doing a routine landing after a routine mission — topping off a number of F-14s — when that evening’s landing quickly became everything but routine, as she slammed the aircraft down and powered up the throttle, as the tailhook snagged one of the arresting wires, and there was a movement to her right, as her co-pilot, one Tom McGrew, jerked against his shoulder harness.
And with the sound and the lights and the force and everything else, there was a thump and trouble, my God, the trouble in River City for — as Carrie later found out — that damn tailhook had snapped clean off so instead of coming to a nice and abrupt halt, the Viking bolted on the deck and started tilting off the port side, and slamming the throttles to full power didn’t do a damn thing, as the Viking slewed off and both her gloved hands reached down and she tugged the lower ejection handles, and maybe she yelled, ‘Eject, eject, eject’ and maybe she didn’t — depended on what day the remembering was going on — and she and her co-pilot, Lieutenant Tom McGrew of Seattle, Washington, blew out of the doomed aircraft. Carrie had been plucked out of the water, legs and arms bruised, coughing up sea water, to find out that her multimillion dollar aircraft was now several thousand feet below them in the water, and that her copilot had actually drifted under the damn bow of the
Well.
There were investigations and a hearing and eventually Carrie was returned to flight status, but her little steps up on the way to the top of the female flying pyramid were faltering. She would shake and tremble during each landing. More and more times, she would miss the very last arresting wire and would have to bolt from the carrier deck and come around for another approach. Soon enough, she was under the spotlight as a possible candidate for grounding and while this was going on her well-earned and hard-earned call sign had mutated, thanks to the rough humor of carrier pilots, from the proud ‘Smash’ to the shameful ‘Splash’. A pilot who couldn’t make it, a pilot who didn’t have what it took to take a hit and keep on flying. A pilot — God forgive them for using such a cliche — who didn’t have what that writer had called the Right Stuff. Though she was never grounded, her flying reputation was permanently blackened.
Soon afterwards, Carrie left the Navy. And trying to get a regular airline job, flying passengers… well, the airline industry was still grinding along in its recession — isolated from the rest of the goddamn US economy, it seemed — but she was finally able to get a job for the General, flying for AirBox, for the General had a soft spot for all ex-military pilots, male or female, perfect records or not. She was lucky, she knew, even though she never flew into any exotic locales, and she grew intimately aware of which motels were safe enough around some of the places she flew into — AirBox pilots never could afford to stay at a regular chain motel — and the hours sucked. Especially around Christmas, where a young girl always wanted to know why mommy couldn’t attend those special parties or recitals…
Carrie walked to the rear of the house, down a narrow hallway. Past the first door, and through that door she could hear the snoring of her cousin Marilyn and the soft droning of a television set. Marilyn had this awful habit of falling asleep while leaving the television on all night, and since it didn’t keep Susan awake Carrie put up with the waste of having the damn thing suck electricity all night.
Now to the second door. She opened it gently and then stepped in, taking a breath, enjoying the scent of her little girl and her little-girl things. There. A little routine she did, whenever coming back from a flight, was to step into this little cocoon, this little-girl universe, and just let the stress and tension ease on right out of her. She walked to the bed where Susan slept, and knelt down, barely seeing her light blonde hair spread over the pillow. The bedroom was neat and orderly, nothing like her own room down the hallway, and nothing like how Carrie had treated her own things when she’d been a child. That little piece of Susan’s genetic makeup must have come from her father, one Robert Francis O’Connor, another pilot from UPS and with whom she had had a brief and satisfactory affair six years ago, an affair that had produced some wonderful pleasures, some good times, a quick and harsh break-up, and this little bundle of joy beside her.
Carrie took another breath of the room, leaned over and kissed the top of her girl’s head. In this little room, at least, Carrie was known as mom or mommy, but never, ever, was she called Splash.
