“Et tu, Minnie?” I ask.
Queeg laughs, but Min He frowns, pointing at the doughnut box. “I only ate one, stupid girl.”
I wolf down another doughnut while Queeg negotiates with Min He. I am finally allowed to go into the office trailer, supervised by Queeg, to use the computer. It’s not until I explain that I want it to print off driving directions that she relents.
I fire up the computer and then call back that 918 number and listen to their answering machine. Barber, Smith and Franklin, Attorneys at Law. I plug Pensacola in one slot and their address in Gandy, Oklahoma, in the other and print out the directions. Queeg stands over me as I do this, watching but not saying a word. I’m sorely tempted to download some porn just to annoy Minnie. That’s probably why he’s standing there.
He waits until I’ve grabbed the paper from the printer, and we’ve gone back outside before he asks. “You’re going to Gandy?”
“Yup.”
“Now?”
Min He is standing a little distance away to make it seem as if she’s giving us privacy, but I see her interest pick up when she hears us talking about me leaving.
“Why not?” I reply.
“You’re crazy.”
He’s right, of course. I am crazy, but I need to take my crazy somewhere else. Camping out on Queeg’s sofa is going to make all of us crazy.
“Nah,” I reply. “Just irresponsible. Undependable. Erratic, even.”
Min He snorts at this, and I’m pretty sure she mutters, “And stupid.”
“First you won’t answer their calls, and now you’re driving a thousand miles without knowing what they want?”
“Eight hundred,” I tell him.
He points to my car. “You’re driving eight hundred miles in that?” Now he’s getting mean.
“It’s an adventure.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You complain about going to the grocery store.”
“I complain about the shopping part, not the driving part.” I am lying. I complain about both parts.
“But it’s Sunday.”
“I’ll crash at a cheap motel there tonight. That way I can be at the lawyer’s office first thing tomorrow to pick up my check.”
“That’s not how it works,” he says. “There’s going to be paperwork.”
I wave away his concerns with my hand. I’ve stopped listening. I understand that driving to Gandy today is a dumb idea, but Nick might well be on his way over here, and that’s a confrontation I’d like to avoid. Besides, it’s a cool, breezy morning, I’m riding a glazed-doughnut sugar rush, and I’m feeling a little loose and what-the-fuckish. Getting out of here sounds so good I can’t stop myself.
“I’ll be fine.”
“What about your job?” Queeg is saying. “Don’t you have anything booked next week?”
I think about my almost empty calendar and how easy it’s been to watch my dead mother’s business die. I didn’t kill it, or at least it wasn’t premeditated. One day I just didn’t bother to return a call about a booking, and when I realized how much I enjoyed not having to take those pictures, I ignored the next call, too. My phone doesn’t ring all that often anymore.
“Nope.”
He frowns. “Your mother stayed busy when she ran the studio.”
“I’m not my mother.” This is my stock answer for any comparison to her. Unfortunately, it’s not ringing as true as it once did.
Queeg sighs and then fumbles in his pocket, pulling out his wallet. I can see that there aren’t many bills inside.
“Stop. I’ve got money.” I don’t mention that it isn’t much and I’ll need to put it all in my gas tank.
He pulls out the bills and glances at them. “Fifty-eight. Here.”
He’s holding the cash out toward me, and I’m shaking my head. “You should go shopping with that money,” I say. “You need a new cardigan. You’re starting to look like some down-and-out Mr. Rogers.” I stick my finger through the largest of the holes in his threadbare sweater. “And stop smoking before you set yourself on fire.”
“Don’t lecture me,” he says. “Either take this or I’m going to throw it away.” He points to the trash barrel and Min He frowns. She’s not going to let that money stay in the trash can.
I take the cash. “Fine. Thank you. I’ll pay you back.” At this I see Min He warming up on a speech regarding my promises to pay back loans, but before she can get started I turn and walk to Queeg’s trailer. He follows me inside.
“Is there any way I can stop you from doing this?”
