“If it goes good they’re going to do one in Fairbanks. Bush pilots are going to fly Lost Souls to the melting ice caps, so they can, like, cry like babies and get competitive about how sad they are and shit. Get photos of those snow bears. Be like, ‘Hey, bear! Sorry we fucked up your summer, bro!’ ”
“You mean polar bears,” Kiwi corrected automatically. “Or possibly the Kodiak bear. Ursus arctos middendorffi. Hey, how come you know about this ride already?”
“You didn’t get the memos? Look around your locker,” Vijay told him. (Kiwi had been avoiding his locker, where ASSFUCKER still glowed lithium white against the metal.)
“Oh, okay. Right-o.”
Vijay cracked one reddened eye at him.
“Right-o? Are you Sherlock Holmes? Have I taught you nothing?”
“I meant, right on. I mean, thank you.” He kept his eyes on the sun. “Really.” A cloud moved and light poured over them. It suddenly occurred to Kiwi that he and Vijay both looked bronzed and goofy, sitting up here in their Thinking Man poses. Like statue rejects that some sculptor had in a paroxysm of shame hidden on the roof.
“No problem, Margie. I hope you get it.” Vijay waggled his bare toes at Kiwi in farewell, one arm flung across his face. Break had ended fifteen minutes ago. He giggled into the crook of one elbow: “Take it to the skies, Margaret!”
Kiwi stood. He spent a final minute staring at the black seaplanes with their torpid propellers, now drowsing like huge dragonflies on the bloodshot moat. Time to go find Carl before he could second-guess himself. His body prickled with dull anticipation, cell memory — it would be freezing on the stairwell. Often Kiwi felt like he was eavesdropping on the conversations of his own body, committee meetings of muscles and ligaments that didn’t seem to include him. Whenever he’d gone onstage to wrestle the alligators, he’d always felt like the last to know about his own terror. It was a disorienting lag. Even the behatted, popcorn-munching tourists in the stadium got the scoop on him. His parents, his grandfather, his sisters, the alligators, his own deep tissues — everybody had him figured for a coward, but Kiwi wouldn’t catch on until he heard his own scream.
Kiwi stood for a moment longer outside the cherry-red door that led back into the World of Darkness, enjoying the feeling of the warm outside air against his back. The outermost rail of the overpass glowed in a thin gold parabola at this hour, like some interplanetary racetrack. Somewhere our Seths are clawing onto their rocks, he thought, staring out across lanes of Loomis traffic.
“Hey, don’t puss out, Marge!” Vijay called. “Threaten him! Tell Carl that if he doesn’t let you fly the plane, you’ll quit and leave for the Burger Burger.”
Kiwi found Carl Jenks spinning on his office chair. He frowned at the tiny cactus plant on his desk as Kiwi spoke.
“And I have excellent hand-eye coordination, sir,” he coughed, “and a good foundation in aeronautics, physics …”
Carl pressed his lips to near invisibility. Possibly Carl Jenks had at one time wanted to be a kind man, a decent and charitable man; and then puberty had come along and slapped this almost translucent blond mustache across his face. The mustache was Carl’s most distinctive feature — the hairs grew in achromatic and already bristling.
Kiwi heard himself speaking faster and faster; he resisted the urge to lean in and do spontaneous calculus for Carl on his clipboard.
“Are you crazy?” Carl said when he’d finished. “Two weeks ago you broke the vacuum. Nina Suárez complains that you’re sexually harassing her. Ephraim Lipmann says that you’re sexually harassing him. Every time I turn around you’re tripping over something, or coming down from the roof stoned out of your gourd. Shut up, Bigtree, I don’t want to hear it.”
Carl Jenks, who had started this disquisition in his usual wry tone, was suddenly breaking on his vowels. His voice shook. He seemed to have accidentally stirred himself to real fury, as if Kiwi’s request were the last in a long string of impossible ideas, inappropriate and painful ideas, that Carl Jenks been asked to entertain in his lifetime.
Carl said, “Scout, our payroll manager—”
“Scott.”
“Scotty tells me that you do not understand numbers. That you cannot do basic arithmetic. And we’re going to train you to fly a plane?”
“Yes?” said Kiwi.
“Tell you what, Bigtree. We’ll train you on the chair and see how that goes.”
“The electric chair?” Kiwi was picturing spikes, white forks of summer lightning running through a tin cap.
“The lifeguard chair. Down in the Lake of Fire.”
Carl Jenks sighed and reversed the direction of his chair-spins. He had an office chair, Kiwi noted, with cushy armrests to prevent strain and fatigue.
“Dale Bonilla is our lifeguard now, but I’m moving him. Tell me, Kiwi, can you lifeguard effectively if you are reading pornography? Can you safeguard the lives of preadolescent children if you are busy shooting half-human, half-tiger monsters in an imaginary jungle on your portable video console?”
Kiwi had played that game in the dormitory: Were-Cats Attack IV. The bad guys had tiger paws for running and human thumbs for guns. Kiwi made it to level 7 with Leonard one Tuesday morning in the dormitory, where they’d been defeated at last in an interspecies massacre outside the gray digitized ruins, ambushed by a roaring horde of bipedal tigers with machine guns and big clawed feet bursting out of their khaki pants. Silence on this topic seemed prudent.
“That sounds irresponsible, Carl. It’s against the World of Darkness policy to use personal electronics on the job.”
Carl rolled his pale eyes. “Quit being such a shoe-licker, Bigtree. What I’m saying is, does Dale Bonilla even know how to swim? Do you think Pam in HR asks the tough questions when she does new hires? I don’t think so, Kiwi, personally, because here you stand.”
“Okay.” Kiwi ran a hand through his hair. Violence was contemplated, then rejected by Kiwi as counterproductive to his larger financial stratagems. He thought, The Chief would have you by the neck, Carl Jenks.
“So I’m not going to be a pilot?”
“Nobody starts at the top, do they? You have to work your way up.” Carl was grinning now, a messy grin that spilled all over his face, his blue eyes sparkling with improved humor, as if this were a joke they could share: Kiwi climbing the ladder.
“You’ll need to get CPR certified.” Carl actually giggled, then relaxed into silence again, as if good humor were an athletic stretch he couldn’t hold. “And you can request your Rescue Stick and your little bathing suit from HR. The ladies are in for a treat, eh?”
At the mention of a bathing suit, Kiwi cinched Cubby’s jeans in his left hand.
“Is this a promotion, Mr. Jenks?”
“Sure.” Carl smiled magnanimously, swept a hand over his moon-white skull. “Why not think of it that way?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN. Ava Goes to the Underworld
“Therefore, for your sake, I think it wise
you follow me: I will be your guide …”
— Dante Alighieri, The Inferno
On the morning that my sister eloped with Louis Thanksgiving, the Bird Man gave me his own version of Virgil’s advice — a swamp aphorism, he said, a maxim commonly uttered by the moonshiners, the glade crackers, the plume and alligator hunters, by the famous bird warden Guy Bradley and the Seminole and the Miccosukee tribes alike, and he was surprised I’d never heard it: