Indian Ocean

When Max had been with NASA, there’d been people who specialized in such aftermath, people good at explaining the reasons for a disaster, promising new safety measures, and, by way of canonizing the lost, reassuring America of its continued claim on manifest destiny. But in the end, it really came down to the fact that when someone’s husband and father went from 98 degrees to 15,000 he did it for God and Country. 

Back in ’72, Max had been alone inside the capsule when alarms began going off. The heat shield was disintegrating and all the needles on the temperature gauges had lain down into the red as if to say, Get comfortable, Max, we’re going to die now. And he understood it was all going to end for him, alone inside that steel pill, somewhere over the Indian Ocean. But he also knew he’d get a flag on his coffin, and a funeral to befit someone lost while taking the big ride. That was the peace of mind public funding bought you. But with commercial space companies like Vector Intergalactic you were risking it all for the greater greed, for private science, and ultimately, for some rich prick like Carlton Veck.

“Maybe we should arrange a parade for the coffins,” Max said, wincing at the way he’d worded the idea. His head felt foggy, muddled by the morning’s tragic news, he supposed, though he’d run out of bourbon the night before and the half-bottle of cooking sherry he’d drunk instead kept him up all night with a rotten gut.

“A parade?” Mr. Veck finally looked up from his desk, a slab of polished granite full of computer screens and sterling silver replicas of the man’s racing yachts. One of these boats had won the America’s Cup the previous year, before sinking on its victory tour. Veck had hired treasure hunters to find and raise the seventy-million-dollar vessel, and the whole ordeal was being filmed for a documentary to be played on the man’s cable network, VectorChannel.

“A funeral procession is what I mean,” Max said. “But if you make it like a parade, with ticker-tape confetti and all, then it’ll feel more triumphant than tragic.” 

“Confetti?” The billionaire turned away to frown at one of his computer screens. 

Max came around the desk to look too. A line of state troopers bushwhacked across an empty pasture. The banner at the bottom of the screen read: SpacePlane Breaks Up Over Eastern Montana: Three “VectorNauts” Presumed Dead.

“So, you want me to go to Miles City?” Max asked.

“As soon as possible,” Veck said. “I need you to settle those people down. I don’t want to see them on TV doing interviews.”

“What should I tell them?”

The billionaire shrugged. “Tell them we’ll pay for a new shed.”

“I believe the debris landed on a barn.”

“Right,” said Veck, squinting at the screen. “Tell them I’ll buy a new cow too.” The heli-cam zoomed in on one of the troopers who’d begun waving his arms. “But you’ve got to use that astronaut charm, Max. Be their friend for the weekend.”

Max thought, again, of the three men who’d burned up in the atmosphere that morning. He imagined all the needles on the dials lying down for them just before the end. “When we lost the Apollo I astronauts in sixty-seven,” Max said, “there was a funeral procession to Arlington Cemetery. Some people actually threw tickertape.” 

“Again with the confetti, Max?” The line of troopers on Veck’s screen huddled around a dark spot in the prairie grass. The camera tried to zoom in on something—was it a foot? 

“These weren’t heroes, Max. One of them was the CFO of VectorAde. The Asian guy won a sweepstakes to take that ride. I can’t drive their coffins down Fifth Avenue. What I need is a parade of lawyers.”

* * *

At one time, when he’d first asked Max to come work for Vector’s then-developmental space program, Carlton Veck had been charming. “Think of it as an emeritus position,” he’d said, “for all you’ve done for humanity.” When NASA ended manned spaceflight, Veck started hiring away the physicists and aerospace techs. And by the time he came to Max, Vector Intergalactic was already putting specialized craft into the upper atmosphere. The newspapers were reporting that the “SpacePlane,” with some further modifications, might simply steer itself a little higher, and by doing so, leave the atmosphere entirely. 

When Veck’s private jet touched down at Custer County Airport, the billionaire’s personal assistant walked Max down onto the tarmac, handed him a dossier marked Yount Farm Debris Site, then promptly re-boarded the plane. The ground crew was still coming out to meet the Cessna for refueling and safety check, when Veck waved them off from the cockpit, and peeled back down the runway.

“What the hell’s he think he’s doing?” asked a mechanic in an orange pinnie. 

The jet whined louder, then hopped into the air, banking hard as it lifted, making a low screaming pass over the airport.

