We Will Be Crashing Shortly (16 page)

This time when the lid was pried open and fell to the side, a cloud of fine dust puffed free from the contents, causing the four of us to cough and wave to clear the air in front of our faces. Inside was an official body bag, the black zip-up kind used to transport murder victims from the scenes of crimes and such. Otis reached in and pulled the zipper open. Inside was a curious sight. At a cursory glance I saw that it was a body, all right, but one that looked to have been dead for a long time. Not only that, but it looked to have been embalmed as well, and buried in a formal suit.

“Oh, Christ,” Otis gasped. I think this was the first time I’d ever seen him overcome. “April, uh, maybe you should stand over there,” he directed me away from the casket.

“Are you kidding?” I was incredulous. “After what I’d been through? I’ve got actual human gore still speckled on my cargo pants. Believe me, I can handle this.” But Otis had whispered something to Officer Ned, and they both turned toward me, shoulder to shoulder, blocking me from further viewing the contents of the casket. LaVonda looked confused and frightened. She held Captain Beefheart to her chest. I tried to push past the two men. “C’mon, let me see,” I began to get angry. The two men put their arms around me in an embrace, and refused to let me through. My intuition screamed at me.
Jacksonville
, it said. I smacked the two of them with my fists, tears of anger forming in my eyes.
Jacksonville
.

Here’s the thing about intuition; people think it’s like a sixth sense or something, like it comes out of nowhere. But it doesn’t. Actually, intuition is based on factors that your brain registers but your consciousness hasn’t had the time to wrap itself around. To act on your intuition, for example, is to act on this base level of awareness without waiting to validate it consciously. Like once a flight attendant named Anna told me of the time a man asked her for directions. Simple, right? He called out to her from across the street, where he stood holding a map in between two parked cars, a Volkswagen and a van. Anna was on the phone talking to her mother at the time, whom she told to hang on because she was about to walk over and give this here man a hand. That’s what flight attendants do, they help people. On the one hand they are trained with an amazing amount of survival skills, but on the other they are also trained to ignore their intuition when it comes to people, lest that intuition interfere with the airline’s need for them to behave as handmaiden to the general populace.

Anyway, Anna’s mom was a flight attendant as well, but a senior one who had long ago shed the industry’s mandate and re-sharpened her intuition. She told Anna, right into her ear, “Don’t go near that man. Just keep walking, but first get a good look at him and tell me the license number of the van.”

“How do you know there’s a van?”

How
did
Anna’s mother know there was a van? Intuition, that’s how. Anna’s mother had been around long enough to have it floating around in the back of her head how predators operate, and one of the ways predators operate is to ask a girl for help. It was kind of genius, really, because who’d be afraid of someone needing help? The van part, well, it was a natural leap. Almost all serial killers had vans on account of how they made excellent combo kidnap/murder workshops on wheels.

A day later a young woman from a few neighborhoods away disappeared. Anna and her mother called the tip line and their subsequent interview with the police helped apprehend the culprit. Unfortunately the girl was found dead. See, she should not have ignored her intuition.

Jacksonville
, my intuition screamed at me.

First, why would Otis want to keep me from seeing the contents of the casket? Especially since I’d gotten a glance and seen it wasn’t Malcolm in there? Why would Otis be so concerned for my feelings? Especially when he had more confidence in my ability to withstand trauma than I did myself? Why treat me with kid gloves all of a sudden?

I knew the answer. “Really, you two, I can handle it.” My voice was calm but my heart jumped around inside my ribs. Officer Ned and Otis looked at each other with uncertainty. “I swear, I’ll be all right,” I assured them. Silently and reluctantly, the two men stepped aside and allowed me through.

Despite my assurances, as I came closer to the casket, I felt more tears begin to flow. Inside the crate—hands peacefully placed across his chest, funeral makeup now garish against the sunken and dried flesh on his skull, the small rose I had placed under his fingers now aged into a perfect seashell of dried leaves—was my sweet and beloved grandfather Roy Coleman.

