We Will Be Crashing Shortly (12 page)

Hackman had Otis by the hair and was trying to knee him in the face, but Otis wriggled free and felled him with a kick to the back of the knee. Hackman, as swift as he was hefty, rolled over and was on his feet again in a second. The two of them made a curious sight—Otis with his black eye patch and Hackman with his mummy-bandaged arm, a result from when Flo slashed it before. Who knows what happened to the gun Hackman had earlier, or, for that matter, the body of the bus driver he’d shot with it.

I jumped from the tug and ran toward them with the crowbar raised in my hand, swinging wildly. I was so furious I discarded a few of Otis’s six rules of hand-to-hand combat he’d taught me. Here is the list:

1. Be Aggressive.
   
2. Be Unrelenting.
   
3. Vary Your Attacks.
   
4. Use the Element of Surprise.
   
5. Disable or be Disabled.
   
6. Keep the Opponent in Your Sight.
   

The most important rules for my purpose in this instance were numbers five and six. Those rules I discarded.

I swung the crowbar at Hackman’s head with all my strength, missed, and stumbled forward, barely having time to throw my arms forward to break my face-plant. Unfortunately it was the hand that held the crowbar, which sailed from my grip and scuttled across the ground to rest at the tip of Hackman’s foot. Hackman swept it up as though he expected it to be there, swung it with all his might, and hit Otis square and solid on the blind side of his head, embedding the bent tip into his skull.

The sound of the crowbar hitting bone was sickening. Otis’s face went instantly white, then gray, then his body crumpled and hit the ground like a bag of hammers. It was terrifying to see. Like that time on television when I watched a professional downhill skier wipe out on the slope during a competition, sending her body into a lateral spin right into one of the concrete snow barriers that bordered the ramp. In the instant her spinning body was deflected back onto the slope—that very instant—you knew she was dead. You did not have to take a pulse, check her pupils, watch for her breath, or do anything else you see people do to check for signs of life. You did not have to “shake and shout” as flight attendants were instructed during annual training in the event they encounter someone who is unresponsive. You saw the life leak out of her. You knew that girl was dead.

Flo threw herself on the ground at Otis’s side. She placed his head in her lap and slapped his cheek. Shouting his name. “Wake up, you bastard!” she shrieked at him. Otis lay like a beached sea lion, motionless.

Hackman had retrieved the crowbar and stood bent at the waist, catching his breath, smiling smugly at Flo. He straightened and walked with purpose to stand above her. He raised the crowbar menacingly, and sneered, “Shut up, you stupid old . . .” but he didn’t finish, because right then I put a bullet in his brain.

I may have discarded numbers five and six of Otis’s rules for hand-to-hand combat, but not number four, the element of surprise. While Hackman had been headed back for Otis, I’d run onto the bus and found the gun he’d used previously. It must have been lost earlier in their battle, and had to be resting under one of the seats along the driver’s side, I knew, owing to the side wheelie Otis had popped on the way inside the hangar. Anything loose on the floor would have accumulated along the left side of the bus.

A look of surprise overtook the sneer on Hackman’s face as the bullet entered his forehead. A small red dot appeared over his right eye, then grew larger and seemed to bubble up and pour out down his face. He dropped where he stood, grazing Flo’s shoulder as he hit the ground. She kicked at him angrily.

I stumbled over and sat down next to her. “Give me that,” she said, and I handed her the gun. Sirens blared in the distance as she continued to stroke Otis’s forehead. I marveled at how relaxed his face seemed. The sound of sirens grew closer.

“Go,” Flo instructed me. I couldn’t just yet. “April, you just killed someone. You have to get.” I knew she was right. If I stuck around until the police arrived it could be days before I’d be free to find Malcolm, and that’s if the police believed a word I said, which they tended to be reluctant to do. There was also the problem that the only exit was through the front of the hangar, with nothing to hide behind for acres in each direction.

“Can’t you come with me?” I pleaded.

“Someone’s gotta serve as a witness and it can’t be you. You’re already wanted for one murder and here you are with another dead body.”
Not to mention the pyramid of corpses on the other side of that airplane.

