Fly Me Read online

She waits for him to break his expression, but it holds fixed. It’s as though the whole frame has warped to uncanny colors, a TV screen with screwy reception. In the instant, she fears for her decency and then her job and then her life, in that order, an ascending scale. His face has hardened, a quiet waxiness, and it hangs there distended. Right up until he doubles over, grinning. He laughs and she frowns. She pulls her arms in tight across her chest.

  “Sorry, not funny,” he says. “We could always just toss him over the fence.”

  “No, no,” Suzy says. “Take my shirt…I have to change into my uniform anyway.” She crisscrosses her arms over her torso and tugs at the hem at her hips, so that the blouse comes off in one motion, long and fluid as she can muster, the light fabric up over her eyes, and the cool air all around her stomach and shoulders and breasts, like fingertips. She looks at Billy to see if she’s caught his attention, but he’s turned the other way, Mr. Manners.

  He carefully flattens Suzy’s blouse on the hood of the car and then tears it in half. He takes the larger piece and carefully arranges the message in block letters:

  MR. HONEYWELL,

  THIS PIG NEEDS HELP. HOPEFULLY YOU CAN TAKE HIM IN. HIS NAME IS HAMLET AND HE’S A KEEPER. PLEASE DON’T FEED HIM TO LARRY THE LION.

  Billy ties the blouse around Hamlet’s neck, tucks him under his arm like a running back, like the Juice, and climbs the fence. He whispers something Suzy can’t hear, kisses the pig on its brow, and drops him over the edge. Hamlet lands on his feet, handsome in his cape. “It’s okay to run,” Billy says.

  She knows she’s cutting it too close, but Suzy’s convinced she’s gonna be okay timing-wise. They just did the right thing. Someone will look out for her. Drop Billy off, change into her uniform, ten minutes on to the airport—check-in, boarding, vodka sodas for the red-eye.

  On the way down the hill, off the Peninsula, Billy pushes the heat lever to max red, and the skin between Suzy’s exposed cups flushes pink. She catches a peek in the rearview: like she’s wearing a bathing suit at night. She’s beginning to belong.

  They park in the alley; Billy lives in a back house. The view of his apartment from the street is obscured by bowing fronds that seem not to have been thinned since Spanish settlement.

  “I’m gonna change fast and then jam,” she says.

  A tropical dampness hangs like moss from the alley to the door. The inside is orderly and adult-seeming, subject to mixed taste and accumulation. Not clutter, but just the comforting gravity of fixedness, intransience.

  She leaves her bag near the door, grabs her uniform, and gets herself dressed without much thinking. Stockings, heels, wings. She pins her hair beneath her aquamarine hat. The bathroom mirror presents someone defying one of the only true imperatives of stewing: Glow, honey, glow.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” she says on her way to the door.

  “You didn’t expect the dealer to live in his parents’ garage?” he says. He hands her the freshly laundered Beefy-T he’s retrieved as consolation for the blouse. “This isn’t quite a fair trade, but I’ll make it up to you.”

  Suzy takes the shirt from him and holds it in her hand, but she’s drawn to a bookshelf with picture frames. Several of the same white Labrador.

  “I have one of those,” Suzy says. “Is it one dog, or two different dogs?”

  “That’s Zuma and that’s Rincon,” Billy says. “Zuma’s dead. And same could be said for her namesake….”

  Suzy looks at him blankly.

  “Surf joke!”

  She frowns and turns back to the photos. In the rest, the three: Billy, whose physical transformation from toddler to present seems to have played out in the most predictable sequence possible, looking the same at every age. Then a narrow man with round glasses and light suits, midproclamation, it seems, in each image, mouth moving always. And a short, blond-haired woman with puffy eye flesh that provides a sort of makeupless definition for her smiley slits, and a smart mouth turned up at one corner that seems eternally amused with whatever her husband is saying at the flash.

  “I should really go,” Suzy says.

  “You know, she died a little after that,” Billy says, as though tracking Suzy’s observations.

  “Oh my God,” Suzy says, elevated by the rush. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  She halts her movement to the door. Almost leans back toward Billy.

  “You’ve gotta go,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  Billy walks her to the car and she gets behind the wheel. They hang there in a disparity of height, and then before she throws the transmission into gear, he bends down and kisses her on the cheek. “Well, I bet I see you tomorrow,” he says, and she chuckles at the presumption and pushes out, his hand tracing the curves of the car the way it would a body swimming underwater.

