Flight (8 page)

He tried to be comforting, to say things that were blandly helpful. He couldn’t help but wonder why she was confiding in him. She had never done so before. It made him nervous—it would be too easy to say the wrong thing—but deep down he felt a small glimmer of satisfaction. She wanted his help. But he worried that he was letting her down. He told her to call whenever she wanted.
Anything,
he said to her.
I’m always happy to talk.

That Saturday he had dinner with the Kid. He’d been studying all day, sitting on his hotel bed with his back against the headboard and the little room radio playing a jazz station. He had a color-coded highlighting system: pink for crucial information, orange for places where the 767 differed from the DC-9, blue for items the
instructor said the FAA guys were asking that year. He’d lost track of the time, surprising himself when he looked up to see that it was six o’clock. All he had eaten for lunch was a packet of cheese crackers from the hotel vending machine, and he was starving. Almost unwillingly, he closed his book.

In the bathroom he surveyed his face. He’d put on weight, and it showed in a paunchiness around his jawline. His beard was coming in, spilling gray like a cloud across his cheeks. It made him look old and haggard, but he decided he could get away without shaving this once. He’d go, get some dinner, and come back. Who cared if the folks at the local Pizza Hut thought he was a wizened old grandpa? He changed his shirt and headed out.

As he was walking through the lobby, he heard a jovial voice.

“Will!” It was Kid Flyboy, parked on an ugly lobby sofa with a newspaper.

“Hey.” Will hesitated, not sure if he could get away with simply greeting him and walking out. The Kid was folding up his newspaper and standing up. His hair was damp, sticking to his face around the edges.

“Did Bart call you up?”

“Uh, no.” Will looked over his shoulder at the door as if expecting someone. “I was just heading out for some dinner.” For some reason, he thought of Margaret. Was she having dinner alone tonight, too? He’d call her later, see how things were going.

“Perfect! Come with us. Bart knows some place that’s supposed to be great.”

Will looked toward the elevators, and sure enough, here came Bart, an affable fellow captain, smiling as he bore down on them.

“Steaks, Colonel!” he called out. “Best steaks to be had for a hundred miles.”

They took Bart’s rental car. The restaurant was pole-barn-sized. Outside it was a large cement pedestal topped by a giant cow. Their waitress was a chirpy blonde, and when she leaned forward to pick up their menus, her uniform gaped open to reveal tanned breasts tucked into a shiny black bra. Bart raised his eyebrows across the
table at Will and the Kid. They had all ordered rib eyes. Will was annoyed that he got dragged into this, but he didn’t feel out of place. This was what it meant to be a pilot: eating dinner in some strange town, ogling the local college students, confident of receiving some measure of respect. He and Bart were used to it. Female attention as they passed through hotel lobbies in uniform was the air they breathed. It was a tribute to their position, to their responsibility for strangers’ lives. The Kid was still taking it all in, delighted with his new persona. He gave off, like heat, a desire to make himself known.

“So, Will, how’d you end up at TWA?” the Kid said, breaking off a piece of bread.

Will looked at Bart, who nodded as if to give him the go-ahead. “The way all the best pilots did,” Will said. “I came up through the Air Force. Trained on the Century series. I flew sixty-two missions in ’Nam.”

“I met Will on the transport home,” Bart put in.

“What happened?” The Kid looked seriously interested.

Will shrugged. “Got shot down over the Tonkin Gulf. Broke an arm and a leg on a rough ejection. I came back and joined TWA. Thirty-one years ago.”

“Will and I have been around,” Bart said. “We’ve flown every one of the airline’s routes.”

“That used to be something, too,” Will said. “We used to fly to Cairo and Bombay and Tel Aviv. I flew into Rome two days after the terrorists bombed it.”

“Those were the days of constant hijackings,” Bart added. “You youngsters probably don’t even remember that.”

Will nodded. “I flew every piece of jet equipment TWA ever bought,” he couldn’t help saying, “from the Convair 880 on up.”

The Kid grinned. “I knew I was working with a pro,” he said. “Even before the end of ground school, Will here is flying the thing like an angel. Got his total engine failure yesterday and brought her in like there wasn’t a thing wrong.”