Jacksonville was the nearest major airport to St. Augustine, Florida, where until recently he’d been buried next to my grandmother in the peaceful and scenic grounds of Tolomato Cemetery. He died nearly five years ago in his garage while restoring a vintage Ford Rambler. The jack had collapsed, which caused the car to fall on top of him and crush his chest. I remember that when my mother got the news, she cried as hard as she did when my father died. I sat for hours at her feet that day, hugging her legs, while Ash admonished us cruelly. “Get up,” he shouted. “Get over it. The guy was old anyway.”

A tag on the zipper of my grandfather’s body bag matched one clipped to a band on his wrist. They indicated that the remains were to be delivered to the forensic department of the Fulton County coroner’s lab.

“That’s your grandfather?” LaVonda asked. Otis had updated her as I gazed at the casket. “You poor child. Here, take Beefy Cakes.” She handed me the dog and I buried my face in his sweet fur. “What on earth is your poor dead granddaddy doing on this plane?”

I had a feeling it had something to do with the federal subpoena to exhume his remains in order to prove my paternal lineage. I discussed this with the other three, taking care to sound composed since they were all staring at me like I was two seconds from collapsing into a laundry pile saturated with sobs. Officer Ned supported my theory, explaining that the body would have been shipped to Atlanta because the chain of custody required by the subpoena specified the DNA sample to be extracted by the jurisdiction requesting the sample.

“Yeah, that explains why he was in ATL,” Otis said, “but why is he here, on this plane? He should have been picked up from the cargo area last night.”

Yes, why was he on this plane? To Grand Cayman. The four of us thought deeply for a minute. My intuition started squawking again.
That bastard
, it said. I didn’t know why or even how, but I knew Ash Manning had something to do with this.

Otis broke the silence. “Let’s close him back up for now.” The second he replaced the lid, we heard the aircraft rumble to life around us.

“There’s the engines!” Otis, the true machine enthusiast, perked up. “Where’re we headed?”

We informed him of the flight plan to Grand Cayman. He rubbed his hands together and grinned. “The Caribbean, nice.”

“I see it differently,” I said. I’d been there with Flo a few times. She had a friend who worked the beach bar at the Marriott and got us discounted rooms and free cocktails (for Flo, anyway; all I drank was ginger ale). “Who could ask for more in a vacation?” she said. Actually, I could. The island was hardly more than a haven for big conglomerate banks, designer shops, and staggeringly expensive restaurants that catered to pale Western executives on expense accounts. There was no local flavor like you’d find in other Caribbean islands. For example, Jamaica had an amazing culture in comparison. Even Cancún, a complete armpit taken over by bad frat bars and 20,000 renditions of the exact same T-shirt shop, offered a more colorful atmosphere than Grand Cayman. To me, the island was as fun and welcoming as an expensive toilet. The average Forbes Global 2000 company accountant would probably differ with me, though, since the island had become a magnet for hefty offshore bank accounts ever since Switzerland ceased to be an outlet in that regard. I knew these things from my brief stint on the WorldAir board. It was amazing what files the officials let me look at when they themselves had no idea what they contained.

I felt the portable jet stairs nudge the aircraft. The ramp worker maneuvered them into place at the right-front door above us. We all hushed as we heard the aircraft door open and the footsteps of the pilots, cabin crew, and smattering of company wonks walk onboard.

Officer Ned asked to see the pairing summary again and I handed it to him. “This plane is going to be practically empty,” he observed. Yes; I explained to him about how the plane had been purchased by Peacock Airways and the transfer was set to occur at GCM airport. “I’m going up there to talk to the pilots, then.” He stepped toward the elevators. Out of habit, I moved to stop him by placing my hand on his arm. I had an inherent distrust of authority while Officer Ned, being an authority figure whose father was an authority figure, had the opposite sentiment. Our views often clashed because of this, which since we’ve known each other has helped keep us from being too stagnant in our views. Still, I didn’t want him to just barge on upstairs without a plan.

He turned to me. “What?” he asked. I was having a hard time voicing my apprehension. “We have to tell the pilots about this.”

“Why do we have to tell anyone just yet?” I countered. No one knew we were onboard. It was a perfect situation if you asked me. “Please . . .” I began, but he gently pulled his arm from my grip and turned back toward the elevators.

