The Absence of Angels by W. S. Penn

Author:W. S. Penn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

33.

Sanchez paid me and paid me well to fly in and out of San Francisco, and on one of my trips I met the woman for whom my uncle had left the Vegomatic. It was the only time I would meet Karen Manowitz, in the San Francisco airport, where I had been trying to fly a stewardess named June—a hopeless exercise. June was due to take off for Denver, and I was carrying a shipment of softwood Kachinas, mass-made in Chinatown by unemployed garment workers, which Sanchez sold at outrageous prices at Johnny Three Feet’s Trading Post. Yet June’s little outfit pushed her breasts up into a pale, smooth heart that made me breathless with a subtle pain like pneumonia, and it was a way to pass the time. Besides, after hundreds of takeoffs and landings, I was curious about those yellow cups that drop down on plastic tubes, which Juney and her ilk demonstrated on each and every flight.

“Where,” I asked her, “do they keep the oxygen?” June looked quizzical, then confused, and finally bored when I said, “After all, above the masks are coats and carry-on luggage. Not much oxygen, there.”

“I take off in an hour,” June said. “Let’s see … I land in Denver at three o’clock and lay over for two hours before I turn around.”

Sitting on a barstool, trying to work the conversation away from June’s scheduled takeoffs and landings and trying to overcome the crashing boredom June obviously felt at my trying to fly her, I heard a familiar voice sing out, “Hey, Jude,” and I turned in fatal recognition to spot uncle spotting me, on his arm a dark-haired woman whom I could describe only as compact. She wasn’t short and she wasn’t tall. Neither was she voluptuous. But her clothes and the skin that showed beneath or beyond the clothes were filled with comfortable economy, as though every inch of skin and clothing had been designed and engineered for maximum efficiency without excessive show or luxury. Rather than beautiful or sexy, she was well-made, and the comfortable, easy way in which she walked beside uncle made me relax so much that I nearly fell off the stool. Years later, when I thought about her, I would know what I’d come to mean by attractive, that seemingly empty and ineffectual word that I can’t help using. Unlike uncle’s wife who even in house slippers walked as though she were wearing spike heels, her body hard and sharp and her sex clinically hidden, this woman on uncle’s arm was one you could hold without having to suit up in protective pads first.

“Hey, Alley,” uncle called across the bar.

“Who is that?” June said. I did not appreciate the criticism implicit in her voice. The tone was that of a woman who plays Simon Says in bed, unable to relax and simply have an orgasm because her nerves cannot forget all of the close calls, the near misses of all the metered men she’s had to endure in the backseats of taxis.

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