Zacatecas: A Review of Contemporary Word

The girl strikes match to matchbook; a sonic boom crackles out over the yellow autumn cornfields.

The two events occur nearly simultaneously, an illusion of cause and effect. Then two jet fighters drop down from out of the thin cloud cover. They circle in close to each other, drawing closer and closer-- so close that everyone watching thinks there's going to be a mid-air collision-- until finally the jets blast off in opposite directions, silver arrows against pale sky. And with an air of studied nonchalance, the girl touches her match to her cigarette, and the audience applauds.

The girl. Of course, she's really a woman, probably nearly thirty, but it's just that it's so much more natural for you to say "the girl." It's not that you mean anything by it. It's just that she's about the same age as you are, and frankly, you don't really see yourself as an adult yet, as someone with responsibility and a career and all. Would she understand that kind of thinking, would she mind being called a girl? Because it really is only the wives of your friends that you call women, because they've taken up some nebulous status as settled down. Just as so many of your guy friends are now men, earnest and tired. And how did this transformation occur? You have no idea. You just woke up one day and saw that it was true.

So this girl smokes her cigarette, and you watch.

She wears a one-piece dress, dark green, along with fashionable, lace-up-the-side boots. Also: tortoise shell sunglasses and a white scarf. She stands with one hand cocked against slender hips, eyes on the sky, hair long and brown and straight over her shoulders. Her neck strains as she watches for the helicopters that are scheduled to perform next. Already you can see them as dull gray specks on the horizon. In minutes they roar past overhead, their trailing dust plumes obscuring the view of Denver and of the mountains. They engage in some sort of mock combat and everyone in the crowd cheers wildly.

Everyone except the girl, that is, who watches the show instead with a brooding intensity of some kind, like maybe she's plotting something, like maybe she's the kind of person who comes to air shows with the secret hope of seeing a plane or two crash and come hurtling across the asphalt runway. Maybe even right now she's trying to use telekinesis on the helicopters, trying to push them just a little too close, so that the tips of their blades get caught up in each other. Or there are other possibilities. Anything and everything is at this point possible. Maybe she likes to go out on dates to the airport, likes to spend her evenings casting voodoo spells on businessmen taking the red-eye to Chicago. Maybe she crosses herself whenever a commercial airliner over-flies her path. She could be that someone free and rebellious and splendidly irrational that you've always imagined yourself with, the kind of person who can make anything and everything exciting.

The kind of person you've never, ever, actually met in real life.

Not that you're here hoping for disaster. In fact, you're rather neutral on air shows. The only reason you came at all was because the whole thing was free, and because you'd never been out to the new airport before, and because your friend Sammy Diaz insisted that you'd like it. Sammy loves airplanes, of course. He's got his commercial pilots license and works for United. His old man joined the airforce as a way out of the ghetto, so Sammy grew up around planes and has always known what it was he wanted to do with his life. He can tell you the specifications on anything with wings, just pulling out numbers from somewhere underneath his mop of black hair. And Sammy is a good guy, tall and lanky, quick to smile. He was one of your roommates back in college. But in a lot of ways you think he overdosed on this whole aircraft thing. He had posters of F-16's and F-18's his dorm room, and when he speaks of jets it's with an annoying combination of reverence and awe. So it's no wonder you're drawn to this mysterious girl, so quiet and calm in the face of supersonic speed, daring aerobatics, stunning technology.

It would be good, you reason, if this girl did believe in telekinesis or voodoo, because that kind of mind-set would go a long ways toward balancing out Sammy and his near-worship of what are, after-all, machines made for killing. And faced with two such extremes: with some spiritual rejection of modern technology versus a smugness in its flawless workings, well, maybe nestled between those two extremes you could feel like it's okay to be non-committal, because there's nothing like two opposing extremes to remind you of how ridiculous certainty can be, whether it's about what progress is, or success, or love, or anything.

You're so intent on this thought, as a matter of fact, that you don't even notice when Sammy's wife Michelle gets back from the concession stand. She stands next to you for a minute or two, holding a tray heavy with hot dogs and drinks. Sammy is there too.
"Hello? Do you want a beer or not?" she says finally.
"Oh, Jesus, sorry 'Chelle." You take a beer and a hot dog. Sammy takes the same. This leaves Michelle with a diet Coke that she sips through a long, thin straw.

She's a tall brunette, leggy, a good match for Sammy. In high school they both ran cross-country, and they both have the runner's thin build. You remember in college how you and Sammy and your third roommate, Sal Hastings, used to play penny poker on Monday nights, and how whenever Michelle joined in she would always win. She was always smart and hard-working and you and Sal used to tease Sammy that he didn't have a chance of hooking up with her. She talked about how she was going to Asia to teach English. Or else back-packing in South America. Never once did you hear her talk about marriage. Yet somehow her and Sammy have found in each other a contentment, and it is both wonderful and incomprehensible to you. In fact, Michelle's just recently gotten her pilot's license, and when her and Sammy talk about flying, it's like they're flirting.
"There," Sammy says, between swallows of beer, "that loop's got to be tough, but the plane on the left's gotten too far ahead."
"Maybe he's just excited," says Michelle, squinting. For your part, you haven't been paying attention to the schedule. The helicopters are gone and two new jets are involved in some sort of huge loop across the sky.
"Yeah," Michelle goes on, "just imagine the view that pilot has. Just mountains and sky and open prairie for a thousand miles in every direction. It's got to be tough not to just let the throttle out and just FLY, you know, in a jet like that." You think about this. In one of those jets you could rocket to any point in Colorado in minutes. It's a Saturday afternoon, late September. The day's been hot but a cool night is just waiting to spill out over the horizon and wash the blue from the sky, leaving it clean and black for the stars. Where would you want to fly on an evening like this?

