Cape Disappointment (14 page)

All in all, Kathy hung up and dialed Bert four times. During the last part of their conversation Bert insisted that Kathy tell him where she was, precisely, to the milepost, and what her vehicle looked like, as if the information was of any use to him in Seattle. “No, Bert. We
were
at the ocean. Just my husband and me. No, we didn't build a fire on the beach. We thought about it, but we didn't get around to it. Listen, Bert. I have to go now. Whatever is going on, we'll handle it at the end of the week.” Kathy heaved a sigh and tilted her seat back, closing her eyes.

“Go ahead, grab some shut-eye,” I said. “You're going to have a couple of busy days.”

“I'm beginning to think whatever is wrong with him is getting worse.”

“You mean he's … let's see … what would be the technical term for it … going nutso?”

“It's nice to hear a clinician put it into medical terms. You know what I think, Thomas? I have this weird feeling he's killed somebody.”

“Did he say that?”

“He's hinting around at something.”

“Let's hope not.”

The landing strip wasn't far from Ilwaco, a tiny town on the peninsula. The strip was a couple of hundred yards long, with a wind sock and six or eight small planes parked near a shack that served as an office and repository for a raft of Coke and candy machines. Looking green around the gills, Kalpesh was there, as was Jane Sheffield and her cadre of campaign workers. A twin-engine plane sat on the end of the runway, one pilot inside the cockpit prepping the plane. It would hold ten or maybe twelve passengers.

“You want to come?” Kathy asked as we pulled up next to the burgundy Lexus that Kalpesh had driven from Seattle. “They said there's room.”

“I'd have to leave the car. Besides, you'll be working and I'll be bored. I might start fondling you.”

“Yeah, well, there is that.”

“Thanks, but I'll stay with the car.”

Kalpesh and the rest of the gang were standing next to the shack laughing about something. Kalpesh looked terrible, ashen. Apparently
he
was
sick. He was deep in conversation with a man who appeared to be the second pilot.

I walked to the rear of the Prius and pulled out Kathy's bag. When I got back around the car, she was on the phone. “Bert, I said—” She rolled her eyes at me, and I leaned over and kissed her forehead. “No, Bert. I said I'm going to be gone for two days, and that's what's going to happen. Yes. We're at the landing strip now. What? I don't know. A few minutes. Inside half an hour for sure. Okay. Okay. Just don't do anything rash. I mean that. I'm serious. You do anything crazy and I am no longer your attorney. You understand?”

When we approached the group, Kathy and I fell into a long hug. As she always did, Kathy felt small and firm against my lanky frame. “I wish it could have been at least two days,” I said. “That would have given us a few more naps.”

“I'll ask the pilot to tip his wings as we pass the Cape. I think we'll be going past the lighthouse. Love you. See you at the end of the week. I'll call.”

On the way back to the car I crossed paths with Kalpesh Gupta and the man he'd been talking to, Freddy Mitz, who was one of the pilots. “Why is this flight originating here, in the middle of nowhere?” I asked. “Why not Seattle?”

“That was my doing,” admitted Kalpesh. “The plane and pilots were in California until late last night, brought a rock band up to Portland for a couple of sold-out shows. And Jane was in the Tri-Cities, so I thought it would be easier for everybody to meet here. Kathy and you were nearby. It worked out best this way.”

I turned to Freddy. “Pretty good band?”

“I never actually heard them play.”

“Nice to meet you, Freddy. Take care of these people. The pretty one's my wife.”

“We always take care of our people.”

I took the single-lane road out to the highway. The overcast was beginning to break up, so I had high hopes for a splendid sunset at the Cape.

I WAS STANDING
in front of the lighthouse at Cape Disappointment amid a congregation of senior citizens who had arrived by bus. I hadn't spotted any planes in the cloudy skies yet, nor did I have the place to myself the way I'd hoped. The clouds were foreshadowing a watercolor sunset. I'd located the black and white Cape Disappointment lighthouse and found a spot where some good citizen might snap a photograph of me that would include the lighthouse, the ocean, and perhaps Kathy's flight, maybe even with a touch of sunshine blasting through the blanket of clouds.

“Hi, baby,” I said.

“Hey, big boy.”

“You got people around?”

“Well, sort of.”

“Can you talk?”

“I can talk.”

For reasons I could not define, we both knew our goodbye was not going to be complete until the plane had passed the Cape. As we talked I spotted a twin-engine plane cruising out over the water. It was traveling north and had to be Sheffield's charter. I handed my digital camera to one of the tourists in front of the lighthouse and asked him to snap a picture of me, positioning myself so the plane would be framed over my shoulder. It was going to make a terrific joke photo,
our vacation together, Kathy in the plane, me in front of the lighthouse, the two of us on the phone.

The old man snapped a picture and I motioned for him to do it a second time as an insurance shot. He did so and then with trembling hands returned the camera. I thanked him, turned around, and used my field glasses to bring the plane up close. “Kathy, I see you. You're … maybe a mile out. Are you all right?”

As I spoke the plane tipped its wings, first right, then left. In the beginning I thought the cutoff in our phone conversation was due to Kathy holding on to her seat because the pilot was overdoing it. For a second or two, watching through the 8×50 binoculars, I thought he was losing control of the plane and was taking it into a spin, but then he got the wings level. They were three thousand feet over the waves, maybe four, just under the scudding clouds. Then I realized that our connection had been cut off. I dialed again, but her phone did not ring. I dialed one more time before realizing my phone was dead. No signal strength at all, even though it had been at its maximum a moment earlier. I hated this new cellphone company.

