by Adam Johnson
The old Custer biplane sits at the end of our strip, acock under a musty tarp. We peel back the canvas, draining water pooled over the twin cockpit holes, and then check the fuselage for cottonmouths, even though you can smell a cottonmouth ten feet away. Berlin had the Custer painted the same black as the Super Sport, so on nights we’re out over the Gulf, the underbelly of the wings take on a deepwater cast, like the unborn, sea-black of caviar.
Berlin hoists the tail around so the Custer points down the dark void between trees, while I wipe the windscreen and pull control cables. There is the squeak of ailerons, a high whine from the air starter, and soon blue smoke pours from the cowling as we jar down a strip I’m supposed to keep mowed. The grass is tall enough in some spots that the prop blasts us with a faint green mist, more the smell of itch than anything, and in one stroke, we lift and roll south over the dark pine stand, charging out of a shallow fog into a moonless sky that’s star-chart clear.
I plug in my intercom. “Check.”
“Check,” Berlin says and points the nose due south, the stick in front of me leaning toward the Gulf of Mexico with my father’s ghost hand.
We rise above a Louisiana lost beneath spring sheets of fog, and as long as we’re under a four hundred-foot radar ceiling, the curve of the earth is ours. Being an ex-pilot has its beauty. There’s no flight patterns, tower clearances, or radio commands. Forget inspections, insurance, manifests, and checkouts. Licensed pilots aren’t allowed to buzz their friends, land on parish roads, or sleep at the controls, the reason we’re up here in the middle of the night.
The Custer levels into perfect air, sharp and pressing, tinted from below by the husky smell of rice fields and a lingering mildew from the biplane’s canvas seats, while ahead is the pristine scent of a high-friction, hardwood propeller, infusing salty air with the finest mist of motor oil. This was Berlin’s first airplane, and though he at one time owned thirteen, it is his last. The license-revoking event is no secret. This time last year, he lifted his ten-seater Bonanza seaplane off our lake to take a group of oil executives fishing in the outbank islands. The men had driven late from Houston, were in our game room all night, so when they climbed in the Bonanza at dawn, they all beamed with drinky exhaustion and the kind of elation gamblers get after risking lots and coming out even.
I was eating breakfast on the dock when Berlin lifted off and banked over me. Water from the floats rained on my eggs. I never went on those fishing trips. At home fishing’s easy—we know where they are—but on the Gulf, you can spend all day with no idea if you’re in the right place. You’re just casting out there, blind. Where’s the fun in that?
All this is public record now. Flying over the Atchafalaya Basin, Berlin scanned for forecasts. Civil Air Radio called for midlevel clouds, thickening, with winds fifteen knots from the east, and the Coast Guard broadcast a muddy chop on an outbound tide. Berlin reevaluated his fishing strategy. In these conditions, the big tarpon fish would go for shiners and not the shrimp he’d brought. There was also a general call for more alcohol, so Berlin decided to put down and change bait.
Descending through a haze of gin, my father set the seaplane down on the number two runway of Thibodeaux Regional, causing a crash that seems filled with certainty, destiny even. Clear and beautiful, it was the last sure thing in our lives, and I see it often:
The Bonanza floats in from the west. White egrets lift from the runway ditches, and banking away, beat each other’s wings. The hull, swan-dive smooth, hovers close to the asphalt, touches. Lacking landing gear, the plane’s breast digs in, flipping the craft, so that everything assumes an unintended motion: Propellers knurl. Orange tackleboxes burst. Fits of ice magnify the light. Dried fish scales, glued to the bait coolers for years, are freed—they litter the air, stick to people’s lips. Graphite rods flex, coils of monofiliment unspooling. And then there are the lures, poised midair; jewel-eyed, cut from iridescent polymers and tensile steel, they teem like African insects. At last, belly skyward, the fuselage smokes with the near-ignition yellow of smoldering fiberglass. On the ground, shrimp flip and turn in puddles of hydraulic fluid and bourbon. For a while, there is only Johnny Cash, American hero, Berlin’s favorite.
