30
“Peaches. You okay in there, Peaches? Such a pretty bird. My Peachy, Peachy, Peachy.”
Freddy Hagerman glared at the woman across the airplane’s central aisle as she stared into the multicolored bird-carrying travel bag on her lap. Jesus H. Christ. If the idiotic woman’s cooing wasn’t bad enough, now the damn thing was squawking. He’d been hoping to get some sleep on the flight to LA.
Three quick presses of the call button brought the head stewardess, an aging blonde who could have passed for a storm trooper, beelining toward him.
“Sir, one press of the button is quite enough. May I help you?”
Just then the bird squawked again, this one an ear-splitting screech highlighted by the laughter of several people in nearby rows. Freddy stared at the stewardess, his raised eyebrows leaving no doubt as to what he regarded as the problem.
The stewardess turned her attention to the woman. The bird woman was an older lady, probably in her mid to late sixties, her attention so focused inside the mesh of the travel cage that she had failed to notice either Freddy’s annoyance or the stewardess’s arrival.
The stewardess leaned in closer. “Ma’am. Excuse me, but I’m going to have to ask you to put the case under the seat.”
The look on the woman’s face could not have been more horrified if the stewardess had just told her the bird would now be served as lunch. A heated discussion ensued, only abating when it became clear that the chief stewardess, whom Freddy had begun to think of as Mein Frau, would not be cowed.
With the bird case safely settled beneath the seat, the squawking miraculously subsided. Then Freddy discovered that, because he was in front of an exit row, his seat would not recline. For the next four hours of sleepless hell, he was forced to endure his head nodding forward hard enough to cramp his neck and a panic from bird woman as Peaches discovered how to unzip its case. This time the old lady refused to be mollified until a frantic search turned up enough tape to secure the zipper.
LAX, perhaps the most crowded and uncomfortable airport in the continental US, had never been something Freddy looked forward to walking into, until now. By the time the plane rolled to a stop at the gate and Freddy rose to retrieve his carry-on from the overhead storage compartment, he was ready to wade through hell itself if it got him off that plane.
Bird woman leaned down and retrieved the case from its resting place, cooing out a string of “Peachy, Peachy, Peachies” before setting it on her seat. Something in Freddy’s face must have given her the impression that he wanted to hear a detailed explanation of why she had been so concerned about the damn bird because she immediately turned toward him and began imparting a detailed breakdown of the events. As if he hadn’t been a firsthand witness.
As her voice droned on, the bird case on the seat behind her tumbled to the floor with a small thud that sent the woman spinning in that direction, a squeal of horror issuing from her lips. “Peaches!”
As Freddy disengaged himself to follow other passengers off the aircraft, a grin split his face. Perhaps there was a God after all.
His newly acquired good mood failed to last. Arriving at the rental car terminal, Freddy failed to find his name on the Gold Club reservation board, something that resulted in an hour-long delay while the attendant placed repeated calls to the office, trying to locate his reservation.
As he pulled onto Airport Boulevard, Freddy glanced at his watch. 4:30 p.m. LA traffic at rush hour. Lovely. He could only hope this trip wasn’t a harbinger of things to come.
It was just after 11:15 p.m. when Freddy finally pulled into the Motel 6 just off El Camino Real in Santa Barbara. As he stumbled into the office to check in, his gaze fell on a sign printed with the slogan, “Welcome to the American Riviera.”
“Yeah, right,” Freddy mumbled to himself as he dropped his bag and banged on the bell.
One thing he had to admit; although the attendant was away from the desk, they had left the light on for him.