Bang Page 3

  Uli doesn’t know what to say to that.

  The grove boss is gone. Cuauhtémoc knows he can pull it off.

  “I’ll take you up,” says Cuauhtémoc. “But if I do you’ve got to share some of this with me,” he says, taking another swig of the whiskey. “Half and half. Split it down the middle.”

  Uli looks at Cuauhtémoc in the darkness. He knows already that for him there is no other way but to go into the sky with his brother.

  Beside their trailer is the tool shed, and beside that is the hangar where the single engine Pawnee sleeps at night. Uli has only been inside it once before, but he knows all of the placards, the entire control panel by heart. Like Cuauhtémoc, he’s read the pilot’s operating handbook. He knows the last time the propeller’s been replaced and the last time the oil’s been changed. He knows where the pitot tube juts from the cowling, what Cuauhtémoc means when he tells him, “Take off the ram cover. Make sure the static vent is clear.”

  Cuauhtémoc checks the oil in the cowling, the fuel in the wings, the hydraulic fluid in the brakes, the fuel sump with a blue enamel cup, the elevators with an up-down motion that shakes the plane and kicks the yoke back and forth inside the cabin like a ghost.

  “Pre-flight done,” he says, then takes another swig from the bottle of Willett bourbon.

  Uli takes a set of headphones from Cuauhtémoc’s left hand, his right hand on the radio, dialing in the ATIS (the weather) coming out of Easterwood Field. The automated voice reads, “Harlingen Easterwood Field. Automated weather observation one zero five three zulu. Winds one six zero at three six. Visibility eight. Sky condition overcast one thousand seven hundred. Temperature three-three Celsius. Altimeter two seven five.”

  Cuauhtémoc turns down the ATIS and adjusts the altimeter to two hundred and seventy-five feet above sea level to match the broadcast. His voice comes in mellow to Uli through the yards of wire.

  “Hell-lo, Hell-lo. Hear me?”

  “Sure,” says Uli. Cuauhtémoc hands him the bottle and gets ready for the call. It sounds like this: “Harlingen traffic, Pawnee five-four-zero-zero-Juliet with weather ready for taxi and take-off, departure toward the south east, Easterwood groves.”

  Cuauhtémoc says his location at the end of the broadcast so anyone in the sky knows where he’ll be coming from. But tonight there’s not a plane in sight, not in the sky and not on the radio. Just the night rolling on forever and the stars beyond that.

  “You ready?” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “I’m ready,” says Uli.

  “Clear!” Cuauhtémoc yells outside the window out of habit—no one is around.

  Uli watches his brother’s hands move swiftly about the dash as he flips on magneto one, then magneto two. Cuauhtémoc cranks the engine, and it sputters. He pumps the throttle three times with long strokes to push fuel into the engine. It’s warm outside but the engine is cold, and there’s no primer. The propeller catches and whirs fast so that it pulls the windows up and out on its hinges.

  “Latch those down,” Cuauhtémoc says to Uli.

  Uli knows that rolling over the bumpy dirt could shatter the glass if not secured. A soft field runway is really a dirt field runway. The name is ironic, especially in the groves, because the earth is uneven, full of stones, full of potholes that dig the front wheel and strut into the ground so that it has to be pulled up into the air to keep it from slowing down on take-off, the full weight of the plane resting on the rear two struts so that the plane is popping a wheelie the entire length of the strip until it’s airborne.

  The soft field takeoff warrants fifteen degrees of flaps and a slight pull-back on the yoke until the front strut gets off the ground just long enough to build speed and ride the pocket of air between the plane and the earth—ground effect, it’s called—until the air pushes up.

  They ride that pocket of air until they reach 80 knots. The Pawnee gallops over the dirt as haughty and elegant as your average town drunk, rising and then falling back down to the earth with a thud on the main wheels and then a hop-skid-skip into the air again, a flutter of the ailerons to keep the plane steady and straight until Cuauhtémoc pulls back ever-so-gingerly on the yoke, nervous sweat dripping down the length of his arms. Uli feels his gullet tightening, a shiver up and down his spine that radiates outward to his fingertips. His hands go jittery. His brother’s hands stay steady, keeping it together by pulling in a calm, labored motion as the plane builds just enough speed to clear the trees.

