©2011

KARCHER

PRINCE

A Silver Ring

By Nathan Carriker

www.asilverring.com

Published by Karcher Prince at Smashwords

Copyright ©2011 by Nathan Carriker

All rights reserved

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14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Cassandra Marshall and Jennette Green

Cover image courtesy of the U.S. Air Force Museum

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

1

Levi Hutchinson arrived home from work Monday evening hungry as usual. But when his sons Wesley and Samuel waylaid him to proudly confess what they’d done instead of school that day, his appetite vanished. Before he could decide what to say, the boys’ mother Charlotte called out to them from the kitchen window, “I think this chicken’s been through enough already, you boys. Now quit tinkering with that car and come get it while it’s at least hot.”

They had to tuck it away where brave men keep their horrible secrets and go make a show of eating supper.

Charlotte had just begun cooking the chicken for an early Sunday supper when their neighbor burst in, frantic with the news. She finished cooking it, alternately trying to hear the radio over the sizzling and trying to ignore it to pray for her family and her country. By the time she was finished, no one was hungry or even thought to ask about eating. The family all sat around the radio, and the chicken sat out until bedtime, when Charlotte carelessly put it in the icebox, uncovered, and went to bed.

A bad night’s sleep hadn’t done her or the fried chicken that would now forever remind her of Pearl Harbor any good. With Levi at work and the kids supposedly at school, she had the time and privacy to sneak it outside and quietly bury it, as she sometimes did with things that cast her meager cooking abilities in a bad light. But with the war on, it just didn’t seem right. When the kids came home, she just fired up the stove, tossed a few extra potatoes into the pot, and let the chips fall.

When their unusually quiet meal was over that Monday night, only one dry piece of meat remained—a leg which sat, with one tiny bite out of it, on youngest son Jim’s plate. His four siblings had managed to swallow their unsavory portions, and all of them were now conspicuously looking at him with expressions ranging from mild amusement, in the case of eighteen year-old Wesley, to middle brother Jacob’s condescending disappointment, to the overwrought hostility and insult sister Eileen’s face wore for her mother’s pride’s sake.

“I’d eat that chicken with a smile if I were you, Nubs,” she taunted him.

Clenched teeth permitted an, “I told you, stop callin’ me that!”

Charlotte’s worry and embarrassment over their inadequate supper cut deeply into her tolerance for the sibling rivalry normally saturating their household. “Eileen, I don’t care what that boy says or does, he don’t deserve to get picked on by his sister for that. Now you apologize.”

She picked up her dishes and dropped a pallid “Sorry…James,” as she carried them into the kitchen. “Nubs” was a name she usually reserved only for defense against her prepubescent brother’s jabs about her accursed “female-ness.” The Hutchinsons’ only daughter, she’d suffered immeasurably at the hands of her five brothers for sixteen years now, but she’d learned the precise location of each of their underbellies and knew just where, if not always advisably when, to strike.

Jim had had an accident in an Oklahoma oilfield a few years before that cost him half his left hand’s middle finger. It had happened on Wes’ watch, and Eileen knew intuitively that he had never gotten over the guilt, so hurling that one epithet at Jim not only put the eight-year-old on the defensive but also ruffled Wes.

At the head of the table, Levi Hutchinson had apathetically cleaned his breast piece down to the bone and asked, “Don’t want your meat tonight, Jim? You know that chicken’d probably love to be eating your leg right now.” Jim struck an accommodating, strained smile but didn’t even make a feint for the drumstick. Without another word, Levi dutifully grabbed the leg from Jim’s plate, devoured it, sucked on each of the dark, greasy bones in turn for a few minutes, then quietly belched into a fist and pronounced, “Right proud supper, Mom, thanks.”

At this, the boys all quietly echoed a half-hearted thanks to Charlotte and got up to carry their plates into the kitchen, where it was Eileen’s turn to spend the next half-hour giving her own thanks by washing the dishes, while the rest of the family gathered around the radio for a news update.

Charlotte’s attention was spent, however and, sitting on the floor between Levi’s knees while he slowly ran his callused fingers through her hair, she drifted into a reverie about the last time they’d made love—the last time things had been normal, the morning of the seventh—and marveled grimly at how much life could change in just one day.

After firing up the stove to make breakfast that peaceful Sunday morning, she’d crept back to their bedroom and lay down on top of the blankets beside her husband for a few decadent minutes of Sunday morning laziness. As she did, a chill ran through her, shaking the bed slightly and popping Levi’s bright eyes open. Without a hint of panic or even displeasure—twenty years spent living hand-to-mouth with this woman had taught him nothing if not that problems were both inevitable and solvable—he asked, “What’s wrong?”

Charlotte blink-smiled warmly and shook her head a little, then leaned over and gave him a long kiss. Then, stroking his graying sideburn with a finger, she whispered, “Not-one-single-thing.”

Life had been as hard as anyone could have imagined for them during the Great Depression, but now Levi was a lead mechanic for Sinclair Oil, in charge of a whole shift of men maintaining scores of state-of-the-art electric-powered oil wells across five counties in Oklahoma and Kansas. He had been re-hired by his old boss after a two year furlough, on the condition that he train himself and pass a battery of tests on the new electric motors powering the wells. The massive diesels had had their time, and now the cost savings associated with electricity as well as the simplicity of stringing wire instead of cumbersome mechanical rod lines across miles of rolling countryside made the change inevitable.

Levi had fallen asleep at the table many nights during the weeks he pored over the electricity textbooks. More than once, Charlotte awoke to an empty bed and went out to find him asleep at the table, his eyeglasses all bent up on his head as he’d simply exhausted himself at his task.

“This is the new thing, Shug,” he’d told her. “I’ve got to either be part of it or die yesterday.”

Like much of the country, the family had thus optimistically gone about its business that Sunday morning. After breakfast, they went to Sunday services together, and when they returned home, Levi and the older boys went out to the garage to finish the clutch replacement they’d begun on the family’s old Ford the day before, while Eileen helped Charlotte in the kitchen and young Jim played with his friends.

As they worked, Levi talked again with Wes and Samuel about their plans should America enter the war. Both boys had inherited their father’s love for and talent with complex machinery, but bookish Samuel’s interests ran to the design and construction side, while Wes’ eyes didn’t really light up until something started moving. Wes and Levi had talked many times about airplanes, both trying to imagine what a thrill flying one might be. Levi was openly jealous of the opportunity Wes seemed to have to become a pilot, and he truly felt his son’s pain when Wes learned that, at 6’ 1”, he was too tall to fit into the cramped cockpit of a fighter and thus, in classic military logic, too tall to be inducted into the Air Corps to fly anything, even a huge bomber.

Wes had asked a recruiter if there weren’t some way, any way he could fly, but the Sergeant just apologized, said rules were rules but that if he “just” wanted to fly, he could become a bomber crewmember—either an engineer, radio operator, or gunner. Wes carefully read the Army’s glamorous description of each job and concluded that being a flight engineer would be the next best thing to piloting, but he’d follow his father’s advice and just wait and see if that silly policy might not change by the time he finished school.

As Levi’s second son, Wes seemed predestined to be relegated to obscurity in eldest brother Lee’s shadow, but when that hellion left home, at sixteen, Levi was working day and night, sometimes gone from home for weeks on end; he didn’t even know Lee was gone for five days. Wes became an indispensable vice-dad to the brood, a clown in good times and a minister in bad. Like any father, Levi loved all of his children equally, even Lee. Each was special for his or her own gifts, talents, and senses, and he openly doted on only daughter Eileen more than any of the boys, but Wes was, often literally, the one who got Levi up in the morning.

What Wes and Samuel had proudly told Levi and their sister, but were still waiting for a good time to confess to their mother, was that they’d ditched school and went to the Army recruiting office in Coffeyville together that Monday morning. By the time they got there, over a hundred men were in line to enlist ahead of them. The recruiter recognized them when their turn came, and Wes asked again about becoming a pilot, hopeful that a real war might bring some flexibility to the rules. It didn’t.

“If flying’s really your bag kid, we can get you on a bomber crew easy as pie. Why, you could be helping remodel Tojo’s palace in just a few months!”

Wes’ lusty hate for Japan roared in his mind and carried his hand through a signature on the enlistment form next to the title “Flight Engineer.” Then he handed the pen to brother Samuel, who’d make his own contribution to the war in a non-combat engineering battalion.

Thus preoccupied with their own tiny roles in the country’s headlong plunge into war, none of them noticed Eileen slip out the back door and into a’29 Chevy driven by a young man smoking a cigarette. Eileen barely had the door closed before it sped away, bald tires leaving fresh ruts in the dirt alleyway. Hearing the noise, Levi got up from his chair next to the radio, flashing Charlotte a practiced “trouble” look, and went to look for their daughter.

Once they were a few blocks away, Frank Lawton reached across the seat to take Eileen’s hand as they drove out to the river. “Did anyone see you leave?”

“No, they’re all glued to the radio, like everyone else in the world. I tell you, Frank, I’m scared to death. Wes and Samuel signed up for the Army today—they’re going off to training next weekend. You do anything foolish like that, and I swear I’ll hurt you so bad you won’t pass the physical! I know my folks’ll be proud of them, but I could see in Mom’s eyes how scared she is. She said she never dreamed the whole world could go so crazy as all this.”

Frank squeezed her hand and smiled accommodation. “I think the physical’s pretty much over when you walk through the door now, sweets. So unless you plan to break both my legs…”

He looked at her playfully, took the last drag off his cigarette, and flicked it out the window. It was unseasonably warm, nearly sixty degrees, and though the winter air lacked the living seasons’ sweetness, with most of the town’s night fires just getting started, it did have a certain pungency like no other’s. It made him feel like a man.

“Would you put that window up if you’re through?”

“Crank’s broke. Sorry.”

He turned the car onto a long lane that led to the river. They pulled up to their usual spot, turned off the engine and lights, and sat in silence for a long minute. Eileen whispered, “Please tell me you’re not going to do anything rash, Frank. I’m going to worry myself sick over Wes and Samuel, and if you get wrapped up in this too, I really don’t know what I’ll do.”

Frank looked out the window, trying to give the appearance of considering her plea but, in truth, trying to think of the best way to tell her it was already done.

They’d met outside school earlier that, his senior, year, as Eileen was walking home. Frank had noticed her the first day and asked if he could see her home only three days later. She was new in town, having moved in over the summer.

Frank and Wes sat at opposite sides of their own classroom, both in the back row, each with his own reasons for sitting there. Their teacher had said at the beginning of the year she had yet to meet a student in whom she couldn’t find some quality to appreciate, but Frank was trying hard to make this the year. His humor was unusually crude, and he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of unanswerable cut-downs. He was both class clown and town bully, playing both parts to the hilt at odd, unpredictable intervals that made nearly everyone around him uncomfortable.

Frank and Eileen kept their burgeoning relationship above board at first, but when Eileen’s father first met Frank on their front porch, he noticed the boy had a black eye and asked him jokingly what the other guy looked like. Frank was truly proud of very little about himself, but fighting well was one such thing. Looking directly into Levi Hutchinson’s still laughing eyes he said, “A hell of a lot better than you would if you’d been him, mister.”

This insolence stuffed Levi’s sympathetic chuckle into a nervous smirk, and he turned back into the house, certain his prim little girl would soon enough notice the dirt and tarnish covering this once-white knight and send him packing. She hadn’t yet, however, nor did she pledge compliance when her father forbade her to see Frank any more after he brought her home late one Friday night in November with whiskey on her breath.

Eileen never found the right time to tell Levi that the “other guy” who’d given Frank that shiner was his own father.

Frank wrestled with how to tell his love that he was, even as they sat by the river with night’s chill just beginning to seep through his open window, already U.S. Government property. The eighteen years he’d spent alternately holding his position against a superior foe at home and seizing the offensive to exploit Weakness at school had prepared him well for the infantry.

“Eileen, them slant-eyed sons-of-bitches are a couple of ships from being able to just walk onto California. Would that be too soon for me to go too, or do you want me to just sit out on the porch and wait for them to come down Wood Street?”

