"We're running a little late today, aren't we?"
I looked at him and saw his mirror sunglasses and his half-nazi smirk. I could feel the rhythmic burn of his strobe lights against my neck. He had me. He was a weekend fill-in and you could tell that right away because he had turned on the siren. The regular cops never did that. All I could hear was some fat Brünnhilde wailing behind me, "Ho-jo-to-ho! Ho-jo-to-ho! Hei-a-ha! Hei-a-ha! Helmwige! Hier! Hieher mit dem Ross!"
"Looks like you really got them horses trotting today, huh, cowboy?" he asked.
In a way the lights reminded me of O'Hare. I recall being caught in the glare of the lights there and had turned and saw her sitting in the golf cart. We had flown back from Hartford together and she was scared to death all the way. Her children had talked her into flying for the very first time. Certainly, she wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea of flying and you could see that on her face. She was a seventy-three-year-old grandma and she was the lead actress in a drama of her own making: Stara Bubba at 30,000 feet.
Anna sat by the window and stiffened at every creak and crump of the aircraft. She clasped a small religious icon in her hands, looking at it intently. "The Bohorodice," she said, showing me the picture, as if I would understand. "The Mother of God."
She let out a muffled cry once when the left engine belched a sudden, huge ball of orange fire. "Bozhe moj!" she said. "My God! What was that?"
"Oh, they do that every now and then until they get warmed up really good. Ain't no big deal, lady" I said.
But her eyelids kept twitching in a spate of nervousness. She didn't believe me at all. "No big deal?" she asked in disbelief. "That was fire coming out of that engine! Do you hear me? That was fire!"
Of course it was. An airplane was nothing but a kerosene stove with wings. You had to expect a little smoke and fire from time to time. "Ain't no big deal, lady," I told her again.
The flight into Hartford had been rough. We came through an awful thunderstorm and the blue-gray cumulus clouds slapped the aircraft around like a drunk arguing with an old battered wife. The plane lifted and dropped fifty or sixty feet at a time. Many were very quiet in the plane and, for the very first time, even those half-drunk, smart aleck salesmen were silent. Some were scared. Others were serious. Everyone looked out the windows at the angry clouds around us and studied them like the teacher would ask about them on the test. I kind of liked it, though. I like a rough flight.
"Bogey at one o'clock. Watch it, Brubaker! Get him! Get on him, Brubaker! Get on his tail, Brubaker! What the hell are you doing, Brubaker? Get Him!"
Anna didn't say much during the flight. She stared out the window the whole time we were in the air except for the time when the stewardess gave her that bag of peanuts. She devoured the peanuts quickly and then she turned again to the window. "I'm not supposed to eat these things, you know." Anna noticed that the wing tips were moving up and down about six to eight inches at a time. She studied them intently. "Are the wings supposed to do that?" she asked.
It was just a small ripple in a very big pond. A couple of inches, what was that? She should have been on that Convair out of Milwaukee the time the pilot asked the guys if they wanted a nice smooth flight or if they wanted to get home early. I would guess that there were only a dozen men on the plane and everyone opted for the quick trip. When the plane passed over the airport at Sheboygan, the pilot put the port wing down at a sixty-degree angle and let the plane slip toward the earth. It went down like a rock, mister! We went from 8,000 feet to the ground in about 35 seconds. I mean, that plane went down like the gas gauge in a loaded, stretch limousine. I had my face plastered against the window and I couldn't pull myself back into my seat. We were still making a left turn when the wheels hit the tarmac. The stewardess told us later that the Captain thought he was still "in Korea with his F-1 fighter." - the crazy coot! But I loved it!
"Pull up, Brubaker! Pull up! He's on your tail! Left, Brubaker, left! Hard port! Put your foot into it, man! Ooh, damn! Damn, that was close!"
"Ssshhttt!"
I heard the squelch from the radio he had attached to his lapel. Oh, he looked the part all right: black shirt, badge, name tag, night stick, Mace, "Sgt. Johnson," He had all the right gear. A big cop. Yes, he was a really big cop!
"I said, give me your driver's license, mister. Now!"
Sister Mary Felicita stood by with her arms folded. She was right in front of me and all I could see was that ruler in her hand. I knew I was going to get it.
