Guest Writers
I’m pleased to be able to include some writing from friends and fellow writers. Please check out their work if you like what you like what you read here.
Deborah Fruchey
Priestess of Secrets
Some secrets are easy to keep. They don’t impact you. You toss them down into the well and forget anyone ever told you. I learned to do this in my teens, when my father started telling me too much about his sex life.
Father was always the one I could talk to. He was the one with emotions. Tell him something with feeling attached, and he would respond with feeling. Not that he wouldn’t run and tell Mom right away, and judgment would surely follow. But for a moment, I’d been listened to. I had experienced empathy.
So when Dad started telling me things, I responded with empathy, too. When he dropped his voice and drew me out of the hallway into the downstairs bathroom for secrets, I prepared to drop everything I knew. Forget that this man is your enemy. Forget that he makes the rules and slaps you when you break them. Forget the spankings with dresses upturned, in front of your brothers. This is something so secret he isn’t even telling Mommy. This is a big responsibility.
It was decades before I understood that his kind of confidences weren’t healthy. I was 40 before a therapist first spoke the words ‘emotional incest.’ But I did know that secrets were humiliating, and dangerous, and you shouldn’t let them out of your hands any more than you’d walk around slashing with a carving knife..
Secrets got you spanked. Secrets got you fired. Secrets got you divorced, in the headlines and in jail. Secrets damaged people.
Not me. I was the priestess of secrets. It had been this way all my life. People came up to me at bus stops, at parties, anywhere, and told me their darkest hearts. It ennobled me, made me the ultimate insider and confidante.
People tell secrets because they can do nothing else. Someone has to be told lest it eat its way out through your skin and leave black tumors. Telling is the only cure. I was the deep black holy well into which strangers and lovers poured their misery. I was the ultimate repository: once you told me ‘this is a secret,’ I almost forgot I knew it. Sometimes three people would tell me the same clandestine tale, yet I was always surprised and fascinated.
I had no secrets of my own, that was the trick. Ask me about anything you want, I would tell you. It’s not that I never did anything wrong, or embarrassing. I guess I just never took it personally. I was human. I had done this stupid thing. Ha, ha, wasn’t that funny? Can you believe I did that? What was I thinking?
You see, I grew up having no secrets. My body language was transparent, and I had a mobile face. My thoughts and my guilts were easy to read, and were punished accordingly. And I had two inquisitive brothers who couldn’t wait to tell on me. My diary, no matter where I hid it, made the rounds as regularly as Newsweek. It even got quoted back to me. So I learned that nothing was mine, not even the inside of my head. Better, much better, to tell the story oneself, and control its presentation – maybe give it a little spin.
But a day is coming, I know it, when I will do something cunning, something sticky, something that creeps up my fingers like mold.
Then I, too, will have to find a priestess.
Autumn Couple
Marisa had married at 46, and she wondered how many years they’d get. 40? 30? Would it be enough? How much of it would be under the tense gun of disablement, one partner looking after another, gulping resentment while the other shuffled, whale-slow, to the toilet? Would his eyes cease to contain him? Would she be single in all but name for a good 20 of those years?
So many things she left to him to do, in the way of Fifties women. He paid the bills, yes, fixed the computer and swept the gutters out. He carried the heavy stuff, dug trenches. When she had lived alone, she had done these things for herself – or not at all. It was beginning to annoy her, how many things he maintained in cherry condition which she would have allowed to dilapidate themselves naturally.
Did that make her slovenly, or him uptight?
Their rhythms, too, were different. She required rest and contemplation, and good reasons to do anything, or the mood to do it. He just acted – as if he had no preferences at all, like a duck or a squid that acts on prerecorded prompts. He would get home from work, see a fallen tree branch, and head straight for the garage for tools to cut it up. She, with her tea in hand, would have been looking at it and deciding whether she wanted to do this, for an hour.
He got out of bed directly into the shower and thence to clothes. She got to the shower two hours after waking, debating over coffee whether the day deserved her dressing for it.
