“Life is a great big canvas. Try not to paint it with blood.”
—from Backter’s Little Bible of Barbs
Still flying high from the treacherous approach and landing on Bushwhacker Butte, Care Plane pilot Glenn Gray taxied clear of the dog-legged airstrip and eased the old Cessna into the flattest spot he could find on the slippery parking ramp. As he shut down the engine and the prop wheezed to a stop, an explosive backfire triggered a squeak of distress from Scout, the undersized former feeder rat occupying the right seat.
“Sorry ’bout that, boss,” Glenn said to his startled co-pilot.
He scooped her out of her shoe-box nest and into his parka pocket, which he had pre-lined with shredded newspaper for the ultimate in rat comfort. The backfire had spooked a couple of winter ravens out of a nearby pine, spilling a branchful of early February snow onto the airplane. Unable to resist the view of anything in flight, Glenn released his lap belt, stashed the ignition key in Scout’s coat-pocket nest, and stepped out of the airplane to watch the big birds circle in the brisk north wind howling out of Wyoming and into Northern Colorado.
His boot touched down on a patch of ice hidden beneath the snow, sending him on his first official tumble of the year. He spun like a stripper loosed from the pole, went airborne and weightless, twisting during the descent to protect Scout from the impact. Air erupted from his lungs and disappeared into the wind as he hit the ground flat on his back, staring straight up at the sky, to a space where he felt far less clumsy.
The soaring birds above produced the illusion that he was still sliding on the ice, a form of vertigo that Glenn had learned to counteract by pressing the numb spot on his cheekbone, just below the reconstructed left eye socket, a constant reminder of a years-old lesson regarding the fragile nature of stability.
Equilibrium regained, he caught his breath and muttered, “The wind can blow me!”
With a jingle of airplane keys, Scout poked her head out of his jacket and scurried up his chest to stand with her forepaws on his chin, inspecting his pupils. She let go of the keys to gnaw on a plastic zip tie he had installed on the old parka as a makeshift zipper pull, repurposed for the moment as rat fodder.
“We gotta get you a chew toy. Don’t we, Rat Lady?”
She sniffed at his throat as if searching for a pulse, or maybe a shred of intelligence. Her head moved rapidly back and forth, tracking strands of Glenn’s long blond, wind-whipped hair. Above her head he envisioned thought balloons filled with follicular trajectory calculations and nesting material. To spare her the effort, he pulled a few threads from his scalp and offered them to her. But her eyes shifted and her body convulsed in alarm. Without accepting his contribution, she grabbed the keys and scurried back into his pocket, jingling as she squirmed into the shredded newspaper.
A moment later, footsteps crunched toward him through the snow. Glenn rolled over and lifted a hand in greeting, preparing an explanation for his informal posture. Words escaped him though, when he found himself staring up the barrel of a gun.
Wrapped in a purple ski suit, the rotund gun bearer looked unsuited for the task of weapons management. Small fingers held a huge automatic handgun, which wavered under the additional weight of a black silencer. The bore of the barrel, centered as it was between two flame-throwing pupils, burned Glenn’s brain with menace.
A female voice quavered through a plaid wool scarf. “I saw an animal chewing your neck.”
“Nothing chewing.” Glenn propped himself up on his hands. “I appreciate your concern, though.”
Despite his calming efforts, the silencer remained pointed, unsteadily, at his left eye.
“Where’s my pilot?” she asked. Stringy brown hair stuck out like a bad wig from beneath a toque pulled down over her eyebrows. A bead of sweat formed at the tip of her nose.
In the most self-assured voice he could muster, Glenn said, “If you’re Mrs. Beck, then I’m your pilot.”
Squinting in apparent disbelief, she turned her head a fraction to one side, keeping an eye on him while scanning the wind-blown ramp for more likely looking aviators. A gust broad-sided her into a foot-crossing fight for balance, a battle made all the more difficult by the too-tight snow suit and the oversized gun. She recovered from the accidental dance and said, “You have got to be kidding.”
Glenn shook his head, using care not to laugh off or appear offended by her statement. Having transported a great many nervous passengers and student pilots, he thought he recognized the attempt to disguise fright with bluster.
Re-leveling her weapon, she said, “You sounded like a pilot on the phone, but you’re kinda raggedy in person. I thought you’d be … tidier.”
“You don’t have to look at me while I fly,” Glenn said.
She waved the gun at the Cessna. “And this is the airplane?” She peered around the little ramp and then at the hangar, as if willing a larger, more modern aircraft to appear. “Something’s not right here. I’m very uncomfortable with this whole operation.”
Mrs. Beck was not the first uneasy passenger to express dismay with the Cessna’s aged exterior or Glenn’s youthful one. From his seated position, he extolled the airplane’s less noticeable features: the smooth new propeller mounted behind the dented spinner and the shiny engine hidden within the dingy cowling, all of which he had helped rebuild and install, right down to the “GG” initials etched into the engine block. He refrained from telling her that he hoped to own the aircraft some day, but he did sweep a hand across the bleak horizon while bragging, “Best airplane in a fifty-nautical-mile radius.”
