, the boy seems to open like a fruit that splits its peel. The six-by-three-foot panel of aluminum alloy is plummeting toward the earth, spinning both horizontally and vertically, pulled by gravity, pushed by wind, streamlined by friction; whistling to the only dance that it will ever know; catching the sun to flash a strange Morse code back to the plane that it abandoned—a farewell, a fuck you, a record of solo flight. And the boy stands on the curb facing the ice cream truck as though he is on the edge of a pool getting ready to jump.
Usually cautious, usually observant, Tucker Knoebel is distracted. He is watching the spectacular light in the sky—a flash too close and too bright to be real. He rounds the corner.
When Tucker’s car comes into view, the ice cream truck pounces into gear and abandons the boy. But Tucker does not notice the truck, or his foot pressing down on the gas; he does not realize that when he bends to get a better look at the tremendous glow, his hands jerk the wheel to veer into the truck. It takes hundredths of a second to transform Tucker’s car into a metallic blue weed blooming from the sidewalk.
But for Tucker Knoebel it happens in slow motion: the initial impact like a cymbal beat that ignites a ballet, the dizzying loss of equilibrium as the car leaps in a graceful twirl, and then the blur of sky and street that seem to record the strange accompanying sounds—like violins being brought to tune around him. Around him also is the smell of chocolate and cherry, the chime of the bell, the taste of the sugar left on his lips. Later, the boy will recollect a comet-like blur reflected in Tucker’s windshield.
Tucker’s last glimpse is of the boy, framed in the passenger-side window, standing on the sidewalk, hands on knees as though getting ready for a game of catch. The synapses in Tucker’s brain slam against one another then so that Tucker perceives the boy as a picture sent by Save-A-Child. Tucker should be thinking of Della, but he is thinking how wonderful it is that the boy is here with him now, placed like a figurine on the lush green lawn.
Dana Kroos received a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston, an MFA in fiction writing from New Mexico State University, and an MFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories and poems have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Florida Review, The Superstition Review, Minnesota Monthly, and other literary publications. Currently she is a Mitchell Center Postgraduate Scholar at the University of Houston. More information can be found at www.danakroos.com.