by Adam Johnson
“That’s it. We’re leaving,” Marty says, as if this isn’t really our plan.
I look at Jimbo, who shrugs. “It’s fake anyway,” I tell him.
Without taking his eyes off us, Marty’s father shouts “shut up” over his shoulder. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To Fly Away.”
“You’re going to Fly Away?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the rest of the family will just pal around with the gator then.” He leans out, dips his toes in the pool, and splashes water on it. “I know, ‘It’s a caiman.’”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Marty says.
Marty’s father puts a hand on my shoulder for balance. With this touch, things suddenly become real for me, and my eyes shift from the hand that grips me to the bare leg below it, swinging back into the blue of the kiddie pool.
This is how a toe comes off. When it happens, it is simple: a sound seems to come before the water even moves, the cracking of a wet sheet maybe, and the caiman rises in motion, turning, too fast to take in. The light changes on the water, there is the popping sound of a hock joint, and I feel fingers grip deep into my shoulder. Then Marty’s father turns from us.
We all just stand there as he hobbles across the gravel, and we watch what is to be one, slow lap around the pool, alone. As he moves past the pool’s shallow steps, the blood starts in earnest, and when he rounds the deep end, we can see his big toe is hanging by a flap.
He moves slowly, foot and heel, foot and heel, looking up at the sun. We have never seen so much blood, and as he passes the wolves, they go crazy with it, heads pressed against the chain link, eyes rolled back, rear legs digging in place.
He says something through his teeth, something we can’t make out, and looks back at us. He comes to the diving board, but instead of going around, he labors over, arms out, in hard-placed steps. Up, off balance, he stares down his yard, the charring meat, the Saturday this is. He looks back at us again.
“Who are you?” he asks. “What are you doing here?”
He comes down hard, half stumbling, and this is when Marty and Jimbo rush to him. But I don’t rush. I look at that caiman, the red strobe warping across its back and the curve of the blue bottom. It sits motionless, rocking in its own wake, and it looks more fake than ever. I get the urge to kick it, too, but I don’t have the guts.
When I catch up, they are in the garage, lowering Marty’s father into the Chrysler. The goal is to elevate his pumping foot on the dash, but they are forced to settle for the open throat of the glove box. Jimbo turns to me. We are standing by the trunk, giving room, and I really think I will be invited along with the family to pace and fret in the emergency room. Instead, Jimbo unzips his pants and spreads the ears of his fly to reveal the white of his Jockeys. When I realize he doesn’t want to take his dope to the hospital, I just shake my head and unbuckle my pants, looping a thumb in the elastic of my underwear in anticipation. Jimbo reaches deep into his groin and fishes out the sweaty bag of weed just as Marty’s mother rounds the fender. Her shirt reads: RUN, REBELS, RUN!
They all load up and drive away, leaving me looking from the dark garage out into the overbright harrows of sharp-cornered tract homes, and I am alone in a stranger’s garage. On the wall are spray-painted silhouettes of missing tools—wrench, hammer, plane—just the empty hooks, and I become aware of the cool air on my legs, pouring from an open door, past me through the garage and out into the world.
“They gone?” a voice asks. I’d forgotten about the boy.
There is a white plastic intercom near the garage door, and I push the button. “Yeah,” I tell him, “everyone left.”
Out back, I find him balancing a plate of burned meat as he drags a patio chair around the pool, where he parks it in front of the wolves. Except for deeper pockets in the pool-decking, the blood is turning dark and colorless, the dull metallic of high photography or the platinum-black of some fish—a bullhead or drum, maybe—that you see on Freshwater Sportsman.
I pull up a chair and join him, our feet outstretched to the edge of the fence, a move that leaves the wolves insane with rage, slathering each other’s necks, roaring at our faces. The boy throws a piece of meat over the fence, and it just disappears. I, too, grab a fillet and loft it over the short fence. All you see is the sudden white of upstretched necks and the falling punch of the throat that gets it.
We lean back in our chairs then, staring straight at those wolves with our heads cocked in a lazy, curious way.
“What’d you do yesterday?” I ask him.
“I don’t know,” he says.
There are gods who are raised by wolves, but I don’t recall the details. It was one of the seventy-three questions I missed on the midterm.