  Suzy parks in short-term and hustles over to check-in. She’s technically under the wire, so the ladies in charge at flight ops state their disapproval with their eyes only. She carries her bag into the office. She’s weighed and told to “give your makeup another go,” which makes Suzy snort. She’s the last one to arrive but heads straight aboard without any of the other girls pausing to comment. She’s flown with one before. Meredith. She recognizes another from training in Chicago.

  They board a half-full flight, run protocol, pour drinks for first-class businessmen whose midweek holiday is now over. Suzy brews coffee for herself and lets it cool while she hands out headsets.

  This is how you buckle a seat belt. This is where you go when you survive a crash in a cornfield. This is when the lights will go out. We’ll be arriving at eight-ish in the morning, East Coast daylight, Wednesday the fifth of July. One final time: Happy Fourth, everyone.

  She’s seated right up front, next to the boarding doors, back to the cockpit. Before she’s really had time to overthink any of the moves of preflight, she’s buckled in with a heavy click. Meredith asks her if she has a copy of the new Cosmo, and sad-seeming, Suzy says, “No, sweetie, I’m sorry.”

  She closes her eyes, a knot of dehydration nestled right up top in the crack between the two hemispheres of her brain. She begins to drift as the plane makes the sweeping ascent she observed, one after another, half a day ago on the beach. Really, what just happened? She left the house, watched the planes, then something was followed by another thing. And now she is at work. It all happened right there, too—on the beach below them now, beneath the canopy of the flight path. She’d been looking for something in Sela del Mar she could grasp concretely, something besides just the breaking of the clouds to convince her she’d landed in the right place after all. She’s spent the last month circling Sela without certainty, skating from this end to the other, slipping past strangers, wrapping the place with a loose string of comprehension. And today, it seems, she finally pulled on the free end of that string and cinched it up—all at once tightly conceived, knowable. She’s finally gotten a grip.

  Before long the plane levels, and Suzy prepares fresh drinks for the passengers in first. She looks for something to cut the edge off the coffee in her blood. All they have in the cabin is unheated breakfast—egg sandwiches, dry oatmeal—so she digs into her carry-on bag to look for the PB&J she made in the morning. As she feels around for the sandwich, her hand grazes a familiar light fabric she couldn’t have packed. She pliers it out with her index and thumb and knows it—the half of her shirt that wasn’t left with Hamlet. This, too, has writing on it now:

  Z,

  NEED AN ASSIST, POR FAVOR. WON’T REQUIRE MUCH. PLEASE SAY HELLO TO A FRIEND OF MINE WHO HANGS AT THE AIRPORT. MIGHT BE A GUY, MIGHT BE A GAL—POSS. ONE OF EACH. THEY’LL MEET YOU WHEN YOU GET OFF THE PLANE AND THEY’LL KNOW WHAT’S UP. THEY JUST WANT TO SAY HEY. I KNOW YOU DIDN’T ASK TO BE A PART OF THIS, BUT IT MEANS A LOT, AND YOU JUST MIGHT DIG IT.

  YOU’RE BITCHIN’, FOR REAL,

  Z

  She fishes around in the bag and finds it without trouble. A brown paper sack, sizeable. The top is rolled over into a handle. Sh
e unfolds it and looks inside. A one-gallon Ziploc bag, stretched tight like a pillowcase around a five-pound sack of Gold Medal flour. Suzy crumples the paper bag shut with a swift sealing-off, like trapping a bat in a bedsheet. Motherfucking fucker. Her eyes are on the passengers. She swallows and stands and stuffs the paper bag into a deep corner of her carry-on. She assured herself it was a casual gig, Billy making scratch for burritos in a seventy-two-and-sunny zona of limited consequence. Nothing real. But what were her grounds for dismissal? She’d known him for twelve hours. Meredith clicks in next to her again and triumphantly presents the new Cosmo.

  An overweight man with leather-cream skin throws his arm into the aisle to get their attention. Meredith sighs.

  “I’ve got him…,” Suzy says, and zips up her carry-on and buries it deep in the crew compartment, beneath all the other luggage. And for the next five hours, without a break in the night, she stays on her feet, pacing extra-attentive, casting vectors with her eyes from all points of the service aisle, up toward the front of the plane and the bag within the bag within the bag within the bag.

