Chapter One
Wally Friedman pulled more items off the conveyor for hand inspections than anyone else. Most times, the pullouts revealed nothing alarming: a half-full water bottle, a camera lens, frozen cupcakes. Who left town with frozen cupcakes? Every so often, though, the pullout was critical. A person could never predict critical; all he could do was attend closely.
In the relatively short time he’d been on the job, Wally had made a number of finds that sparked compliments from other team members, Lydia’s the most effusive. Nothing had happened today, but today wasn’t over.
The flowered bag belonged to an ultra-thin woman in beige stilettos, who shrank alarmingly when she removed the shoes for screening. They didn’t earn a pullout, but they still caught his attention. A woman intent on deceit deserved extra monitoring.
Many observers, trained or not, would’ve seen nothing even with x-ray assistance. This was where Wally excelled, catching the most minute details no matter how intense the distracting colors or patterns surrounding them.
The woman was one of those efficient packers: underwear neatly folded, socks tucked into shoes, toiletries secured in zipped bags. Clearly not careless about packing, probably not about anything. The long-bladed knife was threaded through a comb, and the comb was tightly wedged in a bundled sweatshirt. Slowly Wally raised an arm, signaling Cal to his side.
Other team members continued supervising the placement of carry-ons on the conveyor belts, ushering people through the scanners, pulling out travelers for pat-downs. Routine tasks. Yet if the drudgery of it all numbed them into missing the next zealot with a wrong to right, woe unto them.
Cal left Walter to scan passengers on his own. He didn’t seem to hurry, but in seconds he stood at Wally’s shoulder. “What have we got?” Cal Lantz never raised his voice.
Wally pointed at the screen, waiting for his supervisor to see what he’d spotted instantly. After some seconds, Cal got it.
The line was backing up, the travelers growing impatient. They weren’t worried. Why worry? No one paid them to worry.
Cal carried the bag to the table where suspicious items were processed.
The woman was wearing her heels again, and for a moment the restored height puffed her up. “Can you hurry? My plane’s boarding.” Did she think they’d deliver the craft to her if she grew testy enough? “I can’t miss my plane.”
Her voice was a squeal of irritation, and Wally rubbed an ear.
With a different bag-checker, the lady might’ve snuck her artful concealment through security. Too bad she’d gone up against Wally. When he was a kid, those I-Spy pictures had been no fun because he spotted every object instantly, baffled by how baffled others were. After a while, his sisters had stopped saying “Good job, Wally.”
At the table, Cal drew out the KU sweatshirt, unfolded it slowly, pulled out the comb, and disentangled the blade. It sparkled under the overhead lights.
“My flight,” the woman said, not quite so arrogant.
“Yes,” Cal said. “Your flight.” He repacked the bag, keeping the knife. “This way, ma’am.” Always courteous, that was Cal.
He led her to the private screening room, where she’d have a chance to explain herself. She wasn’t arrested, despite the police being summoned—it was quite a blade. The interrogation lasted just under an hour. That plane of hers? No chance of making that plane. Still, she had reason to be thankful: she was looking at a substantial fine but nothing more. She didn’t see it that way, though; her expression was anything but grateful as a Delta rep worked to rebook her.
“Family heirloom, she kept repeating,” Cal told Wally later. What kind of family passed on blades to the next generation? That’s what Wally asked himself as the day wore down.
After lunch, he directed passengers through the scanner, which was better than pulling them out for pat-downs, Walter’s assignment now. Too much talking came with those closer inspections. “Do I look like a terrorist?” If officers had their routines, so did travelers.
Mid-afternoon, Wally grabbed coffee in the basement break room, where other agents were playing the my-passenger-was-loonier-than-yours game. Today, he might’ve won with the blade lady. He recognized faces and knew a few names, but sat alone all the same, nursing coffee that was too strong, as usual. Every so often, he shot a glance at the clock above the door. During his first days he’d monitored it until he teased out the one-minute defect, consistent if inaccurate. Wally always returned from breaks precisely on time.
Back at bag-checking, his favorite position, Wally stared at the empty screen, ready for the next flurry of activity. From the corner of his eye, he caught Lydia’s enthusiastic thumbs-up but didn’t know what he’d done to earn it. The knife had been hours earlier. Still, he knew enough to answer with his own thumbs-up.
*
By now, being a security officer was such an integral part of Cal, he could barely remember when that had not been so. Always monitoring his own behavior, and his team’s too. Wally and Walter—not twins or even related, despite their similar names—had started this job about three months apart, first Walter and then Wally. Lydia came before them, Brick before her.
