Ketchum

The boarding pass said HANOVER/FREDERICK MR, and the seat was 23C, and nobody looked at it twice.

That was the first thing. He stood at the gate at New Westminster at a quarter to seven in the morning with three hundred people going to Tulsa on a Saturday, holiday people, business people, a family of six in matching shirts, a man asleep across four seats with his hat over his face, and he held the boarding pass in his hand and waited in the line to show it, the way you were supposed to; and the woman at the desk took it and put it under the light, and it beeped, and she said thank you, sir to the boarding pass, and gave it back, and looked past him at the next person.

He walked down the jet bridge with the pass in his hand, and stopped at the door of the aeroplane, and turned round.

“She didn’t look,” he said.

“Nobody looks at six forty-five,” said Theo, behind him, carrying Marcus’s trombone because Marcus was carrying both their bags. “Nobody looks at anything at six forty-five. That’s the whole point of six forty-five.” He looked at the pass in Frederick’s hand. “Mister Hanover. They’ve made you a mister.”

“I’ve always been a mister. At school.”

“Not on a boarding pass you haven’t. On a boarding pass you’ve had a whole aeroplane.”

---

Row twenty-three had three seats on each side of the aisle, and the four of them had A, B, C and D, so that Frederick was on the aisle and Theo across it, and Felix had the window and Marcus the middle, which Marcus had chosen because he said the middle seat was the most ordinary seat on an aeroplane and if they were going to be ordinary they might as well start.

Row twenty-four, directly behind, was Castellanos and Kimura and a woman from Tulsa with a baby.

Castellanos had said it would be three of them and not more, at the Palace, on Wednesday, in a voice that had made the Private Secretary write it down; and then on Thursday the Household had said two, because two was what the King had asked for, and Castellanos had looked at the ceiling for a long time and said two. He was in a short-sleeved shirt and a sports jacket and the expression of a man who had been told to look like a holidaymaker by people who had never seen one. Kimura was in a T-shirt and jeans and had a paperback, and looked like somebody’s older sister going home, which was apparently what she had decided to look like, and she did it perfectly.

The woman from Tulsa had the window. The baby had Castellanos.

It began before the seatbelt sign went off. The baby, who was about nine months old and very solemn, turned round in its mother’s lap and looked at Castellanos, at the side of his large brown face and his short grey hair and his jacket, for a long time, without blinking; and then it put out one hand and took hold of his ear.

Castellanos did not move.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said the mother. “She does that. She likes ears.”

“Ma’am,” said Castellanos.

He did not take the ear back. He sat in seat 24B for the whole of the climb out of New Westminster, looking straight ahead at the back of Frederick’s seat with a baby holding his ear, and his face did not change at all; and Frederick, who had turned round to look, turned back and put his face in his hands and shook, without any noise, until the seatbelt sign went off.

“Don’t,” said Theo, across the aisle, also shaking. “Don’t look again. If you look again I’ll die.”

He looked again. The baby had both ears now.

---

They came down at Tulsa at ten past nine in the morning, local time, and when the door opened the heat came in.

He had been warned. Mr Vollmer had told him, measure eight, median July temperature, Ketchum a little above it; Dame M had told him; the Private Secretary had sent a single typed page headed Climate that consisted mainly of the word hot in different sentences. He had thought he knew what hot was. He had been to Los Angeles. He had stood on the terrace at Solliden on the hottest day in the history of the island, when the tar on the road to the gate had gone soft.

It came in through the door of the aeroplane at ten past nine in the morning like the door of an oven being opened, and it did not stop at the door. It came down the aisle. It came all the way to row twenty-three and sat down in his lap.

“Ninety-four,” said the pilot, over the speaker, cheerfully. “On its way to a hundred and one. Welcome to Tulsa, folks.”

Theo, across the aisle, said something short in Wisconsindeutsch that Frederick had heard Mrs Hartigan say when she burned the sauerkraut.

---

The hire car was not a pickup.

