Truth and Beauty 3-6

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“Carry your bag for you, sir?” piped a small voice at his elbow.

Looking down, Jack saw a boy of perhaps eight or nine, dressed in a once fine jacket and shabby trousers. “Why not,” he said to the boy, pulling his sextant from the side pocket before handing the bag over (he had been robbed before, though never in a Naval facility). “I am bound for the Roth, he said. “Do you know where she is?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” said the boy. “She’s on gate five at terminal A. We’ll have to take the shuttle, sir, this is terminal C.”

Jack resisted a frown. All five terminals met in a central hub to form a lop-sided star. Gate numbers began at the hub. The shuttle circled around the far ends of the terminals. “How about I just give you the two shillings,” he said to the boy, “and we walk through the hub instead?”

“It’s three shillings, sir,” said the boy unashamedly, “and an ice cream.”

“Three shillings and an ice cream it is,” said Jack. Together, they walked down to the hub, Jack stopping from time to time to chat with people he knew, and buying the boy an ice cream at the soft-serve stand. By the time they reached gate 5A, both the boy’s hands and the handles of Jack's bag were sticky. Jack paid the boy his three shillings, plus the fee for carrying the bag, and the boy ran off to find another customer.

Jack considered the gate. On the far side of it lay the jetway to his command, and he was still sorting out his varied feelings on the matter when it opened to discharge a boy of perhaps twelve years old. The boy ran bodily into Jack, losing his hat and bouncing back through the gate into the jetway, where he fell to the floor.

“Can’t you watch where the-” the boy began, but as he looked up to see who he had run into the words died in throat, and his mouth and eyes spread into a trio of large, silent circles.

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