We Will Be Crashing Shortly (2 page)

“The fog was dense like chowder, completely impenetrable,” he’d slur after half a bottle of Jägermeister. “The conditions were terrible for traffic, but perfect for terrorists. Everyone was on edge.”

Selfishly, I love to listen to him talk about it. Otis was deadheading at the time, sitting in the cockpit jumpseat behind the two pilots. He could hear the communication between the doomed KLM pilot and the control tower. “I remember thinking, ‘Shit, that guy thinks he’s cleared for the runway!’ We all heard it. We could see their lights coming toward us.”

On the cockpit voice recorder, you could hear Otis urging the captain along with the copilot and engineer to hurry off the runway. “Get off! Get off!” he cried. The captain did what he could to move the mammoth aircraft out of the way, but a 747 in a dead stop is no match for one barreling at 180 mph. All the survivors were found in the front section of the aircraft.

Otis lost his left eye in the accident, which canned his piloting career. He left Pan Am after that to join WorldAir as a mechanic, a move several steps down for him, and he never piloted a plane again. Today he kept a collection of glass eyes in a bowl by his sink, but normally eschewed them in favor of a black eye patch. Maybe it was this rogue-pirate effect that explained his evident irresistibility with women. I couldn’t tell you how old he was because he had a face like a leather saddle, but it worked for him. I put him somewhere in his sixties, but youthful, like a blond Keith Richards, and with a giant toothy smile like that creature in the
Alien
movies.

“‘Crash,’” he repeated, clapping me on the back. “The name feels right.”

I disagreed. Recently I’d had to postpone my piloting lessons because my instructor, upon learning—in midair—who I was, became so flustered that he fainted on the instrument panel and we landed in a tree at the edge of a Walmart parking lot. Some would call that a crash, but I’m reluctant to admit it, even though in truth I was not aiming for the tree but the actual parking lot. Anyway, everybody lived, which is saying something because it was only my fourth flying lesson. Since then I’ve been relegated to using the sophisticated simulator in the WorldAir pilot-training complex. It was one of the perks of my on-again, off-again ownership of the airline.

Today I thanked God I got the board to hire Officer Ned as head of company security. It was a perk that turned out to benefit me, seeing as how I’d just killed one of our mechanics and was at present an official fugitive from the law. Officer Ned shook his head and handed me a peanut packet. His cellphone vibrated to life. I jumped even though the ringer was off.

“Who is it?” I whispered.

Officer Ned clicked “decline” on his screen. “LaVonda,” he sighed. Then his phone dinged quietly, indicating a text message. He looked at his screen and rubbed his temples again. “She’s on her way over.”

“How does she know I’m here?”

“I told her I had a hunch you were hiding here,” he said. Again, Officer Ned and I had a history with this airplane. I knew if I sat tight he’d figure out where I was.

A luggage tug squealed to a stop outside our hangar. I heard LaVonda calling to the policeman assigned to protect the crime scene, “I am the WorldAir Trauma Liaison, you just tell your boss that it’s written in my work duties to assess all areas where trauma has occurred. And murder is damn traumatizing, you hear me? Now let me through.”

It must have worked, because next we heard LaVonda scrambling up the scaffolding and onto the wing. She had one leg inside the window exit of the plane when the officer yelled at her to get down. “The murder didn’t happen on the aircraft.”

“Don’t you be yellin’ at me to get down off my own plane owned by my company I work for who gave me this important job, the duties of which . . .”

Officer Ned had had enough. He was up and through the hatch in two seconds, calling to the officer to stand down. “This is my assistant,” he waved assuredly. “I’ve got this.”

“Your
assistant
?” LaVonda lowered her voice. “You specifically said I was not your
assistant
. I like ‘colleague’ better. In fact, I think it’s gonna say so in my . . .”

“Thank you, officer,” Officer Ned said. There was some more hoarse whispering between him and LaVonda, and then I heard a strange scuttling sound come running down the aisle above me. My heart leapt.
Could it be?
I stood under the opening in the floor above me, and sure enough.

“Captain Beefheart!” I whispered excitedly. The dog jumped into my arms, licking my face, grunting and squirming like a furry little sea lion.

