Flight (31 page)

“Will there be music?” Kevin asks. Leanne shakes her head.

“We’ve been trying to keep it as simple as possible,” Kit puts in.

“Okay.” Kevin smiles. “In that case, I think we should all process in.” He says the word “pro-
cess,
” the verb form of “processional.” “Kitto, you and your best man move to the back here, and I will, too. We’ll all walk in together—just casually, like this. That gives your guests the cue to be quiet. Let’s do it now.”

The three of them stroll down the aisle. Will appears at Leanne’s side.

“Okay, sister, you’re next,” Kevin says. Margaret points at Carol, and Trevor obeys her signal, going to his grandmother’s side. She walks quickly down the aisle. Leanne notices Carol’s hand dropping to Trevor’s shoulder, as if she’s taking over Margaret’s nervousness.

“No need to scamper,” Kevin says. “I know you don’t want to make it too formal, but give people time to take a look at you.”

“I’m just trying to move things along,” Margaret says, a little sharply. Eddie chortles.

“All right then, bride,” Kevin says. “Dad brings you down next.”

Leanne stiffens. She doesn’t want to make a scene, but her feet feel as if they’ve been buried in cement. She glances down to see if they have sunk into the wet lawn.

“Bride,” Kevin urges.

“Okay, Leanne,” Will says. He takes her hand and puts it on his arm. But his touch is gentle, and when Leanne doesn’t move, he doesn’t pull her forward.

“Come on, Pester!” Eddie calls out. “Get it in gear!”

Leanne finds herself stepping forward. The lawn is not smooth and velvety, as it looks from afar, but lumpy and tamped down with rain. A hot, muddy smell rises up from it, and the grass clings in clumps that threaten to trip her at every step. She holds on to her father’s arm for support and looks at Kit waiting for her.
This is it.

Will stops by Kit and moves aside, taking his seat next to Carol, who has perched in the front row with Trevor. Leanne steps over to Kit.

“Okay,” Kevin says. “The rest is pretty simple. I’ll say the standard things, you’ll do the vows and exchange rings. Everyone stays in place the whole time, right?”

“Don’t forget the doves!” Carol cries from the front row. Leanne’s heart sinks. Whatever notion she had at the time seems childish and absurd now. She’s embarrassed even to mention it.

“Doves?” Kevin asks.

“I don’t know,” Leanne says. “One of them isn’t looking so good.”

“They’re fine!” Carol says. “I just looked at them this morning!”

Leanne feels a surge of rage toward her mother. “It’s sort of silly,” she says. She waves a hand, erasing the idea.

“The plan,” Kit says, “is for Leanne and me to release a pair of doves at the end of the ceremony. Sort of a symbolic moment.”

“I see,” Kevin says. “And who will be in charge of the doves?”

“I will,” Carol says. “I can have them here, under my seat, and at the right moment I can hand the cage over.”

“I don’t know,” Margaret puts in. “Leanne, do you really want a cage up here as part of the ceremony? It’s not even a very attractive cage.”

“Not the one they’re in,” Carol says. “I have another one, a small one that’s old-fashioned and pretty. It just needs to be spray-painted white.” She turns to Will. “Will, you need to do that this afternoon.”

Will grimaces. “Yeah, after the twelve other things you have me doing.” Margaret looks at Leanne and shrugs.
It’s your disaster.

“Whatever. That will be fine,” Leanne says. She just wants this whole ordeal to be over.

“I’ll paint the cage,” Kit says. “I haven’t got much to do once we’ve picked up my mother.”

“Then I guess that’s it,” Kevin says. “I just need a check for the fee, and we’ll see you tomorrow afternoon!”

“Let me,” Kit says as Will ambles toward Kevin. “I know it’s not traditional, but I really want to.” He steps between Will and the justice.

Will stops and shrugs. Kit says something low to Kevin, so Leanne can’t hear, and then the two of them laugh. Kevin turns around, and Kit opens his checkbook and begins to write, using Kevin’s back as a desk.

What does this have to do with me?
Leanne thinks. It feels like a conspiracy. She was in New York, independent, living her own life, even if that meant throwing her life away. It was hers to throw. But they couldn’t stand that. Carol came out and got her to Cold Spring, and then Kit convinced her to get married and settle down and lock her life into an approved pattern. What they don’t understand is that she was happy like she was. Out of all of them, Carol at least ought to see that. She ought to see that Leanne will be as miserable as she was, being forced to tag along with someone else’s dreams.

