Flat Spin

by David Freed

  The old me might’ve suggested we go grab an umbrella drink on the beach after sharing so harrowing a near-death experience. Maybe we would’ve ended up at her place or, God forbid, mine. I was no Brad Pitt, but I was no Meatloaf, either. I still owned my own hair and all my teeth. The plumbing still worked just fine, thank you very much. I was a solid six-one and 190 pounds, a mere five pounds more than I’d been back in the day, snagging footballs for the Air Force Academy and studying Sartre, a rare Humanities major on a campus thick with geeky aeronautical engineers. But, like I said, that was the old me. I signed the entry and handed her back her logbook.

  “Well,” I said, “at least it wasn’t boring.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “At least it wasn’t boring.”

  She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. It beat a firm handshake any day of the week.

  “Take care of yourself, Logan.”

  “Don’t go changing, Charise.”

  I watched her glide into the parking lot where a tall, tanned man in his late thirties was leaning against a silver Lamborghini Diablo convertible, smoking a cigarette. He wore a dark-colored suit with a crisp white dress shirt and a rep necktie striped blue and gold, cinched way too tight. His dark hair matched the gloss of his wingtips. His eyes were cloaked behind a pair of cool guy Ray-Bans.

  A personal injury attorney. Had to be. There has to be more puke-inducing ways to earn a living than chasing ambulances, I thought to myself, though none came readily to mind.

  He flicked away his smoke as Charise approached. She showed him what I’d written in her logbook. He nodded like he almost cared, then flashed me a stony smile as he held open the passenger door for her on his $200,000 road rocket. After she was comfortably settled in, he gingerly closed the door, then hustled around to the driver’s side, glancing my way to make sure I was still watching. He hopped in, fired up the Lamborghini and roared out onto Mayfield Place, grinding the transmission as he upshifted. Charise never looked back.

  Oh, well.

  I took my time tying down the Duck. Over at the commercial terminal, a turboprop taxied in and disgorged its passengers. High overhead, a turkey vulture wheeled unsteadily in the morning air. Two black SUVs drove onto the ramp and parked beside a Dassault Falcon 7X. A large, middle-age woman in sweat pants, who looked very much like Rancho Bonita’s most famous resident, the star of a wildly successful TV talk show and publishing empire, stepped out of the lead SUV. She chatted up one of her personal assistants while others transferred a queen’s procession of designer luggage onto the jet.

  I wanted to yell, “You go, girl!” but somehow restrained myself.

  Had I been able to afford my own personal assistant, I might’ve checked in to see what was next on my busy schedule. Truth was, I needed no reminder to know that I had nothing going the rest of the day. Or the rest of the week, for that matter. I was fresh out of students, with no immediate prospect of any new ones. If I were a religious man, which I’m not, at least not in a conventional sense, I would’ve prayed that my monthly retirement check from Uncle Sugar was waiting in my mailbox when I got home. A breakfast burrito loomed large on my radar, then maybe a nap.

  The last thing on my mind was murder.

  TWO

  It was not yet nine a.m. and already eighty degrees when I walked in off the flight line that morning. Weird weather for early November if you live in North Dakota. Not so weird for the central coast of California.

  Inside Larry Kropf ’s cavernous hangar, where Marine mechanics once toiled over gull-winged Corsair fighters destined for war in the Pacific, it was dank and cool. The place smelled of grease and history. Larry was balanced on a step stool, leaning precariously into the engine compartment of a V-tail Beech. All I could see of him were his elbows and the north end of his ass crack, peeking out the back of his low-riding, navy blue work pants.

  “Somebody’s in your office,” he said without looking up. “Been there awhile.”

  “Did they bring balloons?”

  “Say again?”

  “Publishers Clearing House. I’m a Super Prize finalist. This could be it, Larry. My ship has docked at last.”