What would happen to the house when he slowed down and stopped? For surely a fuse would burst somewhere. Like a fountain running too long with too little water, the pump would burn dry. She thought with dismay of the house settling into genteel decrepitude, and the neighbors talking about her. Would she still care, if they were not looking?
The grass would wave itself in the breeze, crowned by little seed-heads; when the bicycle tires popped, she would just stop riding.
What was it in her that accepted atrophy, the world spinning down to a stop with a glug and a whisper? What was it in her that could watch the cobwebs grow and continue drinking its tea, and when the hot water main broke, just drink it cold with perfect placid balance?
She would fit right into old age, she thought. He would not fit - he would break. She loved him. But she wondered if she’d like it, not having him show her up in her inherent entropy.
She knew she was not The American Way. Perhaps she was something more ancient. She suspected her way hurt less.
None of that stopped the guilt.
She adored him peevishly, like a favorite gorgeous parakeet that insists on chirruping all through your afternoon nap.
Shattered Windows
Snoring
They were all packed into the back of their RV that summer. It was a year of California drought, 1977, and they had left home to tour the country. At home, people were rationing water, letting their lawns die so they could keep showering, spray-painting the dead grass green so it wasn't so depressing. But it still crunched underfoot. Somewhere it must be better: moister, more amusing. Somewhere out there must be a place where they'd like each other better.
But getting there was hell, with 5 children and 2 adults in one rolling room. The littlest girl fit into a cupboard, the parents in a loft over the truck. At bedtime the banquette in the back folded down, and four children who had sworn eternal hostility got to sleep packed together like batteries.
The middle brother snored.
He was a very dedicated snoresman. He never took a break. He was not perturbed, wakened, or even liable to change notes, no matter how they pummeled and turned him. This left 3 children awake.
The 13 year old planned her suicide and fantasized funerals in the rain, and how everyone would suffer and despair and regret.
The 15 year old squirmed and tried not to touch anyone with her breasts.
Her nightgown was cotton and printed with ridiculous pink flowers. God, if anyone from school ever saw it! Ruffles! She though with loathing. I mean really, she was 15 after all, hadn't mom ever heard of Victoria's Secret? She sank into grumpy dreams of a reupholstered closet.
The oldest girl was 18, and what was she doing here? She asked herself, day after sultry day. She was legally old enough to leave. She had — maybe — enough money for a Greyhound bus. She could sneak off while they were staring at the Grand Canyon and go buy some dignity.
But where would she go? The house was rented out for the summer. Her friends were all on vacation. And worse, what about afterwards, when they came back and told her what they thought of her? How she didn't have a shred of love or kindness or family feeling or decent religion in her body. For weeks, shouting, they'd tell her. At dinner. At breakfast. While she was in the bathroom.
She knew what they called her behind her back: Child of Satan. They talked about whether she might soon need an exorcist. While she snuck into the house with library books about witches and ghosts and E.S.P.
Worst of all, what if they followed her, stopped her, plucked her out of the bus like a rolling wayward grape, and said, "This is ours”?
She knew that was what they believed. It was what she believed, deep down. She didn't want to hear it out loud. She was 18 only to the clock.
Not to them. Never to them.
And the RV giggled and groaned its way across America.
The Motel Room Speaks
Here they come, the latest transients, with their stained crumpled clothes and their whiny voices. Fumbling with the room key, slamming the door back into the wall likely as not (on the same caved-in spot), ready to complain about everything. So entitled they are. Before they even put their bags down they are wagging their heads around, looking for flaws.
“It’s dark,” they say first, as if this is unheard of at eleven o’clock at night. “Where’s the damn switch?” It’s exactly where it is supposed to be, but if they take 5 seconds finding it they are instantly aggrieved.
“Not much space, is there?” That's next. What do they expect for $60 a night? Room to do gymnastic routines? There is a table, two chairs, fairly new, I’ll have you know, and a bed that is plenty wide for two human beings who are not too greedy. A bathroom. A TV. What more do you need for the next nine hours, eight of which you’ll spend sleeping?
