O Frango Real

- Paul Vieira -

The air tractor swooped low over the orange fields.  It dived and ascended with ease; dipping just above the trees each time Harrison began spraying.  He wove back and forth across the fields.  The engine puttered along and the pungent odor of petrol filled Harrison's nostrils.  Surprisingly he didn’t hate the smell, he reveled in it, just like he savored the sound of wind digging through the crevices in the plane’s hull.

***

Harrison now thought he wanted to open a restaurant.  This aspiration seemed as though it were always there, but in truth the idea seemed to have come to him recently.  Of late, he often dreamed of a pitched roof with exposed wooden beams, pool tables and a white cobblestone path leading up to the entrance.  A small place by the beach where he could wake up at four in the morning to catch fresh fish for the patrons he'd be cooking for that night. At the very least he sometimes fantasized about standing in the sand on a beach just near the water when the tide was low, underneath the orange and white cliffs he grew accustomed to seeing on vacations taken to visit his father.  He'd shift his legs back and forward digging into the ground with his feet, uncovering the conquilhas that hid not far below the surface.  When he thought hard enough, sometimes he believed he could even hear the sizzle of those small mussels as if he had done just that and dropped them into a pan on the stovetop in his restaurant's kitchen.  He hoped for all of those things.  When he imagined that steam would rise up from the skillet and lightly sting his face it reminded him of his current situation.

In reality the night was hot and Harrison couldn't sleep.  The heat brought back other memories of trips to the water park as a child.  Shirtless rides home often consisted of his back melding with the tan leather seats of his mom's old jaguar.  Now sheets stuck to his skin and when he lifted any part of his body they peeled themselves away.   "Goddamnit. Why can't I sleep? God just let me sleep!" He could feel his eyes welling up, so he stopped talking.  Self-pity wouldn't lull him to sleep any faster.  His heart raced though, that was the worst part.  Harrison would try to sleep and his heart would start racing.  He didn't know what brought it on, but this was the fifth time it had happened in as many nights.  He felt angry.  In just a few hours he had to get up and fly.  The angrier he got the further away any sort of rest seemed, it became like a distant mountain that his frustration dragged him away from kicking and screaming.  Maybe the constraints he felt in his life kept him up.  

He wanted to be free and for a time he was.  Other people called it unemployment, he called it freedom.  Mostly he read, but he also spent a lot of time simply daydreaming in those three months about his ambitions.  He’d struggled before with figuring out exactly what he wanted and achieving those goals, but he could accomplish things. He had in the past.  When he settled on what he wanted: to become a pilot.  Now he wasn’t so sure he had made the right decision.

***

They sat in his black jeep parked just outside the dorms one night.  Light from the street lamps filtered in through the windows and illuminated Lia’s smile while she talked.  She got excited about everything.  It was part of what had drawn Harrison to her.

“I couldn’t wait until your birthday.” 

“Are you sure I should open it now though?” he asked.

The cadmium red digital readout on the dash read 12:30.  It was officially Christmas day. 

“Yes! No, wait, I don’t know.  You decide,” she responded.

The small package had been wrapped in white butcher paper.  He had been on the phone with her when she’d gone to five separate stores to locate the perfect ribbon to tie around it before settling on a light green one.  Harrison had never been given a gift so perfectly wrapped.  He tore away the paper and found a baby blue box with sparkling gold spots inside.  He opened it.  It contained tissue paper and a receipt that read “Berardi Flight School” at the top.

“Oh wow.” 

It was thoughtful, but to him it felt like too much.  They’d been dating for a year, were they at the thousand dollar plus gift level yet?  He didn’t know.  Harrison guessed the money mattered less to her because her parents had so much of it.  

One of the many dark dorm rooms behind her flickered to life with light.  His eyes refocused on her.  Lia smiled again and looked down.  He reached out to her, lightly grasping the ends of her dark hair on the side closest to him.  

“Thank you.” 

***

When he saw the blue morning light begin to peek through his similarly colored blinds, he knew it was time to get up.  Still, he'd lie for sometime after that staring.  If he got up it meant he had to shower and with the frigid piercing water that would stream out of the pipes would also come the brutal truth of his existence: Harrison was stuck.

