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LEARNING TO FLY

by John R. Platt

(Originally published in Blue Murder magazine, 1998)

She was like a deer, paralyzed in the glare of oncoming headlights.

I stood above her, silent, at the head of the bed, the cold metal of a silenced automatic pressed gently to the skin of her forehead. She stared past the gun and into my face, wide-eyed, panicked but completely still.

This would have been so much easier if she hadn’t woken up.

I hadn’t thought it would come to anything like this, back when it all began. The drink the big man offered had tasted good, despite the company. We were sitting alone in a booth towards the back of a seedy bar on Fourth, discussing business. Of course, this wasn’t the kind of business you report on your 1040 every April.

I had been avoiding “meetings” like this for the past couple of months, but two of the big man’s thugs had cornered me coming out of my apartment, and casually suggested I come with them.

What the hell, I thought. They were buying. Besides, the bulges under their jackets made a very persuasive argument.

“Well,” asked the big man as he blew rank cigar smoke out between his few remaining, yellowed teeth. “Are you in?”

It was just him and me now, the thugs relegated to guard duty outside in the cold air outside the bar. He ran his fingers through a stack of fresh bills laying between us. It sounded like a deck of cards being shuffled.

I took another sip of whiskey, and closed my eyes as the drink burned its way down my throat. “Yeah,” I said, my eyes still closed. “I’ll do it.” I lowered my head and told myself that the moisture at the corner of my eyes was just from the booze.

On my way home from the bar, I heard hammering, and before I had even entered my apartment building’s lobby I recognized it for what it was: old man Hudzinski with the eviction notice.

I made my way to the third floor and found the small, greasy manager in front of my door, banging a tack into the fourth corner of the official looking document. He looked in my direction and laughed as I rounded the landing.

“Looks like it’s out on the streets for you, Major,” he said, eyes mean through his dusty bifocals. He laughed again as he turned and raised the worn, paint-covered hammer to put the final proverbial nails into the door of my living coffin.

I grabbed his arm and spun him around, slamming him hard into the wall next to my apartment door. His eyes wide, he brought the hammer around towards my head, but I batted his arm aside. The hammer clanked down on the unwashed linoleum floor. After that, his frenzied breathing was the only sound in the hallway, and the only motion was a fine mist of plaster slowly settling to the floor.

I took his now-empty hand and turned it flat, then pulled out the wad of bills from my pocket. Slowly, I counted out eighteen fifty-dollar bills -- three months back rent -- while Hudzinski stared at me in disbelief. Then I opened the apartment door, tore off the eviction notice, and locked myself in to the dark one-room apartment I called home.

I leaned against the rough wood of the door and looked at the two remaining bills in my hand. One hundred dollars. Here I was, age 43, living in a building that should have been torn down fifty years ago, and in debt so badly I had just agreed to kill someone for one thousand dollars. And twenty minutes after I had taken it most of the money was already gone.

What a goddamn life.

Her eyes stared into mine, and I could see her silently asking the question of the evening: “Why?” The gun felt heavy in my hand. Sweat from my palm started to make my grip slippery.

I pulled the hammer back and closed my eyes.

Why?

The answer was painfully simple. In a complex kind of way.

I hadn’t seen my daughter in close to ten years. I hadn’t even heard from her in more than half of that. She had grown up without me, and I was never sure if that was really such a bad thing.

Seeing my wife’s arm in a cast and her eye swollen shut was probably why I finally made up my mind to leave. No matter how much I said I loved my family, I hated myself more.

Maybe that’s why I took the job. There was no way I could sink any lower than I already had.

The gun was just where the big man said it would be: at the post office. He had given me the key to a mail box, told me the number and when to pick it up. I went to the darkened corner of the post office late that afternoon and looked for the right mailbox. It was on the bottom row, almost hidden behind a wastebasket. The lock was rusty, and it took me three tries to get the key into the lock, my hands were shaking so much. Finally, I opened the little door and looked inside. All I saw was a small, non-descript box, wrapped in brown paper and string. No stamps, no post mark, no return address. Someone had left it there just for me.

I put the package under my arm and headed out into the daylight. As I passed by them, a kid in a stained T-shirt and diapers started to cry, and his mother slammed him up against the wall to shut him up. He screamed, and in response she slapped him against the side of his head. The post office was full of people, but no one made a move to stop her.

I tucked my head down into my chest and kept walking, as fast and as far as I could go.

Hours later I was still walking, my legs aching from the exercise and my eyes sore from the multi-colored neon glowing in the early evening darkness. I was far from home, almost on the other side of town, and I wanted to keep moving, keep walking, never look back. The package was a dead weight in my coat pocket. The whiskey bottle in my hand was already getting light.

