Vintage AirTitle: The Torpedo Show
Author: PK
Category: Fiction



Jeff had never tried the stunt before, but Miklos insisted—the double corkscrew into a synchronized barrel roll was well within his capabilities. Miklos had been commissioned for the traveling stunt plane show, which had been tailgating one carnival through its ambulatory Midwest tour: Iowa, Illinois, Arkansas. And now in Michigan the show saw enormous crowds; even the hours passed as blurred applause, smoke rings. Everywhere the carnival went The Torpedo Show followed, leaving in its wake a stream of evanescent smog and a crowd of spectators who didn’t expect the music to be so catchy, their planes to cut the distended clouds with such inverted, corkscrewed precision. Jeff had been stunt flying since high school and willed himself toward the occupation with constant evening practice, but even he wasn’t sure the whirling dervish was anywhere near a good idea.

After polishing his plane’s double wings to a burnished shine, Jeff consulted again with Miklos, whose foreign intensity somehow felt both admonitory and encouraging. Each word the man spoke carried in it heaviness and brusque direction.

“You step on zee left pedal, then a sudden sving to zee right, and you do not slow down.”

“I don’t slow down. Why not?”

Miklos discarded Jeff’s concern, running his hands along his plane’s immaculate exterior. Jeff had, in all his time working with the esteemed foreigner, never planned to maneuver so much so quickly, and with such noted accuracy. People had died during the shows. Ten years ago, one man traversing the ribbed edge of his plane’s wing—actually walking it while his partner operated the controls inside the plane—fell to the time of a rioting ovation. The show continued for minutes, until the pilot noted his double’s knitted scarf in the rearview mirror. Jeff had seen Miklos perform the same act to the chagrin of the show’s sponsors, though even they admitted the sight was an exhilarating—though wildly irresponsible—pleasure.

“Too vindy—could helix,” Miklos said, looking to the sky. The day had begun with a frosted current and had since tensed to a series of deep, blustery whirlwinds, of which the flatness of the land was already prone. “You practice now. I vatch.”

Jeff popped the plane’s door shut with a tinny snap and incited the thin propellers, their vacillating concentricity whipping his hair in wild strokes. He imagined himself falling through the clouds—first slowly, then rapidly—as he rose above the horizon, stirring the thought from his mind as he warmed up for the afternoon show with a planned series of loops and feigned engine failures, which had always been a crowd favorite. Several townspeople gathered to watch, but Miklos turned them away, one by one, mentioning that during the afternoon show he’d be flying, and anyone who wanted a real spectacle should return then. He folded his arms, his eyes tracking Jeff’s clotted engine smoke as it traced cursive into the placid morning sky.

*  *  *

Leila had lost sight of her boyfriend, Tim, mid-afternoon, somewhere between the merry-go-round and the fried dough stand, her most unwelcome temptation. In her haste to locate him and leave—to finally free herself from the clatter of the prize bell, its shrill ring saturating the midway—she encountered the entrance to the ferris wheel. Her initial assessment of the wheel had pinned it as a place for the lonely and big-hearted, a place not fit for her. But in the hopes of acquiring some view from which to spot Tim, she reluctantly entered the singles line, which was waited on in a much more timely manner than those who chose to board collectively, though at the cost of some residual social stigma. Leila forced the thought of such social relegation from her as a bearded man operating the ride motioned for her to enter the whitish-lime cart while gnawing a block of fresh jerky. He smiled at her, revealing four teeth from which Leila quickly turned.

Inside the cart slouched Brian, a forty-something year-old man who Leila immediately deemed in need of sleep. He had lost most of his hair, and Leila assumed he would exit the ride once she boarded. Instead, he continued staring somewhere in the distance, his vision fixed on a thin line of smoke pricking the sky, occasionally turning to examine some ramshackle boutique from which people purchased stuffed animals the carnival games had, in their innately rigged nature, withheld. Leila sat opposite him, moved her long, brown hair toward her chest and away from the inscribed scratchings near the linked wire: Dylan luvs Brad. Dawn wuz here. A few hearts, a few phone numbers with unrecognizable area codes, one picture of a stick man pooping. Leila had hoped Tim’s polo could be seen through the mass of the other refulgent, discordant colors, and she squinted to begin her search. Both she and Brian kept in complete silence, as if catering to a necessary vow, or willing themselves from a life tilted precariously—only for the moment forgetting the things they could do without.

*  *  *

By mid-morning, Jeff had completed his set of practice tsunamis, the hands-down most feared and difficult stunt both Miklos and he performed simultaneously; the show’s anticipated finale. The two separated a half-mile, hundreds of feet in the air, and rapidly descended toward the ground in an enormous, concave arc of smoke, coming within inches of each other and the landing strip. Jeff’s nerves calmed considerably after each show as the applause from the maneuver bloomed around him. Miklos had performed the stunt for years in Russia, where on several occasions he claimed to have performed the feat while flying upside-down. Jeff initially doubted this claim, though he later grew to understand that Miklos, all things considered, had likely accomplished just that.

Jeff and Miklos spent their lunch hour preparing the planes for their scheduled afternoon ascent into the sky, which looked—in Miklos’s words—to be “ready for flight.” Both toiled over the refined gloss of their windshields, the loose, oiled area around the adjustable brakes, the momentary dust settled in the propellers. As Jeff began to walk toward his packed lunch (two ham sandwiches and a pile of thin, day-old grapes), Miklos approached him.

