Nick sweeney

All Souls' Day from the Skies over Pennsylvania

(an excerpt from a longer work called The Last Thing the Angel Said)

None of the kids we grew up with in our little Penn town of Balz could fathom what Michael Sheltz ever saw. There was no authority to the common agreement that Michael was not right in the head, whatever that could mean, and yet only strangers assumed there was nothing behind his eyes. We knew he saw something, and we knew it filled his head with sheer, explosive joy; we just didn’t know what it was, and, shame on us, we only occasionally wondered, when we coveted that joy for ourselves. While he was still young enough, just about, to draw the kind of empathy that stopped short of indifference, he saw the angels of Balz the All Souls’ Day Milo Galitzki took him flying. 

Milo had learned to fly out of wanting to know how a plane was engineered into magic, but it was more than that, incorporating his unhappiness with the confines of gravity. He was twelve when he first accompanied old farmer Shilnikov in his shuddering crop duster, and fourteen the day he debuted alone in one of the airstrip’s Pipers. On his way out, his sister Mila had held his arm and urged him to stay home, safe on terra firma, but he unfastened her fingers, with some difficulty, and headed for the skies.

He hadn’t known she was thinking of the plane they saw belly-flop its local heroes, drunken pilots Ganser and Weiss, to their flaming doom one day so long before that neither Milo nor Mila would’ve trusted their memories of the crash if the people in our town hadn’t spoken of it as often as they did. A flying sheep, men still stated in barfly awe, the fallout from a freak tornado, hit the propeller, and that was that. No, the duo got shot down, barbershop talkers knew, by a National Guard unit out on the flats on survival maneuvers, driven nuts from thirst and flies.

The widow Ganser said what happened was that the men took three days to drink their month’s pay, went up to clear their heads, and got exactly that wish: a flash of euphoria, then oblivion. Mrs. Weiss came clean on that one too, but none of the Balz men could credit a story as far-fetched as that.

All the same, a check for flying sheep and guardsmen on the ground had worked its way into Milo Galitzki’s take-off routine. Sometimes as he followed the aces’ vodka vapor-trails, he imagined an alarming clunk, the propeller slicing mutton chops before standing still in an illusion of silence. He sometimes imagined a single shell making its way up to slam into his throat and reveal the meat in it. There were other demons for him up there, though, and he soon forgot those bar room fancies.

I saw Milo the day he first went up alone. I should have been in a classroom at the Balz Lyceum. I knelt on my fake sick bed, and looked out the window when my radio was drowned out by the scream of engines. I didn’t know it was Milo then, just saw that contraption of wood and wires against a sky washed with yellow. I watched the trees lean and salute as Milo misjudged how low he was, and I saw the wives of the big cigars in our neighborhood stop their backyard prattle when they caught on that the sky wasn’t there only to allow the sun at their hides.

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The day he took Michael Sheltz up, Milo knew everybody he could think of would get mad if they saw Michael within even whistling distance of a plane, but there was something dogged in him that wanted to make Michael a gift of the sky, the view, the horizon, the Heavens. He drove his pa’s old pick-up right to the hangar, and got them airborne with anxiety but without incident.

Once they were up, Michael made faces Milo could sense rather than see. Michael brought them to life by saying, “Jesus Mary,” over and over. Then he began squawking, “Down. Down. Down.”

Milo quieted him in the usual way, which was simply to point until Michael got so absorbed in what he was supposed to be looking for that he found something to focus on. “We’re in the sky, Michael,” Milo hollered. “Nothing bad’s going to happen up here. It’s down there you’ve got to worry about.”

Two days before, Mila had come home in tears, saying only Michael’s name in explanation; it was quicker than saying the names of all the people in town who were mean to Michael. Milo had pressed her as to why and what and who, and she’d demanded of him, “Just how many heads are you going to punch for Michael?” She’d hidden her face with her heavy dark hair. “Not even you can punch out the whole town.”

A worm of a thought had humpbacked its way across Milo’s mind to boast that he could try, but not even he had enough fool’s enthusiasm for that. He’d reached a hand out to Mila and she’d taken it, run her fingers over its bones, and let it fall.

“Look out the window,” Milo mouthed to Michael, up in that big sky. “Watch for angels.”

Michael took to that. As Milo traced figures-of-eight over Balz, Michael started to yell, “Milo, they’re there.”

“Sure.” Milo was staring at a dial whose needle was, he hoped, having a machine’s joke on him. He banged it, got that needle jumping. “Good. I told you, already.” He put his ear protectors on, blocked out the drone that signaled the chemicals coming to completion inside Michael’s head to bring him light, color, choirs of angels singing, maybe – who knew? Nobody would ever know.

Balz was no monumental town, except for its churches. Milo liked seeing the cross shapes they showed only when you saw them from the air, like their architects knew all along people would fly one day to see them the way they looked from planes.

Michael swiped him on the head. “I see the angels,” Milo read on his lips. 

“Sure.”

“They’re there.” Michael swiped him again.

“I know, goddammit.”

They were, too. All Souls’ Day had the graveyards speckled with candles. In the square outside the cathedral, Balz’s white holy sisters were starting out in procession to serenade the dead. What for, he had come to understand, didn’t matter. 

