Silent Nights

The late afternoon sky was a bright blue, no clouds, as the crew of men in hard hats pounded and shouted to erect the series of steel canisters. The canisters towered over the heads of the several men assigned to each one, and together formed a stark, ugly outcropping against the blue-green foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Nearby, beside the river, the great twin cooling towers of the nuclear power plant imposingly stood, its buildings now darkened and dormant, an industrial fortress now long asleep. Occasionally, one of the workmen would lift his gaze toward the sun; quitting time was nearly upon them, but not quite. Down a little grassy knoll from the job site, at the edge of the old parking lot, their boss looked on, alone but for a boy of about nine or ten who sat propped up on one of the flat-bed trucks, staring up at the sky.

“One of the men the other day told me he saw an airplane,” the boy said.

“Who told you that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Jerry, I think’s his name.

“Jerry is a practical joker who loves to run his mouth. Do you know what that means?”

“That he’s a liar?”

“Not necessarily. Just that he says and does a lot of things, and he doesn’t take life too seriously. Do you know what ‘exaggeration’ means?”

The boy absently kicked his legs. “But he said it looked like a military transport plane—kind of fat and slow-going. Didn’t you say it’s possible that the military still’s flying planes?”

“Yes, but I haven’t seen one or heard one in a long, long time—years. Neither has anyone else. So I doubt what he saw—or thinks he saw—is true.”

The radio crackled on the boss’s belt, but he didn’t answer it. He looked on the crew. It was early autumn but still hot—too hot. The leaves, mostly green, stood motionless on the trees. Sweat dampened their brows. The boss drank from a water bottle at his feet, and the boy waved for him to hand it over, and the boy took a long, sputtering draught.

“If it wasn’t an airplane, what could it have been then?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know. A brown pelican, lost inland, for all we know. We’re not that far from the coast.”

The boy dropped back onto his elbows, flung his head back to the sky, legs dangling. “It’s not fair,” he said. “I want to see an airplane.” He eased back until he was flat, belly-up to the sky.

“You did see airplanes. When you were very little. Remember, I told you? They were still flying when you were born, and for a couple of years after.”

“That doesn’t count. I can’t remember.”

“Sure, it does—why not?”

“Did the airplanes really use to fill the skies, everywhere? And they’d really carry lots of people inside? Like hundreds?”

The boss looked past the crew, toward the gap between the mountains. “Not all the skies, but over cities, yes—overhead would be big airplanes, taking off and landing all the time. They’d carry hundreds of people. Luggage. Pets. Packages. Mail. Like a highway in the sky.”

The boy didn’t say anything. He took this in. “And they didn’t crash into each other?”

“No. It was very organized and safe. The men in the radio control towers directed the planes where to go.”

“Did I ever fly in one? When I was very small?”

“I don’t know. That’s something only your mother would know, and she’s not here.”

The boy scowled and kicked his legs. “Here I’m wanting to see an airplane, when I might have even flown in one myself. Only I don’t remember! Do you realize how messed up that is?”

The boss leaned over the boy. “What’s all this fixation with airplanes, anyway, huh?” he asked. “A man might live a long life, and there’s lots of things he’ll never see or do. Mt. Everest. Dinosaurs. Airplanes—so what?”

The boy sat straight up. “People. Flew. In. The. Sky.” He spoke breathlessly and stared, eyes big as truck tires. “That’s like magic. And you act like it’s nothing. No big deal.” He said the last with a twinge of sarcasm, shrugging his thin shoulders.

“Okay, fine,” the boss said. “I get it. Airplanes—flying—was impressive. We’ll keep looking, you may see one. For sure, we may come across one at an old airfield someplace. Just realize they’re mostly gone now.”

The boy jumped down from the flatbed and stomped around in the grass, opening and closing his fists. He was slight for his age, with quick, dark eyes. “Maybe the whole thing is a lie,” he said, tone accusatory. “Maybe you’re all lying and making it up, like Santa Claus. Maybe airplanes never existed.”

