Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  She’ll be gone, Suzy thought, and your bag, after all this hallucinating, will be filled with nothing but clean clothes. Suzy and Cassidy were suddenly alone.

  “You seem kinda dull to the process here, and there’s nothing I can really do about it but give you the options: either head into the stall and leave the package on the lid, or hand over your bag and I split with everything else, ’kay?”

  This was relief, really. Straightforward instructions. Suzy didn’t even think about resisting. She latched the door behind her, dug to the bottom of her carry-on, and pulled out the Gold Medal bag. It hadn’t dusted the Ziploc the way even unopened bags of flour do. She reemerged and closed the door behind her.

  Suzy asked Cassidy what next.

  “You can do whatever the fuck you want.”

  Suzy clopped out into the concourse. She’d lost her bearings and squinted at signs to see if she could find the stew lounge to go vomit in private. She pulled off her heels and started hustling. But she hadn’t made it a gate before she felt another hand, this one at her elbow, so forceful it nearly spun her.

  “Whoa, whoa, easy,” he said, “I think you dropped a bag.”

  The man was wearing a charcoal-gray suit and a repp tie and smelled like he had an expense account. He was clean-shaven, with midlength sideburns, and his hair was slicked back for the office. He handed Suzy a small green purse.

  “Now, don’t go dropping this anywhere else except where it’s meant to be dropped.” It was an easy smile and he winked. He seemed like a person who’d decided one day to be a winker. “Tell Billy he picked a cutie.”

  He glanced toward the adjacent gate area, and another suited man stood and walked in the direction of the baggage claim. Cassidy traced his line at following distance, and then this man sandwiched her from behind. Suzy collapsed the distance between the concourse and the lounge and didn’t feel her feet beneath her until she’d made it through the door, turned on a shower, and screamed into a towel.

  As she lifted her face, another woman in a robe looked at her, eye lines all torn up from crying about her own problems. Suzy hung up her uniform beside the stall so that it could take steam before the turnaround. She stepped into the hot shower and, running her fingers through her greasy hair, fixated on the sequence she’d just been subjected to. The absence of information. The humiliating depletion of strength. Most especially, though, the failing that had followed: Suzy wasn’t a screamer. Who was it who’d screamed? Who’d let it all happen? Who was this woman who’d been puppeted for all these sleepless hours?

  She felt her pulse fading from her wrists as it would at the end of a race, in the pits at the Glen. She held her hands out before her, rolled them so that her fingers hovered parallel to the floor. They were long and still and red at the tips. They were hairless and veinless and whiter than she would’ve liked. On the palms of those hands were some gnarly calluses, the vestiges of racing—she felt them with her thumb. “Step it the fuck up,” she mouthed aloud beneath that brass rain cloud in the shower. “He’s a fucking skater.”

  In daylight Billy’s parents’ house shows itself: a squat little cake box of yellow clapboard, a concrete slab of a porch, a window near the front door, and a porthole, eye high, that permits whoever’s doing the kitchen dishes a look out onto the street. A white Lab—this must be Rincon—moves not at all and watches Suzy walk herself along the narrow side yard of crabgrass, past the cream Volvo and the lemon Bug and the oleander bushes, through the yellow wooden gate. She heads toward the converted garage in the back, where something Bowie she doesn’t know is playing. She knocks at the screen door. Nada. She knocks again and then flips around: Billy in a chaise lounge in the yard in the concealing shade of a magnolia tree, bare and burned waist up, reading an issue of Rolling Stone with Mick on the cover, and sipping a drink with a straw.

  He doesn’t say anything, but he’s smiling and sucks at the ice.

  “I was about to come see you,” he says.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  “Nah, pull up a chair.”

  “I don’t want to do this out here,” Suzy says, opening the screen door and moving into the back house.

  “Look, I know I should’ve said something…,” he says from the chaise.

  “I can’t hear you,” she says, pushing deeper inside and turning the volume knob on the record player. She sees Billy smile and stand and move toward the door. The back house presents more details during the day—brown shag, a crisply made bed covered in a Mexican blanket, the shelves with high school novels and seashells, matching teak dresser and desk, a table and chairs with an unlit candle. There’s a disconcerting tidiness.

  “I said, I should’ve said something, but if I’d asked, I think you probably would’ve said no.”

  “Oh yeah? What gives you that impression? You don’t think I would’ve been hot to trot to traffic blow?”

  “It’s an acquired taste, so I dunno, I just assumed.”

  “I mean, what the fuck? What was gonna keep me from going straight to the police when I landed?”

  “You noticed it before you landed?”

  “You put a fucking five-pound bag in my carry-on.”

  “Did you go to the police?”

  “What if I did? What if I gave you up and I’m wearing a wire and I just needed you to acknowledge that you planted that shit on me?”

  “I didn’t say anything about it being me…,” Billy says, squinting. “Look, we’re talking about baked goods, if you really want to know the truth.” He pulls on a linen shirt and moves toward her. She grabs her board by the trucks, ready to swing. He stops short and bends forward at the waist, leaning into the alleged microphone she has beneath her shirt. “For a bakery me and a couple guys are starting up in New York. Nothing but premix for cookies and shit. Thanks for your help, Suuz.”