“Nope.” I get my toothbrush from the bathroom and pick up yesterday’s underwear off the floor.
He shakes his head and sighs. “You’re a force of nature, Matt.”
“What? Like gravity?”
“More like an earthquake.”
I brush past Queeg, walk back out of the trailer and down the steps, heading toward my car.
My stepfather is right behind me. “A hurricane.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Tornado, tsunami—”
“Okay, okay. I’m a disaster. I get the picture.” I toss my stuff in the car and then walk back to Queeg. He’s standing there with his arms crossed over his chest. He’s acting like he’s angry, but I recognize it for what it is. He’s worried.
“I’m going, and that’s that,” I tell him. “I know exactly what I’m doing.” That’s a lie, and he knows it, but I can see in his face that I’ve won. Even Captain Queeg can’t stop a hurricane.
Instead, he gives me a wry half-smile and says, “Your lips are moving.”
And then there’s one of those uncomfortable silences where we both realize that a Hallmark-card moment is just around the corner unless somebody acts fast.
“I’d better get going,” I say. “And if Nick comes by looking for me, don’t tell him where I’ve gone, okay?”
Queeg sighs again and shuffles his white old-man sneakers in the gravel. “I have a bad feeling about this, Matt.”
When he looks up and his gaze meets mine, I take a moment to study my stepfather, the slight sheen of sweat on his skin even though the morning is cool, the way his cheeks have gone from lean to sunken, his wracking cough that rattled through the trailer all night. Maybe he should save one of his bad feelings for himself.
“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. It’s one of your favorites, Queeg.”
He’s shaking his head.
“I’ll be fine,” I tell him. “I’ll be back in a couple days.”
He opens his arms, and I step inside. His familiar smell—wool and menthol cigarettes and Old Spice aftershave—makes my throat ache. “I’ll call you tomorrow morning,” I promise.
He doesn’t reply so I pull back and look up at his face. He’s not looking at me; he’s looking at Min He. “Make it tomorrow afternoon,” he says.
“What’s going on tomorrow morning?”
“Just another damn doctor’s appointment.”
I’m not worried until I glance over at Min He. For once I see an expression on her face that’s something other than rage. It’s fear.
I take a step back. “Another appointment?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Define nothing.”
“Everything is fine,” he says, draping an arm around my shoulders. “Would I lie to you?”
If he thought the truth would hurt me, the answer to that is yes.
I glance over again at Min He. She’s staring at me, expectantly. This is when a good daughter says she’s not leaving, that she’ll stay in town and drive him to his appointment tomorrow, she’ll sit in the waiting room, later she’ll go with him to talk to the doctor, to get the results. To hear the bad news.
We exchange glances, Min He, Queeg, and I. All of us know the truth of the situation. For all his bluster, Queeg wants me to stay. Maybe he needs me to stay. I feel a thick panic rising in my chest.
I open my car door and climb inside. “So, I’ll call tomorrow afternoon.”
I pitch my voice to sound breezy, hoping Queeg will play along.
He does. “It’s a plan,” he says with a smile. He’s always been good at hiding disappointment.
I shut the door and roll down the window. Queeg comes up beside the car and leans over. “Are you going to stop by the beach before you go?”
It’s the closest thing to visiting my mother’s grave, and he can’t help but remind me about that once in a while. Now and then when we’re winding up a telephone conversation he’ll ask if I’ve been lately, and I always tell him yes, which is never really true. When I go to the beach, I avoid Fort Pickens, instead choosing Casino Beach or Opal Beach. I tell myself it doesn’t really matter. It’s all the same water.
“Not today,” I tell him. “It’s in the wrong direction.”
He nods. For all that he’s still sentimental about a woman he divorced years before her death, Queeg is a practical man. He understands an urge to go in the right direction.
“Drive safe, sweetheart,” he says.
I turn the key and after an initial roar the engine settles down to a gentle rumble with only a faint rattling sound. Nothing I’ll be able to hear over the radio.