“Have many planes landed today?” Max asked. “With news people on them?”

“A few.” The mechanic’s face curdled remorsefully. “How do you suppose they broke up over Miles City of all places?”

“Hard to say.” Max watched the Cessna bob over the valley, then vanish into the cloud cover. “Back in ’72 I almost came apart over the Indian Ocean.” 

A mystified expression smoothed the mechanic’s face. 

Max gazed into the swallowing cloud canopy, his hangover calcifying around an ancient thought. It wasn’t dying he’d struggled with in those terrible final moments, but the sense of doing so so far from home. In the four decades since, just before relenting to the first drink of the day, he got a sensation of still being in that capsule during the hell of reentry—the weightlessness fleeing his arms, gravity returning to his eyelashes—and an echo of that original terror flooded into the present. 

* * *

Max drove a rental car out to a bed-and-breakfast along the Tongue River. His room had an old tube television, but the circuitry had been removed and someone had constructed a diorama inside—a small painted man on horseback herding cattle across a pasture. It reminded Max of how his father, in his spare time away from the Hamilton Ironworks, had done wildlife portraiture. Every autumn the man camped out in the woods behind their home until a deer came through. He’d shoot it, then pose it in the grass the way he wanted, then record the creature with his paint set. “The key,” his father once said, “is to paint the eyes first, before they cloud over. And the rest before the meat turns.” 

Max stared at the little rancher on his horse, the bored grimace painted, he guessed, with a single hair. Max’s own face felt suddenly heavy, tipping forward to watch his hands panic through the suitcase, before rising, finally, with a flask.

* * *

The Yount Farm was eight miles out of town, along a dry stretch of state highway. Magpies waited on fence posts for roadkill. Beef cattle sunned themselves, oblivious to the falling skies. If, instead of turning off at marker ninety-six, Max had driven another eight or ten miles he’d have come to the area where the police and TV crews were scouring for carnage. No one in the public yet knew of the hunk of charred metal which had landed on Sid Yount’s barn. Everything being found along the scatter line so far was rather small, but this piece was large, some remainder of the fuselage probably, or the engine block. Its recovery would serve a purpose, the way tragic refuse does, pointing to this or that reason for mission failure. Someone would get fired for a sloppy safety check or a forty-cent O-ring would become infamous before being replaced on the next craft with a teflon washer and a twenty-thousand-dollar heat sensor. Carlton Veck would foot the bill just fine. He’d go on television in a few months, pull the failed widget out of his bomber jacket, and make assurances about the new SpacePlane. He’d pause and take a sip of VectorCola, let the camera zoom in on his stubbled jaw, and tell the world what Max already knew.

“I’m going to pilot the next attempt myself,” Veck had said hours earlier on the Cessna. They’d just lifted out of a private airfield east of Los Angeles and swept north over the Nevada desert. Veck had sent his co-pilot to the back so Max could sit up front, and all Max could think was how preposterous—this billionaire with a class-C pilot’s license holding the controls while a retired Navy fighter pilot and an astronaut took turns riding shotgun. But then Veck had revealed his intention to ride the next craft, and Max realized that, beyond all the cartoonish wealth, was a man in possession of the same myopic ambition that had once fueled NASA’s own devotion to manned spaceflight. 

As Max came up the long dirt driveway, a middle-aged farmer in camel-colored workpants came down off the porch. Behind him, a woman held back a springer spaniel. Fifty yards beyond the house, Max could see the barn, a hole in its roof.

“Mr. Yount, I’m Max Doss.”

The farmer squinted into the rental car, as if looking for more people. “Space,” he said, running his hand through his hair, “come to my house.”

“That’s right,” said Max, “though I’ve been back on Earth for decades.”

The man glanced back at the hole in his barn. “Beg your pardon?”

“Oh, you’re talking about the debris,” Max said. “Sure, it’s unusual. In fact, I think it’s a first, a piece this size actually damaging someone’s property.”

“Our milk cow was crushed,” the man said. “Beyond salvage even.”

“Salvage?”

Mr. Yount nodded. “With that kind of trauma butchering can’t save much.”

The woman on the porch cleared her throat. “Tell him about Buzz, dear.”

“Buzz?” Max asked.

“Our boy,” Yount said, “his name is Buzz.”

