Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  He’s in front of the television, just as she suspected, tuned in to the NBC telecast. He hits her with the sorts of questions about her trip to Europe that she should’ve known to prepare for. The precise exchange rate with the franc. The range of pricing on the hotel. How well they seemed to preserve the ornamentation on this monument and that church. Then Wayne tells Suzy he’s been cleared for surgery. It’ll still be some time—they’re thinking six weeks—but the chemo has reduced the size of the tumor and they’re feeling better about their chances of operating effectively. Twenty percent up from ten. They can afford to take the chance. Wayne says he’s lost more of his hair. What hair he has left, he says, seems to have given up on his body.

  For stretches Suzy and Wayne are silent. They let the baseball in on both ends but choose not to sever the line. She opens her mail and dumps some chicken and vegetables into stove water for soup stock. The A’s go up in the top of the sixth and don’t look back. Suzy twists herself up in the phone cord, spinning herself in and out as though in the arm of a dance partner. Blue Moon Odom, Catfish Hunter, and Rollie Fingers close out Rose and Morgan and Bench. It’s the first World Series for the A’s since moving to California. It’s a sign that has something to do with Suzy and Grace, Wayne says. Suzy wonders if a better collective of names has ever won a title in any sport before.

  Speaking of names, Wayne wants to make sure Suzy knows Emerson Fittipaldi ended up winning the Formula One season, the youngest-ever champion, Grace’s age more or less. He wants to make sure Suzy’s still okay working flights—that she doesn’t feel shaky after the summer and fall of terror in the skies. (This, Suzy knows, is not the time to mention her lessons.) He wants to make sure she knows that he’s not so worried about her as much as he is about her sister. The dying man wants to make sure Suzy and her sister know that flying is still the most dangerous thing there is.

  It’s a day of training when everyone’s up in the air. Thirty-minute sessions, Suzy’s scheduled second to last. She and Millikan mime their way through the motions within eyeshot of the others, as though they haven’t been in a cockpit together before. It’s been a month, but they pick up where they left off. He’s moving her through a checklist. Change heading fifteen degrees south, tap the air brakes, pitch and drop five hundred feet.

  It has been foggy all day on the ground near the beach, a sewer lid of smog that dims the world. Above the cloud line, though, it’s radiant. The sky: Genesis blue. Original blue. This cockpit, Suzy realizes, is a guaranteed exposure to sunlight, certain escape from the gray. A way to subvert the claustrophobia of low clouds. Up here is the exception, the cheat. The escape from the squeeze of weather. As though she needs a new reason to want it.

  It’s getting dark earlier, and on their way back, farther east where it’s clearer, they’re cruising over the liquid streams of scarlet and cream on the Santa Ana, the Long Beach, and the Harbor. As they circle back to wrap up their half hour, Millikan asks Suzy out to dinner.

  “What makes you think I’d say yes to this pilot when I say no to all the pilots at work?”

  “Well, for one, it’s wise to give at least some hope to the guy at the controls.”

  He can’t be all that much older than she is, but the lines at the corners of his eyes are like rake gratings. Each class since their last time in the air, she’s run through options for what he could’ve done to get discharged. And she’s convinced herself it has to do with drinking. Now she can’t help but see the cracks in his face as belonging to someone who’s worked his way through a garbage dump of booze bottles. That face, entirely his, utterly unique, like the revolutionary “bar codes” she just read about them trying at a grocery store in Cincinnati.

  “I could land it if I needed to,” Suzy says.

  “I’ll take that as a maybe, then.”

  He smiles, a little goofy. She wonders if he’s ever been drunk in class, if he’s drunk now. It’s unfathomable, that sort of carelessness. But she imagines that the kind of demotion he suffered, to the classroom after war, doesn’t get you any closer to sobriety.

  “How ’bout this,” Suzy says, “I’ll get dinner with you if you let me land.”

  She wonders if it had to do with drugs, too. She wonders who his dealer might be now. She considers just saying his name, just testing the water…“Billy Zar?” But it’s just in her head.

  “That still sounds like a strong maybe,” he says. “And to be clear: you do not get to land. It’s socked in.”

  “Give me ten more minutes, then.”

  “We’ve got one more person to go today and it’s already getting dark.”