“You’d think they’d get tired of this.”
“I think it’s the waves from that thing.” The boy nods toward the tower. “That’s what drives them crazy.”
Above, I hear another bird on approach. Wobbling in, it seems to nearly clip the tower.
Bird is a term my mother first picks up from Tammy when they’re flying the Cancun-Kingston-Cayman triangle eight times a week. It is outbound from Jamaica that my mother’s bird, an MD-80 wide-body with bad fuel lines, drops seventeen thousand feet over Cuba. Tammy, with her overtan skin and tired blue eyes, tells my mother that drops happen, that you can learn to love the thrill.
I look up at the flashing tower, and this boy’s radio-wave theory makes a certain kind of sense, but the mystery I’m trying to solve is what in the world keeps these wolves from coming over the fence.
The stupid part of this story is that the next day we all still go to Fly Away, Jimbo, Marty, and me. It is late afternoon when we arrive, the sun setting over the Vegas strip as we wait before a big muraled door out back by the Dumpsters. Its painting depicts a free-falling woman, limbs out, hair rushing up like fire, and, knowing this must be her, I study the tight body and thin scowl until the door opens to reveal its model, Tasha in the flesh, looking bored and irritable in yellow goggles and a signal-orange jumpsuit. I see the artist captured nearly perfectly the sullen indifference in Tasha’s eyes, which can’t be easy when you’re painting in big jugs and winking lashes.
She eyeballs Marty and shakes her head. “You owe me.”
We follow her in the back way, where we sit in preflight until the last paying customers of the day leave and Fly Away is ours. Between rows of echoing lockers, we strip to our underwear in front of her. Marty still has a quarterback’s body and Jimbo’s an ottoman of a man, but at the sight of me Tasha shakes her head, hands on hips, and decides I’ll need a red drag suit, extralarge.
“Where’d you get the scar?” she asks, eyeing my sternum.
“I was a kid,” I tell her. “I took a tumble.”
Jimbo and Marty bake the last of their dope through a toiletpaper tube while suiting up slowly and without conversation. Tasha sits on a metal stool, watching as I strap into that red suit. She fixes her earplugs, removing then replacing them.
“You don’t talk much,” she says, licking the tips of the plugs before screwing them back in. “Not that that’s bad.”
“What’s there to say?”
She leans forward, points at her ear. “What?” she asks.
Finally she leads us to the control room above the flight chamber, where she presets the engine with a bank of digital switches and relays. With little fanfare, we follow her downstairs to a round chamber, where, in a two-hundred-mile-per-hour wind, I fly. The padding on the walls is red vinyl, rolled and tucked, like the choice upholstery of an old Cadillac. Hovering over the wire mesh that separates me from the motor, I don’t try any flips or fancy moves. I just float eye-level with those who hug the sides, waiting their turns while I take too long, as I am held transfixed, staring straight down the maw of a DC-3.
For the others, there are stunts and bloopers, amazing vaults and gymnastics from Tasha, but I don’t really see any of it. After th
irty minutes, the engine winds itself down, and we wiggle off our helmets to reveal sweaty, matted hair. Marty and Jimbo compare flight stories, gesturing with their hands like fins, their voices echoing with the strange sound in there, and I don’t feel so hot.
Tasha comes over and places two fingers on my neck, clocking my pulse on her watch. The move surprises me at first, but there is purpose in her fingers, and I sense she knows what she’s feeling for. She leans in close for her reading, and at this height I can watch how her ribs finger her suit when she exhales.
“You take everyone’s pulse?”
“Only ones that look like you. They gave us a course on it.” She nods at the motor below. “You know, heart attacks.”
“Nothing’s wrong with my heart,” I say. “How do I look?”
“I’ve got that same scar on my chest, so save the story.”
“From the crash?”
Marty just hears the edge of this but pipes in, “Don’t get her started on that crash.”
“Shut up,” she says to him, and then turns back to me. “You’re okay. You look good.” She adjusts her fingers on my neck, pushes harder.
“We’re going on a smoke run,” Marty says, stripping his flight suit clean off, right in the chamber.
“Sure,” she says. “Whatever.”
Jimbo comes up to me. “Right back,” he says and tries to do the complicated shake with me, leaving my hands fumbling to keep up. Jimbo punches the air and tokes an imaginary joint before the two of them cruise, half-naked, out the padded door.
