Unaccompanied Minor (3 page)

My grandfather Roy on my father’s side had been a WorldAir employee so long that he and the CEO of the company—the same Mr. Alan Bertram outside the door right now hollering about what a big disaster this all is—he and my granddaddy Roy go way back, literally to day one. They had both been hired as engineers on the same date, and remained close friends up until the day my grandfather died. But where Mr. Bertram was a corporate type, my grandfather was a laborer. He loved to work with his hands. Friendships are thick, though, and Mr. Bertram himself attended my granddaddy’s funeral and stood in the receiving line like everyone else. He gave my mother his card, telling her to call him if she needed anything.

My grandfather on my mother’s side, Maxwell Davenport, was a baggage handler for Spartan Airlines back before it merged with WorldAir, and he met my Grammy Mae (see? M-a-e) right on the tarmac of the Monroe County Airport as she was greeting passengers about to climb the jet steps to a flight to Atlanta. My grandmother is sixty-two now and still a flight attendant for ExpressAir, a regional affiliate for WorldAir, a factor that is due to no small feat. Grammy Mae had been canned back in the seventies for having the audacity to get knocked up with my mother’s older brother, so she sued the airline for discrimination and won a precedent-setting case that enabled the mandatory rehiring of all stewardesses previously fired for being pregnant, or over the age of thirty or—I swear this is true—
getting
married
. Any one of those three factors used to be a perfectly acceptable terminable offense until Grammy Mae and a collective of other strong-minded and unfairly fired stewardesses descended on the Supreme Court and set it right.

Today Grammy Mae still flies domestic routes and stays busy. Her favorite trip is the thirty-four-hour Las Vegas layover on the 757, because the crew is put up at the Silver Spur Hotel and Casino where they get a coupon book that includes two free welcome cocktails and half off at the Rootin’ Tootin’ breakfast buffet.

“It’s like a mini vacation,” she tells me. “I can’t believe I get paid.”

She welcomes the breaks, because she told me when she’s not working, my Papa Maxwell expects her to be a farmer’s wife. He retired early from his baggage-handling job and now runs a vegetable stand along Riverside Road, south of the Atlanta airport. Maybe you have heard of his stand; it’s called Papa Maxwell’s Fresh Fruit & Produce. He’s kind of famous for his homemade ginger ale, brewed using the ginger root he grows in his garden. He keeps bottles of it on ice right by the cash register, and people come from miles around to buy it.

I used to like to sit under pomegranate trees in Papa Maxwell’s backyard and feast on the fruit, with the ruby-colored juice running down my arms and dripping off my elbows. This is where they found me, by the way, on that Easter Sunday when it was time to tell me what had happened to my real father. I was under the pomegranate trees, gathering the fallen fruit into my lap.

My mother had been a flight attendant since two years before I was born, then flew with me in her belly until she was so pregnant it was against policy for her to continue. But being in the air was the only thing that made the morning sickness go away, she said.

“I don’t know what it was, but once the plane took off all of a sudden I could feel you quiet down in there,” she would tell me. “It was like reverse gravity or something. Suddenly I felt light as a feather, like the weight of the world was lifted. I loved flying when I was knocked up.” Then she would kiss me goodnight.

She called them “sky stories,” and she told me one every night before bed, even after she married Ash, who thought she was ruining me with this ritual for some reason. “She needs to toughen up!” he’d shout at her, often while standing over us as she held me in bed. “You’re ruining her!”

They always fought, until he figured out how to shut her down. He liked to throw open the door to my bedroom, grab me out of bed, and shake me at her. “Let’s play shaken baby syndrome!” he’d shout. I wasn’t exactly a baby, but I’d be wailing like one, and she would instantly back down and beg him to hand me to her. But he wouldn’t. He would just shove me at her, and then yank me away. “Shaken baby syndrome!” he’d laugh. He was such a bastard.

Inspector DeAngelo:

Don’t cuss.

April Manning:

“Bastard” is technically not profanity. Bastard. Bastard. Bastard-ass bastard! She tried to lock my bedroom door to keep him away from us, but he kicked the door down. That explains the scar on my arm. The door hit me, threw me against a bookshelf, and broke my commemorative Wonder Woman plate. I woke up in the hospital with a concussion and six stitches in my arm.

