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:
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.
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.
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.
Stews used to be forced to retire when they turned 30.
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.
CHAPTER 15
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.”
I remembered it was to the chagrin of the board members, and even that of Officer Ned, that LaVonda had taken her new job at WorldAir so seriously. Since the title had been inv
ented specifically for her, there had yet to be any concise job description created or even a list of duties pertinent to the position. So LaVonda took it upon herself to create her own duties, which turned out to consist mainly of following Officer Ned’s every move.
“You are not my assistant,” Officer Ned tried to reason with her one day recently. “It’s bad enough I have April here hanging out like this is the school cafeteria.” I perked my head up from my iPad as I lay on his leather office couch surrounded by empty peanut packets. “I don’t need you hovering around me all the time, too!”
“I am the WorldAir Trauma Liaison,” LaVonda puffed her chest out proudly, “and it says right here in my job description that my duties include . . . April, what’s a fancy way of saying ‘stick close by’?”
“‘Keep in close proximity to,’” I answered.
“Right, my duties include keeping in close proximity to the head of security, and that is you.”
“You just typed that into your iPad right now while we were sitting here!” Officer Ned hollered.
“So?” LaVonda made a flourish as she pressed the “save” button. “There, it’s official. Now don’t be tellin’ me how to do my job.”
“It actually makes sense,” I piped in. “If she sticks around you long enough she’s bound to run into someone who’s been traumatized.”
I knew Officer Ned would throw himself into an active volcano for my sake if he had to, and he’d probably do the same for LaVonda, too. All that blustering and hollering was just a facade to keep people from getting close. And you can hardly blame him. Look what happened the minute he took me under his wing: Two bullets to the torso, that’s what. But like I said earlier, he looks to have healed nicely.
Today, LaVonda was resolute in the power of support dogs to allay trauma. She hugged Beefheart to her chest and said, “Okay, I feel better now.”
I focused back on the subject at hand. “Hackman’s head didn’t walk off on its own,” I said. “Someone took it.”
“Why would someone steal a dead man’s head?”
Didn’t we all want to know that. I asked Officer Ned if he had the chance to talk to the investigators about the contents of the disrupted caskets that were also found at the crime scene. He looked at me with furrowed brow.
“April, there weren’t any caskets here when the police arrived,” he said. “And, believe me, I looked around the area before I climbed up here. I didn’t see any evidence of exploded corpses.”
“Are you saying you don’t believe me?” I was incredulous. “What do you call this?” I pointed to a small Rorschach pattern of specks below the knees of my cargo pants. I regretted having scrubbed at them with the pile of alcohol swabs I’d found in the first-aid kit the night before.
“That doesn’t look like human remains to me, April,” he answered worriedly. “Listen, are you sure you’re feeling okay?”
“How do you know what exploded gizzards look like?” LaVonda defended me. “Look at this poor child! She’s been crashed up, burned up, beat up, and thoroughly messed up in the last twenty-four hours. Look at that bruise on her forehead! She needs our help.”
“LaVonda, we talked about this, remember?” Officer Ned chastised her. They talked about this? “Remember your training.”
“I’m just sayin’,” she mumbled. “It could have happened like she said.”
“LaVonda, please focus, the doctor said the delusions can be quite convincing,” Officer Ned said.
“What doctor?” I panicked.
“April, you cracked your head pretty hard on the asphalt after falling off the bus, right? I saw the footage on YouTube.” Damn the advent of social media.
“This is not about me hitting my head!” I protested. “I didn’t hallucinate all this! It happened just like I told you!” Officer Ned reached out to put a caring touch on my forehead, and I smacked his hand away. “What about the dead guard in the security hut? Huh? I can’t conjure a dead security guard out of my imagination.”
“April, there was no dead guard in the security hut,” he informed me. I looked at him agog. He continued, “I talked to the actual guard who was there, or who was supposed to have been there, but he’d stepped out to use the can, and when he came back he found Hackman. He’s the one who called the police.”
I shook my head. “No, that’s not right.” I looked at LaVonda imploringly. “That’s not right, is it, LaVonda?”
She didn’t say anything, instead she handed me back Captain Beefheart. “Honey child, I think you’ve been traumatized.”
“Hell yes, I’ve been traumatized! Haven’t you heard a single word I said?”
LaVonda looked pained before saying, “I heard every word you said.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
Officer Ned interrupted, “April, we just want to do what’s best and make sure you’re getting the care you need.”
