Divisible man ten keys w.., p.6
DIVISIBLE MAN--TEN KEYS WEST, page 6
“No, he didn’t,” I said aloud, editing for accuracy. “And that’s not the jet.”
“—which he then used to attack a jet parked on the ramp.” The video jumped back to vertical format cellphone video, flanked by blurry duplicates of the same wiggling image. The would-be cinematographer caught up to the crime in progress after the man had already begun hammering the Citation’s nose. “The incident took place late yesterday morning. Airport police and federal agents quickly raced to the scene—” The video showed Calbert land a final swing and then toss the ax aside before stalking back into the Signature building. “—but not before the assailant ran from the scene.”
“No, he didn’t.” Looked to me like he walked. Details.
The screen cut back to the on-camera reporter whose expression betrayed high pride in his ‘man versus airplane’ bit. I took him for a local news reporter thrilled to be tapped for a Today Show bit.
“We now know that Reuben Calbert, the alleged assailant, has a connection to the company that owns the jet. That company is Amphitriton Pharmaceutical Laboratories, who has been in the news for the past several weeks amid rumors of a breakthrough in cancer research.” Stock video of scientists in lab coats replaced the reporter. A tight shot showed glass droppers putting blue liquid into Petri dishes. “Unconfirmed reports suggest that Calbert’s daughter took part in recent Amphitriton drug trials. The company, citing HIPAA laws, declined to comment.” The scene switched back to the reporter, who for some reason now stood inside the airport passenger terminal. “Although several flights were delayed, normal airport operations quickly resumed after authorities confirmed that the alleged assailant left the scene. Police are now actively seeking Calbert in the greater Wichita area. We spoke briefly with Terrance Remington, President and CEO of Amphitriton, who was present during the attack.” The man who flapped his arms and shouted Pidge’s favorite word at people on the ramp appeared on camera against an indistinct office background. He wore an expensive suit over a dazzling white shirt and crisp silk tie. His hair was perfect, and he had applied makeup for the interview. He spoke softly and eloquently, considerably calmer than when I’d seen him at the airport. “Families that suffer from the tragedy that is childhood cancer are under immense emotional, mental, and financial strain. It is understandable when that strain reaches a breaking point. The violent act of one individual, however, in no way represents the brave families we have been working with for years in our effort to relieve suffering and find a cure for this devastating disease—and I believe we are very close.” He articulated the last bit for emphasis. Someone off camera shouted a question. Remington shook his head thoughtfully. “No. No, we do not plan to press charges. This individual clearly needs help. We do not condone his actions and we frankly fear for his state of mind. But we can forgive. We wish him and his family well.”
The cellphone video got another play. Hoda and Savannah returned to the screen and offered words of shock while the video played two more times in an inset box. They closed with words of condolence for those dealing with childhood cancer. Savannah added a dash of praise for Remington’s corporate compassion.
I hit the power button on the TV. The screen went to black. I stared. In that deep, glossy black, I saw night…and children. Children sleeping. Children attached to transparent tubes. A few emaciated and nearly all of them bald.
Matter in an altered state.
The words of an autistic eight-year-old rang in my head. Lillian Farris’s young ward spoke those words when I made him vanish and took him flying over a woodland landscape of dead trees. We were, he declared, matter in an altered state.
I’ve thought a lot about Boyd Farris’s declaration since that day. Taken in isolation, I might have chalked his comment up to—I don’t know—nonsense from a child. Except that Boyd possesses an exceptional mind. He is also entirely unaware of one of the other thing’s inexplicable attributes.
The other thing doesn’t just make me vanish. Matter in an altered state.
On a fogbound Angel Flight more than a year ago, I made a girl vanish, a girl losing a fight with leukemia. I did it because it was the only way to get her out of an airplane that could not land and onto the ground where treatment waited for her. I didn’t know it at the time but if I believe Boyd, I altered the state of her matter. The girl wound up in remission. Inexplicably and unmistakably. The discovery was revealed to me by the oncology nurse on that Angel Flight, a woman named Christine Watkins.
