"Thunder from a Clear Blue Sky" by Justin Bryant
Thunder From a Clear Blue Sky is now available
They were torn from their homes like weeds from wet earth. They walked under spent graphite stormclouds, through desiccated citrus groves where the fruit grows dry and ropey, and alongside rivers hiding huge, blind fish with irridescent scales. They rested in derelict United Fruit Company warehouses, leaning together in silence like depleted magnets in an abandoned power station. At night, they mumbled songs under oblong moons and spiraling bats, nettles and dandelion seeds clinging to their legs like fearful children. Jets blinked silently above them in the viscous dark. They had as escorts mosquitoes and hunger, fever dreams and waking nightmares, and enough beauty to swell the oceans of the heart: clear streams and distant storms, moonrises over summer wheatglow fields, tiny galaxies of luminescent insects, plains of wild jungle grass. They had, finally, a tremendous weariness that crossed the land with them like a faithful dog just to be by their side, so that death, if it came, might be a relief.
***
On the flight deck of a 1941 production DC-3, first officer Oscar Labruna, studying the radar, sees that there is a line of storms across Panama and extending into the Mosquito Gulf. It has been routing commercial air traffic far out to sea, but Labruna knows he will not have the luxury of diverting; they don’t carry enough fuel for such a detour. Labruna can’t yet tell from his radar where the strongest storms are waiting, but he’s not nervous; he enjoys the challenge presented by bad weather. “I don’t fly the plane,” he likes to brag. “I orchestrate it.”
The pattern of the storms begins to appear on his radar. The plane is over seventy years old, but it has been retrofitted with the latest and best avionics and engines. Labruna is surprised and a little concerned by what he sees. He can switch views to examine the storm by rainfall amount and temperature, and can view lightning strikes superimposed over both. There is not much rain, and the frequency of lightning is only moderate, but the clouds appear light blue. They are cool. This is because they are towering high into the stratosphere, far above the plane’s maximum altitude.
Labruna looks forward, out the cockpit windows. There is nothing to see but black sky and wispy vapor illuminated by their running lights. It is 9:14 p.m. He looks at Captain Ferrera, seated to his right.
“It’s going to be bumpy” Labruna says.
“I can see that,” Ferrera replies, leaning over to check the radar himself.
“It’s not my favorite thing, junking around at night in weather when you can’t see a damn thing,” Ferrera says. Then he laughs, and wipes a hand across his mouth.
Labruna tunes to Panama City radio for local weather. It is clear, light wind, at the airport, but that is still two hundred miles away, and somewhere in between them are mountains of boiling cloud. His radar indicates they are approaching the edge of the first storm, but ahead in the dark night they still see nothing. Labruna cranes his head upward and sees a few stars. This reassures him, for now.
“My aircraft,” Ferrera says. He has been in control of the flight throughout, but this is his way of reminding Labruna not to input the flight controls.
“I suppose I’d better tell him,” Ferrera says, almost to himself. He picks up the intercom, pauses for a moment, and asks their passenger to come to the cockpit.
The man enters. He is tall and strongly built, with thick forearms and fingers and muscles on his back and neck that spread his shirt collar wide. Ferrera explains the problem with the storm. The tall man listens, but Labruna can tell he’s not really hearing. He’s got something else on his mind. Ferrera suggests the man strap himself in to his jump seat. The tall man exits, and Labruna and Ferrera turn back to the problem of the storm.
Labruna’s radar is now a mosaic of green, yellow, and red pixels. They are close enough that he can begin to discern the structure of the storm system. It’s both good and bad news: it is a highly powerful multi-cell cluster, but there appear to be gaps and valleys between the cells. Already his mind makes sense of the colors and patterns. He can see a route through.
“Here we go,” he says. He smiles quickly at Ferrera. “Left, two-two-zero. That’s good. Hold that.”
