Flight Time

Carl and Tara didn’t really start talking into each other until about thirty minutes into the actual flight. They were flying direct from Texarkana, Arkansas to Las Vegas, Nevada, where they were going to get married, despite their vast difference in age.

Carl was hunched over looking out the window to his left. He patted Tara on her knee, which made her jump a tiny bit, and said, “I’ve ridden on these puddle jumpers probably three hundred times and they still scare the you-know-what out of me.”

“See, I like them because it feels like you’re actually really flying,” said Tara, folding her flimsy Wired magazine and sliding it into the back of the seat in front of her. “Those gigantic jumbo jets feel, I don’t know, super stationary the whole time, except for when you’re taking off and landing.”

Carl turned and looked at her. “When the hell did you ride on a jumbo jet? You’re barely old enough to eat hard candy.”

“My dad took me to Lisbon for my sixteenth.”

“I bet he did,” said Carl. “When was that, last week?”

“You better hope not,” Tara said, elbowing him a harder than she intended.

“Last thing in the world I need,” Carl said. “Another free trip to the zoo.”

They held hands and their collective hand dangled awkwardly over the edge of the arm rest between them until Tara unclasped her hand and lifted the arm rest and then reclasped Carl’s hand and let their collective hand rest on his knee.

“Does this mess up your probation at all?” Tara asked him.

“It does if I get caught. But the only person who’d catch me is Danny, and I got Danny right here until I decide to let him out,” Carl said, patting the buttoned-up top left pocket of his rodeo shirt. Danny was Carl’s parole officer and also the boyfriend of Carl’s sister Gina, who was, in turn, was married to Tara’s father Gideon.

“You know you never did tell me what you got in trouble for,” Tara said.

“That’s what you call a deliberate omission of information, sugar booger,” Carl said, flipping their hands over and stroking her palm with his thumb, which looked at once long and stubby.

“Don’t call me sugar booger.”

“What’s wrong with sugar booger, sugar?”

“It reminds me of Dad. He calls cocaine booger sugar.”

“Your daddy has used every slang syllable for cocaine under the sun, moon, and stars at some point in his life. Back when we were doing our thing, we used to mostly call it Benny Blanco, from that Pacino movie with what’s-his-nuts in it as the cokehead lawyer who gets blasted at the end.”

They drifted into a little swath of silence. The midday clouds below and around the plane looked impoverished and ugly.

“What did you do?” Tara said.

“What did I do what?”

“What did you go to jail for?”

“Shit, I don’t know…” Carl said, fidgeting like a hamster now. “Okay, you want to know the truth? A bunch of boring-ass stuff that just kinda collected over the years. There was no like major offense or anything. A whole bunch of too much this or not enough that. Stupid stuff, really. Kind of embarrassing, to be honest with you. I wish I could just say, yeah, I robbed a bank, but then that’d just make me a liar, which I guess ain’t a crime, thank fucking God.”

Tara contemplated this. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“Oh God,” Carl said, beginning to enjoy this. “Ten-way tie, really.”

“Just like a shitty horse race,” Tara said, smiling.

Carl loved Tara’s smile. It was the smile of someone who was twenty-one on the dot but already well aware of the bare-knuckle ruthlessness of life. Tara had asked Carl a dozen times over the two months that they had really come to know each what the favorite thing was that he liked about her, and he had lied every single time and said something other than her smile, for fear of introducing any self-awareness to it, which might mess it up somehow. He had said, her legs was his favorite thing about her, or her ass, or her boobies, or her eyes, or her hair, and he had even thrown out a few super specific things (the back of her neck, her upper lip, how her ankles segue into her calves real nicely, et cetera, et cetera), but it was her smile that at once made him feel like he had won the lotto, and it also instilled a fiery lust in him.

Tara said to him, “C’mon, Old Man, tell me one real bad thing that you did.”

Carl did not at all like it when Tara called him Old Man because, at the age of sixty-seven, he was indeed an old man.

