July 18th, 1978
Cirrus, cirrostratus, cumulonimbus, cirrocumulus—
Altocumulus, altostratus—
Stratus, cumulus, stratocumulus—
These were words she held onto in-flight.
Blades of the plane cut through the air while her mouth moved around the formations she saw. Silently announcing the clouds had become a habit. And when she made these words loud enough they’d drown out the oscillating hum of her body preparing her for it to happen, again.
A hand would be out of place, just slightly off a cheaply upholstered armrest. Fingertips would graze the outside of her thigh below her pastel pink shorts. A calloused thumb would rub against her knee above her white, patent leather boots when she walked past: this would be the best to hope for if it did.
I’m so sorry, Ms.
My mistake.
Say something about it, sweetheart.
Private was a new world for Mel Bloomgarden. She’d been laid off from Pacific Southwest Airlines in May due to rising fuel costs. Still, the weigh-ins happened before each flight. She was down two pounds this trip at 5’9, 126 lbs.
The sunken aisles were different than she was used to, carpeted in royal blue and a half foot recessed from the rows of canary yellow leather seats. Window curtains patterned with banana palm leaves pulled shut with ease. But here, the choppiness of the air was edged with more reticence. In private, there was more surface tension. The pressure between her and her passengers held a greater density in the space between that said and done.
Changes in barometric pressure affected the coffee machine, made it so that she could not turn her back as liquid could speed up and drip over.
Skimming crosswinds, bolts of lightning, flocks of geese — the pilots played God. She could tell from the look in their eyes when a landing went perfectly; 50,000 pounds of metal and plastic sailed down with grace onto a mixture of poured concrete and obsidian-black asphalt.
Tab.
Coca-Cola.
7 Up.
It was their policy to pour half of the miniature bottles of liquor to start. The effervescence of Tab lasted longer at this altitude and was her least favorite to pour.
July 18th was an innocuous, unordinary day except this private flight from Seattle to Dallas left over an hour late. The oil tycoon who’d ordered it was held up eating at a steakhouse. His accountant, the only other passenger booked for the flight, explained this on a hurried call to ground control. Torrents of rain filled up the space behind his voice; he had not apologized.
In this business jet, a Lockheed Jetstar powered by two General Electric CF700 turbo engines, Mr. Monson took his seat in the third row. He threaded his thick, gold-ringed fingers together across his tray-top table. He wore a beige suit, one size too small. His belt was fastened with an oversized, sterling silver buckle with inlaid turquoise stones forming the claw of a bear. Monson’s pet iguana rested in its leather carrier in the seat beside him.
Monson’s accountant, Mr. Spalding, sat two rows in front of him. Loose papers littered the accountant’s lap. A black tie wrung his neck. Spalding—slender, wore black Levi’s jeans, a denim shirt, and a gray Stetson hat. The accountant had a permanent expression of doubt living on his face as though reality elapsed fantasy for him, and he’d not achieved solid footing in either world. Spalding slid a red pen down a sheet of numbers and turned to the next page. Monson slipped in and out of a restless sleep Mel thought could be due to low blood sugar. She knew sleep patterns: natural, sick or chemically induced. She watched its pace, the way it’d overtake a body in cold snaps and warm lapses.
Fearing he could have diabetes, she poured Tropicana orange juice from a box, brought it to him. He woke with a quick batting of his eyes, swallowed the juice then began to eat the ice. His iguana held one eye open, one eye closed.
As she turned toward her cart, the man’s lukewarm hand wrapped around her left inner thigh. His nails, edged with steak grease, indented her flesh with shallow half-moons.
The pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom with all the urgency of a drain overflowing, slowly filling space it was not meant to take.
“We’ve got cold air pressing down and warm air pressing up,” the pilot went on as Monson’s hand stayed still.
His grip grew stronger and moved higher. Mel turned back to see his eyes flutter open as his grip tightened.
“By Jesus,” his arm dropped heavily, “dreamt I was drowning, and you was my buoy,” he looked up at her, winking one of his powder blue eyes. “You saved my goddamn life, honey,” he nodded, assured she understood how what he said was, in a way, the truth. He couldn’t survive without thinking he was powerful, and he couldn’t feel this without stamping out her own efficacy as though it was a glowing cigarette twisting against a flimsy, plastic ashtray.