Captain Beefheart is a loveable mutt with a half-chewed-off ear who looked like a small crocodile covered in fur. In actuality, he’s a corgi/pit bull mix (how those two breeds got together is testimony to the ingenuity of attraction). He was found as a puppy in the compactor of a trash truck after the dumpster in which he’d been abandoned was upturned inside of it. Luckily the trash man heard yelping, dug the puppy out, and dropped it off at a rescue organization. My friend Malcolm then chose Beefheart as his emotional support animal, owing to the amount of time he’d flown as an unaccompanied minor between the East Coast where his mother lived and the West Coast where his father moved to get away from her.

The thought of Malcolm made my heart sink again. I buried my face in Beefheart’s neck and held back tears. Officer Ned effortlessly descended back through the hatch and then turned to help LaVonda with her attempt, which was not at all effortless.

“Get your hands off my butt.” She kicked her feet and Officer Ned backed away. LaVonda perched there for a bit, half descended through the ceiling hatch, legs flailing, then finally let go and hit the floor with a thud. It’s saying something about the durability of the aircraft that it didn’t shake.

“Hoo! That was fun. Where’s my Poochie?” She held out her arms. I held out Captain Beefheart only to have her envelop us both in her warm embrace. It was almost enough to finally make me cry. Almost. I met LaVonda Morgenstern, a former L.A. gang member and ex-Minimart cashier, last year after I’d escaped the car trunk of an abductor—a side perk of the runaway life. LaVonda had been so good at keeping me from going into shock that I lobbied for her to come to Atlanta to serve as “Trauma Liaison” to WorldAir company security. It was a totally made-up position, but the board could not say no to me seeing as how I was a media darling and all. LaVonda now lived in Atlanta with her domestic partner and their two children.

Beefheart jumped to the floor and presented his paw to Officer Ned, who shook it firmly. This dog played a big part in foiling the hijackers of flight 1021 last year. As a result, he was a natural mascot for the airline, and since he was an emotional support canine, it made sense that he be part of the trauma-liaison team. LaVonda, in her customary manner, took their union very seriously, and considered Captain Beefheart her partner, like a police officer in the K-9 unit. Since LaVonda didn’t have an office (in exchange she was assigned an iPad on a shoulder strap and a fleet of those beeping carts to maniacally drive through the concourses), she kept an elaborately padded doggie bed in a corner of Officer Ned’s office, where Beefheart rested between assignments. And wherever Beefheart was, so was LaVonda. Officer Ned blustered about it, but not emphatically.

“Girl,” LaVonda huffed at me. “You sure know how to get yourself into some situations. What the hell part do you play in some man getting chopped up? Tell me everything and don’t leave anything out.” LaVonda folded down the galley jumpseat and sat. I sat on the floor in front of her with Beefheart in my lap.

Officer Ned stood with his arms folded. “She was about to tell me when you showed up making a commotion.”

“Hush,” she whispered to him, then turned to me. “Now what the hell happened?”

I told them I’d been hiding here ever since the Mr. Hackman “incident” the night before, which made it kind of funny that everyone was searching for me high and wide when really I hadn’t gone anywhere. A blood stain in the shape of the continent of Africa was still on the concrete below us. Last night when I peeked through the crease in the cargo door I could see the crime-scene tape crisscrossing the hangar. I imagined it made the plane look like a giant metal fly caught in a Day-Glo web. The few times I had to use the bathroom I pulled myself up through a trap door and crawled on my elbows to the lavatory in the midcabin. I made sure
not
to flush the toilet. It was an experience I wanted to repeat as little as possible.

“April, again,” Officer Ned prompted me again, “how did this start?”

It started when I crashed Uncle Otis’s car yet again, during yet another DMV driving test. Ms. Washington, the DMV instructor, only agreed to give me another try because Otis had wooed her into it. I had requested another instructor, but these were clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles; the only entertainment they got all day was when people asked for something, in which case they got to swat the request to the pavement and watch it pop. What made it worse was that Ms. Washington was now unwisely attached to my uncle Otis, and obviously figured this would be a way to ingratiate herself with him. She kept talking to me like she was going to be my new mother or something.

“April, darling, don’t go crashing into a tree again, got that?” she chuckled tensely as she eased into the passenger seat.

“If I recall the news footage,” a tobacco-shredded voice answered her from the backseat, “it was you who grabbed the wheel and steered it into the tree.”

Ms. Washington and I both jumped nervously and turned to face Flo, who was supposed to have been waiting inside until the test was over.

