Bermuda, 1972
It was a fine, clear day, a beautiful day for doing just about anything. I knew that he'd fly in soon, but that "soon" never came. I feared the worst.
I had to clear my mind. I went to the local convenience store, Puffies. It had a really cool mural painting on the side wall, some blowfish on a blue background.
Right away, they knew I wasn't from around. I had just been staying at my husband's house.
I went in anyways. "Fuck it," I thought. I was hungry. This place had the best sweet rolls money could buy. There they were, all lined up on a little cooking tray, in front, by the window. I recall that morning light. It felt so damn good to be still alive.
I'm fine now, but I've noticed that it is only because I'm out now, shopping. That is when everything seems operational.
No one was talking to Ms. Fox. She was sitting, Indian style, on the white sand outside Puffies, gobbling down her treat, perhaps even talking to the plants. Her face became ghostly pale when a cloud passed over her. You could see no definition of a human being anymore, only those demonic eyes.
When the cloud was gone, the sun felt warm on her back, and she was looking at the frosting lightly dripping over the silver tray, which she managed to swindle from the manager, of course, but not before paying him an extra sum of one hundred dollars. Now, sitting on that warm, white sand, she had her sights on twelve ready-to-eat pastries on a thin paper lining.
That's all she did most days she was there in those early years of the DC-10, the plane Felix used to fly, the years when he flew back and forth from Miami and Bermuda. They were good years, for the most part. She and Felix even made love on the beach once.
1976 Lake Tahoe
After there was an accident involving a cargo door flying off a DC-10, many people were skeptical about flying the planes. Be that as it may, it was soon after the reputation of the DC-10 plummeted that Felix knew it would be the best thing for everyone if he chose to resign, which he did, resigning from his position as an airline pilot. He wanted to dismiss himself from anything else bad happening. He didn't want to be the cause of another catastrophic disaster.
The old RV he had driven up to Lake Tahoe from Florida after his divorce from Ivy was now parked, broken, and covered in a bunch of pine needles.
A fifty-two-year-old Felix, now divorced, sat outside his lake house in Tahoe. An honorably discharged, washed-up pilot sat alone, looking up at the sun, hearing a seaplane flying overhead, and was reminded of just how much he missed flying the DC-10s.
In May, Tahoe did look beautiful, almost as beautiful as his time in Bermuda with Ivy. Felix thought it was the most irrevocable place he'd ever lived in. He used to despise May, but for some reason, this May made him feel a contact high from the warming sun.
His mind shifted back to Miami.
The plane landed safely back in Miami at 9:42 a.m.
The black men were about to deboard. "No one disturb them," whispered one of the stewardesses. "Today, we're going to practice negative reinforcement." She said this in her best New York accent, and the other stewardess chuckled.
One of the black men got interrupted. Then you could see him flare up.
"Why you pushing, Sedge?"
"Ugh, ugh, I don't like planes. I just need to get off this damn compression chamber."
The black men ignored Felix as he stood outside the pilot's cabin and had a smug look on his face as passengers exited. One little girl went up to him and wanted to thank him. "Sir, thank you for getting me and my mommy back to Miami so I can see my daddy." Felix knelt down to shake the hand she had extended, and he asked, "And what's your name, little girl?" She looked up at him with an expression of amazement and excitement at getting to talk to the pilot and said, "I'm Charlotte."
Then her mom moved toward him and said, "Okay Charlotte, let's let this kind man carry on. Her dad is in the Navy and we are going to visit him." Then the mother and daughter departed the plane and walked down the steps attached to it.
The weather outside was a warm eighty-three degrees with no wind. A perfect summer day.
It was now Felix's turn to step off the plane, and something struck him. He was having terrible audio and visual hallucinations. He saw his third grade teacher climbing the stairs. She had six arms, and they were ready to grab him and pull him in. Maybe it was the fish meal he'd had on the plane, the same one the mother and daughter had, the ones he'd spoken to moments before they deboarded, but Felix knew this was all a figment of his imagination too, and he continued walking down the steep boarding steps. He shifted his mind back to the clear lake.
Looking down at the bottom now, he saw the emerald-green shallow water and the sun bouncing off the glimmering stones. He recalled his third grade teacher saying to him on a school field trip along a windy stretch of water in Myakka State Park: "Do you see the pretty sparkling water, Felix?" He said yes. "The water is the truth," she continued. "It is the truest story you will ever hear." Then he thought, "But what if the truth becomes your biggest fear?"
Then he looked into the deeper part of the water and could see Ms. Pancake pulling down his ex-wife. "No, Felix, no! Don't let her get me." Felix wasn't sure anymore what was reality and what was fiction.
Ms. Pancake was right about something, he assented. Felix tried to compose himself, but the years after '76 were horrid, filled with great anguish, and although he knew you had to be born with cerebral palsy, he noticed himself losing his balance while walking from the house to the lake, which was were a small boathouse lay, about two hundred yards from the main house. This went on for many days. She said the water was the truth. Her words stuck, as if you had just seen some dreadful image that stays there in your mind forever.
Her real name, in fact, was Ms. Pancake, Wendy Pancake, aged thirty-nine at the time she was teaching the third grade. Not that it matters, but Felix was past his fifties now, fifty-two to be exact.
Ms. Pancake was coming towards Felix. "I'm going to get you, Felix," he heard her say repeatedly in a soft monotone. He quickly dunked his head in the water. "The truth...the truth is in the water...right, Ms. Pancake?...You said it yourself!" Then Felix took off all his clothes and jumped in, nude, but not before squeezing out some charcoal wash and some squirts from a bottle of body lotion he had in his day bag. He mixed the two in his hands, what he called a "stupid concoction," and rubbed it all over his face, dipping his head in the water again, frantically looking beneath the surface of the lake for any sign of Ms. Pancake. There was nothing, not a trace.
Then, as Felix was walking out of the water to dry off, Ms. Pancake leaped out of the water and, in a deafening tone this time, said, "I'm going to get you, Felix!" Her six outstretched, dangly arms reached for him as he ran and tried to escape. Then everything went silent. No sound. When he came to, the lake looked pretty and blue.
There had been no sand volleyball pit near any part of his house, but now, near the boathouse, there was. It was Sedge the Sledge and Bradly hitting a red volleyball over the net. On the sidelines, Mr. Baldsley and Mr. Jones were discussing the terms of the game. You could see weeds coming up from the dirty sand where Sedge stood. He knew the game went to twenty-five, and only in OT was the game won, when a player's score made it to 15 points. Now there was a charity group who sat down next to Mr. Baldsley and Mr. Jones. They all started to sing, "Oh, he's a jolly good fellow." Then they sang, "We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year." Felix squinted and refocused. He could see the decapitated head of Ivy going back and forth over the net. "If you ever put on damp socks, you know how that feels, Bradly," said Sedge. "You try to play in damp socks." Bradly looked over at Felix and gave him an intimidating stare. By this time, Felix was lying on the rock shore of the lake, with a nasty cut on his forehead.
Only for a short while could Felix hear sound after coming to, but soon, that sound faded, and the volleyball scene faded to white. Then the ghosts of Felix's paranoia were gone.
