Текст книги "Such a Rush"

Автор книги: Jennifer Echols

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

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.

As I flew toward the nicer end of town, the folks on the sand thinned out. The bright high-rise hotels shrank into smaller brick hotels farther apart, then thinned further into complexes of condos with shared pools, then individual mansions where each family had a pool all their own. This section of the beach went on for the longest. There was probably one person vacationing here for every hundred on the flophouse end. I could pick out these individual people. They walked along the beach at great distances from each other. Or they took their children out very early so they wouldn’t get sunburned in the heat of the day, and watched them closely so nothing bad happened to them. Unlike at the flophouse end, these children did not have to take care of themselves.

All the while, I looked out for other planes. The Army base sometimes sent Chinook helicopters skimming across the water and frightening the tourists. The Air Force base sent out F-16s. Occasionally a Coast Guard plane or helicopter would scoot past, on its way to save someone, or just cruising the beach like I was.

And then there were Alec and Grayson, flying in the same pattern as me. I heard Alec announcing over the radio that he was dropping his banner, circling around, and picking up a correctly spelled one. Then Mark took off to go on his crop-dusting run. I was surprised he announced himself according to protocol, considering what Grayson had told me about Mark using his plane as a weapon. Then Grayson took off and circled back for his banner.

Grayson, Alec, and I knew the sequence by heart because Mr. Hall had drilled it into us. We flew out to the ocean and made a slow turn at a safe distance from the shore, always keeping other people in mind. We headed from the flophouse end of the beach to the ritzy end. Where the population thinned to the point that there were a lot more birds than beachgoers and hardly anybody would see the banners, we made a slow, wide, careful turn, always aware of the heavy banner that the plane was not built to drag behind it.

We flew back down the beach the way we’d come, even farther from the shore now to avoid a collision with each other. It seemed impossible, but we had no radar, nothing to tell us another plane was coming except our own eyes, and planes weren’t as visible head-on as they were from the side. Where the commercial section of the beach ended in a nature preserve and the crowds disappeared, we made another slow turn for the ritzy end again. That was the job, until we headed back to the airport for a break or lunch or a different banner.

Each time I passed Alec’s plane, I thought about ways I could talk to him when we took a break around ten, excuses I could use to get into a conversation with him. I didn’t really believe that I could land a date with him like Grayson wanted. But as long as I looked like I was making an effort, I figured Grayson would have no cause to complain, and he would stay off my case until the business folded and he went away.

Every time I passed Grayson’s plane, I thought something completely different. Anger at him first. Then sympathy for the swirl of emotions he was obviously suffering through, all of them negative. In my experience, Grayson was wrong most of the time. But he felt very deeply, and I supposed that was why I’d always watched him. He said and did what I wanted to say and do but couldn’t because I knew my place or I knew better. My sympathy for him didn’t disappear just because he was using me.

Mostly their planes were too far away for me to see except as pinpoints in the sky. I concentrated on flying. I watched the few instruments for trouble. I listened to the engine, because a change in the pitch of its hum would be my first clue something had gone wrong with the plane or the banner. I relaxed into the rush of flight, my fingers and toes tingling with adrenaline at the knowledge that nothing but lift held me a thousand feet in the sky, and nothing below me could break my fall.

The truth was, this plane was not mine. It was tethered to the airport as surely as the pit bull was anchored to its trailer. But if I ever wanted to, just for a little while, braving dire consequences such as prison, I could head out over the Atlantic. Down to Florida. Up to New York. Wherever I wanted. I wasn’t going to do it, but the thought that I could made me smile.

Around ten, Alec announced over the radio that he was dropping his banner at the airport, then landing his plane. I gave him a few minutes so I wouldn’t crowd him, then headed in after him. Landing was a lot harder than taking off. The plane wanted to fly. It didn’t want to land. The asphalt rushing to meet the plane was potentially a more violent situation than the asphalt falling away underneath it. My eyes never stopped moving: over the instruments, all around me in the sky, on the ground, making sure Zeke was off the grassy strip before I roared across it to drop the banner. He couldn’t spell worth shit and he might not have the sense to get out of my way, either.

The runway was clear. I lost altitude exactly like I was landing but without decreasing my airspeed. It was important that I get as close to the ground as possible before dropping the banner so it didn’t float away on the wind and wrap itself around an expensive piece of equipment or knock somebody in the head with the heavy pole like it had knocked the glass door of the airport office last December. I didn’t need help with this. I had done it a hundred times in practice and I operated by feel. Still, I heard Mr. Hall yelling in my head, Drop drop drop.

