Such a Rush (17 page)

“Affirmative,” I said into the mike. “He couldn’t spell for Alec’s banner either.”

“Motherf—” Grayson clicked off his radio before he cussed over the public airwaves. But he was still talking animatedly to himself on the ground. He reared back with one hand like he would pitch the radio down the tarmac.
Don’t throw the radio, Grayson.

I’d flown far enough that I couldn’t see him anymore when he came back over the frequency. “Leah and Alec, both of you come in and drop your banners so we can fix them. Keep an eye out for each other.”

As I made the turn at the end of the airport, I could see Grayson again, looking across the tarmac at Mark. Mark was calling something through his cupped hands.

I concentrated on my flight again. Every flight might be my last, now that Hall Aviation and my job there were balanced so precariously. I circled the airport, dropped my banner, circled the airport some more while watching for Alec so I didn’t crash into him, and at a signal from Grayson finally dipped down to pick up a correctly spelled banner that he’d supervised. I headed out to sea.

Even though the cockpit was hot with the unrelenting sun shining in, and the air was muggy with the scent of my sunscreen, my chest expanded and I finally felt like I could breathe as I flew over the ocean. The Atlantic lapped the Earth so close to my trailer. I could always feel it there, pulsing and cleansing two miles from me. But I rarely saw it now that I never flew. I caught a glimpse only if I got a ride somewhere and we happened to drive by it in the daytime. Now here it was, laid out for me farther than I could see in three directions. I couldn’t even make out its true color for all the sunshine glinting off every wave, like the whole expanse was made of molten gold.

When I’d reached a safe distance from the shore, I turned and flew parallel to the beach. Swimmers wouldn’t venture this far, so if I dropped the banner or crashed the whole plane into the water, I wouldn’t kill them. But I was close enough to the beach that vacationers could read the banner from the sand.

I flew past the flophouse end of the beach first. Garishly painted high-rise hotels crowded each other here. The actual flophouses were across the beach road where I couldn’t see them, with no ocean view. I couldn’t make out details of individual people, but I knew from experience that these folks on the beach were the whores, the girls from trailer parks inland who could easily have been mistaken for whores, the tattooed exhibitionists, the privates in the military with their huge young families, way too many children for one man to support on such low pay. The vinegar scent of beer and cigarette smoke and occasionally marijuana wafted on the air here, even around the children, even at eight in the morning. The party for these people started early and went on all day since they could only afford a night or two in a hotel, and then they’d have to go back home. The few times I’d spent a day, this was where I’d been taken.

As I flew toward the nicer end of town, the folks on the sand thinned out. The bright high-rise hotels shrank into smaller brick hotels farther apart, then thinned further into complexes of condos with shared pools, then individual mansions where each family had a pool all their own. This section of the beach went on for the longest. There was probably one person vacationing here for every hundred on the flophouse end. I could pick out these individual people. They walked along the beach at great distances from each other. Or they took their children out very early so they wouldn’t get sunburned in the heat of the day, and watched them closely so nothing bad happened to them. Unlike at the flophouse end, these children did not have to take care of themselves.

All the while, I looked out for other planes. The Army base sometimes sent Chinook helicopters skimming across the water and frightening the tourists. The Air Force base sent out
F-16s. Occasionally a Coast Guard plane or helicopter would scoot past, on its way to save someone, or just cruising the beach like I was.

And then there were Alec and Grayson, flying in the same pattern as me. I heard Alec announcing over the radio that he was dropping his banner, circling around, and picking up a correctly spelled one. Then Mark took off to go on his crop-dusting run. I was surprised he announced himself according to protocol, considering what Grayson had told me about Mark using his plane as a weapon. Then Grayson took off and circled back for his banner.

Grayson, Alec, and I knew the sequence by heart because Mr. Hall had drilled it into us. We flew out to the ocean and made a slow turn at a safe distance from the shore, always keeping other people in mind. We headed from the flophouse end of the beach to the ritzy end. Where the population thinned to the point that there were a lot more birds than beachgoers and hardly anybody would see the banners, we made a slow, wide, careful turn, always aware of the heavy banner that the plane was not built to drag behind it.

