JUDY RAYMOND
A night was just a night in my boy days in Belmont. If it mean anything it mean licks, because we reach home late nearly every day. Me and the fellas from down the road would be kicking a ball; taking turns riding a bike “borrow” from somebody older brother; forcing down sips of nasty-tasting beer smuggled outta somebody house, and making as if we enjoying it like big men; pelting round a corner laughing, trying to escape the neighbour who vex because we break she window playing windball cricket in the road.
Then we look round and see while we was making skylark, night spread over us like a bedsheet. We late ah-gain. We run home, take our beating, get sent in our beds. Next day, same thing.
Now night long and slow in passing, and you don’t know what tomorrow would bring.
When you flying and the dark coming down, the edge of the world start to blur, the twilight rub out the line between sea and sky, earth and heavens. The plane roaring into a deepening haze. You just have to trust on the far side of the night, you go find yourself still here, light-headed from no sleep, blinking into the sunrise.
Never used to think about it that kinda way. Never thought I had to. I was sure we figure out every possible thing that could happen, had it all under control. We conquer the skies, man. I start making these trips now and again after I finish training, proud to fly on planes I helped design, improved. A new engineer, bright and shiny like the planes I worked on. I used to stroll through the cabin as if I was stretching my legs, but really admiring new features, checking out where they could be made even better. Took notes, drew diagrams. Cutting-edge technology.
Later, when they dim the lights and settle down the passengers for the night, I had to stay in my seat too. So it had a kinda game I used to play, naming the shades the sky melted into one by one: azure, cerulean, periwinkle, mauve, violet, maljo blue, cobalt, navy, indigo, midnight. Had to look up some of them words — the tropical sky had more colours than I ever knew before. Colours for the sea, too, in the day, though you could only do that over the Caribbean, where the sea floor rises up and pierces through the shallow water and spreads out in handfuls of sand. The sea round them does glow from the sunlight and the white coral below: aquamarine, pistachio, chartreuse, lime, turquoise, jade, sea glass.
No, I never say anything about that to anyone, never tell nobody about my game. I was a qualified engineer, man, not a blasted poet.
The sea in other places just iron grey, or maybe school-ink blue or Stag-bottle green, if the sun shining for once. Sometimes it had huge swells reaching up as if they want to pull us down, or lines of white surf like bleached, ragged caution tape, warning you away. I used to feel sorry for anyone trying to power through that in a ship, a straight line that couldn’t bend into the curve of a wave, and bound to end up broken by a airy mix of wind and water that stronger than steel. But still, could be, one day soon, boats will be the only way again to cross the sea. If you dare.
Me, I still feel safer on a plane, but I get jumpy in that in-between time when you flying blind from day into night. Yes, the crew have the instruments to guide them, but it feel like you flying into something unknown. As far as they know, everything still fine. Like what the weather forecast used to say — fair to fine, with a chance of scattered showers — in the days when it had nothing much else to fret about. Like they used to say, flying safer than driving.
Even now, the captain often announces at the start of the flight, in that breezy voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, there may some weather on our way, but don’t worry, we’ll be flying around it . . .” The passengers cool because the man in charge sounding so calm. But I know better. I strap myself in one time. A couple hours later the plane will start to buck, and the captain barking, “Flight attendants, take the jump seats.” Something bad up ahead. And so far we have little warning before we find ourselves in the middle of it. Something worse than we go through before. And we don’t know how much worse it going to get.
You never had to keep the seatbelt signs on all the time for scattered showers. And I can’t be dreaming up names for the colour of the sky any more. The captain sometimes tell me, relax, man, take a nap, leave it to him: I may be in the cockpit, but I not flying the plane. I don’t have to sit bolt upright, strapped into my seat the whole time. That is exactly why the company have me here, though: stay on guard, watch the instruments, notice a tremor, even a sinking in my stomach that might be a warning that something about to hit us.
Sometimes I feel that is what happen to my whole life. Thrown off course, when I thought I was cruising smooth, at high altitude, above the clouds.
