Cropduster, by Mark Jones

I spent the next few days kind of mulling about. Trucks came for bales around noon, but I learned to pick my stacks on the basis of their aroma and the postulate that the most potent get transported last. Walking was my way of circumventing how a college degree here meant nothing, and how being trilingual seemed liable to get me apprehended for treason. I swung by the convenience store and talked up the Asian chick who commutes by motorcycle with her kids and pretended to read classifieds while basking in the fact that she had mated. It was so hot. I needed something to focus on. I started brushing my teeth with my left hand for the simple reason that it was difficult. I memorized Morse Code, the length of day on each planet, and the basics of how to build a sundial from sticks. I went East most mornings to sit on the curb by the house with the piano from which I kept hearing Scriabin. It was a sunbaked area of isolated quiet riddled with potholes and forgotten vomit near a gas station where I could offset the piss thin coffee of capitalism with the authenticity of the etude.

I picked up work at a local cropduster a few miles North along the river as ground crew mixing chemicals, loading aircraft, cleaning, and other odd jobs they needed. The operation was run out of two locations separated by about twenty-five miles. Both had water and fuel storage tanks, dirt airstrips, silver pumping equipment, and corrugated hangars for aircraft buffed so far past immaculate they were rusting. The outfit was owned by a bloke who was just a few years older than me. He lived in a house collocated at one of the strips where he was robbed of his childhood by his father, who did it because his father took away his in exactly the same place. The guy’s wife rarely left the office and spoke in this pilfered incoherent parlance you might observe among tribespeople or those infected with both an identity crisis and stupidity. I never understood her. They had two daughters, aged seven and ten, who had been trained to herd cattle with old pickups, collect empty pesticide containers, throw them in a ditch, then burn them with gasoline. They were fearless and unfortunate enough to have been drafted into the greater agrisphere of talentless clans who conceive and bequeath their kin to the myth that the boondoggle of the bug chase descends from a desire to feed people.

They put me up in a back house behind the hangar at the strip where they lived. It had an attached can into which I could weave a line, but it still demanded foresight in the sense that it could only be flushed when it rained. I became a meteorologist. The alarm got things going at 0345 every morning, after which I got up, washed my face in the sink, got dressed, and rolled my focus into confronting the fact that the gravitational potential of what I required from my coffee was approaching the singularity. I was excited about bending spacetime, but after some rough calculations, this appeared to have occurred at thirty. I got into my boots, stepped outside, closed the door, and started off for the shed under the white eyes of a cow eating a wet grass salad in warm starlight.

We were at least two hours from any sort of sun, so I set course for the shed by using the Pleaides and the sound of Ginger sprinting across the black to meet me. She lived alone among the pallets, wore the sweet perfume of Chlorpyrifos, and was an orange I’d only seen in photographs of magma. Had she been human, she would have been insatiable, and therefore impervious to the presence of kindness, long marred by fate into honing how to be heartless without being offensive. But she was a cat. And she was keen to accompany me wherever it was I was going, so I picked her up and brought her over to where I could fumble around for the light switch. After I topped her food bowl I had a banana and then started dragging down 20kg bags of Dithane and stacking them upright against the wall by the mixing vats.

I pulled the strings on all the bags, most of which came off in my hands or jammed halfway. I thanked Ginger for being fantastic, then set off for the hangar to open the doors. They were trifold panels of steel locked closed in the center by a vertical bar that sat in the floor and stuck into the ceiling. After undoing that in the dark, I spent several minutes pushing each half through a track of casters that clamored like someone was trying to bang their way into the building with a sledge hammer. When I got them against the walls folded up like an accordion, I dropped the vertical locks into holes in the slab, and by that time, the boss was usually walking in wearing his favorite boots, shorts, and whistling.

It was the same stupid tune encoded with the joy of a boy in his late forties suckling his way through life on the breastmilk of inheritance and a concocted online chronicle. It made me want to pummel him. But I resisted. Wingwalked him through the doors while he backed out the bird with a tractor hooked to the tailwheel. When we got to the loading pad, I undid the tow bar, brought over the hose, then put on a mask and started lifting bags of Dithane up and pouring them into the vats. The water I was pumping in with it was kicking the powder into an airborne froth and engulfing me in a cloud of what looked like cornmeal but tasted like chalk. While I did this, he walked over to the water tank to piss through the bottom of his shorts, came back, lit a cigarette, then showed me a recent upload of a sparrow with seven bullet holes and 132 Likes. And who did I reckon the shooter is.

There were other rooms in the backhouse where I was staying because a team of pilots showed up every year for a few weeks to meet demand for the untold tons of crop juice necessary to keep the grain market in surplus. They got paid by the acre, but there was never any talk of contracts. They just showed up because the boss needed hands and paid cash. The whole thing was illegal. But the underlying irony of cropdusting is its parasitic symbiosis with the faithful enslavement of itself and the consumption of enough of its young to yield the mutations necessary to stay half a century in lag. I had yet to encounter another subculture more committed to its own desophistication or more unaware that it was only alive because its suppliers got rich off it. But who was I. I didn’t have any tailwheel time, I didn’t have a proper form of ID, I didn’t grow up on a farm, and I’d never laid eyes on winter wheat. How dare I try to do anything but swallow the holy oath of grown men who fly million dollar machines but were uniformly averse to anyone who could read.

