“Like tits on a nun,” one particularly salty patrolman observed.
The paid funeral notice that ran in the Los Angeles Times six days later said Echevarria had “set off to see the Lord to receive the angel wings he’d deserved for so long.” It said he was born in Oakland in 1961, that he’d earned a business degree from San Francisco State, and that he’d built a successful international marketing company in the Bay Area before taking early retirement and relocating south to LA, there to enjoy the balmier weather, Dodger baseball, and serving his favorite charities, none of which were specified. Survivors included his “devoted wife and soul mate,” Savannah, and a twenty-year-old son from a previous marriage who worshipped him “for the exceptionally caring parent that he was.” No mention was made of Echevarria having been gunned down and gone off to see the Lord in flip-flops and Costco lounge pants. His passing, it was noted, had been “sudden and unexpected.”
Of course, anyone who knew the real Arlo Echevarria knew the obit was mostly all bullshit.
Especially the unexpected part.
ONE
We were turning final when the engine died.
My student was a frosted blonde divorcee named Charise MacInerny with all of six hours in her private pilot’s logbook, who’d decided that learning to fly was an excellent way to show her plastic surgeon ex-husband that she was still every bit as alluring as that gold-digging, cheerleader-turned-pharmaceutical sales rep slut he’d dumped her for. Charise swiveled her ridiculously blue Malibu Barbie eyes toward me, wide with horror, and said, “Fucking do something!”
My plane, the Ruptured Duck, was 300 feet above ground level, half a mile from the runway and dropping faster than the Dow in October. Charise had extended too far downwind in the pattern and surrendered too much altitude, while I’d been stupidly mesmerized by the postcard pretty coastline and shimmering sea of diamonds beyond, wondering how the hell I was ever going to pay for the 2,000-hour overhaul due on the Duck’s power plant.
“I have the airplane,” I said in my nothing-rattles-me-I’m-a-certified-flight-instructor voice.
I grabbed the copilot’s yoke with my right hand, yanked the carburetor heat control with my left, and brought the nose up to sixty-five knots indicated — best glide speed in a Cessna 172. Then I reached down between the seats, keeping my eyes outside the cockpit to maintain spatial orientation, and groped the fuel selector valve: it was turned to both tanks. The gas gauges registered more than half-full — plenty of go juice — yet the engine was deader than a resolution the morning after New Year’s Day.
Charise was hyperventilating. “I don’t want to die, Logan!” she yelled into the boom microphone of her headset. “Please don’t let me die! Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus oh mother of JESUS!”
“Chill out, Charise. It’ll be OK.”
Or, quite possibly, not.
Ahead of us was a BMW dealership, a lumberyard, and a parking lot jammed with yellow school buses — not the most forgiving locales to attempt what we aviators euphemistically like to call an “off-airport” landing, and what TV anchors refer to as a “lead story.” In a flash, I envisioned myself at the top of the evening news: An incompetent flight instructor and his comely student died today when their single-engine airplane… If the crash didn’t kill me, the humiliation of my own inattention would.
I glanced down at the mixture control, which is what I should’ve done to begin with. The red knob was pulled all the way out. Instead of easing back on the black throttle control knob to reduce airspeed, as she was supposed to have done, Charise had inexplicably pulled the fuel-air mixture, effectively starving the engine of gas. I shoved the red knob forward hard enough that I thought for a second the metal shaft might snap in half, retarded the throttle control to a quarter-inch, then reached across Charise’s supple thighs with my left hand and cranked the ignition key.
The little four-cylinder Lycoming thrummed to life with a death-cheating growl.
I eased back on the yoke, rolled in some trim and dumped full flaps as I kicked the rudder and banked the Duck hard left, keeping one eye on the airspeed while clearing the roof of the Rancho Bonita Athletic Club by less than ten feet. We turned final with an eight-knot crosswind and touched down on Runway One-Seven left like a butterfly with sore feet. If the theater critics in the tower were watching, they never said a word.
“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, where are you parking today?” the controller asked pleasantly as we rolled out.
“Charlie Lima’s going to Premier Aviation.”
My answer was met with scratchy static through the headphones. After a few seconds, the controller asked again: Where were we parking? He obviously hadn’t heard my response to his question. The Duck’s ancient, unpredictable communication radios were acting up yet again. I smacked the audio panel where I always smacked it with the heel of my hand, keyed the mic button on my control yoke and said, “Charlie Lima to Premier Aviation.”
“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, roger. Exit on Echo, cross One-Seven left and contact ground, point six.”
I repeated his instructions back to him, tapped the toe brakes and jockeyed the plane off the active runway. After we crossed Runway One-Seven left, I stopped short of the parallel taxiway and dialed in 121.6 on my number-two radio.
“Rancho Bonita ground, Cessna four Charlie Lima, clear of One-Seven left at Echo, taxi Premier.”
“Cessna four Charlie Lima, taxi as requested.”
Charise was gulping air like a gaffed tuna. Her eyeliner had run with her tears, painting a thin black stripe down each cheek. The effect reminded me of one of those annoying street mimes always trying to feel their way out of imaginary boxes.
“I’ve never been that close to death,” Charise said, “and I don’t want to ever be again!”
“Well, Charise, I believe it was Cicero who once said, ‘Anybody is liable to err, but only a fool persists in error.’ We learn from our mistakes, make sure we don’t repeat them.”
She was looking at me with her mouth open. “You’re saying it was my fault?”
“You pulled the mixture control, Charise. The engine doesn’t like that. The engine will take its ball and go home.”
“Well, maybe I did or maybe I didn’t, but if I’m not mistaken, Logan, I believe you’re the flight instructor. You should’ve instructed me. I mean, my God, what am I paying you all this money for?”
She wiped the tears from her cheeks, smearing the black streaks and transferring eyeliner onto her fingers, then noticed her fingertips and panicked anew. She reached into the backseat, retrieved a gold compact from an alligator skin clutch and went to work on her face with a silk handkerchief, attacking her smudged cheeks like a monkey scratching itself. She was wearing wedge sandals with four-inch cork heels and $350 blue jeans that looked like they were sprayed on. Her low-cut knit top was cream-colored and two sizes too small, accentuating a set of baby feeders that either her ex, Dr. Nip/Tuck, designed or the Lord did when Mrs. Lord wasn’t looking. Her lips were alluring little bee-stung pillows. The skin under her chin was pulled Miss Teen USA tight. Whatever Charise MacInerny may have looked like before the advent of modern cosmetic surgery, she was definitely slammin’ now.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, angling her little mirror this way and that, making sure she’d scrubbed off all the errant eyeliner, “I’m not sure this whole flying thing is right for me. I mean, you actually have to remember things.”
There was a time when I would have told her she was wrong, that nearly anybody can learn to be a pilot. And even though I knew full-well after our first flight lesson that Charise MacInerny’s near-total lack of hand-eye coordination, not to mention smarts, placed her solidly outside the “nearly anybody” envelope, we would have gone up again and again. At forty-eight dollars an hour, another hundred an hour for the plane rental, plus fuel, I would have taken her for all she was worth. And, after she’d logged about fifty hours and had yet to solo because the idea of having to actually take off and land a small airplane all by herself still freaked the living Botox out of her, I would have politely suggested that perhaps she was better suited to other, more earthbound recreational pursuits.