David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

The little cabin was filthy with sunlight. He caught Leo’s eye, and Leo nodded at him and even gave him the faintest thumbs-up. Was that to reassure him? Maybe it was because the girl looking out her window at the spun clouds beyond was, although not exactly curled against Leo, in a position that looked promising. Mark pressed his own hot face to the cool plastic of his window. Far below, blinking along the folded green hills of a still-wild land, he could see the shadow of their craft. He closed his eyes.

The plane dropped precipitously, and Mark’s lip was painfully squeegeed over the window it had dried to. Then suddenly they were climbing hard — really leaning into the sky — and then they topped out and started another descent that made them all momentarily weightless in the cabin. Mark felt his gold cigarette case float free in the pocket of his corduroy jacket. They banked hard and he saw a scrub green ridge of mountains beneath the plane. Then the turn ended but the descent continued and they were headed toward a swiftly less distant mass of green and gray. Mark sat straight up and looked down the short tube of plane, through what he guessed you could still call the windshield. It seemed that they were going to fly into the side of a mountain. But then a landing strip appeared ahead of them. A long, straight, clay-red stripe showed itself in the green scrub, and the plane dropped toward it quickly.

The plane skounced off the ground — once, twice — before connecting for good. The plane’s tail swished a bit, but then settled; the engines roared, and the plane slowed and then stopped beneath the cover of something. The sunlight that reached them was chopped up, as if the light were falling in flakes. Were they inside or outside? The pilot cut the engines quickly.

It wasn’t until Mark had unfolded himself from the rear of the airplane that he understood: there was camouflage netting high above them, strung across the end of the airstrip between tall stands of trees. He thought he might be beneath the palapa roof of an enormous beachside bar.

The pilot — Mild Max, the others called him — wandered off and came back with a pony. A chestnut pony with flicking ears, wearing a leather bridle and panniers. Mark thought, What a handsome little beast, and wanted to take a picture of it. He patted his pockets — wallet, cig case, shades, but no Node.

“Hey, Leo,” said Mark. “Did that guy take my Node?”

“Your phone? Yeah.”

“Think I can get it back?”

“I doubt it,” said Leo. “But look. A pony was waiting for our flight. Aren’t you glad you came?”

Trip Hazards started to unload bundled laptop computers from a strapped-down pallet in the rear of the plane; he transferred them to panniers on the pony. It was a motley mix of laptops: some were new and candy-colored and wafer-thin, but most were old-looking MacBooks and scuffed black PCs; a few were covered in bumper stickers.

Mark had just lit a squashed cigarette when Hazards said, “Listen up, you guys. We’re going to walk in a little ways now, but it’s mostly downhill, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. If you need to stop or slow down, just let me know.” And with that, he turned and started walking, leading the pony by her bridle.

They moved in single file, and in silence. There was the swish and zip of pant legs, the two-four time of the pony’s hoof steps, the wing-battering of a flown bird. They stayed on a ridge and came in and out of the trees. A bird of prey made a lazy arc in the sky far away and let out a sharp caw that echoed and re-echoed. They heard their airplane take off, and Mark saw it climb gracefully and buzz away into a bright speck.

After twenty minutes, they crossed a wide marshy meadow and slipped into forest. Then the forest thickened and the trail got thready. At times it seemed to disappear completely, and they were following only the vegetal wake of Hazards and the pony. Twice, the pony had to tramp off-piste to go around fallen logs that the rest of them scrambled over. When Hazards was well ahead of them, Mark asked Leila, “When are you going to tell me who I’m meeting?”

“Whom,” said Leo.

“Fuck off,” said Mark.

“I don’t know,” said Leila.

“Seriously?” said Mark.

“Seriously,” said Leila. “But it must be somebody important.”

Mark wasn’t so sure about that. It seemed just as likely that this could all end with the harvesting of his organs. No, Leo wouldn’t do that. Not an evil bone in that boy’s body. Mark’s story about Cecil the Magical Homeless Sage had as its seed of truth Leo’s friendship with a semi-homeless and semi-psychotic Vietnam vet and paperback merchant in Cambridge. For a week in the bitter cold of a New England winter, Leo had let the man sleep on his couch.

They descended into a burned patch of forest where juvenile conifers were dotted around the husks of their blackened ancestors, all in a green broth of ferns pocked with tiny, gaudy wildflowers. Coolness pooled and pocketed in the small folds of the mountain. Mosses and lichens lashed themselves to the nubbly seats of rock and the crisp ends of dead branches.

Mark was having fun. He liked tramping farther and farther away from the shitshow of his own life, down there somewhere far below him now. Maybe they were walking to heaven, or Shangri-la, or someplace where he would be forgiven for all his miscalculations about how life worked and rescued from the trap that his vanity and greed had landed him in.

The headache had more or less vanished. The air up here was delicious. But he had a shoe issue. He’d soaked one walking across a shallow streamlet; now every other step was a squelchy one. The shoes were new monks of stiff English leather, with a hefty buckle; not really sylvan-escape footwear.

They entered what Mark thought you could call a glen. They walked through a stand of sequoia trees. Between the sequoias there were flowering rhododendrons — crooked and skinny little trees holding lavender teacups to the bark flanks of their enormous patrons. Mark, who liked nature just fine, was battered by the beauty of it all.

Hazards called a halt and offered them all water from a canteen — an actual round metal canteen. There was a rushing stream near them; Mark could hear it through the green. “We can’t be far now?” he queried Hazards, though they could be miles, hours, days away.

“It’s just across this creek and up that little brink,” said Hazards. He was pointing through the trees.

Mark just saw more trees and landforms in the near, middle, and far ground. Did he mean ten blocks? Fifty? “What is?”

“The farm,” said Hazards.

They reached the creek via a series of tight switchbacks. The pony slowed and took extra care at the hairpins.

Ah. This would be more of a river, thought Mark, who had an East Coast notion of creek. This one was swift and wide, and a coolness came off it like from a freezer case. The pony was leery of fording it. Hazards said she needed rest and water; he told them all to take a few minutes. Mark wandered half a block downriver. He slung his corduroy jacket across a leaning tree limb and found a flattish rock to sit on, then unbuckled his stupid shoes, which were ruined. His feet felt like burritos. He dunked them in the river. The cold brought the world into sharp focus: the trees on the banks, the needles on the trees. He remembered something his dad used to say after work: My dogs are barking, he’d announce, and he’d put his feet on the coffee table and pour a fist-size drink into any available vessel. But Mark had no sense of what his dad had done for work. For that matter, sometimes “after work” was early afternoon, when Super Friends was on.

Lola or Leila approached. She didn’t look half as tattered by the walk as he felt. She stood on two tricky rocks at the edge of the river and leaned down to bring water to her face in cupped hands.