Fly Me Page 21

  “I’ve driven race cars.”

  “Not like this, you haven’t, no way.”

  “You seriously think you can show me something?”

  “It’s a dumb trade considering how easy it’ll be for you to fly me out there in your plane. You’re going up later anyway. You said so yourself.”

  He watches the room empty and then looks closer at Suzy’s face. Rather than desperate, she’s made herself look bored, as though she’s already moved on from her own proposal. She leans over to pick up her bag.

  “Look,” Millikan says, “I can’t do it today, I’m…under the weather. But how ’bout next week? Later in the week. We can fly out. I’ll show you some things in the air. But if you don’t show me anything…”

  “Nah—what do I get if I do?”

  “A lift back to Zamperini,” he says. “Otherwise it’s a two-hour hitchhike.”

  Suzy smiles wide. “I feel motivated.”

  Mike calls Suzy in the afternoon on a hot September Saturday when Grace is in the air and out of town.

  “Wanna take a field trip with me downtown?”

  “What do you mean?” Suzy says.

  “I finally bumped into some of those recruiters on the beach. Got invited to an information session at the newly blessed temple. I’m on the books for a meeting. Wanna tag along?”

  “Sure, I guess,” Suzy says. “I was just gonna spend the afternoon on the beach.”

  “I need someone to make sure I don’t walk into the building and disappear forever,” he says. “And besides, it’s your fault I’m wrapped up in this thing anyway.”

  They shoot up the Harbor in zero time and find a parking space across the street from the temple in a lot wrapped in chain link and razor wire. The temple sits at a forty-five on the corner of Hoover and Alvarado. It’s an old synagogue, probably half a century old. Romanesque Revival, ringed by palms. Tan bricks with a red tile roof and a semidramatic entry between Roman Composite columns. It seems clean to the touch, but the shadows give a cobwebby feel to the place. When they pass beneath the central arch, Suzy pinches Mike’s arm.

  In the narthex a pretty black woman in a sky-blue dress and glasses smiles at them. She’s younger than Suzy, barely seems old enough for college. Mike checks in and confirms his guest. They’re led to an antechamber that was likely used until recently for standard Bible instruction. A man is waiting for them there. He is from what’s called the Planning Commission. He has jeans on and a denim work shirt and what looks to be a priest’s collar. He offers a hand to Mike and then to Suzy. His hand is cool and damp, like the walls of a crypt.

  The man welcomes them to the Peoples Church. He describes the basic tenets, which sound very much like those of any other church, but with bonus material—in-house social and medical programs, outpatient clinics, a drug program for addicts, a legal program for criminals, a dining hall for the indigent. The man has just moved here from San Francisco. He’s been called on to develop Sunday services at the new location. Until they’re up and operating at full steam, he says, buses from Ukiah and San Francisco bring members through each weekend. “The members are out milling around now,” he says, “but you won’t believe it if you come back tomorrow.”

  Mike crosses and uncrosses his legs beneath the table. Suzy can sense his mind fidgeting, too.

  “Is Reverend Jones here, then?” Mike says.

  “No, no. He’s in Ukiah,” the man says.

  “Will he be returning anytime soon?”

  “I suppose he’ll be in and out. He’s a very busy man, always on the move. We’re all over the state now.”

  “So he won’t necessarily be here anytime soon, though?”

  “I suppose before the end of the month. We blessed the church just a couple weeks ago. He was here for a week leading up to it. He did radio. He’s quite a speaker.”

  “I’ve heard him,” Mike says. “I’d very much like to meet him.”

  Suzy still isn’t totally sure what they’re doing here, what Mike’s up to. If he’s genuinely moved by the mission of the church. If it’s a combative, dialectical itch he’s looking to scratch. Or if he’s searching for something for his magazine—a cover story for the debut issue.

  “And he’d very much like to meet you, Michael. He loves nothing more than meeting new men and women and sharing his vision. His articulation of The Cause.”

