I look at the Lucky Strike logotype and I think target.
I watched men in moon suits bury drums of nuclear waste and I thought of the living rocks down there, the subterrane process, the half-life, the atoms that decay to half the original number. The most common isotope of uranium is bombarded with neutrons to produce plutonium that fissions, if we can generate a verb from the energy of splitting atoms. This isotope has the mass number two three eight. Add the digits and you get thirteen.
But the bombs were not released. I remember Klara Sax talking about the men who flew the strategic bombers as we all stood listening in the long low structure of sectioned concrete. The missiles remained in the rotary launchers. The men came back and the cities were not destroyed.
7
Marian leaned into me and laughed, watching the land surface expand around us. It was first light, a foil shimmer at desert's edge. At three hundred feet we caught a mild westerly and drifted toward the eyelid slice of sun. But we didn't think we were moving. We thought the land was gliding by beneath us, showing a cluster of mobile homes, a truck on a blacktop to the south. And dogs barking up at us-they barked and leaped and ran yapping into each other as we strayed across the trailer park, passed from dog to dog, new dogs appearing at the fringes, twisting in midleap, dogs from nowhere, multiplying yaps and howls, a contagion to wake the known world.
Then we were out over open earth, bone brown and deep in shadow, and we hung in the soft air, balanced in some unbodied lull, with a measure of creation spilling past.
The pilot yanked the blast valve and we heard the burners pulse and roar and this made Marian laugh again. She talked and laughed incessantly, happy and scared. The basket was not large, barely taking the three of us plus tanks, valves, wires, instruments and coiled rope.
Every propane wallop sent a man-sized streak of flame into the open throat of the nylon that bulbed out above us.
Jerry the pilot said, "We need this wind to hold just like it is. Then we make it okay, I think. But we got to be boocoo lucky."
This made us both laugh. We were lighter than air, laughing, and the balloon did not seem like a piece of science so much as an improvised prayer. Jerry spaced the burns and kept an eye on the pyrometer, adding just enough heat to make up for routine cooling inside the envelope. It was a game, a larger-than-life toy we'd found ourselves wickered into, and our eyes went big at the whooshing flames.
The balloon was candy-striped and when Jerry pointed south we spotted a road and a car, the chase car, a matching candy van that towed the small open trailer used to convey the balloon and basket.
The surge of flame, the delayed rise and Marian saying, "Greatest birthday present ever."
"Ain't seen nothing yet," I said.
She said, "What made you think of it? This is something I've always wanted to do without knowing it exactly Or knowing it but not at the level of ever making plans. You must have read my mind."
Then she said, "I didn't know how much I needed to get out and see this landscape again. Too cooped up with job. But I never dreamed I'd be doing it from here. When you said four a.m. I thought what sort of birthday are we talking about."
"Now you know," I said. "But you only know the half of it."
We leaned close, my arm around her, our thighs pressing, and we were rocked and whirled, although not turning-whirled within ourselves, blood-whirled into quickened sense. I had my free hand around an iron bar, part of the rigid frame connecting the basket to the load cables, and I could feel the metal breathe in my fist.
About twenty minutes later Jerry touched me on the shoulder and pointed straight ahead and I saw the first splash of sunlight on wingtips. The piece began to emerge out of distance and haze, the mesh rectangle completed now, ranks of aircraft appearing as one unit of fitted parts, a shaped weave of painted steel in the monochrome surround.
Jerry said, "Now if the Air Force don't shoot our asses off, we'll just mosey on over."
And that's what we did, approaching at an altitude of four hundred feet. I felt Marian hanging a sort of tremulous gawk over the padded edge of the basket. It was a heart-shaking thing to see, bursts and serpentines of color, a power in the earth, and she pulled at my sweater and looked at me.
Like where are we and what are we seeing and who did it?
The primaries were less aggressive than they'd seemed earlier. The reds were dampened, taken down by weather or more paint, deeper permeations, and this brought them ably into the piece. There were orderly slashes across the fuselages in one section, beautifully mixed blues and flat blues and near blues. The piece had a great riverine wash, a broad arc of sage green or maybe mustard green with brushy gray disturbances, and it curved from the southeast corner up and across the north edge, touching nearly a third of the massed aircraft, several planes completely covered in the pigment-the work's circulating fluid, naming the pace, holding the surface together.
Like my god Nick, how could this be here without my knowing?
The tension of our pressed bodies was heightened by the physical fact of color, painted light pouring toward us. The sun burned high on the line divide. We'd dropped to two hundred feet and Jerry ran a blast of flame. When we were nearly on it the work grew rougher and frontal. I could see unpainted intervals, dead metal strips across the wings of several planes, peroxide white, scabby and gashed, and a trace of stenciled safety instructions apparent on one fuselage. The piece looked hard-won. It lost its flow and became more deeply grained, thick paint in uneven sheets, spray-gunned on. I saw the struggle to make it, scores of people in this chalk heat, muscles and lungs. And I looked for the blond girl in the flouncy skirt painted on a forward fuselage and was elated to spot her, long and tall and unre-touched, the nose art, the pinup, the ordinary life and lucky sign that animated the work.
I could see Marian try to absorb the number. She was not counting but wanted to know, simply as a measure of her amazement. And when I whispered two hundred and thirty at last count, she concentrated more deeply, testing the figure against trie dense array, trie giddiness of general effect. We passed directly over. The planes were enormous of course, they were objects of hulking size, stratofortresses, thick and massy, slab-finned, wings set high on the fuselage, a few missile pylons still intact, a few outrigger wheels suspended, the main wheels chocked on every plane.
And truly I thought they were great things, painted to remark the end of an age and the beginning of something so different only a vision such as this might suffice to augur it.
And we moved toward the blank flats that framed the aircraft and saw how the work lost vigor at the fringes, giving way, melted by intention in the desert.
Marian said, "I can never look at a painting the same way again."
"I can never look at an airplane."
"Or an airplane," she said.
And I wondered if the piece was visible from space like the land art of some lost Andean people.
The breeze took us past and the pilot yanked the blast handle, giving us a final inchmeal rise. We saw a cloudwall hung many miles to the east and hawks floating in the unforced motion that makes you think they've been up there, the same two birds since bible times. There were stones tumbled in a field, great bronze rocks with carved flanks. I felt my wife at my side. We saw dust blowing off the dark hills and a pair of abandoned cars flopped in forage grass, convertibles with shredded tops. Everything we saw was ominous and shining, tense with the beauty of things that are normally unseen, even the cars gone to canker and rust. The pilot pointed to an object some miles away and we saw it was the chase car, a droplet nosing down a long road toward the place on earth where we would light.