Such a Rush

by Jennifer Echols

  He stood. “Ready?”

  He wasn’t asking me whether I was ready. He was telling me I was. I stuffed the last of the biscuit into my mouth, threw away my garbage, and followed him over to the orange Piper. Automatically I took my place at the wing, like I’d done a million times with Mr. Hall. When I saw Grayson had control of the guide on the back wheel, I pushed the strut. One good shove got the plane rolling out of the hangar, and it didn’t take much strength to guide it all the way out onto the tarmac.

  In the distance, Alec was taking off. A lone figure in the grassy strip between the tarmac and the runway struggled with a hook on a rope between upright poles. A long banner stretched out behind him and rippled in the morning breeze. Zeke, Alec had said, but I didn’t know this person. I didn’t want to ask Grayson about him when we were both in this mood, but I had a right to know who would be setting up the banners I was risking my life to snag with an airplane. “Who’s Zeke?”

  “Somebody the unemployment office sent,” Grayson called from behind the tail. His voice betrayed none of the emotion we’d let slip a few minutes before. “I don’t have high hopes for him.”

  “That’s not reassuring,” I said. “But gosh, if you figured out how to hire a guy from the unemployment office? You are running this business.”

  Grayson half-turned to me, a warning, not sure whether I was making fun of him. I wasn’t sure either.

  “I just made a phone call,” he muttered. Then he patted the tail of the airplane fondly. “Check this one out really well before you go. We haven’t taken it up yet, so it hasn’t run since… my dad died.”

  Only a slight hesitation let me know he felt a stab of pain as he said the words. I felt the stab too and wished he’d left the sentence hanging. But I was impressed that he’d gotten it out.

  He slipped back into the shadows of the hangar.

  With a sigh, I turned to my airplane. And immediately cheered up. I was about to fly again.

  But first I had a lot of things to check. I walked all around the plane, running my hand along the fuselage, looking for anything broken. I checked the oil. I pulled the towbar on the back of the plane, checked the ropes and hooks for towing the banners, and brought the hooks into the cockpit so I could throw them out the window at just the right time. I went back into the hangar, my eyes straining in the dark after the bright sunlight, and felt blindly in a toolbox for a dipstick. Grayson was in a far corner of the hangar, rummaging around the red Piper, and didn’t say anything. I went back out and checked the gas. Then I hopped up into the seat and started the engine—my pulse raced with the roar—and taxied over to the gas pumps.

  One of Mr. Simon’s Air Tractors was parked there already. I hoped Mark wasn’t in it. But of course he would be. That was my luck. As I drove closer, I saw I was right. Mark climbed out of the cockpit very slowly, like he was hungover. No surprise there either.

  He glanced over at my plane. I faced the sun, and I hoped he hadn’t seen me behind the glare off the windshield. He might not know I was flying for Grayson. I could shrink behind the controls and let him pump his gas and taxi away before I got out, thus avoiding another shitstorm altogether.

  Settling back to wait, I pulled off my shirt and opened one of the windows to circulate the air in the already hot cockpit. Even though it was only the middle of April, it was summer. The trees across the runway were in full leaf. The grass where Zeke wrestled with the banner was green and long, waving in the breeze like it was tapping its foot, waiting for somebody to wake up from a long winter’s nap and cut it. Really the summer lasted here from April until October, at least. It was strange that the town filled with spring breakers in March, when the weather was so fickle, warm one day and wintry the next. It was strange that the town cleared of tourists in the warm September and October, when the gray tide rolled onto the tan beach under a blue sky without giving it much thought, unimpeded by drunk college students and dangerously sunburned children and obese tattooed exhibitionists. Summer in Heaven Beach went on whether people noticed or not.