  Part II

  The Glen

  On final descent into Los Angeles, the man in 1B starts breathing faster. He’s in a suit with wide lapels, a slack white shirt, and a loosened paisley tie. He has a thin neck and a large, bald head that’s wet the way balloons get in the rain. The flight has been rough, but it has passed for Suzy like a movie in a dark theater—Suzy physically fixed in place while her mind engages with the images she’s just encountered. That there should be any threat to the safety of this flight, any concern beyond the implications of the handoff in New York, catches up with her only now, as the man in the suit, alone in 1B, with no wife or child or business partner to grab hold of, reaches out his hand, beckoning for Suzy’s comfort. She is buckled in and stays upright, high shoulders and crossed legs. He closes his eyes and leans back but keeps his mitt extended. Suzy glances at Meredith, who’s consumed by her magazine, and then turns back to find the man’s fingers dancing pathetically in the space between them.

  Suzy unbuckles and gives the man her hand. He squeezes it sexlessly and then regrips. His eyes are still closed and his hand is chilled. The plane rattles on its way through the clouds and then stills five thousand feet above Pomona. Out the window: the soundless rivers of the Santa Ana and Golden State Freeways; the green thumbprints of the county golf courses; the eastern developments, all dug clay and fresh lumber, dark against the peach-colored dust, singeing the edge of the desert—a new line in the sand. The cabin drops and Suzy’s planted foot leaps. The man opens his eyes, which seem to plead for a countdown.

  “Just a few more minutes,” Suzy says.

  It breaks the spell. He releases her hand and swallows. He removes his jacket and folds it in half and then in half again. The Pacific appears like a tube of neon out the window, and then there’s the Peninsula, scrunched into topographical relief like a comforter badly slept in. A ring on the man’s hand has impressed a little slot near Suzy’s knuckle, deep enough to balance a nickel in. The ground comes fast, and when they hit, there’s applause from the way back. The seat belts click and Suzy’s man is the first one up. As he makes his way toward the exit, Suzy forces a smile and he pats her on the head.

  The primary thing Suzy’s thought about all day was getting back here. This touchdown was the curtain. She and the girls count headsets and spray the washrooms and discuss vague leisure plans with the pilots, and when she’s finally out, the new mission is a straight line: right to the curb, to a cab, and back into town to find that Q-tip shit Billy Zar.

  The cabdriver doesn’t hide his frustration that Suzy’s only going to Sela. It’s a short trip and a cheap fare, and then, for him, it’s back to the end of the line at Terminal 2. He slams his door and turns up the radio to eliminate the opportunity to give new directions. But back from a chocolate-milk commercial, it’s the first chilled-out fwang-fwang Gs of “Take It Easy,” which seems to wind the driver into an even more compressed coil in his seat.

  He cuts west on Imperial, the scenic roundabout that threads the narrows between the oil refinery and the airport. When he’s facing down the cliffs above the fire-pit-pocked beaches between Sela del Mar and Venice, he can’t divert any longer: there’s only one road and it heads for home. Sela, from the north, reveals itself like a time-lapse sequence, a compressed self-history. It looks, at the northernmost edge, as it did during the twenties—electricless, heat-free second homes for Los Angeles doctors. Then there came a bar. Followed by a motel. Another bar. A Laundromat. And finally a taco stand. They’re all still there, beside the refinery, in the same order in which they appeared, first fifty, then forty, then thirty years ago—the war. It is a cruise through regional history, oil to tacos, the story of all Southern California beach towns. And the cabdriver takes it fast. So fast that when they appear at the only stoplight on the north end, they collapse into the present, and they’re back where Suzy and Mike and Grace are improbably living their lives on the edge of the ocean. She pays the cabdriver at the curb, and he races off without a word, back to the queue at LAX. Suzy finds Mike in the office writing something important.

  “Hey, wow,” he says. “Can’t believe you’ve already been there and back. We’re barely awake.”

  “Totally,” she says, “went by in a blur.”

  “Lemme get out of here.”

  “No, no, I’ve gotta run some errands anyway. I’ll just change in the bathroom.”

  “Anything cool happen?”

  “I thought a bald guy in first was gonna piss himself on approach. Begged me to hold his hand.”

  “Was it rough?”

  “Not especially. It took two passes, though—had to pull out the first time because the Dodgers’ plane was in the way. Then had a couple drops, I guess.”

