This made Burroughs laugh. Three distinct and boomingly Rip-Tornesque syllables: huh-huh-HA. “I do,” he said. “I remember with certainty.”
“At this point,” said Jonboat, “I’m not even convinced it was after a funeral…”
“What year were you in Sainte-Maxime?” I said. “You said Handsome Arthur was just a few weeks old, so that’s probably the same year you got it, right?”
“You know, I think it probably was after Reagan’s funeral,” Jonboat said to Burroughs. “Because Fon wasn’t there. She’d have gone to Ford’s with me, but she wouldn’t have ever gone to Reagan’s, and we were wearing our medals, Yeager and me, so it had to be a matter of State—I guess it doesn’t really matter to the story either way. Let’s just say that Brigadier General Charles Elwood ‘Chuck’ Yeager made an appearance at what was likely a former Republican president’s funeral that I was attending.
“Now Yeager is one of my all-time heroes, and first chance I got, I went up to him, invited him out to shoot some pool. I’d heard he liked pool, and I’d heard correctly. So after the funeral, we found a bar with a table, and shot some pool for a couple of hours, just little old me and the first man on earth to travel faster than the speed of sound.”
“And one of the first Americans, don’t forget,” I added—I knew all kinds of trivia about Yeager from Clyde, who’d been a fan ever since he’d seen The Right Stuff—“to beat a German jet in a World War II dogfight. While flying a prop plane.”
Here Jonboat pulled his face into a tolerant—a wiltingly benevolent—smile, assuring me he knew I hadn’t meant to interrupt him.
I inclined my head and shrugged, as if to tell him, “Please, go on.”
The smile persisted.
I said, “Please, go on.”
“Well, one thing I’m not is bad at pool,” he said. “Yeager’s no slouch either, but I’m forty years younger. Fifty, maybe. Hand-eye coordination, fine motor control—these things degrade. I beat him every game, for every one of his medals, but then, of course, I planned to give them all back. I mean, he’s Chuck Yeager. Where would I have been without Chuck Yeager? Probably not outer space. Maybe not. Anyway. He deserved those medals. He made it pretty hard, though, for me to return them. Honorable man. Doesn’t want to take what he isn’t owed. On top of that—you’ve probably seen this in the movies—you’re supposed to act like your medals are meaningless to you, even though they’re not, so Yeager’s in a spot. I understand that. I understand I’m gonna have to wear him down to get him his medals back. I’m gonna have to get him drunk to get him his medals back. And that’s what I do. What I try to do. He can hold his liquor, though.
“A few whiskies in, I get another idea. I ask to see his Curio. Yeager undoes his sleeve. Cure climbs out. Beautiful,” said Jonboat, and gestured toward the globe, which Burroughs’s body still prevented me from seeing. “Undeniably beautiful. Blond-silver herringbone. Different-colored eyes. Super magnetic. Never seen one quite like it before. I ask what’s its name. It doesn’t have a name. Yeager doesn’t like Curios. Hasn’t ever, he says, liked Curios. Never even thought to give the thing a name. But the fellow Yeager got it from—well, the fellow Yeager got the marble it emerged from, from—that fellow called its progenitor Arthur, he tells me.
“Now, who’s the fellow Yeager got the marble it emerged from, from? And why’d he get the marble, if he doesn’t like Curios?
“Fellow by the name of Hussein bin Talal, Yeager tells me. That’s King Hussein of Jordan. That’s who Yeager got it from. The marble was a gift from King Hussein of Jordan, who, while dying at the Mayo Clinic a few years before, requested that Yeager grant him an audience. You see, King Hussein was, himself, a pilot, a kind of daredevil pilot according to rumor, and, it turns out—no big surprise here—that he’d always wanted to meet Chuck Yeager. But he’d never found the time, and now, on his deathbed, he had. Found the time.
“So Yeager, summoned, flies to Minnesota, finds King Hussein sitting up in his deathbed, playing peekaboo with Arthur. The king’s thrilled to see Yeager. Tells Yeager he became a pilot because of Yeager, because Yeager’d inspired him, and that flying planes was, for him—for King Hussein—the purest form of joy, and the only form of real peace, he’d ever in all his life etcetera. Says without Yeager he’d have never known such peace and joy were possible; without Yeager, he wouldn’t have been the man he was today. Says he wouldn’t have known how to dream the dreams he’d dreamt. And so forth. And Yeager claps Hussein bin Talal on the shoulder, tells the dying king he’s grateful to have met him, pleased as punch to meet another man who a guy could see, just by looking into his eyes, understands what it means to be one with the sky—stuff like that.
“Once Yeager’s said his piece, though, the two of them are just left sitting there, okay? Yeager decked out in uniform, wearing his medals, and the king in his open-ass hospital gown, dying, just a couple of days from dying, and, for some reason, not dismissing Yeager, who can’t, obviously, just get up and leave. So it’s time, the scene dictates, for Yeager to say something else. But what? What can you say to a dying king? a dying king, by the way—I may have neglected to mention—who Yeager doesn’t really know anything about, except that he’s dying, was a pilot, and, by virtue of being a king, is pretty much as unAmerican a human being as anyone can imagine, which doesn’t sit very well with Yeager, who, after all, had devoted his whole life to these United States and so on.
“Maybe I’m embellishing that last part a little. But the point is that Yeager, Yeager tells me while we’re getting drunk—Yeager’s at a loss, and King Hussein is just staring at him, giant sunken blue eyes in that cancer-withered face, all deflated skin and knuckly bones, staring. Staring like he’s waiting, seems to Yeager, for the oracle to speak, or seeking comfort maybe, comforting words, or affirmation, seeking something Yeager doesn’t know how to offer, wouldn’t probably know how to offer if the king were his oldest friend in the world, a friend Yeager truly and deeply respected.
“So Yeager goes for small talk, and he’s no pro at small talk. Makes some kind of comment about the king’s cure, which is standing right there, on the king’s gowned knee. Yeager says something about how uncommonly handsome the cure is, how magnetic and etcetera, what a privilege and daily joy it must be to have a cure like that to engage with every day and so forth. And King Hussein tells Yeager to take it. ‘Arthur is yours,’ King Hussein tells Yeager. And Yeager tells the king that’s kind, but he couldn’t. And Yeager tells me that this wasn’t just some pro forma refusal: he really didn’t want the cure. Like I said earlier: he doesn’t like cures. Cures creep him out. He can’t explain why. He’s a guy who loves animals, a guy who’s always had horses and dogs, and he’s a guy who loves machines, who’s had his proudest moments at one with machines, mastering machines. But mechanical animals, or animal-like machines, which you’d think would seem to him to embody so much of what he loved—they’d always made him uncomfortable. It was, he told me, as near to a phobia as he’d ever experienced, his feeling for Curios. Not a full-on phobia by any means. He didn’t flee the room if he saw a cure—obviously. And he’d even overload on a cuddlefarmed one every once in a while on a boys’ night out or whatever, but if he spent too much time with one, he just got…uncomfortable. Creeped out.