The Kid ordered it anyway. I decided on a tuna sandwich on whole wheat and a glass of milk, something the coffee shop couldn’t mess up. But the bread looked like it had been inflated with a bicycle pump; there was more air than there was wheat and the tuna smelled like Puss ’n Boots. “How’s the chili?” I asked the Kid.
“Good,” he said.
“Do you think maybe it’s a little bland?” What do they know about picante in Montana? When I made chili I made it hot enough to make your eyes water and when that wasn’t hot enough I threw more jalapeños in.
“I like it.” How could a person take pride in her cooking with an audience like that?
“Some guys over there are talking about you,” said the Kid, watching over my shoulder. “Do you know them?”
I turned around to see the third-best-looking man in Fire Pond—the prince—although taking his wealth into the equation some might elevate him to number one. Elegant as always in his creased Ralph Lauren jeans and a pair of cowboy boots that were probably made of ostrich hide, he was striding across the coffee shop trying to keep up with a long-legged cowboy. That guy was big enough without wearing cowboy boots and six inches of Stetson. He also wore a Western jacket, a string tie and a silver belt buckle with a great big turquoise in the middle. Dwight Stillman, the very biggest legal representation. Who else?
“Ms. Hamel,” the prince said. “A pleasure to see you.”
“The pleasure is mine.”
“I would like to introduce you to Attorney Dwight Stillman.”
“Attorney Neil Hamel here,” I replied. “And this is … Mauricio Babilonia. Prince Sahid, Dwight Stillman.” The “mucho gustos” and the “pleasures to” circled the table.
“May we sit down?” asked the prince.
“Why not? What brings you two to the Aspen Inn?”
“Attorney Stillman is staying here. It’s a convenient location.” Convenient, maybe, but not the very best. The prince had reserved that for himself.
“How was your stay in the Fire Pond jail?”
“Very limited. I made my one phone call to my attorney and he reminded the officials that I have diplomatic immunity and I was released shortly. It was very amicable.”
“And Heinz?”
“Heinz is managing.” The prince smiled. “He has been in this situation before.”
“I imagine you and Attorney Stillman will find some way to get him out.”
“We’re working on that, ma’am.” If they couldn’t do it by legal means, Heinz could always try his luck at buying his way out of the Fire Pond jail. The legal superstar was lighting up the coffee shop with his illustrious presence, but it was all for my benefit. To everyone else in the place he was probably just what he looked like, a great big cowboy. It would be an interesting confrontation, I thought: the overconfident Stillman versus the uncertain Betts. In this case I’d put my money on the weak; they try harder.
“How’s the chili, son?”
“Great,” replied the Kid.
“Maybe I’ll get myself some.”
“You going to be sticking around?” I asked the prince.
His long elegant fingers mirrored each other as he twisted them, peering deep into his invisible ball. “If all goes as planned, I will be leaving in the Sparhawk on Saturday.”
Stillman’s chili arrived; the Kid was finishing his up. I decided my tuna was fit for cats, not humans, excused myself and went back to the room to call March.
“Are you feeling okay?” he asked.
“Pretty good, but I think I need a nap. If you don’t mind, maybe I’ll come by tomorrow instead. We went out to the accident scene this morning.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Not really, a lot of broken glass. My purse had been searched, but nothing was taken. There wasn’t anything to take.”
“Katharine was here, by the way, and she told me about seeing you.”
“We need to talk about that and my visit to Jimmy Brannen as well. I’ll come by tomorrow. I promise.”
“Okay.” There was a lot of jail-cell ennui in his voice. He needed a visit, but I needed sleep.
“I just ran into the prince and Dwight Stillman. Stillman’s staying here and representing Heinz. The prince told me he is planning on flying the Sparhawk out of here Saturday, ‘if all goes as planned.’ ”
“ ‘If all goes as planned.’ What does that mean?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. See you tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
There was a knock at the door. It was the Kid, the very best looking man in Fire Pond, although the poorest of the top three contenders. I let him in and we took a long siesta together with the curtains drawn. “Watch out for the rich guys,” he said in one hazy moment, “they have more to kill for.” But I don’t know why he said that because where he comes from they’re just as likely to do it for love.
15
NOBODY WAITED UNDER the elk horns at the Fire Pond Airport. The birders had gone home and now the Kid was leaving on the ten o’clock flight, which would get him into Denver around midnight and to Albuquerque very early in the morning. At least he’d had a nap. He wore jeans and his sheepskin coat and carried the well-worn and much loved Cien Años. Joan once told me that she’d had an aging relative who had gotten so foggy brained that she kept rereading the same book. When she got to the end she had forgotten the beginning, so she started all over again. But the Kid never forgot anything. He flipped through the remaining pages.
“I finish by the time I get to Albuquerque,” he said.
“Easily,” I replied. “Thanks for coming, Kid.”
He shrugged—it was nothing.
“I should be back home soon,” I told him.
He touched me lightly on the shoulder. “I know you, Chiquita. I know you won’t leave until you finish here, but watch out and remember … drive careful.” “Don’t worry,” I said.
