Flight (2 page)

“
The Great Trajectory,
” he murmurs. It’s the title of a book he’s reading. The author, an anthropologist at a university out west, argues that the progress of all human civilizations mirrors the course of a single human life. The first phase is simple needs fulfillment. Then there’s a steep learning curve, leading to greater self-awareness and socialization. An era of increasing achievement follows, which the author calls “the Ambition Years.” Then comes the decline: first a slowdown in accomplishments, then the tailing off of ambition itself. Decadence: an era marked by physical decline. In people it’s an aging body, in cultures a depletion of the natural resources that made them successful. After that it’s just a matter of time until the end.

Will likes the theory. The author argues that Western civilization is solidly into its decadence, and that makes sense to him. There are accounts of all sorts of ancient civilizations—the Romans, but also the Mayans, the Taino, the Babylonians—and the story is always the same. It reminds him of the biographies he used to love reading: Andrew Jackson, FDR, Patton. There was always a fresh one under the tree at Christmas, but after a while, he couldn’t read them anymore. You always knew how the story would end.

With the road finally free of traffic, Will walks across to the mailbox. It’s an extralarge metal one from Farm and Fleet, big enough that it won’t overflow, even when they go away for a few days. Over the years it has proved roomy enough for Christmas cards and tax forms, for Margaret’s college catalogs, for the design magazines Carol ordered when she was planning to start an interior-decorating business, for the continuing-education bulletins she got when she thought she’d go back to school and become a teacher.
Carol and her projects,
his sister Janice always said, shaking her head.

The mailbox door opens with a metallic squawk, revealing a modest bundle of mail, still rubber-banded together. The girls haven’t lived at home for fifteen years, and Will and Carol don’t get as much mail. Today’s small group of letters is protectively encircled by a shrink-wrapped magazine. Will looks at that first, because it’s bound to be for Carol.
Olde Country Inns.
The cover shows a picture of the deck of a large white farmhouse. A wicker and glass table is set for brunch, everything in shades of blue. He looks back at his house. This is Carol’s project now: she announced it last week at dinner. She wants to turn the farm into a bed-and-breakfast.

“You mean have strangers come and stay in our home?” Will asked.

“For a price,” she said.

“But why would they want to stay here?” he continued, pressing it.

She gave him an inscrutable look. “For the wholesome country atmosphere, of course,” she said, her voice level enough that he could hear her sarcasm but couldn’t call her on it. “For the spiritual rejuvenation of a return to simpler times.”

Two of the letters are wedding-related: something from the caterer and something from the church. Bills, no doubt. Will has shelled out hundreds of dollars in deposits already, and he knows it will tally up to thousands before it’s over. He shuffles those to the bottom of the stack and looks at the rest. Another bill, this one from the phone company. A quarterly report from his pension plan, now worth one quarter of what he had expected, since TWA went bankrupt and got absorbed into American. A credit-card offer. And there, at the bottom of the stack, the letter he’s been waiting for without really thinking about it, the real reason he came out to get the mail so soon after hearing the gravelly roar of the mailman pulling off the shoulder, why for over a week now he has beaten Carol to the mailbox every day. The return address is embossed with the aqua logo, a wispy bird drawn in one stroke like a Chinese character. Next to it is the name: Cathay Pacific Airways.

So it’s really happening. A couple months ago he ran into Harris
Grolier, a fellow captain from TWA. The flak over American’s acquisition was in the process of dying down, and while no one’s worst fears were fulfilled, no one was exactly thrilled either. Even with reasonable seniority and a better salary, few TWA pilots were happy about flying for American. How do you shed thirty years of loyalty to one company and put on your competitor’s uniform just like that?

“There’s always the Far East trick,” Harris said to Will. “I hear Cathay’s hiring.”

The Far East trick is what some guys do after retiring. The U.S. and Europe have mandatory retirement at sixty. Far Eastern airlines don’t. Everyone knows guys who went to Japan Airlines or Cathay Pacific and flew well into their seventies, starting out in freight and then moving into passenger service. As long as you pass the physicals, you can stay in the sky.

