Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998 21:29:10 -0400 From: "J. Hall" Subject: [WRITERS] INT:GP (aka Goldman Pictures): Blame it on the Bossa Nova.. "How come I don't remember this part before?" Jeff studied Lexie. He had heard the stories of her lasting loving marriage with Karl Tallner; a marriage cut too short by a bad heart. But never could he remember anything about Tony DeLauro. "Because you never asked," Lexie grinned. "Did you?" I hadn't. Lexie Tallner was not the kind of woman who offered much in the way of personal information. Marlowe and I had used her to sneak into Mexico several times on cases after the war and she'd always been a clam, one of those desert refugees you either loved or hated, their past so much popcorn on the floor of a distant theatre back East, the show over for years. She had three prerequisites for dodging the border: cash, no shooting, and if a woman was involved she'd better have the same last name as one of us. Marlowe wouldn't, or couldn't go for the latter part and I usually ended up playing the husband. It got a lot of mileage, most of it whisking studio girls out of bad jams, and I was never sure Lexie took the marriage cover very seriously. Phil ascribed it to her days with Aimee Simple McPherson, a kind of religious lunatic imprinting, but I always knew there was something deeper behind it. "Frank and DeLauro." I sat back in the co-pilot's seat and stared out at the coastline retreating under the shimmer of the huge prop. Occasionally we'd buzz over a fishing trawler and once in a while a ragged village would appear, tucked into a sheltered vee. "Is there anything else?" Lexie waggled the wings over a lowflying string of brown pelicans and began to pull the Bellanca back up. "That girl is trouble, I guess you know that." Her voice was hard, the intercom clipping her accent a little but it wasn't the electronics. Lexie was about as maternal as a Boodles martini and twice as dry. "And if she's DeLauro blood, then she's twice the problem for you. They have a way of getting under your skin. Don't they." I pressed the throat mike. "Skin, hair, fingernails, immortal soul." Lexie leveled the plane out at 1200 feet and grunted an assent. Back in the cabin I could hear the sound of luggage tumbling. "But I think I can handle her." "Here, take her for a minute." I gave Lexie a who-me? look and laid my hands on the wheel, which was jiggling with a motion of it's own. She unbuckled and made her way back into the fuselage, grabbing my shoulder with one hand and squeezing it tight. "It's on autopilot but you never know," she yelled, and gave me the universal pilot's thumbs up. "I was talking about Reinie!," I hollered back over the engine, but she was already gone. The Bellanca sank a few feet then dolphined back up and held steady when I told it to stop that. I fiddled with the HF radio to find some music over the occasional backscatter of fishing boat chitchat and came across a station playing what sounded like a samba marathon. A few low clouds began to build over the port wing and I chanced a look back into the cabin. Reinie and Lexie were head to head, talking, the glow of two cigarette ends illuminating the darkness. Girl talk. When I swiveled back to look up again the sky was ragged with scudding dirty-grey cotton and the ground had disappeared entirely. I wondered what copilots normally did in situations like this. Pull up? I pulled up, not too hard, and the wheel pulled right back. Then froze solid. The clouds parted for a tantalizing few seconds and I could see the coastline much further away then it had been, but much higher on the horizon. The sea was dead grey below and I could pick out little crescents of white sloshing around. A dark female voice was introducing the next number, or reading the want ads on the radio, I couldn't be sure. More gentle guitars and horns oozed out of the headphones. Big help she was. Check the guages. Pilots always checked the guages. The one that said Alt had a slowly counterclockwise rotating hand. The one that said Oil Presure had a blinking red light. I could hear myself yelling for Lexie over the music, too panicked to turn it down. Someone in the cabin called my name, sharply, but no one came up. Autopilot. It was a toggle, right there on the wheel. I watched the Altimeter busily twirling and tried to guess how high we were. Maybe 500 feet and that for not much longer. "Lexie get the hell up here!" I screamed, my teeth vibrating in time to the