“I’m dealing with someone who’s still clearly in junior high.”

“Ah, yes, the old junior high scenario. OK,” I said, “you be the viceprincipal and I’ll play the unruly student who gets sent to your office in need of some serious discipline. It could be wildly entertaining.”

I waited for her to laugh. I might’ve even settled on a polite chuckle, but there was only silence.

“I just need a little time to synthesize things in my head, that’s all,” she said after a long moment.

At that moment, part of me wanted to fire a Sidewinder missile into whatever remained salvageable between us, to say something irretrievably hurtful and blow up the whole ugly mess, so that we would both have reason to walk away for good. The other part, arguably the better part, realized that when it came to my ex-wife, I was incapable of pulling that emotional pin, and probably always would be.

“If you want to retreat to neutral corners,” I said, “so be it.”

“I’ll call you, Logan.”

“You do that, Savannah.”

Click.

Something churned up bitter and hot from under my sternum and burned the back of my throat. I swallowed it down and started through the backyard, toward my truck, which was parked out on the street.

“Bubeleh!”

Mrs. Schmulowitz was sitting at her kitchen table, wearing her big round Liza Minnelli reading glasses, motioning me excitedly through the window to join her.

“I have something unbelievably exciting to tell you,” she said as I walked in.

“You found Kiddiot?”

“Not yet.”

I didn’t mask my worry well.

“He’ll turn up. You’ll see. I’ll make a nice brisket. That always gets him.”

“It always gets me.”

“So tell me something I don’t know.”

Her table was littered with color brochures from various cosmetic surgeons featuring photos of their handiwork — smiling young women in bikinis with radiant faces and flawless bodies. Rancho Bonita was loaded with them.

“So what’s the exciting thing you had to tell me, Mrs. Schmulowitz?”

She beamed. “I’m getting a tummy tuck!”

“Women your age don’t get their tummies tucked, Mrs. Schmulowitz. They get hip replacements and the senior discount at Denny’s.”

“Is that so? Well, how many women my age can do this?” She pushed back from the table, bent down with her palms planted on the floor and proceeded to do a handstand.

“I might get a little Botox while I’m at it, too, maybe a boob lift, the whole schmear,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, the blood draining to her head, her spine crackling like a bowl of Rice Krispies. “Not many eligible bachelors left out there in my demographic. You can’t be too competitive these days, you know.”

“You don’t need cosmetic surgery, Mrs. Schmulowitz. You’re perfect just the way you are.”

She blew me a kiss standing upside down, then suggested delicately — to the extent that Mrs. Schmulowitz was capable of doing anything delicately — that I might want to think about having a bit of work done on my own increasingly furrowed features.

“Don’t get me wrong, Bubelah, you’re a total hotsy totsy,” she said, “but, let’s face it, none of us is getting any younger, with the possible exception of Joan Rivers. Now, you get a little filler, that schnoz of yours straightened out, oy gevalt, we’re talking total chick magnet.”

I might’ve taken her advice seriously, especially when it came to my sneezer which, no thanks to football and the occasional fist, resembled not so much a nose anymore as it did a geometry equation. But the dents and wrinkles one collects along the way chronicle a record of service and sacrifice, in my opinion, like ribbons earned in battle, each to be worn with pride. The last thing I wanted was a nose job.

“I appreciate the suggestion, Mrs. Schmulowitz, but I can barely afford cat food, let alone a new face.”

I helped her to her feet and departed through the back door. I whistled for Kiddiot but got no response. Not that he ever responded to me anyway. Stupid cat.

I was halfway to my truck when I realized I’d forgotten my duffel bag. Back in my garage apartment, I thought I heard him under the bed, but when I got down on the concrete floor and looked, it was only a blue belly lizard, the kind Kiddiot liked to bring inside to play with until he grew bored with them, then forgot. The little reptile skittered away, past my two-inch, 357 Colt Python, which I kept under the bed, within easy reach. Force of habit told me to take the snub-nose with me to San Diego, but for what purpose? Self defense? My days of bad guys were long behind me. If anything, my mission to America’s self-proclaimed “Finest City”—validating the innocence of a man falsely accused by a convicted murderer — sounded to me like a paid vacation. To vacation while armed, that was the question.

The Buddha saw no viable purpose in lethal weapons. Which explains why he was the Buddha. I see firearms as tools, as practical as any saw or drill; they can come in quite handy when bad people need killing. This difference of opinion served to underscore how many of the Buddha’s precepts, in my flirtation with them, did not come naturally to my Western military mind. How does a man prone to violence by nature and training embrace a religion that preaches peace above all else?

Kneeling there on the floor, my surgically reconstructed knee aching, I debated before forcing the Buddha’s teachings down like medicine, the taste of which you hopefully get used to. I stuffed the revolver between my mattress and box spring, then drove to the airport.

The Buddha, in this instance, had no idea what he was talking about.

Four

Air Traffic Control directed me southbound at 9,000 feet across downtown Los Angeles, en route to the Seal Beach VOR. There were planes big and small all over the sky, whose altitudes and headings all seemed to converge with mine. On my GPS, the Ruptured Duck’s ground track looked less like the crow flies than a game of Pac-Man.

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, turn right 20 degrees, vectors for traffic, a 7-6-7 at 11 moving to your 10 o’clock position, same altitude.”

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, turn left 10 degrees for a King Air, 12 o’clock, four miles northbound, 500 feet above you. Report him in sight.”

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, descend and maintain 7,000 feet. I’ve got a Baron at your 6 o’clock, five miles in trail, same altitude. He’s showing 40 knots faster.”

The air over the City of Angels was hazy brown with smog that reduced visibility to a couple of miles at best. And did I mention the turbulence? By the time I climbed, dove, and zigzagged my way down the coast to land nearly two hours later at Montgomery Field on the northern fringes of San Diego, my left hand was cramped so badly (all pilots learn to fly using their left hand only, leaving the other free for important activities like adjusting throttles and picking noses) that I nearly had to pry my sweaty fingers from the yoke.

I taxied in and parked on the ramp in front of ritzy Champion Jet Center where a stringy brunette was working the front desk. The gold name tag pinned to her navy blue blazer identified her as “Kimberly.”

As I walked in, she gestured out the window in the direction of my forty-year-old Cessna and smirked as if to amuse. “That,” she said, “is one homely beast.”

Kimberly was a fine one to talk. To be sure, her skin was not trimmed in oxidized orange and yellow paint, or peeling in spots like a molting snake, as was my airplane’s. But with her overbite, limp pageboy haircut, and a pointy snout that would have looked right at home on an Irish wolfhound, homely was as homely said. Was I put off by her making fun of the Ruptured Duck? Does it rain in Oregon? Nobody insults a pilot’s personal plane, even if that plane does happen to resemble a homeless person with wings. I was about to verbally lay her out, but I didn’t. I decided I would take the moral high ground, turn the other cheek instead. I was proud of myself. Maybe this Buddhism thing is working after all.