“Forty-five minutes. Worst case.”
She nodded and pulled the blind back over her eyes, and instantly he regretted saying to her, worst case. That wasn’t the worst case. The worst case was that they crashed. Think Hammarskj?ld. He hated flying, everything about it, though mostly he hated the fact he was five miles in the air. It was why he hadn’t slept; it was why he couldn’t sleep. He listened to every sound the engines made and felt every lurch when they plowed through a cloud. He had to. He knew it was irrational, the precise sort of craziness that he heard from his patients, but he honestly believed that the plane would only stay aloft if he remained awake. If he slept, he’d never wake up. Or he’d only wake up when he heard the this-plane-is-going-down cries or for the millisecond immediately after the front of the tube slammed into the top of a mountain. Kilimanjaro, maybe, if they were off course. Apparently, the new government in Tanganyika and Zanzibar had just opened an airport near Kilimanjaro, but Pan Am wouldn’t use it. Thank God. A new airport with new air traffic controllers? Nope.
In all fairness, Tanganyika and Zanzibar seemed pretty damn stable. Or whatever the hell they had renamed the country last month. Tanzania. The Serengeti seemed perfectly safe—at least when it came to human predators. There must have been forty Americans and Europeans on this plane with Margie and him and the rest of Katie’s retinue who were going on photo or hunting safaris in or near there. The new nation had experienced nothing like the bloodshed and civil war that were occurring next door in the Congo. Of course, the most catastrophic of the violence this summer, that whole Simba rebellion, was in the eastern Congo, and that bordered Tanganyika and Zanzibar. That kidnapping? Those nuns? Jesus Christ. But the travel agents and the safari outfit were clear: they’d be nowhere near the border with Congo or the secessionist province. They’d fly into Kenya and head south into the Serengeti. It was done all the time: it took more than political unrest in the nation next door—okay, a shooting war between rival political factions—to slow the growth of Serengeti tourism.
No one knew that Billy was afraid of flying, though he supposed that Margie suspected it. His first wife had. But he always insisted that he was awake through every minute of every flight because of his sinuses or his ears, or because he liked to get work done on the flights.
“What sort of work?” Margie had asked the first time they were packing to fly cross-country from Los Angeles to New York to visit his parents. They were in the bedroom, their suitcases open on the bed.
“Oh, you know. Read professional magazines. University studies. Look over patient notes.”
He was pretty sure she hadn’t bought a word of it: it wasn’t like he read professional magazines or university studies all that often when they were on the ground.
He thought of his little boy at home in California. Marcus—who had grown into Marc, unless he or his ex-wife really needed to get the boy’s attention or make a point, in which case that second syllable was everything—was four. He thought, too, of his ex-wife. On the other side of the world, right about now the two of them were probably walking home from the park with the swing sets and the massive slide a couple of blocks from their house. The house Billy himself had once lived in. The house with the little pool of its own. His new bungalow, the one he lived in with Margie, hadn’t a pool, but he was only about a ten-minute drive to his sister Katie’s, and she wouldn’t have cared if he bought a water chaise and a case of beer and lived in her pool. Hers was a Hollywood classic: shaped like a kidney with a diving board at one end, where the water was five meters deep. God, his kid sister had a pool that was almost as big as the first floor of the bungalow where he lived now. She had as many bedrooms in her place as he had rooms in his.
He wondered if there was a word for sibling gigolo-hood. Sycophant? Minion? Hanger-on? Well, all eight of the guests on this safari, including Katie’s husband, were, in a way, the movie star’s hangers-on. None of them would be on this plane or this trip if it weren’t for Katie. What was it that their mother had said to him at Katie’s and David’s wedding? Glenda Stepanov was at that stage where people who knew her would know she was drunk, but everyone else would assume she was just being Katie Barstow’s eccentric, acerbic mom. You knocked up Margie pretty damn quick. Who’s going to pay for my new grandchild’s college someday? Me or your sister? It was not an unreasonable question, given his alimony and child support, and the fact that already he had availed upon his mother for a little help with the down payment on the bungalow. Already he was stretched thin, no doubt about it, and a new baby was certainly going to exacerbate that. It was his mother’s language and his mother’s tone that was so hurtful. So typically hurtful.