But oh, no! I’m not good enough for Mr. and Mrs. Slam, Bam, Thank you Ma’am! Where is the wi-fi, they want to know. As if nobody could live without it for one night on the way from point A to point B. You’d think they’d appreciate the rare chance to be incommunicado in a world with so little privacy.
It’s always the same. The closet is “measly,” there aren’t enough drawers or hangers, and the bathroom! Oh, how they excoriate the bathroom. Too small, too noisy (what, you don’t want a fan to dry things out?). Well, I don’t like their musty odors clinging to the wall with the shower mist, either, just so you know! And don’t get me started about the droop in the counter. How they go on about that. But I notice they always rest their own hips on it in the morning.
Look, very few surfaces are 100% level. And it’s not my fault. It’s the other fly-by-nighters, people no better than they, who lean on it, sit on it, set their overstuffed suitcases on it, even get carried away and have sloppy sex on it, if you can believe that. Oh, I’ve seen everything. It’s so hypocritical. I didn’t leave mildew in my own shower stalls. I didn’t pace the carpet bare or put cigarette holes in my own quilt. But who has to live with those flaws week after week, huh? And they’ll be out of here at 10 tomorrow, probably bitching about having to check out so early. Yeah, suddenly they like me, and want to cling with sentimental fervor.
Enough of these day-trippers already, who leave their wet towels crumpled on the floor so the linoleum will curl up. You know what? I’m glad the walls are thin! Let them stay up all night listening to the threesome banging away next door. At least they’re having fun.
Snake
It seems so petty, but I have a headache. Weren’t those minor characters in old romances always contracting headaches and retiring to bed for the whole afternoon? A maid would sit with them and soothe them by dabbing their temples with lavender water. Who knows what the maid felt, waiting on her as the lady sniffed and complained in a die-away voice that she would rather be playing croquet on the lawn, or walking in the Conservatory with Theodore? The maid wasn’t even allowed in the Conservatory, probably. If I were her, I’d have a headache too, just listening to all of that aristocratic self-pity.
They would fake their headaches too, those ladies, when they didn’t want to face something. Is Robby the Ravisher waiting for you, leering over a bouquet of violets in your parlor? Ah, you cannot see him – you have the headache! Is Mama making an unpleasant scene because you rode out with Lord Pevensey in his closed barouche without a chaperone? Please, Mama, I must be excused, I have developed the most dreadful headache!
Having a headache meant one could do nothing – nothing at all – not even those few proper things allowed to a lady of good family.
So, enough of being a lady! I think I’ll shed my clothes and my skin and shimmy down out of this headache and out of womanness and onto the forest floor. I will become a snake instead. I will wiggle into the dry leaves and compost and scurrying bugs. I will swing everything side to side – not just my hips, I will have no hips – and wobble like a weak wave approaching the beach on a moonless night. Down through all the debris beneath the trees: twigs and rotted fallen things, left-behind apple cores and all the less mentionable bits one finds in murky, secret places. Things that a proper Victorian lady should not know about, or if she knows, should never mention.
Being a snake suits me. You can think what you want when you’re a snake. Those precious ladies have so many headaches only because of all those things they’re not allowed to think. Those unsanctioned thoughts build up behind their brows and press and burn and send them to bed.
That sort of lady jumps and shivers when she sees a snake. She sees that bullet shaped nose, those hard black blinkless eyes, and she knows that the snake might be thinking of anything, anything at all. It worries her, what the snake might be thinking of all unsanctioned. Even if the snake says nothing. She knows that if the snake spoke, it would tell her things she doesn’t want to know, is not allowed to know.
I remember when I was a snake before, once, long ago. I made the mistake of speaking, in those days. There weren’t very many women then, and they didn’t wear much. But even then, they had to watch what they were thinking.
I told one of them – I forget why I bothered with her – that she ought to reconsider her choices. Why was the world in her head so small? Why didn’t she think what she liked? She said it was God’s idea, and one mustn’t argue with God. She said thinking brought knowledge, and the fruit of the tree of knowledge was forbidden.
I said that she needed to rethink her God. She said she had a headache, and went away.
