The Flying Cutterbucks

by Kathleen M Rodgers

  Paralyzed with shock, Trudy had stood rigid, unable to move, the weight of the skillet still in her hands. “It’s done,” came Daddy’s voice from somewhere in her head as the wind picked up outside and snow flurries began to fly. Then something inside of her cracked and she thought her chest would cave in when she couldn’t stop crying.

  Later that night as she and Georgia curled up with Aunt Star on the crushed velvet sofa sipping hot toddies to calm their jittery nerves, she instructed them: “You tuck it away deep inside of you, so deep that your body will absorb it...and you go on with your lives.”

  Trudy had tried to follow her aunt’s directions…her unwritten rules of engagement. But some memories were always lurking below the surface while others played hide and seek and refused to reveal themselves no matter how much Trudy racked her brain for recall. Because the harder she tried to forget, the more she wanted to remember.

  Trudy lifted a manila envelope, peeked inside, and pulled out her voter ID card.

  The wail of a siren pierced the air outside the storage unit, probably a fire truck and an ambulance blasting down Lemmon Avenue on their way to a call. Trudy closed the lid and locked the firebox. Struggling to her feet, she stashed the card in her slouchy handbag and looked around to see if there was anything else she needed before she headed to the polls then one last stop by the cemetery.

  Her gaze steadied on a small cedar box sitting on top of a carton labeled “Sacred Books.”

  Skylar!

  Choking back a knot of sorrow trapped in her throat, Trudy walked over and picked up the box and held it against her chest. “Hello, Miss Bossy Pants,” she whispered, missing the feel and scent of warm fur brushing against her cheek, the sudden draft of cool air as Skylar’s bushy tail swished back and forth, her happy meter.

  For fifteen years, Skylar stayed by her side, loyal to the end, unlike Preston with a pecker full of wanderlust. After Trudy walked out of the mansion fifteen years ago, she found the sunlit loft the same day she found herself standing in the middle of an animal shelter, lost and looking for pure love. The golden-haired puppy with the eager eyes yapped to get her attention, and when Trudy bent to pick her up, the puppy jumped into her arms and they found a home in each other’s hearts.

  They aged together, the four-legged lass and her two-legged mistress. And when aching joints and blindness threatened to end Skylar’s walks through the neighborhood and local parks, Trudy loaded her up in the TrailBlazer and they went for long drives so Skylar could sniff the air and feel the wind in her face.

  When Skylar died the day before Trudy had to leave on a three-day trip, she paid the pet sitter a month’s wages as a thankyou for all the years the sitter had loved on Skylar while Trudy was flying. Then Trudy took Skylar for one last ride on the way to the vet to be cremated. Her death had made Trudy’s decision to leave easy. No more ties to Texas.

  “Come on, old girl, you’re coming with me. Time to set you free.” Trudy placed the container by her purse and opened the carton filled with her most cherished books. As she gazed at the covers and spines, she breathed in the aroma that always reminded her of walking into a library or bakery housed in a basement. She found the smell of old books intoxicating.

  Three titles caught her attention and she scanned trying to decide which book to pick up first.

  The image of a white dove and a black bird nose to nose drew her to pick up the dog-eared paperback of Death Be Not Proud, the slim nonfiction she read for a high school English class. The author had written about his teenage son’s battle with a brain tumor. Holding the book in her hands, Trudy recalled feeling a sense of empowerment as she rose from her desk that day and approached the podium. She paused to make eye contact before she opened her oral book report with a dedication to the memory of her little brother who had died a couple of months before of the same illness that killed the boy in the book. Her teacher commented later how poised Trudy appeared as she stood before the class discussing such a heavy subject. “You didn’t look nervous or scared at all,” the teacher said. Trudy had shrugged and said, “After my father went missing and my brother got sick, what’s left to be scared of?”

  Lots, she would find out a couple of months later.

