Saint Jackal

by J. M. J. Brewer

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

Ana and I let ourselves into Jackal’s RV, where Jackal was cleaning congealed oil from an airplane engine part. We’d met Jackal at a deserted airfield. The faded white markings were longer than I’d expected and impossibly diverse, bent, stretched—runes etching an esoteric pilot’s gospel. I’d felt nearly sacrilegious walking on the asphalt, as if a vehicle were necessary to take communion.

Jackal and his RV had been waiting next to our campsite. “Ike designed the interstate wide enough to land a plane on,” he’d said, pointing east to where the interstate surged.

“I read that, once,” I’d said.

“I’m Diane,” Ana had said.

“Matty.”

“Jackal.”

And here we were in convoy for two weeks: days hunting for Jackal’s aviation fixations, nights drinking excessively potent RV-fermented moonshine.

The airplane part Jackel cleaned was cylindrical and bigger than his head.

“What is it?” Ana asked.

“Can’t speak its name aloud,” Jackal said. “But I call it Fife.”

“Like Barney?”

“Like the Thane, Matty.” He considered himself well read.

“I admire how clean you keep this castle,” I said. His RV was cramped with scrap metal, screw piles, batteries, barrels filled with dirt, and countless solvents in glass or plastic bottles.

Jackal was impervious to sarcasm. “This Pilgrim is actually my second RV. The first is locked up at a PD in New Mexico. Or maybe they sold it to some schmuck.”

Ana took a towel from her purse. She laid it on the couch and pressed down lightly before sitting.

“I found all the screws,” Jackal said, pained.

“She’s precautionary,” I said.

“Why is your old RV in lockup?” Ana asked.

“Haunted,” Jackal said.

He turned the key, and the Pilgrim purred to life.

“Can we roll with you today?” I asked. Ana nodded—it had been her idea; we were low on gas.

“Only if you’re down to roam,” Jackal said. “I’ve heard tell of a big fish.”

We were hours on the road before Jackal revealed further information.

“Hope you brought your toothbrush. We’ll be gone for the night. At least.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” Ana said.

Jackal did not appear the least remorseful. “I couldn’t tell you in so public a place. But we stand to make a mess of cash. If I sell it, I’ll pay you each three percent. If I take it on the road as an attraction, same percent of ticket sales.”

“Fifteen percent,” Ana said.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To procure the plane that Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic.”

“The Spirit of St. Louis?” Ana had discovered more screws in the couch. She slotted them between her fingers like she’d grown new and twisting variations to her skeletal system. “I’ve seen that in a museum. We’ll each need 25 points.”

Jackal scoffed. “Were you born last night? Do I share my Pilgrim with wide-eyed babes? That plane is a counterfeit of the plane that actually made the journey. Think about it! Lindbergh was an occultist. Why would he surrender an object of obvious power? He would not! And neither would Uncle Sam.”

“Good point,” I said, just to keep him from gaining too much steam.

“Without doubt,” Jackal agreed. “The real plane—registration number N-X-212—had other flights by other hands. I will tell you that much.”

“Why planes, anyway?” I asked.

Privately, Ana poked me with her weaponized knuckles. She meant I’d somehow stepped in it.

“No pressure,” I added.

“I just like them, I guess.” From Jackal a statement so vague was suspicious. Ana took my hand and pointed it covertly toward the fan grate above the dashboard radio, the place where a rearview mirror would have been if this wasn’t an RV. A toy plane hung from the grate. The plane was tiny and appeared to be made of that plastic that expands to monster size in water for the duration of a child’s bath.

Jackal abruptly took an exit ramp, then turned off the frontage road onto a country road, then off that road onto a countrier road. Scrubby white pines dragged the Pilgrim’s sides. Half a mile in, we came to a shed and a rude lot. Sprouting off the shed was a rustic carport, and beneath the carport, guts open to the air, were two single-engine airplanes.

“I’ll be quick,” Jackal said. I helped him hook a trailer to the Pilgrim’s hitch. Crickets sang. When I was a kid, I used to catch crickets, and I got it in my head to do that again, right now.

“Watch for ticks!” Ana said. She sat on the trailer’s tongue.

I stopped. Not just for that, but because glinting came from deeper in the field. Glints everywhere, like jet airliner had disgorged a cargo of precious stones.

The Pilgrim purred awake. Jackal called out to me from the driver’s-side window. “Did you know JFK had back pains?”

“What?” We climbed inside. Ana cast me a sideways glance.

“Horrible back pain,” Jackal said, steering the Pilgrim down the strangled drive. I kept an eye out of the back window at the glistering fields; I couldn’t figure it out.

