by Adam Johnson
Ted thumbs the indentations our bullets make in silhouettes of pronghorns and lions and boar. He looks at me hard, in a way he has never done before. He squints. In Africa, Ted tells me, gods live in animals and trees, even in things like tables and radios. There is a big problem over there of gods taking human form and sleeping with women. The god then changes back, and the woman is alone, but for the boy that is born things are worse: he’s a semigod, with small powers he doesn’t understand, and like his father, he’s a roamer, with one wing in heaven, one foot on earth, doomed to wander toward every distant mud city that appears golden in his half-divine sight. His real father might be a bird or storm, sea-beast or lion, so this typical young man, Ted says, must learn to find his fathers where he can.
This story Ted tells me is a good one, though I’m sure he’s probably making it up. I don’t remember my mythology teacher lecturing on this topic. Ted does have a point, though. You can’t go around talking to trees and radios. You must learn to live with the unknown, never taking your eyes off it, but not growing used to it, either. For instance, from this vantage, it looks like these cliffs deadfall straight into the ocean’s abyss. But there’s a strip of land between the ledge and the surf that you can’t quite see from here. You’d have to listen for the church bells or smell for the meat smokers in the market to know this stretch of shore is below. You’d have to use all your powers, because in life you can count on the most important things being beyond your knowing, like a decade you can’t remember, a lost younger brother, or this hidden beach where your mother’s villa is, where she sleeps late after flying all night through turbulence.
THE JUGHEAD OF BERLIN
The doors to my heart get kicked down in the middle of the night, and I wake still dreaming of muscly ATF agents with black cargo pants, lean haircuts, and tough-luck smiles, so that when my father comes down into the game room, I am sitting up in bed, hot. He flips a bank of light switches at the foot of the stairs, making the darkness buzz as the fluorescent tubes hum-up. I begin to make out my father, crash helmet under arm, the Jughead of Berlin.
He can’t sleep some nights since he quit drinking, and he doesn’t seem surprised to see his daughter awake, either. Judging by his spent eyes and wild hair, he has had the same dream about Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms commandos, though for different reasons.
“So you’re home,” he says, as if he’s surprised to see me in my bed.
I roll my eyes in the stuttering light and reach for my flight goggles. “Like I’m some alley cat slut or something,” I tell him. “I wasn’t even dreaming about sex.”
“Maybe we should ask Randy what he’s dreaming of.”
“I’m a complete virgin, Dad.”
He grunts once, which is military for likely.
Germany is where my father and his friends were stationed during the Cold War—where he learned “importing and exporting,” as he puts it on his tax forms—and though I never learned what he did to become the Jughead of Berlin, the name stuck, and Berlin is all I’ve ever heard him called, even by Mom. When people phone our house and ask for Charles Primeaux, I hang up—it can only be a bill collector, a lawyer, or even the ATF themselves, who sometimes ring up impersonating lawyers and collectors. Everybody in Coubillion Parish knows Berlin.
I’ve taken to sleeping in the game room, and I do so in a shimmery emerald chemise. I swing my legs out of bed, and over green silk, I pull on a thick jersey and jeans, then start to lace my duck boots.
Berlin takes in what remains of his game room. There’s been no gambling down here in the year since they made the riverboat casinos legal, and though he’s pretty much accepted that his past life is over, he still calls it his game room. Here he was once the top pit boss in all south Louisiana, but tonight he just shakes his head at the red-foil wallpaper and boot-blacked windows of a room that now reeks of Petit-Chou, the stupid perfume I’ve armed myself with in an effort to snare Randy.
Sobriety and poverty have made my father newly interested in my affairs. From nowhere, he says, “For God’s sake, Auddie, put on a bra.”
“What? I’m wearing a sweatshirt.”
“We’re going flying. There’s a lot of G forces involved, stuff you don’t even know about.” Berlin acts all pissed, but his voice is closer to a whisper. He’d be better off crashing another plane than waking up Mom, who’s been preparing the house nonstop since we got a tip that we might finally be served a warrant this week.