"Knuckles, young man," she demanded.
I hadn't done anything. That goofy Frazier was talking and I had gotten blamed for it. Now, she wanted to smack me on the knuckles with that ruler. "But, I wasn't talking," I protested. She glared at me.
"Ssshhttt!"
Did you ever notice how they always jump on you like you broke their own personal law? Sergeant Johnson's Speed Limit: 35 miles per hour. God help you if you go faster than 35! "You ain't dealing with no ordinary speed limit here, cowboy. This is Johnson's Speed Limit, mister. You speed and I'm gonna bust you so bad you gonna feel like a dime bag of pretzels. You hear me, boy? You speed and I'm gonna bust you like an old fruit jar in the city dump."
I was driving out of town. The speed limit there was 35 mph. But it changed to 50 mph at the train bridge. I guess I was anticipating that bridge too much or maybe I was just daydreaming a little bit. He came out of the fog on the far side of the bridge and his radar caught me. God, he had me! He turned on the gum ball machine and the light cut right through me like a hot knife.
He did a one-eighty and came up behind me. I sat in the car as he talked on his radio. The sharp light from his beacons cut my car into little red and blue ribbons. Fat Brünnhilde wailed in the background: he wouldn’t turn off the siren. A rookie week-end cop.
I waited.
We sat on the runway in La Crosse, Wisconsin. It was a small plane. I'd guess it might hold 10 to 12 people. The pilot and copilot were right in front of us and they were sitting on some books entitled, Airports of the United States.
"Look at that," Markovich said. "They need a set of encyclopedias just to fly to Chicago! Damn, I knew we should have taken another airline."
Hey, maybe it was true. Everyone said not to fly Mississippi River Airlines. "They get lost all the time," Mikkelson told me. He said he would never fly with them. Once, they landed at an airport and waited for the people to roll out the ramp and finally they called the tower to ask why nobody was taking care of them. The tower told them they didn't have a ramp.
"What do you mean, you don't have a ramp? You had one here yesterday."
"MRA 105, I don't know where you think you are, but you are in Winona, Minnesota. You're not in La Crosse or wherever you're supposed to be."
We sat at the end of the runway and waited. It was hot and stuffy inside the plane. The hard sunlight was coming through the windshield of the plane and we sat bathed in it. A few people were digging through the aircraft picnic cooler, looking for the right brand of beer. We didn't have a stewardess on the flight, so the cooler was the airline's idea of a cheap, do-it-yourself substitute. We hadn't even taken off yet and some of the men were popping open their first cans of beer. Even by Wisconsin's freewheeling drinking standards it was a little early in the day for that.
"What the hell are we waiting for?" Markovich asked, tugging at his tie.
There was a flurry of chatter between the tower and the plane. Slowly we started rolling down the runway and then the plane started to accelerate quickly. We were zipping along when Markovich noticed that a Piper Cub was trying to land on our runway. On our runway, man!
"What the heck is he doing? Hey, that sucker's going to hit us! Captain, there's a plane coming right at us! Captain!"
Yes, it was true. The Piper was fluttering down with his wings tipping from side to side like some rookie was at the stick, practicing his touch-and-go landings. He was going to land on our runway while we were trying to take off. And he was coming right at us. Couldn't he see us?
"He's in the sun, Brubaker! Watch it, for God's sakes! He's coming right at you. Get him! What the hell are you waiting for, Brubaker? Get him! Don't you see him?"
“Ssshhttt!”
It was hard to look at him. The sun was at a low angle in the early morning sky and it hit me right in the face. I noticed his gold-capped teeth flashing whenever he talked.
"You got any idea how fast you were going, mister?"
I guess that's a cop's favorite question: how fast were you going? If I knew how fast I was going I wouldn't be speeding. I thought to myself what a dumb question he was asking. "Thirty-five," I said.
"Try forty-nine, cowboy. I clocked you with the gun at forty-nine." He smiled. It was a very smug kind of smile. "We're running a little late this morning, aren't we?" He flashed his big gold teeth at me. "We're in a big hurry, aren't we? Oh, my, my, my!"
He had me.
Sister Mary Felicita had me and Frazier by the ears. She was pulling us up the stairs to the principal's office and we were both howling like pigs in a slaughterhouse.
