On the shelves above the laundry sink are packages of Chiapan fireworks and bottles of sea turtle oil from Belize, leftovers from thousands of transports Berlin’s made down south. Mostly, the cargoes were unexciting — charter down archaeological supplies or missionary Bibles, then bring back frozen Argentinean crawfish and tins of fish eggs. But sometimes there were raw emeralds, vials of curare, or nearly extinct birds.
The well pump is slow tonight, and he looks at me like it’s my fault.
“The Spirit Squad’s stupid,” I say. “So I can pom-pom and do the splits. What good’s that going to do me in the real world?”
He turns the trickle of water off, though his hands are still sudsy blue. “You don’t let your friends down. That’s what the real world’s about.”
Berlin looks for a clean rag to wipe the greasy soap off his hands, and I hand him my Spirit Squad sweater from the laundry pile. While he works his hands clean, I stare at taped-up photos of airplanes on runways hand-cut from exotic scenery, aerials of Toltecan waterfalls and Montserrat, afire.
Then he realizes he’s oiling up my white Spirit Squad top. “What’d you do that for?” he asks. There’s a flash of anger on his face, quick then gone, like when Randy hears the word Waco.
I shrug.
“Look,” he says and hits the garage opener. “Next week this will all be over.” The garage door hinges screech in a way that used to drive the macaws crazy.
“Next week, I’ll have a regular job, and we’ll be normal, like everybody else.”
The governor used to duck hunt with my father. Exxon sent us Christmas cards. On Sundays, the sheriff would drive the parish prisoners out to mow our lawn. But since Berlin crashed our seaplane last year, we’ve entered a world where it’s hard to say what will happen next. According to Randy, the ATF doesn’t worry about things like planning: they give you Level IV body armor, Mylar riot gear, a pouch of shock grenades, and then they point you toward the unknown.
Walking out the door, I grab my Spirit Squad minimegaphone off the dryer. During sports games, I’m supposed to point it at the crowds and convince them that we’re going to win, though we usually don’t. Today, I decide, I will become an ex-Spirit Squad leader.
It’s full dark outside, with a slight breeze, so that wandering mist from our lake is pushed into the orderly rows of our small pecan grove. The driveway is really a levee that divides the marsh grass from Mom’s victory roses, and we walk along a lake-rim of cypress knees. I spin the minimegaphone by its wrist strap. Throwing things out of airplanes is cool for a while, but then it wears off. So this is not like some huge gesture or anything.
The pecans canopy the drive, so that when they sway, dew comes down in volleys. It is sweeter than water. It sticks to your eyelashes, tastes of tonic. Berlin goes through all his jumpsuit’s zippers to see what he may have left in his pockets last time out — a habit from his gin days. He finds gum, and we chew together so we’ll be able to clear our ears on ascent.
Someone crunches through the shale ahead, and out of the mist appears Doc Teeg with a bait bucket and a fishing rod you can telescope with the flick of a wrist. After Teeg’s wife left him, he backed his four-door pickup to our lake and dumped all her belongings to the bottom in an effort to create the kind of artificial reef that trophy-size sportfish prefer. He figures a thirty-thousand-dollar donation of Limoges china and Rochefoucauld silver makes Berlin’s fishing hole part his. My mother won’t speak to him.
He hails us, and first thing, grabs my forearm, rotating my ulna while feeling deep with a thumb. Doc Teeg’s not a doctor anymore, though he set my arm last spring and is tracking Berlin’s stomach and liver. Now that they took his certificates, his work is free and you don’t need to make appointments. His bedside manner is better since he became an ex-doctor, the same way Berlin became a better father after they took his pilot’s licenses and he left the fame of his gin.
Doc Teeg finds the fracture line with his thumbnail, and tracing it under my skin almost makes me sing.
“Berlin, I hear your girl half-nelsoned herself quite a wrestler last night,” Teeg says, like I’m not even there.
“Don’t start on Randy,” I tell him. “That little wrestler rappels out of Blackhawk helicopters.”
Berlin ignores me. “We’ll need that big-ass pickup of yours today.”
Teeg squints, feels deep into my arm with his fingertips, as if he’s imagining my fracture from the inside. He’s chewing gum, too; he looks me in the face, jawing it. “Auddie,” he says, “your arm isn’t strong enough yet to go taking on any championship wrestlers. I suggest some daily wrist exercises to get you in shape for any big matches you’ve been planning.”
Berlin lifts his hand to cut him off. “Stop it with the wrist talk.”
“Rehab the problem area with an up-and-down, circular motion.”
“Teeg,” Berlin warns.
“I’m talking about fishing,” Teeg says and snaps his rod to full length. He mock reels in a big one and smiles. “I’m prescribing fishing therapy for the girl’s wrist.”
Doc Teeg owes my father four hundred grand. Or it’s the other way around. They don’t talk about the money the same way they don’t talk about the reason Teeg can’t practice medicine anymore or how my father became the Jughead of Berlin.
“You just bring that truck by,” Berlin says.
“Where’s that dog of yours?” Teeg asks me, meaning the dog he lost to Berlin at cards two years ago, a blue-merle catahoula pighound named Beau. Beau’s fast and wild, and my dog by default. The little advice I have to offer the world, at age sixteen, is to never name a dog Beau because it will never learn the word no.
Sometimes Teeg really misses that dog, and my dad’s not against giving a man his dog back, especially if it might be in lieu of four hundred grand. It’s that Berlin believes you should remember your screwups, so he tries to keep his past life within sight, but just out of reach. It is on this thinking that he gave me the keys to his Super Sport. This is also why, I believe, we strap on our gear and go stunting in his last airplane on these nights he can’t sleep.
From behind his gum, Teeg whistles a call I could never do, one he says he learned during his triage field training in Stuttgart, and through the dark trees come the sounds of Beau thrashing in the distance, bounding our way. This means he’ll probably chase us down the runway, snapping in the prop wash.
For a moment, we are held by the noisy rush of Beau, charging the underbrush for us. Berlin and Teeg seem to hear in this ruckus something I don’t, as if the dog were fetching something they’d rather not see again. A couple years ago, these two’d still be drinking this time of night, bright-faced and loud in the poker room where I now sleep. This morning, though, they have little to say, and we part before Beau arrives. Doc Teeg rolls off alone toward his ex-wife’s possessions and a dog that’s no longer his, while Dad and I head down the levee because we fly only in the dark, under the radar.
The old Custer biplane sits at the end of our strip, acock under a musty tarp. We peel back the canvas, draining water pooled over the twin cockpit holes, and then check the fuselage for cottonmouths, even though you can smell a cottonmouth ten feet away. Berlin had the Custer painted the same black as the Super Sport, so on nights we’re out over the Gulf, the underbelly of the wings take on a deepwater cast, like the unborn, sea-black of caviar.
Berlin hoists the tail around so the Custer points down the dark void between trees, while I wipe the windscreen and pull control cables. There is the squeak of ailerons, a high whine from the air starter, and soon blue smoke pours from the cowling as we jar down a strip I’m supposed to keep mowed. The grass is tall enough in some spots that the prop blasts us with a faint green mist, more the smell of itch than anything, and in one stroke, we lift and roll south over the dark pine stand, charging out of a shallow fog into a moonless sky that’s star-chart clear.