Dirt Bikes, Drones, and Other Ways to Fly

by Conrad Wesselhoeft

  I’m watching Lee’s fingers as I speak. The way they move, like pistons, is almost hypnotizing.

  “He came with a parachute. I took him down to the barn, climbed the ladder to the loft, opened the hay door, and tossed him out into the wind. That little guy sailed quite a ways before hitting the ground. Man, I was hooked.”

  “I’m sure you were,” Lee says.

  “I kept tossing him out that hay door to see how far he could fly. Each time, he went a little farther—fifty feet, then eighty. Well, the last time, a gust scooped him up and carried him away. I went down and searched the ground all around. Must’ve walked a hundred yards in every direction. He was just gone.

  “After a while, my mom started calling from the house—‘Time to go.’ But I wasn’t about to leave without GI Joe.

  “Finally, she came down to the barn. ‘What’s wrong, Little Texas Slim? Why are you crying?’

  “I told her.

  “‘C’mon!’ she said. ‘We’ll find him.’

  “We climbed to the loft. She knew exactly where to reach for a swallow’s nest, up on the high rafter out of sight. Right away, she found a feather. Cut off the end with a tack knife.

  “‘You go back down,’ she told me. ‘I’ll toss this out—like you tossed your paratrooper. Be sure you follow. Don’t lose sight of it.’

  “So I went outside and watched her launch that feather from the hay door. It caught the wind and just flew. I ran all the way down the ravine, with her cheering me on: ‘Go, Texas Slim! Go!’ I scrambled over some rocks and followed that feather around a bend. Just a few feet from where it landed, I found my GI Joe.

  “So you wanna know what she was like? That’s the best I can do.”

  Lee fits the braid around my wrist. This time, she’s able to tighten the knot. She pats my arm. “All done.”

  I hold up my wrist to inspect. “Thanks,” I say. “A lot better than those stud bands the Hells Angels boys wear.”

  I roll to my feet, dust my ass, and take a goodbye look at Sally Nickel.

  “She left us quick as lightning,” I say. “It changed everything. We’re all different people now. Maybe I should miss her more. Maybe I should feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut. Or had scalding oil poured over me. But it doesn’t feel like that at all. I’ll tell you why—because she’s all around, more now than when she was alive. Guess I’m crazy.”

  I go over to my bike. Strap on my helmet, saddle up, and slam down.

  “You comin’?” I shout.

  Lee gets up and walks over. Reaches for her helmet. Before she puts it on, she looks straight at me.

  “I like honesty, Arlo. I’m all over it.”

  WE GO ALL DAY. Now the sun is down. Purple-yellow sky. Moon cradling Venus.

  We bomb the last miles up the canyon road and bump across the cattle guard. Dad’s pickup is parked in front of the house. Good. Means I can hitch a ride back. Give my old Yam a rest.

  We pull up behind the barn, hose the dust off the bikes, and head for the house. I can see Dad through the living room window. He’s sitting on the couch dressed in a white shirt and bolo tie. Lupita drops beside him. Dad stretches an arm along the back of the couch. It stops just short of Lupita.

  “Hold up!” I say to Lee. “Where’s this going?”

  We stop and watch. It’s not exactly going anywhere. But it looks like it might. I want it to go somewhere. It’s been a long, dark season for Dad.

  “Um, this is none of our business,” Lee says.

  “Maybe not but still . . . ”

  I grab her hand and drag her tiptoe up the steps onto the porch. I drop into an armchair—an old Adirondack—and pull her into my lap. Her eyes practically land in mine.

  Through the window, we hear:

  “How many times you been married, Lupita?”

  “Twice, Hec. You know that.”

  “Somehow I thought it was more like three or four times.”

  Lee gives me a little swat—punishment for eavesdropping. Normally, I’d agree. But this is Dad. And he’s got on a white shirt and bolo tie—damn!

  “Had a couple live-in sets of spurs,” we hear Lupita say. “Kicked the last one out two years ago.”

  “How come you’re all alone now?” Dad asks.

  “I’m not alone, Hec. Got my niece. And Siouxsie. The girls are wonderful company.”

  “You know what I mean,” Dad says. “You could snap your fingers and any one of ten honchos would drop his saddle and come running.”

  “I’ve had it with honchos dropping their saddles,” Lupita says.

  I clasp the lapels of Lee’s jacket, pull her to me. Kiss her—peach soft, plum shiny. Her hair cascades around me, all that red-gold holding the scent of dusk, wheatgrass, and the beautiful brokenness of life. We sink into the Adirondack.

  They go on talking, but who the hell cares.

  After a while, I hear Dad say:

  “Don’t you miss it?”

  “Miss what?”

  Lee lifts her head, listening too.

  “Being with someone,” Dad says.

  “My weakness is for stallions,” Lupita says. “The frisky kind. But stallions have a way of going lame on me. Nowadays one trots up, I shoo him away.”

  “Get yourself a gelding,” Dad says.

  “Ha!” Lupita says. “Not interested in geldings.”

  Lee laces her fingers behind my neck. Man, am I starved.

  “Whoa, Arlo!” She pushes me away and catches her breath. Buttons her shirt. Gives me another little swat, bad boy that I am. Fact is, nothing much has happened. And yet everything has happened.

  We hear Lupita say:

  “Tell you what I do miss.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Picnics,” Lupita says.

  “Picnics! You speaking metaphorically?”

  “Oh, go stuff your metaphors,” Lupita says. “I mean real picnics. Driving up the canyon to the spring. Spreading a blanket under the sky. We forget, this is the Land of Enchantment. The most beautiful place on earth. We bog down in our lives and forget that.”

  “We sure the hell do,” Dad says.

  “How ’bout you, Hec? What do you miss?”

  “Gettin’ naked.”

  Lee lands me another little swat, like I said it.

  Lupita chuckles. “Listen to you.”

  “I used to be a stallion,” Dad says.

  “Used to! What happened?”

  “Death. Life. The whole shebang.”

  “True love is damn painful,” Lupita says. “Still, life is nothing without it.”

  “I disagree,” Dad says. “Life is just fine without it.”

  “You’re the dumbest man I know,” Lupita says. “Get your ass over here before the kids come back.”

  “Why? What are you gonna do to me?”

  “Spell something out.”

  Whatever Lupita spells out must be in Braille, because we don’t hear a single letter. Then Dad gasps.

  “My God!” he says. “Now I can die.”

  “There’ll be no more dyin’,” Lupita says.

  Dad tries to laugh, but for a mere second he chokes on a sob. Lee hears it too.

  “Too bad Siouxsie’s just down the hall,” he says. “Otherwise . . .”

  You can hear the wink in his voice.

  “Hec,” Lupita says, “I could thrive on your bullshit.”

  Lee snorts into my shoulder.

  Me, I’m feeling good.

  I’m feeling great.

  Lee grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet.

  I add a stomp to my step, and we go inside.

  Chapter 48

  MOST MARES LIKE TO BE ALONE before they foal. Not Blue Dancer. She likes having me there. She’s in the big stall now, pacing, stamping, switching her tail.

  She’s lathered. I move the heat lamp farther back. Talk to her, low and easy. Her udder looks waxen where the drops have leaked and dried.

  At ten p.m., I fill a thermos and climb into my b
ed of hay and kittens, flashlight and book. Give her all the privacy she could ask for—and the soothing of my voice when she wants it.

  Just after midnight, her water breaks. I call Lupita.

  “Hunker beside her,” she tells me. “Stroke her neck. Love her. I’ll be there soon.”

  Half an hour later, Lupita arrives with Lee and Siouxsie. Dad swings open the gate so they can watch. But not too close.

  Only Lupita and I get close.

  “Be a lot easier if she just popped it out like a kitten,” Siouxsie says.

  “Kittens are pretty low tech,” Dad says.

  “Push, baby,” Lupita urges.

  Blue Dancer strains. Her sac starts to bulge. What I think is a nose turns out to be front hooves and nose clapped together.

  “Oh my God!” Siouxsie says. “It’s watching us.”

  And, yes, it is. Being born, Blue Dancer’s baby looks right at us through the skin of the birth sac. The eyes seem to follow us.

  Lupita grasps the legs and tugs. “C’mon, push!”

