We Will Be Crashing Shortly

by Hollis Gillespie

  I hadn’t memorized the number on the claim ticket from Colgate’s house, but at least I knew the casket we were looking for was traveling to Grand Cayman, an island in the British Antilles. The caskets were not all facing the same direction, and there was no uniform method for the ticketing agents in the cargo department when it came to sticking claim checks on crates, so my progress was hindered while I flailed around looking for identifying numbers. Flo reached my side just as the ramp agent had gripped one of the transport caskets from the baggage cart and maneuvered it onto the conveyor ramp.

  “Wait!” we yelled to no avail. Earplugs, remember. I jumped onto the conveyor ramp and climbed onto the casket. The worker up in the cargo area caught sight of me and stopped the belt, leaving me perched halfway between the ground and the aircraft. He must have thought I was a grieving passenger, because it sounded like he was hollering condolences or something. I caught snippets of “onto a better place” and the like. The ramp agent at the bottom of the belt was not nearly as forgiving. “Get the hell off there!” the driver yelled, waving a crowbar at me. I ignored him and continued to search for the claim sticker. Flo snatched the crowbar from his hand and smacked him up against the head. A shouting match ensued. He must have known Flo personally because he threw up his arms, stormed back to his tow tug, and plunked down in the driver’s seat with a huff. The ramp worker in the cargo belly, led by curiosity, stepped out onto the belt to begin his descent, but then tripped and stumbled madly toward me. He fell and barreled into the casket with a thud, knocking it off the belt and toward the tarmac below. It hit the concrete corner first and burst apart like it was built from balsa wood. A plastic-wrapped cadaver tumbled free from the planks. The clumsy ramp worker and I both ogled the scene in shock. He reached for me to steady himself, but instead knocked me off my feet and sent me over the edge as well. Luckily the corpse cushioned my fall.

  The cadaver did not appear to be what Flo and I were looking for—not that we knew what we were looking for, but surely it wasn’t this. The departed was a heavyset middle-aged woman who must have died in a car accident or something. She appeared to be wearing the clothes in which she perished, a pale blue pant suit mottled with blood and gravel. I would tell you what her face looked like if she had any of it left.

  That was the thing with the transport of the deceased via air travel; most of the time the bodies were people who had died while away from home, and were dispatched straight from that county morgue to the mortuary in their hometown, where family members were awaiting a funeral. So, if there was a body being shipped in the belly of a plane, chances were it had yet to be touched by a mortician to make it look presentable. They were packed up and shipped fresh from the coroner’s slab.

  “Ugh,” I grunted as I rolled off the body. The ramp worker above me was evidently so overcome that he fled back into the cargo area of the 737 and cowered there. I couldn’t blame him.

  “Great!” exclaimed his coworker, jumping down from the driver’s seat in the tug. “Who’s gonna clean this up?”

  By now we’d caught the attention of passengers on the concourse above us. A crowd had gathered along the large window overlooking the tarmac, and people were snapping pictures with their cellphones. The ramp agent extended his hand to help me up and I rose shakily to my feet, only to be knocked down again by Flo, who had commandeered the luggage tug and drove it into me. Not hard, but still.

  “Get in, Crash,” she commanded. She did not have to tell me twice. She hit the gas and we drove off to the frustrated profanities of the ramp agent behind us. I looked back to register the four flat luggage carts still attached to the tow tug. The last two contained the five remaining transport caskets.

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “North 90,” I answered.

  CHAPTER 11

  North 90 was short for “North 90 Virginia Loop,” the address of a surplus hangar left over from the Second World War that was still located on the airport grounds, which by no means meant it was nearby. The Atlanta airport was the busiest airport in the world, and its grounds covered almost 133 square miles and spanned three separate city limits. (One tends to forget how huge these international airports actually are.) I knew North 90 was presently practically abandoned now that the repairs were finished with the aircraft it housed. I thought it would make a good place to pull in a tug train and pry open some coffins.

