Ever lied to a man, then spent forty minutes trapped with him in a basket at 800 feet?
The underwriter I'd lied to climbed into the hot-air balloon right behind me. I'd put a fake number on the merchant's application. Not a big fake number. That's what I kept telling myself at 5:10 in the morning, standing in a wet hayfield with a gas station coffee, watching a nylon envelope the size of a house fill up with cold air. Marisol's bank statements showed $22,400 a month. On the application I'd typed $31,000. Fall was her busy season, I reasoned. Summer had been windy. Nobody in underwriting wants to hear about wind.
The deal was $45,000 at a 1.38. My cut was $4,500. The funder, a shop I'd sent maybe forty files to, never did site visits on deals that small. Then, the night before, the underwriter emailed me two words.
"Riding along."
His name was Pruett. He showed up in a fleece vest and running shoes, holding a clipboard he hadn't written on yet. The other two passengers were a couple in matching beanies who said they were celebrating ten years. She filmed the burner the whole time it roared. He asked Marisol how many flights she'd done last month.
"Twenty-two," she said.
My stomach dropped somewhere below the basket. Twenty-two flights, four seats, $289 a head, plus photo packages. That was her real number. Not mine.
Marisol ran two balloons and a chase van with a trailer hitch held on by optimism. Sunrise flights, champagne at the landing site, a certificate with your name in gold. On the inside of the basket rail, where only passengers could see it, she'd painted her one rule: IF I SAY SIT, SIT.
"You don't fund what you haven't flown," she'd told me on the phone. That's why I was there, in borrowed gloves, trying not to look down.
Then the burner went off like a jet engine and the field let go of us.
At eight hundred feet the fog sat in the valley like spilled milk. The chase van was a toy on a gray ribbon of road. Pruett finally uncapped his pen.
"So what does a good month look like?"
I opened my mouth to answer for her. She beat me to it.
"Thirty-one," Marisol said. "Thirty-one thousand."
My number. To the dollar. She'd signed the application. Of course she'd read it. I'd just never met a merchant who did.
Pruett wrote it down. The guy in the beanie typed something into his phone. His wife stopped filming.
"That's funny," she said. "Last week you told me thirty-four."
The wicker creaked, and for a second nobody breathed.
The husband turned to her very slowly. "Told you when?"
"On my site visit call. For the advance we funded her Tuesday." She looked at him. "Who are you with?"
He didn't answer, and he didn't have to. The beanies came from the same gift shop, but that was it. They'd met in the parking lot at five. Two funders, each told by their own underwriter to book a sunrise flight and see the business. Marisol had put them on the same flight. Then she'd added Pruett. Then me.
Three funders, one broker, and a woman with $65,000 of their money already in her account, floating in a wicker box with no door.
"You're stacked," Pruett said. It wasn't a question.
"Eleven cancelled flights in August," Marisol said, eyes on the envelope. "Wind. Then the old envelope failed inspection. New one was $62,000. I took the first advance for the envelope. The debit ate me alive, so I took the second to feed the first. Your deal feeds the second." She pulled the burner. Fire roared over our heads. "That's the whole business plan. You can yell at me, but we're up for another thirty-eight minutes, and I'm the only one who knows how to land."
The husband yelled anyway. The wife called her manager and got voicemail at 6:20 a.m. Pruett just looked at me.
"Thirty-one," he said.
"I rounded."
"From twenty-two?"
I had nothing. The sun came up gold over the valley and lit all four of our faces, and every single one of them was looking at mine.
We came down in a soybean field. Marisol hopped out, popped a bottle of cheap champagne, and poured five plastic flutes. Nobody touched them. She handed out the certificates anyway. Mine said my full name in gold script, and under it: FIRST FLIGHT. ALTITUDE 1,140 FEET.
Pruett's email hit my phone before the van arrived. Declined. Under that, one line: "Don't send me any more files."
Then the envelope started to sag across the beans, a hundred feet of red and yellow nylon, still full of warm air, and Marisol stood at the top of it and pointed.
"Everybody on your knees. Push the air out toward the crown. If I say kneel, kneel."
And the four of us, three funders and the guy who lied to them, got down in the dirt in our good shoes and pressed on her balloon until it was flat.