Yes, I like being a snake. I think I’ll stay this way. Being a woman is much too hard. I can’t see the point, really. It’s like dancing on the head of a pin. There’s almost no room to put your feet, so it isn’t really dancing anymore, but stepping in place on somebody else’s treadmill.
Slinking in the muck is more fun. You go where you want, you think what you like, and no one follows you into the dusky, unhallowed places.
I won’t talk to women any more, though. People don’t like it when you tell them about the things they’re refusing to think. Once they think about these things, they must act. Then whatever they do, it is somehow the snake’s fault for telling them the truth.
Snakes have a bad rap. But they do not care.
Deborah Fruchey is the author of six books, and an editor and publisher of her Micro-Press, Last Laugh Productions. These stories were extracted from Priestess of Secrets, which she feels is her best work to date. To see more of her books, or to find out more about publishing with her, visit www.lafruche.net or www.lastlaughproductions.org. Photo by Ronna Leon, Poet Laureate Emerita of Benicia, California.
James W. White
Yo ho, yo ho, It’s A Pilot's Life For Me
“Take the control, will ya?” Bert's command resonated over the sound of twin engines when his Cessna 310 reached five thousand feet and leveled off over Milpitas. We were heading north, flying VFR (visual flight rules) on the return leg of our daily commute, having departed from San Jose's Mineta airport, traveling toward Oakland International.
“Can't I sit this one out?” I whimpered.
It was a beautiful Friday afternoon, visibility unlimited, no traffic in sight, a clear shot to Oakland's runway 28R, ten minutes away.
“No way, Padre.” Bert let go of his control wheel and pointed at mine. “You need to feel confident flying Bertie,” he said. What if I had a heart attack?”
“That's what autopilots are for,” I grinned back, pointing at the instrument panel.
Bert smiled and dismissed my lame humor while he kept his eyes peeled on the sky around us, looking for tiny specks that turn into airplanes in the wink of an eye. “Maybe someday,” he said.
The radio squawked intermittently, talking to bigger fish. We listened and made sure we were out of their way.
* * *
A year ago, I was burned out from my commute that inched down clogged highway 880 from Oakland to Santa Clara. In desperation, I called Rideshare, looking for relief. An ad offered quick rides to the South Bay, for little money and no driving required. The ad was short on details, but the money sounded right, and it was the best pitch Rideshare offered. Was it a bus? Train? I had no idea, but the cheap fare and fast commute time captured my interest.
It was only after I got Bert Inch on the phone that I discovered he purposely wrote the ad in vague terms in order to lure skeptical riders. “When I include ‘airplane’ in my ad I would never get an answer,” he said.
I wondered why, but threw caution to the wind, so to speak, and agreed to an introductory round trip, free of charge. The idea of getting an extra half-hour sleep and still getting to work on time was a compelling incentive.
I met Bert the next morning at the Oakland airport's private aircraft hanger area, a desolate place, far from the bright lights of the terminal. It was cold and foggy, not amenable to flying, in my mind. Driving to the airport with my fog lights on, I had planned out my regrets. Too bad about the weather, I was going to say.
Bert stepped out of the gloom and grabbed my hand. Behind him, parts of an airplane appeared in between billowing gusts of fog. “Great day for flying, huh?” he said.
I shook my head in disbelief. The man was either delusional or a maniac. I let go of Bert's hand and took a step back. “Maybe for the Red Baron.” I took another step back.
Bert smiled. “You worried about this stuff?” He sneered at the gray blanket surrounding us. “We'll be out of it at a five hundred feet. Nothing to worry about. It's clear at San Jose.” He walked toward the aircraft. “Now, let’s do the preflight together and I’ll introduce you to Bertie.”
“Preflight? What’s that?”
“We walk around Bertie and make sure everything is attached,” Bert replied. “We don’t want stuff falling off while we’re airborne.”
I looked at my watch. “How long is that going to take?” Bert’s promise of a quick ride was changing in the wrong direction.
Bert ignored me and headed toward the end of one wing. “Follow me.”
