Sole Survivor (24 page)

By the time he got into a stall and latched the door, his nausea passed. Instead of throwing up, he leaned his back against the door and wept.

He hadn’t cried in many months, and he didn’t know why he was crying now. Maybe because he was on the trembling edge of happiness with the thought of seeing Nina again. Or maybe because he was scared of never finding her or of losing her a second time. Maybe he was grieving anew for Michelle and Chrissie. Maybe he had learned too many dreadful details about what had happened to Flight 353 and to the people on it.

Maybe it was all those things.

He was on a runaway rocket of emotion, and he needed to regain control of himself. He wasn’t going to be effective in his search for Rose and Nina if he swung wildly between euphoria and despair.

Red-eyed but recovered, he boarded the plane for Los Angeles as they issued the final call.

As the 737 took off, to Joe’s surprise his heart made a hollow racket in his ears, like running footsteps descending stairs. He clutched the arms of his seat as though he might tumble forward and fall headlong.

He hadn’t been afraid on the flight to Denver, but now he was in the lap of terror. Coming eastward, he would have welcomed death, for the wrongness of outliving his family had been heavy on his mind—but now, westward bound, he had a reason to live.

Even when they had reached cruising altitude and leveled off, he remained edgy. He could too easily imagine one of the pilots turning to the other and saying,
Are we recording?

Since Joe could not get Captain Delroy Blane out of his mind anyway, he withdrew the three folded pages of the transcript from an inner jacket pocket. Reviewing it, he might see something that he had missed before—and he needed to keep his mind occupied, even if with this.

The flight wasn’t heavily booked, a third of the seats empty. He had a window seat with no immediate neighbor, so he was afforded the privacy he needed.

In response to his request, a flight attendant brought a pen and note pad.

As he read through the transcript, he extracted Blane’s dialogue and printed it on the note pad. Standing apart from First Officer Victor Santorelli’s increasingly frantic statements and shorn of Barbara’s descriptions of sounds and pauses, the captain’s words might allow for the discovery of nuances otherwise not easy to spot.

When he was done, Joe folded the transcript and returned it to his coat pocket. Then he read from the note pad:

One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom.

One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock.

They’re doing bad things to me.

They’re mean to me.

Make them stop.

Are we recording?

Make them stop hurting me.

Are we recording?

Are we recording?

Make them stop or when I get the chance…when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.

This is fun.

Whoooaaa. Here we go, Dr. Ramlock. Dr. Blom, here we go.

Whoooaaa. Are we recording?

Are we recording?

Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Now. Look.

Cool.

Joe didn’t see anything new in the material, but something he had noticed before was more obvious when Blane’s dialogue was read in this extracted format. Although the captain was speaking in the voice of an adult, some of the things he was saying had a distinct childlike quality.

They’re doing bad things to me. They’re mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me.

This was neither the phrasing nor the word choice most adults would use to accuse tormentors or to ask for help.

His longest speech, a threat to kill everybody
and like it,
was petulant and childish as well—especially when immediately followed by the observation
This is fun.

Whoooaaa. Here we go…Whoooaaa. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah.

Blane’s reaction to the roll and plunge of the 747 was like that of a boy thrilling to the arrival of a roller coaster at the crown of the first hill on the track and, then, to the first stomach-rolling drop. According to Barbara, the captain had sounded unafraid; and there was no more terror in his words than in his tone of voice.

Now. Look.

Those words were spoken three and a half seconds before impact, as Blane watched the nightscape bloom like a black rose beyond the windscreen. He seemed gripped not by fear but by a sense of wonder.

Cool.

Joe stared at that final word for a long time, until the shiver it caused had passed, until he could consider all the implications of it with a measure of detachment.

Cool.

To the end, Blane reacted like a boy on an amusement-park ride. He had exhibited no more concern for his passengers and crew than a thoughtless and arrogant child might exhibit for the insects that he tortured with matches.

Cool.

Even a thoughtless child, as selfish as only the very young and the incurably immature can be, would nonetheless have shown some fear for
himself.
Even a determinedly suicidal man, having leaped off a high ledge, would cry out in mortal fear if not regret as he hurtled toward the pavement. Yet this captain, in whatever altered state he occupied, watched oblivion approach with no apparent concern, even with delight, as though he recognized no physical threat to himself.

Cool.

Delroy Blane. Family man. Faithful husband. Devout Mormon. Stable, loving, kind, compassionate. Successful, happy, healthy. Everything to live for. Cleared by the toxicological tests.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Cool.

A useless anger rose in Joe. It was not aimed at Blane, who surely was a victim too—though he didn’t initially appear to be one. This was the simmering anger of his childhood and adolescence, undirected and therefore likely to swell like the ever-hotter steam in a boiler with no pressure-release valve.

He tucked the note pad into his jacket pocket.

His hands curled into fists. Unclenching them was difficult. He wanted to strike something. Anything. Until he broke it. Until his knuckles split and bled.

