The Chickasaw Plum

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SHORT STORY: Actually, Chapter 10 of a work in progress,

CHICKASAW: The Good Life and Hard Times of Dr. Christopher Jacques.

by John R. Guthrie

New York, Tuesday, September 11, 2001

Dressed in her pink jogging suit, Lil first went to the convention center on the second floor of The Colonnade Regency Hotel for 7:30 A.M registration. She took a free sticky bun on a paper plate and black coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Her first meeting was scheduled for 10 A.M., so she bolted them down and stepped out to the street for a morning run. She jogged southward. She heard the plane first. It was too loud, too low to be this far from the airports. The engines whined, then crescendoed to a higher pitch as the pilot advanced the throttles.

Then the boom of explosion occurred somewhere toward at tip of Manhattan island. Lilith stopped, looking toward the sound of the explosion. Then she saw the plume of smoke ascending, a roiling, tumbling, chiaroscuro. Immobilized, she watched the smoke and ash climbing skyward; stygian at its core fading to charcoal, blue, sand, and ivory. Transfixed, she stopped. Some thing was drifting downward. Feathers? She squinted, placing her hand over her eyes and squinted. No, ashes, ashes and here and there among them, bits of intact paper like the leaves of autumn were drifting down from the shining blue sky of that brilliant September morning.

Chris called Nurse Anna Jolley on his cell phone. She was already overseeing the workup up early patients in his clinic. “Anna,” he said he drove down Main Street towards the hospital. “I’m running a little late, but make excuses, please ma’am. I’m gonna do quick rounds and then I’ll be there.”

“Sure, Doc. We only have two people back right now. Both routine blood pressure follow ups.”

At the hospital, he walked in through medical records, noting with satisfaction that there were no charts for dictation or signatures on his shelf. He continued on through and took the elevator to 4 South, a medical floor with mostly geriatric patients, his routine being to work from top floor downward. He got off the elevator and went toward the nursing station. As her passed the first patient room, a room with no patient names on the door, he realized that apparently everyone who worked on 4 South and some others as well were crowded together in the room, silently watching the television that was mounted on a bracket on the wall. He stopped and looked in saw the disaster on the screen. He stepped into the room to hear better. One of the nursing assistants was crying and ringing her hands as she watched.

“ …in lower Manhattan just minutes ago. Unconfirmed eyewitness reports state that the aircraft that struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center was not a small plane as originally thought, but a passenger jet.”

Behind the talking head a live cam feed showed one of the World Trade Center Towers with a fiery plume billowing from it and climbing into the bright blue of the Manhattan morning like the smoke from the stack of an ancient coal-burning locomotive.

At first Chris though only of the building itself, that remarkable feat of structural engineering, that immense exercise in dual phallicism that had so altered the skyline of New York. Controversial at first, they had become iconic.

On the TV screen, the scene shifted to the street. People were running covered with gray-white dust that made them other-worldly, zombie-like, fleeing the horror. He’d focused on the building to the exclusion of the people inside, a sort of denial, he supposed. How many worked there. 50,000? 60,000? Lots. The buildings, the streets around the towers were teeming with humanity. And the people were now fleeing. I can’t believe this, he said out loud, then said it again. “I can’t believe this.” The day he burned the corn crib. Daddy burned it. I was 4 or 5 years old. That out-building had served since long before I was born for the storage of feed corn and fodder for the cows and pigs. He poured kerosene on what hay remained and a wadded up sheet of newspaper he placed in the corner, then he stood back and tossed a kitchen match onto the newspaper. It was a tiny flame at first, blue like the sky at its base, then goldenrod, buttercup. The flame were soon a garden of cunning and magical flowers. They grew, soon leaping like some wild and vicious creature to the warped and graying planks of that structure. As the black smoke climbed skyward on that long ago Carolina morning, them. Mice that had nested beneath the building fled from beneath, running as fast as there tiny feet would carry them. How they chirped and whistled and shrieked in terror. One was smoking as it emerged, the hair singed off of it. It ran a few feet, then fell over, its paws clutching at the air for a few seconds before it lay still, eyes dying, its mouth opening an remaining agape to reveal sharp and tiny teeth and a pink tongue. I cried, hopelessly, as if the world would never be the same again. Daddy turned. “What’s wrong, son?” I pointed at the mouse. He bent and picked me up, patting me on the back to comfort me. “It was trying so hard to run away, then it couldn’t run any more.” I snuffled. “I’m so sorry,” Daddy said. “You know, it was probably such a good mouse, too.” “Why’d you burn it up, then Daddy?” “I didn’t know it was there. That happens sometimes. We don’t mean for it to happen, but we do something and the very nicest ones get killed. We should have a funeral for it. That would be a little bit better, wouldn’t it?”

