He was right about the protest but wrong about the reason.
“You’re going to fly the plane?” Michael asked.
“Well, yes.”
“But… but I’ve seen you fly a plane!” Michael’s voice squeaked, and his fork clattered to the table. “You weren’t that good at it!”
“Everyone needs practice,” Carl said, trying to sell it. He’d never really batted his eyes at anyone before, but he was discovering it was harder than it sounded.
“But why? Why would you want to fly the damned plane and leave me here to fix the car, maybe? Why?”
Carl grimaced. “Because,” he said heavily, “you’re right. I’m not that good. I want to make contact with Stirling and the others, but I don’t want you in the plane in case it’s a really bad idea.”
Michael’s brown eyes got really huge, and he stared at Carl helplessly. “Unbelievable!” he said. “Why can’t you wait for me to finish the damned Cherokee! Or at least try. I can’t promise shit, but if she’s got the right tools and some spare parts, I might be able to get that fucker over the hills and through the woods and to goddamned civilization. At least give me a couple days to try.”
“For one thing,” Carl said, giving Mandy an apologetic look, “we don’t have a couple of days. We gave ourselves a few extra days to look around before we’re expected at the Aerie, and given what Mandy told us, we really need to make that work. Also, I really don’t want to leave a trail someone else can follow back here. If I land a plane in the middle of nowhere—”
“Or crash it!” Michael reminded.
“Or crash it,” Carl accepted, “Nobody has to know where I took off from. But if we come driving out of the underbrush in a tricked-out Jeep Cherokee, I’m thinking we just made Mandy’s life a lot more dangerous. I’d rather fly out, come back with supplies, and then fly out with you before we start our big detective thing at the Aerie, and leave the rebooted rental car as a last resort. But I don’t want you in the plane the first time in case it turns out to be a really bad idea.”
“It’s already a really bad idea!” Michael protested, his hands shaking as he dragged them through his glossy dark hair.
“How do you know?” Carl shot back, hurt. “It could be the best idea I’ve ever had.”
“If it was the best idea you’ve ever had, you’d let me sit in the plane with you,” Michael told him, crossing his arms. “And that’s that.” He looked apologetically at Mandy. “Sorry, Mandy. Also….” He sat up straighter, as though this had just occurred to him. “Also, if I take a look at what Mandy’s got, when we return, we can bring the right stuff to trick out the Cherokee so it’s not held together with bubblegum and a prayer. I know you’ve been watching all the wrong movies, but I’m not suddenly going to convert that perfectly conventional vehicle into a monster truck with tractor parts, okay?”
“I don’t want you in the plane,” Carl said, trying to be reasonable. “Not the first time, anyway.”
“The first time?” Mandy spoke up. “You said you could—”
“My first solo flight,” Carl said, glaring at Michael and daring him to contradict. “I had… instructors for my first takeoff and landing. Landings.” He added the plural belatedly.
“Were they good instructors?” Mandy asked dubiously.
“The best,” Carl said.
“No, they weren’t,” Michael snapped, and then they glared at each other.
“I feel confident I can do this,” Carl told her, trying a smile that said exactly that.
“Then feel confident enough to take me,” Michael insisted.
“You are a father of three, and you’ll be missed if this goes tits up, as Chuck would say,” Carl retorted, and they glared at each other for a moment now that he’d said the thing that should be perfectly logical but Michael had apparently not conceived of yet.
Michael blew out a breath. “Well, you are my reward for two years of prison and a lifetime before that of thinking I was gonna be trapped straight in Texas my entire life, and I’m not watching you blow off or up into the wild blue yonder without me.”
Carl gasped and rubbed his chest. “Dammit,” he muttered. It was suddenly hard to speak, much less argue. “That’s not—you can’t use that as an argument.”
“Then don’t make me,” Michael said, his brown eyes obstinate and not sweet at all. “If Mandy will take me out to see what I’ve got to work with, I’ll make a list of shit we need to bring back.”
“Hamburger,” Sunny said out of the blue.
Carl, Michael, and Mandy all looked at the young woman in surprise. For the most part, their conversation had gone by the two young people like wind around twin mountains. The words might have weathered them a little, but it would take a lot more talking to make an impact. They were certainly not expecting input.
“What?” Mandy asked, sounding disconcerted. “Sunny, what about hamburger?”
Sunny gave them a sweet smile. “Put it on the list,” she said. “Hamburger is some of the shit you need to bring back.” She took a bite of her pie. “This is good. I want it again.”
Carl let out a held breath and Michael did the same, and they both remembered that they were having their first fight in front of other people.
“Fine,” Carl muttered. “I’ll talk to Hunter and Chuck tonight after I take a look at the plane.”
Michael smiled. “You’ll do good,” he said with the same level of confidence he might have had if Carl was drawing up a brief. “I mean, you’re not gonna crash if I’m in there, right?”
“No,” he said, his chest getting tight again. “I might have a heart attack, but I definitely won’t crash the plane.”
LATER THAT night, after Mandy and the teenagers had watched some television—the kids were partial to sitcoms—and Carl had scoped out the plane while Michael had made his list for the Cherokee, Carl used the landline again. It was an old-fashioned desk phone, drunk-piss yellow with a long curly cord and a rotary dial. Carl had nearly broken his finger on the dial because it was stiff from disuse—both the dialer and the finger, apparently. It sat on a small black-lacquered secretary that came with pens and paper and stood in the corner of the room by the television and an armchair—inconvenient when kids were watching TV, fairly convenient for doing business Carl was used to doing on a laptop.
The furniture was indicative of the entire farmhouse. Apparently built in the eighties, the builders probably thought it was a pioneer sort of place—a precursor to a land boom like much of California experienced. But the road proved to be difficult, and a series of floods and then long years of drought had made the low hills a financial risk for nearly any sort of building, and so the house sat in its little valley, alone.
Mandy had told him that the reason they had grazing land for all the goats was that the water table in this part of the Napa Valley was still reasonably functional, whereas much of the rest of the state had already sunk into dust.
Carl, thinking about the feathered abominations in the mews outside, gave a groan. “Why are humans?” he asked rhetorically, not wanting to even broach the subject of what had been done to the planet.