The Art of Crash Landing (20 page)

I
must have fallen back asleep after the dream, but when my alarm goes off, I'm still exhausted. The nosebleed has stopped, however, and once I've showered and eaten a couple handfuls of dry cereal, I still feel shitty, but that's as good as it gets these days. Sometimes my entire life has felt like one long exercise in lowering my expectations.

After checking that there's still water and food in the dog bowls in the kitchen, I go out and put some on the front porch as well, then go to the backyard and make sure the gate is still propped open.

Music is playing in JJ's backyard this morning—Frank Sinatra, in fact. However, once you get past his music selection, the scene gets a lot less classy. A card table is set up on his back patio and on it is an ancient boom box, its extension cord running into the house through a window. JJ stands next to the table with a paint roller in his hand and a cigarette dangling from his lips. He's wearing faded, sagging jeans and a white undershirt. Each lift of his arm reveals a thicket of pit hair and a deeply set yellow stain in the tank.

“What a douche,” I whisper to nobody. I miss the dogs.

The grass is dewy and cool on my feet as I approach the fence, carefully avoiding the weeds and the dog turds. I'm walking quietly, with a smile on my face because it's obvious that my asshole neighbor hasn't noticed me yet. I wait until he has the paint roller fully loaded and is holding it directly overhead before I speak.

“Good morning!” I say much, much louder than necessary.

JJ startles vigorously enough for a large dollop of paint to drop on his head and, I'm especially gratified to see, on the toe of one of his newish-looking cowboy boots. But without so much as a glance at me, he sets his roller in the tray, wets a rag at the outside faucet and wipes the paint off his head and boot. Sadly, the leather seems to come completely clean.

He sets his cigarette down on the edge of the table and comes to the fence.

“Listen . . .” I hate to have to tell him, but I'm sure he's already noticed their absence. “The dogs got out last night.”

He glances pointedly at the open gate.

“The latch is messed up,” I say. He looks unconvinced. “But I don't know that it's my fault anyway, because someone was in the house last night.”

“Other than you?”

“Yes. Someone who doesn't belong there.”

“Like I said,
other than you
?”

God, this man is a jerk. “While I was out, somebody broke in and stole a camera bag and a guitar strap. I think whoever it was took the dogs, too.”

“Guitar strap?”

“You know, so you can play a guitar standing up.”

“You're a musician.”

“No.”

He says “Hmmm” in a neutral tone of voice but he looks surprised.

“What?”

“Your mother was.”

“Not when I knew her.”

He frowns for a second and then asks, “Is that it?”

“Is
what
it?”

His eyes narrow. “Is that all they took?”

“Well . . . and some old negatives. And there were two cameras in the bag.”

He's giving me a you're-crazy look and I don't blame him. It sounds crazy to me, too.

“Listen,” I say, “all I know is that the negatives, the strap, the camera bag, and the dogs are gone. The dogs could have run away on their own, but the other shit couldn't have.”

I study him, looking for a sense of discomfort, some sign that he's hiding something. It's probably just because I don't like him, but if this were a TV crime show, JJ would be my prime suspect. He was her neighbor, he'd kept her dogs—it would make sense for him to have a key. Plus he's a jerk.

He glances at his half-painted wall and says, “I better get back to work,” but he doesn't walk away. He just stands there like he's waiting for one of us to say something. So I do.

“Did you ever hear anybody talk about my grandfather? My mother's dad?”

“Just that he died.”

I nod. “So weird.”

“Not that weird. Everybody dies.”

“But he died before my mom was even born, and she never told me that.”

He's giving me another puzzled look, and I can see why. Even I'm not sure why it bothers me that she kept his death and the
whole born-out-of-wedlock thing a secret, but it does. And of course the fact that Fritter is so tight-lipped about it all just makes me more curious.

I don't try to explain. I just shrug and say, “Never mind.”

When I start to walk away JJ's voice stops me.

“Did your mother really give up her music?”

I turn back around. “She gave up everything.”

He doesn't respond, but I can see the question on his face.

“She left it all here,” I explain. “Her clothes, her books, her friends, her family, her music. And nobody will tell me why. Do you know why?”

He's shaking his head.

“Somebody knows,” I say.

“Not me. I don't know and I don't care.”

“That's not surprising,” I say. “As far as I can tell, you're an asshole who only cares about himself and his yard.”

“Speaking of yards, you ever going to mow yours?”

