Better That Way

Chapter 2 - Delaney

The hole in the fence was down at the low corner where the drainage cut ran through, where the county’s chain-link had given up on the ground and the ground had given up right back. He crouched and held the wire up for me, hooking two fingers through the chain-link and lifting it maybe eight inches, and I went under on my hands and knees with the wet grass soaking through my jeans. The dirt in that cut was cold, since the sun never gets down in there.

It occurred to me, halfway under a fence, that this was the first genuinely illegal thing I had ever done.

It felt astonishing. It felt like nothing at all. It felt like both.

I got up on the other side and turned around. He passed the thermos through the gap and came after me.

I was standing, looking down, while he worked his shoulders under that wire — and from up there I could see the crown of his head. Dark hair, cut short and cut cheap, with a cowlick set in a whorl that he has plainly been fighting his whole life and losing.

I had an unreasonable urge to smooth it out. I did not.

The whole airfield was two runways, a windsock, and a hangar with one light on a pole. Past that the field went to black, and somewhere out in the black the ridge cut the stars off. Wes walked out across it without looking down at his feet one time, the way a person crosses a room they could navigate in the dark. Which I supposed is what mowing a place does to you. He stopped where the mowed line met the rough. Then he sat down, and set the thermos in the grass beside him like a plan he’d been holding onto for a while.

“Eleven-forty,” he said. “Charter out of Charlotte. Comes in over the ridge.”

“You know the schedule.”

“I know the schedule.”

I sat down. The ground was still giving the day’s heat back, up through my jeans into the backs of my legs, and the air smelled like cut grass and something sweeter underneath it that he told me later was avgas.

It was so quiet out there I could hear the wind move through the grass in sections, one part of the field at a time. Off past the fence a truck went by on 9 and the sound of it took a long while to leave. Above us the runway lights ran out in two straight lines toward the far end of the field and then just — stopped. Ended in the dark. I had driven past this place four hundred times in my life and never once looked at it.

“Can I ask you something,” I said.

“You’re going to.”

“Why’d you bring me out here?”

He was quiet long enough that I started working out how to take the question back. When he turned his head the hangar light caught the side of his face. I let myself look at his eyes longer than I had ever let myself look at them. I had known they were gray-green since about the tenth grade. What I hadn’t known was that up close they turn. They go the exact color of the underside of poplar leaves right before a storm hits, when the wind flips them all over at once and shows you a side of the tree you don’t usually get to see.

“You came into the Gas-N-Go at eleven at night to stand near somebody,” he said. “Figured I might as well be somewhere worth standing.”

I opened my mouth and found I didn’t have one thing to put in it.

At 11:38 the ground started shaking.

You feel it before you hear it. Nobody tells you that. It came up through my palms where they were flat in the grass, a low shudder with no sound attached to it yet, and I had a half second of pure animal certainty that something enormous was about to happen to me personally. Then the noise arrived all at once, an unbelievable tearing roar, and the plane came over the ridge with its landing lights blazing and passed maybe two hundred feet above us, close enough that I felt the air move.

I screamed. It was completely involuntary. I grabbed his arm and got a whole handful of the muscle above the elbow, which turned out to be a good deal more than I had budgeted for.

He did not move one inch.

Then I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, falling flat back into the wet grass with my hands over my face, while the sound rolled off down the runway and the ground went still under me.

When I took my hands off my face he was looking down at me.

He wasn’t laughing. There was something on his face I could not read at all, but whatever it was went through me worse than the plane had.

“There’s another one at twelve-ten,” he said.

He looked back out at the runway to say it, not at me. Like a man reading off a departure board he had no personal stake in.

“Okay.”

“And a mail run at one.”

And there was the dimple. He already had his okay. He’d gone and found a second reason anyway.

“Okay,” I said, and it came out about an octave higher than I meant it to.