"Shut up!" she said.
Stupid Frazier. When I got on the bus that morning I stayed near the center of the bus so I wouldn’t have to sit next to Frazier. But he worked his way toward the center of the bus and gave me a charley horse with his knee. A vertical knee lift, he called it. He watched way too much wrestling on TV, I guess. And he was always running around pretending to be Hans Schmidt or one of the other wrestlers he saw on TV. Frazier was an infant who never grew up: a total, imbecile infant.
Later, in retaliation, I gave him a charley horse on his right leg so hard that he fell down on the bus floor and rolled around in pain half way to school. Boy, did I get him! You want a vertical knee lift, Frazier? Well, try that one on for size.
As we approached the school, I made my way through the crowd toward the front of the bus. I got off the bus at the front door and waited for him to get off at the back door. When he stepped off the bus, I nailed him on the left leg. I put him right down on the ground and he grimaced in pain in the mud.
"I'm hit! I'm hit! Scooper, how bad is it? I'm hit! Take a look, Scooper. Scooper? Do you read me? This is Brubaker. Scooper, are you there? Scooper, where the hell are you?"
When Frazier finally got to his feet, he chased me into the school building. We ran around the lockers behind the elevator and back up the stairs in front of the elevator. He chased me up and down the stairs five or six times until he finally managed to grab the tail of my coat. I planted my feet and pivoted him right into that big statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the lobby. Frazier grabbed at the falling statue in horrified desperation, but he was too late. The statue smashed into a million pieces. And she was standing there. She saw it all. Sister Mary Felicita saw everything!
She had us.
"Six hundred miles per hour!" Anna said. "Why, I had no idea these things went that fast."
She watched the wings intently. The ailerons moved up and down rhythmically and you could hear the plane creaking and groaning with each movement. Her knuckles were white. She held onto the armrests like a two-year-old kid strangling a puppy. She was scared. She kissed her icon and her lips moved in silent prayer.
"Bohorodice, spasi nas!" she said, "Mother of God, save us. Oh, I don't know why I ever let them talk me into this. Hospodi pomiluj. Oh, Lord have mercy!"
She was a long way from home. She had watched as the soldiers chased her brother through the house. He managed to make it to the woodpile before they shot him. And she saw it all.
Her family had purchased a steamer ticket and Stefan was supposed to go to America. But the Austro-Hungarian conscript soldiers had a different idea about his future. They wanted him to go to the Front instead. But he didn't want to go. Why should he fight for the Germans in that senseless war? He was a Carpatho-Rusin, after all. So he ran away from them when they came into their village. And they caught him just as he was ducking down behind the woodpile. They shot him. Anna stood by the curtains in the kitchen and she saw it all.
Back in those days you couldn't get a refund on a ticket, so Anna had to go in Stefan's place. Her family insisted that she use the ticket because she was the youngest member of the family. She was the only one strong enough to make the trip. Everyone else was too old.
She had only a small amount of money when she left home and she had to work along the way as she went to France. Everywhere she went, she heard people talking in strange tongues. She understood none of it and she gestured as best she could to make herself understood. She milked cows and pitched hay for her supper. She scrubbed floors and washed windows for her room and board. She walked from eastern Slovakia to Le Havre, France. Imagine that! She walked completely across Europe! It took her three months to get to Le Havre.
She was only sixteen years old and scared. She was scared to death.
"Have you ever been audited before?"
Markovich squirmed. He hated those snotty little reading glasses - those silly half-glasses squatting on the end of his nose. The man wore one of those Fifties neckties cinched up at his scrawny chicken neck: a tie about an inch wide and made out some kind of fuzzy purple stuff. All that was missing was the green eyeshade. He was an accountant with the IRS. "God, what could be worse?" Markovich thought.
"I do hope you have all your documentation with you, Mr. Markovich," he said.
Markovich squirmed. He was scared.
"Ssshhttt!"
"Let's see your registration, cowboy," Sgt. Johnson said.
I always hated that part. You had to go to your glove compartment to get your registration papers and you never knew what the cop was thinking. If you moved too fast, he might shoot you. If you moved too slowly, well, he might even shoot you if you moved too slowly. What were you supposed to do?