  Larry hitched up his pants and descended the stool gingerly, grimacing with each painful step while pushing his Buddy Holly glasses back up his nose with a finger thick as a Wisconsin brat. He was a wide man with furry forearms and a Grizzly Adams beard dense enough to hide small animals. His nose was flat and veined, tenderized by one too many bar fights and far too much tequila. Stretched across his cannonball belly was an oil-smeared gray T-shirt that said, “Guns Don’t Kill People, Postal Workers Do.”

  “Didn’t see no balloons,” he said, rummaging through the drawers of a rolling tool chest stationed beside the Beechcraft’s wing.

  “No balloons? Then screw ’em. I was gonna subscribe to Cat Fancy, up my chances of winning, but they can forget about it now.”

  “Good. Then maybe you can finally pay me that back rent you owe me.”

  “I’ll get you your money, Larry, as soon as I can. You know I’m good for it.”

  “Only thing I know is, you haven’t paid me a dime in two months, Logan. Not to mention that spot weld I done on your exhaust stack and that’s been, what, four months?”

  “Three months. But who’s counting, right?”

  “I got bills to pay, too, OK?” Larry said. “I got a knee needs replacing. I got a kid needs braces. Five grand to get her teeth fixed so when she turns sixteen, I can stay up all night debating whether to take a shotgun to her pimply little prom date after he brings her home four hours late, or de-ball him with a pair of channel locks.”

  “You know, Larry, I’m no psychotherapist, but I believe those would be called issues.”

  “What about the fucking money you owe me, Logan? What about those issues?” He grabbed a socket wrench from the tool cabinet and climbed back up the step stool, pissed and in pain. “You know, Logan, I used to think you were a funny guy. You obviously think you’re a funny guy. But your bullshit’s getting pretty goddamn old. You’re a grown-ass man. Stiffing honest people. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  I was. And then some. If I’d had the dough, I would’ve paid him every penny I owed him right then and there. But what little I had in the bank was barely enough to cover next month’s rent on my apartment, let alone the rent I owed Larry for the cramped, converted storage room I sublet from him in his hangar and called a flight school. The Ruptured Duck, my four-seat 172 with its unreliable radios, hail-dimpled wings, and faded orange, yellow and white color scheme that practically screamed 1973, the year the plane came off Cessna’s Wichita assembly line, was the only inanimate object I owned of any value, and I’d already borrowed against it—twice.

  “Look, I’ve got a government pension check coming in,” I said. “We’re talking $920. I’ll give you half as soon as I get it.”

  “Sure you will.” He shook his head with disgust and disappeared once more into the Beech’s engine compartment. “You need to find yourself a job, Logan, a real job, cuz this flight instructor gig obviously ain’t working out too good for you.”

  What can you say to the truth? I said nothing.

  “I hear they’re hiring over at Sears,” Larry said.

  “They’re always hiring over at Sears,” I said.

  A banner the size of a toboggan hung from the wall above my desk. In red, white and blue letters, it said, “Above the Clouds Aviation—Flight Training, Whale Watching and Aerial Charters.” I’d paid a graphic artist sixty-nine bucks to design and print it out, splurging for three colors instead of two. The artist offered to throw in some smiling cartoon whales jumping out of the water and cute little psychedelic-colored biplanes zipping through rainbows and around cotton ball clouds, but I figured the FAA would take one look at all of that extraneous garbage, assume I was smoking crack—like the artist—and revoke my pilot’s license. I stuck with the basics.

  A woman was standing below the ba
nner, flipping through my “Babes and Bombers” wall calendar, smirking at all the photos of hot chicks posing with hot warbirds. The calendar had been a birthday gift from Larry, back when I could still afford to make the rent, before the economy took a dump and prospective student pilots disappeared like shadows from a passing cloud. She looked up as I entered.

  “I know you,” she said with a cloying smile.

  Some faint new lines around the eyes. A slight softening under the jaw. Not bad for six years gone by. She wore a sleeveless gray silk pantsuit and a black lace camisole that showed more cleavage than I really needed to see. Her feet were clad in patent leather high heels with Wicked Witch of the West toes. A Kate Spade satchel hung from her right shoulder. Her hair was a shade redder than when I last saw her, and shorter. She wore a gold wedding band. No other jewelry. No makeup. She needed none. My ex-wife, Savannah Carlisle, was still every inch the heartbreaker I unfortunately remembered all too well.

