The Flying Cutterbucks

by Kathleen M Rodgers

  “We’re the Flying Cutterbucks,” Trudy yelled over the sound of the wind whipping her hair around. Jewel’s hair stayed in place under her knit cap.

  Her mother turned, her mouth opened in a big O. “You remember.”

  Of course, Trudy thought. Some things you never forget.

  On family outings when she was young, they’d pile into Momma’s station wagon, Daddy behind the wheel, Momma riding shotgun. He’d say, “This is your captain speaking. Ready for takeoff?” And Trudy and Georgia would hang halfway out the windows and flap their arms like jet wings. Bogey would climb on one of the girl’s laps and stick a pudgy hand out the window and bellow in his little boy voice, “Ready, set, go!”

  “We’re the Flying Cutterbucks,” Daddy announced into the shiny cigarette lighter he’d pull from the dashboard, pretending it was a microphone. “Sit back and enjoy the ride.”

  For a few blessed seconds, Trudy’s nuclear family was intact.

  “Can you believe we didn’t wear seatbelts back then?” Jewel hit the power button and the window rolled up and some of the magic faded.

  Trudy eased up on the gas as the image of a station wagon full of people singing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” disappeared into the past.

  “Darling, can you take me home before we visit the cemetery? I need to pee and take a nap.” Jewel leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes.

  Visions of tackling years of accumulation ran through Trudy’s mind. She was itching to get started. “Sure thing, Momma. While you get some rest, I’ll start sorting through stuff.”

  “Have at it,” Jewel said and nodded off.

  It was nearly dusk by the time they left the house and drove back across town.

  At the cemetery entrance, Trudy slowed the Camaro to a crawl. The tires crunched on chalky gravel as they wound through the front section and turned right past the flagpole.

  Jewel pointed to a blue marble headstone a few feet off the caliche road.

  The patron saint of clutter strikes again, Trudy thought with a mixture of amusement and sadness as she pulled up behind a halfwall of fieldstone built by the CCC. She shoved the gearshift into park and went to help her mother out of the car. Even from a few feet away, Trudy could see an assortment of items her mother had placed around the upright marker that stood out against the flaxen lawn and flat tombstones.

  “How do you like what I’ve done?” Jewel asked as they approached Bogey’s grave. Digging through her purse, she pulled out a small rocket and handed it to Trudy. “Here, place this with the others.”

  A toy fighter jet and a rocket flanked each end at the stone’s base. A squad of small action figures propped against the front of the stone stood guard day and night. Scanning the marker, Trudy breathed in the words engraved in the sky blue marble she and Georgia helped picked out so long ago:

  Shepard “Bogey” Cutterbuck

  Flying among the stars

  1963 – 1974

  Stooping, Trudy placed the rocket next to the other trinkets. “You must have to replace these often. They don’t look weathered or rusty.”

  Hugging her purse in front of her, Jewel sighed. “Depends on how much rain we get. Some years are drier than others. I get them cheap at Dollar General. If the wind blows them away, I replace them.”

  Trudy brushed her fingers over her brother’s name. “Momma, tell me the story again how Bogey got his nickname.”

  Jewel paused to gather her thoughts. “When I was pregnant with your brother, your daddy used to tease me and say, ‘Jewel, is our little bogey a girl or a boy?’ As you probably know, bogey is a pilot term for an unknown aircraft or blip on radar. Back then, we didn’t know the sex of a baby until birth. After your brother was born, Shep kept calling him Bogey.”

  Trudy smiled. “Daddy and Bogey were the best of buds.”

  Jewel stared at the grave. “Your Aunt Star says there were two funerals that day. Bogey all decked out in one of your daddy’s flight suits. The people at the mortuary were so good to make it fit. And your Daddy’s photo tucked in Bogey’s hands.”

  Trudy pictured her baby brother deep in the earth, laid out in his casket like a boy fighter pilot…his lifeless face gray against the olive-drab cloth. “Didn’t you stick one of Daddy’s nametags on his chest pocket?”

  Still clutching her purse as if she didn’t know what to do with her arms, Jewel nodded. “Yes, along with a pair of your daddy’s wings.”

