Tillie hadn’t moved, and if it weren’t for Brett checking on her from time to time, I would have thought she was dead.
I propped myself up in the seat, and Brett sat down beside me. “She’s really out,” she said. “I think I get her home, I got to start her with rehab. I just hope to hell I got money to do rehab.”
“Just keep your spirits up,” I said.
“Honey, my spirits are so far down they got to look up to see my socks. And then they need binoculars.”
* * *
As nightfall came I began to get a chill. Leonard put his coat on me again, and Brett sat close, holding me. When it was dark enough, Leonard gave Irvin a little encouragement. “Let’s go, shitwipe.”
“Leonard missed his calling,” Brett said. “He should have been in the diplomatic corps.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s got a way with words.”
Irvin groaned, got up, and wandered into the open cabin. He sat down behind the controls. Leonard sat in the navigator’s seat. Irvin said back to us, “Remember, we don’t make it, it’s ’cause this bully made me fly without enough fuel.”
“We don’t make it,” Brett said, “it’s because your ass was drunk last night when we should have flown out.”
Irvin threw up his hands, shifted in his seat to face the controls. “All right,” he said. “Contact.”
The plane clanked across the rough ground, and when it lifted off it went up fast and at an angle so sharp I thought we were on our way to the moon. The windshield clattered like cold teeth rattling. The engines sounded like a chef chopping cucumbers into slices. The sides of the plane warped and waved.
The air had turned cooler, and up there it was cooler yet. I got the impression the wind was coming in through places that hadn’t been there when we left. As we climbed up, so did my sardines, but I fought them down just below my jawline, and when we finally leveled, I looked out my little window and saw the great blackness that was space and the fine white spots that were the stars.
“Jesus Christ,” I heard Herman say behind us. “Run this fucker smoother!”
“What you think you’re in?” Irvin yelled back. “A 747?”
We flew on and I drifted in and out, mostly out, as the jerks and drops of the plane would bring me awake as soon as I dozed off. I felt cold and feverish at the same time. I looked out the window and saw the night earth running along under us, the plane a great shadow against the moonlit ground.
“How are we?” I asked Brett.
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you were asleep. You missed being scared to death by a land rise, or as we say in East Texas, a mountain. We nearly ran into it. Someone, possibly Mexican Border Patrol, took a shot at us too. There’s a hole in the floor near the tail and we think the wing took a shot, and maybe one of the engines. You know that stuff I told you about never soiling my underwear. Well, I was wrong.”
“Got any more aspirins?”
“Yeah.” Brett pulled her pocket purse out of her coat and got out the aspirins and gave them to me. She went away then and came back with the canteen. I took a handful of aspirins and drank some water.
“What about Tillie?” I asked.
“Still out,” Brett said. “Had the shot been another three feet forward, she would have taken it. Shit, Hap. Is this going to end?”
I patted her leg and gave her back the canteen. I turned and looked toward the back. Bill and Herman were sitting in one of the long seats together. Red had one of his own, looking out the porthole, biting his nails. Somewhere along the way he’d lost his cowboy hat and his string tie. There was just him and the soiled suit now. I saw Tillie on the floor, still as the dead.
“Reckon if the Mexican Border Patrol took a shot at us a ways back, we’re in Texas now,” I said.
Irvin, having overheard us, called from up front. “Actually, we’re about to enter Texas. There’s a kind of gap in surveillance here, and if we fly low enough, we’re okay on radar.”
“So how much further to the landing strip?” Red called.
“Not much,” Irvin said. “We’ll be passing into Texas pretty soon, then we got to do a half circle away from where the law is thick, come into the airstrip low enough to pick vegetables, then I got to land this baby without wadding it up. Which, by the way, takes pretty good skill. The landing strip doesn’t have any lights, just a handful of reflectors.”
The moment Irvin finished his speech there was a sound like someone had fired a shotgun inside the plane. Briefly, I thought that’s exactly what had happened. We were tossed up and back down. I banged my head against the side of the plane, slid halfway to the floor, got my hands under me, pushed myself back into the seat, wished to hell there were seat belts.
Brett was on her knees in the aisle.
“Goddamn!” she said. “Goddamn!”
I reached out and got hold of her and pulled her into the seat, feeling my shoulder tear, my injured thigh stretch. Brett and I looked over our shoulders for Tillie. Tillie had somehow gotten turned longways and was sliding down the aisle toward us on her belly. I glanced at Leonard. He was turned around, riding his seat like a horse.
I heard Irvin say, “Oh shit,” and out of the corner of my eye I caught something, jerked my head for a better look. There was a flash of red and yellow on the wing and it swelled and turned orange and licked blue flames at its tips. The plane yawed and coughed and sputtered. The port engine was on fire.