“Oh, yes, they did,” the boss said, and stepped in front of him, hands on hips. Startled, the boy jumped back. “The crowded airports, the loud jets in the sky, the turbulence—all of that was very real, I promise you.” He talked on and on then, about how you’d have to get to the airport very early in the morning or else miss your flight, the X-ray machines at the security, the little cans of soda and bags of pretzels the flight attendants would hand out from their cart, and if you were lucky enough, on some flights, sweet thin cookies. The slow baggage claim belt that went clackety-clack where the luggage would reappear and you’d have to find your bag and grab it. The boy listened quietly. The sun sank lower in the sky. Soon the workmen traipsed down from the job site, swinging their hard hats by their sides. “Sound real enough to you?” the boss finally asked the boy.

The boy nodded, picked at his shoelaces. They were fraying; he needed a new pair. All his clothes were worn out, his T-shirt too snug across his chest. “I believe you,” he said at last. “I just hate the feeling that all this excitement happened, and I just missed it.”  

“That’s it, boss,” one of the men said, and flipped his hard hat in the air. “Day’s a wrap.”

“About how many more days to seal them up, once they’re all in place?” the boss asked him.

“Oh, don’t know—fuel ponds here look pretty well-contained, over ten years, so we might be able to move faster than the last place. Should be able to assess tomorrow once we get in there.”

The boss nodded, told them to make camp.

One of the men who passed by stuck his white hard hat atop the boy’s head, so big it slipped down to his neck; the boy’s laughter bounced off the inside. The boy flung it off and ran up to the man’s heels. “Hey, Jerry, were you telling the truth to me the other day, or did you lie? About the airplane?”

Jerry, tall and slender, slowed and ran a hand through his thinning, wavy hair. “Why would you think that? That I’d have lied to you?” He reached for the cooler alongside the flatbed, among the bevy of other men, and withdrew a beer. The crew passed around a bottle opener.

The boss strolled up. Speaking loudly, he said, “The boy is going on and on about you telling him you saw an airplane flying, or something. Now were you pulling his leg, or what?”

Jerry took a long gulp of beer. “No, sir, I sure wasn’t,” he said. When he spoke, his mouth flashed two chipped front teeth. “Other morning, well after dawn, I was washing up over there and I saw one of those cargo planes, following the coastline.”

Everyone fell quiet. A few of the men shifted their weight uncomfortably. The boss grimaced and hung his head. “See, see!” the boy cried, and jumped up and down. “Told ya he seen one.”

“Now I’m sure you saw something,” the boss said. “Maybe someone flying a kite on one of the farms down there. Or maybe someone still has a drone, charges it up once in a while and flies it, now and then, just for fun. Or to look for outlaws.”

“Or maybe it was a UFO,” another man said, and snickered.

“It wasn’t a damn drone, or a kite or a UFO,” Jerry said, and set down his beer so hard on the flatbed, the bottle shook. “It was an airplane. I know what I saw.”

From all sides the crew burst with questions. “How’s that now, Jerry?”

“Hasn’t been jet fuel for years.”

“Jet fuel? What about parts?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” Jerry said, and wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve. “You don’t think the military’s got their hands on what’s left of the jet fuel?”

“Military? That’s a joke,” came the reply.

“Well, believe me or not, I can’t prove it to you.” Jerry finished off his beer, wiped his mouth. “Forget I ever said anything about it.” And he walked off for the bushes; moments later, a hard stream of piss struck the ground.

From across the fields, the barn did not appear much bigger than the boarded-up farmhouse and sunken sheds that surrounded it—more like a cardboard cut-out upon the landscape, until the boy and Jerry came within a stone’s throw distance. Weeds coiled and nearly covered the broken windows; from somewhere out back, the gentle late day breeze lifted and dropped a loosened shutter—sigh, BANG! Sigh, BANG! The boy sucked in his breath and halted, but Jerry charged ahead, heaved open the tall, splintered doors with a thrust. A swirl of dust smacked their faces, the ancient odor of sawdust and engine grease; Jerry wiped his eyes, the boy sneezed. Then both crept forward, toward the shafts of light that beamed within; their footsteps creaked and echoed. Most of the inside had been emptied by looters—buckets and bins lay overturned, a workbench left stripped, strewn with screws and nails, now rusted, tatty ropes and cut chains hastily abandoned along the walls and floor. “Careful,” Jerry said sharply, “can’t risk getting cut or poked in here, got that?” The boy nodded. Up high, missing boards made a skylight near the back; they rounded a wall and there stood the skeleton of a machine with two small wheels, two wings, and a tail, and large black lettering across the body that the boy couldn’t read. Its windows clouded thick with dust and grime, and the cockpit door sagged open on one hinge. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Jerry whispered. “There you go, boy.”