She was right again, and urged me again to go, so I did. I ran toward the scaffolding, grabbed one of the lunch boxes on the way, climbed into the L-1011, and hid there, peeking out the galley window as the flashing lights and sirens got closer. When they arrived I saw an ambulance, a fire truck, and two company security vehicles.
Where are the police?
They must have been close behind. I heard the EMTs pronounce Otis dead, then load his body into the back of the ambulance. One of the security vehicles drove under the plane over to its starboard side. The galley didn’t have a porthole on that side so I could only imagine their faces when they discovered the pile of desecrated caskets.

The other security officers tried to get Flo to go with them peacefully, but she kicked and cursed and hollered that the “real police” could find her at the hospital if they wanted to talk to her. I wasn’t surprised, considering that her opinion of security guards was three notches below her opinion of police officers. (“They’re all just thugs with toy badges,” she liked to say, “no offense to Officer Ned.”) She jumped into the ambulance and perched beside the stretcher. I did not find it comforting that they didn’t sound their siren as they pulled out of the hangar and down the tarmac. No one had seen, or thought to look, inside the dark security hut where the guard lay dead. Perhaps it was because the bus had crashed into it and efforts were made to preserve the scene.

The firemen placed a call to the police, then left after the security guards assured them they’d wait for the police to arrive. I crawled through the hole in the bulkhead and concealed the opening behind me by parking a cart in front of it. I curled up in the forward cargo area, closed my eyes, and, incredibly, dozed off for a bit. Now that Hackman was dead I had a horrible ability to relax a little. I almost wished this wasn’t true, like I should have been clutching my knees to my chest and keening like an undermedicated mental patient, but I guess your psyche can only take so much stress before it either breaks or takes things in stride.

This ability to keep from disintegrating under pressure is something airlines look for in their flight attendants, by the way, owing to all the crises that happen in the air. But no matter how skilled you think you are at recognizing this quality in a person, it’s still kind of a crapshoot. Flo told me about how she once had to prepare a DC-9 for an emergency landing after the captain lost both engines after initial approach. There were two other flight attendants onboard that day, and one of them simply sat in the jumpseat the whole time, looking into a compact and applying lipstick.

“I tried to get her to get off her ass and help, but she was gone,” Flo whistled and fluttered her fingers. “She mashed that lipstick to a nub, going over her lips with it over and over, like in a daze.” If the plane had crashed she’d have made a pretty casualty but would have been useless evacuating the passengers to safety. Luckily the pilot was able to restart one of the engines on final approach. When the plane hit the runway, it caused just enough damage for the incident to be reported as a really “rough” landing, as opposed to a “crash” landing.

Flo, though, for all her blustering and crusty exterior, was exactly what any airline would hope for in a flight attendant. She’d seen everything during her decades in the air, and was surprised by little. Here is a short list of mortifications Flo has had to endure throughout her career:

1. The year Flo was hired, stewardesses were not allowed to be married, divorced, or even widowed. She told me of one coworker who, prior to her hiring, had been wed just a month when her husband was killed in Vietnam. When WorldAir found that out they canned her like a truckload of tuna.
   
2. It used to be mandatory for stewardesses to wear restrictive girdles under their uniforms. Supervisors commonly roamed the stew lounges pinching asses to ensure this requirement was being met.
   
3. Stews used to be subjected to a weight limit. This wasn’t really a problem for Flo, who was as big as a baby carrot, but for people like my mother, for example, who was 5'7", and who had a weight limit of 132 pounds when she was hired—132 pounds was the
   minimum
   on the range of healthy weight for women of her height, yet it was the maximum she could weigh without getting fired.
   
4. Stews used to be forced to retire when they turned 30.
   
5. Stews used to have to wear heels two inches or higher to perform their duties. When an employee’s duties include carrying unconscious passengers off the plane during emergencies, it was a bit stupefying why the attractiveness of her shoe ware would play a part, let alone a mandatory part.
   

