by Daniel Riley
Belle and Marion nod, but Suzy looks to Ruth to see if this is something they’re supposed to go along with.
“We’re gonna get these people to L.A. safe,” Mulaney continues. “And we’re gonna hand this motherfucker over. After that, they’re gonna ask you ladies some questions. Do a whole thing with you. All I can say is remember that you were scared and remember that this is a bad guy.”
The captain finds himself a carton of POG in the back, and Ruth leads the girls out to start taking drink orders. Open bar, captain’s call. Ruth, Marion, and Belle hit the aisle, while Suzy starts stocking a service cart.
“Appreciate your help, sweetheart,” Mulaney says, and he throws back the rest of his juice.
“Thanks for making that go away so fast,” Suzy says. “Could’ve been bad.”
Mulaney squints up the aisle and then turns back to Suzy. “You know,” he says to her privately, “I could get in big trouble for what just happened. I broke protocol. I didn’t know the situation—I guessed.” He tilts back his head and tries for juice that he knows isn’t there. “And they’re gonna fry me for it.”
“You saved a planeful of people.”
“That’s not how they’re gonna see it. They’re gonna see it as me endangering a planeful of people.”
“You said we’ll be asked some questions,” Suzy says.
“Yeah, but realistically, it won’t matter. This might be it for me. Things are dicey right now. Every airline’s had its bad day. They don’t love me, the big bosses on the ground. And this is a good way to make an example of me.”
“It’s bad PR, though. Punishing the pilot who saved a plane from a hijacker.”
“When I assessed the situation and saw the guy sitting there, I was convinced that he was some hippie burnout on acid, or whatever it is now. That he didn’t pose a serious threat to me or you girls or the passengers. But you know what? You ever seen that kind of gun before?”
“No.”
“It’s a Colt M1911. Same handgun they gave me in Korea and same handgun they give everyone in Vietnam. Standard-issue sidearm of the armed forces. Means he either served or bought it from someone who did. In any case, it’s a real gun with real bullets. Seven rounds in the magazine. And that fact there—that I made a call based on what the guy looked like, when I was actually dealing with a loaded gun and someone who might know how to use it—that’ll cost me my career.”
He shakes his head and smiles weakly at Suzy, before turning back toward the cockpit.
He passes the man tied up in the last row and, without glancing down or slowing his stride, elbows him swiftly in the face, so that any signs of stirring consciousness are extinguished. Then he’s carried the rest of the way to the cockpit by the mounting shapely-bodied wave of approbation, equal parts whooping and applause.
Suzy skates to the southern tip of the Strand and, at Mike’s suggestion, takes a brand-new book he’s bought, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. She spreads herself out in a tractor-combed, footprint-free brushstroke of empty beach, but she pinks too quickly and so rides to the next beach town, turns over her only singles at a taco stand, and, by early evening, winds up skating back past Howlers. The marquee seems to suggest that it’s a real concert tonight, a leg of a tour. In fact, it’s the last leg of a tour, she learns from the curly-blond manager smoking near the door. They’ve just returned from Europe, a homecoming, Los Sandcrabs hot off a plane from Paris.
“What was your favorite city?” Suzy says.
“In Europe?”
“Right, you can’t answer ‘Sela.’”
“I don’t know, they all kinda seemed the same. We’d travel eight, nine hours a day and get to the new place when it was dark. Every city looks the same in the basement of a music hall with the lights off.”
“So…Rome,” Suzy says.
“Huh?”
He offers her a cigarette, and when she declines, he smokes two simultaneously.
“That’s a little sad isn’t it?” she says.
“I don’t know,” he says. “We enjoyed it. They enjoyed it.” He pulls a straw hat from the ticket booth and fixes it over his curls. “Maybe Amsterdam. Amsterdam was better than the rest. But we’re happy to be back.”
“Well, that’s good. Welcome home.”
She drops her board to the sidewalk and, in evidence of a great betrayal, he says: “Are you not coming to the show?”
“Nah, I was just cruising by. Don’t have any money on me anyway.”