Tasha slides her fingers from my neck to my helmet, which she pats. “Your pulse is strong, rising some, but fine.”
“That scar—really, I was a kid. I fell on a rake.”
Tasha sits next to me, throwing a leg across the padding. “Mine was heart massage. You know what that is?”
“That must have been some crash.”
“I used to be a cheerleader. Can you believe that? What was I cheering for? I don’t even see the point now.”
“’Cause you saw the other side?”
“The other side of what?”
“Jimbo says, you know, you saw the light.”
“‘The light?’ What an asshole.”
We hear Jimbo and Marty bang a locker closed in preflight, and Tasha and I stare at each other. In our minds, we are both mentally following the dopey boys through the corridor, down the stairs until they pass a painting of Tasha that will wink them through a self-locking door, and we almost hold our breath listening for the sound of the exit’s electric deadbolt.
“You wanna see the light? I’ll show you light,” she says.
Using a time delay, Tasha programs the motor for topspeed, 240 miles per hour, to get us off the ground together. On the wire mat, she lies face down, arms and legs out, and tells me to lay on top of her, so that we are stacked and spread-eagled, both with a view down into the DC-3. I immediately begin to swell in my dragsuit, and I know she can feel me harden. The pneumatic starter motor whines into life, and as the radial cylinders choke and sputter before firing up with authority, the lights turn out, leaving us in absolute blackness, something she must have programmed, too. With the sudden dark, Tasha says yes, and, given the earplugs and air pressure, it is more a vibration through our ribs than a sound.
There is no noise or light as the propellers clap up to a fast throttle. The ground simply falls away, and we rise, riding a column of air like a life raft on roiling, black breakers. Tasha does the balancing with her arms and I just hold on, wrapping around her, letting my fingers interlock her ribs, run the raised line of her breastplate scar. Mostly, I just hold on, but as my eyes start to adjust, I begin to see a faint light. From the dark engine below comes a coppery fire, the green-black glow of its hot cowls, and into this I look for a first glimpse of the future. In air hot and black as jet, this minor light speaks loud to me, winks at me as I feel Tasha reach back through the dark to unsnap the crotch flaps in our suits. She yells something I cannot hear.
I enter her without ceremony, and we screw spread-eagled, through wind-whipped nylon, the rattle making Tasha’s flesh feel hard and fibrous inside, like the slick white, gumlike meat of coconut. In the wind tunnel below, the motor’s buttery fire is the only light we have to guide us, and we fall endlessly toward it, like the path-dangling shimmer of a tree viper’s heat pits, the golden Isis beetle burrowing beneath the Valley of Kings. I am a cliff diver, held midleap. I am between engine and ice, green felt and craps, hovering between the untrue city and the coming flash. Close by is my father, night falling, high on endorphins, somewhere after the bullet but before the hyenas, the constellations overhead forming themselves not into giant bears or crabs, but silver Jeeps, celestial banana clips, a great gavel. Of the hard, wheeling lights above, my father’s eyes make out Ladder, Lariat, Fleece, and Sickle. From the stars of Serpens, Scorpio, Leo Major, and Lupus, he sees the Burning Chariot, the Lesser Wing, the False Book.
Tasha has her feet looped around my ankles, and she’s elbowing me in the ribs, to fuck harder, I figure, so I jostle my hips as I am supposed to, yet I feel nothing. Losing my senses, I drift closer to my essential state: coupled and bound with someone I cannot see, hear, or feel. It is in this state—floating, hungry, tethered—that I have a moment of clarity, a vision: I see a resort permanently frozen in glass, like a “Wish you were here” diorama in a snow globe, with plastic figurines of those who people my life, while around them whips a constant category-three storm. If there is a heaven or hell for Tammy, it is the same place—this hot tub she reclines in, with enough chlorine to burn her hair blond again, while above tumbles a sky of yellow masks, complimentary Tanquereys, and wheeling black boxes. On a white towel, my mother sleeps under this sun, margarita gone warm. Of Ted, there is only the red tip of his snorkel as he examines bright fish trapped in clear blue plastic. And driving blind through a storm of seismic charges, MP badges, and Togo masks is my father, one hand on the wheel, the other holding binoculars focused so that everything near him is overblown and blurry, so that all beyond is bathed in tempting, miraculous light.
