A women’s golf tournament came up on the sports channel. Amber Ale, Wylie reminded himself. He’d have to go downstairs and hook up a fresh keg before the noon rush. He carried out the empties and made a list of what needed to be reordered. When he ran out of ways to stall, he dialed Carolyn.
“So, can you come over tonight?” she asked.
Here it comes, he thought. The where-is-this-thing-headed talk. He’d hoped with her it might be different. What he’d liked was her independence, the fact that she seemed just as happy with the whole arrangement as he was. She had her own life. A good business renovating furniture that she picked up at garage sales and flea markets. She stripped, painted, and reupholstered it, then sold it for big bucks to people in West Hollywood and Santa Monica.
“Well, today’s Tuesday,” he said. “We’re still on for tomorrow, right? Can it wait until then?”
She cleared her throat.
“Are you sure everything’s all right?” he blurted, blindsided by the old fear. Panic that he’d done something he couldn’t remember, that he’d blacked out and was about to be told the things he’d done and said, things he just couldn’t believe. He had to remind himself that he didn’t do that anymore, that those days were over. Now there were no surprises.
“Nothing’s wrong. I’d just like to talk to you. I need to tell you something.”
“Oh, Jesus. That sounds bad,” Wylie groaned, running his hand through his hair. “Just tell me.”
“No, not now. Don’t worry. Just come over, will you? It’s no big deal. But could you drop by?”
“Tonight?”
He glanced around the bar. Customers were glaring at him, tapping their money on the counter.
“Yeah, if you can.”
“Okay, I will. What, around seven or so?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
“Okay. Look, I gotta go. A lot of thirsty travelers are here, giving me the evil eye. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Okay, see you then.”
Something in her voice made his heart pick up, like the split second before you’re rear-ended by a car.
“Are you sure everything’s okay?”
“Depends,” she said with a laugh. “It depends.”
2
While Wylie hooked up a new keg of Amber Ale, Rudy Cullen boarded a 737 just in from Orlando and started in business class, picking up magazines, blankets, what-have-you. He grunted as he bent down and felt a warning hitch in his back. God, don’t let it go out again, he thought as he squeezed his pear-shaped body into the third row and grappled with a wad of napkins and empty peanut packets wedged between two seats. His small, dainty hands sweated in the latex gloves. In the next row, someone had stuck three crushed plastic glasses in the seat-back pocket. Whoever was sitting in the window seat had rolled pellets of chewed gum in a tissue, which they’d shoved between the armrest and the side of the cabin. Rudy dug it out. He blinked his colorless eyelashes and brushed crumbs out of the seat, then groaned as he bent to pick up a pile of newspaper on the floor. Someone had left a fuzzy gray sock. Boy, oh boy, the things he’d found in his years on the job—used condoms, toenail clippings, dirty diapers. People were pigs, no doubt about it.
But working on the planes was still great. Rudy had always loved them. As a kid he’d been crazy about model building: bombers, fighters, cargo planes, passenger jets. He’d spent a gazillion hours painstakingly constructing perfectly scaled gliders out of balsa wood and paper. He’d hung them from the ceiling of the room he shared with his older brother. He’d joined the navy right out of high school in hopes of becoming a pilot, but instead of training him to fly, they’d assigned him to a base in Virginia where he’d restocked shelves in the commissary. Just his luck, wasn’t it? The story of his life.
Through one of the windows, he watched a loaded luggage cart zip off across the tarmac. After the navy, his chances for flight school were even more remote, and now, at thirty-seven, his dream seemed to be moving further and further away, until it was only a pinprick on the horizon. Outside, an L-1011 rolled toward its gate like a stately bird. Rudy felt a pang when he saw the tiny figures of the pilots in the cockpit. Even from this distance he could make out their white shirts, the black epaulets on their uniforms. One way or another, he swore he’d get his license. Even if it was a small, private plane, he’d learn to fly. Some day, somehow. He promised himself.
