Crop Dusting Confessions

Floyd rolled his truck through the rusted gate of the Bar None Ranch at eight in the morning, gravel popping under the tires, and there she was on the porch of the farmhouse with a coffee mug in one hand and a clipboard in the other, and his stomach did a little barrel roll all on its own. Cora Bennet. Twenty-eight years old now, seven years since he had last seen her, and she still stood like she owned the ground, which as far as the paperwork went she actually did. Her hair was pulled back in a kerchief, sun on her face, and she watched his truck the way a person watches weather.

So here was the thing about Floyd, and he knew it was a thing, that he had replayed it maybe four hundred times while flying straight and boring lines over other people's alfalfa. Seven years ago, when he was twenty-two and she was twenty-one, they had met at an agricultural conference in Fresno, back when she was still an agriculture student and he was a wannabe pilot with a rental suit and a fake confident grin. They had talked for three hours on a hotel balcony about drift patterns and soil salvage and why the catfish in the irrigation canals always looked depressed, and she had leaned in close and said, well, are you going to kiss me or not, and he had said something dumb like not yet. Then he had gone to bed alone and checked out of the hotel before sunrise and never called her, because he was twenty-two and a coward with a pilot's license he hadn't earned yet.

And now he was here to spray her fields, which was either the universe's idea of a joke or its idea of a second chance, and Floyd honestly could not tell which.

He got out of the truck and waved, trying to look like a professional, a man who had his life together, and Cora came down the porch steps at an unhurried pace, boots crunching the dust, and stuck out her hand.

"You must be Floyd," she said, shaking his hand with a grip that meant business. "Cora Bennet. We spoke on the phone Tuesday."

"We did," he said, and his voice cracked exactly one time, thank god for small mercies. "Nice place."

"It's a mess and it pays for itself, barely," she said. "Come on, I'll walk you to the strip and give you the boundaries. Markus can show you where the mixing station is."

She did not mention Fresno. She did not mention the balcony. She walked him across the yard past a faded red barn that leaned like a drunk uncle and a silo leaning the other way, like the two of them were holding each other up, and his rickety yellow Cessna sat on the dusty airstrip with its wings already gathering the morning heat. A farmhand named Markus, forty-five and built like fence post, gave Floyd a nod that contained roughly zero enthusiasm and went back to fixing a pump.

"North field is alfalfa, that's your first pass," Cora said, tapping the clipboard with a pen. "South of the ditch line is my neighbor Dot's bees, and if you drift one chemical whiff onto those hives she will be over here raising hell before your wheels are down, so mind the wind. West boundary is the creek, do not cross it, the Watsons already think I'm trying to poison their cattle with my personality alone. East is the back forty, that's where the sheep are, and the sheep are stupid but they're mine."

"Got it," Floyd said. "Ditch, creek, back forty, angry bees, angry Dot."

"Dot's not angry, she's nosy. There's a difference," Cora said, and something almost like a smile crossed her face and then got filed away, and she turned to check the wind sock like it was the most interesting sock in the world.

And here was the thing Floyd noticed, because a man who spends his life reading crosswinds learns to read other things too. Her eyes kept flicking over to him when she thought he wasn't looking. When he was loading the hopper, he caught it in the reflection off the truck window. When he was checking his fuel, out along the edge of his vision, there it was again. She had not mentioned seven years ago and apparently she was not going to, but she was definitely counting something, him maybe, or the seconds, and Floyd felt something warm start up in his chest that had nothing to do with the temperature.

He climbed into the Cessna, ran the checks, and fired up the engine, and the old girl coughed once, which he chose to ignore, and then settled into her usual rattling roar. Cora stood off the strip with her clipboard raised against the glare, watching.

"Radio's channel nine if you put yourself in a ditch," she called.

"If I put myself in a ditch I'll be too embarrassed to radio anyone," he called back, and he heard Markus snort from over by the pump, which was the most emotion the man had shown all day.