  He giggles and stands up straight again. This is so much fun for him. He’s sucking at the straw in his tumbler and he’s got his hand on his hip, his whole body arranged in the shape of a beer stein.

  “Listen, I get why you’re a little steamed about this, but let me spell it out some. I mean, you know what’s what anyway, so it doesn’t really matter what more you know, so long as you don’t know stuff they can get you for, right?” Suzy’s in a room with one way out, and that one way is blocked by a giggling drug smuggler in burgundy dolphin shorts. She could walk out, but she’d want more answers in an hour anyway. She’s forfeited her free will all over again.

  “You want some grass?” he says.

  Billy sits at the desk, opens the top drawer, pulls out an Altoids tin and rolling paper.

  “Just tell me what happened,” Suzy says.

  And while he methodically works through the steps of fashioning his joint, he paints in the lines.

  “There’s a guy around here who gets stuff straight from a plane once every couple weeks. The guy I know gives me stuff to keep the parties going in town, plus a couple bricks to get to New York whenever he asks. There used to be a girl in Sela who’d make the runs, but she got knocked up on the road—by a Giants middle reliever or something. And so she had to clip her wings. I’ve been sitting on some bulk for a while now. Tried out one girl who was so upset she transferred home to Pittsburgh and moved back in with her folks. It’s not for everyone. And I certainly didn’t expect you to love it or anything. But you got me out of a bind. A lot of people were putting the screws to me. And I’m gonna do you good for all that.”

  “You’re going to do me good?”

  “I mean moneywise—you’re getting fair, plus some, outta what they gave you.”

  He lifts the work in progress to his mouth and seals the seam, offering Suzy first light.

  “They didn’t give me anything. A little, dark-haired pixie pulled me into a bathroom, swapped the package out of my bag and into hers, and that was that.”

  “They didn’t give you a bag with cash?”

  “Nothin’. They were supposed to?”

  Billy ri
ses to his feet and runs his fingers through his hair, tempering the flood of distress by watching his reaction in the mirror. “Well, that’s a wrinkle,” he says. “People aren’t gonna like that.”

  “Sorry, dude, guess you picked the wrong girl.”

  “Thing is, it’s not me, really, but the guy who has me do this, who put me onto this little thing—they’re not gonna believe me. They’re gonna call the folks in New York and those guys are gonna say they gave you fifty grand in a manila envelope, folded once over and stapled, in a green purse, with a used hairbrush, a pack of Juicy Fruit, and a bottle of L’Air du Temps. And everyone’s gonna wanna know where it went. They’ll come over here and tear up my room. But, as you can see, it won’t take ’em long. And then they’ll be off to visit you and your sister and your sister’s husband, and they’ll fuck things up there until they’re satisfied that you don’t have it, either. And maybe you don’t. Maybe, if they look everywhere, they still won’t find it—totally possible. But if that’s the case, they’ll probably pull you—actually, probably more like you and me—out of bed in the middle of the night, throw us in a van, tie us up in a warehouse in one of those industrial cities along the river, Vernon or Boyle Heights. And they’ll ask us whether we’re still sure we don’t know where the money is.”

  “All because some jerk didn’t give me a green purse.”

  “Right. So lemme know if it turns up. These guys are pretty chill when they don’t have to work too hard. They make things very cool for everyone. But they hate chasing down what’s theirs.”

  “What do you get out of each of these?”

  “I get two thousand; girl gets two thousand.”

  “So why not just take the full fifty and split?”

  As he inhales, his eyes acknowledge this as an interesting question: “Where would I go?”

  “What?”

  “Where would I go? Nowhere to be but here. ‘Sela Vie,’ sister…”

  “Right, of course,” she says. “So how long have you been doing it?”

  “Nine months.”

  “So twice a month, nine months…thirty-six grand.”

  “That’s some game-show speed.”

  “What do you do with it?”

  “Gonna help buy a house.”

  “Won’t that seem a little weird—you being able to buy a house?”

  “Don’t have anything else to spend money on. I mean, might get a new Bug once I get my license back. Otherwise all I buy is cheap beer. I grow my own grass out in that little garden. Maybe I go see the Stones again, but what else? I’m gonna buy my parents out.”

  “You’re gonna live here.”

  “Buy them out, get them somewhere better, make it look like they just handed it down—pretty clean.”

  “This is your dad and your…stepmom?”

  “Nah.”

  “You said last night your mom had died.”

  “Yeah, I say things sometimes.”

  “So she’s not dead.”

  “Want to meet her?”

  Suzy’s face fails to conceal her disgust.

  “My dad wants to move closer to the beach. It’s always been a big deal to him that they’re on the wrong side of the hill. He’s worked at North American Aviation for twenty-seven years, right there on the edge of the airport. Built an airframe for the X-15. And the astronaut parts of the Saturn V. That’s how the surf thing started getting big here, ya know? All the fiberglass and poly-whatever foam left hanging around from the aviation and space stuff. Turned the scraps into decks and skegs.” There’s that word—Suzy’s heard it before and it imprinted. Skeg. The crudeness of the sound subsumed by the elegance of the function: that fin slipping through waves like a scalpel through fat. “But all the old man wants, all he seems to have ever wanted, is to live on the west side of the hill. Hang some stars and stripes off a balcony that looks out over the ocean.”