He was doing it again—putting on a big act as if he didn’t give a damn what she thought he should do. She sat silent for a long moment, shaking her head almost imperceptibly as her eyes filled.

“What do you think the chances are that you could get into a good outfit with no business in combat?”

“Honey, that stuff’s best left to the kind of guy that can’t fight anyway, don’t you think? I mean hell, I’ve been in combat more than about anybody I know my whole life. This way it’s just the right thing to do for once—I’m made for this stuff, hon.”

“This way? This stuff? You’re already in, aren’t you?” She began to break down as she saw the guilty look spread across his face.

“I should have known if Samuel joined you sure as hell wouldn’t stay out of it.” She leaned into his shoulder and clutched his shirt in her fist as she sobbed unevenly, trying to retain her composure but getting overwhelmed by a tide of stress, worry, and confusion.

“Any man in this country that hasn’t already’s going to do it soon, Eileen. We’ve got to get those pan-faced bastards back. We shouldn’t stop till they’re spit-shining our boots in downtown Tokyo! Bobby’s in too, and he ain’t even seventeen yet. Told the recruiter he was, then got my dad to sign the form while he was drunk, thinking it was a thing for school. This is the real thing. You’ll see.”

Eileen Hutchinson pulled herself up away from him but held on tighter than ever to his shirt, shaking him gently as she spoke. “You go fight your damned war then, Frank Lawton. As long as I’ve known you the devil’s had you by the tail, so maybe it’ll do you and the Army both some good to stick a rifle in your hands. But it’s not going to help me one bit to sit here worrying over you out there fighting your damned crusade—not when my brothers are doing the same thing. I swear everybody in this world’s ready to kill each other over something, some of it’s over me, and I just can’t stand it. You and my family are all probably secretly hoping the other will get killed before it’s over.”

“Well, taken prisoner and tortured long enough for us to get married, at least,” he joked. She stared at him for a moment, looking for a chink in the armor he’d put on. Finding none, she let out a sound that was both a sob and a nervous laugh, wiped her nose with the hand that had grabbed his shirt, and kissed him hard on the cheek.

“I love you, Frank. Please don’t try to kill the whole damn Jap army yourself, ok? I know you can, and you know you can, so let’s just leave it at that, alright?”

They held each other and kissed for several minutes but stopped when they noticed a light shining on them from behind. It was Leon Darby, the town cop, driving up about a hundred yards behind them, sealing off any escape.

They quickly separated, Frank mumbling obscenities while straightening his shirt where she had wrinkled it in her grip, and Eileen fixing her hair and face as best she could with no mirror or light.

“Frank? Frank Lawton, that you in there?” came the voice from behind them in the dark, shining a flashlight through the rear window. Darby approached the driver’s door tentatively, hand just touching the butt of his revolver.

“Why, hello, Leon. How’s the night find you, old buddy?” Frank pandered.

“Nothing big enough to complain of, I suppose, Frank. Say,” he shined his light into the car, hitting the floor first to look for bottles, and then Eileen’s face, “that wouldn’t be one Eileen Hutchinson in there with you, would it?”

“You don’t forget a face that sweet once you’ve seen it, do you? Eileen and I were just talking about the war and stuff. Did you hear I joined up with the Infantry, Leon?”

“Nope, but I’m sure you’ll do us all right proud in the Army, Frank. Can’t think of any better thing than for a young man to go fight for his country.” Darby was hedging his bets on getting Frank to let him take Eileen back home with him and figured a few well-placed compliments might help get what he had to say to go down a little easier.

“I hear a lot of boys joined up today. Town’s not going to be the same without you all. Heck, I just might not have a job to do without all you miscreants and ne’er-do-wells mucking up the works,” he kidded.

Frank managed a fake laugh for the middle-aged cop, but before a good break in the banter that Darby needed to broach his point could fully bloom, he interjected, “Well, I guess we’ve about used up our time together for one night, Eileen. What say we take you on back home and pick this up tomorrow after school?”

Leon Darby took a deep breath and pretended to pinch the bridge of his nose, as if what he was about to say pained him, and said, “Well, now, Frank, I think you probably know Eileen’s daddy really don’t want to see her running with you at all, much less getting brought home by you after dark on a school night. He told me it’s been made real clear to Eileen that she’s not to be going around with you, and I just think it’d be best for her and you if you just let me take her back home and you just head on back to town by yourself ahead of us. I can’t tell Mr. Hutchinson a lie about this, but I don’t have to tell him the whole truth, either. Now you see where I’m going with this, don’t you?”

“Yeah, Leon, you’re going down the same old road Eileen’s dad and lots of other folks have gone down with me, and some of them’s not looked too good at the other end of it.”

“Frank, don’t,” Eileen interjected, “you can’t be doing this kind of thing in the Army, or you’re going to spend the war behind bars. Let’s just take Leon’s kind offer here and I’ll see you tomorrow at school, ok? Plenty of time to talk more then.”

“Smart girl you got there, Frank. I’d listen to her if I was you. Them sergeants are going to break you if you don’t learn to bend a little—maybe somebody’s trying to tell you something.”

Lawton paused, clenching his hands around the steering wheel. He hated getting boxed in like this. He felt the same sickness in his guts that his dad made him feel every time they’d argue. He could either betray himself and walk away with nothing damaged but his pride, or have his ego be the only part of him that didn’t hurt in the end. Sure, he knew Leon Darby couldn’t hurt him, but the law was on his side and the Army stood towering over all of them, waiting to see what its newest recruit would do.

“I suppose that’s probably the best thing, Leon, like you said,” Frank leaned over to kiss Eileen, but she politely turned her cheek to him. He kissed it, held his posture leaning for a moment, then sat up in his seat again and bade her goodnight. Eileen got out, walked back to the police car and got in.

Leon Darby held out his hand to Lawton, saying, “I don’t imagine I’m going to be seeing much more of you around here for a while, Frank, but good luck.”

Frank Lawton acted like Darby wasn’t even there, much less speaking to him. He leaned forward to hit the starter, put the car into gear, and began to turn around on the narrow lane. Only after the last of the four-step maneuver did he so much as look at him—a sidelong, bloodcurdling glare that made Darby jump when Frank let fly with an obnoxious honk as he sped past the police car with the only thing on Earth he cared a whit about inside.

2

Justin Prator stood there holding the razor, wondering if he really had the balls to do it. He’d kept them around all eight years he’d been sober. Seeing them every day had helped him weather the anxiety of his second career change—from his old identity as a swashbuckling corporate pilot and jack of all winged trades who’d allowed one too many near misses between the bottle and throttle—into just another eight-to-five drone. But enough was enough. He’d departed Comfortable a few years back, cruised over a year or so of Boredom’s bland landscape, and had only recently realized he’d arrived somewhere vaguely familiar, deep into Burnout. If something didn’t change soon, he’d go nuts.

Justin’s ex, Gloria, never could understand how much his apparent inability to find his place in life frustrated him. Their daughter Sarah was still in high school, but she’d clearly inherited his love of music, and their son Paul had been one of Ohio State’s most driven flight students ever. He took classes year-round to graduate early, began working as a Flight Instructor in his freshman year, and was hired by commuter airline BlueSky at twenty-one. He’d been there just over a year when the major airlines’ hiring boom delivered him from the poverty-level life of a copilot and into a Captain’s seat at age twenty-two. Now that was finding your place.

In his forties and overweight about a pound for every year, Justin’s sleep apnea wasn’t helping his mental state. He only slept well early in the morning, when his body finally became weary enough to ignore the intermittent suffocation, and his job only allowed that to happen on weekends. He’d slept through Paul’s first call, but the second one woke him.

“Hey, Dad. You asleep still?”

“Umph. No, no, just dozing. Dog woke me up earlier,” he lied.

“Well, I just got into Chicago, and I should be leaving for Wichita at 11:15, so probably be there about one I’d say. I’m on the list for the jumpseat, but I could still get bumped. If you don’t hear any more from me, you’ll know I’m on. You are buying me lunch for this, right?”

“Yeah, kid. I have to do something for you I suppose, for risking your good name on a desk jockey like me.”

As an airline Captain, Paul would never again have to earn a living as a flight instructor, but he dutifully renewed his license every two years anyway, partly out of pride but mostly as a favor to his dad. Whenever Justin came due for his FAA-mandated biennial training, he’d call “Mr. Hotshot,” as he called his son—with occasionally equal parts pride and envy—to ask if he’d spare him the indignity of having to fly with, and possibly fail to satisfy, a less “invested” instructor. Today was another such occasion.

Justin’s no-longer-new title with his old employer, Cessna, was Central Regional Director of the company’s Pilot Centers, a franchise/dealer program conceived to increase the company’s market base by making pilot training simpler and more accessible to “average” people. Justin was well suited to the job, with his background as an educator and love for and experience in aviation but, unlike the job he’d lost to drinking, it didn’t pay him just to fly. Still permitted—but not financially disposed—to fly privately, his considerable skills were in atrophy.

“You coming in on Universal?”

“Yep. So, do you want to do it today or tomorrow?”

“I’ve got the plane reserved at four o’clock. Figured that’d give us time to talk a little, or a lot, depending on when you got in, and then talk some more after if we need to. It’s a nice, later model 172, so it shouldn’t be too tough, unless you’re one of those black-hat types.” Justin used some of his limited airline jargon with Paul, trying to show off. “Black-hats,” notoriously too-tough check pilots, could turn a routine route check into the beginning of the end of a pilot’s career.

“Ok, well, the flight number’s 822, and I’ll look for you outside the ticket counters around one, then, ok? I’m looking forward to it, Dad, really. How long’s it been since we flew together now, a couple of years?”

“Pretty close, I’d say. Must’ve been right after you graduated.”

“Well, we’ll find out if either of us can still fly a Cessnoid, I guess. I’m not sure I know what VFR means anymore. That’s where you just go up and flop around without any direction or purpose, right?”

“I’m pretty sure it stands for Visual Flight Rules. Nobody tells you when or where to land anyway, I know that much.”

“I bet you’re right.”

“Can we call that my oral exam?”

“No.”

Justin drew an exaggerated sigh. “Sounds like this could turn out to be a pretty long day. Alright, I’ll see you then, kid, and thanks.”

Paul wasn’t nearly so impressed with himself as his father was. Like him, he’d wanted to be a pilot since he was a boy, but he got his first pair of glasses in fourth grade. A few years later, when he learned the military only allowed men with 20/20 uncorrected vision to become pilots, he went into a frightening depression from which he never fully emerged. Paul’s career as a “bus driver”—his auto-derisive term for airline pilots—was but a frigid surrogate for his Life’s dream: to reach the top of the pilot food chain, flying fighters.

The mental effort of conversation had awakened him too much to go back to sleep, so Justin hauled himself out of bed, gave his Boxer dog a pat on the head and a “Good morning, Double-Ugly,” and went to the bathroom.

Sneering at the brittle, yellow list of “Just for Today” positive morning affirmations taped to the mirror, he added a dubious, “I will not be a fuck-up with my kid,” and grabbed the razor.

He didn’t need them anymore. He’d come close to doing it before, but always chickened out. Why did he cling to them so? It’s not like they were still serving any purpose in his life. If anything, they now only reminded him of those first few years he’d been so weak that to take life One Day at a Time was still asking too much. He’d risked his family to get his commercial license, only to lose it, and them, to alcoholism. He’d had to break the days down to hours, sometimes minutes, to cope with his soul’s throbbing craving for the poison that had left him needing it worse than ever in the aftermath of ruining his life.

But he was past that phase now, thank God. And he was sick of them, truth be told. Sick of steering clear of them, sick of taking care of them, sick of grooming them, sick of the nagging itch. It was time. He was going to do it. He was going to shave the now-graying beard he’d grown as a daily reminder of his most recent trial identity.