I just sat there. I was scared.
"Move!" Sister Mary Felicita pushed me and Frazier up the terrazzo steps toward the principal's office. "Boy, you two are really going to get it this time!"
How were we going to lie our way out of this one? After all, she had seen everything. I never saw her standing next to the elevator. She was standing guard there so the students wouldn't use the elevator. We weren't supposed to use the elevator, you see. And I never saw her. But, she had us. We were dead ducks. Oh, that stupid Frazier!
We entered the principal's office and Sister Mary Severia was sitting at her desk. The bright sunlight was streaming through the windows and her head was silhouetted by her wimple. I couldn't see her face at all. It was hard to see her with all that sunlight coming through the windows. I squinted.
"Yes?"
Sister Mary Felicita pushed us toward the desk. "I have two bad boys here, Sister," she said. "Outlaws!"
"What did they do?" she asked.
"They broke the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the lobby, that's what they did. They broke it into a million pieces. And I saw it all."
"You broke the statue? You boys broke the statue of the Mother of God?”
Frazier squirmed and I tried to make myself invisible. Sister Mary Felicita pushed us toward the principal's desk. We stood in a pool of bright sunlight like hardened criminals in a police line-up. There was no place to hide with all that light coming through the windows. There was no place to hide, man!
She had us.
"Do you live in Chicago?" Anna asked me.
"No, I live in Wisconsin," I said.
"Have you ever been to the Chicago airport before?"
"Oh, lots of times," I said.
"Do you know where we will be landing and where Continental Airlines takes off?"
"I sure do."
"How far is it from where we land to where Continental takes off?" she asked.
"Probably two or three miles," I said.
"Two or three miles? It can't be that far, can it?" she asked. "I can't walk that far with my old legs, you know."
"It seems like it’s that far. Well, maybe it's only a mile and one half. Let’s just say that it's at least a good mile from United to Continental. A good mile." I showed her the palm of my right hand and pointed to my pinkie finger. "We land here," I said, "and you take off here," pointing to my thumb. She raised her eyebrows. "It's at least a mile between the two gates,” I said. “Yes, a good mile!"
"Bozhe moj! I can't walk that far," she said. "What if you can't walk that far? What do you do then?"
"You get one of those sky caps to take you there on his golf cart."
"Golf cart?"
"Yes, they have an electric cart and they'll give you a free ride anywhere you want to go. Well, it ain't free. You should probably tip the guy when you get to your gate. But, he will take you anywhere you want to go."
"Well, I'm not an invalid! I can walk a little," she said. "But I can't walk no mile. Bozhe moj!"
"Brubaker, you can make it. You just took a little flack in your tail. Nothing bad. Looks like Swiss cheese, but it ain't bad. Hang on Brubaker. You're going to make it. Brubaker? You read me? Brubaker? Where the hell are you, Brubaker?"
"Ssshhttt!"
"You live in town, mister?"
What a dumb question. Where did I live? He was holding my registration papers and my license in his hands. Couldn’t he see where I lived just by looking at those papers? What a dumb question! "Yes," I said.
"Where do you work?" he asked.
"In Salem."
"And we're running a little behind schedule this morning, aren't we?" he smiled, "Heh, heh, gonna be a little late for work today, aren't we, cowboy?"
"Yes," I said.
What else could I say? I was a dead duck. That cop was going to have me in the Mayor's Court in a heartbeat, mister. I was going to get a $65 fine just because I was going a little over the speed limit and he was going to nail me just so he could make his damned quota.
I just hated him.
"Mr. Markovich, you have a deduction listed here for a personal computer. Tell me about that computer. Is it used for business purposes?"
Markovich shifted uneasily in his chair. Yes, the IRS man would have to ask about that computer. Why did he ever think he could deduct it? His wife used the computer only to play Tetris and never once did she ever use the computer for any business stuff. It was just a toy for her. And Markovich had deducted it on his tax form. Boy, what a dumb mistake that was!
Markovich rubbed his temples with both hands and pretended to be looking through his file of receipts. "God," he thought, "he's got me!"
