Skillful Death

by Ike Hamill

  I pull out to the end of the long driveway and come to a stop.

  “Which way to an airport?”

  “Let’s try right,” he says.

  I’m not exactly brimming with confidence at his directions. Each time we get to an intersection, it feels like he’s just picking our path at random. The roads go from nice, fast blacktop, to washboard dirt, and then back to highway.

  “I’m picking these roads at random,” he says.

  “That’s inspiring,” I say.

  “Don’t worry. We’re headed in the right direction.”

  Vermont is big on trees and hills and cows, but it doesn’t have a lot of open space. I’ve read that you can lower your blood pressure by staring off into the horizon for a period of time. Something about unfocusing your eyes and staring off towards a distant point is relaxing. I guess that’s why people like to vacation at a place with a view. It makes me wonder how people around here relax. You can never see more than a hundred yards. There’s always a hillside, or tree, or cow, blocking the view.

  I turn left on the next road, as instructed. We climb a small hill and find ourselves driving next to a big open field. It’s amazingly pretty after all the time we’ve spend winding around on the sides of mountains.

  “Pull in here,” Bud says.

  Down a short grass drive, we pull in next to a couple of hangars. A pretty maple tree shades the side of the hangar. The grass in the field is trimmed like a putting green. The flat, open field looks like it stretches all the way to the mountains.

  “Come on,” Bud says, pulling me away from the view. After being locked up in Bud’s house for days, recording his life story, I could stand and look at this view for an hour.

  “You’ll get a better look at the mountains from up high,” he says.

  I don’t travel much. Most of the people who want to apply for the prize end up coming to my office. Every now and then I’ll get a claim for a particular geographic location, but it’s really not more than once or twice a year. I’m okay on big jets. There’s a lot of machinery, investment, expertise, and infrastructure there. No company is going to invest that much money on something unless they expect it to stay in the sky for a really long time. Small planes scare the hell out of me. A car mechanic can’t tell you with any accuracy what the next thing to go wrong on your car will be. Why should I trust some small airplane mechanic to know that a tiny little one-engine plane is going to stay aloft?

  The boss leads me into the dark hangar, which is filled with little two- and four-seat deathtraps.

  “I’m over here,” he says.

  My brain is going a million miles an hour right now. I’m thinking about everything Bud said about how difficult it is to keep an emergency vehicle up to date. I know he flies quite a bit, but this can’t be his regular plane. Whatever plane he normally flies would be at a bigger airport and would probably be staked out by a dozen guys looking for us. This must be a second or third choice plane. Are we really going to trust it to keep us in the sky?

  “Who keeps this airplane registered?” I ask.

  “I just lease this plane,” he says with a smile. “Someone else flies it on a regular basis. Don’t worry, it’s safe.”

  I can’t believe he said, “Don’t worry.” Have these words ever caused someone to stop worrying?

  “No problem,” I say. “Maybe we should just drive to a bigger airport?”

  “I’m sure they have roadblocks set up by now. We won’t get out of the state. I’ll fly us to a place I know where we can catch a ride to a Canadian airport. Much safer.”

  “Maybe I should just tell you my plan and you can go to Eastern Europe. I’ll stay here.”

  “Come on, you’ve got a scientific mind. What are the odds something is going to happen to us in the sky? How often do you hear about a small airplane crashing?”

  Bud is rolling open the big hangar doors.

  He climbs up onto the wing of a powder-blue plane and opens the door. He comes back down to the ground with a clipboard.

  “See,” he says, “there’s a checklist. How could anything go wrong?” He has a big smile on his face, and I can tell he’s enjoying my discomfort.

  ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠

  Despite all my fears, it’s not a bad flight. There’s something deeply unsettling about the way the plane dips and bounces on the pockets of air, like we’re not firmly connected to reality. But as long as I can look out the window and see the place where the hazy mountains meet the sky, my stomach stays peaceful. The boss doesn’t seem to look out the windows much at all. He’s always looking down at his maps, or the instruments, or he’s fussing around with some log book.

  This may be a leased plane, but I think it has some special voodoo going on under the hood. My knowledge of private flying is limited, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t register a flight plan, talk to any towers, or respect international borders. I thought there was supposed to be some kind of transponder in planes to prevent this kind of thing. Must be more than that, or every drug-runner would have an easy way to get over borders. None of those rules seem to apply to Bud.

  He finally gets on the radio when there’s an airstrip in sight.

  After a bunch of pilot jargon, he lines us up and we’re making our approach. They have so much junk in your face, you can barely see the runway at all. The windshield on those planes is tiny. I’m craning my neck just to get a glimpse of where we’re going to land.

  “Are will still in the U.S.?” I ask. I see a lot of Canadian flags around.

  “Nope.”

  I don’t know what kind of arrangement the boss has here, but we don’t even see anyone who looks remotely official. We’re out of the plane, through a side door, and into a nice new car before the engine of the little plane has cooled. The boss is driving, and he’s not sticking to backroads anymore. We’re on a big highway, heading west.

  “Do you want to stop and get something to eat, or can we press on?”

