35. In The Aftermath

Reactions to the ‘grand aviation accident,’ as Lana termed it were diverse.

Lana was packing for another book tour, when her phone chirped.
“Hey, Christine. What’s up, sweetie?”
“Turn on the evening news.”
“OK, I’m doing it.”
There was Scott, captured in a still shot, standing amidst a cluster of people next to his Skylark, which was clearly parked on the freeway.
“Oh. My. God. Christine!”
“He fucked up.”
“He really fucked up.”
The announcer was saying…
“The aircraft had apparently run out of fuel just moments after takeoff. Authorities are blaming the incident, which shut down traffic in both directions for a half an hour, and in the North bound lanes for about three hours this morning just as rush hour was winding down, on pilot error. The pilot, Scott C. Andrews, said he simply forgot to check his fuel level in his eagerness to sell the plane to a prospective buyer.”
“That man just isn’t having a good year,” said Christine.
“No. He’s not.”
“What do you think this means?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s alive; nobody was hurt. The landing looks like it was perfect, no damage to the plane. It really comes down to whether the NTSC and the FAA will let him keep flying. The other issue is insurance. It would be like doing something stupid with a car. Your insurance company might drop you.”
“That sounds bad for Scott.”
“Oh, I don’t know. The announcer said he was demonstrating the plane for a sale. If that’s true, then it’s not a Scott I know. He’d rather cut off his right arm than give up the damn planes. If he’s gotten that far off his cookie, he may not care about not having a license or becoming uninsurable.”
“You think you get into that much trouble for just one fuck up?”
“I just can’t tell, Christine. He had some luck, but in other ways, he was out of it. He obviously didn’t hit any cars. That was lucky. He unfortunately landed at an overpass; he couldn’t have cleared the roadway if he wanted to. He was also at fault. He took off without fuel. How many times have I seen that man do a fuel check? I swear he did fuel checks before he used to fuck me.”

Bruce Sibley found out about the incident when Scott called him.
“Bruce,” Scott said, “I fucked up.”
This, given the many, many fuck ups that Scott had been involved in lately, made Bruce instantly nervous.
“Yeah? Where are you?”
“I’m on I77N.”
“Did you wreck your car or something?”
“I’m standing here outside the Cessna. I had to make a forced landing. I’m at the Rt. 47 exchange. I’m tying up traffic northbound. The cops are here, fire and rescue are here, what I need, I think, is some av-gas. I think they want to fly the plane off. Perhaps you want to come out here. Don’t take I77, obviously. Get over to 47.”
“You said you fucked up. It sounds to me like you lucked out. Did you have a mechanical problem?”
“I took off without fuel.”
“You fucked up.”
“Yeah. I was going to surprise you. I was flying the plane for a buyer.”
“Anybody we know?”
“Sam Akins.”
“Assuming we can work out all of this FAA and other shit, he made me an offer of $50K. I’m taking it.”
“Jeez. That’s kind of low.”
“Yeah, well. The planes sitting on the freeway.”
“Shit. I’ll be there ASAP.”

Dinky little mishaps like that don’t make the national news. Lana, however was running short of material for her book plugging appearances, so when she did “Ellen,” she told DeGeneres that her ex-husband had landed his plane on the freeway. She used his fictional name, but the picture Ellen put up for her daytime audience was of the real Scott. Things like this really pissed him off. To his resentment of Lana, he now added a dose of anger. He began to blame her for his troubles. He began to hate her for doing so well, and talking advantage of her notoriety to rub his nose in his failure. He began to see himself as doomed.

The FAA called him to the carpet. He did not lose his license. The insurance policy was cancelled, but the aircraft was sold, so it didn’t matter much. He drank himself into oblivion almost every night. He slept in. He stopped going to the office. Bruce and Scott needed to have a heart to heart, Bruce thought. Bruce went to Scott’s place on an afternoon in early February. He pounded on the door. From behind it, he heard,
“Go the fuck away!”
“Scott, we need to talk!”
“No we don’t!”
“Yes we do! I’m giving up on Aviation Synergies!”
There was a pause. An unshaven and half-dressed Scott Andrews, shadow of his former self, appeared blinking in the half-opened doorway, the gloom behind him exuding the stench of sweat, puke and gin.
“You’re doing what?”
“Scott, we have to talk. Get dressed and let’s go out for coffee.”
“I’m not your goddamn coffee date. Just come on in here.”
“No. You stink, your place stinks, and the raw deal you’re leaving me with stinks. I want to talk about it out here in the real world. Get dressed. Shave. Do what you have to do. I’ll meet you at Starbucks in about 45 minutes. You blow me off, and you will not have a vote in the way I dissolve the business.”