  “The devil must be wearing thermal underwear,” I said.

  Her smile faded. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Outside your attorney’s office. That morning we signed the papers.”

  “I said I’d see you again when hell froze over. I was upset that day, Logan. I’m sure you could understand, under the circumstances.”

  Her eyes were liquid mahogany, her gaze as penetrating as ever. I wondered if she could hear my heart slamming around under my polo shirt.

  “You cut your hair,” I said.

  “And you didn’t.”

  She approached me slowly, shoulders back, accentuating her breasts, maintaining eye contact while biting her lower lip—classic signals of carnal interest. I was hoping she was going to wrap her toned arms around my waist and admit how much she’d missed me, what a terrible mistake she’d made by leaving. The biggest mistake of her life. But as she drew closer, I could see that her pupils were barely dilated.

  She reached out and gave my beard a playful tug.

  “Very Grizzly Adams,” Savannah said. “I think I like it.”

  “Whew. What a relief. The first thing I said to myself when I grew it was, ‘Gee, I wonder what my insignificant other would think?’”

  “Still the same sarcastic jerk. Some things never change, do they, Logan?”

  I couldn’t decide if I wanted to make love to her or crush her exquisite throat with my hands. A man doesn’t lose so rare a woman as Savannah Carlisle without craving and loathing her the rest of his life.

  “Still modeling?” I asked, doing my best to keep things civil.

  “Nobody wants to see a forty-two-year-old woman walk the runway, not in a string bikini, anyway. Actually, I’m doing a fair amount of counseling these days.” She dug a business card out of her bag and handed it to me. In Ye Olde English script it said, “Savannah Echevarria. Life Coach.”

  “That’s rich. You, of all people, telling people how to manage their lives.”

  “You always did enjoy putting me down, didn’t you?”

  I would’ve apologized but I was in no mood. I parked myself behind my desk and shuffled through a stack of outdated airworthiness directives like it was important work.

  “So,” Savannah said, glancing around, “seems like you’re doing well.”

  “Me? Top of the heap. Couldn’t be better.”

  I was amazed my nose didn’t go Pinocchio on me. All she needed to do was take one look around my stuffy, windowless “flight academy” to see that things could’ve been way better: A card table littered with a dozen dog-eared Jeppeson flight manuals. A cheap plastic fan and a couple of green plastic lawn chairs from Kmart. A decrepit, Vietnam-era metal desk and an Army surplus filing cabinet, olive drab. A computer so old, I had to just about shovel coal into it to make it work. I resented the hell out of her showing up, invading my space, inviting herself back into my world without fair warning. But it was my own fault. I’d left the door unlocked. In the sun-kissed, seaside enclave of Rancho Bonita, with its red tile roofs and Italian climate and verdant hills overlooking the Pacific—“California’s Monaco” as the city’s moneyed minions like to call it—most everybody leaves their doors unlocked. At least they claim to. Admitting otherwise would be to concede that Rancho Bonita, like Los Angeles—its bloated, apocalyptic neighbor 120 miles down the coast—has a crime problem. Heaven forbid anything should undermine property values in paradise.

  “So,” Savannah said, “what made you decide to grow out your beard?”

  “Just trying to walk a different path, that’s all.”

  “A different path. Sounds vaguely Buddhist.”

  “I dabble.”

  “Are you serious? Cordell Logan, a Buddhist?”

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve gone vegetarian, too.”

  Another shrug.

  “A vegetarian. I don’t believe it,” Savannah said. “What happened to Mr. Meat and Potatoes?”

  “You’d be amazed,” I said, “what they can do with mock duck these days.”

  Let me be honest here. I struggle with the vegetarian thing. I mean, sometimes, a dude just has to have a chile verde burrito. But I wasn’t about to admit that to a woman who’d walked out on me. I was the new and improved Cordell Logan. A better man without her. The man she could no longer have. That’s what I wanted her to believe, anyway, even if it wasn’t close to being in the same hemisphere as true.

