Not sure I remember too much about actually graduating from high school, but I do remember that summer after. Those first three months after – when I could finally say something like 'Free at last, free at last, God Almighty – free at last!' – and not feel like a complete idiot. Of course, only an idiot would think that – but suddenly life, and everything about it, felt so different. The idea that the drudgery of school was somehow over and done with, that life would be smooth sailing ahead, all clear skies and fair winds off the stern rail – forever. I think it was the certainty I felt that seemed so entrancing. That everything going forward would just be – better. Better than the last four months had been, anyway.
There was only one cloud on my horizon, yet she had been, I thought, behind me.
Her name was Jen. Jennifer, and we'd broken up midyear, in December – though I didn't quite know it at the time.
I'd gone to Colorado for Christmas break, that ritual parole from boarding school purgatory I looked forward to – beginning some time in September – and I said goodbye to Jen knowing full well that when I got back to campus life would resume right where we'd left off. She was going to the Caribbean to meet her father – sailing, I think, was the original plan, but of course she met someone. A kid from St Paul's over in Concord, and they, presumably, fell in love. By the time we got back to campus there was nothing left to say; I could see it in her eyes, as I had seen it with my own. As soon as I saw them, as a matter of fact, I knew we were done. My Tink had flown away...
Boarding schools – or more to the point, co-ed boarding schools in the 60s – were seething caldrons of hormones, stirred constantly by needful, fragile egos. They're living plays about small town life writ large, with a cast of characters that included a collection of beady-eyed con-men and more than a few cheating housewives, the lid screwed down tight by underpaid staff who would rather have been somewhere, anywhere else. From the moment you arrived in the Fall until the moment you left in early summer, there are two things you thought about: why did my parents send me here; and when was all this bullshit going to be over and done with.
Of course, there was an easy remedy not so easily had. For boys, nirvana lay just across the quad – in the girl's dorms. The Holy Land, the Forbidden Zone – and images of Steve McQueen sliding out of a dimly lit tunnel and onto that drab motorcycle in The Great Escape ought to come to mind right about now – this was where teenage salvation lay. Just a few hundred yards away, supposedly just out of reach. We, of course, saw each other in class and at meals, and for those who kept up their grades, during 'study hall' in the library after the evening meal, yet sooner or later we all discovered the secret routes out of our dorms – into the sweet embrace and warm breath of our desire.
Jen and I had hooked up early in our junior year and we'd been 'an item' since. We were inseparable, or so I thought. We ate together, and on weekends I'd sit on a sofa in the commons room with her head on my lap while we read Milton and Vonnegut together. When it was warm at night we'd sneak out to the fields on the other side of Greenfield's Road, and some nights we'd even take a moment to look up at the stars. After a year together I was sure I'd discovered the gossamer contours of forever, my very own womb with a view, but things change. They fall apart in the widening gyre.
As summer came to us that first year, the prospect of so much time apart was shattering, and we parted that spring vowing to write every day, but I cheated. I wrote two, sometimes three letters a day – though usually at night – and in just a few weeks I started getting a couple a day from Jen. I'd look at the postmark, from Galveston, Texas, rip the letter open and start reading.
We had it, I think you could say, bad, but her's was a guiding light, and she led me on.
That summer was my third flying, and I was working on my multi-engine rating that June, so was in ground school most mornings and flying at least three hours a week – more on the weekends, with my father. When time came for me to make my first extended solo cross country flight, the choice of destinations was easy, and obvious. Galveston, Texas, here I come!
I made the flight in my Dad's Beech Travel Air, an old if reliable twin engined airplane, too well equipped for what it was, and I left Addison Airport, on the north side of Dallas, around midday. Heading almost due south, I skirted Austin and San Antonio, leaving them to the west of my line, and I arced west of the Houston area and slipped on into Galveston before two in the afternoon. Before the really big thunderstorms formed, in other words. So as soon as I had the Beech tied down I called my instructor, then my father, telling them that big storms were moving in and that I'd fly back the next morning.
"Good call," said my flight instructor, admiring my cautious nature.
"Well, did you pack any goddamn rubbers?" my father snorted, admiring my foresight. Which was, all in all, odd – as I shouldn't have needed to pack anything for a day trip. It was, I'm trying to say, hard to pull one over on my old man, especially where the opposite sex was concerned.
And yes, Jen was waiting for me in the parking lot, behind a chain-link fence next to the little terminal.
With her father, by the way.
He was a professor of gynecology at the medical school in Galveston, and I'd met him in passing at Parent's Day that last October. We'd hit it off too, and he'd been impressed I was so committed to flying – and at such an early age, I guess. He, of course, wanted to see the Beechcraft so I walked them out to the flight line and gave them the nickel tour, and had to explain that I couldn't take them up for a ride as I hadn't taken my check-ride yet. He seemed satisfied that I was a responsible young man after that, then we hopped in his Cadillac and drove into town. He had a house not far from the seawall, maybe a block in, and I remember the lawn was half grass and half white sand. I'd never seen anything like this town. Galveston seemed a city perched on the ragged edge of survival, one hurricane away from oblivion, and the muddy water in the Gulf looked anything but inviting.
"Blows in from the beach," Dr Flesh said as I looked at the yard. Oh, yes, that was his name. Harry Flesh – and I kid you not. He tried to talk me into medical school later that evening, too. "You should think about, Spud. There are a lot of openings in gynecology, despite all the hairy situations you can find yourself in."
And as if right on cue, Jen rolled her eyes. She'd heard that one before, I guessed.
Yet I laughed until I cried. And I think I was his new best friend after that.
He took us out to dinner that night, to a seafood place called Gaido's, and I think that was the first time I'd ever eaten a pound of butter for dinner. Everything was slathered in butter, or drowning in bubbling vats of butter, and in my plate of sautéed lump crabmeat the poor critters were doing the backstroke through oceans of silky, golden butter.
He left us alone on the back porch after we got back to their place, and I guess that was the first time I'd noticed there was no Mrs Flesh.
"She died a couple of years ago," Jen told me, but she was evasive around the memory, like we were walking on dangerous ground now.
"Oh? What happened? Was she sick?"
She shook her head, looked away. "No. She was murdered."
I don't think I said a word.
"She was up in Houston. They found her in a hotel room."
"Found her?"
"Maybe a day after it happened. She'd picked up some man and gone to this hotel downtown, and he killed her. Took everything from her purse, which was how they caught the guy."
"Jesus," I whispered.
"That's when my dad decided to send me away to school."
