34. One Year Later

One Year Later.

The choreography at the Feminita-Grays had not changed a bit. They were drinking less and thinking more this winter. Julian had been fasting and running. Feminita had started them on juicing. So they could still move from kitchen to couches with much more swagger, and far less stagger. Julian had finished revising his third unsold novel, and had started another one. He typed relentlessly, making a fiction out of the incident with Lana Andrews. In his fiction, he was able to have his male protagonist rescue her from the battering husband, divorce his nagging wife, and go all the way. It was, he felt, his most commercial book so far. Dana, on the other hand, had taken a beating in the 2012 elections and was licking her wounds on Facebook. So, to keep and eye on the political situation, and keep her chuckling in a grim sort of way, she had the TV tuned to Jon Stewart. For the most part, Julian tuned this programming out these days. He could write just as well with the babble going on in the background as without it. Stewart’s voice was saying, just past the announcer’s lead in,
“Hi, I’m Jon Stewart. Have we got a program for you tonight! Let me assure you, it is one of the ‘truthiest’ shows we’ve ever done. That’s because my guest tonight is none other than the lovely and articulate author of ‘Amy Tells All,’ Ms. Lana Marietta Andersen.” (Applause and whistles from the studio audience.)”
At this, Julian and Dana both looked at the set.
“Say, Jules, that name rings a bell.”
“Yeah, it’s the name of that blogger that got me in so much trouble a few semesters back. Holy shit. We gotta watch this and see if it’s really her. What did she do? Write a book?”
“Well apparently so. Not just wrote one, but sold one.”
“Holy shit,” he repeated.
So they watched Lana, who Julian instantly recognized with his heart leaping in his throat. He looked down at his last sentence. Did this mean his book was toast? He saw his diminutive poetess walk out, her head slightly bowed, but her gait perfectly poised. He recognized her thin smile as she looked out at the audience and did a square dance curtsy. She sat down at Stewart’s desk and perched at the edge of her chair. She was as beautiful as she had ever been. She was that much closer to thirty by now.
“So shall I call you Amy or shall I call you Lana?”
“Take your pick. Shall I call you Jon, or shall I call you Jonathan?”
Stewart leaned back in his chair. He was laughing. He looked at the camera and said,
“She’s quoting the book, I’m not making this up.” He turned back and leaned in to Lana. He tapped is fingers on his desk as was his habit night after night.
“So you wrote a blog.”
“I write a blog.”
“And it got, shall we say, very popular.”
At this the audience laughed. It was ironic, because the blog was incredibly popular.
“So they kept telling me. I had other things on my mind. I had a law degree to earn and a marriage to wreck.”
“In this blog, you threatened to ‘tell all.’ Did you?”
She giggled.
“No, I withheld some things. I had a rule not to use anyone’s name. I myself wrote under a pen-name. I took no comments and I didn’t provide an email address or other contact information.”
“So you were kind of a tease.”
“Yes.”
“But you also wrote some marvelous, marvelous stories.”
“I’m still writing them by the way.”
The studio audience applauded this and there were some whistles. Lana turned to them and grinned.
“They seem to know all about it.”
“I call them as I see them.”
“Yes. I read one about the m words that came out in Harper’s, what, last year sometime?”
“Yes, they approached me because they had gotten a tip from an intern about that particular piece. The m words…, oh, can I say them on television?”
“Well, this is not exactly a family program.”
Laughter. Julian was experiencing an urge to jump out of his skin. He looked at Dana, she was watching this with wide eyes.
“Marriage. One of the m words is marriage. The other one…”
“OK, don’t milk the pony. Don’t beat around the bush. Uh. Don’t, you know, spank the monkey.”
“Right. You get the idea. The piece was about marriage not being what it’s cracked up to be sometimes. Sometimes, you have to masturbate.”
At this the audience cracked up. Her delivery of a joke was impeccable. She marched right into the m word without so much as a comma. Stewart put his head down on his desk. Then, he looked out at the camera and said,
“And Amy tells all about how the ‘evil sisters’ do it.”
“I also had some little tweety poems in there. I was trying to follow up on a perception some of us had that the modern texting style was like little back and forth poems, or poem fragments. I thought that ee Cummings had nothing on my friends with smart phones.”
“Yes, the little back and forth two word sentences that keep morphing into inversions and yet keep a narrative going. Do you want me to read it?”
“Oh, no. I can recite it.”
She looked at the camera and began,
“Poppy-cock.
Cocky-pop.
Pop the top.
