That Air Forever Dark

Vacation turns to nightmare for a group of Americans on an excursion to New Guinea, when their plane makes a forced landing in a swamp populated by headhunters who have never seen white people before.
The jet age has descended into the stone age, and the passengers into living hell.

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Chapter One

STANDING IN LINE on the tarmac of Los Angeles International Airport, waiting to ascend the steps to the plane's entrance, Warren Prescott inhaled smog and gasoline and wondered again why he was standing here, why the hell he'd decided to take this trip. The answer, of course, was obvious. What else is a man to do while he's waiting to die?

The delay gave him occasion to examine the structure of the 757 more carefully. The jet was painted glistening white with a tapering blue arrow emanating from its tail, drawn the length of the aircraft under the windows to its nose. The logo under the cockpit window read "Odyssey."

The ascent was slow because many of the passengers were elderly. Elderly? What do you call yourself, Prescott, at a ripe old sixty-eight?

At the summit he was greeted by a toothy brunette in a dress of floral design belted at the waist. "Welcome," she said, a word echoed by a tall man assumed to be one of the pilots, wearing shoulder epaulets and wings on his starched white shirt.

Warren nodded agreeably before resuming his place in the procession inching inside the cabin. He passed what was probably the galley, two busy men in chef hats and aprons, and shouldered ahead. Clearly he was among the late arrivals, affording previously seated passengers opportunity to examine him. He carried only the tote bag, since luggage was Odyssey's concern, as it should have been, considering the cost of this journey, an adventure he called his "40K Getaway."

As advertised the accommodation was first class, just two seats on each side of the aisle with ample leg room. There were no sweating businessmen to clog it, grunting as they hefted carry-on valises the size of farm animals, stuffing them into overhead troughs.

Looking above for a number to match his boarding pass he saw it was an aisle seat next to a woman who made a show of being absorbed in the tour brochure. He put the tote on the seat and shrugged off his seersucker, exposing a striped tieless dress shirt and Calvin Klein jeans. "Hi, there," he said, opening the empty carry-on bin to emplace the folded jacket.

She looked up briefly and nodded. She was younger than he, by how many years he couldn't guess, but she was damned pretty, having the moist, vulnerable eyes of a doe, soft brown hair, full lips and pronounced cheekbones.

He sat, set the tote at his feet and extended a hand. "Warren Prescott."

She answered it with a grip that ground the base of a brilliant diamond into his palm. "Julie Feldman."

Her voice was low-pitched and husky. The ring was accessory to expensive wardrobe, fawn blouse and slacks together with a bright red shirt open at the throat.

As she returned to the brochure he said, "I almost missed my connection. I had to fly in from New York."

She nodded again, a signal she wished to be courteous but distant.

He persisted, "How about you? Did you have a long connection?"

This was what she feared, a month in the company of a blathering nuisance. "All the way from Beverly Hills."

"Pardon?"

"I said, I live in Beverly Hills, have lived there all my married life."

The impulse to inquire the whereabouts of Mr. Feldman was rejected as tactless. Instead, he chose another path. "You've children, I'm sure."

What the hell, she thought. Might as well be sociable. She smiled, a display of brilliant orthodontia. "Actually, I have no children. And I'm a Catholic, can you beat that? Obviously you have, or you wouldn't be curious."

"Well yes, three, plus seven grandchildren, but don't worry. I'm not going to bore you with biographies or even pictures, because candidly the reason I'm taking this outrageously expensive trip is to get away from them."

Puzzled, she sat back to fix him in the sights of her doe eyes. "I don't understand."

The man looked younger than his years, dark hair dusted with silver, would have been handsome once and, to judge from the mischief lurking behind swollen eyes, probably sexy.

"Oh, don't get me wrong," he was saying. "I love my kids, of course, but see--I'm a recent widower and they've been killing me with kindness. It's just better I--well, stay away for a while."

She frowned at the cover of her brochure. "I'm recently widowed myself. My husband was a film producer, meaning we had to entertain constantly, give a lot of parties. I rarely had a chance to be alone, and thought this trip might be a welcome change."

Warren slapped his forehead in mock self-reproach. "I thought I recognized you. Aren't you a movie star?"