  Setting the book down, she picked up a trade paperback of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. A birthday present from Georgia sometime in the nineties, Trudy opened the book and read the following inscription:

  Sis, this novel is set in a dystopian society ruled by a bunch of fundamentalist white dudes who’ve overthrown the American government. They kidnap women of child-bearing age and force them into servitude where their sole purpose is to bear children for the ruling white men whose wives are barren. How twisted is that? Of course it could never happen here, but the story makes you think.

  Hope it resonates.

  Happy Birthday,

  Georgia

  Trudy shivered and closed the book, recalling how the narrator had been stripped of her identity and forced to wear a long red cloak and white bonnet with wings that covered most of her face. Images of women in black burkas competed with handmaids in red.

  One thought niggled through her mind: What if it could happen here?

  She pictured herself in the story, too old to bear children. Would she be forced to work as a Martha, cooking and cleaning for the commander and his bitchy wife? Or sent to the colonies to clean up toxic waste? No way could she be an Aunt, dispensing pain and misery on the handmaids. But what if she was younger and cloaked in red, giving birth to dead babies one right after the other? Oh, she’d be salvaged for sure, strung up in a public hanging, and left to dangle at the wall.

  After driving by her former home moments ago, she realized Preston had a lot in common with the fictional commander in the story. Preston had tried to rule over all aspects of her life, but in the end he had lost when she took her power back and left. Unlike the narrator in the tale, Trudy had the freedom to walk out.

  Freedom…a word tossed around like penny candy at a parade. Something she’d taken for granted for too long…but not today. Today, she was exercising her right to vote.

  A whiff of jet fuel caused her to look up. She set the book down and breathed in the smell mixed with cold air coming in from the open door of the storage unit. As quickly as it came it left. She glanced down again at the box of books.

  Blinking back at her like a beacon of light from the control tower of some remote air base, the one book she pilfered from her mother’s house and forgot to return: A first edition of Stranger to the Ground by Richard Bach. A gift her father had given her mother before he left for war. Trudy took it without permission on a visit home years ago and forgot to return it. Most of the story was lost on her…but not the feeling of being in flight…inside the cockpit of a fighter jet…as if the reader was the pilot at the controls.

  She thumbed through the pages. A yellowed letter fell out.

  There was that scent again, a mixture that always reminded her of military uniforms and airplane hangars. Or perhaps it was merely the exhaust from a city bus passing by, and yet it wasn’t the same. She began to read the letter dated 25 December 1971:

  My Dearest Jewel:

  After being around an “arrogant fighter pilot” for years, I think you’ll understand the things Bach says in this book. He even uses the term “arrogant fighter pilot.” I’ve underlined the things he captured or described in a special way I’ve never been able to.

  From the moment we met when I was in pilot school at Reese, you wanted to know what it felt like to be at the controls of a jet. Richard Bach lets the reader see the world and life through the eyes of a fighter pilot. In some ways it looks no different than when we’re zooming down the highway in the car. In other ways, it’s very different.

  So, my lady, I hope by reading this book, you’ll get to know the other side of me you once said you wished you could meet, the one who straps on a G-suit and helmet and climbs a ladder to his “office.”

  Merry
Christmas, my love,

  Always and forever,

  Shep

  Trudy’s eyes welled up as she folded the letter with care and inserted it back in the book. At that moment, she knew she wasn’t alone. Another jet took off from Love Field, the sound of the engines roaring in her ears. She couldn’t see the plane from her vantage point inside the cold storage unit…yet she knew it was there somewhere overhead.

  Just like she couldn’t see her dad, but she felt his presence.

  She placed the book with the letter in her handbag, turned out the lights, and left.

  At the cemetery after she voted, Trudy unlocked her trunk, retrieved a flathead screwdriver she kept in her toolbox, and removed the tiny brass plaque on the box containing Skylar’s ashes. After she put the screwdriver away and shut the trunk, she walked toward the children’s section. Stone cherubs and lambs greeted her as she approached the grave and set the box on the wet grass turning yellow. The mist from earlier had stopped, and Trudy wondered if the ground would be covered by a blanket of frost the next morning.

  Kneeling over the tiny flat headstone, she ran her right hand over the inscription:

  Sarah Jewel

  Stranger to the ground

  August 13, 1998

  “My precious babe, I would have given you my last breath just to see you take your first. You came and left so quickly it didn’t seem right to burden you with a last name.”