“Speaking of assholes, are you the one who broke into my house last night?”

He takes a step toward the fence, saying, “You listen to me.” He's angry, and although I don't get the feeling that he's really threatening me, I still catch myself reflexively taking a step back.

“First of all,” he says, “don't you ever call that
your
house. You don't deserve that house. You never once came to visit your grandmother when she was alive. Second of all, Miss Thayer had those dogs for seven or eight years, and they were fine, and I kept them for a month, and they were fine. Two days . . . you had them for two days and now they're gone.”

“Fuck you!” I am embarrassingly close to tears. “I never asked for that responsibility. I was doing my best.”

“And I've never broken into anybody's house, so
fuck you
right back.”

We stare at each other across a barrier of chain link and a grudge I don't understand. He picks up the rag and wipes his hands. I know I should walk away before he says something else mean, but instead I just stand there watching him watch me for several uncomfortable seconds.

When JJ finally does speak, all he says is, “Your car is ready. The repairs came in just under eighteen hundred,” he says. “I was fair. I kept the price down the best I could.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

JJ nods and then returns to his porch. Lifting the paint roller he holds it suspended above the tray as the paint drips slow to a stop.

“I'll keep an eye out for the dogs,” he says without looking back at me.

I sigh, reminded anew of my latest failure. “Thank you.”

“Save your thanks. I'm not doing it for you.”

Sinatra sings the “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” and JJ runs the roller up and down the wall, and I stand here in knee-high grass, off balance and unsure of what to do about the dogs, of what the hell is going on with JJ. Unsure about everything. The sensation I had last night—that I'm missing something—is back again, but for the life of me I can't figure out what it is. I close my eyes and breathe in the smell of paint mixed with the sharp, green scent of the broken weeds beneath my feet. I wish I'd gotten more sleep last night, but sleep can be hard. Frank is right; it is in the wee small hours of the morning that I miss her most of all.

T
here are nice things about riding a bike to work, like not having to bother to fix my hair. It's also fun to watch hapless pedestrians on the trail flee before me as I zip past, zing zinging the little thumb bell on my handlebars. Unfortunately there are also not-nice things about riding a bike to work, like sweating and the way that my newly swollen boobs—as tightly wedged as they are into my bra—jiggle painfully with every bump. Needless to say, by the time I arrive at the fount of all knowledge that is the Gandy Public Library, I am damp and cranky.

Tawny opens the door as I'm parking my bike at the back entrance.

“You're thirty minutes late,” she says.

“My ride didn't show.”

“Awww, that's a shame.” She's all pleased with herself and smirky, probably mostly because she's the reason I'm late, but it's possible that some of the smirk is about my hair. It is pretty windy.

She glances at the bike. “Maybe I'll borrow that later without asking.”

“Go right ahead,” I say. “But the air whistling through all those holes in your face is going to make a damn racket.”

She makes a noise like an old man, “harrumph,” and then under her breath she calls me, and I couldn't make this up if I tried, a
twat waffle
. Truly, this girl's potty mouth is a work of art.
Twat waffle
. It's amazing. Better than
fartknocker
and way better than
dickbag
. I hurry inside to find a pencil and paper to write this one down. It's a keeper.

Fritter is nowhere in sight to witness my tardiness, so I act casual, grab the cart of books to be reshelved, and head out into the aisles as if I've been here all morning. Unfortunately, I haven't ventured far before I once more detect an odor of poo. Since I have no interest in volunteering for another turd hunt, I ignore the smell and get to work.

A woman about my age, attractive in a well-put-together way—a look that I have never managed to achieve and therefore find highly irritating—approaches me as I wheel the book cart into the Biography section.

“Excuse me,” she whispers, “I don't want to be rude but . . .”

I stop and wait for her to finish. Whatever she says next will be rude, of course, because anytime someone begins a sentence with “I don't want to be rude but . . .” what comes next is invariably rude.

The woman knits her perfectly plucked brows and says, “Do you smell dookie?”

“No. Sorry,” I reply in my best adenoidal voice. “Allergies.”

My next stop is the Children's section. By this time I've habituated a bit to the smell, but obviously it hasn't gone anywhere. I see one young mother lift her squirming toddler's diapered fanny to nose height and take a sniff. I quickly shelve the two books in my hand and continue on my rounds before this woman doesn't want to be rude, but . . .

