Road Fever by Tim Cahill Read Free Book Online

busy, flinging nuts, this stewardess, but my companion, Karen, took the opportunity to ask a question.
    “Could you arrange for one of those carts to meet us at the gate? We have a tight connection and I’m on crutches.”
    Karen had been experiencing pain standing for any length of time. She could outrun me for a mile or so before her feet began to hurt, hurt badly, and the doctors said it would only get worse. They told her thatthey could fix her up in two simple operations. It was a painful matter of breaking and rearranging a single bone in each foot. Karen opted to get it all over with at once: the same operation on both feet and then six weeks on crutches. We imagined that the decision would be an exercise in the conservation of misery.
    Our flight attendant said she would make the call later, after she had finished tossing out the rest of her nuts. It looked, I thought, like dinner in the monkey house. There were, by actual count, eight nuts in my bag. Was I supposed to eat them all myself?
    The flight into Minneapolis was late, no great surprise. Seasoned travelers, in 1987, had begun referring to the airline as Northworst. Passengers suspected that the company routinely delayed flights—sometimes claiming mechanical difficulties—when in fact they were waiting for delayed connecting flights in order to fill all seats on any given flight. Disgruntled ex-Northwest employees insisted that this was the case.
    Indeed, most of Northworst’s current employees seemed disgruntled. Flight attendants worked planes full of passengers who had been kept waiting for hours and who were certain to miss connecting flights. There was a feeling of antagonism that pervaded most flights. The attendants themselves had some labor-related gripes with the company, and were not inclined to simple pleasantries. They had begun to develop a kind of homeroom high-school-teacher attitude toward their passengers.
    This was par for the course: I wasn’t going to steam myself into any kind of tantrum.
    An announcement was made about the captain and how he had instructed us to put our tray tables up and to return our seats to the full and upright position. As the flight attendant passed my seat I attempted to ask again if she had arranged for the cart. The woman was overworked—Northworst could have provided a couple more attendants on this flight—and the exertion of firing nuts at the passengers had dampened her hair so that moist ringlets framed her face. She appeared to be in her early forties, and wore a fatigued expression that said something about what I imagined were twenty years of professional glamour and fun at thirty thousand feet. With frequent stopovers in Minneapolis.
    “Excuse me,” I said as she strode by my seat.
    The woman treated me as she might treat a flasher on the street. No recognition: all these perverts want is attention. Don’t encourage them.
    “Miss?”
    But she was gone.
    I reached up and punched the attendant call button. Nothing. Once more.
    Bing, bing.
    And the attendant was standing there, towering over me, glowering. “Yes,” in a tone that meant “now what?”
    “Did you arrange for that cart?”
    “Sir,” the woman sighed, “I said I would call and I did.” A dozen passengers within earshot now knew that I was the kind of guy, he’s got a friend on crutches, he’s gonna ask for help not once but twice. Twice! I felt my face flush with anger and consoled myself with
Furry Fury
.
    So, of course, when we had collected Karen’s crutches and deplaned, there was no cart. We stood there, at the boarding gate, while the scheduled time for our connecting flight came and went. Karen could not walk more than fifty yards on her new feet. We were stymied. The other passengers were gone and the area was devoid of people. Presently, our crew deplaned, the pilots carrying their square flight bags, the attendants pulling suitcases on leashes behind them. When the woman with damp hair passed, I did no more than