Big Sky
BIG SKY
"You'll live," said the guy who owns the Crabapple Cove Cafe. "It just doesn't feel like it yet."
He'd been an army surgeon in Vietnam, so John supposes the old man knew what he was talking about, but looking at the scarred topography of his knee, he isn't sure. The scar twists to follow the path the surgeons had taken to pin, staple, and weld the bones back together, and when he'd first woken up from the surgery he'd looked at his knee and made the old joke about setting off metal detectors, then told the orthopedist to get the fuck out of his room.
So, yeah, he'd lived and he's still living, which surprises him sometimes. On Nantucket of all places, but his first days here had felt like slow death between the boredom and the pain of PT and the boredom again, with the house suffocating around him and the entire island like a cage.
They still feel that way.
Today he's been out of his mind with frustration, not even being able to pace without his knee wanting to splinter, planning how to kill his physical therapist, when he stalks outside and down his driveway, uneven crunch... crunch crunch of clamshell as his left leg struggles to keep up with his right.
Halfway down he hears the rumbly, deep tenor hum of an engine and looks up and sees it, ungainly and beautiful in the blue sky, its propellers eating the air.
* * *
Rodney goes back to his place that evening, complaining that between Cash's constant demands for food, water, playing, going outside, and trying to shove Rodney's laptop off his lap to make him do any one of these things, he hasn't been able to get anything done. John is secretly, horribly relieved by this, but when he collapses into bed that night, he can smell Rodney everywhere and can practically see him, sharking one of John's t-shirts to sleep in, peering critically at the journal he's left on the bedside table, mouth moving with mostly-soundless words in the way that always makes John want to kiss him.
He turns off the light, turns over so he's facing the door, away from the side of the bed that's still rumpled from Rodney's presence there. Cash jumps up, huffs softly as he rearranges the covers, and collapses in a heap, a familiar and sturdy warmth.
And Rodney would be warm and sturdy too, and John would stretch himself all along Rodney's shoulders, spine, his legs, and under his t-shirt, John's borrowed t-shirt, he'd be fire, or something electric covered up by skin.
John sighs. Cash, who like all dogs can fall asleep whenever he wants, snores softly.
He's spent five days banging around Maine, on charter for a hydrologic survey of some lakes in the Hundred Mile Wilderness. It's the longest he's been gone since he got Cash, but it’s the being away from Rodney that unsettles him in a way he doesn't like thinking about. The memory of seeing Rodney there, half-asleep on his couch when John got home this afternoon, wants to settle the anxiety back down, but can't quite manage it.
* * *
He has to wait until he's out of the brace and out of his therapist's clutches, but in six months he finds himself behind the controls of a Grumman G44A. It's a pain to get back to the mainland and out to Methuen where he can take lessons, but it's a good sort of pain.
And flying again is flying, the instructor's voice fading out until it's him and the sky and maybe not the blind speed of a fighter jet, but he's unanchored, free, and the clouds and the cold, high air shiver over him, and the rest of the world is far below, with its hills and small, unexpected cliffs lacing the Merrimack River Valley. A quieter freedom, maybe, but he'll take it, his instructor running him through on-water landing procedure and though he's never done it he knows, how the world speeds up as he descends, faster faster faster with the runway a river’s silver strip stretching out in front of him, and landing on the water isn’t the harsh jolt of concrete but a glide as though across ice or glass, before settling, the water cupping the hull and holding him afloat.
* * *
John persuades Rodney to meet him for coffee the next morning under pretense of returning his journal to him. Rodney asks why John thinks he'd want to expose himself yet again to the most recent assault on the discipline by the The Journal of Theoretical Astrophysics, but John's already learned to recognize Rodney's rhetorical questions and they end up at the Espresso Cafe at ten.
Rodney's there by the time he arrives, already vibrating over a massive cup of coffee and a muffin half the size of John's head. The line is cantankerous and long, and by the time John gets his own coffee and home fries (God, real food), Rodney's demolished the muffin into a ruin of crumbs and the coffee is mostly gone.
He's struggling for some kind of something to say, and wondering if anyone's managed to deliberately choke themselves on something as harmless as home fries, when Rodney breaks in.
"So, planes?" Rodney snakes a piece of potato and onion off John's plate. "I mean, you obviously have to have some kind of income because it's not like, well -- what I mean is, you should be doing something but most of the time you harass me while I'm trying to write--not that I'm saying I don't enjoy it because I do, but anyway..." The second time, John's ready for him and fends him off and Rodney scowls. "Anyway, you just sort of left this week and you said something about planes and could I watch your dog, and it was all very vague, so I was thinking it'd be nice if I wasn't dog-sitting while you were running drugs or whatever, so, planes?"
"Seaplanes," John says, and nods.
"Oh." Rodney blinks. "Seaplanes."
"Yes," John says solemnly. "Actually, amphibious aircraft."
Oh, as Rodney echoes himself and stares into his coffee some more before he looks up and says, "Mind if I take a look?"
* * *
He gets his seaplane rating with his eyes closed and his commercial pilot certification with both hands behind his back, and he's in the air again, and living.
It’s not as simple as that, but when he’s flying, it is.
* * *
"So what do you do?" Rodney's looking at everything in the hangar, the planes, the ground crew, the docks beyond the bay doors where a few de Havilands and Grummans bob on their moorings.
"Mostly charter stuff -- surveying, environmental work, that sort of thing." John's plane, which isn't John's so much as it is the one he flies the most, is another G-44A, white with blue trim and Puddlejumper stenciled on her nose. Like most seaplanes she isn't beautiful or streamlined, and sometimes he still catches himself wishing for something to take him up high enough to scrape heaven at the thin line where night waits.
Rodney’s palm shapes itself to one of the wing floats, and John remembers Rodney saying he's an engineer too, and he wonders what Rodney thinks of this odd waterbird. What Rodney thinks he doesn't say, but nods to himself and turns to John instead.
"Feel like a private charter right now?" Rodney asks, and his grin is ridiculous, a mixture of sly and excited and pleased, and John has to say yes.
* * *
Slyness and pleasure and all of it turn into tension and misery as Rodney hunches in the other cockpit seat during takeoff, his eyes riveted on the instruments as though willing the plane to stay aloft. But once they're up they're up and Rodney unwinds and leans forward to peer out the window, out and down to the land they've left behind.
The Atlantic's blue face stretches out beneath them, and as they climb Nantucket becomes smaller and smaller, a smooth-edged arrowhead piercing the water. The southern coast of the Vineyard is a gentle sine wave, a whale’s back where it curves into Nantucket, and the Cape hooks its talon around the bowl of the horizon. Boats draw their wakes out behind them, fine white penlines across an ocean that reflects the perfect blue of the sky, and the control tower chatter in John's ear tells him of planes in the far clouds, going places.
Puddlejumper can't take them very high, the wind more tactile here, heavier, a reminder of earth and water and everything that waits below, but it's enough, enough because Rodney is all enthusiasm, reeling off questions that don't wait for John's answers, remarks on the coastline, windspeed, hey look at that, oh fuck turbulence please don’t kill us, lift, thrust, hey you’re pretty good, does it really float, is that Boston, this is so unbelievably cool.
"Yeah, it is," John says when Rodney finally stops for breath and stops looking out the window long enough to look at John.
And Rodney, his face, his eyes, the tension in his body that's now exuberance -- all of him is bright and brilliant and so much like John felt when he'd found the air again after having lost it.
Looking at him, John is high enough.
-end-