Dirt Bikes, Drones, and Other Ways to Fly

by Conrad Wesselhoeft

  “One cautionary note: Many top guns have performed well on this exercise only to run out of gas and belly-land in the desert a mile or two short of the airstrip. This is automatic disqualification from our program. If you want the high scores, you must return to point of origin. In other words, spend your power wisely. Questions?”

  My hand slinks into the air.

  “Arlo?”

  “Are there any rules? I mean, anything you can’t do?”

  “Good question,” Major Anderson says. “The answer is no. There are no rules. Just bring your Red Dart home in one piece.”

  He scans the room, sees no more hands.

  “Game on!” he says. “Launch at will.”

  Bang! I launch my Red Dart 200. From a pneumatic catapult mounted on a flatbed truck located three miles to the north of the Skunkworks.

  I’m flying.

  I’m flying!

  Even if I’m sitting in a chair in a cinderblock building. And even if it is just a dinky Red Dart.

  My fingers tingle.

  My mind aches with joy.

  I am wide awake.

  I rock my wing. Pull up. Nose down. Try a chandelle turn.

  I’m tempted to try a loop, but that would cost time and energy. Besides, on my screen I can see the other Red Darts climbing. Already, they’ve jumped ahead. Already, I am last of the flock.

  I bank west toward the Organ Mountains—those bloody knives on the horizon—and slam into a wall of headwind. I’m bumping all over the place. That’s the problem with these little drones: no thrust, no turbo. Gaining altitude is like doing chin-ups when you’re out of shape.

  The others are fighting too. Trying to decide: go high, above the turbulence. Or go around. These are the obvious choices.

  But obvious has never gotten me anywhere. It’s always the unobvious—that hummingbird of a thought—that has taken me farthest, fastest, closest. That’s true when I hit the mesas on my Yam 250, and it’s true when I play Drone Pilot.

  Now a hummingbird flits across my mind. Tickles my central nervous system. Tweets in my ear.

  I peel away from the flock. And point my Red Dart due south. A warning light pulses on my screen: “Off course. Rectify.”

  The sender is “Capt. Charles H. (Chip) Pearson, Command Flight Testing.” He must be one of those shadows behind the glass wall. He pings:

  “Arlo, turn 38 degrees north.”

  I hold to my southern course.

  He pings again. “Baffled. Explain.”

  No time to explain, Chip.

  I click “Message,” type “Trust me,” and hold my breath.

  The reply comes in an instant: “Godspeed, Arlo.”

  Thank you, Chip!

  I slip to an altitude of sixty feet and step my way down to thirty. I can do this because here the wind is just a few knots, puffing to eight or ten. Plus, I love to fly low. To skim across the ground and feel it breathe.

  Trouble is, I’m pointing my Red Dart in the wrong direction—south, toward Mexico, not west, toward the Organ Mountains. It’s too late to turn back—to chase the others on their obvious course. There’s a good chance I will fail, and post the lowest score in White Sands history.

  Still, that hummingbird flutters in my ear.

  The sand ripples, shifts, and rises. I wrestle my Red Dart to an altitude of ninety feet—back into the “turb”—and look down over a vast ocean of silky-white sand. I could gaze at this all day, but you’ve got to focus. Always focus. Fraction of second to fraction of second.

  Ten minutes later, flying south, my fuel has dropped one quarter. I’m aware of Major Anderson watching me through the glass wall. But I’m also aware of what he said.

  There are no rules.

  Now I see it—the highway. A ribbon of black rolling west across the desert.

  I see the truck too. At least, I think it’s the truck. It’s too far off to know for sure. Just a dot wavering in the desert light.

  I bank and point my Red Dart due west.

  Airspeed: eighty knots. I dip my nose.

  A red light blinks on:

  “Too steep. Pull up.”

  Sorry, Chip!

  The dot crystallizes into a military flatbed truck. Lumbering up the highway. I need wing flaps for drag, but the Red Dart is a straight mono-wing design. It’s not built for precision flying.

  I lift my nose.

  Lower my tail.

  Square my wings.

  This has to be perfect.

  Because you can’t scratch taxpayer property.

