He was born into a family whose identifying trait--the trait specific to blood-relation in a way that facial similarities, second cousins and annual reunions were not--was an inborn tendency towards unlikely and spectacular death. The mental and physical degradations,  the regression to infancy and its debilitating helplessness, were tribulations that no Mackerty in recent years had been forced to contend with: no  linoleum-tiled senior homes with flat-footed nurses or abhorrent entanglements with incontinence and diapers. They were alien to the commonplace heart attack, the regimens of pills and the indifference of doctors, the family breakfasts interrupted by the keeling over of the grizzled patriarch into a bowl of denture-friendly cereal.  Quiet transitions from transient slumber to eternal rest--the conventional ideal, death's most forgiving form--were scorned as the loser's way to die, achingly dull and insufferably passive. Death should not be an act of acceptance, of acquiescence, was the general consensus, but of bold confrontation, and accordingly, family tragedy had always eschewed the more mundane forms of car-crash and terminal illness and manifested in ways that invited disbelief. A proclivity for disaster functioned as the primary cause of death, and age, the universal and inevitable disease, was a condition that most Mackertys never contracted. They were proud of it, too; not openly, but with a detectable gleam in their eyes whenever an opportunity arose to chronicle the family's absurd history to an inquisitive stranger, to provide their own particular insight into the morbid legacy and immortalize what had already prevailed through generations. It seemed to them (as John would later surmise) that the family penchant for spectacular death attested to a latent grandiosity in the  blue-collar, Irish-American, middle-class family that would otherwise go unacknowledged; that through death, they compensated for the lifetime of mediocrity and unfulfilled ambition that preceded it.


John couldn't remember the first time the Mackerty Curse (though they never named it as that) had been alluded to in his household, or when his father had first plunked down on the porch swing with an ashtray and a beer in the sherbet-colored light of fading sunset to regale his younger son, his John, with one of many gruesome anecdotes regarding the family's particular brand of fame in the town that Harry would always refer to as "these parts". It seemed that by the time John was able to crawl, retain a cogent memory of any kind, his brain had already devoted a compartment in which these unsettling stories were stored for future reference. They  were an ineradicable component in his mental fabric, as basic and accessible in his developing child's brain as the name of his parents, his dog, Mom and Dad--those first words which which infancy subsided and language became the primary communicative medium. It was almost as if John was born, even, aware of the circumstances in which those illustrious relatives had died. It never struck him as sad, or even strange, in those early formative years, that the deaths of these relatives whom John had never met were discussed to far greater an extent than the lives that preceded them--and that Harry seemed to nourish a sort of admiration, even a wistfulness in regards to the demise of these relatives that was completely incongruous with John's conception of death as a universally and incontestably tragic thing.

The earliest story that John recalled was of Uncle Joe, who died in a roller-coaster mishap that had challenged the imagination and initiated something of a media vendetta against the amusement parks whose remiss safety regulations (and dissolute, greedy operators, was the implication) were supposedly at fault for what newspapers everywhere termed, in bold, capitalized headlines, as "THE COASTER CATRASTOPHE". On Channel Six, news crews had flocked to the chain-link fences encircling the deserted theme parks, where the hulking shapes of so many unattended rides stood clustered and desolate in the absence of screaming children, lent a monstrous quality by their eerie, alien stillness, as expertly coiffed anchors  pointed with vindictive fingers at the coaster which had delivered Joe into the next life. John's father, Harry, claimed that he still had the recorded tapes of this footage buried somewhere in the family video collection. A great observer of story-telling tradition, made pains to describe  Joe as he was last remembered: hurling parabolically through the milky blue radiance of a late August afternoon, strapped into a solitary coaster-car which somehow had escaped not only the tracks but the other cars it entrained. His father seemed to tap into secret reserves of poeticisms and eloquence as he elucidated, for his rapturous son, the rapidly-shrinking rectangular shape  as it darkened to a vague silhouette in its trajectory above the looping, twisting coaster, above the gum-spotted asphalt of the carnival itself, farther and farther until nothing could be discerned of its tragic flight except a shape so small and inconsequential on the blandly cloudless horizon that it might be mistaken by the pin-prick people below for a distant plane or migratory bird. That was Uncle Joe, who, for a relative John had never actually met, had exerted a profound influence over John's young life: it was to this tale  John accredited his cautiousness and disdain for anything even remotely adrenaline-fueled, such  that he had never, not even once, contemplated partaking in any of adolescent subversions of his peers. Recreational drug-use and underage drinking were activities that excited him as much as prospective root-canals, and John's reputation as a 'wet-blanket' was one that would follow him well into his adulthood.