A pilot asked me a while aback if I was single. I ent know what to tell the man. Then I see him check my left hand and watch the ring there. But when I hesitate, he figure it must be a touchy subject, and start to talk about something else.
It does still hit me sometimes, the shock when Lisa refused to come back with me. But looking back, maybe it shouldn’t have been a shock, eh. Like I say, I feel I was cruising — but rough skies ahead.
In South Carolina she talk about missing her parents, her sisters, her old schoolfriends, the neighbours . . . everybody and they mother, man. Some evenings we would lime with friends from back home and everybody would name a thing we miss the most. A coconut round the Savannah, and when you finish drink the water, the vendor would cut piece of the shell and chop the nut in half so you could dig out the jelly. Royal Castle pepper sauce. Driving quite Debe just for doubles. Soursop ice cream, pelau, the prasad your school friend bring for you for Divali.
Mango chow, so hot it burning your mouth, but da’is why you can’t stop eating it. And the mango tasting sweeter because you tief it from the neighbour tree. Rain roaring across the valley, then hammering on the galvanize roof: time for Mummy’s Saturday soup, and then you go and take a sleep. The sight of the sea when you swing the last bend before Maracas, by where the old police station used to be, and you coming down the hill, before they build the big car park, and you could still drive nearly onto the beach. Football in the Savannah in the rain — you strip off your jersey and fall in, and when you reach home Mummy insist, “Young man, you not coming in my house like that,” so you rinsing off by the standpipe in the yard in your drawers and hoping none of the girls from school ent spot you.
Lisa would join in the talk, laugh at the memories. Used to fly home at least twice a year, and always on the phone to the mother in between. She used to take the children too, most years, once we could afford it, even though they always complaining they bored. And too hot, they say, even in those days. Lisa was never a beach person, and they barely know their cousins, so they were shut up in Grandma’s house in Diamond Vale with nothing to do. Looking back, I shoulda go with them more often, take them out, make sure they get to know the place their parents grew up, the place they were from. And just spend time with them while I still could.
The day the boss have the big talk with me and I sign up, I had a smile on my face when I tell Lisa.
“Guess what? We going home.”
“What you mean? We home already.”
“No — home home. Trinidad!”
“What you talking ’bout?”
I tell her the company have a special job for me to do for a couple years, so they sending me home.
“You serious?”
The look on my face answer that question. The look on her face tell me I shoulda ask questions before.
“But how you could tell the people okay to that without saying nothing to me?”
“I say you would be pleased,” I tell my wife.
“So what about my job, my career? The children settled here. What about my friends?”
“But you have so many friends back home still. And your mother. And you could teach there too . . .”
“Mr Man, I can’t believe you tell the people yes, and not a word to me! Is my life too. This is my life now. If you going, you going by yuhself,” she tell me. “I not going back to that two-by-four place again to live. You must be joking.”
I try all kinda argument. Her mother going down in age, my mother; the children should get to know the place before it’s too late; here in the States, storms coming up the east coast regular now that used to peter out way south of us; the big wildfires closing in from the west . . .
“You flying plenty already these days. Why you can’t stay here and fly? Why they have to pick you?”
True, I was flying more than before, and some real rough flights. I didn’t use to tell her how rough they were.
Times she would burst out, “Why you? Why they can’t send somebody else? Why Trinidad?”
I couldn’t tell her I was just one of many. Or that I choose early while I still get to choose where they send me, and this was the best — the safest — choice.
She liked the lifestyle in the States, how when you turn on the pipe you sure water will come out — and clean clear water, not brown like mauby. Buy anything online, day or night, and it reaching by tomorrow. If the electrician say he coming at eight, he coming at eight. No finding out Hi-Lo ent have a single egg — yes, is still Hi-Lo to us: it was Hi-Lo when we fly off into our bright new future, and still Hi-Lo when I come back to . . . whatever. No lining up for hours in a government office, and then the clerk tell you come back with more documents, or pass back tomorrow because the cashier gone on lunch and not coming back after. No more bathing in a bucket for Lisa. No sleepless nights because current gone and the fan turn off and the silence wake you just before a mosquito start whining in your ear, and the sheet sticking to you from sweat.
