We Will Be Crashing Shortly Read online

  “Get your hands off my butt.” She kicked her feet and Officer Ned backed away. LaVonda perched there for a bit, half descended through the ceiling hatch, legs flailing, then finally let go and hit the floor with a thud. It’s saying something about the durability of the aircraft that it didn’t shake.

  “Hoo! That was fun. Where’s my Poochie?” She held out her arms. I held out Captain Beefheart only to have her envelop us both in her warm embrace. It was almost enough to finally make me cry. Almost. I met LaVonda Morgenstern, a former L.A. gang member and ex-Minimart cashier, last year after I’d escaped the car trunk of an abductor—a side perk of the runaway life. LaVonda had been so good at keeping me from going into shock that I lobbied for her to come to Atlanta to serve as “Trauma Liaison” to WorldAir company security. It was a totally made-up position, but the board could not say no to me seeing as how I was a media darling and all. LaVonda now lived in Atlanta with her domestic partner and their two children.

  Beefheart jumped to the floor and presented his paw to Officer Ned, who shook it firmly. This dog played a big part in foiling the hijackers of flight 1021 last year. As a result, he was a natural mascot for the airline, and since he was an emotional support canine, it made sense that he be part of the trauma-liaison team. LaVonda, in her customary manner, took their union very seriously, and considered Captain Beefheart her partner, like a police officer in the K-9 unit. Since LaVonda didn’t have an office (in exchange she was assigned an iPad on a shoulder strap and a fleet of those beeping carts to maniacally drive through the concourses), she kept an elaborately padded doggie bed in a corner of Officer Ned’s office, where Beefheart rested between assignments. And wherever Beefheart was, so was LaVonda. Officer Ned blustered about it, but not emphatically.

  “Girl,” LaVonda huffed at me. “You sure know how to get yourself into some situations. What the hell part do you play in some man getting chopped up? Tell me everything and don’t leave anything out.” LaVonda folded down the galley jumpseat and sat. I sat on the floor in front of her with Beefheart in my lap.

  Officer Ned stood with his arms folded. “She was about to tell me when you showed up making a commotion.”

  “Hush,” she whispered to him, then turned to me. “Now what the hell happened?”

  I told them I’d been hiding here ever since the Mr. Hackman “incident” the night before, which made it kind of funny that everyone was searching for me high and wide when really I hadn’t gone anywhere. A blood stain in the shape of the continent of Africa was still on the concrete below us. Last night when I peeked through the crease in the cargo door I could see the crime-scene tape crisscrossing the hangar. I imagined it made the plane look like a giant metal fly caught in a Day-Glo web. The few times I had to use the bathroom I pulled myself up through a trap door and crawled on my elbows to the lavatory in the midcabin. I made sure not to flush the toilet. It was an experience I wanted to repeat as little as possible.

  “April, again,” Officer Ned prompted me again, “how did this start?”

  CHAPTER 3

  It started when I crashed Uncle Otis’s car yet again, during yet another DMV driving test. Ms. Washington, the DMV instructor, only agreed to give me another try because Otis had wooed her into it. I had requested another instructor, but these were clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles; the only entertainment they got all day was when people asked for something, in which case they got to swat the request to the pavement and watch it pop. What made it worse was that Ms. Washington was now unwisely attached to my uncle Otis, and obviously figured this would be a way to ingratiate herself with him. She kept talking to me like she was going to be my new mother or something.

  “April, darling, don’t go crashing into a tree again, got that?” she chuckled tensely as she eased into the passenger seat.

  “If I recall the news footage,” a tobacco-shredded voice answered her from the backseat, “it was you who grabbed the wheel and steered it into the tree.”

  Ms. Washington and I both jumped nervously and turned to face Flo, who was supposed to have been waiting inside until the test was over.

  “What are you doing here?” I cried.

  “I figured you could use a witness, Crash.” Flo lit a menthol and took a deep drag.

  “Put that out immediately,” Ms. Washington admonished. “I’m not about to shorten my life by breathing in your second-hand smoke.”

  “Why not?” Flo chuckled. “You’re shortening it by getting in the car with Crash Manning here.”