Justin took a few extra moments after shaving to splash the last long whiskers clinging to the sink down the drain, then studied the vastly different face in the mirror—cleaner, younger looking at a glance, but more aged under the new scrutiny permitted by having shaved. Concealed by his beard, lines had been carved into the pale face of a man who still wasn’t who Justin wanted to be, whoever that was, but was now way too old to do much about it anyway.

He put on a jacket and tie and spent an hour over breakfast, thumbing through his stained, dog-eared copy of the Flight Training Manual, Federal Aviation Regulations, and a few other dusty flying tomes. He really wanted to be “on” today and maybe regain some of the respect he was certain his son had lost for him. He knew he’d never again be able to out-fly his prodigy, but perhaps if Paul’s expectations were anywhere near as low as he feared they were, he could still impress him with some half-decent advanced maneuvers and smooth landings from solid, stable approaches.

If he’d had the usual trouble finding his car keys, he’d have been there to answer the phone. But today he’d gathered everything he’d need to take well ahead of time, including the car keys buried under the previous Sunday’s newspaper, scattered across the coffee table.

Holding the door open with his foot, Justin stooped to grab the weathered leather attaché containing his worn, lime-green David Clark headset, some obsolete charts, and owner’s manuals for all six of the Cessna Employee Flying Club airplanes—five of which he’d never flown—and walked out in plenty of time to meet Paul’s flight.

So as he half-collapsed into his eight-year old AMC Ambassador, spilling a little bit of his fourth cup of coffee on his pants and growling a brief curse in response, the phone in his tiny apartment rang twelve times, eight more times a few moments later, then fell quiet for the rest of the day.

3

Charlotte had eaten what had to have been one of the chicken’s thighs, with a modest serving of the potatoes she’d boiled for filler, and her hunger was still reasonably sated when Darby brought Eileen home Monday night. By the morning of the ninth, however, her worried stomach didn’t know anything about any chicken or potatoes and growled ferociously as she cooked breakfast with Eileen behind her, scolded and silent, putting away the dishes she’d washed the night before.

Levi ate his breakfast in his own angry silence, trying to think of a way to keep his family from being torn completely apart. Realizing he was out of both time and ideas, before everyone got up from the table to start their day, he looked sternly at Eileen and pronounced, “You won’t be going around with that junkyard dog anymore, understand? You’re too good for him, and he knows it. He’ll move on, I promise.

“You will too.” It wasn’t a prediction.

Their eyes locked until she got up from the table, saying, “I’m old enough to know who’s good for me and who’s not, Daddy.

“And right now,” she hissed as she turned to storm out the front door and down the street, crying, “You ain’t making the cut.”

With a frown and a twitch of his bald head, Levi dispatched Wes and Samuel to see to her return.

The Lawtons lived on a cross street a few hundred yards north. Wes and Samuel caught up to her just past the turn, behind a hedge that bordered an abandoned house on the corner lot.

“Eileen, stop! Dad sent us after you. I don’t think you want any more of what you’ve got coming than you already got.”

She didn’t even slow down. Wes and Samuel flanked her.

“Eileen, listen to me!” Wes made himself a wall in front of her and grabbed her arms, expecting her to stop.

“Get the hell out of my way, Wesley.”

“Right now it’s just your ass. If I don’t bring you home soon, it’s mine too. Forget about Lawton. He ain’t worth it. He wouldn’t do this for you, would he?”

“You don’t know anything about him. There’s a whole other side to him he doesn’t let out except for me. Now let go of me or I’ll do something that’ll hurt worse than anything Dad’s ever going to do to you.”

As she said this, she saw Frank and his two brothers bound down their front steps and start down the street toward them. Frank was in the lead, followed closely by Bobby, just a year younger and built like Frank but lacking his wit and guile. Behind them a few yards and along for the ride, in more than one way, was thirteen year-old Zach.

Eileen struggled with Wes, buying herself time. Wes had her wrists and started twisting them to force her into a hold. They’d been playing together their whole lives, and Eileen’s practiced responses to her brother’s predictable tactics made her a worthy opponent despite her strength disadvantage. But she could feel it in his merciless grip; he wasn’t playing this time. She was about to be subdued, and it infuriated her. Without thinking, she brought both knees up as hard as she could, hitting her brother’s most vulnerable spot as she pulled him down to the ground with her.

In a few seconds, Frank was slowing to a swagger in front of them, an amused sneer on his face. Ignoring still-uncertain Samuel, Frank looked down at normally three-inches-taller Wes and asked, “What’s got Eileen so upset here, fellas?”

“Well Frank,” Wes panted, “I bet even you can probably figure that one out. No sense pretending you got any manners for us, asshole.”

Wes wanted a reason to hate Frank for his father’s sake, but the respect he always seemed to sense Frank accorded him proved irksome. In another situation, perhaps if they’d known each other from a younger, less volatile age, they may have been good friends.

With his nausea no longer intensifying, Wes stood and felt his knees go hollow in anticipation of the brawl shaping up. Frank had never been beaten in any of his frequent scraps, and Wes knew this likely wasn’t the day. But he also knew that men like Frank didn’t respond to talk—only force and bravado. He’d seen it play out between oilfield roughnecks around his father dozens of times.

With this in mind, he pretended his legs hadn’t turned to jelly, imagined he was already in his Army uniform, and took the last step closer to Frank Lawton, boresighting his eyes with the tip of his nose.

“We ain’t lived around here long, so I don’t know your whole story, but my dad don’t think you’re worth a cup of warm spit, which is kind of unusual. Now you’re making a lot of trouble for his baby girl here, and the only reason we’re here instead of him’s because they won’t send us to jail if we throw you in front of the train.”

Frank smiled, supremely confident of Wes’ bluff. “I’d like to see you, or your daddy, try. Now you go home. And you tell him not to worry about my girl.”

“I don’t tell Levi Hutchinson what to do—and I suggest trash like you don’t go trying to make a habit out of it, either.” Wes’ expression was deadly serious, but his heart was in his throat. They stood there for a long moment, each waiting for the other to strike.

Wes startled visibly as the morning train from Bartlesville blew its whistle. Unflinching, Frank held his cocky smile and raised a contemptuous, daring eyebrow.

“Right on time. Eh, Hutch?”

Afraid of seeing things take a turn for the worst, Eileen’s family loyalties made a sudden, triumphant return.

“Frank, how about I just go back home for now and let me try to handle things, ok? I want my dad to give things another look, to give you half a chance, but if you go kicking the shit out of his boy, that ain’t ever going to happen, now is it?”

Wes broke his stare with Lawton just long enough to register his offense with his sister, at which Frank Lawton couldn’t help but let out a chuckle, casting to the winds the ominous overtone in which he’d been reveling so throughout their exchange.

Frank saw the fresh fear and tired sadness in Eileen’s eyes. He was just about to agree when a voice called from the Lawton house.

“Frank! Bobby! What the hell’s going on down there? Get back here, now!” It was Boyd Lawton, Frank’s father, standing on his front porch in an untucked shirt and jeans. He’d heard the commotion as his boys ran off and come outside to see what they were getting into now.

Boyd didn’t know the whole basis for Frank’s reputation around town, but he believed most of what he heard, and none of it was good. He’d come to see his boys only in terms of how much pride they brought him, which could have been considerable, had he stayed sober enough to appreciate it when they were young and still trying in vain to impress him. Those days were long gone now, lost in the bottomless cocktail of angry despair he force-fed everyone in the house after his wife hanged herself, in the depths of another, still greater depression, in 1935.

He stepped down to the front yard. “If I get to your asses before they’re back in this house, you’re going to wish to Jesus they weren’t attached!”

Frank grabbed Eileen, kissed her hard, then gut-punched Wes when he tried to pull him off of her. He smiled in Samuel’s face as Wes doubled over and, narrowing his eyes with arms at his sides, gave a chuckle and said, “Real roughnecks, you two.

“Tell your daddy to leave me and Eileen alone. And tell him if he’s ever man enough to push his own weight around, getting thrown in front of a train’s going to sound better than what I’ll do to him.”

With that, he and Bobby ran back to their house, Zach trailing along after giving Eileen the finger and a laugh. Through watery eyes, Wes and Eileen watched as Boyd Lawton smacked Frank on the back of his head, hard enough to sprawl him across the front steps, then kicked his rear and pursued his boys into the house, slamming the door behind them.

“I don’t know what you see in that piece of shit, Eileen,” Wes told his sister after the Lawton boys were out of earshot. She didn’t answer but turned and started walking back home on her own, fighting the urge, the near-compulsion to try to get all of her worries and fears in front of her at once. She knew whether she failed again or finally succeeded, she’d break down right there on the sidewalk. She decided to focus on how best to handle her father.

None of her forethought could have prepared her for what awaited her at home, however. It made her father two hours late for work and put her out of school for the rest of the week. The prospect of losing another of his children, especially his only daughter, terrified him, and fear wasn’t something Levi Hutchinson often experienced, expressed, or handled particularly well.

It had, of course, occurred to Levi before that his little girl would eventually have to spread her wings and fly away, but he thought he’d raised her to have standards someone like Frank Lawton couldn’t meet. She’d always been such a steady, reliable child; he just couldn’t see her with someone so “full of piss, vinegar, and gunpowder.”

Eileen didn’t see Frank Lawton outside school again until the day before he left for basic training three weeks later, when Charlotte, having said “any boy headed off to fight a war deserves to kiss his girl goodbye,” allowed her to visit with Frank on their front porch for the two hours after school before Levi would get home from work.

Eileen knew when the war was over, if she didn’t start to lie, to herself or to them—a lot and often—either Frank or her dad would end up in jail, and the other would be dead.

4

Two weeks after he put his father through the wringer out in Wichita, Paul Prator stared silently out the window of the Columbus Airport Holiday Inn’s courtesy van, trying in vain to ignore the racket as it rattled and clattered over the same 2.7 miles of bad road it had traveled 30,000 times in its purgatorial life. He’d had a nightmare, a rarity for him, the night before. Its genesis was simple enough to figure out, but its incredible detail and realism had him reeling.

He’d been reading a book from the shelf in BlueSky’s Indianapolis crew lounge, an old Bantam paperback titled “Ploesti” with a pair of World War Two-era B-24 “Liberator” bombers flying low over a burning oil refinery on the cover. An aficionado of that period in aviation, Paul read a little about the mission as a boy, but since the raid hadn’t been on German soil or had any impact on the war, he’d immaturely dismissed it as inconsequential and never bothered to learn the details.

Ploesti was the tallest of orders: its plan called for just under 200 planes to takeoff badly overloaded at first light from a makeshift base in Libya, fly across the Mediterranean Sea, skirting German-held Greece, crossing Albania and mountainous portions of Yugoslavia. They would have to fly low to avoid radar detection and bomb five oil refinery complexes forming a ferociously defended ring of nearly identical targets without inflicting significant collateral damage to “soft” civilian portions of the central city. The raiders were then to fly the six hour return trip in damaged airplanes, many with wounded crewmembers aboard, trying to avoid capture or interment in neutral Turkey, which was the nearest land for much of the over-water return flight. Casualties were estimated to run as high as 50%, at which level the mission would still be considered a success. There were no fuel reserves.

When the mission was over, roughly 20% of the total force, with four-hundred forty-six men aboard, had been lost. Eight planes and seventy-nine men were interred in Turkey for the remainder of the war, 54 men were wounded but landed safely in friendly territory, and 76 wounded were taken as prisoners of war. Only thirty-three of the planes and barely more than half the men on the mission returned to service.

Paul’s nightmare, like most of his always bizarre dreams, started out innocently enough with him flying at treetop altitude and high speed over beautiful countryside, just enjoying the ride and the incredible rush of high-speed low-altitude flight. What was odd was that, for perhaps the first time ever, he wasn’t flying the plane, but riding on the right side as a waist gunner. Out his window, he could see at least a dozen other B-24s lined up in battle formation, all flying at top speed.

