Aubrey looked at Harriet, but her gaze was intent on the clear plastic door now. He had been dismissed from her thoughts. That felt worse than he had imagined it would. He had expected her to be disappointed in him, but she wasn’t disappointed, just indifferent. He’d made himself believe he had to do this, had to be here for June, for Harriet, but in fact his presence one way or another was of no matter.
And now that he was sure he wasn’t going, he felt listless and deflated. Harriet was holding up the Junicorn and whispering to it, pointing it out at the vast UFO-shaped cloud, just as the Cessna banked toward it.
Axe fiddled with the camera on his own helmet. “Hey, listen. Audrey, man.” It was a small, bitter pleasure that the jumpmaster didn’t know his name either. “If you’ve made up your mind, it’s your right to back out. But you should know it costs the same whether you go or not. I can’t even refund you the cost of your DVD.”
“I’m sorry I ruined everyone’s good time,” Aubrey announced, but the really miserable thing was that he hadn’t ruined anything for any of them. No one was even listening.
The plane tilted ever more steeply into its turn.
“We’re going to circle back over the landing strip—” Axe began, which was when everything shut off.
The propeller on the nose of the little Cessna whined and clattered and stopped turning very abruptly. Wind whooshed under the wings, the soft bellow filling the sudden silence. The running lights inside the jump compartment blinked out.
The vast, whistling silence amazed Aubrey more than it frightened him.
“What happened?” Harriet asked.
“Lenny!” Axe shouted toward the front of the plane. “What the hell, man? We just stall out?”
The pilot, a curly-haired guy in a puffy headset, flipped a toggle switch, pulled a long steel stick out of the dash, and poked a button.
The Cessna floated, a sheet of newspaper hovering above a subway grate.
Lenny the pilot looked over his shoulder at them and shrugged. He wore a white T-shirt with the Kool-Aid mascot on it, that inanely smiling pitcher of red juice. He yanked his headset down around his neck.
“I don’t know!” Lenny yelled. He didn’t sound worried—more annoyed. “Maybe! But I also got no electric! Everything just died. S’like a connection is loose in the battery.”
The Cessna quivered, wings tilting minutely, this way and that.
“No big deal to me,” Brad said. “I was going to step out right around here anyway.”
“Yeah,” Ronnie said. “I was thinking I’d like to stretch my legs.”
“Go on!” Lenny called. “Jump! After everyone is out, I’ll dive and pop it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to glide her in. Hope I hit the runway. Gonna be bumpy if I don’t.”
“Oh, come on!” Aubrey shouted. “Come on, this is bullshit! I don’t believe a word.”
Brad scooted to the door and rotated the stainless-steel latches that held it shut, one after the other. He pushed it up and out of the way. The opening was roughly as wide as a soccer net. He put a foot onto the piping that ran under the door.
“Audrey, my friend,” Axe said gently.
“No!” Aubrey shouted. “This isn’t funny! Make him start the plane! You can’t coerce someone to jump this way!”
“See you on the dirt,” Brad said. He clung to the side of the plane, facing in toward them, one hand holding the rail above. With his free hand, he snapped off a jaunty salute—asshole—stepped from the plane, and was snatched away by the sky.
“Audrey! Audrey, breathe!” Axe said. “No one is running a game on you. There is a problem with the aircraft.” He spoke very slowly and enunciated each word with care. “We would never shut a plane off to scare you into jumping. Honestly. A lot of people back out last minute. I don’t care. I get paid the same either way.”
“Why would the plane just stop working?”
“I don’t know. But believe me, we don’t want to be in it when he tries to pop the engine.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s going to point it at the ground.”
Ron Morris scooted to the edge of the open door, preparing to follow his brother. He sat for a moment, feet on the bar that ran along the outside of the plane, elbows resting on his knees, enjoying the view. The blast of the wind made his skin ripple, distorted the loose flesh of his chubby face. Gradually, almost like a man nodding off, he tipped forward, then dropped headfirst and was gone.
“Hurry up back there!” shouted Lenny from the single seat at the controls.
Harriet had been sitting between her jumpmaster’s legs, looking from Aubrey to Axe to the pilot with a fearful fascination. She squeezed the Junicorn to her chest, as if worried someone might be about to try to snatch it away from her. The Junicorn was a stand-in for June herself, and Harriet was under orders to look after it and take it with her while she did all the things June was never going to get to do: see pyramids, surf in Africa, skydive. Aubrey had the ridiculous sense of being stared at by girl and stuffed animal alike.
“Aubrey,” Harriet said, “I think we ought to go. Right now. Both of us.” She looked past Aubrey to Axe. “Can we go together? Like, hold hands?”
Axe shook his head. “We’ll be three seconds behind you.”
“Please, if we could just hold hands. My friend is scared, but I know he can do this if we go together,” she said, and Aubrey loved her so much he felt like crying. He wanted to tell her right now that he loved her, but that was even more beyond him than stepping out over a twelve-thousand-foot drop.
“It’s not a good idea on a first jump. Our drogue chutes could tangle. Harriet, please go. We’ll follow.”
The chubby jumpmaster began to scoot across the steel floor on his butt, shifting Harriet away and closer to the door.
“Audrey?” Axe said. His voice was soothing and calm and reasonable. “If we do not go, you are risking my life as well as your own. I want to jump while we can. I’d prefer your consent.”
“Oh, God.”
“Close your eyes!”
“Oh, God. Oh, my God. This is fucked.”
Harriet and her jumpmaster had shifted all the way over to the open hatch. Harriet’s legs were hanging out. She cast a final pleading look at Aubrey over her shoulder. Then she grasped her jumpmaster’s hand and they were gone.
“You’ll have solid ground under your feet before you know it,” Axe said.
Aubrey shut his eyes. He nodded okay.
“I’m sorry I’m so chickenshit,” Aubrey said.
Axe humped them across the bare steel, sliding them toward the opening in modest increments. Aubrey thought, randomly, that he was glad Harriet wasn’t sitting in Axe’s lap, feeling him pump his hips against her ass this way.
“Have you ever jumped with anyone worse than me?” Aubrey asked.
“Not really,” Axe said, and pushed them out the side of the plane.
It was more than ten thousand feet to the ground, one minute of free fall and perhaps four minutes of slow, gliding hang time in the parachute. But Aubrey Griffin and his jumpmaster dropped just under four stories before they struck the edge of the UFO-shaped cloud that wasn’t really a cloud at all and stopped falling.
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