Hot Start (2 page)

I pulled on my jeans and polo shirt while the doctor hunched over a small corner desk, jotting more notes in his file. He was a small, thin man with a prominent bald spot and a lab coat that smelled pleasantly of laundry detergent. My regular medical examiner, a frosty former navy flight surgeon who reeked of cheap cigars and whose physical exams took all of about ten minutes, had recently retired. This was my first go-round with Kurtis. Excluding another physician across town, a rumored pill pusher catering to Rancho Bonita’s wealthy and famous, of which there was no shortage, Kurtis was the only other FAA-certified medical examiner within thirty miles. As the Buddha said, you take what you can get.

“You say here you’re six one and 190 pounds.” He turned from the paperwork I’d filled out before the exam and looked me up and down over his reading glasses. “I’d say more like six feet. This is what happens as we get closer to death. We grow closer to the earth.”

“Thank you,” I said, forcing a smile and tying my hiking shoes. “I now feel so much better about myself and life in general.”

“You’re welcome.”

He turned back to the desk and his note-taking. The man had the personality of a yield sign. Instinct compelled me to have a little chat with him about his bedside manner. The Buddha, however, teaches tolerance of all people. I had a long way to go before I could call myself a true believer. Here, I realized, was an opportunity, a self-teaching moment toward becoming a more complete human being. Without ridiculing him, without leveling any snide remark, I asked politely if I’d passed my physical.

“Marginally,” he said, handing me my renewed certificate along with a bill for $150.

It was all I could do not to put him in a headlock.

E
VER
HAVE
one of those mornings? This was one of them. First it was Dr. Kurtis and the flight physical. Then it was the knuckle dragger texting on his phone while riding a speeding motorcycle, who nearly sideswiped my truck as I was pulling out of the parking lot of the medical building, and who had the scones to look back as he was roaring away and flip
me
off after I laid on my horn. Then it was the barista at Starbucks who chided me as a schoolmarm would’ve a dunce for ordering a “small” black coffee.

“FYI,” she said, handing me back seventy-nine cents in change and tucking a strand of dyed chromium blue hair behind her amply pierced left ear, “it’s not called a ‘small,’ OK? It’s called a
tall.
That’s what we call it here. ‘Tall.’ Maybe you can remember that next time.”

“FYI,” I said, pocketing the change instead of tossing it into the “Tips Gratefully Accepted!” jar on the counter as I would’ve otherwise, “this is called getting stiffed for displaying condescending and obnoxious behavior. Maybe you can remember
that
next time.”

Maybe it was the girl. Or maybe it was the vibe I was giving off. Or maybe it was the ridge of high pressure settled over California that had been baking Rancho Bonita for two weeks in triple-digit heat with no respite in sight. In a community where it’s easy to become spoiled by what is ordinarily the planet’s best, most mild weather, where few homes have air conditioning, the whole town seemed to be in a heated mood. My newest student pilot, a stern, bespectacled certified public accountant in her late thirties named Joy Shaheen, was no exception. One would have been hard-pressed to meet anyone with a more inappropriate first name.

Joy, who wore her thin, dark hair stretched back in a tight bun, which made her large forehead appear even larger, was eager to earn her private pilot’s certificate so she could begin commuting by air to her accounting firm’s satellite office in Hayward, across the bay from San Francisco. She’d arrived at the Rancho Bonita Airport that morning precisely at 1100 hours as scheduled for her third flight lesson. We had planned to practice ground reference maneuvers.

“It’s not a good day to go flying,” I said as she stepped from her sensible Toyota Prius outside the World War II-era hangar where my Above the Clouds flight academy was headquartered.

“Why not?” Joy demanded.

I could feel the sun’s heat rising from the asphalt and through my shoes. “Because it’s already ninety-six degrees.”

The air becomes bumpier and less dense as temperatures rise. Less dense air, I explained to her, means less lift, which means that small planes like the
Ruptured Duck
tend to not do what you want them to, like climb with any margin of safety. They tend to display the flight characteristics of a brick. I proposed instead that we spend the morning in my office going over the aerodynamic theories she needed to fully comprehend for the exhaustive written examination all would-be pilots have to pass.

