Phases of Gravity Read online

  Baedecker groaned inwardly. He had planned to rent a car, spend the night in Peoria, and drive out to Glen Oak in the morning. He had hoped to stop by the cemetery on his way.

  "Mr. Baedecker! Mr. Baedecker! Jesus, welcome, welcome. We're really glad to see ya." The man was alone. Baedecker had to drop his old black flight bag as the stranger grabbed his right hand and elbow in a two-handed greeting. "I'm really sorry we couldn't get up a better reception, but we didn't know 'til Marge got a call this morning that you were comin' in today."

  "That's all right," said Baedecker. He retrieved his hand and added needlessly, "I'm Richard Baedecker."

  "Oh, yeah, Jesus. I'm Bill Ackroyd. Mayor Seaton would've been here, but she's got the Old Settlers' Jaycees Fish Fry to take care of tonight."

  "Glen Oak has a woman mayor?" Baedecker resettled his garment bag on his shoulder and brushed away a trickle of sweat on his cheek. Heat waves rose around them and turned distant walls of foliage and the half-glimpsed parking lot into shimmering mirages. The humidity was as bad as St. Louis's. Baedecker looked at the big man next to him. Bill Ackroyd was in his late forties or early fifties. He was sagging to fat and had already perspired through the back of his JC Penney shirt. His hair was combed forward to hide an encroaching baldness. He looks like me, thought Baedecker and felt a blossom of anger unfold in his chest. Ackroyd grinned and Baedecker smiled back.

  Baedecker followed him through the tiny terminal to the curved drive where Ackroyd had parked his car in a space reserved for the handicapped. The man kept up an amiable stream of small talk that mixed with the heat to produce a not-unpleasant nausea in Baedecker. Ackroyd drove a Bonneville. The engine had been left running, air-conditioning blasting to cool the interior to an unhealthy chill. Baedecker sank into the velvet cushions with a sigh while the other man set his luggage in the trunk.

  "I can't tell you what this means to all of us," said Ackroyd as he settled himself. "The whole town's excited. It's the biggest thing that's happened to Glen Oak since Jesse James's gang came through and camped at Hartley's Pond." Ackroyd laughed and shifted the car into gear. His hands were so large that they made the steering wheel and gearshift look like toys. Baedecker imagined that Ackroyd came from the kind of Midwestern stock that had used such huge, blunt hands to string up outlaws.

  "I didn't know that the James gang ever went through Glen Oak," said Baedecker.

  "Probably didn't," said Ackroyd and laughed his big, unself-conscious laugh. "That makes you the most exciting thing ever to happen to us."

  Peoria looked like it had been abandoned or bombed. Or both. Storefronts held dust and dead flies. Grass grew up in cracks in the highway and weeds flourished in the untended medians. Old buildings sagged against one another and the few new structures sat like overscaled druid altars amid razed blocks of rubble.

  "My God," muttered Baedecker, "I don't remember the city looking like this." Actually Baedecker hardly remembered Peoria at all. Once a year his mother had taken them to town to watch the Thanksgiving Day parade so they could wave at Santa Claus. Baedecker had been too

  old for Santa Claus, but he would sit with his younger sisters on the stone lions near the courthouse and dutifully wave. One year Santa had arrived in a jeep with the four elves dressed in the uniforms of the different services. Baedecker remembered that the lawn of the city square had risen in a gentle arc to the elaborate stone gingerbread of the courthouse. He would play at being shot and roll down the grassy incline until his mother yelled at him to stop. He noticed now that the square—he thought that it was the same block—had been turned into a fussily landscaped sunken park near a glass box of a city-county building.

  "Reagan's recession," said Ackroyd. "Carter's recession before him. Goddamn Russians."

  "Russians?" Baedecker half expected to hear a torrent of John Birch propaganda. He thought he remembered reading that George Wallace had carried Peoria County in the 1968 primary. In 1968 Baedecker had been spending sixty hours a week in a simulator as part of the support team for Apollo 8. The year had held no meaning for him except in terms of the project deadlines. He had emerged from his cocoon in January of 1969 to find Bobby Kennedy dead, Martin Luther King dead, LBJ a memory, and Richard M. Nixon president. In Baedecker's office in St. Louis, on the wall above the liquor cabinet, between two honorary degrees from colleges he had never visited, there was a photograph of Nixon shaking his hand in a Rose Garden ceremony. Baedecker and the other two astronauts looked tense and ill at ease in the picture. Nixon was grinning, his upper teeth white and exposed, his left hand on Baedecker's elbow in the same salesman's grip Ackroyd had used at the airport.