Top the pop…”
Julian watched her as she performed this flawlessly, like Gertrude Stein might have done. The poem sounded better when recited than it read on the page. She developed a slight singsong as she accelerated. By the time she got to,
“Let’s split.
Wanna meet at the meet and greet.
OK. See ya out on the street.
Tweet.
Tweet.”
The pace was a gallop, and breathless. The audience roared when she finished. From Dana and Julian’s perspective, there were beeps in place of some four-letter words. The tour de force of it caught Dana off guard. She gasped. She looked at Julian, and she said,
“Wow. You sure know how to pick ‘em.”
The next evening, as Julian sat diddling with his novel, having decided it might be now more worthwhile than ever, Dana entered the living rooms and put a copy of Lana’s book in his hands.
“Wow. Where did you get this?”
“At the Mall. It’s got a display case. The clerk said they’re selling like crazy. I guess I’d better apologize. I was wrong. She’s not a whore. She’s a celebrity.”
“So, you mean I can go back to teaching her in class?”
“Why not? You sort of discovered her.”
He thought about that for a moment. He wondered how true that was and what difference it made. He’d only picked up on the obvious. Lana had created the personal, confessional blog with a literary sheen. It would have been discovered anyway. His hand in it was just dumb luck. He thought now about trying to make contact with her. Would she still be in Parkersburg? He assumed she’d have handlers. How did fame work in America? He had no experiential idea.

Scott, in his protracted battle over the demons of grief and loss, had been on a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs. He’d gain ground and then go on a bender and lose it. Bruce was nearing his wit’s end, and he had decided that if Scott didn’t straighten up and fly right by winter’s end, he’d dissolve the partnership and make other plans. The year had been a bust. They were exactly where they were in the spring. They were breaking even, maybe making a marginal profit, but it was not what it had been. If not for ebay, they’d be finished. Scott had sold his Piper Cub in the summer after flying it one last time. He’d had to pay off his legal bills. He flew the Skyhawk so rarely now, that Bruce had approached him about selling that, too. Bruce found the airborne sales call an unnecessary affectation at this point. He never had Scott’s one on one charisma, and now Scott had it only rarely himself.

Still obsessed and weepy about Lana, Scott watched her television appearances and threw things at the television set. He had made quite a scene at the Follett Bookstore in Marietta. He’d been halfway smashed, and yet, or maybe because of that, decided to drive to Marietta to buy a copy of “Amy Tells All.” He’d pretty much read the whole blog by now, and was quite an expert at it. This blew Bruce’s mind. Scott was becoming more like Brian every week. There was an edge now, thought, to Scott’s rantings about Lana. He had moved from being mooney and loopy to being resentful. Her rise on the national stage had done nothing less than infuriate Scott. It was bad enough that she was the ‘bitch on wheels’ busting men who hit their women. That seemed fitting and proper. But to be a famous cunt, that was too much. So off he went to buy the damn book. When he got out to Follett’s, he was prepared to sheepishly snoop around and try to find it, or maybe to discreetly inquire at the counter as to the obscure aisle where such a book might be stashed away. Instead, when he pulled up in his car, which by now had no wheel covers and was missing both rear bumper and tail light lenses, there was a huge picture of Lana in the bookstore window. When he walked in the front doors, there was a huge display case made of cardboard, with Lana’s cardboard figure smirking beside it. He picked up a copy. He flipped through it. I wasn’t just about the blog, as it turned out. Her abusive husband had a chapter all his own. In making a book out of “Amy Tells All,” she’d described why she’d had to shut the blog down. She mentioned Scott’s jealousy, though he was called “Stan” in the memoir, over nothing. She’d written that her ‘off duty professor’ had been, like many of the characters in the blog posts, a figment of her imagination, or perhaps loosely based on someone she’d known in the past. When he read her description of their little tiff, the one in which he’d hit her, he could see the hand of the born liar at work.
“It was nothing like that,” he muttered.
“Beg pardon,” asked another customer who was buying several copies of ‘Amy’ as gifts.
“That book you’re buying. It’s just a bunch of lies.”
“So what? I’ve never read it. I’m buying it as gifts for my nieces and nephews.”
“Why don’t you get ‘em something that isn’t a crock of shit?”
“No offense, but why don’t you sober up before you waltz into a bookstore?”
“Because when I go into a bookstore, I find crap like this!”
Scott waved the copy of ‘Amy’ aloft. A small crowd was quickly congealing around the Lana Andersen display.