“An airplane?” The boy’s voice trembled. “But why would a farmer have an airplane?”

“They used to spray their crops.” Jerry strolled over, grabbed a broom left against the wall, and poked inside the cockpit. “These small ones, they helped put out wildfires, too. No propeller, somebody took that, looks like.” He shook cobwebs off the broom, then tapped a tank underneath, the metal sounding hollow. “No fuel, that went first of course. Then they stripped the engine, for whatever that was worth.”

“Can I see?”

“What are you waiting for—climb on up in there! Here, I’ll give you a boost.”

A moment later, and the boy sat tall, the cushion’s split seams poking his thighs through the thin jeans, but he gripped the levers and grinned. So many buttons and dials—many more than on the trucks he rode inside, and somehow the farmer-pilot had known what each of them did, to make the plane fly and then return to the ground. He twisted the knobs and dials, hit buttons. There were some kind of pedals on the floor, and he scooted down a little to press them with his feet; an old bird’s nest crunched beneath one. Even with the open doors, the cockpit stunk of old squirrel droppings and fuel, but from his seat he hummed and squirmed with glee. How many boys would he ever meet who could say they’d sat in a real airplane? A small one, sure, but a real airplane just the same. How lucky were they, for he and Jerry to stumble across this one left in the barn. If this airplane was left, there must be others—and could Jerry have been right, that he’d seen one of the bigger ones flying? A military plane—perhaps it was possible.

As he swung his legs in the cockpit, Jerry poked around, muttering to himself about looters, what they stole and what they didn’t, and how if the world hadn’t been so full of greed and thievery, maybe things wouldn’t have fallen apart as fast as they did. But the boy couldn’t remember anything different.

All he knew was that even though the old plane didn’t move, he felt like he was soaring inside—he rubbed the glass with his fist, ignoring the cracks, and pictured himself up in the sky, tried to imagine what seeing clouds up close, as far as you could see, must have been like. Once he’d ridden on a boat in the ocean and guessed the sky might be like that. “If I got to fly in an airplane, I would just stare out the window the whole time,” he said to Jerry, talking excitedly as the man grabbed his arm to help him down. “I guess that’s what people did, right? Got to watch everything happening down below.”

“Some did, for a few minutes,” Jerry said. “But mostly people just read or worked on their computers or fell asleep.”

“Fell ASLEEP?” The boy’s eyes widened. “How? You’re kidding me.”

“People flew in airplanes all the time—they got bored of it. Not me, I would always look out. Especially over the very beautiful places, like the big mountains out West, or the sunset, or over New York City.”

The boy said nothing. He would never be like those people and felt glad about that. Many, like his parents, had now been dead a long while. Before they left the barn, he turned around one last time—the gutted airplane left for the birds and mice, the rain and dust to devour.   

The sun darkened to orange and lowered in the sky. The men set up their camp. Each waited his turn aside the water truck, poured a couple of inches of fresh water from the barrel into the basin, scrubbed his face and forearms with soap. How dirty the job was no one could say, but some still feared radiation, after the war that silenced the skies. Tin pans bubbled with canned meats, baked beans, and dried vegetables. Only when he sat down to his meal did the boss grab a plate for the boy as well and realize he hadn’t seen him for at least an hour. That the boy and Jerry were missing.

The boss leapt to his feet and swore. A chill carried on the breeze, and every moment, the shadows grew longer on the grass. He roused the men, waved for them to help search the bushes. Down the knoll, shrouded by oaks and rhododendrons, a stream rushed—“somebody, get down there,” he yelled. The men fanned out, grumbling. Somewhere in the grove of trees, an owl hooted and swooped through branches—“Who cooks for you?” or so it sounded like, according to the boy, their running joke since the crew started on the road. The boss’s face flushed. He quickened his pace, the brambles scratching his skin. He reached halfway down the hill himself when two figures sprung out of the far field—Jerry, and the kid behind.

The boss strode over, fists clenched. Jerry was grinning, the boy behind him, hopping from foot to foot with delight. “Just what the hell—”

Jerry raised his hand. “With all respect, Boss, before you lose your head,” he said slowly, with a tilt of his head. His breath stank of cheap beer. “We were just down the fields there, having some fun, poking around those old farm buildings before dinner. Why don’t you let the boy tell you what we found in the barn?”