  Sniffling, Trudy dabbed her finger at the corner of each eye. Earlier that afternoon while Jewel napped, Trudy wandered into the living room and found her old diary stuck behind a stack of National Geographics. It wasn’t a formal diary with a lock and key, but a spiral notebook with Trudy’s Tomes scribbled in big loopy cursive on the cover. Chuckling at her lofty title, she made herself a cup of hot cocoa with a dash of chili powder, Aunt Star’s secret ingredient, and curled up in the old recliner to read her youthful musings. While flipping through the pages, she found a letter she’d drafted to her father more than a year after his plane went missing. She read it several times, committing it to memory.

  Gazing at her brother’s tombstone, Trudy recalled the letter:

  April 5, 1974

  Ground Control to Major Dad,

  Can you hear me? It’s Trudy.

  We still watch Walter Cronkite every night on CBS News. Once in a while something comes up about Vietnam, and Momma will scoot to the edge of the sofa and hug a small pillow. I watch her from the corner of my eye. She always has the same look on her face, like any second she expects to see you come walking out of a jungle, dragging your parachute.

  Last year while all of America was celebrating the return of the POWs, Momma gathered us around the television and told us to look at every face, every man getting off those planes. You know, in case the Air Force was wrong. Bogey stood too close to the television, his small arms crossed in that stubborn way of his. After the last man stepped off the plane, Bogey turned to Momma and rolled his eyes. “I told you he wasn’t coming home.”

  Sometimes it’s like your jet took off one day and poof, you vanished in thin air. There’s this song by David Bowie that reminds me of you. He sings about an astronaut who gets lost in space and doesn’t make it back. Every time that song comes on the radio, Momma cranks up the volume.

  Bogey still wants to be an astronaut. It’s all he talks about when he’s not walking into things or complaining his head hurts. He and Momma have been spending a lot of time at the base hospital. Aunt Star says Bogey has an inoperable brain tumor. I guess that means he’s got a grenade in his head about to explode. Georgia and I try to act all brave around Momma. Lately, she walks around all stiff like a broom and bristles when you ask her a question. Sometimes I think if I touch her, she’ll crack like an eggshell.

  Tonight, I caught her pacing up and down the hallway, holding herself like she’s fixing to be sick. Then she went and stood in front of the long dresser y’all share. She picked up the framed photo of you standing by your trainer jet at pilot school at Reese.

  When I came up behind her and touched her on the shoulder, she wheeled around like she was fixing to hit me with your photo. I’m not sure if I scared her, or if I wasn’t supposed to see her crying.

  Ground control to Major Dad…

  Can you hear me?

  Love, Trudy

  A breeze picked up and her mother shivered next to her. “I’m heading back to the car. It’ll be getting dark soon.”

  The evening sky had turned to gray with a line of dark clouds rolling in. Here in the southwest, the smell of rain wasn’t so much a promise but a tease.

  Trudy lingered, gazing at Bogey’s grave. “I’ll be along in a second.” She wished she’d grabbed a warmer jacket. No sooner had she tucked her fingers inside the sleeves of her sweater, using them like hand muffs, than the hair on the nape of her neck prickled.

  “Check six!” Daddy’s voice boomed in her head. A command Trudy couldn’t ignore.

/>   Breathing hard, she pivoted and hyper-focused on her surroundings and what was behind her. She scanned the area looking for bandits, Daddy’s pilot speak for bad guys. He’d trained his children to stay alert. He called it situational awareness, and he hammered it into their heads.

  Trudy half-expected to see someone behind her, but it was only a prairie dog munching on grass.

  “Some bandit you are,” she sighed as the rodent scampered away. When she looked up, a champagne-colored Lexus entered the cemetery from a second entrance and maneuvered along the lane across the section from Bogey’s grave. The sedan was sleek and new and shiny. It came to rest about fifty yards away, next to a line of fir trees. Trudy’s mind flashed to another funeral she and Georgia had attended with Aunt Star a few months after Bogey’s. It was mid-October when they’d ridden with Aunt Star in her Plymouth Valiant, snaking along a few cars behind the hearse and two limousines that had parked about where the Lexus sat now.

  They’d begged Aunt Star not to make them go. “Button your lips and stay close to me. People will question our absence if we’re not there.” Afterwards, they’d gone to Great-Uncle Manifred’s mansion in the garden district where a maid met them at the door. Aunt Star instructed them to give the old man a hug. “Tell him you’re sorry, nosh on some finger food, and if anyone asks, your momma’s in the hospital getting some much needed rest.”