Watkins came at me hard about the effect the other thing had on her tiny patient. She was convinced that what I had done made the difference. I wasn’t, but I couldn’t ignore her. Since then, I’ve visited more than a dozen hospitals in the dead of night. I’ve vanished and slipped into scores of hospital rooms unseen. While cancer-stricken children slept, I closed a grip on a wrist or ankle and made them vanish, too.
I altered the state of their matter.
Dr. Douglas Stephenson, the neurologist who helped me regain my pilot’s license after my accident, knows this. His credentials give him access to data that suggests whatever I’m doing works. Stephenson estimates I have close to ninety percent success. He, like Christine Watkins, encourages me to do more and has gingerly suggested making myself available to medical experts.
Therein lies the problem.
The single factor making me desperate to keep this secret is the ten percent failure rate. It doesn’t always work—a point I carry as the memory of a young woman’s face and the forgiveness she wore on it. I altered Angeline Landry’s matter, and it didn’t matter.
The notion of bringing this added dimension of the other thing into the light of day scares the hell out of me. The expectation of perfection would spotlight every failure. Whatever I’m doing, whatever this altered state of matter does to those tiny bodies, it simply isn’t perfect.
That doesn’t mean I plan to stop. I won’t. If the other thing can help one kid, one family, I have no right to stop. But if I ever doubted my decision, this airport incident erased those doubts.
A man goes berserk and attacks a jet belonging to a pharmaceutical company out of rage over the terrible throw of the dice given his daughter—or in anger over the company’s failure to deliver something promised. A father’s fury made sense to me. His expectation of perfection collided with pharmaceutical failure. He dealt with his pain by swinging an ax.
If people knew what I did, disclaimers would make no difference. The expectation of perfection would be inherent.
What would that man do if I failed his child? What if someone lost a child and decided that I also deserved to lose a loved one?
I don’t know how many children I’ve visited. I don’t count. I don’t record names—only the places I’ve been. I don’t track results. I leave that to Stephenson, and I’ve asked him never to be specific, never to share.
But now I had to think.
I’ve been to a hospital in Wichita, one that specializes in cancer treatment. This was not the first Foundation trip to central Kansas, and it’s on these trips that I slip in and out during the night. I don’t remember the name, or even what the building looks like, but I know I’ve visited hospital rooms containing suffering children in this city.
Did I cross paths with this man’s daughter?
Did I already fail her?
Was that why this man was driven to attack a jet with a fire ax?
I told myself there was no way to know if I met or missed this man’s kid. And if I did fail, logic argued that the child’s condition (or worse, death) was not my fault.
Logic.
The badly focused and wiggling cellphone video on The Today Show showed a big man, a powerful man, a dangerous man making bad choices. The video was shot too far away to show his face. I suspected that his face would soon be all over the news anyway, whether he was caught or not in the days to come.
I didn’t want to see his face.
I told myself it was not my fault. That there was nothing I could do.
Logic.
I tossed the TV remote on the bed and hit the shower.
10
Arun’s wheels up prediction of 2:30 p.m. proved perfect as always.
The ride home from Wichita took us through a cold front that curled down from central Ontario, across Lake Michigan and into the central plains. A line of spring thunderstorms marched into Detroit in time to mess with rush hour at Detroit Metro. Behind the line, tabletop layers of wet cloud stretched into the Dakotas. Cool, stable air made the layers soft and smooth, painted my windscreens white, and let me ride through the opaque sky with only my instruments and engines for company.
I chose the RNAV 31 approach into Essex County airport and let the autopilot navigate to the initial approach fix while I adjusted throttles and used the vertical speed function to nail the assigned altitudes. At the Final Approach Fix, the glide slope and lateral navigation bugs aligned on cue. When the green dots on the scales centered, I dropped the gear, set the flaps for approach, and hit the red autopilot disconnect button on the yoke to hand fly the approach.
