by George Foy
‘Dag,’ the pilot said. ‘Dag.’
‘Yeah,’ Coffin agreed.
The pilot got out of the pickup, found the Yamaha. Checked God was wrapped up warmly. Put on his helmet, kicked off, and roared, too fast, onto the ramp leading to the New Jersey Turnpike.
The shock from Coffin’s words hollowed out space for thoughts to hook up with each other in random ways.
The blurring of road and sky on each side seemed to allow a fudging of memory as well; or perhaps it was the blur itself that reminded the pilot of the huge swirling blue plastic brushes of Krazy Karl’s Kwik Kleen Karwash . . .
*
. . . where Roberto was working the first time they’d met.
Carmelita had brought him to the carwash to meet her brother. She’d introduced her friend by what he did, and Roberto’s eyes lit up like Macy’s on Thanksgiving weekend. Roberto was twenty. To him, being a pilot meant flying, and flying meant getting out of the boroughs, out of Queens, out of the carwash, out of the house where his mother beat up on herself the way all the men in her life had beat up on her, so as to stop passing on the abuse to Roberto and his sister.
He wanted just to ride, the first time. The pilot, drunk on the vinho verde of infatuation, took Roberto up to Halifax – square-up tourism flight, high over clouds and ocean. Ten thousand feet up, he let Roberto steer the plane.
The next time, Roberto wanted to learn.
This of course was more of a hassle, but the pilot agreed. He did so partly because Carmelita approved, on the grounds that it might keep the kid out of the local gangs – the Netas, the Latin Kings were expanding like wildfire in the ’hood around then. Mostly he agreed because he remembered a similar situation, a few years ago, and a large, smelly, foulmouthed redneck named Cal Bigbee, and a younger version of himself who would have swallowed hot coals to be given a shot at doing what he most wanted to do.
Teaching Roberto had opened pockets of warmth in the pilot he had not known existed. It had something to do with the kid always smiling, even when he was busting ass to get the navigation right; it had to do with the minor scrapes he got into around the general aviation terminals, and his eyes, which were kind. This affection must have been shared to some extent, for Roberto early on took to calling the pilot ‘hermano,’ and like all younger brothers, real or honorary, he took advantage of the pilot’s indulgence to roughly the same degree that he listened to his life-advice. The pilot was happy to fall for it, to help Roberto out, in half-conscious resonance, in payback perhaps, for his own older brother and the roles they’d both assumed.
In the marshes under the girders of the Casimir Pulaski Skyway now ripping under his wheels at 84 m.p.h. he saw many curtains of smoke and a lot more fires than was usual in these poisoned wastes, but he spared no thought for Jumpers. His mind was spiked on the memories, on the shock from Coffin’s words; but the pain was getting too big. Great speed somehow brought time and space closer together, and now to kill the pain he chose to fill every space left with their concupiscence; the clean freezing jag of acceleration, the sharp delight of a ninety-mile-per-hour wind, the great cold slowdown in the molecules of guilt that came in knowing he was going too far too fast on roads crushed and spavined by too many winters, on dying bridges with broken cables and rivets eaten out like root canals. Knowing his life depended on keeping the precise edge of balance, rested on fractional decisions made by some overtime office of the brain shaving a micron electric to the left or right; knowing one atom of overcorrection on handlebar or angle-of-lean meant death or paralysis; speeding toward the place Roberto’s sister always went when the world broke down around her.
Chapter Nine
‘He who would travel happily must travel light.’
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Terre des Hommes
The pilot did not wait for visiting hours to enter Bellevue. He went back to his apartment and returned God to his box. He dug out an old surgical smock and stethoscope he kept handy for these occasions. From the Bedou saddlebags that housed his false papers he selected a UCC made out to someone named Brian Veitch of Northwest Washington, DC. The Universal Credit Card contained the driver’s license and social security ID of somebody else, but the credit-chip inside was white money, paid in by the pilot to Riggs National Bank.
