The Art of Crash Landing (2 page)

T
wenty-seven minutes is, if anyone ever asks, exactly how long it takes to cram everything I own into six giant trash bags. Add that to the twenty minutes I'd already spent picking and losing a fight with Nick the Asshole, plus five additional minutes to stuff all the bags into my car, and then maybe a minute to eat the stale half a Slim Jim I found on the floor of the backseat, and you're still only up to fifty-three minutes. Most people would probably have a hard time totally fucking up their life in under an hour. But then again, I'm not most people. I'm amazing. I'm like some kind of fuckup savant.

I fire up the Malibu, put in a Black Keys CD, and light a cigarette with shaking hands. Three drags later I remember why I quit smoking. Slamming on the brakes, I open the car door and lean out to retch, depositing my half a Slim Jim and an earlier glass of orange juice in the middle of an oily puddle.

I am lying about the fifty-three minutes.

It's actually taken years to get things this bad. Even the current screwup started three months ago when I was late getting a
prescription refilled. Or to be more specific, it began the moment I decided that missing six out of twenty-one pills was no big deal.

I drive around the block three times trying to think of somewhere I can go that isn't Queeg's trailer. Around and around I go, running through names in my head, trying like hell not to be what I am—a thirty-year-old woman with no friends. Sure, I have people I party with, but they're not my friends. If they're anybody's friends they're Nick's, and none of them would take me in. I used to have my own friends, of course I did, but it's like the dentist told me when I was a kid—ignore them and they'll go away. He was talking about teeth, not friends, but it's the same theory, and I can tell you it works. The friends part, anyway; I still have my teeth.

If there's an upside to not having friends it's that nobody depends on me for anything at all, which is exactly how I like it. For instance, I never have to help anybody move, and if you think that's not a big deal then you've never loaded furniture into a pickup on a Florida August afternoon. The downside? Well, that's pretty drive-around-the-block-three-times obvious.

When I merge onto the highway heading east, I turn up the music and try to ignore the familiar ache in my chest, a hollow sort of ache that's all sharp edges and empty air where something used to be. Dan Auerbach is singing
It doesn't mean a thing to me
, and I sing along. I know the words to this one.

I think about how I ought to call Queeg and let him know that I'm on the way, but I won't. Odds are, he'd tell me to come on over, but it's not a sure bet. Lately, I get the feeling that my stepfather is a little tired of dealing with me. God knows I am.

W
hen I reach the entrance to Two Pines the gate is closed, so I pull over and park on the far shoulder. Although it does have a few RV hookups, this is mainly a mobile home park, and a weedy one at that. I note the clotheslines sagging under bright beach towels, piles of shoes in front of every door, potted plants struggling to survive in the hot, salty air. I've been coming here since I was a little girl, and I would swear that the only things that change are the ever-expanding rust stains along the trailer seams.

My mother and I first met Queeg here at Two Pines, seventeen years ago. She and I were staying on the far side of the park, in the section filled with extra-shabby trailers owned by the management and billed as vacation rentals. Queeg had wandered back into that area one afternoon while my mother was sunbathing topless, and the rest is history. He hadn't lived at Two Pines long enough to know that the rental people were trouble.

I climb out of the car and stretch. The sun is low enough to be behind the treetops, and the storm has left a steady breeze, making the evening pleasant in that soft, faintly fishy way you can only find
within a mile or two of an ocean. There's nobody in the courtyard, but Queeg's car is parked next to his trailer, so I know he's home.

His name is actually Herman Isaacs, and I remember laughing at that the first time I met him. I was thirteen years old, and the only Herman I'd ever heard of was a Munster. Luckily for this Herman,
The Caine Mutiny
by Herman Wouk was assigned reading for eighth-grade English at Booker T. Washington Middle School. By the time this dumpy, middle-aged Herman married my mother, I'd started calling him Captain Queeg, something for which he should be grateful since I wasn't all that thrilled with the idea of a stepfather, and Lily Munster's nickname for her Herman, Pussy Cat, was awfully tempting.

After the wedding Queeg sold his trailer and moved us all into a little house just a couple miles from here. But after their divorce he bought himself another double-wide and parked it right back here at Two Pines. I sometimes wonder if he still walks through the rental section to meet the people staying there. Probably not. He knows better now.

I eye the familiar fence and then take off jogging across the road, timing my approach to take one, two big steps and then with a hand atop the fence, I side-hop the four-foot chain link, landing on the other side with a crunch-skid on the oyster-shell gravel.
I've still got it.
I raise both arms and do a small Rocky Balboa prance for my audience, which numbers exactly zero. If you do something cool and no one is around to see you do it, are you still cool?

