AMERICAN DREAM

            Sam puts his hand on the knob of the door leading into the small mobile home. His palm is sweaty, but he grips the knob tightly and turns it. He walks into the tiny living room, intent on kidnaping.

            Adam lies on the floor, sprawled on the worn linoleum, watching Saturday morning cartoons on TV. Next to the boy sits a colorful paper plate left over from his birthday party several days earlier. On the plate lie the crumbling remains of a doughnut along with several raisins as small and black as bugs. A clear plastic tumbler with clowns painted on it, half-filled with orange juice, stands next to the plate.     

            On the television screen cavort animated cartoons of talking sponges and dancing fishes. Adam giggles at the antics of the Technicolor characters.

            Sam says, “Howdy, Scout.”

            The boy doesn’t look away from the TV. “Hey, Uncle Sammy,” he says.

            When Sam was getting ready to leave his house half an hour earlier, he put on what he thought Adam would like best. A bright Hawaiian shirt with parrots and palm trees in splashes of brilliant reds and lurid greens. Now, glimpsing his reflection in the mirror above the television, Sam wonders if the shirt doesn’t call too much attention to itself and to him. But he also has on blue jeans, faded and worn at the knees, and he hopes those are nondescript enough that they’ll somehow cancel out the loud shirt. Neutralize its glare. Let him blend in.

            Sam kicks off his loafers and lies on the floor beside Adam. On TV, SpongeBob SquarePants dances. Sam, with his own squarish body, bandy legs, and crew-cut hair, identifies with the little yellow guy, and he laughs out loud at the character’s antics. Adam merely grins.

            “Hey, come on,” says Sam. “That’s funny. Don’t you think that’s funny?”

            Adam shrugs. “I guess so.”

            “You guess so? Well, guess about this.” Sam begins tickling the boy. Adam laughs. Sam tickles harder, and the boy’s laughter rises to crescendos of shrieks.

            Adam’s mother comes to the kitchen door, drying her hands with a dish towel. “Hey, you two,” she scolds in a quiet voice. “Danny’s trying to sleep.”

            Daniel, Adam’s father, works the graveyard shift at the Baxter plant on the edge of town, making medical supplies for doctors and hospitals. Adam’s mother, Danielle, though only twenty years old, takes her wifely duties seriously. “So hold it down,” she warns.

            “I’m trying to,” Sam says, mock-wrestling with the boy. “But it keeps fighting to get up again.” He dives into his tickling efforts again, and new howls of laughter erupt from Adam.

            “I’m not kidding,” Danielle says. “Hush.” She frowns, stern as a judge. “No joke.”

            Sam stops his tickling assault, and instead clamps his palm over Adam’s mouth, covering the lower half of the boy’s face with his big hand. His skin is rough and tan against the boy’s smooth, pale flesh. “Shhh,” he hisses into the boy’s ear. He drops his voice to a loud stage whisper. “They got us surrounded, pal. We have to be quiet if we’re going to get out of this mess alive.”     

            Adam always grasps the quicksilver rules of his uncle’s games instantly, and he cuts off his laughter. He nods his head to show he understands the seriousness of the situation. His eyes dart back and forth,

searching for unseen enemies.

            Danielle sets her mouth in a straight line. Her eyebrows draw closer together. Across her forehead, creases fold. She turns away from the living room, back to the tiny kitchen. Sam can hear her return to her dishes. Putting them away in the cabinets. Storing the silverware in a drawer. Sam’s heart beats faster.

            He removes his hand from Adam’s face, leans closer, and whispers in the boy’s ear. “Want to go for a plane ride?”

            Adam’s eyes widen. He whispers back, “Can we?”

            Sam, twenty-three years old, works as the youngest employee of McGruggle Enterprises, a crop-dusting service. He flies their 1934 Kaydet -- a two-seater biplane of World War II vintage -- fitted with tanks and sprayers. In the spring and summer he makes good money dusting soybeans and cotton for the farmers in the county, doing what he jokes about as the original debugging. Sometimes sightseers come from Memphis or Little Rock. He flies them over the Delta. Shows them the Mississippi River from a point of view they’ve never seen before. If he likes them, he throws in a few barrel rolls and tailspins. Stunts that usually make men laugh and women squeal. Sam likes that.     

            He has taken Adam up with him a few times. Whenever he does, Danielle always acts as cool as if they were only going around the corner for ice cream. Every time they come back, she never seems especially surprised. Or as happy as she should be.

            Sam slips his loafers back on and stands up. Leaning against the doorjamb of the kitchen, he watches Danielle move around the table and counters. Petite. Quick. Domesticated. She wears a skirt that swirls around her ankles. Sam remembers when she used to wear cutoffs so short they barely covered her assets. She doesn’t dress like that anymore. Not since before her son was born.

