“You’re all going to die!” he screamed, pounding, pounding. “You’ll be sucked out into space, all of you!” Ellen thought she could hear the window cracking — wasn’t anybody going to do anything? — and then he dropped both coffeepots and made a rush up the aisle for the first-class section.
Before she could react, Michael rose in a half-crouch, swung his laptop out across the saddlebag lady’s tray table, and caught Lercher in the crotch with the sharp, flying corner of it. She saw his face then, Lercher’s, twisted and swollen like a sore, and it came right at Michael, who could barely maneuver in his eighteen inches of allotted space. In a single motion, the big man snatched the laptop from Michael’s hand and brought it whistling down across his skull, and Ellen felt him go limp beside her. At that point, she didn’t know what she was doing. All she knew was that she’d had enough, enough of Roy and this big, drunken, testosterone-addled bully and the miserable, crimped life that awaited her at her mother’s, and she came up out of her seat as if she’d been launched — and in her hand, clamped there like a flaming sword, was a thin steel fork that she must have plucked from the cluttered dinner tray. She went for his face, for his head, his throat, enveloping him with her body, the drug singing in her heart and the scotch flowing like ichor in her veins.
—
They made an emergency stop in Denver, and they sat on the ground in a swirling light snow as the authorities boarded the plane to take charge of Lercher. He’d been overpowered finally and bound to his seat with cloth napkins from the first-class dining service, a last napkin crammed into his mouth as a gag. The captain had come on the loudspeaker with a mouthful of apologies, and then, to a feeble cheer from the cabin, pledged free headphones and drinks on the house for the rest of the flight. Ellen sat, dazed, over yet another scotch, the seat beside her vacant. Even before the men in uniforms boarded the plane to handcuff and shackle Lercher, the paramedics had rushed down the aisle to evacuate poor Michael to the nearest hospital, and she would never forget the way his eyes had rolled back in his head as they laid him out on the stretcher. And Lercher, big and bruised, his head drunkenly bowed and the dried blood painted across his cheek where the fork had gone in and gone in again, as if she’d been carving a roast with a dull knife, Lercher led away like Billy Tindall or Lucas Lopez in the grip of the principal on a bad day at La Cumbre Elementary.
She sipped her drink, her face gone numb, eyes focused on nothing, as the whole plane murmured in awe. People stole glances at her, the saddlebag woman offered up her personal copy of the January Cosmopolitan, the captain himself came back to pay homage. And the flight attendants — they were so relieved they were practically genuflecting to her. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. There would be forms to fill out, a delay in Chicago, an uneventful flight into New York, eight hours behind schedule. Her mother would be there, with a face full of pity and resignation, and she’d be too delicate to mention Roy, or teaching, or any of the bleak details of the move itself, the waste of a new microwave, and all that furniture tossed in a Dumpster. She would smile, and Ellen would try to smile back. “Is that it?” her mother would say, eyeing the bag slung over her shoulder. “You must have some baggage?” And then, as they were heading down the carpeted corridor, two women caught in the crush of humanity, with the snow spitting outside and the holidays coming on, her mother would take her by the arm, smile up at her, and just to say something, anything, would ask, “Did you have a nice flight?”
(1999)
The Black and White Sisters
I used to cut their lawn for them, before they paved it over, that is. It was the older one, Moira, the one with the white hair and vanilla skirt, who gave me the bad news. “Vincent,” she said, “Caitlin and I have decided to do without the lawn — and the shrubs and flowers too.” (We were in her kitchen at the time, a place from which every hint of color had been erased, Caitlin was hovering in the doorway with her vulcanized hair and cream-pie face, and my name is Larry, not Vincent — just to give you some perspective.)
I shuffled my feet and ducked my head. “So you won’t be needing a gardener anymore then?”
Moira exchanged a look with her sister, who was my age exactly: forty-two. I know, because we were in school together, all three of us, from elementary through junior high, when their parents took them to live in New York. Not long after that the parents died and left them a truckload of money, and eventually they made their way back to California to take up residence in the family manse, which has something like twenty rooms and two full acres of lawns and flowerbeds, which I knew intimately. Moira wasn’t much to look at anymore — too pinned-back and severe — but Caitlin, if you caught her in the right light, could be very appealing. She had a sort of retro-ghoulish style about her, with her dead black clinging dress and Kabuki skin and all the rest of it. Black fingernails, of course. And toenails. I could just see the glossy even row of them peeping out from beneath the hem of her dress.
“Well,” Moira demurred, coming back to me in her brisk grandmotherly way, though she wasn’t a grandmother, never even married, and couldn’t have been more than forty-four or — five, “I wouldn’t be too hasty. We’re going to want all the shrubs and trees removed — anything that shows inside the fence, that is.”
I’d been around in my time (in and out of college, stint in the merchant marine, twice married and twice divorced, and I’d lived in Poughkeepsie, Atlanta, Juneau, Cleveland and Mazatlán before I came home to California and my mother), and nothing surprised me. Or not particularly. I studied Moira’s face, digging the toe of my workboot into the square of linoleum in front of me. “I don’t know,” I said finally, “it’s going to be a big job — the trees anyway. I can handle the shrubs and flowers myself, but the treework’s going to have to go to a professional. I can make some calls, if you want.”
Moira came right back at me, needling and sharp. “You know the rule: black jeans, white T-shirt, black caps. No exceptions.”
I was wearing black jeans myself — and a white T-shirt and black cap, from which I’d removed the silver Raiders logo at her request. I was clear on the parameters here. But the money was good, very good, and I was used to dealing with the eccentric rich — that was pretty much all we had in this self-consciously quaint little town by the sea. And eccentric, as we all know, is just a code word for pure cold-water crazy. “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
“You’ll bill us?” Moira asked, smoothing down her skirt and crossing the room in a nervous flutter to pull open the refrigerator and peer inside.
Ten percent, I could see it already — and the treework would be eleven or twelve thousand, easy, maybe more. It wasn’t gouging, not really, just my commission for catering to their whims — or needs. Black jeans and white T-shirts. Sure. I just nodded.
“And no Mexicans. I know there’s practically nothing but on any work crew these days, and I have nothing against them, nothing at all, but you know how I feel, Vincent, I think. Don’t you?” She removed a clear glass pitcher of milk from the refrigerator and took a glass from the cupboard. “A black crew I’d have no objection to — or a white one either. But it’s got to be one or the other, no mixing, and you know”—she paused, the glass in one hand, the pitcher in the other—“if it’s a black crew, I think I’d like to see them in white jeans and black T-shirts. Would there be a problem with that, if the question should arise?”