At the foot of the mountain he went through the village of Ca- pon Bridge. Almost there, just a few more miles. He checked the mirror as they went by a sodium light on a pole by the little Texaco station, which was dark and deserted at this hour of the evening. It was some kind of pickup with a huge steel bumper welded to the front. Not too new. Mid-seventies maybe.
Impossible to make out the color- Then a camper passed him headed east and, curious, he glanced in the mirror again. The guy behind — blue, I think. Maybe blue.
Leaving the village the road began to climb and he was again in switchbacks at twenty-five miles per hour. The glare of the head- lights from the pickup behind him swept across the mirror going into and coming out of every curve, and he squinted. He turned the mirror so the lights wouldn’t blind him. Should’ve got the day- night mirror, he told himself, but he had saved twenty bucks pass- ing on that option.
Above the noise of his engine he could hear the rhythmic slap- slap of the wipers and the protests of his tires on the wet macadam.
He was almost at the top of this low mountain. He would build a fire in the fireplace when he reached the cabin in a few minutes. Maybe a shot of Irish whiskey while the fire was driving out the chill. Tomorrow he would—
He could hear the engine of the pickup behind roaring and the headlights spotlighted his dash and windshield. He squinted. What was that damn fool doing? Did he want to pass? We’re right at that overlook—
The truck behind smashed into his rear bumper and pushed him. Strong fought the wheel. His vehicle was accelerating. He applied the brakes. Wheel lock-up. He released the brakes and jammed the throttle down. He was trying to steer but the wheels wouldn’t bite on the slick pavement. Goddamn — the car was going across the road, straight for the overlook pulloutt
In the gravel the car skidded sideways and Strong glanced over his shoulder, straight into the pickup’s headlights. Then he felt the lurch as the pickup slammed on its brakes.
Panicked, he looked forward but saw nothing, still blinded from the headlights’ glare. He felt the car’s nose go down, then it began to roll, over and over and over.
The motion stopped suddenly with a terrific, smashing impact.
When he came out of his daze he was in darkness and the engine was silent. There was a little light, but it seemed to come from above and behind, from the road. Jesus… Something black and wet beside him. A tree trunk, where the passenger seat used to be.
The car was half wrapped around a tree. He had gone down over the edge and rolled several times and smashed into a tree. That asshole in the pickup… trying to kill him.
He wasn’t hurt too bad. Thank God for seat belts. Blood on his face, minute pieces of glass everywhere. He was still groggy. What’s that smell? Gasoline! A leak. He fumbled for the seat-belt release.
Someone was beside him, reaching in through the smashed win- dow- “Hey—“
He was being splashed with something wet “What—” Gas! It was gas! “Please, you gotta—“
Out of the comer of his eye he saw the lighted match come floating through the broken window. The roar of the gasoline ignit- ing was the last sound he heard.
2
The airplanes were shiny and brilliant in their bright colors of red, yellow and blue. They hung in the window suspended on wires, frozen in flight, the spring sun- light firing the wings and fuselages and emphasizing the sleek perfection of their forms. -
Jake Grafton stood on the sidewalk and stared. He examined each one carefully, letting his eyes roam from tail to prop to gull- Hke wingtip. After a moment he pushed the door open and went into the warm shop, out of the weak sunshine and the cool breeze coming off the ocean.
As he stood and gazed at another dozen or so planes banging from the ceiling, the shop proprietor behind the glass counter laid aside his newspaper and cleared his throat. “Good morning.”
“Hi.” Jake glanced at the man. He was balding and bearlike and perched on a stool. “You’ve got some nice airplanes here.”
“Sure do. You have a son interested in radio control?”
Jake let his eyes find the swooping, soaring forms above his head. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “Just looking.”
The proprietor began turning the pages of his newspaper as Jake moved deeper into the shop. He wandered slowly, examining the counter displays, fingering balsa from a wire bin, scanning the rack of X-actokmves and miniature drills, looking at the rows and rows of boxes with airplanes and cars on the covers that stood on shelves behind the counter. Finally, back at the door, he muttered his thanks to the shopkeeper and went out onto the sidewalk.