“I’ve got a package of Oreos inside my office and an unopened bottle of orange Gatorade in the fridge,” I said. “I’ll even turn the fan on high. C’mon, what do you say?”

She glared at me with her arms folded. “I can study aerodynamics on my own, Logan. I paid you in full—in advance—to teach me how to fly, not to sit around overdosing on processed sugar inside some smelly storage closet you have the audacity to call an office. If you don’t want to fly with me today, I’ll go find another instructor at some other school who will.”

Her forehead reminded me of a drive-in movie screen.

“It’s your money,” I said.

We went up for almost an hour. I’ve undergone root canals that were less harrowing. Even with the fuel tanks half full, at considerably less than gross weight, the
Duck
didn’t feel like flying. As the outside air temperature hit the century mark, it was all I could do to keep the airspeed needle just above stall, the warning horn moaning intermittently in my ears every few seconds. The vertical airspeed indicator never topped 300 feet per minute—less than half the
Duck’s
normal climb rate under cooler conditions. Spiraling up over the ocean, it took us nearly fifteen minutes to reach our assigned maneuvering altitude of 3,000 feet.

I took my hands off the controls as we bounced violently across the sky and said, “You have the airplane.”

“I have the airplane,” she said from the left seat with an unwarranted overconfidence. “What would you like me to do?”

“Let’s maintain present altitude and try a full, standard-rate, coordinated turn to the left.”

“. . . Standard-rate?”

“Joy, we discussed this, remember? You establish a fifteen-degree angle of bank using your attitude indicator and turn coordinator, and turn the airplane at three degrees per second, remember?”

“Roger.”

Things didn’t go well from the get-go. In turbulence at times severe, Joy overcorrected like the rookie she was and tipped the
Duck
over on his left wingtip. We nearly went inverted.

“My airplane,” I said, grabbing the yoke and restoring us to something approaching straight and level flight. “Joy, just for your information, in a Cessna 172, a roll is something you eat, not do, OK?”

“OK.”

“How’re you holding up? You all right?”

She nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t. “I didn’t realize it could get this bumpy,” she said as we slammed through the air, trying not to look as terrified as she was.

“Usually, when it’s cooler, it’s much smoother up here, believe me.”

“The wings aren’t going to fall off or anything, are they?”

“Hopefully not.”

I smiled. She didn’t.

“Bad joke,” I said. “Ready to try it again?”

“Roger,” she said, this time not nearly as enthusiastically.

I instructed her to execute a standard-rate turn to the right and again relinquished the controls. Again she nearly killed us, tipping us too far over in the bank. Only this time, for reasons that defied explanation, she smashed down on the left rudder pedal and hauled up on the nose. The
Duck
immediately snap-rolled and corkscrewed into a tight spin.

We were looking straight down into the ocean in a seventy-degree dive, straining against our shoulder belts, the waves coming up fast.

“Your airplane!” Joy screamed.

As if I didn’t know that already. I chopped the power to idle cutoff, forced the wings level, kicked in opposite rudder to break the spin, then hauled back smoothly on the elevator to break the dive. We pulled out above the whitecaps with less than 200 feet to spare. I saw a flying fish. That’s how close we got.

Joy said she was ready to head back to the barn. I told her I thought that was a fine idea and asked her if she wanted to take the controls. She declined and didn’t look at me once the rest of the flight, her head in her lap. After we landed and taxied in, she accused me of purposely trying to scare her into quitting.

“You
knew
what it was like up there,” she said, “but still, we went up.”

I reminded her that we’d gone flying at her insistence, not mine.

“You could’ve told me no, but you didn’t, because you wanted the money.” Her movie-screen forehead was beaded with sweat. Her prim little bun was wilting from the heat. “You knew, Logan. And that’s what’s important. You’re dangerously irresponsible and I will
never
fly with you again.
Ever
.”

“Don’t sugarcoat it, Joy. Tell me what you really think.”

She raised her middle finger and stormed away.

As they say in Paris,
“C’est la guerre
,” which I’m pretty sure means, “That is the train station,” or some such. Who really understands the French, anyway?

