It had started to fall apart when one of the pilots broke his leg in a bowling accident and they had had to hire a temporary replacement on a half-hour’s notice to fly a four-passenger taxi charter to Eugene. The stupid pilot had forgotten to put down his gear at Eugene, gone in with the wheels retracted and ground-looped on his belly, totaled the Apache and killed himself and all four passengers.
That had brought the National Transportation Safety Board down on them and their certifications had been yanked for two weeks, after which they had gone on probationary status with Government snoops hanging around doing constant checks on their safety standards.
They were limping but they were still on their feet, and they might have overcome that, but Walker was having private trouble then.
He had met Carla at a TWA pilot’s party in San Francisco less than a week after he’d become a full partner in Or-Cal; he’d been flushed with success and he’d infected her with it. She had been a stew on Northwest Orient but she hadn’t liked it much-“I’m sort of a cozy quiet girl, Keith, I just didn’t like living in hotel rooms.” When Walker met her she’d been working four months in an airline ticket office in the St. Francis and she admitted frankly she was anxious to settle down and make a home, be a mother, be a wife.
It suited him. She wasn’t gorgeous but she had a cute little face, a triangle of good bones with enormous soft onyx eyes. A small soft cuddly girl, nervously vivacious, with a quick flashing smile and a healthy frank body. He had felt good with her, right from the start.
He hadn’t thought much about whether he loved her; he had never actually seen any love lying around. His romantic dreams had been focused on airplanes from the time he’d built his first model kit plane at the age of nine. But in the Army he’d worked it all out for himself, how he was going to save money and buy into an airline and get married and have kids. That way he’d have the best of both worlds-the kind of success everybody admired, the solid-citizen home and family and free-enterprise ownership of his own business; and at the same time an airplane to fly. The only real freedom was being in motion, piloting yourself across the sky.
Five weeks after he had met Carla he had married her. That had been part of the good year too. It had been a sybaritic year, a lot of drinking and a lot of laughs and a lot of sex. Carla knew airplanes and pilots and she was part of the whole thing, not an outsider.
But she hadn’t got pregnant.
They went to doctors. She took hormones. They had tests. Jesus, the money it all cost. But it didn’t solve anything and finally after a year of specialists and lab analyses the pussyfooting doctor had screwed up courage enough to tell him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Walker. You might try artificial insemination-have you thought of it? It’s probably the only answer if you’re still adamant about not adopting children. You’re sterile, you see. No, don’t worry about your potency, it’s nothing to do with that. But some men have natural antibodies. Something in the chemical make- up of the body-a genetic incompatibility between the genes of your mother and father. The spermatozoa simply don’t function properly, and therefore you can’t impregnate your wife-or any other woman for that matter, it’s not merely a matter of individual sexual partners.” And the sly wink: “In a way you know it gives you a kind of freedom some men would give their right arms for.”
At first it didn’t seem to matter to him all that much. There were plenty of kids around for adoption. But Carla wasn’t having any of that.
She became gloomy, depressed. And his own uncertainty had begun to feed on her despondency. Somehow his manhood had been challenged, denied.
She had turned chilly and sarcastic-angry and moody by turns; he had to tiptoe around her.
Finally the plane had crashed in Eugene and he had had a lot to drink that night when he’d heard about it. The next day she had collapsed in tears: “I just don’t want you near me.”
And she had moved out the same day. Packed all her clothes and left.
In time a lawyer served the divorce notice on him-she’d gone to Reno for six weeks. He had to hock some of his Or-Cal stock to make the settlement. By then he had gone into a kind of emotional anaesthesia and it didn’t seem to matter very much but gradually it had begun to tear at him: grief, the sense of stinging loss. For the first time he realized it: he had loved her.
But she was married again. Another pilot, a United Air Lines captain, twenty years older than she was. And he heard from the airport grapevine that she was pregnant and glowing.