Queeg steps away and Min He comes forward and leans in close to deliver her parting words.
“You are a bad one,” she says in a voice pitched just loud enough for me to hear over the engine. “You will get what you deserve. Someday . . .” here she pauses, frowning as she struggles with the words. “Someday, your roast chicken will come home.”
When I laugh at her mangling of one of Queeg’s favorites, she scowls and straightens up, crossing her arms over her ample chest. The engine noise drowns out her voice, but her lips move in one last “Stupid girl.”
Queeg is grinning. That one, he heard.
I back the car up, turn it around, and am almost to the gate when I look over my shoulder at Queeg standing there, looking frail, his gray sweater blending into the backdrop of the cheerless, sagging trailers. He has an arm around Min He’s waist, and I’m glad that he has her, even if it seems to me like she has a pretty wide mean streak.
I tap the horn and stick my arm out the window for one last wave.
“Hurry home,” he calls out.
I accelerate, but slowly, checking my rearview mirror every few seconds. With each glance, Queeg grows smaller, the grip of his love for me less and less painful, until finally I can breathe again. One last glance in the mirror and he is just a speck on the horizon, his hand still raised in a farewell. Or a benediction. I’m not sure which.
CHAPTER 5
Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong Queeg likes to say, and he’s not even the one trying to drive eight hundred miles in a piece-of-shit 1978 Chevy Malibu. It’s around Hammond, Louisiana, that I first notice something is wrong. A faint shudder when I accelerate, a minor lurch, then another. Forty-five minutes later I’m nearing Baton Rouge and the lurching has amplified and my progress down the road is involving a bit more hopping than I would prefer. It’s only happening when I speed up or slow down, but that’s not helpful in the long run. It’s not like I can drive another six hundred miles without stopping even if I could forgo eating and drinking. I don’t have a bottomless gas tank or an astronaut diaper.
I pull off the interstate in Merrydale, a suburb of Baton Rouge, which, for the record, seems far too dreary and flat to have inspired its name. My lunch is unexceptional, but eating it averts my stupid empty-stomach nausea. Things are looking up, in fact, until I put the car in drive and find that I’ve lost my high gear completely.
My new maximum speed without redlining the rpm is thirty miles per hour. The car moves smoothly, if loudly, in this gear, so I decide to keep driving—not that there are many other choices on a Sunday afternoon with no money in the middle of a state where I don’t know a soul. So, emergency flashers blinking away, I crawl along Interstate 10, mile after mile, just me and my piece of shit Malibu with the vinyl trim peeling in so many places that it looks like fur, rust on two fenders, backseat stuffed full of all my worldly possessions. Cars slow as they drive past, the driver and passengers ogling my little redneck melodrama. I give them each the finger—a little cherry to sit atop my white-trash sundae.
I stop a few times for soft drinks, gum, a bathroom. It’s an interesting population at small town all-night convenience stores. Lots of tattoos and unwashed hair. Nobody in these sad places gives my car a second glance. These are my people, my mother’s people. Not a single one of them looks interested in making lemonade.
As the night grinds on, I come to understand that twenty hours alone in a car gives a person a lot of time to think. I turn the radio off when the static starts and back on when I see a town coming up. I sing along when I know the song, I hum when I don’t, and I sigh when every once in a while a song finds a crack and wriggles inside, causing memories to shift and slide. In a rare moment of clarity I see this loss of my high gear for what it is: a pretty damn good metaphor for my life.
When we are young we are limitless. I remember leaning into the wind and feeling as if I could run until the sand turned to water, swim past the horizon, and fly until the blue sky around me filled with stars. There was a time when I believed my whole life stretched before me, rich with promise.
Now?
Not so much.
CHAPTER 6
The summer I turned five years old, my mother and I moved into an apartment complex with few children, and I was lonely. Things weren’t all that great for my mother either; they’d cut her hours at the Photo Gem and she’d had to take a second job at Woolworth’s. During the summer, while she was at work, Mom left me with our downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Klapper. The old woman was nice enough, but deaf as a post and addicted to game shows, so all day long her television played at ear-splitting levels. Mercifully, she took a long nap after lunch, which gave me a chance to watch a few cartoons with the volume down.