He looked around for the clipboard he kept for aeronautical charts. Couldn’t find it. It was not in his chartcase, where it should be. Nor in the milkcrates where he kept his Saint-Exupéry, his Pratt and Whitney manuals, his tomes on tidal currents and Usenets and radio navigation. Nor in the Navy surplus duffelbag with his clothes, or in the footlocker with his camping equipment.
He stood in the middle of the lounge, looking around at his scavenged belongings. There was something wrong with this place, the pilot thought; nothing specific; it just did not feel right. For the first time since he had lived here he got a sense of loneliness that the lights of the City, massed outside his windows like the combined engines of some great starship, could not kill.
He’d been living here too long, the pilot decided. It was getting too permanent. He kept all his possessions in travel gear, trunks, boxes and saddlebags, like a nomad, for exactly this reason; like any good nomad he could break camp at a moment’s notice. Ditch the expendable stuff and move the survival gear out before anyone had a chance to trap him.
‘Never own more than you can carry down the dock by yourself,’ the Smuggler’s Bible says. ‘Never own more than you can stow comfortable and cool on whatever mode of transport you rely on to get yourself out of trouble. This is true of all baggage, both psychic and material . . .’
He found the clipboard under the skeleton of a baby dolphin he had brought back from the Windward Islands. The Hermes A2 thrust chamber solenoids he’d got off a high-tech junk dealer on Canal Street lay behind an ancient linotype keyboard he’d salvaged from the old Brooklyn plant of the Daily News. ‘ETAOIN SHRDLU,’ the first two lines of keyboard read.
All junk, all expendable. Expendability was the price you paid for mobility. He stuffed the solenoids into a canvas shoulderbag and went back into the night.
No one stopped him at the staff entrance to Bellevue Medical Center. The guards all worked on their own patterns of recognition and the pilot checked off green on every one; smock, ’scope, pinned ID. Tired face, blank eyes. They went back to their tiny TV screens as the word ‘intern’ came up on their brain monitors, watching Ned Reynolds anchor wonderfully gory reports on the latest terror bombing perpetrated by the Paquito Munoz Revolutionary Group (Adorno Faction).
The mental ward in Bellevue occupied two new towers that grew like concrete celery from the dirty brick compost of the old complex. The pilot waited at the door to B-29 while a black nurse almost as big as Evangeline turned the locks.
‘Who you lookin’ for?’ the nurse asked him.
‘Chavez,’ the pilot said, ‘C.’ He looked up from his clipboard.
‘Wha’choo lookin at?’ the nurse barked at him. Her eyes resembled a water moccasin’s.
‘Sorry?’ The pilot was taken aback.
‘You was lookin’ at me!’
‘Well of course I was. I was talking to you—’
‘You was lookin’ at me.’ The nurse drew her lips back in a snarl. ‘You got any matches?’
‘No,’ the pilot said.
‘Well you caint bring matches into this ward. Just you remember that. Wha’choo got in that sack?’
‘Rocket parts.’
The nurse’s jaw fell open. ‘You think you so smart,’ she said. ‘You see wha’choo can do with that Spanish bitch. She’s in SR-16, with the rest of the gabbers.’ The nurse looked at his stomach, checking where to aim the steak knife, should the opportunity present itself, and stomped off.
It was four in the morning but only fifty hours away from a full moon and the orange plastic corridors were full of pale men and women, some in hospital johnnies, some in jeans. All smoked, many paced, a few muttered to themselves. Knots
of people from the TDF sub-ward clustered as close as they could get to the televisions, mouthing words the actors spoke.
The pilot found Carmelita sitting at a table in the South Recreation room. The television was on, but she did not watch it and anyway it was hard to see through the tee-dees. He sat down opposite and looked at her for a full minute. She looked back at him as if he were part of the linoleum.
‘Carmelita.’
It was always her hair that changed first, he remembered. It went from that deep glossy black, that mixed weave of panther fur and onyx, to stringy matte. Her skin was the color of stucco. Her neck, always delicate but strong and counterweighted on good tendons, now seemed to bow slightly sideways as if unable to support the weight of her obsession.
Doors stood shut and triple-locked behind the irises.
‘Carmelita?’
Her fingers made housekeeping movements.
