Something the size of a motorcycle hit the ground so hard in front of them that it bounced several feet into the air. Lemon skittered sideways and Harold fell off. The bird hammered away across the scrubby desert, leaving a comical trail of Roadrunner dust behind it.
‘Lemon!’
He knew it was pointless. They never came back when they were called, and Lemon had the look of a bird that wasn’t coming back, period.
Harold got up slowly and turned to find what he first took to be some kind of Ninja Turtle with a hi-tech shell. But as he walked round it he could see that it was actually Captain Frik Venter, still strapped into his seat, his staring eye-whites pricked with blood, his shirt ripped from his body, leaving only a Yogi-bear collar and tie, and with one arm cut off above the elbow as cleanly as if Harold’s mother had been preparing him for dinner.
Harold got sick, but was careful to bend well forward so he wouldn’t ruin his sunshine-yellow shirt.
*
South African jet crash kills 138
AP – A passenger jet crashed in South Africa yesterday, killing all 124 passengers and crew on board and 14 people on the ground.
Although the Boeing 737 came down in the remote Karoo desert, debris fell on a farm where tourists had gathered to watch the popular ostrich races.
None of the dead are believed to be US Citizens.
Well, that’s okay, then, thought Tom, wryly.
Then, almost immediately: What the hell is an ostrich race?
He fired up his computer and checked out the crash online. It was a knee-jerk thing with him. He had to see it. Had to look for clues; had to imagine what the cause might have been, even if he had no connection with the investigation. Like an angler buying a magazine to see how his own catch matches up to carp caught a thousand miles away. Ella had called it obsession; he called it professional curiosity.
The South African Weekly Mail and Guardian had the best coverage. Pictures of the wreckage still smouldering. At least, one part of the wreckage. The plane had broken in two, with the greater part of the fuselage and wings landing on the farm in a blazing fireball. It had been only twenty minutes out of Cape Town, its fuel tanks still well over half full.
The cockpit and fuselage forward of the wings had come down about a mile away.
Tom scrolled down through the pictures of scorched earth, black debris scattered in a wide radius. One picture was of Terrence Terblanche, forty-six, who owned the farm, crying over the body of an ostrich that looked like the crispy remains of a giant Thanksgiving turkey gone wrong. Tom snorted in amusement.
He looked again at the picture of the fuselage. Something about it bugged him but he couldn’t quite get it.
The next picture was of a small African boy, whose wide, shocked eyes were focused on something behind the photographer’s shoulder, as if the horrors around him were too distracting to allow him to look straight into the lens. He wore a bright yellow shirt in a silky material. The caption read: ‘Harold Robbins, aged 12, who escaped on an ostrich’.
Struck by the left-field strangeness of the caption, Tom Googled, found a video link, and watched in wonder as brightly dressed boys raced seven-foot birds across a distant desert.
You learn something new every day, he thought.
5
HALO JACKSON HADN’T learned anything new for weeks, not since Tom Patrick’s address, which appeared to have done his cause no good at all.
He hadn’t seen the report of the crash of SA77 because it didn’t make Fox News and the only newspaper he bought with any regularity was Daily Racing Form.
Halo had been granted three weeks off after what he now thought of as ‘the Hangar Six incident’. Three weeks was apparently the time it took to get over seeing your best bud cut in half. His union rep moaned and bitched and told Halo he would be well within his moral rights to fake post-traumatic stress and bump it up to a few months on full pay.
Halo knew he’d never get over it. He didn’t need to fake PTS: he had the uncomfortable feeling that he’d never get over that either. Just, different people handled it in different ways.
Cal Lemanski had gone right off the rails – had gone what Halo’s grandmother used to call ‘doo-lally’ – and was looking at an early pension.