This blind anger always reminded Joe of his father.

Frank Carpenter had not been an angry person. The opposite. He never raised his voice in other than amusement and surprise and happy exclamation. He was a good man—inexplicably good and oddly optimistic, considering the suffering with which fate saddled him.

Joe, however, had been perpetually angry
for
him.

He could not remember his dad with two legs. Frank had lost the left one when his car was broadsided by a pickup truck driven by a nineteen-year-old drunk with lapsed insurance. Joe was not yet three years old at the time.

Frank and Donna, Joe’s mother, had been married with little more than two paychecks and their work clothes. To save money, they carried only liability coverage with their car. The drunk driver had no assets, and they received no compensation from any insurance company for the loss of the limb.

The leg was amputated halfway between knee and hip. In those days there were no highly effective prostheses. Besides, a false leg with any sort of functioning knee was expensive. Frank became so agile and quick with one leg and a crutch that he joked about entering a marathon.

Joe had never been ashamed of his father’s difference. He knew his dad not as a one-legged man with a peculiar lurching gait, but as a bedtime storyteller, an indefatigable player of Uncle Wiggly and other games, a patient softball coach.

The first serious fight he’d gotten into was when he was six, in first grade. A kid named Les Olner had referred to Frank as a “stupid cripple.” Although Olner was a bully and bigger than Joe, his superior size was an insufficient advantage against the savage animal fury with which he was confronted. Joe beat the shit out of him. His intention was to put out Olner’s right eye, so he would know what it was like to live with one of two, but a teacher pulled him off the battered kid before he could half blind him.

Afterward, he felt no remorse. He still felt none. He was not proud of this. It was just the way he felt.

Donna knew that her husband’s heart would break a little if he learned his boy had gotten into trouble over him. She devised and enforced Joe’s punishment herself, and together they concealed the incident from Frank.

That was the beginning of Joe’s secret life of quiet rage and periodic violence. He grew up looking for a fight and usually finding one, but he chose the moment and the venue to ensure that his dad was unlikely to learn of it.

Frank was a roofer, but there was no scrambling up ladders and hustling from eaves to ridgeline with one leg. He was loath to take disability from the government, but he accepted it for a while, until he found a way to turn a talent for woodworking into an occupation.

He made jewelry boxes, lamp bases, and other items inlaid with exotic woods in intricate patterns, and he found shops that would carry his creations. For a while he cleared a few dollars more than the disability payments, which he relinquished.

A seamstress in a combination tailor’s shop and dry cleaner, Donna came home from work every day with hair curled from the steam-press humidity and smelling of benzine and other liquid solvents. To this day, when Joe entered a dry-cleaning establishment, his first breath brought vividly to mind his mother’s hair and her honey-brown eyes, which as a child he’d thought were faded from a darker brown by steam and chemicals.

Three years after losing the leg, Frank began suffering pain in his knuckles and then his wrists. The diagnosis was rheumatoid arthritis.

A vicious thing, this disease. And in Frank, it progressed with uncommon speed, a fire spreading through him: the spinal joints in his neck, his shoulders, hips, his one remaining knee.

He shut down his woodworking business. There were government programs providing assistance, though never enough and always with the measure of humiliation that bureaucrats dished out with a hateful—and often unconscious—generosity.

The Church helped too, and charity from the local parish was more compassionately provided and less humbling to receive. Frank and Donna were Catholics. Joe went to Mass with them faithfully but without faith.

In two years, already hampered by the loss of one leg, Frank was in a wheelchair.

Medical knowledge has advanced dramatically in thirty years, but in those days, treatments were less effective than they are now—especially in cases as severe as Frank’s. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, injections of gold salts, and then much later penicillamine. Still the osteoporosis progressed. More cartilage and tendon tissue were lost from the chronic inflammation. Muscles continued to atrophy. Joints ached and swelled. The immunosuppressant corticosteroids available at the time somewhat slowed but did not halt the deformation of joints, the frightening loss of function.

By the time Joe was thirteen, his daily routine included helping his dad dress and bathe when his mother was at work. From the first, he never resented any tasks that fell to him; to his surprise, he found within himself a tenderness that was a counterweight to the omnipresent anger that he directed at God but that he inadequately relieved on those unlucky boys with whom he periodically picked fights. For a long time Frank was mortified to have to rely on his son for such private matters, but eventually the shared challenge of bathing, grooming, and toilet brought them closer, deepened their feelings for each other.

By the time Joe was sixteen, Frank was suffering with fibrousankylosis. Huge rheumatoid nodules had formed at several joints, including one the size of a golf ball on his right wrist. His left elbow was deformed by a nodule almost as large as the softball that he had thrown so many hundreds of times in backyard practices when Joe had been six years old and getting into Little League.

His dad lived now for Joe’s achievements, so Joe was an honor student in spite of a part-time job at McDonald’s. He was a star quarterback on the high-school football team. Frank never put any pressure on him to excel. Love motivated Joe.