  She glanced from the tombstone to the brass plaque in her left hand:

  Skylar

  My sweetest girl

  2001-2016

  “We rescued each other. You watched over me for fifteen years. Now I need you to watch over my daughter.”

  With reverence, Trudy placed the plaque next to Sarah Jewel’s name and stood back a moment.

  “Sarah Jewel, had you lived, you would be eighteen and old enough to vote. We could have walked into the polls together, exercising our rights that so many women fought for. To quote your Great Aunt Star, ‘It’s a man’s world, loveys. Sometimes we womenfolk have to take matters into our own hands.’ So, lovey, today, in your memory, I voted against powerful men like your father who view women as sex objects.” Trudy’s mind flashed to another grave back in New Mexico, the one stained with graffiti. She took a deep breath. “Today, I voted against men like the perv.”

  She turned her attention to the plaque.

  “Skylar, you’ve been here before. All those times you sat on your haunches and listened to me tell you about the baby with copper hair and blue eyes, a tiny red mouth opened like a baby bird…only no sound came out. You were such a good listener, offering me your paw for comfort. Sometimes resting your chin on my shoulder.”

  Bending down, Trudy tore a tiny opening in one corner of the plastic bag and sprinkled Skylar’s ashes around the perimeter of the small grave, creating a barrier of protection. With the last remaining ashes left in the bag, she fashioned a crude pair of wings in the center of the grave.

  Rising, she stood back to examine her handiwork.

  In many ways, Sarah Jewel remained a stranger, a tiny being who existed for a short time within her. And yet Skylar’s heart and soul was as familiar to Trudy as most of her family members, maybe even more so.

  Before she left, she dropped the cedar box and plastic bag in a nearby trash receptacle and rinsed her hands with a bottle of water she had stashed in her purse.

  A sense of release washed over her, as if a weight had been lifted. Reaching for her phone, she sent her mother a text. Seconds later, Jewel texted back: Supper ready when you get here. Baked acorn squash and chicken rice casserole. Drive safe.

  Trudy started to tell her mother about the book she’d taken from her years ago, but something told her to wait. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

  She punched in her coordinates in the Camaro’s navigation system, took a deep breath, and eased out of the cemetery. Moments later, she cruised down ribbons of concrete as she headed west, the Dallas skyline in her rearview mirror.

  She called Clay’s number.

  He picked up on the second ring. “Lieutenant Cordova speaking.”

  For a second she couldn’t find her voice. She began to shake. Finally, she stammered, “Clay? It’s me. I’m coming home.”

  Clay hesitated. “Is this the one and only Gertrude Cutterbuck? Best lookin’ twirler in the band?”

  Trudy giggled. Nothing Clay said or did felt lecherous. “I couldn’t twirl for shit, Clay, but glad you think I looked good in my uniform.”

  He let out an exuberant laugh. The kind that could help her forget she’d ever known heartache. A laugh that could send her flying straight back to Pardon…a place that held so much promise.

  With the silver Camaro practically on autopilot, Trudy headed toward the little house of shrines on the edge of town, roughly seven hours away.

  She could feel her whole face break into a grin.

  CHAPTER 13

  Our Lady of Assumptions

  A FEW days before Halloween, a yapping Hercules greeted Trudy at Clay’s front door. The Chihuahua reeled back on its hind legs and bared its teeth.

  “You’re a feisty little fella,” Trudy laughed, leaning down to the dog’s level. He pawed at her against the storm door’s glass surface, his nails clicking away. “Guess you’re not here to say hi but to defend your territory. Trust me, dude, I get it.”

  When she straightened, Clay’s dimpled grin welcomed her as he went to unlatch the door. He scooped the dog up in one arm and held the door open. “Don’t worry. Only one of us bites.”

