The storm around me, however, begins to subside, and our column of air becomes unsteady as the engine tires down. While I’m still inside Tasha, we slowly settle on the wire mat, lightly bouncing from its spring as we begin to gain weight. I don’t know if I came in her or not. I thought there’d be that white flash, the divine light, so to speak, but I may have missed it.
Finished, we strip out of our sweaty suits, and, naked, skin red-streaked, we lie facedown together on the mesh, letting our forearms dangle through the squares of wire. We let it go quiet, and above the smoldering engine, the aluminum sounds of our breathing echo from its turbines, mingling together, so that it whispers back.
Tasha shifts so her breasts swing through, and above the pale ticking blue of hot manifolds, we both let our bladders go, our ears following the urine as it dribbles to crackle and hiss in the blades below. The glowing steam that lifts, a fog of pissy vinegar, drowsily mumbles to us with our own breath, and it is the first true ghost I have seen, though there will be others.
“There it is,” she says. “There’s your light.”
This is the point of the story where I’m supposed to tell you how everything works out and then hit you with the big picture. I’ll give it a shot.
It turns out that, after three operations, Marty’s father loses half the foot to infection and later he sways when he stands. Jimbo shakes his head as he tells me this on the last night I see him, when I go to his house to watch Speedweek’s coverage of LeMans. Speedweek puts me in a bad mood because there are too many commercials. There are no breaks or second halves in the real world. You can’t call time-out at two hundred miles an hour. Around lap four hundred, Jimbo returns from the kitchen shirtless, holding two Millers. Smiling, he asks me if I’d like a beer with head.
The Runnin’ Rebels go on to win the conference title.
Mythology isn’t for me. Right before I fail, though, as an aside, the teacher says something I remember. Of course there are no gods, really, he tells us, which surprises me, because I’d gotten used to the idea. But it makes sense. I know there’s no great hand that shuttles jets safely down or suggests to scavengers that they find other meals.
Ted says he hears from somebody who hears from somebody that my dad is caught bartering military radios for low-grade emeralds in Tanganyika and is deported by the British. They say he makes it out of Africa A-okay, but the more I get used to Ted, the less I trust him. Back when we first meet, when I am nobody in his eyes, the truths come hard and fast. Now I see Ted often, and he no longer says things like Tough break and Face it. Assuming he’s ever even met my father, which is still in question, Ted’s little stories suggest a bigger truth: he’s begun to care enough to lie.
Some days, sure as the sun, I know my father is dead. Others, I hear his Rover circling the oil-field perimeter wire full throttle. I see him on a drilling platform set in a sea of chewgrass, scanning heat waves for signs of motion between the drilling towers, his fingers running in and out the focus of his brass-bound marine binoculars. Maybe he studies the sky, impossibly blue, or eyes distant villages, rising phoenixlike from the tawny-rose savanna clay. Of course he sees women, bronze from this distance, hair dyed like inky wine in the evening sun, as they move their burdens silently along the horizon.
The best version of things I won’t be able to imagine till later, when I am alone in a way I didn’t know people could be. I move to Acapulco, where cliff diving at night is all the rage, and on Friday evenings, Ted and I sit with tourists in silence as we follow bodies that drop through darkness into a pumice-colored sea. On some Sundays, Ted teaches me target-match shooting on the brown plains just beyond the brochure-beautiful mountains of coastal Mexico. Ted’s pistols are of tournament quality, quiet and firm in your hand as they snap and ring the distant silhouettes. On these mornings we leave the church bells and take his Jeep up the winding mountain roads, past Chidiaz and El Agujero, to the high, grassy plains that extend into the heart of mid-Guerrero. The fields whip in the wind, and we shoot into the brown waves whenever the red targets flash through the grass. Ted never produces my father’s binoculars, but it doesn’t matter. We walk into the scrub to see what we hit. We examine the targets, decide angles, hit-and-miss ratios, and then walk out of the brush together to the Jeep, parked on a ridge that divides our view of the world in three: a khaki run of grass, a thin strip of indigo ocean, and the sky, palest of blues.
Ted thumbs the indentations our bullets make in silhouettes of pronghorns and lions and boar. He looks at me hard, in a way he has never done before. He squints. In Africa, Ted tells me, gods live in animals and trees, even in things like tables and radios. There is a big problem over there of gods taking human form and sleeping with women. The god then changes back, and the woman is alone, but for the boy that is born things are worse: he’s a semigod, with small powers he doesn’t understand, and like his father, he’s a roamer, with one wing in heaven, one foot on earth, doomed to wander toward every distant mud city that appears golden in his half-divine sight. His real father might be a bird or storm, sea-beast or lion, so this typical young man, Ted says, must learn to find his fathers where he can.
This story Ted tells me is a good one, though I’m sure he’s probably making it up. I don’t remember my mythology teacher lecturing on this topic. Ted does have a point, though. You can’t go around talking to trees and radios. You must learn to live with the unknown, never taking your eyes off it, but not growing used to it, either. For instance, from this vantage, it looks like these cliffs deadfall straight into the ocean’s abyss. But there’s a strip of land between the ledge and the surf that you can’t quite see from here. You’d have to listen for the church bells or smell for the meat smokers in the market to know this stretch of shore is below. You’d have to use all your powers, because in life you can count on the most important things being beyond your knowing, like a decade you can’t remember, a lost younger brother, or this hidden beach where your mother’s villa is, where she sleeps late after flying all night through turbulence.
THE JUGHEAD OF BERLIN
The doors to my heart get kicked down in the middle of the night, and I wake still dreaming of muscly ATF agents with black cargo pants, lean haircuts, and tough-luck smiles, so that when my father comes down into the game room, I am sitting up in bed, hot. He flips a bank of light switches at the foot of the stairs, making the darkness buzz as the fluorescent tubes hum-up. I begin to make out my father, crash helmet under arm, the Jughead of Berlin.
He can’t sleep some nights since he quit drinking, and he doesn’t seem surprised to see his daughter awake, either. Judging by his spent eyes and wild hair, he has had the same dream about Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms commandos, though for different reasons.
“So you’re home,” he says, as if he’s surprised to see me in my bed.
I roll my eyes in the stuttering light and reach for my flight goggles. “Like I’m some alley cat slut or something,” I tell him. “I wasn’t even dreaming about sex.”
“Maybe we should ask Randy what he’s dreaming of.”
“I’m a complete virgin, Dad.”
He grunts once, which is military for likely.
Germany is where my father and his friends were stationed during the Cold War — where he learned “importing and exporting,” as he puts it on his tax forms — and though I never learned what he did to become the Jughead of Berlin, the name stuck, and Berlin is all I’ve ever heard him called, even by Mom. When people phone our house and ask for Charles Primeaux, I hang up — it can only be a bill collector, a lawyer, or even the ATF themselves, who sometimes ring up impersonating lawyers and collectors. Everybody in Coubillion Parish knows Berlin.