“After the astronaut?”

“After the fact he hums all day long,” Yount said. “Buzz isn’t like other kids.”

Max looked at the woman on the porch. 

“Our son hasn’t come home yet,” she explained.

“We haven’t seen him,” her husband added, “since that junk killed Tanya.” 

“Tanya?” Max asked.

“Our Guernsey,” Yount said. “She’s still in the barn if you’d like to see.”

“But you’re saying your son is missing too?” Max opened the dossier, leafing back through the pages which had made no mention of a missing child, or even that a child existed.

“We’re hoping Buzzer just ran off. He does that sometimes, if he gets spooked.” Yount looked up at the sky. “Is there a lot of this falling junk?”

Max began to explain the extreme unlikelihood of debris falling on a person, but with that hole in their barn they knew better from experience. It reminded him of how the engineers treated him after he’d come back. Before you rode the rocket you were just another chimp they were trying to put into orbit, but once the eggheads had watched Navy divers fish you out of the ocean, something changed. Either you’d seen the curvature of the Earth or you hadn’t. Certainly no one pulled the mathematicians aside on launch day to distribute suicide pills. He’d been thinking of those pills recently, of how the mission supervisor came into his bunkroom, handed him that vile, and said, “If the very worst should befall the mission.” But he couldn’t recall ever giving the pills back, and this nagged him lately, all night sometimes, as if, in looking around the house, perhaps in the old boxes full of memorabilia, he might discover that little glass tube.

Yount paused at the barn door, laid his hand on the latch, and swallowed. 

“You know,” said Max, “my son used to run away too.”

“Pardon?”

Max felt himself floating, then understood again that his feet were on the ground in Miles City, Montana, a weathered farm couple waiting for him to get back on topic. 

Yount drew open the big wooden door and gestured—as if a gesture were needed—to where a desk-sized hunk of blackened aircraft aluminum lay in a mess of blood and straw. It had pulverized the front half of the cow. Bone chips lay about. Tubes of viscera, instantaneously lopped and cauterized. The back half of the creature had been dragged against a wall of hay bales where Max could see evidence of Mr. Yount’s attempt at salvage. It seemed assured that Carlton Veck would get discretion from these people, that they were too modest not to grant it.  

But then the farmer toed a sliver of bone and said, “Tanya gave us milk every morning, without fail.” 

“Mr. Veck is prepared to take care of all the damages,” Max said.

“Our boy is missing, Mr. Doss.” Yount’s wife crunched up behind them in the gravel. “Does Mr. Veck think he can take care of that too?”

* * *

As Max sped back down the rural highway, he held his cell phone to his ear. 

“I don’t understand,” Veck said, “are they suggesting the kid’s disappearance is connected somehow?” 

“I’m just saying it’ll be easier to settle with them after the kid shows up again.”

“I can’t have you out there all week, Max. After you finish with this I need you to sell some confidence to the morning shows.”

“I thought you were doing the TV stuff.”

“The lawyers are saying I should lay low until they get the three families to sign some additional releases. I need you to take the punches for a while, Astro.”

Max pulled into the lot behind the bed-and-breakfast and walked up the back stairway into his room which was filling with grim, late-afternoon light. The ranch diorama, bright and handsome at noontime, had turned downtrodden, its lone rider too far from home too late in the day. He leaned in close to take in again the perfect detailing. It wasn’t even art, but a real thing in and of itself, the way a model train isn’t an interpretation but an actual train done small. 

As a boy, Max had made model aircraft, obsessing over them for entire weekends at his bedroom desk, his concentration broken only by the sudden crack of his father’s Remington 30/30. He remembered running out into the woods behind their house, finding the dead deer, already posed, coming slowly back to life on his father’s easel. Max never learned how to hunt, nor to paint. In return, his father hadn’t understood his son’s career. He’d acted proud about it—the Air Force decorations, the NASA fame—but he never quit saying things like, “Once you’ve traveled in space you’ll never come home again.”  

Max showered and shaved, pausing to wonder at the quirky old faucets, the pull-chain toilet. When he’d dressed himself, he went downstairs again where a young couple was sharing a couch adjacent the host and hostess. The symmetry startled him at first, the two couples, both brown-haired and primly dressed. Only the young wife stood out, bloated and ruddy with child. They paused at Max’s sudden appearance, then the pregnant girl, turning back to the proprietors, said, “But God, if I went for a hike I’d be afraid of what I might find on the ground out there.”