  “I could use a pit stop,” I say. “The side of the road is fine though.”

  I’m half kidding, but he takes me at my word. Traffic’s blowing by at one-hundred-twenty kilometers per hour as I pee on some purple flower at the side of the road. My thoughts wander. If they were using me to try to find the boss, and then they descended on him just a few days after I went to him, did they follow me? Is there any life left for me back in the city, or will they hound me there until they get their hands on him?

  When I get back in the car, I try to find out.

  “Do you think they followed me to your place?” I ask.

  “Yes, and no,” he says. He pulls away and merges back onto the highway. “They must have known about my cabin for a while, because they had good intelligence. They knew how to defeat my security, and knew how to negotiate the mines. They didn’t seem to know about the other Jeeps or some of my other emergency plans, but I think it’s safe to think that they’d been planning for a while. You were only at my cabin a few days. They wouldn’t have planned a whole assault in that time.”

  I’m waiting for the “yes” part of the answer, but he stopped talking.

  I’m about to ask again when he finally resumes.

  “But they may have waited for you to arrive so they could find me distracted. Before you came, I was on the porch, just waiting. So while they didn’t follow you to know where I was, they were waiting for something like you to distract me.”

  “So why didn’t you stay on alert? Why was it so important to tell me your whole life story?”

  “A couple of reasons. One, I thought that if I told the story to someone else, I might gain some insight into how to solve the basic problems. Two, I wanted to get it all down before I forgot it again. I don’t know how long the green candy is going to last.”

  “Green candy?”

  “You remember that candy the monk gave me? He gave me a special piece of green candy for when I wanted to remember the rest of my life story?”

  “Barely. You mean in the
mountains of Tibet?”

  “Yes.”

  “You held onto it for all those years?”

  “Yes. I had it encased in a piece of jewelry. A couple days before you showed up, I finally ate it. It worked.”

  “So you didn’t remember any of that stuff before?”

  “I remembered my time as Dom, and some of my time as Constantine, but the candy really did help. I should have saved a tiny bit. I probably could have sold it to Pfizer for a fortune. I even remembered things from Seattle that I had all but forgotten.”

  “It’s a good thing we wrote it all down,” I say. I still have the backpack with the laptop after all of Bud’s vehicle changes.

  “Perhaps. I can’t say I gained much insight. It just made me more paranoid.”

  ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠

  We approach Montreal as the sun is setting. What a pretty city. It’s nice to see the regular columns of lights again. A city at night looks organized and efficient to me. It’s inviting.

  Bud takes us to the airport right in the middle of everything. He parks in the long-term lot and opens the trunk.

  “Passport?” he says.

  “Got it,” I reply. I pat my pocket.

  “I mean, give me your passport,” he says.

  “Oh.” I fish it out of my pocket and hand it to him. He puts it in a zippered bag and tosses it in the trunk. There’s a green bag and a blue bag in the trunk. They’re both small carry-on looking bags. From the pocket of the green one, he pulls a passport out, checks the photo and then hands it to me. He takes out another one and stuffs it in his pocket.

  I open it and see my own face looking back. It seems that I’ve been to France, Germany, and Mexico in the past year, according to the last page of stamps.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Check the name,” he says.

  “Who’s Leonard Jenko?”

  “You are,” he says. “They’ve probably got Malcolm Harrison on a watch list.”

  “Huh.”

  “You want blue or green?”

  “Blue, I guess. What’s in it?”

  “Just some clothes. It’s too suspicious to travel with no bag. You’ve got to carry something.”

  “I’ve got my backpack, but I see your point. Maybe I should combine my bags,” I say. I unzip the blue suitcase and push the contents around. I see socks, and boxers, a couple pairs of pants, a bunch of t-shirts, and a paperback copy of The Shining. I decide to keep the suitcase and the backpack. That way I’ll be able to keep some things close, under the seat.

  “What are you doing?”

  “They always ask you if anyone else has packed your bag. I don’t want to lie to the authorities, do I?”

  Bud nods. He probably thinks I’m joking, but there’s a point to what I’m doing.

  “Do we have visas?”

  “We’ll pick one up at the consular point in Minsk. I can arrange for letters of introduction to arrive there with us.”

  “I hope so,” I say. “I haven’t traveled extensively, but I know that some of the countries don’t mess around.”

  “It’s not hard getting into Belarus if you pose as a tourist,” he says. “Getting back into the U.S. can be difficult. Once we get past security, I’ll give you some more papers: medical insurance, driver’s license, all that.”

  “It’s nice of you to have fake documents for me ready at all times,” I say. “Do you have passports for anyone else in there?”

  He’s just closing the trunk of the car when my question stills his hand.

  “You know, that’s a good point,” he says. “Let me make sure I don’t have any extra passports.”

  He does. Several fake documents—I don’t even look to see who they’re for—come out of his bag. He stows them in the trunk and then we’re off. The trip is not as streamlined as our entrance into Canada, but Bud definitely knows his way around an airport. He gets us tickets without waiting in any lines and he guides me to a security checkpoint that seems to be waiting just for us. This is all under an assumed name, too. I can’t even imagine what kind of service he would get as billionaire Bud.

