Twenty Balloons

“Twenty balloons,” the city editor had said, not looking up. “Rancho San Rafael. Sunrise. Somebody has to.”

So Kevin Fitzgerald was standing in a wet field west of the university at a quarter to six in the morning with a notebook he could not see to write in, watching twenty men and women in windbreakers unroll twenty enormous bags of nylon on the grass, and thinking that in two years at the Reno Evening Gazette he had covered a double homicide, three city council budgets, a pileup on 395, and a man who had set his own bar on fire for the insurance, and that this was the first assignment he had ever gotten where nothing at all was at stake.

That was the idea. He had the press release in his jacket. The people who ran the State Fair and the people who ran the air races had noticed that there was a weekend between them every September when the visitors went home, and had sat in a room and asked what would keep them, and somebody had said balloons. Twenty pilots had been talked into coming. It was free. That was the thing the release kept saying, in three different places. Free. A town that had spent a hundred years learning how to take money off people was going to spend a Saturday morning giving them something for nothing and see what happened.

At twenty-five he was the youngest man in the newsroom, and he came from people who did not go to things. His father Tom had come home from Korea and gone to work for the county and had never in his life been to anything he did not have to be at. His grandfather Michael had riveted the Riverside and built the WPA walls along the river and had regarded a thing that did not hold weight as a thing that did not exist. Kevin had grown up in that house, on the west side, in the subdivision his grandfather’s wages had bought, and had gone to the university and come out wanting to write down what happened in the town, and had learned in two years that what happened was mostly meetings. He had begun to suspect that he was a Fitzgerald after all. He had begun to suspect he did not know how to look at anything that was not a problem.

The pilots had come from wherever pilots came from. He walked the line of them in the half dark with the notebook open and got nothing he could use. Trucks with Utah plates and California plates and one from Oregon, each with a trailer and a wicker basket the size of a bathtub and a rack of propane bottles, and men and women crouched over the baskets with flashlights in their teeth checking things he did not know the names of. They were friendly and they were busy and they did not have time for a reporter. One of them, a woman with gray hair in a braid, told him without looking up that the trick was not the going up, anybody could go up, the trick was knowing where you would come down, and then she went back to her burner and he wrote that in the notebook because it was the first sentence anyone had said to him. The field smelled of cut grass and propane and cold. Out past the last truck the old ranch land the county had made a park of ran off toward the hills, pale, with frost on it, and the sky over the hills was the gray of a thing that has not decided yet what it is going to be.

The light came up gray and then pink over the Virginia Range, and the crews lit the burners.

It was the sound that got him first. He had expected something soft. Instead it was a roar, twenty roars, a noise like the gas jets on the biggest stove in the world all turned on at once, and the flames went up eight feet into the mouths of the bags and the bags began, slowly, to fill, and to lift, and to turn from bags into something else. Colors he did not have words for in a notebook. A red one and a striped one and one that was all blue with a sun on it. They rose off the grass and stood up on their baskets like animals getting to their feet, swaying, enormous, tethered, and the crews hung on the lines, and the pilots climbed in, and the burners roared again, and the whole field of them strained upward at once, and the crowd, which he had not noticed arrive, a few hundred people with children on their shoulders and coffee in their hands, standing along the road in the cold, made a sound he had never heard a Reno crowd make.

Not a cheer. Something lower than that. The sound people make when a thing turns out to be exactly as good as they had hoped and they are not used to that.

The first one went up.

It went straight up, fast, and then slowed, and hung, and drifted north toward the hills over the tops of the cottonwoods, and the sun caught it, and it was the only thing in the sky. Then the second. Then three together. He stood with his pen not moving and watched twenty balloons go up out of a field in his own town into a sky that was turning the color of the inside of a shell, and he did not write anything down, because there was no one to quote and nothing to count and nobody had been hurt, and for once he understood that this was not a failure of the assignment.

A kid next to him, five or six, on a man’s shoulders, said, “Where are they going?”

“Wherever the wind is,” the man said. “That is the whole trick. They cannot steer.”

The kid thought about that. “Then how do they get back?”

“Somebody drives out and gets them.”

The kid seemed to find this an acceptable arrangement. Kevin found that he did too. He looked at the sky, at the twenty of them scattered now over the north end of the valley, small and bright and going wherever the wind was, and he thought that he would have to write eleven inches about this by noon and that he did not have a single fact in his notebook, and that his grandfather would have said that a thing you could not weigh was a thing you could not trust, and that his grandfather had never stood in a wet field at sunrise and watched a town he had spent his life pouring concrete for do something purely because it was beautiful.

He wrote one thing down, finally, so that he would have it. Twenty. Then, under it, because the city editor would want a second paragraph: Everyone stayed.

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