Like magic, seven hundred feet above the ground, the veil ahead of the nose thinned and shades of brown earth materialized. I tweaked the power to slow from one-twenty to one hundred knots. Runway 31 appeared over the nose, exactly as promised by the publishers of the RNAV 31 approach procedure. Well above minimum descent height, I called Approach Control and reported the runway in sight.
“Final gear check,” I recited aloud, confirming the three green lights on the panel along with visual check of a convex mirror mounted on the left engine nacelle.
I rolled back the throttles and dropped full flaps. The Navajo coasted down a three-degree slope to the asphalt where painted runway numbers waited. I flared out and landed with a gentle squeak of the mains, then held off the nose until it overcame backpressure on the yoke and settled of its own accord.
To save the brakes, I rolled out to the last turnoff and exited the runway for the ramp. A short taxi took me past the Essex County Air Service hangar and office, then left onto the wide middle ramp between two rows of hangars, the largest of which housed the Education Foundation.
Home.
The warm feeling got a boost when I spotted something I had never seen before. The ECAS propane-powered tug idled near the corner of the Foundation hangar. Like something out of my adolescent fantasies, two women lounged on the stubby machine. One—cute, petite, and blonde—occupied the driver’s seat with her wrists hanging languidly through the steering wheel. She wore a black ball cap and Ray Ban Aviators. The other, a long-legged beauty crowned with locks of deep auburn hair, leaned back on the fender of the vehicle, striking a pose that some low part of my brain filed among glossy images from a tool calendar circa 1942. Tasteful. Clothed. And yet breathtaking.
The women watched me roll past the hangar. I cut a tight circle to place the Navajo in front of the door facing away from the hangar. For a bit of bravado, I killed the engines on the roll.
You fly the airplane until the wheels are chocked. It’s an old saw I heard applied to the venerable Beechcraft D-18, but the rule applies to any airplane. Even with the props stopped, I had duties in the cockpit. I fought off the distraction caused when Pidge started up the tug and wheeled it in a tight arc that ended up facing me. Andy gripped the edges of the fender, looking fine and laughing like a girl on a county fair ride.
Damn.
I ran through the shutdown checklist. Pidge nudged the tug closer to the Navajo’s nose. Andy waved at me. I shook my head and waved back. Behind me, Arun popped the cabin door. The airplane rocked when he and Sandy disembarked. I squeezed the garage-door style remote that launched the ponderous rise of the big hangar door. After securing my headset and giving the panel switches a final inspection, I followed my passengers to the ramp.
Sandy Stone trotted to the back of the left wing and waved at Andy.
“Pidge is teaching me how to park airplanes,” Andy called out.
“Fucking A!” Pidge confirmed, then slapped her hand across her mouth. She searched for Arun to reassure herself that he was well out of earshot.
Arun and Pidge have been engaged in a strangely formal courtship, a secret known to everyone at Essex County Airport, and probably a few transients, too. In his presence, she is girlish and charming. Unrecognizable. I’m not sure he’s ever heard her curse. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her not curse. I couldn’t even be certain he knew we all call her Pidge, a shortening of Pigeon which she earned as a young student pilot for her flying skill and foul language. Our smitten Arun uses her birth name, Cassidy.
Pidge cringed but Arun had already started for the hangar, pretending that he was still on the clock and not at all distracted by the young woman driving the tug. Sandy issued a hasty second wave at Andy and followed Arun into the hangar.
“Nice to see you expanding your skill set.” I strolled around the wingtip. My wife blew me a kiss. “Then I guess the first thing you have to do is hop down here and hook up the tow bar.” I pointed at the bar mounted on a rack above the hitch.
Pidge intervened. “No-no-no-no! That’s what we have lowly ramp rats for. Hook us up, my man.” Pidge gestured like someone brushing away a fly.
“Me? No way. I’m the hotshot pilot.”
Pidge leaned toward Andy. “He’s cute but delusional.”
Andy giggled.