The host stood and moved toward Max. “Mr. Doss,” he said, “can I get you something to drink?”

“No thank you,” said Max, then, “Yes. Anything. Whiskey.”

The man swept past the fireplace and scrambled some bottles on the buffet. The windows were going dark now, the big orange fire sucking the light out of the greater world and feeding it into that room.

The host returned with an amber, iceless glass. Max put it to his lips, drank, and remembered. What did it mean to spend all one’s time remembering? Even this episode of action in an otherwise toothless emeritus life wasn’t enough to keep him from constant reflection—thoughts of deer portraits and confettied skies, his little boy’s face pulling up in the back seat of a squad car. Max blamed himself for Junior’s flights—the constant absence, the drinking, the time his son came home early from school to find a flight attendant in his mother’s bathrobe. Denise had been right to leave him. The boy had just been trying to show her how to do it.

“Mr. Doss?” the host said loudly, “I asked what brings you to Miles City?”

Max lowered the glass from his face and the room came back into focus. “Do you know the Yount family?” 

The man shook his head. “For once in my life, Miles City doesn’t seem so tiny!”

“I think they keep to themselves,” Max said. “Wheat farmers, down Route 30.”

“Oh sure, the Younts.” The man seemed momentarily crushed, as if the smallness of Miles City were finally too much. But then his face lifted, and he asked, “Are they friends of yours?”

* * *

Outside again, the evening sky was brighter than it’d appeared from indoors, a deep, unblemished blue on the verge of something darker. Beneath it, the desolate ranchland of Eastern Montana worried over more falling bodies, more super-heated debris. The last time he’d run away, Max Junior had ended up in just such a place, but even farther north. “Because Canada doesn’t have a space program,” Denise had joked at the time. This must’ve been 1987. By then, Max’s wife spoke to him with nothing but spite and sarcasm. She’d joined a feminist book club, took self-defense classes. She traveled frequently, alone or with the boy. Divorce was on their minds already, if not their lips. Max had buried himself in an ill-conceived space-themed restaurant. When Denise was out of town, he brought waitresses back to the house and did their drugs with them. One morning that year, the phone rang and the new girl rolled out of Max’s bed without thinking and answered it. She didn’t know what she was doing. Or perhaps she didn’t know what he was doing. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, pressing the receiver against her chest, “I’m so, so sorry.” Max took the phone from her, trying to calm her with a smile. It’s okay, he’d wanted to tell her. It’d only been a matter of time before Denise found out. He finally put the phone to his ear, but the voice on the other end belonged to a man, an officer with the 89th Mounted Division out of Calgary, explaining that Max Junior had been found dead in a field in Southern Ontario.  

“Mr. Doss?” Mrs. Yount stood in her doorway, squinting past him. 

Max turned around to see that he’d parked his rental on their front lawn. He couldn’t recall any part of the drive from the bed-and-breakfast. 

“Did you forget something, Mr. Doss?”

“Your son,” Max said. “Is he home yet? I can’t stop thinking about him.”

Deeper inside, her husband asked who it was. 

“Come in,” she said. “We’re just sitting down to supper.”

Inside, the light bulbs suffered under lampshades clotted with unbleached linen. The dark paneled walls made shadows of themselves. Mrs. Yount put out an extra place setting and they sat down as her husband said grace. 

“…and protect Buzzer, dear Lord, and return him safely to us. Amen.” 

“Have you contacted the police?” Max asked.

Yount snorted. “They’re too busy shoveling those astronauts into plastic bags.”

“Sidney, please.” The woman took Max’s plate and spooned chipped beef over egg noodles. “Buzzer did this last year when the kitchen caught fire. He gets spooked, but he always comes back.”

Max lifted a forkful of beef, holding it in the air as he spoke. “I’m no lawyer, but it’s probably worth your while to ask for some extra money from my boss. When your boy comes back, I mean. For the pain and suffering.”

Yount’s first bite stalled before it got to his mouth. He put his fork down noisily. “You forget yourself, Mr. Doss.”

“Pardon?” Max said.

The farmer’s face hardened. “You’re forgetting yourself, mister.”

Max looked to the man’s wife for explanation.