In the darkness and quiet of his kitchen, Randy Tuthill sat at the kitchen table, his first mug of coffee before him, just resting. It was just after five a.m. and already he was dreading the day ahead. From the light over the stove the kitchen was barely illuminated but he could still make out the bay window overlooking the small yard — installed several years ago, after more years of gentle nagging from his wife Sarah -and the nearby refrigerator. Its white enamel was almost entirely obscured by recipes, doctor’s appointment cards, and photos of their two sons — Eric and Tom, both serving in the Air Force — and their grandchildren.
Randy picked up the mug, took a sip, put the mug back down. Looked down at the table. The mug was bright yellow and black, advertising AirBox, his home for the past fifteen years. He stared at his hands…huge and scarred and heavily callused from years of moving machinery and tools and parts in and out of aircraft. First in the Air Force, traveling across the world to bases like Incirilik in Turkey and King Khalid in Saudi Arabia, Anderson in Guam and Utapoa in Thailand, hot and cold places, rain and wind and snow, making sure those big damn gray birds flew and flew well. A twenty-year man, he would’ve been content to pull the plug and fish and chase his wife around the house for the rest of his life, but a retiring general had caught his attention, a retiring general who said he was going to set up an airfreight company and needed a good wrench-turner to set up the very first mechanic bays in a rented hangar in Memphis…
Another sip of coffee. Many years ago, many ups and downs ago, many union contracts negotiated and debated and settled. And now…well, not so good.
Randy looked down at his hands again. Funny how when he was younger, that was the thing that bothered him the most. Whether or not he would ever find a woman who wouldn’t be put off by these rough fingers and palms. And then Sarah had come along… Sarah who had worked as a civilian clerk-typist at Nellis in Nevada, and after their courtship and eventual engagement he finally had asked her that important question: hadn’t these rough hands been a liability of his, something she would have to overlook, in the years to come?
Sweet girl! She had kissed the top of his head — at a time when there had been a lot of hair up there — and said, ‘Dear heart, I’ve been with a number of boys, boys with soft hands and soft skin and soft minds and bodies to go with them. When I’m with you, either at work or at play in the bedroom, I like the feel of your hands on me. It lets me know I’m with a real one, a real man, one who’s not soft.’
And as if on cue, there was a murmur of noise and Sarah came into the kitchen, yawning. ‘Up early again.’
‘You know my habits.’ True enough, for at any point in time, when it was possible, Randy liked to get up before anyone else. His own private little oasis of time. Sip his coffee and plan the day and just let those thoughts come right up to the surface…
Sarah ambled over to the coffee pot, poured herself just a tiny bit. Being polite, she called it, since she didn’t like coffee that much, and he smiled at her as she came over to the table. Twenty-five years of marriage and two boys later, she had added on a number of pounds and a few laugh lines, but he still felt like he had come out on top. She had on a thin robe and a knee-length nightgown that had a nice expanse of cleavage, and even at this early hour her short brown hair didn’t look mussed at all. Most of his own hair was gone, his love handles and gut were a daily embarrassment, but she still would smile and say he was the sexiest man alive, and during some brief moments he sometimes fooled himself into believing her.
‘What’s going on in that mind of yours?’ she asked as she sat down.
There was a snappy response back there, like ‘seeing you topless’, but Randy knew her moods and tone of voice, and said, ‘Teeth.’
‘Teeth?’
‘Yeah, teeth. Like dental plan.’
‘Oh,’ Sarah said, raising the mug. ‘Dental plan. The contract talks.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, shifting his legs under the table. ‘The damn contract talks.’
She eyed him as only a wife married to a lead machinist and union local president could, and he said, ‘The talks have been dragging on for months. We’re without a contract right now. We’ve made progress on a bunch of items…but it’s the damn dental plan. We pay a twenty-buck-a-month premium, with eighty percent coverage. The General wants to double the premium, reduce the coverage to seventy per-cent. And he won’t budge.’
‘And you won’t either, will you?’
