Even the clouds the next day seemed immutable. The roar of planes woke her, sounds receding and coming into volume again, a kind of pulse that pinned down the hours. She read on her cot, under the photographs of childhood friends still taped there and places she vaguely meant to travel, redheaded girls posing by their fathers’ cars and European cities rendered gray by war, until the heat became too great. Then she passed through the curtain that separated her room from the bar. She ground coffee beans and swept, the screen door kept open with an old iron. When the floor was clean she passed into the light and weather, wiped mauve dust from the windows of the rented rooms. In the outdoor shower she sung halves of songs she’d always known, Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. Her overalls were filthy, her undershirt was fresh. The afternoon shadows moved across the tawny landscape in spills, and she looked at the print they made with a kind of jealousy, knowing how long she would be inside.
Perched on the counter she ate the stale peanuts and downed her first drink. Men filtered in, some with blue eyes that winked when she slid a glass across the bar, some who smoked silently as though it were a job. By eight o’clock Charlie was liquor-smeared enough to prank-call their parents, not speaking but holding up the receiver to the noise of the room, something Fay couldn’t watch. She vanished by ten, and at dawn Fay woke to the sound of her crossing the courtyard, walking the bundle of her sheets to the washing machine behind the main building. Her sister’s unhappiness had become the avoidable disasters of her body. A week passed, surly and indifferent to what Fay might have wished from it.
He appeared on her day off in a low-slung Ford truck, driving with one arm, the other tanned and dangling out the window, something white and angular held in his clean fingers.
From her room she could hear the tires working, shifting from the dust onto the gravel that Charlie periodically threw onto the entrance of the lot, and she cursed. There was always one who showed up, disappointed, then bellicose, forgetting the sandwich board always placed there on Tuesdays. SOMEWHERE ELSE, it said, loopy blue on splintered pine.
She stepped into the fulvous decay of the afternoon, her lips and eyes posed to communicate an intractable position. Vincent kept his head down as he approached, but she didn’t match his gesture of modesty and appraised him anyway, the creased blue flight suit and the diagonal zippers that highlighted his chest.
In his hand was an elaborate paper airplane, multitiered, slim isosceles triangles that could have been knives, and she pointed at it loosely, her index a little curved.
“We’re closed, and, judging by the size of that thing, my condolences on your demotion, sir.”
He didn’t answer, just blinked, as if to acknowledge that some moment he wasn’t a part of had passed.
“For you,” he said.
He raised a finger then, gauging the wind or making a point. They stood with their backs to the pool, the U of rooms around it, almost always empty. The pilots never recommended their families stay at Charlie’s inn, and the few stragglers that followed the sign on the highway—crooked, three exclamation points—never lasted more than a night. Rising in the air was the overwhelming smell of chlorine, under it layers of vice, a can someone had peed in and hidden under the porch, butts of Camel Wides dug into the dirt of potted plants. The wind was manic, licking at the exposed skin of her neck and arms. She wore work boots and the silk shorts she had slept in, a mechanic’s shirt whose patch said BOBO. Her clothing came almost exclusively secondhand, an insult to her parents’ wealth she relished.
She held it limply, hardly gripping it.
“No, you have to—”
He stopped himself from speaking. She watched him roll his shoulders back and stuff his fists in his deep pockets, pained not to expound.
“May I?”
“You may.”
Without a strategic thought she launched it. Even thrown clumsily, it seemed determined, protected, and the memory she had was of a cat, leaping. When its nose hit the speckled dust too soon, he nodded as though receiving some disappointing news, unfortunate but not unexpected.
“A drive?” He looked at his truck as he asked, perhaps imagining her into it.
IT WAS THE TIME IN the hour before dusk when all the colors, imperiled, flare up in protest, and Fay was aware of how she smelled, onions and salt, an aspect of her time in the kitchen that would not leave her. He moved to open the door but she depressed the searing button of the truck’s silver handle and leapt up into it. Already most of her upbringing had fallen away, though it could be seen still in how she held a fork, heard in how she answered a phone. In the cab her legs fell against a brown sack filled with more planes.
