Before the Fall(113)
“So answer the question.”
“No, because it’s none of your business. I’m not trying to be an * here. I’m literally asking what possible difference it makes. And if you can convince me that my personal life after the crash has any relevance to the events leading up to the crash and isn’t just this kind of parasitical vulture exploitation, then I’ll tell you everything I am, happily.”
Bill studies Scott for a long moment, a bemused look on his face.
And then he plays the tape.
*
Bitch.
That f*cking bitch.
Gus realizes he’s holding his breath. The copilot, Charles Busch, is alone in the cockpit, and he is muttering these words under his breath.
And then, louder, he says:
No.
And switches off the autopilot.
Chapter 43
Charles Busch
December 31, 1984–August 23, 2015
He was somebody’s nephew. That was the way people talked behind his back. As if he never would have gotten the job any other way. As if he was a bum, some kind of hack. Born in the final minutes of New Year’s Eve 1984, Charlie Busch had never been able to escape the feeling that he had missed something vital by inches. In the case of his birth what he missed was the future. He started life as last year’s news, and it never got much better.
As a boy he loved to play. He wasn’t a good student. He liked math okay, but bore zero love for reading or science. Growing up in Odessa, Texas, Charlie shared the same dream as all the other boys. He wanted to be Roger Staubach, but he would have settled for Nolan Ryan. There was a pureness to high school sports, the knuckle slider and the backfield flea flicker, that got into your soul. Wind sprints and alligator drills. The low-shoulder kamikaze into heavy blocking sleds. The football field, where boys are hammered into men by pattern and repetition. Steve Hammond and Billy Rascal. Scab Dunaway and that big Mexican with hands the size of rib eyes. What was his name? A fly ball shagged on a cloud-free spring day. Pads and helmets shrugged on in jockstrap locker rooms, stinking of heat and the fight-or-f*ck pheromones of hot teen musk. The oiled mitt between your mattress and box spring, and how you always slept better with it under there, hardball wrapped in a web of leather thumbs. Boys on the verge of what comes next, grappling in the dirt, using their heads to open alleys. And how it felt to run forever and never get tired, to stand in a dusty dugout trash-talking relief pitchers, your buddy Chris Hardwick lowing like a cow. The coffin corner and the crackback block. The primal monkey joy of picking dirt from your cleats with any old stick, a bunch of boys on a bench spitting sunflower shells and digging deep down in the rubber. The in-between hop and the lefty switch. Hope. Always hope. And how when you’re young every game you play feels like the reason the world exists. The pickoff and the squeeze play. And the heat. Always the heat, like a knee in your back, a boot on your neck. Drinking Gatorade by the gallon and chewing ice chips like a mental patient, bent at the knee sucking wind in the midday sun. The feel of a perfect spiral as it reaches your hands. Boys in shower stalls laughing at each other’s dicks, bell-curving the cheerleaders, and pissing on the next guy’s feet. The beanball and the brushback, and how it feels to round first base and dig for second, eyes on the center fielder, sliding headfirst, already safe in your mind. The panic of getting caught in a pickle, and how white chalk lines when they’re fresh gleam like lightning against the grass, itself a deep, impossible green. Heaven is that color. And the bright lights of Friday night, those perfect alabaster lights, and the roar of the crowd. The simplicity of the game, always forward, never back. You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball. And how after graduation nothing would ever be that simple again.
He was somebody’s nephew. Uncle Logan, his mother’s brother. Logan Birch, a six-term US senator from the great state of Texas, friend to oil and cattle, longtime chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Charlie knew him mostly as a rye drinker with sculpted hair. Uncle Logan was the reason Charlie’s mother pulled out the fancy plates. Every Christmas they drove out to his mansion in Dallas. Charlie remembered the family all dressed in matching Christmas sweaters. Uncle Logan would tell Charlie to make a muscle, then squeeze his arm hard.
“Gotta toughen this boy up,” he told Charlie’s mother. Charlie’s father had died a few years earlier, when Charlie was six. Coming home from work one night an eighteen-wheeler sideswiped him. His car flipped six times. They had a closed-casket funeral and buried Charlie’s father in the nice cemetery. Uncle Logan paid for everything.
Even in high school, being Logan Birch’s nephew helped him. He played right field for the varsity team, even though he couldn’t hit as well as the other boys, couldn’t steal a base to save his life. It was unspoken, this special treatment. In fact, for the first thirteen years of his life, Charlie had no idea he was being elevated above his station. He thought the coaches liked his hustle. But that changed in high school. It was the locker room that woke him up to this conspiracy of nepotism, the wolf pack mentality of boys in jockstraps surrounding him in the shower. Sports is a meritocracy, after all. You start because you can hit, because you can run and throw and catch. In Odessa, the football team was notorious for its speed and precision. Every year veterans of the baseball team got a free ride to good colleges. West Texas sports were competitive. You put up lawn signs. Businesses closed early on game days. People took this shit seriously. And so a player like Charlie, mediocre in all things, stood out like a sore thumb.