“You and your great airplane are late,” Mrs. Beck replied, waving the pistol. “I thought you pilots kept stricter schedules.”
Glenn nodded, welcoming the opportunity to make use of his employer’s newly mandated customer-interaction model, enacted to address a recent increase in client grievances. The handgun—a clear violation of the client/provider dynamic—took the dissatisfaction index to a whole new level. Glenn envisioned presenting the scenario at the next mandatory interaction-model meeting.
“You’re right, Mrs. Beck. I’m ready to go. We can get your daughter loaded up, and then all I need to do is inspect that weapon.” Glenn’s voice cracked on the last word, foiling his own attempt at bravado, but he recovered a measure of confidence with a quote from his bible, the federal aviation regulations: “All firearms must be unloaded prior to boarding.”
The gun bucked and a bullet tore through the left shoulder of Glenn’s parka, unleashing a cloud of fake feathers that filled his mouth with the taste of dusty old pillow. Scout shuddered at the impact but remained hidden. The slug ricocheted off the ramp and struck a distant branch with the crack of a home-run shot, soundly defeating the purpose of her silencer. From a nearby tree, the winter ravens took flight, croaking with apparent displeasure at yet another unnatural noise.
“It’s ‘Doctor,’ not ‘Mrs.’ Dr. Kay Beck. And don’t tell me how ready you are while you’re sitting in the snow getting eaten by ferrets,” she said. “Get up. You look ridiculous.”
Spurred to bullet-induced obedience, Glenn clambered to his feet. Uprighteousness left him feeling no less absurd. He placed a hand over his coat pocket to still the restless Scout, a misinterpreted move that Dr. Beck countered with a gunshot to his right parka shoulder. More synthetic down flew southward and another silenced round ricocheted into the woods, causing Glenn to classify Dr. Beck as the un-motherly type.
Raising his hands to indicate compliance, he looked up between his fingers to watch the de-perched ravens circle in the north wind. He wished himself in formation with them, flying free of postural insult, high above the gunfire. His shoulders felt unwounded, and he hoped that the near misses qualified as well-aimed intimidation. Purposeful or not, he pondered the purpose of noise suppression in the wasteland of Lone Cone National Forest.
“Okay. You can leave the bullets in the gun … please,” he said.
“Shut up!” She pulled the scarf from her face, which improved her diction while revealing a garish blaze of sunset orange lip gloss. “Don’t move.”
The wind peeled a coarse sheet of snow from the ground and sandblasted the airstrip’s only hangar, a corrugated aluminum shed that had buckled and twisted under decades of wind and snow. Behind the woman, in the cold forest beyond the perimeter of the clearing, tree limbs popped and crackled like muffled fireworks. Glenn’s knees wobbled inside his frozen jeans.
“I told you not to move,” she said.
“But, Dr. Beck. Nobody’s ever shot at me on purpose.”
“I’ll do it again … in the name of Gravitas.” She pointed the gun at a pile of luggage stacked against the corner of the hangar. “Get that stuff into the airplane, carefully.”
In the name of guns and Gravitas—whatever that was—Glenn shuffled back and forth through the snow, forcing heavy bags and boxes and cases into the Cessna’s small baggage compartment. Dr. Beck followed his every step, panting with the effort of propelling herself and her insulated suit through the drifts while poking him in the back with the silencer and telling him to hurry.
After the third load of cargo, Glenn turned to her and said, “I’ll have to fit the rest in the back seat somehow. How big is your daughter?”
“Daughter!” She scoffed. “You fell hard for that one didn’t you?”
“I just listen to what I’m told. This was supposed to be a Care Plane flight for a mother and a sick daughter.”
The scoff froze on Dr. Beck’s lips. The slightest tic—the millisecond longer that she held her eyes closed while blinking—signaled the limit of her tolerance for sullen banter. Glenn filed the unique expression in his memory, the only means of identification possible given the bad wig and shapeless snowsuit.
Dr. Beck recovered quickly. Wiping the sneer from her face with the arch of an eyebrow, and a wave of her gun, she said, “Act out of the box for a change and do what you’re told. I want the seats empty, and I want those bags in the baggage compartment. Now!”
“That compartment is overloaded.”
“I see space. Fill it.”
“It’s not a matter of volume,” Glenn said. “I’m more concerned about restraint…and weight.”
“You calling me fat?”
“Not at all, doc,” Glenn said. “I just like to use caution with the center of gravitas.”
“Cautious people … so easy to victimize.” She chuckled and waved the gun at her baggage. “Get all that stuff in there. Now!”
“It’ll make the airplane unstable.”
“Speaking of unstable, that was quite the air show you put on getting in here,” she said. “Bumpy ride?”
Glenn shrugged. The Mountain Pilot’s Guide had described Bushwhacker Butte Regional Air Park as Northern Colorado’s most treacherous aerodrome: “an unlighted, unattended, narrow, short, high-altitude airstrip situated atop a thickly forested mesa, bordered on all sides by trees, cliffs, drop-offs, and rough terrain.” He felt no shame in the two go-arounds and the subsequent firm and graceless touchdown. A fellow aviator would have recognized the accomplishment as a strategic victory in the war against plane wrecks, many of which had occurred right there on the Butte, as evidenced by the aluminum remains lining the runway.