Chris turned his attention back to the television screen where the human mice were fleeing down some New York Street. He found it difficult to focus on the conflagration. New York. Memories. Good and not so good. My ex and I, we, we went up there, four or five times, maybe more; those staggeringly expensive theater/opera/shopping trips she considered her due. Each trip was more miserable than the previous one as the marriage died a lingering death. At least in Austerity we were able to avoid each other. On the last trip, we lunched —nearly $300— at Fraunce’s Tavern where General George Washington had wished his officers’ farewell after the Revolutionary War was over. That place was a favorite of hers. Her mother, after all, was big on DAR because some ancestor a dozen generations removed had joined Washington’s army

My ex ordered pistachio crusted New Zealand rack of lamb. It looked exquisite; fragrant, delicately crusted with pistachio. She sent it back to the kitchen saying to the dismayed waiter, a slightly built man of middle years, it’s supposed to be lamb, not goat jerky.

The second time he brought it, she sent it back again. The waiter picked up the dish once more, but was confused. He said please, madam, I do not understand. Maybe it is my poor English. Please forgive me, I am just a little while from Algeria, you see. Please, allow me to summon the chef. The chef, snootiness personified, nose high, hardly looking at her said, Madam, I am so sorry we are unable to meet your standards. Already well into a bottle of Dom Perignon and it hardly past noon, she’d replied archly, it wouldn’t hurt if the hired help could speak comprehensible English. This is America, you know, not North Africa. Behind the chef, the waiter, that white towel folded over is left forearm, had looked down at the floor seeming somehow even smaller than he actually was as her diatribe continued. You bitch, he’d hissed at her after they’d left. That wasn’t too diplomatic of me. Not a good word choice.

They’d paraded through Bergdorf Goodman’s that afternoon, accumulating two Marc Jacobs outfits she just had to have--$9,000-- and a Valextra bag for $2,000 more. Nieman Marcus became the bargain outlet of the trip. The strappy Gucci shoes she purchased there were only a cool $700. What do you think? she’d queried. I think that’s a helluva lot of penicillin shots, I’d replied, putting her into a pout nice more. Chris, she’d said, can’t you just chill, forget your anal retentive bull shit and enjoy life? Not when you’re spending me broke, no I can’t, I’d replied. The fight had continued over dinner at Windows on the World, the glitzy restaurant 110 floors above the ground at the WTC. The lights of the city below them were lapidary, magical as Christmas. I switched to Scotch. Single malt. Mostly because at 100 proof instead of 80 like ordinary Scotch, it would anesthetize me faster and provide a chemical escape from the harpy I was with. Chris. You better slow down she said. Sometimes, I replied, booze is the only answer. She laughed at this, and we were friends again for a little while, for long enough for a memorable making up and denial fuck back in our hotel room at the Plaza. Ohh, baby, she’d said after the last frantic thrust, the release, as we lay there together. Chris, that was so-o-o good. Was it good for you? Yeah. How good, Sweety? She snuggled closer. I said, it was Bergdorf Goodman, Nieman Marcus and Prada rolled into one. Oh, that’s sweet of you. See, I’m not a bitch after all. And Sweety, let’s try to go by Macy’s, just for fun, on the way to LaGuardia tomorrow. I hardly have any lingerie fit to wear. She pulled my hand to her breast again and I massaged it gently. Lilith never was like that. Never.

LILITH??? Dear God, Lilith is somewhere in New York right now.

In Susan Weatherford’s office in the administrative area of the hospital, a small TV on a corner book shelf showed continuous live feed of the news from New York City. Crowd noises and sirens were heard as well as the talking head who, in the absence of much real information, pontificated away.

“Christopher, I’ve tried umpteen times already. Every circuit is tied up, or isn’t working, or something. On the one hand, I’m worried sick about Lilith. On the other, she’s a mighty savvy gal.”

Sitting toward the edge of the chair before the nursing supervisor’s desk he leaned forward, massaging one hand with the other. “Where’s her hotel located, Susan?

“She’s at the Colonnade Regency. It’s downtown in Tribeca, several blocks, I don’t know how many, hopefully far enough, from the World Trade Center.”