“Sir,” said a clerk, “she’s a local woman that did well. We’d appreciate if you’d keep your voice down, or I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“This bitch was my wife!” Scott bellowed. “I don’t feel like keeping my voice down! She made up all this crap in here about me scaring her to death! She makes it sound like she was seriously at risk! She fucking hit me in the face with the goddamn hairspray! You try that shit on for size!”
The manager was now on the floor and making a beeline for the disturbance. He tried to reach for the book in Scott’s hand. Scott swung for the man with it, but instead it connected with Lana’s cardboard figure. The cardboard went down in a heap. The action caused Scott to lose what was left of his balance, and he fell into the display ending up on the floor under a pile of copies of “Amy Tells All.”

Lana was contemplating getting out of Parkersburg. Reports of Scott’s acting out had reached her from various sources. For her, fame in America was not so terrible so far. She was monetarily comfortable, but 17.5 percent on a million-seller was not all that much. She hadn’t yet sold a million copies. What made the fame part seem glamorous was the television appearances. There were also book signings all over the place that were far less glamorous and exhausting. She’d had to suspend the work that she found as lucrative, and somewhat uplifting, the pursuit and conviction of batterers. This sort of wreckage of lives, particularly of the lives of violent men, was making her friends nervous. She’d been warned. She’d learned to take the warnings seriously. She was looking at real estate in remote locations. She could be a real mountain mama and still write books and blog. It took time, and she was busy. HarperCollins, quite pleased with her performance, was urging a sequel, and keeping her hopping. Her one concession to “fame” was the hiring of a housekeeper. Donna came twice a week and kept the place as tidy as Lana herself had once done for Scott. Then came the grand aviation accident.
On the evening of January 16th, Scott got the idea that he’d do what Bruce had suggested and sell the Skyhawk. He’d met a guy at Lana’s old haunt, the Coyote Gone Wild, who said he was in the market for a decent used Cessna.
“You got a license?” Scott asked.
“Of course. I’ve been a pilot since I was 18.” Scott looked at him. He looked to be about fifty. It was hard to tell in this purple and red light. The man looked like someone he ought to know. The face had a trace in his memory.
“What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. It’s Sam. Samuel Akins. I own the Bald Eagle strip.”
“Oh! Sam! How had I forgotten! I’m embarrassed.”
“It’s OK, Scott. I haven’t seen you for quite a while. I’ve heard you got a lot of stuff on your plate. Life gets complicated sometimes.”
“Yeah, well, as I say, I sold the Cub. Our business has gotten more Internet intense, and we’re not doing enough sales trips to justify keeping a plane. Both me and my partner, Bruce Sibley agree that we should sell.”
“I could come out and take a look at her.”
“Her?”
“The Skyhawk.”
“OK. Why don’t you come out tomorrow early, say 8:30 or so and you can see how she does. She’s sweet, I’ll tell you.”
Scott kept knocking ‘em back at the Coyote, long after Sam Akins packed it in. When he got back to his cluttered little apartment, with the boxes he’d gotten from Lana a year or more ago still unpacked, he’d gone right to the bottle of gin. After quite a few rounds of gin rummy, Scott passed out on his couch. He woke up about 6:30, still drunk. He drove out to Scott Airstrip and turned up the heat in the office. He fell asleep again as dawn crept up on that neck of the river bluffs, and when Sam pounded on the door at 8:25, Scott was face down at his desk. He awoke to Sam’s pounding. He got to his feet and padded to the door.
“Coming,” he said. He opened the door on Sam, who was rubbing his hands together trying to keep warm.
“I was about to give up on you!”
“Sorry. I was out here early, but I guess I fell back asleep.”
“It’s OK. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Oh, yeah. No problem. Let me show you the Cessna, it’s right out here…” Scott grabbed his coat, hat and gloves, scooping them off the floor where he’d dumped ‘em when he’d gotten warm enough earlier. He walked with Sam to the hangar and unlocked it. He hit the light switch once inside. The Cessna was all blue and white, gleaming in the frosty glare of the fluorescent work light. Sam Aikens walked around the plane, ducking down and looking her over. Scott was not working any sort of checklist. He was thinking about a selling price. Scott went on automatic routine to the hangar doors and unlocked them. He pushed the sliding panels aside while Sam looked the plane over.
“Are we taking her up?” Sam called.
“Sure. I assumed you’d want a flight.”
“Are you flying or am I?”
“Oh, how about if I fly the first one, we’ll touch down again and then you can fly ‘er.”