  Looking from inside the windshield, the grove is inked out in the dark but it’s heard in the scraping along the belly of the plane. The sound of loose, shaken oranges thudding to the ground. The rooty smell of chopped leaves like sweet grass freshly cut. And of course, the smell of pesticides too.

  In the dim lights of the cabin, Uli sees Cuauhtémoc pull the bottle of Willett from between his legs. He takes a swig and passes it to Uli. The burn eases the tension in his gullet. Uli keeps taking pulls on the long neck of the bottle until everything outside the windshield is smaller, calmer, disappearing before their very eyes.

  They don’t talk as they drift upwards. For Uli, his first time in the sky is holy. And he thinks—just as Cuauhtémoc always thinks while flying—that none of this makes sense: this much metal floating up into the sky. Uli puts his faith in his brother, despite being completely terrorized by the nervous buzz beneath his skin, by the drunkenness which makes the stars seem too close and the ground too far as the plane pushes higher, faster. The black sky swallows them whole just over the juncture of Highway 77 and the railroad tracks that lead north toward Corpus Christi.

  Uli sees the lake just a mile ahead at sixteen hundred feet. High enough to thin the air but low enough to see the headlights of the cars on the highway and some of the other roads too, the ones that wander back into Mexico where they become rutas, calles, little cities that form like phalanges on the other side of the border. They tow that line—the Río Bravo—just when the engine sputters and cuts.

  The engine buffets inside the cowling until it wheezes for breath. The nose dips forward, the whiskey glugging from the long neck of the Willett bottle onto the floor between Uli’s feet. And then not a word is said between the brothers—that silence that fills the space just before a car wreck. All you can do is wait for it. And that’s what Uli does, every muscle tensing in his body as Cuauhtémoc pulls the lever to apply carb heat, waiting for ignition.

  Uli watches for the idled propeller to spin, but it just stays there as they head toward the river below. Texas to the right, Mexico to the left. He’s suddenly aware of his flesh, how soft he is compared to the metal around him and the earth below. He thinks about nothing else. Just his own softness as the plane dives to one thousand feet.

  Cuauhtémoc hits the rudders and yaws toward the highway, toward Texas, careful not to use the aileron so as not to lose altitude faster. Uli knows if his brother can make the highway, they’ll live, but if they hit the groves, they’re finished. No one hits a tree and survives.

  The wind whistles. Uli’s heart beats so hard he hears the thud in his throat above the wind. It ticks like a clock, the seconds of his life numbered as he plunges to three hundred feet, low enough to see the faces of the drivers inside their cars on the highway. He thinks they look soft too, unworried and unaware about what’s coming down above them. Uli’s sweat sours at his collar. His stomach floats, his brain scrambles as the earth flattens itself outside the windshield and the sky halves itself. Uli would scream if he weren’t out of breath. That silence again.

  Twenty-five feet. And then just the thundering crack of flesh on metal.

  THE FIVE SENSES OF HURT

  SLEEP IS DELICIOUS. Uli doesn’t ever want to wake up.

  Tack-tack go the fox sparrows that hop along the engine cowling. They sing their cheerful morning song amidst the wreckage. Uli wakes to their dry wings flapping like a trilled breath or a hushed snore or something almost insect-like. They bounce between their perches on the plane’s busted cowling and
bent propeller.

  Uli blinks his blurry eyes once, twice. Brown flecks of blood shining in the morning light over the crushed windshield glass. There’s a pile of crystal-fine shards in his lap. He brushes it away with the tips of his fingers.

  He moves to unbuckle himself. An electric pain in his right arm pins him back into place. All around him the birds sing and then more sparrows arrive. His pains ring out in unison, his mind shifting between them like channels on a television. Uli makes sense of these pains the way he makes sense of everything else in his life: by compartmentalizing them into tiny lists.

