I plug in my intercom. “Check.”
“Check,” Berlin says and points the nose due south, the stick in front of me leaning toward the Gulf of Mexico with my father’s ghost hand.
We rise above a Louisiana lost beneath spring sheets of fog, and as long as we’re under a four hundred-foot radar ceiling, the curve of the earth is ours. Being an ex-pilot has its beauty. There’s no flight patterns, tower clearances, or radio commands. Forget inspections, insurance, manifests, and checkouts. Licensed pilots aren’t allowed to buzz their friends, land on parish roads, or sleep at the controls, the reason we’re up here in the middle of the night.
The Custer levels into perfect air, sharp and pressing, tinted from below by the husky smell of rice fields and a lingering mildew from the biplane’s canvas seats, while ahead is the pristine scent of a high-friction, hardwood propeller, infusing salty air with the finest mist of motor oil. This was Berlin’s first airplane, and though he at one time owned thirteen, it is his last. The license-revoking event is no secret. This time last year, he lifted his ten-seater Bonanza seaplane off our lake to take a group of oil executives fishing in the outbank islands. The men had driven late from Houston, were in our game room all night, so when they climbed in the Bonanza at dawn, they all beamed with drinky exhaustion and the kind of elation gamblers get after risking lots and coming out even.
I was eating breakfast on the dock when Berlin lifted off and banked over me. Water from the floats rained on my eggs. I never went on those fishing trips. At home fishing’s easy — we know where they are — but on the Gulf, you can spend all day with no idea if you’re in the right place. You’re just casting out there, blind. Where’s the fun in that?
All this is public record now. Flying over the Atchafalaya Basin, Berlin scanned for forecasts. Civil Air Radio called for midlevel clouds, thickening, with winds fifteen knots from the east, and the Coast Guard broadcast a muddy chop on an outbound tide. Berlin reevaluated his fishing strategy. In these conditions, the big tarpon fish would go for shiners and not the shrimp he’d brought. There was also a general call for more alcohol, so Berlin decided to put down and change bait.
Descending through a haze of gin, my father set the seaplane down on the number two runway of Thibodeaux Regional, causing a crash that seems filled with certainty, destiny even. Clear and beautiful, it was the last sure thing in our lives, and I see it often:
The Bonanza floats in from the west. White egrets lift from the runway ditches, and banking away, beat each other’s wings. The hull, swan-dive smooth, hovers close to the asphalt, touches. Lacking landing gear, the plane’s breast digs in, flipping the craft, so that everything assumes an unintended motion: Propellers knurl. Orange tackleboxes burst. Fits of ice magnify the light. Dried fish scales, glued to the bait coolers for years, are freed — they litter the air, stick to people’s lips. Graphite rods flex, coils of monofiliment unspooling. And then there are the lures, poised midair; jewel-eyed, cut from iridescent polymers and tensile steel, they teem like African insects. At last, belly skyward, the fuselage smokes with the near-ignition yellow of smoldering fiberglass. On the ground, shrimp flip and turn in puddles of hydraulic fluid and bourbon. For a while, there is only Johnny Cash, American hero, Berlin’s favorite.
No one got off easy. The FAA entertained accounts of gambling and drinking. The Gaming Commission was called, and the ATF, whose year of subsequent investigation will culminate in a secret raid, forty-eight hours from now, give or take. The airport tower faces an action for clearing a marine aircraft to land, and there are rival lawsuits against Berlin, who surrendered his flying permits and hangar privileges, but not the bottle, which remained until my arm got broke.
Berlin puts the Custer through some brief drills — a slouching roll into a double barrel, a nose-up loggerhead — as we pass the twin trellises of the Intracoastal bridge that mark the edge of the Lacassine Wildlife Refuge. A brackish mist pushes over the lip of the ocean ahead. The stunts make my stomach drop, and the roll makes all of Randy’s half-nelsons, cradles, and reverses suddenly come back from last night. I picture him working out in black body armor, teaching me arches, tucks, and bridges on a blue mat, his hands training my muscles to respond to a host of new moves. Randy’s been a junior twice now, so technically he’s a senior, which means he’s past head games. He’s way more mature than other guys, like the jerks on the squad who are always hiding your spirit basket. He’s also a transfer from Oklahoma City, so he’s not into all the high society and clubby-club stuff at school.
“About your friends,” Berlin says, his voice sudden and crinkly over the intercom. “The girls in your squad. Promise me you’ll make it up to them, because friends are what it’s all about. You’re a cripple without friends, a blind man.”
He gets all soupy like this when we fly.
“You’re right, Daddy. Friends are the best.”
“We’re about to find out who our friends really are. You’ll see. In a couple days, you’ll start to see.”
“See what?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”
“Keep your grades up,” is all he says.
Soon, we are over the ocean, flying under a sky the slick and grainy black of soaking charcoal, while beneath us the ocean is a milky, vinyl black, close to the Super Sport’s upholstery, but undulating, like sweet crude oil. I raise the minimegaphone and imagine its long pink swirl to the rollers below, coming to rest under all that water like the possessions of Teeg’s ex-wife or the booty of the pirate Jean Laffite. To the east, the horizon begins to faintly glow, which lends a sense of urgency to my officially becoming an ex-spirit leader. I’ll still know all the cool girls, still get Randy, but not have to attend all those stupid rallies, and forget the Honor Code. It feels like I should shout something profound into the minimeg, but I can’t think of anything. When my hand enters the sharp wind, it is simply taken from me, my hand left stinging.
Ahead are oil exploration platforms half lost in banks of fog that mark the edge of deeper, colder water. The blinking towers rise above the amber-glowing domes below, and I begin to make out Berlin’s faint snoring, thrumming off and on in the headset. The engine, too, has settled into a perfect drone, more a changing pressure in your ears than anything. In this fluxing hum, I hear the cooing of the rarest birds on earth, sleeping in our garage until they are wholesaled out.
Taking the stick, I put the Custer into a slow-banking one-eighty. School starts in an hour, and though I’ll have to wake my father to do the actual landing, he’ll have his rest until then. The gin is gone now, and there’s nothing to fear from sleep.
* * *
School is half day because of the Junior Crush Rally, so it’s parlez-vous, hypotenuse, The Red Badge of Verbiage, and then Randy driving me home in his boss Jeep. We bark out of the senior’s lot and lay flame past the cafeteria and gymnasium where the snare drum corps is psyching everyone up for the game and Sadie Hawkins dance. Suckers, I think, though I catch my lips moving with the distant Spirit Squad drill.
Rolling down Broad Street, we pass taxidermy shops, drive-through daiquiri huts, and Cajun J-Jon, the portable toilet storage lot that marks the edge of town. We shortcut across ML King Boulevard, our jerry cans sloshing with fuel on the train tracks, and I can tell Randy’s in a bad mood. He’s hunched up, steering with his elbows so he can crack his knuckles by bending each finger back.