She jolted backward in a bout of turbulence. Mel focused on the horizon behind his black, pomade-soaked hair. She pushed herself back to the beverage cart. Her hands trembled. Reaching the back of the plane, she broke open a mini bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, brought it to her lips, took in its acrid bitterness then rose, spitting it out into the sink.
Her reflection cast back at her in a silver tray meant for moist towelettes: blue eyeshadow glittering in creased caches. Her stomach floated up in more turbulence while she entered the bathroom with its polyester hand towels on faux-jade handles. The bathroom’s ashtray was still littered with ashes from the last flight. Out of habit, she lifted the steel tray out of its compartment, washed and dried it in the undersized sink. Her hands still shaking, she dropped the ash-covered napkin.
As she sunk to her knees, picking it up, Mel saw a small box with a circular opening at its threshold. This opening in the box exposed oblong, gray pellets. Mel recognized the rat poison from the basement laundry room of her apartment building. A white, Art Deco building in downtown Miami—she referred to the studio as a crash pad.
Emptying the pellets from the container and into her pocket, she pushed herself up off the glitter-speckled, laminate flooring.
Walking past Monson, she watched his eyes dart back and forth beneath his eyelids in involuntary spasms.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
The ice cracked as she twisted the tray, pieces coming loose simultaneously. She tipped it. Cubes circled the stainless steel drain and disappeared. Sifting the pellets up from her pockets, she separated them from lint, filled a saucer, and crushed them with a spoon into bone-white China. These dishes reminded her of what her mother used to call their everyday china but only used on Sundays. These were also the days that Mrs. Bloomgarden would call her only child Melanie instead of Mel.
Pouring Coca-Cola out into the sink, she ran hot water inside the empty can.
The poison powder was a fine dust. She added it to the hot water. A sharp, acidic smell came from the liquid as she swirled it with gentle rotations of her garnet-braceleted wrist.
The ice formed as Monson jolted in and out of an impetuous sleep that lapped his consciousness with the same random impulse his iguana flicked out its tongue.
Crystalline specks of gray inside the ice, the powder had absorbed into the water. Pouring Cola over the poisoned ice, Mel knew it wasn’t today that had her doing this. It was all the other days that pressed forward languidly, unmoving like a movie projector that jammed on each image, coalescing onto the next event as the previous remained. An overlapping, emboldened reel, each image grew stronger as it gained saturation from what came before, lending all its strength to play and develop, moving slower, deeper, darker.
There was: the man in private, alone, pulling her down to sit on his lap, the one in business, not letting go of her hand, the rock star (a one-hit wonder) clutching her wrist. His singular, popular song now drummed inside her. Mel had told him to sit, but instead he chose to stand: pressing himself into her, backing her into the bathroom, shutting the door, pulling a switchblade up from the pocket of his acid-washed jeans, putting it to her throat. Then he was inside her, dropping the switchblade and using his hand to cover her mouth. The knife rattled around in the sink while she’d splintered into fragments of herself.
Cirrus.
Altostratus.
Stratus.
A month and she’d told no one. The rock star’s song hummed somewhere inside her, cold, missing its melody, offbeat. Shrapnel of sound shattered through her consciousness and punctuated her heartbeat.
She wanted to chew the ice as Monson did. She’d slide it all down her throat. But then he would win.
Mel propelled herself through her anger, thick, overflowing. It seemed there was an aquifer at the bottom of her heart. It was untapped, unpolluted, with the clarity of purified thought moving through her blood as she walked the narrow aisle, beverage in hand. The ice had melted corners. An intangible cross-contamination at some unreachable speck of time: this would be the response of Monson’s poisoning. A flight attendant, unquestioned. She would be overlooked as though a part of the plane as inextricable and innocent as its neoteric upholstery.
Specks of gray topped the fizzing soda like pinpoints of confetti. The plastic cup was embossed with imprints of tassels swinging around its rim.
“What do you want?” Monson’s sharp eyes broke open at her, blue and empty as the sky behind him.
“Well?” he ran his eyes down her soft-hued uniform.
Her throat compressed. Only dry air emitted from her glossed lips.
She asked him if there was anything she could get him, a pillow or a blanket?