  First he makes lists of severe pains:

  His badly sprained wrist tender to the touch His creaky big toenail on his right foot that stings when he pushes down

  His broken little toe on his left foot

  His ribs

  The hot pain in his mouth like a thousand needles in his gums

  Then of his moderate pains:

  The friction burn where the seatbelt cinched his tracksuit and rubbed the skin over his abdomen raw

  The mild sting of the wind brushing over his exposed wounds

  The dull throb behind his eyes that keep the world moving in a blur

  Then of everything that is okay:

  He can breathe

  He can move his extremities (not paralyzed)

  He’s not alone

  Uli is swimming in his own topsy-turvy equilibrium. When he stretches his left arm out to reach for his brother, he finds nothing, no one beside him, just a bloody stain on the windshield in front of where his brother used to be. Uli feels adrenaline surge in his veins. A lump forms in his throat. He bargains with God until he compartmentalizes these feelings too.

  Things that could have happened to Cuauhtémoc:

  Flew through the windshield (least likely)

  Was fine (not likely)

  Was injured (not fine) but managed to get help (likely)

  Being Uli, his mind dwells on the obvious worst-case scenario. Did he go through the windshield? Uli thinks about it. There would be blood on the propeller. Blood everywhere. And as far as he can see, there is little blood. The thought of his brother going through the propeller is enough to make his body pulse with phantom pains that rival his own very real ones. As long as Uli can remember, he’d always been that way with his older brother—cut from the same cloth, or so their mother had always said. Such was the strength of his empathy. Cuauhtémoc’s pain was Uli’s pain, but the reverse wasn’t necessarily true.

  Cuauhtémoc, having grown up close to his father, learned the masculine value of turning inward, though he felt deeply in other ways: in drink when his walls would gently crash down and he’d cry and cry and run out shirtless into the groves and everyone knew to leave him alone until he came back, which was always a day later, and who knew where he went? He could always be found in the enveloping warmth of a meal, or in the sad notes of his dinged up saxophone with the cork stops that he kept under his bed. Uli remembers that Cuauhtémoc would piece it together when he wanted to seem deep in some way. He’d try to play some fucked up version of Coltrane (or what he told Uli was Coltrane) and they’d both sit there at the end of his bed and go “whoa.” Or they would listen to Jay-Z’s “Black Album,” which was the only record his brother ever owned.

  When Cuauhtémoc ran track, he would blast the album through the rickety speakers of his father’s pickup in the school parking lot, his before-workout ritual to get the juices flowing during his stretches. He’d cruise through the speedbumps in the parking lot for show, wreck the shocks in that truck so bad that their father would always beat him up for every repair the truck needed, beat him bloody until he was reduced to a puddle at the edge of the groves.

  Nobody but Uli saw that part. In the parking lot, Cuauhtémoc was a sight to be seen, el cabrón más poderoso. A Mexican with a pickup, with the “Black Album” cranked, and a track star at that. Not that he was the greatest, but he was good. And there was a certain fascination with the way he trained in the middle of the blacktop. He would get to doing his stretches, the key still in the ignition, the Texas sun baking his already sweaty back, everyone looking on like what’s he going to do next? Because even to his classmates he was a familiar stranger, and being a stranger, and a brown stranger at that, people always expected something violent of him. So they watched, waited. And he performed.

  His big toe creaks as Uli pushes his foot against the floor to right himself back into his seat. There’s a sharp, hot pain inside his mouth. There’s a throbbing at the back of his eye. Everything is blurry. And then it’s not. And then it is again.

  His first thought: I’m going blind. His second thought: That wouldn’t be so bad if that’s the worst of it. But if today is Tuesday, then tomorrow is Wednesday and the day after that is June 4th, the NBA Finals, and fuck—I’m blind. How am I going to watch it? Maybe it’s just a concussion, he thinks. But then what if it’s not?

  A second wave of panic washes over Uli. He rubs his eyes, moving his left arm to his face, but everything is blurry still. Everything hurts.

  Whoosh go the birds as they sweep across the grass, startled by some noise in the distance. Uli hears it too but he’s too sore to crane his neck to see what it is. Something is approaching. A tinnitus builds warm and steady in the hollow space between Uli’s ears, a piercing, internal ringing. He concentrates on the buttery taste of his own blood. And then that sound again. Like the snapping of twigs under a heavy foot or like the rustling of a coyote across limestone.