Everything seemed fine at first, but then he heard a voice in his headset telling him to watch out for flak towers coming up. The planes were flying so low, the gunners actually had to aim slightly upward to fire on anti-aircraft guns the Germans had wisely placed atop towers, to protect them from bomb bursts. The Germans hadn’t planned on such a risky low-level attack, and while they struggled to realign their guns to fire horizontally, the advantage was the raiders’.

Paul was shooting at the towers, but they were going by so fast he couldn’t tell if he personally was scoring any kills, though he could see some of the guns getting hit in the withering crossfire. Suddenly, there was a loud thump, and the plane seemed to jump a few feet sideways, making him lose his balance and fall backward. They’d been hit and his intercom, which had been busy with voices of his crewmembers directing each other’s attention and fire, went dead.

Looking forward as he struggled to his feet, he could see daylight shining into the forward fuselage through a hole where the radio operator and navigator stations had been. Then he caught the unmistakable odor of 115-octane aviation gas and spotted the source, a steady dribble curling around the forward lip of the left side waist gunner’s window. For the volatile fuel to make it the thirty feet or so from its tank in the wing to there without evaporating there had to be a massive leak.

Perhaps oblivious to the fuel leak or just too scared to stop firing, his partner, who he didn’t recognize, at the left waist window was still firing his .50-caliber machine gun as targets came into view. As Paul stood up, he leaned forward and shouted to his friend to cease fire, pointing to the stream of fuel saturating his uniform, but the man wouldn’t stop. Paul resumed firing out his own window, hitting a man running toward a gun tower. It seemed as if he physically knocked the man to the ground, and he felt indignant and powerful.

Miraculously, the strong and chaotic airflow around the opposite window and gun somehow kept the muzzle flash from igniting the fuel, but ahead of them he could see what might soon do the trick. Spread from just ahead of the airplane’s left wingtip as far to the right as he could see were buildings and oil storage tanks ablaze. Where inside that mess their target lay, he wasn’t sure, but what was about to happen to them seemed certain.

He knew they’d passed through the ring of the city’s defenses now, for the flak had stopped completely, so he began making his way forward to tell the pilots about the fuel leak. As he approached the bomb bay amidships, he was almost overcome by the heat welling up from beneath the plane and pouring through the bomb bay doors, which had been open for some time. He could see occasional flashes of undamaged city, but much of the view through the doors was smoke and fire, passing what seemed like only inches or feet beneath the plane.

Just ahead of the bombs was the top turret, in which another man he didn’t recognize was staring straight ahead, guns quiet. Directly to his left was a gaping hole from where the shell had pierced the plane, and through it he could see the number two engine closest to the fuselage on the left wasn’t turning. Covering the inside of the fuselage to his right he could see some kind of liquid glistening in the smoky daylight, and that whole side seemed to be littered with small bits of material he couldn’t identify. Reaching out to touch a piece, he realized it was—seconds before—part of the radio operator, whose other remains were in a lump on the floor to his right.

Peering beneath the floor of the elevated cockpit, he could see the bombardier in his “greenhouse” at the nose of the plane, pounding on the bomb release switch and its housing, trying to get it to work. The bombs were motionless in their rack. The wire that ran from the switch to the release on the bomb rack had been cut clean by the shell, and the plane was now carrying 3,000 pounds of armed bombs over a series of flaming oil refineries—with a fuel leak and a dead engine.

As if he didn’t already know how dire their situation was, climbing the three-rung ladder up to the cockpit confirmed his fears. Half of the gauges in the instrument panel were dead, nearly every red warning light installed was aglow, and the engine controls confirmed what he already knew about the number two engine–it had been euthanized by the pilots before it could shake itself off the wing.

“The bombs are stuck in the bay, and we’re leaking fuel!” he screamed at the pilot, who he felt he knew in the dream but couldn’t identify afterward. The man didn’t respond, but he had his hands full of airplane and perhaps couldn’t think of much to say at that moment. Looking out through the windshield, which was covered in wet soot and had been cracked by debris exploding from below, he could see nothing ahead over the plane’s long nose but blue ocean at some distance. The pilot turned to him and said “We’re gonna make it after all, just you wait. Jar of flies got it made now, buddy!”

That last comment was the biggest mystery. Was he referring to the crew as a jar of flies, which made no sense at all, or could Paul just have misheard him? The dream ended there, and Paul had just shaken it off as another weird dream, though they were seldom so vivid. He’d been reading the book for a few days and had just finished it, so there was little doubt in his mind he was just living vicariously through the dream. Long and detailed as it was, he didn’t see any sense in mentioning it to anyone, except maybe his dad. He wouldn’t want it to seem like he still harbored fantasies about flying in the military, much less twenty years before he was even born.

As much as he hated getting up early, Paul loved to fly in the morning, especially on glorious ones like this. The airplane, all covered in dew, looked like a succulent red, white, and blue Bomb Pop just starting to melt in a midsummer sun. He took his sweet time with the cockpit preflight, savoring the sounds his plane made as he slowly, deliberately awakened the gyros, instrument vibrators, cooling fans, and each electrical bus, savoring the intricate, handsome, some might say cramped cockpit he lovingly referred to as his “office.” By the time his copilot, Mitch Russett, returned from his exterior inspection, Paul had had several minutes of quality time alone with his plane.

The Brasilia was a handsome design, not quite as long as its ample wingspan, with a high T-tail and a 1,800-horsepower Pratt and Whitney turboprop engine, driving a fat, four-bladed, reversible propeller, on each wing. Capable of going well over three-hundred miles per hour, it was one of the fastest non-jet airplanes in the sky, but not the least bit unforgiving or squirrely, like most pilots would expect of such an overpowered, capable machine. Paul adored it.

Picking up on the churchlike vibe, Russet almost whispered, “It’s good outside,” as he contorted himself through the tiny cockpit door.

“Matter of fact, this thing’s cleaner than a convent - you could eat off the gear legs.”

Paul acknowledged with a look over the dirty, scratched, mirrored-brown lenses of his trademark gold Ray-Ban aviators, adding a William Shatner-esque, “That’s—not—a good—sign…and I’m not sure I’m comfortable sharing a ‘cock-pit’ with a guy who just put the words ‘convent’, ‘eat’, and ‘legs’ in a single sentence that wasn’t part of a joke.”

Paul was a big believer in the axiom that the most reliable aircraft are typically the dirtiest, and vice versa. The good ones don’t spend much time in the shop, and all manner of grease streaks, sooty exhaust stains, faded or peeling paint, worn decals, crazed windows, minor fluid leaks, and the like tell a long tale of faithful service.

This particular plane had good reason for being so clean. Its left engine had quietly reached its service life limit and been exchanged six weeks earlier. Then, a chronic problem with the fuel control on the right had developed, leading one hapless crew to a “hot start” two weeks before, which necessitated a thorough inspection of that engine. No damage was found however, and the aircraft had been released for service just the day before. Neither pilot, nor any others outside the airline’s maintenance department for that matter, could have known any of this, which was by design. As far as the pilots knew, they were getting into an airplane that had been certified as airworthy by a highly qualified mechanic with his livelihood, if not his life, on the line—nothing more, nothing less.

“Yeah, I know, but hey, what’s the worst that could happen?” First Officer Mitch Russett asked glibly as he tossed his flight bag into its place beside his seat and folded his six-foot frame into it, sighing as he surveyed the instrument panel. He didn’t look over at his Captain, knowing well there would be no response and that to look for one would show an amateurish amusement with their banter. The really funny guys are the ones that never laugh.

Russett was a newbie as airline pilots go, at only 22 years of age and with scarcely 1,400 total hours in his logbook. But he did understand the complex psychological dance pilots performed together better than most such inexperienced pilots, thanks to the mentorship of his father, a captain for Eastern Airlines.

Russett had flown with Paul Prator for most of the past three months, and the rapport between them could hardly have been better. Spending ten to fourteen hours a day working exclusively with one other individual in a tightly confined place like an airplane cockpit, often without any breaks longer than a few minutes, could be a challenge for even the most flexible and upbeat personalities. The perceived length of a day could vary widely depending on how well each crewmember got along with their partners. Pilots’ personalities run the gamut from antisocial intellectuals, known as “slam-clicks” for the only sound ever heard from them on layovers—that of their hotel room doors locking—to the beer-swilling, skirt-chasing fraternity types who could find trouble on a Monday night in BFE. Either of the pilots or the lone flight attendant could end up being anything from a welcome partner in some good-natured hijinks amongst a well-matched crew, to a human buffer between people who’d otherwise have no love lost between them, to a persistent irritant to either or both of the others, making the entire trip drag for everyone, including the passengers.

Paul Prator and Mitch Russett had no need for any interpersonal buffer, which was a good thing, because their flight attendant, an older and well-kept but not particularly attractive woman named Doris, just didn’t get it. She took her job far too seriously, perhaps because this was the third “career” of her life, and always seemed a little unsure of herself in her work even though she’d been with the company for two years now, and the Brasilia was the only airplane she’d ever worked.

Boarding and startup were uneventful, and Russett ran briskly through the checklist as Prator taxied to runway 28 left at Port Columbus International. With everything done but to turn on every light on the airplane for takeoff, a few thousand feet remained in their long taxi route. In shameless violation of an oft-ignored regulation against non-essential conversation at “critical” times, Paul picked up the conversation they’d had to pause when Doris showed up in the hotel lobby for their ride to the airport.

“So, what was the deal with Blue Legwarmers last night - did you get anywhere with her?”

“Nah, she wasn’t going anywhere with me. I don’t know what went wrong; I lied about what I do and everything. She probably just figured I was out of her league.” Prator particularly appreciated the droll irony in that. Russett’s father had definitely imparted to his son the critical knowledge that being a pilot was no longer a ticket to anything but mistrust from any woman worth having, courtesy of their forebears’ burning the glamorous veneer off of the profession with reckless philandering and false modesty about a job they were clearly proud to have.

“At least you got some sleep.”

“I can sleep when my dick goes limp.”

Paul smiled, looking out his side window, away from Russett, to ensure he had the plane completely stopped behind a 727 ahead of them before pulling up on the parking brake’s red-handle. An emergency backup for the normal brake system, it was either on or off; there was no gradual way to apply it, as many less careful captains had learned the embarrassing way.

“Well, maybe when you’re flying for them.” Paul pointed to the big jet ahead of them. “Chicks dig Ferraris.”

“Yeah, that’ll be the day.”

“Oh, come on. You said your dad flew there, right?”

“Yeah. And they’ve got a firm ‘no-nepotism’ policy. I could be the second coming of Chuck Yeager and they’d still toss my app away.”

“Well, at least you’ll get out of here eventually. Your dad only worked for one airline—that leaves a couple dozen. At least you‘re not a ‘lifer’, like me.”

Russett had flown with Paul a lot and considered him a mentor, someone he’d probably end up calling later in his career to get a leg up for a better job. There were several reasons a pilot might consider himself doomed to the sometimes angry sub-caste of pilots considered unhirable by the major airlines, and Russett didn’t see how any of them applied to Paul Prator.

“Why would you be a lifer?”

“Because I can’t squint hard enough to see 20/20.”

“Oh. Yeah, they really need to change that. I mean, I know the FAA’s the king of ancestor worship, but we haven’t had to wear goggles for quite a while now. How close are you?”

Paul didn’t answer right away, trying to guess at how much of his dirtiest secret he wanted to spill. He’d only been allowed to fly commercially by virtue of a career-killing waiver the FAA would issue to pilots whose natural vision was worse than 20/200, but fully correctable.

“If I ever lose both contacts, I may never find my spare glasses.”

“Oh.”

“You know, I wouldn’t care if they just said, ‘Whoa, you need glasses? That’s it, you’re done. No 20/20, no flying. Have a nice fucking day.’ I could deal with that. I’d just go smuggle cocaine or fly food to Congolese refugees or some shit. But a guy can do exercises and go on a carrot juice diet for a week and whatever else to get through the physical and then show up for his first solo or his first trip wearing glasses and they just say, ‘Gee, that came on awfully quick. Be careful out there, ’k Lieutenant?’ It’s just a total double-standard. Boys’ club bullshit.”