  I opened the other window. Along with warm air, the heavy scent of honeysuckle rushed in, and the growl of Alec’s plane. He dropped out of the sky and dipped low over the grass, headed for the banner pickup between the poles. The sight was frightening. He looked like he was going too slow to remain airborne. But I knew from experience that this was what a banner pickup looked like, and there was no getting the human eye used to it. The nose pitched up sharply. The engine groaned. The plane slowed even more, perilously close to losing lift and dropping like a stone. The banner, which had been all but invisible sleeping in the grass, protested being roused. It wiggled and thrashed and finally, when it couldn’t resist any longer, unfurled to its full length and height in a diagonal line behind Alec’s still-climbing plane: 4$ COCKTALLS LIV BAND CAPTAN FRANKS LOUNG.

  Wow, Zeke couldn’t spell. If that episode back in the hangar was a sample of how Grayson would act for the rest of the week—an awful lot like his father—he was going to blow a gasket.

  I turned back to Mark, who was knocking his head repeatedly against the gas pump. Something wasn’t right—something other than Mark. I had pumped enough gas into airplanes that I could tell. Then I realized what it was. I jumped out of the cockpit. “Mark, whoa, whoa, whoa!”

  He kept his forehead on the gas pump but turned to look at me. “Back so soon? I knew you’d change your mind.”

  I stopped the gas pump, carefully took the heavy nozzle out of Mark’s gas tank, and hit the button for the electric motor to coil the hose back up. Quickly I checked the area for sparks, small fires, anything else unusual. While Mark watched, I uncoiled the grounding clip, pulled it across the asphalt, and attached it to the tailpipe of the crop duster. “Didn’t your uncle teach you never to pump gas without grounding your airplane first? You could cause a spark and blow the whole place up.”

  “That never happens,” he said.

  Which was true. But only because everybody was grounding their airplanes before they pumped gas, except him.

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you?” I insisted. “A spark that ignited the underground gas tank would take half the airport with it.”

  He grinned and shrugged. “Some way to go. Boom! At least it wouldn’t hurt.” He cocked his head to one side, then closed his eye like moving his head had hurt. He eased his head back to its normal position. “What are you doing in that dead guy’s plane?”

  The confrontation was inevitable now. Better to have it while nobody was watching. “I’m flying for Hall Aviation.”

  “No!” he shouted.

  I shrank back at the violence of his reaction.

  The next second, the violence was gone, and he gave me a charming smile. “Come fly for my uncle! I’ll take you up…”

  “When?” I prompted him.

  “Soon. Patrick’s having a party tonight. Come with me and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Take that ‘blond’ friend of yours.” I made finger quotes around her bleach-blond hair with black roots. “I have to get to work.”

  He must have been in a lot of trouble with his uncle and very late, because with only a few more pointed looks up and down my body, he taxied back to Mr. Simon’s hangar.

  Standing in the cockpit doorway and hauling the heavy hose on top of the wing, I gassed up my own plane on the Hall Aviation account, then carefully retracted the hose and the grounding wire. My heart sped faster and faster as I cranked the engine again, slipped on the headphones, and taxied to the end of the runway.

  Here I paused, going through Mr. Hall’s checklist in my mind. The hand controls and foot pedals moved the flaps and the rudder the way they were supposed to. I put my finger on every dial in the instrument panel in turn, making sure each was working. The meter confirmed I had a full tank of gas. The altimeter worked. Finally I ran up the engines and checked the magnetos. The plane vibrated like it would shake to pieces, but all three Pipers were like that. There wasn’t much else I coul
d do to find out whether the plane was working properly short of flying and crashing.

  Pressing the button to broadcast over the radio, I announced my departure into the mike at my lips. My childish voice in my own headphones surprised me every time. I sounded nothing like a pilot.

  Remembering what Grayson had told me about Mark’s vindictive landing after a basketball game, I looked around for Mark. He’d parked the crop duster in front of Mr. Simon’s hangar. The rest of the airport was clear. The skies were clear. I looked a second time, because the only people saving me from crashing into another plane were the other pilot and me.

