The Art of Crash Landing Read Online Free PDF

good at hiding disappointment.
    I shut the door and roll down the window. Queeg comes up beside the car and leans over. “Are you going to stop by the beach before you go?”
    It’s the closest thing to visiting my mother’s grave, and he can’t help but remind me about that once in a while. Now and then when we’re winding up a telephone conversation he’ll ask if I’ve been lately, and I always tell him yes , which is never really true. When I go to the beach, I avoid Fort Pickens, instead choosing Casino Beach or Opal Beach. I tell myself it doesn’t really matter. It’s all the same water.
    â€œNot today,” I tell him. “It’s in the wrong direction.”
    He nods. For all that he’s still sentimental about a woman he divorced years before her death, Queeg is a practical man. He understands an urge to go in the right direction.
    â€œDrive safe, sweetheart,” he says.
    I turn the key and after an initial roar the engine settles down to a gentle rumble with only a faint rattling sound. Nothing I’ll be able to hear over the radio.
    Queeg steps away and Min He comes forward and leans in close to deliver her parting words.
    â€œYou are a bad one,” she says in a voice pitched just loudenough for me to hear over the engine. “You will get what you deserve. Someday . . .” here she pauses, frowning as she struggles with the words. “Someday, your roast chicken will come home.”
    When I laugh at her mangling of one of Queeg’s favorites, she scowls and straightens up, crossing her arms over her ample chest. The engine noise drowns out her voice, but her lips move in one last “Stupid girl.”
    Queeg is grinning. That one, he heard.
    I back the car up, turn it around, and am almost to the gate when I look over my shoulder at Queeg standing there, looking frail, his gray sweater blending into the backdrop of the cheerless, sagging trailers. He has an arm around Min He’s waist, and I’m glad that he has her, even if it seems to me like she has a pretty wide mean streak.
    I tap the horn and stick my arm out the window for one last wave.
    â€œHurry home,” he calls out.
    I accelerate, but slowly, checking my rearview mirror every few seconds. With each glance, Queeg grows smaller, the grip of his love for me less and less painful, until finally I can breathe again. One last glance in the mirror and he is just a speck on the horizon, his hand still raised in a farewell. Or a benediction. I’m not sure which.

CHAPTER 5
    A nything that can go wrong, will go wrong Queeg likes to say, and he’s not even the one trying to drive eight hundred miles in a piece-of-shit 1978 Chevy Malibu. It’s around Hammond, Louisiana, that I first notice something is wrong. A faint shudder when I accelerate, a minor lurch, then another. Forty-five minutes later I’m nearing Baton Rouge and the lurching has amplified and my progress down the road is involving a bit more hopping than I would prefer. It’s only happening when I speed up or slow down, but that’s not helpful in the long run. It’s not like I can drive another six hundred miles without stopping even if I could forgo eating and drinking. I don’t have a bottomless gas tank or an astronaut diaper.
    I pull off the interstate in Merrydale, a suburb of Baton Rouge, which, for the record, seems far too dreary and flat to have inspired its name. My lunch is unexceptional, but eating it averts my stupid empty-stomach nausea. Things are looking up, in fact, until I put the car in drive and find that I’ve lost my high gear completely.
    My new maximum speed without redlining the rpm is thirty miles per hour. The car moves smoothly, if loudly, in this gear, soI decide to keep driving—not that there are many other choices on a Sunday afternoon with no money in the middle of a state where I don’t know a soul. So, emergency flashers blinking