“You’ll hear from her soon,” Chris asserted, with more hope than certainty in his voice.

Lilith, her heart racing, as alert as she ever had as she stood there, appraised the situation. People, some weeping or crying out in their terror, streamed northward around her. I don’t know what’s happened here. Not exactly. An airplane crash because some fool was flying down the East River in a Cessna? But I heard the engines of a big jet.

When my cousin Clarise died of breast cancer at 37, I was still a student, but I held her hand as she drew her last breath. Then after she was gone, I cried and cried, but not before. The car crashes, like the vanload of Mexican workers in Austerity, dead and dying and the same with what was hauled in by ambulance from the LA freeway crashes, the horribly burned mostly children who were victims of that apartment complex fire in Watts. What she saw before her now, though, was a field of broken dreams of unprecedented proportions. The bits of debris continued to fall. The blizzard of paper that continued to waffle slowly down as if in a dream. The snowflake-like particles of indeterminate origin and dust the color of cobwebs that was settling on everything.

She brushed her hair and look at the palm of her hand. Turning toward the adjacent shop window, she saw herself reflected there, dusted in white ash. Jesus. I look like something the cat drug in. In the distance she heard a siren, then another and another.

She turned and began to walk quickly northward toward her hotel. In a moment a squad car, a blue and white with Port Authority Police emblazoned on the side raced southward followed closely by a huge van marked Mobil Medical Emergency Unit. She walked more quickly. A red fire engine, a hook and ladder truck, approached. She looked at the firemen in the front seat and back seat of the cab as the fire engine lumbered by, diesel engine lugging along, siren screaming. They were young, resolute, determined as any soldiers going into battle in their black slickers with the yellow trim arms propped in the truck’s open widows as they headed. She picked up the pace, jogging toward her hotel.

Sadie Slokum wore a pink kerchief over rollers the size of beer cans. She was the devout wife a Pentecostal minister with a Lilliputian church out in the county, and generally a pleasant enough woman.

“Doc, that business in New York, you know what it is, don’t you?”

“I have more questions than answers right now, Miss Sadie.”

“Well, I’ll tell you Doc. This is the devil’s work, pure and simple. Ol’ Beelzebub’s struck a blow this time, know what I mean?”

“Don’t know but what you’re right, Miss Sadie. Now let’s get a listen here.” He applied the stethoscope bell he had been warming in his hand to her chest. The rhythmic Lub-Dub, Lub-dub of her heart was suddenly superseded by AH-Leeah! AH-Leeah, AH-leeahlee AHleee lee-Hupp , huppana, huppana, huppana. Chris removed the stethoscope from her chest and smiling, waited for the gift of speaking in unknown tongues, recognized as a visitation of the Holy Spirit, to pass.

“Praise God,” said Sadie, arms outstretched now, staring fixedly at the four tube fluorescent fixture, where one of the tubes, yellowed and aging fluttered repeatedly in an effort to regains its former luminance. “Doc, when I see the devil in my mind, I call on the Holy spirit to visit me. And it does, praise Jesus.”

“I know, Sadie. Remember, I visited your church on picnic on the grounds day last summer. Heard a powerful sermon from Rev. Slokum on the wages of sin.”

“And I praise God for that, too, Doc. I keep praying that you some day leave that bunch of heathens and moneychangers down at First Baptist. Ain’t hardly a one of them truly saved, includin’ that preacher of yours with his fancy words and slick haircut and pricey suit. Doc, I’m constantly in an attitude of prayer about you, prayin’ that someday you come be a part of our church family for good. What a day of rejoicing that will be.”

After Sadie’s visit was completed and her Maxzide for blood pressure jotted on a prescription blank in a hand-writing near as unintelligible as her glossalalia. The next patient, Christopher back to his office where a 19” TV revealed the ongoing carnage on the tip of Manhattan Island. Black smoke lifted from both towers into the sky like black bunting for the dead. Then the South Tower squashed downward, collapsing on itself like an accordion. Waterfalls of white smoke and dust ballooned from the ruin. Chris said a barely audible, “Oh!”

He picked up the phone from its desktop cradle and hit the intercom button and dialed the receptionist’s desk. “Any luck yet?”

“No, Doctor,” she replied. Nothing but those busy circuit signals. I even called Southern Bell. They said they’ve have enough people trying to get through to New York to overwhelm the system even if some of the Manhattan exchanges weren’t ruined by whatever it is that happened there this morning.