We argue on and off for a couple months, until my time run out. By the end I didn’t know who was this woman I was quarrelling with. I even wonder if she used to go home to spend time with her family or to get away from me. I well know by now she ent want to go home this time, but I couldn’t figure out how she feel about me not being around. Maybe if I coulda tell her what really going on, she mighta come with me. I thought I was making a sacrifice for her, for the kids. For everyone’s kids. I didn’t know how big the sacrifice would be. But could be, sooner or later, something else woulda crack open the marriage and make me see it was hollow all the time like a dry coconut husk.
And the children, they Yankee to the bone, I realise. They promise to come and visit soon. But I doubt it. Maybe they better off where they are. We still all talk, of course, but with long silences. Nobody ask where we going from here. Story of my life right now.
Sometimes I feel I just come right round in one big circle. Even the thoughts in my head going round and round. Look me, living in the house I grow up in, with my mother cooking for me. At least Mummy glad to have me around, even if she fret about me and I can’t answer she questions about what really going on with me and Lisa, what about the kids.
Only difference, since I come back to where I start, is these days I driving a fancy car so big it could barely squeeze in Mummy lil driveway. If I meet another car coming down one of them narrow Belmont lanes, somebody have to back back to let the other one pass.
I put in air-conditioning in the house; it was always hot, on the flat land by the dry river, pressed up against other houses so close you could hear the neighbour cough, and no room for breeze to blow between. I buy a new TV, so big Mummy have to move the space-saver pack up with ornaments and pictures of me — her son in the States with a big wuk — and my nice smiling family. The room so ram-cram it hardly have space to sit. I buy another TV for my room, and a new mattress for my old bed; the room too small for the bed I wanted. I buy a fridge with a ice-maker; it full up Mummy ole-time kitchen, with the frilly half-way curtain across the wire-mesh window, and her washing machine under a red check cover.
Rest of the house same as it always was, but it not home any more. The place feel like it shrink till it come like a dolly house. I ent know where is home these days.
The model aeroplanes I make and hang on threads from my bedroom ceiling when I was at school, they still there. The thread rotten long time, but my mom kept the planes, and I glued back the wings or propellers that break off when they fall. They line up on the dresser in front the TV and on the laminate bookshelf built into the head of the bed, dusted every week. Fighter planes, bombers. A Concorde, a jumbo jet, like the ones I used to want to fly. The magic of flight, man. I suppose I musta feel sticking together all those little pieces of plastic would show me how all those tons of metal could just lift up in the air and float like a bird.
So maybe it not surprising I never did get to be a pilot — I end up a aeronautical engineer. I still get to fly, though, more than ever nowadays. And flying still feel like magic, even now.
Sometimes, to make Mummy happy, if I home on a Sunday morning I will take her to church in my SUV, so the neighbours could see how well her son did. But if it have a God, I ent feel him in that church. I think about him at thirty-six thousand feet, as if heaven just behind that fluffy white cumulus cloud in front the plane. Sometimes I slip in a little prayer to Olodumare. Though maybe is Shango I should be appeasing, god of thunder and lightning. I know about the Orishas from Granny. Is church all the way for Mummy, but Granny — Daddy’s mother — she make sure I know which power to pour a little libation to, and what signs from them to look out for. Between that and church, I think, I flying on a wing and a prayer. But I ent laugh at that. Not all joke is funny.
Some of the fellas down the road still living here since we small. They didn’t get to go and live in Carolina in between, have a family and then lose them. Most evenings we walk down by the parlour on the corner and drink a beer, sit in somebody gallery, eat roast channa, play cards, ole-talk. Normal, normal. For them, nothing change. But it make me feel a how, like I already missing a way of life while we still living it. I don’t know what to tell them boys about what it is I come back to do.
