Life and Death in the Fast Lane
The narrow county roads north of Dallas are fun with so many curves. Debbie down shifts before entering one. The engine revs up and the little MG convertible grips the road on almost two wheels. Before the car is out of the turn, she accelerates and when the car is again facing a straight road, it already has picked up good speed. She up shifts and watches the speedometer go up. There is a buzz of speed in her head, mixed with a buzz of booze and coke. Life is grand.
Her blond hair flies in the air and whips around her face. The money Ken gave her has paid for the car, and the booze, and the drugs and many other things already used up and gone but she doesn' t worry about money spent because there is always more money when drugs are involved. Ken is gone and so is her idea of splitting and starting anew somewhere else. Still, despite the money and the fun, there is an emptiness inside her, a hole where friendship and love and care for others is missing. All she knows how to do is to take but to Ken she wanted to give, she wanted to run the risk of being fooled and taken for a ride because she felt that Ken wouldn' t do that to her. The thought of sharing her feelings and exposing her heart scared her to death but still didn' t stop her for wanting it.
Ken was gone. She could see why; he had enough. He has a future with his flying thing, and has a dad who needs him. She has nothing he needs, nothing he cannot find somewhere for far less headache and without complications. What was she thinking? She was not girl friend material; not even friend material. She just takes what she cans and enjoys it until it is depleted; nobody else matters because nobody else thinks she matters.
Not even Ken.
Hedgerows fly by. The stop sign flies by. A car pulls out of a cut in the hedgerow to her right. Debbie doesn' t slam her brakes; instead, her convertible smashes into the side of the car in front of her. Debbie remembers the horrified face of the woman at the wheel, her huge eyes, the mouth open in a soundless cry. There is an explosion of metal and glass and a jolt and an instant numbness before consciousness disappear.
The Dummy Talks
After the Dallas affair I drove straight to Youngstown to see my dad and try to explain things. Had he ever suspected what I was doing for a living? Probably. After bringing back Tony' s body with a belly full of holes I imagine that the gossip about our business down south had reached the inconceivable and the unbelievable but somewhere among the rubbish of tales and lies many folks had probably guessed what we were up to. Even before Tony' s funeral, when I bought and paid for with cash for my dad' s new truck, the old man gave me a look of disapproval that told me he knew something wasn' t right even though he said nothing. I made stories up about how I was working for this South American tycoon and how well I was getting paid to fly him around in his big jet. From flying bank checks and flipping burgers to be the anointed driver of the jet set; that was quite a leap and I knew that my dad didn' t buy the story. Besides, I' m not a good liar. I don' t know if at the time he kept his mouth shut because he couldn' t or didn' t want to contradict me, or because he figured that I was old enough to know what I was doing. These thoughts and the fabrication of an explanation and its delivery kept me occupied while the miles went by, driving in the company of my shame and my fears.
The day I had to return back south, after burying Tony, my dad stood next to my truck and said," Son, I think you need to quit that flying job you got." His grimace showed his feelings better than his words. I said nothing. Before I could make up any excuses my dad turned his back on me and walked back into the little clapboard house that had been our home since before I was born. He never looked back. Was he crying? Was he pissed off? Both? I don' t know and I don' t want to speculate. All I knew for sure was that he didn' t approve of my flying job. I couldn' t blame him. I was forcing on my dad the unsavory task of having to face Tony’ s parents almost everyday and be ashamed that his son was still alive and theirs was not. The old man didn' t deserve that crap.
Despite knowing I was hurting my dad, Youngstown and its misery had turned my stomach; I didn' t want to live from day to day on a few dollars, ever again, to get old and haggard and have to go to a funeral in threadbare cheap suits and shoes no better than cardboard. I ran out of Youngstown haunted by the hard times I saw in its people and its buildings and sought shelter in Ortega' s open arms.
After watching Sonia get whacked, of course, my attitude reversed. There is nothing like the sight of brains on a deck to make a person see things with a new perspective. There was nothing that could have stopped Ortega from spilling my brains on that deck that same day. That, as the cliche says, was an eye opener.
