Matthew Dexter lives in Cabo San Lucas. Like the nomadic Pericú natives before him, he survives on a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet of shrimp tacos, smoked marlin, cold beer, and warm sunshine.
I Am More than Two Giant Breasts Flying an Aircraft
by Matthew Dexter
I used to be a pilot, probably flew you or somebody you know across the country, but now all I do is put on the uniform, drive rental cars around the west coast sitting in airport bars drinking martinis, until passengers call airport security. They question me and kick me out of the terminal. My husband died six years ago of stomach cancer. Every Sunday I sit on his gravestone and make love to the cobwebs. Baby spiders are spun around the colored leaves that refuse to blow, but I wipe them away and place a purple geranium on his clever quote about dying young.
"This is a sad day," says the man visiting the resting place of his daughter.
We are neighbors and shall be for eternity, so might as well get to know the poor bastard. He places teddy bears and toys in plastic boxes on the grass, talking gibberish and singing songs about unicorns that live with dragons. The man has a bag resembling the one Santa Clause uses to hand out gifts, but the man only has one arm, so he asks if I can help with the presents.
"That's a great quote," the man says.
Everybody always comments on it. Some laugh, others just nod their heads or brush a twig off the headstone. My husband spent his last few months looking for the perfect pithy statement, searching all the local libraries, sitting in the basement late at night thinking, with the lights out smoking marijuana resin from our teenage son's metal pipe for motivation.
"This guy was a class act," the man says.
My husband was a wizard. He scrapped that piece with a hanger. Nobody says you can catch cancer, but I know it happens. Our son went down first-class over the Pacific Ocean and a few months later his father was diagnosed with the condition. His health was perfect before the accident. Everything happens for a reason.
"How old was your son?" I ask.
The man helps me clear away the dead cicadas that I do not want to touch. His arm on my shoulder is the comfort of an adolescent summer love. The stump brushes against the hairs a woman never shaves on the back of her neck.
"How I wish I could hold her again," he says. "She was only five."
We dig up the graves, his first and then mine. We do it for no reason and for every reason at the same time, when the sun has set behind the mountains for the millionth evening, once all the gifts have been unwrapped and the fountain of youth has fallen from the sky. We dig until the shovel hits the caskets. We pull the coffins from the earth. We have the strength of six men and a machine that can fly.
"Why do you keep a spade in your trunk?" the man asks.
I have no answer, been digging graves for years, stealing geraniums from fancy houses by the freeway, unearthing family pets. I do my business beneath tequila moonlight while their masters are sleeping, attempts at resurrecting memories, buried too soon, nostrils awakened by decaying corpses. The coyotes howl, extraterrestrials have sex in other galaxies, life goes on.
"Touch me," the man says.
I do and we fill the holes in the ground, first hers and then his, his and mine, and the constellations warn us that two humans should not be doing it like this, but we don't care. His lips are flowers; my hips are more than enough for one man to plant himself in the dirt. We grind as insects investigate our ears, mosquitoes make love in layers of crippled flesh we have not shown anyone in years. Exposed, the fog creeps lower, his hand tighter, stronger than two palms on a yoke, the sweat, the semen, it's all the same, our voices pulling weeds from the soil.
"Jesus, this is nice," he says.
I bite his earlobe and suck the blood. An airplane is falling from the sky. A grave is being desecrated. But we are a million miles away with the children who are waiting in the wings with angels. When we finish we pull on our underwear and rise and meet those flashlights, the handcuffs around my wrists, his stump held by a deputy.
"Was it worth it?" the officer asks.
I do not answer. The words have run from my lips, they stain my panties; say more than a cunning quotation carved into granite. The drone of an engine sends shivers down my sweaty spine. Somewhere on the west coast there is an empty bar in an airport. There is a corner table where your pilot is sitting, drinking something special, wishing she was somewhere else, anywhere but here.
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