“JFK described the pain as ‘fiery’ and ‘molten.’ He had migraines—and this is from the horse’s mouth, mind you, admitted only to Jackie—that ‘rendered his mental landscape into a sea of burning coals. A conflagrating celestial body.’”

“Nothing wrong with his ego,” Ana said.

The twinkling in the field was planes, I realized. An entire field of shimmering planes.

Jackal brewed the moonshine in his shower. Translucent tubes extended from three metal jugs out through a gap in the roof. A bar of hair-strung soap and a bottle of Head & Shoulders proved the shower’s continued utility.

“Another shot?” I poured three more shots. Ana seldom did hers, and Jackal invariably picked up the slack. Anyone driving by on the highway would be able to see us, lit up in here, orange against the wide interstate dark. But nobody passed. Certainly, we had no neighbors at the picnic stop.

 “I knew things would work out once I learned your name,” Jackal said.

“Matty?”

“No, Matthew,” Ana said. “It’s a trustworthy name.”

“No, Diana,” Jackal said. “The name of the Princess.”

“It’s Diane,” Ana said.

Jackal waved this away. “Princess Diana could read the movements of birds on the wing.”

“She looked a bit like a bird,” I ventured. “An egret. Pretty and thin.”

Jackal nodded along. “She was fucking tapped in, y’all.  She saw visions of the moon in daytime, too. And not, like, hanging next to the sun. In place of it.’”

“What did it mean?” I asked.

“Where’d you get this from?” Ana asked.

“Please, Matty, I cannot interpret the signs witnessed by a Saint.”

“Where’d you get all this from?” Ana repeated.

Jackal stood. His energy shifted, stormlike. “What does it matter, if it’s true?”

“You’re right,” Ana said. She gripped my knee. I stayed still as I could.

“You bet!” Jackal said. “And you know what the kicker is?”

“Let’s take a walk,” Ana suggested. “You can tell us, outside.”

“Why would we do that? Shut up and listen: St. Di was pregnant. They waited to do it until she was pregnant.”

Jackal unsheathed the knife he kept on his hip. He stabbed the air, as if in demonstration. The blade flashed inches from my eyes.

“My middle name is Fitzgerald,” I said, fast.

“Really?”

“No, but it is Robert.”

“Strange.” But he looked pleased. He sat back on the toilet and made an ottoman out of the towel bar. “That is mighty strange, brother.”

Ana laughed, too loud, and I brayed along with. She released three more shots of moonshine from the tap.

“To friends,” Jackal said. He clinked his glass solemnly against ours. “And to never repeating what I am about to tell you.”

We drank.

“Promise,” I said.

Ana crossed herself—she was not Catholic.

“Our plane, N-X-212, was seen flying in the sky before each of the assassinations. Sources corroborate.”

“Amazing,” Ana said.

“Wow,” I said.

“Don’t I know it,” Jackal said. He leaned his head against the faux-wood wall. After we were sure he was asleep, Ana and I crept to our tent.

Jackal roused us just past dawn. He appeared none the worse for wear. I sorted myself with a few pukes. Ana couldn’t, even though she’d woken nauseated most mornings since we’d hit the Southwest—a change in air quality increasing phlegm production, she thought.

“How’d you sleep?” Jackal asked, not really asking. “We’re awfully close. I couldn’t tell last night.” He brought the Pilgrim around and onto a cloverleaf ramp. We swirled up and up until the entire world became blue sky and the contrails etched there.

“I cannot believe this is happening,” he said. He caressed the toy plane hanging from the vent, flicked the plane so it spun, caught the end of its twist, and spun it back around. To my great surprise he hitched out a little sob. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry.”

“We’ll find it for you, buddy,” Ana said. She squeezed Jackal’s arm. “We promise.”

“Promise,” I said, not really understanding.

The interstate titled down, and suddenly we were pointed at a hulking dam. Six surges of murky water sprouted from the dam’s concrete back.

“We have arrived,” Jackal said.

He took the next exit under an overpass and drove until the ramp sprouted arterially and ejected us, finally, onto a raised expanse protected by a defunct gate and decrepit guardhouse. We’d left the interstate far behind in the process of this exchange. Below and far off I could hear, dimly, the metallic wails of ghost cars.

“What have we here?” Ana breathed, face to the window. The gatehouse had the air of the long-abandoned. No vagrant squatted here. And to judge by the weeds sprouting through the concrete, no vehicles had passed for ages.

Two concrete pillars marked the entrance to the dam’s lip. It was clear that the Pilgrim could only thread this gap with the side mirrors removed.

We disembarked. Stepping outside brought me utter recall of a forgotten memory: it smelled just like mornings before summer school, waiting for the bus in an empty parking lot three blocks from my house.

