Ronnie
Saturday, ten in the morning, and Della's at a widow's house picking up a dead man's words.
I've been watching the clock on the panel since nine like a kid watching an oven with a cake in it. The Moon's not in the window any more, because it is the window. A grey edge, close enough to scrape, with black behind it and a line of white light along the top like the rim of a plate.
Tess is beside me. She's had her knees up in the next seat since half past nine, with her chin on them and her sleeve pulled down over her hand. Boyd swapped with her without a word, which is how Boyd says sorry now. He moves.
"Seven hours," says Tess.
"And a bit. The burn's at six."
"Seven hours till you go behind it. Nobody can hear you back there. That's what you said." She doesn't look at me. "I want it before that. You said you'd get it."
"I said I'd find it."
"Say it like you're not on TV."
I try, I swear to God I try. I open my mouth and what's in there is Mack's story, in Sully's pauses, with the small laugh at the valve where the laugh goes. It's the only version I've got. It's sixteen years of a man telling it at dinners and another man teaching it to me with his arms folded.
"I've got the one with the laughs in it," I say.
"I know."
"Della's getting something. At ten. His own words. Not the dinner ones. Something he wrote."
Tess turns her head on her knees and looks at me for the first time all morning. "Okay," she says. "Okay. Ten."
At ten o'clock nothing happens.
At a quarter past, I key the channel. "You there?"
Nothing. Not the delay, not the breathing, just the backup hiss, the sound of a line with nobody on it.
At half past I try again, and there's nothing. At a quarter to eleven Otis floats past with a breakfast bar and says, "She'll be in traffic. A1A on a Saturday, you could grow a beard," and I love him for it, and I don't believe him.
"I can raise Ailsa," says Boyd, from Tess's old seat. He's got the little radio out already, the red light on. "She's in the building. She'll know."
"Do it."
He does it. A crackle, a crunch, and Ailsa. "I'm saying nothing on a radio today, Mr Castellane. I said so this morning. And Mr Kip tells me this box of yours goes down the same pipe as Ms Quint's line, and I've no wish to be on that pipe." A pause, and another crunch. "She's alive. She's been on the phone to Mr Kip at the guidance desk for an hour, and he's gone the colour of milk. That's all you're getting."
Boyd looks at the radio. "That woman," he says, with real admiration, "would not tell you the time if you were drowning in it."
So that's eleven o'clock. Alive, and furious about something, and not on my line.
Hazel's at her porthole. She's got her graph paper flat against the wall, the loop's numbers and Mack's card side by side, with the three short lines in the column and the question mark at the bottom, and Lionel's old camera hanging off her wrist with the cap on. She hasn't written anything new since seven. She just looks at it now and then, like a door she's already checked is locked.
A bit after eleven I say, to fill something, "Tess. Can I ask you a thing?"
"You're going to anyway."
That's Della's line. I don't say so.
"Your dad's watch. The twin. Bette said it went to your family. Is it under there?"
I nod at her sleeve. She's had it pulled down over her right wrist since the soup on Sunday, and every time anybody looks at it, she tugs it.
Tess looks at her own sleeve like it belongs to somebody else. Then she pushes it up.
There's no watch. There's a flat black remote, the one I saw the edge of yesterday, like a garage opener, on a Velcro strap, with one button. The stream button. The one she's had her thumb on all week.
"That's for chat," says Tess. "Since the cable went it doesn't do anything. I keep it on anyway." She pulls the sleeve down again. "Mom gave Dad's watch away. At the memorial. She gave it to Sully."
"Sully."
"He cried more than anybody. That's what Mom said. She said, he cried more than anybody, he should have it." She shrugs, one shoulder. "I was ten. I thought it was a nice thing to do."
I don't say anything, because I can't. There's a sound in my head, and it isn't a voice.
A ballroom. Plates, clapping, a microphone with too much echo, and under it a small electronic nothing, at nine o'clock on the dot. Royce at two in the afternoon, saying journey, and a chirp under him that Della said was a phone. A tablet by my ear at ten at night, a tiny Sully reading numbers a second late, and something chirping in it.
I look at my left wrist. Mack's watch. Steel, scratched, the strap gone soft. Its chirp's been off for years, because it drove Bette up the wall.
"Ronnie?" says Tess.
"I'm here."
"You've gone a colour."
"I'm thinking."
"You never think. You talk."
"I know," I say. "It's terrible."
Here's what I know how to do. It's one thing, but it's mine.
When a man's doing a voice, you can't ask him, because he'll answer in the voice. You make him jump, and for one breath, before he gets the voice back up, you hear what's underneath. I've done it to a thousand uncles.
At five to twelve the loop wakes up. Royce has been off it since the car, so it's Sully, back on console, doing the noon update himself, gravel, calm, in both ears.
"Constance, Flight. Good afternoon. Coming up on hour ninety-four. Six hours to the burn. All stations are go."
I put my hand on my headset. On the button for the loop. The open one, the one the whole world hears.
Hazel turns from the porthole. She's seen my hand.
I watch the clock on the panel. The last minute before noon goes by like a bus you're not on.
I put Mack on.
Not the party Mack. Not the calm one from the news. The one from the voicemails, Bet, we're out of the good bread, quick and tired and not finishing his sentences. I put him on like a coat I've worn every day for eleven years.
"Flight," I say, quick and low, not waiting for any laugh. "Do me a favour. Tell Ros I didn't bring him home. I brought the capsule home."
Beside me, Tess stops breathing. That's hers, and I've just said it to the whole world in a dead man's voice.
