Flat Spin

by David Freed

  “Hess? Hess was a pitseleh,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “Hermann Goering, now there was a fascist who had starting fullback written all over him.” Gingerly, she lowered her arthritic back into a chair and exhaled, like air escaping a tire. “I’m making a nice brisket Monday night. With those green beans in the cream sauce you like—and, yes, I realize dairy with meat violates every kosher law in the book, but so does bacon and I think it goes without saying where we all stand on bacon, am I right? Anyway, you coming, yes or no? Be there or be square.”

  “Brisket? Green beans in cream sauce? Of course, I’m coming.”

  She double-clicked her dentures approvingly.

  I’d signed the lease the previous summer after relocating to Rancho Bonita, where I’d vacationed one spring break in college and had wanted to live ever since. Every Monday night during football season, Mrs. Schmulowitz cooked me dinner. We’d sit together on a blue mohair sofa more shabby than chic, eating off of metal TV trays and watching the game on the world’s only still-functioning black and white console television. Cocooned in a cabinet of real mahogany which she dusted every day, it was a twenty-one-inch Magnavox that took ten minutes to warm up and hummed like a transmission tower, drowning out the announcers. But Mrs. Schmulowitz never seemed to mind. She knew more about offense and defense then any announcer who ever lived. It was in her blood. Her uncle was Sid Luckman, the late great Jewish quarterback. Accordingly, Monday nights were spent with Mrs. Schmulowitz offering her own expert play-by-play commentary, when she was not speculating aloud as to whether certain players were members of her tribe based on the names stitched on the backs of their jerseys.

  “What does it matter if they’re Jewish,” I’d say, “as long as they can play?”

  “What does it matter? I’ll tell you why it matters!” she’d respond, her voice rising with indignation. “It matters because the goyim of this world need to know that Jews can do more than balance the books and win Nobel prizes!”

  Mrs. Schmulowitz sipped her iced tea. “So, no flying this afternoon?”

  “Too hot to fly,” I said, hoping I sounded convincing.

  The old lady rubbed her eye, an unconscious gesture that suggested she doubted I was telling the truth. “You wanna talk hot? I’ll tell you hot. Back in Brooklyn, we used to pour boiling coffee in our laps, just to cool off.”

  “Somehow, I doubt that, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

  “Believe what you want, bubby. My third husband, he’d believe anything. Nothing but trouble, that man.”

  In the oak tree above us, Kiddiot uncurled his tongue like a roll of bubblegum and yawned.

  “Listen, Bubeleh, tell me it’s none of my business, but some kid came by today looking for you. Said he was from a collection agency. Tall, black, muscles out to here. I told him for his own good to get lost before I had my way with him.”

  “I’m having a few minor cash flow issues. Nothing to worry about. Business’ll pick up.”

  Mrs. Schmulowitz reached over and patted my hand. “Of course it will. But, listen, if there’s anything I can do between then and now, slip you a few bucks to tide you over, whatever, you give me the word, OK? Happy to help. And don’t you worry none. I got more money than I know what to do with. My first husband, he saw to that, may he rest in peace.”

  I thanked her for her generosity and assured her that I was getting along just fine. Taking a handout from my landlady would have been about as low as I could go. I wasn’t there. Yet.

  Kiddiot and I were napping on the hammock when my cell phone rang an hour later. He jumped off my chest and onto the grass while I groggily fished the phone out of my pants pocket. I was hoping it might be a new student or possibly a whale watching charter. Anything to generate a little income. It wasn’t.

  “My hot water heater just took a dump,” Larry Kropf up at the airport said, “but I can’t call a plumber. Wanna know why?”

  “Well, your telephone’s working, Larry, so I know that’s not the reason.”

  “I can’t call a plumber, smart ass, because I can’t afford a plumber. The wife wants to run a load of clothes. The kid wants to take a shower. But they can’t do either one because I got no hot water! So now I gotta replace the fucking heater myself and go to the plumbing supply place and buy all the fittings at least three times because nobody in the history of mankind has ever done a plumbing project without first getting the wrong parts at least twice. Plus, I gotta take time off from making money so I can spend money I ain’t got! You know what I’m getting at here, Logan?”

  “That retirement check’s coming in any day, Larry, I promise.”

  “When’re you gonna pay me what you owe me?”

  “Soon as I can.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means have a little faith, Larry.”

  “Faith don’t put food on the goddamn table!”

  “Tell it to the Pope. You should see that guy’s table.”

  “Sell the Duck.”

  “I sell my airplane, I’m out of business.”

  “You’re out of business now! You got no students, Logan!”

  I told him that running a flight school is a lot like fishing. Some days they’re biting, some days they’re not. Things could turn around for me tomorrow, I said. You just never know.

  There was silence on the other end for a couple of seconds. Then Larry said, with more resignation than rage, “You got two weeks. Either you pay me what you owe me, in full, or you’re out. You don’t pack your shit up on your own, I call the sheriff and he packs it for you. I got other people interested in the space, Logan. Nothing personal. It’s business. You understand.”

  “Yeah. I understand.”

  The line went dead.

  The left side of my face burned from too much sun. The back of my head throbbed from too much Larry. For a moment, I considered taking Mrs. Schmulowitz up on her offer of a loan, just to tide me over. But the notion of it made my stomach spasm. I was forty-three, a divorced, dime-a-dozen flight instructor with a tired airplane and no students, sharing a converted garage with a cat that barely gave me the time of day. My life was in a flat spin.

  I thought about calling around to some of my old superiors in the intelligence community. Maybe one of them might know of a job somewhere. After all, I’d left Alpha on good terms. Passed my psych evaluation on the way out with flying colors. My superior officers couldn’t believe that anyone would ever willingly leave so coveted an assignment. I gave them some clichéd explanation about needing new challenges. In my resignation letter, I even managed to squeeze in a quote by Anaïs Nin that I remembered from my Academy days: “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore.” But the reality was, after a decade of covert ops, I was tired of all the secrecy and all the blood. I knew it was time to hang it up when I finally ran out of euphemisms to describe death in my after-action reports. You can write that the target was “voided” or “neutralized” only so many times before the words begin to lose their potency. Yet all of that only partly explained why I had wanted to move on. The demise of my marriage to Savannah also factored into my decision to quit. Echevarria, arguably my closest friend in Alpha, had stolen her from me while my fellow go-to guys did little more than watch. There’s an old maxim among warriors: “Trust me with your life, never with your money or your wife.” It was my fault, my brothers-in-arms reminded me: I’d been stupid enough to trust one of them.

  I left Alpha angry. Six years later, I was still angry. But anger, like faith, as Larry reminded me, doesn’t put chow on the table. His threat to kick me out of his hangar reinforced what should have been glaringly apparent to me long before: I needed a steady job.

  I decided to head inside despite the heat and check the classifieds on Craigslist. I rolled out of the hammock and was bending down to strap on my sandals when my phone rang again.

  FOUR

  Gil Carlisle, my former father-in-law, had a West Texas drawl smooth enough you wan
ted to rub your cheek on it. He never raised his voice. He never had to. A self-made oil tycoon who had more money in the bank than some Third World countries, he almost always got what he wanted on his deceptive country-boy charm alone. And on those rare occasions when charm didn’t do the trick, his platoon of $1,000-an-hour lawyers usually did.

  “Bet you’re wondering why I’m calling,” Carlisle said over the phone.

  “I know why you’re calling, Gil.”

  Savannah had tried to get me to go to the police, to tell them what I knew about the real Arlo Echevarria. I knew when I said no she’d likely go sobbing to her daddy. Now daddy was calling, the master of silky persuasion, bent on convincing me to do what his daughter could not.

  “You heard about Arlo, I take it?” he said.

  “Savannah told me.”

  “A damn shame is what it is. I’ll tell you what, Cordell, sometimes I just don’t know what this world is coming to. I truly don’t.”

  “It came to that a long time ago, Gil.”

  “Well, I suppose there’s some truth to that, son.”