As for Cal, here the longest by far, his hair had thinned and grayed in the service of protecting others. He knew two things well: how to watch out, and how to take care of people. As supervisor, he often drifted from station to station, sometimes homing in on behavior that no one else had marked as peculiar. With his upright posture, hands linked behind his back, Cal was ready to spring at the first hint of trouble.
Back at the scanner, Cal beckoned to a young woman sporting a huge pair of glasses with bright yellow frames. She gave him a flaky grin, which he ignored.
He worked at keeping himself wrapped in a bit of mystery. Passengers should feel uneasy around him, never sure what he might do next. That way, he figured, if they were thinking about doing no good, they’d stuff the idea into a back pocket for another day, when somebody less unnerving ushered them toward a different flight. So far, this strategy had worked.
A Delta rep announced boarding for folks needing assistance. As usual, the words got much of the horde stirring. Two men without obvious limitations handed boarding passes to the rep. Anybody could step forward and say, “Yes, me, I need assistance.” Cal was convinced that early boarders cheated regularly. Wasn’t the world made up of people trying to put things over on one another, jostling for a step ahead? Add a limp to the walk or a stoop to the shoulders, and who’d be the wiser? None of the officers had medical training. Cal didn’t consider the Heimlich maneuver or CPR to be anything more than manual training, certainly not enough to challenge a disability claim.
Now the rep called out first-class boarding, and a few more people stepped forward, the woman with the yellow frames among them. What kind of person chose glasses like that? Did the frames conceal microelectronics? He considered pulling her out for closer inspection, then decided against it.
A woman paced back and forth with a sleeping infant. Weapons stored in the stroller’s complicated undercarriage? Two young men huddled over their gadgets. Hatching a plot? A middle-aged man couldn’t stop yawning. Exhaustion or nerves? Never trust people to show you all of themselves. If an officer jumped at every suspicion, though, his feet would never touch ground.
Another flight landed. Several minutes passed, and several more. Now incoming passengers streamed off the plane, hustling past the secured area to find their checked luggage and be on their way, all of them eager to leave the airport and get on with other business. Nobody looked back at the team who kept them safe. Thank yous were rare in this job.
*
Walter Teague’s last assignment today was checking boarding passes and IDs. He stood alone at the podium, waiting for business to pick up.
“Pay day,” Brick said, joining him.
“Always a good day,” Walter answered. He and Kristen might catch up, if they could avoid new expenses. But those kept raining down. Their oldest needed bigger shoes about every other month. The boy must be going for the Guinness record. Walter loved his son, no doubt; he just wished the kid could get those feet under control.
“Good day for the bill collectors,” Brick said, suggesting that he carried his own obligations.
“Allen needs shoes.”
This station—the standing, the waiting—sometimes drew out comments that Walter would otherwise have kept to himself.
“Kid takes up an entire paycheck on his own,” Brick said, his face overly friendly.
Walter couldn’t make sense of this eagerness to please. Still, Brick did his job, and what else could you ask from a coworker?
A Delta rep took up her microphone to start boarding. Get to the gate, people.
“Kids,” Brick added with a grin. “Nothing but trouble.”
“Lucky you’re so ugly, no woman will have you.”
The comment was sharper than Brick deserved, but his frequent harping on the stupidity of having kids irked Walter.
“No argument from me on that.”
Walter wondered at Brick turning serious, but he didn’t push for more. He had enough to think about. One day his brother would reappear—“Mr. T, Mr. T”—and double Walter’s worries. Double? Make that triple.
*
By the time his last break rolled around, Brick was more than ready, though he thought he’d done a good job hiding his impatience. He exited the secured area before popping two squares of peppermint gum and striding through the terminal, joining the flow of recent arrivals who were heading toward baggage claim. On a different day, he might be among them, a traveler retrieving luggage. Why not?
A full flight from L.A. had landed, so the area was congested, the travelers staring at the conveyor belt as they always did, willing it to move. Didn’t the technique work every time? As soon as the belt rumbled to life, the crowd surged forward, all eyes on the bags spitting out and tumbling over each other. A scraggly-bearded man at the foot of the chute assigned himself the task of straightening items, positioning handles for convenient grabbing. Some people were like that—insisted on lending a hand, wanted or not.
A black suitcase, not quite small enough to fit in the overhead, the type people were always sneaking on board, fell out onto the belt. Before the man could straighten it, a teenage girl with a full-sleeve falcon tattoo grabbed the handle and swung the case to the floor, where it landed with a loud thud. What was in there anyway? No worry of Brick’s; she was hightailing toward the exit.
