Training my eyes on the cement-block washateria that served the trailer park, I started walking. The TV said you should ignore bullies and they would stop harassing you. In practice this worked about half the time. The other half, you ended up with two tall boys shadowing you through a trailer park, their fingers taking little nips at your clothes, like dogs. But today the advice worked. Aaron picked up a handful of gravel and threw it at Ben’s crotch, then took off running. Ben chased him. They faded into the trailer park.
I felt relieved until I touched the permission form in my pocket again. Please be home. Now that the confrontation with my mother was imminent, my stomach twisted. Suddenly I was not in such a hurry. Anyway, if she happened to be home, she couldn’t escape me. There was only one road into the trailer park and one road out. I dragged my feet around the washateria to the side where the mailboxes were set into the wall so they were harder to break into, and unlocked ours with my teeth gritted. I had been checking the mail since I was ten because my mom never did. I’d been the bearer of bad news for the last three evictions, and I always expected that business-size envelope. There wasn’t one today, only junk, which I dumped in the trash. The nicer sections of Heaven Beach placed recycling bins next to the trash cans. The trailer park did not recycle.
Please be home. I fished my cigarettes out of my purse and lit one, relaxing into the first rush of nicotine. Back in our last town, my boyfriend had snuck cigarettes to me. Now that I had to buy them, they were a huge ding in my paycheck. I had tried to quit, but they were the only thing I looked forward to every day besides watching airplanes. Please be home. I entered the dark opening in the woods. Gravel crunched under my feet. Country music blasted from a trailer even though all the windows were shut. At least I knew someone was home. If Ben or Aaron came back, I could call for help if I needed it. Of course, my mom had called for help plenty of times in trailer parks when no one had come. Please be home.
I reached our lot, rounded the palmettos, and stopped short. A car older than me, faded red with a blue passenger door, was parked in the dirt yard. My mom didn’t have a car. A shirtless man with a long, gray ponytail edged out of the trailer, onto the wobbly cement blocks stacked as stairs, holding one end of the TV that had appeared soon after we moved in last month. We were being robbed again. Nicotine pumped through me and made me dizzy as I turned to run for the country music trailer.
Then the man was backing down the stairs, and my mom appeared in the doorway on the other end of the TV. I didn’t recognize her at first. She’d been a bleach blonde the last time I saw her a few days ago. Now she was a bright redhead. I knew it was her by the way she walked.
I exhaled smoke. The man must be my mom’s boyfriend. She’d said we were moving here to Heaven Beach because he was going to get her a job at the restaurant where he worked. But she hadn’t gotten a job yet, and he hadn’t come over while I was home. I’d begun to think she’d made him up. Sometimes we moved because a boyfriend said he would get her a job. Sometimes this was what she told me at first, but I’d find out later we’d really moved because she’d owed someone money.
She must have been telling the truth this time. A TV was the first thing she asked for from her boyfriends because she knew I loved it. It kept me company. It was also the first thing to get pawned because it was worth so much cash and was easy to carry. The refrigerator had been pawned only once.
“Hey, hon!” my mom called to me. “Open that door for Billy, would you?”
I opened the driver’s door of the car and leaned the seat forward so they could wrangle the TV into the back. They had a hard time of it, cussing at each other. The TV was almost as big as the backseat itself. They propped one end inside. My mom held it while Billy sauntered around the car. While she was bent over like that, it was obvious her shorts were too tight, but she still had a great figure for a mom. She should have, since she was only thirty.
Finally she straightened, left the door propped open for Billy to slide into the driver’s seat, and turned to me. “You look so pretty today! Give me a hug.”
I walked into her embrace and felt my whole body relax, just like after my first puff on a cigarette. At the same time, I held my lit butt way out so it wouldn’t set her hair on fire. I wasn’t trying to hide the cigarette. I’d gotten over my fear of her seeing me smoking. I’d thought at first that she’d be mad, but she’d walked in on me smoking a couple of times and hadn’t said a word.
She squeezed me and let me go. “I’m sorry we have to take the TV. Billy needs to make a car payment.”
