by Sue Hardesty
Her cousin James jumped down from the driver's seat and nodded to another volunteer fireman as he snatched a hose. As he turned it toward Loni, she jumped behind her uncle. James didn't dare spray his own father. She was so hot in her polyester uniform that the water would feel good, but the harsh water spray would knock her down and he would keep her there.
"James!" her uncle reprimanded. "Stop screwing around and get the diesel diluted in that tree before it explodes on you!" As he sprayed the tree, the wing slowly dropped out of the tree from the force of the water, and the diesel smell dissipated.
* * *
"Did Rene live here in the park?" she asked her uncle as she lifted her heavy French braid off her neck. Her hair suddenly came loose. Long black waves fell around her head, temporarily blinding her. Damn! Loni complained to herself. Coco must have chewed through the rawhide thong. She did that every time they were on a long boring patrol. She tried to concentrate on the answer as she fought her hair, swearing under her breath at Coco.
"No, he lived up on Walker Heights with the hoity toity. He kept his plane at the Caliente Airport."
Pushing the hair off her broad forehead and high Apache cheekbones, Loni asked, "Did you know he was landing here?"
Uncle Herm shook his head. "Didn't call a flight plan in to me. Didn't ask for lights either and he couldn't land without them that time of morning." Pulling a stained kerchief from his back pocket, Herm hesitated a minute as he scrubbed at the sweat running down his face. "Tells me he wasn't planning on landing here in the first place. Engine trouble must've happened fast. I didn't hear a distress call." Loni had to agree; Rene didn't have time to call.
She refocused on the steadily growing group, mostly old timers who didn't have to get to work. The younger men and women began to leave. She nodded to Mr. Spinzolli, joining his friends. Everybody called him Spin. A short, swarthy man with a strong Italian accent, he was probably the only Italian immigrant who had ever settled in Caliente. She loved his green corn tamales, best in the world, although she didn't dare tell her grandma that. His wife ran a small Mexican food stand in front of their house near the school. Summertime, in the cooling dusk, he pulled a two-wheeled cart with a large stainless steel pot up and down the streets with young boys followed him, crying "Tamales!" He sent the kids to the doors with the orders and rewarded them with free tamales. Sometimes it was all some of those kids got to eat that day.
A dust devil suddenly whirled in behind Loni, swirling her hair into tangled mass and shooting dirt up into her eyes and nose. Sharp needles of sand peppered her, stinging and crawling into every drop of sweat available, in her hair, neck, crook of her elbows, even down inside her shirt. Finally the dust devil let go and passed through the firefighters who scrambled to safety, laughing at her as she scrubbed the hot silt out of her eyes between sneezing bouts.
Humiliated, she stepped over to the fallen tree and broke off a twig, stripping away the soft needles. She spun a hunk of her hair into a knot on the back of her head and used the twig like a long pin, weaving it through the knot. Then she tried to slap the dust off her dirt colored pants, but to no avail. The sweat streaks on her shirt had caked into mud that she couldn't even scrape off.
Hoping the twig would hold until she got home to a cold shower, she turned her back on the firefighters to bury her overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Everyone ignored her, murmuring among themselves and pointing around. Broken tombstones lay scattered everywhere.
"That's Bessie's," she heard an old man's quavering voice. Loni spotted Old Man Forrester. Everybody called him Rooster. It wasn't because he had a chicken ranch, although he really did, but because he actually resembled a rooster. His large Adam's apple bobbed constantly under his chinless face and huge beak of a nose. As always, he wore a red-striped Western shirt with a red round cap. With no bill to protect him from the sun, his nose was always red and blistering.
She nodded to Jake Sly as he pushed his way in front of Old Man Forrester, recalling how he took storytelling to the extreme. Wherever he was, drugstore, meat line, café, it didn't matter. Everybody could hear his high, clear voice as he told one whopper after another. She thought about the time she sat beside him in the drugstore. "Hey, Sly. Tell me a lie."
"Can't," she recalled Sly's answer. "Sold them all to television."
He was an old time cowboy, working wherever he could. Mostly he broke horses, and Loni hated the way he treated them. Wrapping a whip on his stub and using spurs sharp enough to cut, he rode a horse until he not only broke the horse, he also broke his spirit. She had picked him up on the road a few times, drunk, and taken him home or jail, depending on her mood. He had lost a hand when his rope accidentally wrapped around his wrist while the other end was on the neck of a very large bull that kept going. As he lifted his good arm at her, she noticed a cast from fingers to elbow. She really tried to fight her mind from going there, but she kept wondering how he wiped himself.
"No," Sly said impatiently. "That Bes goes to Bessard."
"And you know that how?" Forrester asked. "Looks like Bess to me."
Loni heard a snort, and Sly insisted, "Cuz it's on the right side of the stone, o' course, you idjt."
"Well, crap. Y'all know Sly knows everything. You heard that too, huh, Pat? Who was it told us how smart Sly is? Who was that? Oh, yeah. It was him!"
She heard snickers as someone asked how the tombstones would get glued back together. Another voice said, "Might as well dig a hole and bury Rene now seeing as he's already here." Loni heard a small laugh. "Won't even have to embalm him," someone else added.