The storm around me, however, begins to subside, and our column of air becomes unsteady as the engine tires down. While I’m still inside Tasha, we slowly settle on the wire mat, lightly bouncing from its spring as we begin to gain weight. I don’t know if I came in her or not. I thought there’d be that white flash, the divine light, so to speak, but I may have missed it.
Finished, we strip out of our sweaty suits, and, naked, skin red-streaked, we lie facedown together on the mesh, letting our forearms dangle through the squares of wire. We let it go quiet, and above the smoldering engine, the aluminum sounds of our breathing echo from its turbines, mingling together, so that it whispers back.
Tasha shifts so her breasts swing through, and above the pale ticking blue of hot manifolds, we both let our bladders go, our ears following the urine as it dribbles to crackle and hiss in the blades below. The glowing steam that lifts, a fog of pissy vinegar, drowsily mumbles to us with our own breath, and it is the first true ghost I have seen, though there will be others.
“There it is,” she says. “There’s your light.”
This is the point of the story where I’m supposed to tell you how everything works out and then hit you with the big picture. I’ll give it a shot.
It turns out that, after three operations, Marty’s father loses half the foot to infection and later he sways when he stands. Jimbo shakes his head as he tells me this on the last night I see him, when I go to his house to watch Speedweek’s coverage of LeMans. Speedweek puts me in a bad mood because there are too many commercials. There are no breaks or second halves in the real world. You can’t call time-out at two hundred miles an hour. Around lap four hundred, Jimbo returns from the kitchen shirtless, holding two Millers. Smiling, he asks me if I’d like a beer with head.
The Runnin’ Rebels go on to win the conference title.
Mythology isn’t for me. Right before I fail,
though, as an aside, the teacher says something I remember. Of course there are no gods, really, he tells us, which surprises me, because I’d gotten used to the idea. But it makes sense. I know there’s no great hand that shuttles jets safely down or suggests to scavengers that they find other meals.
Ted says he hears from somebody who hears from somebody that my dad is caught bartering military radios for low-grade emeralds in Tanganyika and is deported by the British. They say he makes it out of Africa A-okay, but the more I get used to Ted, the less I trust him. Back when we first meet, when I am nobody in his eyes, the truths come hard and fast. Now I see Ted often, and he no longer says things like Tough break and Face it. Assuming he’s ever even met my father, which is still in question, Ted’s little stories suggest a bigger truth: he’s begun to care enough to lie.
Some days, sure as the sun, I know my father is dead. Others, I hear his Rover circling the oil-field perimeter wire full throttle. I see him on a drilling platform set in a sea of chewgrass, scanning heat waves for signs of motion between the drilling towers, his fingers running in and out the focus of his brass-bound marine binoculars. Maybe he studies the sky, impossibly blue, or eyes distant villages, rising phoenixlike from the tawny-rose savanna clay. Of course he sees women, bronze from this distance, hair dyed like inky wine in the evening sun, as they move their burdens silently along the horizon.
The best version of things I won’t be able to imagine till later, when I am alone in a way I didn’t know people could be. I move to Acapulco, where cliff diving at night is all the rage, and on Friday evenings, Ted and I sit with tourists in silence as we follow bodies that drop through darkness into a pumice-colored sea. On some Sundays, Ted teaches me target-match shooting on the brown plains just beyond the brochure-beautiful mountains of coastal Mexico. Ted’s pistols are of tournament quality, quiet and firm in your hand as they snap and ring the distant silhouettes. On these mornings we leave the church bells and take his Jeep up the winding mountain roads, past Chidiaz and El Agujero, to the high, grassy plains that extend into the heart of mid-Guerrero. The fields whip in the wind, and we shoot into the brown waves whenever the red targets flash through the grass. Ted never produces my father’s binoculars, but it doesn’t matter. We walk into the scrub to see what we hit. We examine the targets, decide angles, hit-and-miss ratios, and then walk out of the brush together to the Jeep, parked on a ridge that divides our view of the world in three: a khaki run of grass, a thin strip of indigo ocean, and the sky, palest of blues.