Chris sighed. “Thanks, Tracy. Keep trying.” He replaced the phone on the cradle and went to Exam 4 to see Franklin Delano Raney about his osteoarthritis.

“Communis’, Doc’” said Gerald, whose gray hair curled from beneath an aging baseball cap with “US Army, Korea” embroidered on the front and in small letters below that in smaller letters “America: Love it or Leave it.” As he’d mentioned to Chris on every visit, he was now “serving our veterans as Post Commander of the Austerity VFW.”

“We should’ve wiped ‘em all out while we had the chance. MacArthur knew that Doc. He’d a nuked ‘em then and there like you’d wipe out a nest of snakes. But nobody paid him attention.” Here Gerald leaned forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level. “You know why?” As Chris opened his mouth to respond, Gerald answered his own question. “Because, Doc, there was Communis’ in government then jest like there is now. Communis’, but also, pinkos, fellow Travelers, comsymps, gays, lesbians and heathens, if you catch my drift.”

“I catch your drift, Gerald.” Chris as he scribbled Piroxicam, 20 mg./disp. #30, take 1 daily for relief of arthritis pain. Refill X 3 on his prescription pad. Then he scratched through and wrote Refill X 6. “And thanks for coming by, Gerald. See you in six months. Good to see you.”

In his office again, Chris dialed Tracy at the front desk. “Tracy, see if you can get the flight schedules for any planes coming in from New York City.”

“Doctor Jacques, I’ve already checked.

“I’ve checked every airline that flies into Piedmont Regional Airport. Every agent says the same thing. All airlines have been grounded indefinitely by the Federal Aviation Administration due to the current emergency.”

Chris’s brow wrinkled and he took a deep breath. He looked down at the green carpet as if inspecting for lint as he replied, “thanks, Tracy. You’re always a mile ahead of me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Thanks, Doc. I try. And Doctor Jacques?”

“Yeah, Tracy?”

“I’m sorry.”

On the TV screen before him, he watched as the remaining tower dissolved downward, spitting smoke and dust and steam in protest as it fell. There were screams from somewhere in the street. Chris realized his mouth was open, shut it, and continued to watch.

The television coverage then cut to a long shot from somewhere, Brooklyn? The Statue of Liberty? No, probably a news boat in the harbor, showed the great clouds of smoke billowing from the conflagration above all of lower Manhattan like the clouds of a hurricane sky.

Lilith continued her slow steady jog toward the hotel as emergency vehicles continued to roar southward in a display of flashing amber, blue and red, head lights blinking, sirens crying out like lost and wounded things. I used to dream about being in the Army Nurse Corps. I would be in a MASH unit, dispensing care to wounded solders and the hapless civilians who happened to be injured n the war. Maybe I should’ve, but then Peter Oxendine came along. And like a fucking goose I fell in love with Mr. Nuts ‘n Bolts the great engineer. But I seem to be in a war zone here.

At the entrance way of the Colonnade Regency Hotel the doorman, some scrap of white cloth tied over his nose and mouth, muffling his voice, said, “thank God you’re back, Ma’am.”

“Yeah. Good to see you her too,” Lil said, a little short of breath from her jog.

“Yes. Thank you. We’re trying to account for all our guests. If you would tell them at the desk that you’re here, and your name, it would be greatly appreciated.”

Once in her room, she switched on the TV. As she watched, the south tower collapse, she said, Jesus, those poor fuckers. I’ve gotta go back, and help.” She stripped, showered off quickly, watching the crud and dust from the street whirl into the shower drain at her feet. She pulled on a set of faded green surgical scrubs that had been intended to be her pajamas. She found a silk scarf in her half unpacked suit case. The scarf had preening, fan-tailed peacocks blazing with color imprinted on it. She considered. It was her favorite. It had cost $115 at Bally of Switzerland, a Rodeo Drive boutique. Peter’s mother had been careful to let her know the price and the name of the shop when she gave it to her as a nursing school graduation present. Thus she added, under the guise of pointing out its great quality, guilt and obligation to the matter of the gift. She stroked its smooth texture, held it to her nose and sniffed, smelling the faint perfume of the lavender sachet in her bag. Then she smiled and tied it around her lower face as a dust mask. She stepped back into the bathroom and wiped the condensate of the bathroom mirror. Nurse Frito Bandido. This will ruin a nice scarf, but it’s also but good riddance to another bad memory. She went to the elevator, went down to the street, nodding at the doorman as she passed, then strode south at with the clear-eyed certainty of one pursuing their own and personal Holy Grail.

