The Flying Cutterbucks

by Kathleen M Rodgers

  Trudy inserted an attachment on the end of the vacuum’s hose and remarked, “I bet Dad was the ringleader, the pilot making the call.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Jewel slapped the air and made a face. “He was too busy flying with his hands and swapping war stories with other pilots to notice. He had to buy the bar a few times, I recall.”

  Flicking the power switch, Trudy pulled the mask over her mouth and nose and aimed the suction wand at layers of cobwebs encrusted with carcasses and shells. The roar of the vacuum filled the room as her mind wondered: Did her daddy feel the impact when his jet hit the ground? Did he splatter or did his body roll into a twisted mound of flesh and metal? Like a giant roly-poly? Or was he reduced to nothing more than burned meat? Without a body, they would never know. Maybe that’s why she tried so hard to remember him whole.

  Once she finished cleaning the corner, she shut off the vacuum and leaned backward to stretch. Bracing her hands on her lower back, she scanned the room, thinking about what section to tackle next. Her gaze drifted to the wall of windows facing south with the rustic French doors that opened onto the patio. How many times had they held those doors open for Daddy when his hands were full of tongs and platters of tangy barbeque? “Chow time,” he’d holler as he marched from the sunroom through the archway into the kitchen as if he’d just returned from a hunt.

  Oh, Daddy, she had the urge to cry out, you took such pride in providing for your family. Did we ever thank you?

  Glancing past her mother, Trudy gaped at the three-cushioned rustic Naugahyde couch she once referred to as the chuck wagon, due to its lumbering construction and wagon wheel armrests.

  She removed the mask and turned toward her mother. “Remember how Daddy would come home from flying, suck down a cold glass of sun tea, and then stretch his rangy frame out on the couch?” She pushed the vacuum aside and plopped down on one end.

  Her mother stopped rocking and glanced at Trudy as if she were looking right through her. “I thought I saw him there late one night not long after his plane went missing. You kids were already in bed. I heard a noise and came into the kitchen to investigate. When I peeked in here —” her eyes darted wildly about— “the room was completely bathed in moonlight. I’d forgotten to lower the shades. And there he was, stretched out on the couch in his flight suit and boots, his big ol’ feet propped on the armrest. Of course when I turned on a light, the couch was empty.”

  Trudy’s scalp tingled. She hugged herself and admired the room her father built with the same hands that flew fighter jets and tossed his young children in the air and caught them before they hit the ground. The loving hands that caressed his wife when he thought no one was looking.

  Except for the hum of traffic on Seven Mile Road, a hush fell over the room. Burrowed into the couch, Trudy broke the silence. “Georgia thought she saw Bogey one time a few years after he passed. She was performing at a basketball game during halftime when she looked across the gym and saw him standing under one of the hoops.” At the time, Trudy dismissed it as her sister’s way of working through her grief. Trudy wasn’t so sure.

  Jewel tapped her fingers on the arms of the rocker and tilted her head as if she was contemplating what Trudy said. A large ceiling fan whirred above them. Jewel pulled off her knit cap and clasped her hands behind her head. “Your sister shared that with me last time she was home. I asked her if Bogey looked happy or sad. She said he looked at peace. I take comfort in that.”

  Trudy leaned her head back and stared at the ceiling fan. “Momma, what was harder? Losing Bogey or Dad?” The words slipped out before she could catch them.

  Jewel picked at a loose yarn in her knit cap. “With your brother, I at least had some closure. But Shep, well…” She glanced at her wrist. “Mercy, look at the time. It’s already ten o’clock. I better go take my pills.” With a sigh, she pushed herself out of the rocker. “Can I get you anything?”

  “I’m good, Mom. Think I’ll take a break and make a run to the dump.”

