True Buddhists believe in the cultivation of forgiveness and kindness through love. Cultivate enough goodwill, they assert, and you can insulate yourself from the coldest of insults. I’d like to believe that someday I’ll get there. On that frigid morning, I restrained myself from wiping the grin off Preston Kavitch’s face and turning him into a human pretzel. Call it progress.
There was little left for me to do in South Lake Tahoe but drive around, dowsing as if for water, hoping divine intervention might somehow lead me to Savannah. It all felt so futile.
I headed to the airport to retrieve Savannah’s luggage and the duffel that I’d left behind with Marlene, and to head home.
“You’re not listening to me,” she kept saying into the phone, bent forward in her chair, rubbing her forehead. She glanced up as I walked in and raised one finger as if to say she’d only be a minute. “We can sell the house. It’s not about the bills, honey, it’s about making our marriage work. Look, I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you back.”
I waited until she signed off.
“Problems on the home front?”
“Money issues.” Marlene forced a smile. “What else is new, right?”
She fetched our bags from a closet and offered me some cookies for my flight back to Rancho Bonita, which I declined. Sweets were the last thing on my mind.
FOURTEEN
Piloting a small airplane is not unlike sex. If done well, both can be ecstatic, mind-blowing experiences. Done poorly, embarrassing disaster bodes. Do either long enough, and you learn to perform without consciously thinking about performing, satisfying the needs of the moment while your mind focuses elsewhere.
As I flew the Ruptured Duck home that morning, my thoughts remained focused on the man who’d taken Savannah from me. Who was he? Why did he do what he had?
I knew that he had to have been acquainted with Chad Lovejoy, and that he lived in proximity to Lake Tahoe. After all, the two of them on relatively short notice had hiked up to the crash site together. They’d found uranium, realized its potential value, and Lovejoy had lost his life for it. Streeter surmised that Lovejoy had told Dundee all about me, how I was a pilot, how I’d spotted the downed airplane, and how Savannah and I were staying at a local B&B, where Dundee subsequently abducted her to strong-arm me into airlifting his ill-gained treasure out of Lake Tahoe.
The problem was that Lovejoy had done time in state prison. He’d interacted with innumerable other inmates, many of whom, like him, had since been released from custody. Dozens lived in and around Lake Tahoe. Any one of them, Streeter believed, could have been Dundee.
“It’s going to take time,” Streeter admitted before I took off for Rancho Bonita. “I’d advise you not to get your hopes up.”
“What hopes?”
He didn’t have to tell me that the more time passed, the more likely it was that Savannah was dead.
“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, contact Rancho Bonita Tower, one-one nine, point six.” The approach controller’s voice in my headset jarred me from the depths.
“Point six,” I responded. The GPS showed a twelve-minute ETA. I switched frequencies on my number two radio. “Tower, Cessna Four Charlie Lima, VFR descent.”
“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, descent, your discretion.”
One thought consumed me: that after I landed, I had to find a way to identify Dundee. And kill him.
Rarely do I sleep more than two or three hours at a stretch without waking up in physical or emotional discomfort — the legacy of having played too many contact sports, and of having killed too many people. Sometimes I can nod off again before dawn, but not always; I’m lucky on some nights if two or three hours is all I get. When I got back from Lake Tahoe that afternoon, perhaps ironically, I slept twelve hours straight. Kiddiot was crouched on my chest when I woke up, purring and licking my chin. That was a first, too.
Scientists say pets have a sixth sense when it comes to human behavior. They can detect nuances in mood that even people closest to us typically can’t. I had always assumed that Kiddiot was born without any sense. And so, when he seemed intuitively to fathom my depression and sought to comfort me, if that is in fact what he was doing, I was somewhat stunned.
“I take back every insensitive thing I ever said about you.”
When I reached up to stroke his ears, he dug his claws into my ribs and spring-boarded out his rubber cat door like his tail was on fire.
The author Robert Heinlein once said, “How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven.” As I watched Kiddiot go, the door flapping in his wake, I allowed myself a small smile, but only for a moment; Savannah, after all, was still gone.
A new prospective student named Stefan Weber had left a message on my answering machine in Larry’s hangar while I was up north, saying he was interested in flying lessons. We’d made arrangements to meet at 0930 for his one-hour, fifty-dollar introductory flight. My watch showed 0820.
I yawned and stretched, did a few half-hearted push-ups, climbed into the shower and stood under it for a long time, hoping the hot water would steam away my sense of loss. It didn’t. I toweled off, dressed, got in my old Tacoma, and drove to the airport.
It was something. And anything was better than dwelling on what had happened to Savannah.
“Sweet Jesus,” Larry said. He was peering at me through his thick lenses with his jaws parted, revealing teeth that had never been to the orthodontist. “She was kidnapped?”
I nodded.
“Do they know who did it?”
“No.”
We were standing outside his hangar, beside the Ruptured Duck, waiting for my new flight student to show up.
“I’m really sorry, Logan. I had no idea. It must be hard. I know if something like that ever happened to my wife, much as we’d both like to hire a hit man sometimes to have each other whacked, I’d feel like crap, too.” His voice cracked and he swabbed a sausage finger behind the right lens of his glasses. I’d never seen Larry display emotion of any kind beyond anger.
We were both silent.
“Well, at least you got a student,” he said after awhile, “something to keep your mind busy, right? Been awhile since you had one of those.”
“True.”
He shook his head again and said to himself, “Goddamn,” staring at his steel-toed work boots, filthy with oil stains. The front of his gray, grease-streaked T-shirt bore the words, “I hate being bipolar. It’s awesome!”
“Don’t worry about me, Larry. I’ll be all right.”
He offered to buy me a beer after work. I reminded him I didn’t drink.
“OK, a burrito, then.”
“Actually, I’m having dinner tonight with Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Larry said. “You and the old lady watch football Monday nights.”
“Take a rain check, though?”
“Fair enough.” He paused, struggling to come up with something appropriately profound to say. “Well anyway, the sun also rises, or something like that, right?”
“Let’s not make assumptions before all the facts are in.”
Larry grunted like he was more or less amused and then, in that awkward, halting manner by which heterosexual men typically express affection for each other for fear that anyone might accuse them of being gay, reached out and gripped my left shoulder as if he were squeezing a cantaloupe at the grocery store.
I realized after he walked away that he’d left a greasy, perfectly defined paw print on my last clean polo shirt.