The next day, after a long and tiring Wednesday in his clinic, Chris sat in his study at home. It was his favorite room -- row after row of books on walnut shelves. He sat at his desk and looked at the shelves along the walls, packed with the trove of books that collected since adolescence. The finely bound copy of Melville’s Moby Dick, a gift to him when he was twelve. Roget’s Thesaurus. Eric Partridge’s Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, a book that was as hefty as its title. Bartlett’s gold-embossed Familiar Quotations. All of the reference books I’d bought with the pay raise I received when I made Lance Corporal in the Marines. My survey continued; the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica, a few years old but still as dignified, informative, and functional as a graying teacher. Harrison’s Internal Medicine in two volumes abutted Goodman and Gilman’s Pharmacology, Grant’s Anatomy, Taylor’s Family Medicine, and other medical references, each one as authoritative and full of minutiae as any medical school professor.

There were shelves crammed with back issues of periodicals; the Journal of the American Medical Association with fine art pictured on each cover, and the Southern Medical Journal. Multiple copies of the Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association, right alongside back issues of Playboy, glossy and bright, followed by several appropriately somber back issues of the Baptist Courier.

His desk was a battered antique mahogany desk he’d gotten at a bargain price at an estate sale. The room had lots of windows for light, and a view of the yard, full of trees and greenery, and of the pond across the road. He settled into his upholstered recliner and tried to read the article on the prevalence and treatment of HIV positive patients statewide in the Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association. But after reading the one paragraph abstract at the top of the article four times without being able to remember a thing he’d read, he put it aside. He tried to picture Lilith’s circumstances in New York. Surely she’d be safe in her hotel, riding it out. Or would she? He considered turning on the TV. No. They must have shown that fucking plane crashing into that building every three minutes now since yesterday morning when it happened. If I see that one more time I will positively heave. Don’t they have anything else to do at CBS?

He put aside the journal and stared through the trees, their shadows long in the evening light, toward the pond across the street.

Theo entered and interrupted Chris’s reverie by clearing his throat. “Excuse me, Doc.”

Chris’s upholstered desk chair screeched as he swiveled back toward the entrance doorway where the houseman stood, his white jacket on, a kitchen towel draped over his left shoulder.

“Doc, I’m serving fried chicken tonight. Be just a little, ‘bout half hour, before it’s done. Rice and pan gravy, green beans, fruit salad, biscuits.”

“Wow, Theo. You’ve outdone yourself. What’s the occasion?”

“Well, Doc, reason I’m late is I got to watching the TV, and studying that mess up in New York. I never saw anything like that in my life. I figured you might be more worried than most, Miss Lilith being up there. Thought it might be a good time to put on the dog a little, help us both remember there’s lots of good things in life, too. Even though some bunch of fool’s done all that mischief up there, knocked down those buildings, killed a bunch a folks, it’s a good time to remember the good stuff that’s still all around this. With all that sadness, maybe it’s a good time to celebrate providence and rejoice in it, even while we're mourning what’s lost.”

“Theo, know what”

“You’re the best Christian I know.”

Chris decided to take a walk around the pond while Theo finished dinner. Relax, forget his worries about Lilith and everything else for a bit. A good houseman can free you up to do the things you do best. Also, it’s nice to have someone in that big house when I come home at night. It felt right empty after my divorce. Theo’s been good company for me.

Got some catching up to do. Better do hospital rounds at 6 a.m. There a staff meeting at 7 A.M. also in the hospital cafeteria. Patient roster’s overcrowded, too. Gotta hire a new lab tech to replace the one that’s moving to Texas with her family. Payroll’s coming up again on Friday. Again Lilith intruded on his reverie. Maybe I could go up there? No, no flights. Can’t drive, surely she’d be back by the time I got there.

He stepped out the door and walked across the yard, crossed the macadam street and followed the narrow trail that wound past the pond. Sometimes the neighborhood boys caught fish in the pond, bream and bluegill that glimmered in the sun, each scale a miniature prism as the fish flapped and arched in their efforts to escape. The pond was shaded by pine, the fragrant yellow pine of the Piedmont, and by willows that drooped down like women washing their hair. Wading birds stalked their prey in the shallows of the pond, and once, after a hurricane, gulls had blown in from the coast 200 miles away and taken refuge there, bobbing contentedly along its surface. A muskrat lived beneath the bank; he was a slender and stealthy creature who could slide down the bank and be undulating through the water in the blink of an eye, revealing little more than his small rounded ears and eyes and nose above the water as he swam.