“What about Flo?” I brightened. “Have you spoken with Flo? She’ll tell you everything.”
“Ah, April,” Officer Ned continued cautiously, “we did call Flo and she said she hasn’t seen you since the day before yesterday.”
I guffawed incredulously. “She did not say that. Call her again, right now. Call her. And use her work cell,” I added, remembering her personal cellphone lay broken up somewhere off GA400.
Officer Ned did as I asked and put the phone on speaker. Flo picked up on the first ring. “What?” she groused. Officer Ned asked her to do him a favor and confirm once again where she was the night before. “I was right here, Thor, how many times you want me to say it? I was here all night drinking vodka and watching MacGyver DVDs. Same thing I do every night.”
“I think we have a bad connection,” Officer Ned complained to her. “What’s that sound?”
“That’s just me,” Flo said. “Tabasco sauce is getting low, I gotta smack it outta the bottle”—smack smack smack. “You can’t make a Bloody Mary without Tabasco sauce.”
“Okay, so you were home last night?”
“Tell the truth,” I implored her.
“Is that Crash?” Flo’s voice brightened. Smack, smack, smack. “Tell her I said to keep kicking ass.” He handed the phone to me.
“Flo, the truth,” I begged.
“I’m telling the truth, kid,” she chuckled. Smack smack smack. “I was right here, watching MacGyver. Season four, episode eleven.” Officer Ned gently took the phone from my hand, thanked Flo, and hung up.
He eyed me expectantly. LaVonda looked on guiltily. “This is harder than I thought it would be,” she mumbled.
“April, please, it’s better that you come with me.” He held his hand out to me. “Otherwise I’ll have to tell them where you are and they’ll have to come here to get you. If that happens I can’t guarantee things will go smoothly.” I held Beefheart close to me and backed away from him down the catwalk toward the avionics area. Officer Ned followed me, and LaVonda after him.
“Excuse me, Thor,” LaVonda interjected. Officer Ned winced at the nickname. Only two people on earth were allowed to use it: Flo, who called all tall, muscular men “Thor,” and LaVonda, who had been introduced to him through Flo as such. “But I did not sign up for this,” LaVonda continued. “You didn’t say anything about us throwing her over to the police like a bloody piece of meat. I’m here ’cause she in distress. She need medical attention.”
Exasperated, Officer Ned turned to her. “Oh my God! You believe her, don’t you? This is exactly what the doctor warned us about. She’s suffering from a TBI, LaVonda! Her delusions are going to be very persuasive, but we have to stand strong. If she doesn’t get the help she needs she could suffer permanent brain damage. And if she doesn’t go with us willingly, what choice do we have but to call the police? Get your head back in the game and focus.”
“Don’t tell me where to put my head,” she argued. “I know where my head needs to be, and just because some doctor—”
“Who is this doctor?” I cried.
“�
��waved around a bunch of papers, some high-falutin’ FBI forensic psychologist, came into our office—”
“My office,” Officer Ned said.
“—talkin’ about how our sweet April here is suffering from some ‘psychotic episode’ and going around killin’ people—”
“What?” I cried.
“—don’t mean we should roll over like a coupla hobos and let them have at her. She needs a lawyer, for one.”
“What she needs,” Officer Ned pointed at me with his arm outstretched, then looked back at LaVonda, “is a hospital.”
I reached into my back pocket and grabbed the handcuffs I’d picked off my wrists the night before. Before Officer Ned could react, I’d clicked a bracket around his outstretched wrist and locked the other one around the metal shelving grid supporting the avionics area.
At first he seemed disbelieving, tentatively shaking his arm like the cuff was a party favor that could break easily. Then the realization set in and he yanked his arm around more furiously. “April, give me the keys to these immediately. This isn’t funny.” I shook my head. “The keys,” he insisted. I shook my head again.
“Oh, girl, you did NOT just handcuff Thor to the airplane,” howled LaVonda. “I swear to Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, you did NOT do that.” She threw her arms above her head and paced up and down the catwalk, slapping her thighs and howling with laughter.
“April,” Officer Ned growled. “Unlock me this instant.”
I backed away from him and handed Beefheart to LaVonda, who calmed down to a few snorts and the wiping of tears. “Yeah, child, you gonna unlock him, right?”
We Will Be Crashing Shortly Page 10