  "Not really their fault," grunted Ackroyd. "Caterpillar's fault for dependin' so much on selling to 'em. When Carter pulled the plug on heavy equipment exports after Afghanistan or whatever the hell it was, it all went downhill. Caterpillar, GE, even Pabst. Everybody was getting laid off for a while. It's better now."

  "Oh," said Baedecker. His head hurt. He still felt the motion of the plane as it had banked in over the river. If he couldn't fly an aircraft this day, he wished that he at least could have driven a car to work the cramps out of arms and legs that ached to control something. He closed his eyes.

  "You wanta go the quick way or the long way?" asked the big man at the wheel.

  "The long way," Baedecker said without opening his eyes. "Always the long way."

  Ackroyd obediently took the next exit off I-74 and descended into the Euclidean geometries of cornfields and county roads.

  Baedecker may have dozed for a few minutes. He opened his eyes as the car stopped at a crossroads. Green signs gave direction and distance to Princeville, Galesburg, Elmwood, and Kewanee. There was no mention of Glen Oak. Ackroyd swung the car left. The road was a corridor between curtains of corn. Dark seams of tar and asphalt patched the road and provided a rhythmic undertone to the air-conditioner. The slight vibration had a hypnotic, equestrian quality to it.

  "Into the heart of the heart of the country," said Baedecker.

  "Hmmm?"

  Baedecker sat up, surprised he had spoken aloud. "A phrase a writer—William Gass, I think—used to describe this part of the country. I remember it sometimes when I think about Glen Oak."

  "Oh." Ackroyd shifted uncomfortably. Baedecker realized with a start that he had made the man nervous. Ackroyd had assumed that they were two men, two solid men, and the mention of a writer did not fit. Baedecker smiled as he thought about the seminars the various services had given their test pilots prior to the first NASA interviews for the Mercury program. If you put your hands on your hips, make sure your thumbs are toward the back. Had Deke told him about that or had he read about it in Tom Wolfe's book?

  Ackroyd had been talking about his real estate agency before Baedecker had interrupted. Now he cleared his throat and make a cupping gesture with his right hand. "I imagine you've met a lot of important people, huh, Mr. Baedecker?"

  "Richard," Baedecker said quickly. "You're Bill, right?"

  "Yeah. No relation to that guy on the old Saturday Night Live reruns. Lot of people ask me that."

  "No," said Baedecker. He had never seen the program.

  "So who was the most important, you think?"

  "What's that?" asked Baedecker, but there was no way to steer the conversation a different direction.

  "Most important person you ever met?"

  Baedecker forced some life into his own voice. He was suddenly very, very tired. It occurred to him that he should have driven his own car from St. Louis. The stopover in Glen Oak would not have been much out of his way, and he could have left when he wished. Baedecker could not remember the last time he had driven anywhere except from his town house to the office and back. Travel had become an endless series of airhops. With a slight shock he realized that Joan, his ex-wife, had never been to St. Louis, to Chicago, to the Midwest. Their life together in Fort Lauderdale, San Diego, Houston, Cocoa Beach, the five bad months in Boston, had been near the coast
, all in places where the continent clearly ended. He was suddenly curious about what Joan's impressions of this great expanse of fields, farmhouses, and heat haze would be. "The Shah of Iran," he said. "At least he was the most impressive. The court show they put on there, the protocol, and the sheer sense of power he and his retinue conveyed, they put even the White House and Buckingham Palace to shame. Little good it did him."

  "Yeah," said Ackroyd. "Say, I met Joe Namath once. I was at an Amway convention in Cincinnati. Don't have time for it since I got involved in the Pine Meadows deal but used to do real well at it. Thirteen hundred one month and that was without really working at it. Joe, he was there for another thing, but he knew a guy who was real good friends with Merle Weaver. So Joe, he told all of us to call him that, he spent the whole two days with us. Went down to the combat zone with us and everything. I mean, he had commitments, but every time he could, he and Merle's friend would go out to dinner with us and pick up a round of drinks and all. A nicer guy you wouldn't want to meet."