He admired people like her, people who didn’t want strangers meddling In their affairs. Mind your own business—that had been one of his favorite sayings since grade school. She seemed to favor it too. Of course, a man without headaches had no need for clichéd reminders to keep him tracking. Too bad that didn’t describe Brick. Could be it didn’t describe the tattooed girl either. Maybe he’d ask, if she ever showed up for another flight. But how could he frame the question without sounding like a creep?
A few people shot him second glances. What was a security officer doing at baggage claim? Danger afoot? He paced slowly around the carousel, watching the unclaimed bags going round and round.
Now more travelers were giving him looks. What was he up to? What was going on at KCI? The man who’d been straightening bags gave it up and stepped back. If an explosive device rocketed down, he wasn’t going to be there to catch the worst of it.
Idiots, Brick thought. If danger threatened, nonessential personnel would be evacuated pronto. Protocols were in place, and if a crisis hit, Cal knew the steps to take, like senior security at every airport. Brick had been here six years, long enough to be a lead officer, if not a supervisor, but nobody could advance until somebody above advanced or quit. Even if the opportunity presented itself, the promotion would demand more training, require the completion of more papers. He’d have to use his legal name, as he had when he’d first applied. No matter. He was Brick now, and writing Dwayne on a few forms wouldn’t change that.
At a job fair a year before starting with TSA, he’d traded in his birth-certificate name for a better one. The name had come to him all of a sudden, as he made his way to the registration building, the only brick structure in the complex. The bricks’ shade, which bore an uncanny resemblance to his own sandy hair, had caught his attention. Brick—solid, dependable. Why stick with a name you’d never liked? Dwayne “Brick” Evans, he’d signed on those applications, and it had felt transformative.
Not for everyone, though. Despite the seven years since the switch, his mother still insisted that she knew who he was. There was no tricking Patty. Just last night, she’d reminded him that she’d known him for every one of his forty-two years. Brick? Let somebody else claim that outrageous name.
His break almost over, he headed back, enjoying the last of the gum not allowed on duty, and stopped at check-in, where Wally stood. “You catch a jihadist while I was gone?”
Wally’s gaze skittered to the podium.
Brick had intended the comment as a joke, but he saw he’d missed the mark and tried a friendly shoulder-punch instead.
Wally scrunched into himself like a man zapped.
Others jacked around; why couldn’t Brick? Then again, Cal never fooled around. Not everyone had to be a jokester.
Brick scrutinized the terminal. Nothing to catch a security man’s eye. “Never mind,” he said, as if in answer to an objection. “Keep up the good work.” He spoke as if he’d already been promoted.
Wally stared at the floor. Brick looked down too. His loafers, polished twice weekly, shone. Wally’s shoes didn’t look nearly as good, and that left Brick satisfied with their exchange.
Back at work, his next assignment was divestiture officer. He called out orders: place metal items in bins, remove liquids, empty pockets, take off shoes. He kept his face stern.
It never tired him to tell people what TSA demanded. When he was assigned to the scanning booth and pulled someone out for a more thorough inspection, Brick often made the person wait while he checked the no-fly list. He’d never caught a creep up to messy business, but that didn’t mean he never would.
*
Lydia yanked off the blue disposable gloves, then fast-marched to the break room to see how the crash simulation was going. This was the first full-fledged drill she’d ever witnessed, though Cal said they happened every three years. Matters had proceeded rapidly since earlier, when she and her colleagues had joked about the faux victims looking better than actual passengers. The make-up artists and set designers, from a local college theater department, had gone all out. If Lydia hadn’t known better, she would’ve sworn those play-acting students with their bruises and bloody bandages were in serious need of medical attention, that the smoke bombs and fog machines weren’t a professional production but a tragedy horrific enough to make national news.
The air had cleared, but the plane remained nose down on the tarmac and the victims were still scattered around the craft, a few rescue workers making their way among the injured. After the initial excitement of staging a performance at this peculiar venue, the students were ready for more. Two actors yawned. Another, supposedly nursing an injured leg, looked like a sunbather lounging poolside. Then again, even Meryl Streep could milk only so much emotive energy out of lying on a stretcher.
Lydia sympathized. The stiletto-heeled blade-carrier, nicely spotted by Wally, had provided a temporary escape from the humdrum, but in the end she and her knife had fizzled to nothing, as these events always did. Not that Lydia minded humdrum. Days that ran their course, with no upsets to swerve you into a direction you wanted to avoid—who’d complain about that?
