“Shit.” I slam my hand flat on the desk. Seconds later the radio fills with other pilots in the area calling to report the crash. The language is like a force field helping me keep my distance from all the voices. There’s panic in all of them, but most keep it controlled well enough that I can understand what they’re saying, well enough that I can call them professionals.
“Golf Foxtrot Zulu Whiskey. Mayday, mayday, mayday.”
“…into the side of the mountain.”
“…huge fireball west of Fintry Provincial Park.”
When the calls stop I get up and walk around the room, snapping the blinds one by one, yanking the thin little cords and sending them up so fast they crash and rattle into the tall windows. “I want to be able to see what’s going on out there,” I shout at no one in particular, to the whole room, launching my arm in a wide arc to account for every single one of them. “What the hell do we have windows for?” No one in particular looks in my direction. “And if it bothers you, John, wear some fucking sunglasses.” I slam the door and head for the vending machine glow at the end of the hallway. John follows me and at first I think he’s going to start complaining about the blinds again, but his approach is too slow, too careful. When he gets to me he stretches and his back cracks. “You good?” he says, without looking over, drumming a finger down the machine choices.
“Fine, yeah,” I say, fishing in my pockets for change.
“First one, eh?”
I look over at John, but he’s tapping his foot and staring at the vending machine, nodding his head as though it’s emitting some kind of musical beat.
“Well,” John says, considering the coins in his hand. “You’re part of the club now.”
“What club?”
A few months ago in a conference hall for a seminar on flow and capacity management, I sat in silence — the only person under fifty in the room — and sipped my acrid coffee, letting it burn my lips while I listened to all those grey-hairs add up their years to retirement. When I was asked to introduce myself, I stood and said, “My name is Wes Harris and I have thirty-three years until retirement.” The room thundered with laughter, all these rip-roaring red faces going berserk at the thought of thirty-three more years. They laughed so hard they cried, grown men wiping tears from their jiggling cheeks. I meant it as a joke, but for some reason I couldn’t laugh along with them. I sat back down in my seat. Sipped my coffee. They all looked the same to me, inside and out. It was the pallor of their skin, that waxy sheen and puffiness around the eyes after years on the job — the signs of a dull heart. I check my reflection in the screen for those signs. Pull down my bottom eyelids. So far I see nothing of the sort.
“Some guys go their entire careers without a call like that. Now look at you.” John slaps my shoulder. “Not even a year in and you’ve had your first.”
“Guess so.” I go to put a coin in, but John gets there first. “Is that something to be proud of?” I ask him.
“Had my first, oh, almost ten years ago now.” He takes his time choosing his pop. “My only, actually. Pleasure pilot with his wife. Oil pressure problem. Found the plane half-submerged, tail up near the beach. Just a few feet of water, but they both drowned. Mountain’d be quicker.”
“Sure would.” When I reach out to put my coins in I notice my hand is shaking.
“Why’s that grizzly sleeping on a cloud, right?” John chuckles, cracking open the can and taking a long sip. “Heard that one?”
“Nope.” I shove money into the machine.
“When’d they raise the prices on this thing, anyway?” He takes another sip and gives the machine a jab. “Another quarter and still the piss-poor selection.”
I punch random buttons. A can drops into the slot and I grab it and leave John standing at the machine talking to himself. When Angie was two months pregnant I flew to the other side of the country to train for this job, a year in a program with a 3% success rate — flashcards, mnemonic devices, simulators — studying day and night in a dorm room in Cornwall that smelled of feet (could’ve been my own feet.) But I ate it without complaints. Forget the fact that I could knock off a paper on the Islamic Golden Age over an all-nighter while half in the bag. I may have had a future on one of those leafy campuses, but instead I became a human mainframe for weather and word patterns. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India. That’s the versatility of the human brain.
Back at my desk the screens are winking and the condensation drips down the sides of the can, pooling at its base. After the sugar, my hands have steadied themselves, but my heart is still pounding in my chest, like waking up from a bad dream you can only remember the outline of. Sometimes you need some fire and brimstone to wake you up. I guess that’s where I am now, awake in front of all these buttons telling me things, giving me the answers. All I have to do is record and repeat. But the fire and the brimstone aren’t here, far from it. And in a funny way I feel nothing. After all that, I am still sitting at my desk, tapping my fingers on the particleboard. That’s what the training is for. The shaking is a symptom of the adrenaline. Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo. I’ll get a phone call soon. I start to prepare the package. Everything that is recorded is kept, sealed, mailed, analyzed, investigated by the Transportation Safety Board. I pick up scraps of paper where I had scribbled details and set them aside to be included in the envelope. With the blinds pulled up the entire room looks different. John’s back at his desk rubbing his temples, making a real show of it. I take in the view from the windows: Cinnamon Ridge, the golden hoodoos under clear blue skies. No wind. Perfect visibility. A good day for flying. A host of sparrows lifts from the line of windbreak birches south of the tarmac, swooping in two giant arcs before settling back again among the branches.
The phone is ringing at my desk and I have a hand on it, but there’s that pause again — one second and a half. Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. On the tarmac a shimmer of heat blurs the ground and far in the distance — far as one can get it seems — off on the other side of those great blue mountains, smoke.
“LOOKS LIKE A HAWK,” Angie said, one slender hand shielding her eyes, the other resting on the baby nestled against her chest in the carrier. Sophie was four months old and it was late October, the air brisk and needles on the path, sticky with resin. The hike was a way to avoid the boxes stacked to the ceiling in our living room. NAV Canada had placed me in Kamloops and we’d just moved into a split-level rancher twice the size and half the price of what we would’ve found in Vancouver. We didn’t know anyone in the city. Everything was new and it was easy to be busy and happy.
“I’m going up,” I said, arms crossed over my heaving chest. I coughed and spit into the dirt.
“No,” Angie smirked, “you’re not.”
“I am.” My knee was throbbing and I stooped to rub it. I’d broken it several years ago when I fell out of a second-story window during a game of indoor paintball, and every so often after exercise or strange weather it would start to act up.
“Sore?” She smiled at me and bounced the baby from side to side. “Why don’t you catch your breath?”
“I’m fine.” I said, shrugging her off. We had reached our goaclass="underline" the telecommunications tower up the mountain behind our house, the one whose red spire blinked above the tree line. The path snaked up the mountainside, keeping its grade gentle, but the distance was enough to get me huffing the cold air as I tried to keep up with Angie. Even with a baby strapped to her chest she was faster than me. I could tell she was staying ahead on purpose, trying to make it look easy, but there was a shimmer of sweat on her upper lip. On the way up, we’d talked about ways in which to build a new life. It was difficult to say who had asked more from the other coming here — Angie, giving up the possibility of returning to her counselling job, or me, venturing into a whole new career. On any given day it felt different.