There was Great Uncle Patrick, whose death had transcended family-legend and surpassed the status the most notorious urban myths to establish itself as honest-to-God folklore. Uncle Patrick had died, so goes the story, in the throes of a Chinese Finger Trap: one of those narrow woven tunnels in which the index finger of each hand is inserted for no other purpose then to be caught, inextricable, while the owner of the now conjoined fingers frowns in contemplation, tugs at either end of the contraption in a futile effort to free them, and for an interval of no more than two minutes--in which the curious party resorts to his neglected common sense and ponders the conundrum that this deceptive object has landed him in--fights a sneaking, wholly-irrational fear that the severing of certain digits or appendages will be necessary if the party will ever regain some semblance of unrestricted movement again. This object, the most banal sort of joke-shop purchase or grade-school party-favor, had led the clinically claustrophobic, chronic asthmatic, and widely suspected schizophrenic Patrick Mackerty to his death; that the way in which the finger-trap had actually resulted in Great Uncle Patrick's death seemed to be regarded as besides the point, because Harry never said and John never asked.  

The morbid trend went back generations and spread like disease throughout the Mackerty Family Tree. Men, and only men--as evidenced by John's paternal grandmother who, at 96, was still possessed of a mental acuity that sometimes Harry found less a blessing on God's part than a prolonged act of cruelty--died in manners which ranged from the violent to the preternatural, never quite in ill-health and with a good many years distancing them from the age at which death is invariably ascribed to natural causes and met with a shrug of helplessness, if not indifference: "Oh well. It has to happen sometime."

Not to say that every man of a certain age met his end disastrously. Harry himself, for example, was enjoying good health and at an age where the majority of ill-fated male relatives and predecessors had already become posthumous legends and departed for whichever afterlife they were bound. Similarly, John's older brother, Shawn, having abstained from everything it's possible to abstain from, graduated from high school and a prestigious college without ever showing the slightest inclination towards the behaviors which generally render Mackerty men as likely candidates for extending the family tradition into the younger generations. Shawn was married now to a woman who taught Sunday School and kindergarten classes and, in between volunteering at the local homeless shelter and going to mass--she was of a slightly evangelical bent-- seemed to devote a majority of her time to ensuring that her husband engage in nothing more dangerous than handling a knife at the dinner-table, so as to steer him, to the best of her ability, from the fate to which so many of the Mackerty men were destined.

There was the tacit expectation that after graduating from high-school, John could, should he choose, further his education at a (local, was the implied imperative) university, a decision that would more or less be acceded by his parents regardless of their own feelings towards institutions of higher learning and the insufferable pretension of most college alumni and the forgotten value of a quietly fulfilling life on one's home turf, etcetera, etcetera. Only that after indulging this academic yearning for the prescribed four years, John would return from his chosen hubble of intellectual posturing and commit himself to the life of his forbearers: owning and operating the Mackerty business, that being of a master-mechanic at the Mackerty Auto Repair shop. This expectation had initially been imposed on Shawn, who had disappointed his parents first in his principled opposition to the owning and driving of cars (Shawn's interest in environmental health seemed less the product of charitable interest than of some strangely misplaced guilt) and then crushed their parental hopes further  in his decision to pursue graduate studies--and to move as far as humanly possible from These Parts so as to escape the breadth of parental influence.

Naturally, it then became incumbent on John to assume the burden that Shawn had cast off. His father had been indoctrinating him with the principles and axioms of auto-repair since John had been old enough to sit in the front seat, and John had acknowledged, with the sort of weary acceptance of martyrs and penitent criminals, that the administration of Mackery Auto Repair was the career path for which he was intractably headed.  

Once John had gently suggested, upon being questioned by a neighbor as to what he "wanted to be" when he grew up,  that he had an interest in comic books. It had been nothing more than that: a simple statement of a fact in which he had deftly avoided expressing any future plans or renouncing the family business. Yet Harry had clapped him good-naturedly on the back, ruffled his hair in a proprietorial way and said, in a declarative, almost challenging voice, that Johnny here was of course going to ascend to the family throne of auto-repair, follow in Pop's footsteps and continue the legacy of skilled Mackerty mechanics. The matter was resolved then, insofar as John as concerned. The dream of incorporating comic books into his life in any significant way was a dream best banished.

He'd accepted this fact, yes, but he hadn't yet embraced it. Certainly he couldn't turn his back on his father again, let him down like Shawn had, but there was still the prospect of a mechanic's life to reconcile with. The truth was that John was wholly, painfully, incorrigibly disinterested in cars--the appeal was entirely lost on him -- and was faintly disgusted, even, by the pungent smell of gasoline, the feline screech of wheels, the claustrophobic confines of a car's interior. Just the whole sensation of hurtling down endless stretches of pavement at unfathomable speeds, strapped into what John couldn't quite think of anything other than a shiny wheeled coffin, was something that John had always found strongly and indefinably repellent. He found nothing beautiful or compelling in the gritty complexity of a functioning engine, was put off by the domineering, mammoth aspect of SUVs and muscle-type cars, hated the pervasive filth of motor oil, and felt, on what he might even describe as a spiritual level, an aversion to every aspect of driving or repairing or selling or associating with the biggest achievement in modern transportation.

