Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  Chapter 27

  Leila found a luggage dolly while Leo lifted the slack Mark from the front seat of the Wagoneer. Awkwardly, they lay Mark down on it. He hmmphed and stirred, but did not wake. They wheeled him across the vast hall of the hangar to the small airplane that Trip seemed to be prepping for flight. In a distant corner, a jumpsuited mechanic was tinkering in the wheel well of a gleaming business jet. Otherwise, they were alone. Over in the main terminal, thought Leila, grandmothers were taking off their belts for the TSA, but here she could wheel an inert human from a Jeep to a tiny plane, no problem.

  Leo strapped Mark across the two rear seats of the plane and then sat beside Leila on strict and narrow seats, vinyl-upholstered, facing their slumped abductee.

  “Either one of you know how to take a carotid pulse?” Trip asked them from the front seat when they were all in the plane and the doors were closed.

  Leo nodded yes and knelt out of his seat to press two fingers to Mark’s neck. He looked at his watch and then cast his eyes down in concentration, counting the beats of Mark’s heart. Leila stirred for Leo. When she’d first seen him, she’d thought he was scattered and lost-seeming, but now this fearlessness on her behalf. Why was he here? Was it love? If love, could she return it? Did she want to? He did cause in her some excitement. That letter of his. Was it his orphanhood? And why was that appealing?

  “Seventy-five and strong,” Leo reported. “Breathing steady and clear.”

  Jumpsuit Guy left the jet he had been tending and walked over to the plane they were in. By means of a little tugging wagon attached to their front tire, he towed them outside, through wide hangar doors. Trip showed Leila and Leo how to use the headphones. Leila crowned Mark with a pair, and set the little knob to Noise Cancel. Outside, in the August dazzle, their plane seemed even smaller than it had inside the hangar. Jumpsuit Guy stripped out of his jumpsuit. He was a heavyset Native American–looking man with a ponytail, wearing a faded ball cap and a T-shirt that said Gun Control Means Using Two Hands. He got in on the left side of the plane, beside Trip, and donned a sharp pair of aviators.

  “Lola, Leo,” said Trip, “this is Mild Max. He’ll be our pilot today. I’ll be the copilot, third officer, purser, and head steward. Here, have some nuts.” He twisted around and offered Leila and Leo foil envelopes of cocktail nuts.

  Driving across the tarmac, the little plane felt spindly. But then Mild Max made a tight one-eighty at the top of the runway. There was a pause, as if for breath, and then the engines started to bellow. Leila, in a rear-facing seat, felt herself pressed against her four-point belt. They went from brrrr to bzzzz and then the wheels lifted free, and then there was no going back.

  They climbed steeply. A thrum ran through the whole metal body of the plane and into her chest. Soon, Leila could see the cobra curves of the Columbia River far below. She leaned across Leo to look through the window on his side. He smelled a little like toast. Plus that nice mild dank, like a handful of mushrooms.

  Chapter 28

  Southern Oregon

  When Mark woke—if that was the word—he figured he was dead and going to heaven. There was no sound at all but a pleasant wash. And what were those? Clouds? Really? It was clouds after all?

  But, no, he was not dead. He was in a plane, a very small twin-engine plane. There was Leo Crane. And there was the girl from the Heathrow lounge—Lola or Leila or whatever. The time before was coming back to him. They’d collected him from Nike…No, they’d been waiting there for him. Then the pursuit and rescue by the same vehicle. The skate park and the power washer and the pill.

  His head felt like a bag of crabs. Same as when he’d woken in the under-lit hallway of that hipster-kitsch hotel this morning. The dude who’d given him that hog roofie was up there in the cockpit, beside the pilot. The pilot looked like a fat, Indian George Clooney.

  The little cabin was filthy with sunlight. He caught Leo’s eye, and Leo nodded at him and even gave him the faintest thumbs-up. Was that to reassure him? Maybe it was because the girl looking out her window at the spun clouds beyond was, although not exactly curled against Leo, in a position that looked promising. Mark pressed his own hot face to the cool plastic of his window. Far below, blinking along the folded green hills of a still-wild land, he could see the shadow of their craft. He closed his eyes.