At a nerve-wracking hour later, Scott walked into the Starbucks in the Blennerhassett. He’d dressed, shaved, and even showered, but his gaunt dishevelment still seemed out of place in the swank, stately old hotel. He sat down at a table with Bruce Sibley.
“OK, here I am making an admittedly rare appearance.”
“I appreciate it, Scott. However, I sit out there at that airstrip which we don’t need to pay for because we’re no longer flying. What we’re doing is a modest amount of Ebay business in aircraft parts. Our inventory is way down. Without the ability to fly around, meet people who are ramp rats, you know, all of that stuff that you used to do so brilliantly, we are pretty much losing our shirts one button at a time.”
“Kind of nice to be needed. It’s a bit too late. I don’t give a shit.”
“So you don’t mind if I do something else with my life?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Well, what are you going to do for money?”
“What are you going to do for money?”
“I have gotten pretty good at Ebay. I can sell all sorts of stuff on Ebay. I was going to expand away from aircraft parts, look for something cheaper in the way of space to rent, and try to make it be what it is, a resale business.”
“Sounds good, Bruce. Draw up the papers. Get some goddamn layer to break up the act.”
“What about you?”
“You give a shit?”
“We’ve been friends since high school, Scott. I’ve thought of you as a brother, and I’ve looked up to you as a sort of mentor. At this point everything we dreamed of, which we had been within a hair’s breadth of achieving, has now been lost. It all goes back to the moment you smacked your wife…”
“Hold on right there, pardner. You put your finger right on the wound. My goddamn ex-wife.”
“You’re ex wife is doing OK.”
“Yeah. She gets on these talk shows and makes a monkey out of me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t watch ‘Ellen?’”
“I have no clue what that even is.”
“Let me clue you in, ex-pardner ‘o mine. Ellen Degenerate is a talk show host. Ms. Andersen is out there plugging that piece of shit book of hers, so she’s on that show. She tells the tittering audience that I landed my airplane on the freeway. They show a picture. It’s national television, you get that?”
“Yeah. So What? You did land your airplane on the freeway. You did a damn good job, and nobody got hurt. But you might have filled it up with av-gas before you took off.”
“She made a national spectacle of my humiliation. She’s merciless. She’s worse than pond scum. She deserves to die. And her little kitties, too.”
This struck Bruce as another expression of his grief and not as a game plan. He had to fish for a response. It was out of his element, this level of human need.
“Lana’s a piece of work, I’ll grant you that. But I’m concerned about you. What are you going to do to pay rent?”
“Oh. I see what you mean. Well, if you break up the act, do I get a cut?”
“There is the matter of debits versus credits. So far, you are almost completely on the debit side. So no, you are not going to be getting a check, if that’s what you mean. And that is being generous.”
“Dis-in-generous,” was Scott’s uncharacteristically literary response.

Bruce missed the game plan, and Scott forfeited the right to have a hand in his destiny. All he cared about now was how he was going to finish Lana once and for all. Restraining orders mean nothing to someone who’s resolved to murder you.