“A plane. Only a small one,” the boy said. “It was only about—” he paused, thoughtfully, and pointed, “the size of that truck. Jerry says it’s the kind that could only carry the pilot and nobody else.”

The boss’s jaw slackened, but he said nothing.

“An Air Tractor,” Jerry said. He shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels. “Possibly that farmer bought it to spray his fields, but the cost of fuel and spray got so high, he stuck it in the barn, maybe hoped he could use it again one day. Then looters got to it. Gutted it down to nothing.”

“Airplane or no,” the boss finally said, “next time you disappear like that, not telling anyone, and with the boy, it’s your job. Got that?”

“Yessir.”

The boy jumped to the boss’s side, tugged his arm. “It was real dirty,” he said. “Jerry checked but there was no fuel inside, so that’s too bad. Even if someone knew how, it couldn’t fly.”

“See there. I told you airplanes were real.”

“Yeah, but I still haven’t seen a big one. Maybe one day we will!”

The boy ran on ahead, worn out soles of his shoes flopping. The boss leaned into Jerry’s face and let out a string of expletives he hadn’t wanted the boy to hear. As the two men strolled up, more than a few of the workmen shot Jerry a dirty look. “Hate me all you want, we saw ourselves an aero-plane, we did,” he said in a sing-song voice. “That other one flew south, just you wait—you’ll see.” He swiped another beer from the cooler, opened the lid with a loud crack.

Twilight fell. Most of the men set up their bedrolls in the pine grove near the trucks. A few tossed coins for the flatbeds. One brought out a violin, sent scratchy, warbling notes to the pulsing stars. Another had carved out from a piece of cardboard the silhouette of an airplane, and the boy, lying on his belly, traced this cutout with a pencil and paper over and over again before the crackling campfire.

“The reason we don’t have airplanes anymore is the same reason this nuclear plant is closed, isn’t it?” the boy asked, more aloud to himself than anyone else. “All the power plants we go to, they’re all shut down.”

The boss was sipping some whiskey by the fire, staring into the blaze of stars and the quiet—oh, the quiet!—of the weathered mountains darkened to shadows. He’d been thinking of his first campfires back when he was a boy, their eternal comfort. “That’s right,” he said slowly. “We didn’t have the energy anymore to fly the planes, or the keep the power plants going. It cost too much. That’s why our job here is so important—you might say it’s the most important job left. To bury the waste, as much of it as we can. That way you and the younger ones might have a chance.”

“If there’s no more fuel for airplanes, how much is left?” the boy asked. “We have fuel for the trucks.”

“Not much—it’s not the same fuel. That’s why we move the trucks as little as possible. You know how when we’re going to move, I call on the radio?”

“And the army men show up,” the boy said brightly. “And they fill us up and go with us to the next stop.”

“For as long as they show up,” the boss added.

“What happens when they don’t?”

“Then we stop. We dry cask the spent fuel ponds at as many nuclear plants as we can, up and down the East coast, until then.”

“Then what?”

“Then it’s lights out—except for this.” The boss gestured at the fire and the starry sky with his whiskey.

Somewhere down in the valley a pack of coyotes began their cascading yip-howl, signaling their kill. The boy scrambled down from the truck with his sketch, held it up against the fire. On the sheet he held up he’d traced one big airplane from the cardboard stencil, then free hand, attempted smaller versions all around it—a half-dozen or so different airplanes buzzed around the paper. The boss recalled that world, a lifetime of memories already so faint, he can barely believe he experienced them, that such a life had been real: long overseas flights to Europe, hi-speed trains so fast the scenery was a blur, airshows his grandparents had taken him to as a kid, the different makes and models of planes lines up, fighter jets peeling acrobatics in the sky, their screams deafening, the swoosh of subway cars opening, beeps and honks, dings and shrieks, tires squealing as the neighborhood teens drag-raced behind his last comfortable house. Engines grinding, revving, roaring. How much did he yearn for that old world? To those remaining, the fall had returned the sanctity of a silence, a sacred holiness long forgotten.

“It’s okay if I don’t see an airplane, the real big kind,” the boy said. “I decided.”

The boss smiled. He placed a hand on the boy’s shaggy head. The fire’s sparks flew up and up. They danced a flight path of their own atop the flames, glowing bright as the stars before burning out.