I walk past the dinner-mint-colored metal table and chairs that sit, exactly as they always have, on the empty slab behind the office trailer. Other than being perhaps a little paler pastel, they're frozen in time, still with a loose chain circling through the chair legs. No ordinary thief specializing in ugly metal patio furniture will be able to nab one of these chairs. No sir. Only one wily and strong enough to drag away the whole set will score these beauties.

Queeg's door squeaks open. My heart sinks a little at how carefully he descends the three cement steps.

“Mattie . . .” He starts toward me, slowly. “What a surprise.”

I notice the absence of the word
pleasant
. “You know me, Captain. I thrive on doing the unexpected.”

We give each other an awkward one-armed hug.

“Saw your little gymnastic maneuver there at the fence,” he tells me.

Excellent! I had an audience. I am cool. “I've still got it,” I say.

“Is it catching?”

“Not by you,” I reply and it's the truth. Queeg is to cool what black is to white, what antimatter is to matter. When he walks into a room, he actually creates a coolness vacuum that sucks all the cool from everyone around him. He is a coolness black hole.

We look at each other and grin.

“You know,” Queeg tells me, “that gate isn't locked. You could have opened the latch and walked in.”

See? The Uncool Force is strong in him. “Where's the fun in that?”

“Not breaking a hip is fun.”

“Okay, now you're talking like an old man.”

He doesn't reply but I can tell we're both thinking the same thing. He is an old man.

I ask him if I can stay for a while, and although he tells me it's fine, there's a pause between my request and his answer—a long enough pause that, once I pull my car through the gate and around behind his trailer, I don't unpack. I can't always take a hint but I'm going to take this one. I promise him that it's only for tonight. I'll figure something else out tomorrow.

We cook together in his tiny kitchen and then sit knee-to-knee at his table. Over dinner we talk about safe subjects: his bowling league, my job. Freelance photography doesn't provide me with
much of an income, but it keeps me stocked up on funny stories. So I launch into one about a recent photo shoot where the bride's dress wouldn't zip, an angry grandma threw her rosary beads at the groom, and the reception was held in the church gym where we had to take off our shoes before stepping onto the polished court.

It's good to laugh with Queeg again. He is the yin to my yang. We're complete opposites in every way and yet manage to hang together somehow. And I don't know whether yin or yang is the white tadpole but Queeg would definitely be that one, and I'd be the black one, because from the moment we met Queeg, life started to get brighter for my mother and me, and, I suspect, darker for him. Or maybe now that I think about it, the yin-yang thing isn't right at all. It doesn't leave any space for my mother. Maybe Queeg and I are bookends, each propping up a different side of the same terrible story.

The sky is a purple glow once we've finished cleaning up and stepped back outside. We walk over to the metal table and chairs behind the office. The chairs grind on the cement as we pull them out. Touching the chalky powder coating gives me goose bumps.

Queeg sets his beer on the table, and I set down my glass of ice water. I can see the question in his eyes—he's been nagging me about my drinking for years, and I'm sure he's never seen me turn down a beer before—but a question unasked is easy enough to leave unanswered.

“So . . . are you going to tell me what happened?”

I sigh. A question asked is harder to dodge. “Nick is an asshole.”

“Isn't this the idiot I met last summer?”

I smile and shake my head. Last summer's idiot was named Chris, and Queeg got a chance to meet him when I talked Chris into a beach vacation. Rather than getting us a room at a hotel, I
booked a trailer here. Even as I was on the phone, I knew making a reservation at Two Pines was a mistake, but I did it anyway. It was kind of like buying a Ding Dong at the 7-Eleven. You know they're gross, with waxy chocolate and that peculiar white goo in the middle, but you remember loving them as a child, so you buy one anyway. It was like that. Only I made Chris eat the Ding Dong, too.

And then it rained all week and there we were, screaming at each other in the cramped kitchen. The funny thing was, they'd put us in the same trailer my mother and I had usually rented when I was a kid. After I'd finally managed to make Chris hit me, I remember lying there facedown on the floor and taking a deep breath to see if I could find the smell of my mother's boozy vomit in the orange shag.

“No,” I tell Queeg. “This one has a college degree.”

“In what?”

“English.”

“So what does he do?”

“He's in a band.”

“Of course he is.” Queeg knows and disapproves of my propensity to date musicians.

“But mostly he's an assistant manager at Pizza Hut.”

“Another idiot.”

Queeg has a simple classification system when it comes to the men I date. They're all idiots. I like to think it has something to do with them not being good enough for me, but I suspect it has more to do with them being stupid enough to date me.

“We had a fight,” I say. I don't mention the start of the fight, which was me not having my share of the rent. Instead I start near the end of the argument. “He told me I was a slob.”

Queeg doesn't comment on this. He knows me.

“And he said that I use too many
aphorisms
.”