  “I always felt like it’d be better to go on takeoff than landing—like, if you had to pick one. I’m always doing a pulse check on my life when I’m making that climb. Thinking about what I’ve been up to, things I should be up to. But on approach, to L.A. especially, once you see the little buttons of the Forum and Hollywood Park, it’s like you’re already on the ground running around. To crash then?”

  “I think this guy was just drunk,” Suzy says. “But if I was choosing, I’d rather it happen at altitude—max out the fall.”

  “I don’t think Grace would much enjoy this conversation.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “Speaking of which—she wants to go to Howlers Friday night. The StrandDogs are doing a thing. And she says you should come if you can.”

  “I don’t know the StrandDogs.”

  “Band she likes.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “You hungry? You need any lunch? Grace left half a turkey sandwich in the fridge from last night.”

  “Nah, maybe in a little bit. Have to take care of this thing and then I’ll probably eat.”

  “Car run okay?”

  Suzy freezes. She’s left the car in overnight parking. She’s forgotten altogether. It was that kind of trauma—the package obscured the simplest things, the details of the handoff searing sunspots in her brain.

  “I…I left it in short-term. I’ll go back and get it now.”

  “No problem. I don’t need it till tomorrow.”

  “I’m gonna get it this afternoon. I promise.”

  “Really, it’s nothing.”

  “I don’t mistreat cars.”

  “I know.”

  “Three hours.”

  First she needs her board, though. The other thing she lost yesterday. She moves through town, makes the turn onto Flipper’s walkstreet, sees it leaning against the fence, exactly where she must’ve placed it as she passed through the gate. Too easy. She plucks it from the yard, hears groaning from inside, and then starts skating toward the intersection Billy led her to the night before. Blue jean shorts, a peach cotton blouse, rubber flip-flops. Weatherwise, it’s a mimeograph of yesterday. One co
uld be fooled into imagining it as a do-over, as though none of the events of the Fourth transpired.

  Suzy plays it again: the moment she discovered the package. The heat she felt it giving off during the flight, while she poured drinks and repelled sleep. She’d buried it underneath the carry-ons of the other stews, as deep into their shared compartment as it would go. No one would know until the drug dogs rushed onto the plane in New York. But at the gate: no drug dogs. The passengers exited, morning in New York. Eighty degrees at eight a.m. They had two hours at the airport before the turnaround. Another mission with a straight line: cabin, jet bridge, concourse, ladies’ restroom. She walked slowly in her pumps, mentally restraining herself from running. There was a Union News serving coffee and hash browns and then a restroom next door. She would flush the contents, no matter the bulk. But then: a hand on her shoulder.

  “Excuse me, miss? What kind of mascara is that?”

  The woman reached Suzy’s shoulders, five feet in a modest heel. Her hair was black enough to be blue, eyes brown enough to be black. Jacket and shift, a uniform of the office, invisible in its averageness. Suzy said she didn’t know offhand and began digging in the side pocket of her carry-on to check.

  “Mind if I see?”

  “I’m grabbing it if you’ll—”

  “Show me in the bathroom. We’re gonna end up there anyway, let’s just head in now.” So it was happening like this. “See those two over there?” the woman said. “They’re not gonna let you get much farther than the bathroom anyway, so might as well come let me try on your mascara.”

  On the way the woman called herself Cassidy. Suzy watched Cassidy in the bathroom as she muddied up her eyelashes in silence. “Think they’d let me fly?” she said.

  “Too short,” Suzy said.

  “Well, fuck me.”

  The only other woman in the bathroom flushed and washed her hands and said something about the heat melting her rouge. While Suzy watched Cassidy work the applicator through her lashes, the bathroom walls seemed to slowly compress, the way the stage set would break apart whenever Suzy recognized herself in a dream. It wasn’t possible to be in this place because she’d taken none of the natural steps that could’ve led her here. She couldn’t recall walking from the gate to the Union News, or even off the plane. She couldn’t recall taking the flight, meeting Billy Zar, moving to Sela, signing on for stew school—she hadn’t been in control for any of it. The present moment made no sense unless you strung together two months of semiconscious incident. Not so much decision-making as forces that had been allowed to work on her, forces that upon closer reflection—like, if she really thought about it—had pushed her straight to this place. A crime, a criminal.