  “She had a nervous breakdown.” Georgia rolled her eyes before they went inside.

  “I’m having one right now.” Trudy nudged her sister in the back.

  But nobody inquired about Jewel Cutterbuck that day. They were too busy gossiping about the tragedy when Uncle Manifred was out of earshot.

  “Gladys spoiled him rotten after little Rene died, poor thing, wasn’t but three.”

  “There’s rumors he smothered her…but who knows.”

  “That boy was never quite right and from such a good home.”

  “Ne’er–do–well. Couldn’t hold down a job. Gave his daddy so much grief.”

  “Stumbling onto the tracks at night. What was he thinking?”

  “He wasn’t. The louse was probably liquored up and out of his mind.”

  “God, I hope he didn’t know what hit him.”

  The memory caused Trudy to shudder. She glanced back at the half-wall where the Camaro was hidden from view. She assumed Momma was getting situated and warming up inside the car. Trudy focused her attention back on the Lexus. You didn’t see many foreign models in Pardon. Out here, folks tended to drive American-made cars and trucks. From her vantage point, she could see a tall woman in a dark coat and headscarf get out of the Lexus and come around to the passenger side where an elderly woman sat hunched in the front seat. The two women appeared to talk briefly.

  Then the woman in the headscarf made her way toward a row of tombstones not too far off the road. In low-heeled pumps, she walked with her head down, stopping every few seconds to look this way or that. She walked with purpose, perhaps a businesswoman overdressed for a Saturday.

  An old woman’s voice trilled, the tone impatient, like she was barking orders or directing the tall woman to go back the other way. The woman in the scarf turned, and headed toward another row of tombstones. Seconds later she stopped abruptly in front of a large tombstone. Her shoulders drooped momentarily before she wheeled around toward the Lexus and hollered, “I found it.”

  With Momma hidden behind the half-wall, Trudy ducked behind a large statue of Jesus missing a hand. She felt foolish peeking out behind his stiff robe, but she didn’t want the woman to see her spying. Since the day Aunt Star forced them to attend the funeral, Trudy avoided that side of the cemetery.

  The woman pulled an aerosol can out of her coat pocket. Shaking the can, she bent over and sprayed something up and down the length of the grave. After a moment, she stood, stuck the can back in her pocket, and pulled out a cellphone. Backing up a couple of feet, she held the phone up and appeared to snap photos. She hollered something to the old woman in the car, but the wind shifted and Trudy couldn’t hear what she said. The woman in the scarf lingered at the grave as if in deep thought, then she rushed back to the car.

  After the Lexus drove away, a hawk keened overhead, divebombing at something on the ground.

  “What was she doing?” Trudy jumped at the sound of her mother’s voice. Jewel was standing at the half-wall, her elbows propped on the ledge. “Aunt Gladys is buried over there somewhere, along with her little daughter and —” Suddenly Jewel stopped as if she couldn’t be troubled to finish.

  Trudy’s stomach twisted inside out. “I’ll go check. You get back in the car and warm up.”

  Dreading the trek to the other side, she maneuvered through the cemetery, careful not to walk on people’s graves or to twist her ankle in a prairie dog hole. Seeing the prairie dog earlier reminded her that the varmints were known to build whole towns in cemeteries out west. As Trudy drew closer, her gaze zoomed in on the word spray-painted in big red letters over the brittle grass.

  She covered her mouth as the word rapist screamed back at her from the grave.

  Gulping air, she felt like she’d been sucker punched. Her heart pumped faster as she looked up at the name on the headstone:

  Manifred “Dub” Hurn II

  Our only son

  1935 – 1974

  Her chest hurt and she stumbled back, her throat parched as awful visions howled through her mind. A severed head and dismembered legs, the mutilated torso pushed down the tracks by a locomotive pulling freight. The engineer said later he thought it was a stray cow. Would the images ever go away? Her whole body trembled as she backed away as if he was still a threat.

  She tore out across the cemetery, grateful she’d worn her riding boots with sturdy soles. Keeping her head down, she counted to ten then backward as her hair swung in her face and she willed herself to calm down. She couldn’t risk Momma asking too many questions.