From the skies that threw their atomic light onto the day, Milo saw his neighbor Eurydice Armentiere, who was too self-absorbed and haughty to be the love of anybody’s life, though he was still thinking she’d one day be the love of his. She was all the more beautiful on account of being escorted by her dog-ugly brother Benny. Milo wished he could go down low, and yell out the window at her, “Hey, Eurydice, where did you get the chimpanzee?” 

I thought about that a long time after Milo told me about it. With all he had to think about up in the sky, that was his wish, to go down and make Eurydice froth out the laughter only he could bring her. Why did he want to do that for her, I would wonder, when he wouldn’t do it for me? In return for laughter, I could have given him a view of infinity much greater than any he could have spied from some plane.

If he’d looked for me on that All Souls’ Day, I would have been on that same trail to the cathedral, candle in hand, being prodded up the hill by the ghost of my cot-dead kid brother. How would Milo have seen me, though, all taken up as he was with his hope for the gift of a laugh for that frosty uptight bitch Eurydice? 

I wish I could say he just forgot her, but what drew him away from the sight of Eurydice was only that when you were flying a plane, it wasn’t a good idea to watch the ground. Milo got air under the wings and looped the loop over Balz, our town filled with specters. He had to imagine the grace of the movement, could feel only the grind of its reluctant compliance.

Michael signaled an end to his terror at last with a susurrus of exhilaration. “Born to fly,” Milo thought he could hear him say. It sounded as though Michael was feeling a tuneless song coming on, so Milo pointed. “Angels,” he said firmly. “Don’t miss a single one.”

He eased the yoke out to guide the plane on its gradual way down, was relieved, as he always was, at a landing right out of the book, and blessed himself. He was about to help Michael out of the cockpit, then thought it’d be better if his friend stayed out of sight. He told him they had a game on, to see how long he could sit in that plane and count the runnels cutting through the condensation on the windows. He went over to the little control hut to fill in the log.

Big Dave Francesi, superintending that day, was shoveling breakfast into his face. He poured Milo a coffee and said, “Say Milo, that was… who up there with you?”

Milo thought up, “It was my ma,” and scrawled her name. “She, uh, wanted to see the churches on All Souls’ Day.”

“She did?” Dave made a careful nod of approval, of kids being nice to their moms, maybe, or maybe of grief cabarets like All Souls’ Day.

“You know,” the silence prompted Milo, “and, uh, the graveyards.”

Dave nodded again.

“With, like, the candles.”

Dave summarized, “Churches, graveyards, candles – check. I know what All Souls’ Day is, Milo.”

“Uh, right.”

Milo tried to catch Dave’s eye, but Dave was looking out the window. There was nothing on Dave’s face that could be called an expression, exactly. All the same, Milo knew there was something wrong, and that the fists he saw Dave making were soon going to wind up close to his nose. “So that’s your ma,” Dave was trying to work out, “taxying the plane around out there?”

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“This is your ass, Milo,” Dave brayed every time he got a spare breath. It took them ten minutes to catch Michael, and then they didn’t really catch him. He just turned toward a fierce first-day-of-winter headwind howling between the hangars. For an awful and terrifying instant, the little plane reared up as if on hind legs, then sank gently down, one of its eyes blinking out Michael’s white face. Instead of just ticking down, the engine keened.

Dave did his gentle giant bit to help Michael to the ground. Then he turned and spoke into Milo’s face to communicate how close he was to beating the living crap out of him. Milo owed him for the fuel and the service to the engine, and if he put his nose anywhere near the airstrip again Dave would set his dogs on him. Did Milo catch his drift? Milo thought he had all that. He started to wipe the spit out of his eye.

Dave was on the point of striding off. Instead he paused in mid-step and made a line for Michael, who was standing whooping and flapping his arms, like he was ready to take to the air again, but this time without some stupid plane. Michael treated Dave to his limp grin, and started to say, Milo guessed, “Born to fly.”

Dave cut through it with, “You want wings, huh?” Milo could hardly bear to look as Dave reached under Michael’s coat and pulled his shirt tails out. “Wings?” Dave’s yell wiped the grin off Michael’s face. Milo knew that what was to follow was just some dumb tradition, administered to all who completed their first flight. He heard Michael’s shirt rip all the way up his back as Dave spread his own arms wide and pulled the tails apart.

“Jesus Mary.” A fearful expression cleared the clouds out of Michael’s eyes and crossed them, spread his nostrils wide and clamped his mouth open.

“Wings.” Dave wiped his hands against each other with a clap, and then he was on his way.

“In trouble, Milo?” Michael hissed as he flapped after Milo. 

Milo stopped and took a deep breath as he thought of how his own wings had just been clipped. He bade farewell to the airspace that, he realized only then, had gone so far to expand his little world. He bit his lip and counted to ten. “Well,” he assured Michael, “you’re not.” 

He pulled his jacket off, threw it to the ground and removed his shirt. He handed it to Michael, who was so pleased with it that he put it on over his coat. Even so, the only thing that brought the hint of a mule’s smile back to Michael’s face was the sight of Milo, his ribs contracting as dark tears came to his eyes and made the pale sun do a wild, joyful dance.