  “Ten more minutes and I’ll get a drink with you. I’ll stick around for the last one and get a beer.”

  “Five more minutes,” he says.

  “Half a beer, in that case.”

  “Okay, ten,” he says. “Jesus.”

  “And a landing,” she says.

  “And I’ll be landing.”

  On Halloween morning Suzy stops by the house to borrow a shirt from Grace, but Grace isn’t there, it’s just Mike. He’s sitting in the office, her old room, and he’s staring at a sketch of a trumpet. Suzy recognizes it from somewhere, but it’s in Mike’s handwriting, on one of Mike’s yellow legal pads. He has a book on his lap, well worn, yellow but not ancient yellow, modern yellow, and it’s open to the last page, the author biography. Suzy recognizes the book, too—The Crying of Lot 49. The trumpet, the secret symbol of their mail society, or whatever it was. She never read it, but she met lots of boys during her semester at Yale who had. Who were talking about even getting the trumpet as a tattoo.

  Mike’s face is erased of its color. He looks only half-full of necessary body fluids. Someone has died, it’s the only explanation.

  “Are you okay?” Suzy says.

  “Did you know that he lives here?” Mike says.

  “Who?”

  He shows her the last page, the photoless author bio. “But it doesn’t even say it here. I just heard from my editor today, he asked if I ever saw Pynchon around. And he explained the whole thing. Said he has a book coming out in the spring. A big one. ‘A rocket book.’” He does scare quotes with his fingers.

  Suzy stands in the doorway, silent. “So?”

  “I just…can’t believe he lives here.”

  “Maybe we’ll run into him at Howlers tonight.”

  Mike doesn’t smile. Mike is spooked—the effect of having heard the clarion call that his turf has been infiltrated without his knowing. It’s a look that says Mike Singer can taste another writer’s blood in his mouth.

  The after-lesson drink with Millikan turned into two, which turned into dinner TBD. And so the first Friday in November, he offers to cook for her at his place. It’s the sort of bad idea Suzy regularly wonders how the women in the papers could make. Offering up one’s body to be tied and taken, sliced and diced. Or even just adding a complication to the training—wrapping up the fate of her pilot’s license in the satisfaction of a dinner date. It’s not like her to take the bait so readily, but, basic as it sounds, there’s something about the way Millikan smells, an effect to which she submits. It’s his aftershave, she’s pretty sure. She didn’t really notice it before the last lesson. But the richness of that eucalyptus head-cloud, it’s the smell she now most associates with the cockpit. A scent that reminds her of air and light and lift, but also the bone planes of Millikan’s well-shaped skull. That double association gets her like a hook in the gills.

  His house is an actual grown-up house—not an apartment, not a condo, not a beach pit, but the sort of place people with children might live in. There’s a freshly mown lawn and hedges that appear tended to. There’s a concrete drive that looks poured over recently, crack-free. There’s a porch with a rubber tree in a plastic bucket and a two-person seat suspended from the overhang. There’s even a red door—an upstate door—with a brass knocker and everything.

  The door opens. It startles her. He dries his hands on his shirt
and waves her in. He leans forward and kisses her cheek. It surprises her. It’s not a gesture she receives often out here, and it’s certainly not something he’s done before. Not at the airfield, not at the racetrack, not when she left him hanging at the bar. The whole thing has the scent of that eucalyptus—the kiss, but also the room, the house. She promised herself to check the house for emergency exits, first thing. But she finds her resolve melting away already. She’s brought a six-pack of Coors and he takes it from her, leads her to the kitchen, and she follows without reluctance.

  The kitchen overwhelms with a new smell—straightforward, everlasting: butter, potatoes, greens. Two fat steaks sit on a flowered plate, oiled and seasoned and ready for the grill. He offers her a drink, and Suzy says whatever he’s having, and so he pours her two fingers of Jim Beam over ice. He moves through the kitchen in tight lines. The efficiency makes the kitchen seem larger than it is, but really it’s quite small. An undersized table, a slim counter, a stove with four burners, a fridge, and, near the side door, a washer and dryer. It’s through the door that she smells the coals burning. He can practically tend to the grill and the stove top at the same time.

  Millikan. Mitch. Mitchell. He is the same but different. He looks fresher than he has on other occasions, lit up like a watered plant. Jeans and white shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, showing off the hairy wrists, the boxer’s hands. It’s a version of what he wears to the airfield, only made softer by the smells in the kitchen. Made softer by the streetlights that spill into the house and the fact that it’s too dark out for aviators. The tight toasted skin, the casual lift of the frequent haircut, the peninsulas of the forehead on the hairline—firmly established, but with no plan to press deeper toward the crown. He never touches his hair, a sign he’s not worried about it going anywhere. There’s the squint, even in low light. The beady eyes and the crinkles. Signs of the quiet type, signs of the thinker. Narrow face, tall face, tapered to the mouth and its down-turned corners, and a chin that announces itself as neither prominent nor obscure. God, Suzy thinks, this pilot.

  He hasn’t spoken since pouring the drink, but he’s making no effort to scramble for conversation. He’s comfortable at the stove, he’s comfortable with this woman in his place. Suzy, resting her hands on the back of a tall wood-and-wicker chair, imagines all the other women stacked up in that kitchen: one leaning on the counter, another twirling the phone cord around her finger, a few more plumping their asses up onto the windowsill to watch him work. She can’t fantasize about the others and speak at the same time, and so she opens her mouth and starts.

  “Thanks for having me,” Suzy says.

  “Thanks for coming.”

  “This your standard move? For the promising students, I mean?”

  “Yeah, I love cooking for older men who are desperately seeking a new hobby.”

  “But, I mean, you seem to be at ease with me here. You seem to know what you’re doing.”

  “This is not the first time I’ve prepared this meal for a guest, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  She sips once and then twice and stands her ground, comfortable as he is. Without announcing it, he takes the steaks out the side door to the grill. She hears the sizzle as they hit the grate.

  “You hear about the hijacking last weekend?” Suzy says.

  “The, what was it, Algeria?”

  “Same terrorist group from Munich. Demanding the release of the killers who were caught.”

  “How’d it wind up?”

  “Dumped the plane, I think.”

  “Jesus,” he says. “Barely notice anymore, there’s been so many lately.”

  “The crashes in the past few weeks, God.”

  “You keep a list?” he says.

  “Our newsletter from the airline has this little Bad News box. We hear about every one.”

  “What were the latest?”

  “There was that Uruguayan plane.”

  “Oh, never mind, right, the rugby team.”

  “Flew into a mountain? I mean, how does that happen?”

  “Clouds, carelessness. Flying by wire and switching over too late.”

  “And then the congressman,” Suzy says. “Alabama…Mississippi…Louisiana?”

  “Louisiana,” Millikan says. “I guess this stuff does register somewhere.”

  “Disappeared. No wreckage, no sign.”

  “What about the rugby team?”

  “According to the box, no sign of any survivors there, either.”

  “Does it make you nervous about flying?” he says.

  It touches Suzy cold. Not because she hasn’t considered it, but because she hasn’t engaged the question with another person before. She was lying there on the beach just this week, reading words, magazines, newsletters, and she came across the deaths of these dozens, and she felt the illogical urge to get up into the air, to run straight into the burning building. It was an impulse that was both her present and her past—a thing she’d felt previously only on the racetrack. The more difficult the course, the more frequent the accidents, the more convinced she grew that she was the exception, that she was the one meant to make it out. Now she’s ready to put her hands on the yoke for days and days and be the kind of pilot who doesn’t ever crash.

  “Honestly,” she says, “it makes me want it more.”

  Millikan smiles. “Thata girl.”

  “If you’re good, you’re good,” Suzy says. “If the plane’s gonna go down, it’s gonna go down. But you can do some things. Preparation, practice, skill…”

  “A little luck,” he says. “You can only control what you can control. But there’s a lot you can’t control.”

  “So how do you do it? Why aren’t you afraid?”

  “I’ve been close to going down, and when you don’t, it’s sort of like house money. Who’s afraid with house money?”

  “I don’t know how to play craps.”

  He smiles again. She can tell that he can tell that she’s kidding, that she gets it. It’s a comfortable wavelength to operate on. A slick compatibility.

  He slips out the door to flip the steaks and she excuses herself to the bathroom.

  The house is comprised of five small rooms that reveal themselves off a coiling hall. The living room is sparse—a worn leather couch, a spare coffee table, a television, and an overstuffed bookcase. The bookcase surprises her, distracts her from her line to the toilet. The books are all for adolescents. Stuff she remembers male classmates carrying around in elementary school and junior high. Hardy Boys. Narnia. Slim paperbacks about sports and war and wilderness survival. The shelves filled edge to edge. They look hastily distributed, not necessarily collected and organized one by one. Like he’s inherited them recently, his childhood cache, maybe. Rescued from the junk pile during a paring down. Suzy can imagine her parents doing that sort of thing. Sounding an untelegraphed alarm of Everything must go. The race home to salvage things she hasn’t thought of in years. A bookcase of her own with all the nostalgic crap she might not even ever look at again. Here is that for him: Mitch Millikan, Boy Detective, adventures K–12.

  Next is the bedroom, dark, lit at the windows by a streetlamp, just enough for Suzy to make out an uncluttered floor and a bed crisply made. Then, a second bedroom, an office that leads into a yard via a sliding glass door. In the office are a single chair and a single lamp. A reading room, perhaps. But on the floor—brown boxes with black glass faces. First one, then a few, then at least a dozen sharpening into view. She steps into the room, looks closer. Television sets. Each like the other. Newish-model Sony Trinitrons, sitting quiet. In a pile in the corner, pairs of antennae, rabbit ears separate from their heads. Suzy can’t begin to guess what this is, but it boomerangs her back to the animal fear, the porch thought—she doesn’t know this person, not even a little.

  She still has to pee, though, and so finds the last room off the hall, the last room of the house. The bathroom is petite and peach colored. She sits and inspects the walls—wh
ite, bright white. Fresh paint, no mildew. She stands and flushes and draws the shower curtain. It smells like new plastic. The tub is spotless. She peers out the mail-slot-shaped window above the tub and finds a view of the neighbor’s kitchen. A man with a mustache is doing the dishes. He stares directly at Suzy. His eyes catch light like the blade of a knife. She pulls the curtain back quickly and washes her hands. The sink is scrubbed porcelain; the mirror is smudge-free; there’s nothing in the trash bin besides a few strands of floss. Everything is military spick-and-span.

  She dries her hands—freshly laundered towel—and returns to the mirror. She’s even more translucent than usual, spooked by the neighbor’s unobstructed view into the shower. There are freckles, there are light eyes, even some lines beneath them. Her hair looks as lightly and thinly drawn as a pencil sketch. Her mouth, though, stacks up full, her lips a pair of pinkie fingers. She notices that the mirror doubles as a cabinet. She opens it. Finds the usual things. Every new detail comes as a small relief. Beside the tube of toothpaste is a jar of Proraso shave cream. That’s it, she thinks. She unscrews the top, finds herself overwhelmed by a higher concentration of the scent she most associates with him. The eucalyptus. The way it clears the head like horseradish. She fingers some excess from the cap and touches the lines beneath her eyes. She rubs it in, coolly, a shot at reducing the swelling. When she opens her eyes again and the picture of Suzy comes back to her in the mirror, she inspects herself and is satisfied. There’s nowhere to go but back in there. “Okay,” she says.

  Dinner goes quickly. She feels badly that she’s eaten in minutes what took an hour to prepare. They talk about growing up. Suzy’s Schuyler Glen and Millikan’s Omaha. Mom at home, Dad in the stockyards—there’s a reason this steak tastes as good as it does. Three brothers, three sisters, Millikan in the dead middle, the easy-to-overlook centerpiece. He joined the air force after high school, ended up in California. Got into the test-pilot business. This has never come up before. Suzy can’t believe he was one of that maniacal strain. The one-in-four-dead odds that made it the most dangerous job in America. The backstory is beginning to touch the edges of things she’s heard about. She knew he’d been at Edwards at some point, but didn’t put together that it’d been with that gang. Somewhere along the way he wound up in Vietnam, she knows, but she hasn’t quite pieced that part together yet. She has a second Jim Beam and then stands up to pop the top off a first beer. She’s through eating, doesn’t need seconds. Doesn’t know how long she really has to get to the heart of it, anyway, and so wastes no more time.