propeller pitch, which was growing ever more chattery. One more look back into the cabin. I couldn't see anything. Maybe they were asleep. "Mother Mary full of grace," I prayed, and slid the Autopilot toggle over. The Bellanca bucked on a wing and headed for the ocean. There, that would wake them up. Once upon a time, when the Germans and the Italians and the Parisian Maquis and Art Pert had ceased their efforts to erase me from the census of the living, I'd been chummy with a Polish stunt pilot named Glennia Myzcsk who thought it would be just wonderful if I could be taught the rudimentary skills of flying her surplus Lysander. She was dark, with blueblack curls and frosted eyes and if a man couldn't learn to fly, then what good was he? I almost agreed with her until she also let me know that if a man couldn't invest every nickel he'd ever earn in underwriting Air Glennia then what good was he? I dropped out of her flying circus but not before learning that the ground was where you didn't want to go without having someplace to apply the wheels in a nice, rolling motion, especially if the plane was out of gas. I didn't think we were out of gas but dry land had vanished. The Bellanca was a miserable beast, swinging from side to side and lurching up and down but the Altimeter little hand had stopped corkscrewing to zero. I pushed the big throttles forward, put my feet on the pedals hard and pulled back gently to raise the nose. Reinie stumbled into the cockpit and dropped like a rock into the pilot's seat. "Where the hell is Lexie?," I shouted. Her face was dead white with a little green trimming around the gills. I threw Lexie's headphones at her and motioned for her to put them on. She did, her head on a swivel watching the sea rollicking away under the port wing. "I didn't know you could fly," she said into the mike, and I realized the music was still going strong. "I can't. Where's Lexie?" "She said she was going to lay down for a while," Reinie croaked. "Hey did you know she and Tony were once-" "I don't care! Get her up here pronto!" The plane dipped and rose and dipped again then slid sideways. "I can't!" Spray from the ocean below, or rain, began spattering the windshield. "Jesus Reinie, this is serious. Did you kick her out the door or something?" "She's sick, Jeff. I came up here to see if you had her medicine." I checked the Altimeter. If I read it right we were only 300 feet over the Sea of Cortez. I tapped the guage with my fingers and hoped it wouldn't fall out. Reinie began ransacking the bins around Lexie's seat. "What medicine? As far as I know she's invulnerable to everything but kryptonite." She found a small brown glass bottle and held it up triumphantly. "Hold on, I gotta give her something," she said, but I grabbed her arm. "You aren't going anywhere. Put your hands on the goddamn wheel." She shook me off with an angry glance. "It's her heart, you idiot. She needs nitroglycerin." "It doesn't matter at this point. You'll be a lot safer belted in when we hit." Reinie stopped. "Hit?" I pointed to a smudge of green dead ahead. "I think that's an island. We can't get over it and I don't know how to fly around it." She put the pills in her lap and sat back. "Buckle your seatbelt, Lareine." She did, pulling at the harnass with shaking hands. I pulled the side window open and could smell the salt in the air. It was an island all right, mostly mountain, filling the windshield with green, a fringe of sugar white beach at the foot. I tried pointing the plane at the sand, and partially succeeded. It would have to be enough. The Fuel Pressure light was bright red and the needle was at nothing. Glennia would have said it was time to buy some dirt and park there. The flaps lever was somewhere and I groped for it. "You called me Lareine," she said, and I eased the throttles backwards, the Bellanca sighing toward Mexico. "Are we going to die?" We didn't die. The plane did. Long after, I would remember the feeling of utter helplessness as the ground rushed up. Somewhere an angel, maybe it was Carole Lombard herself, helped flatten the dive and turn the nose parallel to the beachfront. And long after, I would remember Reinie's hand locked over mine on impact. to be continued... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I've gone way beyond afraid. Right now I'm somewhere between bedwetting and a near death experience." --Rizzo tottering, but afoot for the moment: E k k l i p s i o n : http://members.xoom.com/Ekklipse/NewHome.html