  North 90 had undergone a number of renovations and uses over the decades, having been appropriated by a bevy of eye-blink airlines that have come into and gone out of business in that time. (Hooters Air, anyone?) WorldAir had owned it since the early fifties, and made good money leasing it to these corporations. During my brief tenure as a board member, I liked to dive into the company archives to look up as much of the history as I could. Much of this information was public information, but not attainable in digital format, which meant you couldn’t find it online. These days if you can’t click on something it might as well not exist. I know I sound like a get-off-my-lawn old fart when I say that, but it really does seem like the truth is not so much hard to find as it is just neglected and ignored. It was like catnip for me to forage through these records that hadn’t been touched in half a century. Taped to the window frame above my desk in Officer Ned’s office was a list of the six crazy fly-by-night airlines that WorldAir has leased North 90 to since the seventies.

  6 CRAZY FLY-BY-NIGHT AIRLINES TO WHICH WORLDAIR HAS LEASED HANGAR SPACE

  Hooters Air—The worst part of this airline, if you ask me, is that they made the public think the half-naked waitresses on board were actually flight attendants. They weren’t. I’m surprised this airline lasted three years.

  Naked-Air—This nudist airline existed exactly one day.

  Pet Airways—For the kind of pet fanatics who serve their show dogs filet mignon.

  Erotic Airways—The sole purpose of this airline was to indoctrinate willing partners into the Mile-High Club. The pilots didn’t even log a destination when they took off. They just took off, circled around, and came back. It folded after four days.

  Smokers Express—A smokers-only airline that didn’t even last a day. The executive who thought of it couldn’t get the backing to get it off the ground.

  Argyle Air—This was started by a company known for its clothing, which I guess is just as good as an airline started by a company known for its hot wings.

  Today North 90 was being used to repair the infamous L-1011 that fell apart above Albuquerque last year. You’d think that crashed-up airplanes would go straight to the scrapyard, but banged-up aircraft are salvaged all the time. In the eighties a Boeing 737 crashed in the Andes mountains, killing half the people aboard and completely shearing off the left wing and landing gear. That aircraft was cargoed off to the salvage yard and welded to the remains of others to make an airworthy facsimile of itself. Typically it was then sold to a lesser airline, as it was unusual for a major airline to reintegrate a crash-repaired airplane back into its own fleet. Maybe the reason for this had something to do with superstition—that or the fact that, holy crap, the plane frickin’ fell apart and crashed in a former life.

  This L-1011 in particular was slated to be sold to a puddle-jump startup based in Grand Cayman called Peacock Airways. As a condition of the sale of the L-1011 to Peacock Airways, WorldAir was only responsible for restoring the structure to airworthiness, which is why zero restoration had been made to the interior of the fuselage. Airlines, when they buy a brand-new plane, get them delivered gutted so they can retrofit the interior with their patented seats, systems, and décor. Since Peacock Airways was buying this plane used, they would have to do the gutting themselves.

  The L-1011 airplane was a good candidate for reconstruction, seeing as how the bomb blast had been isolated to the tail section, which broke off cleanly for the most part. Otis himself had been instrumental in reattaching a replacement tail section, as he could not resist anything that required the use of fire and hanging from a harness. (My he
art felt a pang of worry as I wondered what came of him. I hoped he was able to crush Hackman’s face like a bug.)

  Peacock Airways itself had only been in existence for less than a year and was already off to a bad start. For its ceremonial inaugural flight, packed with politicians and media, the Caribbean PR department for the airline thought it would be a good idea to let loose a flock of actual peacocks to roam the aisles of the plane and entertain the passengers. I guess nobody told them that peacocks are pretty vicious birds. One bit a fingertip off of a local television reporter, which caused the passengers to panic and run to the front of the aircraft to get away from the birds. The sudden redistribution of weight caused the pilot to lose control of the airplane, which immediately crashed just off the shore of Cancún. You can see a number of videos of the crash on YouTube, even, thanks to the gaggle of tourists on the beach with their cellphones at the ready. Four passengers and most of the peacocks died.