Will sent an application to Cathay. His sixtieth birthday is coming up in July. All his life he has planned to retire when his time came, settle into the farm and do what he moved back there to do. In retirement, he can be a real farmer, full time. Now, with commercial planes being used as weapons, he should be eager to turn in his wings. But for some reason, the thought terrifies him. He tries to imagine his life without flying, but he can’t. He can see himself driving to Farm and Fleet, fixing the door on the barn, walking the fence line, seeding the western field with George’s John Deere. But he can’t see himself doing all those things knowing he’s never going to fly an airplane again.

Ever since he was twelve years old, he wanted to fly. It came to him in a moment, when he was plowing his father’s field, his skinny boy arms still having to crank double time to turn the tractor’s large steering wheel. He looked up and saw a plane, a Gooney Bird or a Constellation, buzzing its tinny path to Midway, and he wanted so much to be up there, cleaving a furrow through the sky, that something in him slammed shut and he knew he was gone. He knew right then that he would put tractor and field and farm behind him and learn to fly.

He opens the letter and flits his eyes over it—
Asia Pacific freight routes, standard benefits package, transfer to passenger fleet
—and it’s almost like takeoff, something you know is going to happen but still sucks the stomach out of you when it actually does. He went to work right out of the Air Force, straight from Vietnam. What will it be like to go back to the Far East as a pilot, even on commercial jets? He could find himself flying into Bangkok again, or Saigon, or even Hanoi. He imagines the lush green jungle, the neat geometry of rice paddies, the long low plateau just north of Hanoi they called Thud Ridge because so many F-105s went down there. His buddy Rogoff’s plane—what’s left of it—is on that ridge. Rusting on the damp Hanoi ground. The great trajectory. A tight hard knot seems to be resting not in his stomach but lower down in his gut. He needs to go to the bathroom.

He turns and faces his house again, waiting for a chocolate brown SUV to pass before he ambles back across the road. He folds the Cathay Pacific letter in half and shoves it into the front pocket of his hooded sweatshirt. He hasn’t made a decision yet. But Carol doesn’t even know he’s thinking about it.

The concrete walk up to the front door is lined with flower beds. Most farmhouses don’t have a front walk, but Carol had insisted.

“We’re not farmers,” she said when they first moved in, “so there’s no reason to pretend to be.” She was using the tone that meant the subject was closed, so Will had kept silent. In fact, as the son of a farmer and the owner of a farm, he qualified for the label. But he didn’t say that.
If we’re not pretending to be farmers,
he thought,
what are we pretending to be?
He didn’t say that either—it would have started a fight. Those were the early days, when Margaret was three and Leanne just a baby. They avoided fighting then, much as they do now. It was the middle years that were full of battles, shouting, nights spent stewing in anger, whole days without speaking.

He puts the mail down on the front porch and goes back to the flower beds, where he noticed a few weeds. If Carol sees them, she’ll ask him to pull them. She’s determined to have everything perfect
when people come over for the dinner. Kneeling down on the sidewalk, he feels a lightening in his heart, an automatic satisfaction triggered by the action of doing something that will make Carol happy.

The weeds are reedy and green. They look healthier than the delicate pansies and nasturtiums Carol has laid out with obvious care. Somehow the sight of the flowers, bravely trying to live up to an ideal of luxuriant beauty, makes his heart ache. For all her efforts, Carol never seems to get it exactly right. And yet what she wants is simple: beauty, elegance, control. He grabs a weed by the base and yanks.

He works methodically, rolling the idea of Cathay Pacific over in his mind, thumbing the possibility like a pebble. According to Harris, freight pilots are based in the U.S., New York or Chicago. So that won’t be a big change. But when you switch over to passenger service, you have to be based in Hong Kong. He could leave George in charge of the farm, as he always has when going away on trips. He and Carol can have the excitement of living somewhere exotic for four or five years while he finishes up his flying career. It won’t be such a long time, really. He isn’t going to do it forever, just long enough for him to wrap up his flying years with grace and a sense of completion, not the abrupt disappointment of seeing the airline he worked for all his life simply fold up and disappear like a bad restaurant. Not the ignominy of turning sixty and being officially declared unfit by the FAA.

