by Daniel Riley
“I have some questions,” she says.
“Oh yeah?”
“What’s up with the TVs?”
“You found the TVs?”
“It’s weird.”
“It’s a side thing.”
“You sell them?”
“It’s only a dozen at a time. TVs, repairs, installation. We get ’em from somewhere, the buyer gets a discount, we make a little something.”
“A man with two jobs.”
“I take what I’m given.”
“But what does a pilot like you…I don’t totally get it. What are you really doing here?”
“I wanted to cook you dinner.”
“But what happened?” she says. “What did you do?”
He smiles at her—she’s proud of her directness, like a child who’s smug about the first check of a chess game.
“I killed somebody I wasn’t authorized to kill.”
Suzy is cold all over again. These sudden, extreme temperature changes—in a sink they would break a glass.
“You killed somebody?”
“I hit somebody while I was driving a car, a farmer near Edwards. We’d been out at the bar near the base and we were racing home—that’s what we did—and he was on the side of the road, the edge of his property. I didn’t even see him.”
“And he died?”
“You ever hit an animal?”
“We grew up with deer.”
“So you ever hit one?”
“Just once,” Suzy says. “But it was glancing, a clip. All we had to do was knock the dent out.”
“Well, lemme tell you what happens when it’s square. It’s not a thud. It’s like, I dunno, it’s like a trampoline. The car launched him. The body was thrown over the property fence and into a field. Eighty feet.”
“Oh my God. Was it instant?”
“I know people only die one way, but this guy looked like he died a hundred ways. All the bones, all the bleeding.”
“But it was an accident.”
“Sure, but I’d been drinking.”
“They arrested you.”
“If they’d’ve arrested me, I’d probably be in prison.”
“So, what then?”
“The air force guys showed up first. They got me back to base. They called the cops, dealt with them directly. Said they’d take care of the discipline. They wanted to handle me themselves.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“I thought it had to be a good thing. A protective thing. But the short of it is they needed better pilots overseas, and they weren’t gonna get any of the guys they really wanted to volunteer. They gave me one option, pretty much, and so I went.”
“So you did a tour.”
“They made me stay three years.”
“Jesus.”
“Same deal each time—another go or they’d court-martial me for the drunk driving or turn me over for manslaughter. They let me out after three. But I knew I wouldn’t fly with the air force again. If they make it so you can’t get where you want, why stick around? And with the way information moves with those guys, it’s tough to even get a shot at flying commercial.”
“And so: Zamperini Field. Mitch Millikan meets Suzy Whitman.”
“And so.”
“That’s a tough story,” Suzy says.
“I’ve grown pretty used to it.”
“Do you like the teaching, at least?”
“Not…not especially. It’s what I can do until there’s something better.”
“Guess they didn’t take it all away,” Suzy says.
“You mean I’m still allowed to rent a car at the racetrack?”
“Sure, but also—”
“The Cessna?”
“I guess? You can still get up and go.”
“That’s right: I can still get up in the clouds,” he says, smiling sadly. “Glad to see you’ve been paying attention to the whole point of this stuff.”
They don’t know each other—that’s the thing. That’s the thing with a dinner like this one, with an innocent entry point but no discernible way out. Which is why, with the food gone, Suzy drinks more, meeting Millikan at his dark pace—one for one, and quick. The act does the work of longtime acquaintanceship. And it’s how, by the time they’re out of things to say to each other, there’s been a bridge built, a natural little path to the other side and the next stretch of uncharted wilderness, where their faces can meet across a kitchen table.
The night of the election, bartenders at Howlers are giving out free beers if you can prove you didn’t vote. Suzy and Billy can prove they didn’t vote, though Suzy did. She snuck in early to a booth at the lifeguard office on the Strand, when there was no one around besides blue-haired volunteers. The California polls are still open, but news organizations are close to calling the thing for Nixon. The televisions are off in the bar and the speakers are blasting the new Genesis album in full, and the sense is that this day feels less than even every other day like an election day. There’s a vacuum of consequence. Especially in Sela, the farthest point possible from meaningful democracy.
Suzy and Billy drink beers, and because her flight was canceled while he was at her apartment in the afternoon, she can’t get away with the excuse that she has to be at the airport in the morning. The twenty-four-hour rule, never in great effect under ordinary circumstances, need no longer apply. They really drink so many beers, and on their way out Billy pats his pockets and realizes he’s left his keys at Suzy’s apartment. So they hike up the hill and take the seemingly hundreds of stairs to Suzy’s front door, stairs through which Billy loses a flip-flop, and as she moves through the door and turns on the lights, he taunts Suzy with the presence of his keys in his hand—he’s had them all along. Her indifference is a win for Billy.
