Staying Put

In the Sacramento and Las Vegas airports, a person can access the Internet free of charge. In St. Louis that same person has to fork over $7.95 a day. Which, to me, seems kind of pricey, especially compared to "free." And who spends all day in an airport, at least by choice?

Anyway. I left St. Louis this morning and passed through Las Vegas this morning, stopping to let the hopeful off the plane and their counterparts on. I actually did not know I would be stopping in Vegas--I thought the plane would go through Kansas City. These might be important details. I sat in the aisle seat in the hopes of making a quick exit when I finally reached home, and because the plane was full, I had two people sitting next to me. The first to arrive, a short, pudgy woman who I would learn when airborne could down an entire pouch of peanuts in one gulp. Impressive. She never explicitly said she wanted to sit in my row, just kind of grunted when I looked up at her and asked if she wanted the window seat. She shut both window shades right after snapping her seatbelt closed, and soon after liftoff was asleep.

The woman who sat between us must have had a bad night, if not a long weekend. Thin and blond, she wore a gray dress, and shoes patterned with black and white squares and decorated with dull buckles. She carried only a purse and what must have been another dress in a garment bag that she shoved unceremoniously in the overhead storage compartment. She, too, began to doze not long after we took off: her head bobbed up and down a few times; her body did the pre-sleep twitch. And, soon, her head was on my shoulder. Each time I tried to edge away, my other shoulder extended into the aisle and I would be bumped by either someone walking toward the bathroom or one flight attendant or another.

So, I stopped moving away and let her sleep; I read, alternating between Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent (a kind of travelogue) and Don Waters' Desert Gothic (short stories). My friend Tom gave me Waters' book, and the story "What to Do with the Dead" I read while riding Amtrak across Nevada just after last Christmas. It is one of the best stories I have read in a long time. It is also set in Nevada.

As I read Bryson's description of visiting Newport, Rhode Island, the blond woman woke up and tapped me on the shoulder 4 times. (I counted--it was as though she were knocking on the door.) "Where are we?" she asked. I did not know how to answer, but I did not think the obvious "in an airplane" was what she wanted. "We just left Las Vegas," I told her. She looked at me, her thick lips open enough to show white teeth, and seemed to process what I'd told her before mumbling something about Sacramento and going back to sleep. Dozing on and off for the remainder of the flight, she would speak to me once more: "Do you know why it's taking us so long to land?" No, I didn't know. "We're almost there," I said, which caused her to mumble something else about Sacramento.

And then we did land, and she took her purse and her garment bag and followed me off the plane, stepping on my heel with her checkered shoes as she hurried to get into the terminal. "So sorry," she said, though I doubt she knew why.