My dad was staying in the basement of an old Army buddy. Together they had faced the Chinese volunteers in Korea and together they now watched for ... something. Mustached hitmen wearing dark glasses and driving big black cars? Cuban killers in guayabera shirts smoking big cigars? Brown faced killers with black hair disguised as telephone repairmen? Nobody knew but just to be safe my dad had avoided being seen in public and nobody knew where he was. Paranoia is a good thing when the enemy is unknown.
I met him in the dark and damp basement. It pained me to see him hiding like this because of my own troubles that had nothing to do with him.
"I' m sorry about this mess," I said.
"How are you holding up?"
"Fine, I think. I owe nothing to those guys and I quit fair and square."
My dad could see that my expression didn' t match the confidence of my speech.
"But you ain' t sure that they won' t come after you anyway."
I sighed. "No. I' m not sure. Like in a bad gangster movie, I' m the guy who knows too much."
The old man looked at me with sorrow printed on his face, sorrow not for him but for me.
"Where you some kind of capo for those guys?"
"Dad! You know me," I protested. "I was just the driver of drug smuggling airplanes, a gofer. I don' t even have agun!"
"What about Tony?" he asked.
"He? Well, he wished he could have been a big shot, but he was just a small time hustler ..." and I proceeded to tell the old man the tale of the dismissal of Tony Szpiganowicz and how he came to die in my airplane. It felt good to let that off my chest.
"That one," my dad said after I was done," he died happy."
I had never thought of that, of Tony dying happy, shooting it out with truckloads of Cubans, going down in a blaze of glory and bullets. I was not cut out for that kind of glory. I wouldn' t feel too happy to see my blood pooling on the floor of an airplane flying a few feet above the Caribbean, with more blood on the floor than inside me.
"After a long silence I said my words of wisdom," I fucked up dad."
"No kidding. Live and learn, you dummy," said my dad. He showed neither anger nor disappointment. He was ready to move on, more willing than I was. I could picture Johnny in his dirty apron sitting next to my dad and winking at eye at me. I told you so, you dummy.
Payback
The sun beats down on McCarran airport and a wind coming from the desert across runways and taxiways blows through the buildings that shimmer behind the dancing heat. Inside the pilot' s lounge things are cool thanks to the miracle of air conditioning, a miracle dwarfed by the miracle of Las Vegas sprouting in the middle of what should be a death valley devoid of water and flora. A miracle within a miracle within a miracle, thinks Ken, sitting at the lounge in his black tie and white shirt with three-bar copilot' s epaulets. He is thankful for having landed a real flying job. It isn' t an airline job but it is close enough, as they say, for government work. Flying sightseers over the Grand Canyon is an auspicious beginning. His logbook is fattening up with multi engine turboprop time under Part 135, his springboard to the jet cockpits that roar in and out of Las Vegas day and night.
Leaving his past behind feels like getting out of the suffocating darkness of a burlap sack, emerging like the Great Houdini from his confinement into a bright future with his defeated shackles dangling harmlessly from his wrist
s and ankles.
His dad had refused to leave Youngstown and had even refused to move out of his old house to somewhere else in town.
"I built this house for your mother and I' m gonna die in it," he had said, and Ken had believed him. There was no point in fighting the old man' s stubbornness, plus his dad wasn' t a dummy; he was rather capable of taking care of himself with the help of a sawed off double barrel shotgun and his old .45 pistol.
Ortega had not shown any signs of displeasure, not yet, about the way they had ended their businesses relationship, and that was rather comforting; still, Ken can' t help waking up in the middle of the night, his nerves touched by the live wire of a noise or a shadow coming from the darkness. He sleeps behind a dead bolted door with a revolver under his pillow. Time, Ken thinks and wants to believe, will remove the ghosts that still haunt him. The memories of Sonia' s head exploding and Tony' s blood in his hands will fade into just a discomforting and sporadic thought, not to bother him in his sleep anymore.
"Kenneth Banaczyk!" a voice commands behind Ken. He turns around on his chair to face a group of men in suits. The one that spoke is holding a badge in his open hand.
"U.S. Marshals. Please stand up."
The sound of the handcuffs snapping around his wrists in the pilot' s lounge, under the eyes of his fellow pilots and chief pilot, the unsavory degradation of being escorted out like a criminal, like the criminal he was, to the waiting cars outside, the surprised faces of his coworkers behind the windows, that humiliation will haunt Ken for the rest of his life.
Inside the car, between marshals, Ken sees himself inside a thick and oppressing burlap bag, hands and feet tied by the strongest of steels and a heavy chain choking his neck, and he ready to be dropped into a cold and bottomless sea.
Part II
Twenty Years Later
Rise and Shine
The clock radio goes off at six o' clock in the morning and the DJ' s familiar voices fill the room. Debbie stays in bed while a song plays and gets up with the commercials. She shuts the radio and goes to the tiny bathroom in her one bedroom apartment. She hops on her one right leg. The left one is missing from the knee down. She flops on the toilet and the sound of piss falling on water is long and strong; She is not the one to get up in the middle of the night for a bathroom break because her sleep is steady and she has learnt to leave her worries in the threshold to her night rest. She knows that there is plenty of time during the day to worry about bills and money and the minutia that somehow manages to grow into a spawn of evil, ready to cut her down to pieces.
Her two cats, Munch and Ernie, come to greet her and both try to push each other away from her one leg. She scratches their heads and they meow. Debbie knows that those sounds of pleasure are also demands for breakfast. Having cats is like being married again, some hairball always in need of something from her. At least Munch and Ernie are honest in their affections.
She wipes, stands and flushes, and with a short hop she is in front of the basin. The face in the mirror has sunken lips because her dentures are still in a glass full of water and cleanser. The accident in Dallas had taken her leg and her front teeth, plus three years of her life at the Gatesville State jail after she was convicted of vehicular homicide, reckless endangerment and reckless driving. She had gotten five but served only three. It' s hard for a cripple to be a troublemaker so the parole board had let her go without much fuss.
After washing, putting make up on and gluing her dentures to her gums she hops to the bedroom where her prosthesis waits standing next to her bed. With great deftness she readies her stump and fits the artificial limb, a hinged marvel of plastic and titanium, a far cry from the cheap peg leg she got at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Hospital in Galveston as a courtesy of the State. At least the peg had been better than crutches. Later on a charity got her a better, second hand - or as she had joked, second leg – prosthesis that had not fit her well but at least had looked like a leg, with afoot to put a shoe on.
At the beginning of her jail sentence she didn' t have any teeth because the State of Texas considered dentures a luxury and not a medical need the taxpayer had to pay for. She limped through corridors and yards and halls in her wooden peg and with her mouth sunk over her jaws, her head slung low and avoiding talking to anybody so her gapping mouth would not make them laugh. Those were hard days; her body still reeling from pain, both from her scars and from the chemical withdrawal she was going through. Drugs could be had like in any other jail she had done time in before, but this time she had decided to go cold turkey, the hard way, without counselors, support groups or nurses.
Her mangled body and the presence in court of the husband and the two little girls of the woman she had killed had made an impression on her. Suicide had been in her mind many a time during her stay at the hospital, handcuffed to bed, like as if the law were expecting her to stand up on her still whole but broken leg and hop away to Mexico, toothless and banged up beyond recognition. Suicide had flashed through her consciousness like a lit highway message board many occasions afterward but time and her innate will to survive had made such appearances less frequent and duller. Twenty years more or less, and still counting, and she had managed to stay clean. Alcohol and cigarettes don’ t count as such in her list of past and present addictions.
The same charity that got her the leg paid for her first set of dentures. Her toothless reflection in the chromed plastic panels that passed for mirrors at the jail disgusted her beyond measure so that first donated set of dentures felt godsend, like gold teeth instead of the cheap composites they were. They ill fitted her even after the jail dentist had fixed them up the best way he could. She had to watch them or they would come flying out of her mouth and she had to be very careful when chewing, but at least she could smile and talk without feeling like she was showing her wind pipe to the person she was talking to.
Since then Debbie has measured her life improvements by using the quality and fit of her dentures and prosthesis as a yardstick. This morning they were her most priced material possessions. The cats were her most priced emotional ones.
Debbie in jeans and a polo shirt walks into the kitchenette followed by Munch and Ernie. Her steps are firm and there is no trace of a limp. She stands in front of the sink and the sunlight alights her face and her pretty dimples. She is not a young girl anymore but an attractive middle aged woman, a little bit worn out in places and on the scrawny side. Her pony tail is a natural dirty blond color and there are a few white strands by the exposed roots around her face. Her attractiveness is not bought at a beauty parlor but comes from a natural, girlish look and her big brown eyes, and the dimples, of course. But she smokes and her skin has a dried up and eroded texture, and Denver' s altitude and dryness doesn' t help it. She is cutting back to five smokes a day. She has her first after eating a bowl of cereal on the couch while watching the early morning news.
The cats are fed and now lie satisfied on the sill of the living room window under a shaft of sunlight, licking their paws. "Bye guys," she says to her pets before closing the door and stepping out into the breeze way. She descends the stairs and a keen observer could have noticed the slight and odd way in which she bends her left knee. She gets in her Geo Metro, cranks it up and puts her dark glasses on. A few minutes later her little beater merges with the rush hour traffic in the street. Another day, another buck.
Men at Work
The high road or the low road, the path of righteousness or the path of perdition, the fork in the road, and on and on the cliché s go, some of them as ancient as humanity because since there was such thing as humanity, its members had found the way to screw up their lives by making the wrong decisions at those points in their lives when making a different decision would have meant a good or a bad life. Here is the rub though, that good and bad distinction; who can tell one from the other? Monday quarterbacks can look on Sunday’ s game and explain blow by blow what went wrong or right, but at that point, who cares? The gam
e is over, finito, done with.
Has my life been good or bad? God damned if I know. After my arrest In ever flew an airplane again.. On the other hand, neither my family nor I have ever been hungry either, and we have a decent roof over our heads, and clothes, and health. So I fucked up big time and it bit me in the ass, but my life was not over with and I got my shit together and now I own a landscaping business and a few rental properties and can afford to live the American dream, even if it is in installments.
Dwelling on what it could have been breeds bitterness. Dwelling on my mistakes feeds my self pity. Playing the blame game exhausts my mind and such obsession won’ t let me see what needs to be done to continue on living. These things I learned right after my passage through the Department of Justice and the Florida halls of justice. It was a swift passage, but not uneventful.
From Vegas they hauled me to Jacksonville, Florida. Here I sat in a cell, waiting for the big foot of the Federal government to come down on me and squash me like a roach. It’ s funny how people make jokes about lawyers, how they mock them, that is, until they are in the hole and need somebody to pull them out. The joke turns on you and the despicable lawyer becomes a white knight, for a handsome fee, that’ s true, but a knight nevertheless. Nobody else is going to stand up for you, by you.
My knight for hire was Adrian Rubenstein, a rotund Jew whose bald head and droopy face made him look like a man with the social skills of a loner living with his mother. His clear baritone voice articulating flawless legal arguments dispelled such erroneous first impression and left not doubt about his brilliant legal mind. Besides a good brain for legal matters I believe that a good lawyer has an attribute that cannot be learn in law school. That attribute is the ability to deal, and to deal hard and long for his client, to deal until the prosecution gives up, to be stubborn and play the other side until the best deal possible is on the table, and then know when it’ s time to lay the cards down, call the game off and take the deal. That kind of eager stubbornness and good timing doesn’ t come from the classroom, I know that much. I’ m sure that Mr. Rubenstein would have made a successful career of selling used cars.
Snapshots of Modern Love Page 9