The revving of a high-power engine never enthralled him, and while John had always done his filial best to convince his father that this was not the case--making appreciative noises and bug-eyes at whatever luxury-turbo-middle-aged-crisis came into the shop, pawing with feigned absorption at his collection of Hot Wheels and issuing little shouts of excitement as his remote-control cars zipped around the kitchen floor--his passions lay elsewhere. Like most boys, John had entered a phase during elementary school where the grueling eight hours of a typical school-day demanded a discrete, portable form of entertainment that could be retrieved, concealed, and traded at a moment's notice. Moreover, these impressionable prepubescent years necessitated the induction of some sort of role-model into their young lives, a larger-than-life figure to embody the collective hopes and yearnings of over-imaginative children and bring them to some sort of vicarious fulfillment--achieve all the extraordinary things that a predetermined car-mechanic couldn't and could never do. John Mackerty had found such a figure by immersing himself in comic-books: a world comprised of tiny colored dots and seen through a sequence of squares, in which disaster could find resolution in the span of 24 pages and so many formulaic good v. evil punch-ups, and where no thought was too private to be communicated via the standard nebulous thought-bubble.

In fourth-grade, John's passing interest in comics evolved into something one might term as an 'obsession'. He devised a new, complicated route in walking to school that led him across the peripheries of his home slice of suburbia, through a park-trail padded in pine needles and rain-soft leaves, down Main Street, past the used-auto lots and side-by-side Nail salons to the shopping plaza in which his mecca, Stanley's Comics, was located. He made a ritual of appraising new issues and importuning whatever pale sullen employee happened to be manning the counter that day--more often that not Stanley himself, curled on a stool with a bagel in his hand and watching John with an expression wavering between bafflement and suspicion. John, his school books in tow and shoes hopelessly untied (having finally reached the age where Velcro was no longer socially acceptable), would enter the dim humid store with its brown-stained Styrofoam ceiling tile, its dusty light that seemed in some way recycled and stale, and scuttle over the flecked carpet to study, admire, and lust after whatever issue the accumulation of weekly allowance hadn't yet enabled him to purchase. Day after day, John would haunt Stanley's Comics and pour over glass display cases where collector's issues shined beneath fluorescent lights, glossy pages depicting the original renderings of those now iconic superheroes which differed so starkly from the modern stylized incarnations, the images familiar from television and the slick cheap issues that comprised his own collection. Those original story-lines from the Golden Age of comic books, the epoch in which comics were once as vital to boys as video games were to his own battery-dependent generation, assumed  the same sort of historical and spiritual significance as the Old Testament in John's mind; comics took on something of religious function in John's life, with his chosen hero--the comic book character who resonated with him most--filling the void that Aunt Margaret's Christianity and his father's car-worship had left empty and gaping.

While John nourished a deep respect and affection towards the seminal Super Heroes of old--Spiderman, Batman, Superman, the enduringly super-powered, super-mutated, super-moral and, as the myriad names implied, always super manin the truest sense of the affix--chivalrous and frustratingly stoic and clearly the type of men with whom psychiatrists would have field days--the "hero" that truly appealed to John in the way that cars and Jesus hadn't was an obscure and (in his opinion) under-appreciated character with the plaintive sobriquet 'The Dirigible'. The Dirigible was, as John would later discover upon consulting a dictionary, just that: a type of human blimp.

Rodney Shellington was a 22-year-old college drop-out with what was, to all indication, a below-average IQ, a chronic lack of hand-eye coordination, a possible speech impediment, color-blindness, and a general air of hapless stupidity that made him all at once pitiable and infuriating. His painful earnestness and indisputably good nature invited sympathy while his tactlessness and gullibility repelled it. An avid reader of The Dirigble found himself simultaneously rooting for the benign farm boy to prevail in his encounters with all the preposterous villains he happened across while also feeling some sort of  cynical affirmation, a smug complacence, whenever Rodney inevitably found himself abused and humiliated at the hands of whichever low-life specimen slithered out of the Bayou for what seemed like the singular purpose of taking advantage of him. There was a sense of rightness in Rodney's misfortune, that one who made himself so vulnerable, who took so little preventative measures against manipulation and awarded trust so indiscriminately, was simply asking for it; that seeing him fall victim to dumb buck-toothed criminals adhered to the conception of the world as inherently predatorial and justified distrust, suspicion, insincerity--all the qualities that Rodney lacked--on the part of the reader who armed himself accordingly against the devices of mankind.

It was true, Rodney was pretty stupid, and there was a grueling stretch of about 3 or 4 issues whose sole purpose was to  summarize, in the form of a 'flashback', every agonizing misadventure that characterized his formerly un-super life. A child Rodney with mismatched teeth and an overlarge head was shown graciously submitting to the pummeling of playground bullies and practically prostrating himself at the feet of those who demanded his lunch money--as ingenuous then as ever. There was no one who had not taken advantage of Rodney's generosity and gullibility at some point, even the nice local Southern folk who told him when his shirt was inside out or grabbed his elbow before he had a chance to step off the curb and into the path of some merciless truck-driver's 18-wheeler. Even if these Samaritans had shown some sort of sympathy towards their village idiot, they nevertheless patronized and condescended to him in a way that, for the reader, obliged to identify with their main character, was excruciating. For most comic freaks, those episodes alone would have been enough to renounce The Dirigible forever, return to the neglected issues of Spiderman and inter The Dirigible to the Potter's Field of disowned comic books in the square of dusty darkness beneath the bed.

