Puddle Jumper
A serial novella, in five parts...
I. Home Sweet Home
Jericho, Texas. September, 1999.
If anyone took the trouble to look through the stack of unopened mail scattered across the table top in the entry way, just inside the front door, they would find that there was little more than $300,000 spread between five accounts – approximately $175,000 in a company-sponsored retirement account, $99,000 in a savings account at Jericho State Bank, $21,000 in a money market account at First Federal, $15,000 in a similar account at Jericho State, and $2,400 in a regular checking account – a paltry sum considering the bounty on J. Levi Bingham’s life was $10 million.
Mixed in with the bank statements and utility bills, sport and car magazines, discount circulars and church bulletins was a small envelope containing a 3” x 5” RSVP card, indicating the invited guest would be happy to attend the farewell dinner scheduled for 6 p.m. on the night of the Autumnal equinox. It was the only response, meaning simply that the others hadn’t bothered to respond or did not wish to make their planned attendance known. Still, there was a good six or seven mail days left before the “RSVP by” date.
Of course all of it was a moot point, given that J. Levi Bingham’s corpse lay stretched across the marble tile beneath the table, his dark blue silk evening robe wrapped indelicately around his feeble old legs. He’d fumbled the mail and his hot cup of Earl Grey tea, or vice versa, and in the effort to stop one or both from spilling, he’d slipped and fallen and broken both his hip and his right arm. The pain was intricate; it hurt him in so many places at once, hurt in so many ways, all at the same time. A sharp, bright pain radiated around his torso and up his spine and a dull throbbing ache ran down his leg and thrummed in the ball of his foot.
Immediately after it happened, he tried to straighten himself and assess the damage, but the effort proved too exhausting. Neither arm would support his scant weight, 148 lbs. of withered 78-year-old man. He tried to roll away from the spot, get closer to the phone in the hallway, but every move made the hip feel like broken glass, ground by a pestle in a mortar. And all of him was wet, his upper torso from a faint sweat and the tea soaked into his pajama top, the lower part of him because of the quarter cup of urine that escaped when his body cracked on the hard tile floor, a figurative “accident” after the literal one. With all of the commotion, Levi was tired, and being in such a state, it seemed perfectly logical for him to lay his head on his unwounded arm and rest a while before trying to figure a way out of the mess he found himself in the morning before he died.
***
A long time ago, during some random encounter in a transient life filled with them, another elderly gentleman, not at all unlike Levi warned me that a young man dreams about the things he will do in this life and then sets out to do them, accomplishing what he can and re-defining what he can’t, so that his life’s successes seem planned and his failures, calculated changes in direction. The stranger said a middle-aged man’s life is spent re-defining and an old man spends his days remembering. I don’t know and can’t say exactly what Levi spent his final 46 hours thinking about, but stuck there on the floor like he was, I have to imagine it was spent remembering the events – both successes and re-defined failures – of his life. It’s what I would have done, but that doesn’t make it any better an assumption. It just makes it congruent with any other possible answer.
To understand Levi, a person first needs to consider that he was an Englishman, a true “Brit’s Brit” as they say, born in Manchester, raised in London, loyal to the Queen and fond of his tea and biscuits. After that, one needs to consider the fact that he was the most fearless amateur bull rider in all of west Texas. Add the two sums and it’ll will produce a fraction of what it meant to be Levi Bingham in a town like Jericho, Texas. See, he liked his beer in a glass, his whiskey straight from the bottle, liked his women smart, and liked his horses tall, at least fifteen hands. He also liked a good book, Charles Dickens being his favorite, enjoyed listening to classical music (Copland, Stravinsky) and wore Italian loafers to Sunday morning worship service, the one time a week he didn’t wear boots.
He preferred driving his heavy duty pick-up truck with the windows down, even in the middle of the summer on a dusty dirt top road. He bathed in the evenings before supper and sat on his porch, watching the sun fade while smoking a cigarillo. He rose before dawn and sat in the same spot drinking hot black coffee, thinking about all of the things he needed to do before he could return to that spot. It was a ritual, hard and set, but Levi was a risk taker just the same, a man who bought low and sold high: land, real estate, oil properties, stocks, bonds. And he made enemies: lawyers who wanted to take every dime he’d made, ex-wives who wanted the same, but would settle for a steady stream of alimony. Then there were the transactional losers, the foolish men who underestimated him on a cattle deal or a land sale. They paid the price for their ignorance and usually it was steep.
***
So where was I while my boss and friend of forty some odd years lay dying in a pool of urine and Earl Grey tea?
The better question might be phrased this way: Where did Levi send me the day before he slipped and died in a puddle of Earl Grey tea? The small town sheriff at the Jericho police station asked me the question the first way.