  The last time Gil Carlisle and I had spoken was when Savannah and I were lurching through the sudden death of our divorce. He’d called from his Lear jet en route to a business meeting somewhere in Europe to let me know how truly disappointed he was that things hadn’t worked out between his daughter and me, and how he always genuinely appreciated having me as a son-in-law, even if he never did get around to inviting me to go dove hunting with him on his 3,000-acre spread outside Lubbock, what with his busy schedule and mine. Then he warned me, sweet as honey glaze on a side of mesquite barbequed beef, that if I ever tried to claim as community property so much as one thin dime of Savannah’s trust fund, I’d find my ass in court faster than a three-legged sheep chased by a pack of coyotes. I told him I didn’t give a shit about Savannah’s money. He hung up without saying another word.

  And now, here we were, years later, talking like all of it was water under the bridge.

  “My little girl’s hurtin’, Cordell,” he said. “Nothing worse on this earth than for a father to see his baby girl in pain. Rips your guts up. You’ll do anything to stop that kinda pain. I mean, anything.”

  Mrs. Schmulowitz emerged from her house lugging a galvanized watering can and began dousing the pots of pink geraniums that lined her back porch. I shifted the phone to my other ear and kept an eye on her to make sure she didn’t fall off the top step.

  “I’d appreciate you talking to the police, telling ’em what you know,” Carlisle said.

  “There’s nothing I can tell them they don’t already know, Gil.”

  “Savannah tells me otherwise.”

  “Savannah’s mistaken.”

  There was a pause. Then Carlisle said, “Listen, Cordell, if I’ve learned one thing thirty years rootin’ around out in the patch, making hole, it’s that there’s never been a sticky situation that couldn’t be unstuck. How much we talkin’ ’bout here?”

  “Are you offering me a bribe, Gil?”

  “I’m trying to pay you for your valuable time, you stubborn donkey, is what I’m trying to do! Hell, I’ll have the money wired direct to your bank account if that’s what you want. All you gotta do is go talk to the police. An hour out of your day. That’s it. Don’t sound too sticky to me now, does it?”

  “I’m not interested in your money, Gil.”

  “Well, then hell, hoss,” he laughed, “you’re the only one.”

  I was certain he’d checked out my credit report before calling. He knew damn well I was interested in his money. Given my financial straits, I was interested in just about anybody’s money. With the possible exception of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s.

  “OK, here’s the deal,” Carlisle said, “I’m flying out to El Molino tonight for a business meeting. I’d sure like it if you could find the time to come on up a spell. We could do breakfast, pow-wow this thing. There’s a little café right there at the airport. Food’s real tasty. Ate there awhile back.”

  “I’m not much of a breakfast eater,” I said.

  “All right. Lunch, then.”

  “It’s a long way to go for lunch, Gil.”

  “Not for a crackerjack pilot who’s got his own airplane.”

  My head ran through everything I had to do tomorrow: Get up. Look for a job without success. Sink deeper into depression.

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “I’m pretty booked tomorrow.”

  “Well, I don’t doubt it, a man of your many talents. Look, Cordell, I’m just gonna cut right to the chase. How does twentyfive grand sound? You fly up to El Molino in that little ol’ plane of yours, enjoy a nice meal on yours truly, you’re back home come siesta time. No strings attached.”

  Twenty-five grand. With no strings attached. I could pay off Larry and still have enough left over to cover the engine overhaul on the Duck.

  “C’mon, hoss,” Gil Carlisle said, his voice as silky as a Texas waltz, “you got nothin’ to lose. What do you say?”

  I said, “I’ll see you around eleven-thirty.”

  I rolled out of bed early the next morning and straight into my patented, ten-minute exercise routine. Push-ups, reverse push-ups, crunches, lower back spasms, quit. Endorphin rush is a cruel hoax. Anyone who’s ever played contact sports at the collegiate level can attest to that in later life. Aerobic exertion is nothing more than pain heaped atop pain. The only relief comes when you’re finally done with abusing your musculoskeletal for the day. Which I more than was.