“April, we have to send someone to check on Flo, for one thing,” he reminded me.

Otis straightened with sudden attentiveness. “What about Flo?” he asked. “What happened to Flo?”

LaVonda filled him in on the coded distress signal we received from Flo during our cellphone conversation with her earlier, as well as the
MacGyver
reference. “Season four, episode eleven,” she said, nodding solemnly.

At that Otis headed for the elevators himself. “Now where are you going?” I asked. He didn’t answer, as just then there was loud clamoring that signaled the elevators were coming to life. LaVonda, now accustomed to concealing herself, rushed to the jumpseat area so she’d be out of the sight line of the elevator window. Otis and I ducked behind the caskets while Officer Ned, worrisomely, stood his ground before the elevator door so that whoever opened it would encounter him before anything else.

At just 16 inches wide, the elevators on an L-1011 are little more than dumbwaiters, really. They can accommodate just one meal cart or two people front-to-back at a time. Either/or, not both. To operate from the inside, two toggle switches on each side of the interior need to be pressed simultaneously, making it impossible to control it with just one hand. This design was intentional, as a legacy of earlier-model, differently designed L-1011s had a propensity for people to get their limbs ripped off. As a mechanic, Uncle Otis was especially knowledgeable about these types of injuries to cabin crew on the aircraft, as he was often dispatched to create adjustments to the machinery to circumvent similar accidents in the future. Otis himself was further testimony that air travel is just a giant ongoing human experiment. Accidents like the Tenerife disaster always result in studies that identify glitches in the system that can be corrected to make flying safer. In that instance, the miscommunication between air traffic control and the KLM pilot centered around the phrase “stand by for takeoff,” which was misunderstood as “cleared for takeoff,” to horrific consequence. Today, the universal rule during taxi is that the word “takeoff” cannot be spoken in the cockpit during taxi unless it’s to inform and confirm that the aircraft is cleared for the runway.

On my mother’s refrigerator, she kept a list Otis had made for her benefit, detailing his “top six” most common workplace injuries that occur inside an aircraft cabin. Here’s the list:

1. Loss of Limb.
   In 1976, a stewardess got her hand cut off in the service elevator of an L-1011 when it got stuck between the fuselage and the downward-traveling elevator.
   
2. Loss of Eye.
   Example: One Uncle Otis Blodgett. ’Nuff said.
   
3. Third-Degree Burn.
   Until the mid-nineties, when airlines banned inflight smoking, flight attendants commonly ignited like Roman candles thanks to the combination of alcohol, lit cigarettes, and, worst of all, the synthetic fibers that made up their uniforms. (“You might as well wear clothes made out of exploding aerosol cans,” Otis said.)
   
4. Stab Wound.
   And I don’t even mean the kind created by knives. An aircraft in the sky is far from a stable environment. Accidental stabbings by Bic pen, umbrella, broken cane, chopsticks, and the like are common.
   
5. Head Injury.
   Those flying soda cans pack a punch once the plane hits turbulence.
   
6. Broken Leg.
   Just make sure the beverage cart is secured during takeoff. And if it’s not, don’t stick your leg in the aisle to stop it from careening toward the passengers. It weighs 700 pounds. (Flo added this one.)
   

Every time I heard the grinding of the L-1011 elevator gears, I thought of this list. As the elevator descended I could see a set of legs, first. They were clad in the slacks option of the WorldAir flight attendant uniform. This must be one of the cabin crew members, I realized. Even though the flight was being ferried at near-zero passenger capacity, there would still need to be at least two flight attendants to man the front doors. These were the kinds of trips the FAs at WorldAir loved, because they were paid the same for ferry flights as they were for working a plane full of whiney passengers. Ferry flights tended to come available at the last minute, and if you were quick at the employee interface, you could pluck one up for extra time. And if you were lucky you’d get a captain who let you fly the plane, too. Totally against the law, but it happened.

The clamoring stopped once the elevator had fully descended. Officer Ned obstructed my view of inside the car as he stood between me and the elevator. Then, curiously, he held out his arms and let out a hearty laugh. “Oh, my God,” he said, his voice thickening with relief, “am I glad to see you.”