In the meantime, at least he spent every day around planes. On planes. He moved into coach class, pushing his cleaning cart in front of him. He loved the smell of jet fuel and the power of the aircraft as it stood tethered to its gate. He was part of the team that worked to keep it in top form, just like the crews that restocked the galley and cleaned the restrooms, or the guys down on the tarmac who wore headsets and knee pads while they refueled, unloaded, and checked out the landing gear. As he moved through the cabin, he thought of where the plane had been. The altitude it had reached, the velocity of its flight, the miles it had logged. He was part of it. Ground support, airline industry, he always answered when someone asked him what he did for a living.
There was a clatter at the front of the plane. Rudy looked up as Latasha McCain rolled her cart on board.
“How you doing?” she called out in a lazy voice, barely turning her head to look at him.
“Good morning, Latasha,” he called. He waved at her, but she was already squeezing into the first row, spraying the armrests, wiping them clean. She straightened the seatbelts and pulled open the seat-back pockets to make sure they were stocked with in-flight magazines, safety instructions, and airsick bags.
Rudy suddenly felt sour. Still, he forced himself to ask, “How’re you today?”
“Doing okay,” Latasha mumbled, still not lifting her head.
Well, he’d tried, Rudy thought as he got back to work. The problem with Latasha was her attitude, and unfortunately hers wasn’t the only one that could use some improvement. It was the same with all the women he supervised, what he called his crew. To them this was just a job, and they moved slowly, taking their own sweet time. They had no idea what it took to keep this big bird aloft. Didn’t know and didn’t care. They could be cleaning a house or a movie theater for all they cared. But he imagined the plane flying over the castles of the Rhine, the Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower. The pilots in the cockpit, the dome of the night sky, the air traffic controllers directing the web of routes that wrapped the globe.
“You want me to start at the front of coach or work back from the tail?” Latasha yelled. She gave him a look: her mouth off to one side, her eyes squinted up.
Rudy chewed his lips. It was important for him to stay professional. “At the front, Latasha,” he said firmly and calmly. “Like always.”
Boy, these people. They were different, that’s all there was to it. Black and Mexican and Filipino. Not that he thought anything less of them, because he liked people, all kinds of people. He gave everyone a break. His own wife was from the Philippines, for goodness sake. But still, the looks they gave him. Like he didn’t notice. Tittering behind his back, the way they met each other’s eyes. Never his. And it wasn’t like he’d had a whole lot of advantages; he’d started out just like the rest of them, as a cleaner. No easy breaks in his life—not that you’d ever convince them of that.
He bumped his head on the overhead compartment when he straightened up in Row 14. It figured, since if you added the two numbers together, one and four, you got five—his unlucky number. Plus, he was fourteen when he’d moved to L.A. from the small town in Nevada where he’d been born. That was when his troubles had started, when his mother had remarried and he’d been sent to a junior high where he felt out of step with everybody else. He watched Latasha out of the corner of his eye, her head bobbing up and down as she sprayed and wiped, her big behind poking into the aisle. Well, having his staff not like him was just part of the job, he reminded himself. That’s the way it was when you were a supervisor. You weren’t there to win a popularity contest.
“Hey, hey! Would you look at that,” Latasha called out, more to the back of the plane than to Rudy. She held up a roll of bills she’d found in one of the seats, counted it right in front of him. “Three dollars!” Tucked it straight into her apron without a second thought, like it was her due. He’d found money himself: coins that fell out of people’s pockets, singles given back as change for cocktails. Sometimes a ten, once in a while a twenty. He always turned it in.
“Not bad, huh Cap’n?” Latasha grinned.
Rudy scowled. He hated the nickname. It was bad enough when his crew used it, but other people at the airline had caught on, people who mattered, like the pilots. Some of them even saluted him when they saw him in the terminal, wheeling his cart of spray bottles and rags. “Morning, Cap’n,” they said, a sparkle in their eyes.
Rudy moved to the seats behind the wing, picked up a pile of rumpled blankets, and pulled out a pillow that had been shoved between the seats. The flight attendants called him Cap’n, too. Hard to believe now, but he had actually considered being a flight attendant himself, had even begun the training. But he’d soon found out that being a fruit was practically a requirement for the job, so it was no wonder he only made it through one week of the two-month course. Those fairies talked and laughed with the women trainees like they were one of the girls, and the women talked and laughed right back, like they were the best buddies in the world. He was the one who couldn’t get the time of day from any of the women! Like he was the fag! Go figure. Whatever. It had worked out for the best because now that he was married, with his wife’s daughter to raise, he couldn’t be running all over the globe. He was a family man who worked regular hours and came home for dinner every night.
“Hey, Rudolph! Mr. Red-Nose Reindeer! How goes it?”
Rudy turned toward the back of the plane, where Cage, one of the baggage handlers, had come up the rear stairs.
“How’s life in housekeeping?” Cage shouted above the engine noise that flooded in from the tarmac. “How’s Mr. Claus and all the elves?”
Rudy shook his head and pretended to laugh. Cage had the mental maturity of a five-year-old. Rudy watched while he reached into a compartment in the galley, took three Cokes, toasted Rudy with one, and headed back down to his buddies who were loading luggage for the next flight.
The baggage handlers were another bunch of losers. Dishonest as hell, slackers, and half the time they came to work drunk, stoned, or both. Rudy knew because he’d worked there, too. After six weeks on the job, one of the men—his supervisor, in fact—had shown him how to unzip the bags and slide his hand around to look for the stash of money so many people stupidly hid in their cases. But Rudy had higher standards than that. Ethics. Word got out fast that he’d refused to take money from the bags, and from that day on his life was in danger. Big bags came rushing at him whenever he turned his back. Packages dropped out of nowhere. The last straw came when the hatch was secured while he was still loading bags in the hold. In the pitch dark he screamed for all he was worth, pounding on the sides of the plane. He pictured himself suffocating somewhere over the Pacific. At the last minute the hatch had opened and he’d blinked out at his co-workers’ laughing faces framed by the square of blinding light. He’d walked off the job and gone straight to the office to ask for a transfer.
Latasha was humming, working at a slow, steady pace, like she didn’t have a care in the world. The airline had been cutting back the ground crews’ hours since the terrorism threats, and unless things picked up and people started flying again, they’d lay off more people. You’d think that would matter to someone like Latasha, but as he watched her she picked up a magazine, thumbed through the pages, and stuck it in her apron. She hummed a little louder, as if she was trying to get under his skin, to show him that—even though he was her supervisor—she didn’t give a damn what he thought.
Rudy sighed. He’d almost reached the back of the plane. The day lay ahead: one more plane before lunch, when he’d eat the ham sandwich and the bag of potato chips that Inez had packed for him that morning. His stomach growled just thinking about it. Then the long afternoon followed by the drive home. His lower back twitched; his shoulders ached. Sometimes he felt so old, even though he was still nowhere near forty. He thought of Inez. His wife. He repeated her name and a kind of peacefulness came over him, a feeling that things were okay. He’d seen her for the very first time in church, standing in the pew with Vanessa, who was only six at the time. It was funny, but seeing the two of them like that—so serious, so quiet, as they listened to the sermon—he’d instantly spotted the empty space next to them just waiting to be filled. All he had to do was step into it. He realized then and there that he and Inez could complete each other, that he could stop being a single man and she could stop being a young, unwed mother with a daughter everybody wondered about. They could be a family. And that’s what had happened, more or less. He thought of his happiness on a plane just like this one, when the two of them headed off to Hawaii for their honeymoon. It was a charter, sure, a package deal, and they had waited in the terminal through a four-hour delay while what the airline called the “equipment” was repaired. Still, once they were in the air, Rudy had looked out at the clouds that were as big as castles and felt that his life was finally getting on the right track, that things were about to take off.