I’ve flown enough to feel comfortable inside airplanes. I’d glance into the pilot’s cabin while boarding, but never felt compelled to know anything more about flying. All I knew is the pilot and copilot control the immense power of a plane’s engines and somehow turn all that power into flight. The airplane’s exterior was none of my business.
Following Bert as he tinkered with pieces of the plane’s exterior, I wondered why I needed to know about stabilizers, ailerons and landing gear? I glanced at my watch again. I just want to get to work.
“It’s always good to have a second pair of eyes,” Bert replied. “You see anything loose or missing let me know.”
“Right,” I replied. “Whatever you say.”
It was cold and dark when we climbed into the cockpit. I sat next to Bert in a spartan, but comfortable leather seat while behind me, four additional seats looked cramped and uncomfortable with little room for briefcases, purses or whatever. The whole space was much smaller than the business class cabin on a Boeing 737. I could see why Bert was having trouble getting passengers.
With a whine, then a throaty roar, Bertie's two engines roared to life, charging the plane with energy that pulsed through every bone in my body. The dark instrument panel turned into a Christmas tree of dancing dials and meters. Indicators bounced from left to right. Some stood straight up while others clung to opposite sides. “Sounds like we're in business,” I said.
Bert nodded from under his headphones and gestured for me to put mine on.
Me? The headphones reduced the cockpit noise and added a new sensation, conversation with nameless authorities who gave permission and instructions to pilots on the ground and in the air.
Bert's voice boomed over the radio's chatter. “Oakland ground, this is Cessna 535, ready to taxi VFR, over.”
“VFR?” I thought for a minute. “Oh yeah, I get it. Very foggy runway. Makes sense.”
Bert laughed. “Good one,” he replied. “I’ll remember that. VFR also stands for visual flight rules. It means we can fly without the tower telling us where to go. In bad weather we have to fly using IFR, instrument flight rules. Not nearly as much fun and it takes longer.”
“But… what about the fog?”
Bert shook his head. “Like I said, it’s clear once we’re airborne and it’s clear in San Jose.”
Permission from the tower ended our conversation and Bert advanced a set of levers between us that increased the plane's noise, vibration and commotion.
I waited for progress, but despite what seemed like an unstoppable fusillade of energy, Bertie stood stock still. I glanced at Bert in quiet concern while the plane strained against something even more powerful than its mighty engines.
“Something the matter?” I ventured.
“Shit,” Bert muttered. He dropped the engine noise and jumped out of the cabin.
I fiddled with my seatbelt. “This is it,” I said. “I'm leaving while I can.”
Before I could unfasten myself, Bert climbed back into his seat, a sheepish grin on his face. “Forgot the chocks,” he admitted.
“The chocks? Those wooden wedges under the wheels? You forgot ̶ ?”
“Buckle up,” Bert commanded. He revved the engines again and we moved forward into an impenetrable wall of fog. The landing lights were useless. As we advanced into the black abyss, Bert looked at me and smiled. “Never mind,” he said. “Happens all the time.”
* * *
And he was mostly right. Shit happens all the time. Why I decided to take my chances in the air with Captain Bert Inch, I don’t know. Maybe it was his swash-buckling attitude. Compared to my staid, conservative workday colleagues, Bert was an interesting contrast, an air pirate who knew serious, hands-on stuff, like flying an airplane very well and wasn’t ruffled when shit did happen.
Like the time we wound up in the backwash of a 737 that unexpectedly climbed into our flight path out of San Jose. We never found out how that happened, but I quickly learned there’s a lot of turbulence behind a 737 when it’s going full blast, clambering for altitude, and poor Bertie took a tumble while Bert scrambled to keep her from rolling and pitching out of control.
Or the near miss over Fremont. During commute hours, the skies above Fremont are almost as crowded as highway 880. Between one and eight thousand feet, civil aviation is busy in two directions, east/west between Livermore and Palo Alto and north/south between San Jose and Oakland, and everyone is flying VFR. Above eight thousand feet, commercial jets coming from the east are making their final descent to San Francisco and Oakland airports. Bert never takes his eyes off the windshield until we’re all wheels down and he expects everyone on board to do the same. One evening over Fremont a dot in the windshield went unnoticed until Bert caught sight of the dot about a second before impact. There are two unofficial rules regarding imminent collision protocol, when your nose goes down the tail goes up and everybody is right-handed. Bert chose to veer right and so did our dot, now turned into a menacing airplane. The result was no evening news story about a mid-air collision over Fremont that day.