Ahead of them, suddenly, faintly illuminated, is the storm. The cloud structures provide reference for their speed. They are hurtling towards the grey-black mountains, but the valley he’d seen on radar is there. “Left, left, just a little,” he says. Ferrera eases them between the cells.
“A little buffeting,” Ferrera says, referring to feedback in his stick, but the air is still smooth.
“Okay, it’ll -- you can level, and then we’ll have to turn hard right. You can see it, there. Turn. Turn.”
Ferrera banks them to the right. The right wingtip is clear of the storm cell by less than a hundred feet. Out his window on the left side, Labruna looks up for the stars, but sees only the neighboring cell looming above them. He scans the radar. The valley is closing fast. The cells are colliding around them. They are at twenty-five thousand feet, their maximum altitude.
“Right, um, there’s still a gap, but it’s closing. You’ll level here and then right at two-two-six, and then...it may close on us, but it’s narrow there. We’ll be through it in fifteen seconds.”
“Out the other side?” Ferrera asks.
“Yeah,” Labruna answers uncertainly. But looking at the radar, he already knows he’s wrong. Out the windows, he sees the valley coming to a dead end, and the wall of cloud, primed with moisture and driven higher by updrafts at the front of the squall line, now rising impossibly above them. There is nowhere to turn.
Before Labruna can say anything, Ferrera sees it too, and mutters, “Shit.”
“Can we jump it?”
“We’re going to have to try,” the captain answers.
Ferrera nudges the throttle and eases the nose slightly up. The plane responds initially, but Labruna knows this is dangerous. If the plane isn’t able to climb any further, the nose-up attitude will cause them to lose airspeed and, quickly, altitude.
“Twenty-five three,” Labruna says, reading the altimeter. They’ve climbed three hundred feet.
“We need more.”
Labruna no longer feels exhilarated by the challenge. Adrenalin has been replaced by dread. Solid cloud walls are all around them now. It’s like slaloming through skyscrapers a hundred feet above city streets. Lightning explodes right outside their windows. He has been listening to commercial flights chatter about the storm on the radio. He would like to join in, ask for route suggestions or just for best wishes, but, of course, he can’t. The tall man pays them to be invisible.
Graveyards in the sky. That’s what his first flight instructor used to call thunderstorms. The cloud wall rushes up to meet them.
“She’s strong,” he says to Ferrera, but really to reassure himself. “She can take anything.” They look at each other and force smiles.
Cloud swallows them. For two or three seconds the air remains smooth, and then there is a single bang! and they are jolted upward with a floating sensation, the kind you get when you hit a pothole too fast on a country road. Labruna can feel the plane settling back into its trajectory, and then the turbulence comes. It throws the plane as if it is in the jaws of a giant terrier, up and down, left and right. A downdraft hits the right wing and snaps them into a forty degree bank. Ferrera struggles to level. There follows a series of smaller but incredibly violent bumps, blurring the instruments to the point where Labruna can’t read the altimeter or airspeed indicator. The plane sounds like nickels shaken in a tin can, all groaning metal, slaps and bangs, deeper thudding from the cargo hold. He thinks of the old joke about DC-3s: a collection of loose parts flying in tight formation. It doesn’t seem funny now.
Incandescent white light explodes in front of them, filling the windows and cockpit. Labruna is momentarily blinded. The sound is unexpectedly muted, a muffled, metallic groan, and all the instrument panels and interior lights blink off. The cockpit is dead. Labruna’s eyes adjust rapidly; without any glare or interior illumination, the clouds outside swirl in a mix of charcoal, black, and white.
“Lightning strike,” Ferrera says. “Engines?” he asks.
Without instrumentation, Labruna cannot be sure, but his instincts, and the way his body feels in his seat, tell him that they are still being propelled forward.
“Engine one good,” he says. “Engine two…good.”
Labruna begins the process of rebooting the interior power. When he flips the final switch, there is a reassuring click and a flicker of light. Before power returns completely, he looks out the window again, and something to his left catches his eye. They are still plowing through heavy cloud, but through it he sees the silhouette of a plane flying alongside him, backlit by more flashes of lightning, no more than a hundred yards away.
