Landing on Water

Southern Review, The, Summer, 2008 by Mark Baumgartner

The light fixtures vibrate when the planes come in over the Western-most Bar and Inn, north of Dakar, west of everything else. A rattle of fixtures, a dimming of lights, a lull in conversation every four minutes or so--you can almost set your watch by it.

Cecilia pushes through the dark clatter of the bar to the door and out onto the bright sunlit deck, a tray of drinks balanced with effortless grace on the palm of her hand. She likes it better outside where there ' s nothing between her and the planes and a sky scraped clean by white roiling noise. Out here on the deck there is only the blue of the Atlantic all around her--the far end of Africa, the Pointe des Almadies, the end of the world. A few thousand miles to the west is Cuba, dead across, and nothing in between. She dreams of Cuba often. It must be the jukebox, she thinks--all the songs a gorgeous, alien mashup of French hip-hop, local rhythms, Cuban jazz. All the things the locals love, and she herself, even if the Westernmost caters largely to foreigners.

She waits patiently for the planes shadow to pass over before going into her act. It ' s an old DC-9. Cecilia knows this without looking simply from the sound of the engines. Aman at the nearest table asks something in a dialect she hardly understands--Wolof maybe, the words are thick and unintelligible--but his voice is lost in the roar of engines. He ' s an older gentleman, black and handsome, courtly even--a local. She points at the sky, smiles an apology. She ' s been around planes and airports her entire life, an Air Force brat, toted from town to town to town, and now Senegal, L ë opold S ë dar Senghor International Airport, named for some erstwhile poet and president. She ' s seen countless takeoffs and landings and once, in Belleville, east of East St. Louis, even a crash. A flame-out, really: an old Vietnam-era Phantom out of Scott AFB took off the corner of their neighbor ' s garage before plummeting into the golf course pond out back. She was eight at the time and remembers a column of black smoke and her mother running into the kitchen shouting about the plane. " Not a plane, Mom, " she answered coolly, " a Phantom

, " a distant thrill of knowing dread in her voice. At times her whole life seems caught up in a brilliant white jet wash of sound. She thinks about plane wrecks often, but there is no particular fear in the thought, no malice. Always it passes, as it does now; the skies empty only to fill again, chaos and noise followed by quiet and vague disappointment, a continuous cycle. The DC-9 clears out, and Cecilia goes to work.

It ' s a small thing, serving drinks, but her patrons stare at her anxiously as if she were part barmaid, part trapeze artist. The tray shifts from her good hand to her bum arm, and she builds the drinks skillfully there at the table, martini glass filled with six counts of gin, followed by a few drops of vermouth. It ' s a trademark of the Westernmost, mixing the martinis at the table. The whole act is unexceptional, save for the arm. Whereas her left is perfectly formed--smooth, tan, and tapering into long, slender fingers--her right ends halfway down from the elbow, terminating in a curious, tender sort of nub. Women watch her mix drinks with narrow-eyed caution, men with feverish keenness bordering on obsession. She ' s been followed out to her car, to her apartment, men with their eyes on the ground and hands in their pockets, asking her out for dinner, out for the night. She ' s always surprised by the attention. She hardly thinks about the arm at all, and when she does she regards it with the same casual disregard as the missing fender on her little ' 83 Renault. The car was messed up when she got it, as was the arm, and she doesn ' t see anything remarkable in either. She can drive a stick as well as anyone, even if it seems thrilling and dangerous and terribly exotic to everyone but her.

She finishes mixing the martini and the patron repeats his question, this time in French, thickly accented and flirtatious. She looks up and sees not the patron but another figure at the far end of the deck. She straightens slightly, and an empty glass slides off her tray and smashes on the concrete floor of the deck. The dark olive uniform, the peak of the cap, the stony line of jaw--for a moment she thinks it ' s her father, dead now for several years, but it ' s only Darrell, her ex. There are bright shards everywhere, glimmering in the late afternoon sun. It ' s been a long time since she ' s dropped something, years maybe. She ignores the shattered glass and the patron, and lays her tray on the ground over the heart of the mess. Excuse me

, she says in Wolof, one of only a handful of phrases she knows with any confidence, and steps up silently behind Darrell. He is quiet and perfectly still, like a bust of some beautiful unknown soldier gazing out over the water. On an impulse she licks her bad arm and presses it cold against his ear. He comes to life slowly, turning to his right, and when he does Cecilia dodges playfully to the left and takes a seat beside him. " Howdy, Colonel, " she says.