Will didn’t know what to say. It was a pretty landing, but he couldn’t tell what the Kid was playing at.

“Will’s up there with the best,” Bart agreed. “You watch and learn, young man.”

Kid Flyboy nodded and started buttering his bread with great care. “So the first thing he does when the second engine goes is drop his gear.” The Kid was acting casual, but suddenly, Will got it. Kid wanted to know if dropping gear was the right thing to do, so he could show off in his own engine failure. His heart sank. He busied himself with his own piece of bread and tried to act as if the conversation didn’t interest him at all.

“You don’t say,” Bart answered, and he looked at Will, a slight furrow of concern bisecting his brow. “Every guy has his own way of flying,” he said, looking around the room in a way that ended the conversation.

A flash of anger sparked through Will. Surely Bart knew he did the right thing, knew the only way to judge whether you’ll make it dead-stick or not is to dirty up the plane right away. Drop your gear at the last minute, and you’re in for a nasty surprise. He didn’t want to say it, though, because that would educate the undeserving Kid. He picked up his water glass and looked at Bart over the top of it.

Bart surveyed the restaurant far too casually before turning back to the Kid and grinning. “How do you like those new computers?” he asked, and then Will saw it. Bart was on his side. Bart didn’t want to tell the Kid, either, so he was letting the Kid think Will was wrong. Will wanted to laugh out loud. He concentrated on buttering his slice of bread. Good old Bart.
We old guys stick together,
Will thought.
They can’t get ahead of us yet.

“It’s really coming down, isn’t it?” Leanne says.

Will starts at her voice. No one has spoken for at least fifteen minutes. The thud of the wet highway against the van’s tires, the regular thump of the wipers, the flat gray light—everything has combined to hypnotize them into drowsy silence. Even Carol looks up in surprise, as if she has forgotten the presence of the young people.

“It’s only passing through,” she tells them, although they haven’t asked for reassurance. “Everything will be fine by Saturday.”

“I’m surprised at how flat it is here,” Kit says. “I didn’t notice that last time.” Will looks at him in the rearview mirror. Kit’s gazing out at the fields with a small squint. When he moved in with Leanne, she told them he was a filmmaker of some sort. Perhaps he’s seeing it all as a film, visualizing a landscape shot.

“You should see the Great Plains states,” Will says. “Now that’s flat. Michigan is actually hilly.” He waves a hand toward the landscape. “Glacial terrain. That makes us lucky in water, too. We have the Great Lakes. The Plains states don’t have lakes. There’s not one natural lake in the state of Missouri.” He’s surprised by the strength of his desire to defend his little corner of the world.

“That’s right,” Kit says, seeming to like the topic. “I read something about that. There’s an aquifer underground in the Plains, right? That’s where the water goes.”

“The Ogallala Aquifer.” Will tightens his hands on the steering wheel. “But it’s drying up.” He feels himself warming to the task of explaining how things are.

“Oh yeah?”

“Out there,” Will tells him, “they irrigate on a center-point system. They drill wells down into the aquifer and bring the water up into a pipe that rotates around the well like the hand of a clock. You can see it from the air. Each one makes a green circle.” He pauses, visualizing it. “Twenty years ago, there were hundreds of them. You’d fly over and see green polka dots for miles across the yellow plains. Now one in three is brown. The wells are dry.” His voice cracks as he says it; he’s overwhelmed by his own words. That’s what his book is trying to explain. The great trajectory. A tremor rises in his throat, almost as if he might cry. He looks in the mirror again, to see if Kit has understood.

The young man is looking out the window. “No shortage of water here,” he says.

“But that’s just it,” Will tells him. “Now that they’ve pumped the aquifer half dry, they want to start pumping water down from the
Great Lakes. But it’ll be the same problem all over again. It just delays the inevitable.”

“The inevitable?” Kit is flagging. Carol is glancing at Will as if wishing he would be quiet. He looks away, back to the road, where water sluices toward them from the wheels of the car ahead.

“The depletion of our natural resources,” he says. “The end of our culture. It’s all wrapped up together.”

Leanne moves in the backseat, and Will glances at her in the mirror, thinking she might say something. But she, too, is gazing out the window.

