|
|||||||||
| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
|
Analog
|
|||||||||
|
Tonto’s is the kind of bar daddies tell their little girls never to go to- except for my father, who was an Air Force pilot in the first gulf war and raised me to be as fearless as he was. Tonto’s is a western saloon by way of the Mumbai slums, down to the dim light from candles flickering in the wind from the opened door. The most striking thing about the place, about every place now that the power’s gone, is how quiet it is. There’s a piano in the corner, but nobody every plays it.
Tonto’s is run by a one-eyed octogenarian who prefers to just be called “Gray” even though these days his hair is completely white, though he’s taken a turn this last year and doesn’t tend the bar too often himself. I’m drinking alone again, like most nights of my life. I feel bad about Gray, though I know I shouldn’t. I was a pilot like my daddy, on a mission like any other I’d ever flown. There was no way I could have known… A man ten years younger than me pulls up to the empty bar. Most folks who drink at Tonto’s know me, or at least know enough about me not to bother, but he sits on the stool next to me. He has a shaved head, shorn down to just longer than skin, but at least he’s clean shaven, and not terrible on the eyes. He orders a beer, which proves he isn’t from around here; Gray’s beer’s just watered-down whisky, though if Gray’s here it’s got a little Coke or club soda for carbonation. The second give-away is he doesn’t stink, at least not to local standards. When we lost power, we couldn’t get water out of the aquifer, except by bucket, and that’s a lot of elbow grease for water a gallon at a time. There’s a hotel in town operates a diesel pump, and they can get you a hot bath, but it costs what most people can make in a week. Some people trek out to one of the streams or lakes, but lots of people just take their turns in one of the communal baths, and there seems to be an unspoken agreement that so long as everyone stinks the same we don’t complain about it. Most men leapt at the chance to bathe only once a month, but most of the women, at least the few I talk to, went along only grudgingly. I feel a little bad every time I rub some of that lotion on my hands and neck I brought back from Portland, because I know it’s because it smells nice and not because my skin’s dry (though it is at that). He watches the bartender pour his drink, then with it in hand, turns to me and smiles. “Not even a shot of Pepsi for fizz.” He turns to the tender, “could I get a glass of whisky, too, to sharpen the edge? And one for the lady, if you’d please.” The tender, I think his name is Cole though we’ve never really exchanged pleasantries, eyes the new fella, since it is a large order for a man he’s never seen (and can’t know if he has the paper to back it up). The new man reaches into his pocket and builds a stack of Sacajawea dollars ten high or more, and that’s good enough to get him scooting. He turns back to me. “Blake.” He waits for me to reciprocate, and when I don’t he asked, “You always drink alone?” I want to strike back at him with something about how if I’m drinking along maybe I want to be alone, but the whisky comes and I take a drag off it and swallow the poison. He seems to notice my reticence, and starts to stand up. “Well, my only purpose was picking up my drink, and buying you a whisky, so to keep from bothering you I can finish my drink someplace else.” “Wait,” I manage to get out, but because of the whisky it’s deeper and gravellier than it should be; I almost sound like my father. “You can stay.” “I was beginning to wonder if you were deaf or mute, and I was making an ass out of myself,” he thought for a moment, “though I suppose it’s early yet to rule out the latter.” I smiled, just a little, despite myself, and he noticed. “So what do you do around here? Not that I think what a person does in any way defines them- it’s just trivia.” “Pilot,” I said. That was usually the part of a conversation where someone put it together, where they squinted at me and through the haze of cigarette smoke and booze, remembered the pictures from the newspapers, put away my wild red hair in a neat pony tail, redressed me in my old Air Force blues. “You’re shitting me. You work with one of the collectives or,” his eyes seemed to light up, “you actually own your own plane?” “Well, own’s a funny word.” I hesitated, but hell, it’s not like there was enough government anymore that even grand theft airplane was going to be a crime anytime soon. “You ever heard of Crazy Kerry?” He stared dumbly at me. “A smut king. I met him in a place like this, further east. He owned a chain of strip-mall porn shops that were in danger of going under until-” “The blink” he said, and I didn’t want to let on, but I was grateful for the help. “Because of the blink, all electronics went dead, which meant the internet was dead, too, and suddenly all those worthless magazines were worth a lot of money. He spent the first hour or so trying to talk me into ‘modeling.’ Apparently with his newfound wealth he’d gotten his hands on some old-school electricity-free cameras and wanted to make more porn. But as the night wore on and he got a few drinks into him, he reverted back into a human being, and more’s the pity me I happened to like the person he turned into. Things happened, and I even moved in with him for a time.” “He had a plane, old single-prop like my grandfather taught my dad and me to fly on to dust crops at his farm. Kerry used it to fly out deliveries and to drag those big obnoxious banners across the sky advertising his ‘merchandise.’ Since I could fly, I took to flying to earn my keep. He had it painted red, with little plastic horns glued onto the fuselage, and in white on the side its name was printed in blocky white text: Horny Little Devil. ” “I wish I could say I won it from him fair in a card game, but, one day I was flying a shipment down to Springfield, when I had some engine troubles and had to turn around. When I got back to his house, I found Kerry starring in some of his amateur porno with a couple whores from the port, and I got the impression it wasn’t the first time. So I took off in his plane. At the time I figured he’d been playing games of chance with my health, but I think I was just rationalizing.” I’d finished my whisky midway through the story, but Blake was polite enough to wait until I was done to ask Cole for another, but before he could pour it, Blake asked, “How much for the bottle?” Cole didn’t say anything, just set it down and took the stack of Sacajaweas and retreated to the end of the bar. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, taking the bottle. “It’s a nice night, and my hotel has a great view from the roof.” “That sounds safe,” I said. “Funny, you didn’t strike me as a ‘safe’ kind of girl.” “Careful, unless you want to find out how unsafe I can be.” He grinned. “That’s kind of what the whisky’s for.” Since this whole part of town runs off the same well, his hotel wasn’t far off. In fact, it used to be just a big barn; a lot of the towns anymore are the same, since farms had some of the best gravity-based irrigation in the country, combined with access to arable land; access to food and water. There was a ladder up to his third floor room where he grabbed a pair of glasses, and from there we climbed out a window up onto the roof. He pours me a drink, and asks, “How’d you become a pilot?” “Cop out is I was an Air Force brat, but,” I swallow, because I’m not sure how much I want to share, “I became a pilot to get above things, gain perspective. My dad was a great pilot, but he was also an alcoholic and once he even hit my mom. But up in the air, all that mattered was that he really did try to do the best for us. I always loved flying for that. You can get away from whatever is bothering you- but it isn’t like you’re running, because eventually, you always have to come back down. So it forces you to think. It takes away your burdens for a while so you can collect yourself, but you know you’ll have to shoulder them again soon. Flying is probably the only thing that’s kept me sane all these years.” He spent a long time looking up at the sky, and the moon, looking like it was getting closer every minute, before he said, “You’re that pilot, aren’t you?” My shoulders tense; getting my ass kicked on a roof didn’t sound like the best night of my life. “There’s no bounty on me, if that’s what you’re thinking. Or do you just want to take a swing at me?” Wouldn’t be the first time for either. He narrows his eyes. “No. Why-” he stops himself short, “yeah, I guess some people might want to. But you don’t seem like a, well a crazy person. And you flew for the Air Force, right? What I’m really curious about is, did you know? I mean, you were a bomber pilot, so obviously it was a bomb, but did you know what it would do?” “Even the scientists didn’t know. They thought- they were sure it was just going to knock out power in the city, maybe the state, which for some reason the Colombians call Departments. Nobody, not even the cranks, were talking about pissing off the ionosphere or permanent geomagnetic storms. But I didn’t know any of that. As far as I was told it was just another bomb, dropped on just another bombing run in the war on drugs and piracy. Except- how familiar are you with history?” “Some,” he said. “Well, when the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the pilots were