And what the hell, her hopes came true.
The door clicked open and two people came out, a heavyset woman and a tall, thin guy with a stringy mustache. Hank, the soft-spoken dispatcher. He must have just cracked a joke because the woman was laughing as they stepped through the door, which snapped shut behind them. Either they didn’t see Carrie or didn’t care. Just another pilot. Down the hallway they went, to the restrooms, and as the guy went into the one marked Gentlemen Carrie stood up and went down the hallway, carrying her kit bag.
She caught Hank as he stood in front of the sink, a comb in his hand. She noted the look of shock on his face as she came through the door. Then he gave her a brief glance of recognition, and started out with a little joke. ‘Hey, Carrie, didn’t you notice the sign outside, the one that—’
Not a word from her side. She stepped up and swung her black leather case at the back of his legs, hitting him hard, and followed that up with a kick to the ankles. Hank yelped and fell down in a tangle and then she was on him, her knees slamming down on his chest, her hand now on his throat.
‘Hey, hey, hey!’ he called out. ‘What the hell do you think—’
Carrie grasped his thin throat and squeezed, making him squawk.
‘You shut the fuck up and listen,’ she said, leaning down to him. ‘Shut the fuck up. Got it?’
A muffled squawk, his eyes wide.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Listen and listen well, pal. You call me Splash one more time, either over the air, in private, or in your home while you’re whacking off in the bathroom, then I’m gonna come back and tear your balls off and feed ’em to the catfish. You got it?’
Yet another squawk that she figured was an affirmative signal, and she relaxed her grip, got up. Her legs were shaking. She hoped he didn’t notice.
Hank sat up, face mottled red, his hand to his throat. ‘You…you crazy bitch! I’ll have you fired! Today!’
Carrie bent down again and he tried to scramble away, like a crab with broken legs, and she was sure that she surprised him when she kissed his forehead. ‘Sure, Hank. You do that. You tell everyone how a girl beat you up in the boys’ bathroom. Just like high school, right? You go on and do that, and just remember what I said. No more Splash. Ever.’
Carrie picked up her bag and walked out, and within two minutes had joined Sean in the checkout process. He kept silent as they signed and processed forms, and then he said, ‘You okay?’
‘Never been better.’
‘Sure?’
‘Positive.’
He didn’t seem to believe her. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Give you a ride home?’
‘Absolutely.’
The ride home took about twenty minutes, ten of which were spent nodding in sleep against the passenger’s-side door of Sean’s Ford Explorer. He kept the music low and his mouth shut, a perfect co-pilot. At the northern end of Memphis’s sprawl, where there were pleasant neighborhoods with one- and two-family duplexes, Sean stopped to let Carrie out as the sun was coming up.
He looked over to her and then leaned over and gave her a kiss. She kissed him back and said, ‘Knock it off. You know the rules about fraternization.’
‘Screw the rules.’
‘Another kiss and you’ll be wanting to screw something else. Later, co-pilot man.’
‘Tomorrow?’
She smiled. ‘Call me and we’ll work something out.’
‘I want to raise Topic A again, you know.’
‘Raise it and we’ll talk. Honest.’
Another kiss. ‘All right, then’
She got out and Sean drove off. It looked to be a beautiful day. She let herself in the side door and let her bag drop in the kitchen. Dishes piled in the sink, and she felt a flash of anger. Work all night and come home to dirty dishes and…
Carrie was tired, but she also tried to remember what it had been like when she was nineteen. Somewhere in this duplex two young girls were still slumbering. Her seven-year-old daughter Susan and her cousin Marilyn. Poor Marilyn. The young girl was struggling to make it through her sophomore year at the University of Memphis, and Carrie recalled her own times, joining the Navy ROTC to get a degree in history — like that was going to do anything for her — and then, after graduating from ROTC, finding out that she actually thrived in the Navy. Hard to believe but there it was. One of her heroes when she was younger had been Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, and through her aviation training at Pensacola that had been one thought at the back of her mind: that she would someday take Sally Ride’s place up there in the cosmos. Maybe the first woman on the moon. That would have been something.
Carrie went out of the kitchen and into the small living room, and then to the bathroom. Washed her hands and then her face. Looked at the tired eyes, the short blonde hair. Hat hair again, and she recalled the really vicious helmet hair she’d get out on deployment, flying her S-3 Viking jet, off and on the USS Enterprise…
And there you go. From Smash to Splash.
For ‘Smash’ had been her call sign, indicating who she was in the pantheon of aircraft carrier pilots. The real gods of this particular pantheon were the fighter jocks — and just a few jockettes — who wrestled F-14 Tomcats up into the air and down onto the deck with vim, vigor, and a few touches of arrogance. She hadn’t quite made it to F-14s but had done all right with the S-3 Viking. That little jewel of a four-seater had originally been designed for ASW work -anti-submarine warfare — for if there was one thing that the admirals overseeing carrier task forces were terrified of, it was some sub sneaking its way into the defensive cordon around an aircraft carrier and sinking the damn thing. But with the Cold War over and what was left of the USSR submarine force rusting and sinking at the dockside, the Viking went through a few changes to make it a new aircraft. There was the airborne-surveillance Viking and the cargo Viking and the airborne-refueling Viking, and one humid night, in the Sea of Japan, Smash was 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 Enterprise, steaming ahead, where he was either drowned, crushed, or shredded into pieces by one of the four twirling propellers.
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 cliché — who didn’t have what that writer had called the Right Stuff. Though she was never grounded, her flying reputation was permanently blackened.