“Rich men, dromedaries, and needles,” Jackal said, fiddling with a screwdriver. Ana and I explored the renounced kingdom. We ran our hands along concrete fissures. We inspected the pillars for graffiti and found faded evidence of artistry.

Ana stuck her arm between the pillars as if through a doorway. “Feels like a whirlpool.”

She was right: air sucked into the gap. Doubtless a random consequence of construction and location. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that to go through this gap was to enter a different place. It was there, and we were here.

Before I was quite aware of myself, I walked through.

There was nothing new on this side except the dam’s lake and, past that, abandoned interstate cloverleaf. The lake water was grey and still and probably ten feet below the dam’s lip. Still, it felt close enough to swish my arm through.

“It’s going to storm,” Ana said. And maybe she was right. Maybe that explained my anticipation.

“Come hold these,” Jackal said, cradling side mirrors like twin infants. He passed them to me, lined the Pilgrim up for the gap, whispered through with nary a spark.

As we crossed the dam the sound of the spillway roared over my own thoughts. Ana gripped my hand and faced lake-ward: vertigo. I stuck my head out of the Pilgrim’s window and watched the water shoot thick from the dam’s concrete body. Distant interstate traffic seemed to witness our spectacle. What would they think about the RV and trailer cutting across the dam? Would they assume a road crew? A lost driver?

“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” Ana asked once we’d finished our crossing. “I mean, could you even land a plane here?”

This swooping interstate was all underpasses and, I guess, overpasses, by virtue of opposition. Cloverleaf was too tame a word; The interstate looped like heartworm, without method or planning, as if grown wild. No wonder it had been abandoned.

Jackal pointed to the tip top, then traced down unlikely curves and switchbacks all the way into a snake ball of concrete.

“That way, I think,” he said.

“I’m lost,” Ana said. I caught her nerves, all the more contagious for their rarity.

Still, the landscape entranced me. Bright green grass sprouted from exit-ramp swirls; gulls congregated in puddles on the pocked road. Here was the ultimate in abandoned sites: an outdoor cathedral to failed infrastructure, the apex of fossilized ruination. I felt as if I could trace its lineage back to the primordial, conceive of it as simultaneously ancient and newly born.

I couldn’t hear the interstate traffic at all.

We followed the twisting way until we came to an empty expanse swathed in road-wide shadows. A basilica made of concrete. Man’s cave. A grand building might have been meant to inhabit this void. It never would.

But from within this empty cathedral blinked two yellow lights. The lights were spaced about as far as a car’s headlights. No, too wide: another RV.

The lights blinked again.

“That’s gotta be them,” Jackal said.

“Where did you find the seller?” Ana asked.

“I’ve got my channels,” Jackal said. “Although I wouldn’t exactly call them a ‘seller.’”

Jackal did not deign to continue. Ana and I shared worried looks.

He drove carefully. Concrete boulders with corrugated road sign fins hulked behind concrete rubble sprayed in chaotic patterns. Rainwater had collected in concrete rifts to create gray pools.

Across the way the other RV blinked its headlights at us. It must have been parked on a rise.

The Pilgrim trundled in and out of the shadows. When we were twenty yards away from the other RV, Jackal dropped the Pilgrim into park, yanked the e-brake, and turned the key. Gulls cried out the absence of the machine sound.

We filed outside. The concrete held a solidity belied by its rotten appearance. Gray-green moss sprung to life in any available crack. I felt at a distance from the earth I knew. In a gray place far, far off. Much further away than any Pilgrim could journey.

Ana grabbed my hand. She was about to speak, I think, when the yellow lamps leaned forward.

I realized they weren’t headlights. No, not at all.

They were eyes.

A great shape came toward us out of the gloom.

“Jesus Christ,” Jackal said. And I wanted to laugh because he wasn’t all wrong. Whatever came from the gloom might just have been some young God—or something adjacent to a God, the distinction laughable from my trivial perspective, and I was laughing by then, or wailing, the sound pealing out of me until there was nothing left, until I sucked air on sore knees because somewhere along the way I’d fallen and on either side of me Jackal and Ana had done the same.

The young God crawled to the lip of a concrete pool. Gulls fell sharply to pick moss from the water’s skim. He slid into the pool with a child’s solemn care, and I realized He hadn’t noticed us yet.

Sunlight—so pale as to be indistinguishable from moonlight—reached through the bands of shadow to illuminate the God splashing in the pool. He appeared to be no older than a toddler, though His skin was tattered by the elements. Still, I couldn’t gather a full picture of Him through the sensation of things slipping out of track, through my tears.

