Grandfather was an aeronaut. When he had been a child, he listened to the stories his father and uncles told when they returned from the war. They were pranksters, these brothers, and embellished long tales of how their single airship charged against German armadas that blotted out the sun. To hear them tell it, the European airs were made safe by them alone, and always with a stitch-busting quip. Their service had been downright merry, with long wine vacations and pissing over the basket lip into the Pyrenees a mile below, broken by the occasional firefight with a thousand airborne Nazis. But Grandfather heard enough kernels of truth from his father in private. The brothers, they had swung in a gunner basket from a bag of helium and hydrogen just one matchstrike away from conflagration. They refused to smoke, and became praying men when tracer bullets lit up the night. And, his father said, they had painted European red with the blood of falling Nazis.
He listened to the dogfights, airships circling each other like the squid and the whale; he listened to the repeated encounters with the rogue Black Baroness, whose infamy still was not enough to shoot down the brothers from Maryland. But more than that, Grandfather listened to his uncles' stories of their downtime. They painted a picture of a lazy platform nudged lightly by the bellies of the clouds, and the quilt-pattern farmlands passing beneath like a stilled river. Birds warned them to keep away from the hungry sun; at night, if the moon made love beneath the earth, they rose close enough to the stars to catch them in Mason jars. Grandfather wrapped himself in his love of the sky, and quit his schooling to live on the breeze.
Grandfather purchased his first airship, stole his second, and built his third from scratch. Between then and now, I have little to no understanding of his life. Perhaps he woke up one morning to find my grandmother curled fast asleep in his moorings; maybe he picked up in a port town one gin night. I can't rightly say, although I know that he remained steadfastly an aeronaut even as the aero-copter began to replace the airship as man's footstep in the sky. Grandfather scoffs at every one he sees, and if I'm with him I will as well. They do look a little ridiculous.
On his grandchildren's birthdays, Grandfather offers to take us anywhere we want aboard his airship. I've been to both oceans because of him, and would have seen the Arctic circle if only the air currents had been right.
My sister turned ten and knew that she wanted more than anything to catch a glimpse of the wild horses that run along the plains and into the foothills of the Rockies. Grandfather made his annual visit and, after inviting me along out unusually high spirits, set off for the mountains.
Between Michigan and the barley seas out West, Grandfather stopped playing cards with us and instead told us his stories about our grandmother. 'I had never seen a woman half so beautiful in my life, and I fear I never will again,' he said. Only two years dead, Grandmother had never seemed to us anything other than an elderly woman with a rosary in her pocket. I imagined to myself that Grandfather was referring to a different woman altogether.
'She could fly, you know? S'how I met her, and she cut off her wings for me. No one has ever done anything that's meant as much to me as that. Cut her wings so that we might be together. Gorgeous, gorgeous.'
Far-off thunderheads off the starboard bow, gilt in the fires of the sun setting before us. We wouldn't make it before dark.
'It skips a generation, I think. Your father, he never tried flying or any of that. Got too wrapped up in his trains. How could he know?
'But it skips a generation,' he said between sips of some bottle. 'You ever try to flying, Jared?'
'No, Grandpa.'
'Ever wanna? Try flapping your arms, boy. Maybe you'll beat us there.'
'I don't want to , Grandpa.'
'Suit yourself. Think your sister could? I betcha she can. C'mere, pumpkin. You're gonna be a brave big girl now, okay?'
'Grandpa...' But he wouldn't listen to me. He grabbed my sister under the arms and propped up on the railing. Her little feet kicked out into open space. Below her, the longest of falls.
'Just gotta think like a bird,' he said with rum breath. 'Think like a bird and you'll be just as beautiful as your grandmother was. Ready, pumpkin?' My sister shook her head, and he failed to notice. 'Here ya go, kiddo. And don't go breaking any men's hearts.'
And released.
We watched her drop away. Grandfather scratched his beard and mumbled something that wasn't for me. 'Grmmmm...mayhap it skips two generations...' He turned back to check our altitude, and started singing some aria learned in Catholic school. Under us, a white dress grew smaller and smaller.
