Free Please by Peter Darbyshire Page A

the empty sky. I looked over at the garage. The doors were open, and inside I could see two men in grease-stained overalls bent over the engine of a car. One man would touch a part of the engine and shake his head, then the other man would do the same with another part of the engine. In the doorway of the garage, a woman was talking on a cell phone. "You don't understand," I heard her say, "I'm stuck here. I can't go anywhere."
    A plane passed a couple of hundred feet over us just then. Over the noise of its engines, the man beside me shouted, "DC-10. Series 10. General Electric CF6-6 engines. 40,000 pounds takeoff thrust. Two hundred and fifty passengers, three cockpit crew. First flight made in 1970." The other men nodded and lifted their beer cans to their lips. Nobody said anything else until the next plane came. Then the man next to the first one who had spoken said, "737. 800 model. General Electric CFM56-7B engines. 27,300 pounds thrust. 189 passengers. First launched in 1965." They all nodded again and drank some more.
    One of the mechanics got behind the wheel of the car and tried to start it up. The engine turned over and over but didn't catch. The other mechanic looked at the woman and shook his head. "I don't even know where I am," she shouted into her phone.
    The men went around the circle until it was my turn. When the next plane passed overhead, they all looked at me. I looked up at the plane. "United Airlines," I said. "Probably going to New York." They kept staring at me until the next plane came, but even then they didn't say anything. They didn't speak again the whole time I was there, and they didn't offer me another beer after I finished the first one.
    In the garage, one of the mechanics closed the hood of the car. The other one went over to a coffeemaker in the corner and poured himself a cup. The woman put her cell phone in her purse and looked up and down the street. Then she went over to the car and sat behind the wheel, started turning over the engine herself. It made a slow grinding noise, like the engine was tearing itself apart underneath the hood. I could hear it all the way back to my car.
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    AND ONCE I SAW a plane struck by lightning. It was only a hundred feet or so off the ground when the lightning hit it, so quickly that all I really saw was the afterimage. There were two bolts - one came down from the clouds, while the other rose up from the wet ground - and they met somewhere in the fuselage. I couldn't see anything but white for a moment because of the lightning, but I felt the vibration from the thunder where I sat on the car.
    I waited for the plane to fall from the sky but it didn't. Instead, it kept on rising into the sky, until it disappeared in the clouds. It was as if the lightning had never happened, or I had imagined it. For a moment I thought that perhaps everyone on board was dead, that the lightning had electrocuted them all in their seats, and that the plane was flying on its own now. I had a vision of it continuing to rise up into the sky, perhaps all the way out of the atmosphere and into orbit, everyone inside melted into their seats.
    When I went home later that night, I turned on the television and watched for any stories about the plane. There was nothing, though, just a few brief sound bites about the salvage operation of a different plane that had gone down in the ocean a few days earlier. Nothing at all about any planes being struck by lightning. It was as if I were the only person in the world who even knew it had happened.
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    ANOTHER TIME I STOPPED at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop by the airport. It was surrounded by overgrown grass fields, and empty coffee cups and plastic bags filled the ditches at the side of the road. There was a tractor trailer with a cargo of live cows in the parking lot. A couple of them turned their heads to look at me through the slats of the trailer as I went inside, but the others just kept on staring at each other.
    The driver of