It was all from a list May Lee kept folded in her purse, torn out of the February 1990 issue of Mademoiselle. Sixteen years later, he could still remember the photo of the laughing blond couple in matching denim shirts at the top of that list, and the careful way she unfolded the tearsheet and smoothed it out every time she referenced one of the hints.
Item four on the list: Share new experiences! (Hint: Fear is bonding! Why not try a roller coaster?)
May Lee was scared of heights. Charles was scared of dying in a helicopter crash. So they booked the Lover’s Special, a seventy-five-minute aerial tour of the Grand Canyon departing from Las Vegas that promised majesty, grandeur, and two glasses of champagne apiece. As May Lee stepped into the helicopter, Charles took a picture and then bounded across the tarmac to settle into the bucket seat beside her. In a determined show of affection, he adjusted the straps of his wife’s seat belt and leaned in close to buckle it, but left his own undone so that his shirt wouldn’t rumple. As they flew over the South Rim and caught their first glimpse of the canyon out of the fishbowl windows, Charles took hold of May Lee’s small hand.
“Wow, it’s so pretty! It’s huge!” she said, squeezing his hand.
Charles didn’t answer. Instead, he felt the helicopter sway from side to side like an old-fashioned cradle and wondered if this was one of those daredevil pilots who was going to try to get a rise out of them by pretending he was about to crash. Charles felt the sweat prickle under the rough linen of his Rive Gauche safari shirt and was just about to tap their pilot on the shoulder when the man’s voice broke into their prerecorded tour narration.
“Folks, we seem to be having a problem—”
And then a wild, sick lurch and a screech from the front seat as the pilot—a former Coast Guard sergeant who completely lost hold of his military demeanor—gave up control of the craft. Their helicopter slammed into one of the 270-million-year-old Kaibab Limestone formations, bounced, once, on a ridge, and exploded as it dropped five thousand feet to the floor of the canyon.
Still on the ridge: Charles, saved by his sartoriphilia.
The bounce threw an un-seat-belted Charles against the improperly latched door, flinging him out while slowing his trajectory just enough that he landed with no more force than, say, a fall off a bicycle. Charles experienced the entire event as a flash of heat and steel and noise, accompanied by a gunpowder-and-roses smell so unexpectedly sweet that he was sure he’d open his eyes to find himself in the testing room of one of his factories, a broken vial of rose oil at his feet. Instead, he stood at the edge of death, choking on dust and surprise, wiping mule shit from his shirt, and was instantly flooded with a shameful relief. He wasn’t happy that May Lee was almost certainly gone, but as he looked down on the fireball at the bottom of the grand and glorious canyon, he knew that luck had once again smiled upon Charles Wang.
十二
Vernon, CA
186 Miles
DRIVING SOUTHEAST on two and a half hours of freeways, plus an hour at a U-Haul rental place on Western and Venice, landed the Wangs behind a building in Vernon close to sunset. Covered with a faded mural of giant Aztec women grinding maize under gargantuan stalks of corn, the former tortilla plant was now—or was until last week, at least—one of the three buildings that warehoused the output of Charles’s factories.
He still had the key. In fact, he still had all of his keys, encircling a wide brass ring, each bearing a piece of dark green label tape embossed with a number and a letter. This was the fifth property that he had acquired, after the vast mixing plant in Garden Grove and before the former aircraft hangar next to a thread manufacturer downtown, so he located key 5a (the front door) and 5d (the back door). 5b was for the bathroom and 5c opened the small office inside the warehouse. The letters were assigned depending on Charles’s own migratory patterns: whichever door he opened first received an a, and then onwards through the alphabet, so that each time he revisited a place it also meant retracing that first heady rush of acquisition.
“Dad, what are we doing here?”