“You’re on the list.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Come in for a few songs, and go whenever you want. Comped drinks, too.”
Suzy has always been susceptible to a free thing.
The band looks like they’ve been fending off cholera. Three of the four are pale and gaunt, their faces, in the colored stage lights, looking like old fruit. The bassist and drummer must be twins—imagine how nice that must’ve been for the parents, Suzy thinks, to harbor a complete rhythm section in their garage growing up. The lead guitarist is Giacometti shaped, his nipple-length, center-parted, bead-curtain hair playing an optic trick that makes him look seven and a half feet tall. And then the singer, three stacked circles, like an Intro to Drawing Humans exercise: a round head on a rounder torso on the roundest base, a Baskin-Robbins triple. He’s got a mustache and prominent buckteeth, like photos of the Queen front man she’s seen in Rolling Stone. And yet somehow together they look undeniable onstage. Utterly sore-thumb-ish in the normal world, but perfectly cast in performance.
They bow and then start in, a jangly surf guitar that sounds like it’s being run about in a cathedral; a Dick Dale surf-rock drumbeat; and then the feeble nasalings of one long, happy-sounding complaint—what it would be like if Neil Young drank enough to find his way west and face-plant off the pier. The music is simple and ubiquitous; the voice is closer to discrete. But still, Suzy thinks, it’ll never quite break through at home, here in the South Bay, where everyone knows this kind of beach music and anyone can play it. It takes leaving, exporting that ordinary local sound, in order to find its audience. Where the mundane arrives packaged as the exotic. The accents, the beat, and that uplifting nasal. “We’re going to Asia next,” the manager said. “We seem to do all right everywhere else, but all the guys want is to stay at home.”
They play four or five songs before Suzy realizes they’re different songs—the drums don’t stop, no break for whiskey or cigarettes. Her own drink is gone and she side-shuffles to drop her glass at the bar, but before she makes it, she feels a pinch on the numb point of her elbow.
“You stoked they’re back, or what?”
Look at that face: total indifference to any line she’s drawn in the dirt. And then it curls right around the eyes and mouth, an expectant smile, as though this run-in is both the most probable occurrence and also the most preposterous.
“Super stoked, brah,” she says, slow and half-dead of enthusiasm.
“Your sister here?” Billy says.
“Just me. But I’m heading out. The manager or something, I was passing by and he invited me in.”
“Owen?”
“I didn’t catch his name.”
“Overalls?”
“Overalls and a straw hat.”
“Owen.”
“Owen didn’t seem to love Europe,” Suzy says.
“He’s just bummed ’cause his girlfriend left him while he was gone.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“It was kinda brutal. He got home and saw all the unopened letters he’d sent from the road. She left him a note that said: ‘I don’t know where this is going, but I need to do some things before it’s too late.’ And then she actually made a list of those things.”
“What did the list say?”
“I don’t remember all of them. ‘Swim with dolphins in Baja.’ ‘Live in a cool house.’ ‘Fuck a world-class athlete.’ Owen was hung up on the dolphins thing because it was something that he’d always wante
d to do. Something he’d figured they’d do together.”
“But he was on the road. And she wanted to get to Baja.”
“Exactly. I guess he couldn’t do much about the other two, either.”
“‘Fuck a world-class athlete’ is tough to take,” Suzy says.
“I asked him what she might mean by ‘world-class.’”
“An NBA player?”
“No, I think it was more that she’d been watching a lot of the Olympic trials. You know, track and swimming and stuff like that.”
“An Olympian,” Suzy says.
“Yeah, not one of the Rams or the Dodgers. Not one of the US Open surfers.”
“Does an archer count?”
“I think it’s probably about the muscles.”
“A fencer?” Suzy says.
“Some dude who’s six three with stomach muscles.”
“Dressage?”
“I don’t know that word.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Sounds Yale-y,” he says.
“One semester only, remember,” she says.
“Yale word.”
“It’s horses, has to do with horses.”
“I think she probably just saw a photo of Mark Spitz on the starting block.”
“‘Not Owen’ is the point of her note.”
