The Last Run

by Todd Lewan

  His pilots, to his good fortune, he considered to be tops in the business. He had fifteen fliers, transplants from the navy, army, Marine Corps, and the usual recruits from the Coast Guard’s farm system. All of them had completed two tours before Alaska and not one was a hotshot. Usually you would get at least one air cowboy with a cute temper. But in Sitka he’d been blessed with men who flew with their heads—not their balls. He had no patience for tricks or stunts or those who played up the risk of their missions in their flight reports. Everyone knew what it took to climb into a helicopter on a bad night in Alaska; there was no need for grandstanding.

  He had never particularly liked accepting awards for doing his job—it had made him awkward, in fact—and he liked even less having to rank pilots when it came time for their evaluations. There were a handful for whom he held a special regard, but he never let them or anyone else know it. One was Jack Newby. Ex-army, tall, with the composed expression of a ceramic cat, Newby had a wit that could make skulls smile. He also had more confidence than anybody Ted LeFeuvre knew. Newby was not concerned about leading, yet he was the kind of pilot who could get his crew to follow him anywhere and do anything. What he knew about helicopters he knew absolutely and what he did not know he was unashamed to admit. Oftentimes there was something hollow about charismatic people. But in Jack Newby’s charisma there was nothing but sincerity.

  Another was his deputy operations officer, David “Bull” Durham. Bull never said much but he was perhaps the hardest-working officer Ted LeFeuvre had ever met. He was conservative in the cockpit, flew strictly by the book, and yet was more technically resourceful than the daring pilots. He was a human reference book in the cockpit. He knew precisely how far the aircraft could be pushed under any condition and his ability to use the whole helicopter, to maximize the machine’s output, was unmatched. He did not have the natural charisma that Jack Newby did. But Bull had a huge heart and perhaps was the more knowledgeable.

  One of his very best aviators, Dan Molthen, combined superior flying instincts with a refreshing lack of ego. Those instincts, Ted LeFeuvre thought, must have come from his days in the navy, where he did a lot of night flying off aircraft carriers. At thirty-five he won the Distinguished Flying Cross, the highest aviation honor in peacetime. He was lean but strong—he worked out like a fiend—and had a long face that made an angular, sober silhouette. He was boyish, though, so self-effacing that unless you flew with the man you would never know he possessed motor skills that most aviators could only dream about.

  Then there was Bill Adickes. Crack was a short man, fatless, with smoldering topaz eyes set in a near-permanent squint. He didn’t have outstanding motor skills like the others, and he wasn’t as knowledgeable on the technical aspects of the aircraft. What he had was imagination and cunning. He was also economical with his helicopter, something he’d learned by flying combat helicopters for twelve years in the Marine Corps. Sometimes Adickes got himself into trouble for not planning all of his moves out in advance. But he was so unflappable, so creative, and so very, very lucky when he needed to be that he always—always—pulled himself and his crew out of jams to complete a mission.

  As for the rest of his fliers, the one Ted LeFeuvre thought might be closest to entering that top tier was a thirty-three-year-old from Newton, Massachusetts, Steve Torpey. His peers called him Torp, the made-for-TV pilot. He had a wide, telegenic smile, and some remarked that he’d come up to Alaska to forge a reputation as a top gun. Ted LeFeuvre hadn’t seen any of that in him. He was a little stubborn, perhaps, prone to impatience, maybe, but he was diligent and knowledgeable. And if there was such a thing as a natural, Torpey was it. He had extraordinary intuition in the air and fast, fluid motor skills. In four years in Alaska he hadn’t gotten a single big case, though, and it bothered him. But once he gets that case, Ted LeFeuvre thought, he will have something inside of himself for the rest of his days and it will make everything else he does in life easier.

