"That's the way," he said. "The light touch." He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. "Why don't you gain some altitude? We don't need to horse around down here on the deck."
I eased back on the wheel and the horizon slipped below the nose.
"Good. Give it some gas. Like a car going uphill."
I felt around for the throttles on the console between us. D.B. took my hand in his and brought it to the levers. We pushed them forward until the climb grew steady and powerful. I leveled off, deftly, I thought.
"Fine. Here, let me trim her up some. Shock waves from the bombs jacked the tail out of trim."
"Yeah," I agreed. Shock waves from bombs. "Can I try a turn?"
"She's all yours."
I needed help with the first one, but after that I felt comfortable and confident turning. I even flew a big figure eight. I don't know how long we turned and banked around towering cumulus chimneys, but soon I lost all sense of direction in my concentration on the light touch. D.B. tapped the compass and motioned for a turn to the west.
The coast of Florida appeared first as a smudge on the horizon, then materialized, a long yellow beach, white breakers, tall glass condos, and low, rich houses with red-tile roofs. I took her all the way. The houses in the subdivisions grew squarer and poorer with more objects in the yards as we flew inland until houses gave way entirely to agriculture on the banks of Lake Okeechobee.
"There's Moxie," D.B. said, pointing down at a short grassy airstrip. Planes were parked between the runway and endless bean fields. There was a miniature control tower with a limp orange windsock. "I better take her now."
I gave up the controls.
D.B. said, "You're a natural, pard."
"Really?"
"You can always spot 'em."
"So this is it?" I said.
"What more do you want?"
What more did I want? I wanted something. I longed for something.
"I'm not going to hurt anyone, if that's what you mean. Anyone else. But you'll have to make your own way home from here."
D.B. made a low, slow pass over Moxie Field. There were people on the ground. As one, they shaded their eyes and looked up at us. I could see them point and gesture to others. D.B. gave them a long look at the black bomber before he stood it on its wing in a wild approach turn. When he leveled out, we were on the ground, in one brilliant, stomach-wrenching motion. He taxied to the white stucco control building and spun his airplane around in its own length, ready to go again.
A crowd was gathering around it.
"Give that dog of yours a pat for me, pard."
I wanted to say something. But what? I climbed out of the cockpit.
The passenger compartment reeked of vomit, and the passengers were pale. Chucky was acting desperate. He had the hatch open, but the little aluminum ladder made him wild. It wouldn't go down. He yanked and swore until Calabash grew impatient, placed his big black Ked between Chucky's shoulder blades, and expelled him through the hole. Jellyroll wagged his tail and circled the hatch anxiously. I told him, "Go," and he jumped into the grass. His ears flying in the prop wash, Jellyroll lifted his leg and peed on the landing gear. Calabash was next out. Sybel said something to me, but it was lost to the engine roar. She rolled her red, swollen eyes, smiled thinly, and climbed out the hatch.
I glanced forward at D.B. He turned in his seat to give me the thumbs-up sign. His face was smeared with tears. I dropped out of the black belly.
The heat clobbered me, an alien from a wet island, as if it were something solid and blunt. My knees collapsed, and I crawled off to the side near the tail toward my friends, who stood on the edge of the tarmac sizzling in the wavering heat. My dog sat panting in Calabash's shadow. We stood together and watched.
The snarl of the engines, the fine white dust set in motion by the whirling propellers combined with the breathless heat to blur the edges of reality. This was where Billie's death had led, and I wanted to see it crisply, precisely record its details for later when I could figure out what it meant. But things had no crisp edge. People looked ghostly in the white dust. They glanced at us as they pressed toward the plane. Elderly men materialized, passed, and vanished into the noise. They were expecting this, Kiley had said, the black bomber flying in from out their youth. You can't kill Danny Beemon. Not so his daughter, poor tortured Billie, whom I didn't even know, maybe because I didn't try hard enough. I wanted to think about her later, sometime later.
He waddled out of the dust at top speed. I'd seen that gait before. We spotted each other at once. He skidded to a halt and squinted at me. "Are you here to impede us?" shouted Dr. Harvey Keene.
"No. I'm through. D.B.'s waiting for you."
"Yes, I hear him. I'd like you to meet Barnett Osley." He meant the man two steps behind, deeper in the dust. He stepped forward. Half his face rested normally, but some terrible force, maybe a stroke, had twisted the other half into a toothy grimace. The good half smiled and nodded.
"How do you do. Doctor?" Then I introduced the doctors to Sybel and Calabash. Jellyroll sniffed the doctors' shoes.
"We'll be going now," said Dr. Keene, who put his steadying arm around Osley.
"We don't want to upset Danny Beemon," said Dr. Osley.
The crowd began to cheer. Some people waved shirts and handkerchiefs; others lifted young boys astride their shoulders so that they might see from an unobstructed place Danny Beemon standing waist-high out of the top hatch. Smiling his still-boyish smile, he waved his Mets cap in a circle over his head, then dropped back into the pilot's seat.
The crowd, us with it, pressed into a semicircle on the port side. Harvey Keene clambered into the belly hatch, then leaned out to help Barnett Osley aboard. One of them pulled the hatch shut. The noise changed pitch. The engines screamed, and the elegant shape began to roll. Heat waves rippled from the wings. Danny Beemon was airborne again.
I knew he'd do it. Everyone else seemed to know, too. He wheeled around steeply and buzzed us. The noise hurt, and the wash rocked us like pines in a storm. We shielded our eyes and watched. Then he was gone, a lingering drone, a speck receding, then nothing. A cloudless blue Florida sky.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DALLAS MURPHY is the author of Lover Man, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year (1987), which was also selected as one of the Year's Best by Publishers Weekly and nominated for a coveted Edgar Award. His second novel, Apparent Wind, was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a flamboyant comic nightmare...There is fun here, but also real fury in Mr. Murphy's raging imagination." Dallas Murphy grew up in south Florida and now lives in New York City.
Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery Page 21