I parked the already rusted six month old cruiser my mom had bought alongside the other clunkers and golf carts at the airport—a mere twenty feet from the “terminal”, a temporary mobile trailer with brown siding and some janky wooden stairs…looking out on the two single blacktop lane runways, I had to chuckle—this was a one-camel town for sure…Jon and David were there with tickets, and we quickly loaded onto a small puddle-hopper…this was my first plane-ride in another country to another country! That thought was not lost as we nailed the take-off and soared above turquoise plates & white sandbars…meanwhile my real fear of crashing there and sinking to the bottom, that, any blue way you cut it, would be a black and cold grave to die in, was palpable in the six square feet of cockpit room…I sat next to the pilot and could count the number of nose hairs in his right nostril…it was pretty strange to be aloft in this small craft, like a small car or a flying burrito, with only a thin skin separating you and turbulent air…Jon and David were high, giggling at me and sharing Belizian secrets, watching the great gringo marvel at the all-too-common small plane flight…but that couldn’t stop the slender, rarefied, and beautiful scene that was unfolding from my shotgun position…the dashboard dial and gauges spelled out the relative calm of the machinery…It was so loud you felt yourself seized with the desire to masticulate anything—knobs, dials, glass, safety card, sun visor—and the same tall words kept pushing up from the stomach to the lips: Death now? Death now? It couldn’t be helped in a flying machine…I tried talking to my bleary-eyed companions but it was so loud and they so stoned that soon we just laughed and looked down…
We were flying into Corozal en route to a big wedding where I would know no one and be the only American…without neglecting the gathering of whores and drinks…oh, yes, there would be those too…what lay ahead of me I wanted so bad I could bite…and forty minutes of flight time had brought us to the end of the road, another tiny dirt landing strip, the most impossibly small target in the history of Literature…our goddamn plane went right perfectly down that strip…in the net of my nerves reached the hand of marvel as we bounced down that rickety gravel path, in complete Central American control, passing the terminal, a miraculous shack, with ten Belizians or Mexicans waiting by crumpled cars and tall grass, finally doing a six point mechanical turn and coming to a smooth stop where we deplaned, as different men and certain warriors…And waiting in a roof-cut and flame-painted early Eighties Monte Carlo was Oscar, Jon’s frontier older brother, with a smile like Texas and the wiry deftness that also marked his little brother…the family resplendence was uncanny…”Ehhhhhhhhh….what’s up dudes?”
Brothers hugged, then David, and Jon introduced me to Oscar, and I was give the same deep hug of greeting…within the curtain of insects, we had our welcome! We piled in that black threnody missile and sped off V8 style, laying dust in our wake and seeing cold cervezas on the waterfront…
- Michael Price