  All of his pilots, of course, had come to Alaska specially trained to fly the Coast Guard’s most sophisticated helicopter, the Sikorsky H-60 Jayhawk. It was a tank of an aircraft—it weighed twenty-one tons without a crew or gas—and had the power of one. With twin, 1,980-horsepower engines, the Jayhawk cruised at 146 knots and hit dash speeds of 180. It could fly 325 miles offshore, hover forty-five minutes and still return with a safe fuel reserve. Its computer could fly and land the aircraft, its global positioning system could receive data simultaneously from four satellites and its forward-looking infrared sensors made navigation a snap.

  The Jayhawk certainly was to his liking. Flying it required a certain modesty at the controls, a careful touch—not brute strength. Though faster than its predecessor, the hulky H-3 Pelican, the Jayhawk was a wide aircraft susceptible to downdrafts. Once in the water, the H-60 sank like a stone. You either got out of the aircraft in thirty seconds or you went for a ride to bottom of the ocean.

  Ted LeFeuvre had never ditched a helicopter. But he was never more than an ordinary pilot and not much to talk about at sea, either. He got violently ill his first cruise aboard a Coast Guard cutter. He threw up halfway through his inaugural flight in a T-34 Bravo helicopter, and left his dinner in his lap during a night flight in a T-28 plane. (The engine caught fire and he was greeted on the runway by a squadron of fire trucks.) At flight school in Pensacola he was flunked for bringing his T-57 Jet Ranger in too fast on an approach and had to fly extra time to compensate for his mishap. He barely graduated with the class of 1977, his grades one one-hundredth of a point above passing.

  He’d always taken longer to learn maneuvers that other pilots picked up effortlessly. While training in New Orleans to qualify to fly the H-65 helicopter, he was sent home after a few blunders and grounded for two days. For years he cringed at hovering close to the water; he still tightened up a little when flying in tight formation with other aircraft.

  Physically, he was no recruiting-poster type. He was unathletic, not particularly tall, wore glasses and had gone gray. At forty-six, he was in okay but not spectacular shape, though of late he had begun to feel a slowness, a fuzziness in the perimeters of his reflexes. He chided himself for not getting more time in the helicopter, but it didn’t bother him too much, really. He was an administrator now more than a pilot. It would be silly for him to stand in for his aces.

  THIRTY

  Most nights he had trouble sleeping. When Ted LeFeuvre had been married he would go to bed early to read a book and to be together with his wife. She had wonderfully beautiful hair and a lovely face and body and he would lie sometimes and watch her hair shine as she twisted it up in the lamplight, and if he could feel the warmth from her arms and legs he would be happy. Besides the wildness there were all the small ways of making love and he always looked forward to lying next to her so that he could revisit them. But now he no longer read in bed and he would stay up late to put off lying in bed alone.

  Often he sat up in the den. Some people said keeping a journal might help him get over things. Rubbish, he thought. It had been bad enough losing his wife. Why would he want to record it now? So he read the Scriptures and the Psalms. There was one in particular, Psalm 121:1-2, he found useful: I lift my eyes up to the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and Earth. Other tools that helped were his John MacArthur tapes and the R. C. Sproul book Willing to Believe. He would rock in his chair, listening to sermons and reading, and ponder questions that had long remained unresolved in his mind.

  God, he thought, how much of my destiny is of my own choosing? Do I have the complete freedom to choose my destiny? Did my ex-wife? Or is it only You, Lord, who decides our fate?

  They were vexing, sobering questions for a man of the military who was only then realizing the enormous task of changing one’s course in life, and they prompted, to his chagrin, other troubling thoughts. If all men, as he had always believed, were inherently imperfect beings, what gave him the right to expect his former
wife to be a perfect, loving spouse for always?

  Night after night he tussled with this moral dilemma. What did it really mean to forgive? What did forgiveness look like? Perhaps he was too logical and analytical a man to forgive. He wanted to forgive his ex-wife. But if he did, would that mean he’d have to be her best friend? Call her all the time? Commiserate with her? Shake hands with her new husband? He didn’t want any of that. He was through being a sap. And he genuinely disliked the man his children referred to as Jughead. But if he felt this way, did it mean he had not truly forgiven?