A man from the tour bus with a hearing aid in each ear began shouting into his phone. “Marshall, are you there? Marshall? I can't hear you. Marshall?”

Astonishingly, the plane dipped its wings again and did some sort of flip spiral, turning toward us, but on its side. To my amazement and horror, the plane began a sputtering descent toward the ocean in a slow, seemingly uncontrolled corkscrewing motion.

Cursing loudly enough that all of the old folks from the tour bus stopped what they were doing and followed my line of sight out over the ocean, I watched helplessly. Like a kite with a tangled tail, the plane was going down, flipping and fluttering and finally taking the final part of the dive toward the waves in what was more or less a straight line. The last thousand feet or so it went down like a lawn dart, straight and undeviating.

As the plane struck the ocean, a gout of water shot up from the ocean swells, and then the spot was lost in the rolling of the waves, a mile or a mile and a half out. There were no boats in sight, and as far as I could see, no other planes. I had two immediate thoughts. The first
was that the plane wasn't Kathy's. It couldn't be Kathy's. Kathy couldn't be dead. None of them could be dead. The second thought was that I was hallucinating. Neither speculation was based in reality.

A woman was weeping while a man with a camera around his neck tried to console her. Two nearby figures had cellphones pressed to their ears, calling the authorities, no doubt. For some inexplicable reason, I called Kathy back. Or tried to. It was a reflexive act. The phone was dead, her phone, my phone, everything was dead. None of the others around me seemed to be getting their calls through, either, but they were all old and doddering and their nerves had taken over. The plane had plummeted into the ocean in a classic vertical dive, but I was hoping for survivors. I was an idiot. There would be no survivors. Kathy's body was sinking to the bottom of the ocean. A plane hitting the water from that height would impact with roughly the same force as if smacking a concrete field. Anybody who'd ever gone off a high board at a local swimming pool and muffed the dive knew how unyielding a body of water was. There would be no survivors.

Two women and a man made a beeline for the lighthouse so they could importune the attendant to get help. As the trio scurried past, I heard one of the women say, “We have to get a boat out there before they drown. They're going to drown. We have to act fast.”

It was a fiction to think passengers from the plane were alive and awaiting rescue— or at least, that was what I told myself. Kathy was dead. She was most certainly dead. They were
all
dead. There had been some sort of malfunction and the plane went down and by now they were at least a hundred feet underwater. The irony was that after promising myself I wouldn't live through her death twice, over the course of the next week I found myself replaying it hundreds of times.

More people began clustering around us, and as they did so, those who'd witnessed the crash or had been standing next to someone who'd witnessed it explained to the newcomers what the commotion was about, displaying the pride people first on the scene of a catastrophe seem to adopt. Two of the elderly women wept. In a strange way, I was grateful for their compassion. Already I could feel myself withdrawing inward, as if becoming autistic. My brain felt like a shattered mirror.

“What happened?” asked one of the newcomers.

The man who'd taken my photo replied. “There was a plane out there, and it just all of a sudden went down. It didn't even look like they were trying to save it.”

“It was like a maple seed or something,” said his spouse, her voice shaky.

“I don't see any crash,” said the newcomer.

“You look close, you'll see plane parts floating on the waves.”

He was right. When I got the binoculars focused and the swells allowed it, I saw what appeared to be two sections of a wing in the water. “See any people out there?” somebody asked.

“No. No people.” My voice sounded as if it were coming from somebody else.

“But they might be alive,” said a woman. “They might be waiting for the rescue boats. I mean … what if there are sharks?”

I walked away and kept walking until the discussion was a buzz in the breeze. It was hard to believe our idyllic vacation had turned into this nightmare. My legs felt shaky. I felt like vomiting. Not knowing what else to do, I stood in the breeze. I couldn't stand next to the lighthouse for the rest of my life. Surely there were actions I should be taking, but I couldn't think of what they might be.

It was all so wrong. If Kalpesh hadn't phoned Kathy this morning and told her he was sick, Kathy would have been in the rustic little motel room on the beach with me. We would have heard about this on the radio or from a phone call. It was Kalpesh's fault. If Kalpesh hadn't gotten sick, Kathy would be alive. Kalpesh was the reason Kathy was gone. She'd taken his seat on the plane. He was the one who should have been dead. The others were all going to be on the flight anyway, including Sheffield, but Kathy had been placed there by a man I would hold a grudge against for the rest of my life. Even as my brain churned, I knew I wasn't thinking straight. I knew, but I didn't care. Strange how tragedies beg you for somebody to blame.

Kalpesh.

I FOUND HIM
along the Columbia River between Ilwaco and the small town of Chinook. Ironically, the kid's name was Noah and he had at his disposal a twenty-foot fiberglass launch stocked with a searchlight, sonar, GPS, and depth finder. He also had half a case of beer and had already generated at least two empties that I could see. It was his dad's fishing boat, but Noah was on a three-week sabbatical at his parents' vacation home at the gorge with his girlfriend and had full use of his parents' play toys, including Jet-Skis, sailboards, motorcycles, and the boat. Noah was twenty-two, I think, or twenty-three.