Inspector DeAngelo:

Didn’t your mom call the police and have him arrested?

April Manning:

That’s a good one. The police were called, yes. I recently read the report, which was attached to the recommendation on custody. My mother made the mistake of telling Ash to call 911 while she tended to my injuries. Ash called, all right, but he told them my mother was the one who hurt me. When the police came, it was her word against his. I was unconscious from getting bashed in the head by a door, which made it pretty hard to put in my two cents. The officer took their statements in the emergency room while I was getting stitched up, and since both were claiming abuse against the other, the officer had them both hauled off to jail.

Wanna know what happens to an unaccompanied minor when she’s released from a hospital emergency room while her mother and stepfather are in prison and all her grandparents are on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic? She gets thrown into the Fulton County Children’s Shelter, which is just a euphemism for juvenile jail, because that’s where they also throw the runaways, junior druggies, muggers, thieves, and any other criminal under the age of eighteen, male
and
female. It took three days for things to get sorted enough so that I could go home, and I had to spend most of that time barricaded in a utility closet to keep from getting assaulted by a two-hundred-pound seventeen-year-old thug who had decided I was his “bee-otch.”

After that, Ash called 911 on my mother all the time. It was his favorite thing to do. The police would be at our door in minutes, Ash would make up some complaint and demand they write a report. When my bedroom door was replaced, he put the lock on the outside of the door. That’s how he started locking us up. I used to have to climb out the window and onto the porch roof to get out of the house. Then I couldn’t get back inside, so suddenly I was a runaway and it was all my mom’s fault, according to that crazy bitch the guardian ad litem.

Investigator DeAngelo:

Cussing.

April Manning:

“Bitch” is not profanity. They say it on television all the time. Even daytime TV.

Anyway, Ash thought it would do me good to let me lie alone, crying in the dark. Also, it wasn’t until she married him that we began celebrating Easter Sundays again. Until then we ignored Easter. The purpose was to try to keep me from remembering things. It was a diversionary tactic employed by my mother. Ash thought it was ridiculous and was certain it wouldn’t work. He was half right; it didn’t work. I still remembered that my real father died on Easter. But I didn’t think it was ridiculous. Like I said, diversionary tactics have their purpose.

Speaking of diversionary tactics, I really think they should include ways to recognize the difference between smoke bombs and actual bombs in the “Explosive Device Recognition” guide in the WorldAir flight attendant manual, which is like my bible. But like with the real Bible, I still have my criticisms of it. I will probably expound on those later, but for now, according to the “Explosive Device Recognition” section, the list of things to look for in a suspicious device is:

1. Power source
   
2. Initiator
   
3. Explosive (of course)
   
4. Sensor
   

It’s in the security section of the handbook, which is written out all in lists. I am very big on lists. And by the way, I was told to be as specific as possible in this account, which explains the rambling details. So I am simply complying with orders.

See? I am cooperating.

Which is saying something, because I have major trust issues, except for with people like my friend Flo, who is my ex aunt-in-law. I still don’t know exactly how we are related—it’s like twice removed by marriage and then even further removed by divorce—but the fact is that Flo has been around my mother and me for all our lives. She called both of us “Kid,” probably because she had no kids of her own, so she treated my mother and me like we were her facsimiles thereof. Still, the only reason I trusted her is because she figured out what I was up to two weeks ago and didn’t tell anyone. She said she’d never seen anything like it in all her years of flying, which, of course, got her to reminiscing.

“Those were the days to fly, kid,” she’d say. “You could smoke and drink Bloody Marys in the galley all day and never have to worry about being Breathalyzed at the end of your shift.”

Flo still smokes and drinks Bloody Marys in the galley all day, so I don’t know why she was nostalgic about that particular thing. It was the reason she always bid to fly the old Lockheed 1011s, because the galley is located under the cabin in a whole separate area where passengers are not even allowed. She could spend the whole flight down there doing anything she wanted, and she didn’t have to answer to anyone—not the passengers, pilots, or even other flight attendants. All she had to do was prepare the carts and send them up in the tiny little elevators, and I usually did that for her. It was part of our deal. That and I was supposed to provide her clean urine samples in case she ever got popped to report for a drug test. So I tried to book myself on as many flights with Flo as I could, because she knew my mother and she knew my situation. Like I said, it did not take her long before she figured out what I was up to after she discovered me in the lost-and-found room of the Detroit employee lounge.