No one got off easy. The FAA entertained accounts of gambling and drinking. The Gaming Commission was called, and the ATF, whose year of subsequent investigation will culminate in a secret raid, forty-eight hours from now, give or take. The airport tower faces an action for clearing a marine aircraft to land, and there are rival lawsuits against Berlin, who surrendered his flying permits and hangar privileges, but not the bottle, which remained until my arm got broke.
Berlin puts the Custer through some brief drills—a slouching roll into a double barrel, a nose-up loggerhead—as we pass the twin trellises of the Intracoastal bridge that mark the edge of the Lacassine Wildlife Refuge. A brackish mist pushes over the lip of the ocean ahead. The stunts make my stomach drop, and the roll makes all of Randy’s half-nelsons, cradles, and reverses suddenly come back from last night. I picture him working out in black body armor, teaching me arches, tucks, and bridges on a blue mat, his hands training my muscles to respond to a host of new moves. Randy’s been a junior twice now, so technically he’s a senior, which means he’s past head games. He’s way more mature than other guys, like the jerks on the squad who are always hiding your spirit basket. He’s also a transfer from Oklahoma City, so he’s not into all the high society and clubby-club stuff at school.
“About your friends,” Berlin says, his voice sudden and crinkly over the intercom. “The girls in your squad. Promise me you’ll make it up to them, because friends are what it’s all about. You’re a cripple without friends, a blind man.”
He gets all soupy like this when we fly.
“You’re right, Daddy. Friends are the best.”
“We’re about to find out who our friends really are. You’ll see. In a couple days, you’ll start to see.”
“See what?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”
“Keep your grades up,” is all he says.
Soon, we are over the ocean, flying under a sky the slick and grainy black of soaking charcoal, while beneath us the ocean is a milky, vinyl black, close to the Super Sport’s upholstery, but undulating, like sweet crude oil. I raise the minimegaphone and imagine its long pink swirl to the rollers below, coming to rest under all that water like the possessions of Teeg’s ex-wife or the booty of the pirate Jean Laffite. To the east, the horizon begins to faintly glow, which lends a sense of urgency to my officially becoming an ex-spirit leader. I’ll still know all the cool girls, still get Randy, but not have to attend all those stupid rallies, and forget the Honor Code. It feels like I should shout something profound into the minimeg, but I can’t think of anything. When my hand enters the sharp wind, it is simply taken from me, my hand left stinging.
Ahead are oil exploration platforms half lost in banks of fog that mark the edge of deeper, colder water. The blinking towers rise above the amber-glowing domes below, and I begin to make out Berlin’s faint snoring, thrumming off and on in the headset. The engine, too, has settled into a perfect drone, more a changing pressure in your ears than anything. In this fluxing hum, I hear the cooing of the rarest birds on earth, sleeping in our garage until they are wholesaled out.
Taking the stick, I put the Custer into a slow-banking one-eighty. School starts in an hour, and though I’ll have to wake my father to do the actual landing, he’ll have his rest until then. The gin is gone now, and there’s nothing to fear from sleep.
* * *
School is half day because of the Junior Crush Rally, so it’s parlez-vous, hypotenuse, The Red Badge of Verbiage, and then Randy driving me home in his boss Jeep. We bark out of the senior’s lot and lay flame past the cafeteria and gymnasium where the snare drum corps is psyching everyone up for the game and Sadie Hawkins dance. Suckers, I think, though I catch my lips moving with the distant Spirit Squad drill.
Rolling down Broad Str
eet, we pass taxidermy shops, drive-through daiquiri huts, and Cajun J-Jon, the portable toilet storage lot that marks the edge of town. We shortcut across ML King Boulevard, our jerry cans sloshing with fuel on the train tracks, and I can tell Randy’s in a bad mood. He’s hunched up, steering with his elbows so he can crack his knuckles by bending each finger back.
“Listen to this shit,” he says and glances at me. “The sixteen-inch barrel of an assault weapon is rifled at 1:32. What’s the rotation of a bullet passing through at eighteen hundred feet per second?”
