The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [64]
After walking for another forty minutes we reach the site of the crash. I look around at what’s left of the plane. The cabin was almost totally destroyed and so there’s nothing much left except the tips of the wings and the tail, which is intact. But there’s no nose and the engine is completely smashed. No one has found the propeller even though there has been an extensive search for it. There is no dashboard either, not even melted parts. It seems that the plane’s aluminum frame crunched on impact and then melted.
Since small Cessnas are such lightweight planes, I’m able to lift the entire tail and flip it over. The specialist tells me that the fire that melted the plane was probably caused by impact rips in the fuel tanks are in the wings on both sides of the cabin. I also find bits of bone in the ashes and pieces of my father’s camera. I stand against a rock next to the ranger as the Cessna specialist hesitantly takes some photographs of us that I want.
I also talk to the pathologist later that day, after a nap, and he tells me that the body was shaken up on its trip down the mountain in the plastic bag, since what he received in the pathology lab is quite different from what the primary sighting reports indicate. The pathologist tells me that he found most of the organs unrecognizable “as organs” due to the devastating impact and severe burning damage suffered by my father. Since the body is unrecognizable as my father, identification is done on his fake teeth. My father’s original teeth were lost in an automobile accident on PCH when he was twenty, I find out.
• • •
On the flight back to L.A. I sit next to an old man who keeps drinking Bloody Marys and mumbling to himself. As the plane makes its descent he asks me if this is my first time in L.A. and I say “Yeah” and the man nods and I put the headset back on and listen to Joan Jett and the Blackhearts sing “Do You Wanna Touch Me?” and tense up as the plane breaks through smog to land. As I get up, taking out my overnight bag from the overhead compartment, I drop my lighter in the old man’s lap and he hands it to me, smiling, and, sticking his tongue out a little, offers me a role in a porn film starring some good-looking black guys. The only things in my overnight bag are a couple of T-shirts, a pair of jeans, one suit, a copy of GQ an unopened letter from my father that was never sent, my bong, and a handful of ashes in a small black film container, the rest having been gambled away at a blackjack table in the casino of Caesars Palace. I close the overhead compartment. The old man, wrinkled and drunk, winks at me and says “Welcome to L.A.” and I say “Thanks, dude.”
I open the door of the apartment and walk in and turn on the television and put the overnight bag down in the sink. Martin’s not here. I pull a bottle of apricot-apple juice out of the refrigerator and sit on the balcony waiting for Martin or Christie. I get up, open the overnight bag and find the GQ and read it out on the balcony and then I finish the juice. The sky gets dark. I wonder if Spin called. I don’t hear Martin open the door. The ice machine in the refrigerator clanks out cubes of ice.
“Man, it was hot today,” Martin says, holding a beach towel and a volleyball.
“Was it?” I ask him. “I heard it snowed.”
“Do any gambling?”
“I lost about twenty thousand dollars. It was okay.”
After a while Martin says, “Spin called.”
I don’t say anything.
“He’s a little pissed, Graham,” Martin says. “You should have called him.”
“Oops big-time,” I say. “I’ll give him a call.”
“We have reservations at Chinois at nine.”
I look up. “Great.”
The music from the television carries out to the balcony. Martin turns away and walks back into the apartment. “I’m gonna peel a pomegranate, then take a shower, okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.” I move off the balcony too and try to find Spin’s number but then I’m following Martin into the bathroom and later I find Christie’s Guess jeans by the side of Martin’s bed and underneath that is a bayonet.