  Baedecker was surprised to realize that he recognized his surroundings. He knew that around the next curve in the road there would appear a dairy with a floral clock in the center of the driveway. The dairy came into sight. There was no clock, but the parking lot looked newly paved. The purple-shingled house to the left of the road was the one his mother used to refer to as the old stagecoach stop. He saw the sagging second-floor porch and was sure it was the same building. The sudden superimposition of forgotten memories over reality was disturbing to Baedecker, a sense of déjà vu that did not dissipate. He looked straight ahead and knew that it would be only a long sweep of curve and then another mile before Glen Oak would declare itself as a fringe of trees and a single, green water tower visible above the cornfields.

  "You ever meet Joe Namath?" asked Ackroyd.

  "No, I never have," said Baedecker. On a clear day, from thirty-five thousand feet in a 747, Illinois would be a verdant patchwork of rectangles. Baedecker knew that the right angle ruled the Midwest in the same way that the sinuous, senseless curves of erosion ruled the Southwest where he had done most of his flying. From two hundred nautical miles up, the Midwest had been a smudge of green and brown hues glimpsed between white cloud masses. From the moon

  it had been nothing at all. Baedecker had never even thought to look for the United States during his forty-six hours on the moon.

  "Just a real nice guy. Not stuck-up like some famous people you meet, you know? Damn shame about his knee."

  The water tower was different. A tall, white, metal structure had replaced the old green one. It burned in the rich, slanting rays of the late-summer evening sun. Baedecker felt a curious emotion seize him somewhere between the heart and throat. It was not nostalgia or some resurrected form of homesickness. Baedecker realized that the scalding wave of feeling flowing through him was simple awe at an unexpected confrontation with beauty. He had felt the same surprised pain as a child in the Chicago Art Institute one rainy afternoon while standing in front of a Degas oil of a young ballerina carrying an armful of oranges. He had experienced the same sharp slice of emotion upon seeing his son Scott, purple, bruised, slick, and squawking, a few seconds after his birth. Baedecker had no idea why he felt this now, but invisible thumbs pressed at the hollow of his throat, and there was a burning behind his eyes.

  "Bet you don't recognize the old place," said Ackroyd. "How long's it been since you been back, Dick?"

  Glen Oak appeared as a skirmish line of trees, resolved itself into a huddle of white homes, and widened to fill the windshield. The road curved again past a Sunoco station, past an old brick home, which Baedecker remembered his mother saying had once been a way station on the underground railroad, and past a white sign that read GLEN OAK—POP. 1275—SPEED ELECTRICALLY TIMED.

  "Nineteen fifty-six," said Baedecker. "No, 1957. My mother's funeral. She died the year after my father."

  "They're buried out in the Calvary Cemetery," said Ackroyd as if he were sharing a new fact.

  "Yes."

  "Would you like to go out there now? Before it gets dark? I wouldn't mind waiting."

  "No." Baedecker glanced quickly to his left, horrified at the idea of visiting his parents' graves while Bill Ackroyd sat waiting in his idling Bonneville. "No, thanks, I'm tired. I'd like to check into the motel. Is the one on the north side of town still called the Day's End Inn?"

  Ackroyd chuckled and slapped the steering wheel. "Jesus, that old roadhouse? No, sir, they tore that place down in '62, year after Jackie and I moved here from Lafayette. Nope, the nearest other place is the Motel Six over on I-74 off the Elmwood exit."

  "That will be fine," said Baedecker.

  "Aw, naw," said Ackroyd and turned a stricken face to Baedecker. "I mean, we'd planned on you staying with us, Dick. I mean, we've got plenty of room, and I okayed it with Marge Seaton and the council. The Motel Six's way the hell gone, twenty minutes by the hardroad."

  The hardroad. That was what everyone in Glen Oak had called the paved highway that doubled as the main street. It had been four decades since he had heard the phrase. Baedecker shook his head and looked out the window as they moved slowly down that main street. Glen Oak's business section was two and a half blocks long. The sidewalks were raised strips of concrete three tiers high. The storefronts were dark, and the diagonal parking places were empty except

  for a few pickup trucks in front of a tavern near the park. Baedecker tried to fit the images of these tired, flat-fronted buildings into the template of his memory, but there was little conjunction, only a vague sense of structures missing like gaps in a once-familiar smile.