“What are you doing here?” I cried.

“I figured you could use a witness, Crash.” Flo lit a menthol and took a deep drag.

“Put that out immediately,” Ms. Washington admonished. “I’m not about to shorten my life by breathing in your second-hand smoke.”

“Why not?” Flo chuckled. “You’re shortening it by getting in the car with Crash Manning here.”

“If you don’t put it out, I’ll fail April’s driving test before she puts the key in the ignition.”

Flo rolled her eyes and flicked the cigarette out the window. I was very touched that she’d forgo her fifth cigarette of the morning for my sake. But sentiment aside, I also suspected Flo was here in order to recount my progress on her blog,
JetHag.com
, which was clocking over 20,000 unique hits a week these days. In it she divulged a slew of airline insider information that would have immediately gotten her canned but for the fact that the blog was written anonymously. I knew it was her because I recognized the stories she told and the vernacular she used, referring to passengers, coworkers, and WorldAir executives alike as “Mr. Asstard,” “Miss Bitchy Pig,” and “Sir Turdface.” I had to admit it was entertaining reading—with the exception of her Wednesday posts, which were dedicated to the exploits of Crash Manning.

Ms. Washington buckled herself in and gripped the handle protruding from the BMW’s passenger-side dashboard. “Fasten your seatbelt!” she chirped. “And be careful this time.”

My seatbelt, of course, was already fastened. No disrespect to Ms. Washington, but telling me to be careful was like telling a pumpkin to be orange—it’s in my nature. It’s one of the reasons I hate my nickname Crash, because I am the most safety-obsessed person I know. For example, I knew that the greatest lifetime chance of crashing occurs within six months of getting a driver’s license. And here was a note Otis taped to the bathroom mirror for me this morning:

1. Lack of situational awareness necessary to detect and respond to hazards
   
2. Miscalculating road conditions and driving too fast
   
3. Distraction due to something inside or outside the car
   

I cut my teeth on airline safety manuals, and sat rapt in my grandfather’s shed as he invented half the patents that make WorldAir, as well as all airlines, a safer way to travel. My flight attendant father’s death onboard an aircraft in a fire literally created a new evacuation protocol that has since saved hundreds of lives. So the last thing you need to remind me to be is careful. I didn’t even bring my cellphone today for fear it would ring while I was driving.

“I never bring a cellphone with me into the car,” concurred Ms. Washington. “It’s like an accident magnet.”

I pulled out of the parking lot without incident. I could feel Ms. Washington relax next to me. She was an attractive and tiny woman, but then I’m 5'10" so a lot of people seem short to me. Her light brown skin was dusted with freckles and she wore her mahogany-colored hair in a big bundle of dreadlocks atop her head. Flo could have related. She was barely pushing five feet and used to wear her hair in a huge bun in order to qualify for the minimum height requirement of WorldAir stewardesses back in the day.

Flo’s presence actually did calm me down as I pulled into traffic and took a left on Hank Aaron Boulevard toward Memorial Avenue as Ms. Washington instructed me. Flo had been flying since 1967 and, like most old-school stews still working the skies, she was so sharp you could cut yourself just by conversing with her—so you had to be careful. I’d spent hours listening to her wax poetic about how, back in the good old days, “you could smoke in the cabin before takeoff and belt a few back with the pilots in the cockpit.”

But if you ask me, those old days were not so good. The chauvinism her colleagues faced was legendary. My mother once told me that Flo, in the span of her career, had twice stood before Congress—
twice!
—as part of a petition for more fair treatment of women in the workplace.

“I’ll never retire,” Flo was fond of saying, “until they pry the peanuts from my cold, dead fingers.”

Flo blamed herself for how my stepfather Ash turned out, seeing as how she technically gave birth to him forty-nine years ago and all. But it’s not like she raised him. She popped him out in one of those Shame Compounds created throughout the Bible Belt back then for girls of ill repute who’d been knocked up and needed a way out. In 1965, Flo was hardly older than me and had aspired to be a stewardess her entire life. But those were draconian times, and no American airline would hire a woman if they knew she’d given birth (yeah, progressive, right?)—and worse, stewardesses were canned all the time for rumors to the effect they’d propagated or even gotten married on the sly. Those secret spawning wards throughout the South back then were full of stewardesses trying to keep their circumstances on the down-low so they could retain their jobs.