Finally, out or curiosity rather than cruelty, Halloway shouted out the last name. ‘One more, Olds! What about -, In the absence of the car, he pointed at random. ‘- Oldsmobile!’
Immediately Halloway regretted the prank. Too late, he saw the rictus on Olds’ face. Sitting behind the wheel of a white Galaxie, he began to pound the controls, angry with the car when it failed to start on its own. When Halloway reached him he had slumped back and was already moving into a deep fugue, mouth agape, the blood in his face making a livid lace-work of the scars. On the seat beside him, like some hyper-excited small animal, his right hand flicked out a desperate message on the calculator.
‘Olds… it doesn’t matter!’
Halloway pulled open the door and tried to calm him. Bizarre messages glimmered among the headlamps as he sank into unconsciousness, the engines of a hundred cars throbbing around him in the exhaustfilled air.
Teach me to fly!
Within an hour Olds had recovered. Sitting back on a car seat beside the barbecue, he touched his face and scalp, feeling the tracery of scars as if making sure that the jigsaw was once again in place. After dragging him to the elevator and taking him back to his lair, Halloway had moved among the cars, switching off the engines one by one. When the building was silent again he leaned against the balustrade, looking out at the distant towers of the city. Despite the moss-covered airliners by the terminal buildings, Halloway noticed that he was no longer thinking of his quest for his parents’ apartment. Already the elements of a far grander scheme were forming in his mind.
They sat together in the dusk, listening to the steady beat of the generator on the roof, their faces lit by the glow of the barbecue.
With the same innocent guile that he used on his grandfather, Halloway said: ‘Olds, you’re a genius with cars. But can you start up anything else?’
Olds nodded soberly at Halloway, not taken in by him for a moment. He inspected his slim hands, as if resigned to the talents multiplying from his fingertips.
Anything. I can make anything work.
‘I believe you, Olds. We’ll find my sailplane and you can put an engine and propeller on it. Then I’ll teach you how to fly.’
Early the next morning Olds and Halloway set off together from the airport. Olds selected, apparently at random, another breakdown vehicle from his stable of trucks and pick-ups on the first floor of the car park. Into the rear section, where a generator was bolted to the deck, he slung a leather tool-case and reels of power cable. He had recovered from his seizure of the previous afternoon. Something about the prospect of flying had given him back his self-confidence. As they left the airport, circling the pyramid of radiator grilles, he flicked a series of questions at Halloway.
What engine size? How many horse-power?
‘I can’t remember,’ Halloway admitted. Already he was having to pretend that he had flown a powered craft. ‘Big enough to drive a propeller. The size of this truck’s?’
Far too heavy. I’ll find an aero-engine.
They crossed the river and headed northwards through the city. At intervals Olds would check his fuel gauge, stop the truck in the centre of the street and leap out with a siphon hose. He moved around, shaking the parked cars and listening to the swish of fuel.
Once, while Olds was sucking away at his hose, Halloway strolled across the sidewalk to a small bar. A juke-box stood in the doorway, thick dust covering the extravagant plastic front. Halloway pressed the buttons at random, and then wandered off along the street.
When he returned five minutes later Olds had disappeared. The truck stood in the roadway, the engine of the power generator ticking over smoothly. The tool-bag had gone, and cables ran from the generator across the sidewalk.
‘Olds! Let’s go!’
Then he heard music coming from the bar. There was a jangle of coarse sound, a rapid beat of drums and guitars, and a rock-and-roll singer’s voice bellowed across the empty street.
When he reached the bar he found Olds crouched behind the juke-box, tool-kit open on the floor. Like a leather carpetbag fitted with hundreds of pockets, it seemed to contain every tool ever devised. Olds’ arms were deep inside the entrails of the machine, hooking up a series of extension leads to a transformer.
When Halloway put his hands to his ears Olds switched off. He winked at Halloway.
That’s only a beginning.
He was as good as his word. As they pressed on down the endless avenues lined with office-blocks, hotels and department-stores, Olds would stop the truck, seize his tool-kit and unwind his cables across the street. In rapid succession he started up three pintables in an amusement arcade, a line of washing machines in a launderette, a telex and two ticker-tapes in the ground-floor office of a commercial business, and a complete appliance range in a home equipment store. As if in rehearsal for some lunatic household, mixers whirred, fan-heaters pumped, vacuum cleaners roared, a dozen other gadgets clattered and whistled.
Watching all this, Halloway was impressed by the casual way Olds turned on these devices. They moved northwards, animating these minuscule portions of the city, leaving behind them these happy nodes of activity.
Confused by the noise and excitement, Halloway sat limply in the truck when they reached the mirror-sheathed office block into which he had crashed. The sailplane lay among the cars, its broken wings stirring in the light air. As Olds moved around it, inspecting the inverted cockpit with his gentle but shrewd eyes, Halloway half-expected him to reassemble the glider with a few waves of his screwdriver.
Olds pointed to the humpbacked cockpit, where the strengthened fuselage frame behind the pilot’s seat formed a platform whose purpose Halloway had never understood.
This is a real aircraft. Designed to take an engine. But you built it to look like a glider?
‘I know,’ Halloway lied. ‘I couldn’t find the right power-plant.’
Olds’ quick hands were exploring the interior of the fuselage.
Runs for control lines. A fuel-tank compartment. It’s well thought out. And room for both of us.
‘What?’ Genuinely surprised, Halloway peered into the cockpit.
Behind the pilot’s bulkhead there’s space for a passenger.
As Olds pointed with the calculator, Halloway stared at what his father clearly designed to be a rear seat. Had his mother and father planned to leave him behind when they flew off? Or perhaps his father had intended to take his son with him, the two of them soaring back to the city together. Puzzled by these discoveries, he noticed Olds watching him in a shrewd but still kindly way. Did Olds really believe that Halloway had designed this powered glider himself? Was he using Halloway in exactly the same way that Halloway was trying to exploit him?
For the time being it hardly mattered. Halloway took the wheel for the return journey to the airport, after they dismantled the glider and lashed the sections to the truck. The power and noise of the engine erased all doubts. Barely controlling his excitement, he tried to hold down their speed as they raced through the streets.
‘Olds! Watch this!’
They crossed a section of the roadway planted with poppies, the vivid but sinister flowers extending in front of them for three hundred yards. The bumper of the truck scythed through the flowers, and a dense cloud of petals billowed into the air, staining the sky like a miniature sunset. Halloway turned and made a second run through the poppies, almost standing at the wheel as they hurtled through the whirling petals.
As they approached the centre of the city Halloway drove around the side-streets, hunting out any other of these floral tracts planted here in the broken asphalt by some aberrant gardener. Soon millions of leaves were drifting through the coloured air. There were white streets where they found daisies, yellow avenues filled with a mist of crushed buttercups, blue boulevards which wept a rain of forget-me-nots.