So when you endure this kind of blatant objectification as a matter of daily course, evidently you become a very flexible person. When it came to the darkness of the human soul, and the dangers it caused, Flo seemed to question nothing and accept everything. “Ain’t nobody coming in on a white horse to save your ass,” she was fond of telling me, mostly while we were watching some reality-crime television program depicting the plight of some poor victim too terrified to do anything other than everything her attacker demanded. “You got to save your own ass.”

She wasn’t always this way. “I used to be a starry-eyed idiot just like any of these other girls,” she indicated the television. “What happened?” I asked. “I wised up,” she said, and left it at that. I personally think Flo turned out fine, and imagined that my father’s mother, her best friend, would have turned out just like her if she’d lived. Flo and my grandmother met in the sixties during stewardess training. That was back when WorldAir crews worked trips to exotic locations like Morocco and Borneo, before the mass implementation in the eighties of “hub-and-spoke” route systems that genericized crew layovers for most major airlines. But until then, Flo and my grandmother traveled the globe together, and the world was their personal balloon on a string.

I had a picture of them taken in 1979, standing in the huge engine well of a 747. They were each wearing one of the iconic Pucci-designed pink-and-orange uniforms from back then, which consisted of a short tunic over hot pants and white patent-leather boots. Their bleached platinum hair was styled in the poofy cascade that was popular then, with a center strand clipped at the crown like Sharon Tate in the movie posters for
Valley of the Dolls
. Their beauty was radiant. My father was four years old then, having been born just two years after stewardesses won the right to have children and keep their jobs. Imagine fighting for the right to be a parent and employed. Male stewards were not subject to the same restrictions. My grandmother died the year after the picture was taken, from hypobaropathy, or altitude sickness, while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with Flo and a group of fellow flight attendants on a ten-day layover in Tanzania.

I was startled awake by the sounds of more sirens.
How long had I been out?
Surely just minutes. I peeked out the porthole and saw that the police had arrived. “How do you turn the lights on in this place?” one shouted. The hangar was dark, thank God, otherwise I wouldn’t have felt free to peek from above like I did, even though it was a distance of about 30 feet high. At present the police were trying to work with the minimal ambient light coming from the vending machines against the wall by the security hut, along with the headlights from the police cars. Uniformed officers cordoned off the area and began positioning floodlights around the crime scene. Plainclothes homicide detectives perused the area taking notes.

A police photographer began taking Polaroid shots of the crime scene before the others had finished with the network of lights. Contrary to popular belief, cops don’t use chalk, tape, or anything else to outline the body at the scene of a homicide. It would contaminate the crime scene. Instead they rely on the photographs for reference after the body had been collected and sent to the morgue.

“Get those lights working,” the detective shouted again. A forensic technician waved him off—the body wasn’t going anywhere—and continued to unspool the anaconda of electrical cords with the objective of getting power to the portable lighting system. The photographer snapped away with the Polaroid, flooding the area with interludes of bright flashes. As the bulb illuminated the area where Hackman fell, something looked wrong.
Flash.
Darkness.
Flash. What is that?
Darkness.

Finally the technician found the outlet and plugged in the portable floodlight system. The hangar lit up like the surface of the sun, and I immediately saw clearly what had been bothering me about the crime scene. It was Hackman’s head. Or lack thereof.

Until now, LaVonda and Officer Ned had pretty much been sitting rapt during the last few hours, listening to me recount the previous day’s events, as though I was telling them scary campfire stories or something. But then LaVonda jumped to her feet and began pacing the length of the cargo catwalk. “Oh, no you did NOT.” She circled once, came back, and sat back down. “You did NOT just tell me Mr. Hackman’s head went and walked off on its own. No, no, no siree, you did NOT.” She got up again to perform the same curious pacing ritual. “I’m gettin’ the chills,” she shuddered.

For the last few hours the atmosphere had been peppered with bustling sounds coming from the hangar outside—the scaffolding removal, the change of shift of the police officers standing guard, the cleanup of the crime scene, etc.

“Sit down, LaVonda,” Officer Ned whispered hoarsely, “and be quiet.”