women, at least the few I talk to, went along only grudgingly. I feel a little bad every time I rub some of that lotion on my hands and neck I brought back from Portland, because I know it’s because it smells nice and not because my skin’s dry, though it is, at that.
The stranger watches the bartender pour his drink, then with it in hand, turns to me and smiles. “Not even a shot of Pepsi for fizz.” He turns to the tender, “could I get a glass of whiskey, too, to sharpen the edge? And one for the lady, if you’d please.” The tender, I think his name is Cole, though we’ve never really exchanged pleasantries, eyes the new fella, since it is a large order for a man he’s never seen (and can’t know if he has the paper to back it up). The new man reaches into his pocket and builds a stack of Sacajawea dollars ten high or more, and that’s good enough to get him scooting.
He turns back to me. “Blake.” He waits for me to reciprocate, and when I don’t he asks, “You always drink alone?”
I want to strike back at him with something about how if I’m drinking alone maybe I want to be alone, but the whiskey comes and I take a drag off it and swallow the poison. He seems to notice my reticence, and starts to stand up. “Well, my only purpose was picking up my drink, and buying you a whiskey, so to keep from bothering you I can finish my drink someplace else.”
“Wait,” I manage to get out, but because of the whiskey it’s deeper and gravellier than it should be; I almost sound like my father. “You can stay.”
“I was beginning to wonder if you were deaf or mute, and I was making an ass out of myself,” he thinks for a moment, “though I suppose it’s early yet to rule out the latter.” I smile, just a little, despite myself, and he notices. “So what do you do around here? Not that I think what a person does in any way defines them- it’s just trivia- making conversation.”
“Pilot,” I say. That’s usually the part of a conversation where someone puts it together, where they squint at me and through the haze of cigarette smoke and booze, remember the pictures from the newspapers, put away my wild red hair in a neat pony tail, mentally redress me in my old Air Force blues. Then the reactions polarize, into either hate or abject fear that they'll catch a bullet just for being near me.
“You’re shitting me. You work with one of the collectives or,” his eyes seem to light up, “you actually own your own plane?”
“Well, own’s a funny word.” I hesitate, but hell, it’s not like there’s enough government anymore that even grand theft airplane was going to be a crime anytime soon. “You ever heard of Crazy Kerry?” He stares dumbly at me. “A smut king. I met him in a place like this, further east. He owned a chain of strip-mall porn shops that were in danger of going under until-”
“The blink,” he says, and I don’t want to let on, but I’m grateful for the help.
“Because of the blink, all electronics went dead, which meant the internet was dead, too, and suddenly all those worthless magazines were worth a lot of money. He spent the first hour or so trying to talk me into ‘modeling.’ Apparently with his new-found wealth he’d gotten his hands on some old-school electricity-free cameras and wanted to make more porn. But as the night wore on and he got a few drinks into him, he reverted back into a human being, and more’s the pity, I happened to like the person he turned into. Things happened, and I even moved in with him for a spell.”
“He had a plane, old single-prop like my grandfather taught my dad and me to fly on to dust crops at his farm. Kerry used it to fly out deliveries and to drag those big obnoxious banners across the sky advertising his ‘merchandise.’ Since I could fly, I took to flying to earn my keep. He had it painted red, with little plastic horns glued onto the fuselage, and in white on the side its name was printed in blocky white text: Horny Little Devil.”
“I wish I could say I won it from him fair in a card game, but, one day I was flying a shipment down to Springfield, when I had some engine troubles and had to turn around. When I got back to his house, I found Kerry starring in some of his amateur porno with a couple whores from the port, and I got the impression it wasn’t the first time. So I took off in his plane. At the time I figured he’d been playing games of chance with my health, so he owed me, but I think I was just rationalizing.”
I’d finished my whiskey midway through the story, but Blake was polite enough to wait until I was done to ask Cole for another. Before he can pour it, Blake asks, “How much for the bottle?” Cole doesn’t say anything, just sets it down and takes the stack of Sacajaweas and retreats to the end of the bar. “Let’s get out of here,” he says, taking the bottle. “It’s a nice night, and my hotel has a great view from the roof.”
