“Lost, Skipper?” smiled Jacob Enright, who walked through the ankle-deep sand toward the Colonel’s bent back.
Colonel Parker looked over his shoulder and smiled at Enright’s youthful face.
“Afternoon, Jack.” The Colonel laid the sextant on its side in his lap. Immediately, he looked at the stopwatch hanging from his neck. Then, from the sextant, he read the sun’s angular altitude above the motor oil’s steady surface. On a pad of paper at his knee, with pencil the Colonel cut in half the angle read from the sextant. He circled this new figure. Beside it, he jotted down the time noted on the stopwatch.
As Jacob Enright stood silently aside, Will Parker made a black dot upon a pad of engineering graph paper set upon the sand. Across the sheet, a series of 20 dots formed a straight line from the paper’s upper left corner down to the lower right corner. Sideways along the paper’s left margin were penciled the words “sextant altitude.” Across the bottom was written “time — gmt.”
“Not lost, Number One,” the Colonel drawled as he rose to his feet on the beach. “Just keepin’ sharp.” William Parker carefully loosened the alignment screws at each of the sextant’s two mirrors before he carefully laid the instrument inside an elegantly waxed walnut box. He poured the motor oil from the plate into a plastic bottle.
Before he took a step, the tall colonel rubbed his right leg below the knee as if to work out a stiffness from sitting in the chilly sand.
“The old masters used to practice their sextant with a bowl of molasses for a horizon when they were ashore and away from the sea horizon.”
Colonel Parker studied Enright’s designer jeans, his Irish sweater, and his white Topsiders. “Country club closed today, Jack?” the taller man grinned.
“Nope. Thought I’d take you up on your invitation to see the old homestead after all this time.”
Enright looked uncomfortable at his breach of the Colonel’s zealously guarded privacy.
“You betcha, Jack,” Parker beamed.
Relief filled Enright’s clean, lean face.
“Great, Skipper.”
“Come on up to the ranch, Jack. Pleased to have your company,” the long flier smiled warmly.
Jacob Enright was pleased that finally he had chosen to visit his captain’s beachfront home, although the two men should have had their fill of each other that morning. Two hours earlier, they had shot six hours of ascent aborts in the simulator.
You can train with a man, fly with him, sweat and swear with him over flightplans and checklists, and urinate into a plastic bag at his side in the cockpit. But you do not truly know your partner until you have stood in his home and have seen his toys.
Colonel Parker was an odd mixture of visual impressions. Standing, he was long and leggy. Although his short, graying hair ending at a farmer-red neck betrayed the wear of middle age, his lined face radiated the tightness of a four-stripe airman. Beneath his one long eyebrow which crossed the bridge of his angular nose, clear gray eyes twinkled at the world which he had fashioned carefully from his life. Fine lines creased from the corners of his eyes toward his too-large ears. These were perfect pilot’s eyes: bright and clear and firmly anchored to the creases around them, borne of uncountable airman’s sunrises at the top of the world. The firm leanness of his body and his long, veinous arms were ever covered by a baggy wardrobe of casual clothes and sweat-bleached flightsuits. His clothes hung loosely rumpled upon his spartan frame. He had the look of a man who wears his father’s clothes.
At ease, the Colonel looked like a tall, almost gaunt man, who would most likely trip if he took a step. But he moved like a dancer with the agile grace and order of slowly flowing water. To watch his long and elegant stride was to watch a body moving onward to a place he longed to be.
Jacob Enright enjoyed watching his captain walk along the beach. The second in command took pleasure and comfort from the measured determination with which William McKinley Parker walked, flew, and steered his life. But Enright noticed the Colonel favoring his right leg as he walked.
“Too much handball for an old boy,” Enright thought.
Genuine anticipation warmed Enright as he followed the Colonel toward the wooden back porch. The shorter pilot had often wondered what Parker’s home would say of its owner. He had speculated whether he would find chrome-and-glass furnishings poised lightly upon thick carpet, or a dirt floor with a black kettle suspended above a firepit. For inside the slow-speaking colonel, whose twangy voice revealed his boyhood in the hollows of Kentucky, there lived both a brilliant electrical engineer and an honest-to-God, mud-on-his-spurs cowboy.
When the lights in the ceiling worked with the sunshine raining through the windows to reveal the room where he stood, Jack Enright was amazed. The Colonel’s home was perfectly ordinary: well-worn furnishings, a few low bookcases, a stereo, and assorted junky easy chairs — all upon dirty carpet of no particular color.
“What ya think, Jack?” inquired the Colonel, who had laid his precious box and pads atop the sorely nicked table in the dining room. The table was cluttered with a day or two of dirty dishes.
“Homey, Skipper.”
“Ya betcha, Number One.”
Colonel Parker handed Enright a cold beer, still in the can, which the tall man had fetched from a kitchen cramped to the point of being crummy.
“Browse,” Will Parker invited cheerfully with a wave of his own can of beer. He moved about and tidied up the single large room which had the back porch and dining room at one end and the living room at the other.
“Thanks, Will,” Enright smiled. He could not find a single model airplane.
Enright moved about the airy little house. Along one wall, broken by the arch leading to the tiny kitchen, was a line of framed photographs, large and institutional. They were the usual fare of squadron portraits with thin boys posing proudly before F-4 Phantom and A-6 fighter planes. In the background were rice paddies.
Turning to the long, unbroken wall opposite, Enright saw other framed images running the length of the long room. But these were dressed in finely crafted frames made from expertly mitred barn siding. And the colors were sparkling in the daylight of afternoon.
Jacob Enright sucked in his breath, warm with beer. He surveyed a dozen elegant photos and lithographs — every one a single lighthouse.
Against gray skies and frothy seas, each portrait was a solitary lighthouse growing from jagged and rocky shorelines.
“You still there, Jack?” called the Colonel as he walked from the kitchen.
“Skipper, these are magnificent. Magnificent.”
Enright stepped sideways to study the long row of lighthouses. He shook his head slowly as he felt the tall man stand at his side in the afternoon sunshine.
The thin pilot turned his face to the older man at his side. Colonel Parker’s neck was at Enright’s eye level. The shaft of daylight swirling in from a window fell upon the Colonel’s face. It accented the deep lines and hollow cheeks. The long face was firmly set in a strange weariness. The warm gray eyes within angular shadows were tranquil, even sad.