“On Christmas Eve, 1984, I beat a guy to death with a golf club in a pool hall in western Massachusetts.”

“Bull-fuckin’-shit.”

“I am as serious as a brain tumor.”

“How did that happen?”

“Long story.”

“Long flight.”

“Not it’s not,” Carl said. “We’ll be on the ground before you can say Hocus Pocus Abracadabra.”

“Yeah, maybe if we crash.”

“Planes don’t crash at this altitude. Unless they’re zapped by lightning or another plane goes slammin’ into them.” Carl said, punching the palm of his hand for effect.

Tara very briefly thought of what it’d be like if another plane flew into them right now at this moment. Probably your brain would just go haywire and none of it would really register. It was horrifying to think about, that’s for sure. Her thoughts ambled elsewhere.

“You ever seen a UFO?” She asked Carl.

“I’ve been staring at the sky my whole damn life and I have not seen one flying object that I could not identify. Plane after plane after plane after satellite.”

“Bummer. Any ghosts or Bigfoot or anything?”

“Nope. I had a TV turn on by itself once and that is about it. How about you? Ever been ab-ducted?”

“Yeah, but not by aliens.”

Carl did not at all like it when their cartoonish conversations veered into the realm of seriousness, so he changed the subject.

“I really do like your hair. Bold burgundy.”

Tara had chopped off her hair two days ago and died it auburn, or, yeah, bold burgundy, according to the box.

“Oh, you like it now. Two days ago you said it was interesting.”

“Where I come from, interesting is a very positive adjective.”

“Where do you come from?”

“You really wanna know? One day many, many moons ago, way back in the 1953, my mother was out shopping for a new car, and she thought she really had to go to the bathroom…”

“Shut up. God, you’re such a cornball.”

“I’m serious! What do you think Carl is short for? Car Lot. On account of that’s where I came squirtin’ out. Car Lot Jenkins.”

Tara wished he had not reminded her of what will be her new last name sooner than later. She started chewing on her thumbnail.

“I’m just fucking with you, baby,” said Carl. “I was born on Barksdale Air Force base in Bossier City, Louisiana. Right side of the tracks, wrong side of the river.”

Tara leaned up in her seat and turned to face him and said, “Do you think I have a shitty memory or something? Do you think I’ve just got rocks and garbage and dead bugs up here?” she said, tapping her head.

Carl was taken aback by this question, but he kept his cool. “I think you make that ol’ boy Dumbo look like a shoebox full of pistachio shells, that’s what I think. You got a spooky good memory, baby. Freaks me out sometimes, to be honest. And I think that brain of yours is probably the most adroit critter in the galaxy.”

Tara smiled and settled back into her seat, loosely wondering what the word adroit meant. Carl did the same and discreetly sighed. A hokey duo of esoteric dings sounded from unseen speakers, probably indicating either you could move about the cabin or not move about the cabin.

“It’s weird…” Tara said to Carl. “Because of the glow, you look sort of pixilated right now.”

“I look pixilated?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“Maybe I am pixilated. Maybe that’s all this is, just a big computer game or something.”

“Just as viable to think that than think whatever else, really.”

“Amen.”

Tara further contemplated all this and said, “What if we’re stuck in a video game that our, like, I don’t know, future relatives come up with, and the name of the game is Faith, and the whole game is just everyone running around trying to make each other lose faith or gain faith…”

“Faith in what exactly?”

“Faith in religion,” Tara said. “Faith in the Christian God, you know, faith in God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and all that.”

“Gotcha. Continue.”

“I mean, that’s it. I’m just saying, it’d be kinda weird if all this was a video game.”

“It’d be a goddamn nightmare is what it’d be,” Carl said, wrangling with the tiniest shard of a nascent existentialist crisis.

Tara noticed his mild but visible discomfort. She was about to open her mouth and change the subject, but Carl said, “Did I ever tell you that me and Gina have a half-sister named Hope and another one—from a totally different mother, of course—named Faith?”