She’d pulled up the airport’s stats for the last five years. The numbers suggested that she could stay at KCI until she retired without being involved in a single truly threatening incident. There would definitely be no terrorist attacks. If you added human error and mechanical malfunction, the chances of mishaps rose, but a significant percentage of those clustered at facilities where the workers were accident-prone or careless.
She’d passed on this info to her mother and sister, but neither of them was impressed by more numbers from Lydia. The job was dangerous, her mother insisted, and Lydia should find a different one. Dangerous? No more than most. Besides, Lydia liked the work. “One of these days,” her mother warned her. Her mother watched too much television.
Out on the tarmac, a woman with hair nearly as red as Lydia’s, though straight rather than curly, gathered everyone around her and read aloud from a clipboard. At the end of her recitation, the performers, suddenly animated, tossed bandages, slings, and splints into a barrel. One wannabe star unwound the dressing from her head and flicked it whip-fashion from side to side before dropping it in. Another cast member jumped from his stretcher to join her. Arms around each others’ waists, they gallivanted, their movements in perfect alignment. By the time they tired of waltzing, their classmates had disappeared into the terminal.
Outside, Lydia caught the employee shuttle to the workers’ parking lot. When she took her first step off the bus, she calculated how many more she’d need to reach her car. She had parked at the far end, so the number would be high.
Numbers relaxed her. They always had. Her sister said that Lydia didn’t know what she was doing half the time because her head was smothered in dopey numbers.
83, 84. A Buick with remnants of a fender bender. A Ford truck with a Royals World Series sticker from last year. She should’ve gone to that parade. The city was convinced that another waited in its immediate future, but that wasn’t likely, if you went by the 2016 standings.
117, 118. Here was the thing about numbers: they never, absolutely never, let you down. If you were looking for stable, for never-changing, for 100% reliable, pick numbers any day.
131. Her car, visible in the distance, was still many steps away.
210, 211. She was short today: she’d hit 240 easily, when 217 had been her estimate. Her sister would say the numbers had let her down. Wrong. If anything, Lydia Paley was the one who had let the numbers down.
—
Author’s Statement
No one pays attention to the TSA officers shepherding travelers through airport security. After reading my novel, though, I believe many will start. Airport security, a job where wariness is an asset, is ideal for the agents in this novel, who each harbor a troubled history. For Cal, betrayed by his father and ex-wife, few people pass the trustworthiness test. Brick’s childhood mistakes still haunt him, and he’ll do almost anything to fit in. Walter, his brother’s rock through a turbulent childhood, now faces that same brother’s escalating demands, which threaten the well-being of Walter’s family. Wally, on the spectrum, misses social cues. Lydia believes that numbers never let you down but fears that her failure to save her father from life-destroying depression means that his fate also awaits her.
The structure of the novel is an element I struggled to solve. With five protagonists, their pasts interweaving with the present, the challenge was to maintain momentum while letting each one’s plot-line to evolve. My solution—and I hope it works—is to allow each character’s story to unfold in a single continuous section, after the initial chapter. The reader delves into Cal’s world before moving on to Brick’s, Wally’s, Lydia’s, and finally Walter’s. The commonality of their work connects them to each other and unifies the novel’s components.
As a writer, I enjoy exploring situations where trust is an issue. To say that your past directs your future is simplistic but true. If you’ve been betrayed, can you learn to trust again? Can a person control the consequences of the past and embrace a new way of looking at the world? Some of the characters in this novel succeed in doing so, and others don’t. As is often the case for me, writing their stories was an avenue for understanding and appreciating each character, flaws notwithstanding. How can anybody understand and appreciate, even admire, people who don’t exist in real life? For me, that is one of the abiding mysteries and great pleasures of writing and reading fiction.
Jacqueline Guidry is a Cajun who grew up in Louisiana, taught at Appalachian State University, and practiced law, representing disability applicants who were appealing Social Security denials. Visions, Stories, her first collection, is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press. Her work has received five Pushcart nominations, Yemassee’s Fiction Award, and descant’s Gary Wilson Short Fiction Award; it has also appeared in the Arlington Literary Journal, Nimrod, Orca, South Carolina Review, storySouth, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Year the Colored Sisters Came to Town (Welcome Rain), was selected for the Pen/Faulkner Writers in Schools program and as the Community Read in Kansas City, Missouri, and Windsor, Connecticut. She now lives in Kansas City.
Embark, Issue 22, April 2025
Embark 