As he walked over the spillway that ran beneath the road, he could see and feel the cool watery smell of the outflow. It murmured and gurgled from the pond, making its way first into Indian Fork Creek, then into the Choctaw River, the Broad River, the Cooper, Charleston Harbor and, finally, into the Atlantic Ocean and all the world beyond. That would make a great canoe trip some day, putting in somewhere along the Broad River and going all the way to the sea.

He walked into the woods beyond, hoping the cares of the day would evaporate as he walked. The air was fresh with resin. Pines and mimosas and black gums lined the narrow dirt road, their branches meeting overhead, subduing the light like heavy drapery. Around the curve, just inside the woods that lay beyond the pond, there were blackened remains of a campfire and a few beer cans, along with a gaping empty pizza carton. On the limb of a sumac bush, a condom dangled like the shed skin of a snake, a gray film against the greenery.

If he was aggravated that kids had partied and left their debris there, he could at least take heart that they had used a condom. Austerity had one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the nation. It was a soap opera that was replayed again and again; fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen year olds get hormonally overwhelmed, then terminally horny, and finally mistake tail light for love light. They “do it” somewhere, usually at home, and nine months later Austerity has a new citizen.

He emerged from the woods and into the field beyond, where broom straw danced, blond and delicate in the breeze. High-tension electrical lines were strung between steel towers that stalked like giants across the land, vanishing beyond the next rise in the earth. The power line right-of-way was dotted with the white tracery of Queen Anne’s Lace. Field daisies grew here and there, like specks of gold that had dripped from some artist’s brush.

He looked up into the sky to see a single red-tailed hawk soared, fierce and lovely as it cruised the thermals high above. He watched for a moment until it flew out of sight over the woodlands, then turned and walked back toward his house, remembering to stop and gather up the beer cans as he went. He left the spent condom hanging on the sumac bush. Good citizenship does have its limits.

He looked up at his house on the hillside as he emerged from the woods that surrounded the pond. It was a fine house, stately, a 1950’s tri-level built by a now deceased radiologist. Before it sat his Jaguar. The lawn was well trimmed, the autumn foliage bright and beautiful. But the house, even with Theo living in the apartment in the lower level, at 6,000 square feet, was two or three times what he actually needed. The Jag? Nice, but really still just a way to get from one place o the other. Something that cost half as much would do just as well.

He thought, there of Lilith, lost somewhere in the disaster in New York, her goodness and beauty, both inner and outer. The only thing of true value in his life recently he had let slip through his fingers. Looking again at the sumptuous house, the glitzy car, both as meaningless as the pebbles beside the roadway, he felt like sitting down and weeping.

When he trudged on up the hill to the house and entered through the kitchen table, Theo was serving up the fried chicken.

Lilith passed city hall and saw the blue and white emergency services van parked there. She approached, intent on determining where she could best help. Both towers were spouting smoke now, black smoke that climbed eastward into the sky. As she looked up, the South Tower, like a dying thing, collapsed onto itself as surely and precisely as if the collapse had been orchestrated by a demolitions engineer. Smoke and dust ballooned forth, and people in the vicinity fled northward, some crying out as they went.

Lil was overtaken by a cloud of dust, protected only in some degree by the peacock scarf that covered her nose and mouth. A portly man of middle years, red-faced and gasping, running from the place of destruction, clutched his chest with his right hand as he approached her, then collapsed into her as he fell to the sidewalk.

Heart attack. CPR time. She dropped to her knees, loosened the man’s tie, ripped his shirt front open and listened. There was no heartbeat. Looking up, she saw a paramedic, kit in hand, apparently from the Emergency Medical Van, in the distance. “Do you have a defibrillator? No heartbeat, no respiration.” He did not hear her, her voice being at that moment drowned out by a rumbling from the South Tower.

And at just that moment, from somewhere in the Manhattan sky, a cloud of masonry chunks tumbled downward like a meteor shower, a piece the size of a softball striking Lilith near her right temple. She collapsed on top of her of the dying coronary patient, blood flowing steadily from her temple to make tracings across her face and drip steadily from her chin to the pavement.

In the distance, sirens continued to wail and some screamed and cried out as thy fled the cloud of dust and smoke and debris that flowed from the fallen building like a tsunami down the street to where Lil lay unmoving across the corpse of the man she intended to save.