told to get altitude and distance, then shut everything down. They had to turn the plane into a glider, because they thought the bomb would cause an electromagnetic pulse and kill all the electrical equipment, and maybe the engines, too. Our mission had similar directions, only when you’re flying a B-2 the entire thing is electric. Gliding that for any length of time is a hell of a prospect. We did as we were told, but when we tried to restart our electrical system and the engine, sparks shot out of the control panel and fried everything. We were dead in the air. We managed to ditch in the gulf; we still thought the B-2 needed to be protected and secretive, because it would be important to national defense.” I sighed; that was the last time a B-2 would ever fly, and I loved those damn things. “A fishing boat picked us up. We tried to radio for assistance, for the Coast Guard cutter that was supposed to be our lifeline, but their electronics were fried, too. They got us to Guatemala, and that’s where it started to become evident that something very wrong had happened. Electronics everywhere were down. At first we thought terrorists, you know? You might be too young to remember how preoccupied with drugs and terrorists we were.” “I’m not that young.” “We caught a bus headed north, and pretty quickly we realized it wasn’t terrorists, because nobody was this organized. Power was out in all of Central America- but what was telling is even battery-operated electronics, like the radio on the bus, were down. The digital world had disappeared. There was chaos.” “Because of that it took a bit of doing getting back across the border, then back to base. We were arrested. There was some kind of investigation. Some jag from JAG even called me al Qaeda. I think the bosses were mulling over letting our B-2 crew fry for their new weapon malfunctioning when one of the eggheads who built it came forward. Then it was no longer deniable.” “Still, the stink of it followed me. I was discharged four months later, not honorable, not dishonorable- just discharged; I didn’t even know you could do that. I had a fiancé, a Captain. His mom had been flying to Florida when the blink… her plane went down into the side of a mountain. He told me he knew it wasn’t right to blame me, but he couldn’t not blame me, either. We would have had beautiful kids… but it’s a very different world, now. People fight over scraps in the streets like dogs. It’s no world for children.” I pause, half-expecting him to make a move. I’d mentioned my loneliness, but also my desire to not have children- a more potent combination of man-bait (at least to the male mind) as there is. Instead he said, “You should go.” “I thought we were having a good time.” “We were. But I put something in your drink. Gram, she’s crazy. She wanted me to drug you, and bring you here. She blames you for my grampa- he had a pacemaker. But she’s wrong about you. You’re not… you’re not a bad person. You should go.” I wanted to; my libido had given way to nervousness, but my legs wouldn’t move. I force myself up with my palms, but my legs don’t budge, and I start to slide toward the edge of the roof. I try to dig my fingernails into the roof’s shingles, but my hands are weak, and I barely catch the gutter as I roll over the edge. Blake’ss there in an instant, and grabs my wrist. “Pull, goddamnit- you’re heavy.” “That’s not nice,” I slur, though there isn’t much pulling I can do. And then I make the mistake of looking down. The world begins to spin and I can’t feel my arm enough to know if I’m twisting around or if maybe he’s let go and I’m falling. I black out. I come to, heaving for air, pinning Blake to the roof beneath us. He’s breathing heavily, and I’m confused and I kiss him, though I realize too late that isn’t why we’re panting, and pass out again. I wake up to the rising sun on my face. I’m at the airfield, and I know before my eyes adjust to the light that I’m leaned up against my plane, because I recognize its smell. I’m roped to the rear wheel, and there’s somebody standing over me, too wide to be Blake. “Good morning,” an older woman’s voice says, and it wants to be pleasant, almost is, except that underneath there’s something cold and mercenary. It’s in her smile, too, which I finally see when she steps between me and the sun. But it isn’t in her eyes. Her eyes are full of hate. It’s a look I know well enough. “If you want you can consider it a moral test. You could have told my grandson, ‘No.’ I know he’s a pretty boy, but if you wouldn’t have tried to slut him up, maybe I’d have let you walk away. Probably not, but it might have made me think that somewhere in there you were a real human person, that you cared, and weren’t just out to take every man I ever cared about away from me.” She’s red in the face, and her fists are white, clenched and shaking; if she were a man, or thirty years younger, I think she would have hit me. But she closes her eyes, and sighs. “My Walter had a pacemaker. The blink fried it, cooked his heart in his chest.” There were about 3 million people worldwide who had pacemakers when I dropped that bomb- not the easiest statistic in the world to find after computers stopped working, but it’s not like I was sleeping anyways. To put that number into perspective, estimated deaths from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki range up to about 166,000. “I woke up to the smell of an overcooked burger; it made me hungry. I rolled over to tell him I’d make us sausages, but he was dead.” She steps to the side, so the sun blinds me again. “I thought about opening your chest, putting a radio inside and letting an electrical storm have you, but that, that would be too good a death for you.” “I want you to feel around your back, you feel that cone? That’s a W-78, or rather one of the three warheads from a W-78. I know you were an Air Force pilot, dear, so stop me if I’m rehashing for you, but the W I believe marks it as a nuclear weapon, and it has a yield of around 350 kilotons of TNT.” Fat Man and Little Boy were each about 20. “You can’t see it, and more’s the pity, but I wrote ‘Skinny Bitch’ on the cone, though now that I know you better, I probably would have named it ‘Ugly Whore’- hindsight always being twenty-twenty. The plan is to fly the both of you into the sky; take off will be a bit painful, as you’ll be dragged the length of the runway, but I’m told you’ll survive, and once we achieve altitude, the warhead will arm and release, and the both of you will fall until it detonates.” I know the surrounding area enough to know the damage it would cause. “The town,” I said- there were a few thousand people living there. “And there are crops. People will starve.” “Then their deaths will be on you. What’s a few more thousand in the scheme of things, when you’ve already killed millions?” And she was right. Pacemaker deaths were the tip of an iceberg. Millions more killed when other medical devices failed, killed by disease medicine could no longer combat, by starvation when food production and transport suddenly and radically had to change. She walked around and started the plane’s engine. “Gram, this is crazy.” For the first time I realize Blake’s here. “You can’t do this. She’s a person, she’s real- alive. You can’t-” then something in his voice changes, “I won’t- let you.” I hear the safety slide off a gun, an old M9. “You’re not going to shoot me, Gram.” Blake makes a move for the gun, and I hear their struggle. The gun goes off. I strain to see around the plane, but all I can make out is their legs. That moment lasts forever, staring at two pairs of legs- then Blake falls. Gram comes around the plane, fast. She’s crying, but trying to wipe the tears away without letting me know what she’s done and how terrible she feels for it. But she also gets too close; I latch onto her right knee as she rounds past me, and twist hard. There’s a soft pop and she keels over, screaming. The gun falls out of her hand, just past where she could reach. I kick her several times in the face, then wrap my legs around her head and pull her closer as she fights me. Then I put her head in a leg lock and squeeze until she stopped moving. I might have kept a hold of her, but I hear stirring behind me. Suddenly the rope around me gets tighter, then starts to slacken. “I should have been more specific; I meant she wasn’t going to kill me.” The rope falls to the ground, and Blake helps me to my feet. “You’re a strange man,” I tell him. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.” I think for a moment. “That’s true- but I haven’t known you that long.” I hear his grandmother’s breath rattle out of her throat, heavy, barely there, and I realize I owe him a great deal, and kiss him without thinking, then whisper, “Thank you, for saving my life… though you did almost get me killed.” “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?” He smiles, but the blood loss is starting to get to him, and he stumbles, and likely would have fallen if I didn’t catch his shoulder. “That’s presuming you live at all.” He smiles again, but it isn’t carefree; he’s old enough to know that the quality of medicine isn’t what it used to be. His odds are about as predictable as a coin’s toss. Maybe I’m just bitter about the drugging, but I don’t feel I can sugarcoat it for him; maybe I just know that if he does die, it’s one more body on my pile, a stack that’s constantly growing, one my plane might not be able to lift me above some day. |
|||||||||