He says: “Some people just don’t take to flying upside down, that kind of thing. How’s your stomach?”
She is brushing herself off—ineffectually. Her feet are soaked and around them grows a puddle at which the man stares with a widening one-sided grin. All his expressions have a sardonic tilt.
Wet to the skin and miserable, she replies with tart defiance: “My stomach’s all right. You might offer me a towel.”
“Bathroom’s in the hangar next door. But you have to go outdoors to get there.”
“I don’t suppose you have an umbrella.”
“Never use ’em.” His leer is a bit lewd. She wonders what it is about her that amuses him so. She doesn’t feel a bit funny.
He is putting on a hat—a baseball sort of cap. He says, “Well shit,” and clumps past her to the door. “Wait here.” He goes out into the rain.
She feels she’s achieved a petty victory. She glances through the jumbled papers on his desk and has a quick look at the documents that are thumbtacked to the wall under the crayon-on-cardboard sign. Beside an old map of Angola—what’s that doing here?—she spots his private pilot’s license, dated 1951, and his commercial licenses—single-engine and pilot-instructor, both dated 1974—and a certificate from the State of California permitting Charles W. Reid to operate a bonded school for the training of private pilots in single-engine dual control aircraft. There is the inevitable Playboy calendar nude. Off to one side she sees an Air Force certificate: he retired in 1972 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, which probably means he’d been serving as a major—not a very high rank after twenty years’ service. Most of the documents are dirty and have gone ragged around the edges; none is framed.
Thumbtacked on the side wall above the desk, where he’ll see it when he is sitting down, is a color snapshot of a nine- or ten-year-old boy with masses of brown hair and a big jaw like Reid’s.
Wind slams the door open and he lunges into the room with a wadded towel in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other. He kicks the door shut behind him. All his motions are big and rangy: he moves like a large predator with total confidence in his own physical authority. He sets the coffee on the desk and proffers the towel. “Here you go.”
“Thank you.” She makes her voice softer than before. “It was stupid for both of us to have to get wet. I’m sorry—I didn’t think.”
“I’ve been wetter than this and survived it, I guess.”
She scrubs her hair with the towel. “Is that your son?” She indicates the snapshot.
“Got to be. Looks like me, doesn’t he. That was taken nearly ten years ago, when he made that sign. He’s a sophomore at Stanford. Studying East European languages. Damn fool kid wants to go into the diplomatic corps. I can’t talk to him any more.”
But you’re fond of him, she thinks. That’s good. You’ll know what it means to worry about your child.
She says, “When he gets a couple of years older he’ll realize you’re not as stupid as he thinks you are.” She wraps the dank towel around her neck; there’s no point trying to fix clothes or make-up—everything is ruined.
She reaches for the coffee, pries the lid off and tastes it. “This stuff’s terrible.”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you drink it?”
“I get it from the machine next door,” he says. “It’s better than the stuff I make.”
“Then I hope I never have to taste yours. About these flying lessons now—I thought maybe you could give me some books to study, and don’t you people use those phony airplanes inside a hangar where you simulate actual flying for the students?”
“Link Trainers? That kind of thing? I’m not that rich. Maybe you aren’t either. They use those to train professional pilots. If you intend to take up commercial flying for a living, maybe you ought to go apply to Pan Am or United Airlines.”
“I just want to learn how to fly a small plane.”
“What for?”
It takes her aback. She didn’t anticipate that one; she hasn’t prepared an answer to it.
When she hesitates, Charlie Reid says, “A few women take it up because they’re lying out in the back yard by the swimming pool with nothing to do in the afternoon and they see a bunch of light planes buzzing around and it looks like a lot of fun. Glamour and freedom and something to do in the afternoons. And then there are the ones—the divorcees—that figure maybe it’s a way to meet a man. You one of those?”
“No.”
“Well then.” He waits.
She says, “I’ve been up in small planes. As a passenger. I like it. I like the feeling. I can’t explain it any better than that.”
“Well, it’s your money,” he says. “You don’t get the sample ride today but I can start you in on basic principles and paperwork.”
“Good. Let’s get the red tape out of the way and then maybe you can give me some homework. I’ll be away for a week or so. When I get back I’d like to start taking lessons three or four days a week.”
“That’s kind of pushing it.”
“I’m in a hurry,” she replies.
12 On Thursday she leaves at dawn and drives to Las Vegas.
There are several mail-forwarding services in town. On Fremont Street she picks one at random and signs up for six months, paying cash in advance. The man at the counter does not ask for identification.
In the coffee shop of one of the downtown casinos she orders iced tea. It is a drink she’s never liked very much but it seems to be the thing to do in the Sunbelt and it fits in with her intentions to change her habits.
She is squirting lemon into the glass when a man stops beside her table. “Hi there. What’s your name?”
Her breath catches. It is a moment before she can look up. She tries to make it steely. “I’m sorry. You’ve got the wrong table.”
“I just thought maybe you’d let me buy you a drink or something.” He is losing his pale hair on top and he wears flesh-colored glasses. Probably about her age. Slender, almost reedy. Type-casting him, she thinks of electronics—he looks as if he programs computers. An apologetic half smile shapes his mouth as if engraved there.
She says: “Thank you. No.”
“You’re very attractive, you know, and if you’re by yourself—”
“I want to be by myself.”
“I just thought—”
She says, “They have legal prostitution here. If you’re horny—look, just pick up a newspaper over there and read the ads and find something you like and make a phone call.”
The man says, “It just doesn’t work for me if I have to pay for it.” He turns his palms up in a gesture of abandonment. “But then I suppose we all end up paying for it one way or another.” He wanders off. She ventures a guess that the ink probably hasn’t dried on his divorce.
She feels compassion for the bewildered fool. There was a time when she’d have been happy to invite him to sit down and have a cup of coffee and tell her the story of his life. She’s always liked people; she’s always curious about them.
She wonders why her rebuff seemed to take him so utterly by surprise. Perhaps everybody assumes that an attractive woman who’s alone must have a transparent reason to come to a place like this.
She doesn’t want to take any others by surprise; it might make them remember her. When the next man arrives at her table and says, “Hi. You alone?”—it isn’t more than five minutes later—she gives him a grim look and says, “I’m waiting for my husband. He’s a police officer.”
“Lucky for him. Too bad for me.” The man goes away, good-natured, taking it in stride, searching with bright eyes for his next opportunity.