  She tossed her hair back and smiled at his humor, at his attempt to put her at ease. Dragging Main and riding around like they were kids was one thing. But today he’d invited her to his house, a mid-century ranch with a pitched metal roof and a wide driveway that curved up to a two-car garage. Located on the corner of Coronado and Cibola in Northwest Pardon, Clay’s neighborhood was across town from the wood-frame bungalow where he grew up near Our Lady of Assumption, a mission-style Catholic church with its own grade school.

  Adjusting her purse strap, she crossed the threshold and breathed in a pleasant aroma. “Smells good in here.” She glanced around, surprised by the open floor plan. Interior walls had been knocked down to eliminate boxy rooms. Dark hardwood floors contrasted against hand-troweled Navajo white walls. Splashes of color from a few Southwestern paintings appealed to her senses, along with the familiar aroma.

  Clay gestured to a large candle burning in the center of a massive coffee table with spiral legs. “Sandalwood. Remember? Every time we’d walk into the old TG&Y, you’d head straight for the candle aisle. You’d sniff every votive until you found the bin marked ‘Sandalwood.’”

  “Ah, and then I’d inhale. My drug of choice.” Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply, letting the fragrance carry her back. Even before her eyes fluttered open, she could feel two pairs of eyes studying her. “You have a good memory, Clay.”

  Hercules expressed his displeasure with a grumpy grrr. Clay stroked the spot between his pointy ears. “Settle down, Little Man. She’s our friend.”

  Clay’s voice calmed the dog and sent ripples of pleasure throughout Trudy’s body.

  She swallowed, hoping Clay hadn’t noticed. “How long have you lived here? This house has good bones.” The second she said it her face grew hot. She was thinking the same thing about Clay.

  “A couple of years. I bought it as a foreclosure. Saw its potential.”

  Without asking, she headed straight for the kitchen area. “This is lovely.” She ran her hands over the white quartz countertops and marveled at a thick supporting pillar wrapped in stainless steel to match the appliances. “Are the cabinets bamboo? I love the effect of the frosted glass doors.”

  “Yup, very affordable. My cousin Hector flips houses. He bought them ready-made and added some extra touches to give them a custom look. I helped out on weekends and holidays when my schedule allowed it.”

  “You guys did a m
arvelous job.”

  “Thanks. We gutted it down to the studs. It’s not a mansion, but it suits me.”

  Suits me, too, and mansions don’t always make for happy homes. She knew that firsthand. Her eyes roamed over everything, including Clay when he wasn’t looking.

  Craning her neck, she gazed at the white cathedral ceiling. A dark beam ran the length of the ceiling from the entry to the back of the house. Wedge-shaped transoms at each end of the house let in lots of natural light and added to the overall design. Twin sliding glass doors overlooked a covered patio and a bricked-in backyard featuring desert landscape.

  She turned and gazed at the rest of the open room. Instead of a man cave jammed with dark furniture and the mandatory recliner, she found a chalky low-slung leather sofa and matching chair gathered near the corner fireplace. Approaching the empty firebox, she imagined herself tangled up with Clay in front of a blazing fire, his bronze skin warming her up on a cold night.

  Clay’s shoulder brushed against her, and she caught her breath. “Next time you come over, I’ll build you a fire. It’ll give me a good excuse to get more firewood.”

  Sweet Lord, she was about to burst. He aroused feelings in her she’d sent into hibernation.

  At the sliding glass doors, she peered out past the covered patio with its stone pavers to the flowerbeds filled with white gravel and the occasional rosebush and pear cactus that lined the back wall. A lone oak clinging to its last leaves stood guard in the middle of a neat square of yellow Bermuda grass. For a long time, she’d felt like that lone tree, clinging to something she needed to let go of. But the fear of exposure kept her from completely dropping her guard.

  “I thought about putting in a pool, but —”

  “Having a pool isn’t everything,” she cut in, hoping he wasn’t trying to apologize for the view. No shimmering water feature to impress her. Clay’s yard appeared sparse by Preston’s standards, but how could she tell Clay at that moment, as he stood next to her stroking the top of Hercules’s innocent head, that she was trying to block the image of Preston coaxing her to strip bare. To dive into the blue so he could sit on the top step and get off while she glided up and down the pool, pretending not to notice.