“Well . . .” Queeg pauses to take a sip of his beer. “If the shoe fits . . .”

“Shit!” I laugh. “I had to look the word up.”

He laughs, too, but his turns into a cough. When he finally catches his breath he's still grinning, but his eyes are watering from the struggle. “You'd know lots of big words if you'd gone to college.”

“Oh, come on. I know plenty of big words, just not that one.”

“If you say so.”

Queeg knows I'm right; I'm no dummy. But that doesn't stop him from giving me his raised-brow you're-not-living-up-to-your-potential look. I get it a lot from him. No matter how badly I screw things up I can always count on him to make me feel worse about it—not by being critical, but by being so certain that I could do better. He was only officially my parent for four years, but believing in me is a habit he can't seem to break.

“You're partly to blame, you know,” I tell him.

“How do you figure that?”

“You were the one who taught me all those stupid sayings.”

“You're the one who dates assholes.”

He's got me there.

“Anyway,” I say, “the fight got really big and I threw him out.”

“I thought it was his apartment.”

“Yeah.” I lift my glass. Its moisture has made a perfect deep yellow circle on the faded tabletop. “I'd kind of forgotten about that.”

He shakes his head, “Oh, Matt . . .”

“I know, I know . . .” And I
do
know. I'm in a serious jam, but I still start to laugh. “I should look before I leap.”

“Out of the frying pan . . .” he says, but his smile is forced. He mostly just seems tired and worried, the way he always looks when we're talking about me.

“I haven't seen Minnie,” I say, changing the subject. I'm referring to Min He, the old Asian woman who is both the park manager and Queeg's on-again, off-again lady friend. Their relationship is a long, complicated story that I try not to think about because it brings with it mental images of saggy, naked old people.

“She's at her daughter's. I'm picking her up tomorrow.”

“I'll leave early.” Min He hates me, and with good reason. Another story, but one that isn't particularly long or complicated.

I take a sip of my water and close my eyes, soaking in the moist Florida evening, the tree frogs and the crickets singing, the palms rustling in a breeze so soft I can't even feel it.

When I open them, I see Queeg watching me.

“What?” I ask.

He shakes his head and smiles. “Sometimes you look just like your mother.”

“I don't look anything like her,” I say, and we both know it's true. She was petite and soft. I'm tall and knobby. She had bright copper curls and green eyes that changed color with her moods. I have blond frizzy hair and blue-gray eyes that are a little larger than they need to be. My mother was striking, maybe beautiful. I, on the other hand, am nothing special.

“Mattie?”

“Yeah.”

“What's really going on?” he asks.

I can't say I don't consider it, laying all my problems—broke, homeless, pregnant—at his Hush Puppy–wearing feet. Ten years ago that's what I would have done. Hell, an hour ago that's what I planned to do. But looking at him tonight I see a deep weariness I've never noticed before. It scares me.

“Nothing,” I say. “Just my usual shit.”

He smiles and gets a familiar look on his face. I know what's coming next.

“Well, sweetheart, when life gives you lemons . . .”

“Zip it, old man.”

I can see from his grin that he's tempted to keep pulling my chain, but in the end he zips it, thank God.

For as long as I've known him, every single time I've had a problem, Queeg trots out Lemons to Lemonade. And every single time he does that, it annoys the shit out of me, which in turn amuses the hell out of him. We may not technically be a family anymore, but considering how much fun we have irritating each other, you'd never know it.

I've tried explaining to him why that particular aphorism is so annoying, but he can't let it go. Deep down, he is still of the opinion that all I need is a better attitude. My opinion of that opinion is
fuck that shit
. As far as I'm concerned, there are two types of people in this world: people like Queeg who, when life gives them lemons make lemonade, and everybody else. And although those smug, cheerful lemonade-makers think the rest of us just sit around all day bitching about not getting oranges, they're wrong. It's all about volume. When you're ass-deep in lemons, you start looking for a shovel, not a pitcher and a cup of sugar.

Queeg clears his throat and leans back in his chair, lifting one leg up and crossing it over the other. He still wears sock garters.

“So,” he says. “Is your phone working?”

As usual, this afternoon I ignored a call from him, and, as usual, I feel bad about it. “As far as I know.”

“Somebody's been trying to get in touch with you.”

“Area code 918?”

He nods.

A 918 number has shown up on my phone a dozen times the past three weeks, but I've never answered it. If I've learned anything in my thirty years, it's that the surprises in my life aren't
birthday parties and engagement rings. My surprises are visits to emergency rooms, flashing lights in my rearview, or more recently, a stupid blue line on a white plastic stick.

“I've seen that one come up a couple times,” I tell him.

Queeg sits up a little straighter and frowns. “And you never answered?”