  “Definitely not the man I married,” Savannah said.

  “Not the one you dumped, either.”

  “I didn’t dump you, Logan. You filed on me.”

  “Yeah, after you banged my boss.”

  Her eyes flashed fire. “Whatever I did, I did long after you forgot what the word faithful meant.”

  “You make it sound like I was some kind of womanizer.”

  “Did you or did you not sleep with that flight attendant?”

  “If you’ll recall, Savannah, we were separated at the time.”

  “Did you or did you not sleep with her? Yes or no, Logan?”

  “I was drunk. I told you, she meant nothing to me.”

  “Well, she sure as hell meant something to me.”

  “Look, what I did was wrong. I admitted that then, I admit it now. But I didn’t leave you, Savannah. I wasn’t looking for a way out. You were.”

  She sank into one of my Kmart lawn chairs without asking if I minded and ran a hand through her hair.

  “I didn’t come here to open old wounds,” she said, sighing.

  “Old wounds? I don’t see you for six years. Not a phone call. Not a Christmas card. Then you show up unannounced and expect us to have a friendly little chat? Catch up on old times?” I got up from my desk and stuffed some papers into the filing cabinet. “What the hell did you come for anyway, Savannah? Because, as I’m sure you can appreciate, being a life coach and all, I really do have a life to get back to here.”

  “Arlo’s gone.”

  “And you expect me to give a shit? The guy ran out on his first wife, Savannah. What makes you think he wouldn’t run out on you someday?”

  “I meant, he’s dead.”

  Her words hung in the air like the rumble of distant artillery fire.

  “Dead . . . as in died?”

  She stared at her shoes. “Last month. I wasn’t sure if you’d heard or not.”

  Arlo Echevarria. My old boss. The man she’d dumped me for. Dead. I wanted to punch my fist in the air. I wanted to dance like Snoopy come suppertime. I wanted to shout that the Buddha was right, that Karma is real! I looked back at my ex-wife from my make-believe paperwork, hoping the expression on my face didn’t betray the sudden, unbridled joy I felt inside, and said instead, as evenly as I could, “What happened?”

  “Somebody came to his door dressed like a pizza delivery driver and shot him.”

  My head was spinning. “You said his door.”

  “We moved to LA last year, after Arlo retired. My father helped us buy a place in the hills, above Sunset, but Ar
lo moved out after a couple months. He was just . . . He’d changed. We fought a lot. He was renting a little house up in Northridge. We were . . .” Savannah drew a breath and let it out slowly, “separated.”

  She unfolded a newspaper clipping from the Los Angeles Times and laid it on my desk. I snatched it up and skimmed it. A paid obituary. It was full of lies and half-truths.

  “Who wrote this?”

  “I did.”

  She waited for me to say something comforting. I slid the clipping back to her across the desk and picked at a splinter in my thumb.

  “Christ, Logan, you act like it was nothing. Did you hear what I said? Arlo was murdered.”

  “Sorry for your loss.”

  She gave me a hard look and made a little huffing sound through her nose and mouth, like she couldn’t believe anyone could be so callous, let alone a man to whom she’d once given herself so freely.

  “You know, I’d forgotten what a complete bastard you can be.” Her chin quivered. Then she began to sob.

  The air inside my office started to feel heavy. I turned the table fan on low, watching it oscillate back and forth, the blades riffling the pages of my wall calendar, while she wept. I thought about all the pain she’d heaped upon me and how hard I’d tried to drink myself off the planet after we’d divorced. I had long ago accepted the reality that the wounds she’d inflicted having left me for Echevarria would fester forever. And yet, bitter as I still was, I actually found myself feeling sorry for her as she sat there in obvious pain. Which made me feel even more bitter.

  I yanked open the top drawer of my desk. Inside was a thick stack of brown paper napkins from Taco Bell. How the hell can any corporation possibly turn a profit when half the free world steals its napkins by the fistful? I backhanded her one.