This was either a lie or just stupid. Who would make payments on this car?
“It’ll only be for a few weeks,” she said, “until he gets paid.”
Also a lie or stupid. Pawnshops didn’t work this way. They would give Billy so little money for this TV and charge him such high interest to retrieve it that I would never see it again. Besides, if he didn’t have enough money to live on now, this was not going to change the next time he got a paycheck. I’d been through this scenario with my mom and her boyfriends enough times to predict the outcome. I was never sure whether she didn’t know or didn’t care or simply saw no way out.
She flinched and her eyes snapped skyward as a plane roared overhead. The trailer park was at the end of the airstrip where the planes landed. The prickly forest shielded the trailers from some of the noise, so the planes could sneak up like this. The unlikely piece of machinery suddenly appeared overhead and loomed in the sky as if by magic, slow enough to look like it ought to fall, loud enough to vibrate the corrugated metal of the trailers. Adrenaline rushed through my veins, like nicotine but better.
“God, I hate those fucking airplanes,” my mom said. “Billy’s going to get me that job soon and we’ll move someplace nice, I promise.”
“Okay,” I said with no emotion. She said stuff like this all the time. Occasionally she really did get a job, but the longest she lasted was a month. I watched the plane until it dropped behind a stand of pines. Even after that I could hear the engine, and I looked in the direction of the airstrip where it had gone.
“Wait a minute,” my mom said. “You have some money you could give to Billy.”
My cigarette had burned down to the filter. I took a drag anyway as I turned back to my mom, concentrating on not glancing down at my pocket where all my money was. Exhaling smoke, I asked casually, “From the airport? I don’t make very much. They take out taxes. And I’m already paying the power and the water.”
The afternoon light glinted weirdly off the creases in her heavy blue eye shadow as she considered me skeptically. “You work there every day after school and all weekend long.”
“Actually…” I was horrified at how easily the lie came out. “I’m not working half the time I’m there. They won’t give me enough hours. My boyfriend works there, and I hang out with him.”
“Really,” my mom said, raising her penciled eyebrows. “What’s his name?”
Mark. Mark was the obvious answer, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell that fib. Before I knew what I was saying, this came out: “Grayson Hall. His dad owns the airplanes that tow the advertising banners at the beach.”
“I hate those things,” she said. “But a boy like that, maybe he’ll stay in school and amount to something.”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling sick.
“Sheryl,” Billy called from inside the car. “This year.”
“See you soon, hon,” my mom said. She air-kissed her fingertips and blew the kiss to me, then shuffled around the car, kicking up dust, and got in on the other side.
Waving to the car as it disappeared into the forest, I realized I was still holding a dead cigarette. Normally I would have taken it inside, made sure the fire was out, and deposited the butt in the trash. Today I tossed it onto the dirt along with countless butts from my mom and everyone who’d ever lived here, then climbed the cement blocks and went inside the trailer.
The wall where the TV had been looked bare, eve
n though it wasn’t. Before the TV had appeared, my mom had hung my first-, second-, and third-grade school photos there in frames. Fourth grade was the year she started saying the school was gouging her and the pictures were highway robbery. My newly exposed smiling faces watched me as I passed through the combined den and kitchen. I escaped down the hall and into my bedroom, where I opened my dresser drawer and pulled out the trailer lease agreement. My mom threw stuff like this away. I tried to snag it from her first. Sometimes having the paperwork helped when a landlord wanted to kick us out. This time it would help me forge her signature.
I pulled the permission form out of my pocket and unfolded it. For something to press down on, I drew the magazine off the top of my dresser: last month’s issue of Plane & Pilot, which I’d borrowed from the airport office. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. I liked to read the articles in bed at night. They kept me company. I’d always intended to take the magazine back. Suddenly I felt like a thief.
