Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(21)
I had purchased a one-way ticket to San Juan, and from there a one-way ticket to Vieques. When the month was up, I would probably fly directly to New York. If I was able to sell the apartment remotely, as I hoped, it was entirely possible that I would never see Chicago again. As the plane continued to ascend and the lake vanished beneath the clouds, I found myself praying that one day—one day soon—this would no longer feel like a loss.
Several hours later, the plane descended over vivid blue-green waves and delivered me to the San Juan International Airport.
A man with a handwritten sign greeted me at the gate. With dark curls and deeply tanned skin, he looked Latino, but didn’t have so much as a hint of a Spanish accent. “You’re Libby Miller? Great,” he said in a way that made it impossible to discern whether he was being sincere or sarcastic. The wraparound shades he wore, even though we were indoors, did not help. He took my carry-on from me. “We’ll get your checked bag, then head to the tarmac.”
“Tarmac?” I asked. Thanks to my new friend gin and the exhaustion plaguing me, I had fallen asleep shortly after takeoff and slept most of the flight. Now I had cottonmouth, a pounding headache, and the linguistic capacity of a second grader.
“Private planes use different runways from the commercial carriers, and they usually don’t have gates,” he said. “You did book a charter flight to Vieques, right?”
“Right,” I said, massaging my temples.
“Great. Do you have to use the bathroom or anything? There isn’t one on the plane.”
“I’m good,” I said, though this had not been true for more than a week. I tagged after him to the baggage claim. Once we located my suitcase, we wound through a series of halls, eventually coming to a security checkpoint where a uniformed woman barely glanced at my license. A set of stairs deposited the two of us onto a blazing hot field of cement. The roar of jet engines shot through the air, and I covered my ears. The man pointed at a battered pickup truck at the edge of the lot, indicating that was where we were heading.
When we reached the truck, he threw my suitcases onto the bed, then opened the passenger door for me. The truck didn’t have the name of the airline on it, and I hesitated as I imagined Paul chiding me for not being more cautious. Eh, I thought as I thanked the man and climbed in. Not that I wanted to miss out on my vacation, but the Grim Reaper was lurking just offstage anyway. If this guy wanted to drive me to a secluded beach and strangle me—which seemed highly unlikely, as he barely seemed to register my presence—then it would probably be no worse than, and possibly preferable to, death by overzealous cell colonization.
I was hoping for air-conditioning, but the man rolled down the windows and I spent the next few minutes pretending to be entranced by palm trees while wondering if I was sweating hard enough to make it look like I wet my pants. We pulled up near an airstrip where a row of planes was parked. The man grabbed my suitcases and began walking to a small plane. Scratch that—a plane so minuscule you could park it in the average suburban driveway. He pulled down a panel that made up the better part of the right side of the plane and suddenly I understood Paul’s fear of flying all too well: this thing was a tin can with wings, and I was about to allow it to hurl me into the sky.
The man started up a rickety set of stairs attached to the panel, both suitcases in hand. When he reached the top, he turned. “Coming?”
I looked at him, confused. There wasn’t a single other person in sight. “Where’s the pilot?” I asked.
“You’re looking at him,” he said. I was indeed, and he was wearing deck shoes, a pair of khaki shorts, and a linen shirt that was two washes away from becoming a rag. I must have done the disappearing-neck trick because he said, “Hey, look, I’m doing you a favor. It’s my day off and I could have said no when they asked me to fly you, which would mean you would’ve ended up on the ferry. And trust me, unless you want to lose your lunch, you don’t want to take the ferry on a windy day like today.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed or irritated. “I didn’t have lunch,” I said. “And thanks, I suppose.” I climbed in after him. “I’m the only passenger?”
“Yep,” he said. He turned around to face me and finally lifted his sunglasses. His dark brown eyes met my own, and he stared at me for what seemed to be longer than a socially acceptable length of time (though to his credit, I didn’t look away, either). Something odd in me had just begun to flutter when he pivoted and pulled the glasses back over his eyes. “Sit where you want,” he said.
“Okay,” I said flatly. There were just a handful of seats to choose from; I took one behind him to the right, which had a decent view out the tiny cockpit window as well as the side window. Shades firmly in place, he swiveled back around and ran me through the emergency procedures, which involved little more than a seat belt and a prayer, then handed me a large pair of noise-blocking headphones. “It’s a quick flight, about twenty-five minutes, but it’s loud. And Puerto Rico gets busy in the fall, so it can take a while to get out of San Juan.”
He wasn’t kidding. We sat on the runway for the better part of an hour as large sweat stains formed in the pits of my T-shirt, and my jeans papier-machéd themselves to my thighs. I cursed myself for not taking two minutes in the terminal to change into a dress, then chided myself for caring. After all, I had bigger fish to fry than body odor, and besides, I would never see this alleged pilot again.