  After Jewel left, Trudy waited a second before she rose from the couch and padded across the room in her sneakers to a basket of paperwork sitting next to the rocker. Bending over, she rifled through a stack of papers until she found the folder of newspaper clippings she’d discovered earlier. In case her mother returned, Trudy quickly scanned through the folder, past the stories of her dad missing in action and at least five copies of Bogey’s brief obit that barely took up three inches of space in the newspaper. When she came to the headline, “Son of Wealthy Businessman Dies in Freak Train Mishap,” she fingered the yellowed clipping and remembered how the story had given her nightmares for years.

  Her heart and stomach collided as she began to read:

  (Editor’s note: reader discretion advised due to graphic nature.)

  At approximately eleven p.m. on Tuesday evening, October 8, a Santa Fe train engineer headed eastbound reported a strike as the freight train approached the station a few miles away. Due to blizzard-type conditions and poor visibility, the engineer at first thought they’d hit a stray cow or possibly a hobo crouched down waiting to jump the train. After the engineer released the brakes and the train came to a stop, the conductor got out to investigate.

  Human body parts were found splattered on the front of the engine and strewn down the tracks where the strike occurred. A man’s wallet was found among bloody clothing and an empty whiskey bottle was found intact near the impact site. Police were called to the scene, and the county coroner identified the dead man as Manifred “Dub” Hurn, Jr., (39) of Pardon, NM. He was killed by blunt force trauma. He was the son of wealthy businessman, Manifred Hurn, Sr., also of Pardon.

  Residents living in the area are asked to call the Pardon Police Department if they witnessed anything out of the ordinary on Tuesday evening. Funeral services are pending.

  Trudy heard her mother rooting around in the kitchen. She stuffed the clipping back in the folder and stuck it back into the stack to look at later. Crossing her arms, she stood in front of the wall of windows and looked out at the backyard.

  Beyond the patio wall, the rambling lawn her father had planted and watered had long ago surrendered back to patches of sandy brown dirt, prairie grass, and weeds. At least her mother kept it cut back. The small grove of fruit trees that lined the back section of the property had disappeared, along with the old barn. But the chain link fence that ran up and down the east and west sides of the backyard and along the south end, had withstood the test of time. On the west side, a double-swing gate wide enough to drive a car through had been padlocked for years after Jewel sold the Camaro and had the barn torn down. A single gate at the southeast corner of the yard stayed unlocked.

  How many times had their dad lectured them not to go through that gate? “That’s for the gas man to come in to read the meter. If I ever catch any of you kids outside that gate or near those train tracks, I’ll tan your hides from here to kingdom come.”

  Trudy glared at the gate as if danger still lurked there on the other side. She shivered, visualizing the perv sneaking along the tracks from his casita up the road and slipping through the gate before he made his way across the backyard and knocked on the side door under the carport. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Trudy had some vague recollection of Dub hitting the floor, his head bent at a slight angle, the side of his face exposed all slackjawed and slobbery, while Aunt Star knelt over him checking his vitals. But mostly Trudy’s memory was fuzzy.

  While she was out running errands, Trudy would call Georgia one more time and ask her to help her remember. Calling Aunt Star and peppering her with questions would get her nowhere. Trudy had learned this the hard way years ago on a layover when she called Aunt Star after drinking a couple of margaritas. “I guess the fool got run over by a train,” Aunt Star huffed, catching her breath several times before she quickly changed the subject.

  In the kitchen, Trudy grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and handed her mom the keys to the Camaro. “Feel free to
take it for a spin while I’m gone.”

  “Not on your life, darling. There are too many bells and whistles.”

  At the city dump south of town, Trudy slowed the minivan to a crawl as she approached a shack where a grizzled fellow in a gray uniform met her at the gate. As she rolled down her window, the man’s gaze traveled to the faded blue military sticker on the van’s windshield. Without warning, he snapped to attention and gave her a crisp salute. “Good morning, ma’am.” His hands and face were covered in grime.

  His actions were so unexpected. It took her a second to respond while she processed that he’d spent time in the service. She eyed the stitching on his nametag: Tiny. Surely that was his nickname. “Hello there. What branch were you in?”

  “Air Force, ma’am, military police.” He grinned awkwardly, revealing a mouthful of broken teeth.