  The man spends the next forty-five minutes surfacing some of what he means. The utopian vision that Suzy gleaned in that first flyer on the beach. A world of mixed race. (Eighty percent of the organization is black, the man says.) A world, too, of compassion for the elderly and tenderness toward children. A world with the sort of free services on offer here—medicine and drug treatment and food. An institution financed internally, without any help from the government. An institution of healing. The man tells stories about Jones’s propensity for healing. His capacity to rid church members of cancer, sickness, and pain. He tells a story about Jones being shot one evening while leaving his home in Ukiah. An assassination attempt. Blood everywhere. Jones crawled back into the house, the man says, and emerged shortly thereafter in full health.

  The man then shifts and asks Mike and Suzy a therapist’s litany of questions.

  When Mike mentions that he is a journalist, the man sits up straighter. Suzy can’t believe Mike’s said it right out—that he insists on establishing himself that way. She’s certain they’ll be asked to leave.

  “Reverend Jones will be very interested in this,” the man says. “The Prophet cares very much how his word is disseminated. He contributes a large percentage of our funding to newspapers. We’re always in search of men and women who’ve worked in the press to help us with our message.”

  Suzy’s shoulders relax. The man just wants Mike to do their PR.

  “So there’s really no clear sense of when Reverend Jones might be back?” Mike says again, when the questioning is over.

  “There’s no telling. He is a man moved by the spirit. There are just so many others elsewhere who’ve yet to be exposed.”

  Once their orientation session is deemed complete, the man leads them back toward the narthex and reiterates his desire for them to attend the service tomorrow. The woman with the glasses asks Mike and Suzy for their phone number and address. Mike fills out the form for both of them. Lies, Suzy hopes. When he finishes, the woman asks Mike for a contribution. The church relies on The Commitment, she says. Mike meets Suzy’s eyes over the forms and then reaches for his wallet and a pair of tens.

  When they exit together, it’s the same sensation as leaving a summer matinee—bright on the way in, brighter on the way out. Mike and Suzy each have sunglasses over their eyes before they reach the car.

  “What was that about?” Suzy says when they buckle in.

  “I’m looking for some healing in my life.”

  “Seriously—is it for the magazine? Do you want to write about them?”

  “I don’t totally know,” Mike says. “I mean, there’s something incredibly odd about Jones, obviously. You don’t just build a new religion in this country, not this easily. That’s a thing you could do last century, not this one.”

  “I didn’t like the lady on the beach and I didn’t like that guy. Are they even allowed to wear collars like that?”

  “I just…I want to meet the main man.”

  “But that’s what I mean—what’s it for?”

  Mike pulls out of the lot and has a necklace of green traffic lights before him.

  “Did Grace ever tell you about my mom?” he says.

  Suzy knows she left when Mike was a kid, but she doesn’t know any of the circumstances. It was a thing that Grace left alone, with Suzy and even with her parents.

  “Just the most basic…”

  “She left me and my dad when I was ten,” Mike says. “She made me lunch in the morning and walked me to school, and then I waited till dark for her to pick me up. That night I walked home alone for the first time. There was no note,
no sign of anything. Her car was in the driveway. Her house keys were on the kitchen counter. My dad was freaking out. He was sure she’d been kidnapped. He called the cops. They came over, started prowling around the house. Separated me and my dad. Interviewed him in the kitchen. Interviewed me in my bedroom. I don’t remember the questions. But I remember throwing up at one point. I haven’t been able to eat peanut butter and jelly since. My dad was crying, yelling—I could hear from the second floor. Meanwhile, one of the cops noticed that a bunch of the hangers in the closet were bare. Most of her underwear and socks and pants were gone, too. She’d packed a bag.”

  Suzy has her eyes on the hot lane lines of the Harbor.