He’s wearing a black tee with an open, brown JROTC uniform shirt over it, so that when his fingers pop, I can see the little wave of his pecs and a jump in that vein in his bicep. Brown polyester whips in the wind. I can smell his skin.
“What?” I ask. I’m in a pixie skirt, pleated to hide my thighs.
“Bootleggers cut sixty liters of eighty proof rum with fifty liters of water. What proof results? Can you believe it? I’m sniper school material. My night vision is off the scale. I mean, I could have my ATF tactical badge today, but I got to learn this shit?”
Strewn across the backseat are coils of black rope.
“I’ll tutor you,” I tell him. “I’ll be the answer to all your questions.”
He glances up at the sky, smiles. “You gonna teach me Spanish, too?”
“You gotta learn Spanish?”
“Yeah, they say the whole future of the ATF is about Mexicans. They showed us this current events video. If you had seen this chart they had—by the year 2035, America is completely shaded yellow, with red zones in every major city.”
“What’s all the black rope for?” I run a loop through my fingers, feel the heat.
Randy trains his brown eyes on me, blinks back to the road. Past the fire station, we hit open road and pick up speed.
All his antennas start to sing. “Special ops,” he says.
“Kinky,” I tell him, and he kind of blushes. Behind him, the rice fields are a blur of gray-green water, and I wonder if he has any idea about the raid on my house or whether he’s just not letting on to the fact that he’ll be holding the flashlight when the advance team pulls me from my bed—in the semisheer emerald chemise I ordered special from Baton Rouge—only hours after he’s kissed me goodnight from the dance.
This thought, combined with black rope, makes the cords in the back of my neck go electrical, and I know I should have joined the Future ATF instead of the stupid Spirit Squad. I want my ATF outfit—Gore-tex boots, black Kevlar, a Spectra assault suit with chemical-proof panels thick enough to stop sarin nerve gas, yet still elastic enough to let you kick for the throat.
“I got the Super Sport for tomorrow night,” I tell him.
“About tomorrow.”
“I know, I know. You haven’t officially agreed to take me to the dance or anything, but my dress, forget about it. It’s a black silk skirt over a skin-tight catsuit.”
As we near the gates to my drive, we pass Jim Green, riding his bicycle at the edge of the road. Jim Green’s the most powerful man in south Louisiana, and Randy’s head turns as we pass him.
We park down the road a bit, and Randy leaves her running. I get out and lean against the Jeep’s grill, which is papered with the wings of dragonflies. I can tell by the way he puts his hands in his back pockets when he gets out, how he places his feet just so in the shale gravel in front of me, that he’ll try to give me another excuse.
“Look,” he says, “I’m eighty-five percent sure I’ll have tomorrow night off.”
Randy works some nights as a watchman on an oil recovery vessel parked in the Black bayou.
“My dad can have that boat sunk by tomorrow,” I say. “Towed to sea and burned. You don’t believe me, but believe me.”
Randy smirks. “Maybe it’s more like ninety percent,” he says. He casts a weary glance at the bicycle pedaling toward us. “That’s James Green, isn’t it? The former gravity drainage commissioner?”
The gravity drainage commissioner approves all building permits. He can rezone your house while you sleep, revoke watertable access, run a bayou through your land, or declare your property in a floodplain. Everyone must deal with him.
“Yeah, my dad and those guys all went to the Cold War together.”
“They have a video on James Green in current events.”
“Sobriety is their only current event. They flew high in Germany, that’s for sure. Then they ran southwest Louisiana for a while. Now, they drink a lot of coffee.”
“No offense, but your dad’s had documented problems running boats, planes, and cars, let alone the eighteenth state of the union.”
“You can’t even manage taking me to a dance.”
“I’m coming to your fish fry,” he says, “and we’re at ninety percent, okay?”
This is the point where he’s supposed to kiss me. I’m assuming he wants to kiss me. I’ve got him loosened up, joking, but he glances away, wishing, I think, that I’d kiss him. This is half of why I’m sweet on him. But I won’t let him off the hook.
“Bring a fishing pole,” is all I tell him before he climbs in his Jeep and burns out, leaving zaggy trails in the shale.