  The plane dropped precipitously, and Mark’s lip was painfully squeegeed over the window it had dried to. Then suddenly they were climbing hard—really leaning into the sky—and then they topped out and started another descent that made them all momentarily weightless in the cabin. Mark felt his gold cigarette case float free in the pocket of his corduroy jacket. They banked hard and he saw a scrub green ridge of mountains beneath the plane. Then the turn ended but the descent continued and they were headed toward a swiftly less distant mass of green and gray. Mark sat straight up and looked down the short tube of plane, through what he guessed you could still call the windshield. It seemed that they were going to fly into the side of a mountain. But then a landing strip appeared ahead of them. A long, straight, clay-red stripe showed itself in the green scrub, and the plane dropped toward it quickly.

  The plane skounced off the ground—once, twice—before connecting for good. The plane’s tail swished a bit, but then settled; the engines roared, and the plane slowed and then stopped beneath the cover of something. The sunlight that reached them was chopped up, as if the light were falling in flakes. Were they inside or outside? The pilot cut the engines quickly.

  It wasn’t until Mark had unfolded himself from the rear of the airplane that he understood: there was camouflage netting high above them, strung across the end of the airstrip between tall stands of trees. He thought he might be beneath the palapa roof of an enormous beachside bar.

  The pilot—Mild Max, the others called him—wandered off and came back with a pony. A chestnut pony with flicking ears, wearing a leather bridle and panniers. Mark thought, What a handsome little beast, and wanted to take a picture of it. He patted his pockets—wallet, cig case, shades, but no Node.

  “Hey, Leo,” said Mark. “Did that guy take my Node?”

  “Your phone? Yeah.”

  “Think I can get it back?”

  “I doubt it,” said Leo. “But look. A pony was waiting for our flight. Aren’t you glad you came?”

  Trip Hazards started to unload bundled laptop computers from a strapped-down pallet in the rear of the plane; he transferred them to panniers on the pony. It was a motley mix of laptops: some were new and candy-colored and wafer-thin, but most were old-looking MacBooks and scuffed black PCs; a few were covered in bumper stickers.

  Mark had just lit a squashed cigarette when Hazards said, “Listen up, you guys. We’re going to walk in a little ways now, but it’s mostly downhill, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. If you need to stop or slow down, just let me know.” And with that, he turned and started walking, leading the pony by her bridle.

  They moved in single file, and in silence. There was the swish and zip of pant legs, the two-four time of the pony’s hoof steps, the wing-battering of a flown bird. They stayed on a ridge and came in and out of the trees. A bird of prey made a lazy arc in the sky far away and let out a sharp caw that echoed and re-echoed. They heard their airplane take off, and Mark saw it climb gracefully and buzz away into a bright speck.

  After twenty minutes, they crossed a wide marshy meadow and slipped into forest. Then the forest thickened and the trail got thready. At times it seemed to disappear completely, and they were following only the vegetal wake of Hazards and the pony. Twice, the pony had to tramp off-piste to go around fallen logs that the rest of them scrambled over. When Hazards was well ahead of them, Mark asked Leila, “When are you going to tell me who I’m meeting?”

  “Whom,” said Leo.

  “Fuck off,” said Mark.

  “I don’t know,” said Leila.

  “Seriously?” said Mark.

  “Seriously,” said Leila. “But it must
be somebody important.”

  Mark wasn’t so sure about that. It seemed just as likely that this could all end with the harvesting of his organs. No, Leo wouldn’t do that. Not an evil bone in that boy’s body. Mark’s story about Cecil the Magical Homeless Sage had as its seed of truth Leo’s friendship with a semi-homeless and semi-psychotic Vietnam vet and paperback merchant in Cambridge. For a week in the bitter cold of a New England winter, Leo had let the man sleep on his couch.