  Usually, I enter the Drone Zone cranked at the speed of blur. Now I pull all the way back until I’m hovering over the flatbed. Float down like a lazy kite. The earth pulls me. The airflow lifts me.

  Seventy-eight knots.

  Seventy-two.

  Sixty-five.

  Fifty-eight.

  I tilt my nose steeply up.

  Hunker my tail.

  Fifty-seven.

  Fifty-six.

  Inch down . . .

  Barely breathing.

  I’m between earth and sky. Totally awake. Everything is clear.

  I’m me. Nobody else.

  Yea, though I fly through the valley of the shadow . . .

  My wheels kiss flatbed metal.

  The softest bounce.

  Mom’s peck on my forehead: “Good night, sweet prince.”

  Mullins doesn’t even glance in the rearview mirror.

  Now I’m hitching toward the Organ Mountains.

  I may as well take a thirty-minute nap.

  Chapter 17

  MULLINS DROPS ME OFF at the Travelodge just after dark. I don’t tell him about piggybacking on his flatbed—something stops me. I’ll tell him in the morning.

  In the lobby, I peer through a window into the pool area and see Dad and Siouxsie soaking in the Jacuzzi. The swimming pool is boiling with cannonballing kids trying to splash the ceiling and failing by at least five feet. The sign on the wall reads NO RUNNING. NO DIVING. But everybody’s illiterate tonight.

  I go to our room, change into my suit, grab a towel, and head back.

  “Hey, it’s the world’s best drone pilot,” Siouxsie says as I ease into the Jacuzzi.

  Dad tries to read my face. “Well?”

  I shrug. “All I know is, they want me back tomorrow.”

  Something passes between Siouxsie and Dad. Some flicker. The faintest sign of hope. Soaking in the hot water, just the three of us, amid the banshee screams and echoes, we don’t say anything.

  Because the last year’s been nothing but bad news. That’s what our bones, muscles, and cells remember. They don’t remember good news. It’s scrubbed from our DNA.

  “So you scored high?” Siouxsie asks.

  I lift my voice so she can hear: “Yeah.”

  Dad clamps a fist and squirts a jet of water into the air. “Let’s celebrate,” he says. “Where shall we have dinner?”

  “Atomic Burger!” Siouxsie says.

  “Totally,” I say.

  Dad nods. “Tonight all roads lead to the Atomic Burger.”

  He helps Siouxsie out of the Jacuzzi. She pauses before each step to find her balance. Dad’s patient with her. Makes sure she has a rail to hold on to. Some of the splashing banshees notice Siouxsie. “What the hell is wrong with her?” one says.

  I almost leap out of the Jacuzzi.

  One more word.

  Just say one more word.

  But nobody says anything. They go back to cannonballing and their goal of a wet ceiling.

  I sink into the hot water and close my eyes, wondering, what does it mean? Could I actually have beaten some of those pilots? Air force officers from Vandenburg? Navy officers who blast off the deck of the Enterprise?

  It doesn’t seem possible.

  Mission one—piggybacking on Mullins’s flatbed out to the target area—worked only because it didn’t fail. My margin of error was tighter than the crack in a butterfly’s ass.

  Missions two and th
ree were just video games—scenarios involving acrobatic flying, evading tracers, locking on targets, taking out targets. What I do all the time when I play Drone Pilot. All it takes are the three “-itions”—ignition, intuition, and ammunition. Plus speed-of-a-fly reflexes.

  I climb out of the Jacuzzi, go to the edge of the pool, curl my toes around the border tiles, and do a standing flip, which I pretzel into a can opener, leaning back just far enough to truly propel a geyser but not so far as to hit my head.

  Going under, I hear maximal vacuum suckage. Everything shudders. An aquatic bomb explodes. I surface to see that I have drenched half the banshees.

  They stare at me in saucer-eyed wonderment, because I have just done in one dive what they have failed to do in a hundred—shellacked the ceiling, which is now dripping wet, especially around the central light fixture.

  I’m kind of disgusted with myself for showing off, but it’s important to let them know that there are standards in the world.