“Jeffrey, you know vhat to do, yes?” To Jeff’s consistent amusement, Miklos was never able to grasp the concept of abbreviating one’s name.

“About the dervish? Yes. I know, Miklos.”

“No, Jeffrey, zee spinout.”

“The spinout?” Not only had anyone neglected to tell Jeff about the additional maneuver, but the thought of a nauseous spinning post-stunt had him wondering how many additional hands he’d require to gain reasonable control over the plane.

“After zee zunami.”

“Miklos, I’m not trying it—not without practice.“

“Vell, I vill.”

Miklos turned toward his stunt plane, glopped another liberal polish onto its hood, spread it to a thin, silver luster.

*  *  *

As the oscillating whir from the afternoon stunt show waned in the distance, Leila and Brian had somehow managed to further the space between them in the cart. Leila’s search for Tim had, in keeping with her recent study habits, quickly turned sour, and she picked at her sundress, awaiting the wheel’s final full turn, at which point she hoped to exit and walk to the town bookstore. Brian sighed at the sight of his wife, clad in a lumpy knit sweater, shepherding their two boys from the bingo hall. He straightened his posture a bit then spoke, as if cued to.

“She’s doing it again.”

Leila wondered, for a moment, if she could ignore the man. The wheel had turned  several times since she had boarded, but had not neared its pinnacle, its halfway point. She responded out of obligation, an insecure mumble.

“Who’s doing what?”

“My wife. She’s doing it again.”

Brian had focused on the carnival’s token ring toss, where his wife had strategically positioned their eight- and ten-year-old boys to wrap rings around the necks of peripheral bottles whenever the barker averted his neurotic gaze. Brian had been unemployed for four months, and his wife operated under the injurious presumptions that if a game could be beat it should be beat and that there was room in the backseat of their station wagon for an oversized plush gorilla. One pang of the prize bell announced the luck of a recent winner, and Brian slumped further in his seat.

“What’s she doing?”

“Nevermind.” Brian had realized unfolding his personal life to a young, female stranger was, in the moment, unnecessary and candid, though his desperation for some small talk held him in a state of only half-regret. Two planes surged into the air in a sudden swell, and for a moment even the ride operators’ eyes fixed on the sight. Leila’s surprise at the concentrated frisson in the air had her turn away from the sight, toward the space behind the carnival, where Tim and another girl stood; between the fried dough stand and the broken portable toilet. Leila shut her eyes and, for the moment, thought about how many senses she could close off simultaneously.

*  *  *

Jeff and Miklos had been performing for nearly a half hour, taking turns eliciting praise from the afternoon’s first crowd with various perilous maneuvers. Per usual, Miklos deviated from the scripted show with additional quick turns and spirals—even spinning out as a demonstration of his mastery over the skill. Jeff prepared for the whirling dervish, and though jarring his consciousness and acquiring a heaving blood rush to the head, he accomplished the stunt with only temporary hearing loss, which he learned to shake swiftly through the generous applause. Both planes arced and rose dramatically in preparation for the final act, the tsunami.

As Jeff’s plane dove, Miklos unexpectedly rotated his, the convex tin belly and wheels of his plane facing skyward. Having never seen Miklos perform the stunt upside down, Jeff assumed that, in another attempt to overshadow his own safer aerial acrobatics, he had chosen to deviate from the scheduled maneuver last-minute. Jeff’s concern at either catching a wheel on the ground or backing out and looking like a complete fool dominated the seconds of his earthbound plunge. Miklos hooked a small loop of smoke in the air before immediately jetting toward their paths’ intersections.

The two met a nearly perfect current of air as both planes—one inverted, one righted—approached the earth. Jeff’s focus on the things around him blurred. His vision felt obstructed around its peripheries. The sound of the two planes ripped into the air, and Jeff pulled suddenly upward, unwilling to risk contact as Miklos whizzed by with a surreal, angled flourish. A click—some minor pop—and the sounds of pulverized metal and cracking sparks instantly quieted the applause. Jeff only saw the accident as he turned with a wide loop, a maneuver normally employed to end the show.  Miklos’s right propeller spiraled from its place on the plane into the horizon, as if required to continue with some performance. Jeff thought about how perfect his departure from the scene could have been—one full tank of gas, a spritely shine to the vintage plane—but instead touched down with extra care, running to the sight of the crash, which steamed with hot tin and serrated flesh and a tincture of engine oil. In that moment, Jeff raced through the angles in his mind—the spinout he had failed to allow adequate space for, the buffer zone he had irrefutably violated—and turned back toward his plane.

*  *  *

Both Brian and Leila hadn’t seen it, but immediately after the impact, a pink mist hung in the air. They pressed their faces against the cart’s wires. Below, in the tangled disorder of the carnival, Brian’s wife stole two enormous stuffed pandas and an inflatable guitar. Tim had drifted with the other girl toward an apple tree and kissed her there, as planned: forehead, cheek, lips. Brian and Leila saw none of this. At the edge of the carnival, a limber women covered in red sequins curled into the barrel of a cannon, and two carnival barkers sold makeshift tickets to see what they pronounced the greatest wreck of them all. The ride lurched forward as final smoke from the crash met the clouds in ribbons, plateauing beneath them in pools and rising above in one massive clot, a night sky pushing through the firmament.

PK is an undergraduate student currently living in New Hampshire. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in South Dakota Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pear Noir!, Mud Luscious, The Catalonian Review, decomP, and others. He is the Editorial Assistant with The Medulla Review.