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| https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/06/america-by-air-a-morning-jaunt-over-jersey/487193/?page=5 |
"You can let go of those armrests now," laughs Buddy into the bluing sky after they've reached cruising altitude.
"Whew," exhales Alice as an orange glow to their left streaks the eastern horizon over the Delaware Bay. "That crosswind at the Manville airport nearly tipped this little Cessna."
"You get used to it," reasons her friend as he reaches for sunglasses. "This little plane they gave me turns a two day drive into a half day."
"We'll just see about that," she laughs to his insinuation that they'd be making this flight together again. "Now tell me about Ajax."
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The history of smuggling around the world is peppered with displaced people finding a way back to wealth. Whether it was opium in the Orient, rum in the colonies, or moonshine in the Appalachians, the traffickers had reasons to operate outside societal norms.
In the case of the Beatty family and other reiver clans at the Scottish border, resisting first the Romans and then the Normans meant finding the means to trade for metals needed for swords, shields, and chariots. Displaced to America with the consolidation of England after 1600, the reivers turned first to rum running and then to whiskey bootlegging to hold onto meager family lands. The transition to cocaine and air-trafficking in the second half of the twentieth century was a dangerous elevation of a way of life originally fueled by the colonization of the western world.
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"I like it when you talk dirty with me," chuckles Arthur Beatty the tenth before glimpsing Alice's glower and sobering up. "He's all set up as an outrider pony down there."
"Why would you do that?"she exclaims, turning toward him with wrinkled forehead and pursed lips. "You know Ajax doesn't respond to just any driver."
"It won't be just any driver if you'll take the job," Buddy continues, levering the control yoke left toward the open ocean to steer clear of monitored airspace around Washington D.C..
"Me?" she whispers, her face smoothing out as her mouth hangs open.
"I had to pull some strings, but yeah, the Hialeah outrider gets room, board, a salary, and a commission for all the big races."
"It's so far from anyone I know," she begins, already seeing a new life in south Florida.
"Lake Okeechobee is just an hour away, and I hit the track twice a week."
"What is it that you're doing down there?"
"I'm the hangar manager, so I keep an eye on the place and work on the planes."
"My, my, Mr. Airplane Mechanic, you are a man of many talents."
"These little piston engines aren't so different from the trucks and buses I've been around my whole life."
"But what are all those planes used for?"
"Mostly moving the family back and forth, snowbirds that they are."
"I'll have to see the stall and paddock," she equivocates, choosing to ignore the wink he thinks is hidden behind his sunglasses.
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