  He tried not to anguish over it, and as the months passed he gradually ceased to anguish and did his best to free himself of guilt through work, insofar as he could. In fact, he found he was able to replace nearly everything but the children with religious discipline and hard work. When he was lonesome for the kids he would pray for them and remind himself to stay within the carapace of work and prayer that he had built for his own protection. Work hard, he told himself when he felt the loneliness coming. If you stop working hard now you may lose it. Most of the time the carapace held up fine. But there were slow periods at the air base and holes in his schedule between church events and meetings, and it was during those periods that the aloneness was worst.

  He realized that it was probably normal to feel lonesomeness for his children as he did, being so far away from them for so long. He was unafraid of dying alone, or even dying in disgrace. But he was terrified of the destructive nature of loneliness. It opened the door to self-pity, which he knew always led to other moral weaknesses, and they in turn would cause him to fail the Lord. Not that he considered himself on the verge of a moral meltdown. But he was wary of one.

  Some nights when sleep was elusive he would go to the computer he had set up in the spare bedroom and write to his parents. His father’s heart was failing and the doctor had said he could go at any time. It bothered Ted LeFeuvre that he could not be there for his father in California at that moment. When he began his letters he would feel connected to them, but as he signed off the joy would drain out of him the way the tide slips off a flat and the ebb begins in a channel.

  Above the computer, on the shelf, he kept a book, The General Next to God: The Story of William Booth and the Salvation Army. Sometimes he would flip through the pages, reading about William Bramble Booth, the pawnbroker’s apprentice who began the Army’s work in the slums of London in 1865 at the age of thirty-six. A handwritten note on the first page always made his heart ache: To dearest Ted—Hoping you will get some further inspiration from the life of your great-great grandfather. He would be proud of your dedication to the Lord. Mother and Dad, Christmas, 1972.

  Whenever he read these words, he thought: My dad is dying, my only brother, Phillip, had a severe stroke after a skiing accident, and I’m the one crying like a baby over a divorce. Lord, my ancestors would be ashamed of me. His great-uncle had served as William Booth’s chief of staff at the Salvation Army. His great-aunt was once the U.S. commander of the Salvation Army. His great-grandmother Catherine Booth had worked at her father’s organization in London until she sailed to America to start a Bible college in Kentucky. His grandparents were missionaries in America, Palestine and in the Upper Volta, where his grandfather died of dysentery and malaria in 1924. His uncle had been bishop of Manchester in the Church of England.

  He had planned to enter the ministry himself after graduating from Azusa Pacific, a Christian college, where he’d been a youth pastor and had double-majored in psychology and biblical literature. But at the last moment he decided against it. He wasn’t exactly sure why at the time. It suddenly didn’t feel right—a shift in attitude he chalked up to divine intervention. It was only years later, after losing his wife and kids, that he figured out that his inability to respond to others’ emotional troubles in an empathetic way was what had really kept him from becoming a pastor.

  It was painful to admit this, even more so than going through life with a reputation for being a logical, analytical kind of man. He was actually a man of deep feeling. But he had always been a man of very strong will, a man always in complete control of his emotional responses. So strong was his character that over time he had grown unaware, in a boyish sort of way, of other people’s emotional traumas. How another person could slip so far out of control was a foreign concept to him. It simply didn’t register.

  Not even when it happened to him.

  The lady who led him to the brink he met, not surprisingly, at church. Her name was Katherine Ballish. She’d moved to California from Oregon as a fourteen-year-old, and he often saw her and her older sister at Sunday services. She liked to be amused and she had a deep, uninhibited laugh and a blitheness he found peculiar. They saw each other at Bible study and he frequently ran into her in the halls of La Habra High. In his senior year he had the minimal wit to surmise this was no accident; when he asked her about it she told him she’d leave early from her classes and run to catch him as he left his. Even so, he remained oblivious to her sexual interest until a buddy of his pulled him aside a day before graduation and told him that Kathy had the hots for him.