The sea breeze was brisk this morning and tangy with salt. Not many people on the street. This Delaware beach town lived on tourists and summer was a long way off. At least the sun was out after a week of low, scuddy clouds and intermittent drizzle. Stand- ing there, Jake could faintly hear the gulls crying as they soared above the beach and boardwalk a half block away. He looked again at the airplanes in the window, then went back into the shop.
“Sell me an airplane,” he said as the proprietor looked up from his newspaper.
“Delighted to. Which one you want?”
Jake scanned the planes hanging from the ceiling. He began to examine them critically.
“You ever build an RC plane before?”
“Build? You mean I can’t buy one already made?”
“Not any of these, you can’t. My son built all these years ago, before he went to the air force. They’re his.”
“Build one,” Jake said softly, weighing it He hadn’t figured on that. Oh well, the decision was already made. Now he wanted a plane. “Let me see what you have.”
Forty minutes later, with a yellow credit card invoice for $349.52 tucked into bis wallet, Jake Grafton left the hobby store carrying two large sacks and walked the block to his car. He walked purposefully, quickly. For the first time in months he had a task ahead that would be worth doing.
Fifteen minutes later he parked the car in the sand-and-crushed- seashell parking area in front of his house. He could hear the faint ringing of the telephone as he climbed the steps to the little wooden porch. He unlocked the front door, sat one of the paper sacks on the floor and strode across the living room for the phone on the wall by the kitchen table. The ringing stopped just as he reached for the receiver. He went back to the car for the other sack.
The airplane on the tid of the box looked gorgeous, mouth- wateringly gorgeous, but inside the box was sheet after sheet of raw balsa wood. At least the aircraft parts were impressed, stamped, into the wood. All you would have to do was pick them out and maybe trim the pieces. The instruction booklet looked devilishly complicated, with photos and line drawings. Jake studied the pic- tures. After a bit he began laying out the balsa pieces from the box on the kitchen table, referring frequently to the pictures in the booklet. When the box was empty he surveyed the mess and rubbed his temples. This was going to be a big job, even bigger than he thought.
He put coffee and water in the brewer and was waiting for the Pyrex pot to fill when the phone rang again. “Hello.”
“Jake. How are you feeling this morning?” Callie, his wife, called twice a day to check on him, even though she knew iCirri- tatedhim.
“Fine. How’s your morning going?”
“Did you go out?”
“Downtown.”
“Jake,” she said. tension creeping into her voice as she pro- nounced his name firmly. “We need to talk. When are you going to call that admiral?”
“I dunno.”
“You can’t keep loafing like this. You’re well. You’re going to have to go back to work, or retire and find something to do. You can’t just keep loafing like this. It isn’t you. It isn’t good for you, Jake.”
She emphasized the word “good,” Jake noticed listlessly. That’s Callie, instinctively dividing the world into good and evil- “We’ll talk about it this weekend.” She was driving over from Washington when she got off w
ork this evening. Jake had driven over to the beach house two days ago.
“That’s what you said last weekend, and Monday and Tuesday evenings. And then you avoid the subject” Her voice was firm. “The only way I can get your undivided attention is to call you on the phone. So that’s what I’m doing. When, Jake?”
This weekend. We’ll discuss it this weekend. I promise.”
They muttered their goodbyes. Jake poured a cup of coffee and sipped it as he sorted through the piles of balsa again. What had be gotten hinuetf into?
Coffee cup in hand, he went through the front door and walked past UK car to the street He turned toward the beach, which was about a hundred yards away. The house beside hw wu empty, a suaiiBer place that belonged to some doctor in Baltimore. The aext house belonged to a local, a phar» adst whose wife worked sights down at the drugstore. He had seen their son OB the beach flying a radio-controlled airplane, and didnt Callie say this week was spring break for the kids? He went to the door and knocked.