They had asked for a pickup. All four of them, at the Palace, on Wednesday, in writing, on a separate piece of paper from the list, because Felix said if you went to Oklahoma you went in a pickup with the windows down, he had seen it on television, it was the first thing; and the Household had considered the request for a day and come back with a large grey car with four doors and tinted windows and a smell of new carpet, which Kimura collected from a desk at the airport with a form and a key and drove round to the kerb outside arrivals with the air conditioning on so high that the inside of it was like the inside of a fridge.

“That’s not a pickup,” said Felix, on the kerb, with his bag.

“No,” said Kimura.

“We asked for a pickup.”

“You did,” agreed Kimura. She opened the boot. “Sergeant Castellanos asked for this. You may take it up with Sergeant Castellanos.”

Felix looked at Castellanos, who was standing at the edge of the kerb in the heat in his sports jacket, looking at the airport road and the cars on it and the roofs of the car park and the sky, the way he looked at everything, as if it might at any moment do something.

Felix did not take it up with Sergeant Castellanos.

---

The road went north and east out of Tulsa on a motorway, and after twenty minutes the motorway went through a row of booths and a barrier and a sign, and the car stopped.

“What’s this?” said Frederick.

“The turnpike,” said Kimura, from the driver’s seat. “The motorways here are toll roads. You pay at the booth.” She was reaching into the pocket of her jeans. “It was in the Private Secretary’s notes, under Roads. They were built on tolls in the 1950s because the legislature wouldn’t raise a tax, and the tolls never came off.”

“Can I pay it?”

Kimura stopped with her hand in her pocket and looked at him in the mirror.

“Number two,” said Frederick. “With my own money. I could start now.”

“Have you got any money, sir?”

He thought about it. He put his hands in his pockets, both of them, front and back. There was a boarding pass in one, and a handkerchief in the other, and in the back left one a folded piece of paper that was the Private Secretary’s list of telephone numbers, which he had been told to keep on his person at all times and had, and nothing else.

“No,” he said.

“Then no, sir,” said Kimura, quite kindly, and paid the woman in the booth four pounds sixty, and took the receipt, and put it in the glove box with the form for the car, and the barrier went up.

Behind him Marcus said, very quietly, to Felix, he hasn’t got any money, in the tone in which you might say he hasn’t got any feet; and Felix said of course he hasn’t, he’s the King, what would he buy, and Marcus thought about it and said a pie.

---

They came off the turnpike after an hour at Vinita.

It was the county seat. Mr Vollmer had said so, and had shown it on the map, a town at the crossing of roads with a grid of streets much bigger than Ketchum’s, fourteen miles away; and they came off the turnpike at the junction and went through it, slowly, on the main street, and Frederick looked at it out of the window with his face close to the glass because the glass was the only cool thing in the world.

A water tower, silver, on legs, with the town’s name on it in black. A courthouse, red brick, square, with a clock in a little tower that said twenty to eleven and was wrong. Shops along the main street with awnings out against the sun and their names painted on the glass. A feed store. A bank on a corner, stone, very old for something so small, with columns. A church, and another church, and another. A diner with a sign shaped like a cup of coffee. A pawn shop with bicycles chained in a row outside it, five of them, in the sun, red and blue and one silver, and a hand-lettered card in the window that said BIKES.

“There,” said Frederick.

“What?”

“Bikes.” He turned in his seat to keep looking at them as they went past. “In the pawn shop. On the left. Five of them.”

“Number two,” said Theo.

“Number two.”

“You haven’t got any money,” said Marcus, kindly.

“I’ll get some.”

“How?”

Frederick turned back round in his seat.

“Number four,” he said.

Theo looked at him across Felix, who was in the middle now, with a long slow look that Frederick had seen before, on the landing at the Hartigans’ flat and in the lunch hall at Ellicott and across a great many tables; the look of somebody watching a thing begin and being, against his better judgement, completely delighted.

“Right,” said Theo. “So. Job, then bike, then bus. In that order.” He held up three fingers and counted them off. “You’ve got it backwards. You can’t get a job without getting there, you can’t get there without a bus, and you can’t get a bike without the job.”

“Then the bus first.”

“You haven’t got any money for the bus.”