  I stood up and stretched my aching lumbar. A lizard skittered past me and disappeared under the deco pink Frigidaire that came with the apartment. Kiddiot liked bringing in lizards to play with them. The only problem was, after awhile, he’d get bored and go back outside to take a nap or a sunbath, while his reptilian friends invariably found their way under the refrigerator. I used to pull the fridge out from the wall to set them free. But they didn’t want freedom. They would go scurrying from under the refrigerator to under the matching pink stove to die there. Or under the bed to die there. Or under my pressboard, ready-to-assemble Ikea nightstand or dresser. Or under the purple Naugahyde couch that Mrs. Schmulowitz picked up at a police auction (“Nobody else bid on it! Can you believe that?”). Sometimes, the lizards Kiddiot invited in even managed to die behind the molded, one-piece plastic shower stall in my “bathroom,” which was really nothing more than a corner of the garage cordoned off by two flimsy stud walls covered with sheetrock. To make the garage feel bigger, Mrs. Schmulowitz had the entire place painted hospital ship white. To make it feel more homey, she’d put down braided rugs. Over the apartment’s lone window, which afforded a picturesque view of the alley, she’d hung frilly gingham curtains, more suited to a little girl’s room. The cumulative effect did little to obscure the fact that the place was still a garage. But what the hell. It kept the rain off my head on those rare occasions when it rained in Rancho Bonita. Plus, at $750 a month, including utilities and high-speed internet service for my laptop, it was a relative steal by local standards. Throw in the free brisket dinner every Monday night during football season, and I had no complaints.

  After showering and shaving, I pulled on a pair of Levi’s and laced up my good Nikes. Hanging next to the stove in the freestanding metal locker that served as my closet were a half-dozen clean shirts. I picked a short-sleeve blue polo. Silk-screened on the breast was the “Above the Clouds Flight Academy” logo, and the silhouette of a high-wing Cessna. Some people said the plane looked like it was flying toward the sunset. Others said it was flying toward a sunrise. It all depended on whether you were a glass halffull or half-empty kind of person, I suppose. Stitched in cursive script below the airplane logo was the self-anointed title, “Chief Flight Instructor.” Talk about delusions of grandeur.

  My review of job listings on Craigslist the night before had yielded no viable prospects. I walked through the backyard, down along the left side of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s house, through the gate of her picket fence, an
d fetched the morning paper from her lawn to review what few help wanted ads there were—a last-ditch attempt to hopefully find a job opportunity that would give me the legitimate excuse not to fly up to El Molino and accept a handout from my former father-in-law.

  City of Rancho Bonita seeks Animal Control Officer. Hell, I can’t even control an intellectually challenged cat. How could I possibly be expected to arm wrestle possums?

  Grassroots Environmental group looking for organizers to help save endangered forests. Yeah, right. Let’s cut down a bunch of trees and grind them into newsprint so we can get the word out about saving the ecosystem.

  Couple seeking private chef to prepare fresh, organic meals 3 to 5 nights per week. Forget it. I’m a cook whose idea of an oven timer is a smoke detector.

  After three minutes of scanning the want ads, I concluded that there were no jobs to be found in the greater Rancho Bonita area that required my skills, such as they were. I refolded the newspaper, quietly propped it against Mrs. Schmulowitz’s door, and walked back to the garage.

  Kiddiot was lounging out on top of the pink refrigerator like the Great Sphinx of Giza. The tip of his tail swayed back and forth, over the edge of the freezer. His eyes were closed, but I knew he was only pretending to be asleep, the way cats do.

  I washed the day-old “Savory Turkey Platter” out of his bowl, of which he hadn’t eaten a bite, and replaced it with a fresh can of “Tender Ocean Whitefish and Tuna in Delectable Juices.” I set the food bowl down on the floor near the kitchen sink and waited for him to make his move. He got up, took his time stretching, and hopped onto the sink, then down, onto the floor. He approached his food bowl warily, like it was hiding an improvised explosive device. He sniffed the bowl from a foot away, flicked his tail a couple of times, leaped back on top of the counter, then up onto the refrigerator.

  A wise man said once that the purpose of cats is to remind man that not everything in life has a purpose. He was wrong, at least so far as Kiddiot was concerned. Kiddiot’s purpose was to remind me that friends and wives may come and go, but furry, antisocial mooches never leave.