“Captain Grafton. What a pleasant surprise.”
“Hi, Mrs. Brown. Is David around?”
“Sure.” She turned away. “David,” she called, “you have a visi- tor.” She turned back toward him, “Won’t you come in?”
The boy appeared behind her. “Hey, David,” Jake said. He ex- plained his errand. “I need some of your expert advice, if you can come over for a little while.”
Mrs. Brown nodded her approval and told her son to be back for lunch.
As they walked down the street, Jake explained about the plane. The boy smiled broadly when he saw the pile on Jake’s kitchen table- “The Gentle Lady,” David read from the cover of the in- struction booklet. “That’s an excellent airplane for a beginner. Easy to build and fly. You chose a good one. Captain.”
“Yeah, but I can’t tell which parts are which. They aren’t la- beled, as far as I can tell.”
“Hnunm.” David sat at the table and examined the pile. He was about twelve, still elbows and angles, with medium-length brown hair full of cowlicks. His fingers moved swiftly and surely among the parts, identifying each one. “Did you get an engine for this plane?”
“Nope.”
“A glider is more difficult to fly, of course, more challenging, but you’ll get more satisfaction from mastering it.”
“Right,” Jake said, eyeing the youngster at the table.
“Let’s see. You have a knife, and the man at the store — Mr. Swoze, right? — recommended you buy these pins to hold the parts in place while you glue them. This is a good glue, cyanoacrylate. You’re all set, except for a board to spread the diagram on and pin the parts to, and a drill.”
“What kind of board?”
“Oh, I’ll loan you one. I’ve built three airplanes on mine- You spread the diagram on it and position the parts over the diagram, then pin them right to the board. And I’ll loan you my drill if you don’t have one.” Jake nodded. The youngster continued, his fingers still moving restlessly through the parts, “The most important as- pect of assembling this aircraft is getting the same dihedral and washout on the right and left wing components, both inner and outer panels. Be very careful and work slowly.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll run home and get my board and drill. You won’t need the drill for several days, but I might as well bring it over.” He bolted out the door, leaving Jake to refill his coffee cup and stare at the actual-size diagram.
The house was quiet, with only the background murmur of the surf on the beach and the occasional burble of a passing car to break the solitude. The task assumed a life of its own; breaking the pieces out of the balsa boards, assembling them on the diagram, occasionally sanding or trimming with the razor-sharp nobby’knife before pinning them into place. As he worked he occasionally glanced at the picture on the box, visualizing how the airplane would look soaring back and forth above the sand, trying to imag- ine how it would feel to fly it. This would be real flying, he knew. Even though his feet would not leave the ground, the plane would be flying free. and since he would be flying it, so would he. He carefully glued the rudder and vertical stabilizer parts together and began assembling the horizontal stabilizer.
The knock on the door startled him- He had been so intent on his task he had paid no attention to the sound of the car driving up. “Yeah. Come on in.”
He heard the door open. “Captain Grafton.”
“Yep.” Jake looked up.
The man standing there was in his late twenties, slightly above medium height, with short brown hair. ‘Toad Tarkington! Come on in! What a surprise!”
The man’s face split in a wide grin and he crossed the room and pumped Jake’s hand. “It’s great to see you again, CAG. I thought for a while there you were dead.”
Grafton nodded and studied Lieutenant Toad Tarkiagton. today clad in jeans and rugby shirt and windbreaker. He looked… just the same as he did the morning they went after Colonel Qazi in an F-14 five months ago. Last September. And here he was with that grin… quick, energetic, nervous. He was ready to laugh or fly, ready for a prank in the ready room or a night cat shot, fully alive. That’s what Toad Tarkington projected — vibrant, energetic, enthusiastic life.
“I’m not a CAG now. Toad. I’m just a plain ol’ sick-leave cap- tain.” CAG was the title bestowed on an air wing commander, and was pronounced to rhyme with “rag.”