  “My grandparents got involved. My dad was still convinced that she couldn’t have left on her own. She loved him too much, he said. And she loved me too much, too. Once the search went wider, once extended family and friends were called and messages were left with everyone in her address book, that’s when we got the letter. Wrong word—not a letter. The plea: ‘I’m okay. Please stop looking for me.’”

  Suzy is silent.

  “So, you know, she never came back. And this guy here reminds me of what happened to her.”

  “You think it was something like this?”

  “It wasn’t an affair. At least not only an affair. She’d met a woman in line at the supermarket, it turned out. She’d started going to some meetings at the rec center. She’d told one of her friends about it. Her friend didn’t think anything of it at the time. I don’t know what sort of organization it was. You know much about that Hubbard guy? Mega best-selling author—that’s the craziest part to me. But he’s the one with the center on Hollywood or Sunset or whatever. I got a wild hair while I was in college that it was his organization. I tracked him down once when he was speaking in New York. I brought a photo, I told him her name. He claimed he’d never met her before. At least not in his present life.”

  “I know it doesn’t mean much at this point,” Suzy says, “but I’m so incredibly sorry.”

  “There’s just this much of me that still wonders, counter to my best interest, whether she might turn up at a place like this, you know? Walk in for the orientation and—oh, it’s Angie Singer.”

  “You think this might be some sort of cult?”

  “Every religion, right?”

  “But I mean—”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know anything about it. But that was weird, wasn’t it? I think I need to come back.”

  Suzy meets Billy on the beach to share a burrito. She’d delivered the balance of cash when she returned from Schuyler, and she’s worked out a plan to pay him back the extra amount she lent her father. Business aside, she hasn’t had an opportunity to tell him how it really went with Wayne, to share the whole thing in full. Suzy breaks it to him that she promised Wayne she’d quit.

  “Well,” Billy says, “I understand your situation, but I’d recommend against that.”

  “I didn’t say I was doing it,” Suzy says. “I just said that’s what I promised.”

  “Besides what you owe me, you could use some money to sit on. With the new apartment, too.”

  “New apartment, flight school. Plus enough to put something away. I’m talking one more, basically, two max.”

  Billy nods. She knows he’s just letting her say what she needs to say without believing it.

  “What’ll you do when you’re through stewing?” Billy says. “You said a year, right? That’s the mark?”

  “If that. Make a little money while I can. I do like flying.”

  “Female pilot,” Billy says incredulously.

  “The way you just said that makes me want it more than ever.”

  “It just sounds like a tough road.”

  “In that case, I’ll go to law school and work on becoming a senator. Take an easier path.”

  “I didn’t mean anything. Though law school would be a pretty funny move.”

  “That’s what I’ll tell ’em I’m saving the money for. I mean, if anyone comes across it, if anyone asks.”

  “’SC law school’s pretty good.”

  “You’re like a Trojan booster.”

  “Just stating facts.”

  “I still don’t get why you didn’t just go.”

  “Didn’t need anyone to make a plan for me. Had a pretty nice thing. Plus, get to go to all the games anyway.”

  “They win today?” Suzy says.

  “That’s what I hear. Another blowout. 55–20, or something like that. Three and oh now. I haven’t seen a team like this one before.”

  “Well, maybe we can watch sometime.”

  “Maybe we go sometime. I better take you soon, before you clip your wings.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “No use to me after that.”

  “Ah, right. Cash in while you can.”

  They eat in silence and then Billy reaches for an oversize seashell. He inspects the inner ear of the shell and then holds it at arm’s length. “‘Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio,’” he says, turning to Suzy with great commitment, “‘a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times’!”

  Suzy shakes her head. “You are filled with many, many surprises.”

  He grins without opening his mouth. “Eighth grade. I forget the rest.”

  “Still impressive. I barely remember what I ate for breakfast.”

  “Hey,” he says, “speaking of clipped wings, are you gonna be one of those girls who hang out with all the former stews down at Howlers or whatever? I saw them the other night.”

  “My sister always jokes about it. She’s appalled by the thought. I think she’s just worried it’s gonna be her one day.”

