Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

She took the blouse off his lap before he could answer, and the Marine looked up as she walked away with it, her tight, firm ass moving all too nice under her snug-fitting blue uniform skirt. As Jack watched and liked what he saw, he answered to no one who could hear him, “Sure.”

Stacey had long wild curly blond-tipped hair that brushed off her shoulders, dark underneath the blond, and even darker eyebrows, but bright blue eyes like turquoise jewels. Jack couldn’t help but stare at her pretty face as she came back toward him.

When he caught himself staring, Gunner Valentine blinked, and said as she came past him, her hand gently patting his shoulder, “Thanks a lot.” Then he added with a smile, “Phase that pays?”

Stacey laughed and headed to the aft of the plane. A few minutes later, she wore a blue apron and pushed a drink trolley up the aisle with the other flight attendant, a young, slim, redheaded girl named Patricia. Skinny but athletic, with a nice rack and can.

Jack took a Dr Pepper and a pack of pretzels. As Stacey pushed past him, she nudged his shoulder with her butt, and chortled. When he looked up at her, a big grin on his face, she gave him one of those smiles.

“What do you do in the Marines?” Stacey asked Jack a half hour later, and about that much time left in their flight to El Paso. She had wandered down the aisle, as if she was making a second check for trash and empty cans when she stopped by the Marine’s seat.

Closing his notebook, Jack looked up at her, and shrugged. “Mostly sit behind a desk these days, I suppose,” and pointed at the rank on his collar.

“Sure a lot of fruit salad and glitter on your jacket for a guy who just sits behind a desk,” Stacey said. “I recognize your face.”

Jack was surprised. “You do?”

“You’re that guy,” she said. “They had your picture in TIME magazine. I read the whole story. Al-Qaeda took you prisoner and you escaped and rescued some girls the insurgents had taken into slavery. The story said two of them got killed, but one made it out alive with you. That senator. What’s his name?”

“Carlson,” Jack offered.

“Yeah, that’s it. Carlson from Nevada,” Stacey continued. “He called you a special kind of hero.”

“Don’t believe everything a politician says,” Jack said. “I’m nobody special. Honest!”

The flight attendant smiled big and knelt by Jack. “We’re laying over in El Paso tonight. The flight crew. Patricia and I split a room. We’re at the Del Norte Hilton.”

“Nice place,” Jack said, and looked again at her blue eyes and the dark underlayer of her curly blond hair. She had him tempted.

“So, with us landing fairly early,” Stacey said, then blushed bright red. “If you have a friend… Patricia and I want to go dancing. Or if you don’t have a friend, maybe you can dance with us both?”

Then Stacey quickly stood up, beet-faced, and rolled her eyes. “I’ve never done this before, so I feel a little awkward. Hitting on you?”

“Hey, that’s cool,” Jack said, and instinctively gave her a pat on the hand. “I haven’t been home much in the past fifteen or so years, so I wouldn’t know where to start when it comes to picking places to go dancing. Besides, I have family and friends waiting to see me. I doubt I’d have time. But wow, it really is tempting. Seriously.”

Stacey reached in her skirt pocket and took out a silver case with her personal calling cards inside it. She took one out and handed it to Jack.

“My cell number’s on the card, also my address in Dallas, and my email, too,” she said. “Think about it and maybe give me a call. Even down the road if you can’t make tonight.”

She walked away before Jack could say anything else. He looked at the card and didn’t quite know what to do. So he tucked it in his shirt pocket and opened his computer.

As the plane began to descend, it banked into a standard rate turn, entering the terminal control area approach. Gunner Valentine looked out the window and saw El Paso coming below. He found his notebook case and tucked the MacBook inside, then looked straight down. His hometown.

Below, like looking down on a bad dream, he saw the Devil’s Triangle. City fathers and law enforcement had worked for years to improve El Paso’s notorious hood, but it still remained the hood. Land of Barrio-Azteca outlaws, drugs, violence, whores, addicts, chronic gloom, and short lives. A ways over, but still in the valley, Jack could see his own neighborhood. Coronado High School just past it, where he had played his glory days of football. Liberty Cruz had cheered him as he ran long for touchdown passes.

On the hill, he saw the plush streets where Liberty had grown up. The rich hood, where the money flowed. Most kids there went to private schools, but Paul Cruz had sent his daughter to the public schools. Deep down, Jack liked Liberty’s dad, who never forgot his poor roots and did a lot of lawyer work helping the poor kids in the real bad hood, down in the Devil’s Triangle.

“Fucking shit hole,” Jack grumbled under his breath as his eyes followed Hondo Pass from Dyer Avenue to Gateway Boulevard, and the blocks and blocks of poverty, violence, and crime they surrounded.

Devil’s Triangle had changed Jack’s life forever. Not the hood but the thugs the hood had bred. One bad night. That’s all it took. One really bad decision by an angry, seventeen-year-old Jack Valentine.

As the plane made its final descent into El Paso, Jack wondered how his life might have turned out had he not gone to Sonny Gomez’s bloody bucket biker bar that night, so many years ago. On the positive side, however, it did put him on the tracks that led to the Marine Corps and this life he now led.

Red neon from the sign outside slashed through the front door of the El Gomez Club as Jack Valentine and three big boys trailing at his heels pushed their way inside the filthy dive and headed to the bar.

Two buzz-cut cholos in high-belted khaki pants and untucked blue-plaid shirts, single buttoned at their tattooed necks but wide open from there down, beer bellies protruding, stretching tight the rib knit of their wife-beater undershirts, stepped aside and watched as the four teenagers ambled past them.

“¡Hijole! ¿Que la chingada?” one whined in subdued breaths to the other, knowing trouble had just walked in.

“That baboso ’s back again?” the other sang back.

“ Pendejo must not have got his fill,” the first one said.

“Looks like he brought help this time, ese ,” the other said, and they both nodded like bobbleheads, watching.

Across the nasty saloon, a yellow light shone over a game of Nine-Ball that fell dead quiet. Every eye in the joint now watched the outlander quartet belly up.

This stinking swill house with the red neon flashing GOMEZ outside sat at the corner of Norton Street and Hondo Pass Avenue on the top end of what Texans in El Paso in 1988 called “the Devil’s Triangle.” Bordered by Hondo Pass on the north, Gateway Boulevard on the west, and Dyer Avenue on the east, this wedge of slum blocks had the reputation of the worst of the worst in an already rough city sharing the same stretch of border with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Lives sell cheap here in this Paso del Norte outlaw hood. Drugs and guns flowed like the piss and beer at Sonny Gomez’s gangsta water hole. Sane people avoided this slice of ugliest El Paso life, but anyone calling a barely seventeen-year-old Jack Valentine and his three sixteen-year-old fellow Golden Thunderbirds from the Coronado High School football team anything resembling sane or even remotely rational tonight had better think again.