by Brian Hodge
“Look, Bobby Lee,” he said softly. “Ain’t that constellation The Twins?”
‘Scuse Me, While I Kiss the Sky
Leonard started at the barrels in the corner of the abandoned office complex he called home, and he frowned. They were sealed tightly, marked with some of the strangest labels he’d ever seen, and every damned one of them had the word WARNING somewhere on its surface. They had been covered with tarps and rolled into a back corner hastily when the base closed down. At least, that was how it appeared to have happened. Leonard hadn’t been there at the time.
Outside the dusty, cracked windows the hulks of several very old aircraft canted on their sides, or hunkered in rusty splendor, collapsing one piece at a time to the cracked and ruined tarmac. There was only one plane not in complete disrepair, and that was Leonard’s crop duster. The yellow Cessna didn’t exactly glisten in the early morning light, but it was in good repair, lubricated and maintained with the same attention to detail and precision that Leonard had applied during his 20 years in the United States Air Force.
Leonard would still have been in the service, lubricating jets and flying on weekends, if it hadn’t been for the drinking. He’d tried to keep it all together, to get in early enough and sober enough to rise each day and perform his duties, well-groomed and awake enough to advance through the ranks, but it wasn’t in his nature. He’d made E-6 and never had a chance to advance further. At twenty years, when he was passed over for promotion the final time, his retirement had been mandatory.
Despite the drinking, Leonard had saved some money. Though he’d hoped to stay in the military, having most of the needs of his life provided, and collecting a bi-weekly paycheck, he’d been bright enough to realize this wasn’t likely. The savings had amounted to enough to buy the used Cessna. Crop dusting wasn’t exactly the heroic war bird adventure he’d dreamed of as a boy, but the adult Leonard had fewer illusions. He was still flying, he was eating fairly regularly, and he had a case of Old Crow in the corner of his kitchen, only half-empty. Life could suck worse.
The base had been closed in the late sixties, apparently in a great hurry. Leonard found it by accident, from the air. He’d been dusting the back end of the Murphy farm, taking occasional hits off a silver flask he’d slipped beneath his seat, and he’d gotten lost. He should have turned toward the highway, but instead, he’d found himself buzzing low over the marshy ground near the borders of the Great Dismal Swamp. Elizabeth City, NC was off to his right, and Old Mill was down south. Highway 17 wound into the distance, cars and trucks glistening along its length, but this one time, somehow, Leonard failed to notice that he was moving away from the highway instead of toward it.
Natural mistake, if you happened to be a half-drunken pilot who really didn’t have anywhere to go when he landed. Leonard had just begun to glance nervously at his gas gauge and to wonder where in hell he was, when the glint of glass from below caught his attention. The highway and directions forgotten, he’d banked the Cessna in a long, slow arc and slipped lower. He’d recognized the rusting corrugated metal buildings and drab colored buildings for what they were immediately. He nearly pulled up in panic as his mind registered that he was buzzing a military airfield. Just before he yanked back on the controls, it ALSO registered that the place was deserted. Abandoned.
Without thinking, as was his habit, Leonard banked again and located the clearest of the runways. He brought the Cessna in for a bumpy, but serviceable landing and cut the engine. Nothing moved but some leaves, scurrying across the cracked tarmac. Grass and weeds sprouted from several cracks in that crumbling surface, and around the hangars and office buildings, the overgrowth had gone wild.
It didn’t take long for Leonard to appreciate the merits of what he’d found. There was a service road – not a good one, but passable with a 4X4 – leading away from the swamp and back toward 17. The end of this feeder road was overgrown with weeds and blocked by a metal fence, but this was easily bypassed. There were a number of buildings so far gone that their only likely future use was as debris, but there were others not so bad off. That day, Leonard had climbed back into his Cessna and flow back to civilization for one of the final times.