And since then—well…Rudy pursed his lips. He thought of the stucco box the color of old bologna that he and Inez had rented for the entire eight years they’d been married. It was nothing like he wanted: bars on the windows, saggy screens, and a patchy yard. Tiny, so they were always bumping into each other. The neighborhood was no place for Vanessa to grow up, with bums passing through all the time, eyeing the houses for anything they could steal. Kids throwing trash and hollering, lowlifes hanging out working on their cars on the weekends. No place for Inez, either. Inez. Rudy’s heart sank. His moist hands itched in the latex gloves. Inez’s silence grew and grew, filling the rental so that sometimes it was hard just to get a breath. She needed her own house, a place where she could have everything just the way she wanted it. Then things would be better. He was trying, he told himself, as he picked up pieces of a Disney World postcard someone had shredded all over the seat. He was doing his best.
When he finished the last row, he straightened up and stretched his stiff back. The cabin, which had looked like the scene of an overnight party when he got on board, now looked like a freshly cleaned hotel room. Latasha was halfway finished.
“I’m out next week, remember,” she said as he squeezed past her cart on the way out.
“That’s news to me, Latasha,” Rudy responded. “I didn’t hear anything about that.” His crew was always taking time off: sick kids, vacations, colds, surgery. The latest was Imogene, one of his best workers, who claimed to have developed carpal tunnel syndrome.
Latasha shook her head. Rudy wished she’d look him in the eye. Just once. Was that asking too much?
“I told you. Two or three times,” Latasha scolded. “I let you know a month ago that I needed the time off and I reminded you again last week.” She put her spray bottle in a pocket of her apron and squeezed between the row of seats.
“Well, I didn’t see it written down on the schedule,” Rudy said, trying to keep his voice reasonable. Latasha went on working like he wasn’t even there. “You know, Lula’s off next week, too. I can’t imagine that I’d give permission for both of you to be off the same week.”
“My mother’s having surgery!” Latasha snapped, finally looking up at him. “It’s been scheduled for a month. I told you just as soon as I heard. She needs around-the-clock care for the first week. You’ll just have to figure something out.”
Rudy stumbled back a few steps, shocked by the look of rage on her face. The nerve of her, talking to him like that! He took a deep breath, ready to come back at her in no uncertain terms, but just as he was about to let loose, his own boss, Glenn Waller, appeared at the front of the plane.
Rudy gave Latasha an I’ll-deal-with-you-later look and started down the aisle. “What’s up, Glenn?” he said cheerfully when he reached the cockpit. He pulled off the latex gloves and looked down at his small, pink hands. For some reason his heart was pounding.
Waller took him by the elbow and guided him out the door and onto the jetway. A walrusy-looking man with pale skin, rumpled clothes, and a brush mustache, Waller steered Rudy into a corner next to a folded wheelchair. He stood too close to him, leaning down so that Rudy could smell the cigarettes and coffee on his breath.
“Listen, Rudy. I’ve got some kind of tough news for you.”
“Is my wife all right?” Rudy gasped. His heart whirred. The wheelchair handle probed his spine.
“No, no. Nothing like that. Your wife’s fine. I mean, as far as I know, she’s fine.” Waller thought a moment, brushing his mustache into shape with his index finger. He seemed to be looking at a place on top of Rudy’s head. “What I was going to say is, well…” He cleared his throat. “The thing is, Rudy. We’re going to have to lay you off. It’s a hell of a thing and I hate to be the one who tells you. But you know how things have been around here. We just don’t have the business. I’m sorry. Sorry as hell.”
Across the jetway was a narrow, vertical window. Its glass was hazy, but Rudy could make out a plane pulling into the gate next to them, the flagman on the ground guiding it in. He watched it nose to a stop, watched the jetway push up to it, suction around the hatch like a lamprey eel. In the cabin everyone would be surging up, unsnapping seat belts, opening the overhead bins.
“When?” Rudy asked, his eyes still on the window.
“Well, that’s the thing. Everything’s happening so fast. This quarter was worse than we expected. We just got the word from upstairs: we have to cut back right away. So listen—”
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