Tara could tell when Carl was joking or being corny and when he was serious.

“Ain’t that some shit?” Carl said.

“Hope and Faith,” Tara said, pondering this. “Do they know each other well?”

“No clue. I haven’t seen either one since Super Bowl Thirty, whenever that was. 1996. Downtown Larry Brown was the MVP. God…Thinking about Diana Ross doing her little shimmy during halftime still gives me a little bit of a baton rouge, if you know what I mean.”

Tara knew what he meant. She leaned over him and looked out the widow and said, “How high do you think we are?”

“High enough to make a big-ass splat if we fall out of this sucker.”

“I’m serious, what are we, like, thirty thousand feet?”

“Probably about that, yeah. Thirty thousand feet.”

“How many miles is that?”

“I have no idea.”

Tara chinned at him and said, “Diana Ross, huh? You like hanging out in the spice rack, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“When was the last time you dated a girl the same color as you?”

“Baby, I glow in the dark. Nobody’s the same color as me.”

“When was the last time you dated a white girl?”

Carl tilted his head at her and said, “You ain’t white?”

“Nope.”

“That is what, in some social circles, they call a big fat bummer.”

“Oh, hush,” Tara said. “No fault of mine my ancestors weren’t squid people like yours.”

“No, I guess not. I was wondering where your tan lines ran off to. Guess that explains it.”

“Babette, you know, my actual mom, is from Trinidad by way of basically everywhere, and you know what Dad is.”

“What is Gideon? I’ve known that prick for forty years, and I know where he grew up and everything, but to be truthful, I don’t know basically nothing about where he’s from.”

“He was born in Curitiba, in Brazil, but his dad was allegedly German, but nobody really knows. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

“Ah, not all panthers are pink,” Carl said, half cryptic, half joking. “You ever take one of them spit tests?”

“Nope.”

“Hell, you ought to. Be kinda neat just to see where you’re from.”

“I crawled out of a test tube in Bethesda, Maryland.”

“Yeah, you did,” Carl said, glancing over at the flight attendant’s legs as she glided down the aisle, head swiveling. “I actually took a spit test year before last.”

“Oh, yeah? And what it’d tell you?” Tara said, playing along.

“What I already knew.”

“And what’d you already know?”

“That I am one hundred percent Comanche.”

It took Tara a second to remember what a Comanche is and then she made a fake laughing sound.

“I’m serious, Kemosabe!” Carl said. “I go to pay the ol’ boy that gave me the test, and I ask him, straight-faced and all, just like this, I ask him, Dr. Clay—that was his name, Dr. Morris Clay—I said, Dr. Clay, you prefer cash or check or women or stolen horses?”

“God, shut uppp…”

“But, check this out, that ol’ boy threw it right back at me too. He goes, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Jenkins, but we only accept scalps and thundersticks,’ just like that. I’ll never forget.”

“Elle-oh-elle.”

“I mean, it is partially true. According to my saliva, I’m English, Irish, Scottish, Choctaw, Cree, with some Mediterranean stuff mixed in.”

“Typical American mutt.”

“Pretty much.” Carl said. “You got, what, four brothers and sisters? Gina had two, I think, before she met Gideon, and Gideon had, what, two also, correct?”

“I have six brothers and sisters, not counting the abortions.”

Carl wanted to maneuver away from this topic carefully and speedily but Tara beat him to it. “If there was one thing you could go back and change,” she said. “What would it be?”

“Probably proposing to you over a goddamn bowl of cold miso soup.”

“Aw, that’s sweet,” Tara said, kissing him on the cheek. “It wasn’t cold, though, it was room temperature.”

“Must’ve been a cold room,” Carl said. “I just wish it could’ve been something, I don’t know, more special. Something memorable, like the swordfish at that joint in Destin we went to that time.”

“I still can’t believe that motel.”