Rodney's power was an unusual one in the sense that it wasn't particularly desirable as far as preternatural abilities go--at least not from the standpoint of the devout grade-school set who so favored the mutants and aliens and vigilantes typical of most popular comic books . There was something a touch grotesque in the depiction of Rodney's pencil-necked, freckle-specked frame distending and inflating, popping the buttons from his plaid shirts like corks from a champagne bottle, his stunted, concave face puffing out and the bony fingers swelling into pale little sausages that flopped and wiggled on his meaty hands like bloated caterpillars. Such was the imagery attending Rodney's frequent transformations from skinny bucolic farm kid to the eponymous 'hero', the "Great" Dirigible, the Human Zeppelin, the Good Blimp, etcetera, etcetera. This distinguishing ability was neither aesthetically striking in terms of its artistic rendering on the page--what could be said about frame upon frame featuring a human-sized beach ball making fish faces and floating upwards like an errant balloon?--or particularly exciting in regards to what unusual crime-fighting tactics it conferred or what 'villains' it enabled him to defeat.. Truth be told, The Dirigible's 'power' was nothing of the sort; here was not a weapon with which to crush those who opposed civil liberties and compromised the basic integrity of man.  His ability was nothing more than an fantastic, somewhat comical means of escape--thus making Rodney was the most passive 'super hero' ever to be identified as such.

Nor were the villains so formidable by the standards of other famous comic book antagonists, the incorrigibly evil foes who remained paradigms of ruthlessness in the comic lexicon and whose very appearance addressed the innermost fears of the  children who faithfully despised them. The Dirigible's nemesis was a sleazy, weasel-faced, jaundice-eyed professor with what might have been an intentional likeness to Woody Allen and a disturbing fondness for sharp metal objects. Inevitably, his distinguishing feature, the attribute that lent him the nefarious quality and unique malignancy essential to any villain worth his weight, was the large needle-point he wore on a strap affixed to his head-- making him an understandable adversary to Dirigible, who could be reduced to a uselessly deflated sack should his ballooning flesh be punctured.

John couldn't explain what it was about the Dirigible that appealed to him so strongly. While he was fervently devoted to his hero of choice, he nonetheless acknowledged that the Dirigible was truly lacking in any admirable qualities and, by all indication, should have been a creative and financial failure. He had met no one besides himself who followed he series.

It would be years before he was old enough to look back and understand that the the comic's intention was not to capture the hearts and imaginations of boys like John, but to satirize super-heroes and the comic industry altogether--the Dirigible was a vehicle for ridicule. The irony escaped him; he only saw the Dirigible for what he was on the page, and that was a person with whom John could strangely, inexplicably, relate.

***

The annual fair in These Parts was an event held every Fourth of July that John remembered from his toddler years as being a combination local carnival, petting zoo, and barbecue, with a sort of retro 50's vibe lent by the cotton candy pagoda, the rusty, precarious looking ferris wheel, and the profusion of  squeaky voiced teenagers who held hands and threw popcorn and looked like members of some sort of youth-cult all dressed identically in their sneakers and jeans and under-washed tee-shirts. Their laughter was loud and their shouts vaulted high over the noisy community garble, over the cheesy, organ-heavy carnival music, into the black, star-strewn summer night, where they met John's four-year-old ears in excited, staccatoed fragments. He remembered being led around by his mother and feeling small and in the density of people, the volume of sound, feeling at once excited and intimidated, enthralled at the the prospect of entering, and temporarily being a part of, this world of color and largeness and entertainment.

As a child, his mother had escorted him around the fairgrounds with his hand held unnaturally tight, with a sort of death-grip in which he could feel the inner curve of her wedding ring digging into his palm. He remembered how her face had been waxen and faintly discolored with was clearly worry. She warned him to stay close even while she was carrying him; she told him not to stray too far even while his tiny hand was enveloped in hers. It wasn't until he was older that he learned her only reason for carting her tiny son to the fair was to retrieve his father, Harry, who had joined the ranks of neighborhood men who habitually tarnished the fair's attitude of good clean fun and entertainment by using it as an excuse to get wildly, publicly, and remorselessly drunk.  Not that Harry was an alcoholic--no, he had after some traumatizing experiences in his youth renounced the favored pastime of his Irish ancestors--and the drunkenness was the adjunct of a vice that more seriously towed the line of legality than a few extra pints did. In the abandoned supermarket parking-lot not far from the fair's location--an expanse of shining black asphalt from which all the obstructing yellow-painted concrete curbs had been removed--local guys invested in their cars made it an annual practice of  mustering some dusty adrenaline and irking the wives by pitting their respective rides against one another and seeing which car was able to cut across the length of the parking lot first. It was a suburban, somewhat silly take on street racing that involved neither streets nor actual racing, seen more as a middle-aged lark than anything. What made it a matter even worthy of police concern was less the 'racing' itself--after all, the use of the parking lot eliminated any potential traffic-law violations--than the fact that those involved were usually past tipsy and invariably disrupted the elderly couples in the neighboring houses with their shouts and cheers, the screeching of 20 year old brakes and the sleepy roars of sluggish station-wagon engines. That more often than not one of the perturbed elderly couples lodged a complaint and sent the police to disperse the gathering seemed more an incentive than anything: the summoning of policemen recalled the recklessness of youth and allowed the participants to relive something that had been lost in the embrace of domesticity and the surrender to adulthood.