Lana returned home from her taping of the DeGeneres show, with its side trips to book signings, and knew right away something was amiss. The front door had been kicked open. Lights were on. Had she been burglarized? The breaking and entering of her home was her first thought, and it was not immediately dismissed. She next thought of Tory and Mea, who were not to be seen. She called for them but they did not appear. She did not immediately think of Scott. He had respected his retraining order for a good long while now. He seemed to continue to provide talk show fodder by his pitiful antics, and she did not think of him as a threat. She moved cautiously. She did not want to catch a malicious intruder unawares. She moved in the direction of her kitchen, but as she began her inspection she heard a sound behind her. She turned. There was Scott. In his hand he had an iron rod. The rod had a hook on the end of it. It was a fireplace implement. She did not have a fireplace. She understood that he was armed. The danger made the fine hair on her nape respond, and she broke out in goosebumps.
“What the hell, Scott? You’ve crossed a line.”
He said nothing. He was very thin. He stank. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked like hell; he was the devil come home for vengeance. She wanted to get free of him, and as before, get to her phone. The phone was in her coat pocket. She needed to get him talking. That had never been easy.
“Scott, you really can’t just come here and hang out, you know.”
“I no longer give a flying fuck what you think I can do and can’t do.”
Her mind raced. What was there to say? He was so incredibly angry that he reeked of it. The menace in his voice was like a blow, and she could see by the way he held the poker at the ready that the literal as opposed to literary blows were coming next. It would not do, she realized to remind him of the court order. He’d already violated it, and had expressed his ‘what the fuck’ opinion. She might try reason. What reason did she have?
“Why are you so angry with me now, after all of this time?”
“You make me want to puke. You and your goddamn book.”
“Ah, the goddamn book. You don’t like my book. What don’t you like about it?”
Was she going to talk him down by engaging him in a critical discussion?
“I don’t like hearing that I’ve been joked about on national television.”
“Ah that. Perhaps it was a bit over the top. I’m sorry. I actually did point out that you are a consummate pilot and that your landing was by all accounts perfect.”
“Fuck you.”
“Would you like a drink?”
She was bottoming out. She was desperate. Offer the devil a beverage. He’d have to put down the poker to take a sip. The poker was in his right hand. She could see his left hand shaking. Her own limbs were unsteady. Keeping her chatty composure was taking conscious effort.
“Fuck you.”
“Well, can I at least get out of this coat and get you to tell me what you want?”
“I want to mess you up.”
“Ah. I gathered that. How long have you been here?”
“Not long. Long enough.” That was a sinister blast of vitriol that he spat out like yellow bilious venom.
“Long enough for what?” She moved towards him, which was extremely counter- intuitive, but he was blocking the doorway. She had the idea that if she could get past him and get a hand in her coat pocket she could get to the phone long enough to both bolt out the door and call 911. He blocked her, his aggressive body language backing up his next remark.
“You aren’t going anywhere, cunt.”
Now, she took a step back. She was keeping an eye on him. He stood right where he was, blocking the door. The back door to the back yard was another way out. That door was both locked and chained. He was blocking her access to the hallway and the first floor bath where she had hidden out from him before in that other less malicious scenario. She took another step back.
“You’d better back up. Keep backing up. You can get all the way up against the wall if you like. I’ve got a big surprise for you.”
“I usually like surprises,” she said, but her voice betrayed her fear.
“I know.”
She looked around the kitchen now, seeing as how that is where she was trapped. What was this surprise? It was sure to be evil. Was there a weapon in here that she could wield? It was her kitchen. It had knives, and ladles (shades of her mother), but nothing that would outreach that poker. She could try throwing a glass or vase at him. But then her eye fell upon the hint of the surprise. The big freezer sported a glob of dark matter and the moment she saw it, she thought not of chocolate pudding, but of shit. The moment she thought of shit, she thought of and smelled cat shit. Her eyes raced down the freezer’s side panel to the floor where there was more cat shit.
“What have you done to my cats?” She wailed.
“They’re chillin.’”
She took the steps over to the freezer and lifted its lid. There in the mists were the corpses of Mea and Tory, contorted by their futile efforts to escape, close to each other for warmth, and their matted fur was rimmed with frost. Her keening wail split the air. She left the freezer door up, and whirled around. Her own anger had now no upper limit and obliterated her fear. She grabbed a glass from the dish drainer and in a flash had its rim broken on the counter-top. She ran at him with it aloft. Her saw her coming at him and raised the poker, he took a swing, but she was too fast and he missed her. She rammed the broken glass into his abdomen and he dropped the poker which was now uselessly behind her back. She rammed the glass again higher up. He pushed her away with his hands, but she just slashed at them like a fury. Everywhere he ducked, she was there, slashing. She caught him in the face and he ran away. It would have been smarter of him perhaps to flee the house out the open front door.

He was not going to let her best him twice. He ran up the stairs, and she pursued him, right on his ass. At the top of the stairs, he abruptly turned and kicked her hard. It was an angry blow, aimed at her gut, and it hit home there just as she reached the top of the staircase. The blow sent her tumbling down the stairs, her limbs flailing to find a way to stop her fall, but only running afoul of the banisters. Her coat offered some protection and dampening of the pummeling stairs. The broken glass went flying and landed with a tinkle as it struck the wall and littered the floor. At the top of the stairs, with blood now obscuring his view, Scott heard her head crack on the wooden floor. She was sprawled out there at the bottom, not moving. His anger was unabated. He’d seen this bitch get up before after blows that had sent any other normal person reeling and knocked them out for the count. She’d cornered and trapped him, ridiculed him and bested him for the very last time. He’d set out to fuck her up, and he intended to finish the job, if it was the last job he finished in this life. He raced down the stairs and kicked her about a dozen more times. She never moved. It was a merciless beating. He stopped short of fetching the poker and running her through with it.

His last act was to reach into her coat pocket and find that goddamned iPhone. He had a bone to pick with it too. He found it after some rummaging. It was in the second of the two pockets he tried, as he straddled Lana’s body. He took aim at the wall and threw it. It broke into a few pieces. He tossed the biggest piece next to her body and smashed it to bits with his heel. After this, he wiped the drying and fresh blood from his face and bent over with his hands on his thighs. All of this running around and beating had left him light-headed, out of breath and sweating. He straightened up at length, and walked out, leaving behind his coat, his poker, his ex-wife, and the rest of his life. He roamed the streets of the Parkersburg suburb. He walked past the sorry wreck of his car where he had parked it out of view of the house. He hadn’t wanted to tip her off going in; he’d wanted the element of surprise. He moved in some sort of reverse flow of time, tracing his steps backwards, back to the point at which life as it had been ended. He was so far gone he had no sensation of cold. He walked more quickly on automatic pilot. He covered some ground. His feet did not share his aimlessness of mind. At dawn, he’d arrived at the Wood County sheriffs building. He knew in his bones that this was the only door still open to him, and bruised and bloodied, he turned himself in.

When Donna the housekeeper arrived in the morning, she saw Lana still sprawled where she’d fallen. She was unconscious, but still breathing. She called 911. Otherwise, she did not touch the crime scene. She waited outside for the ambulance. She knew better than to try to move Lana or offer any sort of dubious first aid. If her life was to be saved, she needed immediate professional attention.