  I turned from the taxiway onto the runway for the first time since the day Mr. Hall died. The wind was calm. Taking off wouldn’t be hard. I had done it a thousand times. The butterflies in my stomach weren’t from fear. They were from anticipation.

  The hair on my arms stood up. I squeezed the controls to brace myself so I wouldn’t shiver with the chill of wanting. Normal people got that feeling when they quit smoking cigarettes. I had gotten it then too.

  Normal people did not get that feeling when faced with danger.

  Here it came. I sped the plane down the runway. All I had to do was keep it fast and straight. The shape of the wings and airspeed and physics did the rest. The plane wanted to fly.

  Suddenly it soared. The view out the front of the windshield changed gradually, so it was hard to tell how high I was. But out the side window, the plane separated from its shadow on the asphalt like Siamese twins cut loose from each other. The ground rushed away. The trees, so towering and textured before, flattened into uniform treetops like a field of grass. As I turned the plane, the ocean two miles away glinted into view. This time I couldn’t suppress the shiver of pleasure.

  I announced my banner pickup into the mike, cringing at the sound of my baby voice. No wonder the boys had made fun of me and Mark hadn’t taken me seriously. I wouldn’t hire a pilot who sounded like me, either. My anger drove me to throttle the plane higher than I needed to as I dove for the grassy strip beside the runway. Lining up with the posts where my banner waited, I raced along the ground, the plane almost meeting its twin shadow again.

  At the Hall Aviation hangar, Grayson stood with his arms crossed, watching me.

  At the Simon Air Agriculture hangar, Mark stood next to his plane with his hands on his hips, expecting me to fail.

  I threw my first hook out the window.

  Held the altitude steady.

  Trusted my own instincts and the feel of the airplane, like Mr. Hall had taught me, trying not to overthink. Just feel.

  The poles passed under me. I had no way of knowing whether the hook hanging from my plane had snagged the bar on the end of the banner. Not yet. I waited for the feel of it, refusing to lose my cool just because two boys who had never believed in me were staring me down.

  When the plane had traveled a long way from the poles—too long, it seemed—I felt it. The engine whined higher and the entire plane resisted forward motion, as if it were a paddleball stretched to the end of its rubber band and bouncing backward. I throttled down to give the plane more power to tow the banner. I pulled the controls to point the nose up into heaven, a climb almost steep enough to stall. The banner anchored me to the ground with its weight. The plane shuddered like it would tear apart.

  seven

  The engine groaned. But I kept going up. The shadow of the plane fell away in the grass. An invisible hand gave me a boost when the end of the banner left the ground, as if severing that last tie to the Earth was all we needed to propel us forward and up. I glanced down at Grayson, tiny on the ground now.

  He wasn’t standing with his hands on his hips anymore. He was standing with his hands on his head, like something had gone wrong. He put one hand down and then brought a dark shape to his lips—Mr. Hall’s radio. His voice came over the frequency Hall Aviation used. “Leah. Zeke can’t spell.”

  “Affirmative,” I said into the mike. “He couldn’t spell for Alec’s banner either.”

  “Motherf—” Grayson clicked off his radio before he cussed over the public airwaves. But he was still talking animatedly to himself on the ground. He reared back with one hand like he would pitch the radio down the tarmac. Don’t throw the radio, Grayson.

  I’d flown far enough that I couldn’t see him anymore when he came back over the frequency. “Leah and Alec, both of you come in and drop your banners so we can fix them. Keep an eye out for each other.”

  As I made the turn at the end of the airport, I could see Grayson again, looking across the tarmac at Mark. Mark was calling something through his cupped hands.

  I concentrated on my flight again. Every flight might be my last, now that Hall Aviation and my job there were balanced so precariously. I circled the airport, dropped my banner, circled the airport some more while watching for Alec so I didn’t crash into him, and at a signal from Grayson finally dipped down to pick up a correctly spelled banner that he’d supervised. I headed out to sea.