Monson shrugged, roughly, dropping his shoulders, as though they carried a great weight. The accountant’s voice, nearly washed-out by the engines, rose for the first time. Spalding said he’d take the Cola she was holding if she wasn’t going to drink it.
“Is that for you?” his eyebrows raised, as if communication with her required wading into mud. She realized that, without her cart, they could not tell she intended beverage service.
“Mr. Spalding, I took a sip out of this one but let me get you a fresh glass.”
Monson’s eyes shut, again. Spalding craned his neck back down to his papers. With a dip of her knees, Mel lifted the iguana carrier and walked the aisle to the back of the plane, setting the carrier on her small counter. Pouring the Cola down the sink, a release seized her. Currents of the past crashed down against this moment where six poisoned ice cubes clacked against stainless steel.
He and the rest had taken something—one kiss, one pinch, one grab at a time. Tailors unraveling bad stitching, they’d undone her.
The green iguana shut his eyes as if in imitation of its owner while Mel sensed a dilation within her soul. A darkness had broken open inside the gold-flecked iris of her being. Her own venom narcotizing her blood, she knew what would happen next because it had been building from the first day. She’d been 26 and standing on a hot tarmac. A pilot pinched her as he made his way to the plane. Stepping out of the shower of her hotel room that night, a dim fluorescent light flickering above her revealed a pinpoint, bright-violet bruise on her right hip.
The melting ice bled flecks of poison into the sink as she unlocked the reserve. Six auxiliary packs equipped the plane for an emergency. Her own voice ricocheted inside her ears as she ran her hands over the packs.
In case of emergency, oxygen masks will drop down.
Please fasten your seatbelt.
Please refrain from smoking while the no smoking sign is on.
Monson’s guttural snore resonated down the aisle.
Unfolding the pack, she pulled out the belt, brought it through the handle of the iguana’s carrier, placed the other end around her waist.
The harness was secured neatly in place.
Her training told her the positions to follow, the timing to pull, which cord and where.
Just past 30 years old, the decade giving way to the 80s—the sediment of her trauma was filtering up through layers of stony docility. Metallic, serrated pain tore at her throat. Strapped to her side, the iguana looked up at her through the black mesh of its carrier as though he had some sense of this exchange between them and the importance of his compliance. He was, after all, trapped in this fuselage the same as she was. She slipped off her boots and zipped them inside the carrier. The reptile perched on top of the patent leather.
The door was more substantial than she remembered from her training. Her muscles strained against her polyester uniform. Her legs weakened under the force of the steel. She bent her knees, braced her body. Tears welled inside her emerald-green eyes.
The door slid into place, syncing with her arms. If the men began to yell, she could not hear as all she could listen to were the currents of her diffracting thoughts. Though these had become distant, crackling with static. Her mind seemed to have become a radio, and she could no longer tune into any fixed frequency.
It was as if in the protocol she’d been trained to follow that she’d stepped into the air. Her body seemed a part of the plane meant to dislodge at that perilous moment.
Enveloped by the sharp clarity of her decision, she tipped forward, held by the atmosphere, arms outstretched.
12,000 feet above ground level.
A fall rate of 115 miles per hour.
60 seconds freeflying.
The carrier pressed against her body as both gradually accelerated to terminal velocity. With the sum force of their drag, their buoyancy in the air was equal to the downward force of gravity acting against them.
The vast expanse of what she saw sped through her. The land entered her sight at once and at the same time, piece by piece. A realization that she was alive, that her mother had strained in a hospital bed for eight hours in Tallahassee to bring her to this earth, moved through her. It was a world she was treating as replaceable with another.
Mel pulled her ripcord, suspension lines threading up as the main canopy opened. The ground below sized into focus. No longer an indiscernible mass of taupe, the landscape was threaded with roadways and scatterings of silver cholla cacti. The air warmed.
She could not return. She knew this as she knew the chaos in the plane she’d left, how the accountant’s papers had flown in a whiteout of parchment, blinding him. Confusion would have grown until she became the inextricable element that sealed their minds closed around the issue. These events would be recorded. Ground control would be punctually alerted of her desertion of the plane, her theft of a beloved exotic animal from its owner.
D.B. Cooper, she smiled. That was her, in a way.
