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Roy BentleySix-Degree Freedom Big black road, big black river,
big black Heaven in the sky above… —Patti Scialfa, “Big Black Heaven” It’s 1965. We’re about a mile up, maybe more. The pilot is I.T. since his name is Ivan Taylor. I.T.’s decided I’m the son that he’ll never have. All summer, he’s been taking me up; letting me, just this week, fly. Steer the thing straight and level through a bright world above the world. Below, a checkerboard of corn- and beanfields: a white-striped snake of two-lane I recognize as the shortcut past the Pure Oil refinery. I.T.’s got on those aviator Ray-Bans. He’s Johnny Unitas, in profile—cropped hair, one of those grief-chiseled, movie-star faces that you expect nothing, and everything, of. He’s telling me about six-degree freedom, holding forth about roll, pitch, yaw—whatever those are—and up and side. Which takes me somewhere I don’t want to be in the Cessna. He says, “Pay attention. This is backward,” and slows our forward momentum mid-air. __________ I.T.’s warming up, throwing first base to third, the shortstop catching whatever is left over. Coach Woody Hayes is at Ohio State, and so every pick-up game is war. Life and death. You know these guys—sixteen-seeming at thirty. At forty. The shortstop hurries a practice tag, reminding I.T. that he’s reminding himself to press. I know this guy, he thinks, staring into the ball diamond of I.T.’s Ray-Bans. Then—wham!—I.T.’s into the near-infield grass, one-kneeing what should have been easy. He’s gone down for. In the Hoback Park bleachers I.T.’s wife is beside me. Pat doesn’t like baseball, hard seats. A car radio plays a Buck Owens song. The song is about having a tiger by the tail. __________ I.T.’s from No Lie, Kentucky. South of, and between, Hell for Certain and Jenkins. A hillbilly, technically, because any hillbilly with college is like a man without a country. He’s been called briarhopper once or twice. In the air, we’re off course. Not by much but enough that I.T. touches the bent brim of his ballcap. Stares at the line of sunset- as-horizonline. He’s decided something isn’t where it was before, and we turn, the dials of the control panel beginning to blaze, greening in advancing dark. __________ From my side of the plane, I see a worked- to-curving brim of ballcap, some lettering— everything there is to know about Ivan Taylor landing a Cessna. If Sundin’s Flight School had lighted runways I’d know this happened all the time, right-stuff pilots going farther out than one should on allotted fuel. I’d reconstruct an airstrip so lit up by a gas station’s signage that it should be no sweat. Piece of cake. If I could trace the line of athleticism from an infield pop fly I.T. bare-handed for the final inning’s side-retiring out, to this windscreen, I’d keep I.T.’s American cool like it was my birthright or a lucky silver dollar. I’d have the right-side profile of a man— all men who exhaust themselves and their allotment of luck in the service of—what?—you tell me. The most familiar place in the world is what we have to get back to, acres of wheat and alfalfa knotting the last of the light and Heath, Ohio. __________ I’m not thinking of the Wright Brothers when Pat hands I.T. his 30th birthday present. And I’m tired of the happy pictures of families sitting down to peaceful meals in the nineteen sixties. I’m weary of hearing how awfully good it was then. Maybe any part of the truth travels better, farther, than the whole truth. It’s just that Ivan Taylor pitching his unopened gift onto a sofa cushion isn’t anything I’ve seen before. This is the year it will come crashing down for both of them, the year I kill Pat’s oldest and favorite parakeet, lobbing the bird-as-baseball to Garry Bowling, a neighbor kid. Don’t ask me why I did that. Ask I.T. about winging that ribboned shirt box. __________ Here we are: downwind of—scared, you bet— and directly over the restaurant where Pat works. I can see the high schoolers cruising, rolling through the restaurant parking lot, circling, while sweating herds of Holstein cattle fill a flat quilt of fields before the airport. I.T. isn’t happy about any of this—his life going totally bust, having to put both hands on the lopped-off figure-eight of the wheel, bracing to take whatever comes. To his right, I await the usual touching-down cry of tires. He turns from what he’s doing to tell me something I can’t hear over the high whine of the Cessna’s throttling up. He looks back, hydraulic sighings and gear-grindings underfoot a kind of signal (must be) because he brakes. And hard enough to leave a ribbon of black to testify to the fact we’re down, and safe. We taxi to the hanger and I.T. flips the engine kill switch. We sit in a silence almost Biblical. He points in the direction of an almond of flame from the burning off of waste gases at the refinery. The light’s no big deal. What’s local never is. And then he says, That’s what I had to steer by as if letting a boy in on more than he should. |
Roy Bentley is the author of Starlight Taxi (Lynx House: 2013), which won the 2012 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize. His other books include The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine: 2006), which was the winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2005, Any One Man (Bottom Dog Books: 1992), and Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama: 1986), which won the 1985 University of Alabama Press Poetry Series. A recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, six Ohio Arts Council fellowships, and a Florida Division of Cultural Affairs fellowship, his poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Rattle and elsewhere. |