Once I finish with the books on the cart, I go to the Reference section; I want to take a look at some of the really old high school yearbooks. I have an idea. And of course, it is there, in the Reference section, that the dookie lurks. It's on the small side, like the last one, and this time it's balanced on a shelf rather than on the floor. In fact, this UFO isn't just on any shelf; it is placed neatly in the gap left by the yearbooks I swiped Tuesday. Someone isn't just shitting in the library, someone is messing with me.

To avoid alerting Fritter to the missing yearbooks, I grab some paper towels, disinfectant, gloves, and a plastic bag from the back room and clean it up myself. I notice as I'm picking up this firm, brown beauty that there is something embedded in the poo. Lifting it up as close to my face as I dare, I look closer. It's a cigarette butt. Very interesting.

I toss the UFO in the Dumpster in the parking lot, and then while I'm out there I make a stop at Tawny's truck, which is locked, of course. It's certainly possible that this is merely a reaction to my liberal borrowing policy, but it could also be because of the bundle lying on the passenger-side floorboard. It's well camouflaged by a mound of crumpled fast-food sacks; in fact, if I hadn't been in the truck yesterday, I probably wouldn't notice the mysterious addition. There's a filthy towel covering the lump that just happens to be the size of, say, my mother's camera bag and Nick's guitar strap nestled snugly together. I go around to the passenger's side and lean against the window, cupping my hands around my face to see inside. The towel is mostly tucked in on this side, too, but from here I can see the rounded tip of something brown leather outlined in stitching. It looks a little like the end of a belt, barely visible between a wadded-up Burger King sack and a Coke can. If I were a bettin' man like Mr. Nester, I'd bet that's the tail end of a collector's-item-near-mint-condition-brown-leather-guitar-strap-signed-by-Jimmy-Page-and-Jeff-Beck.

As tempted as I am to go grab one of the bricks lying by the Dumpster and smash the truck window to retrieve my possessions, I really want to know why Tawny took them in the first place—especially all those random photo negatives. She spent a long time riffling through my mother's desk drawers to collect all those. Why would she bother? Not that the camera bag, cameras, and the guitar strap are necessarily valuable, but she could have just swiped those to piss me off. But all those negatives? They're worthless. I think with a little finesse I can get my shit back and find out why she stole it all in the first place. In fact, a plan for dealing with this juvenile delinquent is starting to take shape, but it will have to wait. First I need to go back inside and look at those old yearbooks.

In the senior chapter of the 1958 book, I find my grandmother Matilda “Tilda” Thayer,
Most Talented Girl
. And there's Fritter Jackson. Under her name it says,
Our Little Firecracker
. I suppose I can see someone describing Fritter as a
firecracker
if by
firecracker
they meant enormous pain in the ass.

I look in the index to find more photos of Tilda and Fritter, and I come across a picture of the two of them posing with their dates—the girls in taffeta, the boys in suits. The caption underneath reads,
Tilda and Fritter bringing a couple of familiar faces to the prom. Welcome back, Gene and Dick!
The boy with his arm around my grandmother is clearly the guy that Fritter identified as Eugene. The other boy, the one next to Fritter, I don't recognize.

In the 1956 volume, I find Eugene Wallace in the senior section.
The Lone Ranger
it says beneath his name. It doesn't take long for me to find Fritter's date, Dick, in this book as well: Richard Hambly, also a senior.
Tonto
is written beneath his name.

Hmmmm . . . If
Little Firecracker
won't tell me what happened to
The Lone Ranger
, maybe
Tonto
will.

Just a couple shelves above the yearbooks are the Gandy phone
books for the past several years. I find Richard Hambly's listing, and after looking around to make sure I'm unobserved, I rip out the page, stuff it in my pocket and then quickly replace the phone book and the yearbooks back on their shelves. Next, after making sure Fritter wasn't lurking anywhere nearby, I wander back to the far corner set apart from the rest of the room with its beige cabinets and little row of microfiche readers. Once I figure out how to use the filing system it doesn't take me long to find the correct microfilm reels and suss out how to run the projector.

I get lucky; news of Eugene Wallace's death appears about halfway through the second reel. I'd been checking the obituaries, so when that turned up,
beloved son, dear friend, leaving behind parents, Burneel and Carter Wallace, fiancée Tilda Thayer
etc. . . . I went backward looking for the report of the initial accident or whatever it was that caused his death.