“I think it’s just bad luck with the Olympic year. Gets the mind going, you know?”
“I always like the Olympics.”
“My favorite thing in sports. Well, Trojans up here, Lakers here,” Billy says. “Olympics right here, above all the rest.”
“You should go. I’ll get you a discount on tickets to Germany.”
“Is that right?”
“Actually, I don’t give a shit—and no, I’m not helping you. But you should go somewhere. Go to Arizona. Go to Minnesota.”
“I’ve waited this long, it can’t just be anywhere.”
“Why have you never left?” she says. “What’s the real reason?”
He shrugs with his lower lip. “My folks didn’t take vacations anywhere else. I mean, we’d go to Lake Arrowhead and Mammoth most years. But their big idea would be to go see Old Sacramento or where the Russians settled California, their little colony.”
“I thought it was the Spanish.”
“Exactly. People don’t realize the Russians were here, too. Right up above San Francisco.”
“Is your family Russian?”
“Don’t think so. Even though it sort of sounds like it.…They’re just all about deep, old California stuff, like how their families came. These places, you get there, spend a couple hours walking around—and then you’re out of things to do besides drive more.”
“I’m surprised Nixon hasn’t blown it up.”
“Maybe he has. But I’d bet it’s still there. Fort Something. Think about that: if it’d been the Russians instead of the Spanish.”
“Then they’d be simply Sandcrabs.”
“How do you say the?”
“That’s what I mean, they don’t really do thes.”
“Sandcrabs in all caps with a backward R.”
“Totally,” Suzy says.
“But see what I mean? That’s the thing: so much in C.A. Big state. Big history. You know that in fourth grade when we did California history, they told us most other states’ histories weren’t interesting enough and so those kids got taught California stuff to fill in the gaps?”
“That’s not remotely true.”
“Well, that’s what they said.”
“I love that that’s your reason for never going anywhere.”
“Plus: whatever’s not here to begin with, there’s new people bringing it every day. I prefer to just kinda sit here and let it come to me.”
“The more you talk, the more I’m convinced I want to go back east immediately.”
“But everything you need in the world is right here.”
Even Billy’s face seems to lose enthusiasm for the bullshit he’s shoveling. Suzy shifts her bag to the shoulder closer to the door. Billy registers her impatience.
“Maybe,” he says, “it’s more like I just never imagined myself to be the kind of person who got to go to a bunch of different places.”
“Why’s that?” she says.
“It just seemed like a thing meant for other people.”
Suzy frowns. There’s a shadow of familiarity, an imprecise familiarity: “That makes sense.”
“You might be mocking me and I might deserve it—”
“No, I mean I understand that feeling, I’ve felt that feeling.”
“And now you fly around the world.”
“And now I pour cocktails and clean up vomit.”
“Next chance I get, I’ll do it,” he says.
“Yeah, where to?”
“Somewhere with a beach, somewhere chill.”
“Of all the places in the world, your first trip is somewhere with the same super-bitchin’ kicked-back lifestyle as Sela.”
“Just ’cause you’ve been more places than anyone here doesn’t mean you get to condescend…,” he says. “How ’bout we ask a Ouija board?”
“You want to check with the bartender to see if they have one?”
“Actually, you know what?” Billy says. “Let’s settle it now, for real. There’s a map of the world in the men’s pisser. Follow me.”
“I’m not going to the bathroom with you.”
“Jesus, Z, I’ll leave the door open.”
“Please don’t call me that,” she says, but he’s moving now and he’s got her firm around the wrist. Los Sandcrabs keep bouncing from one song to the next; it happens quicker than an album moves through tracks. The leanest one feints like he’s going to dive into the crowd, his guitar case serving as a surfboard. But the fans are thinly dispersed and he thinks better of plunging in. Suzy bets it worked in Brussels.
Billy grabs a dart out of the bull’s-eye near the entrance to the bathroom, and together they wait for the men’s room to vacate. Suzy’s suddenly very aware of the time, that she should really be going.
A muffled flush and then the door’s open, and there inside on the wall, a tattered world map drafted in double-barreled hemispheres, looking like when a movie spy glimpses a target through binoculars.