His rent wasn’t much, but free was always better, so he moved out of his run-down apartment and took the money he would have paid for rent, plus the grudging half of his security deposit he was able to dig loose from the landlord’s tight pockets, and traded his old car on a beat-up but serviceable GMC 4X4. He loaded up and rolled out. That same night, he staked out the main office of the old airport, which sported some furniture that hadn’t crumbled or been eaten by bugs, a desk and a table, and windows that still held out the rain.
It had been two years since that first fateful night, and Leonard felt right at home in the old building. He’d managed to cannibalize the rest of the base and seal the office up tight. The back corner of one hangar had yielded a rusted, but serviceable generator. The windows were sealed from the weather using scrounged tubes of calk, the roof patched and re-patched until it would have taken a native guide to lead a drop of water inside. All the comforts of home, and then some, Leonard was fond of saying, though only when alone.
Over the years, more and more of Leonard’s conversations had been one-sided. He’d trusted the outside world less and less. He didn’t want anyone learning where he lived, or where he flew out of, and the secret had grown in weight as he carried it over the span of years. He was the center of a great deal of speculation, the butt of even more jokes. Word had it that the local police and at least one State Trooper had shown an interest in locating his landing strip.
“To catch the fucker flying drunk,” they’d say. “He’s a damned menace, strafing farms and scaring cattle. Nearly plowed into a semi trailer on 17 last spring.”
At first, Leonard ignored the rumors. He hadn’t hurt anyone, and no one seemed to suspect where he was headed when he left a job. All they knew was that he flew out over the swamp. Leonard always flew over the center of the Great Dismal before looping in low and returning to the old base from the rear. Someone would have to be mighty close to catch him. Mighty close, or watching from above. That was his biggest fear. If the bastards found him out, he was worried they might make him leave. Hell, if they knew the place was there, they might try to talk the government out of it and convert it to a working airport, or plow it under and grow more cotton. Who knew?
One thing Leonard did know – those barrels across the room were trouble. Anything with that many warning labels on it was trouble. Hell, a moron could see they were trouble, but here he was, drop cloths strung across the top of the lot of them and using them for furniture. If a moron could tell, what did that make Leonard?
He reached for the half-empty bottle of Old Crow on the table in front of him and poured until his glass was half full. Bottles got empty, glasses got full. A matter of perspective he wasn’t even aware he applied. Full glass good. Empty bottle bad. Leonard sipped, and he thought, piecing together what he’d heard lately and weighing the actions and subsequent reactions that faced him.
He needed to get that shit out of the office; that much he knew for sure. He needed to get it far way, to a place no one could find it and track it back to him. It was a problem. He could just roll them out and up a ramp into his truck, dump them in the swamp, and forget about them, but that might backfire. They might corrode, or pop open. They might kill some fucking squirrels, or a snake or two, or wind like chemical serpents down the Inter-coastal Waterway to end up in someone’s sink. Leonard didn’t know what the fuck was in those barrels, but he knew the time from which they came. He knew the rumors they told down at the Beer Shack in Old Mill. He knew about FBI cover ups and CIA experiments, dusting whole populations with drugs and sitting back to take notes, all the while playing the game of deny everything.
Leonard wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack, but he’d spent his time working for Uncle Sam. He had no illusions of a perfect government, and the secret nature of the
base he’d made his home – the fact that with all the local legends and fables, no one had ever mentioned it to him – made him suspicious of those barrels in ways he didn’t want to contemplate. So he sipped, and he thought, and eventually the level of his drink lowered, along with his common sense.
“How in hell bad could it possibly be?” he thought.
Rising unsteadily, Leonard crossed to the first of the barrels, pushed aside the cover, and examined the crimp-on stopper that closed off the barrel’s mouth. It was coated in plastic, sealed with twisted wire that had lead seals mashed around them. There were colorful warning labels, obscure in their meaning, but ominous in their simple gaudiness. Gaudy was not a military style, and to see that they had resorted to such a thing to catch your attention? Well, it caught Leonard’s. He sipped some more of his whiskey, then set the glass on the barrel and headed across the room to his tool box.