“I think they mentioned gravity to us in school, Dad.”
“And don’t go rolling your dang eyes.”
I silently mouth yes sir.
He walks away at this and starts fumbling with one of the slot machines we have to ditch before the raid. He grabs a silver dollar off the bar and takes a pull. Seven Bar Seven.
He taps another silver dollar on the bar, then looks at me. “So, am I going to meet this boy before he points a gun at me on Sunday?”
I come up beside Berlin, lean against the poker pit railing. I take a dollar and spin, pulling Bell Cherry Cherry. The slot machines are old, from Cuba, with burnished silver casings and hand-painted tumblers—green stars, black bars, crackled gold bells. Berlin’s probably going to bury them tomorrow, and I don’t know how I’m going to sleep without them in quiet formation around me.
“First of all,” I tell him, pulling again, “the ATF won’t even let Randy touch a gun yet, and second, I invited him to our fish fry tonight. You’ll like him.”
Berlin looks away, then meets my eyes, meaning maybe he’ll like Randy and maybe he won’t, meaning he’s not going to speak to the possibility yet.
As the tumblers stop, three silver horseshoes align, sending a brief stream of Kennedy dollars into the pewter hopper below. But this is not luck. Our family has gotten where it is in this world by knowing the future. In back of each machine, below the scrollwork, is a little screw that adjusts how much it pays out.
“Couldn’t we keep one of them?”
He grunts. “Hell,” he says, turning. “Let’s just fly.”
We make our way through the abandoned blackjack and booray tables toward the garage, half-shielding our eyes from what is an all-too-bright past. Except for my bed, it still feels like a bayou version of Vegas in here: fleur-de-lis carpet, wet bar, twin ice machines, a row of banker’s lamps, and a brass smoker’s companion that now holds the keys to the ’69 Super Sport I’ll drive with abandon after Randy agrees to escort me to the Sadie Hawkins dance Saturday night.
“I figure they’ll come in through there,” Berlin says, nodding as we pass the double side doors that lead out to the back parking lot.
I picture a wave of ATF agents and Gaming Commissioners busting through my bedroom door with bright lights and loudspeakers in a raid no one’s supposed to know about. And of course, bringing up the rear, in black body armor, will be Randy. He’s the captain of his JROTC unit at school, but he’s really into the ATF. They have a program called Future ATF that lets you do tons of ride alongs until you pass your entrance exams.
I come up and screw with Dad’s hair, which pisses him off, though he’s kind of a sucker for it. “You’re still the king,” I tell him. “You’re the Jughead of Berlin.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says.
In the garage, I peel back the car cover to check out the Super Sport while Berlin hunts for his aviator glasses through engine parts strewn across oily workbenches. Though he’s sold his cargo planes, it’s hard to imagine they’ll run without all these pieces left behind. He’s been rounding up his tools because he starts as a mechanic for Grumman at Chenault Airfield next week, going to work for the first time since he left the air force ten years ago.
The Super Sport’s paint job, under the droplights, is beyond black. It’s like you spread black jelly across the Chevy’s curves. I crouch to stare into the fenders, and they are almost teary with it. When you reach to touch, you don’t even know where the car will begin, the paint’s that deep, and this girl reflecte
d in the black enamel looks a little older, a solid seventeen, with force and direction. This is the girl Randy’s after, and I imagine him riding shotgun as they race down parish back roads, his surplus Airborne boots on the Super Sport’s dash, her wrist brushing his thigh as she shifts for fourth.
It’s like cayenne in Lycra pants, this thought, and I have to look away from the dark mirror of the quarter panel. Daydreaming like this is what screwed up my spirit drill last night at the wrestling meet. Just the sight of Randy warming up in his blue-and-silver Fighting Catfish tanksuit. Beyond sexy. Those leather mat booties, and that headgear they wear? He had me. I mean, he was practicing hammerlocks.