In between excitements I learned the fundamentals of takeoffs and landings, maneuvering in flight, and talking to the tower, but I didn’t have any ambition to pilot an airplane. Whenever Bert’s friend Roger, aka MacGyver, joined us, I was only too happy to give up my copilot seat, sit in a rear seat and play lookout.
* * *
One of my turns to play copilot occurred under partly cloudy skies with a threat of rain north of us. The good news was we were cleared for VFR flight. Takeoffs are easy, and I got us airborne heading west, then veering north without incident. When we levelled off at five thousand feet, the full moon appeared majestically, climbing from behind Mount Hamilton. When we lost sight of the moon, while gradually descending toward Oakland, Bert mentioned the moon would catch up with us and we’d see a second moon rise from behind the Berkeley hills during our final approach to Oakland. I made a mental note to look for the moon over the East Bay hills.
While Bert and MacGyver chatted away, I concentrated on the repeated pattern of observing the compass, altimeter, and the sky around us. As we passed over Union City I also worried about landing in the dark and wondered what was for dinner.
Over Hayward, I noticed Hayward airport’s runway lights were on and I waited for our instrument panel to light up. It was the pilot’s job to engage the panel lights. Annoyed with Bert’s dereliction of duty, I took a quick glance at the pilot seat to see Bert toggling the switch with a serious look on his face. All conversation stopped when the radio died, and the instruments stayed dark.
MacGyver stuck his head between us, reached out and rapped on the instrument panel. “What the fuck?” he whispered when the panel remained black and unresponsive.
We were on our final approach to runway 28R when Bert took the controls. “Use the manual landing gear control,” he told me, pointing at a handle in the dark cabin. “Go ahead,” he said, his eyes glued to the runway, throttling down Bertie’s engines. I moved the indicator to the gear down position and turned the handle. We all held our breath.
Nothing happened. After repeated turns with no results, Bert, advanced the throttle, pulled up and passed over the runway. “Get the flashlight,” he told MacGyver, “I’m going to buzz the tower. Keep your eyes peeled!”
Three minutes later, after maneuvering full circle around the airport, Bert passed low, at tower height, and MacGyver flashed at the tower’s windows. “Watch the tower,” Bert said as we rolled to the right for another circle. A green flashing light coming from the tower answered Bert’s signal. Bert sighed. “We’re cleared.”
‘We’re cleared’ meant Oakland airport shut down all traffic until we either made up our minds what to do next or ran out of gas. We had lost electrical power. No lights, no radio and no electrically powered landing gear. Fortunately, Bertie’s two engines ran on an alternate, self-contained power source, called a magneto ignition system, which I knew nothing about other than being glad it still worked.
“Get out the manual and use the gear crank,” Bert ordered. MacGyver found the manual and checklist in a rear storage compartment and with me holding the flashlight we read instructions for manually extending the landing gear. I found the gear crank nested and hidden under some insulation between the pilot and copilot seats. The instructions called for engaging the crank with a locking pin and turning the crank until the landing gear was fully extended. Better said than done.
The Cessna model 310 is a low wing configuration, meaning the wings are below the cabin. There are advantages and disadvantages for having the wing either above or below the cabin, but right now our main disadvantage was we couldn’t see the main landing gear. After a few anxious false starts we got the crank to turn. But after many revolutions there was no indication the crank had lowered the landing gear; no detent, no lock, it just went round and round, like it wasn’t doing anything.
Bert, now making lazy circles around the airport, looked at a small mirror near the nose of the plane. Illuminated by the city lights, he squinted at the mirror and smiled. “The nose gear is down,” he said. MacGyver and I let out a sigh of relief.
“Now what?” I asked.
“We still don’t know if the nose gear is locked and we know nothing about the main gear,” he answered. “We’ll have to check it out.”