Paul’s face flushed as he finished his tirade. “I’ve been flying my whole life—I can fly circles around any swingin’ cheese dick with 20/20 who just decided he might like to be a pilot after he stumbled into a recruiter’s office to ask directions to his Aunt Lucy’s. But I’ll spend my career here, doing the same fucking thing for ten cents on the dollar, because they’re too lazy to cull the pile on something that actually matters.

“I’m sorry, man. I just have a thing about bullshit blanket policies. It doesn’t matter if you wear contacts and they know it. They’re just using it to weed people out, and I wish they’d look at something else. Like ability, maybe.”

Mitch Russett felt terrible for having cast a pall over what had been a great start to their day. He had to say something, and “I’m sorry” wasn’t going to cut it.

“You thought at all about getting that surgery or those special contacts that can get you to 20/20 for a few hours or days at a time?”

“Yeah, I looked into orthokeratology, it’s called, but my eyes are too fucked-up. The doctor says he’d be surprised if I got to 20/20 at all, and it costs eight hundred per eye, per year. That’s a big gamble. And radial keratotomy, the surgery, works in almost all the cases, but it hasn’t been around long enough to be considered safe, and they’re onto it. Most of the airlines now ask if you’ve had it done, and if they do any kind of serious physical, they can see the scars. And it’s five-thousand per eye. That’s an even bigger gamble.

“As bad as flying a turboprop for thirty-grand a year the rest of my life sounds, shelling out serious cash to end up not even able to leave, or going blind and then having them come out with some no-risk, undetectable way to correct vision the next year sounds a hell of a lot worse.”

“Yeah.”

The 727 taking off ahead of them was breaking ground, a cloud of kerosene soot pouring out behind it.

“You ready?” Paul quickly surveyed the cockpit, his mind comparing the position of every switch, dial and annunciator light to the file photo in his mind labeled “pre-takeoff,” as the tower cleared them. Russett did his own last minute “big stuff” check as he acknowledged the clearance and replied, “Hit it.”

Paul advanced the throttles as he lined the plane up on the runway centerline and scanned the engine gauges for any abnormal indications as they accelerated. Having seen nothing unusual by the time his copilot called “V1, rotate,” indicating they’d reached the speed at which aborting the takeoff was no longer safe, Paul applied, then gently reduced, back pressure to the Brasilia’s control yoke. Simultaneously, he pressed the right rudder pedal just enough to counteract the complex set of forces that would otherwise pull the plane’s nose to the left as it pitched up and, with the smooth grace of a ballerina, 26,000 pounds of airplane, worth about eight-hundred dollars a pound, was climbing at 2,000 feet per minute and accelerating through one-hundred fifty miles per hour.

Climbing through 1,500 feet in a rare cloudless Ohio sky, they had switched from the tower controller to departure radar control, raised the landing gear and wing flaps, and just reduced power on the engines when there was a muffled “poff,” followed immediately by a mumbled, “What the fuck, over?” from the pilots, neither knowing who’d actually said it out loud.

The airplane banked slightly and yawed hard to the left; Prator countered, and looked at the engine gauges, which were showing textbook failure indications. The autofeather system automatically aligned the stricken engine’s propeller blades with the slipstream, eliminating the biggest source of aerodynamic drag, and both men heard a tiny voice in his head say, “Cool - a real engine failure - I get one!” Outright failure of a turbine aircraft engine would occur only once in hundreds of thousands of hours; many pilots could retire having never seen it happen. It was, for young pilots like them, a revered badge of proven competence to successfully handle one, though none would tempt Fate by actually wishing for it.

Designed to be safe after any statistically possible malfunction, an airliner experiencing a simple engine failure was not, by itself, considered an emergency. The standard drill was to run a checklist or two to close fuel, hydraulic, and electrical connections with the affected engine, taking note of lost redundancies, and land as soon as possible with emergency vehicles standing by, just in case something else went wrong.

But as Prator trimmed the controls to make the plane fly straight on one engine, something else did.

A loud synthetic bell sounded in the cockpit, along with a calm but insistent female voice saying, “ENGINE FIRE.” With little thought and even less discussion, Mitch silenced the warning and used a single word, “verify,” to get Paul’s concurrence in selecting the correct, illuminated one of the plane’s two “fire handles” sticking out from the center of the instrument panel. Pulling it shut off the engine’s fuel and hydraulic supplies and generator if they weren’t already isolated and armed two fire extinguishers for discharge into the engine.

Now the little voices inside the pilots’ heads that had said “cool” about the engine failure were nowhere to be heard, having been replaced by hysterical ones screaming, “FIRE? HOLY SHIT, MAN! NOT COOL!”

A seal for one of the engine’s main bearings had blown, starving it of oil and causing the smallest of the engine’s three concentric rotors, spinning at well over 30,000 RPM, to literally weld itself to a halt, igniting an inferno in the engine’s core. In the seconds it took the autofeather computer to do its job and for the pilots it was coddling to get the most basic awareness of what was happening, the engine was destroyed and a two-hundred mile-per-hour wind was force-feeding the fire.

In the cabin, twenty-two passengers sat transfixed in fear as they watched the engine disintegrate from the inside out. Flames and smoke trailed as far back as any of them could see, with molten engine dripping from the massive tailpipe at the wing’s trailing edge. One of the passengers, a pilot for another airline on his way to work, got out of his seat and moved all around the cabin trying to get a read on the situation, stressing his fellow passengers all the more.

Doris remained in her jumpseat at the front of the cabin, trying hard to appear composed with all eyes scrutinizing her expression as she reviewed her emergency evacuation drill, praying she’d live to use it.

After seeing the fire continue unabated for what seemed like minutes, Doris couldn’t keep quiet any longer. She picked up the interphone to call “the boys.”

“You guys know about the fire, right?”

In the cockpit, the “boys” knew, indeed. By the time she called, they’d already performed the immediate action items they had to have memorized for an engine fire in flight, and were in the middle of a 30 second waiting period after “blowing” the first fire extinguisher into the engine. If the warning remained after that, they would turn the fire handle the other way, discharging the other extinguisher. The “engine fire in flight” checklist ended there, Mitch advised Paul, and the two looked at each other. They’d both trained for this situation in the simulator dozens of times, and in each case the first bottle put the fire out.

Paul couldn’t help but recall a sick joke his dad once told him. They’d been discussing emergency procedures, specifically engine failure in a single-engine airplane at night. Justin said, “About all you can do is trim for best glide speed, head for the darkest patch of ground you can reach, and try like hell to get the engine running again. When you think you’re getting close to the ground, you turn your landing light on. If you don’t like what you see, turn it off.”

The thirty seconds seemed like an hour, but that glowing-red fire handle didn’t so much as flicker.

Russett asked, “You ready?”

“Do it.”

Mitch twisted the handle the other direction, and watched with some relief as the indicator for the second bottle’s discharge “squib” lit up. They’d turned back to the east by this time and were pointed directly at Rickenbacker Air Force Base, just south of Columbus, just about eight miles ahead.

If that light doesn’t go out pretty quick, but the light flickered once and went out before Paul could finish the thought.

“Call Doris and make sure the detectors didn’t just burn away.”

Mitch already had the interphone in hand.

“Doris, we don’t show any fire indications up here anymore. What do you see?”

“Um, there’s a lot of smoke still coming out of the engine, but I don’t see any more fire. Are we going to be ok? I mean…”

“We’re ok now that the fire’s out, but we’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do up here, so I’m going to go. We’ll get back to you in a minute, plan to land back at Columbus in about 10 minutes.”

“Well, should I, um…hello?” Doris asked, but realized Mitch had hung up on her. She pretended to talk for another few moments, let out her best fake laugh, then hung up and stood to make a seat belt check in the cabin. The passengers were clearly shaken, and with the fire gone they were now giving her their undivided attention; it made her uncomfortable.

“The pilots said we’ll be landing back in Columbus in a few minutes,” she repeated as she walked through the ten rows of seats, looking at everyone’s seat belt, but not really seeing anything. The pilot who’d been out of his seat said he wanted to talk to the pilots. She told him they were very busy and couldn’t even talk to her right then, but she’d see what she could do in a minute.

With the fire warnings stopped, Paul called for the single-engine approach and landing checklist. The third item on that checklist was to consider leaving a backup electric hydraulic pump on to replace the one normally driven by the now deceased engine. At that point, Mitch looked up to the overhead panel for the switch controlling the pump and noticed both hydraulic fluid quantity gauges read zero.

Numerous other relatively low-priority warnings and annunciators were going off in a cascade effect unlike anything either man had ever seen in simulator training, except for some doomsday scenario hatched by a gifted and sadistic instructor during occasional “free time” after a particularly clean checkride. On those occasions, anything and everything was fair game in a macho contest between instructor and pilot, with the instructor playing the part of cruel Fate, trying anything within the realm of possibility to kill the pilots, and the pilots doing anything, orthodox or not, to survive.

“Paul, look here real quick.” Mitch was pointing up at the hydraulic panel and tapping on the left system’s fluid quantity gauge.

Prator stole a glance. “You think that’s real?”

“I don’t know. There’s still power to the right gauge.”

“Yeah.”

Paul had noticed the rudder seemed to be moving itself to the left and was impossible to move back to the right. “Rudder’s jammed, it feels like.”

“Rudder’s jammed? What do you mean?” Russett’s not long-changed voice cracked, and he swallowed nothing from a mouth gone dry. This was some kind of multiple failure, and now they seemed to have some structural damage too, which was his personal aeronautical “boogieman.”. As a kid, he’d read accident reports about planes that had been literally torn apart by thunderstorms, overly aggressive pilot technique, or both, and he had no trouble imagining the terror of riding a fluttering piece of wreckage for some eternal seconds to a sudden and gruesome death.

“It’s not moving. I’m pushing as hard as I can to line the nose up, but it’s not moving at all.”

Mitch Russett noticed the plane was literally flying somewhat sideways through the air. Paul had to hold about twenty degrees of right bank to keep from turning left.

Unable to deflect the plane’s rudder to counteract the asymmetric thrust from the good engine, the only other way Paul could keep the plane from rolling over was to reduce power or use the ailerons to bank the plane’s wings in the opposite direction, creating an uncomfortable, crooked maneuver called a slip. Already low on airspeed and altitude, reducing power was the last thing Paul wanted to do.

Flying in a slip increased the minimum speed they’d have to keep for the wings to create enough lift and reduced their climb rate, which had been a healthy 1,000 feet per minute just after the engine failed, to an anemic six-hundred feet per minute. Putting the landing gear down would negate most of that, and with no hydraulics they wouldn’t be able to raise the gear once they let it fall into landing position. They would have to land with no rudder, wing flaps, nose steering, or brakes—or Mulligans.

“Actually, I don’t think the rudder’s jammed, or we wouldn’t be sitting here talking right now. I think it’s just lost pressure and the air load on it’s just too strong for me to overcome manually.”

Russett nodded.

“What do you think about the brakes?” Paul asked.

“What about them?”

“You think we’re going to have any?”

Russett puzzled over the question. It wasn’t as easy to answer as it seemed. The Brasilia had hydraulic brakes, like any other large plane, but it had the added redundancy of the parking brake, which could tap pressure stored in a small shock absorber for the hydraulic system called an accumulator to instantly lock the wheels. In training and even in their Quick Reference Handbook, “QRH,” it was made clear that, when all else fails, the accumulator will always work. “You’ll stop right now, and probably blow the tires; it won’t be pretty, but you will stop,” went the conventional wisdom.

“I’m looking at the ‘loss of both hydraulic systems’ procedure, and it says that even in the event of a total failure on both systems, the accumulator will retain enough pressure to hit the brakes up to three times, depending on preload.”

“But if we don’t have any fluid for it to push with…”

“How’s it going to work?” Russett shared Paul’s concern.

“I don’t know. Doesn’t sound like it is, does it? Get maintenance on the radio and let’s get a ruling here, can we?” Prator’s leg was starting to fatigue from pressing on the rudder pedal, so he stopped. Nothing changed.