The television showed a rerun of Pain in the Afternoon. Brooke Denali – she played Shana, the wife of Chase MacBride, who owned the Network – had been locked in the refrigerator by Yakusa mobsters looking for a VR porn disk featuring Chase and a Shih-Tsu. Chase’s illegitimate daughter Simone, played by Amy Dillon, had been raped by MacBride’s intellectual-copyright lawyer, who knew enough to get away with it. ‘She’s going to be all right,’ the TV medic said. ‘Trust me. It’s her mind that’s in pain.’
The pilot suddenly felt the urge to sob. He got up and strode around, slapping his boots from one end of the room to the other, disturbing a man of about his own age who was trying to get across the room without the benefit of either floor or walls or ceiling.
When he returned to his seat, Carmelita had not moved, but a very large, slightly pudgy man in a blue jumpsuit with NASA shoulder patches was sitting and smoking in the chair he had just vacated.
‘Rocketman!’ The pilot stopped dead in surprise.
The big man frowned. He put a finger to his lips. He checked under the table, under his seat, looked around to make sure no one else was in the room. The man seeking levitation did not seem to count.
The big man’s eyes were a very clear royal blue. His nose was large and hooked. His skin was the color of roasted almonds, his hands the size of baseball mitts. The first two fingers and the thumb of his right hand were stained orange from tobacco.
‘You bring the stuff?’ he asked the pilot, after his security check was complete.
‘Right here. How do you do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Get in here without me seeing you?’
The big man blew away the question with an impatient wave of his hand.
‘Hermes A2 hydraulic ram solenoids, modified for RV-A10 missile launchers, it’s gotta be.’
‘I think that’s right.’
‘With the Northrop adapter?’
‘What the dude said.’
‘Aaaah.’ Rocketman put out his cigarette. He dug his hands in the bag and opened the flaps wide. He was too polite to examine a gift in the giver’s presence and to vent his curiosity he started to jump in his seat. ‘Aaaah!’ he repeated, and grinned. His mouth was as wide as his hands were big. The smile seemed to bring real sunlight into the saturated neon. Even Carmelita’s silence lost weight.
The big man glanced in her direction. He stopped jumping, and the smile dimmed.
‘She’s been here three days, hasn’t said one word.’
‘It’s her brother,’ the pilot told him. ‘He’s missing.’
Rocketman looked around the room again, then leaned toward the pilot.
‘Missing, you said?’ he whispered.
The pilot nodded.
‘Aaaah,’ the big man said. ‘I thought it was you.’
‘No. I was gone for a while, but I was only a day late, getting back.’
‘No,’ the big man replied. ‘I don’t mean you were missing. I meant, you gave her a hard time. That’s what she said, last time she was here. You gave each other a hard time.’
‘We weren’t easy on each other,’ the pilot agreed, and reached for a chair.
‘I thought that was it.’ Inside the bag, Rocketman’s hands touched a solenoid lead, delicately, like touching a woman.
‘Places,’ he said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘Places,’ Rocketman repeated. ‘She said that. You was obsessed with places, not people. You think, by changing places, by going different places, you can change things inside you. Crossing borders, she said. That’s what your hope is.’
The pilot thought about it.
‘Maybe,’ he admitted, finally. ‘But it don’t seem to work.’
‘She didn’t say it worked.’
They sat in silence for a while. A girl came in and asked Rocketman for a cigarette. He gave her one. She asked the pilot for a light. He gave her one.
‘It’s almost ready,’ Rocketman said finally.
‘You got the oxy-alcohol all right?’
‘Yeah. There were other bugs.’ The big man wiped his forehead with one sleeve as if thinking of the sweat involved in solving them. ‘The worst is guidance. The balance is so sensitive. That gyroscope you brought for me is cranky as hell. Not your fault – it’s s’posed to be supercooled, and anyway the good ones are still classified. But—’ he lifted the bag ‘—if these adapters are as smooth as they say, it should hook up okay.’
‘Great,’ the pilot said, not very enthusiastically. ‘Listen, man—’
But the Rocketman knew. He picked up the bag, opened it for a brief, loving peek. He went to the door, checked the corridors carefully, left and right – and disappeared.
The door swung to behind him.
The pilot pulled his chair next to Carmelita’s. Very gently, so as not to scare or disturb the girl, he put his arms around her shoulders, and laid his head against her cheek.
The girl did not move. Her eyes looked at the sign on the wall.
NO MATCHES, it read.
He hugged her tighter. Her skin warmed against his.
‘Carmelita,’ he told her, ‘I know you can’t or won’t hear. But there’s a chance. A guy I know spent four days in the Gulf Stream, once. On a raft. Roberto coulda been picked up, like that guy was.’
Rocking her softly against the chair’s adamantine plastic. Holding a conversation with a memory of her.
‘D’you think it’s my fault?’
‘It doesn’t matter, I guess. Whose fault. Even if it does. It’s OK not to tell people. As long as you talk to yourself. Inside. Let it balance out. OK? Don’t stop communicating, inside. That’s what Roberto was doing, you know? Communicating. Same thing. Me too. People try to stop us, stop the words, stop the cargoes. They use borders or taxes or fear, same thing. We all got to fight the fear. We got to keep movin’, we got to keep those lines open, those cargoes running, inside, outside. We got to get the pretty things through. Carmelita?’
The pilot hugged her for ten or fifteen minutes, mumbling in her ear, hoping it would soak in somehow.
Pain in the Afternoon was replaced by an enter-news show. The anchor was explaining what people in St Petersburg were wearing now the army had thrown its weight behind the Centrist-Organizatsni coalition. ‘Kevlar monkey-jackets are definitely in,’ the anchor said. ‘Short short leather skirts are out.’
Then he left. The big nurse made him wait another five minutes while she finished a half inch of Zero Cola from the bottom of a can. ‘Hope you had a real nice talk, Doc,’ she hissed as she let him into the outside.
*
Carmelita’s face played on a screen behind the pilot’s eyes while he rode the elevator down Bellevue.
He remembered the way it looked the first time he met her, at a smoky little convention center near Raleigh-Durham where the qualifying heats for the XVIth Annual Miss East Coast Rollerblade-Go-Go Championships were being held.
The pilot had taken a room in the center’s motel while he waited to pick up a cargo of tax-free cancer sticks to fly into the (heavily taxed) New York m
etro area. He was sitting at the motel bar, sandwiched between fake Olde England hie-thee-hither-wench decor and puce recessed lighting, when she first skated in. She wore pink in-line skates with yellow tassels and a loose wool cardigan over her leotard. She stood at the bar, one leg straight and one foot resting on the skate toe, and ordered a shot of tequila. Her face was half scared, half determined. She slugged the shot and choked a little. Then she turned around and skated out – head high, ponytail feathering like a banner – skated out to the main hall to perform.
He was still sitting at the bar when she came back an hour and a half later. There were no skates this time; she had on jeans and a sweatshirt that read ‘Life is a Constant Audition.’ Her hair was down. It caught the light and sort of rippled. She came in with a gaggle of other go-go skaters but sat alone at a booth, head bent over a colored drink.
She did not lift her head when he sat down opposite.
‘Didn’t win, huh?’ he’d asked her.
No answer.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Fuck off, pal.’
‘That’s a nice name,’ the pilot said brightly. ‘Mine’s Joe. People call me Skid, sometimes. Mostly, they just call me “pilot.”’
‘Lucky you.’
‘I fly planes,’ the pilot agreed. ‘I am lucky.’ He’d recently done three runs in and out of Barrett Town, Jamaica, fast runs at minimum altitude with no problems. On one of the runs he’d met a Guyanan flyer who had ripped off three Sperry TFRs from McCain Air Force Base, where B-52s went to die. The Guyanan had traded him an entire 464-A unit – radar, feedback computer, servo-gimbals, manual – for five bales of compressed Barrett Town sens’. Once he figured out how to couple it to the autopilot, he’d be able to do more runs, faster, at lower altitudes, than he was doing now. The girl caught his tone and looked up.
‘You don’t look like a creep,’ she said doubtfully.
‘Ah, you can’t tell by the looks.’
‘You look young, to be a pilot.’
‘It’s the freckles.’