She closes her eyes and scuffs her feet toward the bedroom door, and when she slowly reaches toward the knob, she waits, expectantly, for the bolt of lightning to jump from brass to fingertip. By then, she figures, if Billy doesn’t know he’s in—which maybe he doesn’t, he’s still standing by the front door—she doesn’t totally care anyway. She has a hot hand. The more she gets, the more she wants. But whether she’s sleeping in her bed alone or not is up to him, and so she moves to her room so that whatever’s gonna happen can get on happening.
On the second Monday in November, Suzy reports to the private-jet terminal in the middle of the morning. It’s a press flight, her first one. Two dozen newspaper, magazine, and catalog writers from “the West” are gathered at the private check-in gate, drinking coffee and eating little muffins. The plan is to show off Grand Pacific’s first 747. It’ll be used primarily for the L.A.–New York route, but today they’re just gonna take it to San Francisco. It’s the sort of junket that would’ve been happy to host a writer from Mike’s California magazine. Suzy knows about the press flights—that you’re meant to turn your standard High Bubble even higher. That while there are only twenty-five passengers on the 747, the crew is meant to work as though it’s full. It goes by in a snap, and they’ve landed before Suzy’s even paying much mind to the fact that they’re in the air.
At SFO there’s a hot lunch of chowder and sourdough while one of the Grand Pacific executives gives a lengthy presentation on the new 747 service, due to launch in the early part of next year. The journalists are served bottomless lunchtime martinis, and they stop taking notes ten minutes into the talk. There are a few obligatory questions, and then it’s more drinking. Suzy hangs around the back of the presentation room, watching the planes on the runway and counting down the minutes till they reboard. It’s a waste of a day, but it’s double flight credit. While watching a Pan Am plane taxi to its gate—imagining what international location it’s most likely to have slept in last night—she receives a light brush on the shoulder.
“I promise not to take it too personally, but you seem more interested in what’s going on out there.”
It’s the executive from the front of the room. He i
ntroduces himself and Suzy says hello. He’s younger than he looked with the microphone—probably the oldest-looking young person Suzy’s seen. Thick hair and a smooth face, but a dark-gray suit that fits him like a garbage bag. He asks about her time with the company, and Suzy answers all his questions politely. When he finishes his drink, he stays hovering in the back, looking for a new angle. He asks Suzy if she’s auditioned for the latest ad campaign.
“I hadn’t heard of one,” she says.
“It’s quite good, I think. And I suspect you’d have a very good chance of being selected.”
“Selected for what?”
“We’re picking ten girls to be the faces of the campaign. These new advertisements in magazines and newspapers, on billboards. TV, too.”
“What do you have to do?”
“Oh, not much, really. It’s just a picture of a pretty, caring, hardworking stewardess such as yourself, and the words say: ‘I’m…’ Remind me your name again?”
“Suzy.”
“And so it says: ‘I’m Suzy, Fly Me.’ And then the next line would be: ‘Fly Suzy. Fly Grand Pacific.’”
Her face is a soup of uncertain lines.
“You like it that much, huh?”
“Maybe not for me,” she says. “I mean, it’s clever. I just—maybe not for me.”
“We don’t have a light red yet.”
“My hair.”
“It’s tougher than any of the others to find.”
“Gotta have one,” she says.
“I think we do.”
“We’re always the last.”
“Just think about it,” he says. “If you change your mind, give me a call direct. I’ve got a good bit of the say-so.” He hands her a business card.
“If you’re still short a light red…,” Suzy says.
“Then call and I’ll have somebody make it happen.”
“‘Fly Me…’”
“See, it’s pretty good, right?”
“I’d vote for them to just print a portrait of the 747 instead.”
“See, I like that attitude—selling for the brand even when the writers are all over there.”
“You wouldn’t even have to change the copy.”
“I like the enthusiasm.”
“That 747’s the sexiest girl we’ve got.”
The weekend before Thanksgiving, Suzy meets Rachel at the base of the trail to the Observatory. Suzy and Rachel were roommates in stew school, twenty-four hours a day together for three weeks. They slept in twin beds on metal frames on carpetless linoleum, like Madeline. Suzy and Rachel locked without effort, not because they were exceptionally well matched, but because you could never be odd woman out as a pair. Rachel was from Chicago. She’d grown up on the South Side and moved to Wilmette before high school. She happened to know the only girl Suzy knew from the North Shore—they’d met at church and then again at New Trier and then again at Loyola in the city for college.
As graduation grew nearer at stew school—as it became clearer that they would not be kicked out for infractions or a lack of competency, like half of their class—Suzy and Rachel were given the pick of their home base and both selected Los Angeles. Though they’d live in different corners of the sprawl—Suzy in Sela and Rachel in Pasadena—they learned that it wasn’t that far, really, during light traffic, and so seeing each other wouldn’t be an issue. But they hadn’t seen each other. Except on the occasional flight, maybe two or three times, which was always great. Still, Rachel did this thing that bugged Suzy where she always had to acknowledge it, call it by a name: “We’ve just got to find a way to do this outside the airport!” she’d say, and Suzy would agree each time, meaning it but knowing that she probably wasn’t going to leave Sela on most nights. It was an odd conviction of Suzy’s—in spite of the fact that she had no great obligations keeping her wrapped up, just Mike and Grace and the occasional thing with Billy. But after their last encounter at LAX, that latest “Absolutely, you’re right, we must,” Suzy realized that failing to follow through one more time might end their friendship for good, and so proposed a hike in Griffith Park.