After a few minutes on the radio with a crisis team hastily convened at company headquarters, the verdict was that the parking brake accumulator would in fact stop them, hard and fast, if they used it. With that or an uncontrolled swerve off the runway after touchdown as the two possible scenarios, Prator picked up the interphone and briefed Doris. He then punched up the P.A. system and addressed their passengers for the first time since before they’d started that sick pup of an engine that had just drizzled Pratt and Whitney over half of Franklin County.

“Folks, we’ve obviously had a pretty unusual thing happen here this morning. I’m not going to tell you this isn’t an emergency, because it is. The situation is that the left engine failed, we had a fire, and it appears now that the fire knocked some other components out, including some or all of our hydraulics. Now, that’s not the end of our story, because we have some manual flight controls on this airplane, and I’m not even sure we don’t have some residual hydraulic pressure. The reason I’m not sure is that the fire seems to have taken out a good chunk of our lights and gauges up here, but we have to assume the worst-case scenario is valid. We are going to land at Rickenbacker Air Force Base, south of Columbus, because their runway is longer and wider than Port Columbus. I know that isn’t the most convenient option for any of you, but it is the safest course of action. I’ve asked Doris to prepare the cabin for an emergency landing, with the remote possibility of an emergency evacuation. I need for all of you to follow her instructions and mine explicitly, and I have every confidence that what’s going to happen is going to be a normal, uneventful landing. If it’s not, however, we have to be ready.”

Paul kept his microphone keyed for a moment more, wondering if he should say anything else, but decided against it and released it.

“Well, I’m sure that made a big impression back there,” Prator said aloud, but mostly to just himself. “So, you ready for the approach?”

“I don’t think you’re going to like this no-flap approach speed.”

“Mitch, I’m a pilot. I don’t like anything but money and time off. What’s the damage?”

“151.”

“Yep. This is going to be interesting.”

Their inability to extend the wing flaps meant an increase to their minimum approach speed of over 30 knots, increasing the pressure Prator would have to overcome to use the rudder, the likelihood of a fire-damaged tire blowing out on touchdown, and, obviously, the amount of speed they would have to dissipate before going off the end of the runway if the brakes didn’t work as advertised. It also gave him a general idea of where their minimum flying or stall speed might be lurking. It wasn’t as far away as he’d hoped.

All of this also meant that, once the landing gear came down, a missed approach, or “go-around” would likely prove fatal. They would have a Hobbson’s choice of descending gradually and under control into the ground, impacting at around one-hundred-seventy miles per hour, or attempting to maintain altitude at great risk of losing control and turning into what an old friend of his liked to call a ‘smoking hole’.

“I’d like to get about a fifteen-mile final so we’ve got plenty of time to get the gear down. Sure as shit something in that left wheel well’s going to hang up. We may have to get creative. When you go to drop the gear, make sure you do the left one first. Don’t drop the others until it’s down.”

The emergency gear extension controls were on the right side of the cockpit, beneath a panel in the floor under Russett’s left leg. There was no way for Paul to help him with the crucial task.

“That’s not a problem, man. You take as much time as you need, let’s get it right.”

Keying his microphone, Paul said, “Columbus Approach, Bluegrass 514’s requesting the visual to 21 at Rickenbacker, and we’re requesting a fifteen-mile final and all the equipment.” “Equipment” was jargon for having fire and rescue vehicles standing by their landing runway. Paul was acutely aware that, from the time Mitch declared their emergency on the radio after the engine failed, every crackpot wanna-be-pilot with a radio scanner and every television station in Ohio was listening to every word he said.

Extending the Brasilia’s landing gear without hydraulic pressure was procedurally simple. The copilot, using a tool resembling a straightened tire iron with a flared fitting at one end and a handle at the other, would slip the flared end over each of four metal fittings beneath the emergency landing gear extension access panel. The fittings all normally pointed up and forward at a 45 degree angle, and the tool was used to pry each of them backward roughly 90 degrees. Moving the first fitting would vent all the hydraulic lines to allow the landing gear to fall freely once they were released from the mechanical locks holding them up in their wells. The other three fittings released those locks for the nose, left main, and right main landing gear legs.

“Blue 514, roger, you’re cleared for any approach to any runway at Rickenbacker, and they’ve already rolled the equipment and a chase plane for you,” the Columbus Approach controller replied.

Slipping the extension handle over the return line fitting, Mitch said, “OK, just say when.”

As his glidepath to the runway approached the normal three degrees, Paul pressed his lips together and, trying to prepare for any number of new crises when the gear came down, reset his grip on the yoke. “Do it. Go.”

Russett pulled on the handle, but felt a resistance much stronger than he’d experienced in any simulator session. He released pressure and pulled again, still feeling as if he wasn’t really moving anything, but only applying torque.

By this time, they were less than 12 miles from the runway at 3,000 feet, and Paul had been wrestling an airplane that was never intended to fly in this configuration for half an hour. Mitch tried the fitting again, and it felt as if something actually moved this time, but when he released pressure on the handle, it still sprung back to the starting position, which was not as it had been in the simulator. He pulled again and felt only the previous odd resistance.

Having neither seen nor felt anything like a gear leg coming down, Paul impatiently asked his copilot, “What’re you doing over there?”

“This thing doesn’t feel right.”

“What do you mean?” The strain was showing on Prator’s face.

“Well, I pull back on the return line thing, but it feels like nothing’s moving, except one time, but even then it didn’t stay in position once I got it back.

“I don’t think it’s going to come down.”

“Did you follow the procedure?”

“Yes. Exactly. I’ve done this in the sim, but the fittings always stay in the position you pull them back to, they don’t spring back like this.”

Prator reduced power to keep from getting too high to land, since none of the landing gear drag had been added yet, and the airplane straightened out somewhat. He looked down at the panel on his copilot’s floor then back out the windshield at the ever-closer runway a few times.

“Just try the uplocks and see what happens.”

Russett pulled back on the left main’s fitting, and felt the same odd torqueing sensation he’d felt with the return. Then he tried the other two uplock releases with similar results. Nothing was happening. The landing gear position indicator, a set of three green and three red lights, was totally dark, indicating gear up and locked, but it also failed to light up when he tested it, so there was no trusting it. Still, there was no different sound, no sensation of any change taking place to the airplane at all. By now they were less than five miles from the field and 1,500 feet from the ground.

“Tower, Blue 514. We’re having a gear indication problem. Can you take a look and see if you see our gear down?” Prator asked. The stress in his face was unmistakable, yet he seemed almost resigned to what was now looking like an inevitable gear-up landing, which would likely total the airplane and hurt a few people, not to mention the huge fire hazard.

After a short pause the controller responded “Bluegrass 514, Rickenbacker tower, you appear to have a nose gear down and all others up, but your gear doors are all open. Fly-by is approved. Maybe we can get a better look as you pass.”

“Shit. Well, what do you want do now, man?” They were three miles from the runway at 1,000 feet.

“Can we climb at all?”

Prator paused, looked at his airspeed and said, “I think so.”

“I say we go around then. We can try a few more things.”

“Tower, 514’s going to fly by and take you up on that look-see.” Prator gingerly added power on the good engine. The airplane swerved drunkenly and began to climb at 300 feet per minute.

As they passed over the airport, the tower controller confirmed his earlier report. All gear doors were open, having no hydraulic pressure to hold them up, and the nose gear was extended. This configuration explained their paltry climb rate, and narrowed their margin above stall speed even more. With the good engine at full power, Prator now had two hands full of airplane.

“What do you want to try?” he asked Russett.

“I think, if I can just get this return line to come back for me one time, I can hold it open with just my hand and then use the handle to pull the uplocks. You think that’ll work?”

“Beats the shit out of me. If it doesn’t, we’re going in like a one-handled wheelbarrow, because I don’t know if I can keep this thing upright much longer.”

It took another five minutes to reposition themselves, and in the mean time Prator had Russett call their company again and explain the problem in his own words. The mechanic started to respond, but was asked to hand the microphone over to the airline’s director of flight training. A former Air Force and major airline pilot who’d come to work as an instructor at BlueSky after his mandatory age-60 retirement as a pilot, he was well respected by BlueSky’s pilots but had never faced such an odd, compound emergency.

“Mitch, this is Jim Stevenson. You guys are having a rough day of it up there, aren’t you? Listen, you’re doing a terrific job. I just want you to check to be sure you’re on page 18 of the QRH with the emergency gear extension - hydraulic failure checklist, and not the page before that where they put the procedure for an electric or gear control failure. If you do that one, you’re not going to get your gear down without hydraulics.”

“Don’t answer that” Paul barked. His stress meter pegged, Paul keyed his mike. “Jim, we’re on the right page, we know what we’ve got up here. The procedure isn’t working; the gear’s not coming down. I’m pretty sure I’m not buying the line about the parking brake accumulator either. Mitch thinks he’s got a way to get some wheels down, and it sounds pretty good to me, but when we land if we don’t have nose steering or brakes and either of those left main tires is blown, I don’t think we’re going to care much. We’re almost back on final now, so we’ve got to go. 514 out.” He reached down and turned the number two radio off. The glad-handing about what a great job they were doing had tweaked his last remaining well-frayed nerve, and he wasn’t about to let anyone think they’d succeeded in blowing sunshine up his ass right before he got killed.

Lined up twelve miles out, Russett began feeling for a good release on the return lines, and after a dozen or so false pulls, he got one. He reached down with his left hand and grabbed firm hold of the return fitting, then slowly released the pressure he was holding on the handle. It stayed back. Quickly he slipped the handle off of the first fitting and began yanking away at each of the two main gear uplock releases, feeling both resistance and movement, but nothing positive.

The tower had sent up an Air Force trainer to fly chase after their first approach, and it was directly behind and beneath the Brasilia on the right side, watching. Its pilot reported all three landing gear now appeared to be down.

Still not convinced this bad day was over, both men mentally prepared for the collapse of one or more landing gear legs, since the extension procedure had gone so poorly. They knew for the gear to lock down, it had to fall freely, and it was anybody’s guess if that had occurred. Landing with a single main gear collapse would be more dangerous than a belly landing. Then there was also the likelihood that the fire had blown one or both of the left main tires, which would also make for a swerve upon landing they’d be helpless to counteract. In any event, the odds looked pretty slim for an uneventful landing, which made Prator feel all the more wise for having chosen to come to Rickenbacker instead of going back to Port Columbus. If they were going to become crash test dummies, it’d be far better to do it at an Air Force base than a major civilian airport with lots of airplanes, buildings—and witnesses—around.

At five-hundred feet, Russett made the standard call out of airspeed and sink rate, both of which were right on the money. Paul was holding about half-power on the good engine in the descent. There was no way the airplane was going to climb in this configuration. The approach had to be right.

Paul’s heart was about to beat out of his chest as he gently stopped descending over the runway and kissed the pavement with the main gear. They held. He gently lowered the nose, and it held as well.

The good news was they were down and rolling straight. The bad news was they were doing over one-hundred and fifty miles per hour with no nice way to slow down. Prator tried the normal brakes, just for the sheer hell of it. Nothing.

He said he was going for the parking brake, locked his shoulder harness, counted to three, and pulled. Nothing.

He pulled three more times in quick succession, if for nothing else than to take out some frustration on this pig of an airplane that was trying its damndest to end his career, if not any longer his life.

“I’m going to try some reverse on your side. Hang on,” he said, easing the right throttle backward into the reverse thrust range.

Then, giddy with adrenalin, Russett struck the tone of a sportscaster and said something very strange.

“We’re going to make it after all, just you wait. Our guy’s got it made now, buddy!”

Paul couldn’t believe his ears, but he didn’t have time to dwell on the déjà vu. He was kicking ass and taking names, and everybody was going to walk away now for sure. Not hurting the Goddamned airplane was icing on the cake though, and the icing always was his favorite part.

The ‘whoosh’ of the propeller blades going into reverse pitch was unmistakable, as was the yaw the airplane took to the right. Paul quickly went back to idle with the right throttle and shrugged. “Well, we’re just along for the ride now.”