“How would you like to live in Hong Kong for a couple of years?” he imagines himself saying. Carol should be thrilled. She has never loved the farm—in fact, she’s spent much of her life regretting their move from the nice Chicago suburb where she started her career as an airline pilot’s wife in 1968. She has often pointed out how much the girls would benefit from a year or two abroad. The girls are no longer an issue, but living abroad is still a glamorous prospect. They’ll live in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, socialize with other pilots and their wives. The food’s supposed to be good. And the shopping—that alone should make her want to go.

He’s plucking the last few weeds from the main bed when he
notices a sparkle on the back of his hand. He stops and sits back on his heels, examining it. Veins cross his hand like highways, curving up over the hill of his bones. Around them blooms a dark mottled colony of age spots. Now there are lighter spots among them, shimmery teardrops of rain. He looks up, and another one hits him in the eye. It’s only a splattering, but he can see from the gray banks of cloud that real rain is on its way. They’re the clouds that look like a solid thing from above, a fuzzy wool blanket some giant has thrown over the earth. He stands up, bones aching from just five minutes of crouching. Turning to the west, he squints toward the lake. It’s thirty miles away, but from the air he could see it, could determine whether or not Margaret and David will be starting out their drive in the rain, or whether they’ll have clear going for fifty miles. Once they get to this side of the lake, they’ll be in it.

Drive safe,
he thinks, sending the thought out along this road, along the county road through the state forest and down the long gray tunnel of I-94. He thinks of his daughter and son-in-law in the front seat, his grandson on his booster in the back. He’s four, but they make boosters for bigger kids, too, now. When Will was young, they just put the kids in the car and called it safe. These days it seems parents have to contemplate danger lurking whichever way they turn.

He goes toward the ditch and tosses the weeds into the brackish water that has pooled there since the thaw. Then he goes back to the porch and picks up the bundle of mail. He puts his hand against his sweatshirt pocket, and there’s a slight crackle. As if in answer, a quick flash of lightning is followed by a low growl of thunder. The wind picks up quickly, then stops. The world stands still, expectant. Will is moving toward the front door, mail in one hand, the other reaching for the knob, as the clouds seem to break apart and a curtain of rain drops down.

There’s a service plaza coming up, Margaret knows it. She remembers it as a childhood landmark, her father driving them home from
O’Hare after a flight from San Francisco or Phoenix or Fort Lauderdale, some trip he thought might be fun for the family. It’s not an exit—she doesn’t want to risk an exit, which might cause confusion about getting back on the highway, might involve her in stoplights and left turns and merges, any of which could spoil her forward momentum—but a freestanding service plaza, with gas stations on both sides of the highway and a restaurant perched on the overpass above the traffic. It’s somewhere just east of the city, because when they drove to Chicago, the sight of that plaza was always a sign that they were nearing O’Hare. Once they drove by it after a tornado, and every window of the restaurant was blown out. Long blue curtains trailed out the windows, swaying like the leaves of an underwater plant. Margaret was surprised when they next passed to see it put back together, lights bright, people inside eating chicken nuggets or french fries while traffic zoomed by underneath. Quick restoration was unusual for Chicago, a city not gifted in the art of renewal. Margaret always envisions it as entropic, an explosion moving outward as the center goes from bad to worse. She used to love its urban shabbiness, because it was so far from the rural shabbiness that surrounded her childhood, in spite of her mother’s vigilance. Now she can’t help but see Chicago’s decrepitude as something darker, a metaphor for all the winding-downs she’s living through—of empire, of prosperity, of youth and expectation and love.

Love. Love is what got her here.

“Don’t do this, Margaret.” It didn’t sound like him, her husband of seven years. It was his voice hollowed out, as if a knife had scraped it clean of something that wasn’t essential to him, perhaps, but was essential to her loving him.

Margaret looks in the rearview mirror. Trevor has his head resting against the backseat, turned to the side so he can stare out the window. His eyes don’t seem to be following anything; he’ll probably be asleep soon, she thinks, glancing ahead to where a rickety little delivery truck is valiantly trying to overtake an eighteen-wheeler.
David and Goliath,
she thinks, and the cold stab of fear hits her stomach again with the name.
David.