Frederick opened his mouth, and shut it again.

In the front seat Kimura, who had been driving in silence with both hands on the wheel at ten to two, made a very small sound, and when Frederick looked in the mirror her face was perfectly straight, and her eyes were not.

---

South of Vinita the country changed.

It had been flat round Tulsa, and flat on the turnpike, open and brown and wide, with the grass burnt pale in the fields and the trees standing in ones and twos along the fence lines with their shade pooled under them like water; and south of Vinita, on the smaller road, it began to roll. Gently. Up and down, low hills, and more trees, oak and something else he did not know, darker, and the fields smaller, with cattle in them standing under the trees in the heat, all facing the same way, not moving, as though somebody had arranged them.

And then the road came over a rise, and there was water.

He saw it between the trees first, a flash, blue, very bright, and then the trees opened and it was there on the left, below the road, going away. Not a lake the way he knew lakes, round, with a far shore. A lake that went off in every direction at once, between the hills, in long arms and coves and inlets, one behind another, so that wherever you looked there was more of it round the next hill, blue and still and shining in the noon sun, with the wooded hills going down into it on every side and docks along the edges and boats tied up at the docks and a white speedboat out in the middle of one arm drawing a long white line behind it on the blue.

It was Mr Vollmer’s map. The glove with all the fingers spread. Except that the map had been pale blue on white, and this was blue on green, and the light came off it so bright that it hurt.

“Oh,” said Marcus.

Nobody else said anything. Kimura slowed the car a little, without being asked.

Frederick looked at the water going away between the hills and thought, without meaning to, of a town under it. Forty feet down. A street, a church, a post office, a railway that came and went. Under all that bright blue, where nobody lived.

---

The sign was on the right, at the edge of town, where the trees stopped and the first house began.

It was a plain green sign, a road sign, the kind every town in the Realm had, on two posts. KETCHUM. And under the name, in white, the number: POP. 471. And under that, smaller, the same name again in another script, a script he had seen at school once, in a book, letters that looked like a cross between the letters he knew and something else entirely, curling and squared at once; the Cherokee syllabary, because this was the Nation’s land, and on the Nation’s land the Nation’s language went on the signs as of right.

Kimura stopped the car beside it. Nobody had asked her to. She stopped, and sat with both hands on the wheel, and did not say anything.

They looked at it.

Four hundred and seventy-one. He had read the number in the blue report on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, and on the aeroplane, and it had been a number, a measure, a row on Mr Vollmer’s card. Now it was on a green sign at the edge of a town in a hundred and one degrees, under a sky so big and pale it looked bleached, and beyond the sign the road went on, past a house with a porch and a flag and a dog asleep in the shade of a pickup truck, a real one, red, with the windows down; and past that, a church, white, small, with a square tower; and past that, at the bottom of the slope, the water.

“Four hundred and seventy-one,” said Theo, quietly. “Four hundred and seventy-five.”

Frederick looked at him.

“For seven weeks,” said Theo. “Counting us. Four hundred and seventy-seven with the detail.” He looked at the sign. “We’re about one per cent of the town.”

“Is that ordinary?”

Theo thought about it.

“I’d have to ask Mr Vollmer,” he said.

Behind them, in the back, Felix had his face against the window, looking past the sign at the red pickup with the windows down and the dog asleep in its shade; and Marcus had his hands between his knees and was looking at the white church; and in the front seat Castellanos had turned round, all the way, which he never did, and was looking not at the sign or the town or the water, but at the four of them in the back, one after another, with an expression Frederick had not seen on his face before and could not read.

“Sergeant?” said Frederick.

Castellanos looked at him for a moment longer.

“Nothing, sir,” he said. He turned back round. “Mrs Sixkiller is expecting you at the farmhouse at one. It’s two miles past the town. She said not to be late, because she has a funeral at two.”

“Whose?”

“She didn’t say, sir.” Castellanos looked through the windscreen at the road going down past the church to the water. “She said she’d show us the well first.”

Kimura took her hands off the wheel, and put them back on, and drove into Ketchum.