She eyeballs Marty and shakes her head. “You owe me.”
We follow her in the back way, where we sit in preflight until the last paying customers of the day leave and Fly Away is ours. Between rows of echoing lockers, we strip to our underwear in front of her. Marty still has a quarterback’s body and Jimbo’s an ottoman of a man, but at the sight of me Tasha shakes her head, hands on hips, and decides I’ll need a red drag suit, extralarge.
“Where’d you get the scar?” she asks, eyeing my sternum.
“I was a kid,” I tell her. “I took a tumble.”
Jimbo and Marty bake the last of their dope through a toiletpaper tube while suiting up slowly and without conversation. Tasha sits on a metal stool, watching as I strap into that red suit. She fixes her earplugs, removing then replacing them.
“You don’t talk much,” she says, licking the tips of the plugs before screwing them back in. “Not that that’s bad.”
“What’s there to say?”
She leans forward, points at her ear. “What?” she asks.
Finally she leads us to the control room above the flight chamber, where she presets the engine with a bank of digital switches and relays. With little fanfare, we follow her downstairs to a round chamber, where, in a two-hundred-mile-per-hour wind, I fly. The padding on the walls is red vinyl, rolled and tucked, like the choice upholstery of an old Cadillac. Hovering over the wire mesh that separates me from the motor, I don’t try any flips or fancy moves. I just float eye-level with those who hug the sides, waiting their turns while I take too long, as I am held transfixed, staring straight down the maw of a DC-3.
For the others, there are stunts and bloopers, amazing vaults and gymnastics from Tasha, but I don’t really see any of it. After thirty minutes, the engine winds itself down, and we wiggle off our helmets to reveal sweaty, matted hair. Marty and Jimbo compare flight stories, gesturing with their hands like fins, their voices echoing with the strange sound in there, and I don’t feel so hot.
Tasha comes over and places two fingers on my neck, clocking my pulse on her watch. The move surprises me at first, but there is purpose in her fingers, and I sense she knows what she’s feeling for. She leans in close for her reading, and at this height I can watch how her ribs finger her suit when she exhales.
“You take everyone’s pulse?”
“Only ones that look like you. They gave us a course on it.” She nods at the motor below. “You know, heart attacks.”
“Nothing’s wrong with my heart,” I say. “How do I look?”
“I’ve got that same scar on my chest, so save the story.”
“From the crash?”
Marty just hears the edge of this but pipes in, “Don’t get her started on that crash.”
“Shut up,” she says to him, and then turns back to me. “You’re okay. You look good.” She adjusts her fingers on my neck, pushes harder.
“We’re going on a smoke run,” Marty says, stripping his flight suit clean off, right in the chamber.
“Sure,” she says. “Whatever.”
Jimbo comes up to me. “Right back,” he says and tries to do the complicated shake with me, leaving my hands fumbling to keep up. Jimbo punches the air and tokes an imaginary joint before the two of them cruise, half-naked, out the padded door.
Tasha slides her fingers from my neck to my helmet, which she pats. “Your pulse is strong, rising some, but fine.”
“That scar — really, I was a kid. I fell on a rake.”
Tasha sits next to me, throwing a leg across the padding. “Mine was heart massage. You know what that is?”
“That must have been some crash.”
“I used to be a cheerleader. Can you believe that? What was I cheering for? I don’t even see the point now.”
“’Cause you saw the other side?”
“The other side of what?”
“Jimbo says, you know, you saw the light.”
“‘The light?’ What an asshole.”
We hear Jimbo and Marty bang a locker closed in preflight, and Tasha and I stare at each other. In our minds, we are both mentally following the dopey boys through the corridor, down the stairs until they pass a painting of Tasha that will wink them through a self-locking door, and we almost hold our breath listening for the sound of the exit’s electric deadbolt.
“You wanna see the light? I’ll show you light,” she says.
Using a time delay, Tasha programs the motor for topspeed, 240 miles per hour, to get us off the ground together. On the wire mat, she lies face down, arms and legs out, and tells me to lay on top of her, so that we are stacked and spread-eagled, both with a view down into the DC-3. I immediately begin to swell in my dragsuit, and I know she can feel me harden. The pneumatic starter motor whines into life, and as the radial cylinders choke and sputter before firing up with authority, the lights turn out, leaving us in absolute blackness, something she must have programmed, too. With the sudden dark, Tasha says yes, and, given the earplugs and air pressure, it is more a vibration through our ribs than a sound.
There is no noise or light as the propellers clap up to a fast throttle. The ground simply falls away, and we rise, riding a column of air like a life raft on roiling, black breakers. Tasha does the balancing with her arms and I just hold on, wrapping around her, letting my fingers interlock her ribs, run the raised line of her breastplate scar. Mostly, I just hold on, but as my eyes start to adjust, I begin to see a faint light. From the dark engine below comes a coppery fire, the green-black glow of its hot cowls, and into this I look for a first glimpse of the future. In air hot and black as jet, this minor light speaks loud to me, winks at me as I feel Tasha reach back through the dark to unsnap the crotch flaps in our suits. She yells something I cannot hear.
I enter her without ceremony, and we screw spread-eagled, through wind-whipped nylon, the rattle making Tasha’s flesh feel hard and fibrous inside, like the slick white, gumlike meat of coconut. In the wind tunnel below, the motor’s buttery fire is the only light we have to guide us, and we fall endlessly toward it, like the path-dangling shimmer of a tree viper’s heat pits, the golden Isis beetle burrowing beneath the Valley of Kings. I am a cliff diver, held midleap. I am between engine and ice, green felt and craps, hovering between the untrue city and the coming flash. Close by is my father, night falling, high on endorphins, somewhere after the bullet but before the hyenas, the constellations overhead forming themselves not into giant bears or crabs, but silver Jeeps, celestial banana clips, a great gavel. Of the hard, wheeling lights above, my father’s eyes make out Ladder, Lariat, Fleece, and Sickle. From the stars of Serpens, Scorpio, Leo Major, and Lupus, he sees the Burning Chariot, the Lesser Wing, the False Book.
Tasha has her feet looped around my ankles, and she’s elbowing me in the ribs, to fuck harder, I figure, so I jostle my hips as I am supposed to, yet I feel nothing. Losing my senses, I drift closer to my essential state: coupled and bound with someone I cannot see, hear, or feel. It is in this state — floating, hungry, tethered — that I have a moment of clarity, a vision: I see a resort permanently frozen in glass, like a “Wish you were here” diorama in a snow globe, with plastic figurines of those who people my life, while around them whips a constant category-three storm. If there is a heaven or hell for Tammy, it is the same place — this hot tub she reclines in, with enough chlorine to burn her hair blond again, while above tumbles a sky of yellow masks, complimentary Tanquereys, and wheeling black boxes. On a white towel, my mother sleeps under this sun, margarita gone warm. Of Ted, there is only the red tip of his snorkel as he examines bright fish trapped in clear blue plastic. And driving blind through a storm of seismic charges, MP badges, and Togo masks is my father, one hand on the wheel, the other holding binoculars focused so that everything near him is overblown and blurry, so that all beyond is bathed in tempting, miraculous light.