  By the time Trudy got back to the car, her whole body was shaking.

  Her teeth chattered as she went to start the car and turn on the heater. “I’m freezing, Momma, how about you?”

  Jewel reached for her seatbelt. “I’m fine, darling, but I hope you’re not getting sick. You’re as white as a cotton boll and your face is covered in sweat.”

  Licking her lips, Trudy lied. “Must be the altitude. It’s a mile high here. I need to get acclimated.”

  Jewel leaned over and touched Trudy’s forehead. “You feel cool to me.” She studied her daughter. “Did the altitude ever bother you at thirty thousand feet?”

  “The cabins are pressurized, Momma. You know that.” Trudy shoved the gearshift into drive and the headlights came on. Tires crunched against gravel as they drove away from Bogey’s grave, protected by a squadron of tiny super heroes.

  “What was that woman spraying?” Jewel asked as they approached the end of the lane where they could either go left or right.

  Trudy kept her voice even. “Ant killer. You should have seen the size of those mounds.”

  Jewel twisted in her seat and Trudy could feel her mother’s eyes bore into her. “This time of year?”

  “Yup, the seasons are out of whack. This morning felt like Indian summer. We might see frost by tomorrow.”

  Jewel leaned against her seat and clasped her hands over one knee. “And they say there’s no such thing as global warming. Try convincing those ants.”

  When they got to the end of the lane, Trudy hooked a left instead of going right to avoid driving past Dub’s grave even though the graffiti was shrouded in darkness by now.

  After they stopped by the store for a few groceries and headed west on Seven Mile Road, Momma dozed off. Halfway home, she woke with a start. “So if that woman was killing ants, why were you hiding behind Jesus?”

  Hiding behind Jesus? Trudy scrambled for an answer.

  “Uh, I was looking for his missing hand,” she offered weakly, praying the gates of Heaven hadn’t clamped shut on her forever.


  Jewel Cutterbuck let out a quiet laugh. “And what would you do with it if you found it?”

  “That’s easy, Momma. I’d place it on Bogey’s grave.”

  After a light supper of soup and salad, Jewel retired to her bedroom to read. Trudy rummaged through the cupboard until she found a set of wine goblets with silver etching that read: Pardon Air Force Base Officers Club. Sometime after Daddy’s plane went missing, one of Momma’s friends, a pilot’s wife named Shirley, stopped by the house after happy hour with a couple of glasses she’d pilfered from the club. When Jewel tried to refuse, saying, “But that’s government property,” Shirley shoved the glasses in Momma’s hands and remarked, “Honey, after what you’ve been through, the Air Force at least owes you some commemorative stemware.” That night, with Trudy and Georgia and Bogey peeking from the hallway, Jewel and Shirley polished off a bottle of wine courtesy of the O’Club’s bartender.

  Rinsing off a layer of film, Trudy poured a splash of wine and took a healthy sip. Leaning against the counter, she studied the east wall of the kitchen above the messy table. Fifty-year-old macaroni art mingled with childhood drawings taped to the wall and a giant fork and spoon from an overseas assignment. A red and yellow God’s eye made out of yarn and chopsticks captured her attention. One of Bogey’s art projects from the base chapel after they moved back to New Mexico. She racked her brain for the Spanish name. Oh, yes, Ojo de Dios, Eye of God.

  “You are supposed to bring protection and healing,” she muttered, eyeing the diamond-shaped weaving over the rim of her glass.

  Setting her wine down, she went to grab her cardigan before going outside. Heading toward the spare bedroom, she did an about-face at the hall closet and threw open the door. A Conga line of car coats and parkas danced from hangers as she rifled through them. She stopped when she came to the sage green nylon jacket with bright orange lining: Daddy’s flight jacket.

  Shrugging into the puffy sleeves, she zipped herself in, inserted her earpiece, and stepped outside to call Georgia. Except for the lamppost out front, all the outside lights were in working order. The backyard spotlight illuminated the vintage travel trailer where she and Georgia used to hang out as teenagers, listening to music on their transistor radios. If she strained her eyes hard enough, she could see the railroad tracks running along the top of the embankment at the end of Jewel’s property line. A shiver shimmied up her back.