  During his junior year in college they moved into a tiny house next door to East Whittier Friends, the church where they’d married. She found work across the street as a secretary for the denomination’s supervisor. He sent résumés to seventy-two schools up and down the California coast looking for a job teaching and got no bites. (He couldn’t speak Spanish, so he was considered unqualified.) So he took a temp job for the Western Auto Supply Company, read gas meters for the state utility and delivered concrete block to building sites before finally filling out an application to the Coast Guard in November of 1974. Six months later, at his wife’s insistence, he called the recruiting office. “Sorry for not calling you back, Mr. LeFeuvre,” said the petty officer who answered. “We lost your phone number. You’ve been selected.”

  So began their lives as a Coast Guard couple. Kathy gave birth to Michelle weeks after their arrival in Eureka, California, his first assignment, and Cam came along a year later. After that, the LeFeuvres crisscrossed the country, moving from air base to air base. He flew rescue missions. She took up watercolor painting and crochet.

  Only once, during seventeen years and nineteen address changes, did he have even the slightest clue that his wife was miserable. That was in New Orleans. One night he’d been playing a board game with the kids. She was doing the laundry. Offhandedly, he asked her why she didn’t wash the clothes during the day and she flew into a rage. My time is mine. You will not dictate to me. And she stormed out. He thought about her outburst for a moment, shrugged it off and went back to his Parcheesi game.

  In 1988 he was reassigned to Kodiak. That first year in Alaska he was away 180 days on fishery patrols. He wasn’t home much the following year either. Then, one May afternoon, he came home after a monthlong deployment on the Bering and she gave him an especially warm greeting. She even invited him to dinner, to a Mexican place he liked.

  They had ordered and were picking at an appetizer of spicy cheese nachos when she put down her napkin, gave him a sidelong look and said firmly:

  “Jim Rao asked me to leave with him.”

  Rao was a pilot who lived downstairs with his wife, Leigh-Anne. In a month they were supposed to be leaving for Florida. Ted LeFeuvre lifted a nacho out of the basket.

  “Well,” he said, “that must have been funny.” He snapped the dangling cheese with his finger and lowered the nacho into his mouth. “So what did you tell him?”

  “I told him I wanted to go with him.”

  He stopped chewing.

  “Oh.”

  She looked down at her plate. He finished chewing the nacho and tried to swallow. His throat was dry.

  “So”—he cleared his throat—“what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “Stop it.”

  He wanted to say something cute, something smart, bu
t all that came out was, “Are you going, then?”

  “I’m afraid to.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll get the kids.”

  Years later he thought it might not have been as bad if she had not caught him in the parking lot and told him to go right back inside and pay the bill because she had no money. He also thought it might not have been as bad if she hadn’t forbade him to tell anyone about her affair in order to protect her lover’s Coast Guard career. It certainly wouldn’t have been as bad if he had simply cut his losses right then, if they’d split and gone their separate ways.

  But he couldn’t. Lord knows he did not want to love his wife. But Lord knows he did and time and again he would plead with her to save their family. Sometimes she softened and promised never to see her lover again. And then the following morning he would come down to breakfast and she’d gaze blankly at him, as though she didn’t know him from the queen of Siam.

  He remembered in San Diego, where they transferred him a year later, how he’d lie in bed beside her and stare up at the bedroom ceiling. It was a vaulted ceiling with joists that came together at one point over their bed and he would stare at that one particular spot for hours and hours. It became his symbol of agony. The light of the streetlamps would come through the big window and illuminate the ceiling and he would look up at the way the ceiling gathered above him and the way the shadows of the leaves of the tree outside moved on the ceiling and in this see the loss of everything. He would see the loss of his family, of his children, of the complete control he’d once had over his emotions, and he would go limp and cry easily about words she’d thrown at him, like daggers.

  “Have you been in contact with him again?”