I noticed a fresh ding in the already heavily scarred fairing covering the
Duck’s
nose wheel—the likely result of some small stone the propeller had sucked in before takeoff. I had a can of spray paint somewhere. I’d get to the repair when I could. All I wanted to do at that moment was escape the sun.

T
HE
LITTLE
fan on my battered metal, government-surplus desk was doing its best, but it was toasty inside the hangar and getting toastier. In a couple of hours, the place would be all but uninhabitable. I was thinking about canceling the two other students I had on my schedule that afternoon and calling it a day when aircraft mechanic Larry Kropf, the guy I sublet the office from, ambled in. Under his arm was a folded newspaper.

“Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the delicious creamy filling of my favorite cookie.”

“Help yourself, Larry.”

He snatched up the package of Oreos like a grizzly going after a salmon and ate them two at a time. Despite lap band surgery, Larry had recently ballooned back to somewhere north of 300 pounds. He was King Kong furry, with an unkempt beard and Buddy Holly-style glasses, behind which sat the soft eyes of a cocker spaniel. A Tuskegee Airmen baseball cap was perched atop a helmet of coarse graying hair that hadn’t seen a comb in days, if ever. He was wearing beat-up work shorts and boots with tube socks that showed off his oddly skinny legs, and his white T-shirt, smeared with hydraulic fluid, was stretched tight across his cannonball belly. “Kiss me before my girlfriend comes back,” was printed on the front of the shirt.

“You read the
Sun
today?” Larry asked with a mouth full of cookies, his beard collecting black crumbs.

“That rag? Not in a long time.”

Larry was among a dwindling number of local residents who subscribed to the
Rancho Bonita Sun.
Once owned by a respected media conglomerate, the newspaper had been acquired in the 1990s by a mean-spirited divorcée whose software-pioneering ex-husband was reputed to have called the court- mandated, record-setting terms of their split, “The best billion dollars I ever spent.” The new publisher soon canned most of the
Sun’s
veteran journalists as insubordinate before turning the paper into an embarrassing showcase of puffery, promoting society events and business grand openings, and as an editorial mouthpiece for her elitist, often xenophobic views. Rarely was local news covered objectively, if it was covered at all.

“Then you haven’t heard,” Larry said.

“Heard what?”

“About Roy Hollister.”

“What about him?”

“Looks like the cops identified the guy who shot him.”

I was tempted to say, “Why should I care?” but I didn’t.

The murder of Roy Hollister and his wife, Toni, nearly two months earlier had been the talk of the town for weeks in Rancho Bonita, where violent crime is rare, but I didn’t exactly choke up over the news. As far as I was concerned, Hollister was a first-class dirtbag, even if he was a fellow pilot. We’d crossed paths a few times on the tarmac as he was climbing in or out of his Piper Malibu, before he moved up to a Cessna Citation and started parking on the high-rent side of the field, where half of Hollywood kept its executive jets. Wearing those ten-gallon hats and safari jackets and cowboy boots crafted from elephant skin, in Rancho Bonita of all places? Who the hell did he think he was? I would’ve disliked him if for no other reason than the fact that he became rich killing animals and calling it sport. That he was so consistently arrogant only reinforced my disdain. Hollister had always reminded me in a weird way of one of those avowed, so-called white supremacists. You know the type: out of shape, out of touch, and out of their minds, who crawl out occasionally from under their rocks to spout their malevolent screed. How could anyone so overtly pathetic be so full of himself?

Larry, on the other hand, considered Hollister something of a friend. He’d worked on Hollister’s Malibu a time or two and had been paid promptly, which is a big deal in Larry’s book. Hollister had once even taken him on an antelope hunt in Wyoming. With his vision, Larry couldn’t hit the ground if he fell off a step stool, but he appreciated the invitation, regardless. The two hadn’t spoken in some time, yet when word spread that the infamous safari leader and his wife had been murdered at their mansion on exclusive Madera Lane, blue collar Larry grieved as if he’d lost a true buddy.

“People didn’t understand Roy,” he said, grabbing another fistful of Oreos. “He was always real good to me, which is more than I can say about my wife.”

I realized they’d been friends, but I couldn’t help myself. “Hollister got paid to kill helpless animals, Larry. He called himself the ‘King of the Big Five.’ Do you know what the Big Five is?”