Jackal ventured closer. I followed him over a half-wall of rubble. The Boy leaned chubby arms over the crater’s sides to grab at something in the darkness. He made the burring sounds of an engine and swung his prize from the shadows: a plane. His toddler’s hand grasped the plane inexpertly. Metal pinched; a window exploded under the pressure. He brought the plane diving over the pool. The plane’s propellors spun lazily, and the Boy slapped the water with sedan-sized hands to mimic explosions.

“N-X-212,” Jackal whispered. My nearness to the Boy was intoxicating. Did Jackal feel it, too? I dared not make a sound for fear of His notice.

But He only played in His bath. I don’t know how long we spent behind the boulder, watching Him there. Slowly understanding Him. Eventually I could see that His skin was almost translucent. I watched the flow of His blood through veins as big around as my wrists. I wondered how massive He would be at full growth. And I pitied Him because He’d been abandoned. That was sure enough. But when? Long, long ago, I sensed, perhaps so long that this curlicue interstate had grown along with Him.

“Poor guy,” Jackal said. And to my immense surprise he left cover. He bounded up to the Boy, introduced himself to a God.

The Boy swung toward Jackal with the careful regard of a drunkard. He tossed the plane down. I feared Jackal squashed. But Jackal did not even flinch, not even when a slowly spinning rotor knocked his shoulder. From the spot ran a thin, distinct line of blood.

“I’m Glen,” Jackal said. “Glen. Can you say that?”

The Boy gurgled. My chest rumbled in the bass.

Jackal absentmindedly brushed the blood. “Glen,” he repeated. He pointed at the Boy. “What’s your name?”

The Boy slapped the concrete with petulance. The concrete cracked open.

“I’ll call you Charles, Jr.,” Jackal said.

The Boy shrieked His pleasure. The sound was terrifying, but the Boy liked His name. Or being named. Jackal had a knack for this.

Jackal was even more affected. He embraced one of the Boy’s fingers. The Boy cooed.

I wanted to join him out there. To seize this wonder at whatever expense—but I could not make myself budge. I wanted to check on Ana nearly as much. Yet, how could I have turned from that spectacle?  Any lessening of attention felt tantamount to suicide, a loss of experience so great as to be mortal.

The Boy clutched Jackal in a meaty fist. He drew Jackal into the sky and shook him delightedly. It seemed almost a blessing to die by this Boy’s hand, even if by accident.

But Jackal was not dead. He held the Boy’s hand as the Boy squashed him into the cockpit. Jackal bled all over the nose of the plane. He wiped his brow with his left hand—his right arm hung there, subtly malformed, altered by God.

Yet I’d never seen Jackal happier. I’d never seen anyone in such a state. He was past happiness and into ecstasy. Enraptured.

The Boy was likewise pleased. He picked up N-X-212 and orbited the plane at the length of His chubby arm. Around and around, back and forth, the figure of Jackal a blur. This was the plane’s first passenger flight in… how long? Since the Princess’s death in ’97, or perhaps the flight that had landed it here.

The Boy finally paused. He laughed in uncontrollable, pure delight.

Jackal called out to us. “He’s all alone. He needs someone.”

I couldn’t speak.

The Boy peered in our direction, and Jackal waved for His attention.

“Let’s go for another ride, Charlie!”

The Boy approved of this idea. He flew the plane on a sinewave, and Jackal shrieked with exaltation.

Ana took me by the hand. I felt like I was waking from a dream. She dragged me toward the RV. Sloshing bathwater cascaded over me, soaking my back, baptizing me.

“I can’t drive it,” she hissed.

I flung open the door of the Pilgrim. All that chrome and aluminum and vinyl. The rubber, my God. Man’s creations. Everything in the world had been recontextualized.

“Get on with it,” Ana said. She slammed her door. I shifted the Pilgrim into reluctant, grating first; this was only my third time driving stick. The trailer rattled behind us. The Boy’s happy shrieks followed, burrowed into me so my molars rattled along with the trailer. I willed Jackal to keep Him in that pool. Could He walk yet or only crawl?

“Shit, Matthew, drive. I feel like I’m going to scream.”

I hit the ramp at speed. Ana rolled the window and stuck her head out.

I couldn’t hear the splashes anymore, but I could hear, faintly, His deep giggle. And I wanted to take a last look. Like Ana. To see what I would miss, forever. To see what Jackal had won, had gotten a second chance at.

As if to tease myself, I glanced instinctively at the space where a rearview mirror would be.

Where the toy plane hung.

You had to wonder: was that the plane’s size after being submerged in the bath, or before?

The sun blazed in the sky. Out of passenger’s window, the moon, a ghost in the daytime.

I flipped the sun visor. I asked Ana.