Mrs. Klapper had a key to our apartment in case she needed something from up there for me, and I think I wasn’t supposed to know that she kept it in a little silver bowl on the mantel. But, like most five-year-olds, I knew a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to know.
That summer Peter Pan, the Disney version, was rereleased in theaters. We didn’t have a lot of extra money, but my mother must have understood how long the days were for me, because the weekend it opened she called in sick and took me to the Saturday matinee.
I’m not sure if that was the first movie I saw on the big screen, but it’s the first one I remember. The sticky floor, the salty popcorn, having to sit on my knees to see over the head in front of me—I remember it all. But mostly I remember wanting to fly.
It felt so obvious to me. With enough fairy dust and lovely thoughts anyone could fly. Lovely thoughts aren’t hard to come by when you’re five, and in our apartment dust wasn’t in short supply. Unfortunately, even after several weeks of lovely thoughts and trying everything from flour to the dust from the windowsill, my feet had never lifted from the olive green carpet.
I started kindergarten that fall and underwent the usual strain of adjusting to school and trying to make friends, but I never gave up on my dream of flying. It wasn’t long before Halloween appeared on the horizon, and I had an epiphany. I wasn’t Wendy; I was Tinker Bell. What I needed were wings.
Convincing my mother that last year’s costume, black leotard and tail with cat ears on a headband, would not work again this year, took all the whining I could muster, which, in all honesty, was a fair amount. I wasn’t an easy child. But when you’re five and you want to fly, the ends justify the means.
The day before Halloween, my mother brought it home. She pulled the folded package out of her purse, and carefully worked the costume out of the wrapper. Rather than cutting off the tags, she pinned them up inside.
Despite my best efforts to channel only lovely, flight-worthy thoughts, watching my mother’s care with the costume brought an unhappy thought to mind. “Did you steal that?” I asked.
> “No,” she said. “I borrowed it.”
“From who?”
“Whom. Come try it on.”
I stepped into the shiny blue tunic, avoiding the pins. Tinker Bell’s dress was green, but I didn’t mention that to my mother.
I tried again. “Borrowed from whom?”
“It’s a little big,” she said. “But it will have to do.”
“The pins are sticking me.”
She shifted the pinned-up tags until they were less annoying and then slipped the wings on and adjusted their straps.
“There,” she said. “You look like an angel.”
“I’m a fairy,” I said, although in truth the wings were shaped more like an angel’s wings than Tinker Bell’s.
“Take it off until tomorrow night.” My mother eased me out of the wings and then the dress.
“Can I take it to school tomorrow?”
She shook her head.
“Just the wings?”
“You’ll get them dirty,” she said. “It’s borrowed, remember? I have to take it back to the store Saturday.”
I think I knew my mother was misusing the word borrowed. I was pretty sure that none of the other kids at school were wearing costumes their mothers had borrowed from a store without asking. But I didn’t mention it again. I just hugged her tight and promised that I would be extra careful with the costume. And I meant it. Really.
The following afternoon, when the school bus dropped me off I went to Mrs. Klapper’s as usual. I let myself in; she always left her door unlocked in the afternoons so that my arrival wouldn’t interrupt her nap. That day, however, instead of going to the kitchen to eat the sandwich she had left for me, I reached up and plucked the key to my apartment from the silver bowl, then went back out, quietly shutting the door behind me.
The costume was right where my mother had hung it. Carefully . . . oh so carefully, I put it on. The wings were more difficult to get into by myself, but not impossible. I was cautious with the fairy dust, talcum powder this time, lightly dusting just a tiny amount on my arms and legs. I put just a little bit in my hair. More would have been better. In the movie, Tinker Bell had sprinkled it liberally over Wendy, John, and Michael, but my costume was borrowed. This would have to do.
The Art of Crash Landing Page 3