FLIPKA

Chapter 20, Part Two

A few feet from the end of the runway, he jerked back on the throttle and up we rose, not smoothly like a jumbo jet, but like a roller coaster, up and down and finally skimming over the hot, buzzing wires. 

“Holy Shit!” I mumbled. “I could have touched those power lines!”

“Hang on to your stomach, my dear,” he uttered with unadulterated glee. “We’re not clear yet—we’ve got an exhilarating half roll coming up; otherwise we’ll slam right into the side of Rattlesnake Mountain.” 

“Exhilarating? My ass! Who designed this runway? It’s more like an obstacle course.”

“Nonsense! Try landing a cargo plane on Lindbergh Field. Now there’s an obstacle course.”

Below I could see jackrabbits scurrying this way and that, perhaps thinking a giant hungry hawk was above them, and then, without warning, the right wings dropped and I was sideways, face-to-face with the desert floor. The engine revved loudly as the plane rolled in a wide half circle, its shadow flitting along the desert floor like a ballerina pirouetting across the stage. The sudden awareness of my body as a shadow provoked a twitch of existential angst. Something intrinsic to me had escaped and now laughed from its place of relative security at my precarious predicament. I felt like frigging Peter Pan. 

“You’ve got to admit. It’s better than sex,” Captain Wug sighed as the wings leveled off. We were heading east into the sun, following the highway leading back into town.

“I can’t remember sex.” I muttered. Both of my armpits were drenched. My stomach lay far behind on the dusty tarmac. Sex was the last thing on my mind. 

“Pshaw! A lovely lass like you? Perhaps that’s why you’ve chosen the romance genre . . .”

“Before you go any further, Dr. Freud, I should confess. I’m not really a romance novelist. God forbid. The most anal-retentive CPA on the planet could write a more believable romance novel than me! I’m actually trying to find a girl who disappeared from the girls’ reformatory four days ago. At one time I was considered an expert in, well, abnormal psychology, which is what got me into this pickle. My real name is Fi Butters.”

“I see.”

“Well, there’s an old cemetery at Fort Palmer and just above it, a mine tunnel that was boarded over, but somehow the young ladies—inmates, if you want to call them that—have pried open the boards and have been using the tunnel to escape. But I can’t figure out where to. One of miscreants claimed under hypnosis that the tunnel leads to a sinkhole. Have you seen anything like that?”

“A sinkhole? That’s usually the type of thing you’d expect to find in the Yucatan or Florida.”

“Yes, I’d considered that she might have been describing a repressed childhood memory . . .”

“Sinkholes would be quite unusual out here, unless . . .”

“Unless?”

“The subterranean peculiarities of this area are legendary, my dear, making it impossible to catalogue the many oddities and strange occurrences.”

“There are a lot of old mining operations in this area, right?”

“Mining is what made most of Nevada, mining and the railroads.”

“Anyone actively working out of any of the old mines?” 

“Hmm,” Captain Wug sighed, “Hmm.” 

“Anyone who might be working out of a pair of those aluminum trailers?”

You’d think the desert would be more scenic from a small plane but it isn’t. You see things from the air that you miss whizzing by in a car—backyard garbage dumps, the half-eaten carcasses of cows, ponds fluorescent with pollutants. Things people want to hide. It’s like the ultimate form of snoopery, peeking in folks’ backyards from above.