A hundred or so feet above the town of Maryville, Matt Drabek was at peace.
The single-engine Cessna he was piloting cruised over the town on a beautiful afternoon in May, over the traffic light at Main and Central streets where midday passery shuffled about their business, over the town square, the town hall, the residential neighborhoods where his house once stood among the rows of modest three-bedroom tracts, over Casy's Supermarket where his wife Maureen was assistant manager, over the Maryville High School where his daughter Melissa attended tenth grade, and over the Bradbury Surveying and Title Agency, where he spent seventeen years of his life until the beginning of last year.
“It's this damn economy.” his boss, Tom, told him when he signed his layoff notice. Construction was way down. Land wasn't being surveyed for new projects because houses weren't being built anymore because banks weren't lending because people splurged their life savings on the McMansions that kept sprouting up everywhere like crabgrass until suddenly realizing they couldn't afford the mortgage payments.
Not that Matt himself was immune. The foreclosure notice for his house arrived in the mail two months ago. Since then flying became what was once a recreational thing every three to four months into an obsession. Maureen chastized him for it one day before he stepped out the door.
“How long are you gonna keep this up?” she asked.
“Keep what up?” he replied, slightly annoyed.
“Running away from your problems!”
Matt felt like a teenager locking horns with his mother every time they had this discussion.
“When I find a way to deal with them. Right now I just need some breathing room to figure all this out, that's all.”
“Yeah, well, when you do and find yourself in the street, Melissa and I will be at my mother's!” she said coldly. Dealing with his bullheadedness was something she was not very good at.
“I'll figure it out!” he shouted back, slamming the door behind him.
Up here, Matt felt safe. The phone wasn't ringing with those damn bill collectors on the other end. Nor were human resource reps calling to schedule interviews and then never hearing from them again. Nobody could touch him here. It all felt as if he were sitting high in a tree while
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a pack of bloodthirsty wolves waited below, clawing at the tree trunk.
If only he could fly into the sun, he thought, to a place where nobody rich and powerful and greedy could take what was left of good, decent people like him. It if ever existed.
Matt banked left and flew over a patch of woods. He'd been a pilot since he was a teenager, his father owning a charter air service and flying school at the local airport. Until he was nineteen, when his father and some passengers on their way to a state basketball final crashed into a farm field in the middle of a snowstorm. The passenger chartering the trip, a local businessman and town council official, had paid him extra despite his misgivings about flying in a snowstorm.
There were no survivors from the crash. The families of the victims sued his father's air service, causing it to fold along with the bad press suspecting his father was a corrupt and inept pilot. It took the family home and most of Matt's college money to hire a lawyer to prove to everyone that he wasn't. But the strain took it's toll on Matt's mother, who died from a broken heart a year later.
It was just after three o' clock when Matt reached the skies over Albany. He thought of Maureen and Melissa and fought off a strong urge to go home. Back to being a husband and father and the rat race to which he was unwillingly a part of. But he fought it off, thinking of the letter he left behind on the kitchen table before he left. He spent two hours writing it in the pre-dawn hours.
Maureen,
You and Melissa will probably never understand why I'm doing this. I don't even understand it myself.
But there are certain times in life when a man is called upon to do whatever he feels in his own heart is right and just. Whatever is wrong, he needs to do what must be done to set things right again.
In this world a man isn't a man anymore. He's a number without a name. A footnote in a rich banker's computer showing how much he can take from a workin' man and get away with it. They did it to my parents. And now they're trying to do it with you, me and Melissa. And I'm not going to let them.
I'm doing this for you, but mostly for Melissa, so she can grow up in a better and more honest world than what we have now. We all make the world the way it is. But it's not going to change by itself. WE have to change it.
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All my love,
Matt
Up ahead, the last building in the pastoral office complex on the outskirts of Albany, stood the corporate headquarters of the Frontier Mortgage Company. It stood like an ivory tower in the setting sun, a monument to the great American ideal of capitalism at it's most arrogant. Each floor, each company office staffed by a rep hired to screwand swindle good people out of the live's they've given blood, sweat and tears for.
Well today, proclaimed Matt, all of that was coming to an end.
He circled the building a couple of times. Inside the people were looking out the windows and wondering what the pilot of this plane was up to.
Matt shed no tears, only smiled. He flew the plane farther out after his second lap aroung the building and headed straight for the building, gaining speed and velocity.
Before it could impact into the building, he turned and patted one of the two metal drums full of diesel fuel in the back seats. Then he turned, musing over his one final thought how Maureen would be calling him a son-of-a-bitch.
About the Author
George I. Anderson lives in Millville, NJ. Man Camp is his first work of fiction.
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