  She tried to picture him in his younger days, a one or two striper in a clean uniform, his service revolver strapped to his hip, as he waved cars with military stickers through the front gate of an American base somewhere around the world. “So you were a sky cop then.” She smiled, and for a moment, memories washed over her of uniformed airmen saluting her father and him saluting back.

  “We don’t get many officers out this way,” Tiny said, glancing around as if part of him was back in the military and not working the gate at a smelly dump. Blue stickers on a windshield used to signify the vehicle belonged to a commissioned officer while a red sticker implied the car belonged to an NCO (noncommissioned officer).

  “Oh, I’m just an aging brat.” She needed to clear that up, not mislead him into thinking she was worthy of his salute. “My father’s the one who served, not me.”

  He relaxed his stance. “Doesn’t matter, ma’am. I was saluting the rank.”

  “Oh, okay, well…do you want me to pull up a bit?” She felt a pang of sadness for him, for the life he’d once led. But she could sense a man like Tiny wouldn’t want her pity. “The bags marked with an R stay. I’m dropping those off at the recycle place in town.”

  Tiny directed her to pull up a few feet. “I’ll grab those bags and you’ll be on your way.” Behind his helpful smile, she detected a beaten-down look in his eyes.

  Pulling forward, she tried not to make a face as she breathed in the foul air. After he unloaded the bags, he pointed to where she could turn around. Before she left she tipped him twenty bucks.

  He gaped at the money, his bottom lip quivering. “You’re a good person, ma’am.”

  “I don’t know about that, but I do know life can be brutal at times.”

  A part of her wanted to tell him how her dad was missing in action, that his body and jet had never been found. But why unload her baggage on this tired old vet who looked like he was barely scraping by. “Hey, Tiny…?” She started to thank him for his service, but the words always rang hollow the second they left her lips. She’d said them too many times to too many uniformed passengers over the years. After a while she’d sounded like a robot. There had to be another way.

  Gripping the steering wheel, she bowed her head a second to think. With the election looming a few weeks away, she wondered if a working-class man like Tiny would fare any better no matter who was president? Or were men and women like Tiny so far down the food chain they would always be at the bottom of the pecking order regardless of who was in power?

  When she looked up, tears clouded her vision. “Tiny…?” She called him by name again and peered into his eyes. “You’ve been a blessing to me today. Thank you.” She patted her hand over her heart as if to make a point. “I appreciate you.”

  He blinked a couple of times and pressed his lips together and nodded. As she drove away, she watched him in her rearview mirror. He stuck his arm up and waved and she tooted the minivan’s horn. Veterans Day was coming up in a few weeks, and she wondered how a veteran who’d served his country with pride had ended up working at the city dump. It didn’t seem fair.

  At the community recycling center, she pulled up and unloaded the two bags in a big bin that reeked of sour beer and sticky soda cans. Before heading to the store, she saw the text her mother had sent five minutes ago, asking if she was okay. Trudy had the urge to text her back and say, “Hey, Mom, your unsavory character turned out to be a broken-down vet employed by the city.” Instead, she texted she was fine and would be home shortly after stopping by the store. Here she’d traveled all over the country for nearly forty years, encountering thousands of strangers each month on planes, in airport terminals, and hotels, but now that she was back in Pardon, she might as well be sixteen with a swinging ponytail out driving the family station wagon.

  Dashing through the supermarket, she grabbed the ingredients for soup, along with a loaf of crusty multigrain bread, and a bottle of cabernet. Back at the minivan, she stashed the groceries in the passenger seat and came around to the driver’s side. As she went to open the door, she gazed at the crinkled blue sticker centered at the top of the windshield. The words “Department of Defense” and “Pardon Air Force Base” tugged at her heart. Until Tiny pointed it out, Trudy had barely given the decal any thought.