“All right,” Billy says, “no matter what, this is the first place I go, deal?”
“Whatever,” Suzy says.
He toes his right foot up to the threshold, and Suzy apologizes with her eyes to the woman waiting for the ladies’ room. He warms up and fires the dart on a course that’s as tight as a drying line. Its tip pricks a spot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, then clatters off the cinder block wall and into the toilet bowl.
“Welp, Minnesota it is,” he says.
“Wow.”
“World-class athlete right there.”
“Go to Munich,” she says. “Just pull the trigger and go to the Olympics.”
“Owen said Europe wasn’t much anyway.”
“Owen told me all he saw was highways and the basements of music venues.”
“Oh, he likes that line. The ‘Every city looks the same…’ line. He said that to you?”
“He said that.”
“We’ll have to try again,” Billy says, meaning the map.
“I’ve gotta go. Flying in the morning.”
“Always off to fly.”
“Yes, it’s a job.”
“Where are you going this week?”
“Couple places.”
“That’s cool. Anywhere good?”
“Going to New York.”
“Oh, I do love New York,” Billy says, his face on a trip of imaginary nostalgia.
“Mm-hmm,” she says.
“If you’re at all interested…”
“I’m not.”
“I’m not talking about this week. I wouldn’t dream of talking about this week. I mean if ever in the future.”
“See ya.”
“If ever in the future
you change your mind, just know…,” he says as she covers the distance to the door. And she can’t really hear anything else he says over the mmmm pop-pop mm-pop, mmmm pop-pop mm-pop and the saxophone solo.
The flight is the morning’s first, six sharp, the line leader on the tarmac. Each evening, after the midnight red-eyes to Boston Atlanta Miami, the airport contracts into its black window of low hours, receiving stragglers from the burning colonial capitals of Latin America but sending no new flights out into the night. That blackness is like the space between a heartbeat: that another day will come isn’t absolutely certain, but worth betting on all the same. When the morning arrives, each muscle in the system shows up for work, puts the machinery into motion, catapults its blood to the outermost extremities—those first airplanes out over the water.
Suzy and Grace are backlit on takeoff, a proximate deep-summer sun washing up over the curve of the plains and down toward the second coast, the pitch of the light and the engines of the 707 whining higher, in concert. The sky and sea are a Lakers-colored Rothko out the window. They’re up and out, banking over the water with the patient spiral of a wheelchair ramp, until they’re riding an antsy jet stream back to New York.
The other girls find the whole idea adorable, though they keep guessing Suzy’s the older one ’cause of the worry lines on her forehead. Grace wins a ro-sham-bo for the business cabin, and so Suzy takes care of drinks in the back. It’s a packed flight, the kind that could go down and reset the lives of a hundred and eighty families. Why is this the thought each time Suzy’s up? What is the Worst Thing? she’s always wondering, in order to establish an edge, a margin of possibility. After all, to come to terms with the Worst Thing is to live in a pretty satisfied space of Not That.
The plane doesn’t go down—not until it means to. They’re a little late, but there’s still plenty of daylight to cover the drive up to Schuyler Glen. They rent a Gremlin, toss the bags in the back, and change out of the tops of their uniforms in the parking lot. Traffic’s bad getting out of Queens, but once they’re through Harlem and over the George Washington, the highways open up and New York collapses around them like a big top during the load out. It is inescapable: the curtains of pitch pine and scarlet oak lining the highway, the scent of a rain shower in the process of steaming back out of the soil, the summer stereo of insects like electric wires. They keep the windows down and the radio off for at least the first few dozen miles through Rockland and Orange Counties. It hasn’t been that long—they’ve been away only since Suzy’s graduation in May—but it feels for Suzy as though she’s transitioned back from the imaginary world into the real. The hyperpresent clarity of these sights and sounds makes Suzy feel as though Sela life might just be a movie they’re caught up in, simultaneously making and watching, an occupation of the mind, a dream drifted into while waiting to return to this very moment, to the uncurving highway to the center of their home state.