  THE ATOMIC BURGER IS the m ost famous burger oasis in New Mexico. In fact, it’s famous nationwide, due to the bumper sticker I Dropped an Atomic Burger in Alamogordo, NM.

  The walls are plastered with atomic bomb and space-age knickknacks: a picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb; a model of the Enola Gay, which dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima; and a huge poster of a mushroom cloud forming the image of a woman in a bikini, with the words Operation Bikini, 1946–1958: A Light Not of This World.

  We slide into a booth, and Dad and I order Double Atomics with crispy fries, and Siouxsie a green-chile Neutron with cinnamon taco chips. Dad orders three bottles of Dos Equis beer—“for lubricational purposes”—to be delivered “ice cold, twelve minutes apart.” Siouxsie and I go with cherry-limes.

  “Put your hearing aids in, Siouxsie,” Dad says.

  She plugs in the tiny fortune cookies. For some reason, we’re getting along. We even mention Mom—how she made burgers with sautéed onions and pecan barbecue sauce. The way we talk, it’s like she’s still alive, back home in Clay waiting for us. Dad uses the present tense: “You know how Mom cooks onions . . .”

  On the wall above our table is a picture of Neil Armstrong. He’s in his space suit, helmet off, smiling at the camera. The caption reads One giant leap for mankind. Next to this is a photo of Buzz Aldrin shaking his eighty-year-old ass on Dancing with the Stars. Somebody has scratched out the caption and written Infinite tiny steps for his sponsors.

  What really catches my eye, though, is a small, framed newspaper article. It’s on the wall above the booth next to ours. All I can read is the one-word headline:

  T-FOG.

  I stand on my seat to read the rest:

  While in Otero County, be sure to visit the John G. Magee, Jr., Monument and Memorial Chapel.

  Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., was killed in December 1941 when his plane collided with an Airspeed Oxford trainer over Lincolnshire, England. He was nineteen years old. Three months before his death, he wrote the poem “High Flight”—

  “Siddown!” Dad barks. “Show these Alamogordo-ites you’re a well-bred pony.”

  I sit.

  The waitress comes by with our drinks. “We sure like it when you notice our history,” she says to me. “Lonnie’s in the kitchen. He’s our assistant chef and curator. He’s crazy about space and rockets. If you want, I’ll send him over.”

  “Yeah, definitely,” I say.

  “Fine,” Dad says. “But first we’d like a few minutes alone with our burgers, if you don’t mind.”

  “Assistant chef!” Siouxsie says, after the waitress has gone. “Doesn’t she mean ‘assistant cook’?”

  The greasy-fryin’ smells from the kitchen awaken me to the fact that I’m starved. It’s been a long day. When our platters arrive, I dive into my Double Atomic. Dad stares at his in awe.

  “Note how the UFO-shaped bun hovers over a bed of crispy fries,” he says. “And note how the tarry sauce and layered mushrooms resemble the singe line left by a departed alien craft. Good God! I wouldn’t dare put ketchup on this.”

  He chomps down, wagging a finger at the newspaper scattered on the next table. I lean over and scoop it up.

  We munch, slurp, and read the Alamogordo Daily News, greasily swapping the sections. Mom would never have allowed reading during a meal. Eye contact was important. Posture was important. Talking about each other’s day was important.

  “Two-four-six-eight—communicate!”

  That was one of her favorite sayings.

  Dad’s scanning the TV listings. “Hey,” he says, draining Dos Equis bottle number one. “Check this out—Battleground. Would you guys mind if I caught a late movie on TV?”

  “I’d definitely mind,” I say. “Got a big day tomorrow. Gotta rest up.”

  “It’s a World War II tank-and-grenade epic,” Dad says, like he didn’t hear me. “Great action sequences. Saw it when I was about your age, Arlo, at the Raton drive-in.”

  “A war movie!” Siouxsie says. “I thought you were a pacifist.”

  “I am a pacifist,” Dad says. “War movies don’t count.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Siouxsie says. “Arlo needs a good night’s sleep.”

  Dad folds the TV page. “You’re absolutely right.” He toggles his empty bottle at the waitress. “We all need our sleep.”

