1104 MST
The flight attendant was too far aft to interfere by then. Van was standing over her in the aisle, had a hand on her wrist,
but he was looking at Frank Heck. Heck put a hand on her other arm, and for a moment Allie had the hilarious idea they were
going to play tug-of-war with her.
“That’s a good idea, Allison,” Heck said. “You go sit with your man and think things over. Just don’t vanish on me. I feel
like we got more to talk about.”
“I won’t let her leave the state,” Van said, and held her hand until she collapsed into the seat between Van and Robin. The
two men in the row in front of her looked through the gap between their seats at her.
“You all right, darling?” asked Robin.
Allie nodded.
“What was that about?” Van asked.
Allie shook her head. “I got no spit.”
“I can help with that,” said the man who had stormed Omaha Beach. He handed her a plastic cup of what looked like soda water,
a lime squished in between the blocks of ice. She drank off half his gin and tonic in two swallows. It was cold and sharp
and good.
“Did you see it?” asked the older man.
“Dad,” said his son.
“Don’t ‘Dad’ me.”
Allie nodded. “I saw it.” She saw no reason to lie.
He extended a hand between the seats. “Raymond Pinet. This is my boy, Gregg. It’s Allison, yeah? Tell me this, Allison. What did you see?”
“He’s hoping you can settle a disagreement,” Gregg told her. He had a graying mess of brown hair, like he had just rolled
out of bed. Donna would love him, loved men with untucked shirts, uncombed hair, three days of beard bristle. She was turned
on by hapless, helpless men who let her boss them around. “My dad thinks he saw Smaug out there. You know Smaug? Kind of a
sly dragon, sprawls around on piles of gold, eating hobbits and getting fat? And I’m, like, no frickin’ way. This is the kind
of thing you have to stick with a rational explanation.”
Donna would like that too, the way he used the word frickin’ instead of fuckin’. She liked innocents. She liked despoiling them.
“What’s the rational explanation?” Robin asked.
“It had to be a UFO,” Gregg told them. “They’ve been playing tag with our aircraft since we started putting planes in the
air. All our modern technology was reverse engineered from the one that crashed in New Mexico in the late forties.”
“Bullshit,” his dad said. He found Allie’s gaze again. “You know why my son and I are going to England? So I can look at old
cathedrals. I love ’em. I fell in love with ’em when I was stationed over there, during the war. You know what old cathedrals
are fulla? Monsters. Dragons and orcs and trolls hanging off every corner, vomiting water when it rains. People been carving
monsters into waterspouts for as long as there have been waterspouts.” Now he looked at his son. “If spacecraft have been visiting this world for centuries, you’d expect to see some
of them carved into the chapel walls. But you don’t. You get fire-breathing serpents instead. Why is that? How do we even
know what a dragon looks like if no one’s ever seen one? There isn’t a lick of evidence for Roswell and little gray men, but
dragons, kiddo, they get around. There’s not a culture on earth that doesn’t have stories about them.”
“You’d love my friend Arthur,” Allie said. “He wrote his dissipation on dragons.” She didn’t think dissipation was the word she wanted, and she downed the rest of the gin and tonic to clear her head.
“Dad,” said graying Gregg. “Satellites. We’ve mapped every inch of the earth. I think if there were dragons lying around, we would’ve noticed.”
“Who said they’re of this earth?” Allie said. “Maybe they come from somewhere else.”
Van gave her a warning glance. Gregg and Raymond Pinet didn’t clock it, but Robin did. She let out an anxious sigh, folded
her hands in her lap, then unfolded them again.
“Your friend Arthur, he’s an academic?” Raymond said.
Allie nodded and then said, “You know what else is academic? Whether it’s a dragon or a UFO. Totally the wrong question to
ask.”
“Mm,” Raymond Pinet said. “You’re right. Of course.”
“What’s the right question?” Robin asked.
Raymond Pinet looked from Allie to Robin and back. “The way I see it, there’s two. The first thing you have to ask, is that
thing out there going to swat this plane out of the sky?”
Robin pressed herself back into her seat. “Uh-huh. What’s the second question?”
Raymond Pinet raised one eyebrow. “Are you right with Jesus? Because if you aren’t, now might be the time to give him a holler.”