“You and me both,” said Carl, following it with a sleazy whistle. “Of the seven zillion bags-of-bones on this planet, I guarantee you I’m on the only one that ever had to declare bankruptcy because of period sex.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“Looked like the last five minutes of Jaws in there.”

“Hey, that was your idea,” Tara said. “I warned you.”

“I know you did, baby. I’m just giving you a hard time,” Carl said, wincing at the memories of the smell of blood. “The thing that pissed off was that little passo-aggro poofer working the front desk. He was about one thank you sir from getting the snot bubbles whipped out of him.”

“And those Mexican dudes in the Porsche who thought we were drug dealers.”

“Those dudes were not Mexican, baby, they were Salvadoran. And that wasn’t a Porsche, that was a Nissan 370Z, which actually does kind of look like a 911. And we are drug dealers, baby. Or at least one of us is.”

Tara worked as a bottle girl on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at an overpriced club called Score, and she made additional dough selling a brand new designer drug called Quetzolethalcol, or Lethal, as it had been mercifully shortened to on the street. Lethal made you feel like a winged jellyfish for about six endless hours and then it dropped you into a sea of battery acid. The sheer brutality of its comedown was responsible for about once suburban suicide a week and, according to the few eager beaver scientists that were studying it, Lethal killed somewhere between one million to two million human brain cells per dosage. It was not a good drug, but it was cheap to make and you could sell it at a high price. Carl had worked seven different jobs in the last six months and had not had more than five thousand dollars in his bank account since 1988. It was his idea that Tara start peddling Lethal. “Your teeny bopper amigos will go nutso for it,” he had told her, over a bottle of Crown Apple, which he had requested Tara swipe from her place of work. “I’m just saying you might want to get yourself a bigger piggy bank.”

That had been back in November. And now it was April and they were on their way to Vegas to get married. Tara’s ears popped. The plane was beginning to make its slo-mo descent. The captain got on the horn and started mumbling something about the arrival time and the outside temperature in Las Vegas.

Tara stretched and yawned real big so her ears would finish popping.

“The golf club you killed the guy with…”

“What about it?”

“What kind was it?”

“Like, what brand was it?”

“No, I mean, was it a 9-iron or a putter or what?”

“Oh. It was a 3-iron,” Carl said. “Only reason I ever knew it was a 3-iron because I had to memorize that crime report like it was the damn Canterbury Tales… Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Three strikes, he’s out. Just like MLB.”

“Interesting.”

“That it was.”

“My brother-in-law got killed with a bowling bowl in a batting cage in Cairo, Georgia.”

“Did he now?”

“Yep. It was pretty gnarly,” Tara said, nodding her head.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Carl, half-turning to face her. “Look, baby, you ever hear that expression, don’t bullshit a bullshitter? One of these days, I’m gonna sit you down and teach how to tell a proper lie.”

“How did I mess this one up?”

“Well, first of all, the six or seven people who live there don’t call it Kie-ro, they call it Kay-ro. And second of all, there’s an old antiquated Biscuitville County blue law that prohibits bowling bowls in batting cages.”

“I’m gonna barf all over you one day,” Tara said. “Just giving you a heads up.”

“I will most certainly deserve it.”

Tara leaned over him and looked out the window again. The ground way down beneath them was khaki colored.

“I wish it was nighttime,” she said. “America looks so fucking stupid from way up here at night. Stupid towns, stupid cities.”

“Spastic asterisks, every one of them,” said Carl.

“Ten-lane roads to everywhere and nowhere.”

“Zillions of lamps and lights, illuminating precisely nada.”

“Everybody in their car or on their phone or both.”

“Total detachment, AKA the American Dream.”

Tara kissed Carl. It was an arid, directionless kiss with travel breath and smacking sounds.

“Let’s go fight some battles together,” she said.

Carl grunted in accord. They settled into their seats and each of their minds drifted into the pseudo-consciousness that rules supreme at high altitudes.