sitting down he opened the
hand-luggage compartment above and found a book. It took him some moments to get it out
but in the end he succeeded and to avoid having a Coca-Cola spilt on his trousers again
he offered to sit in the aisle seat.
‘The little lady can have the window,’ he said with a sweet smile. ‘I got more room for
my legs here.’
Eva said that was real kind of him. (She was beginning to adjust her language to
American and ‘real’ was just as good as ‘really’.) She was also beginning to
distinguish between nice Americans who didn’t complain when one of the quads spilt things
on them and were polite and called them little ladies, and the other sort who said ‘Fuck’
and called her a hippopotamus just because she stepped on their toes. After that the flight
continued pretty harmoniously. There was a movie which kept the girls interested and
Eva concentrated on what she was going to say to Uncle Wally and Auntie Joan about how
kind it had been of them to invite them over and pay for the tickets especially as there
was no way she could have come; the quads’ education cost so much and clothing them etc. In
fact she dozed for a while and it was only when the stewardesses came round with the
trolley again and they had something more to eat that she woke up and took particular care
to see that there was no more spilling on people’s trousers.
In fact she got talking with the nice man in the aisle seat who asked if this was her first
trip to the USA and where she was going, and who was real interested to learn everything
about her and the girls and even went so far as to write their names down and said if they
ever came down Florida way this was his address. Eva really liked him; he was so
charming. And she told him all about how Wally Immelmann was head of Immelmann
Enterprises in Wilma, Tennessee, and had a lakeside house up in the Smokies and how her
Auntie Joan had married him when he was at the airbase and an Air Force pilot flying out
of Lakenheath, and the man said he was Sol Campito and he worked with a Miami-based
finance corporation and sure he’d heard of Immelmann Enterprises, like everyone had
it was so important. An hour later he took another ‘hygiene break’ which was a new term
for Eva and meant going to the toilet again. This time he didn’t take so long and when he
came back he put his book away in the luggage compartment and said he was going to get some
shut-eye because he had to catch the shuttle flight down to Miami and it was a long trip
from where he’d come, like Munich, Germany, where he’d had some business. And so the flight
wore on and nothing untoward occurred except that Penelope kept asking when they were
going to get to Atlanta because she was bored and Sammy wouldn’t let her have the window
seat so she could look out at the clouds. Behind them the two men in grey suits watched the
man who had given up his window seat for Samantha. One of them took himself off to the
toilet and was in there for five minutes. He was followed half an hour later by the second
suit who stayed even longer. When he came back he shrugged as he sat down. Finally by the
time Eva was getting really tired the Jumbo was slowly dropping down towards the land
and the countryside seemed to be coming up to them and the undercarriage was locked down
and the flaps were up and they were down with only a slight thump and lurch and into reverse
thrust.
‘The land of the free,’ said the man with a smile when they were at the terminal and could
collect their bags from the overhead lockers; he was on his feet helping to get Eva’s and
the quads’ stuff for them. And then he very politely stood in the aisle in the way of the
other passengers to let them file out first. In fact he let a number of other passengers
go in front of him and only then moved himself. By the time they had collected their hold
luggage
Richard Ellis Preston Jr.