And I find nothing. Not a mention of an accident, not a mention of an illness. Nothing. I zip forward and backward through the dates surrounding the obituary, but don't see the name Eugene Wallace anywhere.

I'm still sitting there in front of the monitor, defeated, when Tawny wanders over.

She grabs the chair next to me, turns it around backward and straddles it. “Whatcha looking at?”

“Old newspapers.”

“Why?”

“I'm not sure,” I reply, still turning the wheel, watching page after page sliding by. “Either I'm making a big deal out of nothing, or I'm trying to uncover a well-hidden secret.”

“Cool.”

“Cool?”

“Secrets are awesome.”

I turn to look at Tawny. She's wearing a wide grin.

“
My
secrets aren't awesome,” I tell her, and it's the truth.

“Not to you, because you already know them,” she replies. “But they'd be awesome to me.”

From the sparkle in her eyes, I can see that the girl believes what she's just said. She would love to have a secret of mine—my worst one, in fact. She wants to hold it in her hand and weigh my pain against her own. I wonder how long it's been since I was young enough to think that was a contest worth winning.

I shake my head. “Most people's secrets are just sad. Some are terrible.”

“They're still irresistible,” she insists, “like a scab you can't help but pick.”

I turn back to the microfiche reader.

Tawny watches me read for a second or two and then says, “Somebody named Karleen called for you. She sounded pissed.”

I pull out my phone and check the time: one thirty. Shit!

“Is she still on the phone?”

“Nah, it was like an hour ago. When I told her you'd gone to lunch, she just hung up.”

“But I didn't go to lunch. I was here!”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“You could have looked around for me.”

“I could have, I guess,” Tawny says, and then she shrugs. “Oh well.”

I feel myself swell with rededication to my plan to mess with this most irritating teenager. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but when you're really hungry, the temperature isn't all that important.

“I was actually just about to come talk to you,” I say, wearing my most disappointed face. “I'm afraid that tonight isn't going to work well for developing pictures either.”

“Is that right?” Tawny's smirk from earlier this morning is
back. She's waiting for me to talk about last night's break-in and how there aren't any negatives left to develop.

“Yeah, I've got another date. We'll need to put off the darkroom lesson until tomorrow. Okay?”

She's confused but trying not to show it. I imagine that she's thinking it's possible I haven't yet noticed the missing negatives, guitar strap, and camera bag, although she's got to be wondering how I could have missed the dogs' absence.

“So . . .” she draws out the word, buying herself a little time to decide how to play this scene. I don't interrupt her; I'm enjoying it too much. Finally she says, “So, everything else is okay? You just need another rain check?”

“Yup. Everything's great, thanks. And last night I found a bunch of hidden negatives. We'll print those tomorrow. No telling what's on them.”

If I had even the slightest doubt that Tawny was the burglar, it is put to rest when I see her startled reaction and how quickly she tries to hide her surprise.

“So are we on for tomorrow night?” I say.

“No problem.” She's careful to keep her face neutral, but her cheeks are flushed, and in her eyes is just the tiniest glint of mischief. She's not a terrible liar, but she's not as good as I am. She'll get better though, if she keeps working this hard at it.

“I really am sorry to cancel, but if we did it tonight I'm afraid we'd have to rush. I'll be at the house until eight o'clock, but then I'll be gone until midnight at least.” I'm laying the time specifics on a little thick, but I don't feel like I have a choice. If things go my way, I'll be making a quick excursion this afternoon right after work, and I need the girl's upcoming criminal caper to happen when I'm back at home waiting.

Tawny stands up, stretching like a cat. Her T-shirt lifts enough
to show a thick metal barbell through the skin above her navel. “So, are you going to take your lunch break now?” she asks.

“In a minute,” I say, turning back to the microfiche reader.
Eugene Wallace, beloved son, dear friend, leaving behind parents, Burneel and Carter Wallace, fiancée Tilda Thayer . . .

Tawny stands behind me, reading over my shoulder. I'm ready for her to leave, and I can tell she senses that, which is why she lingers.

She leans down and whispers, “Like I said,
irresistible
.”

“I don't pick scabs,” I reply.

Tawny laughs. “Don't be stupid. Of course you do.”

I open my mouth to argue, but I'm too late. She's already walking away. Before I turn off the projector and put away the film, I read the obituary once more. In fact, I read it several more times. I'm glad Tawny isn't here to watch me do it.