"Can't do that," Spin said. "He's Catholic, and they have to have Mass and haul him around awhile first."
The quiet voices calmed Loni as she moved back to Uncle Herm. "Who does maintenance on the plane? Do you know?"
"He did. He didn't trust anyone else." Herm was perplexed. "Guess he wasn't as good as he thought." Shaking his head, he continued. "He's brought it by, but I haven't seen it in a long while." He hesitated, rubbing his arm. "Careless. Always in a hurry to get somewhere." Pulling off his yellow straw hat, Herm wiped his forehead, smearing grease across it. "Have you seen this plane lately, Daniel?" Loni turned, grateful to see her other cousin.
"No. Not for months. Got the last records, though." His dark chocolate eyes were warm as he reached for Loni.
Returning his grin, Loni backed up a step to avoid the whisker burn he always tried to give her. "Could you check out the engine?"
"Sure," he answered, punching her arm in greeting. Except for a few aging lines and sags on Uncle Herm's big German face, she couldn't believe how much Daniel favored his dad. Uncle Herm's hair had stayed as straight and dark as that of his oldest son.
Loni knew this crash wasn't his fault. In high school, she had watched Daniel work on his old junker cars as she did his homework. He kept them in her grandpa's barn to hide them from James, who thought anything belonging to Daniel belonged to him. James brought everything back pretty much ruined. On the other hand, any car Daniel sold was like new and never came back with a complaint.
Loni worshipped Daniel in high school. He was her protector until he graduated a year ahead of her. After that things got dicey, and her grades went to shit with James and his friends always around to bully her.
Watching Uncle Herm and Daniel walk away, she again marveled at how much they were alike. As big as his dad, Daniel walked like him, wide shoulders swinging, elbows out. They nodded in greeting as people parted to give them plenty of space. The firefighters had thrown their rubber suits onto the top of the truck, the yellow legs hanging helter skelter over the side. Three of the men used a helmet to play football in the shade of a salt cedar.
When her uncle and Daniel stopped to talk to James, she realized she needed to get Rene out of the heat. Where was that coroner?
Loni herded the grumpy old men back through the arch, some more reluctant than others to move along, so that she could wrap the yellow tape around the scene of the w
reck. "Jeez," she told them, "you're worse than herding cats!" Tittering like little girls, they gradually moved on while she kept them from collecting souvenirs.
As the fire truck followed the crowd out, she climbed back up onto the plane. With a small digital camera, she photographed Rene, the gauges, the shattered windshield and windows, and other debris. Leaning over the body, she moved Rene's striped tie aside and pulled a small notebook and cell phone out of his yellow shirt pocket. She hoped they would tell her why he was trying to land.
"Anybody alive in there?" a voice asked, walking up to the plane.
"No. Rosie went in the ambulance. Just Rene left."
A pleasant, middle-aged man wearing Levis and a Western shirt nodded toward her. He had the usual medical bag in his hand.
"You must be the coroner."
Smiling, the man held out his other hand. "Dr. Benjamin, at your service."
Loni grinned to herself at the formal introduction. "Loni Wagner, Highway Patrol. At your service."
"Good," the doctor said. "Would you call the mortuary for me? I forgot and left my cell in the charger."
"Sure. It'll take a bit. I need to go back to the hangar to find a phone book. Can I do anything else?"
"That should do it," the doctor answered, surveying the plane. He shook his head and started climbing.
Loni kept taking pictures of the scene. Trash and pieces of metal were scattered, and luggage hung out of a split in the side of the plane. She carried the luggage and Rosie's purse over to the back of her SUV.
Returning, she bagged the small debris. The ground was already hot to the touch. Too bad the town couldn't afford to water, Loni thought, seeing the desolate brown around the tombstones. It could really use some green grass and a few wild poppies.
Loni circled for one last search and stumbled over an elegant marble statue of a young girl. The crash had broken it from a tombstone and shoved it into the dirt. She caught herself on a limb, gouging a broken piece into her hand. Swearing under her breath, she sucked at the splinters as she scanned the crash site. She felt like a fish in a bowl as the watchers examined her every move. Still sucking on her hand, she checked for any suspicious objects that could give her clues to what had happened..
Much too uncomfortable with the crowd's surveillance, Loni returned to her SUV with the evidence bags and lifted the back door, piling the bags into a box. She opened the passenger door. "Coco, out." Loni pushed the wiggling dog aside as she filled the lid to Coco's water jug and sat it down in front of her. While the dog drank, Loni made one more circle around the engine to see if it might ignite before they got Rene out. The smell of diesel had lessened but still burned her nostrils.
Loni closed the back of the SUV and shooed Coco back into the front seat, following her in as she pushed Coco's wet, dripping muzzle away from her face. She carefully wove through the people and cars now lining the dirt road for a quarter of a mile. My god, she wondered. Where do they all come from?
* * *
Driving along the dirt road, Loni watched the painted letters on the front of the huge corrugated tin hangar grow steadily larger until she could read "Wagner Airport." The name was everywhere, the legacy of a pioneer family, and she hated it. Growing up, all she heard was a disgusted, "You're just like so-and-so," or "Why aren't you more like so-and-so?" Or the worst, "Must be the breed in you."