All right; people got along without an arm, without an eye, without their hearing, without both legs. You could get along without love. He had plunged himself into the business; he had flown the maximum number of hours every month that the CAA would permit, and some they didn’t permit. He had gone out on the stump to drum up business, talking up air-freight contracts with coastal fishing outfits and printers and gimcrack cottage industries up in the mountain towns with their ragged-windsock dirt runways.
Then the Post Office Department had started awarding contracts on a low-bid basis to private air-taxi carriers to try for one-day delivery of first class mail in the hick towns. It meant a lot of night flying and a lot of instrument flying because you had to live up to the stupid tradition about the dangers of snow and rain and gloom of night. Walker had sweated blood to get the contract and had started flying the route himself in the Lear-an overnight round-trip from Sacramento to Eureka every twenty-four hours with four stops between, each way-half the time flying blind in bad weather, relying on cockpit instruments and radio ranges. The postal contract left it up to the pilot whether to fly in questionable weather but the point was, if you didn’t fly you didn’t get paid.
It was a grueling grind and you couldn’t keep it up forever, six nights a week. You started taking a harmless- looking little heart-shaped amphetamine tablet now and then, just to give yourself a bit of an edge. Then you took two and three and four and after a while you had a pocket full of them on every flight, and your nerves drew up like bowstrings and your judgment began to play tricks on you: you’d come in too long, overshoot, tear rubber off the tires braking too hard; you’d overestimate your altitude and come down so hard you bent the landing-gear bracings; you’d be flying through a clear night sky and you’d start to hallucinate, you’d see Carla’s face winking sleepily at you from a cloud, you’d see a North Vietnamese MIG-21 diving at you with tracers winking silently out of its wing guns and you’d take violent evasive action and barely miss clipping a mountaintop.
He began to recognize that he was falling apart and he resolved to steady himself. He took two weeks off and spent the time at Tahoe in a motel just off the lake shore. It took a few days to withdraw from the pills and that was sheer hell but he knew what he was doing. He spent the days around the swimming pool soaking up the mountain sun-this was last June-and evenings he’d go out and gamble a little, taking it easy, just playing a bit of dollar roulette and two-dollar blackjack and not losing more than he could handle. He could feel the tension draining out of him as if a drainplug had been pulled. He started going over to the Nevada side and casually dating the recently freed divorcees who were always in the casinos dying for a man, any man, with no promises demanded and no questions asked.
But he was still putting Carla’s face on every woman he slept with. There was no cure for that malaise.
He’d gone back to work toward the end of June and he’d been flying the old DC-6B up to Portland on a cargo job for a paper mill when he’d flown into a high-tension cable.
There was no excuse for it. The day had been a little misty with drizzling rain but he was flying into a first- class airport on the beams and the visibility was good enough to see the ground from seven or eight hundred feet. The aircraft was in good working order and the copilot had gone through the landing checklist with him without a hitch. But the voice of the girl on the headset, giving him his landing instructions, had reminded him of Carla’s voice and he was seeing Carla’s face in his mind when he should have been watching the earth come up, and the copilot had been working flaps and undercarriage instead of watching the runway, and Walker had lost too much altitude too fast and clipped the power line with the starboard wheel. It had thrown the plane around through a ten-degree arc and she had hit the ground on the port wingtip and spun as if the wingtip were a pivot. The gear had collapsed under her, the props had broken against the concrete, the fuselage had spun with the port wing snapping off at its root and the plane ending up on the grass in half a dozen pieces.
He’d sat in the overturned pilot’s seat, hanging by his seat belt, not feeling a thing, hearing the meatwagon sirens and the wail of tires and the spouting foam of the fire hoses, and then the crash crews had pried the plane open and climbed inside to drag him and the copilot outside. In the ambulance they’d tested him for breaks and concussion but all he had was a few cuts and bruises. The copilot had a gash on his head from the control wheel and for twelve hours he’d been on the critical list, and Walker had waited in the hospital; but the copilot had pulled through, so there was no manslaughter charge against him.
The downed power line had cut electricity in two factories and four hundred houses and a shopping center. The community was incensed, the insurance company was outraged, and when the government had pulled Walker’s