We flew back down the beach the way we’d come, even farther from the shore now to avoid a collision with each other. It seemed impossible, but we had no radar, nothing to tell us another plane was coming except our own eyes, and planes weren’t as visible head-on as they were from the side. Where the commercial section of the beach ended in a nature preserve and the crowds disappeared, we made another slow turn for the ritzy end again. That was the job, until we headed back to the airport for a break or lunch or a different banner.

Each time I passed Alec’s plane, I thought about ways I could talk to him when we took a break around ten, excuses I could use to get into a conversation with him. I didn’t really
believe that I could land a date with him like Grayson wanted. But as long as I looked like I was making an effort, I figured Grayson would have no cause to complain, and he would stay off my case until the business folded and he went away.

Every time I passed Grayson’s plane, I thought something completely different. Anger at him first. Then sympathy for the swirl of emotions he was obviously suffering through, all of them negative. In my experience, Grayson was wrong most of the time. But he felt very deeply, and I supposed that was why I’d always watched him. He said and did what I wanted to say and do but couldn’t because I knew my place or I knew better. My sympathy for him didn’t disappear just because he was using me.

Mostly their planes were too far away for me to see except as pinpoints in the sky. I concentrated on flying. I watched the few instruments for trouble. I listened to the engine, because a change in the pitch of its hum would be my first clue something had gone wrong with the plane or the banner. I relaxed into the rush of flight, my fingers and toes tingling with adrenaline at the knowledge that nothing but lift held me a thousand feet in the sky, and nothing below me could break my fall.

The truth was, this plane was not mine. It was tethered to the airport as surely as the pit bull was anchored to its trailer. But if I ever wanted to, just for a little while, braving dire consequences such as prison, I could head out over the Atlantic. Down to Florida. Up to New York. Wherever I wanted. I wasn’t going to do it, but the thought that I
could
made me smile.

Around ten, Alec announced over the radio that he was dropping his banner at the airport, then landing his plane. I gave him a few minutes so I wouldn’t crowd him, then headed in after him. Landing was a lot harder than taking off. The
plane wanted to fly. It didn’t want to land. The asphalt rushing to meet the plane was potentially a more violent situation than the asphalt falling away underneath it. My eyes never stopped moving: over the instruments, all around me in the sky, on the ground, making sure Zeke was off the grassy strip before I roared across it to drop the banner. He couldn’t spell worth shit and he might not have the sense to get out of my way, either.

The runway was clear. I lost altitude exactly like I was landing but without decreasing my airspeed. It was important that I get as close to the ground as possible before dropping the banner so it didn’t float away on the wind and wrap itself around an expensive piece of equipment or knock somebody in the head with the heavy pole like it had knocked the glass door of the airport office last December. I didn’t need help with this. I had done it a hundred times in practice and I operated by feel. Still, I heard Mr. Hall yelling in my head,
Drop drop drop.

I dropped the banner and pulled the plane into a safe climb, unlike the dangerous half-stalling climb of a banner pickup. I would leisurely circle around the airport and land. The wind was calm, the weather clear. There was no reason to feel shaken. Mr. Hall’s ghost was not in the cockpit in the seat behind me. I hadn’t heard his voice in my head, only the memory of his voice. Yet my hands trembled on the controls.

I’d expected to have a reaction like this if I ever flew in the Cessna again, since Mr. Hall had so often ridden beside me, teaching me. I hadn’t thought I’d react this way in one of the Pipers. Though he could have instructed me from the backseat, that would have added too much weight to tow a banner. He’d coached me on this kind of flying from the ground, over the radio. Especially dropping a banner.

And especially landing the lightweight Piper with its tendency to spin in a ground loop. As I announced my final approach over the radio in my babyish voice, he would be standing on the tarmac with his radio—

And there he was.