And I wasn’t done. Watching my mom’s signature on the lease, I copied the S in Sheryl onto the permission form. It wasn’t a perfect imitation. My hand shook. But Mr. Hall wouldn’t have her signature on file for comparison like the school did. I copied heryl. I was going to get in trouble for this. It would come back to haunt me, I knew. I copied the J in Jones. The alternative was to stay on the ground and never go up in an airplane. I copied ones. Go ahead and fork over my last dollar to my mom so she and Billy or whoever her boyfriend was that month could fund a party with my money, he could get a new fishing rod and a shotgun, they could pawn it all for beer money or for crack if he was one of those boyfriends, then try to win the money back at the Indian casino in North Carolina. I underlined Sheryl Jones just as she did, like an eighth grader still in love with her own signature.
I pocketed the form. With the magazine under my elbow, I locked the trailer door behind me and walked to work. I skirted just beyond reach of my neighbor’s chained pit bull, prompting the dog to bark and lunge maniacally at me. As I popped out of the forest, into the long, wide clearing, the barking was drowned out by an airplane engine. The World War II Stearman biplane that Mark’s uncle once used for crop dusting was coming in for a landing.
Mark had told me that his uncle, Mr. Simon, had bought three Air Tractors just recently—the ugliest planes I’d seen at the airport yet, with ridiculously long noses and harsh angles, painted garish yellow. Now that Mr. Simon used those monstrosities for crop dusting, he’d converted the biplane back into a passenger plane so one of the crop-duster pilots could give tourists a joyride.
The biplane was beautiful, the huge motor in the nose balanced by the long wings above and below. It looked like it had soared out of a time machine. I watched it sail downward and held my breath for the crash—but planes always seemed to me like they should crash. None of them had actually crashed while I’d been a witness. The biplane skimmed to a smooth landing and slowed. I tripped and realized I’d stumbled out of the long grass and onto the asphalt tarmac.
Way in the distance, the men of the airport lounged in rocking chairs on the office porch. Mr. Hall. The Admiral, an actual retired admiral who looked anything but in his cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirt. Mr. Simon, looking exactly like the owner of a crop-dusting business in overalls and a baseball hat from an airplane manufacturer. Another retired Navy guy—Heaven Beach was a popular place for them to settle. The jet pilot for one of the local corporations. As I drew close, several of them turned to watch me.
As I reached hearing distance, all of them watched me, and they fell completely silent. I was sure they were staring at the copy of Plane & Pilot under my arm. I hoped my elbow covered the label with the airport address. I stepped under the awning.
Mr. Hall said, “Hello, Leah.”
“Hello, Leah. Good afternoon, Leah,” came a chorus of voices.
I grinned blankly, staring past them at the runway, as I backed through the glass door.
The town sent one of their maintenance guys, Leon, to take care of the airport when I wasn’t around. He put chocks under airplane wheels just fine, but he didn’t have the greatest telephone skills, and I’d made him promise never to touch the files because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he could read. I took the keys and the airport cell phone from him. After he left, I listened to the messages he’d let go to voice mail. As I called a man back about renting a hangar and went over the lease agreement with him, my skin caught on fire. If I got caught forging my mother’s name on Mr. Hall’s permission form, I couldn’t very well claim I was only fourteen years old and didn’t understand what was legal in paperwork and what wasn’t.
I tried to forget it and play friendly airport hostess as I greeted a millionaire jetting in for a weekend vacation with his family. I called the town’s only limo service to come pick them up. I made fresh coffee in the break room. I wiped the whole office down, even the empty rooms. After the old men left the porch and I was pretty sure nobody was watching, I slipped the copy of Plane & Pilot back onto a table in the lobby.
For the last hour and a half the office was open, I sat in a rocking chair on the porch in the hot afternoon, watching the occasional air traffic. The office was set slightly ahead of the straight line of hangars. Beyond the brick corners of the building, I couldn’t always see who was prepping a plane to go up. I loved when an engine suddenly roared to life, startling me, and the plane taxied to the end of the runway. It revved its motor, then sped toward me and lifted with no additional noise at all, like a car driving up a hill, except there was nothing underneath but the runway and then grass and then trees and then—I couldn’t see where it went.
