Before the Fall(114)
The first time they came for him, he was fifteen, a skinny freshman who’d scored the starting kicker spot after shanking a thirty-six-yard field goal. Six hulking ranch thugs, stripped down and sweaty, shoved him into a shower stall.
“Watch your shit,” they told him.
Cowering in the corner, Charlie could smell their sweat, the musky funk of half a dozen teenage linebackers, not one under 250 pounds, who’d just spent three hours steam-cooking in the August sun. He bent and vomited onto their feet. They beat him good for that, slapping him around with their cocks for good measure.
In the end, huddled on the floor, he flinched when Levon Davies bent and hissed in his ear.
“Tell a f*cking soul and you’re dead.”
It was Uncle Logan who pulled the strings to get Charlie into the flight training program of the National Guard. It turned out he wasn’t a bad pilot, though he tended to freeze in sudden emergencies. And after the National Guard, when Charlie was kicking around Texas unable to hold down a job, it was Logan who spoke to a friend at GullWing and landed Charlie an interview. And though he had yet to find anything in life he was truly good at, Charlie Busch did have a certain sparkle in his eye, and a certain cowboy swagger that worked with the ladies. He could charm a room and he looked good in a suit, and so when he sat down with the HR director of the airline he seemed like the perfect addition to GullWing’s fast-growing stable of young, attractive flight personnel.
They started him as a copilot. This was September 2013. He loved the luxury jets, loved the clients he served—billionaires and heads of state. It made him feel important. But what he really loved was the grade-A, top-shelf * working the main cabin. Goddamn, he thought the first time he saw the flight crew he’d be working with. Four beauties from around the world, each more f*ckable than the next.
“Ladies,” he said, lowering his aviators and giving them his best Texas grin. The girls didn’t even blink. Turns out they didn’t sleep with copilots. Sure, the company had a policy, but it was more than that. These women were international sophisticates. Many spoke five languages. They were angels that mortal men could look at, but never touch.
Flight after flight, Charlie made his play. And flight after flight he was rebuffed. Turns out, not even his uncle could get him into the pants of a GullWing flight attendant.
He had been at the company for eight months when he met Emma. Right away he could tell she was different from the others, more down to earth. And she had that slight gap between her front teeth. Sometimes during a flight he’d catch her in the galley humming to herself. She would blush when she realized he was standing there. She wasn’t the hottest girl in the fleet, he thought, but she seemed attainable. He was a lion stalking a herd of antelope, waiting for the weakest one to wander off.
Emma told him her father had flown for the air force, so Charlie inflated his experience in the National Guard, telling her he spent a year in Iraq flying F-16s. He could tell she was a daddy’s girl. Charlie was twenty-nine years old. His own father had died when he was six. The only real role model he’d had for how to be a man was a rye drinker with fancy hair who told Charlie to make a muscle every time they met. He knew he wasn’t as smart as the other guys or as skilled. But being less talented meant he’d had to develop ways of passing. You didn’t have to be confident, he realized early on. You just had to seem confident. He was never a great fastball hitter, so he learned how to get on base by walking. He couldn’t deliver the monster punt so he mastered the onside kick. In classroom situations he’d learned to deflect hard questions by making a joke. He learned how to talk shit on the baseball field and how to swagger in the National Guard. Wearing the uniform made you a player, he reasoned. Just like carrying a weapon made you a soldier. It may have been nepotism that got him in, but there was no denying now that his résumé was real.
And yet who had ever really loved Charles Nathaniel Busch for who he was? He was somebody’s nephew, a pretender, the varsity athlete who’d become a pilot. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like an American success story, so that’s what he called it. But deep down inside he knew the truth. He was a fraud. And knowing this made him bitter. It made him mean.
*
He caught a ride from Heathrow on a GullWing charter, landing in New York at three p.m. on Sunday August 23. It had been six months since Emma broke up with him, since she told him to stop calling her, stop going by her place and trying to get on her flights. She was scheduled to do a milk run to Martha’s Vineyard and back, and Charlie had it in his head that if he could just get a few minutes alone with her he could make her understand. How much he loved her. How much he needed her. And how sorry he was about what had happened. Everything, basically. The way he’d treated her. The things he’d said. If he could just explain. If she could only see that deep down he wasn’t a bad guy. Not really. He was just someone who’d been faking his way through the world for so long, he had become consumed by the fear of being found out. And all of it, the cockiness, the jealousy, the pettiness, was a by-product of that. You try pretending to be someone you’re not for twenty years, see how it changes you. But my God, he didn’t want to be afraid anymore. Not with Emma. He wanted her to see him. The real him. To know him. Because didn’t he deserve that for once in his life? To be loved for who he was, not who he pretended to be?
He thought about London, seeing Emma again, like a snakebite, poison spreading through his veins, and how his instinct when he felt out of his depth was to attack, close the distance between himself and his—what? Opponent? Prey? He didn’t know. It was just a feeling, a kind of panicked advance, that had him put on airs, had him hike up his pants and slip on his best cowboy swagger. The only thing you can do, he had long ago decided, when you care too much, is to act like you could give two shits—about school, about work, about love.