  They descended into a burned patch of forest where juvenile conifers were dotted around the husks of their blackened ancestors, all in a green broth of ferns pocked with tiny, gaudy wildflowers. Coolness pooled and pocketed in the small folds of the mountain. Mosses and lichens lashed themselves to the nubbly seats of rock and the crisp ends of dead branches.

  Mark was having fun. He liked tramping farther and farther away from the shitshow of his own life, down there somewhere far below him now. Maybe they were walking to heaven, or Shangri-la, or someplace where he would be forgiven for all his miscalculations about how life worked and rescued from the trap that his vanity and greed had landed him in.

  The headache had more or less vanished. The air up here was delicious. But he had a shoe issue. He’d soaked one walking across a shallow streamlet; now every other step was a squelchy one. The shoes were new monks of stiff English leather, with a hefty buckle; not really sylvan-escape footwear.

  They entered what Mark thought you could call a glen. They walked through a stand of sequoia trees. Between the sequoias there were flowering rhododendrons—crooked and skinny little trees holding lavender teacups to the bark flanks of their enormous patrons. Mark, who liked nature just fine, was battered by the beauty of it all.

  Hazards called a halt and offered them all water from a canteen—an actual round metal canteen. There was a rushing stream near them; Mark could hear it through the green. “We can’t be far now?” he queried Hazards, though they could be miles, hours, days away.

  “It’s just across this creek and up that little brink,” said Hazards. He was pointing through the trees.

  Mark just saw more trees and landforms in the near, middle, and far ground. Did he mean ten blocks? Fifty? “What is?”

  “The farm,” said Hazards.

  They reached the creek via a series of tight switchbacks. The pony slowed and took extra care at the hairpins.

  Ah. This would be more of a river, thought Mark, who had an East Coast notion of creek. This one was swift and wide, and a coolness came off it like from a freezer case. The pony was leery of fording it. Hazards said she needed rest and water; he told them all to take a few minutes. Mark wandered half a block downriver. He slung his corduroy jacket across a leaning tree limb and found a flattish rock to sit on, then unbuckled his stupid shoes, which were ruined. His feet felt like burritos. He dunked them in the river. The cold brought the world into sharp focus: the trees on the banks, the needles on the trees. He remembered something his dad used to say after work: My dogs are barking, he’d announce, and he’d put his feet on the coffee table and pour a fist-size drink into any available vessel. But Mark had no sense of what his dad had done for work. For that matter, sometimes “after work” was early afternoon, when Super Friends was on.

  Lola or Leila approached. She didn’t look half as tattered by the walk as he felt. She stood on two tricky rocks at the edge of the river and leaned down to bring water to her face in cupped hands.

  “So is it Lola or Leila?” he asked her, lighting his last cigarette.

  “You can call me Leila,” she said.

  “You guys ready to tell me what it is you want from me?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I assume it’s something that only you can do because you can get so close to Straw.”

  “What makes you so sure I’ll agree to do it?”

  “Leo said you have a good heart.”

  They crossed the rushing creek and climbed the little brink. They were standing at the edge of something far below them that looked to Mark like a dull green lake but that turned out to be a small and oddly uniform forest in a perfectly round, sunken declivity.

  “What is it?” asked Leo.

  “A caldera,” said Hazards.

  Leo looked blank, saving Mark the trouble of looking blank.

  “A subsidence of land due to volcanic activity,” said Hazards.

  “A crater?” said Leo.

  “The geology is different,” said Hazards. “But sure.” He led the pony down broad steps carved into the steep rock walls and through a narrow path that ran straight between the…trees? Plants? But what plants? They were growing in neat rows, like corn, and like corn, the stalks were strong and fibrous and columnar. But these plants were taller than any corn, and lithe like bamboo. Mark looked up. A dozen feet above him, the path was covered in the green arch of the plants, a jungle allée. The plants had palmate leaves starting midway up their stalks, leaves fringed at their edges in a deep green fuzz. Mark had always been an end user; he’d never been near a pot farm in his life. If that’s what this was. But just from reggae album covers and the like, he thought that the plant around him was not marijuana. But what else do you grow acres of in the backcountry?