  “They seem to have fun.”

  “Ever talk to the older ones? Who did it in the forties or fifties? Best year of their lives—every one of them. European vacations. Magazine spreads. High glamour. After a couple drinks they start in; sounds like it’s been all downhill since then.”

  “What about the husband and children?” Billy says.

  “Guess it’s not the same as trips with the girls to Rome.”

  “Whatever, that’s the case for a lot of people.”

  “Spend their whole lives reminiscing about being twenty-two?”

  “I get it.”

  “Not me,” Suzy says.

  “Maybe you get your ’SC law degree and become queen of the stews, then. Make it so they don’t have to quit when they get hitched and knocked up.”

  “Hearing you describe that future is an effective strategy to keep me in your business,” Suzy says, burrito in her mouth. “Now I’m never gonna stop making runs.”

  Suzy shows at the airfield in the morning, wearing tight jeans and a canvas shirt, all business. She isn’t even convinced yet that it’s not a prank. But there he is leaning against the door of the classroom, sipping coffee and squinting at the prop plane that’s coming in wobbly over her shoulder. She expects a warm welcome, but Millikan waves her unsmilingly toward the plane, a single-engine Cessna 172, postured with high shoulders like a tiny, proud Olympic gymnast. He hunches over as he opens the door and corrals her into the cockpit. They’re buckled in, with matching headsets, locked and loaded, and the engine’s up before he even asks her how she’s doing. Suzy has an anchor in her gut, the uncomplex feeling that this is a mistake, that she shouldn’t have pushed it on him, that he’s only doing this because he worships at the altar of keeping his word.

  They’re first for takeoff and then the wheels separate from the concrete, and she’s reminded immediately of the sensation she’d get in gym class all those years ago, practicing the long jump, speeding, leaping, basking in the lift but suffering for the inevitable arc toward the pit. Only, of course, they’re pulling higher here, and it’s at those heights, with Millikan one-eightying back toward the Inland Empire, that he seems to grow comfortable with where he’s going, the rules he’s breaking. “Just fifteen minutes,
” is what he says, and Suzy drops her eyes out the window to where the land looks just like it should, the Thomas Guide index pages she’s been studying at home writ real, natural tones and highest resolution.

  At the track Suzy admires the cars Millikan has reserved. A pair—it’s only fair that they’re the same—of Shelby GT350 Mustangs. A half hour is all they’re signed up for. They initial on the liability line.

  The infield course—the street course—is closed, so they’re stuck, to Suzy’s side-eyed dismay, with the oval. At the starting grid, buckled in but engines dead, they set the terms—ten laps around the oval, a little sprint. Suzy upgrades the deal. If she wins, she says, she gets to fly some on the way home. She lets Millikan move off the line and hangs on his bumper for the first eight laps, right there in his rearview, drafting three lengths back. She’d always loathed racing ovals, the long left turn. But she watched the cyclists in Munich, the practiced tactics on the velodrome, observed and took note. And in the ninth lap she moves high on the track, just to get him dancing a little, before dropping back down into a drafting position. A bogey on his six. She goes high again, and he moves with her. She makes it look as though she’s trying to pass, but that she’s dispossessed of the power to pull it off. Finally, when she’s sufficiently bored and ready to start racing, she slings out of the stream and presses the car into the higher gear she’s been pretending not to have. And for the final lap it’s as though his car has decided not to take chase, to let her just go instead.

  By the time he pulls into the pit, Suzy has already jumped out of the Mustang and is assessing the gunk on the windshield.

  “Where’d the extra juice come from?” he says.

  “See,” she says, “I told you you were gonna learn something.”

  On the way back he lets her put her hands on the equipment. Her hands look small compared with his. She watched them on the way out—thick, strong, broken-looking like a boxer’s. He asks her to change altitude, to tinker with speed—sticking to his word all over again. He asks for readings on the heading, attitude, VSI.