Jim’s brakes squeak him to a stop beside me. “I used to have a Jeep just like that,” he says.
He dismounts, and we walk across the big grates that mark our property. The grates are made to break the ankles of cows that try to cross, but there’s been no cows on our land for years.
“I presume that’s the Future ATF boy Teeg told me about,” Jim says. He wears a bubble-head helmet and Spandex cycling shorts tight enough that you can see his noodle, but he has dark, intense eyes and a silver tooth that will give you les frisons when he flashes it at you.
“He won’t go to the Sadie Hawkins with me,” I tell Jim.
“An obvious fool.”
Ahead through the trees are the muffled sounds of an engine revving and the clipped barking of Beau.
“You sure that raid’s this weekend? I mean, couldn’t we get it moved back a week? You can make a call or something, right?”
Jim thinks a moment on this. A storm blew through last week, clearing all the dead wood from the pecans and live oaks, and the downed branches give like dry sponges under our feet.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to get the dance moved back instead?” he asks me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say and stuff my hands in my pockets. He sounds pretty dang casual considering they raided his offices earlier this year. Though he knew they were coming, he didn’t realize they were going to tear the place apart. All his fish died and his carpets still stink like pepper gas.
Around a bend in the drive, my father stands next to Doc Teeg’s dually pickup, which has obviously just seen a rut. Brown water still drips from its panels, and there’s about a thousand pounds of mud-splashed slot machine in back. They’ve been driving around our property unlocking all the old gates so that the ATF doesn’t knock our fences down. My father’s pants are wet, though Teeg’s are clean.
“Shotgun,” I call.
Berlin sits in the back seat with Jim as we drive down to throw the slots in our lake. I change all the radio presets while Teeg talks to my dad about Beau, the two of them eyeing each other in the rearview mirror.
“I’m just saying, maybe we should tie him up. I don’t want him loose with all those people running around,” Teeg says.
“Nothing’s gonna happen to Beau,” Berlin tells him.
“A man doesn’t want his dog to get shot for no reason.”
“He’s not your dog anymore.”
“Shot?” I ask.
“Whoa, whoa,” Jim Green says. “Slow down now. From what I gather, there’s a newer, friendlier ATF out there, one committed to nonlethal means—concussion canisters, caustic sprays, stun wands, and so on. They’re not into bullets anymore.”
Teeg opens his mouth to speak, but from above comes the drone of an airplane, and we all power down our windows to lean out for a look.
The trees are thick though, so there’s nothing to see.
At the water’s edge, we back down the creosote planks of what was the seaplane dock. Our lake is really a long, open area where twenty miles of marshlands drain into the Coubillion River. The water is brackish, the color of chicory coffee, when it empties from the wetlands, but now, as the tide pushes seawater in from the Gulf, it is gray and cloudy with a shimmer to its surface, like hot fish broth.
Teeg drops the tailgate, and he and my father both hitch their pants before beginning the work that will erase the last traces of our past lives, that will be a final step on our year-long road to lame-o.
But before the first slot gets the heave, my mother appears in flower-print overalls, carrying a roll of duct tape and smelling of the heavy lemon wax she’s been using to seal her cherry buffet, sidebar, and secretary. In the past two days, she’s put down carpet runners, draped the antiques, and packed her grandmother’s Rutherford crystal and Celine service for twenty-four.
She walks right by me, moving with deliberateness past the pylons. When she passes Jim Green, his awful bulge clearly outlined in those shorts, she lifts a hand in disgust and says “please.”
She halts before Teeg and Berlin.
“It is enough,” she says, “that my dining hall has suffered under green felt, fake gold trim, velvet wallpaper, and spangled flooring. It is sufficient that thirty men are to tromp through our house in short order. But that’s my friend’s china off the end of this pier, and you’re not throwing your foolish gaming machines atop it.”
Teeg closes his tailgate, carefully latches it. He tips his cap and nods to her.
“Don’t you sheep me, Doctor,” my mother says. “I know all about you. I was at those officers’ parties, if you’ll remember. I could read a German newspaper, too.”