She made a wry face. "I was never a movie star. I was in a few movies, yes, in small parts, but I was such a terrible actress I begged Irving--that was my husband--to let me quit." She leaned across and tapped his arm. "However, I began my career as a singer and I was a darned good one, if I do say so myself."

This opened the door to accustomed flirtation. "If I promise to behave, will you sing for me sometime?"

Her look was a blend of doubt and vexation. Warren cursed his easy charm. There you go again, he thought. You wonder why some people consider you shallow, a lightweight? Never mind. Better that than get trapped in conversation with pontificating bores.

He and Bea had shared a love of laughter. They loved to be amused and amusing. During the heat of imagined slight one or the other would eventually surrender to silliness, sending damage downstream as so much flotsam.

Warren was considering his next topic when arrested by the sight of a youngish blonde woman advancing down the aisle. She wore the cotton dress with a colorful design that identified her as a stewardess. Submitting a smile, she knelt. "Mrs. Feldman, Mr. Prescott," she said, "my name is Betty. I'm the senior flight attendant." Crows-feet at the corners of her eyes did not mask her loveliness. "I'm the person to blame for seating you together. You see, of all the passengers, you're the only two who are--unattached."

"Oh fine," Warren said. "Actually, you've done me a favor, Betty. Mrs. Feldman is far and away the most attractive passenger on this airplane."

As expected, the compliment scored. His companion laughed and said, "If you're determined to be charming you could at least call me by my proper name. It's Julie."

The attendant rose, relieved. "Thank you for your understanding. Once we're aloft I'll be back to serve you a bottle of Dom Perignon."

* * *

The bottle was a dead soldier, nose down in ice water, when Warren succumbed to weariness. "If you'll forgive me," he said to his new friend, "I think I'll crash."

"It's been a long day for you," Julie said, and handed him a pillow.

"My thanks, ma'am." He put it behind his neck, pushed the seat to full recline and closed his eyes. "See you in my dreams."

The wine had depressed him. Oh yes, the lady had eyes to cause instant heartbreak, but so had Bea, his precious Bea.

The camera of his mind focused on a man in a dark suit he recognized as himself, sitting crosslegged on grass at the grave site.

"Take the weight off your paws," he said to his family, consciously quoting Bea. "The occasion's uncomfortable enough as it is."

He set down the walnut box containing the ashes, his right hand lingering on the gold identification plate that numbered the dates of her mortality.

After the six had settled themselves Warren looked at the surrounding faces. Ellen and her husband had driven up a day earlier, to air out the summer house and stock provisions; the others had been waiting outside his Park Avenue apartment to join him in the limo.

Warren inhaled a lungful of clean Connecticut air. This was home to him. He'd been raised in Sharon and every summer returned to the two-story house his parents bequeathed him, its white clapboard requiring occasional repainting, along with the green shutters. A few miles down the road was Lake Wononscopomuc, its frigid water tempting only to grandchildren who shrieked delight.

Despite a glaring sun it was a cruelly beautiful afternoon, with a timid yet refreshing breeze, and the cemetery, selected a decade earlier to be their final resting place, was hushed in veneration of the sleeping.

He saw evidence all three of his children and Sam's wife, Sonia, had been weeping, though dogwood blossoms may have contributed to the inundation from his son's eyes and nose.

Of course Bea would have rummaged immediately in her purse for Contac. "He's my favorite child," she often said.

"Hush. The girls may hear."

"He's so sweet. He never complains about how much his allergies bother him."

"How about Anita? She's sweet, too."

"Mmm, yes. But in a different way."

"And Ellen adores you."

This was dismissed with a wave of the hand. "Ellen is her father's daughter. She's more practical than sensitive."

Had Bea been present at this moment Warren knew she would be making mental notes, anxious to chide Anita about putting on weight, anxious to ask Ellen what dishes she'd prepared for the wake.

It was silly, really. For years he had begged her to hire a cook; though he could afford it comfortably, his wife was adamant. Cooking was something she did better than any woman on the planet and, besides, it set an example for the two girls.

"Would you rather I spent the time as a do-gooder, gossiping at luncheons intended to plan charity balls?"

He groaned. "I hate wearing a tux. I hate dancing."

"Very well, then. Case closed."