At least stuck waking up at the crack of dawn and driving across a small town.  Four gas stations, three restaurants, - pizza, a diner, and Mexican - two general stores, and one library. Each of them went unnoticed by Harrison, as they slipped by his window and eventually out of sight.  Some might've called the area quaint but Harrison grew up in Ferris Meadows.  He knew the drive to and from the community by heart.  He knew it was the vast expanse of orange and pistachio orchards that hypnotized people.  They forgot themselves.  Harrison remembered how before his dad moved away he used to drive Harrison home on that same route and how sometimes, for just a few seconds, his dad would start driving towards the trees.  He’d look left or right and the junky Silverado he drove would start to follow his gaze into the opposite lane, before he caught and corrected himself.  Harrison, on occasion, would look at the trees himself, but he was more careful with his driving.  He thought that maybe everyone saw something different through the openings at the end of the rows just on the other side of the groves. 

Harrison himself rarely grew distracted while driving.  On this particular morning he thought about his trouble sleeping. Harrison had this notion that maybe once he started work he’d be able to sleep.  He promised himself that would fix it.  He would get tired after work, and if he got tired, he would sleep.

***

Flying an airplane was something that Harrison had always had an attraction to.  Something about the idea of taking advantage of the ability to do a thing that humans couldn’t do physically, but had given themselves the ability to do in a plane appealed to him.  It seemed to him that flying broke the rules of nature in some way and he liked that. 

During his first lesson he was eager to get into the air.  Harrison arrived almost an hour early, giving himself enough time to quell his anxiousness before he was actually behind the plane's controls.  Eventually he’d made his way through the minuscule public airport and across the airfield with his instructor, who wore a bright blue polo that verged on purple, a hat that read US AIR FORCE and kept referring to him as “son.”  Everyone around called him “Bud” and Harrison blamed the fuel fumes for the deficit in ability to come up with creative names around the hangar, though Bud appeared friendly enough.  After some casual conversation, he’d presented the plane to Harrison with a childlike enthusiasm, tossing his arms wide as if Harrison had won the machine on a gameshow.  It was white with a dark blue stripe down the side.

“Are you ready for the fun part?” Bud had a glint in his eye as he said that.

He didn’t exactly get to fly on his own the first time out, he later realized he’d been foolish for thinking he might get that chance.  Bud had spent the next hour explaining some of the mechanics of flight and going over the parts of the plane with Harrison.  He showed him how to check the fuel and engine oil levels as well as completing the rest of the preflight checklist. 

The thing about flying that truly shocked Harrison was that he was quite good at it.  He kept going.  After completing his private license, he did commercial and agricultural training.  It was a challenge he enjoyed.

***

He arrived across town for work.  Today marked the end of his third year doing aerial application.  He had become a crop duster.  

His plane was a yellow Air Tractor, which he loved because even though it was cramped the small plane made him feel closer to the actual flying.  In a short time he had become oddly connected to it.  If a crosswind managed to catch him off guard putting him on the wrong course, the plane let him know.  The roaring of the engine and the feeling in the steering spoke to Harrison in a language only he understood; the machine used that to tell his senses exactly what occurred at any given time.  Now he knew what Bud had meant when he said with the right connection to a plane you could know how fast you were going just by the sound of the air moving by.  Harrison barely looked at his instruments after the preflight checklist, unless he needed to spray - something he was still getting used to doing.  He checked the fuel level and to see if there were any contaminants in it before he hopped into the tiny cockpit.  

Harrison took off from a small dirt road in the midst of a cut out clearing surrounded by a small grove of trees.  The owners of the ag aviation company he worked for had set up their own runway on a relatively large piece of land just outside the county line.

He already loved the plane, loved the feeling of pitching forward and diving in close to the ground to drop a payload of pesticides.  Many pilots flew agricultural just for the opportunity to do the sort of maneuvers commercial pilots never get to do.  There was a thrill in reaching the end of a stretch of plants, jerking the control stick back to avoid tall trees that lined a property, then quickly banking and coming back in for another run.  He even had enjoyed waking up early to see the morning sun hanging beautifully over the horizon as he did his work.  It was a pure and natural form of flying.