“Kid!” she said, sounding happy and surprised. “What the hell are you doing here?”

She was standing in the doorway with the light coming from behind her, and it illuminated her giant white bun, which made it look like her head was on fire. If you knew Flo, you’d realize why that image is appropriate. As tiny as she is, Flo is never hard to miss. She’s a sixty-seven-year-old flight attendant with a white bun on her head as big as a bicycle seat. That bun is the whole reason she ever got hired, she told me, because back in the sixties you had to be at least five-foot-two to be a stewardess, and Flo is technically only five feet and a half-inch tall. The bun, though, put her up over the line, and they didn’t start getting really strict about these requirements until the 1980s. I know all the airline history. Just ask me.

“Where’s your Rollaboard, kid?” she asked in response to my shocked silence. “Because it looks like you could use a change of clothes.”

“It got gate-checked in Los Angeles,” I told her.

“You should know better.”

I did know better. In fact, I have a whole list of reasons why it’s a bad idea to carry luggage at all. Here are the top four:

1. Luggage can obstruct the exit in the event of a plane crash
   
2. Luggage slows you down between gates during stopovers
   
3. Luggage can contain a bunch of severed heads (like the abandoned bag of cadaver heads found at O’Hare recently)
   
4. Even carry-on luggage can be forcibly checked at the door of the plane, never to be seen again
   

That fourth thing actually happened to me two and a half weeks ago. But to be fair, I should not have booked myself on a Boeing 757, which is a single-aisle jet and therefore has only half the overhead stowage space. A Boeing 757 is now the second worst jet on my list of worst jets to fly nonrevenue. The first on the list is a DC-9, of course, because it’s over fifty years old and smells like feet.

But I had hopped the 757 for two reasons: One, I couldn’t take the flight to Atlanta because the agent working the gate that day was, in an understatement, suspicious. And two, the 757 was the last flight leaving for Detroit that night, and the Detroit crew lounge is where I know I can still use my mother’s badge for access. In Atlanta, for some reason, when I swiped her badge through the security reader and entered her passcode, the door just beeped menacingly and remained locked. It’s a good thing everyone’s all complacent again and no one ever pays attention to door alarms at airports anymore. They all just assumed it tripped by mistake. So all I had to do was smile and take two steps backward into the crowd and out of suspicion.

That doesn’t mean I was
unable
to get into the Atlanta employee lounge, it just means it was not as easy. Like I had to sit in the elevator on the A Concourse until somebody from the employee lounge summoned it from underneath. That way I could ride it down there without having to swipe my mother’s badge, and just disembark as though I belonged there. Funny, though, I really did feel like I belonged there.

Again, in Detroit, my mother’s badge still worked. And why wouldn’t it? She may have been in the nut house, but she was still employed by WorldAir.

The lost-and-found room in the Detroit crew lounge is like a walk-in closet, packed with old suitcases and discarded uniform pieces, but they’re still clothes, and flight attendants come in all sizes. I’m a size 4 and some of those pants were too small even for me, while others were big enough to be used as hammocks. That’s when Flo busted me, when I was swapping out my old clothes for some new ones.

“C’mon, start talking,” she prompted me.

“I ran away,” I whispered.

“I gathered that,” she said, giving me a hug as, finally, the tears came. Even though her head hardly made it to my elbows, her hugs were still pretty powerful. She locked the door behind her and lit a cigarette that she was not at all supposed to be smoking. Then it occurred to me that the Detroit lost-and-found room was her secret cigarette place. Flo had secret cigarette places in practically every airport that existed, not to mention the airplanes. When it comes to smoking on airplanes she was like a MacGyver all on her own. She kept shower caps in her carry-on bag to slip on the overhead smoke detectors in the 767 lavatories, for one, and she’d blow the smoke right into the sink drain, which has double the suction of a vacuum hose.