  “Your parents know your plans?”

  “They know I’m busy and that it’ll only upset them if they ask too much. And so maybe it’ll be a nice surprise one day.”

  “Noble son.”

  “Look at it the right way, ’kay? We’re all in this on behalf of the space race. Helping the guys who put men on the moon get the houses near the beach they deserve.”

  Suzy snorts. “What about your mom?”

  “She likes it here.”

  “I can’t believe she’s not dead—what an awful thing to say.”

  “She’s making cookies right now.”

  “And you’re not doing this on her behalf? Just your dad’s?”

  “She doesn’t need any help.”

  “She’s content to be provided for?”

  “Oh, no, she takes care of herself. She teaches chemistry at the high school. They met at ’SC. Smart lady, so-so baker. Not as good as she thinks. Maybe that’s what they’ll use the money for—hire a Guatemalan or something.” Billy stretches out on his bed and puts his hands behind his head. “Wanna lie down?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  The music has gone silent.

  “Can you flip it?” he says.

  For some reason Suzy moves to the record player and places the needle at the edge of the B side. She hasn’t listened this deep in. “People stared at the makeup on his face…” She grabs her board and moves toward the door. The light has leveled itself so that it slides through the trees and bites the screen like a razor.

  “If that bag turns up, it’s twenty-five hundred for me, fifteen hundred for you,” Suzy says on her way out.

  “That’s not really how it works.”

  “And that four’s coming out off the top. I’m not handing it over for them to cut off a piece.”

  “That’s not really for you to decide, either. You hand over the bag, they cash you out.”

  “I really don’t care. I don’t. You can explain to them that on this one it’s working like that. Let ’em know it’s okay ’cause this will be the only one, ever, with this particular girl—they don’t have anything else to worry about. If you’re so concerned, cover the difference out of your piggy bank.”

  “Two and two,” Billy says, grinning on his back.

  “Three and one. And I’m keeping the French perfume.”

  The StrandDogs get to keep their time slot, but they’re relegated to a midbill act when Jackson Browne calls the bar’s owner and asks if he can work out some new stuff after whomever, which is why there’s a crowd at the bar and it’s tough to catch anyone’s eye, even if you’re Suzy after a shower and you’re wearing new French perfume. She pays for the first round by breaking a twenty from her haul. They settled on a $2,500/$1,500 split—her penalty assessment to Billy. She wonders if he’ll be here tonight, seeing as most everyone she’s pardoning her way past was at the beach on the Fourth, or if not there, then that brunch at Huevos or the party at Flipper’s. She holds the cocktails high above her head, doing better not to spill than she does in a turbulent aisle in coach. She keeps her bearings on Mike’s head, which is on the horizon, beneath an indoor rubber plant, screaming about something with Grace.

  “Okay!” Suzy says as she pulls up to the argument. Grace smiles prettily and sucks from her straw.

  Onstage a three-piece cover band called The Cover Band shifts capably from Three Dog Night to Stevie Wonder to a big, taffy-stretched eight- or nine-minute version of “Rocket Man,” for which somebody’s girlfriend climbs onstage to sing harmonies.

  “Have you seen these guys before?” Grace says.

  “I don’t think so,” Suzy says.

  “They’re one of the good true local ones. J.P., the one playing rhythm and singing, he’s from right around the corner. Both main guys, they’re songwriters for Warner Brothers, like, they’ve written hundreds of songs for the label that go into the pot for any of the artists to play. J.P.’s a good guy, I like him.”

  When she finishes her drink, she shakes her ice at Mike.

  “I don’t even know what it is,” he says.

 
She narrows her eyes.

  “Vodka pineapple,” he says.

  Mike throws the rest of his own drink into his mouth and bobs toward the bar.

  “Everything all right?” Suzy says.

  “He can be such a little bitch at these things. I don’t say anything about how he spends his time, don’t question whatever he’s doing when I’m flying. But he gets so weird at these shows. He’ll never say it, but he just looks at me with this pure disdain when I start talking about bands. The fact that I read about them in the paper, or talk to the bartenders, or, God forbid, meet some of the musicians, like J.P., and chat with them about what they do.”

  “He’s jealous?”

  “I’m not totally convinced he even likes listening to the music. Which is the main offense. If he’s gonna come just to babysit, he can go ahead and treat me like a kid and pick up the tab.”

  Howlers is the last building at the south edge of Sela, a yellow-green snail shell that swirls upward on the inside like the Guggenheim, a three-story atrium with two bars, a stage, and a roof with a view of the water. From the outside it looks as though it’s made of the same two ingredients as most structures in town—brick and chipped stucco. A large wooden sign, salt bitten, hangs from chains off the roof. But after The Cover Band set, when it’s sufficiently dark, someone in management invites whoever outside for a jokey little unveiling of the new sign: hot-green neon, wide as the second-story balcony, bathing the otherwise unlit block in light, like it’s Sunset.