Of course, it was not Ellen Mackerty's duty as a wife and mother to indulge her husband's nostalgia so much as it was to steer him from potential harm, scandal, and legal ramifications. Thus she often found it incumbent upon her with each coming year to pack her children into the mini-van, cruise through quiet, night-cloaked streets, past houses framed in squares of recently cut-grass and retrieve her husband from the notorious parking-lot. The children would sit in the backseat with the nylon seat-belts chafing their chins and their coloring books in their laps, watching their mother scream curses with her hands on waist, one hip thrust out in the familiar stance of motherly reproach,  her outline palled in the twin beams of headlights. Then their father would sidle into the passenger side, smelling of something strange and looking appeasingly at their mother's grim profile as she strangled the steering wheel in her grip.

Then her (and the townships') problems resolved when the designated parking lot finally emerged from contracting limbo and the vacant super-market was converted into a discount furniture store. The annual parking-lot gatherings were suspended indefinitely, and while the former participants briefly considered searching for a new location, none were really devoted enough to the drunken pastime to put forth the necessary effort in finding a suitable place. The car-owners sufficed to waxing and washing their '96 Volvos and Saab hatchbacks to gleaming-intensity on sunny afternoons, in good view of (what they presumed to be) envious neighbors, and Harry had enough luxury cars coming into the shop to keep him happy and occupied. Soon the racing became a pleasant if vaguely embarrassing memory. The whole affair seemed to have been forgotten, quite to Ellen's relief, until the Independence Day Fair began running a local go-cart contest in which youth were encouraged to build their own wheeled contraptions with which to navigate a small, kid-friendly course on the edge of the fairgrounds. Inevitably, this new addition was met with a dogged, even fanatical enthusiasm. The parking-lot crew were now provided with an entirely legal means of returning to their old pastime, if vicariously--their children functioning, as they are wont to do, as  the proxies of their parents. There was Ollie Harter, for instance, whose father Stanley Harter regarded his 1973 lime-green T-Bird as a second and possibly favorite child. When Stanley invited Harry Mackerty over for a neighborhood barbecue and, while reacquainting Harry with the beloved T-Bird, casually mentioned his son's intentions of participating in the go-cart race--and even more casually unveiling the construction he had been building with a quiet, frenzied concentration for months--there was no question in Harry's mind as to who the intentions really belonged to. Ollie himself seemed happy enough to demonstrate the go-cart to Harry, sitting in the little kid-sized seat, smiling blandly and turning the steering wheel this way and that--but it was clear that Ollie, who wore glasses and bow-ties and had a glazed, pallored look that Harry accredited to too much time spent behind the monitor, was careening around in his go-cart while stringing along HTML commands and building websites in his head.  

The morning after that barbecue, Harry lurched into the linoleum-tiled, fluorescent-lit kitchen through the steam of sizzling pancake batter and pulled up a chair across from his son. He was dressed for work in jeans from which the smell of motor oil was permanently embedded, unvanquishable after so many washings, and the short-sleeved colored shirt with the name 'Harry' embroidered in red script over the breast pocket. His face was half-shaven in the manner of someone who conducts his morning grooming while still partly unconscious; his hair was wet-combed and unevenly parted. When he spoke, he directed his words through the air over John's head and towards Ellen's back, her hair knotted, her apron strings tied and her slippers making coarse scratching sounds as she padded from table to counter, counter to table, ferrying food back and forth like a baton in a relay race. John was sitting in his typical seat near the window, sunshine warming his neck and splashing squares of light on the table, where it refracted on the edges of his glass of orange juice and scattered over the ceiling like confetti. Waiting to be served, he turned the glass this way and that and watched the pinpoints of light dance overhead. Interlinking crescents of moisture formed on the table's wooden grain. He crossed and uncrossed his eyes, pretending that the resulting visual distortion was a type of x-ray vision with which he could see through objects, penetrate their solid exteriors to study the inner structures on which they relied. Squinting, he stared at the backs of his mother's broad calves with their the tapering, protruding ankles, projecting in his mind a black screen on which the transparent white ghosts of bones formed their symmetrical, inscrutable patterns.

Harry gulped his water and said decisively, "Stanley Harter is something."

Ellen murmured in agreement and flipped another pancake.