Wind flooded against her feet, chilled toes growing numb. Her body was falling below the horizon.
A road slanted up in the distance, rising from the earth like a cobra hesitating before lashing into its prey—it dove into a hill.
She felt her heartbeat pounding through her ears, the snapping of her parachute unraveling in the wind, her thighs whipped by the sky.
The air grew less thin. Mel breathed more deeply as the ground seemed to rise to meet her. The desert spread out. What she’d seen as a fraction of sand now revealed itself to be the expanse of acres.
She knew how to land from her training. She would bend at the knees to let the inertia take her body in against the ground.
The impact traveled through her legs. The movement broke through her entire being, cleansing her with warm air moving through her wild, honey-colored hair. The parachute deflated, unraveling its bilious plume to look like strewn laundry—a discarded sheet attached to the fallen suspension lines behind her, collecting sand in its ripples.
Stillness then, it overtook her as she stood with her feet apart. The parachute limply fell as though it were never needed.
She unclasped the harness buckles, unthreaded the carrier from her straps, unzipped its top. The iguana advanced without reserve, clingingly pacing up the pink sleeve of her shirt as though it knew her shoulder, had stayed there before. She unpinned her nametag from above her breast, Melanie. Tossing it in the air, she imagined Mary Tyler Moore in downtown Minneapolis throwing her hat.
The iguana’s long tail coiled around the back of her neck. Her plans unraveled in the scorched sunlight before her. Each step affirmed she could continue. The parachute lay like a toy, played-out, abandoned on an unloved lawn.
Hot sand sifted off the tops of her bare feet.
Yards away, the dirt road etched into the dry land, cooler but pebbled with small stones that dug into the bottoms of her feet. Her skin glowed white in the earthen glare of the sun. She stepped delicately on the stones, eyes lifting to check her progress towards the vinyl-sided building off the road a couple of hundred feet before her.
“You ready?” she whispered to the reptile, vertigo whirling through her. Dizzy, she stopped. The iguana’s head nestled into the shade beneath her hair.
Pulling out her boots from the carrier, Mel slipped them on routinely.
Four cars glimmered in the sunlight in front of the building. One had a flat tire, metal rims caked in dust, croppings of desert-marigolds having taken root around its rubber.
A stack of tires lined the side of the building. Three satellite dishes on the restaurant’s roof made it look as if they might be picking up stations from outer space. A sign above the door had two light bulbs that hung from tendrils of wire: RUBY’S.
Opening the door, she paused in its threshold.
Her pupils grew larger in the dim light of the diner. The smell of grease and beer hung heavily in the air. Two men sat watching a boxing match; two bloodied faces looked into each other on-screen.
The iguana shifted to her left shoulder.
A woman appeared from behind two swinging doors. The doors were etched with cowboys leaning against walls; their spurs lay flush against each side, hats tipped to shade their eyes from a make-believe sky.
“My god,” the woman threw a dishtowel over her shoulder, “Trina Clark, my god.”
“I—I—don’t,” her voice felt unfamiliar, sharp, as though the words coming from her mouth could cut her if she spoke too quickly.
“Trina, that hair!” the woman came from behind the counter, running her hand through Mel’s hair, its tangles. “What are you doing back, and who is this?”
The woman now had her fingertips grazing the iguana’s tail until it crawled down Mel’s arm and leg. It roamed across the filmy black and white checked floor, climbing up rodeo-themed wallpaper to a windowsill. The July sun poured in warm pools around the reptile.
“More coffee, Ruby,” one of the men raised his cup.
“Ruby,” Mel said, “so good to see you again.”
Ruby turned toward the kitchen, grabbing a silverware set and a glass. She set a paper placemat filled with ads of local businesses in front of Mel which told her she’d landed in Lovelock, Nevada. She was in the Great Basin Desert.
A pitcher of water in one hand, a pot of coffee in the other, Ruby poured Mel a fresh cup of each.
“Whaddya’ call him?” Ruby filled an ashtray with water and brought it to the iguana on the windowsill.
Mel scanned the TV screen; the fight was labeled Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Dick Ecklund.
“Leonard,” Mel told her, drinking the water, feeling it run coolly through her dry lips.
“The prom queen,” Ruby batted at a fly, “back from where? Where was it that you moved off to, Iowa?”
“Yes,” Mel answered, “Des Moines,” now watching the fight, the quick feet, circuitous motions, bodies evading and invading each other’s space. This was how she had to be now, sharp, composed, ready to hit and be hit—to keep going no matter how battered she felt.
“Miss prom queen, back and eating at my diner. What’ll you have to drink?”
Mel scanned the menu, back and forth between the typewritten choices, ink smudged with oil.
Tab.
Coca-Cola.
7 Up.
“Tab.”
“And to eat?”
”The Caesar salad.”
“Et tu, Brute?” Ruby laughed.
Mel stared flatly at her waitress.
“I mean, even you, Trina? A girl raised on a cattle ranch, eating like a bird? Not even the chicken Caesar!” she picked up Mel’s hand. “Perfect nails but still not married, just you rolling into town with a lizard,” Ruby heaved her shoulders, letting them go, reluctantly, “the prom queen.”
Mel pulled back her hand. She prayed they would not turn on the radio, that there had been no report of a missing flight attendant.
“Nails and marriage have little to do with each other.”
Ruby held out her hand, “I’m a nail-biter. That’s why I don’t have a ring.”
“There could be other reasons. It could be you haven’t met the right guy.”
Mel thought they looked the same age, both nearing their mid-30s.
“Nope,” Ruby pulled back her hand, “even the right guy isn’t going to spend all that money to put a ring on the hand of a nail-biter. The choice is up to me to stop, and then I’ll get my ring.”
“More coffee,” the second man, like the first, said and raised his cup without turning around.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
When her salad arrived, Mel ate slowly, deliberately.
Ruby put out a head of iceberg lettuce. Leonard chewed on a leaf.
Mel lightly dipped her romaine in a cup of Caesar dressing. Ruby sat down with her when the boxing match entered into the ninth round.
“People like you don’t get lost. People like you always know where you’re going,” Ruby told her.
Mel sat expressionless, looking past Ruby to the fight. Sugar Ray was down.
The men had started arguing over whether Ecklund had knocked him out or Sugar Ray slipped. One of the men said underdogs never win, they just get lucky. The camera panned around Boston’s Hynes Memorial Auditorium to reveal the Technicolor crowd reacting hysterically.
The screen kept replaying a clip of a push/punch that sent Sugar Ray falling backwards to the canvas of the ring. When played at a regular speed, Sugar Ray’s body seemed caught off-guard, a slip the plausible explanation for how his legs gave out beneath him. In slow motion, however, Sugar Ray’s body seemed illuminated in the pausing of time to reflect its convex, giving way to the pressure Ecklund exerted, each fiber of his being failing him in a final surrender to the momentum his opponent lashed out at him with tired, red-gloved knuckles. In slow motion, Ecklund had undeniably won in this moment. This was her. At regular speed, she’d lost her job, and surely the perception was that she had lost her mind. But when slowed down and the play-by-play analyzed, she had won. If her silence gave Monson his power, her actions had been deafening. The jump had methodically begun to restore her inner lining, a fabric that time had left pallid, torn.
“You always intrigued me, Miss Perfect. But you went for the wrong guys,” Ruby watched Leonard methodically chewing on lettuce, tore a piece off for herself.
“What’s his name? Whose throat is it?” Ruby held a butter knife to her neck, sterling silver hoop earrings dangling almost to her shoulders.
Mel noticed a spark in her hazel eyes that told her this woman might be serious.
“Mr. Lou Monson.”
“We’ll get him, girly.”
Leonard seemed to look between them, a silent witness recording the exchange.
Ruby brought out a basket of fries, salted them. She popped the lid off of a Heinz ketchup bottle, held it up at an angle, hit it against her palm and asked where it was she was staying. Mel answered, “Nowhere,” her voice slowly fading as the fight commentators came on.
The men continued arguing, both believing Ecklund had triumphed in the contested seconds, undoubtedly, but how? How could an underdog ever really win?
Ruby put her hand over her necklace, a gold book pendant on a chain and said, “The both of you, your heads, I’ll give you a place to rest them. Mr. Lou Monson won’t find you at my place.”
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Astroturf carpeted steps led to a glass-paned front door. Mel unzipped her boots, carried them in her hand. Ruby fished her keys out of her purse.