Nights I don’t feel to lime with the fellas, I watch the news on the big TV. The Singapore flight that drop nearly two hundred feet in five seconds. Man die of fright, others break their backs when they crash out of their seats and their skulls burst open the overhead lockers. Before they send me back home, I already went through flights like that — not so bad, true, but bad enough so the flight attendants lie down flat right in the aisles and hold on tight to the seat struts, praying, while the passengers screaming and vomiting all around.
So I glad I get sent to the Caribbean, where so far nothing major happen. Those of us in the business used to worry — if we worry at all — about the wrinkled sea crawling below us. Never mind the smiling cabin crew showing you how to tie bow and blow whistle on your life vest. If you reach in that water, oxygen mask and floating seat cushion and all, very little chance you reaching in one piece. And suppose you survive, who getting to you in time? In that heat, with no shelter, no drinking water, broken bones? Even in my early days we had to keep a eye out for hurricanes cooking up in the Atlantic. Now they bigger, stronger, and they can blow up sudden out of nowhere.
That is why they send me here. That is what I can’t tell Lisa, or Mummy, or even the captains wondering why I sitting in their cockpit so often — I feel some of them guess the reason, though.
The company have me riding the planes to figure out the changes, note the wind speed and strength, find some way to spot a storm or patch of turbulence that the instruments not picking up. And not just that. They put us engineers on board to see how to reinforce the next generation of planes, and maybe the ones flying now too. We trying to make them stronger but not too heavy, without lessening the payload they can carry, the number of passengers, the amount of fuel, without needing so much lift they can’t get off the ground. Sometimes I wonder if when I was training, they already knew what was coming, exactly what skills we engineers would need for situations we never dream ’bout yet.
Meanwhile the weathermen figuring out algorithms to predict those hurricanes that brewing quick-quick, one far-off black cloud that swell up and swallow the sky in minutes, too big to fly round, too savage to fly through. Storms that can toss a airliner like when a Savannah breeze toss a kite into a tree and tangle the string round the branches and there it stick. Except we would fall, into that pretty pretty sea, like a overripe mango from the top of the tree where nobody could reach. And is not grass below. Like I say, you will hit that enticing water like if is concrete.
And the turbulence now: air calm for so one minute, but then, braps! — the plane drop like it fall off a cliff. If the engines stall, we lose pressure, the plane suffer structural damage — we can’t stay in the air, we can’t land — plenty variables, plenty technical ifs and maybes — I wouldn’t go into alla that. But the end result always the same. Simple. The plane go mash up, like one of my model planes when the string snap, and never mind how much instructions I follow, my glued-together wings and engines get smash into shards of grey plastic that dig scratches in Mummy polish-up wooden floor.
We doing what we can, we making some progress. It still have hope. We waiting to see if nature stronger than mankind smart.
When I start in this work, I thought one day I could be designing some advanced kinda aircraft, new supersonic jet, plane that could arc through space and glide back into the atmosphere . . . real sci-fi stuff. Maybe I will one day. Or maybe I go be around to see the end of what they call the age of flight. And the start of something else. But doh ask me what.
Every few days I head for the airport. I remember the flights when everything was routine. Never ordinary, though, not to me — the ice-pale dawns while the passengers still sleeping, islands way below that catch the light and shine it back when the sun come over the horizon, little archipelagoes dangling from the longer string, green beads from a necklace that fall and break on a tiled blue floor.
Early-morning airport trip today. The hills throwing long shadows still as the plane taxis to its spot, turn like it weightless, and poise like a dancer waiting for the music to strike up. Air traffic control clear us for take-off. The usual careful checks going on in the cockpit. I make sure my straps fastened, give the captain a smile and a thumbs-up. Then the engines press me hard into the jump seat and the massive, fragile metal tube start to race down the runway and float up into a blue that I ent have a word for any more.