            “Adam wants me to take him flying,” Sam says to the back of her head. “Okay with you?” He hopes she doesn’t notice how his voice cracks.

            Without turning around, Danielle continues her chores. She shrugs. “Sure.”

            “Danny wouldn’t care?” he asks. Sam is very careful to get everything right. To make her an accomplice.

            She stops wiping the stove and turns to face him. “Danny wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t care. Why don’t you go on and do whatever you want to.” Sarcasm laces her tone.     

            Even though Danielle is Sam’s niece, because he was a late child himself, he’s only three years older than she is. They grew up together, closer than he and her mother ever were. The best of friends. Buddies. Till six years ago. They had been alone in the house, watching a rowdy comedy on TV about infidelity. Sitting close on the couch. Drinking beer. His hand brushed her thigh. He laughed. Made a joke of it. She let slip the merest sliver of a smile. He moved closer. She watched him sidelong. He made a stupid suggestion. She laughed. He got serious. She was reluctant. He insisted. She hesitated. He persisted.

            She gave in.

            When the doctor told her a couple of months later that she was pregnant, Sam knew she would have had the baby aborted, but she had no money for the operation. She would have run away, but had nowhere to go. She would have killed Sam, but when she confronted him with a steak knife in her hand, all she could do was burst into tears. She spent hours pleading with Sam never to tell anyone. Not that he would have, anyway. He was as mortified as she was. Still, she made him promise not to tell. Made him swear by everything he held sacred. Which, he didn’t tell her, wasn’t much.

            She plotted. She schemed. She connived. Finally, she convinced the captain of the high-school football team to marry her. Someone not apt to care overly when his baby was born a couple of months premature.

            Sam knows, though, that she still has never forgiven either him or their son.     

            “Do whatever you want to,” Danielle says to Sam again. She stares at him. Frowns at him. Dares a reply. For a moment, Sam’s heart stutters at her words, but then he sees she has no idea the license she’s just given him, and he breathes again.

            He turns and goes back into the living room.

*

            Sam has spent a lot of time working on his car. On his pride and joy. On his baby. His 1941 Cadillac convertible. The white machine glides like a ghost above the asphalt, silent, weightless. It does on four wheels what planes do on two wings. Its every response feels like that of a living creature. The slightest pressure of his foot moves it. The lightest caress of his hand directs it. A living thing. A breathing thing. A breathtaking thing. Its red leather shines. Its steel hide gleams. Fire of the sun dances on its chrome, on its silver.

            With the top down, the wind wrangles Adam’s brown hair. The boy sits tall in his seat, trying to lift his chin as high as he can. The yellow sun shines on his face. His face red with life. Nothing but blue sky above him. “Why would anyone,” he asks, “have a car with a roof?”

            Sam shakes his head. Shrugs his shoulders. “My question exactly.”

            Sam smiles at Adam. “Where would you like to go today?” he asks the boy. “Where would you like to fly to?”     

            Adam stares ahead, watching the road. They pass a billboard for the Blue Moon Café, sporting a huge painting of the full moon. The boy asks, “Can we go there?”

            “A restaurant?” asks Sam. Such a staid choice surprises him. Disappoints him. It seems so ... fettered. Fettered is a good word for how it feels.

            “No,” Adam says. “The moon.”

            Sam barks a curt laugh, a relieved laugh, but shakes his head. “Not and have you back in time for supper.” Not that he plans on having the boy back for supper, anyway.

            Without hesitation, the boy says, “Africa, then.”

            “How about Barnesville?” counters Sam. “Would that be far enough? We could fly over there and spend the day at the livestock show. You could see horses and cows and pigs and goats. How would that be?”

            “Alligators? Tigers?”

            “Sorry.” Sam shakes his head. “Cows. Horses. That’s the best I can do. Pigs. Goats.”

            “I want to see a tiger,” the boy insists.

            “We could fly over to Memphis and go to the zoo. They have tigers there.”

            The boy frowns. “I don’t want to see a tiger in a cage,” he says. “I want to see a tiger that could jump on a man and eat him up.”     

            Surprise spreads across Sam’s face in a flush. “Where’d you get an idea like that?”

            Adam doesn’t answer, though. He stares silently at the houses they are passing. At houses he always passes every time he comes into town.

            The county road abruptly mutates into a city street. Streets in this neighborhood are lined with large, two-story homes, some over a hundred years old. Columns. Verandas. Each has a lawn shaded by huge oak trees, and a carpet of grass a green so dark it verges on blue. The contrast with the boy’s tiny two-bedroom home on its brown, dry hillside is stark, but several years will pass before Adam realizes what the difference means and how it sets the limits of his life. How the economic strata of his family defines his place in the world. At the moment, he is simply a five-year-old boy riding in the car of his mother’s uncle with the top down and the wind in his face.