“Somebody’s starting a new life,” her father says next to her, and from her tangle of anxious thoughts, she speaks without thinking.

“You, I guess, Dad,” she says. “A new life flying for Cathay Pacific, huh?”

There’s a slight delay before a rustle goes through the family. Margaret gapes. Her father’s expression is baffled. Trevor’s lower lip makes a U, as if he might cry. Carol is the first to speak.

“Oh, no, Will, you haven’t!”

Will drives fast. The rehearsal was short, but the flurry afterward dragged it out so they ended up leaving for Grand Rapids later than he intended. He wants to get there and get the car parked in time to meet Kit’s mother in the baggage claim. He could just drop Kit off and wait in the car, but that seems unfriendly. So he speeds up U.S. 131, slowing down only at overpasses where he knows state troopers lurk. After about fifteen minutes of speed and silence, Kit speaks up.

“Is it all right if we make a quick stop so I can buy some spray paint for the cage?”

Will glances at his watch and mumbles something vague. He wants to say no, but he can’t think of a good reason.

Kit watches him. “So,” he says, turning to look out the window. “Cathay Pacific, huh?”

Will smiles. You have to give it to this kid. He doesn’t beat around the bush, and he doesn’t try to be diplomatic. Will can’t help but admire him for it.

“You start out flying freight,” he says. “I’d probably be based in Chicago.”

“But you’d want to switch out of freight?”

Will shrugs. “Who knows?” It’s not entirely honest. He has always assumed he’d apply for passenger service the moment he was allowed. That’s what guys do. But why should he, really? What’s the difference between flying a load of tourists and a load of cheap Chinese electronics? Cargo’s easier to get off and on, that’s one
thing. And it doesn’t come racing up to the cockpit and try to fly the plane into buildings.

“I guess your wife was surprised.” Kit leaves the sentence hanging in the air, waiting for an explanation.

Will puffs out his cheeks. All his life he has been asked to explain Carol, and after forty years he’s no better at it. “I figured it would be a nice surprise,” he says. “I was waiting for the right time to tell her, because I thought she’d be happy.” As he says it, he knows it’s false. He had thought she
should
be happy. That’s a slightly different thing.

“The thing is, she doesn’t like me to make big decisions without asking her first,” Will says. “I’ve done that in the past, and it upsets her.”

“You mean moving to the farm,” Kit says. He’s surprisingly willing to broach family topics.

“Yeah, that,” Will answers. “She was never really very happy there.” He runs his hand over his face. Just talking about it makes him feel tired.

“It was where you grew up.” Kit keeps making open statements, waiting for Will to explain or deny them.

“Yeah.” Will doesn’t know what else to say about that. He grew up, he went away, he came back. Is it such an unusual story?

Kit scrutinizes the landscape as if the answer might be there. Maybe he’s interested in their family story because he’s marrying into it. He might want to understand Leanne better, or get a grip on what kind of extended family their possible children will have.

“What I wonder,” Kit says, “is why you came back here.”

Will has answered this one lots of times. “When I was little,” he says, “I used to drive the tractor all the time, and I’d look up and see the planes going overhead and think. That’s where I want to be.” He’s stopped by an impatient move from Kit.

“I know the story,” Kit says. “Then once you started flying, you flew over the fields and looked down and thought, That’s where I want to be.”

Will nods. “That’s right.”

“Leanne told it to me,” Kit replies. “But it isn’t the whole story,
really. Why did you look down and want to be in the fields?” His voice is gentle but searching. He really wants to know.

Why did he come back? Will knows it was a mistake. Carol was never happy on the farm, and the girls drank in that unhappiness every day. They learned his yearning to leave; he was never able to teach them, or even to formulate for himself, his desire to go back.

How does a man atone for his mistakes? Will has dreamed his dream at least once every week since 1967. Sometimes he dreams the bombing run exactly as it was. Sometimes he dreams it different. They abort the mission because the weather is awful. They roll in and there’s nothing there. They pull out at the last minute, when they see someone on the ground. An old man doddering off to pee. A young girl in a coolie hat, baby in her arms. A farmer wading into his rice.

Other times he dreams he’s the man on the ground. He dreams he’s standing at the door of his hut, only it’s not a hut, it’s his father’s house in Michigan. Four planes are rolling out of nowhere, tiny specks in the sky that he watches with only vague interest until he realizes they’re heading for him. Then, as in a movie, he gets a close-up of the first pilot’s face, his hand on the throttle, missiles armed and ready under his wings. He runs inside and tells his parents. They are sitting in the living room, his father in his recliner, his mother on the davenport. “Run!” he yells. They look at him as if he’s crazy. “Get out of here!” Nothing. He stands, impotent, until he hears the familiar whistle.

He’s never told anyone any of this. Maybe that was a mistake, too. Maybe he should have shared his stories with his family, so they could understand what was driving him, making him want what he wanted. Would it have helped? He looks at the young man sitting next to him.

“In Vietnam, we played this game,” he says.

The game was Rogoff’s idea. “Gordon Rogoff,” Will tells Kit. “He was my best friend at Korat—that’s where I was stationed. Korat Air Base in Thailand. Sometimes we called him Rog. Like ‘rogue.’”

Will was never sure why he liked Rogoff. The guy couldn’t have been more different from Will. Rogoff was a city boy—mainline Philadelphia—and a Harvard man. Not only that but he’d majored in classics, slogging through two years of graduate Latin before chucking it to join the Air Force. “Best decision I ever made,” he said, swigging from a beer at the O-club. Will, whose hootch was across from Rog’s, knew the guy had a stack of Latin and Greek books on the table by his bed. They were paperbacks, but still. Not many guys dragged books halfway around the world just to see them bloom with mildew in the Thai jungle. Rogoff was probably the only guy at Korat who could recite dirty Latin poetry and recount Hannibal’s attempt on Rome.

“Hannibal’s problem was not unlike ours,” he told them. “He took stock of the enemy just fine. But he failed to factor in the goddamn
weather.
”

Will arrived at Korat in July 1967. In August, Washington declared Hanoi no longer off limits for bombing. After that, they flew almost daily into Route Pack Six, the most heavily defended airspace in the world. Weather stopped their runs more often than antiaircraft fire. But weather they were used to. What was new was flying through a sky so full of flak there wasn’t time to think. You dove in, dropped your load, and headed for the hills.

“You only get one pass,” Will tells Kit. “My wing commander told me that my first time into Hanoi. One pass, haul ass. That’s the name of the game.”

On average they lost about one guy a week. When you stepped out over Hanoi, you took a deep breath and hoped for the best. Nobody was coming in after you. There was a saying around the base for rescue operations in Pack Six.
Ain’t no way.

It’s thirty-four years ago. Will is in the officers’ club at Korat.

“Okay,” Johnson is saying. “I’ve got a good one.” He’s a tall, loosely jointed guy who seems like he should be shy but isn’t. Others shift nervously when he speaks, embarrassed in his stead.

“I’m fifteen years old. I’ve got this horse.” Johnson’s eyes gleam in spite of the collective groan.

“Shit, not another dead pet,” someone says.

Johnson is unfazed. “So it’s summer in Oklahoma, and I’m riding my horse out to check on a fence. And I see up ahead something lying on the ground. When I get closer, I see it’s one of the heifers.”

The game, Will explains, was Rogoff’s idea. Whenever they lost a guy, they gathered and drank bourbon together, sort of an informal wake. But it made them fidgety and morose to sit around staring into their glasses, so they began to invent distractions, games. At first it was just cards. Then one night Rogoff had a new idea. The challenge would be to tell a story
ad misericordia
. It meant “for sympathy,” he explained. The best story would win an extra round. Anyone who failed to win sympathy could be made to keep trying until he succeeded or was declared a loser. Losers would pick up the tab.

They started that night. The wing commander, Baz, won with a story about watching his cousin slip off a dock, cracking his skull on the way down. The kid was never the same again, and Baz always felt guilty for standing there, for not being able to prevent the tragedy from happening.

Ad misericordia
became part of their routine wake. The one Will’s thinking of was for a guy called Reggie McPhee, a tall skinny guy with a wife and twin boys back home. “See you after the war” were the last words he said. They heard his beeper wailing desolately all the way down, but when they tried to contact him on the ground, they got nothing. “McPhee,” Will said several times, violating protocol by using his name. “If you can hear me, come up voice or radio.” Nothing. After a few passes, the flak got thick, and they had to get the hell out.