I come up and lean against the workbench. Mixed with jet engine bearings and platinum spark plugs are superblue feathers, left from when our garage was filled with blue hyacinth macaws, the rarest birds on earth. Berlin’s old air force crash pack is piled among the junk. I run my hands over its black nylon, picture my father’s cargo jet cutting out over Bulgaria or something. Inside are bandages, fishhooks, a crusty bottle of iodine. The pack smells like old mosquito repellent, which somehow makes me think of Randy.
“So, did they give you suicide pills in case the Russians shot you down?”
“Suicide pills?” He shakes his head. “Who would put suicide pills in a survival kit?”
“Just asking,” I say.
“Look,” he says. “The closest I came to the enemy was shooting white russians at thirty thousand feet while airlifting New Year’s vodka to all the boonie NATO outposts.”
I strap the crash pack over my shoulder, and it feels pretty tough.
Berlin finds his flying glasses. He rubs the yellow lenses with a shop towel, then holds them up to the work lights, okays them.
“So this raid,” I say. “It’s like a sure thing, right?”
“We’ll go stay at Aunt Clara’s a while.”
“What’s a while, a week?”
“You just worry about school,” he tells me. “Worry about learning your Spirit Squad routines, about not letting the other girls down.”
“Those girls? They’re so fake. Those are the girls who wrote ‘stay the same, never change’ on my cast when my arm got broke. What’s that supposed to mean? All they care about is Juniors Rule! And crap like that.”
Berlin walks to the sink to wash his oily hands. Talk of my arm usually shuts him up, but not today. “Seems to me that if you cared a little more about juniors ruling, your precious Randy wouldn’t have lost his wrestling match last night,” he says and reaches for some Fosforpuro, a Mexican soap that’s illegal here because it’s bad for the environment. Totally ignoring me, he starts lathering his hands.
On the shelves above the laundry sink are packages of Chiapan fireworks and bottles of sea turtle oil from Belize, leftovers from thousands of transports Berlin’s made down south. Mostly, the cargoes were unexciting—charter down archaeological supplies or missionary Bibles, then bring back frozen Argentinean crawfish and tins of fish eggs. But sometimes there were raw emeralds, vials of curare, or nearly extinct birds.
The well pump is slow tonight, and he looks at me like it’s my fault.
“The Spirit Squad’s stupid,” I say. “So I can pom-pom and do the splits. What good’s that going to do me in the real world?”
He turns the trickle of water off, though his hands are still sudsy blue. “You don’t let your friends down. That’s what the real world’s about.”
Berlin looks for a clean rag to wipe the greasy soap off his hands, and I hand him my Spirit Squad sweater from the laundry pile. While he works his hands clean, I stare at taped-up photos of airplanes on runways hand-cut from exotic scenery, aerials of Toltecan waterfalls and Montserrat, afire.
Then he realizes he’s oiling up my white Spirit Squad top. “What’d you do that for?” he asks. There’s a flash of anger on his face, quick then gone, like when Randy hears the word Waco.
I shrug.
“Look,” he says and hits the garage opener. “Next week this will all be over.” The garage door hinges screech in a way that used to drive the macaws crazy.
“Next week, I’ll have a regular job, and we’ll be normal, like everybody else.”
The governor used to duck hunt with my father. Exxon sent us Christmas cards. On Sundays, the sheriff would drive the parish prisoners out to mow our lawn. But since Berlin crashed our seaplane last year, we’ve entered a world where it’s hard to say what will happen next. According to Randy, the ATF doesn’t worry about things like planning: they give you Level IV body armor, Mylar riot gear, a pouch of shock grenades, and then they point you toward the unknown.
Walking out the door, I grab my Spirit Squad minimegaphone off the dryer. During sports games, I’m supposed to point it at the crowds and convince them that we’re going to win, though we usually don’t. Today, I decide, I will become an ex-Spirit Squad leader.
It’s full dark outside, with a slight breeze, so that wandering mist from our lake is pushed into the orderly rows of our small pecan grove. The driveway is really a levee that divides the marsh grass from Mom’s victory roses, and we walk along a lake-rim of cypress knees. I spin the minimegaphone by its wrist strap. Throwing things out of airplanes is cool for a while, but then it wears off. So this is not like some huge gesture or anything.