  As the world comes back into focus, he sees the birds lift into the sky in unison. Isn’t it the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, all of them shifting in the air like that, like a grey-black cloud whooshing and then gliding to the shape of the breeze? Come back, he wants to say. Don’t leave me.

  From the corner of his eye, he spies one lonesome bird pecking at bits of glass in his lap.

  He looks at the little thing flitting around the cabin, completely unafraid of him—this thing, impossibly delicate, impossibly light.

  His eyes follow the bird as it perches on his left knuckle. Uli watches as it pecks out an impossibly tiny bug crawling in the slick of his own blood, an animal that’s found its way into a surface wound on his wrist.

  The approaching sound grows louder. Having captured its meal, the bird flits about the cabin briefly before darting out the opened cabin door. In the blur of his vision, Uli follows it as it glides over the scarred earth beneath the wing of the Pawnee.

  In the mud, a pair of boot prints meander from the aircraft toward a place over the hill. Uli’s adrenaline picks up. His head whips around despite the pain. And with his head turned, Uli sees a sheet of paper. He picks it up, pulls it close to his face.

  WENT FOR HELP. DON’T LEAVE.

  Before he can finish reading, the sound is already upon him. And then everything is black.

  The air warms and cools but the heat stays in Uli’s wounds. His skin goes furry with bugs soaking their translucent wings in his cuts. The sun beats down. And then the moon. And then that collective buzz that comes from everywhere, the angry hum of the cicadas that lull him to sleep.

  That night, still in the plane, Uli dreams about Cuauhtémoc. When he sees him, he can smell him, dusty-sweet just like home. He wants to tell him that he loves him, but you can’t say that you love your brother to his face. You can say you love your mother or that you love chocolate, but you can’t say you love anything else. He needs to fall asleep. He wants to forget his pain. He makes lists to think of anything else:

  First of the people he loves:

  Mamá

  Cuauhtémoc

  Papá

  Frijol #1 the Armadillo (R.I.P)

  Bill the farmhand

  Then of the foods he loves:

  Menudo

  Domino’s Pizza

  The McGang-Bang (A McChicken sandwich, sandwiched between the patties of a double cheeseburger)

  Cabbage

  Fideo

&nbs
p; Then bands:

  Hacienda (from San Anto)

  Jimi Hendrix (after ’69)

  The Black Keys

  Shakira Molotov

  Then girls:

  Teresa

  Marta, his childhood crush (with eyes like drops of champagne)

  Priscilla, his babysitter (with big, deer eyes)

  The Bus Lady (with old lady watery eyes)

  Katie, the blonde girl from school (the Mexican dream!)

  Kaylee, Katie’s little sister (because she’s the only pretty girl who talked to him).

  He makes lists until that sinking feeling grabs hold of him and drags him downward into the part of sleep where you can’t remember anything—pitch black.

  Uli knows he’s on the American side because he hears Hank Williams in his head. Hey, good lookin’. He feels a dumb, crooked grin pull across his face. His first thought: I’m alive. His second thought: Water.

  Morphine numbness courses through his veins.

  On his back he feels the cotton gown. The tightness of the covers tucked over his belly and into the mattress. His arms are clammy and cold inside two black casts. His ears are ringing. With his fuzzy vision, he can barely make out what looks to be a white, painted brick wall.

  Hank Williams gives way to the sound of the ocean. Giant waves all around him. Uli dreams he can breathe underwater and then he dreams he’s in the sky. He couldn’t fall, even if he wanted to. There’s a siren in the distance. He’s read about those in Mrs. Hector’s Pre-AP English class. Greek Mythology. You have to cover your ears with beeswax. In his morphine drowsiness, he doesn’t have beeswax, so he just listens to the sirens. He thinks they sound like popcorn in his head. The staccato sound of Spanish. Then silence.

  “Where were you born?” the too-trebly sirens ask.

  Uli’s eyes shoot open. He tries to knock the fog from his head. The vague, fuzzy outline of a man beside his bed.

  “I don’t know where I was born,” he says after a while.