I hooked the tow bar to the nose gear.
Pidge fired up the tug and inched forward until the tow bar dropped into the latch. I hopped clear. She powered up and pushed the Navajo into the hangar. Inside, she killed the tug engine and left it attached to the airplane, which told me she planned to hang around until Arun finished post-trip business with Sandy.
I gave Andy a hand and helped her down off the fender. She kept the hand and planted a kiss, pressing herself close. I liked her touch and the suggestions it implied. I tried for seconds but she leaned back.
“Let me say hi and goodbye to Sandy, and then I need you for something.” She planted a quick one on my lips, then pulled away. I watched her hurry across the hangar floor toward the office.
Pidge joined me. “Jesus, Stewart, get your tongue up off the floor. This is why I keep telling her to blink twice if she’s being held against her will.”
“She is held. Against her…Will…” I tapped my chest. “Get it?”
“Oh, shut the fuck up.”
11
Andy drove the six-year-old Subaru Outback we purchased used shortly after New Year’s. Al Raymond, who maintained a large used car lot in Essex, had been pestering Andy about selling her a new ride ever since her car wound up in Leander Lake. Andy insists she would commit grand theft auto before buying a car from Raymond. For as long as she could, she used a police department vehicle, which doubled as a symbol of security at the farmhouse. With the steam released from the recall effort and a general agreement that once our house had been shot up it didn’t matter if we had a police cruiser in the yard or not, we decided the time had come to replace her car. The insurance settlement, per usual, didn’t come close to providing the cash we needed, but Tom Ceeves steered us to a reputable dealer in Sturgeon Bay, and we were able to finance the shortfall.
I liked the little green Outback. Andy rocked the six-speed manual transmission, which colluded with her heavy right foot to make each ride a thrill. She promised that if I behaved, she might let me drive it one day.
“Where are we going?” I asked after she told me to leave my car at the hangar and ride shotgun in the Subaru.
“One quick stop, then I thought we’d get tacos for dinner.” She pulled onto Highway 34 and quickly shifted up through the gears.
It’s probably sexist of me, but I couldn’t help but steal glances at a beautiful woman throwing that shifter up and down. The car windows were closed, but I always imagine wind sweeping back her hair when Andy drives. My libido wandered. Tacos meant dinner out, which meant time alone over drinks, which meant…
“What’s the quick stop? Is this about Leslie?”
“No. Leslie texted. She’s delayed.”
“Delayed, as in…?”
“No idea.”
“Did she give up anything new about the six guys?”
“Not a word.”
I expected as much.
“So, what’s the quick stop?”
“Something from work. Won’t take long.”
I did not ask for details, but that didn’t prevent me from guessing. A chat with a witness. A knock on a door that probably wouldn’t be answered. An ambush interview with someone who had been reluctant to speak to a uniformed officer. Andy carried both a loaded weapon and a load of charm. She used the latter with a marksman’s skill.
Andy asked me about the trip. I told her the weird story of the man attacking the airplane, and how it showed up on television.
“Those people will put anything onscreen if they have video.” Those people referred to journalists. Andy is not a fan of most media crime coverage. “God forbid video catches a cop doing something. Did they arrest the guy?”
“I haven’t heard. Doesn’t seem to be much doubt about who he is, though, so I’d say it’s only a matter of time.”
“True. The fantasy of ‘going on the run’ doesn’t play well in a world full of cell phones and surveillance cameras.”
“I don’t know.” I thought of our short-lived status as fugitives last fall. “We did alright.”
She laughed. “For what? A few days?”
“You looked good as a blonde.” I offered the compliment carefully, recognizing the potential for backlash.
“You’re saying I don’t look good with my natural color?” There it was.
“Let me rephrase…you made being blonde look good.”
“Nice save.” She laughed. “Hair color doesn’t influence facial recognition software. We weren’t going to get very far. From the description of your airplane ax murderer, I give him another forty-eight hours. He sounds like he stands out in a crowd.”
