Better That Way

Chapter 7 - Wes

I didn’t call her.

Nine days. I know because I counted them at the time.

The airfield gets cut once a week, at four in the morning, before the heat and before anybody’s flying. I’m the one that cuts it. You don’t cut it short, either, which is the thing nobody guesses. Six inches to a foot is what you leave it. Any shorter and you’ve got geese standing out there, and geese and airplanes do not mix.

Long passes down the length of it first. Then the lights. You cannot run a deck over a runway light. There are better than sixty of them out there, and every one gets finished by hand with a string trimmer, walking.

That is the part that takes the time. Two hours and ten minutes if the deck’s sharp. The dew soaks your boots through by the second pass. Everything smells green and wet and a little like gasoline. The sun comes up over the ridge around six and turns the whole thing white for about four minutes and then it’s just a field again.

When the time came around for the next scheduled mow, I came up the south end and there it was. Two dents in the grass where we’d sat. Still flat. Grass takes a while.

I throttled down without deciding to. Sat there a second with the deck screaming behind me and the whole east end going pink.

Then I put the deck over that spot and kept going.

**********

The rest of the week the county has me starting at seven. Ballfields, the right-of-way on 9, the courthouse lawn, whatever else is on the sheet. Off at three. Garage after that till six or seven, depending what Dale’s got. This week we’ve got a Ram with a bad water pump, a Camry that came in on a hook, and an F-150 whose owner wanted it done Thursday and would not be paying until the fifteenth. Two bays, one lift, and a fan up in the corner that moves the heat around without doing anything about it. Pretty sure the radio in that shop has been on the same station since the nineties.

Dale’s back bedroom has been mine since I was twelve.

The wallpaper in there has little blue ships on it. My aunt Doreen put it up for somebody else’s kid a long time before me and nobody has ever brought it up.

There’s not much to say about it, really. A window unit that has to be shimmed with a paint stirrer. A dresser. My mother’s high school yearbook up on the closet shelf, which I have never opened.

My paycheck goes in an envelope in that dresser. About a third of it goes to Dale for the house, whether he asks for it or not.

There was four hundred and ten dollars in the envelope in June.

I bring it up because it’s relevant. A man ought to know what he’s got before he starts thinking about what he wants.

Here’s the thing I told myself every day for nine days, usually somewhere in the middle of a job with my hands busy:

She leaves in eleven weeks.

Her father is the prosecuting attorney of this county.

You have four hundred and ten dollars.

You had one night; that’s more than you had a month ago. Leave it be.

It’s a good argument. I’d make it again.

**********

On the ninth night I drove out to the field around eleven to see if the mail run was early. Yeah, that’s a lie. I have no reason to be at that field at eleven at night, but I drove out there anyway.

Her Corolla was parked on the shoulder at the low corner with the hazards going.

Which is about the most Delaney Hollis thing I know how to tell you. The girl breaks onto a county airfield in the dark, and puts her four-ways on first so nobody runs into her.

I was grinning at the windshield before I knew I was doing it.

I sat in my truck with my hands at the top of the wheel and my heart going like I’d run up a hill. Killed the engine. The ticking it does when it cools off sounded loud enough to carry.

I would like to tell you I got right out.

What I did was sit on that shoulder with the engine off for the better part of forty minutes, running the same argument I’d been running for nine days and losing it a little worse every time around.

At eleven thirty-eight the ground started going. I felt it come up through the floorboard and into my boots before I heard it.

I sat there and watched the eleven-forty come in over the ridge and pass right over the top of her out in that field. Two hundred feet.

Landing lights lit her up for about a second and a half and then took it back.

She didn’t make a sound. She had her face tipped up and her hands down flat in the grass on either side of her, smiling at the underside of an airplane like nobody had ever told her not to. She didn’t know anybody was watching her, either, and there is not a thing I can do to explain what that did to me.

Then I got out.