  That Peacock Airways was still in business is testimony to the complacency of the traveling public, if you ask me. Most people didn’t seem to care about the condition of the plane, or even of the pilot, they just wanted to pay as little as possible for a ticket to Vegas. I attributed this mentality to a theory I had about the perpetuation of mass delusion put upon consumers by the airline industry as a whole. Because in fact it was not normal to be rocketing around in a metal tube thousands of feet above the ground. We all know it’s not normal, but just as people are able to be incited to panic about innocuous things, they can be placated from panicking about things that are anything but innocuous. I once wrote a paper for my online high-school psychology class that centered on that famous case in the sixties in which a woman was stabbed to death over the course of 45 minutes on the street outside her apartment building. Several of her neighbors heard her screams, but did nothing because, surely, if something frightening was happening, wouldn’t everyone be jumping from their seats to make a fuss? Normalcy is an artificial and self-fulfilling construct. The neighbors weren’t evil people, they were just adjusting to the present circumstances with bovine complacency.

  Airlines depended on bovine complacency in order to exist. They fortified it with all the inflight distractions available in recent decades—sound-canceling headphones, eye masks, nonstop movies, inflight WiFi, alcohol—all these conveniences perpetuated the illusion that it was normal to be hurtling through the sky in a metal vessel that was one burnt-out wire away from being a smoldering black crater in a cornfield somewhere. In truth it made perfect sense to be terrified to fly, but the artificial normalcy maintained that there was nothing to be frightened about. Because, surely, if something frightening was happening, wouldn’t everyone be jumping from their seats to make a fuss?

  See? Situational awareness. The airlines had discovered it could work for and against them.

  When Flo and I pulled into the hangar, the lights were dimmed as the mechanics had gone home, though a pair of lunch boxes remained on the picnic table outside the utility office on the right side of the building. Behind the Plexiglas, a security guard leaned way back in an office chair with his back to us and his feet up on the desk. The hangar was so large it could house an entire neighborhood. So large, in fact, that WorldAir opted to place only a single security camera at the entrance of the facility, then sprang for the round-the-clock security officer to address any unlikely intrusions.

  Flo directed the tug train toward the starboard side of the mammoth aircraft, the side farthest from the security guard, who hadn’t looked up from his nap. She parked it so that the last trailer was blocked from view by the giant wheel of the back landing gear. She braked the vehicle and I hopped off in a rush toward the caskets. Flo was right behind.

  “Where the hell are the ID stickers?” I griped.

  “Who cares,” Flo said, thwacking the first crate with the crowbar she’d taken from the ramp worker. Splinters flew but the lid didn’t budge.

  “Give it,” I took the crowbar and shoved the flat end into the seam of the lid and partially pried it open, then repeated the maneuver further down the crack until we could get enough leverage to pop open the lid. I didn’t have to take a second look to know it wasn’t what we were looking for. Inside the naked body of a heavily tattooed Hispanic man stared back at us, the Y-shaped coroner’s incision traversing his lumpy, bloated torso. It looked like the coroner used kite twine to unevenly stitch it back together. This rankled a peculiar offense to my sense of decorum. “Oh my God, I hope after my autopsy they sew me up better than that.”

  “Promise me you’ll bury me at sea,” Flo said.

  We shoved the crate off the trailer to make way for the one underneath. I cringed when it hit the ground with a crash, rolled on its side, and emptied its contents onto the floor. Sorry, I winced, grateful the body was encased in plastic. “Did we break him open? It looks like we broke him open.”

  “Focus, Crash,” Flo reminded me. She’d adopted my technique with the crowbar and was halfway finished prying off the lid of the next casket. I placed my palms under the lip of the cover and shoved upward, popping it free. I looked away; inside was a girl who could not have been more than 19. Poor thing. She wore only blue panties. Her cause of death wasn’t discernable from the outside.

  The next casket held a guy who must have been in his seventies. The skin on his face and neck was speckled with dried blood, but other than that he looked like he was sleeping.

  “Here goes nothing,” Flo deftly pried open the next lid without my help. She was getting pretty good at it now. As soon as she flipped it open, the stench hit us in the face like a cloud of chemical toilets.

