Travel Agent

Billy Barton decided that his dad would have been a travel agent. As the job became extinct, his dad would have adjusted gracefully. One evening Billy’s dad would have spread out his old travel brochures on the living room carpet. It would have been after he and Billy had just finished eating a tray of Stouffer’s Family Size Lasagna.

He would have told Billy, “Arizona has a beautiful sunset. Look at the canyon’s shape. Light falls into that mile-deep mortar and pestle and mixes up god colors the human eye can’t understand.”
Billy would have picked up another brochure and asked, “What about Hawaii’s sunset? It looks like a giant purple comforter being thrown over everybody.”

Billy’s dad would have agreed and then shown Billy a brochure of Florida, “Sunsets in the Keys smell like molasses and suntan lotion. You can fall asleep on lawn chairs while dried sugar cane stalks fan the day off your skin.” Then Billy’s dad would have leaned in with secret knowledge, “But the best sunset in the country is Leonard Gordon Park in the Jersey City Heights.”
Billy would have laughed, “New Jersey?”

“Yeah,” his dad would have insisted, “the pollution restricts the light into this endless photograph with skyscrapers that bottom out like a briar patch and anxious cars that bump over rusty bridges and giant metal birds that dip in and out of Newark’s neon clouds. New Jersey has the most honest sunset in America.”

Billy would have asked, “How can one sunset be more honest than another?”

Billy’s dad would have said, “By making the folks who see it more honest.”

Billy looked down at the emptying tall boy in his hand. He looked back up at a plane rising over a chain-smoking factory. Billy followed the plane until his eyes lost it in a toxic cloud on the other side of the sky. He finished the tall boy and laid down on the park bench.