Mrs. Schmulowitz felt sorry for me, too, and insisted on giving me a few bucks. “Just to tide you over,” she said, “until you get on your feet.”
She’d made similar overtures in the past, which I’d always politely but firmly turned down. You have to be pretty desperate to start taking handouts from little old ladies. But with my bank balance approaching negative integers and a monthly retirement check from the government that barely covered my rent, I didn’t have much choice but to say, “Thank you.”
I went flying, if only to distract myself.
The air offshore at 3,000 feet was cool and smooth. The Duck may have been nearly as old as I was, but he took to the sky that morning as if he’d just come off of the assembly line in Wichita where he’d been born more than forty-five years earlier. No creaking. No groans. Every flight instrument functioning solidly in the green as we burned lazy eights in the sky.
We orbited surfers and wakeboarders and, farther out, sailboats running with the wind, their spinnakers puffed out over their bows, in full bloom. We spotted no whales, unless you count dolphins, and we saw hundreds of them, a huge pod all surfacing and diving as if one, churning the ocean into creamy foam.
Shimmering blue sea. Green mountains, seemingly soft as lambs’ ears. And, along the water’s edge, extending inland among sun-kissed hills and arroyos, the Spanish-tiled roofs of Rancho Bonita. For an hour, I allowed myself to forget everything but how to fly an airplane and what a privilege it was to see the planet from so rarefied a perch. Sometimes you forget how beautiful the world really is, if you allow it to be.
Whatever euphoria I felt lasted about as long as it took me to land.
By the end of the second quarter, Tampa Bay was trailing Carolina 24-3. The Buccaneers lined up for a twenty-nine-yard field goal attempt with no timeouts left and the clock about to expire. Good snap. Good hold. The kicker stepped into it, planted his right foot, swung his left leg… and missed.
“That ball was so far right,” Mrs. Schmulowitz remarked, “it nearly took Rush Limbaugh’s head off. More brisket?”
“No, thanks, Mrs. Schmulowitz. I’m beyond full.”
“How ’bout more green beans? I got enough in there to feed Patton’s army.”
“I couldn’t handle another bite. Everything was delicious, as always.”
We were sitting in her living room, on her blue mohair couch, in front of her old Magnavox that hummed like a transmission tower, watching Monday Night Football with the volume turned down and eating dinner off of TV trays, like we always did.
“I know you saved room for dessert,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “I made German chocolate cake. If you don’t eat some, we’re gonna be in big trouble.”
“Why is that, Mrs. Schmulowitz?”
“Because it’s a giant cake, that’s why. You remember that little guy from ‘Fantasy Island?’ Always running around, yelling, ‘Da plane, boss. Da plane’? This cake is so big, that little guy, he could hide in it, no problem.”
“How could I resist? I’ll take a small slice.”
“Now, you’re talking, bubby.”
Off the sofa she sprang like no octogenarian I’d ever seen, a wonder of nature and superior genetics.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, “I got you something.” From behind a sofa cushion, she extracted a small box wrapped in blue foil paper with little stars of David. “Call it an early Hanukah present.”
It was a gold Cross pen with my name engraved on it.
“So you can write the next chapter of your life,” she said.
“You’re the greatest, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
I tucked the pen in my shirt pocket as she padded into the kitchen and started telling me about her first husband, the one with the sweet tooth, and how she bought him a dozen Hershey bars for Hanukah one year, and how he ate them in a single sitting, which prompted innumerable cavities, along with an onset of adult acne that ravaged his face like a Biblical plague. Truthfully, though, I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about where I’d been, and wondering where I was going.
The second half started. The cake arrived. I gorged myself on sugar while 300-pound men in pads and helmets pounded each other senseless as Mrs. Schmulowitz provided her usual expert, play-by-play commentary on the game. By the fourth quarter, consumed by memories, I’d turned inward and silent.
Mrs. Schmulowitz looked over, her dark eyes filled with compassion. She rested her hand on mine and said, “Tomorrow’s another day, bubeleh.”
“Think I’ll take a little walk.”
“Late-night stroll. A fine idea. Fresh air, burn off some of that brisket, get the old ticker pumping. I could use a little exercise myself. How ’bout a little company?”
“I’d really rather be by myself tonight. You understand.”
“Do I understand? Of course, I understand! Don’t give it another thought. Go. Just promise me one thing.”
“Name it.”
“Look both ways before crossing the street. This town is filled with meshugener old people. I haven’t seen one yet who knows how to drive, especially in the dark.”
I assured her that I’d look both ways.
The moon that night was a silver sliver hanging low in the western sky, bracketed by Venus and some faint star, the name of which I didn’t know. A dark and still night save for the throaty rumble of a motorcycle on a nearby street, its exhaust chopped to make the bike sound deafening — a not-so-subtle flipping of the bird to the rest of staid, refined Rancho Bonita.
I’d left Mrs. Schmulowitz’s house and was halfway down the block when a large man came charging out from between two parked cars and tackled me to the sidewalk.
His right arm was around my throat, his biceps and inner forearm pressing against the carotid arteries on either side of my neck, while his right hand hooked into the inside elbow of his left arm, which was clamped around the back of my neck. A classic sleeper hold. We practiced the same move frequently on each other at Alpha. I knew that I had no more than about three seconds before I lost consciousness.
I brought my right hand back over my head to rake his face, but he seemed to anticipate my intentions and shifted his weight to the left, keeping his head just out of my reach. I attempted to tuck my chin into his bicep so that he could only squeeze my jaw and not my neck, but he forecast that move, too, adjusting his hold and maintaining pressure.
Then I remembered the gold pen Mrs. Schmulowitz had given me.
I grabbed it from my pocket and gouged the tip deep into the soft tissue above his right elbow. He yelped in pain and immediately relinquished his hold, rolled onto his left side, and shouted, “Son of a bitch!”
I’d have recognized that voice anywhere.
“Buzz?”
“Jesus, Logan, you stabbed me?”
“What was I supposed to do? You attacked me.”
“You call that an attack? That wasn’t an attack,” he said, sitting up and clutching his arm. “If I had attacked you, god-dammit, you’d be dead.”
He was built stout as a whiskey barrel, with a crew cut and a leather patch over his right eye.
“What’re you doing out here, Buzz?”
“They sent me out, to see if you still had it.”
“Had what?”
“You know what, Logan. The good stuff. Your mojo.”
I looked at him, not fully understanding.
“Who’s they?” I said.
He winced. “I can’t believe you stabbed me. Jesus Christ, this thing hurts like a mother. Help me up, will ya?”
I helped him to his feet by his good arm.