“OK by me.”
The Cessna hadn’t been flown in a while. It would have been prudent to check the fuel level and quality, to look for leaks in brake lines, check the tire pressure, check the engine oil level, give the hydraulics a once over, charge the battery, oh, the endless checklist. Scott did none of these things. Instead, he pulled the wheel chocks, wondering to himself why Bruce had chocked her in the hangar. At this he rolled his eyes. ‘Bruce.’ He got into the cockpit, and opened the door for Sam. He gestured for Sam to get in. Sam wondered about the no fuel check, but assumed that Scott had been there earlier, as he had said, and done all that stuff. He knew Scott to be meticulous about his aviation. As Sam buckled in, Scott was checking the ailerons, the rudder, and the elevator. This was well-ingrained habit. He turned to Sam and said,
“You’ll love this bird. She’s got some miles on her, but she’s in great shape.”
“Seems to be,” said Sam, nodding.
Scott pushed the mixture to full rich, and primed her. He switched on the battery and turned the key. The turnover was sluggish, but she caught. They sat for a moment inside the shaky tin can. Scott let her run. It was a cold morning. She was sucking down fuel just sitting there in the hangar.
“Purrs like a kitten!”
“Sure does!”
He brought up the throttle and released the brake. They taxied out to the field. As he reached the threshold of the strip, he stopped. He pressed the brakes with his toes. He opened the throttle and listened for any sign of rough running.
“Smooth!” He yelled at Sam. Sam nodded.
“Good brakes! Again Sam nodded and smiled.
She was coming up to temperature. He didn’t need to see the gauge. He could smell it. In fact, he really didn’t look at the panel at all. His idea was just to get airborne, fly over Mineral Wells, and then fly back and land, just one big circle. He wouldn’t need the radio or the avionics for any of that. It was just primitive flight. Sam picked up the headset that was down beside the console. This would make it possible for them to have a conversation, at least. Scott shrugged. Sam put the headset back down. Scott now taxied out onto the strip and began his takeoff roll. She lifted off after eating up two thirds of the strip. They began to climb out. Scott looked over at Sam and grinned. Sam grinned back. They had gotten as far north-northwest as the golf course, reached about 1500 feet, and Scott was just about thinking it was time to bank to the right and begin his circle when the engine coughed. He glanced at Sam and shrugged. It coughed again, and then again. The pressure fell off and now, for the first time, Scott looked at the instrument panel. He now realized that there was no fuel in either tank. They were out of gas and dead stick. He felt himself redden. He got a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Sam leaned over and in and looked at the panel that Scott was looking at.
“Son of a bitch!” Sam yelled. He looked out the window at the situation.
“I’m heading for the Interstate,” Scott said. He did not need to shout anymore. The engine was silent. I77 did some twisting and turning below them. Scott kept his airspeed up and set up the power off glide. It was a matter of calculating the rate of descent while lining up on the writhing snake of moving target and hoping for the luck that they’d not touch down on the roof of some vehicle. Both Sam and Scott watched the roadway and traffic as it came up at a steady rate. Traffic was mercifully light. Sam saw a mini van fishtail below as they sank below 500 feet. Any traffic below would have gotten the idea that this plane was going to join the flow of the morning commute to Parkersburg. Scott set up a nice approach and dead stick landing that touched down just at the route 47 exchange. They had used up most of their forward energy and rolled to a quick stop. Traffic began to pile up in both directions. Scoot pulled on the brake, turned off the magnetos, pulled the mixture to full lean, and turned off the battery. He then put his head down and shook it. When he straightened back up, a motorist was pounding on the door. He opened the door and the man blurted out,
“Are you ok?”
“Yeah,” said a defeated sounding Scott. He unbuckled his safety belt. Sam did the same.
“Well, nice flying, Bruce.” This was only partially facetious. His dead stick landing had been perfect. His pre-flight had been terrible. Sam opened his door as well. They had to wait with the plane for the authorities. This would tie up I77 for a few hours. The NTSC would need to take some information and measurements. It was an ‘aviation incident.’ In the meanwhile, Sam turned to Scott and asked,
“How much do you want for it?”
“I’ll sell it to you for $72,000.”
“I’ll give you 50 for it. It’s been in an accident.”
Scott rolled his eyes. He was going to lose his license. In all likelihood, the insurance would eat him alive. As he sat, he saw the flashing red lights that signified the police, the fire and rescue, and most certainly the local news. Now the whole damned Andrews clan was famous.
“Sold,” he said.