He tried to steer with the rudder, now that their speed had dissipated enough that he could move it, but it was like trying to steer a car with power steering and a dead engine.

They drifted ever so slightly to the right of centerline as their speed dropped below the sixty knot bottom of the airspeed indicators. Everyone’s survival was now assured, but Paul wanted more. He wanted the bitch to stop on the runway.

He shut down the right engine to eliminate what little thrust it made at idle, but the laws of physics were unyielding, and the 12-ton airplane trundled off the paved surface of the runway and about 100 feet into the clearway weeds, where it came to a gentle stop.

When Paul and his crew arrived at the base commander’s office thirty minutes later, having used every inch of “his” 12,102-foot runway (and a few dozen feet of his weeds beyond), Paul’s first instinct was to call his dad. He was no airline pilot, but he could certainly appreciate the crucible through which Paul and his career had just passed unscathed and would be very proud of him. Even though there was no privacy, and knowing it was strictly forbidden to have any conversation about the incident with anyone before speaking with his company, the FAA, and the NTSB, Paul couldn’t resist excusing himself to use the restroom down the hall and picking up the pay phone next to it, “just to let him know I’m ok.”

Justin said he was glad, and he’d be going out for dinner but would be back home later to get a full rundown and for Paul to just keep trying if he didn’t answer at first.

Paul wondered about what his father said about dinner. Who’s he having dinner with? Dad doesn’t “have dinner” with anybody—he’s always ‘fed up with humanity’ by the end of the day and likes to be alone. That’s when he used to do his drinking. What if it’s a woman? Jeez, he’s not dating, is he? Am I ready to have a stepmom?

“What’s the occasion, you got a hot date or something?”

Please, God, don’t say “Well, as a matter of fact,”

“Are you kidding? No, it’s, well, I’ll tell you about it later. You better get back to your deal there, Captain.” Paul reveled in the pride in his dad’s voice.

Just then, the base commander’s secretary came out of the office and said Paul’s Chief Pilot was on the phone for him.

“Captain Prator, sir, they need to speak with you right away. I’ll tell them you’re in the restroom, but you should hurry.”

Nice old doll – she runs interference pretty well. Wonder why. Paul mused, pretending he already knew some of the stupid things the General had her do to cover for him.

His father had always told Paul he’d likely make more money than a military pilot and get to fly a lot more, especially as he got older, since the military tends to put pilots past their prime behind desks to set up hoops for the younger, less experienced ones to jump through. Now, looking through the open doorway into the General’s office, he imagined how frustrated he would be in that position. Back when he was a kid, he’d have gladly signed on for his entire career, just to be able to look into the mirror and see a superhero in a flight suit and one of those cool helmets with the tinted visors standing utterly invincible in his place, but that time had clearly passed from the General’s life, if not yet altogether from Paul’s.

Now, eyeing the General sitting at his desk like some…drone, for the first time, he didn’t have to remind himself; his dad had been right.

“Yeah, they’re looking for me right now—got to find some way to pin it on the pilots, right? Good luck’s all I can say—we kicked ass.”

“Good job, Paul. I’m so proud of you! Don’t let them get to you now; you know you did right.”

“Thanks, Dad, I’ll talk at you later.” Paul hung up the phone, feeling smug but a little nervous, as if he’d just taken a test and had no difficulty finishing it ahead of everyone else in class. Could they have done anything wrong up there? The only thing he could imagine them throwing at him was the length of time they spent flying around on one engine, but he really didn’t see what choice they’d had. If he’d gotten into a big hurry and landed unprepared, there might be nothing left now but some recyclable aluminum and a big patch of scorched grass out there.

“Looks like you did a decent job with a bitch of a situation, Captain,” the General said as Paul returned to the office. “I’d like to see more pilots like you in the Air Force. May I ask if you’ve ever considered it?” His handshake was firm, and there was genuine respect in his face.

Paul cleared his throat to say, “Well, yes, General, I did ‘consider’ it. I ‘considered’ it for a lot of years, actually. Unfortunately, I also had to ‘consider’ selling my soul to the devil to give me 20/20 vision long enough to get through training at Lackland, which I hear is all the further you need to get without corrective lenses.”

There was nothing subtle about Paul’s words, but had there been any, his expression would have cleared up any confusion about his message.

“Well, you could come in as a back-seater and probably get a transfer later, if you did well.” Then, striking a conspiratorial expression, he added, “I could help you.”

“I’ve heard of that, yes sir. I just don’t know how many years of my life I’m willing to throw away just for a chance to do something I already know I’m better at than a guy whose corneas are his best qualifications.”

The General pursed his lips and nodded. “They say ‘Life’s a bitch,’ Captain, but that’s not entirely true. It’s just one long hand of poker. Some of us get dealt good cards, but some of us have to bluff. Time is our chips, and everybody buys in with the same amount, so if you put enough in, sometimes you can win with a hand that’s nothing. You follow me?”

The General took a business card from the brass holder on his desk and handed it to Paul.

“Yes, sir, I think I do. I’ll mull it over.” The General’s stature in his blue uniform was almost overwhelming to Paul, and he felt an urge to salute the man but managed to satisfy it by just bowing his head slightly as he turned to leave, before he made a total ass of himself.

The Air Force had done Paul and BlueSky a huge favor by whisking them to Headquarters after the passengers had deplaned. They hadn’t seen so much as a microphone yet, despite the fact that news of the bloodless and anticlimactic “accident” had already pre-empted the soaps on all three network affiliates in Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati.

After the initial slew of questions, phone calls, and paperwork, they were free. BlueSky 514’s crew was placed on administrative leave and would be taken to a hotel to rest and recuperate before deadheading back to Indianapolis for a debriefing the next day.

Their layover hotel was unable to accommodate any more than the two crews already scheduled to spend the night there, so the company arranged accommodations at the upscale Hilton Downtown, a welcome change. An orderly took them there in an Air Force staff car, and they were able to get checked in and to their rooms without any contact with the press.

“You guys going to come downstairs and let your grateful Captain buy you some brewskis, or you think we’ve had enough excitement for one day,” Paul asked as they approached the hotel. He was hoping, as was Mitch, that Doris would take the graceful exit offered her, stay in her room and bathe or something like that, and let the two guys get some quality “debrief” time at the bar.

To their surprise, Doris piped right up with a “Hell, yes. It’s fucking Miller time!” She realized how unlike her that sounded and looked around as if taking note of the time and place she’d finally been freed. Mitch, sitting opposite Paul with Doris between them, rolled his eyes discreetly, but Paul couldn’t contain a chuckle. With that, all the stress of the day suddenly broke like a landslide, and the trio finally had their first real laugh of the day.

5

Downtown Columbus was all but deserted when Paul Prator and his crew met at 7 p.m., so they decided just to go to the hotel’s faux Irish pub. As promised, Paul put the whole crew on his tab, and they ate dinner and rehashed the whole day for a good couple of hours.

Having had a few more than her usual glass of wine, Doris got “a little tipsy” and said she wanted to go on up to bed. Ever the gentleman, Paul had Mitch hold their table and escorted her as she zigzagged her way to her room, slurring through what few would recognize as Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

He then started back to the pub but stopped by his own room first to call his dad, just in case—or perhaps to ensure—his big night ended early. An answering machine, something his father detested and swore he’d never buy, picked up the call. Paul left a message for “whoever’s taken my father and replaced him with someone who’d use an ‘ass-ream machine’.”

When Paul returned to the pub, a group of nearly a dozen people were sitting around a larger table where only a few had been before, and Paul noticed one of them in particular. Tall and athletic, but still very feminine, with shoulder-length dark hair and eyes the brooding gray-green of a summer squall line rolling across the plains, her youthful beauty stood out from the party of mostly older people.

“What’s going on over there?” Paul asked Mitch when he returned.

“I don’t know, but they’re having a good time, seems like.”

Paul watched the young woman for a long moment then turned to order another beer from their waitress.

“Did I tell you about the dream I had last night? Nightmare, really.” He laughed a little, finished his beer and said, “Maybe somebody was trying to tell me something.”

“No, you didn’t mention it. Let me guess—you were at work, and you had this hellacious fire on number one, and the bitch just would…not…go…out.”

Paul looked up at the ceiling, giddy, and shook his head, “No, no, no, no.…”

He stole a glance at the girl, headed for the ladies’ restroom in the back of the pub. “It was actually worse, but along the same lines, if you’d believe that. I’ve been reading a book about this bomber mission in World War Two, and I guess I’ve been getting a little too into it.

She was going into the restroom. “I was in one of the bombers in the book, but not flying it. I was a gunner in the back, the “waist gunner,” they called it. And we were in the middle of this nasty raid these guys did, down on the deck right over the target, and all hell was breaking loose. We had an engine out, a fuel leak, we were getting the shit kicked out of us by anti-aircraft, and then to top it all off, the bombs wouldn’t release.”

“Wait, I think I’ve heard this one. You’re about to say, ‘So there I was, flat on my back,” Russett quipped, but Paul wasn’t indulging him this time.

I should be there when she comes out, he thought. “I’ve got to take a leak. Be right back.”

Paul headed for the restrooms, hoping to God he’d get there just as she was coming out so he could get in her way; get a whiff of her perfume, perhaps a word with her. He walked fast at first but then slowed his pace noticeably as he closed the distance to the restrooms until, when he was less than ten steps away and there was still no sign of her, he had to stop and feign interest in the dart board on the back wall.

“Come on, sweetie. Come on out and talk to Paulie,” he mumbled half-aloud. The dartboard was out of order, according to a sign, and there wasn’t a soul around to pretend to talk with while he waited. He did have to urinate, but the ladies’ room door was opening and there she was, taller than she’d seemed from a distance, and even prettier. Those eyes, barely any makeup, and lustrous chestnut brown hair, thin and not at all busty, all the ways Paul’s taste ran. Sure, he’d had a hell of a day and was more than a little drunk, but Jesus. He was literally dumbstruck.

“You the dartboard mechanic?” she animated somehow before his eyes.

“Uh, yeah, yeah,” he play-acted, “this one here’s got, uh, big problems. Yep. You guys won’t be playing on this one anytime soon. I’m so screwed.

“Seems like you’re having a pretty good time without it, though. You guys all work together or something?” Nice save.

Across the Mississippi and several state lines in Wichita, Justin Prator and a petite but stately old woman had arrived separately at the Scotch & Sirloin on East Kellogg Avenue, just a mile or so away from Justin’s house near Cessna’s headquarters.

She’d finally reached him on the phone a week before, just after Paul’s visit. After making sure it was really him, she began the conversation bluntly, saying “Justin, I don’t want you to think this is someone’s idea of a joke, so I’m going to get right to it. I’m the woman who gave birth to you and then gave you up for adoption. I’m your real Mum.”

Justin had been home for a few hours, eaten his dinner, and was just getting into a particularly good episode of “Miami Vice” when she called. Thinking it was probably Paul, his only frequent caller, he answered the phone in the overtly presumptuous “what must I do for you now” voice he liked to use to tease his son when they’d recently spoken and he wasn’t yet craving his company.

When the voice on the other end was female, his mind immediately went into defense mode, since the only women that ever called were his secretary, reminding him of something he’d forgotten, or his daughter Sarah, asking for money.

That it could have been a friendly call from a prospective romantic interest didn’t cross his mind for a second, and having someone with a soft, pretty English accent call just to say “Hi, Justin. I’m your real Mum,” wasn’t exactly something he had any turn-key plans for handling, either. He stood there in silence, holding the phone and staring, blind, at his dog apathetically licking himself in his spot on the sofa, and tried to figure out what he should feel.

The woman on the phone waited.

“Wow. Well, that is quite a little bomb you dropped on me there, um, what did you say your name was?” Calling a stranger “Mom,” or “Mum,” was out of the question.

“Oh dear, where are my manners? Melody. Melody Thompson was my name when I, when you were, well, oh my, this is positively dreadful, isn’t it? I’m so sorry. I thought I had rehearsed at least the first minute or two of this conversation much better.”