“Yeah, well, you may be right about that,” Kit says. He speaks lightly, drawing the conversation closed like a neat little sack. Placating the old guy to get him to shut up. Will glances at Carol, casting about for a way to keep asserting his point until the young man gets it. His impulse is a tiny flame persisting in a doused fire.

As if sensing this, Carol moves to stamp it out for good. “That’s farmers for you,” she says. “Always full of dire predictions.” She turns to them with a conspiratorial smile. It’s meant as a joke, but Will can hear the edge in it.

“Well, you laugh now,” he says. He tries to think of a better rejoinder, an eye-opening way to finish, but nothing comes. Like birds, the words flit away.

Will had his FAA oral the Monday after the steak-house dinner.

“How does the fuel-dump system work, and what is the jettison rate?” All FAA inspectors looked like retired G-men. This one read the questions off his clipboard, and Will answered slowly and carefully, not getting anything wrong. When he was young, he used to try to answer quickly, to show that he didn’t have to think about it. Now he knew it was more important to get it exactly right, even if that took a few seconds more.

“What’s the maximum starting exhaust gas temperature?”

Will joined TWA in 1968. It was the end of a big hiring spree at the major airlines: United, Pan Am, TWA. He had agonized for
weeks over which airline to join, ultimately choosing TWA over United. It was the wrong decision, he knew now, but how could he have foreseen it? “I want us to be able to travel to Europe,” he had told Carol. TWA and Pan Am were the flagship carriers, worldwide symbols of American prosperity and glamour. United was the poor relation in those days, the country cousin back home. Now Pan Am was dead and TWA was in perpetual trouble. Its refusal to die was an industry joke. By the year 2010, the joke went, there would be only three U.S. airlines left: American, Delta, and “the financially struggling TWA.”

They did get to travel. When the girls were little, Will gave Carol tickets to London in her Christmas stocking. He wasn’t there to see her surprise. He was away on a trip, as he always was on Christmas through the long years he spent at the bottom of a huge seniority list. Being hired at the end of a big wave meant he flew flight engineer for fifteen years before even getting promoted to copilot. Now they didn’t even have flight engineers anymore. Only the last few 727s required three guys in the cockpit, and those planes were being phased out.

“Name all the electrical circuits on the same bus as the cabin lights.”

The weekend’s cramming paid off, and Will answered every question correctly. He felt like his brain was melting slightly at the end, an overloaded circuit board. Still, he got through it. The FAA inspector shook his hand absently, already looking at the next name on the list.

The Kid was waiting in the hall as Will headed outside.

“How was it?” the Kid asked, his face upturned and eager.

“Piece of cake,” Will replied, pleased with the way it came out. Careless, unsurprised, cool.
Piece of cake.

When he went back to his room, there was a message from Margaret.
Just calling to say hi,
her voice said, sounding vaguely distant in the hotel’s crackly voice-mail system.
No need to call back. Maybe I’ll try you later.

He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. Leaving the training
center, he had felt mentally exhausted. But now he couldn’t stop his brain from cycling through the questions and answers of the oral.
Jettison rate, twenty-six hundred pounds a minute,
he thought.
Circuits on the right forward bus.

The Kid seemed cocky for his second simulator test flight, eager to show what he could do. He and Will traded places for it, Kid Flyboy settling into the captain’s seat, Will sliding into the copilot’s.

“Where shall we go today?” the Kid joked as he pulled out the simulated flight-ops pages churned out by a training facility computer. The instructor had a huge cup of Starbucks coffee. Smelling it, Will made a mental note to ask the guy where he got it as soon as they left the simulator. On the other guy’s day, he always tried to say as little as possible. That was only good manners.

Kid Flyboy moved quickly, entering the performance data into the inertial reference system. Will had a sinking feeling, watching him go. It was clear that the software stuff made an intuitive kind of sense to him.

“Do you have the final weight from the load control agent?” Kid Flyboy asked, and Will had to snap back to the present and turn to his own monitor. He loaded the information, then mistakenly went to hit execute before activating it. The Kid looked across at him quickly.

“Sorry,” he told the Kid. “Guess I needed one of those gallon coffees this morning, too.” The instructor chuckled a little and settled into his seat.