Floyd took off into the flat white sky and turned north over the alfalfa, and the green rolled out below him like somebody had spilled it, and he thought, well, she's watching, so. He came around at the end of the first pass and instead of the boring swing he pulled the stick back and rolled the little plane clean over, catching it smooth, and dropped down low over the field so the wingtip nearly combed the tops of the crop. Then he did it again on the next pass, a lazy loop with a little half roll at the top, because apparently seven years of regret had turned him into a peacock with an engine.

Down below, Cora stood with her clipboard held up, and he could not see her face at that distance, but he could see the clipboard, and the clipboard was pointed the wrong way, covering the lower half of her face, and the clipboard was shaking slightly, and Floyd decided that was a laugh she was hiding behind a piece of laminated paper and it was the best thing that had happened to him in seven years.

"You're gonna kill yourself and I'm gonna have to fill out paperwork," Markus said over the radio, dead flat.

"That was a coordinated agricultural maneuver," Floyd said.

"That was a guy showing off."

"That's also true," Floyd admitted, and grinned into his headset where nobody could see it.

He ran the north field twice more, keeping it mostly professional, mostly, and then swung east to take a look at the back forty before his second run, because he wanted to see the sheep and the fence line and figure out his drift angle with the morning wind. That was his story and he was sticking to it. The back forty was a wide brown-green bowl ringed with oaks, and the sheep were scattered across it like dirty cotton balls, and the pasture was soft-looking and long and honestly the nicest emergency landing zone he had ever mentally cataloged, not that he was planning to use it.

Then the engine spat.

It was not a dramatic noise, that was the insult of it, just a cough, a stutter, like the plane clearing its throat, and then another one, and the smooth roar went ragged under him. Floyd's hands did what seven years of flying had trained them to do, mixture rich, fuel pump on, carb heat, all of it while his mouth said a word the radio probably should not have carried. The engine caught, ran clean for ten seconds, and spat again, harder, and lost about four hundred RPM, and the altimeter started being honest with him in a way he did not appreciate.

"Markus, I'm coming down," he said on the radio, trying to sound calm and mostly failing. "Back forty. Tell her it's fine."

"Tell her yourself," Markus said, which was somehow comforting.

Floyd set the flaps, picked his line across the sheep pasture, and brought the old girl down with more bounce than grace, the wheels hitting hard once, skipping, hitting again, the tail swinging as he stood on the rudder, and the sheep exploded in every direction like popcorn in a pan, bleating their stupid heads off, and the Cessna rolled to a lurching stop about forty yards short of an oak tree. The propeller ticked in the heat. One very offended ram stared at him from eight feet away like Floyd had personally ruined the morning.

He sat there for a second with his hands on the wheel, heart going, engine hissing, and through the windshield he could see, way off across the fields, a small figure on a four-wheeler already bumping toward him at a speed that suggested the clipboard was not going to save anybody this time.

Cora pulled the four-wheeler up short a few feet from the plane and got off without turning the engine off, which meant he had to sit there listening to it clatter while she looked him over. "You're not bleeding," she said.

"No," Floyd said. "Just my pride."

"Your pride is gonna be fine, your airplane is another matter." She circled the Cessna once, arms crossed, and he could tell from her face she already knew more about engines than she was going to admit, farm girls usually did, and then she stepped back and gestured toward the house with her clipboard. "Come on, the deerflies are eating me alive and I need coffee before I decide how mad to be." So they walked up the long dirt track together in the noon heat, the four-wheeler puttering along behind them at walking speed like a resentful dog, and Floyd tried to think of something to say that would not sound like an apology seven years late, and failed, and settled for swatting at a deerfly that had been working on his neck since the landing.

The farmhouse kitchen was dim and cluttered and smelled like old wood and onions, and Cora sat him down at a table with a map of the county taped to one corner and started slapping damp cloths on things. "Hold this on your neck," she said, "the bites swell like golf balls out here if you don't, ask Markus." Markus was at the counter drinking coffee straight from his thermos, and he looked at Floyd over the rim. "Golf balls," he agreed.