Anna looked out the window and squinted at the bright sunlight. We had begun our descent into Chicago. A mottled blanket of low-lying clouds lay beneath us like bright froth on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. It was hard to look at all that brightness. It hurt your eyes. It always amazed me that the dull overcast on the ground was surprised by the shawl of brightness that tucked around it. How could the runway be dark when a scintillating zone of light was spread upon the upper reaches of the atmosphere? That didn't make sense to me.
The plane plowed through the deck of clouds and you could feel an alternating surge and restraint as the wings chopped away at the banks of foggy mist. Anna kissed her icon again and a deep groove of worry etched itself into her face. A staid blanket of tension wrapped itself around the passengers in the plane. The steady drone of conversation in the plane had been replaced by an eerie sort of quietness. We were going to land.
As we broke through the clouds, you could see the full panorama of O'Hare Airport below. Anna studied the terminal and the utility vehicles below us. "What are all those little yellow trucks down there?" she asked.
"They're aviation fuel trucks," I said.
"Aren't they awfully close to the runway? What if we hit one of them? What then?"
"We'd get cooked up like a dead duck, I guess"
"Bozhe moj!"
Frazier started to sweat in the hot sunlight. He studied the tiles on the floor, brushing them carefully with the tip of his shoe. He tried to look as innocent as he possibly could. I didn't do much better than he did, to tell you the truth. We both squirmed in the pool of sunlight surrounding Sister Severia’s desk.
"I saw everything," Sister Mary Felicita said, "Frazier was chasing Billy and he caused the statue to get broken. It was all his fault. Billy was just trying to get away from him."
"I see," said Sister Mary Severia. "Then you'll have to pay for the statue, Mr. Frazier. Do you understand? You'll have to pay for it."
Frazier couldn't believe his ears. He was going to have to pay for the statue. And I was going to skate away scot-free. I exhaled a long sigh, relieved. Frazier swallowed hard and I could see his Adam’s apple disagreeing violently with Sr. Severia’s decision.
"Brubaker, you're going to make it. Just take it easy. I'll be right behind you. The bad guys went home, so you don't have anything to worry about. You hear me, Brubaker? Brubaker?"
We were right over the runway and the pilot lowered the landing gear. There was a whirring sound from the hydraulics and the gear locked in with a loud ka-roomp sound.
"What was that?" Anna asked.
"I guess we just ran over one of those gas trucks," I said.
Anna screamed. She screamed so loudly you would never think all that noise was coming out of a little seventy-three-year-old woman. Immediately, everyone in the plane started to yell and scream. The whole plane full of people just went totally nuts! It sounded like Alberich terrorizing die niebelungen in Wagner's Das Rheingold: "Eeeeeiiieeee! Eeeeeiiieeee! Eeeeeiiieeee!"
The stewardess ran up the aisle frantically, saying, “It’s all right. It’s all right.” Anna wasn’t so sure, though.
We touched down and rolled to a stop at the end of the runway. Anna breathed a deep sigh of relief and kissed her icon again. "Woo!” she said, crossing herself. “We made it! Thank God."
Later, I saw her on the golf cart in the terminal. She was on her way to Continental's gate. She was relaxed and smiling as she rode on the cart, holding her purse tightly against her stomach. I noticed her when the cart came up behind me and the strobe lights burned against my neck.
"It wasn't that bad at all, was it?" Anna said to me. "And I thought it was going to be terrible. We always worry over nothing, don't we?"
“It’s just like sitting on your living room couch, lady,” I said. “The hardest part is staying awake.” She smiled.
"Ssshhttt!"
"Well, let me ask you this, mister," he said. "If I came through here tomorrow morning would I catch you going forty-nine miles per hour on this road?"
"No sir, I'd be just like Stara Bubba."
"Stara Bubba?" he asked.
"Yeah, I’d be just like an old grandma. I'd be moving like a three-legged turtle. Real slow, man. Real slow!"
He handed me my license and my registration papers. He smiled at me. The gold teeth glinted in the sunlight. God, I hated that smile. "You have a nice day now, you hear?" he said.
I couldn't believe it. He was going to let me go! He had me dead to rights and he was going to let me go. I drove away slowly. And I mean real slow, man.
It was bright and sunny that morning and I could tell right away that it was going to be a good day. As I drove to work, I thought about writing Markovich a letter. They don't get much mail in the penitentiary, you know.