At two minutes until closing time, I lit a cigarette. Mr. Hall’s truck still sat outside his hangar, but he might close up and go home at any moment. Then I would lose another night of sleep and go through this whole ordeal again tomorrow. I had told him I would be back today with my signed permission form, but maybe he didn’t believe I would get my mother to sign it. And he would be correct. Please don’t leave.
Exactly at closing time, I stubbed out my cigarette in the urn of sand outside the office door and walked over to the Hall Aviation hangar. I’d learned the hard way yesterday not to bang on the outer door, because this just annoyed Mr. Hall. The screech as the door opened was warning enough for him. I walked on in. Beyond the shadows of the airplanes, he looked up from his desk inside his bright glassed-in office in the corner and swept his hand toward the empty seat.
I dug in my pocket for the money and the permission form, unfolding them and handing them over as I sat down.
He set them aside without looking at them. “You’re back.”
“Yes, sir.” Why had he placed my money and the form to one side? Did he already know the signature was a fake? I forced myself to calm down and concentrate on his face, as if I actually wanted to have a conversation with him.
He was in his late forties, like the parents of fourteen-year-olds ought to be. I could tell his hair used to be blond and curly like Grayson’s, but it was turning white, and he’d cut it so short that it looked almost straight. I could also tell he used to be hot like Grayson. The traces of a strong chin and high cheekbones were still there in his weathered face, but he seemed to have gained a lot of weight quickly. His face was misshapen with it now, and the roll didn’t sit right around his gut.
“I figured you’d be back,” he said. “How are you liking your job over at the office?”
I loved my job. It was the best thing I’d ever done. But I knew that would sound weird and overeager. Basically all I did was sit on my ass over there. I said, “It’s going okay.”
“The airport old-timers have a joke about you.”
He meant the men who talked on the porch. I stiffened, bracing to get made fun of even here at the airport, where I had felt relatively safe.
He rumbled on, “We’re remembering something that happened fifteen years ago, and somebody will say, ‘Ask Leah.’ Get it? You do such a good job and know e
verything that’s going on. We’ve never had anybody like you running the office before.”
“Oh, ha-ha,” I said. The joke wasn’t funny, but he was trying to pay me a compliment. Which was ridiculous, because anybody could have done the job I was doing if they’d cared. Though, come to think of it, maybe caring was the secret ingredient.
“Why do you want to be a pilot?”
I opened my mouth. This was a test, and I shouldn’t hesitate with an answer. The truth was, I didn’t understand the question. I was here for one lesson. One. Maybe in my fantasies over the last month, I had pictured myself with a job as an airline pilot, in a dark blue uniform, with my hair tucked and sprayed into submission under a neat brimmed hat, standing in the doorway to the cockpit and greeting passengers as they boarded, all of them looking me up and down and mistrusting a small woman, but deciding to give me their confidence because of the uniform and the vast airplane that was all mine to fly. At least, that’s how I pictured an airline flight starting. I’d never flown before. I’d only seen it on TV. Maybe my fantasy was stupid.
On a sigh I said, “I like airplanes.”
He raised his white-blond brows at me, not helping me at all, waiting for me to continue.
I swallowed. “I’ve always lived near the airport.”
“Really?” he asked, furrowing his brow now, confused.
“Not this airport,” I clarified. “Other airports. I move a lot. The last one was at the Air Force base, and I got closer than I’d ever been to an airplane. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
This he understood, nodding slowly.
“When I moved here, I got the job at the office. Now I’m not just hearing the airplanes and seeing a flash of them above me through the trees. I watch them take off and land. They look like they shouldn’t be able to fly.”
He laughed. Though he cut himself off quickly, pressing his lips together, I could tell he was trying not to grin. “Let me tell you something, Leah. Years ago, this place was crawling with kids wanting to be pilots. There were four folks doing your job, two in the office and two on the tarmac. That rabbit warren of empty rooms you’re in charge of was full of business. But since 9/11 and the bad publicity about airports and a couple of recessions, not as many people want to take flying lessons.”