“Maybe,” Chris said to Theo, “if I’d been a little more decent about things, maybe Lil wouldn’t have gone to New York.

“Doc,” Theo replied, “no disrespect, but sometimes you think too much. No way you could’ve known what was going to happen in New York. Only the Lord did, and sometimes when stuff like this happens, I wonder if even the Lord wasn’t busy with something else or maybe He just a little absent minded. No way to know what would have happened in Austerity the same day if she’d been here.”

“Theo, you’re right. I guess I would feel a lot better if I just knew what was going on with her, but all the phone lines still are tied up. Or if maybe I could help her get home, even drive up there if I had to.”

“Doc, I don’t know. But phones get fixed, and airplanes will fly again. Listen Doc, could be there’s something you’re gonna be able to do, if you think about it.”

“You think so?”

“I think so, even if it’s not clear right this minute.”

On Friday, 14 September, Chris stood alone at the window of the jet-way at the Piedmont Regional Airport. It was three days after the tragedy in New York, the first day the Federal Aviation Commission allowed commercial airliners to fly again. He could see the first range or two of the Great Smoky Mountains on the horizon, misty and obscure in the haze of early autumn. Outside the poplars had shed most of their leaves and stood naked and desolate, their bare limbs uplifted in supplication beneath an autumn sun that was fast dripping to the horizon.

In the distance to the northeast, there was a tiny speck in the sky that grew as he watched, eventually becoming a jetliner, wheels reaching for the earth, landing lights bright specks on wings tipped with red and green lights. Flaps drooping down and engines moaning, the plane settled like grace and glory from above on the end of the runway.

The tires touched pavement and engines keened louder as the thrust reversers were deployed. Finally the plane turned at the far end of the runway and returned down the taxiway and slowly approached. Lights still flashing, it braked to a stop at the area where cargo buildings stood, still a full100 yards from the passenger terminal. The starboard engine was switched off and decrescendoed as its turbofan slowed. A ground crewman approached the plane and tucked yellow wooden chocks before and after the nose wheel and kicked them into place. A motorized lift table the color of marigolds rolled up to the cargo bay from the far side.

As Chris watched, unmoving, fascinated as if by a serpent, three ground crewman clad in blue overalls with fat red hearing protectors over their ears stepped onto the lift table and snapped the safety chains behind them. The hydraulic scissors of the lift stretched upward and waited.

On the airport sound system he vaguely heard something vaguely familiar; Pavorotti singing something. As the tenor powered into the refrain, Chris recognized the piece as Puccinni’s Nessum Dorme.

Hew was startled by a scream from behind him. He turned to see a child, a sturdy three-year-old boy lying on the blue carpet of the hallway, kicking and screaming as if its heart were being ripped out. The child, too weary to walk further, was swept from the floor and into his fathers arms. The parents, both clad in athletic shoes and droopy gray jogging suits, continued on their way, the child looking back tearfully over the father’s shoulder as they went. Chris returned his attention to the scene unfolding on the tarmac.

A hearse the color of midnight crept slowly onto the taxiway and stopped a respectful distance from the aircraft and the attendant table lift. The lift machine finally backed away from the plane that sat with its navigation and running lights blinking cheerfully and slowly lowered a gray metal coffin slowly before turning and rolling slowly toward the hearse that stood with its casket bay yawning, the dark suited funeral home workers standing on either side to receive the coffin. Assisted by ground crewmen, the morticians muscled the coffin into the hearse.

One ground crewman ran to the aircraft, jerked the chocks from the nose wheel. The starboard engine fired off again in a plume of heat shimmies. Another ground crewman, hands upraised, directed the aircraft toward the jet way.

Within minutes, the passengers began emerging from the entry door that led from the jet way, a grand variety of people all looking grimly intent on getting elsewhere. As Chris watched, mouth dry, no one he knew emerged. The gentleman who was apparently the final passenger stepped briskly by Chris.

When it seemed that the last passenger had appeared, one of the flight attendants, dragging her rolling bag behind her appeared. Chris continued to look at the jet way entrance, then started to turn away. He paused as he heard someone else coming up the jet way.

Lilith had on a pink jogging suit and carried a rolled up newspaper. Weary, a little disheveled, a large band-aid only partly covering a bruise on her right temple and cheek. She stopped in surprise when she saw Christopher waiting. “Chris?”