“Where did you say you were again Mr. Carter?”
“Me? When?”
“The morning your former boss took a nasty fall and ended up dead on the floor of his million dollar ranch?”
“You don’t think I –“
“Weren’t you engaged to Miss Irene?” the second officer interrupted.
“...had anything to do with this?”
“Did you have a falling out with Mr. Bingham over Irene Turner?” Yes, Levi and I had a “falling out” over Irene Turner. Police the world over have one thing in common. They all seem to get the wrong facts right, while inevitably getting the right facts wrong. Truth is, Levi and I had been having a falling out over Irene for forty years, and it didn’t take a junior police ranger with a real brass secret decoder badge to sort that fact from all of the other circumstances. The question they should have been asking was about Irene. Where was she the morning Levi died?
I’ll save that for later. I need to explain where I was on that morning first, and to do that, I need to talk about something else for a minute.
On May 13, 2013, CNN reported that time travel was in fact, possible. The staff writer clarified by saying that a person would have to move faster than the speed of light, and then would only be able to travel forward a mere fraction of a second, but they conceded to the general public that such a feat might be possible. In 2011, noted science magazine, Scientific American speculated that parallel universes really do exist citing quantum theory as a postulate and pointing to the results of several independent laboratory experiments as potential proof. Sources like these merely speculate on what might be possible and are constrained by what the general public can understand. They don’t endeavor to explain what could happen if the cosmos were to align in a random place at an unspecified time.
Phrased slightly differently, they convey only a general understanding of the sufficiently proven theories, interpreted by an extensively degreed consensus, agreed upon by other steadfast conservatives. Such thinkers also observed, and the great rationals of the day largely agreed that the world is flat and the coelacanth was extinct. The earth is the center of the universe, Columbus discovered America and parallel universes, well… such things exist only in the realm of science fiction magazines. None of those revered laboratory creatures stood with us on the rocky banks of Spruce Lake. Not a one of those ordered scientific minds stood beside us when the wind blew cold and sharp out of the northwest. The water slapped at the shoreline, sloshing and spraying our faces with a faint mist. A smell of broken evergreens and spent airplane fuel filled the morning air and Levi walked back and forth from the wreckage, collecting his things while mumbling an odd phrase and a string of curses.
***
Jericho Municipal Airport, August, 1984.
“We need a bigger engine,” he said after invoking the name of God and suggesting something just short of eternal condemnation for all of the people standing in the immediate vicinity. “Same make and model, but a better engine.”
I looked at him and Irene, standing next to each other in front of the dusty Quonset hut located out by the patch of dirt affectionately known as the “south runway”.
“I don’t think they’ve got one with a bigger engine.”
There were only two runways at the Jericho Municipal Airport. One ran north and south, the other sort of northeast, southwest, with a little hitch in it leading to the rented hangars. There were a couple of planes for sale in front of the hangars, an Antonov An-2 “crop duster” and a small Cessna; we were looking at the Cessna. Parked next to those, an extreme oddity for the wide, baked flatlands leading to the fabled llano estacado, a Grumman G-44 Widgeon, a real “puddle jumper” made for carting passengers, albeit only a few of them between islands in the Caribbean or Hawaii, maybe Alaska. A plane that could land on water, an anomaly, a ghost, a thing out of place in the desert southwest.
“I like this one,” Irene said. “It’s got character. Seems like it has a story to tell.”
“I don’t know,” I ventured. “It’s a plane for taking off and landing on water. Not much of that around these parts.”
“What kind of bloody engine does it have?” Levi asked.
“A good one,” the assistant manager at the Jericho Municipal Airport answered. “A real good one.”
“What did you call it?” Levi turned and glared at me.
“A ‘puddle jumper’,” I said it again.
“Any idea what that means back home?” he asked with a nod in the general direction of mother England.
“Nope,” I shrugged.
“Probably best,” he quipped before turning to face the assistant manager. “How much would you be willing…?” His voice trailed off and the assistant manager’s eyes craned upwards as he attempted a mathematical calculation in his head.
After several seconds, he quoted a price. Levi immediately offered the man fifteen percent less. The man thought long and hard again and came back with a price that was $1,000 lower than the original. Again, Levi instantly offered fifteen percent less, having revised the amount to factor in the owner’s reduction in mere seconds.
“You got a head for figures,” the man said. “I can see that I won’t be getting much out of you. How about we settle in the middle?”
Levi announced the agreed upon amount in his British accent and they shook hands. They shook hands and the next twelve years seemed to disappear in little more than a blink. My eyes fluttered softly and I was standing on the beach at Spruce Lake.