“No, no, please. I don’t know what this is, but nothing like “dreadful” is even close to what I’d call it, ma’am. I mean,” he started to inhale deeply, then caught himself and tried to feign nonchalance as he, for the first time in his life, addressed someone as, “Mom.”

Suddenly he realized that this could all still be some smart-ass’s idea of a joke, and he felt foolish for calling her that.“You’re sure about this, what you’re telling me and everything?”

“Yes, Justin, I’m quite certain. It’s taken me quite a bit of research and no small expense to be sure, but I have all the documentation now, and it’s rather incontrovertible, I must say.”

So much for the joke idea, he thought. Who says ‘incontrovertible’?

“Where are you? Where do you live?”

“I’m home at the moment, in Austin. Austin, Texas.”

Were there any other Austins?

“Well, that explains the accent, I guess.” They both laughed, a little more than his quip warranted, trying to be nice to each other.

“Justin, I’m calling because I’d like to meet, I mean, see you, again. You can say ‘no’ or take some time to mull it over, and I promise I won’t be hurt. I know your head must just be swimming at the moment.”

Actually, she has no idea, he thought, but Justin was instantly taken with the sweet lilt in her voice. He would wonder later if perhaps the sound of a mother’s voice can’t help but sound sweet and trustworthy to the child, even if it’s never been heard before. He didn’t know how, but he somehow felt as if he had missed her all those years, and he couldn’t wait to see her again.

She arrived slightly ahead of him and recognized him the moment he walked through the door and approached the hostess’ station near the cash register. Their eyes met immediately, and he figured the odds of two old women coming to this place alone for dinner on a weeknight had to be astronomical.

“Might you be Mr. Prator?” she asked, and her accent brought to Justin’s face the same mischievous, bemused smile she remembered from the young man in an old photograph she carried. She hadn’t seen it except in her mind for forty years, and she’d forgotten what it did to her insides.

Back in Columbus, Paul couldn’t believe he was actually talking to this girl, or more like it, that she was actually talking to him.

“Well, I feel like I work against them a lot more than I do with them. That,” she said with sincere pride and feigned disgust, “is my family.”

“Oh. You guys having a reunion or something?” The televisions mounted above each end of the bar, tuned to MTV and, as if by law, turned up too loud, barked the “Hi there!” at the beginning of Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time,” but only the girl looked up.

Paul had felt the crowd at her table watching him, and all conversation there had stopped, perhaps to grade his performance with her. Following his gaze, she noticed her family watching her; her younger brother Marty puffing out his right cheek, miming fellatio.

Sick fuck, she thought, grimacing at him with seething eyes.

“I love this song, but the video’s just too weird,” she said, looking back up at the TV, hoping he’d mimic her and somehow not see her brother. “Yeah, we do this every year, usually at somebody’s house, but there’s some babies this year, so we decided to meet in the middle to give everybody more space, which is fine by me.”

“Babies like ‘Pampers’ or babies like ‘whiners’?”

“Both, really,” she chuckled, “but I meant like Pampers. My sister-in-law and my cousin both had babies this past year.”

“So, does that make you one of the whiners?”

“What, about the babies? Oh, no, I love kids. I mean they’re not for me, not yet, but, they’re fun. I’m still waiting for my boyfriend to come to his senses and ask me to marry him, but I think he’s a little threatened.”

Ahh, the boyfriend reference, he thought, right on time. Blow-off play number 4, textbook performance. I give her an 8.5 out of 10.

She’d seen the look on his face before, and decided to toy with him a little. “Of course, I could always meet someone a little more secure and ditch him. Serve him right,” she said with a coy smile that seemed to mock space and stop time. No doubt about it—head over heels would be a step back. He was gone.

“They’re going to send my troglodyte brother over here to get me if I don’t get back, but it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Dartboard Game Repairman.” Raising an eyebrow over a wry smile, she added, “Keep up the good work.”

Glancing at the game, he offered his hand. “Paul Prator. I know absolutely nothing about dartboards. But I’d love to maybe play some foosball later, if you’re going to be around.”

“Christina, or Christy, if you like that better, but not Chris. Chris has smaller tits than I do and he belches the national anthem after his fifth beer—every fifth beer,” she said, offering her hand, which he noticed had short but well-kept fingernails and a grip that just didn’t want to hurt him. “Maybe we can get a game going with your friend and one of my entourage, if you don’t mind really gross firemen.”

“Well, as long as they don’t try to…” Paul started, but she was already walking away. She gave a quick look back when she was about halfway back to her table, but he didn’t see it, having turned to finally go to the men’s room before he pissed his pants. Along the way, it dawned on him that she’d noticed Russett, which meant she’d been watching them, or him, at least a little. He wondered if it was his better-looking partner in crime she was after, but he knew Russett wouldn’t intentionally cock-block him with a girl he really liked.

As he urinated, he felt a familiar dizziness. He’d be full-on drunk soon. “That would explain such reckless behavior!” he pretended to scold himself aloud. “Get to meet the family before you even go out with the girl this time, eh, Paul? Gooood plan.”

Paul habitually talked to himself, sometimes pretending to talk to the toilet, whenever he got drunk and no one else was in a restroom he was using.

”Druuunk, druunk, drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk…Jesus, I hope this girl’s just half as hot as I think she is now when I get these beer goggles off…”

Back at his table, Paul brought Mitch up to speed on his brief chat with Christy.

“Man, you couldn’t get me to hit on some chick with her family right there watching like that. You’ve got balls of steel.”

“Balls of barley’s what I’ve got. Besides, I didn’t know what I was doing until I was already doing it. She said she might be into a game of foosball later - you up for that at all? Maybe she’s got a cute cousin…”

“All I see over there with her are oldies, fuglies, and old fuglies. Plus, I’m getting a little tired actually. I think the day’s festivities might finally be taking their toll, man. I could go to sleep right here.” Paul struck an expression of overacted utter despair. “But, I guess I could, under professional duress, give my poor Captain who’s buying my beer, an assist, just in case it might help his loser ass get laid.”

Paul perked up. “That’s the spirit. Anybody asks me, I say you’re ready to upgrade.”

“Yeah, sure. Ready, willing, and able, but notice how ‘senior’ isn’t in that list? So what about this nightmare you had? I’m curious how you got out of it, or if you just woke up drenched in sweat. And I can’t believe I just painted that mental picture.”

“Ah, it’s just a dream. Hell, I can’t even remember much of it anymore. I know it was just because of that book I’m reading. Pretty amazing what the guys on that mission did though. Talk about balls. A bunch of guys our age, fresh out of college, flying friggin’ B-24s from Libya across the Mediterranean, then dropping down on the deck for a couple hundred miles and trying to find this town full of oil refineries Hitler needed to fight the war: Ploesti.” Without a hint of self-consciousness, he pronounced it the Rumanian way, “plo-YESHT-e,” and his gaze went nowhere for a second.

“Some of the planes that made it back had fucking corn stalks caught in their bomb bay doors. That’s low—and those things weren’t exactly easy to fly, either. Overloaded four-engine bombers? Probably flew like shit-on-a-stick.

“The whole thing ended up pretty much a disaster, because they lost their lead plane, with their lead navigator, to a mechanical before they ever saw European soil, and the next guy in line made some big mistakes. That, and they had some old planes and some brand-new ones, so the formations got strung out and separated, and by the time they arrived at the IP, nobody knew where anybody else was anymore, and some of the navigators turned at the wrong IP in the first place so they ended up approaching the target from two different directions. It looked to the Germans like this incredibly well-planned, Swiss-watch coordinated attack, but in reality…”

Paul had gotten utterly lost in his own story and, catching his mouth running like a little boy’s after an airshow, decided he’d best summarize and shut it.

“…it was total clusterfuck.”

“Paul?”

“What?”

“What’s an ‘IP’?” Mitch had been politely listening, but took his chance to bring the unsolicited debriefing to an end by asking the question in a Ben Stein monotone, hoping Paul would take the hint.

“Oh, sorry. Stands for ‘initial point’. It’s where the bombers commenced their target runs.” Paul took a gulp of beer, and Mitch saw he was gathering his thoughts to begin anew. So much for hints. He had to be stopped.

“You’re really into this stuff, aren’t you? World War Two, I mean. You’ve talked about it before.”

“I always have been, I guess. My dad learned to fly when I was a little kid, but I was way into it even before then. We lived in Wichita for a while, so there was always a lot of aviation stuff around, but for some reason World War Two planes just grabbed my attention. It’s like,” Paul stared at the saliva smear on the rim of his Guinness glass and said, almost to himself, “It’s when aviation saved the world.”

Justin and his mother were on their best behavior as they tried to catch up on the past forty years of their lives. Like two Pentagon supercomputers communicating with an eighties-era modem, both had so much to share, but they could only talk, and listen, so fast.

After a few minutes of small talk, Justin began the real conversation, asking his mum to explain her accent.

“I was raised in a little town about 85 miles northeast of London. When you came along, I knew there was no way my life would ever be the same if I stayed; you must realize that a woman becoming pregnant out of wedlock was an absolute scandal in those days, at least in the Kingdom. My family would have been outraged, justifiably. My whole life was upended at once.

“When your father,” she started to well up ever so briefly, but stopped it. “When I lost him, I had no one to turn to, no one who would accept and understand. So, I borrowed money from an Uncle I knew would be more happy to see me leave than to stay and embarrass the family. He suspected what was afoot and asked me no questions. I came to the United States, and I’ve been here ever since. It seems the accent is still hoping I’ll return home someday, but most people here don’t seem to mind. If anything, it gives them the misinformed impression that I’m the product of some prestigious breeding. But very little of my life afterward has any bearing whatsoever on you. I didn’t go looking for you to tell you about me. I want to know about my son. Please. So, do you fly for Cessna then? Are you a test pilot for them, or a delivery coordinator, or something like that?”

“No—nothing so interesting, unfortunately. I’m in charge of a flight school program they began a few years ago hoping to increase the number of people learning to fly and, in turn, the number of planes they’d sell. It’s mostly a desk job, but it’s more stable than any flying job I ever had. The pay and benefits are good, and I suppose I’m helping other people find the joy I did in flying, in a small way.” His initial contented, if not quite proud, expression faded and he poked at the ice in his drink as the voice in his head added, and you were a little too drunk a little too often to be anybody’s pilot.

Even drunk, Paul Prator’s heart climbed quickly, effortlessly into his throat when he saw Christina get up and start toward him. She seemed even prettier somehow, and he resolved silently to himself not to overdo it, but not to let her get away either.

“None of my deadbeat family says they want to play, but I’m getting no end of crap from them for talking to you. The more I try to get them to shut up, the longer they’ll go on, so what do you say we just go play a game or two and see if they’ll get bored enough to let it go?”

“Sounds fine to me—anything to piss your family off.” That gaff got out ahead of him, and he feared she’d take it badly, but the look of conspiracy on her face put him instantly at ease.

Paul looked vaguely at Mitch, going through the perfunctory, uniquely male ritual of pretending to be torn about abandoning a friend in favor of a female.

Unlike the females’ counterpart, the concern a man exhibits in such cases is always feigned, understood to be, and the deceit is always forgiven in advance; a mini-drama staged entirely for the benefit of the female audience, who is to be moved by the actor’s concern for his pitiful friend, and thus more amenable to the idea of having his hand going down her pants.

With any luck, the reward for the abandoned friend is that occasionally another female notices and takes pity, and with a lot of luck, the duo can pull off a “double-header.” With no hope of such a glorious outcome that night, Mitch still played his part to a tee.

“Uh, I don’t know man, I’m pretty thrashed myself. I was just thinking how good that bed’s going to feel, you know?”

“That’s cool, I hear you. Go get some sleep,” Paul said, almost unable to conceal a smile at getting his conquest all to himself without even having to work for it. He was definitely going to put in a good word for Mitch Russett with their Chief Pilot when they got back.

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