It all happened so damned fast, he thought. Just seven weeks after detection of the malignancy in her esophagus, Bea was gone. Just like that. And typically she was more concerned for him than for herself, cheerful even as she turned away to vomit into the little Saks gift bag.

He frowned to focus self-control, unaware he was stroking the box. "As you know, Mom wasn't a religious person. If we'd done this today in a church we'd be listening to a eulogy delivered by some guy who never knew her. Better the words should come from us."

He glimpsed two cemetery employees conversing quietly yards away, probably sons of men he grew up with; they were wearing blue coveralls, one smoking, the other leaning on the shovel used to dig a hole Warren noticed for the first time.

Staring into it, suddenly aware his partner of forty-three years, the woman who had shared his life, his lover and best friend, was about to be consigned to a mound of dirt, he was seized by panic. The horror of a future without her so consumed him he fought an impulse to rise and run.

Instead he took two deep breaths and said, "So--She'd want us to keep this light, okay? She knew how much we loved her. So if you have a memory that makes you laugh or smile, this is the perfect time to share it. Sam, may I ask you to kick off?"

Sonia lifted a tissue from a packet in her lap and gave it to her husband to wipe his eyes and nose. Studying his son, Warren stared at the embodiment of Bea, her sandy hair and light blue eyes, her perennially bemused expression.

Sam shredded the damp tissue as he repeated a story the family never tired of hearing, of the rafting trip down the Housatonic, when his mother appropriated his new Japanese wrist watch so it wouldn't get wet, stuffed it down her blouse and forgot about it until, in a car filled with strangers, its alarm went off. Emanating from a woman's bosom was a jangling rendition of what may have been the Japanese national anthem, a happenstance beyond explanation.

The reminiscence roused soft laughter. Seated next to her husband Ronald, Ellen was smiling as she wiped away tears. Recently turned forty, her pride was dedication, the efficient fulfillment of any task her mother requested. Perceiving the role as servitude, her accountant husband was resentful.

At her father's nod, Ellen accepted center stage. "You could never put one over on Mom."

Then she told the story of dressing for a summer party in a nerdy outfit her mother had insisted she wear, something not even Shirley Temple would be caught dead in, told of how she had hidden a miniskirt in the bushes next to the gate, told of how she was in the act of changing when she looked up to see her furious Mom.

"Literally," Ellen said, "she caught me with my pants down."

Smiling, Warren looked last to his younger daughter, seated beside her husband Joe, a carpenter, pawing at Anita's arm, offering useless support as she wept nonstop, tears soiling her best dress. Of the three children Warren felt sorriest for her, mother of a brain-damaged girl, sorrow and stress responsible for her food addiction.

"'Nita?" the father prompted gently.

Her reply was a wail. "I can't do it. How can you all sit here and joke? She's gone, and I want her back. I miss her so much!"

The circle listened to her sniffling in silence.

Warren waited. Then he lifted the box of ashes so all could see and said, "I think it's better if we just say goodbye, each in his or her own way, by holding her one last time." He put the box in Joe's lap. "Would you please start this around?"

As Bea was taken from him, Warren closed his eyes, even as he closed his ears to the sounds of lamentation. He shut out everything. He shared the darkness with the only woman he had ever loved.

Unexpectedly, behind his eyes, she rejoined him, rushing toward him in the New Haven railroad station, just debarked off the train from Smith, on a crisp fall Friday, wearing the same camel's hair coat seen in the framed photograph by his bed, her blonde hair bobbing above that radiant smile, waving, hurrying, hurrying into his arms. He kissed her, tasting lipstick, smelling perfume and shampoo. Melting in her pale blue eyes, he said, "God, I love you."

Just then he felt his knee jostled and wakened to see Ronald extending the box. He accepted it, saw the workmen watching, then saw he was expected to say something to terminate the ceremony. So he lifted the remains.

"Good night, my love," he said, and kissed her.

Though he had rehearsed self-control, all at once it deserted him. Desolate and ashamed, he heard his gusting sobs, even as he discovered himself collapsed in the embrace of the son-in-law he disliked.

Excerpted from THAT AIR FOREVER DARK by Bradford Dillman. Copyright © 2001 by Bradford Dillman. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.