I watched while he went through the metal detector and walked down the corridor toward the plane, watched his long, skinny legs until they turned a corner and disappeared from view, and then I went to the Rent A Wreck counter and paid his bill, making it tax deductible. As I was now without wheels, I arranged to have the car transferred to me.
“No problem,” said the clerk, whose name tag identified her as Rowanda Moore. Rowanda wore a white blouse and a gold vest. She had long, plum-lacquered, dagger-shaped fingernails that my secretary, Anna, would have envied and her puffy champagne blond hair looked suspiciously like it had been teased; obviously like it had been dyed. Light golden blond tinged with pink is a color rarely seen in nature. She handed me the papers to fill out.
“Do you happen to rent trucks or four-wheel-drive vehicles?” I asked her.
“Yes, ma’am, we do. We get a lot of customers looking for campers and 4 × 4s they can take into the back country. You interested?”
“Yes, but not in renting exactly.” It was worth a shot. Just about everybody in Montana drove a four-wheel-drive or pickup, but that didn’t mean somebody who lived elsewhere couldn’t get his hands on one, too. “Has anybody turned one in with a dented fender? The other night someone ran into me and, well, I was wondering if it could have been one of your rental vehicles that did it.”
Although Rowanda was practiced in the art of physical deception, she was honest about Rent A Wreck. “No, ma’am. We haven’t had any accidents reported.” That eliminated one possibility, but only one. Maybe it hadn’t been turned in yet, maybe it had been rented at Budget or Avis or Hertz.
“Well, thanks anyway,” I said.
I walked through the airport, past the Welcome to Big Sky Country booth where brochures advertised log homes, backpacking expeditions, rafting and hiking trips, hunting trips, fishing trips, boating trips that followed the path of Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, their Indian maid. From a vending machine an upstate newspaper announced the Montana news: a man had been arrested for buzzing grizzlies by helicopter in Freezeout, an Indian named Kills on
Top had been charged with a barroom murder.
My next stop was the Frontier Airlines ticket counter but no one was in attendance. I waited quietly for a few minutes, noisily a few minutes more. I coughed, cleared my throat, tapped on the counter. “Anybody work here?” I asked, slipping into impatient attorney voice. A boy with floppy bangs came out of a back room where a sign on the door said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He left the door open and I could hear a football game playing on TV.
“Yeah?” he said.
“I have an aunt coming in for a few days from the East. I wonder if you could tell me what the connections are from the New York area.”
“We don’t fly to New York.” An unseen cheer went up as someone scored a touchdown.
“I know that. But you do fly here and I want to know what the connections are.”
He reluctantly punched his computer. “We can connect with an American nonstop flight to Denver and get her here at eight P.M.”
“That’s too late. Don’t you have a flight that comes in around three in the afternoon?”
He tapped into the computer again, the keys tickety-ticked. I could hear a commercial coming from the TV. Spuds, the party dog, knew the secret to having a good time was knowing when to say when. “That flight comes from Bullhorn,” he said. “It’s the only incoming flight we have in the afternoon and the return trip of a flight that leaves here at eight in the morning. To make that three o’clock flight you’d have to leave New York at six A.M., stop in Chicago, change in Denver, have a two-hour layover and change again in Bullhorn. It’s out of the way and a terrible connection. You’d do much better on the later plane. When can I book her for?”
“Let me think about it,” I said. “I was also wondering if you could give me the names of passengers on a particular flight. I was out here about a week ago and I thought I saw an old friend get off that three o’clock flight from Bullhorn, but he went to get his luggage and I lost track of him. It’s someone I’d kind of like to get in touch with again.”
His look implied, “For this you dragged me away from football?” But he said, “We are not allowed to give out the names of our passengers.”
“Well, thanks anyway.”
I wandered back through the airport and ended up in an observation room with a large window that faced the runway. There wasn’t much traffic at Fire Pond Airport and at the moment the runway stood empty, its bright lights beating back the night. The walls of the room were lined with model airplanes, a history of aviation. The Air Force’s sleek fighting machines were represented: a Sabre jet, a Scorpion, a Delta Dagger, a Shooting Star, a Voodoo and the jet of the moment, named appropriately the F-16 Fighting Falcon.
There was a time when flying was new and people stood in the window and waited for their loved ones to take off, half convinced they would never see them again. Now kids were shipped back and forth across the country willy-nilly without even a certainty that a parent would be at the other end to meet them. A plane rolled toward the runway, the lights twinkled at the ends of the wings. I couldn’t tell whether it was the Kid’s flight or not from where I stood. My business concluded, I was ready to return to my home-away-from-home motel efficiency, but I hung at the window a little longer. If it was the Kid, I’d watch him leave. It was one of those instants where time and space connect, when a vacuum caused by a coming event sucks the breath from the present, a dark still moment before the whoosh of spontaneous combustion. Something at the dark end of the runway ignited while I stood there and burst into flame, its fiery tentacles reaching into the night. There was no way of telling what it was or how big it was, but most likely it was an airplane. What else was there to burn at an airport? A trap door dropped open beneath my rib cage and my heart hovered at the edge. At the same time my rational mind said, “It’s not the Kid, the Kid’s plane is on the runway.” But you can’t always trust the rational mind.
Word of the fire spread fast and people from all over the airport rushed to the window—a crowd for Montana. Some, like me, held themselves nervously in place, but most were thrilled. “Wow,” said a little boy next to me. “Look at those flames.” Obviously he wasn’t worried about losing a lover. In the crowd I spotted a Frontier attendant.
“That couldn’t be the Frontier flight to Denver, could it?” I asked. “I know somebody on that plane.”
“No way,” she said. “That’s where the private planes are parked. Our flight is taking off just about now.”
The waiting plane, not to be deterred from its schedule by a fire, sped down the runway and lifted off, giving its passengers a spectacular overhead view of the end of someone’s dream and the beginning of an insurance claim. I watched the taillights rise and move out. Now that I knew the Kid was gone, and it wasn’t my private plane going up in smoke, the fire began to resemble a celebration, a pep rally bonfire or a campfire where kids sit around and roast marshmallows on sticks at the end of summer. There was no reason to linger any longer, but I stayed, fascinated by the fingers of flame. Apparently there was plenty of fuel to feed the blaze and it took the airport’s ground crew a good fifteen minutes to get it under control. At my distance they were little stick figures, black silhouettes that moved back and forth in front of the flames. As the fire and excitement died down, I decided to head home. Among the crowd behind me I saw some sharp-eyed mountain faces, some placid faces from the plains, some watchful Indians and one face that I recognized all too well, the radiant, enraptured Katharine. Her expression approached bliss as she stared out the window.
“Katharine?” I asked.
She looked as if I had woken her from a dream and for a moment the dying flames reflected in the black centers of her eyes and they glowed red and feral like a coyote on the prowl. She smiled.
There was a disturbance at the end of the room. Someone was pushing and shoving his way through the crowd.
“That’s her! That’s the woman!” Even in haste and in anger the voice spoke of British schools and Mideast money—the prince. He was followed by two airport security guards who wore drab uniforms, but the prince himself was resplendent in a brown leather flight jacket with a white silk scarf around his neck. “That woman tried to blow me up,” he said. “She wrecked the Sparhawk.”
A guard lunged at Katharine and she threw up her arms to ward off the attack. He grabbed her and she fought and scratched back. The blissed-out look evaporated quickly and rage took its place. While the guard struggled to get control of her arms, she kicked her cowboy boot and nailed him right in the crotch. You had to admire her spirit.
“You bitch.” The guy doubled over and Katharine began a broken field run, elbowing her way through the crowd. It was a gallant but hopeless effort. The other guard was right behind and, as she broke away and dashed across the slick-floored lobby, he tackled her. She landed flat and hard on her stomach and her breath was knocked out. Just to be sure she stayed that way, the guard sat down and straddled her back. It was an undignified position for a woman, but it had an impact. I’m not sure dignity was the issue when it came to Katharine anyway. Anger was. She pounded her fists against the linoleum and gasped for breath, never having been schooled, apparently, in the sixties protestor’s art of going limp.
The prince walked up and stood next to her and his polished boots came to rest very close to her head. In spite of his British manners he came from a barbaric country, a place where you have the choice of killing your attackers outright or letting the state’s executioners bury them up to the neck in sand while they throw stones at the protruding heads until they splatter like grapefruit. The prince studied Katharine’s livid face carefully, looked at his boot as if he’d decided she wasn’t worth bloodying it, then turned and walked away, leaving the suspect to the guard. Katharine recovered her breath enough to spit at the spot where his foot had lingered. “Bastard,” she yelled.
If that was courage, she had plenty of it. But to me it looked like a mad monkey had gotten control of her mind, and once you let him in it’s hard
to get rid of him. He was a screeching, hyper monkey with no regard for anything but his own need to express. It’s a type of abandonment and rage that I see exhibited nowadays more often by women than men, and men usually have to be drunk before they let it show. With women it is closer to the surface. Anything—an annoying husband, a bratty child—can set it off. Domesticity and marriage are its natural habitat, but not the only one. It is the raw nerve of anger, and if you scraped at it, all you’d find underneath would be another, redder layer. What could be the source of such a rage, but the illusion of helplessness? Wouldn’t a person with perceived options and confidence find a more productive way to obtain a goal? It made one wonder what had been accomplished in the last twenty years. I suppose it was a sign of progress that women felt free to let it out in public, but it was depressing that they needed to.
“So Attorney Hamel,” the prince said, parking his shiny boots next to me. “We meet again.”
“What happened?” I asked him.
“She sabotaged the Sparhawk.” The ball was between his hands and he squeezed them shut, squishing the air out. “I saw that woman walk away from the area, but I didn’t think much of it. For all I knew she had a reason to be there, maybe she had a plane of her own on the field. I like to fly at night—the nights are so big and peaceful here—and I was taking the Sparhawk out for a short flight to amuse myself. I got in, turned on the starter, but there was something in the jet that jammed the engine and whoosh the plane went up in flames. It was very fortunate that I got out alive.”
“Well, be grateful for that.” You couldn’t feel too bad for the guy; he hadn’t even been singed and besides there were lots more Sparhawks where that one came from. “How could she sabotage a jet?” I asked.
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