“Yeah. It’s me, Lil,” he swallowed and smiled a little, not sure how his presence would be received. She smiled back, that glorious smile that overwhelmed a bandage, a bruised face, and some degree of dishevelment as she stepped over and threw herself into Chris’s arms, embraced him, then kissed him long and deep.

Finally she stood back and looked at him then hugged him close again and spoke into his chest. “God, it’s good to see you.”

“Yeah, me too,” he said.

She stepped back and looked him in the face. “But Chris, how did you know what flight I’d be on? I didn’t know myself until the last minute.”

He pulled her closer and spoke into her ear. “I was at the clinic yesterday. Theo called, He’d never called me at the clinic before. He said, ‘Doc, pardon me for calling you at work. But they said on the radio the planes start flying again in the morning. I figured you’d want to know that, Doc. Never can tell who’ll be one of those planes, Doc.’ Then click, he just hung up. I went back in my office. I told Anna Jolley to shut it down, apologize for me, reschedule people. I didn’t know when you’d be in. So I met every flight.”

She spoke, her voice muffled against his chest again. “Thanks, sweetheart. Thanks so very much. It’s been so really fucking bad these last three days.”

“Yeah, I've been watching the tube. But I want to hear about what happened with you.”

“I want to tell you, but I’m just too weary to deal with it right now.” She sobbed, but only for a moment as she and Chris held each other close.

Chris nodded, “It’s OK. I can imagine. But please tell me this now anyway; the off-loading of the coffin. I wonder why they stopped and offloaded that coffin before discharging passengers.”

“Yeah, it was unusual. The captain came on the intercom on final approach. He said that we were carrying as he delicately put it, a coffin with human remains in the cargo hold. Somebody from way out in the county, he even told us a little about the young man; from Puerto Rico originally. Name was Oscar Ramirez. He worked in the kitchen in the World Trade Center. He said most of the ground crew people here had already done a double shift because everybody started playing catch-up when the FAA let planes fly again today. They needed to finish up and go home for safety regulation reasons if nothing else. Also, because of the uncertain schedule, the Ramirez family’d been waiting all afternoon to escort the young man’s body home. So the captain said if no one objected, we were going to get Mr. Ramirez get on the ground first before we off-loaded the living. Of course, no one objected, so that’s what we did. All of us on the plane were peering out the window when they retrieved the coffin. Oh, Chris, you could here people just crying so hard, me included. I guess all of us coming in from New York knew we were lucky it wasn’t us in the box. And we shared, I guess you could say, in the common humanity of a now dead young man.”

Chris shook his head, “All of you on that Delta flight became honorary pall bearers.”

Lil responded, “We did, in the truest sense, for Oscar Ramirez and his family. And we’d never even met him.”

Chris paused, then took a deep breath before speaking. “Lil, I didn’t know what had happened to you. Didn’t even know if you’d be back today or ever. But when I saw that coffin coming off the plane, I don’t want to tell you what I thought. For a moment when I though everyone was off the plane, I wished for a moment it was me in it instead of someone that I thought it was in that coffin.”

Lil said, “That bad, huh?” He swallowed hard, didn’t speak, just pulled her closer as they continued walking her head against his shoulder now.

Both of them found it hard to say anything further for a few moments, so they turned and walked away slowly, arms around each other’s waist, down the long corridor that led to the main terminal. Finally Chris spoke. “Nice.”

“Nice?”

“Yeah, the Muzak,” he replied.

She nodded just a little. “Yeah, real nice. The theme from Mozart opus 467.”

“Oh. I though it was the Theme from Elvira Madigan.”

“Same thing. Elvira Madigan’s the popularized version,” she said.

“Aren’t you smart?”

“Chris, one of the things I always loved about you is that you are s-o-o-o perceptive.”

Chris nodded, then added, “Yep. I know you’re smart. But I knew you were good-looking before I knew you were smart.”

“Flattery will get you…everywhere.”

“You know, I really love you.” He pecked her on the cheek as he spoke.

“Love you, too. But…and this is important; do you love me for my mind or for my body?”

“Have to think about it. In med school I did better in anatomy than neurology, though.”

She, laughed, removed her arm from around his waist and pinched him firmly on the butt.

In the parking lot outside the terminal, they paused to look in wonder as the last gold sliver of the evening sun dipped like a benediction beneath the cusp of the Great Smokey Mountains in the distance.

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume III - Number 9 - September 2006

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