The WC-130 Hercules made a loud, continuous hum as it flew southeast above the Atlantic. According to coordinates from the National Hurricane Center in Miami, the storm that had just ripped through Cape Verde would break the horizon in less than a half hour.
Baxter silently double- and triple-checked his weather charts with drafting tools. Pepe Miguelito’s lip quivered as he read another Dear John letter.
“I got a baaaaaaad feeling about this mission,” said Milton “Bananas” Foster. Then he began crying. “We’re all gonna die!”
Marilyn Sebastian shook Foster by the collar. “Be a man!” She slapped him, then kissed him hard.
Back in the cargo hold, Honeycutt skipped rope in his boxing trunks.
At zero seven hundred hours, the edge of Hurricane Rolando-berto began to rise out of the sea, larger and larger.
“Oh my God!” yelled Foster.
“Easy now,” said Montana. He adjusted the rudder to bring the course around east.
Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes glanced up from his latest copy of Skank. “You can’t fly for shit!”
As the plane reached the outer bands of the storm system, the wings began to shake. Montana ’s heart rate remained level as he deftly banked the plane left to minimize crosswinds. They entered clouds and the cockpit went blind. All instruments from here on. The drone from the engines and vibrations from the storm became deafening.
“Baxter?” Montana said into the microphone of his intercom headset.
“Go!” Baxter said into his own headset.
“Sebastian?”
“Go!”
“Barnes?”
“Fuck yourself.”
“Honeycutt?”
“Go!”
“Miguelito?”
“Go!”
“Foster?”
Whimpering.
Barnes turned around and smacked Foster with his rolled-up stroke magazine.
“Go!” said Foster.
Montana wrapped a scarf around his neck and adjusted his goggles. “Okay. This is it. Hold on.”
The plane banked back right and shook savagely. A forgotten coffee cup slid off a shelf and broke. The blind view out the cockpit darkened. The glass cover on the altimeter cracked. There was a spark, then flames from the weather console, but Baxter hit it quickly with a Class C fire extinguisher.
Montana raised his chin and spoke solemnly into the headset. “It has been a privilege flying with all of you.”
Then nobody spoke. The violent shaking of the fuselage seemed to go on forever.
When they had almost given up hope, there was a bright flash and the Hercules punched through the interior wall of the hurricane and into the calm, clear eye of Rolando-berto. A cheer went up in the cockpit. Baxter hugged a tearful Miguelito; Barnes hugged Foster. Sebastian unexpectedly found herself in Honeycutt’s arms. They looked deep into each other’s eyes, remembering that weekend in Baton Rouge. Marilyn’s eyebrows raised up in poignancy and she opened her mouth, but Honeycutt shook his head. “No, don’t say anything.” They let go and went back to their stations.
Montana radioed Miami with news of their success.
8
Way up north in the Gulf of Mexico, the very tip of Florida ’s panhandle meets the Alabama border on a remote barrier island named Perdido Key. In the middle of the island, right at the state line, is a ramshackle roadhouse built in 1962 called The Flora-Bama Lounge. It is an outpost of sorts-a peculiar, isolated place standing in relief against the bright, flat landscape of shore and ocean. It takes persistent driving and a good map to get to, and the people who make it there are not in a hurry to get anywhere else. An old peach windsock flaps over the roof to aid customers who arrive by parachute and seaplane.
On an uneventful day late in the year, at exactly noon, a burly old man with white hair and beard sat on the last barstool at the Gulf end of The Flora-Bama. He looked out the back door at the waves and laughing gulls. His name was Jethro Maddox, and he was on his eighth Bud.
Jethro’s tired eyes scanned the Redneck Riviera. “This is like Paris in the twenties,” he told the bartender, who was distracted by a TV tracking map showing a newly formed hurricane.
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated!” Jethro lifted his beer and drained it all at once and then looked at the can. “I have drunk you, beer, and I thank you. We are now one…”
Jethro smacked the empty can on the bar and burped with abandon. “There is no shame in a belch if it is the truth…” And he promptly toppled backward off his stool and disappeared from sight.
The bartender heard muttering from the direction of the floor-“Ouch! Galanos! I will kill you!”-and he leaned over the bar looking for Jethro. “Are you okay?”
Jethro stood and whisked off his sweater and fit his fishing cap back on his head. “I am fine,” he said and remounted the stool. “A man will hurt, but he must forget his hurt. The great DiMaggio played with hurt, and there was a grace when he struck out that others do not possess when they connect hard… We will drink to DiMaggio. Another cold one…”
As the bartender popped the top on another can, he heard a deep drone high above and stepped over to the window and looked up. “Must be a hurricane plane returning to Keesler.”
“Ah, brave aviators. They are a noble crew filled with the vigor of their youth,” said Jethro, “and they will never feel more alive and proud than when they face the knowledge of death.”
W e’re all gonna die!” screamed Bananas Foster in the cockpit of the WC-130 Hercules ten thousand feet over The Flora-Bama Lounge.
Nobody paid any attention. They were all reading books, writing letters or doing tedious chores on the boring return flight over the Gulf of Mexico. Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes scraped diligently with a quarter on an ancient scratch-and-sniff foldout in one of his magazines, but instead of an arousing bouquet from the southern female glands, all he got was a musty attic.
Sebastian and Honeycutt stared together out the lower windows in the cargo hold, tracing the shoreline with their eyes. They tried to identify the features of the Florida panhandle. Santa Rosa Island, Pensacola Bay, the Naval Air Station, Perdido Key. There was a scattering of cotton-puff clouds far below, throwing shadows on the ground, and they could make out the white wake of a shrimp boat in the Gulf. They could even see teeny-tiny cars driving along the coast, and they wondered where those people’s lives were headed.
A red Alfa Romeo convertible sped east along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico on Route 292, Free’s “All Right Now” blasting from the stereo. Two tall, athletic, college-age women looked up at the plane in the sky and wondered what was going on in those lives.
They were the kind of women who were sexy at a range of a quarter mile, and their loose hair blew and snapped in the wind with a wild coquettishness. They wore big T-shirts over bikinis, and their sunglasses were cheap and cool. They gave off wanton vibrations. The scene could have been from a devil-may-care, coming-of-age independent flick that takes the jury award at Cannes, or maybe a tragedy-strikes-good-kids-in-a-small-town made-for-TV movie that opens with Meredith Baxter Birney staring through drizzling rain on a windowpane, popping pills and wondering when it all started to go so horribly wrong.
The driver was Ingrid Praline, a twenty-one-year-old blonde from Alabama with Scandinavian blood, and in the passenger seat was LaToya Olsen, a military brat from the Bronx.
Ingrid’s hair and cheekbones recalled Ursula Andress in Dr. No. She often braided her hair into pigtails and wore denim bib overalls, and the giant Lolita package gave men hemorrhagic fever. LaToya favored a young Lena Horne; she had the face of an angel, especially the eyes, and she often kept her hair pulled back in a bun, but now it was down.