I dropped the banner and pulled the plane into a safe climb, unlike the dangerous half-stalling climb of a banner pickup. I would leisurely circle around the airport and land. The wind was calm, the weather clear. There was no reason to feel shaken. Mr. Hall’s ghost was not in the cockpit in the seat behind me. I hadn’t heard his voice in my head, only the memory of his voice. Yet my hands trembled on the controls.

I’d expected to have a reaction like this if I ever flew in the Cessna again, since Mr. Hall had so often ridden beside me, teaching me. I hadn’t thought I’d react this way in one of the Pipers. Though he could have instructed me from the backseat, that would have added too much weight to tow a banner. He’d coached me on this kind of flying from the ground, over the radio. Especially dropping a banner.

And especially landing the lightweight Piper with its tendency to spin in a ground loop. As I announced my final approach over the radio in my babyish voice, he would be standing on the tarmac with his radio—

And there he was.

No, that was Zeke, the banner guy who couldn’t spell. He stood on the tarmac, watching my landing. I willed away the new, unwanted rush of adrenaline. No matter how ideal the conditions, flying was never safe, and I had to concentrate on landing this plane. I pushed Mr. Hall and the alarming sight of Zeke out of my mind as I lowered the plane to the asphalt and felt the gentle meeting of runway and rubber tires through the foot pedals.

The plane slowed to a crawl on the runway. I turned it and taxied toward the hangar, looking out all the while for Grayson landing behind me, or Mark landing. Wrecks happened on the taxiway as well as in the air. But the runway was clear. Zeke had moved to the grass, where he wrestled with the banner I’d dropped. I parked the plane outside the hangar, next to Alec’s yellow Piper, and cut the engine. The propeller in front of me transformed from a circular blur back into a propeller. Silence flooded the cockpit.

I winced at the sudden rush of emotion now that the adrenaline was leaving me, and I squinted to keep from crying. I couldn’t cry in an airplane out here on the tarmac. Pulling the headphones off my ears and over my thick hair, I opened the cockpit door and stepped way down onto the asphalt.

As I hurried through the dark hangar, Alec called “How was it?” from a corner. I couldn’t see after the bright sunlight outside, and with tears crowding my eyes. “Good,” I called back, still headed for the restroom in the back. With Alec in the hangar and Zeke on the runway and Grayson still up in the air, the bathroom should be empty, but with my luck, it would be occupied. In that case, I didn’t know where I would put these tears.

I could hardly see the doorknob in the shadows. I turned it and stepped into the pitch-black room and flicked on the light and closed and locked the door behind me and collapsed against the door. I could not make a noise. I shoved my fists into my eyes and screamed silently about everything I had lost.

Why couldn’t Mr. Hall be here this week, running this business like always? His life had been small—coffee, corned beef sandwiches because he had grown up in Pennsylvania and still had a taste for Yankee delis, flying—but his life had been nice, and I had enjoyed sharing it with him. It wasn’t fair that he’d had his son taken away and then died alone in his condo and waited half a day for a friend to find him.

That thought choked a noise out of me. I wrapped both arms around my waist and squeezed the air out of my chest so I wouldn’t have any noise left in me to scream. I wished Mr. Hall were here. I wished I’d never felt I needed to let Mark into my life. I wished Grayson weren’t forcing me to fake feelings for Alec. I wished I could fly without relying on anyone. Or relying only on Mr. Hall would be okay, if I could just have that back. I missed his gruff voice, his kind words, his powdery-smelling old-man cologne closed up in the cockpit with me. Dizzy with despair, I set my forehead against the door.

Someone knocked. I felt like I’d been shot in the head. I jumped even higher than I had when the delivery guy had knocked on the door of my trailer the night before.

“Leah,” Alec called. “Open up.”

“Just a sec.” Glancing in the mirror above the sink, I saw there was no way to disguise that I’d been bawling my eyes out. I ran water into my cupped hands anyway and splashed it over my face.

“Come on, Leah,” Alec called. “I feel the same way.”

I paused with a paper towel halfway to my face and considered my red-rimmed eyes in the mirror. I wouldn’t convince him to ask me on a date while I looked this way, but I had a hard time caring when I felt like death. I unlocked and opened the door and walked into his arms.

“Shhh,” he said, stroking my hair as I sobbed into his T-shirt. “I cried yesterday, the first time I went up. Grayson had gone to talk to you about working for him. I was alone so it was okay.” He squeezed me gently. “You can hear my dad yelling at you, can’t you?”

I nodded against his shirt. “Sorry. I’m getting you all wet.” He felt shitty enough about his dad. I didn’t mean to make things worse for him. The last thing he needed was to comfort somebody else. I put both hands on his chest and pushed away.

“Nah, I probably got my sweat all over you. Too hot for this.” He stepped away from me and pulled his T-shirt off over his head.