Everyone had their own room, although being born male was apparently an unwritten prerequisite for those not fond of cooking, washing dishes, going to get groceries, or doing laundry. The boss only hired local chicks, and sat his favorite hen at a desk by the entrance so he could eyefuck her from behind while pounding one of his wife’s fruit smoothies like it was Jack. Anne made maps and answered phones. We were instructed to address her as “Annie” and find a way to see through the sass of how seven years into unwed motherhood at 25 might be the purgatory where the sexpot does penance before pupating into matriarch.

The pilots were all decent enough folk with permanent gigs and families in other rural cesspools. Living with them under the same roof, sharing the same showers, and eating at the same table made it clear that it had never crossed any of their minds why a man might aspire to achieve something not obtainable in this country. Alvin was about my age, had three wives, seventeen children, and eldership in a sect so inbred it was molecularly equivalent to grease. Darryl was a little older, ate nothing but hot pockets, had a massive neck, and put to me in private an unsolicited pitch for Christianity on the grounds that places in the bible show up on google maps. Matt was early thirtyish and the kind of unkempt walking colostomy you could only get by mixing drunkard with unquenchable thirst for nicotine and involuntary stepfather. He filled the cupboard with his cans of chili beans which he inhaled as his sole nutritional staple and which woke him at 0300 each morning to bellow like a quasar from his anus. The only nonalcoholic thing I ever saw him drink was concentrated energy from what I initially took to be a pack of shotgun shells but turned out to be cartridges of something you could either shoot intravenously or snort as is. Vince had recently turned fifty, and had spent the years since thirty weaseling himself into flying jobs because he was a licensed mechanic and schooled in how to aggressively pretend to be interested. He got his foot in the door by stroking whoever guarded it with the façade of a happily married man with three kids, but then closed out family restaurants with Matt plastered on whiskey and barfing on me while I drove for them. He was a former enlisted man on a lifelong quest to avenge having never flown fighter jets who feigned fascination as a way to surveil for dirt with which to badmouth guys in their absence.

The wind picked up one afternoon and the boss radioed to the planes to finish the job they were on and head home. It was going to be a gale well into the next day, and that meant the ground crew would be spending it washing aircraft. I quite liked this because I could get a good look at the bird and learn how to keep pace with largescale agriculture but remain an idiot. The secret is to dump your entire basket of capital into more powerful engines and bigger hoppers while treating the instrument panel as a place to put post-its scribbled with everyone’s opinions. The ergonomic disaster I found while washing out cockpits seemed designed as an indigestible mess either to be incompatible with smart people or to satisfy a desire to be so distracted one has no choice but to fly into something. This is what I discovered lurked behind the urge to constantly recycle the same froth about how ten thousand flight hours is still too little to be safe. I asked the pilots one night while working my way along an ear of sweet corn if the inventor of the speedometer should be imprisoned for robbing us of our ability to correlate the sound of the wind with whatever gear we are in. I asked them if such a talent was something we could codify into a philosophy of how to build bridges or optimize radar waveforms and if physicians should be licensed to wield scalpels with the seat of their pants. I asked them why it was so blasphemous to admit shrouding monkey skills in mysticism and labeling capable people insurance risks is just a means of keeping the newcomer so confused they eventually quit. Everyone just kind of looked around like their wives walked in on them whacking it. I finished my corn, tossed it in the trash, and started flossing myself with a finger. Matt got up and headed for the shitter, Darryl warmed up another hot pocket, Alvin pretended to be texting, and Vince just sat there glued to the news looking pissed.

Things seemed to suddenly lose steam after a few weeks. The pilots all left in rental cars, the birds went in for maintenance, and the combines came out en masse to crisscross the fields and undo everything we had done. I was shoveling an apple slice into the peanut butter jar one day at the backhouse when I heard the phone. Boss’s wife. Spitting into my ear again with that unplaceable misinflected drivel about what I gathered to be code for the bugs didn’t bite this year and commodity prices kept growers stingy, so money is tight, and I’m sorry but we’re gonna have to let you go.

I just hung up, packed my stuff, awoke early to fill Ginger’s bowl, then left her with a kiss that contained every positive piece of me that wasn’t ruined. I kicked out the screen in the window of the storeroom to give her a means of escape if anyone ever locked her in again. I wanted vengeance for these things, but that was all I could do. The ten year old offered to lift me to the gate, so we headed out with her piloting the pickup with one hand on the wheel and the other preparing me a breakfast of half a bag of barbeque chips. There was no sign of her parents. I debarked at the gate, waved, double checked I had my wages, then started walking south along the road for town. It was the typical convoy of beaters, big rigs, abandoned billboards, and the blare of air brakes. I felt like I might have a coffee, so I hung a left by the boat dealer and plotted course for main street. Halfway around the corner I caught the boss standing on a speed model fornicating himself through selfies flamboyantly choreographed to say he’d built the dynasty with his bare hands. I watched him pull out a wallet, hand something to a salesman, then prance about his new toy picking his nose, smoking his father’s cigarettes, and playing with his crotch.