Toad grabbed his hand and held it, that grin splitting his face. “Have we got a lot to talk about! I tried to call you, sir, but your phone wasn’t listed.”
“Yeah. Had to have the number changed. The reporters were driving me nuts.”
Toad pulled one of the kitchen chairs around and sat down. “I was pretty damn happy last fall when I heard you were alive. What happened to you anyway, after we rammed that transport?”
“Some Greek fishermen pulled me out of the water. I don’t re- member a thing. Had a concussion. Lucky for me the life vests inflate automatically nowadays. Anyway, they pulled me out and I made it.”
“How come they didn’t radio someone or head for port?”
“Their radio was broken and they were there to fish,” Jake looked away from Toad. He was back among the ordinary, every- day things, for a moment there… but he was here, at the beach house. “They thought I was gonna die on them any minute and they needed the fish. I was in a coma.” His shoulders moved up and down. “Too damned many Gs. Messed up my eyes. That’s why I wear these glasses now.”
Jake removed the glasses and examined the lenses, as if seeing them for the first time. “It’s 20/100 now. It was 20/500. The Gs almost ripped my eyeballs out.” He placed the glasses back on the bridge of his nose and stared at the pieces of balsa on the kitchen table. “I don’t remember much about it. The docs say some blood vessels popped in the front part of my brain and I had some mem- ory loss.”
“By God, sir, I sure as hell can fill you in.” Toad leaned forward and seized his arm. Jake refocused on that excited, expressive face, “The Gs were something else and I couldn’t get to the ejection handles, and I guess you couldn’t either. Man, our bacon was well and truly fried when she broke up and spit us out. The left wing was gone and I figure most of the left vertical stab, because we were getting pushed around screwy. I—” He continued his tale, his hands automatically moving to show the plane’s position in space. Jake stopped listening to the voice and watched the hands, those practiced, expressive hands.
Tarkington — he was the past turned into a living, breathing per- son. He was every youngster Jake had shared a ready room with for the past twenty years, all those guys now middle-aged … or dead.
Toad was still talking when Jake turned back to the pile of balsa on the table. When he eventually paused for air, Jake said mildly.
“So what we you up to these days?” as he used the X-acto knife to trim a protruding sliver from a balsa rib piece.
“My squadron tour was up,” Toad said slowly. “And when you get a Silver Star you can pretty well c
all your next set of orders. So I talked it over with the detailer.” He looked around the room, then swiveled back to Jake. “And I told him I wanted to go where you were going.”
Jake laid the knife down and scooted his chair back. “I’m still on convalescent leave.”
“Yessir. I heard. And I hear you’re going to the Pentagon as a division director or something. So I’m reporting there this coming Monday. I’ll be working for you.”
Jake smiled again. “I seem to recall you had had enough of this warrior shit”
“Yeah. Well, what the hell! I decided to stay around for another set of orders. I can always pull the plug. And I’ve got nothing better to do right now anyway.”
Jake snorted and nibbed his fingertips together. The glue had coated his fingertips and wouldn’t come off. “I don’t either. So we’ll go shuffle paper for a while, eh?”
“Yessir,” Toad said, and stood. “Maybe we won’t get underway, but we’ll still be in the navy. That’s something, isn’t it?” He stuck out his hand again, like a cowboy drawing a pistol. “I’ll be seeing you in the office, when you get there,” he said as Jake pumped the outstretched hand. “Say hello to Mrs, Grafton for me.”
Jake accompanied Toad to the door, then out onto the porch. There was a young woman in the car, and she looked at him curi- ously. He nodded at her, then put a hand on Toad’s shoulder and squared around to face him. “Take care of yourself, y’hear?”
“Sure, CAG. Sure.”
“Thanks for coming by.”
As Toad drove away Jake waved, then went back into the house. The place was depressing. It was as if Tarkington brought all the life and energy with him, then took it away when he left. But he was of Jake’s past. Everything was past. The flying, the ready rooms, the sun on the sea as you manned up to fly, all of it was over, gone, finished.
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