  "Jackie kept some supper warm, but we could go out to Old Settlers and get in on the fish fry if you'd like."

  "I'm pretty tired," said Baedecker.

  "Good enough," said Ackroyd. "We'll take care of all the formalities tomorrow, then. Marge'd be pretty busy tonight anyway, what with the raffle and all. Terry, my boy Terry, he's been dying to meet you. He's a real hero to you . . . I mean, shit, you know what I mean. Terry's real excited about space and everything. It was Terry that did a school report on you last year and remembered you'd lived here for a while. To tell you the truth, that's what gave me the idea of you being guest of honor at Old Settlers. Terry was so interested in this being your hometown and all. 'Course Marge and the others would have loved the idea anyway but, you know, it would mean an awful lot to Terry if you could spend the two nights with us."

  Even at the crawling pace at which they were moving, they had already traveled the length of Glen Oak's main street. Ackroyd turned right and slowed to a stop near the old Catholic church. It was a part of town Baedecker had rarely walked in as a boy because Chuck Compton, the school bully, had lived there. It was the only part of town he had come to when he had returned for his parents' funerals.

  "It really wouldn't put us out," said Ackroyd. "We'd be real honored to have you, and the Motel Six's probably full with truckers this late on a Friday."

  Baedecker looked at the brown church. He remembered it as being much larger. He felt a strange lassitude descend over him. The summer heat, the long weeks of traveling, the disappointment of seeing his son at the Poona ashram, all conspired to reduce him to this state of sad passivity. Baedecker recognized the feeling from his first months in the Marine Corps in the summer of 1951. From there and from the first weeks after Joan had left him.

  "I wouldn't want to be any trouble," he said.

  Ackroyd grinned his relief and gripped Baedecker's upper arm for a second. "Shoot, no trouble. Jackie's looking forward to meeting you, and Terry'll never forget having a real-life astronaut visit."

  The car moved ahead slowly through alternate streaks of cream-rich evening light and stripes of dark tree-shadow.

  The bats were out when Baedecker went for a walk an hour later. Their choppy, half-seen flits of movement sliced pieces from the dull dome of evening sky. The sun was gone but the day clung to light the same way that Baedecker, as a bo
y on such an August evening, had clung to the last sweet weeks of summer vacation. It took Baedecker only a few minutes to walk to the old part of town, to his part of town. He was pleased to be outside and alone.

  Ackroyd lived in a development of twenty-or-so ranch houses on the northeast corner of town where Baedecker remembered only fields and a stream where muskrats could be caught. Ackroyd's house was of a pseudo-Spanish design with a boat and trailer in the garage and an RV in the driveway. Inside, the rooms were filled with heavy, Ethan Allen furniture. Ackroyd's wife, Jackie, had closely permed curls, laugh wrinkles around her eyes, and a pleasant overbite, which made her appear to be constantly smiling. She was some years younger than her husband. Their only child, Terry, a pale boy who looked to be thirteen or fourteen, was as thin and quiet as his father was stout and hearty.

  "Say hello to Mr. Baedecker, Terry. Go on, tell him how much you've been looking forward to this." The boy was propelled forward by a shove of Ackroyd's huge palm.

  Baedecker bent over but still could not find the boy's gaze, and his open hand felt only the briefest touch of moist fingers. Terry's brown hair grew longest in front and dropped over his eyes like a visor. The boy mumbled something.

  "Nice to meet you," said Baedecker.

  "Terry," said his mother, "go on now. Show Mr. Baedecker his guest room. Then show him your room. I'm sure Mr. Baedecker will be very interested." She smiled at Baedecker and he thought of early photos of Eleanor Roosevelt.

  The boy turned and led the way down the stairs, taking them two at a time. The guest room was in the basement. The bed looked comfortable, and there was an attached bathroom. The boy's room was across a carpeted expanse of open area, which might have been planned as a recreation room.

  "I guess Mom wanted you to see this," muttered Terry and flicked on a dim light in his room. Baedecker looked in, blinked, and stepped in farther to look again.

  There was a single bed, neatly made, a small desk, a minicomponent stereo, and three dark walls with shelves, posters, a few books, models, all the usual paraphernalia of an adolescent boy. But the fourth wall was different.