"Building that kid of his a damn go-cart. Has a whole workshop set up in the garage, tools and all this electrical equipment and I'm thinking to myself, damn, Stanley, as if the kid actually cares. God knows  the kid's just playing along, doesn't have a mind for anything that he don't type into a keyboard. And I'm thinking to myself, why bother? If the kid don't want to do it why bother. Like Johnny here, he wants to do it. And if he wants to do it well, then we'll do it. Right Johnny?"

John blinked and uncrossed his eyes. His vision resolved itself into a single distinct image--ten fingers splayed out on the table, not twenty--two legs beneath his mother's skirt, not four--and looked at his dad. "Yes. Right."

There was a story about this, John thought, recalling Desmond, whose fate had assumed a proverbial status by epitomizing the sort of brazen fearlessness that his father so admired. Desmond had died playing Chicken in customized Ford Mustang (his father ardently described the play of light on its chrome embellishments), throttling across a bare stretch of road towards the approaching headlights of vehicle driven by a longterm rival, some family foe bent on defeating Desmond in whatever  opportunity availed itself. So Desmond, Mackerty that he was, squinting boldly into the twin white glare of high-beams, held tight until it became apparent that the other bitter driver was would go to any lengths for the sake of a single petty victory. A rational, God-fearing boy, Desmond did the sensible thing and veered his car from the path of pointless death and went rollicking into a roadside field, free from danger, breathing deeply, affirmed in his love and life and chiding himself for his recklessness, only to collide with another car, some hick's discarded lemon left to rust and rot on cinder-blocks,  that in the waning ebb of adrenaline he had failed to notice. This had been the end of Desmond, and John had been horrified, disturbed by the mercilessness of fate, the morbid, senseless aspect that at the time he had been too young to term as irony.  That night, after his father related Desmond's death with the same sort of reverent tone that seemed to John an oversight of the tragedy at its core, he had consoled himself by rereading old issues of the Dirigible and making disproportionate sketches of the hero on recycled bits of typing paper that he illustrated with crayons and taped to his walls.

It was Desmond John was thinking of now as he looked at his hands and listened to the rythym of his father's chewing. Desmond and the Dirigible, who emerged from the remote parts of John's consciousness and commanded his attention whenever the dark crest of hopelessness seemed bound to break on him; Rodney Shellington with his cheerful incompetence and moralizing embrace of misfortunate, Rodney who saw no shame in the quick retreat, refused to acknowledge any disgrace in his failure to adhere to super-hero conventions, the conception that unusual power demands bravado and a denial of the basic human instincts, the gravitation towards flight and self-preservation. It was a choice now, John saw, his father was making him choose, however unconsciously--Desmond or the Dirigible.

***

Something caught John's attention as soon as he slid from the truck's passenger seat and stood admiring the carnival's luminous outline. The asphalt shimmered, hot beneath his sneakers, exhaling the day's heat into the humid July night. Harry was busying himself in the truck bed, untying the supporting cords and the blue tarp to maneuver the go-cart onto the ground. As John waited, anxiously smoothing down a stubborn callick and rocking on the balls of his feet, he glimpsed something curious: at once abstract and unmistakable, strangely illuminated by a flickering light at its base that suffused it with a golden color, a warmth that pulsed and danced with each fluctuation in the feeble breeze. It loomed enticingly over the mass of people--a scrap of red bobbing between the intersecting beams of hte ferris-wheel, a good distance behind the carnival itself--the crescent of its outer edge hovering like a sinking sun on the horizon, partly obscured by the moving, swirling crowd with its many faces all blended into one smooth expanse of varied color.

Behind him miniature wheels turned and rattled, clanking against the pavement and drowning out his father's ruminative muttering. The go-cart was freed. Harry patted it like a faithful pet and then clapped John's shoulder heartily. The go-cart was saddled on his childhood red wagon, which puberty and the resulting disinterest had rusted into a quaintly sentimental piece of junk, a childhood memento in the corners of which spiders spun webs and gray dust accrued.  His father towed it along, go-cart and wagon, whistling to himself. Falling in line behind him, John stole one last straining look at the thing, now clearly recognizable as a hot-air balloon--gently straining against its tethers, big, breathing, both alien and touchingly archaic, a once scientific novelty reduced to trivial carnival amusement. The slender crescent had bloomed as the balloon either rose or inflated further, revealing its shape and the bloated swell of its sides which billowed softly between its internal pressure and the opposing wind. He lingered a moment longer and felt something rising in his gut, mirroring perhaps the balloon's restrained movement: a visceral compulsion that he couldn't quite associate with any particular emotion. Perhaps longing for something that he couldn't define as of yet, or an evolved sort of nausea for the impending race, or something different, unfamiliar and independent of any of exterior circumstances; a distilled, sensual reaction to something he had never seen before, such that he couldn't even identify what it was about that something that had triggered it.

Harry called to him now, both cheerful and impatient. "Johnny? Coming?" John turned, the strange feeling quelled, and trod along behind his father.

