THE WHEEL
1
IT TAKES THREE men and a furious fate to destroy Mary’s life.
There she is. In a bra. Buttoning new jeans. Twisting to the mirror to inspect her ass. Strawberry hair spilling over freckles, spread out and faint as faraway stars in milky space, a universe exposed in negative.
The soft bump and flex of a shoulder bone.
Everything looks how she wants it. The clock says ten minutes until Rob arrives. The window is glazed with custard sunshine, soon to be caramel dusk. She must hurry.
It’s a casual date. But still a date. No T-shirts. A blouse then. Red. Yes, red and fiery. And the leather jacket. It’ll be cold at the pier. It’s September now, it’ll be cold. The ocean will be nipping at the beach, frigid. Cooling the air.
Heels or sneakers? Shit. No time for this. Sneakers. Fine.
There she goes to check her hair, make-up, practice a smile that will light up her royal blue sparklers. Love, youth, vitality. So excited for the night she feels ready to burst. Tonight with Rob. A palpable excitement, a buzzing electric wire tapped into a hot-light Saturday night. Quickly, what to bring. Clutch will do. Essentials only.
Wait, do you hear?
And now she’s flying to the stairs because there’s a knock at the door that means Rob has arrived.
Time to go because time is short.
OUTSIDE THE FOUR-UNIT building just off Lincoln Boulevard, that messy urban strip that runs parallel to the coastline but bears none of its fruit, Rob waits.
His hand touches the pocket of his jeans. Fingertips find the secret. A silver ring, encrusted with diamonds, crowned by the largest, the one he’d saved for. Tonight is the night. It was all planned, etched in his popping mind, neuro-scraps scribbled upon over the last several months while driving, at work, half-asleep before rising.
They will have dinner, drinks. A stop at the arcade. Then, when the silent dark blue dusk settles completely and night falls, stars winking, they’ll ride the Ferris Wheel. Dashing strips of neon tubes, an eternally shooting star at its hub; red, blue and yellow lights pulsing outward from the wheel’s core, to its ends, to the floating cars, hinged and rocking. When they arrive at the top – the very highest point – the whole of the city will be spread out to the east, the dark blanket of the Pacific to the west, the coast snaking blisters of runway lights terminated by the distant smokestacks of Long Beach to the south, the bent elbows of the Santa Monica mountains – that stagnant herd of hunchbacked Mastodons, wooly with forest green – to the north.
But not yet. Later. Footsteps. He takes a deep breath, lets it out. Smiles in readiness.
The door flies open. She dovetails into him and they kiss.
“You look beautiful.”
Neither know anything of the man sleeping in the small plane a few miles away, snoring in drunken slumber, as if in wait to be summoned like a Kraken, destroyer of worlds and true love.
FRANK IS KNEES-TO-CHIN in the Cessna’s seatless rear cabin. The wind-tossed tarp lies across the windshield like a dead acrobat, letting the late-afternoon sun drink the interior shadows like a golden cat laps cream.
The snores stutter and Frank wakes, slow and dumb. One lid lifts half-open, the other remains sealed. There’s a crust at the corners of his eyes and lips. His mouth is an ashtray dipped in sap and left in the hot sun for an afternoon. His brain is pudding with a heavy skin. He manages to rub the sealed eye open. A watch ticks on his wrist. Later than he thought. Much later.
“You’re kidding me,” he says, voice slurred and ragged, breath foul. Then remembers.
The Typhoon Restaurant, just off the tarmac. Pilots and “in-the-know” tourists. Leslie working the bar, passing him freebies because they hadn’t slept together yet. Votes of confidence. Frank a regular, and regularly alone. The Cessna 172 had been a gift to himself after the divorce. The property in Brentwood a gift to his wife, now ex’d forever. Which left him with the bungalow in Venice they’d been renting to a couple LMU grad students, and if he’d felt bad about terminating their month-to-month, he didn’t notice.
Now it was nights out at clubs, bars, hip-lobbied hotels. Spending more than he should, a fifty-year-old man trying for thirty all over again; but youth is slippery and does not play well with the older you wanting it back. It shucks and jives, laughs as you leap and cross your arms, hug empty air. All the dancing for coins made Frank a bitter, tired old bear. Desperate. The loneliness, after the divorce, at first nothing but a distant point in space, now a meteor bearing down, hellfire from the sky, big as a moon, plant-wilting heat, soul-wilting doom. No big red panic button in sight except for the shot glass, Leslie filling it up so he could hit it again, destroy the destroyer.
Last night he’d hit the big red button until it broke, split down the middle. His black-out started shortly after midnight, lifted momentarily at closing. The manager played orderly, ushered him out by the armpits. A cab was called, but fuck that. He’d fly home. And so, evading the night guard, he’d snuck through the dark, under the bulging white corpse-eye of the waxing gibbous moon, to the Cessna.
And, oh, what fortunes awaited him! A gift, a forgotten gift. A full bottle of the good stuff. The old stuff. Hunched in the rear, sucking on the glass tit. Brown sustenance. The great curing poison, swallowed, swallowed down.
Now, awake, blood still thick with the devil’s elixir, he knows his task. That bitch, he thinks. And then, the next shoe drops.
Catalina Island.
Of course! That’s where she is all right, walking through herds of buffalo with Jim What’s-his-fuck. The new guy. Yeah, sure.
Frank knows what to do. A quick sweep of the tarp, a topping of the 172’s tank, and off, off he’ll go, high into the sky, due west for the island. If he leaves now, he’ll land at Island in the Sky airfield well before nightfall, twenty short minutes. Then he’d rearrange things a bit. Get some shit organized with the ex and old Jim What’s-his-fuck.
Frank belches, then cracks the door and pukes onto the tarmac. Wipes his mouth. Better. Much better. Stepping over the slop, proving himself worthy. Note the dexterity! He smiles as he pulls loose the knots of the splayed tarp.