MacGyver and I shared a nervous glance.
“Maybe all three are down and locked, maybe not. We’ll have to find out.”
Another disadvantage of a low wing configuration is the clearance between the propellers and the ground. There’s not much more than one foot of clearance, depending on the gear design. That means without landing gear to hold up the plane, the prop will strike the pavement immediately upon landing, sending the plane to oblivion. There is no belly flop option.
It was now raining and, without wipers, the city lights below us streaked across the windshield in a blurry haze. Bert brought Bertie around and lined up with the runway. “This may take a couple tries,” he said.
Below us, hundreds of passengers missed their flights and above us all the commercial jets were scrambling to realign their flight plans while we did touch-and-goes in a crippled plane that might wind up a pile of wreckage before the night was over. Would be make the ten-o’clock news I wondered?
Up to now, none of us felt greatly concerned, but as runway 28R’s lights rushed up to meet us we gripped our seat handles in quiet apprehension.
Just above ground level Bert dipped Bertie’s nose and we felt contact, enough to assure us the gear was locked before we ran out of runway. With a roar, Bert blasted up and away. “One out of three,” he said.
On the second pass, Bert dropped on the nose, then gently dipped the left wing. The reassuring thump of solid contact with the tarmac made us all exhale as Bert lifted us up again.
“Cross your fingers,” he said while he lined up for pass number three. As before, Bertie settled on her nose, then on the left landing gear, but when Bert dropped the right wing there was no contact. The emotional letdown and uncertainty almost caused us to run into the runway’s end lighting structure before Bert blasted us back up. He had done a fantastic bit of piloting with absolutely no room for error, three times, but after all that we were still helpless.
“Since the left is down, the right is also probably down but not locked,” Bert said. He gained altitude and MacGyver and I scratched our heads. I imagined the landing gear hanging loose under us, flapping in the wind. “Flip her over?” I suggested, thinking the wind resistance and centrifugal force might force the gear into position.
Bert shook his head. “I don’t like it. Too dangerous.”
Too dangerous? I thought. There’s an understatement. Even MacGyver smirked.
“No. Really,” Bert went on. Flipping could apply too much force on the gear. We don’t know what condition it’s in. I’d hate to have it fall off.”
MacGyver and I nodded in agreement. Another understatement.
We didn’t know our altitude, but we were high and I glanced to the east. The full moon climbed above Mount Diablo, just like Bert said it would. Don’t be silly, I thought, watching the moon and regarding it as an omen. The second coming. I’ll take it as a good sign.
“I’m going to drop the plane,” Bert announced. “Hang on.”
That was the first time I heard Bert refer to Bertie as a plane. It was a small issue, but I sensed his concern by saying it.
With a woosh, Bert forced Bertie to rapidly lose altitude, hopefully spreading the right main gear out and locking it in position. Unfortunately, we didn’t get any reassuring sound of movement or sensation of the landing gear locking into position.
“Here we go!” Bert said and began another approach.
I peered into the darkness, looking for a haystack. If this didn’t work, it was clear we were running out of options. The last time I looked before the instrument panel went dead, we had gas for another half hour of flying time, but to where? Ditch in the Bay? With no radio, no instruments, and no navigation lights we were blind and invisible. We didn’t dare leave the vicinity of the airport for fear of hitting another aircraft, or a mountain.
We all made our silent prayers and waited for our pirate pilot to bring us in for a safe landing.
This time Bert touched the nose gear down as close to the start of the runway as possible. We would need room to test all three gears. After the nose and left gear touched down, Bert gently dropped the right wing.
The runway lights rushed toward us and I thought how easily they could rip off all three gears if we were a second too slow in our liftoff.
A quick touch, some resistance and we were back up, the lights screaming under us by inches.
“I think we got it,” Bert said.
We were too drained to cheer.
“Hi home, I’m honey!” It was a joke my wife and I enjoyed sharing whenever we came through the front door. A spoof on an old cliché, perhaps, but still a gesture of endearment and relief returning to a welcoming home. That night I opened the front door to the sounds and smells of just another weekday evening knowing I was lucky not to be on the ten o’clock news.