The back of the hangar was dim after the bright sunlight and the bright bathroom, and my eyes seemed to jump around in the dimness, unable to focus completely on his smooth skin, his muscled chest and arms, his compact body.

“I’m going out for a smoke,” he said. “Want one?”

I did. It would be a great way to bond with him and take another step toward him asking me out, but I couldn’t. I’d promised his dad that I would stop smoking. I had stopped, and I didn’t want to be tempted now, when I felt weak. “No thanks,” I croaked. “I’d better stay in here and cool down.”

He reached out and rubbed his hand up and down my bare arm a few times, soothing. In the dim light, he was monochromatic, his skin and blond hair the same color.

I followed him into the main part of the hangar. While he kept going out the wide door to the tarmac, I stopped in front of an electric fan and let it blow on my bare stomach. The sweat underneath my bikini top turned cold.

“Good job, Leah,” Grayson called over the noise. “Nice acting.”

I was too stunned and hurt and angry to speak, but not too angry to look for him. He was in Mr. Hall’s tiny office, typing on a computer keyboard, gazing at the screen. He didn’t even care what horrified expression passed across my face.

The words I quit formed on my lips. Also, You are cruel. I took a breath to say them.

An alt-rock song, strange and tinny sounding, sang in his office. He picked up his phone and watched the screen for several seconds as if he thought it might change.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I didn’t want to care, but his face had gone white, like someone else had died.

He looked up at me in surprise. He’d forgotten I was standing there, though he’d lobbed an ugly insult at me ten seconds before. Whoever was calling owned all his attention. He shook his head almost imperceptibly—at me, maybe, but I wasn’t sure. He finally put the phone to his ear and managed a “Hi, Mom!” that sounded a lot more cheerful than he looked.

I turned my body so the fan cooled my back. My ears were out of the wind, though, so I could hear him as he said, “No, everything is good. The plan is good. He’s not making things any easier, but he’s doing what I told you he’d do.”

Nonchalantly I turned my head in the darkness so I could see Grayson in the bright office. Normally he acted comfortable with his tall body. He took up a lot of space when standing. Sitting, he spread himself out over a chair and the surrounding area. But as he sat in the chair behind the desk in the office, he looked half his size, knees drawn close, ankles crossed on the floor, one arm hugging himself, head down and cradled in the palm that held the phone. “Alec told you that?” he asked.

I didn’t want to get in his business. The more I did, the more he was likely to get in mine, which was how I’d gotten in this mess in the first place. But I was so alarmed at how he looked that I watched him unabashedly now, waiting for a different angle so I could glean some information about what had gone so horribly wrong that he curled into a tight ball.

He glanced up at me, and I thought I was busted.

But he couldn’t see me very well, out in the dusky hangar. Almost as soon as he looked up, he looked down again, reabsorbed into the conversation, as if I weren’t there. “I’m doing everything I can. I’m doing some other things you don’t know about.”

To keep Grayson from blackmailing me, I’d been hoping for a way to blackmail him right back. Here it was. Whatever Grayson was trying to get Alec to do, their mom was in on it. I felt sure I was the part of the plan Grayson hadn’t told her about. She was a middle-class mom, after all. She’d been married to Mr. Hall once upon a time. I couldn’t imagine that she would approve of Grayson forcing me to date Alec, no matter what the reason was. All I had to do was threaten Grayson that I would tell her, just like he’d threatened to tell my mom about me.

But as I thought this through in my head, I realized there were big holes in my plan. I had no way to get to Wilmington to talk to this lady. I could steal Grayson’s phone, punch the speed-dial marked Mom, and call her. Then a strange girl would be calling her to say her middle-class son had blackmailed me to date her other middle-class son, months after the deaths of their father and brother. She would call the police. When the cops cruised to my address and saw where I lived, they would arrest me for extortion. I lived in a trailer and people assumed the worst about me.

“Love you too. Bye.” He clicked off the phone and stared at it in his hand for a few moments. Glanced at his watch. Scooted back the chair with a rattle of ancient casters and walked out of the office. Stopped short when he saw me standing there.

While he was on the phone, he had forgotten again that I was there. He’d even forgotten about insulting me down to my very bones.

He realized I’d overheard him on the phone with his mom.

He was afraid he’d given away why he wanted me to go out with Alec.

He went back over his words, calculating whether or not he was safe.

I saw it all in his face, surprisingly easy to read when he wasn’t wearing his shades—which was probably why he wore them so much, like his whole life was a poker game and he was trying to prevent himself from telling his hand. I just wished I really had overheard something that gave away his secret. I still didn’t have a clue.

I spun on my flip-flop and headed farther into the hangar to refill my water bottle from the fountain, hoping the whole time that he wouldn’t hurl another stone at me. I wasn’t sure I could take it. Then I escaped back outside to my airplane.