  Even though the cockpit was hot with the unrelenting sun shining in, and the air was muggy with the scent of my sunscreen, my chest expanded and I finally felt like I could breathe as I flew over the ocean. The Atlantic lapped the Earth so close to my trailer. I could always feel it there, pulsing and cleansing two miles from me. But I rarely saw it now that I never flew. I caught a glimpse only if I got a ride somewhere and we happened to drive by it in the daytime. Now here it was, laid out for me farther than I could see in three directions. I couldn’t even make out its true color for all the sunshine glinting off every wave, like the whole expanse was made of molten gold.

  When I’d reached a safe distance from the shore, I turned and flew parallel to the beach. Swimmers wouldn’t venture this far, so if I dropped the banner or crashed the whole plane into the water, I wouldn’t kill them. But I was close enough to the beach that vacationers could read the banner from the sand.

  I flew past the flophouse end of the beach first. Garishly painted high-rise hotels crowded each other here. The actual flophouses were across the beach road where I couldn’t see them, with no ocean view. I couldn’t make out details of individual people, but I knew from experience that these folks on the beach were the whores, the girls from trailer parks inland who could easily have been mistaken for whores, the tattooed exhibitionists, the privates in the military with their huge young families, way too many children for one man to support on such low pay. The vinegar scent of beer and cigarette smoke and occasionally marijuana wafted on the air here, even around the children, even at eight in the morning. The party for these people started early and went on all day since they could only afford a night or two in a hotel, and then they’d have to go back home. The few times I’d spent a day, this was where I’d been taken.

  As I flew toward the nicer end of town, the folks on the sand thinned out. The bright high-rise hotels shrank into smaller brick hotels farther apart, then thinned further into complexes of condos with shared pools, then individual mansions where each family had a pool all their own. This section of the beach went on for the longest. There was probably one person vacationing here for every hundred on the flophouse end. I could pick out these individual people. They walked along the beach at great distances from each other. Or they took their children out very early so they wouldn’t get sunburned in the heat of the day, and watched them closely so nothing bad happened to them. Unlike at the flophouse end, these children did not have to take care of themselves.

  All the while, I looked out for other planes. The Army base sometimes sent Chinook helicopters skimming across the water and frightening the tourists. The Air Force base sent out F-16s. Occasionally a Coast Guard plane or helicopter would scoot past, on its way to save someone, or just cruising the beach like I was.

  And then there were Alec and Grayson, flying in the same pattern as me. I heard Alec announcing over the radio that he was dropping his banner, circling around, and picking up a correctly spelled one. Then Mark took off t
o go on his crop-dusting run. I was surprised he announced himself according to protocol, considering what Grayson had told me about Mark using his plane as a weapon. Then Grayson took off and circled back for his banner.

  Grayson, Alec, and I knew the sequence by heart because Mr. Hall had drilled it into us. We flew out to the ocean and made a slow turn at a safe distance from the shore, always keeping other people in mind. We headed from the flophouse end of the beach to the ritzy end. Where the population thinned to the point that there were a lot more birds than beachgoers and hardly anybody would see the banners, we made a slow, wide, careful turn, always aware of the heavy banner that the plane was not built to drag behind it.

  We flew back down the beach the way we’d come, even farther from the shore now to avoid a collision with each other. It seemed impossible, but we had no radar, nothing to tell us another plane was coming except our own eyes, and planes weren’t as visible head-on as they were from the side. Where the commercial section of the beach ended in a nature preserve and the crowds disappeared, we made another slow turn for the ritzy end again. That was the job, until we headed back to the airport for a break or lunch or a different banner.

  Each time I passed Alec’s plane, I thought about ways I could talk to him when we took a break around ten, excuses I could use to get into a conversation with him. I didn’t really believe that I could land a date with him like Grayson wanted. But as long as I looked like I was making an effort, I figured Grayson would have no cause to complain, and he would stay off my case until the business folded and he went away.