  First, it’s common for things to go awry during the international shipping of human remains, and this was a case in point. A hermetic seal is just a “tight seal,” not necessarily an “airtight seal.” And if left unattended in a warm climate, a hermetically sealed cadaver can slow-cook like one of those meals-in-a-sack you find in old army rations. I covered my nose and mouth with the crook of my arm and finally noticed the claim sticker on the bottom corner of the crate. It showed the cadaver had come in on a flight from GCM that night. It was hot in the Caribbean this time of year; this casket must have sat on the tarmac at Owen Roberts airport and stewed for a few hours before they finally loaded it.

  “Looks like the same sewing technique as the first guy.” Flo lit a cigarette and pointed to the coroner’s incision. The corpse was a pot-bellied Caucasian male. He looked to be in his mid-thirties at the time of his death, which appeared to have been from two bullets to the head. His chin and neck were smeared with a big dark blood stain. He was clad in grotty boxer shorts and nothing else.

  I looked more closely at the coroner’s incision and yes, it was crudely stitched up like the last one. But then why wouldn’t it be? County coroners are doctors who only deal with dead people, and most of the time their cases come to them as a result of some terrible crime. If they had to humanize their subjects they probably wouldn’t be able to make it through the day. It’s up to the mortician to dress the body up for burial, and it’s not like they bother with anything under the clothes. I heard they use everything from PVC piping to chicken wire to chopsticks to position bodies so they look presentable for the funeral.

  Flo rested against the crate and took another drag on her cigarette. I have to admit I was grateful for the smoke because it was helping to mask the ghastly reek coming from the casket.

  “I think I know that guy,” Flo joked wanly, pointing to the dead man, “if it wasn’t for the beer gut.”

  In fact his gut was so huge it looked like he swallowed a medicine ball. My eyes must have been playing tricks on me, because his belly seemed to get bigger by the second. Later, thinking back on this moment, I had to marvel again about how, just when I think I’m jaded enough not to be surprised at any terrible turn of events, just when I think I’ve hit rock bottom, a trap door opens to reveal a whole other level of awfulness beyond anything I can imagine.

  Flo sensed i
t before I did, and tentatively placed her hand on my elbow as she backed away from the casket. I should have trusted her instincts, but instead I peered closer at the bloated corpse. My brows furrowed. It appeared as though the tension against the stitches was causing them to come undone. “What the . . . is that . . .”

  Boom! The cadaver exploded like a loaded cigar. Thick, rust-colored gore coated the interior of the not-so-carefully sealed hermetic bag. Luckily the thick plastic kept most of it from splattering all over us like gut stucco, but believe me, enough got out to send Flo and me scuttling to the other side of the wheel well to escape the scene.

  “What the hell was that?” Flo lit another cigarette, her hands shaking.

  “Jesus God,” I gasped.

  I think I knew what happened. My mother was a fanatic about those forensic shows that detail terrible rapes/homicides/abductions and crimes of the like, and often forced me to watch them with her so she could point to the screen and exclaim, “See? Never go near a man in a van!” or “What’d I tell you? Never answer the door!” I remember one show steered from the norm by investigating a funeral home in Georgia where the director was caught ripping off the families of the deceased by not performing the services for which he’d been paid, I mean at all. People would drop off their loved ones for cremation, for example, and two days later the mortician would hand them a box of ashes that later proved to be nothing but incinerated kitchen garbage. Later the uncremated bodies were found dumped and rotting around the backyard, covered in tarps, leaves, and pieces of plywood.

  For the deceased who were to forgo cremation and be buried after an expensive closed-casket ceremony, the shady mortician reserved a special kind of neglect. He just placed their remains in the casket and sprinkled a few pounds of ground coffee on top to try and dissipate the smell. Ground coffee used to be pretty effective at masking the scent of narcotics when smugglers tried to get past the drug dogs at customs, but it was less effective at camouflaging the reek of rotting flesh, and soon the funeral home was the subject of local suspicion. The suspicion instigated an official federal investigation during a somber funeral one hot day when the casket at the center of the ceremony very unceremoniously blew up like a bad parlor joke. It turned out that the body, a misanthropic spinster aunt whose estate everyone in the room was hoping to inherit, had not been embalmed at all, so it continued to decompose in the heat and accumulate trapped gases until the inevitable happened.