she knew iCirri- tatedhim.
“Fine. How’s your morning going?”
“Did you go out?”
“Downtown.”
“Jake,” she said. tension creeping into her voice as she pro- nounced his name firmly. “We need to talk. When are you going to call that admiral?”
“I dunno.”
“You can’t keep loafing like this. You’re well. You’re going to have to go back to work, or retire and find something to do. You can’t just keep loafing like this. It isn’t you. It isn’t good for you, Jake.”
She emphasized the word “good,” Jake noticed listlessly. That’s Callie, instinctively dividing the world into good and evil- “We’ll talk about it this weekend.” She was driving over from Washington when she got off work this evening. Jake had driven over to the beach house two days ago.
“That’s what you said last weekend, and Monday and Tuesday evenings. And then you avoid the subject” Her voice was firm. “The only way I can get your undivided attention is to call you on the phone. So that’s what I’m doing. When, Jake?”
This weekend. We’ll discuss it this weekend. I promise.”
They muttered their goodbyes. Jake poured a cup of coffee and sipped it as he sorted through the piles of balsa again. What had be gotten hinuetf into?
Coffee cup in hand, he went through the front door and walked past UK car to the street He turned toward the beach, which was about a hundred yards away. The house beside hw wu empty, a suaiiBer place that belonged to some doctor in Baltimore. The aext house belonged to a local, a phar» adst whose wife worked sights down at the drugstore. He had seen their son OB the beach flying a radio-controlled airplane, and didnt Callie say this week was spring break for the kids? He went to the door and knocked.
“Captain Grafton. What a pleasant surprise.”
“Hi, Mrs. Brown. Is David around?”
“Sure.” She turned away. “David,” she called, “you have a visi- tor.” She turned back toward him, “Won’t you come in?”
The boy appeared behind her. “Hey, David,” Jake said. He ex- plained his errand. “I need some of your expert advice, if you can come over for a little while.”
Mrs. Brown nodded her approval and told her son to be back for lunch.
As they walked down the street, Jake explained about the plane. The boy smiled broadly when he saw the pile on Jake’s kitchen table- “The Gentle Lady,” David read from the cover of the in- struction booklet. “That’s an excellent airplane for a beginner. Easy to build and fly. You chose a good one. Captain.”
“Yeah, but I can’t tell which parts are which. They aren’t la- beled, as far as I can tell.”
“Hnunm.” David sat at the table and examined the pile. He was about twelve, still elbows and angles, with medium-length brown hair full of cowlicks. His fingers moved swiftly and surely among the parts, identifying each one. “Did you get an engine for this plane?”
“Nope.”
“A glider is more difficult to fly, of course, more challenging, but you’ll get more satisfaction from mastering it.”
“Right,” Jake said, eyeing the youngster at the table.
“Let’s see. You have a knife, and the man at the store — Mr. Swoze, right? — recommended you buy these pins to hold the parts in place while you glue them. This is a good glue, cyanoacrylate. You’re all set, except for a board to spread the diagram on and pin the parts to, and a drill.”
“What kind of board?”
“Oh, I’ll loan you one. I’ve built three airplanes on mine- You spread the diagram on it and position the parts over the diagram, then pin them right to the board. And I’ll loan you my drill if you don’t have one.” Jake nodded. The youngster continued, his fingers still moving restlessly through the parts, “The most important as- pect of assembling this aircraft is getting the same dihedral and washout on the right and left wing components, both inner and outer panels. Be very careful and work slowly.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll run home and get my board and drill. You won’t need the drill for several days, but I might as well bring it over.” He bolted out the door, leaving Jake to refill his coffee cup and stare at the actual-size diagram.
The house was quiet, with only the background murmur of the surf on the beach and the occasional burble of a passing car to break the solitude. The task assumed a life of its own; breaking the pieces out of the balsa boards, assembling them on the diagram, occasionally sanding or trimming with the razor-sharp nobby’knife before pinning them into place. As he worked he occasionally glanced at the picture on the box, visualizing how the airplane would look soaring back and forth above the sand, trying to imag- ine how it would feel to fly it. This would be real flying, he knew. Even though his feet would not leave the ground, the plane would be flying free. and since he would be flying it, so would he. He carefully glued the rudder and vertical stabilizer parts together and began assembling the horizontal stabilizer.
The knock on the door startled him- He had been so intent on his task he had paid no attention to the sound of the car driving up. “Yeah. Come on in.”
He heard the door open. “Captain Grafton.”
“Yep.” Jake looked up.
The man standing there was in his late twenties, slightly above medium height, with short brown hair. ‘Toad Tarkington! Come on in! What a surprise!”
The man’s face split in a wide grin and he crossed the room and pumped Jake’s hand. “It’s great to see you again, CAG. I thought for a while there you were dead.”
Grafton nodded and studied Lieutenant Toad Tarkiagton. today clad in jeans and rugby shirt and windbreaker. He looked… just the same as he did the morning they went after Colonel Qazi in an F-14 five months ago. Last September. And here he was with that grin… quick, energetic, nervous. He was ready to laugh or fly, ready for a prank in the ready room or a night cat shot, fully alive. That’s what Toad Tarkington projected — vibrant, energetic, enthusiastic life.
“I’m not a CAG now. Toad. I’m just a plain ol’ sick-leave cap- tain.” CAG was the title bestowed on an air wing commander, and was pronounced to rhyme with “rag.”
Toad grabbed his hand and held it, that grin splitting his face. “Have we got a lot to talk about! I tried to call you, sir, but your phone wasn’t listed.”
“Yeah. Had to have the number changed. The reporters were driving me nuts.”
Toad pulled one of the kitchen chairs around and sat down. “I was pretty damn happy last fall when I heard you were alive. What happened to you anyway, after we rammed that transport?”
“Some Greek fishermen pulled me out of the water. I don’t re- member a thing. Had a concussion. Lucky for me the life vests inflate automatically nowadays. Anyway, they pulled me out and I made it.”
“How come they didn’t radio someone or head for port?”
“Their radio was broken and they were there to fish,” Jake looked away from Toad. He was back among the ordinary, every- day things, for a moment there… but he was here, at the beach house. “They thought I was gonna die on them any minute and they needed the fish. I was in a coma.” His shoulders moved up and down. “Too damned many Gs. Messed up my eyes. That’s why I wear these glasses now.”
Jake removed the glasses and examined the lenses, as if seeing them for the first time. “It’s 20/100 now. It was 20/500. The Gs almost ripped my eyeballs out.” He placed the glasses back on the bridge of his nose and stared at the pieces of balsa on the kitchen table. “I don’t remember much about it. The docs say some blood vessels popped in the front part of my brain and I had some mem- ory loss.”
“By God, sir, I sure as hell can fill you in.” Toad leaned forward and seized his arm. Jake refocused on that excited, expressive face, “The Gs were something else and I couldn’t get to the ejection handles, and I guess you couldn’t either. Man, our bacon was well and truly fried when she broke up and spit us out. The left wing was gone and I figure most of the left vertical stab, because we were getting pushed around screwy. I—” He continued his tale, his hands automatically moving to show the plane’s position in space. Jake stopped listening to the voice and watched the hands, those practiced, expressive hands.
Tarkington — he was the past turned into a living, breathing per- son. He was every youngster Jake had