Captain Bert, MacGyver and I had parted company on the tarmac with little fanfare. After handshakes and goodbyes, Bert told me I was excused to go home. “We’ll handle the aftermath,” Bert said, with a sly smile. “We probably ruffled a few feathers.” MacGyver laughed. “That’s putting it mildly,” he added.
I took one last look at Bertie and saluted our captain. “Don’t forget the chocks,” I said as I turned to leave.
Jim White is a California-based writer of historical, literary and science fiction. He and his prize-winning poet wife enjoy a small-town lifestyle near the San Francisco Bay area. Jim earned an MA in U.S. History. His professional career has included military service, teaching, research librarian and technical writing. Jim is an active participant in his community’s literary organization, hosting prose workshops and mentoring writers. Jim's stories have appeared in Datura Literary Journal, The Wapshott Press, Remington Review, Adelaide Books, and Rochak Publishing.
Jim says "This is a true story that took place on or about October, 1999. I haven't set foot in a private plane since.”
Visit his website for more great stories.
Aletheia Morden
The Frogman Cometh
In 1968 I lived with my lover, Roy, above the Santa Monica Pier merry-go-round in an apartment he had rented from Mrs. Winslow, the pier manager, for $12.00 a week. There were three rooms: a main room, a kitchen and a bathroom. Roy took the kitchen door off its hinges and propped milk crates under each end so we could use it as a dining table.
One night we hosted a dinner party. Spaghetti provided the main course, washed down with a half-gallon of cheap red wine. The entrée had been a tab of acid; dessert a fat marijuana joint passed around the table. Two candles stuck in empty Chianti bottles provided ambient lighting.
The sound of ocean waves gently washing onto the shore came through the open windows as Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain played on the turntable. Joe and Barbara, who also had an apartment above the merry-go-round, were our guests.
Joe worked as a hairdresser at Los Angeles’ I. Magnin department store. Barbara had left her older, very rich husband to live with Joe. She was a model and wore beautiful clothes, although on this night she just had on an over-sized man’s shirt barely covering her thighs. I wore a t-shirt dress that barely covered mine. Our lovers sported cowboy shirts and jeans as we sat cross-legged and shoeless on the floor.
Suddenly, the front door flung open. A dark figure stood in the doorway holding a gun, growling, “Hands up.”
Was this a hallucination? We stared in stupefied silence as a man in a black scuba diving suit complete with skin-tight cap, goggles that almost covered his face and flippers, flapped his way into the room. He reached down and wrenched the remainder of the joint from Joe’s fingers.
“Simon!” my lover exclaimed, as Frogman took a toke of the roach.
“Aw, man, how’d you guess,” our next-door neighbor said, removing his goggles and pushing back his diving cap after he passed the joint back to Joe.
“The gun,” Roy replied. “No one else I know has a Luger semi-automatic that his father took off a captured German submariner in World War II. Want some spaghetti?”
Simon tried to sit cross-legged, but it was hard for him to bend in the rubber suit and flippers. In the end he joined us at the table wearing…nothing.
Aletheia Morden is a transplanted Brit whose writing compulsion started when she was asked to write a weekly film review column for an underground newspaper. This quickly morphed into writing plays, screenplays and short stories interpreting subtleties of character and complexities of relationships. She’s also a decades-long prolific letter writer and journal keeper.
The Frogman Cometh is a piece of flash fiction from her book Between the the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a collection of short stories about the ups and downs of family life labeled “droll, ironic, sometimes disturbing.
Her latest book, The Last Indentured Servant: A Hollywood Memoir is based on letters between her mother and her from the summer of 1965 through the summer of 1966, when she answered a British newspaper ad and ended up as an au pair to a showbiz family in Hollywood. arriving right before the Watts riots. And so began a roller-coaster ride through L.A.’s mid-century vibrant and political life, including visits with the stars and plenty of poignant family drama book-ended with cocktail hour and a plethora of partying. “What’s a teenager to do? Well, I’d wanted an adventure,” she says.
Both books are available on Amazon.