The pecans canopy the drive, so that when they sway, dew comes down in volleys. It is sweeter than water. It sticks to your eyelashes, tastes of tonic. Berlin goes through all his jumpsuit’s zippers to see what he may have left in his pockets last time out—a habit from his gin days. He finds gum, and we chew together so we’ll be able to clear our ears on ascent.
Someone crunches through the shale ahead, and out of the mist appears Doc Teeg with a bait bucket and a fishing rod you can telescope with the flick of a wrist. After Teeg’s wife left him, he backed his four-door pickup to our lake and dumped all her belongings to the bottom in an effort to create the kind of artificial reef that trophy-size sportfish prefer. He figures a thirty-thousand-dollar donation of Limoges china and Rochefoucauld silver makes Berlin’s fishing hole part his. My mother won’t speak to him.
He hails us, and first thing, grabs my forearm, rotating my ulna while feeling deep with a thumb. Doc Teeg’s not a doctor anymore, though he set my arm last spring and is tracking Berlin’s stomach and liver. Now that they took his certificates, his work is free and you don’t need to make appointments. His bedside manner is better since he became an ex-doctor, the same way Berlin became a better father after they took his pilot’s licenses and he left the fame of his gin.
Doc Teeg finds the fracture line with his thumbnail, and tracing it under my skin almost makes me sing.
“Berlin, I hear your girl half-nelsoned herself quite a wrestler last night,” Teeg says, like I’m not even there.
“Don’t start on Randy,” I tell him. “That little wrestler rappels out of Blackhawk helicopters.”
Berlin ignores me. “We’ll need that big-ass pickup of yours today.”
Teeg squints, feels deep into my arm with his fingertips, as if he’s imagining my fracture from the inside. He’s chewing gum, too; he looks me in the face, jawing it. “Auddie,” he says, “your arm isn’t strong enough yet to go taking on any championship wrestlers. I suggest some daily wrist exercises to get you in shape for any big matches you’ve been planning.”
Berlin lifts his hand to cut him off. “Stop it with the wrist talk.”
“Rehab the problem area with an up-and-down, circular motion.”
“Teeg,” Berlin warns.
“I’m talking about fishing,” Teeg says and snaps his rod to full length. He mock reels in a big one and smiles. “I’m prescribing fishing therapy for the girl’s wrist.”
Doc Teeg owes my father four hundred grand. Or it’s the other way around. They don’t talk about the money the same way they don’t talk about the reason Teeg can’t practice medicine anymore or how my father became the Jughead of Berlin.
“Y
ou just bring that truck by,” Berlin says.
“Where’s that dog of yours?” Teeg asks me, meaning the dog he lost to Berlin at cards two years ago, a blue-merle catahoula pighound named Beau. Beau’s fast and wild, and my dog by default. The little advice I have to offer the world, at age sixteen, is to never name a dog Beau because it will never learn the word no.
Sometimes Teeg really misses that dog, and my dad’s not against giving a man his dog back, especially if it might be in lieu of four hundred grand. It’s that Berlin believes you should remember your screwups, so he tries to keep his past life within sight, but just out of reach. It is on this thinking that he gave me the keys to his Super Sport. This is also why, I believe, we strap on our gear and go stunting in his last airplane on these nights he can’t sleep.
From behind his gum, Teeg whistles a call I could never do, one he says he learned during his triage field training in Stuttgart, and through the dark trees come the sounds of Beau thrashing in the distance, bounding our way. This means he’ll probably chase us down the runway, snapping in the prop wash.
For a moment, we are held by the noisy rush of Beau, charging the underbrush for us. Berlin and Teeg seem to hear in this ruckus something I don’t, as if the dog were fetching something they’d rather not see again. A couple years ago, these two’d still be drinking this time of night, bright-faced and loud in the poker room where I now sleep. This morning, though, they have little to say, and we part before Beau arrives. Doc Teeg rolls off alone toward his ex-wife’s possessions and a dog that’s no longer his, while Dad and I head down the levee because we fly only in the dark, under the radar.