***

Waiting now at the starting line, the plastic helmet with its foam visor secure on his forehead and its nylon strap chafing his chin, he sat hunched and nervous in his father's labor of love, the clever, wheeled contraption which felt liable to collapse into splinters and spokes at any given minute. It had been pieced together from an old bicycle and the tiny plastic wheels off his roller blades, fixed to a frame devised from what appeared to be an infant's car-seat, a bob-sled, and a rolling suitcase.The steering had been improvised with components from the same red wagon which had been used to transport it to the carnival. He idled now on the level stretch of ground that marked the beginning of the course, overlooking the incline down which the racers were to be propelled by gravity in their trembling, home-made constructions: pressing forward until the hill leveled out again and physics relented, go-carts and their young uncertain drivers slowing on their mismatched wheels to crawl over the finish-line delineated by an expanse of aptly colored red-white-and-blue streamers. Here a cluster of parents waited with encouraging smiles, chatting to one another, pointing out their kids from the assortment of pale, helmeted adolescents that in their nervousness and uncertain excitement became interchangeable. John cast a few desperate glances at his competitors, hoping to see evidence of good nerves, stamina, perhaps even of confidence and competitive drive--anything but his own clammy fear, the anxiousness he felt powerless to conceal. His face seemed to be flickering back and forth between different expressions in his attempt to maintain the appearance of blank neutrality. He suspected that they were failing in this intended purpose; the squinting, purse-lipped glare he adopted seemed to manifest only another permutation of the fear he was trying to dispel. He distinctly heard a stifled sob from somewhere further down the line. Harry's bald head nodded approvingly  at the bottom of the hill, standing tall above the rest of the parents with his arms crossed over his midsection. Stanley Harter stood beside him, talking animatedly.

No backing out now. He considered it, contemplating the sprawling hill with its receding dirt track, the little car held together with bent nails and clever applications of duct tape. Not at all representative of its creator's mechanic expertise.He felt trapped inside its feeble structure--not so much driving it as claimed by it--and it seemed unwilling to let him go. He watched desperately as a small man wearing a spinner hat and foam finger lurched past the line of carts and stood before them, smiling widely, a whistle around his neck and a checkered flag in his hand. "Ready, kids?"

John sighed, hoping that the inhalation of air would quell the nausea pooling in his belly; but once his chest had expanded and the air had gathered in his gut, John found it difficult  to release the breath, to purge the oxygen and the intended nerves from where they had been festering inside him. He likened it to an asthma attack, or what one might feel had he had asthma. He puffed feebly through his mouth and pushed air through his nostrils, but all to no avail; his stomach felt massive, vacuous, his throat raw and bulging, his head throbbing from a strange internal pressure. He moved a hand tentatively to his throat, to the swell of his adam's apple, expecting to meet the coarse, constrictive fiber of a noose, or else a protrusion that signified some sort of obstruction in his airway. But there was nothing; only soft childish skin, uncreased and unshaven and unmistakably his own.  

The man in the spinner-hat was looking expectantly down the line, his eyes beaming encouragement. John wanted to evaporate. He knew he shouldn't to shut his eyes--it seemed not so much an acceptance of death as an invitation--but once they were closed he could not pry them open. He gripped the steering wheel and wondered why now, in this most urgent moment, all the Sunday school prayers he had so hollowly intoned with the insipid quality of recitation, so blandly memorized and listlessly chanted, why now those pleas and supplications slipped so readily from his mind. Oh well. His eyes were shut, his helmet was on, his hands were on the steering wheel and--he was going.

It was a sensation unlike any other in that he didn't feel anything at all. There was air, a charcoal darkness behind his eyelids, a humming in his ears, but nothing to indicate he was moving. And yet he was; he was sure of it, with a sort of visceral awareness, an inexplicable, yet undeniable certainty similar to that felt when waking up from a particularly lifelike dream and being convinced, even without any palpable evidence, in the singular, genuine reality of the present. He knew he was moving, that the cart had been pushed and was now hurtling down towards it's destination. Despite the absence of the jerky shuddering, the pitching from side-to-side, the convulsions of the wheels as they tumbled over unforgiving ground, the simple, overall discomfort that he associated with the awful contraption, John was sure, and curiously elated in his sureness. Nor could he hear the rusty shrieking of wheels in motion, or the metallic rattling of shoddy

But with his eyes shut and only an abstract impression to inform him, John had no grasp of how long he had been moving or how much distance remained between himself and the finish-line. Nor did he realize he was crashing until it had already happened--until his eyes were forced open by the impact of his head on the rain-softened ground, his helmet knocked off and  the cart skidding haphazardly with its wheels in the air. They spun helplessly above the splintered debris, putting him in mind of an upended bug or turtle, the stranded creatures he had seen flailing in his front yard and, with a childish, sheepish chivalry, righted again and watched as they flew or skittered away. John blinked. His limbs were splayed wide over the grass and his head tilted back, as if making a snow-angel. He peered over at the remnants of the go-cart, broken, pitiful, a sorry companion in his misadventure. They lay side-by-side like two soldiers on a bloody battlefield, reveling in their injury. He wondered why no one had come to tend to him yet.

