Rick Moody - Right Livelihoods

My wife left on the early boat, trusting that I would not get into any of the locked cabinets in the dining room and that I would agree to return to the self-help meeting, which reconvened in the afternoon. Also, with the aid of our trusty domestic staff, I was to look after Skip. The weather was unseasonably warm and moist, and the sky was bleached white, as if it were the pad on which a momentous story was soon to be written.

I got down to work on the question of the aircraft.

As you know, our airstrip, since it was first created by the military, is sturdy enough to withstand the weight of a full transport plane, with its complement of fighting men. Therefore, as I’ve said, it’s possible that an aircraft as large as a jet could land here. A small jet would be more effective at eluding government capture and could ditch at one of the laboratories on Plum Island, scattering contaminated slurries on the breezes. Or it might collide with the nuclear power plant, likewise broadcasting radioactive materials. Helicopters have also been known to land on our airstrip, as when the most successful of the younger set tries to make it into work on Monday mornings.

These aircraft I have mentioned were theoretically feasible for any assault, and this I told Skip as we breakfasted on sugary cereals. “Skip,” I remarked, “I don’t want you to tell your mother any of what I’m about to tell you.” He nodded solemnly because except on those days when he glimpsed the enormity of his disability, the days when he railed at the world and destroyed household items, he was docile and accepting. He liked secrets, or at least the intimations of secrets. “I’m having trouble thinking all of this through,” I said. “There are just too many variables in my head. But here’s what I suspect. I suspect that the aircraft the hostiles used was not a jet or a helicopter, because it would attract too much attention. We need to think in terms of small single-engine or twin-engine propeller planes. What do you think, Skip? Piper Cub?”

Skip cried out the name of the plane, “Piper Cub!”

Cereal made him energetic.

“What about the Cessna?”

“Piper Cub!”

A single-engine plane can typically fly five hundred to nine hundred miles before refueling. That would greatly increase the number of available targets. Though it did depend, of course, on where the plane was hangared. The great Lindbergh sparked the interest in general aviation of this sort, and it was shortly after his flight, as you no doubt are aware, that William T. Piper purchased the Taylor Aircraft Corporation and received the appropriate licenses to develop its “cub” model. In 1938, the J-3 Piper Cub was introduced, and it became popular immediately. It was the training aircraft of choice in the postwar years. My own father, in fact, “Dutch” Van Deusen, was known to fly one.

“It’s a Cessna 414A,” I called to Skip, having long ago left behind my Lucky Charms. Who knew how many hours passed before this felicitous conclusion? I found, by querying the FAA Web site, that there was in fact a Cessna twin-engine plane with the registration number DB-81404, and that the owner was located in Massachusetts. But that was not all I learned. It was here that the uncanny part of my story caused me to spill a cup of coffee, up in the study, which would annoy Helen no end. I suspect you will have divined the owner of the plane by now, or the registered owner thereof. But I will make manifest my evidence. The registered owner of the aircraft was none other than one S. Hawkes-Mitchell.

How many S. Hawkes-Mitchells could there be? And could this Hawkes-Mitchell be the government agent who wrote the original Omega Force report, which had been leaked to me by the woman on whose loggia I had spent a night one month before? Was Hawkes-Mitchell working for us or them? Was he a man who merely dreamed up techno-thrillers? Or did his work involve consulting on national security issues, such that the thrillers were almost certain to have encoded military information contained within them? Did Omega Force: Code White precede the actual Omega Force, which I now believed was bent upon attacking the coast of the Northeast, such that the Omega Force was an effect of the novel? Or vice versa? Was Hawkes-Mitchell employed by one of the conservative think tanks? Was he associated, in an earlier era, with plots to furnish arms to the Nicaraguan Contras?

I did my best to enunciate when I called the FAA hotline to ask if there was a telephone number listed for the licensee of the Cessna in question. I made clear that there were legal issues involved. The operator asked if I had a head cold.

“I’m in excellent fettle, and while I’m touched by the thought, I don’t have time to discuss my health.”

She declined to give me the necessary telephone number, but directory information served ably in that regard. There was a feeling of momentousness when at last I was in possession of the telephone number of Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell. I was not sure of protocol with respect to an actual, living author. Should I tell Hawkes-Mitchell that I’d found myself eager to learn how his novel would end, though in truth the ending was hackneyed and predictable? Was it appropriate to tell him that I hadn’t found the character terribly sympathetic? And what if he was not the same Hawkes-Mitchell who composed Omega Force but was, rather, an assassin who could instantly cause to be distributed to the island a lethal dose of some rain forest venom that would be admixed with my antidepressants and my antiseizure medication, causing my instantaneous death before the eyes of my horrified loved ones?

I could sense that I was being delivered to the center of the mystery. I waited as the bell tolled on the other end of the line. Apparently there was no answering machine, because the ringer kept tolling and tolling long past what is acceptable in this day and age. At last a tired woman grumbled a curt greeting. Her voice sounded as though she’d had cigarettes for breakfast since years before the surgeon general’s first report on the hazards of that product, a health campaign I personally helped implement.

I asked for Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell.

“Excuse me?”

I asked again for S. Hawkes-Mitchell. Or Mr. Hawkes-Mitchell.

“I’m inquiring into the whereabouts of Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell.”

“Well,” she said, sighing mournfully, “I’m sorry to tell you then that Stuart is dead.”

“Dead?” As the author might have said himself, I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. “But I just read his book, and it was. . a pretty good book.”

“Stuart died last year, I’m afraid.”

“Would it be possible to ask how he died?”

“Who’s asking?”

I blanked for a moment, trying to come up with an appropriate pseudonym. “Well, this is Ned Roberts Jr. I’m an amateur pilot, looking for a, uh, I’m looking to buy a Cessna Skyhawk or similar model, and I was doing some inquiries into persons in western Massachusetts who might be interested in—”

“We don’t have the plane anymore.”

“I see, well, I—”

“Stuart had an accident in the plane.”

“He—”

“That’s right.”

“You mean the plane with serial number DB-81404 met with a. . with a fiery conclusion?”

“I hated the plane right from the beginning, and I told him to get rid of it.”

I continued to stress the consonants in my words, such that I probably sounded like a speech professional to her. “And you say this tragedy took place last year?”

“About fourteen months ago.”

“So there was no chance that he was. . because you see I could have sworn I saw the plane. . ”

It was then that I began to hear in her voice a growing suspicion. I couldn’t help, however, but push my inquiry to its logical conclusion. It was all clear to me now. I could see it as plain as the headlines on tomorrow’s daily papers. Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell, by virtue of his imagination, had breathed into life the Omega Force series long before recent global political events. Hawkes-Mitchell was trying to make an honest dollar, though he had in fact dreamed up a rather dreary thriller with unappealing characters. He was naturally unaware that the story had somehow spawned a genuine Omega Force, this cadre staffed entirely by dark-complected persons. Naturally, in the course of beginning to use their assault capability just as Hawkes-Mitchell had planned it, it had become necessary for the Omega Force to kill off the author himself, the artificer, lest he reveal the linkage between his pulp novels and the planned assault on the PIADC or the Osprey Nuclear Power Plant.