  I’m polishing my platter with the last of my crispy fries, and Dad’s nursing his third Dos Equis, when Lonnie swings out of the kitchen in his grease-splattered apron. The waitress points to our table. Lonnie shambles over.

  “Hiya, folks, where you from?”

  “Clay Allison,” I say.

  “Outlaws!” He aims a finger at us. “Bang, bang!”

  None of us even fakes a smile. How could we?

  “I hear you’re interested in our space and aviation collection,” Lonnie says.

  I point to the framed article hanging above the next booth. “What’s T-FOG all about?”

  Lonnie looks surprised. “Nobody ever asks about that one,” he says, “though they should. John Magee, he was the original T-FOGGER. Wrote the most beautiful poem, ‘High Flight.’”

  “Hold on, give me a sec,” Dad says. He presses the beer bottle to his forehead, closes his eyes, and recites:

  “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lonnie says. “You hear that poem about every time you go to a funeral around here. There’s a theory that he composed it in a state of hypoxia.”

  “Hypoxia?” Siouxsie asks.

  “Oxygen deprivation,” Lonnie says. “Magee flew so high in an unpressurized plane—a Spitfire, I think—that he probably got stoned for lack of oxygen and started hallucinating. That’s how he came up with those wild images.”

  Dad lifts the bottle to his forehead again, recites:

  “. . . wheeled and soared and swung,

  High in the sunlit silence.”

  Lonnie nods. “Images like that. It was either hypoxia or . . .”

  “Or what?” I ask.

  “Or he had a breakthrough.”

  “Like a religious breakthrough?” Siouxsie asks.

  “Not exactly,” Lonnie says. “T-FOG—Touch the Face of God—doesn’t necessarily mean in a religious way. It just means to connect.”

  “Connect to what?” I ask.

  Lonnie opens his arms. “To every molecule in the universe.”

  “Sounds Zen-y,” Siouxsie says.

  “It does sound Zen-y,” Lonnie says. “But there’s a bunch of scientific reports that say some pilots—when they get up high in the atmosphere, or go into space—become hyperaware and experience a ‘transmolecular epiphany.’”

  “Hey, go easy on the English language,” Dad says.

  “Put it this way,” Lonnie says. “They see themselves as part of the universal family of planets and stars. The astronaut Edgar Mitchell T-FOGGED all the way back from the moon, just gazi
ng out the window.”

  “And I T-FOG every time I down a Dos Equis,” Dad says, hoisting his bottle. “Same result at a reduced cost.”

  Lonnie says, “We are all children of the universe.”

  “Too bad he had to die so young,” Siouxsie says.

  Lonnie shrugs. “War is war.”

  Dad points to a portrait across the room. “Tell me, Lonnie, why is Julius Caesar in your collection?”

  “Sir, that’s not Caesar, it’s Aeschylus, the Greek playwright. According to legend, an eagle mistook his bald head for a rock and dropped a tortoise on it. That’s how he died.”

  Lonnie points out a bunch of other stuff in the collection. He’s proudest of the spare tire from the Lunar Roving Vehicle—the “moon buggy”—hanging on a nail above the hostess station.

  “That’s really the crown jewel in our collection,” he says.

  “Say, isn’t that Raquel Welch in the bikini poster?” Dad asks.

  “No, sir, that’s a generic voluptuous woman.”

  “Speaking of transmolecular,” Dad says, “could we possibly mingle some of our molecules with a parfait?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll bring you a dessert menu.”

  Chapter 18

  WE STOP FOR GAS ON the way back to the Travelodge. Dad ducks into the minimart and comes out with a six-pack of Dos Equis.

  Siouxsie goes silent.

  It worries me, too.

  By the time we get to our room, I can barely keep my eyes open. I brush my teeth, peel to my boxers, and fold into the queen-size bed I share with Dad.

  Falling asleep is like stepping off a ledge. Mom takes my hand to guide me. I could think of a thousand things, but when I close my eyes, I think of only one.

  We’re on Burro Mesa, walking on the north rim. On the horizon is the Front Range of the Rockies. Just a few feet away is that sheer drop to the dusty floor of Colorado.