He was approaching from the southeast. There were no clouds over the airport, and no traffic he could make out. A far-off V of birds stroked across the sky toward the land.
Below him houses and gray roads rolled by, breaking the irregular green of the trees: he was away from the coast. The airport grew larger, the three runways a gray triangle pointed at him, the service area as vivid against the dark green pines as he remembered. Far below he could make out tiny multicolored ovals drifting up toward him — balloons, he realized with a start, their threadlike strings undulating behind. The sun caught on a random car windshield, sparkling like a diamond.
He pushed left rudder hard and went into a bank, thrusting the control column forward and the nose down as he did. The sky went over the top of the canopy and the ground centered itself on the windshield and began to climb slowly to meet him. The altimeter was dropping, the needle retreating from 3 past four calibrated notches to 2 and still descending when he checked the airspeed indicator, just leaving the green arc of normal operating range at 130 mph and making its way through the yellow, labeled CAUTION. He eased back on the throttle, keeping the indicator away from the red line, and the triangle of runway shook gently and grew in size in his windshield, tilting from the level as his wings did, and when he felt he couldn’t go any lower he began to pull up, the ground rushing along under him like a film out of control, vague shapes and colors streaking by, blurring and disappearing in an instant. Tree after tree swept past and roads and a hill and the airport suddenly loomed in front of him from out of the trees like someone rising from tall grass, the central buildings rushing at him, and he was too low too low the wheels his belly would hit surely and he was over, skimming the billowing carpet of treetops again, the altimeter creeping higher as he pulled up and around.
Climbing, he turned on the receiver. There was a loud burst of static. “Uh, 9–0 Zulu, have you lost your mind? Acknowledge.”
His climb and bank were carrying his nose around to the sun, which flooded white and blinding across the canopy. He leveled out east of the airport, the plane sideslipping a bit as he did, and came around again, on line with the runway. He eased the nose up and the throttle forward and his airspeed began to drop.
He lifted the microphone from his lap. “This is 9–0 Zulu. Can I have landing clearance?” he said.
A voice crackled back. “Jesus Christ, by all means, Zulu.”
He was already on his approach. He extended his flaps. A utility right-of-way flashed by beneath him, the power lines and treetops closer than he expected.
“Watch your airspeed, Zulu,” the radio said. Things seemed to slow. Trees drifted by. The curve of a road. A field with a white dog outlined against tall weeds.
“Keep your nose up, Zulu. Keep it on the horizon. Stay level. Watch your airspeed.” He did. It read 90. Everything was spinning by him. He was so low he saw only trees and then they stopped and it was flat and wide before him, gray streaked with black, and the white number 28 glided up to meet him and he could hear the radio as if it were in someone else’s cockpit—“Ease back! Ease back!”—and, keeping the top of his cowling in line with the horizon, easing the nose still farther back, cutting the power still more, he caught one last glimpse of the airspeed indicator, vaguely remembering it as too high, before he hit.
He bounced, jerking forward and upward in the seat as if catapulted, his shoulder harness straining against him, the wings outside the cockpit swaying against the level ground flashing past. And he lifted the nose still more and cut the throttle almost to nothing, and the plane seemed to hesitate in the air before dropping again, like a sofa, to the runway, the concussion nearly shaking his hands from the wheel but leaving him on the tarmac, rolling instead of flying, with quite a distance of safety margin still to go. He rolled and rolled and began to slow and his toes found the brakes again, a little too soon, but again, learning quickly, and he taxied to the very edge of the runway and bumped off onto the access area, turning until trees and trunks filled his vision and the plane rolled to a stop. He reached forward to switch the engine off and the propellers began to materialize, blurs cutting a half circle in front of him before hacking and chopping to a halt, gleaming and smooth. He wasn’t used to the silence, and small noises seemed out of proportion, welcome.
Across the long bisection of runways to his right he could make out a lone police car, a bar of red-and-blue lights on its roof, approaching on the access road from the parking area, its tires audible on the gravel. There had been no foam on the runway, no battery of rescue vehicles, no SWAT team. And no crash. There was just a lone police car, in no discernible hurry. As it grew closer, he unbuckled his harness, anxious to get the bike and the bag out of the cargo area himself. He wanted no help at this point. He’d come this far, he had a way to go, and he wanted to be ready by the time they arrived.
About the Author
Jim Shepard (b. 1956) is the author of four short story collections and seven novels, most recently The Book of Aron, which has been shortlisted for both the Kirkus Prize and the American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal. Originally from Connecticut, Shepard now lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the J. Leland Miller Professor of English at Williams College, where he teaches creative writing and film. He won the Story Prize for his collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Shepard’s stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, among other publications; five have been selected for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize.