The Accidental Tourist

“I mean, of course I knew that they were coming; it’s been nearly a year; in fact he called ahead and told me they were coming, but when I saw them in black and white they just seemed so brisk. They didn’t take into account the feelings of the thing. I guess I wasn’t expecting that.”

Macon had a sense of some danger approaching, something he couldn’t handle. He said, “Ah! Yes! Certainly! That seems a natural reaction. So anyway, good luck with the house, Sarah.”

He hung up quickly.

His seatmate on the flight to Edmonton was a woman who was scared of flying. He knew that before the plane had left the ground, before he’d looked in her direction. He was gazing out the window, keeping to himself as usual, and he heard her swallowing repeatedly. She kept tightening and releasing her grasp on the armrests and he could feel that, too. Finally he turned to see who this was. A pair of pouched eyes met his. A very old, baggy woman in a flowered dress was staring at him intently, had perhaps been willing him to turn. “Do you think this plane is safe,” she said flatly, not exactly asking.

“It’s perfectly safe,” he told her.

“Then why have all these signs about. Oxygen. Life vests. Emergency exits. They’re clearly expecting the worst.”

“That’s just federal regulations,” Macon said.

Then he started thinking about the word “federal.” In Canada, would it apply? He frowned at the seat ahead of him, considering. Finally he said, “Government regulations.” When he checked the old woman’s expression to see if this made any better sense to her, he discovered that she must have been staring at him all this time. Her face lunged toward him, gray and desperate. He began to worry about her. “Would you like a glass of sherry?” he asked.

“They don’t give us sherry till we’re airborne. By then it’s much too late.”

“Just a minute,” he said.

He bent to unzip his bag, and from his shaving kit he took a plastic travel flask. This was something he always packed, in case of sleepless nights. He had never used it, though — not because he’d never had a sleepless night but because he’d gone on saving it for some occasion even worse than whatever the current one was, something that never quite arrived. Like his other emergency supplies (the matchbook-sized sewing kit, the tiny white Lomotil tablet), this flask was being hoarded for the real emergency. In fact, its metal lid had grown rusty inside, as he discovered when he unscrewed it. “I’m afraid this may have. turned a bit, or whatever sherry does,” he told the old woman. She didn’t answer but continued staring into his eyes. He poured the sherry into the lid, which was meant to double as a cup. Meanwhile the plane gave a creak and started moving down the runway. The old woman drank off the sherry and handed him the cup. He understood that she was not returning it for good. He refilled it. She drank that more slowly and then let her head tip back against her seat.

“Better?” he asked her.

“My name is Mrs. Daniel Bunn,” she told him.

He thought it was her way of saying she was herself again — her formal, dignified self. “How do you do,” he said. “I’m Macon Leary.”

“I know it’s foolish, Mr. Leary,” she said, “but a drink does give the illusion one is doing something to cope, does it not.”

“Absolutely,” Macon said.

He wasn’t convinced, though, that she was coping all that well. As the plane gathered speed, her free hand tightened on the armrest. Her other hand — the one closest to him, clutching the cup— grew white around the nails. All at once the cup popped up in the air, squeezed out of her grip. Macon caught it nimbly and said, “Whoa there!” and screwed it onto the flask. Then he replaced the flask in his bag. “Once we’re off the ground—” he said.

But a glance at her face stopped him. She was swallowing again. The plane was beginning to rise now — the nose was lifting off— and she was pressed back against her seat. She seemed flattened. “Mrs. Bunn?” Macon said. He was scared she was having a heart attack.

Instead of answering, she turned toward him and crumpled onto his shoulder. He put an arm around her. “Never mind,” he said. “Goodness. You’ll be all right. Never mind.”

The plane continued slanting backward. When the landing gear retracted (groaning), Macon felt the shudder through Mrs. Bunn’s body. Her hair smelled like freshly ironed tea cloths. Her back was large and boneless, a mounded shape like the back of a whale.

He was impressed that someone so old still wanted so fiercely to live.

Then the plane leveled off and she pulled herself together— straightening and drawing away from him, brushing at the teardrops that lay in the folds beneath her eyes. She was full of folds, wide and plain and sagging, but valiantly wore two pearl buttons in her long, spongy earlobes and maintained a coat of brave red lipstick on a mouth so wrinkled that it didn’t even have a clear outline.

He asked, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, and I apologize a thousand times,” she said. And she patted the brooch at her throat.