“I thought of it as a firm commitment to the planet,” he said.
“Looked more like a suicide attempt to me,” Dr. Beck replied.
The magnitude of that insult pierced Glenn’s ego dead center. Admittedly, certain elements of the process had lacked perfection, and he wouldn’t have wanted the show on film. In his own mind, though, the landing had ranked right up there as a work of aviation art. An experience that had taken him, for a moment, to a rare place where he felt like he belonged, doing what he was meant to do: Care Planing sick children and worried parents to and from their medical appointments. The antithesis of suicide: life-lifting and affirming, for himself as well as others. Life-giving, not taking.
“Went pretty much how I expected,” Glenn said through gritted teeth.
“But you. You’re not at all what I expected,” said Dr. Beck. Her pumpkin-colored lipstick cracked as she pursed her lips. “I thought only female pilots could have such nice long locks. You guys are supposed to get haircuts, aren’t you? What’s with that bare spot behind your ear? You sick?”
“I can arrange for a betterly groomed pilot,” Glenn said, spurred by weaponry to the highest levels of customer service.
“Not necessary.” She beckoned him nearer with the weapon. “C’mere.”
Glenn baby-stepped toward her, using care to remain clear of the unstable felon’s personal space. He even left room to shake hands if she wanted. But with the air of a woman used to getting her way, she grabbed the airport security badge hanging around his neck and pulled him well within range of her foul breath. Pressing the silencer to Glenn’s forehead, she lifted the plastic rectangle and held it alongside his face. A wind gust blew powdery makeup from her cheeks and into his eyes.
She tilted her head to view his features from all possible angles and finally said, “You’ve had work done.”
Blinking the makeup from his eyes, Glenn crossed them so as to inspect the crook in his dog-legged nose, another monument to bad judgment. “It wasn’t elective,” he said.
Dr. Beck’s accusatory frown softened to a faraway stare. She gazed skyward and chanted as if reading from a cue card, “Surely men of low degree are vanity—chasers of the wind.”
“It wasn’t cosmetic,” Glenn insisted. Her sudden lack of awareness relative to the gun made him edgy. “An airway was blocked. The lungs never lie.”
“They that make a graven image are all of them conceit,” she intoned, peering at Glenn as if in the presence of an illusion. “And in their delectable ways they shall not profit. Emptiness will be their reward.”
Glenn had any number of equally vague, similarly insulting quotations on the tip of his tongue. Wherever you go, bring a working brain, came to mind. However, sassing an armed assailant seemed un-brainful.
“The insurance company pre-approved the surgery,” Glenn said, a little louder than he intended. He tensed, preparing to duck and grab for the gun. “I didn’t make a cent.”
The volume of his voice seemed to break her stupor. Her eyes cleared. She shook her head and hollered, “Good one! I’m gonna justify my next tummy tuck just like that.”
She yanked on his ID, hard enough to snap the break-away lanyard, and stepped beneath the wing of the airplane, close to the cockpit door. Glancing again at his badge, she said, “I guess I was expecting somebody … different. Somebody more disciplined and clean cut.”
Disinclined to reply in a clean-cut, disciplined manner, Glenn asked for his ID back.
“That won’t be necessary.” She tucked the badge into her back pocket and gestured with the pistol toward the cockpit. “Keys in the ignition?”
Glenn tipped his head downward and said, “Coat pocket.”
“Damn you careful people.” She waved him toward her again. “Okay … very slowly … get them out and hand them over.”
Behind her, a creaky aluminum door banged against the fuselage of an airplane wreck. Her demeanor hardened and her expression sank once again into the trance-like daze, but even deeper this time. From past experience, Glenn recognized the look—a precursor to brutality.
There would be no future lineup of snow-suited, wig-wearing scoffers for him to identify. No future at all, he imagined, aside from a gangland-style execution. A silenced bullet would pierce the back of his head, shatter the remains of his ego, and cough its way out his mouth. He would disappear into the mountains, just like Skip St. Scott—the lost aviator whose disappearance had ignited Glenn’s fervor for flight.
In the end, all the laborious flying lessons had failed to prepare him for such an end, no more useful than his in-depth analysis of “Get Smart” reruns. He had no checklist to use as a guide, no shoe phone, no Agent 99.
An hour earlier, the trip to the Butte had symbolized accomplishment and fulfillment, a small victory in the battle to bring meaning to his vagabond existence. Dr. Beck’s silencer, on the other hand, signified a deadly, less fulfilling purpose. Glenn chuckled bitterly at his misinterpretation of meaningfulness. Solid evidence indicated that he was not meant to help a sick little girl and her worried mother that day. He would never own the Cessna. Instead, he was meant to die by the hand of a spellbound soldier from the Church of Gravitas. A simple act of charity had mutated to a matter of life and death.
He gave himself a mental pat on the back for not wasting any money in an IRA weighted with worthless company shares. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the key ring, from which hung Scout, his pet rat.
I welcome any and all thoughts or advice you might have–good, constructive, or other: