by Daniel Riley
They’re in California the next day. And the first moment she’s alone, when Grace and Mike head out for lunch together, Suzy calls Billy from the airline phone. She asks him what he’s doing and he says, “A lot of the usual,” which she takes to mean he’s free. She asks to meet up with him, and he suggests a bench at Twelfth, right on the Strand.
“No,” Suzy says. “Let’s meet inside.”
“There’s nothing you can do inside that ain’t better outside.”
“Jesus,” Suzy says. “Let’s at least meet on the sand, then.”
Thirty minutes later they’re sitting near a bank of ice plant, facing the water, matching skateboards spiked side by side.
“What’s up?” Billy says. “Why down here?”
“There’s too many people walking up there. You know half of them, and I need to actually talk about something.”
“Are you following the Stones to Europe and inviting me along?”
“Are you still…is the opportunity still available?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you still doing what you were doing? Do you still need someone to do the thing?”
“The flight to New York just didn’t have the same bounce without it, huh?”
“The question’s really simple.”
“Yeah, there’s a backlog, in fact.”
“Okay, so.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I just need the money.”
“You’re not working for a cop or something, are you?”
“Nah. I need to help someone out and I need money.”
“You’d have to say if you are—that’s a real thing. You’d have to tell me.”
She pats her sides, stomach, and tits—presses through her T-shirt to prove there’s no tape recorder.
“C’mon,” she says.
“Well, like I said, there’s a little bit of buildup here. Need someone to get two to New York in the next ten days. And one more a couple weeks after that.”
“I’m talking about one or two. No more than that—that’s it, really.”
“You buying a car?”
“I just need it—a little bit, is all.”
“It doesn’t make a ton of sense, businesswise, for us to only have you do one or two.”
“Do you need my help or not?”
“Listen, I’m on the line, just like you. It’s just not making sense to me what’s causing the big change.”
“You offered it up.”
“And you stormed away like I’d kicked your dog.”
Despite the reddest stretches of that first flight to New York—the parts that were flooded with revenge plots—she’s realizing hers has been a put-on indignation with Billy, a grimace papering over a real warmth. She cycles forward and back through their hours together and can’t come up with a reason not to share what’s going on. Especially if it’s the only way he’ll let her in.
“We went home, me and my sister, we drove home before the concert, and we saw our folks. My dad told us he’s sick.”
“What kind of sick?”
“He has a tumor on his spine.”
“That’s very bad.”
“He needs better doctors, he needs better treatment, he needs surgery—and they need money. They don’t have money.”
Billy is silent and his mouth is small. His face is free of expression, and it looks to Suzy as though he’s attempting to slow his heart, his brain, his blood beat. It’s a commitment to half speed.
“What?” she says.
“That’s terrible. I don’t know what to say.”
Billy, who has something to say to everyone. It’s a generous response—honest, unselfish. It isn’t cluttered up with the whipped air of overblown sympathy. It’s not wet with remorse. It’s about all she could want, even though she didn’t know it.
“Yeah,” she says. “I do this thing whenever I get bad news.…I play this mental defense and I immediately rationalize it, give it context: This is bad, but at least it’s not that other thing.…It’s nothing compared to if that other thing happened.…And what I think I’ve always compared the medium-bad things to, what ‘that other thing’ is, is my dad dying. My mom dying. Grace dying. You’re gonna be okay about this dumb thing because it’s not Dad Cancer.”
“So you have to accept that it’s just as bad as it seems.”
“It is the max-bad thing.”
“What is it you think the money can do? Or that you want it to do?” he says.
“My dad was ready to just let it ride—that was the plan before Grace and I came home. Just, nothing. I hate that.”
“He’d already given up on it.”
“I think they were seeing the impossibility that even the best effort, the best circumstances, could bring. And decided it wasn’t worth spending a bunch of money and time and pain on those long odds.”
“But you think it’s worth trying? Or at least you think you can help them try with money?”
“I know that what he was saying is a thing. That sometimes, for some people, it’s just better to let it come, face it head-on, instead of fighting it and making it worse. I just didn’t think my dad was like that—I figured he’d fight it till the fighting killed him. I can’t face the alternative. I can’t accept him, or me, or anyone, I guess, not wanting to live.”
“It’s probably not ‘not wanting,’ right?”
She brushes the hair from her face. “I can’t let him not have the opportunity to live if he wants to try.”
“So, runs and money.”
“Just money. Money by some means. And even though it’s the last thing I want to do, the circumstances require that certain efforts be made. And I heard of a way to make some scratch.…”
“Well, okay,” Billy says. “What’s the next time you’re going?”
“I’m gonna call the airline today. I’m gonna tell them what’s going on, that my dad’s sick, and that I’d like to try to get out there once every two weeks and spend most of my days off at home. I think that so long as it doesn’t affect the airline all that much—that I can still do other routes just the same—they should be okay with it. Fly-in–two-days-at-home–fly-back sort of thing.”
“That’s pretty ideal if you really do want to be involved with this,” he says.
“I’m talking two or three times max,” she says.
“You said one or two before.”
“Then two.”
“Well, all I mean is it doesn’t have to be. If you need more or whatever.”
“My sister’s gonna try to go out when I’m not there, to help at the house and in the hospital, too—we talked about it.”
“Does she want in?” Billy says.
Suzy looks at him to make sure he’s kidding, and he lifts the corner of his mouth.
“You want to eat something?” Billy says.
She shakes her head without really checking with her body.
“C’mon, you can tell me about the concert.”
“It was good,” she says. “It was really, really good.”
“Thanks, Robert Christgau, I feel like I was there.”
“What do you want, what would you want to eat?”
“Let’s get some soup at the diner.”
“It’s eighty fucking degrees.”
“‘It wasn’t nothing but some water and potatos,’” he says, stomping a big beat with his heel, building in animation, “‘and the wonderful, wonderful soupstone!’”
“I don’t know that song.…”
They hang around and the sun passes behind a mountain range of clouds, so that it turns to winter, an optic threat of rain. Sand-sea-sky in a chrome gradient. Neither makes a move to leave. Without the sun there’s no shadow to tip off Suzy that Billy’s leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. “That’s all very fucked up, seriously,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
Suzy nods but doesn’t move, and then says, “Okay, let’s eat.”
The first one’s an afternoon flight, weekday, hal
f businessmen, some empty seats. It’s the same package: the five-pound sack of Gold Medal flour inside the sealed Ziploc inside the brown paper bag. This time Suzy packs it herself, in a lunch pail with measured proportions of brown sugar, chocolate chips, and vanilla extract. A container of ready-made ingredients, just like Billy said—dry mix for the fledgling bakery business in Manhattan.
Of course they don’t check her bag. They’ve never checked her bag. Cocktail dress, jeans, shirt, and underwear. A pair of comfortable flip-flops. A couple books and a lunch pail with the dry mix. That’s about as domesticated as it gets. In the mirror: the reflection of the high-femme stewardess image she’s never quite pulled together naturally. The painted nails, the three-dimensional hair, the hundred-and-fifty percent eye shadow—it’s always been effortful, a necessary performance. And now she’s a girl whose greatest charge against her is just loving baking too much.
By the time there are tall mountains out the windows, Suzy’s feeling confident there’s nothing left to complicate the run. Just three more hours of happy-hour cocktails, cigarettes, and headsets, and it’s off the plane and into the bathroom, just like before. But there’s a pair of eyes in a first-class aisle seat that won’t drop from her body. She sees them as she passes facing forward and she feels them trailing her as she moves back into the forward compartment—eyes peering out of a face that’s been quickly sketched, a loose bag of shaved lines, a head with a countable number of hairs. She’s beginning to wonder whether he’s some sort of monitor, if it’s some sort of trap. It’s about then, over Colorado, that he asks for a drink: “Something whiskeyish with something sour.”
“So a whiskey sour,” Suzy says.
“Well, anything but that, but the same basic idea.”
He seems amused with the complication, that it’s made him memorable.
Suzy mixes the drink—Johnnie Walker with some concentrate out of a plastic lime squeeze bottle. She doesn’t have real options. She places it on his tray.
“Well, what’d you do?” the man says.
“Something whiskeyish with something sour.”
“What do you call it?”
“I don’t know. Whiskey lime.”
“Give it a good name.”
She thinks on it. “Indecision’s Remorse.”
“I don’t know if I’d remember that one. I like when they’re named after famous people. Or pretty ladies.”
“How ’bout my name, then?” Suzy says with exaggeration. “Beverly Hills.”
“That’s not your name.”
“You got me. And though I’d love to chat, I’ve gotta run back and get this food service started.”
“Well, hold up, before you go, what do you say you and me go out tonight.”
“I appreciate the offer, genuinely, but I’m turning around and heading straight back.”
“Well, how ’bout I jump on that plane and we get drinks tonight in Los Angeles?”
“That’s…that’s very sweet of you, but I’m probably gonna be busy then, too.”
“Well, consider it. Maybe we’ll get grounded in New York or something. Just know it’s an option.”
“Will do,” she says.
He asks her again over Missouri and a third time on final approach, the last cabin check. Suzy smiles through the advances but starts to sweat his lingering eyes as she gets closer to the handoff. At the gate the cabin clears, and the pilots thank the girls for their service—the sort of five hours that passed without incident, five hours that will fade from recollection for the pilots and the stews by next week, no-memory memories that will last forever. For everyone but Suzy, at least, whose trip glows a little more on account of her elevated ordinary.
At the end of the jet bridge, the man is waiting. She’s fairly certain he’s not involved, only that he’s distracting from the task at hand.
“Hey, lemme at least buy you dinner in the terminal, since it looks like it’s blue skies for the return flight.”
“Oh, thanks again, really, but I’m just gonna go nibble on something at the lounge and freshen up. We’ve only got about forty minutes.”
“Well, how ’bout I join you there?” he says. Suzy’s walking now, in the direction of the Union News and the bathroom. She’s scanning the terminal for Cassidy and her friends.
“I don’t know, I don’t think they’d let you in there.”
“I just don’t see what the big deal is, why you can’t eat with me if you’re eating in there?”
She strains to grin and shakes her head in subtle yaws. “I don’t know…,” she says, preparing to let him down less easily. And then she spots Cassidy. Cassidy’s keeping her distance, on the edge of aborting on account of the stranger, who’s not part of the plan.
Suzy perks up and her eyes widen and she says, “Oh my God, this is my friend! She came all the way out to surprise me!” Suzy raises her hand and waves, and Cassidy has no choice but to approach, her face tight with reluctance. “Cassidy! See,” she says to the man, “I haven’t seen her in forever.”
They close the gap and Suzy says, “Are you here to surprise me for dinner?” Cassidy’s face doesn’t move, but Suzy says, “Thank you so much.”
“Listen,” Suzy says to the man, “I need to run to the bathroom, and I need to catch up with my friend. It was nice meeting you, nice talking.” And Suzy grabs Cassidy by the arm, hooks her in the crook of her elbow, and vanishes with her into the bathroom before Cassidy can protest in full.
“What the fuck was that?” Cassidy says in the empty bathroom.
“That was a passenger who wasn’t going to leave me alone. He was going to fuck up everything.”
“Don’t ever, ever say my name out there again.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Suzy says. “I’ll make something up next time.”
Suzy carries her bag into the stall, unzips, pops the lunch pail, pulls out the sack, and waves Cassidy over impatiently.
“Look who’s an old pro,” Cassidy says.
Cassidy is such a Broadway tough when she’s barking instructions, but there’s a luminescence when she smiles, especially coyly like now. Crooked lips into a noncommitted grin, words out of just one side of her mouth. Suzy kinda likes her just then. But Cassidy doesn’t break role for long—takes the sack and puts it in her bag.
“Who has the money?” Suzy says.
“Same as last time.”
Suzy zips up and walks out of the bathroom with Cassidy left behind. She looks for the men, and when she finds them in a newsstand, she clops in a direct line, approaches without pretending to browse, and says, “Thanks for holding my purse.” The man squints at her and looks for a signal over Suzy’s shoulder, a sign from Cassidy. When it comes, he hands her the bag, and Suzy leaves him, too, without another word. Three minutes on she’s in the lounge, and her appetite is expansive. She asks the chef at the carving station for some slices of roast beef and a scoop of mashed potatoes. She pops a Coke and sits near the window, where the sun is coming in flat. She reaches into the bottom of her bag and lifts the purse, unfastens the brass, thumbs the cash.
One done. She can handle another. If she’s honest, she feels herself looking forward to it. The same scenario, a beeline from the plane to the bathroom, only next time maybe they trust her enough so it’s Cassidy with the money herself. Cassidy softening even further. Cassidy and Suzy alone.
“Are you sure I can’t be a stew?” Cassidy might ask.
And Suzy would have the opportunity to purse her lips in mock assessment and say, “Still too short.”
Suzy’s first lesson at Zamperini is on a Monday evening. It’s not the class with J.P.—you can’t hook up with a course midstream, turns out—but rather another one at the airfield. The instructor’s a young pilot named Millikan. He doesn’t even say his first name. Or maybe that is his first name. There’s no Mr., no initial. Just Millikan. Former military, he says, but he looks jarringly young. Narrow face, long nose, tight skinned if a little baggy eyed. The first night in the c
lassroom is introductions. Suzy and seven middle-aged men—most of whom, sounds like, have money set aside to buy their own planes. Though she’s come into some discretionary funds herself, Suzy’s an aberration, the only one without military experience or facial hair. When Millikan asks why she’s there, she says she wants to learn how to dogfight. That’s a long way off, he says, and Suzy says, “Four months, right?”
It’ll be two months before they even get inside a real plane, he says. It’s all reading, props in the hangar, then on to the simulator—this new box hooked up to a yoke and pedals that Millikan’s a little wary of. He didn’t learn on one, figures they might be a waste of time. But they’re fun to play with, he says, even if they’re not fully effective for certification. Once they’re through with the prep, they’ll get up in the planes with Millikan—feel their way around a cockpit, put hands on the equipment, and fly side by side with their instructor, he says, like fifteen-year-olds do in driver’s ed. Suzy smiles at this. She remembers her own driving lessons—lessons required by the state, even though she’d been fudging her way into racing via a tractor license for a few years. The driving instructor moved her through the typical motions and lifted his clipboard to make notations only when Suzy started downshifting into high-speed turns.
All this, though, Millikan says, is logistics. The real reason to be here is for the wonder.
“Think of it…,” he says. “Flying is still, in 1972, an underrated achievement. Getting up in the air and winding up somewhere else because I or you choose to—that is some crazy bullshit!” He describes flying’s capacity to make us more aware of the bigness of the world and the smallness of man, but also man’s (“and lady’s, I suppose”) ability to push back against nature. Our ability to eat up impossible distances—journeys that had taken us months—in the space of an evening. “Flying,” he says, “is about our collapsing of the distances that have divided us since the Garden. About seeing, from way up high, how parts form a whole, the ways we interconnect. Or at least have the opportunity to connect. This is about celebrating that. Appreciating that—right?”