Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (top 50 books to read .TXT) 📕

She wanted to say that maybe that was before he grew vampire fingernails, caught syphilis and traveled with a gang of lawyer/goons. Instead, she stood up. He stood, too, a little shakily, she thought, and came over and put his hands on her shoulders. She still wore a heavy flying shirt and so couldn’t feel the fingernails, but was aware of them.

“Why don’t you get into something more comfortable? Let me show you the ladies’ bedroom—every kind of nightgown and robe you can imagine.”

“Sorry, Howard, not tonight. I don’t want to ruin the good memories.”

Later, she couldn’t tell what time it was. With the inch-thick black curtains, it could have been 3 a.m. or 8 a.m. or noon or anything, but she was still dead tired so too much time could not have passed. A telephone was ringing and after a while she knew it wasn’t a dream and reached for it but couldn’t find it, couldn’t even find the lamp if there was one, had no recollection of where she was or why but the ringing kept on.

Half asleep, groping in the dark, she knocked the phone off the bedside table and couldn’t get the lamp turned on and got down on her knees beside the bed and eventually located the receiver.

It was Howard.

“What the hell do you want, Howard?”

“Terry,” he said.

“Terry what?”

“Terry’s down. They’re looking for him.”

She understood immediately. Pilots don’t need more than that.

“I’m sorry, Maggie, I’m truly sorry. Mount Lemmon, coming into Tucson, lost contact. No idea why he was over Mount Lemmon. Shouldn’t have been. They’re up there looking.”

She dropped the receiver. She had no idea how long she stayed like that. On the floor, in the dark, leaning against the bed, the receiver voice squawking until a horrible buzzing started that might have been in her head. Why had she insisted that he come?

Chapter 38

Joe called Lizzie with the news. She was in Chicago covering the trial of “The Great Transportation Conspiracy,” as the newspapers called it. The carmakers’ scheme to destroy electric rail had started in Galesburg, and nearby Chicago is where the justice department chose to conduct the trial, which was already into the second month. She’d been home twice so far, catching the Super Chief each time to spend two days with Joe in the garden. She was due home again a day before the funeral, but Joe decided not to wait to inform her.

“Maggie would have called,” he said, “but she’s still in Tucson. She’s coming back today with the remains.”

Lizzie didn’t answer right away. She sat with the phone in her hand thinking of her sister and how sad it was: two husbands, two airplane crashes, two deaths. She’d been blue anyway from too many days in courtrooms, nights alone in hotels, meals in diners. Terry’s death stunned her.

“The remains,” she whispered. “That’s what we are when we’re dead.”

“If we’re lucky.”

“I’ll be on the train tonight. At least it’s the weekend.”

“I’m glad you prefer trains. When’s this trial going to be over?”

“Who knows? So many indictments, so many lawyers—GM, Firestone, Standard Oil, Greyhound, Mack, on and on, and they all have to tell the judge that they really didn’t know what was going on, and anyway what’s done is done, and the new buses are so nice and gasoline is cheap and so let’s move on, etc., etc. And then the lawyers from a dozen cities argue that costs run into the tens of millions and somebody is responsible and somebody has to pay and somebody has to go to jail. Thank heaven Fred Barrett’s back here to keep things focused on Pacific Electric. His records are meticulous. The judge understands that the damage done to Los Angeles dwarfs everything else.”

♦ ♦ ♦

The services were in the Wadsworth Chapel on the V.A. campus off Wilshire, about which Terry surely would have had mixed feelings. He was not religious but kept in touch with many of his wartime buddies through the V.A. His health was good, but he was a regular for checkups at Wadsworth and always walked the grounds looking for the few guys left who’d flown with him in the Pacific.

The chapel is a white shingle Victorian from the turn of the century, one side for Protestants, one for Catholics. Other denominations get to choose. Terry wouldn’t have cared. The grounds are neat and verdant, and it’s as good a place as any to spend your last hours above ground, dead or alive. Lizzie and Joe could walk over. Robby’s old pre-school co-op was just over the hill. Burial was to be down Wilshire in Westwood Village Cemetery; it was pricier than the V.A., but Maggie thought Terry deserved more than a white stone.

Arriving home alone in Playa del Rey after flying in from Tucson with the casket, she’d finally let go. She’d held it in for three days, showing no weakness in public. But stepping into the house—his house—was too much. She mixed a drink and went out into the patio as they’d done so often. The marine layer was in early that evening, spreading sea air and stillness like a blanket over the hill. Looking out over the calm Pacific, the center of Terry’s life, suddenly the tears came, psychic tears, the kind that start when the plug is finally pulled. They’d been building for days, couldn’t get out, and suddenly burst the dam. They tumbled down her face onto her blouse like the horrible days in Paris. She was the crier, had always been the crier, and she’d wondered at it. Her stoical sister could get through anything with dry eyes, but Maggie held them in until she couldn’t bear it anymore.

♦ ♦ ♦

He was a popular guy, and with friends from Hughes and the beach club and his V.A. war buddies they would fill the Protestant side. The pastor, the Rev. Browne, did not know Terry or Maggie, but that’s the way it is at the