            Sam, on the other hand, is a twenty-five year old American male with even less prospect of being happy than the boy. He has no wife or offspring, is no husband or father. All he is, is a fuse burning toward a powder keg.

            Actually, that isn’t as true as Sam’s despondency makes it seem. It’s only half true. He has no wife. He is no husband. What he is, the only thing he is, is a father.

*

            They pull into the gravel lot of the airport, and park next to the Quonset-hut office of McGruggle Enterprises. Dust stirred up by the car, billows around them. Hangs in the still air in a cloud. Makes Sam cough as he walks toward the office. Adam follows. Inside, the air conditioning provides pleasant relief after the morning’s heat and humidity. A smell of motor oil and cigar smoke saturates the atmosphere. Sam loves the smell because to him it’s the smell of flying.

            Sally sits at her desk, the glow of the computer screen lighting her face and her billowing, yellow hair. Her scarlet mouth blazes. Her black-irised eyes are heavily shadowed, even this early on a weekend morning.

            “Hey, doll,” Sam says to her.

            She looks at him with slitted eyes. She’s old enough to be his mother, and usually tells him to treat her with more respect. He usually tells her he will when she deserves it.

            Today she answers him with nothing but a sullen, “Morning.” She smiles at Adam, though, and coos, “Hey, sweetie.” The boy looks down and scuffs his toe.     

            “Where is everybody?” asks Sam. Empty chairs huddle behind cluttered desks. On the walls behind the desks hang calendars, each on a different month. Some from different years. All with curvaceous women in skimpy bathing suits. The one behind Sally’s desk has a muscled young man in a bulging Speedo. “Where’s the boss?” Sam asks. “I want to take a plane out.”

            “All of them are out already,” Sally tells him. “Busy morning. No one will be back for

hours.”

            Sam quirks his mouth. Flying off into the morning sky had been his plan. He hadn’t really thought much beyond that. The sudden change catches him flatfooted. He looks at Adam. “Well, buddy,” he says. “What else you want to do?” He has to ask a five-year-old for instructions.

            Adam says, “I don’t know,” and shrugs, an action that mirrors his mother’s habit so closely it makes Sam’s stomach lurch. For a moment, indecision strikes deep into his galloping heart.

            Sam’s first response to any fear has always been movement. Either horizontal or vertical. It makes no difference to him. Flight is all. Just pure flight. He herds Adam out the door. “See you later, sugar,” he calls to Sally. The closing of the door cuts off her reply B if there is any.      

            Sam and Adam stand for a moment in the swelter of the sunlight, then Sam steps toward the car. He gets behind the wheel and cranks the engine. Adam climbs over the passenger’s door without opening it. At the junction of the airport drive and the highway, Sam pauses. No traffic is approaching from either direction. He can turn right and head back to Danielle’s house, drop off the boy, and spend the rest of the day doing the ordinary things of his life. Can spend the rest of his life doing ordinary days.

            Or he can turn left and head to Memphis or Nashville or any point east. Cross the river. Flight. He can have the boy with him. Now and forever. And he does want the boy with him. He realizes now just how right his decision to keep the boy is. How much having a son adds to his life, how much laughter, how much pride. He wants this feeling of companionship to go on. Forever.

            With a sudden start, he realizes for the first time that what he is doing is a capital crime. He can be put to death for kidnaping. Even if it is his own son. Such a serious consequence came about because of the kidnaping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. When Charles Lindbergh was twenty-five, he flew across the Atlantic Ocean. Solo. Now, here Sam is at that same age, stealing his own son. Sam has never flown across the Atlantic. He has never flown around the world. Maybe, he thinks, he should try that. Maybe he and Adam could find Amelia Earhart on some jungle island in the South Pacific, and the three of them could live out their lives in contented seclusion.     

            He glances left toward the freedom of the road, the sky. Then he looks back to the right, to stability, to a long life, to life-as-a-good-citizen. He can turn either direction. Everything hinges on this decision. Whatever he decides will remake the universe from this point on. It isn’t a matter of making the right choice. Either choice will simply be the choice he makes. But his life, his future hinges on his decision right now. Everything swings. Everything pivots. On this moment. On this Here. This Now.

            He can take Adam, his son in blood, and make the boy his son in fact. Even if it means fending off the law and dying in a hail of bullets.

            But he has to make up his mind.

            Right now.

            Adam squints in the sunlight and asks in a petulant voice, “What are we waiting for?”

            Sam laughs out loud, stomps on the gas, and swings the weightless car to the left, to the east, toward Memphis. Toward freedom and flight. Toward the morning sun burning in his eyes.

* * *