Free Summerland by Michael Chabon Page B

Airships were one of his many hobbies. But after his wife's death he had actually dreamed of them. It was the same dream every night. Dr. Feld, smiling, her hair tied back in a cheery plaid band that matched her summer dress, stood in a green, sunny square of grass, waving to him. Although in his dream Mr. Feld could see his wife and her happy smile very plainly, she was also somehow very far away. Huge mountains and great forests lay between them. So he built an airship—assembled it quickly and easily out of the simplest of materials, inflated its trim silver envelope with the merest touch of a button—and flew north. As he rose gently into the sky, the mountains dwindled until they were a flat brown stain beneath him, and the forests became blots of pale green ink. He was flying over a map, now, an ever-shrinking AAA map of the western United States, toward a tidy, trim bit of tan in the shape of a running boar, surrounded by blue. At the westernmost tip of this little island, in a patch of green, stood his smiling, beautiful wife, waving. It was Ethan who had eventually gone to the atlas and located Clam Island. Less than a month later, the big Mayflower van full of boxes pulled into the drive between the pink house and the ruined strawberry packing shed. Since then the shining little Victoria Jean , Mr. Feld's prototype Zeppelina, had become a familiar sight over the island, puttering her lazy way across the sky. Her creamy-white fiberglass gondola, about the size and shape of a small cabin cruiser, could fit easily in the average garage. Her long, slender envelope of silvery picofiber composite mesh could be inflated at the touch of a button, and fully deflated in ten minutes. When all the gas was out of it you could stuff the envelope like a sleeping bag into an ordinary lawn-and-leaf trash bag. The tough, flexible, strong picofiber envelope was Mr. Feld's pride. He held seventeen U.S. patents on the envelope technology alone.
    Mr. Arch Brody had arrived early at Ian "Jock" MacDougal Regional Ball Field to see to the condition of the turf, and he was the first person to hear the whuffle and hum of the Zeppelina's small motor, a heavily modified Mitsubishi boat engine. He stood up—he had been dusting the pitcher's rubber with his little whisk broom—and frowned at the sky. Sure enough, here came that Feld—no more or less of a fool than most off-islanders, though that wasn't saying much—in his floating flivver. As the ship drew nearer, at a fairly good clip, Mr. Arch Brody could see that the gondola's convertible top was down, and that the Feld boy was riding beside his father. They were headed directly toward the Tooth. Mr. Brody was not a smiling man, but he could not help himself. He had seen Mr. Feld tooling around over the island many times, making test flights in his blimp. It had never occurred to him that the crazy thing could actually be used to get someplace.
    "I'll be darned," said Perry Olafssen, coming up behind Mr. Brody. The players and their parents had started to arrive for today's game between the Ruth's Fluff 'n' Fold Roosters and the Dick Helsing Realty Reds. The boys dropped their equipment bags and ran to the outfield to watch the Victoria Jean make her approach.
    "I don't know if I'd want to be flitting around in that thing today," Mr. Brody said, resuming his usual gloom. "Not with this sky."
    It was true. The hundred-year spell of perfect summer weather that had made the Tooth so beloved and useful to the islanders, seemed, to the astonishment of everyone, to have mysteriously been broken. If anything the clouds were thicker over Summerland than over the rest of the island, as if years of storms were venting their pent-up resentment on the spot that had eluded them for so long. It had been raining, on and off, since yesterday, and while the rain had stopped for now, the sky hung low and threatening again. In fact Mr. Brody had arrived at Jock MacDougal that day prepared to execute a