Entering the airport hangar, she wound around small planes, wings, engines hoisted on blocks, and other airplane parts to her parking spot. With Coco close on her heels, she headed into her uncle's office stuck in a back corner, dwarfed by the huge hangar. Without a word, she walked past Herm and Daniel lounging in overstuffed chairs to stand in front of the swamp cooler hanging in the window. Lifting the front of her shirt to let the air blow around her body, Loni sighed in relief.
Daniel gave her a hard time about how soft she was. "You deserve it for livin' in someone else's country too long."
"Listen," she answered. "You got cotton on. Try wearing this godawful polyester crap."
"I don't hear James complaining," he teased her.
"I don't either since he's a town cop and wears cotton shirts and Levis," she shot back.
"You should go upstairs to your apartment and shower." Her uncle nodded at the ceiling of the office. "Cold water's best way to cool down. You're done with your shift."
"Can't yet. I need to get Rene out of the sun."
"You do look like crap." Daniel laughed. "You get down and roll in pig shit?"
Ignoring him, she stood awhile in the cool air before she picked up the phone book.
"Did you find out why Rene was trying to land here?" Daniel asked.
"Not yet," Loni answered, opening her phone.
Uncle Herm's big shoulders shrugged. "Only thing come to mind is when he realized the engine problem, we were the closest place to land."
"Probably," Loni considered. "Something doesn't feel right." Finding the number to Kister's Mortuary, she called Wilber to come and get Rene out of the sun.
"Bout time you called," said a voice on the other end. "Heard about it hours ago. Can't be helped how he's gonna smell. Coroner's gonna be mad."
"Coroner's there. He told me to call." She hung up. Shaking off the complaining voice, she called the public electric company for a boom. Already on their way, they told her.
Using the copy machine in Uncle Herm's office, Loni made a copy of the five pages in Rene's book. Eying the cover, she decided to make a copy of it as well. The geometric design was unusual, one she had never seen. She flipped his cell phone open and wrote down the numbers from the phone's speed dial onto the back of the copy.
Turning back to Daniel, she joked, "Come to think of it, Dannie boy, why are you up at this ungodly hour? I remember how hard it was to get you out of bed before noon." As Loni waited for his answer, her mind moved on to the pages she had copied. They all had sets of numbers listed beside names. Maybe money amounts? She didn't recognize any of the names. Were they listed in his phone? They seemed to be a combination of something. Streets? Cities? The rest of the notebook was blank.
"We had a rush job to replace a carburetor by seven." Daniel's voice broke into her reverie as a middle-aged, thin man stormed into the office.
Wet, stringy hair hung in long strands down his back, and curls of gray hair stuck out of his undershirt as he waved a knobby bare arm toward the runway. He pushed into Daniel's space and stuck a demanding finger into his chest. "You got to get me out of here!"
Daniel stepped to the side as he stared the man down. "You know what, Larry? If you don't get a haircut soon, you're going to have to climb up on a limb to shit."
Loni burst out with a guffaw before she could stop herself. Larry glowered at her. When he saw the notebook in her hand, the fire quickly bled out of his eyes, and his freshly shaved face smoothed out. Pulling his eyes away, he raised his hands in retreat. "Okay, okay, I know I'm out of line. I'm sorry. But this is a really important meeting."
"I know, Larry. Your plane's ready," Daniel said in a noncommittal voice.
Uncle Herm nodded down the runway. "Wind's down this morning." Loni saw the heat from the tarmac was already bouncing water mirages.
Larry's face took on a furtive expression as he nervously turned away, pulling on the black suspenders holding up carefully creased dress pants. He jumped into a golf cart, hair flopping, and whirred down the runway, disappearing into the garage of the third house. She thought she identified Dorothea's purple robe on the woman inside the garage.
Loni turned. "Tell me about Larry."
"Like what?"
"What he does for a living, his interests, family. You know, that kind of shit."
"Well," Daniel finally said, "he married Dorothea Rodriquez and has a bunch of kids. You know. We called her Dot in school. Now she prefers Dorothea."
"Yeah," her uncle added. "He's got a teenaged kid from his first wife. Calls him Billyjoesombitch."
"Billy Joe what?"
"B
illyjoesombitch." Daniel shrugged his shoulders. "That's all we ever heard Larry call him."
Exasperated, Loni punched him in his rock hard gut. "Be serious."
Daniel stared at Loni and started laughing. "Like I tell James, don't play cop with me." Shaking his head, he stopped laughing. "Listen. I don't play with these people, and I don't listen to you women gossip. Ask Mom." Daniel nodded at a small red pickup driving up. "She gossips about everything."
Loni's Aunt Mae bounded out of the pickup and hugged Loni with one hand as she handed Uncle Herm and Daniel each a sack. "Your lunch." She turned back to Loni. "Shame on you. I've only seen you twice since you've been home."
"Yeah, I'm sorry. I'll get by soon, I promise." Loni grinned back at the infectious smile on Mae's chubby face under her short, brown curls. Loni noticed gray strands that weren't there when she left years earlier.