  We’ve got a bunch of hours to kill before our plane leaves. Bud knows about a quiet corner of the airport where some chairs face a window and you can watch the planes take off. I plug in the laptop and he fills in more details of his life story.

  56 ABROAD

  I TRANSFER THE BAGS to my left hand so I can open the door. I go shopping every day. I have three reasons: it gives me practice with my Russian, I only have to carry enough water for one day, and it’s something to do. The boss doesn’t shop. Even here, we’re afraid that someone might spot him. Apparently, it’s not easy to go unrecognized as a billionaire. We don’t have a car, so I have to walk two miles to the store.

  We’ve got another few days to kill before our next expedition. Our tourist visas run out next week, but Bud says that we’ll be okay. I don’t know how they’d catch us. We don’t have any interaction with the authorities. On one of our boat trips, the guy asked to see our passports. I think he wanted to make sure that we weren’t cops. The boss was asking about borders and branches of the river, and the guy started to get pretty nervous. He settled right down when he saw our Canadian passports. Everyone likes Canadians.

  Except for my accent, which makes everyone laugh, I think I could fit in here. People are a little less focused on rules and regulations than in the States. When you see a group of men together, there’s a certain lawless feeling about them. Individually, they’re pretty nice. The other day I saw a cop who was hassling a guy because the back of his truck was full of kids. I can’t understand them when they talk fast, but it seemed like the cop was telling him not to carry kids around like that. The guy started arguing with the cop and then suddenly there was a whole group of guys arguing with the cop. The cop just put up his hands and walked away. In New York, that same confrontation would have ended with night sticks and cuffs.

  So what does that say about these men? That they don’t like authority? To me, it just says don’t mess with a group of them.

  We’re renting the left half of a house that’s been split into two apartments. I broke into the other half one bored day. It was uninhabitable—all busted walls and ripped out plumbing. A family of cats was living in the kitchen. Our place isn’t bad. It could use a few coats of paint and a water filter. And every evening the lights dim until the bulbs just emit a hissing, orange glow. Aside from that it’s okay.

  As for our expeditions, we’ve found nothing. I don’t know why I would expect different. The boss already said that he had tried and failed before. We’re just following his old footprints and achieving the same results.

  I set my bags down on the table and one of the heavy bottles of water falls over. Bud’s hand shoots out and stops it before it rolls off.

  “I’m wondering if I’ve made a mistake,” he says.

  “Yeah?” I ask. This trip was my idea. I told the boss that I thought if we went to eastern Europe that we could track down where he grew up. Bud approaches things with an orderly, logical approach. I imagined that he systematically toured every inch of every river, comparing what he saw to his childhood memories and trying to retrace his journey. It’s like when you’re trying to find your car keys. But sometimes, your keys are in the freezer.

  I’m good at finding hidden things because I don’t see the world in the same way as everyone else. If you’re looking for your keys, you’ll start at the table by the front door, search the kitchen, search your bedroom, and then work your way into your living room. That’s not my approach at all. I’ll start by climbing up onto the arm of the sofa and trying to find all the red things in the room. I know that the key ring is blue, but I’ll try to tune my eyes to only find red things. I have this thought that people get a vision in their head of what they’re looking for, and that prevents them from seeing what’s around them. That’s why I always do two things. First, I get a different perspective. Second, I look for the opposite of w
hat I’m trying to find.

  Unfortunately, Bud didn’t quite buy my approach. When I told him that my plan was to take bus trips around all the major cities, he vetoed the idea and said that we would take trips up the rivers to try to find stands of bamboo. I couldn’t talk him out of it, so that’s what we’re doing. Meanwhile, I’ve learned enough Russian on my daily shopping trips so that I can start my own search.

  “I’m going shopping,” I say.

  Bud is hunched over a big paper map, tracing contour lines.

  “Didn’t you just go shopping?” he asks, without looking up.

  “Different kind of shopping,” I say.

  “Okay.”

  I don’t mention when I’ll be back. I’m not sure how long this trip will take. I’ve got a pocket full of money, most of which I’ve embezzled over the past couple of weeks. Bud manages the budget, but he doesn’t have a complete grip on what things cost, so I’ve been skimming. I met a guy who drives a van into the city every day around noon. He will give me a ride for a small fee.

  ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠

  In geographic areas, people seem to agree on how they’re all going to walk. It might look like everyone has their own style of walking around, but there are more similarities than differences. Where I’m from, they’re all business. The pace is quick, the arms don’t move much, and heads stay high. Out west, I’ve been to places where everyone has their hands in their pockets and chins tilted up.

  Here, it’s the hunch and shuffle. Once you’ve got the walk down, you can blend in no matter how you’re dressed.

  I hunch and shuffle to a block with shops and people I can talk to in my broken Russian.

  The first place I go is a jewelry shop.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Good afternoon,” the woman says. She has a smile that doesn’t cover her whole mouth.

  “I’m looking for something unusual, for my girlfriend,” I say.