America America by Ethan Canin Read Free Book Online Page B

tellin’ me you really don’t know?”
    “No, sir.”
    He laughed. “It’s his wife, kid.”
    I looked at him, then reached for a nut to match the compression ring. “It is?”
    The sound of the engine rose again, and when I looked up the red fuselage was coming in for another run. It angled diagonally above the meadow this time and tipped its wings. Gil McKinstrey hardly looked up. At the end of the field it turned and climbed again, closer to the estate now, passing below us over the sycamores by the garage. There it banked, smoothed into a shallower ascent, and, as it crested the roof of the main house, suddenly rolled over and flew upside-down half the length of the entrance drive. At this even Gil McKinstrey let out a laugh. I tried to make out Mrs. Metarey’s figure in the cockpit. When the plane disappeared, I hopped down from the Ferguson and walked back to sift through the cart.
    “She been to the South Pole in that thing once,” he said. He struck a match on his boot and lit the cigarette. “Or maybe it was the North Pole. But I know she’s been to some pole or something. Get cold, though, wouldn’t it? Freeze your nuts clean off.”
    The compression ring in my hand was rusting. I reached into the bucket of grease. “There’s a lot around here you could just stare at all day,” I offered.
    “’Stead of working.”
    “Maybe so.”
    “Even more to look at inside the house,” he said. He winked.
    “I wouldn’t know.”
    He turned to watch the plane, but I could tell he was smiling.
    “I never work inside the house,” I said. “I work out here.”
    “Learned it out some ranch in the West,” he said finally, turning again to regard me. “Her daddy’s land, I guess. Montana or someplace. When she was a little girl, I heard. Before she met Mister Metarey.”
    “She’s good, isn’t she?”
    “Guess so. Least that’s what folks say who ought to know.” He wiped his face with a rag from his pocket. “Christ,” he added, “hot enough to boil rats out here.” He looked at the ground. “But you’re a cool customer, ain’t you?”
    “Just trying to do my job.”
    He folded the rag and set it back in his shirt. “I only come out for the ball-peen hammer anyways. Left it in your cart like an ass.” He pinched out the cigarette, replaced it in his boot, and looked to the west, where the biplane was descending now over the strip. “Didn’t mean to spoil the show.”
    “I wasn’t watching a show,” I said again. “I was working.”
    He was shifting parts now in the bottom of the cart. The ball-peen hammer was on the far end, underneath some quarter turns, but I didn’t say anything. “Sure,” he said at last, pulling it out and testing its blow a couple of times against his palm. “I know you were, kid. You’re doing good enough.”

    B EFORE LONG, Christian and I had begun meeting on weekend afternoons when my shift was over. Back up at the house, I’d find her waiting on the cool limestone porch or under the shade of the bur oak in the driveway—the one my father and I had worked under—where we’d sit down together and talk about what we’d done during the morning. My own mornings were always the same, and I made an effort to make them seem commonplace, even though they still weren’t—not for me. Hers consisted of riding lessons, which her father paid for in return for chores in the stable, or reading, or trips with her friends to the quarry lakes. She laughed sometimes at small things I said, and her laugh did something to me. Soon I found that these interludes were marking my days—the ones when we saw each other, and the ones when we didn’t. If during one of our visits Mr. Metarey had asked me to go back out and work, I would have obeyed him instantly—and I would never have sat with his daughter again. And I suppose I was expecting that he would. But he didn’t.
    So we kept it up. That job was the first I’d ever had in any way independent from my father, and