Icarus Upside Down

“I remember exactly where I was when I heard about…” Here it’s easy enough to fill in some blanks with Kennedy Assassinated, Man on the Moon, Nine-Eleven, etc. But what about the smaller stuff a little closer to home? I remember my first dead body—that stuck.

I was ten years old and lived in South Miami. Kind of nowhere really. I had a bike, a best friend, two parents, and a dog. My friend and I lived on our bikes, and we went everywhere. At least it seemed like everywhere. No helicopter parents back then so we were free to explore the world.

On a warm summer morning, my friend and I were a few blocks from my house heading who knows where when I noticed a small plane overhead flying low. I think it was a small Cessna. In any case it flew past us and over our neighborhood. It circled a group of houses nearby and kept turning. The circle tightened, one hundred feet off the ground. In a flash, too quick to grasp, it spiraled down. I didn’t see it hit behind some houses but immediately there was a thick cloud of pitch-black smoke rising into the clear blue sky.

We sped over as fast as our bikes could take us and knew this was an immediate, live event and we’d be the first one’s there. The plane came in headfirst in the back yard of a suburban home a few blocks from mine. We were there in seconds and dropped our bikes in the next yard. I could feel strong heat from the aviation fuel set ablaze. An adult told us to stay back, and we did. In those days adults had some authority—today, I’m sure we would have told him to take a hike.

The plane was small and crumpled up on itself, but you could still see the tail section intact. It was white with blue pin stripes. The rest was just a black mess. In the middle were two charred and blackened bodies or what was left of them. In the adjacent backyard a young man with a hose was squirting a small stream of water at the fire and screaming and crying. The hose did nothing to quench the flames. He was crazed and hysterical; two men were holding him back. I didn’t understand that part and it looked strange and wild to me. I’d never been near death and certainly nothing like this so close-up and ugly and violent.

It turned out the young man in the yard was the brother of the pilot, who was another young man accompanied by his girlfriend. The pilot was flying too low and circling too low—like Icarus upside down. He wanted to impress his brother maybe or maybe the girl. Who knows?

Long afterwards, I would think about what I saw that day. I’d never seen these two people before and there weren’t any photos of them on the news or the paper. They were just thirty feet away and on fire: human shapes charred and blackened.

I wondered what they were thinking as the plane went down. No time to react, just split-second realization. Was she screaming at him, “Quick screwin’ around, you’re scaring me.” Or maybe, “Look, down there, Its Joe, he’s waving.” Then the death spiral.

This made the Miami News Metro section. Not much else though. Two dead, Pilot Error the cause. All was cleaned up soon after the standard investigations were conducted. I didn’t know the family who lived there but I’m sure they moved away after this.

Small planes crash all the time but don’t make the big headlines unless its someone famous. I remember the day the music died. The day Buddy Holly spiraled down into an Iowa Cornfield. Actually, I don’t as I was only an infant, but I’ll bet there are still lots of folks around who remember when they first heard the news. Me, I was just some kid on a bike on a warm sunny South Florida morning exploring the world. But I remember.

 

Greg Martin is a short fiction writer and essayist. Currently working on a novel in an experimental form. BA from Univ of FL and MS from USC. Originally from Venezuela but lived all over the US and Canada. Long career in Finance/IT.