Breathing deeply (again feeling that once he'd inhaled air there was no releasing it--as if the atmosphere were reluctant to leave his lungs and return to the polluted miasma of open space), he let his eyelids sink and studied the sky through a fragile net of lashes. Pallid, the stars shone with a dingy lusterlessness, their brightness contained to mere pinpricks on the black expanse of sky. They put him in mind of apertures in a darkened room, of the thin margins of space around doors and window-frames too minute to attract attention in the daytime but starkly vivid when seen in the absence of an imperceptive artifical light, in unmitigated darkness, where the small bright intrusions threaten to compromise the nullifying solace of a night-soaked, heavily-curtained room. He imagined, with the sort of wondering, even painful incomprehension that accompanied any deep contemplation of the physical world beyond his immediate experience in it--anything more abstract than a fistful of brown-tinged grass on an august afternoon, pungent with the wilting scent of recent cutting, or the hazy glittering quality of a sky emerging in the aftermath of a storm, or the glossy crackling of lovingly turned pages in a prized issue of The Dirigible--the varied topography of the sky as another imperfectly permeable wall through which glimpses of a great, expansive, exterior light could be attained; that in these small allowances, these scattered frays and tears in the world's sheltering fabric, the larger, indefinable universe dropped cryptic hints, muted reminders as to its vast and indefinable presence beyond or containing the parameters of their own rigidly circumscribed existence. There was the mind-bending enigma of trying to attribute limits and boundaries, of applying physical principles to the shapeless abstractions of eternity, infinity, universe, things that stretched endlessly in either direction without ever rejoining or intersecting. Trying to gage the scope of these things, of outer-space, was impossible--they escaped entirely the breadth of human understanding.

Inevitably, his vague ideas to what Heaven might look like--granted there was a Heaven, which he wanted to believe, and did believe most of the time--consisted of luminous generalizations of clouds, of benign, undefined shapes waltzing in heavenly conference through scatterings of stars and warm diffusions of golden light, whose source John associated with the divine aura of Him, The Man, Himself. John never ventured to imagine God with any greater detail than to picture either a serenely bearded man or an amorphous concentration of blinding, sentient light. In fact, John's mental image of Heaven was not dissimilar to an ideal night sky, and gazing up into the evening, into the cloud cover whose gauzy grayness John likened to a fine layer of dust, he thought of all the relatives whose deaths were regarded with equal parts horror and admiration, who he had never met but hoped to meet one day, maybe, on a mellow floating cloud, in the ceaseless radiance of the supposed afterlife.

With a sigh, John hoisted himself to his feet, wiping dirt from his knees and shoulders, and looked sympathetically at the go-cart wreckage. He said a quiet goodbye and, resiting the impulse to wave, turned and walked up the hill with  a singular destination in mind. He stumbled through crowds of teenagers, caught in the cross-fire of their popcorn throwing, their mouths parted and teeth bared in explosive laughter; he staggered through interminable lines accruing before the most popular rides, bumping and throwing 'excuse me's at ticket-bearers who waited with their arms crossed and hips thrown out. He was blind to the enticing flashing lights of the tilt-o-whirl, repelled by the brusque thrill of the bumper cars, and walked unheedingly by the vaulting rotation of the ferris-wheel. A singular, unrelenting force guided him towards the scrap of red, the bright curve, which he gradually allowed to fill his vision as he grew closer.

Standing before it, John was impressed by the sense of his own smallness. His neck ached from craning, from sighting along swelling sides to where the red met starkly with the gray-blue stretch of sky. It blotted out the night, which from this distance, could be seen only in brief glimpses, encroaching darkly along its edges.The shape he likened to a budding flower: the rounded form tapering off and opening--like an inverted vase, even a light bulb; it seemed like something in bloom, or else a cloud exhaled by the basket sturdily fixed by thick ropes beneath it.  

There was no line--there was no one around, except the person tending to the balloon--and John was led into the basket without ceremony.

Lifting off, the sensation was at first not one of weightless ascension, of defying gravity, but of growing larger--he peered over the side as the people shrunk into colored specks and the carnival took on the dimensions of an elaborate, immensely detailed play-toy--something seen in a Sears catalog that was always too decadent to request as a Christmas present in good conscience. He looked up, expecting that with increasing altitude, that the distance between himself and the sky would be reduced significantly, that the murky, minute stars would expand, increase in brilliance, in presence. He watched them with rapturous anticipation and was only marginally disappointed when they stayed the same. He was blissful nonetheless. When he saw, on the outskirts of the carnival, the small crowd of parents gathered at the foot of the hill--was that broad shining speck the bald plate of Harry's head?--he thought of Desmond, whose parked-car fiasco he had entertained in a vividly recurring mental sequence through all the (now wasted) preparation for the big race. He thought of Desmond, of Uncle Joe, of Uncle Patrick, the relatives he had heard about but never met; but most of all, peering up into the soft gold-lit vacuity of the wide, billowing fabric, the warm insides of the balloon--lighter than air, truly weightless--he thought of the Dirigible and fully understood the integrity of escape.