He was back moments later with wire cutters in hand, and set to work on the seals. The fucking thing was ready to withstand a brutal attack by shippers, handlers, and the military, but Leonard was tenacious. About fifteen minutes later, plying the lid with a pipe wrench, he had it open.
He caught no immediate scent, but when the lid released under his attack, he heard the contents sloshing near the top. A small splash of clear liquid popped up and splattered the barrel. Leonard stared at it. Slowly, hoping it wasn’t some sort of experimental acid, he reached out his index finger and swiped it through the stuff, raising it to his nose. Nothing. No scent at all. It might have been water. Hell, maybe it was fucking water. Maybe it was a huge pile of water, kept pristine and un-blemished by the seals and the barrels, tucked away for some experiment that never happened.
The whiskey having deadened too much of his brain, Leonard brought his finger to his tongue and tasted. Where there had been no scent, there was certainly a taste. It was odd, numbing, but not burning. Leonard stood back, grabbed his drink, and stared at the barrel. When he took his next swig of whiskey, the numbness spread, leaking into his throat. He saw that there were colored trails in the spilled liquid on the barrel’s lid. They moved, sinuous and bright, like molten carnival glass. He sipped again and turned toward the window.
The sun was nearly gone beyond the horizon, and the orange gold melting over the tree line beyond the air field was mesmerizing. Leonard stepped to the window and stared into the night. He felt energized. He was as wide awake as he could ever remember being, though he had no inclination to move. He sipped his whiskey slowly and felt the warm, soothing sensation as it slipped down his throat. A sizzle began near the base of his neck, each crackle bringing a synaptic maelstrom of images and amplified sound.
Leonard turned back toward the barrel.
“Damn,” he said to no one but himself, and his glass of Old Crow. Then again. “Damn.”
There were five barrels. Each probably held thirty to forty gallons of whatever the fuck that was. Leonard knew he should just dump it. A part of his mind that was receding, walling itself off and growing silent, knew that he needed to let this go and stick with his abandoned air strip and his whiskey, but it was more of a background hum than a real influence on his thoughts.
On the air-field, two fifty gallon tanks at the ready, the old Cessna sat, glinting in the moonlight. It was a beautiful color – how had he never noticed that? Leonard’s fingers itched for the controls. Five barrels. Fifty gallons a tank – thirty gallons a barrel. The math came more easily than he expected. Three tanks. He had to drop three tanks on the fields of North Carolina, and then dump the barrels somewhere safe, and he would be free of worries. They might still find him, but they would not find those barrels. Not with Leonard lying around waiting to be their scapegoat.
“Ground Control to Major Tom,” he said, chuckling.
For some reason the idea of flying while the sky melted from one color to another was appealing, rather than frightening. Setting his empty glass on the table, Leonard slipped through the door into the darkness beyond in search of a hand truck. It would take a couple of hours to drain the barrels into the tanks, but he had time. He could get one tank out before dawn. Fifty gallons. He knew right where to dump it, too. Where it would be most appreciated.
Laughing to himself, Leonard set to work. It was going to be a long night.
“If you aren’t kidding,” Jess said in disgust, “then I’m gonna kick your ass.”
Slug gazed at him coolly, wide half-vacant eyes glistening with all the intelligence of a dairy cow. Teeter grinned, all teeth and spiked hair, chrome rings looped through every other inch of his jacket and mirrored in the tiny glittering studs and rings that looped identically through his flesh. Teeter stood behind Slug to remain outside the “ass kickin’” radius.
“I ain’t kiddin’” Teeter laughed. The laugh had the grating quality of nails on slate. Accompanied by a smile that revealed twin rows of twisted, yellow teeth, that laugh alone would have been enough to earn him a smack in the jaw if Jess had been closer.
Slug licked his lip, and grinned. He had the expression of someone about to say something, but Jess knew the moron would forget what it was before he ever managed to force the words to his lips. Talking to Slug was like talking to yourself, only more disgusting.
“Who in hell would come up with a thing like that?” Jess growled. “It ain’t right, and I ain’t doin’ it. You can go fuck yourselves.”