Fifty miles to the north is the college town of Fort Collins, where on days like today you and Sammy and Sal Hastings used to sit up on the roof of your house and drink under the hot Indian summer sun. Sal was always the practical one. He'd tell you to come down from your perch before you got sunburned and you'd call all your friends, and then you'd shower and dress and walk down to the liquor store on the corner. And all you'd have planned would be to walk the streets of the university district and listen for the sound of guitars playing and people laughing, and then to follow it all to some brightly-lit party. Because back then, when you were that age, tomorrow was theoretical at best, the future only the barest of abstractions. And would you want to fly back to that if you could, if you had some voodoo mystic jet fighter?

Or would you go four hundred miles to the east, to St. Louis, where the blonde you dated back in college now lives, the girl who wanted to marry you and who is now married to an electrical engineer. Would you fly back and change any of this? Or would you go only the forty miles to Colorado Springs, where the girl you dated just last year is doing who knows what with who knows who, her father paying the way, with no need for job, planning, nothing. How long would it take to fly in an F-16 to a place where we could all live like that, you want to ask Sammy, like maybe he'd know the stats on that one.
"You know," says Sammy, oblivious, finishing his hot dog, "we should get together tonight, all of us. I can call Sal and he could come over and we could all have a barbeque, maybe even play some poker..."
"Oh, right, 'cause you still haven't seen our new place," Michelle says to you, "and you really got to see our new place. It's all so brand new!"

You finish your beer. You look out into the crowd. The girl in the green dress and the white scarf and the boots who had so caught your fancy is gone. You look up into the sky at a set of fading contrails. Their white streaks mix with billowing, island-like clouds, and in them it's possible to make out shapes, visions, possible futures. Can you see yourself someday in a crackerjack suburban townhome like Sammy and Michelle, new car parked out front, brain surgically removed and a set of credit cards installed? Or take your old roommate Sal. Would you want a job like his? He's managing his own upscale pawnshop, an extraordinary pawnshop in a national chain of pawnshops, all devoted to revolutionizing second-hand retailing. End quote. Does he believe in any of that corporate mission crap? Of course not. But he's rolling in the cash, so he pretends. He likes to play real poker now, not just the penny ante variety. Yeah, and he's cynical. You don't hear him talking about marriage ever. He likes to go down to the Glorious Quran, where the dancers are gorgeous and young. Sal's got the money to tip well, which translates into better service. He tells you this every time you see him. The dancers will shove their nipples in your face and run their hands over your thighs. This is how he met his last girlfriend; he was telling you this the last time you saw him, at a New Year's party in Sammy and Michelle's old apartment.

The clouds roll lazily across the blue of the sky, changing shape so slowly you hardly notice. The contrails fade out into nothingness. Michelle is talking about the logistics of shopping, getting the grill going, calling up Sal. She barely notices the show's finale, when three huge cargo planes lumber in for a series of touch and go landings while a stealth fighter soars overhead. Then everything is over and the crowd starts for their cars. The asphalt everyone has been standing on all day clears to reveal smashed and splintered plastic cups, spilled beer that's attracting wasps, air show programs blown into piles like dead leaves. The heat of the day is already fading, people are putting on sweaters and wind brakers.
"We're heading out to find our car," Sammy says, "I'm sorry we can't give you a ride"-- this is because they're in Michelle's little two-seater Fiat-- "but we'll see you then in an hour or two, at our place?"

You nod your head. Then you go and stand in line for the bus back to Denver, because your own car broke down two weeks ago and there's no money to fix it until the end of the month. But what else is new? If only, you thought, there were something more.

A lot of people came out to the air show and traffic is bad. You have to wait a long time for the bus. There's nowhere to sit down and your legs are already sore from standing all day. But then you see that the girl in the green dress and the boots is in line for the bus too, not far ahead of you. She no longer wears her sunglasses; her eyes catch yours watching her. The sun is low and dull on the horizon, the sky already purpling. And at that moment you know that it's not telekinesis, that you don't need no jet fighter, not a wife, not a whore, that you don't even need friends who are ghosts of the past only, that what you need is maybe something as simple as meeting someone you hadn't expected to meet, a catalyst to clear the mind, to set it working on possibilities again instead of history, to restore your confidence in luck. To let yourself work out some kind answer to the question you've been trying to ask yourself all day: Where to go next? And what to do with this thing in front of you, this future?

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