“Sure hope you don’t crash today, Bigtree.”
“Okay, are you serious? Can we talk about anything else? That is unduly ominous for daybreak.”
Kiwi pronounced “ominous” so that it rhymed with “dominoes.”
“Huh? You’re om-in-ohs, bitch. Bro, you’re jumping the whole table. Bigtree: is a shark eating you below the waist or something? Calm it down. It’s going to be fine.”
Kiwi saw that his long legs were indeed bucking the half-moon of their Formica table. The salt and pepper shakers were doing little NBA jumps.
Kiwi was wearing Leo’s oxford shirt, even though it was 90 degrees out, to disguise the bruises he’d gotten from his grandfather. He’d thought about trying to pass them off as hickeys from Emily Barton, but he had several on his arms.
Kiwi wished that he could tell Vijay about Grandpa Sawtooth. He kept thinking about the moment when he’d lifted the old man by his frail shoulders and his eyes had widened, full of an animal pain. Even then Kiwi hadn’t released him.
They were both sitting on the same side of the booth, as if they were copilots of the fast-food rocket ship, Kiwi said, to indigestion and Grade D regret. Kiwi found a crack in the upholstery and started pinching up curly stuffing.
Outside the restaurant window, a bag lady of an advanced, indeterminate age marched forward in front of their window, her face lost in a glassy tangle of curls. Her hair was shockingly white. Red and yellow flags of cloth waved all along her shopping cart like a little parade. She had such an accumulation of crap in there, none of it particularly eyecatching: Kiwi’s gaze snagged on a clock radio, a doll with a gouged cheek in a gray and red-ribboned party dress. Enough metal rods to build a really crappy organ. Things so generic that they caused Kiwi a pang; at first he thought he’d recognized them. Bigtree tribal artifacts! he’d thought — really, it was the same junk that every family had.
There was a story that traveled around the islands about a woman named Mama Weeds. A swamp witch. But now Kiwi saw that there were witches everywhere in the world. Witches lining up for free grocery bags of battered tuna cans and half-rotted carrots at the downtown Loomis Army of Mercy. At the bus station, witches telling spells to walls. Only the luckiest ones got to live inside stories. The rest were homeless, pushing carts like this one. They sank out of sight, like the European witches clutching their stones.
“What are you staring at? Are you checking her out?” He peered at the bag lady. “She’s a little old for you, Bigtree.”
“Bro! No. I’m staring at the, ah. The rods. Sure are a lot of rods in there.”
“Rods!” Vijay did his mimicry of a persnickety white man. He started out seriously and then shifted into sniggers, a speech habit of Vijay’s where he dropped the mic midsentence and became his own audience. “If you love rods, son, you go right ahead. That’s your lifestyle choice …”
“Huh? Oh, right. I forgot. I’m gay. Ha-ha. Very funny.”
If you really were gay, Kiwi thought for maybe the thousandth time since he’d arrived at Loomis County, how could you possibly live here in Loomis County? If you were a bookworm, a Mormon, an albino, a virgin; if you were a “reffy” ([n] Loomis slang for a recent immigrant, derivative of “refugee” and used in Loomis night schools as a shorthand for kids with bad clothes, dental afflictions, accents as pure as grain alcohol); if you had any kind of unusual hairstyle, evangelical religion, a gene for altruism or obesity; if you wrestled monsters on an island, like Ava, or conjugated Latin, like he did, or dated the motherfucking dead, how could you survive to age eighteen in an LCPS high school?
Ava and Ossie: how would his sisters survive a trip to a high school bathroom, even?
Just that morning Kiwi had found a fanciful lilac Post-it stuck above the faucets of the dormitory john: TO THE ASSHOLE WHO KEEPS BLEEDING IN THE SINK …
“You need to have something in your stomach, bro,” said Vijay, with the weird brotherly solicitousness that cropped up between them sometimes when nobody else was around. If other dudes were present they stayed gruff and neutral; when girls were in the backseat Vijay treated Kiwi like his mentally challenged ten-year-old cousin, giving him slow, emphatic instructions (Put the tape in the tape deck, bro … Thank you!), which Kiwi pretended to hate but somehow didn’t exactly mind. We are brothers, he’d think sometimes in the middle of a volley of “bro”s, pleased that he knew enough about the mainlanders’ culture by now to keep this happiness a secret.
“I can’t eat,” Kiwi said, staring at his thin hands. “I’m going to vomit. What if you do everything right but you vomit your Burger Burger special in the cockpit, do you still pass the test?”
“You’ll be fucking fantastic, Bigtree,” Vijay said, lying badly and kindly.
“Look, if I go down in flames, turn in my homework for me, okay?”
“Okay.” Vijay chewed. “That would suck, though. Who do I give it to?”
“It’s under my bed. My night school instructor won’t accept late assignments. Miss Voila Arenas — she’s kind of a hard-ass. But I bet she will accept it if it’s posthumous. Be careful with the toll plaza. I spent, like, sixteen hours on it.”
Kiwi had created a scale model of the Golden Gate Bridge out of dry fettuccine. This was a supplement to the actual assignment. The actual assignment had been to describe the Golden Gate Bridge in three paragraphs.
“Good luck up there, Margarita!” Vijay said an hour later when he dropped Kiwi off at the airfield. “Remember you don’t got insurance and I’m not going to be the one to spoon-feed you baby food and change your diapers when you shit so don’t crash.”
“Yeah.” Kiwi grinned lamely. “See you.”
He would do this, he would get this done. To get a pilot’s salary you had to fly a plane. There was no way out but up.
In a Cessna you were soaring, sailing above everything, and a new sense entered the world. All the irregularities retreated into surfaces. Dennis was letting Kiwi do everything this time.
“Okay. Carb heat off, area clear, water rudders up, stick aft.
“Going good. Full power now, watch your nose come up, ease off the back pressure, now you’re going to want to accelerate to taxi speed … good … you ready?”
Kiwi eased the stick forward until it hit 70 and let the plane climb. At 1,000 MSL they hit the cloud bottom. The wind was light and from the north. The sky today was a sea of blues and they flew through cloud wall after cloud wall, bulleting right through the white banks. Tints shifted; the world slid away from them at an angle. The sun made the wings flash tin and gold. Kiwi watched the swell of Coral City, a place he’d never visited. West of Loomis, way out. Rooftops out there made a uniform field of squares as the plane soared higher — brown and mustard and flecks of green quilted the suburbs, while the downtown was mostly eel-flashes of steel and cement white; in the drab center of the city, Kiwi recognized the striking tangerine rooftop of a famous luxury hotel, the Coral Castillo — and everywhere glass flashed, cars moved up the freeway like sluggish blood cells.
His nausea was gone, he realized. His stomach had settled itself somehow, miles above the ground. And then it was happening — Kiwi stared at his two hands moving over the control panel. He was flying.