Nobody said it, but everybody listening in on the radio, including the Mooney pilot, knew that there was a fair chance he might soon be participating in that process known uniquely to aviators and agricultural brokers alike as “buying the farm.”
I was in no mood to play Good Samaritan. What I wanted to do more than anything was land, then go chill out with a long walk on the beach after an emotionally taxing weekend discussing possible reconciliation with my ex-wife at her home down the coast in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, given the urgent needs of a fellow airman, not to mention the Buddha’s insistence that true contentment can never be realized without embracing a reverence for all humanity, I suppose somebody had to goddamn do something.
“Rancho Bonita Approach, Four Charlie Lima has a visual on the Mooney,” I said, pressing the push-to-talk mic button on my control yoke. “I can shepherd him in.”
Static in my headset. The Ruptured Duck’s radios were acting squirrelly again. Small wonder considering they were ancient enough that Marconi probably designed them himself. I smacked the audio panel where I always smacked it and tried radioing again.
“Approach, Cessna Four Charlie Lima, how do you hear?”
“Four Charlie Lima, Approach. Loud and clear. How me?”
“Loud and clear. Four Charlie Lima has the Mooney traffic in sight. If he orbits left and throttles back, we can form up and he can follow me down on the ILS.”
“You ever done any formation work, Charlie Lima?” the Mooney pilot asked me.
“Some,” I radioed back. “I flew A-10’s in the Air Force.”
“A Warthog driver?” He said it like it was some kind of disease. “Y’all’re into close-air support, not precision flyin’.”
“That’s true. But the way I see it, you’ve got two choices. You can wait for the Blue Angels to show up, or you can live to tell the tale. Your call.”
He chuckled. “Well, when you put it that way, I suppose I’ll just have to take what I can get. Tell you what, Charlie Lima, you get me and my wife down in one piece, the drinks are on us.”
“Unable,” I responded. “Demon rum turns me into the Incredible Hulk and green’s definitely not my color. My makeup consultant says I’m much more of a winter palette.”
“All right then, how ’bout dinner?”
I’ve never turned down a free meal in my life. I wasn’t about to start now, not with the sad state of my bank account.
“You’re on,” I said.
I glimpsed his face as I maneuvered alongside his airplane a mile above the earth. He looked to be about fifteen years my senior, around sixty, graying and gaunt, wearing a sky-blue windbreaker. Rimless reading glasses perched on the end of a long, bony nose. His wife, a sultry blonde who appeared closer to my age than his, rode copilot and gave me a nervous, Queen of England-type wave. I nodded in response. She looked familiar. They both did. But there was no time to play place-the-face. I had to get two people on the ground, quickly, or they would soon be in it.
The pilot angled his Mooney in behind the Ruptured Duck’s left side and held it there. Our wingtips were separated by less than five feet, as if our two ships were one.
“Looks like you’ve done a bit of formation work yourself,” I radioed.
“Been awhile.”
The controller’s voice crackled in my headset. “Cessna Four Charlie Lima, flight of two, four miles outside of Jared intersection. Turn right, heading zero-six-five, vectors to final approach course. Maintain 2,000 feet until established. Cleared to land, ILS runway 8. We’ve rolled the equipment for you, just in case.”
I repeated the instructions to the controller, leaving out the part about the “equipment,” also known as the airport crash trucks, whose crews rarely get any real action to speak of and were probably salivating at the possibility.
The Mooney pilot repeated that his fuel gauge needles were bouncing on empty.
“Think positive,” I radioed him. “We’ll be down soon.”
“Hopefully not too soon,” he said.
We started down through the soup.
I wish I could say that it was a descent into hell. That flying blind, we iced up and spiraled out of control, managing to pull out only inches from impact. Or that visibility was so limited, we nearly collided and only by some miracle cheated death. But that would’ve been the Hollywood version. This wasn’t. With the Mooney a wispy ghost glued to my left wing, I centered the localizer and glide slope needles on my VOR and rode them down like I’d done on countless other instrument approaches under far lousier conditions. At 300 feet, the clouds gave way and there was the runway, half a mile dead ahead.
Booyah.
“That’s one I owe you,” the Mooney pilot radioed.
“Rock on.”
I shoved my throttle to the firewall, informed the tower I was initiating a missed approach and climbed back into the soup.
The pilot and his wife were standing beside their airplane outside mechanic Larry Kropf’s hangar as I taxied in. Larry, a hirsute man-mountain from whom I sublet a glorified storage closet that I had the temerity to call an “international flight school,” already had the Mooney’s cowling open and was noodling around inside the engine compartment. He was wearing his usual low-riding, blue Dickies work pants, revealing his usual six inches of butt crack, and a faded, oil-smeared gray T-shirt that said on the back, “In dog years, I’m dead.”
I toggled off the Ruptured Duck’s avionics master switch and pulled the mixture control. The Mooney pilot had my door open and was shaking my hand almost before the propeller had stopped spinning.
“You’re one helluva stick, fella,” he said.
“If I was, I’d definitely be making more money than I am.”
He grinned. “You must be flying for a regional carrier.”
“He’s a flight instructor,” Larry said. “A broke one at that.”
“Thanks, Larry. I love you, too.”
“My name’s Walker,” the Mooney pilot said, still pumping my hand.
“Cordell Logan.”
“Well, it’s a damn pleasure, Mr. Logan.”
He volunteered that he and his wife were flying home to San Diego after attending a charity fund-raiser in Carmel when his vacuum pump gave up the ghost. Larry had already concluded that the pump was beyond repair and would need replacing. There was also a problem apparently with the fuel sensors on Walker’s plane. Even though the gauges had indicated his wing tanks were all but dry, the Mooney, as it turned out, still had plenty of gas left.
“How long you figure it’ll take to fix everything?” Walker’s wife asked Larry.
“I get the parts in, you’ll be on your way tomorrow afternoon.”
“Guess it looks like we’re laying over in Rancho Bonita.” Walker turned to me. “I’d appreciate a hotel recommendation. Something reasonably priced, if there is such a thing around these parts.”
“Good luck with that,” I said, almost laughing as I climbed out of my plane.
Dwarfed on one side by verdant, 4,000-foot mountains, and cuddled on the other by the Pacific, Rancho Bonita perches on a hilly, south-facing strip of earth that is among the most picturesque and least affordable locales in all of America. An average two-bedroom fixer can run close to $1 million. A gallon of gas costs twenty-five cents more than anywhere else on the mainland. Everything is more expensive in “California’s Monaco,” as the city’s landed gentry like to call it. But the trust fund babies and reclusive show biz luminaries who make up a disproportionate percentage of its population rarely complain. Nor, for that matter, do Rancho Bonita’s many other, lesser residents. Surrounded by natural beauty and graced with arguably the most perfect weather on the planet, everybody smiles a lot and counts their blessings, even if it means scrounging for work and slowly draining their life savings in the process.