  “If you don’t put it out, I’ll fail April’s driving test before she puts the key in the ignition.”

  Flo rolled her eyes and flicked the cigarette out the window. I was very touched that she’d forgo her fifth cigarette of the morning for my sake. But sentiment aside, I also suspected Flo was here in order to recount my progress on her blog, JetHag.com, which was clocking over 20,000 unique hits a week these days. In it she divulged a slew of airline insider information that would have immediately gotten her canned but for the fact that the blog was written anonymously. I knew it was her because I recognized the stories she told and the vernacular she used, referring to passengers, coworkers, and WorldAir executives alike as “Mr. Asstard,” “Miss Bitchy Pig,” and “Sir Turdface.” I had to admit it was entertaining reading—with the exception of her Wednesday posts, which were dedicated to the exploits of Crash Manning.

  Ms. Washington buckled herself in and gripped the handle protruding from the BMW’s passenger-side dashboard. “Fasten your seatbelt!” she chirped. “And be careful this time.”

  My seatbelt, of course, was already fastened. No disrespect to Ms. Washington, but telling me to be careful was like telling a pumpkin to be orange—it’s in my nature. It’s one of the reasons I hate my nickname Crash, because I am the most safety-obsessed person I know. For example, I knew that the greatest lifetime chance of crashing occurs within six months of getting a driver’s license. And here was a note Otis taped to the bathroom mirror for me this morning:

  TOP THREE REASONS TEENAGE DRIVERS DIE IN CAR WRECKS

  Lack of situational awareness necessary to detect and respond to hazards

  Miscalculating road conditions and driving too fast

  Distraction due to something inside or outside the car

  I cut my teeth on airline safety manuals, and sat rapt in my grandfather’s shed as he invented half the patents that make WorldAir, as well as all airlines, a safer way to travel. My flight attendant father’s death onboard an aircraft in a fire literally created a new evacuation protocol that has since saved hundreds of lives. So the last thing you need to remind me to be is careful. I didn’t even bring my cellphone today for fear it would ring while I was driving.

  “I never bring a cellphone with me into the car,” concurred Ms. Washington. “It’s like an accident magnet.”

  I pulled out of the parking lot without incident. I could feel Ms. Washington relax next to me. She was an attractive and tiny woman, but then I’m 5'10" so a lot of people seem short to me. Her light brown skin was dusted with freckles and she wore her mahogany-colored hair in a big bundle of dreadlocks atop her head. Flo could have related. She was barely pushing five feet and used to wear her hair in a huge bun in order to qualify for the minimum height requirement of WorldAir stewardesses back in the day.

  Flo’s presence actually did calm me down as I pulled into traffic and took a left on Hank Aaron Boulevard toward Memorial Avenue as Ms. Washington instructed me. Flo had been flying since 1967 and, like most old-school stews still working the skies, she was so sharp you could cut yourself just by conversing with her—so you had to be careful. I’d spent hours listening to her wax poetic about how, back in the good old days, “you could smoke in the cabin before takeoff and belt a few back with the pilots in the cockpit.”

  But if you ask me, those old days were not so good. The chauvinism her colleagues faced was legendary. My mother once told me that Flo, in the span of her career, had twice stood befor
e Congress—twice!—as part of a petition for more fair treatment of women in the workplace.

  “I’ll never retire,” Flo was fond of saying, “until they pry the peanuts from my cold, dead fingers.”

  Flo blamed herself for how my stepfather Ash turned out, seeing as how she technically gave birth to him forty-nine years ago and all. But it’s not like she raised him. She popped him out in one of those Shame Compounds created throughout the Bible Belt back then for girls of ill repute who’d been knocked up and needed a way out. In 1965, Flo was hardly older than me and had aspired to be a stewardess her entire life. But those were draconian times, and no American airline would hire a woman if they knew she’d given birth (yeah, progressive, right?)—and worse, stewardesses were canned all the time for rumors to the effect they’d propagated or even gotten married on the sly. Those secret spawning wards throughout the South back then were full of stewardesses trying to keep their circumstances on the down-low so they could retain their jobs.

  Ms. Washington hushed Flo when she started to sing along with Pink’s “Blow Me,” which was playing on the radio. I had turned left on Memorial and then veered right onto Trinity Avenue so Ms. Washington could lecture me while we drove past city hall. I was about to circle back to the DMV parking lot when my attention was drawn to a silver Rolls-Royce parked on the curb outside the corporate offices of Colgate Enterprises. That’s got to be Malcolm’s dad’s car, I thought, and was momentarily confirmed when I caught sight of Mr. Colgate, only to realize it wasn’t Malcolm’s dad but Malcolm himself I was looking at.

  Wow, I thought, it’s funny what the last eight months have done to my best friend. When I met him he was a cherubic redhead with a warm smile and easy manner. He must have grown an inch a month since our inflight adventure last year. No longer cherubic, he was now a strapping guy, with thick wavy hair, a pronounced jawline, and green eyes that crinkled into half-moons when he smiled. I’d known him since we were 12, having spent most of that time on airplanes traveling coast to coast between divorced parents. He was the only friend I had who was my age, and the only one I knew who came close to relating to the idiocy of my custodial situation. We’d spent countless hours updating each other on the travails of our divorced parents and their ensuing custody battles. My woeful tale included a vicious adoptive father who lied and bribed his way into becoming my primary physical custodian. Astoundingly, Malcolm’s story was even worse than mine. Believe me, I’d met his parents. His mother was a verbally abusive, blue-blood boozehound who reveled in using the court as a club with which to berate his father, a rich corporate mogul now disgraced and under indictment for fraud, insider trading, and tax evasion. Malcolm bounced like a pinball between them, back and forth, with them both seeming to put anger and resentment at a precedent over their son’s welfare. I was amazed that Malcolm turned out to be such a kindhearted and jocular young man.

  Watching Malcolm today, I had to smile. I had never seen him in a suit before, and realized I assumed I was looking at his wealthy father due in part to that and in part to the bombshell on his arm. She had platinum blonde hair, boobs big enough to be seen from outer space, and stiletto heels so high she could use them to spear lobsters.

  I slowed down and waved to him, despite Ms. Washington’s gentle admonishments. He didn’t see me, so I attempted to toot the horn a little. The only problem was that the horn of a 1970s BMW sounded a lot like a hotel fire alarm, or maybe that was just one of my uncle Otis’s upgrades to this particular BMW, but whatever the case, the sound was enough to make everyone’s eardrums bleed.

  Not surprisingly, everyone within a radius of two blocks jumped like nervous squirrels. Flo and I both laughed, and even Ms. Washington let a tiny smile crease the firm line of her lips. By this time, we were flush with Mr. Colgate’s Rolls. Malcolm and his paramour both jerked their heads up at the sound of the horn. I expected him to smile broadly at the sight of me, as he usually did, but instead his face froze in an odd expression. It was so unexpected that I stopped the car completely, causing the vehicles behind me to make a mild seesaw as they braked to avoid my back bumper.

  “Oh, that one’s gonna cost you,” Ms. Washington firmly check-marked the form on her clipboard. “Another move like that, young lady . . .”

  “Flo, what’s wrong with Malcolm?” I interrupted.

  “I don’t know,” Flo sounded concerned, as well.

  I lowered my window and called, “Hey, Prince Charles!” I tried to sound cheery by poking mild fun at the stately condition of his attire. “What’re you up to all fancy like that?”

  “I, uh, I . . .” Malcolm stammered. His face turned white and his eyes were pleading. “Miss, I think you have me mistaken for someone else.”

  I waited for him to tell me he was kidding, and when he didn’t I furrowed my brow and continued to assess the situation. That was one of the most important things you learned from the WorldAir flight attendant onboard manual—assess the situation. I couldn’t believe the number of people who died like day-old fruit flies simply because they didn’t bother to do this.

  “Situational awareness, kid,” Otis liked to point out to me with a wink. “Don’t forget. Sounds simple, but it’s not. You got to be aware of your surroundings.” He should know, I guess. He witnessed close-hand how the lack of situational awareness can erase 583 people in the blink of an eye. In fact, I would not have been surprised if Otis had helped write the chapter on situational awareness in the WorldAir flight attendant manual. I’ve read the manual cover to cover a couple of times now, and the last and most important item on the checklist for situational awareness was “Use Your Intuition.”

