Dead Man’s Hand
Live man’s folly
By P X Duke
Copyright 2013 P X Duke
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0-9869558-4-6
Disclaimer
What follows is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Places mentioned by name are entirely fictitious and purely products of the author’s imagination, and are not meant to bear resemblance to actual places or locations.
15.1
Dead Man’s Hand
Live man’s folly
One man's intricate ring becomes another's folly in this short strange tale of a dead man who was unable to rest in peace.
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Dead Man’s Hand
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Dead Man's Hand
The last time I saw Jean-Marc alive, he had on a particularly noticeable and unique ring that he had picked up in his travels. It was in gold and silver, extremely detailed, of a tall ship, fully rigged and under full sail, on what appeared to be black onyx. I have never seen anything quite like it, before or since.
When I asked about the ring, he told me he found it during one of his market forays into the Merkato in Addis. The souk where he bought it had no one who was able to tell him anything about it.
I wanted to look at it more closely. When I asked him to take it off, he refused. Obviously it had a great deal of meaning to him, and to some extent I understood why, given the intricacy of the design. Where he bought it probably figured into it, too.
In any case, I thought the ring summed up every aspect of our occupations as aviators. We wandered around the world to wherever the jobs took us, mere transients, moving from place to place, crossing oceans and continents, going contract to contract, and moving from relationship to relationship with women we would never see again.
THE NATURE OF our chosen profession scattered the company’s employees far and wide across the country and the world. It was a rare occurrence when any of us ended up back at the head office in a group. When we did, we liked to get out on the hanger floor and mingle with the maintenance people responsible for the well-being of the aircraft with which we entrusted our lives and the lives of our passengers.
If the right crowd was in town, some of us would end up hitting the hotel down the road for an evening well-spent until closing time. The hotel owner was a former company employee. If he was in a particularly good mood, he'd lock the doors and allow the drinking and partying to go on well past closing time and into the wee hours of the morning.
Plenty of tips kept one or two of the waitresses interested, but only enough to encourage them to serve more alcohol. Not one of us ever convinced a single one to go home with us or to go out on anything resembling a date. Perhaps through experience they had grown wary of spending time with anyone involved in the transient world of aviation.
One of the maintenance crew that usually came along for the beer was young Bill, a lowly apprentice. He was a slow-witted, slow-talking, slow-moving man who spoke with a drawl that managed to irritate the hell out of anyone who spent too much time listening to him. Consequently, he had been labeled as not the brightest bulb in the hangar, so to speak.
Bill had a wife who didn't take kindly to his evenings spent out on the town with the boys and the resultant absences from the dinner table at home. Following a night of drunken debauchery, he would drag his sorry ass back into the shop on a Tuesday or a Wednesday or a Friday morning. He’d appear with a hang-dog look and a ready tale about what his wife had done to punish him for his indiscretions the night before.
I don’t recall that any of us told him we thought of her as a first-class bitch.
Eventually, we became fed up with listening to Bill's constant whining. It was really starting to drag down the celebratory atmosphere in the bars we all frequented as a group.
After one particularly long and winding nighttime trail of devastation and destruction, we ended up at a strip club to close out the evening's entertainment. When the place shut down after last call, some of us pulled Bill aside in the parking lot to give him a pep-talk before sending him on his way to his merry wife.
With our words of encouragement freshly implanted in Bill's tiny brain, he was no doubt eager to test our advice. He eagerly departed for house and home where we all knew he would be chastised by his bride one more time. His tardiness in arriving would most certainly result in bringing on wifey's disagreeable disposition and shrill tongue yet again.
Following this most recent episode, Bill didn't show at work for a couple of days. When someone finally noticed his absence, we chalked it up to phoning in sick, and our coffee-room discussion ended soon after.
Larry, the owner of the company—in his own right not to be outdone as a drinking machine, along with the rest of us—called Bill's bride to inquire if he was ill. Unfortunately for Bill, this was not the case. Upon hanging up the phone, Larry came out to let us know that Bill had been hauled off to jail.
A quick call to the precinct confirmed it, and one of us was dispatched to bail the man out. Bill was back on the shop floor once again. This time he had an even sadder tale of woe with which to regale his comrades.
It seems that our pep-talk of a few nights previous had really cheered Bill up and put him in the proper frame of mind for the coming confrontation with his blushing bride. Upon his arrival, he discovered his belongings had been deposited on the front porch.
The door was locked. The message was clear.
Bill, not one of the smartest flies circling over the horse turd, pounded on the door for a couple of minutes. Not getting the response he hoped for, and by now thoroughly fed up, Bill applied force and shoulder to the locked door.
Unfortunate as it was for Bill, his wife had condescended to open the door at the exact same moment. Both door and Bill landed on top of his bride. Woman that she was, she didn't take too kindly to this turn of events and consequently, when the police arrived, Bill was hauled off to jail.
Now you know how Bill's mind works, or doesn't, as the case may be.
We were all somewhat chastened by the unintended consequences of our advice-giving. Nevertheless, it afforded us a good laugh at Bill's expense.
The overseas project I headed up needed a third aircraft to cover the increased work load. The company boxed one up and had it flown into Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. It arrived via an Air France 747.
I delegated myself to getting the import documents completed. This proved to be a nightmare until I discovered the appropriate French official. He recommended the proper amount of baksheesh with which to anoint the palms of the overly officious locals. This encouraged the release of the aircraft from customs bond.
All that we needed was an additional pilot to crew the helicopter.
When the charter arrived and Jean-Marc stepped onto the tarmac, I was as surprised as he was. He had been with the outfit for almost as long as I had. We last worked together on forest fires in northern Canada, but we had never spent time in the same foreign locale.
His base had been Ethiopia. Consequently on his R&Rs he went into Addis to scour the markets there on the lookout for interesting and unusual bits and pieces of gold and silver for his female acquaintances around the globe.
I, on the other hand, preferred the more isolated regions on my rotations out, and consequently ended up in Mog, or Djibouti, or Galkayo, to name only a few. I preferred those places to getting to know the white enclaves in the larger centers such as Nairobi or Jo'burg, where one could become enmeshed in the local white perceptions of the continent's native affa
irs.
For the most part, I figured there was no point in going to Africa to see and experience a white world. Africa was black. Its former name on the old charts was the Dark Continent, for the unknown and mysterious visage it presented to the European explorer of the 19th century. I didn't want to miss out on any of that, even if it was the next century and things were starting to modernize.
Don't get me wrong, though. I enjoyed all that Nairobi had to offer, too. In fact, when I could get there I ended up spending quite a bit of time with an Israeli girl.
It took some time to get caught up on all of this, of course, and so Jean-Marc and I would retire to the local watering holes where we could sit and observe the local color. Mostly these spots were frequented by a few Djibouti regulars, la légion Étrangère and various and sundry other miscreants as could be found.
At one point we discovered a troupe of misguided German flight attendants trapped against their will with their flight crew during a grounding. We managed to rescue them from their boredom and brought them into the fold.
We spent ten days trolling the depths of Djibouti depravity with our new-found friends. When our aircraft was finally assembled and ready for departure, we said our goodbyes to the girls and flew off into the rising sun and lonely desert.
Eventually, the contract we