Macramé hanging baskets overflowed with verdant green ferns in the front hall. Mel reached up, touched a frond, followed Ruby down the hallway.
They passed a spotless kitchen, cupboards painted glossy white.
The hall opened up into a sunken living room. A solid-glass stereo cabinet held a tape player and turntable. Vinyl records and books lined a teak wall unit.
A faux-zebra rug sprawled across the floor of the guest bedroom. Mel set all she had on top of this rug: a pair of boots issued to her from an airline that she no longer worked for and a leather iguana carrier. Ruby left her alone to get settled, and Mel ran her hands over the daffodil patterned blanket on the room’s twin bed. Staring at her sole possessions, she listened to the steady beat of her heart.
She pressed her palms against the sill of the room’s large window. It faced west to vast, moonlight tinged Juniper Mountain. The heaviness of the craggy rock lifting out of earth comforted her. Its impenetrability seemed as though it could guard them against any proximate force.
Home was a place inside herself that she had not been to in a long time. Here, she felt there.
“Do you remember those twelve dozen roses they gave you? They were white, yellow, and a real soft pink,” Ruby moved pees around on her TV dinner. “That’s . . . 144 roses you held. Do you remember?”
Lava lamps anchored the television on golden Formica side tables. Mel let her eyes rest on the incandescence of the tapered glass lamps, the translucent mineral oil and velvety purple paraffin wax ebbing inside them.
“Do you?”
“Won what?”
“Prom queen.”
“Yes,” Mel lay back on the baby blue, shag carpeting.
“Girls like you and girls like me don’t cross in real life. We don’t really know each other,” Ruby focused on the television screen.
Leonard crawled between them, navigating between a bowl of water and cut carrots.
“Girls like us are born to hate each other, not love,” Ruby tied her pink chenille robe in a neater bow.
Mel, almost dry from her bath, sat up, letting her long hair hang down her back. Her matching yellow robe was tied tightly around her waist.
“It’s a shame how they set us up against each other from day one,” Ruby sighed.
“Have you ever been in an airplane?” Mel ran her hand along Leonard’s back. His scales were cold, hard.
“No,” Ruby picked at her microwaved cubed carrots, imagining what it’d be like to cut through the sky endlessly. She shut her eyes and pictured clouds streaming by circle windows. She felt her body growing lighter, lifting, sunlight flowing around her. She’d have luggage with tags that had her name embossed into them with golden cursive letters.
She thought of how she’d picked her brother, James, up from an airport once. He’d arrived home shell-shocked, mute, from Vietnam in ‘72, and she’d envied him. Ruby knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help it—he’d seen the world, he’d left. He’d moved through the opacity of clouds.
“Never flown, never needed to.”
“Have you ever had anything happen to you that you didn’t want to happen?”
“Of course.”
“No, I mean, hurt. Has anyone ever hurt you? Done something to you that you didn’t want done?”
There was a sudden silence. Saturninity expanded between them like a Mylar balloon, reflective. All each could see was her own skin, legs, nails, both painted fuchsia. Mel had dipped Ruby’s fingernails in Tabasco sauce so that Ruby would no longer bite them.
The air conditioning clicked, and they let the TV play. The same fight from earlier in the day was being re-aired. The same jabs, clinches, falls and sprays of blood replayed. The auditorium crowd was hypnotized by the methodical violence. Popcorn popped in the concession stands while punches caused cuts, wounds needed taping and re-taping.
“I’m a fighter too,” Mel whispered, “featherweight.”
A wind chime broke through the quiet night, the moon waxing gibbous.
Ruby sank down onto the carpet, reached out and touched the matted knots of Mel’s hair. She took a comb from her robe pocket, began working over the entanglements, delicately, so as not to break a strand. She pulled at each matted place, freeing, smoothing and releasing Mel from her snarled texture.
She repeated Mel’s question, her voice saturating the words, absorbing them. Ruby let the question break apart inside her, disintegrate, sink to her stomach and travel through her veins. Mel’s question cut her open and stitched her together again in one sentence.
“Yes,” Ruby answered, the word splintering through her vocal cords, piercing the air.
“Me too,” Mel’s voice cracked as she released the truth from where it had been cellared, in the atriums of her heart, “me too.”