Rachel is freckle faced, a freckles-on-the-lips sort of density. But even she’s browned out in L.A. compared with Suzy. She’s wearing Nike-swoosh running shoes and dolphin shorts and a T-shirt without a bra. It rained the day before, and the heavy shower pruned the trees, the green leaves of the live oaks mixing with the golden sycamores’ to give the impression of a true autumn. The lower part of the trail is a canopy of trees and is sopping with damp shadows. They talk about flight plans. They talk about passengers. They talk about the Bad News box in this week’s newsletter.
“Have you seen the latest?” Rachel says.
“Not yet—another hijacking?”
“The newsletter said there’s gonna be security changes.”
“Really? Finally? What set them off?”
“Three dozen passengers on that plane for thirty hours.”
“This is the one that went to Cuba?”
“Right—on Southern. Thirty hours. Can you imagine?”
“So, what, the new rules are…”
“Don’t bring knives, don’t bring guns. Major airports. And then pat-downs, bag checks, metal detector.”
Suzy’s legs go weak and she falls a step behind. She imagines at once how Billy will take it.
“Bag checks?” Suzy says. “Metal detector?”
“Yeah, starting first week of January.”
“Wow, soon…”
Even if she wanted to keep going, it wouldn’t be possible. She counts on her hand the max number of runs she’d be able to do in that time.
“But obviously doesn’t affect us,” Rachel says.
“What do you mean?”
“Pilots, stewardesses, and airport staff are exempt.”
Suzy can’t tell if she’s relieved or not.
“We’re still only subject to the hens in flight ops.”
They step out from beneath the canopy and into direct sunlight, the dirt path casting above them like a fly-fishing line loose on the water. It’s a steady ascent but with curves to cut the grade, the Griffith Observatory like Oz at its end. Suzy lays down asphalt with her eyes, imagines racing a car to the top.
Rachel mentions that she’s been seeing a captain. They wound up in a crew that works together on the regular—a pair of pilots, and a quad of stewardesses who went in for Midwestern flights out of L.A. Not the most sought-after routes—Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City—but routes Grand Pacific is happy to let them run together. Rachel and the captain had been sharing a room on the road for three months.
“And he’s married?” Suzy says.
“He is.”
“Welp.”
“And get this: his wife is a former stew. That’s how they met.”
“So she knows what’s up, then.”
“I’m proceeding as though each time is the last time.”
“It can’t last, Rachel.”
“That’s okay.”
“So why do it?”
“C’mon,” Rachel says. “Ace in Korea.”
“Ha. You sound like my dad.”
“How’s that?”
“Doesn’t matter. But wait, how old is he?”
“Midforties.”
“Jesus.”
“No kids, though.”
“Yeah right.”
“No, no. Shoots blanks. That’s part of what makes it okay.”
“Maybe it’s her problem,” Suzy says.
“Maybe. But I’m not pregnant yet.”
“Do I know him?”
“Oh, probably.”
Suzy thinks hard, really wants to nail it. “Mulaney?”
“Ew…God…no.”
“What?”
“He’s old,” Rachel says.
“He’s gotta be the same age as whoever you’re talking about!”
“But Mulaney’s going bald. Plus he’s got those weird intense eyes.”
“Manson eyes.�
�
“Right, yes. He’s just…hard-core.”
“It’s true. We had a hijacker on a flight with him.”
“What?! You were on that flight?”
“I was, but I’ll tell you about it later. What’s important now: who is it?”
“Do you know Bill Mackenzie?”
“So I really wasn’t far off.”
“You do know him, then,” Rachel says.
“He’s Mulaney with thicker hair. If Mulaney’s Aldrin, Mackenzie’s Armstrong.”
“If Mulaney’s Aldrin, Mackenzie’s Gordo Cooper.”
“That’s right, you’ve always been with Gordo,” Suzy says. “You finally got your Gordo.”
“We’ll see. It’s been a couple weeks. It might be over now and I wouldn’t even know it.”
Suzy’s reminded of Grace’s veteran—the temporal distance between a death and learning about it.
“When do you fly again with him?” Suzy says.
“Tomorrow to Detroit.”
“So you’ll know soon, then.”
“I just don’t want his wife to call again. It happened in the summer, only once. But I can’t deal with that again. I like these guys, but I don’t like them that much. I’m on her side in the end.”
“Well, maybe tomorrow you just do your job, do the work, and pretend like you’ve never done it any other way before. When he tries to talk to you at the hotel, just say you’re going to the pool with the other girls. He’ll get it.”