The plane tilts. She tries to right it. It tilts the other way.
Charlie says, “Easy. For God’s sake.”
The ground is coming up fast again; she realizes it’s too fast—the angle just isn’t shallow enough—and then the airplane lurches into a trough that feels bottomless: her stomach pops right up into her throat and she hears his groan and then she feels the controls move under her hands and feet when he takes over.
Halfway down the runway the wheels touch and then he is slamming the throttle forward and the yoke comes back toward her and the acceleration presses her back in the seat. The plane bounces and roars. A quick red haze slides down over her eyes.
She feels it soar. Down out of her side window she sees the earth pirouette, spinning as it drops away.
He levels it off. “You want to try again now?”
Something comes up into her throat and she has to swallow.
He says, “In other words you don’t want to do it again right now.”
“Give me a minute to catch my breath.”
“Darling, you can have all afternoon. You’re paying by the hour.” Then he speaks sotto voce to himself but she hears him distinctly enough; she is meant to: “And I can’t imagine a bigger waste of time and money.”
“I’m going to learn to fly this thing if it kills me.”
“No,” he says. “You mean if it kills me.”
She draws a long breath. “Okay Charlie. Let’s do it again.”
“Shee-yit.”
23 On the fourth approach he keeps his hands off the yoke and she lands the airplane by herself. To be sure it is one tire at a time: there’s a good deal of bouncing and pitching but she manages. She even remembers to steer with the pedals instead of the wheel.
She brings it to a stop at the edge of the pavement. “Do you want me to take it in?”
“Thanks just the same.”
He taps her hands. She lifts them off the controls. Charlie taxis toward the hangar and idles into the parking slot, fitting it neatly between an Aercoupe and a Bonanza and cutting the ignition. Then he sits tense and still with his eyes squeezed shut. His huge hands engulf the control yoke.
She says, “You don’t have to make a comedy act out of it.”
He pushes the door open and swings his legs out onto the strut. He needs to climb out carefully because he’s so big; he tends to bang his head and he’s always getting caught in spaces another man might negotiate with a foot of room to spare.
Without waiting to help her he drops down off the step and walks away toward the hangar.
She smiles slightly, knowing him a bit now. She’s confident he’ll go for it. He’s as good as most—and as inconsistent—but he’s not all bluff. And he’s got his mercenary side.
A good thing too because time’s getting very short. It’s August 8. Four weeks from today they’ll have left Fort Keene and it will be too late.
If Charlie refuses there’ll be very little time to get someone else.
She’s going to have to put it to him today. No later than tonight.
She watches him go into the hangar. The heavy rolling gait is peculiar to him: as though he were a sailor on a wildly swiveling deck. He seems to hesitate before planting each foot, as if to make sure first that there’s solid ground under it.
After a moment she follows him through the hangar. Two of the Beechcraft mechanics are working on a plane; they both wave to her and she smiles back. She stops at the coffee machine and plugs quarters into it and carries two cups of the wretched swill around the corner into Charlie’s sanctum. She finds him in the chair with his elbows on the desk and his face in his hands.
She puts his coffee in front of him and tastes her own. “I wouldn’t’ve thought it was possible to get used to this stuff.”
“I once thought it was possible to get used to anything,” he says.
“What changed your mind?”
“You did, my love.”
“Am I supposed to be flattered or is that another joke?”
He says: “Some people are born piano players and some people are born aviators.”
“And I am not one of the latter.”
“You don’t have the instincts, my beauty. Listen. A few years ago my kid was in a rock band. High school combo. They played for club dances and things. A couple appearances on some local public-access cable TV channel.
“They were all eleventh graders except this one guy who played the Fender bass. He was a senior and he graduated and went back East to college, and Mike’s senior year the kids had to find themselves another bass player.”
His voice rumbles around the room, throwing ominous echoes. She enjoys the sound of it but she knows how a man’s deep voice can deceive by making him sound as if he’s got answers for everything.
“They hunted around school,” he says, “talked to the music teacher, all that, and it ended up they auditioned about five kids for the job. In my garage. I heard them all. Couldn’t tell much difference—all that junk sounds the same to me. Kids’ music always sounds like crap to a parent. I grew up on the jitterbug—I hear that stuff now, it sounds like crap even to me. We just couldn’t have been that naive.
“Now there was this one kid they auditioned from the school marching band, played the tuba, but he knew how to play the bass and he was by far the most accomplished musician of the bunch. You give him the notes, he can play them—almost never makes a mistake. Mike said this guy was the best-trained technician he’d ever heard.”
He goes on: “But they turned him down. They went for another kid instead. Because this guy, the earnest zealot with all the training, he stood there like a lump and just played the notes. He didn’t have the music in his bones. He heard it—but he didn’t feel it. How’d they put it? They said he just didn’t have soul.”
“I had a feeling there’d be a moral to this story.”
“Honey sweet, you may be the world’s greatest pole-vaulter for all I know but you ain’t got the soul of an airplane driver. You study long and hard, you’ll memorize enough to get you a license, but every time you go up in the air you’re going to be scared of the aircraft. You’re never going to have a feel for it.”
“Why are you so anxious to do yourself out of a paying customer?”
He smiles briefly: he can be surprisingly gentle. “Baby love, you’re not going to make a good pilot. And if you can’t do it well, why do it at all? Take up water skiing or horseback riding or amateur theatricals.”
She doesn’t reply. She watches him. Charlie sips coffee and makes a face. “We having dinner tonight?”
“That depends.”
He gives her a straight look. He has an airman’s blue grey eyes and when he isn’t being sardonic they seem morose. The random thought crosses her mind that if you were filming The Charlie Reid Story you could cast Robert Mitchum in the title role. Charlie doesn’t carry his eyes at half mast and he doesn’t really look like the actor but he’s got a similar resonance and he presents to the world a rough facade that hides a good ear and an ironic intelligence.
Charlie says, “I wish I could tell when you’re really mad. Everything’s an act with you.”
“When I’m really mad you’ll know it.” She perches a hip against the desk; there’s only one chair in the tiny room and he’s sitting on it. She glances at the ten-year-old snapshot of Michael above his head. The kid’s big-jawed face has the same effect as Charlie’s: a little shifty and a littly ugly but somehow you know that against your better judgment you’re going to like him.
“Does he still play in a band?”
“They’ve got a little group. Sorority dances and such. Just casual stuff. They have fun.”