Flight (9 page)

Why am I doing this?
The question rose up, gassy and disruptive, at least once a day. Will had fewer than five years before mandatory retirement. He didn’t need the 767. He could keep flying captain on the DC-9, where he was senior enough to get his first-choice bids every month, never flying on holidays or getting stuck with undesirable layovers. But the DC-9 made short hops around the U.S. all day long: Chicago to Kansas City to Cedar Rapids to Omaha. If he wanted the plum trips now, the transatlantic flights or the twenty-four-hour layover in Hawaii, he had to fly the 767. He
didn’t want to spend his last two years checking in and out of Omaha. He wanted to do what he had joined TWA to do.

“Okay,” the instructor said as Kid Flyboy got the plane launched into the digitized sky over Dallas-Fort Worth. Will suspected the Kid would get his full engine failure. But the instructor took him through a pretty standard routine: interrupted climb, 45-degree turns, stall maneuvers, a nonprecision approach. On his second takeoff, the instructor failed one engine, and the Kid handled it with surprising ease. He looked pleased when they climbed out of the simulator, and the instructor looked satisfied as well. As they left, Will’s heart sank at the thought of the lousy cafeteria lunch and then a long afternoon of the same routine for him. He saw the Delta guys and looked over to see if the instructor had remembered his coffee cup. He hadn’t. Will felt a secret satisfaction as the door slammed behind him. Let the Delta pukes clean up after them.

“You got kids?” They were parked in the noisy cafeteria. Kid Flyboy had a shred of lettuce stuck to his lower lip, and Will couldn’t help but watch it as the Kid talked. It made him look absurd, undercut his tightly held posture of cool.

“Yeah, two,” Will said. “Two girls. They’re grown up now.” He looked down at the chef salad he had selected with his health in mind and wished he had gone for the grilled cheese. It was hard to ruin grilled cheese. The Kid was demolishing a BLT. A side order of fries spilled over onto his orange tray.

“Either of them ever consider flying?”

Will was jolted out of his food funk by the question.
How stupid can you be?
he wondered. Or maybe it wasn’t so absurd. When Margaret was about ten, she got obsessed with space. They had planned their family vacation so they could make a stop at Kennedy Space Center. They toured the site, watching a film about astronaut training and taking photographs of the girls in front of Apollo-era rockets. Will had never thought much of her obsession, and sure enough, the next summer it was replaced by horses.

“Well, when my older one went to college, I thought she might join ROTC,” he told the Kid. “She objected on anti-militaristic grounds.” He tried to make it sound jokey, and the Kid grinned. Will had in fact once suggested ROTC to Margaret, but she had slapped the idea down with the fervor that marked her entire college era. He had never suggested anything to Leanne.

“She’s a historian now,” he told the Kid, wanting him to know that she turned out okay, that she wasn’t some flake chaining herself to fences at missile sites. “Teaches at Northwestern.”

The Kid nodded, just sufficiently impressed. “Mine’s four,” he offered. “A boy. What a demon.” He shook his head in awed pride. “He’s so cocky, he’s sure to be a fighter pilot. But he’s a lot of work for his mother.”

Will nodded. “They are work,” he said. It sounded stupid. He longed, foolishly, to demonstrate his superior knowledge. “Of course, it only gets worse,” he told the Kid. “I think the girls gave my wife the most grief in their teen years.”

“She must be relieved now, to have them all grown up and settled,” Kid said, and Will felt a surge of anger. What was up with the third degree? He wasn’t about to go into Margaret’s rocky marriage with a guy who didn’t know how to land an engineless plane. With great control, he made his voice calm.
Relax your jaw,
his doctor always told him.

“It’s good to have your kids settled,” he said. “Shall we get going now?” He picked up his tray, and the Kid, after one more slurp of his soda, followed Will’s lead.

That night Margaret called before he was asleep.

“He left us, Daddy. He didn’t come home last night.” Her voice was twisted and strange, as if the wires had gnarled, keeping it from getting through clearly. “I don’t … I can’t …” She didn’t finish, and for a moment it seemed as if she had disappeared.

“Honey?”

“He hasn’t even called!”

“Okay, let’s think about this.” Will’s eyes took in the hotel room. Blue patterned bedspread. Fake brass lamp. Dark wood cabinet with television inside, minibar underneath. The thick blue drapes were pulled shut over the window, and a notebook and pen were laid out on the table, as if someone had expected him to sit there taking perfect little notes. His actual notes were piled on the dresser, neatly stacked by the maid. He scratched his head, aware of how thin his hair had become.

“Okay, let’s think about what to do. Where has he … Where is he likely to go?”

“I don’t know.” The way the words tapered off to a wail suggested she had said this too many times. “I’ve called his mom’s place and his sister and all the friends I can think of. I even called his girlfriend.”

Will pinched the bridge of his nose, where his glasses had left an indentation. He didn’t want to think about Margaret calling her husband’s girlfriend. When it came down to it, he felt lost in his daughters’ world. Drugs, the Web, alternative lifestyles. Things had changed too much.

“Any information?” he asked.

“Everyone denies seeing him. But now I don’t know … I don’t even know who to trust.” He heard something in her voice, a mournful edge he’d never heard before. It was a hollow echo, the sound of someone who had seen her own mistakes. Margaret had never been one to make mistakes. Every step in her life had been carefully planned and carried out with absolute conviction. Now she radiated uncertainty.

“Your counselor,” he said. “What does your counselor say?”

“My counselor …” She sighed heavily. “My counselor says to sit tight. She says he’s probably just trying to get my attention so we can address things more directly.”

“Well, I guess that’s what you’d better do.”

“I don’t know how I can!” she cried. “How can I?” She broke then, and he could hear a single sob on the other end of the line.

“Oh, honey,” he said. “Look. I don’t know what to say. Like I said … people get crazy. He’s frustrated. He’s done the only thing
he can think of. He’ll come to his senses, and you guys will sort this out. He will.” He was silent, listening to her weep.

“You and Mom never got like this,” she said, controlling her tears but talking in a small voice, like a child. “You and Mom would fight without getting so out of control.”

“We were just different people,” he answered, as if he had expected this reply. “We got crazy in different ways.” It was true but not true at the same time. Some part of him suspected that the craziness could still come. “Get some sleep,” he told his daughter. “Do what your counselor tells you. There’s nothing else you can do.”

“I know,” she said, her voice now under control. “I know it; I just hate not being able to do something.”

After he hung up, he continued to sit on the edge of the bed, unable to move. He felt an enormous sadness dragging him toward the earth. Finally, he stood up and went to his pile of manuals. He saw his face in the mirror as he walked by. An ineffectual old man. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do. He might as well study.

But when he picked up the flight manual, he found his arm hurtling through the air, launching the book across the room. It smashed into the wall on the other side of the bed with a tremendous smack, dropping to the floor open. He looked down at his hand. It was shaking.
How did that happen?
he wondered. Something had taken him over. He couldn’t do anything, not even control his movements.
Old man,
he thought, and a phrase came into his head.
Tattered coat upon a stick.
He could remember someone reading it to him once. Margaret, maybe. Something she was studying in school.

It was Kid Flyboy’s third and last period when he finally got his engine failure.

“I bet I’ll get my engine failure today,” he had announced that morning as he caught up with Will in the parking lot. “Here, I brought you a coffee.” He held out a Starbucks bag. “Creamer and sugar in there. I didn’t know what you took.”

“Thanks,” Will said, surprised. He couldn’t even bring himself
to wonder what sly motivation the Kid might have had, because he was too tired. At eleven Margaret had called to say David had been located: he had gone to the home of a mutual friend. Margaret had talked to David on the phone, and Will had reassured her that David was just getting away to think clearly for a while. At seven that morning she had called again to say that maybe he was right, because David had agreed to go to couples therapy. Margaret sounded exhausted but slightly hopeful. Will had tried to encourage the feeling. He had tried to sound confident and consoling, sure that everything would work out fine. The effort left him feeling blank and empty. He looked at the Kid and didn’t even have the energy left to resent him. He just wanted to get it over with.

They did a normal instrument departure, and the Kid launched into his airwork. He did some steep turns and then a go-around into a holding pattern. The Kid’s face was relaxed beneath his headset, his hand loosely on the stick. He was in control of the plane.

Will looked at the sky and earth playing on the windows of the cockpit and wished it were a real plane and he could walk right out. Just open the door and free-fall to the earth.
This isn’t what I signed up for,
he thought. He was getting old, and what had become of his life? When he was twenty or thirty or forty, this wasn’t how he imagined himself approaching sixty: unable to fix anything or make anything work out right.
I want to do it over,
he thought. What would he change, though? He couldn’t see how he could make things end up any different. If only there were a single moment where things went wrong, then he could go back and fix that, or at least know the right thing to fix.

When the engine failure came, it was both engines at once. The Kid was confident, jumping to attention, easily beginning the standard procedure. He measured his ground speed, checked his altitude, did the calculation. The computer agreed he could make it, just. He didn’t drop his gear.

“We’ll make it,” he told Will. Will nodded his okay, careful not to look at the instructor. A phrase from his Air Force years popped into his head.
Ain’t no way.

At first everything went smoothly. The Kid decreased altitude at the right rate, the plane gliding sleekly through the air. It kept its speed so well that the Kid had to introduce drag with the flaps as they neared the airport. The runway was in sight, and they were moving at the right speed when the Kid dropped his gear.

It happened as Will knew it would. The gear dragged the plane down, not much, but just enough, and there was a sickening lurch as the simulator’s hydraulic nose dipped toward the ground. There wasn’t much the Kid could do with no power. He tried to bring the nose up, but the plane was low and out of trim; even a pilot with decades of experience would have fought to regain control. The last thing they saw was an approach light rising in their path. Fifty yards from the runway, the screen went blank.

The three of them sat there in silence. “Well,” the instructor said at last. “Hit the approach lights.”

“Yeah,” said the Kid, deflated.

“Dead-stick landing is not on the rating ride,” the instructor said. “Still, you could use a few more hours.” He rifled through his schedule pages. “I need to get Thursday’s schedule,” he said, rising in a rustle of paper. “Wait here.” He clunked down the stairs.

Will and the Kid sat in the silent cockpit. With the windows black and the computers off, it didn’t feel like an airplane at all.

“All I’ve ever wanted to do is fly,” the Kid said, surprising Will. His voice was flat in the cockpit’s dull gloom.

“It’ll go in your record,” Will said, “but it probably won’t matter.” Guys had crashed the simulator before. “At least it wasn’t your rating ride.” Surprisingly, he felt bad for the Kid. Maybe he should have helped him out. It was an easy mistake, after all.

“I built model planes when I was three,” the Kid went on. “As soon as I knew about the navy, I planned to join. I went to the Gulf War.”

Will was surprised by that, too. He hadn’t taken the Kid for someone with any real action in his past. Maybe that explained his confidence.

“Everything went like I wanted. I got back from the Gulf and
joined up with TWA. Lately, I’ve been wondering if I chose the right airline.”

Will laughed. He felt a sense of relief. His hatred for the Kid seemed small and faraway, a town seen from miles above.

“I grew up on a farm,” Will said. “I drove a tractor every single day in the spring. I’d be plowing my dad’s field, looking up at the planes going by overhead, and all I wanted was to be up there, flying.” He paused, and the Kid half turned in his seat, encouraging him to go on.

“Now I’m in the opposite place, you see? Now I’m flying, and I look down and see the fields. Corn, apples—whatever. Combines and harvesters. And I think,
Man, I wish I was down there.
Now I’m up in the air, I wish I was back on the ground.”

He stopped and met the Kid’s eyes. The Kid didn’t understand the story. Will wasn’t sure he understood it himself. It was the story he’d always told to explain why he left the farm and why he went back. But it meant more than that. The Kid still thought all motion was forward. He didn’t understand how much would drag him back. Maybe Will couldn’t tell him that. He doubted if anyone could have told him at the Kid’s age.

“Thursday night,” the instructor said, filling the doorway. “Eight o’clock.”

“Yeah, okay,” said the Kid. He looked downcast again.

The instructor turned. “How about you, Will? You okay with coming in at night? If not, I can fly it with him.”