  On closer inspection, she realized her mother had scraped the base access sticker off the old station wagon when she traded it in and taped it to the minivan’s windshield at a time when she no longer had base privileges. Long before the base had closed, when Major Cutterbuck’s benefits and pay had stopped, Jewel the loyal pilot’s wife had acted out of defiance. As if a blue government sticker on her windshield could help keep her husband alive.

  Climbing into the van, Trudy unscrewed a chilled bottle of water and emptied it in one long swig. She needed to swallow the lump swelling in her throat.

  Before putting the transmission in reverse, Trudy mentally shifted gears. Contemplating the newspaper clipping about the freak train mishap, she inserted her earpiece and punched in her sister’s number. While she waited for Georgia to pick up, three words rolled through her mind: blunt force trauma.

  CHAPTER 11

  Carport Door

  “TELL ME what you remember.” Trudy pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the house. The minivan sputtered along, lacking the get-up-and-go of Momma’s old nine-passenger station wagon with passing gear.

  Georgia sighed on her end as if it took all her energy to talk about it. “He knocked on the carport door. Said he needed the keys to Daddy’s Camaro. Said Momma called him from the hospital…that she needed him to fire up the motor so the oil wouldn’t turn to sludge. He said it took a man to keep a fine car like Daddy’s all tuned up and running properly.”

  “And you believed him,” Trudy cut in, her tone flat as the landscape around Pardon. “’Cuz he mentioned Daddy’s car.”

  Georgia’s voice thickened. “I didn’t see the whiskey bottle until I’d unlatched the screen door and he was halfway inside.”

  “Is that when he grabbed you?” Trudy heard the tremor in her own voice.

  “No, he took a swig of booze and asked, ‘Where’s your big sister?’ When I didn’t respond, he mumbled, ‘Guess you’ll do.’ I didn’t know what he meant at first, but the second I turned my back to get Daddy’s keys from the cupboard, I could feel Dub’s eyes on me like creepy crawlers. I tried to act brave as I went to hand him the keys. He stood there leering at me, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand before he set the bottle down. I remember his hands; they were huge, with fingers thick as clubs.”

  At the next intersection, Trudy hooked a right and headed west on Seven Mile Road. Her heart spun as she dreaded the next part, and yet she needed to hear it in order to piece together what happened that night.

  Georgia paused to catch her breath. “I told him to take the keys and leave. That I had a lot of homework and Aunt Star would be home any second. He could leave the keys outside by the carport door when he was done.”

  “So that’s when he grabbed you,” Trudy finished.

  “Yeah. I tried to run into the sunroom and escape through the
back door, but the fucker was quick. He blocked the archway and shoved me against the kitchen table. The next thing I knew, Aunt Star was yelling at him. I never heard her come in. I was screaming too hard trying to fight him off. I weighed all of ninety pounds back then.”

  Misty-eyed, Trudy blinked and noticed several cars zipping past her on the left. She glanced at the speedometer and realized she was going thirty-five in a fifty-five miles-per-hour zone. “And then I walked in.” She pressed her foot on the gas and the minivan hiccupped and lurched forward.

  “And all hell broke loose,” Georgia declared, sounding congested.

  Trudy shuddered and breathed through her mouth, her nose stuffy all of a sudden. Neither sister said anything for a moment.

  After a long pause, Georgia broke the silence. “One time when Bogey was catching fireflies down by Dub’s place, he spied the perv peeking through a neighbor lady’s window. When Dub saw him, he threatened to feed Bogey to a pack of coyotes if he squealed. That poor kid. He lay awake for several nights listening for their howls.”

  “Did Bogey tell you this?” Trudy pictured their little brother hiding under the covers in case Dub came looking for him.

  “Yeah, he made me pinky swear not to tell anyone, not even you. It happened right after Daddy left for Vietnam. Poor kid thought Dub would snatch him if he told. Plus, Bogey knew better than to go near Dub’s place. He thought Momma would ground him.”

  As Trudy listened, she felt an intense hatred for a man who’d been dead for years.

  “Hey, sis, can I put you on hold for a sec? I think one of my students is calling.”