Adam Johnson - Emporium

“Couldn’t we keep one of them?”

He grunts. “Hell,” he says, turning. “Let’s just fly.”

We make our way through the abandoned blackjack and booray tables toward the garage, half-shielding our eyes from what is an all-too-bright past. Except for my bed, it still feels like a bayou version of Vegas in here: fleur-de-lis carpet, wet bar, twin ice machines, a row of banker’s lamps, and a brass smoker’s companion that now holds the keys to the ’69 Super Sport I’ll drive with abandon after Randy agrees to escort me to the Sadie Hawkins dance Saturday night.

“I figure they’ll come in through there,” Berlin says, nodding as we pass the double side doors that lead out to the back parking lot.

I picture a wave of ATF agents and Gaming Commissioners busting through my bedroom door with bright lights and loudspeakers in a raid no one’s supposed to know about. And of course, bringing up the rear, in black body armor, will be Randy. He’s the captain of his JROTC unit at school, but he’s really into the ATF. They have a program called Future ATF that lets you do tons of ride alongs until you pass your entrance exams.

I come up and screw with Dad’s hair, which pisses him off, though he’s kind of a sucker for it. “You’re still the king,” I tell him. “You’re the Jughead of Berlin.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says.

In the garage, I peel back the car cover to check out the Super Sport while Berlin hunts for his aviator glasses through engine parts strewn across oily workbenches. Though he’s sold his cargo planes, it’s hard to imagine they’ll run without all these pieces left behind. He’s been rounding up his tools because he starts as a mechanic for Grumman at Chenault Airfield next week, going to work for the first time since he left the air force ten years ago.

The Super Sport’s paint job, under the droplights, is beyond black. It’s like you spread black jelly across the Chevy’s curves. I crouch to stare into the fenders, and they are almost teary with it. When you reach to touch, you don’t even know where the car will begin, the paint’s that deep, and this girl reflected in the black enamel looks a little older, a solid seventeen, with force and direction. This is the girl Randy’s after, and I imagine him riding shotgun as they race down parish back roads, his surplus Airborne boots on the Super Sport’s dash, her wrist brushing his thigh as she shifts for fourth.

It’s like cayenne in Lycra pants, this thought, and I have to look away from the dark mirror of the quarter panel. Daydreaming like this is what screwed up my spirit drill last night at the wrestling meet. Just the sight of Randy warming up in his blue-and-silver Fighting Catfish tanksuit. Beyond sexy. Those leather mat booties, and that headgear they wear? He had me. I mean, he was practicing hammerlocks.

I come up and lean against the workbench. Mixed with jet engine bearings and platinum spark plugs are superblue feathers, left from when our garage was filled with blue hyacinth macaws, the rarest birds on earth. Berlin’s old air force crash pack is piled among the junk. I run my hands over its black nylon, picture my father’s cargo jet cutting out over Bulgaria or something. Inside are bandages, fishhooks, a crusty bottle of iodine. The pack smells like old mosquito repellent, which somehow makes me think of Randy.

“So, did they give you suicide pills in case the Russians shot you down?”

“Suicide pills?” He shakes his head. “Who would put suicide pills in a survival kit?”

“Just asking,” I say.

“Look,” he says. “The closest I came to the enemy was shooting white russians at thirty thousand feet while airlifting New Year’s vodka to all the boonie NATO outposts.”

I strap the crash pack over my shoulder, and it feels pretty tough.

Berlin finds his flying glasses. He rubs the yellow lenses with a shop towel, then holds them up to the work lights, okays them.

“So this raid,” I say. “It’s like a sure thing, right?”

“We’ll go stay at Aunt Clara’s a while.”

“What’s a while, a week?”

“You just worry about school,” he tells me. “Worry about learning your Spirit Squad routines, about not letting the other girls down.”

“Those girls? They’re so fake. Those are the girls who wrote ‘stay the same, never change’ on my cast when my arm got broke. What’s that supposed to mean? All they care about is Juniors Rule! And crap like that.”

Berlin walks to the sink to wash his oily hands. Talk of my arm usually shuts him up, but not today. “Seems to me that if you cared a little more about juniors ruling, your precious Randy wouldn’t have lost his wrestling match last night,” he says and reaches for some Fosforpuro , a Mexican soap that’s illegal here because it’s bad for the environment. Totally ignoring me, he starts lathering his hands.

On the shelves above the laundry sink are packages of Chiapan fireworks and bottles of sea turtle oil from Belize, leftovers from thousands of transports Berlin’s made down south. Mostly, the cargoes were unexciting — charter down archaeological supplies or missionary Bibles, then bring back frozen Argentinean crawfish and tins of fish eggs. But sometimes there were raw emeralds, vials of curare, or nearly extinct birds.

The well pump is slow tonight, and he looks at me like it’s my fault.

“The Spirit Squad’s stupid,” I say. “So I can pom-pom and do the splits. What good’s that going to do me in the real world?”

He turns the trickle of water off, though his hands are still sudsy blue. “You don’t let your friends down. That’s what the real world’s about.”

Berlin looks for a clean rag to wipe the greasy soap off his hands, and I hand him my Spirit Squad sweater from the laundry pile. While he works his hands clean, I stare at taped-up photos of airplanes on runways hand-cut from exotic scenery, aerials of Toltecan waterfalls and Montserrat, afire.

Then he realizes he’s oiling up my white Spirit Squad top. “What’d you do that for?” he asks. There’s a flash of anger on his face, quick then gone, like when Randy hears the word Waco.

I shrug.

“Look,” he says and hits the garage opener. “Next week this will all be over.” The garage door hinges screech in a way that used to drive the macaws crazy.

“Next week, I’ll have a regular job, and we’ll be normal, like everybody else.”

The governor used to duck hunt with my father. Exxon sent us Christmas cards. On Sundays, the sheriff would drive the parish prisoners out to mow our lawn. But since Berlin crashed our seaplane last year, we’ve entered a world where it’s hard to say what will happen next. According to Randy, the ATF doesn’t worry about things like planning: they give you Level IV body armor, Mylar riot gear, a pouch of shock grenades, and then they point you toward the unknown.

Walking out the door, I grab my Spirit Squad minimegaphone off the dryer. During sports games, I’m supposed to point it at the crowds and convince them that we’re going to win, though we usually don’t. Today, I decide, I will become an ex-Spirit Squad leader.

It’s full dark outside, with a slight breeze, so that wandering mist from our lake is pushed into the orderly rows of our small pecan grove. The driveway is really a levee that divides the marsh grass from Mom’s victory roses, and we walk along a lake-rim of cypress knees. I spin the minimegaphone by its wrist strap. Throwing things out of airplanes is cool for a while, but then it wears off. So this is not like some huge gesture or anything.

The pecans canopy the drive, so that when they sway, dew comes down in volleys. It is sweeter than water. It sticks to your eyelashes, tastes of tonic. Berlin goes through all his jumpsuit’s zippers to see what he may have left in his pockets last time out — a habit from his gin days. He finds gum, and we chew together so we’ll be able to clear our ears on ascent.