Rumble Tumble

“Oh, that’s good,” Brett said.

“It’s warm now, but come nightfall, up there, you best have some long jammies on under your clothes. It’ll freeze your balls off. And in your case, lady, whatever’s hangin’.”

I turned to Bill. “This is it?”

Bill shrugged, “I didn’t say I could offer you Air Force One.”

“This is Negative One,” Brett said.

When night came it turned cold as Irvin predicted. We helped push the plane out of the hangar, then boarded. It was crowded in there, us with our guns, and Red ended up sitting on the floor.

The plane’s outside lights were dim, the inside control panel lights a sickly green. The motor sounded as if it would really rather not do this. The runway was bumpy. We left out of there with a bang and clatter and a sickening lurch.

We bobbed into the night sky and the engine coughed and sputtered and the propeller on the left wing stopped and started, eventually caught as it cast the remnants of a wasp nest away. Directly below us there was nothing but the dark land, and way to the left were lights, clean and clear and bright, like fallen stars. I assumed they were the lights of sleepy Echo.

We rose higher, but never really gained much altitude. The night grew darker, and Irvin was right, the plane was cold. It bit through our clothes and filled our socks and shoes and circled about us like a wraith.

Red said, “This is most unpleasant.”

“Can we drop you somewhere?” Leonard said.

“Quite amusing,” Red said.

“Yeah,” Leonard said, “well I’d like to hear you laugh on the way down.”

“Leave him alone,” Herman said.

“All of you shut up,” Irvin said. “Let me concentrate. Mexican Border Patrol, they spot us, they’ll take a shot at us. Had a bullet come through this ole rotten floor once, ran up my trouser leg, come out through the skin on my knee. Close call. Didn’t need any more than a Band-Aid. I got an iron plate under the seat here now, don’t want to catch one in the balls or up the ass.”

“How are the other seats fixed?” Leonard asked.

“Just cushions,” Irvin said.

“Hell,” I said to Leonard, “your balls are iron anyway, aren’t they?”

“You know, you’re right,” Leonard said.

We continued to fly low, trying to stay under radar, if there was any, trying to take a straight line to where we were going, which, according to Herman and Bill, was on the edge of the Great Plateau and the Western Lands, some of the most inhospitable terrain in all of Mexico.

We flew for some time. How long I can’t say. Couple hours at least. I nodded off to the hum of the motor, Brett and I falling together for warmth. When I awoke it was to a coughing engine.

“Is the engine playing out?” I said.

“No,” Irvin said. “I’m lowering us. I make a change up, down, or sideways, the engine farts. I got to get some work done on it one of these days. Everybody grab your asses, we’re going down.”

Irvin cranked the plane into a steep turn, and down we went at an angle so tight we were temporarily lying on the side of the plane, then suddenly we were straight, being tossed about the cabin like jumping beans. Next thing we knew, the ground was coming up fast. I took hold of Brett and tried to remember my plan about going out between her legs, but there was no time for that.

The plane sputtered and spat and leveled out. We came in hot as a flaming hard-on, the nose down a little too much. At the last moment Irvin righted us and we smoothed out and the wheels hit and the plane hopped a few times and came to a jerky stop.

We got off, pronto. I bent over and lost what I had last eaten, which only reminded me I was hungry. Or maybe what I felt gnawing in my stomach was fear.

Leonard gave me some water from one of the canteens Bill had brought. I rinsed my mouth, then drank a sip. I looked around. There was nothing. Just a flat expanse of land, some rolling night-shadowed dirt, some brush clumps here and there.

Bill came over, said, “What you do is, you walk five miles that way.” He was pointing to the west.

“Five miles?” Brett said. “Why the fuck not ten? Shit, you could have gotten closer.”

“They’d have seen us come in,” Irvin said. “May have already. I’ve run some stuff for them, and I don’t want to lose jobs in the future. More than that, I don’t want them to find me. I want to keep my balls, they give me ballast. You walk that five miles and you’ll come to a place where there are lots of things growing. That means you are nearing water. Next you will come to an oasis. At the oasis is The Farm. You can’t miss it.”

“And if we walk five miles and there’s nothing?” Leonard said. “We’re in the middle of the desert and you’ve got our money, and come morning our asses are burnt crackers. I don’t think I like this plan.”

Herman and Red came over. Herman looked very big in the moonlight. Red seemed oddly smaller than ever.

“Bill’s right,” Herman said. “This is the area. We go in, we get the woman, we go out.”

“You head southeast,” Irvin said. “You meet the plane there.”

“Seems to me it would still be easier to come back here,” Leonard said.