CONTINUED…
A serial novella, in five parts...
I. Home Sweet Home
Jericho, Texas. September, 1999.
If anyone took the trouble to look through the stack of unopened mail scattered across the table top in the entry way, just inside the front door, they would find that there was little more than $300,000 spread between five accounts – approximately $175,000 in a company-sponsored retirement account, $99,000 in a savings account at Jericho State Bank, $21,000 in a money market account at First Federal, $15,000 in a similar account at Jericho State, and $2,400 in a regular checking account – a paltry sum considering the bounty on J. Levi Bingham’s life was $10 million.
Mixed in with the bank statements and utility bills, sport and car magazines, discount circulars and church bulletins was a small envelope containing a 3” x 5” RSVP card, indicating the invited guest would be happy to attend the farewell dinner scheduled for 6 p.m. on the night of the Autumnal equinox. It was the only response, meaning simply that the others hadn’t bothered to respond or did not wish to make their planned attendance known. Still, there was a good six or seven mail days left before the “RSVP by” date.
Of course all of it was a moot point, given that J. Levi Bingham’s corpse lay stretched across the marble tile beneath the table, his dark blue silk evening robe wrapped indelicately around his feeble old legs. He’d fumbled the mail and his hot cup of Earl Grey tea, or vice versa, and in the effort to stop one or both from spilling, he’d slipped and fallen and broken both his hip and his right arm. The pain was intricate; it hurt him in so many places at once, hurt in so many ways, all at the same time. A sharp, bright pain radiated around his torso and up his spine and a dull throbbing ache ran down his leg and thrummed in the ball of his foot.
Immediately after it happened, he tried to straighten himself and assess the damage, but the effort proved too exhausting. Neither arm would support his scant weight, 148 lbs. of withered 78-year-old man. He tried to roll away from the spot, get closer to the phone in the hallway, but every move made the hip feel like broken glass, ground by a pestle in a mortar. And all of him was wet, his upper torso from a faint sweat and the tea soaked into his pajama top, the lower part of him because of the quarter cup of urine that escaped when his body cracked on the hard tile floor, a figurative “accident” after the literal one. With all of the commotion, Levi was tired, and being in such a state, it seemed perfectly logical for him to lay his head on his unwounded arm and rest a while before trying to figure a way out of the mess he found himself in the morning before he died.
***
A long time ago, during some random encounter in a transient life filled with them, another elderly gentleman, not at all unlike Levi warned me that a young man dreams about the things he will do in this life and then sets out to do them, accomplishing what he can and re-defining what he can’t, so that his life’s successes seem planned and his failures, calculated changes in direction. The stranger said a middle-aged man’s life is spent re-defining and an old man spends his days remembering. I don’t know and can’t say exactly what Levi spent his final 46 hours thinking about, but stuck there on the floor like he was, I have to imagine it was spent remembering the events – both successes and re-defined failures – of his life. It’s what I would have done, but that doesn’t make it any better an assumption. It just makes it congruent with any other possible answer.
To understand Levi, a person first needs to consider that he was an Englishman, a true “Brit’s Brit” as they say, born in Manchester, raised in London, loyal to the Queen and fond of his tea and biscuits. After that, one needs to consider the fact that he was the most fearless amateur bull rider in all of west Texas. Add the two sums and it’ll will produce a fraction of what it meant to be Levi Bingham in a town like Jericho, Texas. See, he liked his beer in a glass, his whiskey straight from the bottle, liked his women smart, and liked his horses tall, at least fifteen hands. He also liked a good book, Charles Dickens being his favorite, enjoyed listening to classical music (Copland, Stravinsky) and wore Italian loafers to Sunday morning worship service, the one time a week he didn’t wear boots.
He preferred driving his heavy duty pick-up truck with the windows down, even in the middle of the summer on a dusty dirt top road. He bathed in the evenings before supper and sat on his porch, watching the sun fade while smoking a cigarillo. He rose before dawn and sat in the same spot drinking hot black coffee, thinking about all of the things he needed to do before he could return to that spot. It was a ritual, hard and set, but Levi was a risk taker just the same, a man who bought low and sold high: land, real estate, oil properties, stocks, bonds. And he made enemies: lawyers who wanted to take every dime he’d made, ex-wives who wanted the same, but would settle for a steady stream of alimony. Then there were the transactional losers, the foolish men who underestimated him on a cattle deal or a land sale. They paid the price for their ignorance and usually it was steep.
***
So where was I while my boss and friend of forty some odd years lay dying in a pool of urine and Earl Grey tea?
The better question might be phrased this way: Where did Levi send me the day before he slipped and died in a puddle of Earl Grey tea? The small town sheriff at the Jericho police station asked me the question the first way.