“That sounds safe,” I say.
“Funny, you didn’t strike me as a ‘safe’ kind of girl.”
“Careful, unless you want to find out how unsafe I can be.”
He grins. “That’s kind of what the whiskey’s for.”
Since this whole part of town runs off the same well, his hotel isn’t far off. In fact, it used to be just a big barn; a lot of the towns anymore are the same, since farms had some of the best gravity-based irrigation in the country. Combined with access to arable land, that’s food and water. There’s a ladder up to his third floor room where he grabs a pair of glasses, and from there we climb out a window up onto the roof.
He pours me a drink, and asks, “How’d you become a pilot?”
“Cop-out is I was an Air Force brat, but,” I swallow, because I’m not sure how much I want to share. “I became a pilot to get above things, gain perspective. My dad was a great pilot, but he was also an alcoholic and once he even hit my mom. Up in the air, all that mattered was that he really did try to do the best for us. I always loved flying for that. You can get away from whatever is bothering you- but it isn’t like you’re running, because eventually, you always have to come back down. So it forces you to think. It takes away your burdens for a while so you can collect yourself, but you know you’ll have to shoulder them again soon, because you're gonna run out of fuel. Flying is probably the only thing that’s kept me sane all these years.”
He spends a long time looking up at the sky, and the moon, looking like it was getting closer every minute, before he says, “You’re that pilot, aren’t you?”
My shoulders tense; getting my ass kicked on a roof doesn’t sound like the best night of my life- though it probably wouldn’t be the worst. “There’s no bounty on me, if that’s what you’re thinking. Or do you just want to take a swing at me?” Wouldn’t be the first time for either.
He narrows his eyes. “No. Why-” he stops himself short, “yeah, I guess some people might react that way. But you don’t seem like a, well, a crazy person. And you flew for the Air Force, right? I am curious, though. Did you know? I mean, you were a bomber pilot, so obviously it was a bomb, but did you know what it would do?”
“Even the scientists didn’t know. They thought- they were sure it was just going to knock out power in the city, maybe the state, which for some reason the Colombians call Departments. Nobody, not even the cranks, were talking about pissing off the ionosphere or causing permanent, rolling geomagnetic storms. But I didn’t know any of that. As far as I was told it was just another bomb, dropped on just another bombing run in the war on drugs and piracy. Except- how familiar are you with history?”
“Some,” he says.
“Well, when the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the pilots were told to get altitude and distance, then shut everything down. They had to turn the plane into a glider, because they thought the bomb would cause an electromagnetic pulse and kill all the electrical equipment, and maybe the engines, too. Our mission had similar directions, only when you’re flying a B-2 the entire thing is electric. Gliding that for any length of time is a hell of a prospect. We did as we were told, but when we tried to restart our electrical system and the engine, sparks shot out of the control panel and fried everything. We were dead in the air. We managed to ditch in the gulf; we sti
ll thought the B-2 needed to be protected and secretive, because it would be important to national defense.” I sigh; that was the last time a B-2 would ever fly, and I loved those damn things.
“A fishing trawler picked us up. We tried to radio for assistance, for the Coast Guard cutter that was supposed to be our lifeline, but their electronics were fried, too. The trawler got us to Guatemala, and that’s where it became evident that something very wrong had happened. Electronics everywhere were down. At first we thought terrorists, you know? You might be too young to remember how preoccupied with drugs and terrorists we were.”
“I’m not that young.”
“We caught a bus headed north, and pretty quickly we realized it wasn’t terrorists, because nobody was this organized. Power was out in all of Central America- but what was telling is even battery-operated electronics, like the radio on the bus, were down. The digital world disappeared overnight. There was chaos.”
“Because of that it took a bit of doing getting back across the border, then back to base. We were arrested. There was some kind of investigation. Some jag from JAG even called me al Qaeda. I think the bosses were mulling over letting our B-2 crew fry for their new weapon malfunctioning when one of the eggheads who