  All that pushing, and then the foal slips out in a gush. Lupita peels away the sac, and we see a wet, shaggy, ears-back baby horse.

  “Ha—a stallion!” Lupita says.

  She clears the nostrils and mouth. Feeds it oxygen from a little tank she’s brought along. Blue Dancer lifts her head and begins to lick her newborn.

  “Come over here, Siouxsie. Don’t make any sudden moves.”

  Dad lets go of Siouxsie’s hand, and she steps into the stall, gets down on her knees, and squeezes a hoof.

  “Weird,” she says. “It feels mushy.”

  “That’s right,” Lupita says. “It’s nature’s way of protecting him from cutting his mom’s uterus. Those hooves’ll be hard soon enough. Slim, hand me that knife.”

  Lupita cuts and ties the umbilical. For an hour or more, we watch this licked-shiny, milk-stuffed, spindly-legged baby stumble around the stall.

  Eleven days later, Cornflakes foals—a chestnut filly with four white socks.

  And in the last week of January, Queen Zenobia gives us a colt.

  “Look at that great big chest,” Lupita says. “Here’s our champion. Watch out, Kentucky!”

  All these births are about waiting, breathing, and pushing. About peeling away a sac to reveal a tiny horse itching for life.

  From the start, I get along just fine with these babies.

  All they want to do is run.

  All they want to do is fly.

  Chapter 49

  “THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a point of no return,” Uncle Sal tells me. “You can bail now or right up to the last second. I’ll support you one hundred percent.”

  We’re up on Burro Mesa with the crew of the hit reality TV show CrazyDirty&Extreme.

  The guy from Price Waterhouse is here too. He’s the “neutral third-party representative,” or official observer, whose job is to make sure that nobody cheats or fakes. He checks out the Ducati and Flying Squirrel and then gets a little too close to my parachute pack.

  “Hands off!” Uncle Sal snaps.

  Uncle Sal’s in no mood to like these people. And he’s barely talking to me. “Why am I here?” he mumbles to himself. Then he answers: “I’m here because I’m here.”

  Bill-William Cooper has been pacing. Now he walks up to Uncle Sal and me. “Whatever happened to all the glorious sunshine in New Mexico?”

  He’s right. Nothing glorious about this tin-plate sky. The wind, too, is kicking around. It’s definitely not a great day to fly off a mesa—or to film somebody flying off a mesa. Mr. Cooper consults with an assistant, then tells me to “be prepared mentally” both to jump and to cancel. Thanks a lot.

  The herd—a few dozen browns and their calves—has retreated to the south end of the mesa. I don’t blame them—there’s no peace here at the north end. Especially with a helicopter chopping all over the place.

  IN FACT, IT’S MY SECOND time on Burro Mesa with the CD&E folks. We came up here two weeks ago to scout and plan. Uncle Sal was with me then too. “Can’t let you enter the lion’s den alone,” he told me.

  That day, it was me, Uncle Sal, Bill-William Cooper, and a stunt coordinator named Thumper.

  “How’d you get the name Thumper?” I asked.

  “The hard way,” he said.

  Mr. Cooper photographed the north rim from various angles, uploaded the photos, then created a graphic map. He and Thumper gazed up, around, and out. But they didn’t seem to notice the fresh-cut square of earth near their feet, about twenty paces back from the rim. When they weren’t looking, I rubbed some of that grit and sand into my hands and pocketed some more.

  “We only get one shot at this,” Mr. Cooper said. “So we gotta get it right, and we gotta get it all.”

  We huddled around his laptop, and he pointed from the screen to the place where I would start—about eighty yards from the rim. Then he showed us where the cameras would stand. “There, there, and there,” he said.

  “We’ll also film you from a zip line as you accelerate,” Mr. Cooper said. “We want to catch your kinetic energy—that rush as you twist the throttle. I’ll be in the helicopter, just off the rim, with the aerial crew.”

  “I’d like to ride in the helicopter too,” Uncle Sal said.

  “Fine, fine.”

  Thumper explained how the two minicams would work. “We’ll mount a sportcam on your helmet—for the bird’s-eye view. And we’ll U-bolt a sportcam to your handlebars, pointed at your face, so we can catch your expressions—and believe me, you will express. This camera will fall with the bike, which, of course, will get annihilated on impact. But the camera will survive, because we’ll encase it in polycarbonate.”

  Mr. Cooper then launched into an explanation about reality TV. “What we’re trying to do here,” he told Uncle Sal and me, “is make the experience feel real-real-real. The guy sipping a beer in his armchair in Wheeling, West Virginia, should experience the same rush as you, Jett, as you fly off the mesa. His stomach should be dropping right along with yours. The bigger challenge, however, isn’t up here, it’s down there. God knows how far you’ll go in that wingsuit of yours.” He swept an arm across the horizon. “Where do you think you’ll land, Jett?”

  I pointed to the river glinting in the distance. “Probably about there.”

  Thumper laughed. “The Rio Loco! I highly doubt you’ll get that far.”

  Uncle Sal flashed a glare. “Only a fool would doubt Arlo Santiago,” he said.

  “Arlo San—?” Thumper looked puzzled. “I thought your name was—”

  “His name is Arlo Santiago!”

  MAKING A HIT REALITY TV SHOW is basically all about waiting. Everybody tinkers with this camera, that light, that microphone, then retinkers; then the wind changes, so they retinker again. The helicopter needs more fuel. The assistant director needs more coffee.

  Hurry! Wait.

  Take two: Hurry! Wait.

  On and on.

  Only problem is, waiting breeds doubt.

  Doubt breeds fear.

  My own philosophy is: Don’t wait—go!

  I wait.

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, the sun splits the clouds and the wind tapers off. Mr. Cooper gets everything he could hope for—the ancient turquoise sky of New Mexico, the distant spiked peaks of Colorado, the bled-dry mesas, and the shadows getting longer.

  “Let’s get the shot before we lose it!” he shouts.

  The crew rushes about with new energy. Thumper barks orders into his radio.

  I peel out of my jeans and flannel shirt, zip into the Flying Squirrel, strap on my parachute. Uncle Sal posts himself in front of me like a sentinel. When the man from Price Waterhouse comes sniffing around again, Uncle Sal blocks the way.

  “What the hell!” he tells the man. “How do you fake something like this?”

  “Time to board the chopper,” Mr. Cooper tells Uncle Sal.

  “Hold on a minute,” Uncle Sal says.

  He puts an arm on my shoul
der, and we step away.

  “Let me see those hands, Arlo.”

  All of me is shaking, but my hands are seismic.

  Uncle Sal looks ready to cry.

  “Arlo-Arlo-Arlo, say the word and we walk away. Who gives a damn about these reality TV people? Who gives a damn about their money or market share? None of it matters—none of it. Say the word.”

  I don’t say the word.

  Maybe if I were doing it just for me.

  But I’m not.

  “C’mon,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  THE CHOPPER LIFTS OFF and flies out over the north rim. It swings around and hovers there. A CD&E cameraman sits in his safety harness in the open door, aiming his camera at me like an assassin.

  I unzip my leg pocket, scoop out the sand and grit that I’ve stored there, and rub it into my hands like chalk dust.

  Slide on my helmet, throw a leg over the Ducati, and fire her up. Grind pepper like Burro Mesa has never heard. The Monster is wide awake.

  Thumper guides me to my mark.

  He radios the crew one last time. Reaches over and activates the sportcams on my helmet and handlebars. Pats my shoulder. His mouth moves, but I can’t hear him. I throttle down.

  “What did you say?”

  He cups his hands to his mouth. “Anytime, Arlo.”

  Anytime! Easy for you.

  Because all the bells and alarms—all the evolved, life-saving no’s and don’ts—are screaming inside me.

  Not to mention the guilt.

  My biggest fear isn’t what might happen to me; it’s what might happen to Dad.

  I could power off and walk away. It’s definitely the logical-rational thing to do. It’s one thousand percent what Dad would want me to do.

  Instead, I shove the thought out of my mind.

  Nature sure knows how to draw a line, because the north rim of Burro Mesa is as straight as a ruler. Beyond stands the Front Range of the Rockies. Below stands nothing at all—just gaping space, three thousand feet straight to the floor of Colorado.

  It’s the same line Mom galloped toward long ago, knowing her horse would balk. Or did she?

  Anchor of earth, spiral of sky.