  They came to the end of the plant alley and walked out into a meadow. One hundred yards away, Mark saw a shingled farmhouse in a small stand of trees, with a blanched and listing barn nearby.

  As they came closer to the house, he heard the skkrring of a sprung screen door and saw a woman come out of the little house and onto its wide-brimmed porch.

  “Baby. You’re back!” she called. There was love and relief in her voice, and she even gave a little whoop, which carried well across the wide meadow.

  Chapter 29

  Leo was sitting in the kitchen of the little cabin with the woman who had hollered to Trip Hazards as they arrived. She said her name was Constance Nozzikins. Leo was helping her, he was shelling peas. He thought the cabin was about the coolest thing ever, hand-hewn and hobbity. There was a kitchen, a common room, a bedroom, and a sleeping loft.

  She swished some potatoes around in a bucket of water and then started slicing them. Her knife looked sharp.

  “What are those plants outside?” Leo asked. He was working by the window. “Is the whole crater filled with them?”

  “It’s a caldera, not a crater, but yeah, the whole thing: four hundred sixty acres. That’s the latest crop,” said Constance.

  She was hunting in the tangle of pots and pans that hung from the timber lintel over the sink. “This is one of our best sites. The altitude, I think, and the silica in the soil. And the remote location, of course. No one else gets yield like we do,” she said boastfully. He was about to say But crop of what? when she asked, “How many you got?” She meant peas. He tipped the bowl he was shelling into to show her. “Do twice that. We’re six tonight.” Leo, manually dexterous and comforted by piecework, grabbed more peas from the bowl. The sun was twenty degrees above the far lip of the walls that ringed them, and sunlight was streaming through the kitchen’s western windows; the line of evening advanced slowly across a broad field of mystery plants.

  Constance had moved on to mushrooms. Her knife looked sharp. She did that tap-tap-tap thing with the point of her knife, and a mushroom fell down in tatters on the board.

  “Is it pot?” asked Leo. He had never really been up close to marijuana plants before and knew what they looked like only from reggae album covers and the like.

  She stopped chopping. “Leo, look at me,” she said, turning around.

  He looked at her, open and easily.

  Three seconds went by. Constance looked worried.

  “Is this not enough peas?” he asked.

  “Would you come out here with me for a sec?” she said.

  They walked through the swinging door and into the common room.

  Leila, Mark, Trip, and another guy who had been here when they’d arrived were sitting around a wooden table. The new guy had introduced himself as
Roman Shades; Leila said she knew him from Dublin. At the table, it was clearly Mark against the rest of them.

  “Look. I’ll help you,” Mark was saying, “but I’m not taking your weirdo test.”

  “Roman?” Constance interrupted them. “I thought we had only one test to administer here?”

  “That is correct,” said Roman Shades.

  “But what about this guy? I thought he was”—she paused—“but then I looked closer, and I don’t think he is. I think Leo Crane is his real name.” Leo thought she was being rude, all this talking about him while standing beside him. “Montes,” said Constance sharply, “you vouching for both these guys?”

  “I’m vouching for Leo. Leo’s vouching for Mark.”

  “I was wondering about him too,” said Trip. “The extraction manifest had him as straight, but then on the way in here he seemed tuned in. I assumed they’d done him Portland.”

  Then Roman spoke directly to Leo: “You’re not a Diarist?”

  “What would make me a Diarist?” asked Leo.

  “An eye test, apparently,” said Mark, sarcastic. In his swollen, ruined shoes, he looked like a vanquished musketeer.

  “This is no good, having them here,” said Constance, talking to her boyfriend and Roman Shades only. “I want them both tested.” She was still holding her knife.

  Leo felt the current of peril in the room.

  “Oh, I’ll take your test,” he said brightly, sitting down in a chair at the table. “I like tests.”

  Constance put a janky-looking laptop computer on the table. She tapped and clicked and then laid it open before Leo.

  On the screen was a grid of numbers and symbols. To Leo, it looked like something between Arabic script and Masonic hieroglyphs.