They sped under low-hanging telephone wires, through flats of brown where barely verdant tufts appeared, brief and nagging. Not long into their drive he patted his front pocket, reached across her to check the glove box.
“See any sunglasses down there?” he asked, pointing floorward. “Tan case. Might be under the seat.” Instead of bending she wriggled straight down into the wide space there, crouching as she slipped a hand under, her cheek resting on the seat where her thighs had been. When she rose she arranged them on his face.
“Hey now. That looked a little too easy for you. Rosebud, was you done born in the belly of a truck?”
It was the first time she laughed, bright, quick, a bird as stunning and red as it was swiftly gone. He looked at her long enough that she gestured to the road—he should watch it.
A teal convertible pulling alongside of them turned the moment over, Rusty gesturing in a tight twirl, Vincent sighing as he acceded and rolled the window down.
“How about a race, finally? You missed out on a good one last night, nearly to Vegas. Rick switched between my car and Chip’s at eighty on the freeway.”
“I like my bones very much as they are.”
“Come on, Kahn. You say that every—”
“I like my bones. I have a few things I’d like to do with them.”
He shouted slowly over the wind from the deep cab of his truck, every syllable doled out evenly onto the conversation. When Rusty pulled in front of them and sped away, his hand floated out the passenger side, fingers clapping twice to the palm.
A silence passed, more comfortable than it should have been to two people new to each other, as they climbed into the San Gabriel Mountains. She removed her boots and pressed her heels into the dash. He said what he did next as the view fell open, the fact that diminished their options against the sky that seemed to increase them.
“You should know I’ve got a wife.”
“No ring.”
“It’s uncomfortable to fly with.”
“Oh, I’ll bet it’s a real encumbrance.”
“For maximum control you want to be able to feel absolutely everything.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I haven’t, but I’d very much like to.”
“That seems like an excuse I could just-almost buy if I were your wife. Maximum control.”
To this he did not reply, a way of cutting the remark from existence, and they parked soon after. On the mountain the seven o’clock light could barely provide for them, but they spent the last of it pitching the planes he had folded. She was underdressed for the altitude and he stood behind her arranging her arms and fingers, crouched to correct the dig and splay of her bare feet. The first thing he ever kissed was her ankle, briefly, a small and eager threat. A sliver of moon appeared, tactful above the scabrous bushes that ran the cliff.
“There’s a German scientist, arguably he was a Nazi, who says we can put a person on the moon by 1978.”
“I’ll be forty by then,” she said. “Speaking of other planets and the completely unknown.”
The remark was irrelevant—she felt it die. There was nothing inherently compelling about her being young, but it was the reigning god in her life, the thing from which came all permission and unhappiness.
“Where did you come from,” he said, both hands back in his pockets.
“Not far from here geographically, but very far from here. Do you know about my sister? About Charlie?”
“She was—is?—an aviator. Broke an Earhart record. If you don’t mind my saying, a raiser, manufacturer even, of hell.”
“Truly, she seized the means of production on hell. She wasn’t, in fact, raised naked in an outhouse. We come from people who care deeply about the appropriate silverware. My grandfather invented the question mark, was the town joke. What he actually did was, the second Sutter’s foreman had his lucky morning, before Polk had even made his announcement, he went up and down California, buying out all the shovels and trowels and importing more. And then he sold them for twenty times the cost. Some saloons, too, where the people who made money lost it.”
He nodded. She should go on.
“No,” she said. “What about you?”
Ohio, was all he would say. Son of Andrea and Frederich, brother of Sophie. Boy Scout Troop 46. Cabin in the mountains, quieter than the base though not the done thing. He acted as though he knew nothing about his life except what could be seen.
There was no discussion of leaving—he simply got into the car. Had she upset him, she wondered, as they coasted down the canyon, but then he placed two fingers on her earlobe and kept them there the whole drive back, a slight pressure that made her delirious, all of who they might be to each other imagined by that gesture.