“Proximity warning,” he says, almost in disbelief.
“What?”
“Proximity warning, ten o’clock.”
Ferrera begins turning them to the right just as cockpit power returns in a series of blinking lights. Labruna checks both his radar and Airborne Collision Avoidance System screen, but the first is blank, and the second is still booting up. He sees the plane again, receding as they turn away. It is a DC-3 of the same vintage as theirs, and with similar but slightly different markings.
“There,” he says, pointing. Ferrera looks over and sees it.
The plane disappears into cloud.
“What the hell,” Ferrera says, angry and mystified. “Does he have another plane up here with us?”
Another series of violent jolts rocks the plane. Labruna scans his radar for any sign of relief, and then -- “There might be a gap opening at your two o’clock.”
“I see it!” Ferrera has continued the climb, helped by strong updrafts, and they are nearly out of the top of the storm. For a split second they find clear air, and he banks towards a seam between cells. But it closes just as fast, and again they crash and bang against masses of moisture-heavy cloud. At one point, a downdraft drops them three hundred feet in three seconds. Ferrera fights it and slowly begins to climb again. Labruna looks up. Solid cloud gives way in places to gauzy haze. Patches of black sky begin to show.
“Climb, climb,” he urges quietly. He sees a single star shining through the haze. They burst through a final curtain of mist, and suddenly they are skimming along the top of the storm. His radar goes black. The sky ahead and above them is awash in stars. They are free. The plane flies smooth and true.
Ferrera sighs and says simply, “Fuck.”
Labruna peers over his shoulder and can see part of the gray wall of the storm receding, still spitting lightning. The Captain descends to twenty-three thousand. He leans back in his seat and stretches his neck.
Labruna, his fingers trembling, reduces the gain on the radar so he can see the storm again, already five miles behind them. Although it is long and winding like a serpent, there is a bulge in the center, where multiple cells are colliding, and he can see that it is tracking to the west, towards the Gulf of Chiriquí. It will either spend its venom there, or continue to grow into something that makes the news.
The tall man comes back into the cockpit. He still looks fierce, but Labruna thinks he looks a little shaken, too.
“Are you okay, sir?” Ferrera asks.
The tall man doesn’t answer. He is coiled and tense, like the storm itself. Labruna can see his rib cage expand with each breath. The tall man looks past them, out the cockpit windows. A carpet of benign cloud glides below, faintly illuminated by the tapestry of stars above, and a sliver of moon, newly risen. His breathing slows.
“It’s beautiful,” he says.
The clouds unroll beneath them. The engines hum and the radio crackles with chatter, pilots and ground control trying to fight the storm, but to Labruna it feels very quiet in the cockpit.
“Yes,” Ferrera agrees. “Yes, it’s beautiful.”
“You must see beautiful things all the time from up here.”
Ferrera looks at Labruna. “Yes sir, we do.”
The tall man crosses his arms in front of his chest as he stares out the cockpit windows. “I envy you,” he says. “I took flying lessons when I was a teenager. Single-engine plane. But other things got in the way.”
Labruna wonders if the man has any idea how dangerous the storm was.
“Maybe this is heaven,” the tall man says. “To fly forever on a beautiful night, and never have to land?”
“Who can say, sir,” Ferrera answers.
“What a Heaven that would be,” the tall man says. “To never land. To stay up here, with the moon.” He shakes his head. “Well, right. Who can say? Who can really say?”
He nods again, then returns to the cabin.
Captain Ferrera exhales deeply.
Labruna looks out the window to his left, but sees only the receding storm.
Justin Bryant is the author of the 2013 memoir 'Small Time' from Bennion Kearny Press (UK). His short fiction has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Modern Literature, VLAK Magazine, Thin Air, and others, and is forthcoming in Monkeybicycle. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina and is on twitter at @jthouse37