I shuffled across 78th, and suddenly the big man’s thugs were on either side of me. I looked at them, one by one, trying to figure out where they had come from. They both stared forward as we walked together, their faces like stone, moving as quietly as a cat and a mouse. I had never known their names, but I suddenly found myself thinking of them as “Tom and Jerry.” Drinking always brought out the morbid humor in me.

“It goes down tomorrow night,” said Jerry.

“You’d better get home and sober up, get some sleep,” continued Tom, as he took the bottle from my hand and handed it to a passing bum, who “whoop”-ed and ran off down the street before I could grab it back.

I turned to object. That’s when Jerry hit me across the jaw. As I fell, the street below me faded into a darkness I didn’t wake up from until the middle of the next afternoon.

Somehow, they’d gotten me back to my apartment without much of a fuss, even left a cold compress on my chin and a bottle of aspirin on the bedside table. I swallowed a handful of aspirin dry, then stumbled to my feet and shuffled to the bathroom.

The gun sat on the toilet, a note placed strategically behind it.

DON’T FORGET, it read.

Like I ever could.

So there we were. She and I. Me and her. Victim and ... murderer.

The moonlight streamed in through the window beside her bed, a thin yellow line crossing the bottom half of her face, enough for me to see the uncomfortable arch of her neck as she looked past the headboard toward me, standing above her. Also enough to see the watery pools gathering around her eyes, and starting to drip past her cheekbones.

“Why?” she mouthed again.

My arm relaxed just a little, and suddenly I found myself talking. “I always wanted to fly,” I said.

That much was true, not that I expected her to understand what I meant. Ever since I was a kid, all I had wanted to do was fly. Even breaking my arm when I jumped off the roof in a Superman cape when I was six didn’t change that. Hell, it just intensified it.

I took flying lessons all through high school, joined the Air Force as soon as I was old enough to enlist. Turned out to be a crackerjack pilot, too. My superiors were so impressed they shipped me out to the Pacific Rim as soon as I’d completed my training.

I couldn’t believe it. There I was, not quite twenty, serving my country doing what I’d always wanted to do. You can’t even begin to comprehend how proud I was, how much I loved being alive as I prepared to fly over the jungles of Vietnam.

I got shot down on my first mission out.

That changed me. I returned home on an honorable discharge, married my high school sweetheart, had a little girl. But it wasn’t enough. I’d suffered injuries that made it impossible for me to ever fly again. And after soaring among the clouds and the stars, being on the ground was the closest thing to Hell I could imagine.

I began to drink, not that it helped the depression any, and before I knew it I began to take out my fears and angers on the only other thing I loved in this world: my beautiful wife.

And that led me to where I was now.

“I don’t understand,” the woman whispered.

“I know,” I said back, and pulled the trigger.

The wind whipping around me was cold, tearing right through my jacket and forcing the hairs all over my body to stand on end. Eight stories below me, the sounds of late night traffic echoed around Fourth Avenue. Delivery trucks rumbled by, and tires screeched as taxis took corners too quickly. A couple of gang-bangers cursed loudly as they walked towards the bar underneath my vantage point. They kept on moving when they saw Tom and Jerry standing guard.

A gust of wind pushed me an inch closer to the ledge. My breath came in frozen icy puffs, but inside it all, I felt warm.

I held the bullet up in my hand and admired it. Its dull brass casing reflected the moonlight, and I smiled. A dud. I had pulled the trigger and nothing had happened. Nothing, except a second chance for a woman whose name I didn’t know. And a final, last chance for myself.

I kissed the bullet, and dropped it into my pants pocket. From my jacket, I withdrew a new box of shells, purchased with the very last of my thousand dollars. I dumped the old bullets from the automatic’s magazine and began loading it all over again with fresh, shiny rounds. This time there’d be no chance of anything going wrong.

I rammed the magazine into the automatic. From a hundred feet above them, Tom and Jerry looked even more like cartoon characters, just heads and shoulders and big feet. I chambered the first bullet.

Five minutes later, as if responding to some silent inner signal, the two heavies turned and walked into the bar. It was almost time.

I stepped up to the ledge, pointed the gun at the bar’s tiny awning below. And as I heard the door open and saw the big man and his escorts walk out into the street, I jumped.

The wind tore at me, roaring in my ears. My trenchcoat flapped crazily behind me, like the Superman cape I wore when I was six. I screamed, but I could barely hear it.

The big man looked up, and I began to fire.

I was smiling.

For the first time in years, I was flying.

PLATT TRIVIA:

Nothing makes John angrier than puppies.

Damn you, puppies.