“Just be our guest, Mr. Doss,” she said softly. “There’s no need to give advice.”

Max turned back to her husband, the last syllable still shaping the man’s mouth. But Max couldn’t forget enough of it, not permanently. Sometimes at night, just before nodding off, when the whiskey had finally, temporarily unwritten the record of the years since liftoff, he’d wonder if maybe he had burned up during reentry and this was all some erroneous flight of the mind in the final moment of existence.

“Mr. Doss?” Yount’s wife reached out to touch Max’s shoulder.

Max put down his fork and took hold of the table. 

“Mr. Doss, are you alright?”

“The beef,” said her husband. “Shit, Clara. Something’s wrong with the beef.”

Max tipped his face forward, pulling air into his chest. The food did smell vaguely chemical. “I’m fine,” he managed, and this was becoming the truth, the dizziness receding now. “I’m fine. I’m fine. What was it we were talking about?”

Yount looked at his dinner skeptically. 

His wife stared at Max. 

“We were talking about your son,” Max said. “Weren’t we?”

The farmer teased a piece of meat onto the broadside of his knife. “Could the space junk have turned Tanya radioactive?”

“Sidney, please. The meat is fine.” She forked a big first bite into her mouth. “What about your boy, Mr. Doss. How did you get him to stop running away?” Clara chewed and waited. “Mr. Doss?”

Max lifted a forkful to his nose.

Clara spat into her napkin. 

Yount shoved his plate away. “Sweet Hell, Clara, it is radioactive.”

Max sniffed his fork again to be sure. “Actually,” he said, “it’s liquid hydrogen. It’s rocket fuel.”

Clara left the room. A moment later she could be heard retching in the bathroom, then sobbing. Her child was missing. Max understood. If she came back into the kitchen, he resolved to tell her that before Max Junior disappeared forever he was returned to the family safely many, many times. But her sobbing tailed off and she still didn’t reappear. Finally, Max turned to Mr. Yount, whose eyes still bore down upon the toxic dinner.

“Denise insisted it would pass,” Max said. “Like terrible twos or bed wetting. But my son kept running away, farther each time. Once, he even got himself on an airplane, without a ticket…”

The farmer finally looked up.

“…Junior ended up in Florida that time,” Max said. “All the way from Seattle. Can you believe that?”

Yount still seemed submerged in shock, as if, in that ruined meal, he were finally coming to terms with the disappearance of his boy, the death of his best milk cow, and the trillion-to-one chance of a space craft landing on his barn. But then, slowly, the man reanimated, blinking his way out of the madness of such grievous improbability, and his voice started up. 

“It’s how we survive out here,” Yount said, waving his hand over the pile of chipped beef. “When you hit something in the road, if it doesn’t kill you, you load it into the truck and bring it home.”

“Salvage,” Max said. “I wish I understood better.” 

“Sure,” the man said, easing back against his chair, his voice softening, “but space is your thing. I bet you know a lot about it.” Yount’s face momentarily brightened, and Max wondered if perhaps the farmer was finally putting it together, that he had an American icon in his kitchen, that somewhere deep in the past this dinner guest had ridden in an open car with a city’s worth of tickertape clotting the air. They felt suddenly memorable again—the years since those terrible seconds blazing back down through the atmosphere—and Max could feel the promise of a safe touchdown blooming in his chest, home again on planet Earth. 

* * *

The time Junior made it to Florida, Max had traveled alone to retrieve the boy, then fifteen. This was 1983. But instead of heading home right away, they rented a car and drove to Cape Canaveral together. At the Kennedy Space Center, they took the off-limits tour, ate bologna sandwiches beneath the fried and rusted shuttle moorings of Apollo 13.

“I know it’s tough having an astronaut for a father,” Max said.

“It is?”

“Because every kid wants to be me.”

“Not anymore,” the boy said. “Now everybody wants to be in a rock band.” 

“What I’m saying is, you don’t have to be an astronaut.”

The boy shrugged. “I don’t want to be one.”

Max looked at the hangar where the new space shuttle lived. “What, you want to be in a rock band too?”

“I think I’d like to live on a farm,” Junior said. 

“Farming’s hard work.”

“I don’t want to be a farmer. I just want to live on a farm.”