“Where did you say you were again Mr. Carter?”
“Me? When?”
“The morning your former boss took a nasty fall and ended up dead on the floor of his million dollar ranch?”
“You don’t think I –“
“Weren’t you engaged to Miss Irene?” the second officer interrupted.
“...had anything to do with this?”
“Did you have a falling out with Mr. Bingham over Irene Turner?” Yes, Levi and I had a “falling out” over Irene Turner. Police the world over have one thing in common. They all seem to get the wrong facts right, while inevitably getting the right facts wrong. Truth is, Levi and I had been having a falling out over Irene for forty years, and it didn’t take a junior police ranger with a real brass secret decoder badge to sort that fact from all of the other circumstances. The question they should have been asking was about Irene. Where was she the morning Levi died?
I’ll save that for later. I need to explain where I was on that morning first, and to do that, I need to talk about something else for a minute.
On May 13, 2013, CNN reported that time travel was in fact, possible. The staff writer clarified by saying that a person would have to move faster than the speed of light, and then would only be able to travel forward a mere fraction of a second, but they conceded to the general public that such a feat might be possible. In 2011, noted science magazine, Scientific American speculated that parallel universes really do exist citing quantum theory as a postulate and pointing to the results of several independent laboratory experiments as potential proof. Sources like these merely speculate on what might be possible and are constrained by what the general public can understand. They don’t endeavor to explain what could happen if the cosmos were to align in a random place at an unspecified time.
Phrased slightly differently, they convey only a general understanding of the sufficiently proven theories, interpreted by an extensively degreed consensus, agreed upon by other steadfast conservatives. Such thinkers also observed, and the great rationals of the day largely agreed that the world is flat and the coelacanth was extinct. The earth is the center of the universe, Columbus discovered America and parallel universes, well… such things exist only in the realm of science fiction magazines. None of those revered laboratory creatures stood with us on the rocky banks of Spruce Lake. Not a one of those ordered scientific minds stood beside us when the wind blew cold and sharp out of the northwest. The water slapped at the shoreline, sloshing and spraying our faces with a faint mist. A smell of broken evergreens and spent airplane fuel filled the morning air and Levi walked back and forth from the wreckage, collecting his things while mumbling an odd phrase and a string of curses.
***
Jericho Municipal Airport, August, 1984.
“We need a bigger engine,” he said after invoking the name of God and suggesting something just short of eternal condemnation for all of the people standing in the immediate vicinity. “Same make and model, but a better engine.”
I looked at him and Irene, standing next to each other in front of the dusty Quonset hut located out by the patch of dirt affectionately known as the “south runway”.
“I don’t think they’ve got one with a bigger engine.”
There were only two runways at the Jericho Municipal Airport. One ran north and south, the other sort of northeast, southwest, with a little hitch in it leading to the rented hangars. There were a couple of planes for sale in front of the hangars, an Antonov An-2 “crop duster” and a small Cessna; we were looking at the Cessna. Parked next to those, an extreme oddity for the wide, baked flatlands leading to the fabled llano estacado, a Grumman G-44 Widgeon, a real “puddle jumper” made for carting passengers, albeit only a few of them between islands in the Caribbean or Hawaii, maybe Alaska. A plane that could land on water, an anomaly, a ghost, a thing out of place in the desert southwest.
“I like this one,” Irene said. “It’s got character. Seems like it has a story to tell.”
“I don’t know,” I ventured. “It’s a plane for taking off and landing on water. Not much of that around these parts.”
“What kind of bloody engine does it have?” Levi asked.
“A good one,” the assistant manager at the Jericho Municipal Airport answered. “A real good one.”
“What did you call it?” Levi turned and glared at me.
“A ‘puddle jumper’,” I said it again.
“Any idea what that means back home?” he asked with a nod in the general direction of mother England.
“Nope,” I shrugged.
“Probably best,” he quipped before turning to face the assistant manager. “How much would you be willing…?” His voice trailed off and the assistant manager’s eyes craned upwards as he attempted a mathematical calculation in his head.
After several seconds, he quoted a price. Levi immediately offered the man fifteen percent less. The man thought long and hard again and came back with a price that was $1,000 lower than the original. Again, Levi instantly offered fifteen percent less, having revised the amount to factor in the owner’s reduction in mere seconds.
“You got a head for figures,” the man said. “I can see that I won’t be getting much out of you. How about we settle in the middle?”
Levi announced the agreed upon amount in his British accent and they shook hands. They shook hands and the next twelve years seemed to disappear in little more than a blink. My eyes fluttered softly and I was standing on the beach at Spruce Lake.
CONTINUED…
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