The woman turned a little red. Osano grinned. He knew what he was doing. I got a little embarrassed too. I always fall a little in love with strange women who hit me right. I could see her thinking how she could get Osano to do the job for her. She didn’t know that she was too old for him and he was just playing his cards very coolly to nail the young stewardess.
There we were speeding along at six hundred miles an hour and not feeling a thing. But Osano was getting drunker, and things started going bad. The heart lady was boozy maudlin about dying and how to find the right guy to go down on her the right way. That made Osano nervous. He said to her, “You can always play the Big Ace.” Of course, she didn’t know what he was talking about. But she knew she was being dismissed, and the hurt look on her face irritated Osano even more. He ordered another drink, and the stewardess, jealous and pissed off that he had ignored her, gave him the drink and slipped away in the cool, insulting way the young can always use to put older people down. Osano showed his age that day.
At that moment the couple with the poodle came up the steps into the lounge. Well, she was one woman I would never fall in love with. The discontented mouth, that artificially tinted nut-brown face with all the lines of life excised by a surgeon’s knife, were too repellent, no fantasies could be spun around them unless you were into sadomaso stuff.
The man carried the beautiful little poodle, the dog’s tongue hanging out with happiness. Carrying the poodle gave the sour-faced man a touching air of vulnerability. As usual Osano seemed not to notice them, though they gave him glances that showed they knew who he was. Probably from TV. Osano had been on TV a hundred times and always making himself interesting in a foolish way that lessened his real worth.
The couple ordered drinks. The woman said something to the man and he obediently dropped the poodle to the floor. The poodle stayed close to them, then wandered around a bit, sniffing at all the people and at all the chairs. I knew Osano hated animals, but he didn’t seem to notice the poodle sniffing at his feet. He kept talking to the heart lady. The heart lady leaned over to fix the pink ribbon over the poodle’s head and get her hand licked by the poodle’s little pink tongue. I never could understand the animal thing, but this poodle was, in a funny kind of way, sexy. I wondered what went on with that sour-faced couple. The poodle pattered around the lounge, wandered back to its owners and sat on the feet of the woman. She put on dark glasses, which for some reason seemed ominous, and when the stewardess brought her drink, she said something to the young girl. The stewardess looked at her in astonishment.
I guess it was at this moment that I got a little nervous. I knew Osano was all jazzed up. He hated being trapped in a plane, he hated being trapped in a conversation with a woman he didn’t really want to screw. What he was thinking about was how to get the young stewardess into a toilet and give her a quick, savage fuck. The young stewardess came to me with my drink and leaned over to whisper in my ear. I could see Osano getting jealous. He thought the girl was coming on to me, and that was an insult to his fame more than anything else. He could understand the girl wanting a younger, better-looking guy, but not turning down his fame.
But the stewardess was whispering a different kind of trouble. She said, “That woman wants me to tell Mr. Osano to put out his cigar. She says it’s bothering her dog.”
Jesus Christ. The dog wasn’t even supposed to be up in the lounge running around. It was supposed to be in its box. Everybody knew that. The girl whispered worriedly, “What should I do?”
I guess what happened next was partly my fault. I knew Osano could go crazy at any time and that this was a prime time. But I was always curious about how people react. I wanted to see if the stewardess would really have the nerve to tell a guy like Osano to put out one of his beloved Havana cigars because of a fucking dog. Especially when Osano had paid for a first class ticket just to smoke it in the lounge. I also wanted to see Osano put the hard-faced snotty woman in her place. I would have ditched my cigar and let it ride. But I knew Osano. He would send the plane down into hell first.
The stewardess was waiting for an answer. I shrugged. “Whatever your job makes you do,” I said. And it was a malicious answer.
I guess the stewardess felt the same way. Or maybe she just wanted to humiliate Osano because he was no longer paying any attention to her. Or maybe, because she was just a kid, she took what she thought was the easy way out.
Osano, if you didn’t know him, looked easier to handle than the bitch lady.
Well, we all made a bad mistake. The stewardess stood next to Osano and said, “Sir, would you mind putting out your cigar? That lady says the smoke is bothering her dog.”
Osano’s startling green eyes went cold as ice. He gave the stewardess a long, hard look.
“Let me hear that again,” he said.
Right then I was ready to jump out of the plane. I saw the look of maniacal rage form over Osano’s face. It was no longer a joke. The woman was staring at Osano with distaste. She was dying for an argument, a real uproar. You could see she’d love a fight. The husband glanced out the window, studying the limitless horizon. Obviously this was a familiar scene and he had every confidence that his wife would prevail. He even had a slight, satisfied smile. Only the sweet-looking poodle was distressed. It was gasping for air and giving delicate little hiccups. The lounge was smoky but not from just Osano’s cigar. Nearly everybody had cigarettes going, and you got the feeling that the poodle owners would make everybody stop smoking.
The stewardess, frightened by Osano’s face, was paralyzed-she couldn’t speak. But the woman was not intimidated. You could see that she just loved seeing that look of maniacal rage on Osano’s face. You could also see that she never in her life had been punched in the mouth, that she had never gotten a few teeth knocked out. The thought had never occurred to her. So she even leaned toward Osano to speak to him, putting her face in range. I almost closed my eyes. In fact, I did close my eyes for a fraction of a second and I could hear the woman in her cultured, cold voice saying very flatly to Osano, “Your cigar is distressing my dog. Could you please just stop?”
The words were snotty enough, but the tone was insulting beyond any mere words. I could see she was waiting for an argument about her dog’s not being allowed in the lounge, how the lounge was for smoking. How she realized that if she had said the smoke was distressing her personally, Osano would get rid of the cigar. But she wanted him to put out the cigar for her dog. She wanted a scene.
Osano grasped all this in a second. He understood everything. And I think that was what drove him crazy. I saw that smile come over his face, a smile that could be infinitely charming but for the cold green eyes that were pure maniac.
He didn’t yell at her. He didn’t punch her in the face. He gave her husband one look to see what he would do. The husband smiled faintly. He liked what his wife was doing, or so it seemed. Then with a deliberate motion Osano put out his cigar in the welled tray of his seat. The woman watched him with contempt. Then Osano reached out his arm across the table and you could see the woman thought he was going to pet the poodle. I knew better. Osano’s hand went down over the poodle’s head and around its neck.
What happened next was too quick for me to stop. He lifted the poor dog up, rising up out of his seat, and strangled it with both hands. The poodle gasped and choked, its pink beribboned tail wagging in distress. Its eyes started bulging out of its mattress of silky ringed fur. The woman screamed and sprang up and clawed at Osano’s face. The husband didn’t move out of his seat. At that moment the plane hit a small air pocket and we all lurched. But Osano, drunk, all his balance concentrated on strangling the poodle, lost his footing and went sprawling down the aisle, his hands still tight around the dog’s throat. To get up he had to turn the dog loose. The woman was screaming something about killing him. The stewardess was screaming out of shock. Osano, standing straight up, smiled around the lounge and then advanced toward the woman, still screaming at him. She thought that now he would be ashamed of what he had done, that she could abuse him. She didn’t know that he had already made up his mind to strangle her as he had the dog. Then she caught on…She shut up.