Some of the guys were envious of Cal and his imminent life of leisure, but Halo had gone to see him in the Packer Institute – what his grandmother used to call ‘the nuthouse’ – and it had made him shiver. Chris Stern had been cut in half by the Pride of Maine, but Cal Lemanski had been scooped out like a tub of Ben & Jerry’s at a kids’ birthday party. The big Pole, with his thick black beard and booming laugh, looked like a half-deflated sex doll, sagging at the joints and barely able to hold the weight of his own head. He’d recognized Halo and thanked him for the Juggernaut without smiling; just left it on his lap, shiny and unthumbed. Then Cal’s wife, Paula, had come in, so Halo had patted Cal’s back and said goodbye. When he left, Cal’s wife was sitting holding her husband’s gnarled hand on top of a glossy blonde licking her own left nipple; Paula stared at Cal and Cal stared at the wall.
No. Halo reckoned going back to work ten minutes after the Hangar Six incident would have been better than what Cal Lemanski was facing.
Halo’s three weeks off had been wasted anyway. He’d get up early because that was his routine, and watch Judge Judy re-runs until he was hungry enough for breakfast. Then he’d go to the park or the movies. Three times he’d gone to see Vee and Katy. Vee seemed constantly dazed, and Katy was by turn naughty and quietly tearful for Daddy, her little world rocked by something she didn’t understand.
After the third time, he’d realized he was being no help and stopped going. Vee had her mother to lean on.
Halo had his own demons to face. He had to make a conscious effort to stand his ground the first time an engine was run in testing. He put his protectors on the instant it started, and felt it buzzing in his chest. Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed hard. None of the men on this shift had been in Hangar Six. All his crew were still in hospital or recovering slowly at home. No one would really understand if he spewed all over his shoes.
Then, a couple of months after he got back – just when he’d thought he was doing okay – he finished his shift and found another man using Chris’s locker.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
Everyone looked round at Halo. The fair-haired youngster at the locker stared in surprise. ‘Uh, excuse me?’
‘Who said you could use that locker?’
The kid blushed maroon. ‘Um, Mr, um, Mr … the supervisor guy.’ He was in his undershorts and a T-shirt, holding his spanking new coveralls defensively in front of him. ‘I’m new. Aaron Perry.’
He held out his hand but Halo ignored it. Chris’s possessions had been tossed into a file box. He stared around the locker room with tight lips. ‘Who did that?’
Gully Johnson buttoned up his coveralls and nodded at the blushing Aaron, who said, ‘The guy told me to put this stuff in a box and use the locker.’
‘You just throw it in like that?’
Perry glanced around the room for support, but no one was taking his side. ‘Sorry. I thought it was stuff nobody wanted.’
In another mood at another time, Halo would have agreed with him. Apart from a couple of plaid shirts and a pair of worn Reeboks, the box held a bottle of aftershave, another of L’Oréal shampoo (‘Because I’m worth it,’ Chris used to say), a few coins, a photo of Chris with Vee and Katy, a cross-head screwdriver and a creased poster of Scarlett Johansson with oily gum marks in each corner.
Perry moved aside warily as Halo came forward and picked up the box. In his arms, he could smell the aftershave and he bit his lip as he shoved the box into the bottom of his own locker, on top of his training shoes. He slammed the door and clicked the padlock on it, then grabbed his jacket and left.
‘Sorry, man,’ he heard Perry say behind him.
The next time he went in to work his locker smelt like cat’s piss. He threw away Chris’s Reeboks and sprinkled Chris’s aftershave around to try to chase out the reek. He took the file box and loaded it into his car.
On his way home that night, he put it in a dumpster behind a Taco Bell, then cried all the way through the drive-thru.
*
Four days afterwards, when Tom Patrick got back to the rented Long Beach condo he bitterly called home, there was a stack of bills on the mat and one white hand-addressed envelope. Inside it was a picture of Chris Stern before a 737 fan blade had sliced him in two like a slab of blue steak. Next to him was a pretty young woman with shining hair and big green eyes, and between them a girl of about five, with her mother’s eyes and her father’s wide smile.
There was an LA phone number scribbled on the back of the photo, which Tom didn’t call.
6
THE PINBALL KID sat down beside Tom and they exchanged the briefest of eyebrow-raises as they bought their tournament chips. Tom waited at least half a minute before glancing up to his right. The Pinball Kid’s girl was nowhere to be seen.
