Pressing the button to broadcast over the radio, I announced my departure into the mike at my lips. My childish voice in my own headphones surprised me every time. I sounded nothing like a pilot.
Remembering what Grayson had told me about Mark’s vindictive landing after a basketball game, I looked around for Mark. He’d parked the crop duster in front of Mr. Simon’s hangar. The rest of the airport was clear. The skies were clear. I looked a second time, because the only people saving me from crashing into another plane were the other pilot and me.
I turned from the taxiway onto the runway for the first time since the day Mr. Hall died. The wind was calm. Taking off wouldn’t be hard. I had done it a thousand times. The butterflies in my stomach weren’t from fear. They were from anticipation.
The hair on my arms stood up. I squeezed the controls to brace myself so I wouldn’t shiver with the chill of wanting. Normal people got that feeling when they quit smoking cigarettes. I had gotten it then too.
Normal people did not get that feeling when faced with danger.
Here it came. I sped the plane down the runway. All I had to do was keep it fast and straight. The shape of the wings and airspeed and physics did the rest. The plane wanted to fly.
Suddenly it soared. The view out the front of the windshield changed gradually, so it was hard to tell how high I was. But out the side window, the plane separated from its shadow on the asphalt like Siamese twins cut loose from each other. The ground rushed away. The trees, so towering and textured before, flattened into uniform treetops like a field of grass. As I turned the plane, the ocean two miles away glinted into view. This time I couldn’t suppress the shiver of pleasure.
I announced my banner pickup into the mike, cringing at the sound of my baby voice. No wonder the boys had made fun of me and Mark hadn’t taken me seriously. I wouldn’t hire a pilot who sounded like me, either. My anger drove me to throttle the plane higher than I needed to as I dove for the grassy strip beside the runway. Lining up with the posts where my banner waited, I raced along the ground, the plane almost meeting its twin shadow again.
At the Hall Aviation hangar, Grayson stood with his arms crossed, watching me.
At the Simon Air Agriculture hangar, Mark stood next to his plane with his hands on his hips, expecting me to fail.
I threw my first hook out the window.
Held the altitude steady.
Trusted my own instincts and the feel of the airplane, like Mr. Hall had taught me, trying not to overthink. Just feel.
The poles passed under me. I had no way of knowing whether the hook hanging from my plane had snagged the bar on the end of the banner. Not yet. I waited for the feel of it, refusing to lose my cool just because two boys who had never believed in me were staring me down.
When the plane had traveled a long way from the poles—too long, it seemed—I felt it. The engine whined higher and the entire plane resisted forward motion, as if it were a paddleball stretched to the end of its rubber band and bouncing backward. I throttled down to give the plane more power to tow the banner. I pulled the controls to point the nose up into heaven, a climb almost steep enough to stall. The banner anchored me to the ground with its weight. The plane shuddered like it would tear apart.
seven
The engine groaned. But I kept going up. The shadow of the plane fell away in the grass. An invisible hand gave me a boost when the end of the banner left the ground, as if severing that last tie to the Earth was all we needed to propel us forward and up. I glanced down at Grayson, tiny on the ground now.
He wasn’t standing with his hands on his hips anymore. He was standing with his hands on his head, like something had gone wrong. He put one hand down and then brought a dark shape to his lips—Mr. Hall’s radio. His voice came over the frequency Hall Aviation used. “Leah. Zeke can’t spell.”
“Affirmative,” I said into the mike. “He couldn’t spell for Alec’s banner either.”
“Motherf—” Grayson clicked off his radio before he cussed over the public airwaves. But he was still talking animatedly to himself on the ground. He reared back with one hand like he would pitch the radio down the tarmac. Don’t throw the radio, Grayson.
I’d flown far enough that I couldn’t see him anymore when he came back over the frequency. “Leah and Alec, both of you come in and drop your banners so we can fix them. Keep an eye out for each other.”
As I made the turn at the end of the airport, I could see Grayson again, looking across the tarmac at Mark. Mark was calling something through his cupped hands.
I concentrated on my flight again. Every flight might be my last, now that Hall Aviation and my job there were balanced so precariously. I circled the airport, dropped my banner, circled the airport some more while watching for Alec so I didn’t crash into him, and at a signal from Grayson finally dipped down to pick up a correctly spelled banner that he’d supervised. I headed out to sea.
Even though the cockpit was hot with the unrelenting sun shining in, and the air was muggy with the scent of my sunscreen, my chest expanded and I finally felt like I could breathe as I flew over the ocean. The Atlantic lapped the Earth so close to my trailer. I could always feel it there, pulsing and cleansing two miles from me. But I rarely saw it now that I never flew. I caught a glimpse only if I got a ride somewhere and we happened to drive by it in the daytime. Now here it was, laid out for me farther than I could see in three directions. I couldn’t even make out its true color for all the sunshine glinting off every wave, like the whole expanse was made of molten gold.
When I’d reached a safe distance from the shore, I turned and flew parallel to the beach. Swimmers wouldn’t venture this far, so if I dropped the banner or crashed the whole plane into the water, I wouldn’t kill them. But I was close enough to the beach that vacationers could read the banner from the sand.
I flew past the flophouse end of the beach first. Garishly painted high-rise hotels crowded each other here. The actual flophouses were across the beach road where I couldn’t see them, with no ocean view. I couldn’t make out details of individual people, but I knew from experience that these folks on the beach were the whores, the girls from trailer parks inland who could easily have been mistaken for whores, the tattooed exhibitionists, the privates in the military with their huge young families, way too many children for one man to support on such low pay. The vinegar scent of beer and cigarette smoke and occasionally marijuana wafted on the air here, even around the children, even at eight in the morning. The party for these people started early and went on all day since they could only afford a night or two in a hotel, and then they’d have to go back home. The few times I’d spent a day, this was where I’d been taken.