Then a trolley full of tourists came up to see the moorings and Max signed all their brochures. An older man told a story of seeing him in a parade in New York in the seventies with a girl on each arm.

“That about sums up my days since,” Max said, and the little crowd of sunburnt out-of-towners erupted with laughter.

After that, Max Junior didn’t speak. The long car ride. The longer plane. He didn’t say much to his father for the rest of high school. Max gathered updates through Denise, mother and son having grown suddenly so close. They made plans for the boy without Max in the room—for a trip to Walden Pond, a summer internship painting sets for a dinner theater, art school in San Francisco. Junior even began going by his middle name, Charles, suddenly his grandfather’s namesake.

“You wanna paint deer?” Max said to the boy years later. “Is that it?” It was graduation day, hours into the night following. A bunch of Junior’s friends were strewn about the patio. A boy in a heavy braided poncho was drinking straight from a bottle of wine that Ronald Reagan had given Max. All evening, he’d been feeling reclusive and drunk, but suddenly Max was on his feet, standing amidst his son’s deadbeat comrades, shouting. “If that’s all you want,” he spat, putting his finger within an inch of his son’s nose, “then I don’t care. Go paint fucking deer.”

A few days later, Junior disappeared again. He got on the Empire Builder to Havre, Montana, then hitched into Canada where he fell in with some hippies on a communal farm. He lived there for three seasons until a hit of LSD tore open his heart and he died facedown in a field of marijuana. 

* * *

It was after nine o’clock when Max got back to the bed-and-breakfast. The host was sitting at his desk in the little office off the foyer, reading a novel, a police scanner murmuring beside.

“Is there even any crime around here?” 

The man clapped the book shut. “I’m thinking of starting a syndicate.”

Max stood a moment longer in the foyer, unsure of what to do with himself in a bed-and-breakfast after hours. 

“Mr. Doss, is everything alright?”

“Why do people keep asking me that?”

“You’re fine then.”

Max steadied himself against the doorjamb. “Can I ask you a question?”

The man clicked off the scanner.

“What’s the allure of this place?” Max asked.

“You mean this house or this town?”

Max shrugged. “They’re both so old fashioned.”

The man touched his chin thoughtfully.

“I’m all about the future,” Max said. “I was an astronaut, you know.” 

“Yes, I know.”

“You do?” 

“Sure,” the man said. “Everybody knows.” 

“The Younts don’t.” 

“I’m sure they were just being polite.” Then he looked at Max like he knew something, like he knew everything—the gifted childhood, the moody unmotivated father, the Air Force decorations, the ascent to NASA stardom, the parades and hotel girls, the twenty-eight days drying out at Sierra Tuscon, the relapses, the failed marriage, the failed restaurant, and of course Max Junior, Canadian pot farmer dead at age nineteen. The Yount’s little boy came to mind, huddled somewhere in the high grasses, adrift in the deep cold night. Then Max thought again of the Indian Ocean, of coming apart so far from home, and he wondered if those three VectorNauts had understood the chances of fertilizing winter wheat on the high plains. 

* * *

In his room, the little rancher lorded over his darkened field, the weak glow of the alarm clock painting his cattle red. Max tipped back the dregs of his flask. He doubted he could wait until breakfast. He could not wait until breakfast. He walked back downstairs, out into the still Montana night. Pure black and empty, the day’s heat being sucked up into the atmosphere. 

He tore down Route 30, toward the airport, cell phone to his ear. “Send the plane,” he barked onto Carlton Veck’s voicemail. “There’s nothing out here for us. Send the plane and I’ll be ready for the morning shows as soon as you can get me to New York.” His phone beeped. Service had been lost. The satellites couldn’t find him. He looked out onto the claustrophobic little world shaped by his high beams, a bifocal smudge of light in the utter dark of the high plains. How long had it been since he’d looked at the road? Minutes, perhaps much longer. It seemed, without any streetlights or houses or other cars, that he was floating again, alone in that capsule, counting the orbits before gravity should pull him back down.

He blinked and blinked, tried to draw air into his chest. Was he drunk or dying? “Am I alive?” he asked. “Did I even make it?” He watched the highway now without seeing it, without noticing how the headlights were beginning to paint a shape in the road—the furry horizon of a mammal’s haunches, the bony tangle of antlers, the sad-eyed calm of a creature seeing the light.

*