  Looking at Malcolm, my intuition was screaming at me right now.

  Ms. Washington urged me to continue driving, but I ignored her and focused on the scene at the side of the road. The blonde woman took care to keep her face directed away from me. It turned out she was not “on” Malcolm’s arm so much as she was grabbing it and urging him into the backseat, where someone else was reaching out to pull him inside. Malcolm was still staring at me in a white-faced panic as the woman placed her hand on the top of his head while she and the man both pulled and shoved him into the car. What the hell? The man in the backseat then urged the driver to go, and it was then that I recognized Mr. Hackman.

  “That bastard!” Flo hissed from behind me.

  The sight of Mr. Hackman brought out anger in me, as well. He was a small, paunch-bellied, balding man who looked older than his 52 years. He had successfully lobbied against unionization of the WorldAir mechanics, only to appoint himself official corporate liaison solely for the purpose of conceding the new contract in obvious favor of management. We figured he did this in order to accept heavy bribes, a contention that was backed up by the McMansion he acquired in Alpharetta soon afterward. By then Molly told us she had left him, due to the spousal abuse as well as the apartment she discovered he kept downtown across the street from the Cheetah so he could house a small harem of strippers at his beck and call. But evidently he didn’t want Molly to go on her own terms. So he ambushed her in the garage one night, and beat her with a lawnmower blade until her head was hardly more than pulp.

  Today the case was “pending,” as the police put it, and was on the verge of going cold because the only witness, Molly herself, was on life support and couldn’t finger her attacker. My friend Alby, a former flight attendant who now ran her own small law practice, is the sole reason Molly still breathes. The minute the police declined to charge him, Mr. Hackman was at the hospital as Molly’s next of kin demanding the removal of her life support. I happened to be in her room at the time, delivering my daily bouquet, when suddenly Mr. Hackman barreled in with a gaggle of nurses, insisting she be unplugged because “it’s what she would have wanted.”

  Panicked, I got Alby on the phone, and she was able to petition for emergency custody of Molly and thus put off any unplugging for at least ten days, at which point Mr. Hackman would have to appear in court to argue
against the petition. Mr. Hackman was livid, and he’d been beaming heavy hate vibes at me ever since. Officer Ned called some old contacts at the station and found out that Mr. Hackman had taken out a half-million-dollar life-insurance policy on Molly, and Alby and I were the only things keeping him from collecting it right away.

  So the sight of Mr. Hackman usually frightened and angered me, but now here he was rough-handling my friend Malcolm, which especially got my blood to boiling. I yanked the parking brake and lay on the horn with both hands. Pedestrians covered their ears and stared at me. Ms. Washington hooted with consternation and told me to keep driving. Flo encouraged me from the backseat. “Block ’em in, kid!”

  Mr. Hackman flailed furiously at the driver, urging him forward. The driver looked over his shoulder at us and I felt my blood turn to ice.

  “Ash, you bastard!” I screamed.

  “Call me Dad,” he sneered back at me. He put the Rolls in gear, slammed on the gas, and basically shoved us out of the way with barely a dent in the expensive Rolls bumper.

  We, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well. The front bumper of our BMW, probably in place with nothing but staples anyway, peeled halfway off and hung to the ground like a limp banana leaf. “They’re getting away!” Flo harped, tossing another cigarette out the window.

  I disengaged the parking brake, shoved the transmission in gear, and left skid marks smoking on the asphalt as I tore off after them. It soon became evident that, while Otis may not have cared a single bit about the outward appearance of this car, he certainly turbocharged the engine. We shot out like a rocket and caught up to them instantly. By this point Ms. Washington had slipped into such a state of panic that all she seemed able to do was clutch the dashboard handle, her eyes bulging and her body stiff with fear. And no wonder: Ash had begun bumping us with the Rolls in an effort to push us off the road or into oncoming traffic. At one point it was like we were hitched together as we turned left onto Central Avenue. A block later we would empty into the freeway. The freeway. I had never driven on the freeway.