Teeter began rocking back and forth in a passable imitation of a metronome. That was why they called him Teeter. He never stood upright without swaying, or rocking. “Off balance in more ways than one,” Jess was fond of saying.
Jess leaned on the front post of the Brown Dog Diner, watching his two companions with a scowl planted firmly across his pocked face. Jess stood six three in his boot heels, weighed in at a little over two hundred pounds. His long dark hair was in a ponytail slung over one shoulder. He wore a greasy Oakland Raiders baseball cap and a pack of Tahoe cigarettes poked out the top of his shirt pocket. Still, if you stood off a way and looked at the group, you would have to admit he was a cut above his buddies in both style and hygiene.
Teeter slowed his rocking and managed to choke back his laughter. The glint in Jess’ eye had sharpened.
“Everybody’s talkin’ about it,” Teeter whined. “You got to see for yourself, Jess. Better than any weed you ever saw, and lasts longer than trippin’ – that’s what Mabel said.”
“Mabel don’t know her ass from a corn row,” Jess replied, grabbing his smokes in irritation. He flicked his wrist, loosened one from the pack, and slipped it between his lips.
“Maybe not,” Teeter said, “but that girl’s been stoned more than all the apostles combined, and if she says that shit is hot …”
Jess lit his smoke and turned away, staring off down the road. Dust rose in slow clouds behind a pickup truck passing on the road to their right. Out on 17, the whine of tires whipped past in echoes of distant places and real lives.
There were only two vehicles in the parking lot of The Brown Dog. One was Jess’ battered Ford pickup. Jess kept the engine running smoothly, but the rest of the truck had gone to hell. Rust pocked the sides and primer-colored spots broke up the larger expanses of glossy black paint. Teeter called it the Black and Tan, when Jess was in a good mood, but lately that hadn’t been often. More and more that whine on the freeway was calling Jess by name. Times like this, when his only two friends showed themselves for the mouth-breathing flesh-wasters that they were, that call was louder still.
“They’ll be down by the swamp tonight,” Teeter continued, breaking the silence. “Everyone will be there.”
“Gonna … party,” Slug managed, his grin widening for a second and his eyes lighting with a tiny flicker of something vaguely intelligent that drowned quickly and faded into the dull brown depths.
Jess said nothing. He was listening to the world passing him by, and gears were clicking into place that hadn’t clicked in a very long time. “Better than any weed, huh?” he asked.
“Lasts longer than a trip? You get any visuals with it?”
“Mabel says the world melts right away, like you walked into another world,” Teeter agreed. “Plenty visual, to hear her tell it. And you can smoke it. You don’t gotta lick the bugs…”
“I’ll see you boys at the swamp,” Jess said, shaking his head in disgust again. He watched Slug a moment longer as bile rose in his throat. “Christ.” He pushed off the post and headed for his truck. Slug watched him go, not even registering the movement or turning until Jess had the pickup’s door handle in one hand. Teeter followed like a lost puppy, or a duckling.
“Drop us in town, Jess?” he asked, voice still whiny.
“You need the exercise,” Jess said. He slammed the door and started the truck, spitting gravel as he pulled away from Teeter and Slug and sending the more agile of the two stumbling back and away with a rhythmic string of curses that matched the hypnotic swing of his tall, thin body.
The Swamp was the local name for a particularly secluded spot at the far end of an all-but-deserted stretch of dirt road. The place butted up against the edge of North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp and featured a dilapidated barn that had been shored up and fitted with discarded furniture and assorted junk. It was a gathering spot for teens, men trying to avoid the searching eyes and voices of their wives and girlfriends, hunting parties and the occasional transient on the way to more civilized places.
The police rarely wound their way out to The Swamp, with the exception of those who joined in the festivities. Old Mill North Carolina sported a police department of only six officers and a Chief. Of those six, four were known to imbibe, and at least two spent a good amount of time flying on airlines fueled by green leaves and the munchies. Civil Service in rural NC didn’t pay too well, so the servants of the public often found their own perks.