Still, things had been changing for him recently and even though he continued to appreciate the things he got to do in the air, he wasn't so certain he loved the job as a whole.  After a long period of working his way up in the business he couldn't help but feel like some of his original desire to fly had been stripped away.  Years of non flying chores such as maintaining the planes, the same thing he did years ago at that first small airport to pay for his advanced flight lessons, made being a pilot feel too much like work.  Maybe he should've left it a hobby.  At least flying gave him time to think. 

He'd been thinking a lot lately about his dad’s restaurant.  

***

“Frango Real” was the restaurant his dad had decided to open up after he went away.  It didn't look like anything special from the outside.  It took up a small part of a larger strip mall type of shopping center.  Certain characteristics separated it from the average cafe in a shopping center.  It boasted a much larger outdoor eating area than most.  Additionally, a three-foot tall wall extended outwards from the left side of the establishment, topped with red-brown tiles that separated the patio seating from the rest of the square.  The whole area looked older, but the Frango Real in particular could have stood in for a saloon in a western.  In the center of the square a sort of amphitheater had been constructed.  A few steps led to a concrete and cobblestone circular space with a tree in the middle.  Harrison played soccer there as a child.

Later, he spent his pre-college summers over a stovetop.  Maybe that’s why it was so easy for him to imagine running his own place.  Pan seared steaks and linguica were his favorite things to make.  However, he took pleasure in cooking almost anything.  

One day as they’d been walking along a beach his father stopped him. 

“You want to catch some clams?”

Harrison’s dad relished teaching him about things that he used to do as a kid.  He showed him how to build slingshots and fish, once he’d even taught him how to make a trap for catching small animals out of some tree branches and a shoelace. 

His dad pulled him towards the water.  He stood just where the water met the sand and began doing an odd sort of motion like he was dancing the twist. Then he threw his hand out around Harrison’s shoulder and whipped him close.  He pointed through the clear water.

“Look!”

Just below the surface of the shin-deep water, between plumes of dirt that his dad had shifted around, Harrison could see small dark mussels floating. 

“That’s how you find conquilhas.”

His dad scooped them up.

“Do you collect them?” asked Harrison.  

“No, you eat them,” his dad answered.

“Gross!” 

Harrison was a picky eater, but when his father went back to catching the little creatures he copied.  He’d never seen anyone catch something for lunch with their feet before.  Later, back at his dad’s apartment, they would steam them open together and the rest of the family would slurp the slimy animals out of their shells.  Harrison ate chicken instead.

***

Today, Harrison was distracted while he flew.  He stared into the trees and thought of Lia.   Where was she now?  They’d each moved back to their respective hometowns after graduation.  He wondered what her life was like.  Did she ever get to travel the world like she had wanted?  He thought of Bud.  Surely, he was still out there somewhere telling newbie pilots not to look at their instruments “so damn much.”  Mostly he thought of Dad.

It had been five months without him.  Just five months since he passed, and Harrison was unable to be there when he left.  He was too far away.  No way for Harrison to get there fast enough even if he flew.   He knew he would've hated to watch it happen, but it wasn’t about him.

Amongst the sea of green and speckled orange a flash of white caught Harrison’s eye as he dumped another haul of chemicals.  He gave the engine a little throttle, not enough to stall it, but enough to steer the plane into position for a quick second pass.  He came in more slowly this time.  Yet he was unable to make out what the white objects were, just now he could see that there were more than one lying on the ground.  He followed them from above with his plane.

Harrison brought the plane lower.  Now, he could hear the plane’s landing gear cracking and smashing through the tops of the trees.  There was something that looked familiar just on the other side of the orchard.  An image of the cobblestone path intruded on his thoughts.  Why did he think of that?

He was reaching the end of the field, but didn’t notice.  Harrison didn’t slow the plane he only stared, as a building seemed to rise out of the horizon and into view up ahead. Finally he knew what his father saw on the other side of the trees.  

Harrison thought of his dad and the Frango Real, and the plane drifted downwards following his gaze.  

© 2016 - 2024 Paul Vieira