Airplane House

By Greg Martin

My oldest memory is from when I was five. My second oldest memory is also from when I’m five, and they happened on the same day.

My oldest memory is watching as The House was torn down.

My second oldest memory is my new baby brother coming home.

Both, of course, were omens of doom.

The House had stood there for years. I don’t remember it, but with enough prodding, my parents have a few stories to tell about it. The neighbors are pretty much the same.

“They were drug dealers! The entire basement was full of drugs…”

“It’s none of your business, so butt off.”

I got mostly the last answer whenever I’d ask about The House, but occasionally I’d get juicy tidbits like the first three. It was these stories that I lived off of. What fifteen year old doesn’t want to know that they lived across the street from a drug dealer, who had a batch of prostitutes to buy from (in more ways than one!) and if you were in need of it, a little nip’n’tuck could be done for you.

But that ended ten years, three months, two weeks, and five days ago. Because on that fateful day, The House was torn down and Jack came home.

My parents had gone to the hospital. My mother had been huge, blossoming with the surprise that would be my little brother. I had no interest in the matter; all the little kids in the neighborhood were boring and they were pests. I don’t remember this, but my parents make sure to remind me how much I hated the idea of a little brother.

Which, I might add, I still do. Just a lot less.

They were gone, and the babysitter (my aunt) had fallen asleep. I was watching TV, and I heard a noise. What five year old can ignore a noise? So I turned away, looked out the window…

And The House was being torn down. A big ball smashed through the walls. A truck was pushing debris away. Within an hour, my eyes glued to the window, The House was practically history.

I know why that is seared into my memory. Because it was the last moments of my free life, the life before Jack arrived.

But now Jack is sick. He is dying, hairless as the chemotherapy slowly destroys his body. And as I watch him slowly vanish from the world, the plot of The House is being cleared away. The debris is being bulldozed, the overgrown grass trimmed.

I watch it daily, with mild interest. I had grown out of playing in the lot; it had long since become uninteresting. Even Jack had grown tired of it, he was too old for it too. It was just something across the street that mildly interested me.

My mild interest grew when the plane appeared.

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I hadn’t heard about the plane beforehand. Mom and dad say they knew, and thought it would be an interesting addition to the neighborhood, and so hadn’t contested.

Jack was fascinated. He asked to have his bed moved so that he could stare at the airplane while sitting in bed. Mom and dad agreed; they always did.

“I want to be an airplane pilot,” he whispered to me that evening at the dinner table. I ignored him; he wouldn’t make it that long. The doctors all said so.

The next day, when I got home from school, one wing was gone.

“They took it away in a HUGE dumptruck!”

“It was so cool, a whole bunch of people came and they just like, cut it off.”

“I wish you could have seen it!”

I ignored Jack, as I always did. He never noticed, he always kept talking, even if it made him tired. The doctors said he had to reserve his strength; who knew when it would be all gone? It was better that I ignored him.

From that day on, there wasn’t a silent moment. Pieces were removed from the plane, pieces were added. A fence surrounded the yard, a path was built up to the stairs, leading to the door of the plane.

Airplane seats left, big leather couches moved in. Boxes upon boxes replaced old pieces of the plane. And as the airplane became less and less like an airplane, Jack did the same, becoming less and less like himself. He stopped trying to talk to me.

We never saw the man, C. Tranger. He was a mysterious figure, an enigma that owned this airplane across the street.

He had a door built, so that he could walk out onto the remaining wing. We could see it was to be his deck; he put patio furniture on it.

A garage was built, and a driveway led up into it. The door was always closed; no one lived in the plane, not yet.

When Jack turned eleven years, seven months, one week, and two days old, there was silence. Not the normal silence of a weekend, but it was a weekday. I had no school, Jack never had school, so we sat in the living room. Nothing was said; nothing was ever said.

But then a car drove up. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a car. But it drove up the driveway, and then the garage door opened. And the car went into it, closing behind.

Jack said something; I didn’t respond. I was paying attention, wanting to see what C. Tranger looked like.

The side door of the garage opened, and a man stepped out. He looked around, taking in his airplane, and then walked to the door, where we watched him walk up, and in.

C. Tranger had arrived.

And Jack coughed next to me. C. Tranger was joining the neighborhood, and my little brother was leaving it.

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I stopped reading when my name came up. I knew the story; I had given them the story. I had hoped they would talk to C. Tranger. Find out what his first name was, what his story was. Maybe even get a picture of him.

Instead, it was the same stock photo of the airplane house that we had been seeing for months. The caption was even the same, talking about the construction of the “odd” house.

Jack told me he had seen C. Tanger a few times. Said he was an old man, and that he left every morning after I did, and came back every afternoon before I did. He watched that airplane house all the time.

“Can you take me over there? I want to meet him.”

I closed the door behind me, leaving his question floating in the air, where true airplanes should be. Where his spirit would soon be joining them, according to the doctors.

I went over there, the next day. Jack was at an appointment with mom, maybe dad. I didn’t go to appointments anymore, I knew my brother was dying. I didn’t need to be told again and again, like mom and dad. They still hoped that he would live. They still believed.

The grass was green, perfectly watched. C. Tranger was never seen outside, so I assumed he had an automatic sprinkler system installed.

I knocked on the door after climbing the stairs, and he answered. He was an old man, his hair all gray and face full of wrinkles.

“Can I help you?”

I introduced myself, said I was curious about the house. That I lived across the street, and had watched it all.

He smiled, and let me in. “Welcome to my house.”

He told me about how he had flown planes for most of his life. How he had knew that the airplane was his true home. “I never slept well when I wasn’t in a plane,” he explained, gesturing to the elaborate design.

The couches were soft, he served me Coke. I drank as he told his stories, stories of all the places he had flown, all the people he had met, all the storms, everything. It was dark when I next looked towards the window.

And then he spoke of his wife.

“She was beautiful, and was stolen from me too early. She’s the reason I built this house.” I asked why. “She loved airplanes too, she was a stewardess. We both lived on planes, and knew that we wanted to be with them forever.” They couldn’t stay in the air forever, so they saved and saved, and the day before she died, they bought a plane.

And then I told him my story. My cell phone rang at some point, but I ignored it. C. Tranger learned about my mom, my dad, my grades, my friends at school, the person I wanted to be my Valentine’s, and then I told him of Jack.

“He was born the day they tore down The House,” I said. He nodded.

When I went home, my mother yelled at me for being so late – where was I? how come I didn’t call? why didn’t I pick up my phone when she called? couldn’t I have at least texted her?

But instead, I ignored her, and went to the room where Jack lived. He was laying there, barely alive.

I told him of the airplane, I told him C. Tranger’s story, of how he had flown all his life, and how he couldn’t leave the air. Jack listened to every word I said, as if I had never spoken to him before.

“I… want to be a pilot when I grow up,” he whispered.

“You will be, lil bro.”

My oldest memory is when The House was torn down.

My second oldest memory is when my parents brought Jack home.

They were, of course, both omens of doom. Bad things to come.

My most recent memory is the smile on my little brothers face, and realizing that maybe he had just been waiting for me to call him that, my little brother.

I hope the doctors are wrong. I don’t want that to be the last memory of Jack.