No, that was Zeke, the banner guy who couldn’t spell. He stood on the tarmac, watching my landing. I willed away the new, unwanted rush of adrenaline. No matter how ideal the conditions, flying was never safe, and I had to concentrate on landing this plane. I pushed Mr. Hall and the alarming sight of Zeke out of my mind as I lowered the plane to the asphalt and felt the gentle meeting of runway and rubber tires through the foot pedals.

The plane slowed to a crawl on the runway. I turned it and taxied toward the hangar, looking out all the while for Grayson landing behind me, or Mark landing. Wrecks happened on the taxiway as well as in the air. But the runway was clear. Zeke had moved to the grass, where he wrestled with the banner I’d dropped. I parked the plane outside the hangar, next to Alec’s yellow Piper, and cut the engine. The propeller in front of me transformed from a circular blur back into a propeller. Silence flooded the cockpit.

I winced at the sudden rush of emotion now that the adrenaline was leaving me, and I squinted to keep from crying. I couldn’t cry in an airplane out here on the tarmac. Pulling the headphones off my ears and over my thick hair, I opened the cockpit door and stepped way down onto the asphalt.

As I hurried through the dark hangar, Alec called “How was it?” from a corner. I couldn’t see after the bright sunlight outside, and with tears crowding my eyes. “Good,” I called back, still headed for the restroom in the back. With Alec in the hangar and Zeke on the runway and Grayson still up in
the air, the bathroom should be empty, but with my luck, it would be occupied. In that case, I didn’t know where I would put these tears.

I could hardly see the doorknob in the shadows. I turned it and stepped into the pitch-black room and flicked on the light and closed and locked the door behind me and collapsed against the door. I could not make a noise. I shoved my fists into my eyes and screamed silently about everything I had lost.

Why couldn’t Mr. Hall be here this week, running this business like always? His life had been small—coffee, corned beef sandwiches because he had grown up in Pennsylvania and still had a taste for Yankee delis, flying—but his life had been nice, and I had enjoyed sharing it with him. It wasn’t fair that he’d had his son taken away and then died alone in his condo and waited half a day for a friend to find him.

That thought choked a noise out of me. I wrapped both arms around my waist and squeezed the air out of my chest so I wouldn’t have any noise left in me to scream. I wished Mr. Hall were here. I wished I’d never felt I needed to let Mark into my life. I wished Grayson weren’t forcing me to fake feelings for Alec. I wished I could fly without relying on anyone. Or relying only on Mr. Hall would be okay, if I could just have that back. I missed his gruff voice, his kind words, his powdery-smelling old-man cologne closed up in the cockpit with me. Dizzy with despair, I set my forehead against the door.

Someone knocked. I felt like I’d been shot in the head. I jumped even higher than I had when the delivery guy had knocked on the door of my trailer the night before.

“Leah,” Alec called. “Open up.”

“Just a sec.” Glancing in the mirror above the sink, I saw there was no way to disguise that I’d been bawling my eyes
out. I ran water into my cupped hands anyway and splashed it over my face.

“Come on, Leah,” Alec called. “I feel the same way.”

I paused with a paper towel halfway to my face and considered my red-rimmed eyes in the mirror. I wouldn’t convince him to ask me on a date while I looked this way, but I had a hard time caring when I felt like death. I unlocked and opened the door and walked into his arms.

“Shhh,” he said, stroking my hair as I sobbed into his T-shirt. “I cried yesterday, the first time I went up. Grayson had gone to talk to you about working for him. I was alone so it was okay.” He squeezed me gently. “You can hear my dad yelling at you, can’t you?”

I nodded against his shirt. “Sorry. I’m getting you all wet.” He felt shitty enough about his dad. I didn’t mean to make things worse for him. The last thing he needed was to comfort somebody else. I put both hands on his chest and pushed away.

“Nah, I probably got my sweat all over
you.
Too hot for this.” He stepped away from me and pulled his T-shirt off over his head.