The delay runs. Out. Then the time it takes a man to hear it. Then back.
And then, in both my ears, for one breath, a different man.
"Mack—"
Soft. Flat. No gravel in it anywhere. A Midwest voice, small, from somewhere with snow and factories, a voice I've never heard come out of that console in my life.
And under it, small and electronic and right on twelve o'clock, a chirp.
Then the gravel comes back. It comes up fast, a hand grabbing a rail. "Say again, Commander."
I let go of the button. I don't say again. I key it once more, still Mack, easy. "Disregard, Flight. Old man thinking out loud."
"Copy," says Sully. Steady as a floor. "Otis, you holding that stopwatch?"
From the back, by the hatch, Otis goes pink. "Yes, sir. Yes, Flight."
"Good man. Keep it on your chest. Flight out."
"That was mine," says Tess. Very quiet. Not angry yet. Getting there. "That was my mom's kitchen."
"I know. I'm sorry. I needed something only he'd know."
"Only Mack would know."
"That's what I mean," I say.
Tess has turned her face to the window. Boyd is looking at me from his seat with his fat lip and no Texas at all. Hazel hasn't moved from the porthole. She's got one hand flat on the graph paper, over the numbers.
I take the headset off. I hold it in my lap, the little foam bud and the button and the wire.
Then it goes off.
Faint, out of the earbud, in my lap. A voice. I put it back in my left ear fast.
"Ahoy, matey."
Ladies and gentlemen. I want you to understand the pirate.
It's the worst pirate I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of bad pirates. I've heard dads do pirates at the end of a long day with a paper hat on. This is worse. This pirate's got no rolling R. This pirate's got no parrot. This pirate's from Atlanta. This pirate sounds like a woman reading a pirate's tax return.
"Arr," says Della, in my left ear. "It be Captain Barnacle, matey. Ye be keepin' a sharp eye, now."
I nearly laugh. It's right there, coming up like a sneeze.
Then I remember what Barnacle's for.
The grown-ups are listening.
"And now," says Della, in a completely different voice, all teeth, a dentist on a stage, the worst Johnny Jackpot in the history of television, "the prize is not behind door number one, folks. I'm sorry. That card's a dud."
The card. Mack's card, clipped beside my screen in his big blue loops, with the numbers Kip read on the loop at ten last night, off Flight's sheet.
"Arr," says the pirate, back again, flat. "The old parrot learned every word off the captain, matey. And the captain went over the side." A breath. "He knows this lingo too, matey, every word of it. Let him. If he shuts the hatch on us, ye'll know whose hand is on it."
She was listening. At three in the morning, when I thought I was talking to a car park, she was learning my bits.
I key the channel. I don't think about it. I just open my mouth, and Captain Barnacle comes out of it, the real one, the one I've done at four hundred birthdays and one christening, a rolling R like a barrel going down a ramp.
"Arrr, Cap'n. This old sea dog heard that parrot squawk not ten minutes since. And I'll tell ye for nothin', it weren't in a parrot's voice."
Nothing for a moment.
Then a sound in my left ear, very small, through the nose.
"Aye," says the worst pirate in the world. "Keep yer ears open for the weatherman, matey. Captain Barnacle out."
At the porthole, Hazel is looking at me with her glasses on her forehead. She doesn't say anything out loud. She just shapes it, very clearly, with her whole mouth, like she's talking to a boy across an exam hall.
What. Is. Happening.
I tell them at half past twelve.
Everybody in, round the chair, the way we did the casting. Headset off, on my knee, with the button where I can see it. Tess's red light is dead because Tess's cable is dead, and nobody on the ground hears a word.
The orange box behind Otis's head hears every one. I sit so I'm facing it.
I whisper. We're five people with our heads together in front of a big grey window, like a huddle at a game nobody's winning.
"Sully's got your dad's watch," I say to Tess. "It chirped under him just now. And that wasn't his voice. Under the gravel there's another man, and he said Mack's name."
"He was Mack's friend," says Otis. "He'd say Mack's name."
"Not like that."
Hazel takes her pencil from behind her ear. She looks at the column on her graph paper, the three short lines and the question mark. Then she puts the pencil through the question mark. One line, neat, like she's marking.
"The card is wrong," she says.
"Della says."
"Then I have checked a wrong number very carefully." She says it with no expression at all. "Three ways."
Boyd has his hands flat on his knees. "Son. You're telling me the man reading us our numbers—"
"I'm telling you what I heard."
"That's not evidence."
"It's all I've got. I'm a lookalike, Boyd. Listening's the whole job."
He looks at me for a long time. Then he nods, once, like he's signing something.
Tess hasn't said anything. She's looking at the hole in the panel where her cable went. I turn to her. I put everything down. Mack, Barnacle, the golf man, all of it, on the floor of the cabin like bags.
"You wanted it like I'm not on TV," I say. "This is all I've got. I think your dad died because of something Sully did. And I think Mack carried it for him, and told it with a laugh in the middle, for sixteen years. And I think he was going to stop."
Tess doesn't cry. She nods. She looks at the orange box behind Otis's head with its little green eye, and she says, quite clearly, to it, "Did you get that?"
The light stays green.
At one o'clock, on the dot, the loop wakes up.
"Constance, Flight. Hour ninety-five. Five hours to the burn. All stations go."
Gravel. Calm. Not a crack in it.
I listen under it. I listen with everything I've got, the whole ear, the one that won't shut.
Nothing chirps.