Cold Winter Rain

by Steven Gregory

  “All right,” I said. “Thanks. At least I don’t have to ask Mrs. Kramer about that.”

  Grubbs nodded. “Another reason to tell you now. Besides, reporters are calling my office so often I had to put an administrative assistant on press duty full time. A morning press conference at which I have nothing to report has become a part of my day since the day after Kris Kramer was reported missing. Her father’s death will increase the number of reporters in my briefing room exponentially. Some of these facts will be in my statement to the press pool tomorrow morning. You heard it here first.

  “See you around, Slate.”

  It was almost noon. Don Kramer’s burial service was over, the family getting into the limousines, the cars lined up in single file, exhausts making steam clouds in the cool damp air.

  I needed to return to lower Alabama, to the boat and the bar for more clothes and to take down more systems for a longer absence.

  I had time to get back to the hotel for lunch and to pick up the files Kramer gave me, then I had one more appointment on the Southside of Birmingham before I drove to the airport.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Smolian Psychiatric Clinic perched on Seventh Avenue South in the complex of buildings known locally as UAB, seventy-five city blocks on the south side of the railroad tracks that run northeast to southwest through Birmingham and bisect the city as the Thames bisects London.

  America remembers Birmingham for Bull Connor and his fire hoses, “A Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” But that was nearly fifty years ago. For two decades Birmingham’s mayor has been African-American.

  Old Birmingham called itself The Football Capital of the South. The stadium with that slogan painted on the bottom of the upper deck sits quietly rusting on the west side of I-65. In the new Birmingham, neither Auburn nor Alabama has played a football game for years.

  Birmingham reinvented itself as the medical center and engineering capital of the South. The UAB Health Services Foundation built the “third-largest ambulatory clinic in the world,” as I once heard it described at a cocktail party by the gushing wife of the financial VP of the foundation. I.M. Pei designed the building. It was called the Kirklin Clinic after the famous heart surgeon George Wallace lured there from the Mayo Clinic in the sixties.

  The state built the clinic and created the foundation so the school could continue to attract famous M.D.‘s who expect to make a million dollars a year, minimum. Alabama could never afford to allow Alabama citizens, forty per cent of whom did not graduate from high school, know that it was paying that kind of money to employees, even doctors.

  So they set the clinic up as a private foundation, and the foundation paid most of the good doctors’ salaries. Off the school’s books, off the tax rolls, perfectly legal — and out of the public eye.

  The Smolian building was not designed by I.M. Pei. Psychiatry doesn’t attract the revenue stream to justify expensive clinical offices. Smolian’s architecture was more 1950s-public-clinic than 1990s-famous-architect.

  Dr. Beverly Adams’ office was on the third floor. The geriatric elevator opened a dozen feet in front of a glass cubicle housing reception and billing.

  The only other persons in the lobby were a small family, mother, father, and pre-school son, talking quietly in a corner.

  Renee, the receptionist, greeted me with her usual smile that managed to convey warmth and professional distance simultaneously. “Good afternoon, Mr. Slate,” she said. “Please sit down. Dr. Adams will be available in just a few minutes.”

  It was four minutes by the big clock above the reception window. It had never been more than eight. Punctuality was one advantage of consulting academic physicians. Their government salaries diminished the need to overbook private patients.

  “You can go back now, Mr. Slate,” Renee said with that schizophrenic smile.

  My psychiatrist was waiting for me at the door of her office down a corridor along the outside of the building.

  Bev Adams was forty-five, tall but not angular, with blonde hair worn at chin length and gray eyes. She had graduated second in her undergraduate class at Cornell and in the top ten at Harvard medical school.

  She hadn’t told me that herself, but I’d learned all I could about her before my first appointment.

  The corridor was lined with windows; Dr. Adams’ tiny office, just large enough for her desk and its chair, a filing cabinet, and a chair for her patients, was windowless. I followed her into the office, and we took our places.

  “How are you?” she said.

  Every session began this way. Here, in this building, in this relationship, unlike almost anywhere else on earth, the expected answer to that question was not necessarily “Fine.”

  In fact but implicitly, there was no expected answer to that question, here. There was no anticipation at all. This moment between that question and my answer was the moment in every session with Bev Adams that I anticipated most and from which I derived the most benefit, if not pleasure.

  I had never told her that, and I probably never would.

  Bev waited. I breathed once. In. Out. My breath like a gate. Swinging open. Swinging shut. “I’ve been better,” I said.

  “What do you want to tell me?”

  A missing girl. Her father dead. And as always, my dreams.

  Five years and seven months had gone by since the accident.

  We’d been driving back from the beach on the first Sunday in June. Anna and David were in the Volvo just ahead of me.

  I followed, alone in the Toyota because I’d driven down earlier in the week for a conference, and Anna wanted David to ride with her. In the safer car.

  It wasn’t safe enough. The eighteen wheeler crossed the median, its driver asleep, swiped aside a Camaro and hit the Volvo head on.

  No car is safe in that kind of accident. I stopped and got out and ran and looked — once. And thus began life alone.

  After the funeral, I’d gone in to the law office every day for six months. But after I wound up Anna’s estate and settled — too cheaply — with the trucking company, I wrote a cordial letter of resignation to my senior partner at Steiner & Sayre, rented the house to a visiting professor of medicine from the University of Geneva, loaded the Toyota with clothes and books, and drove south until there was no more land.

  “They were taken away, Bev.” I liked to say her name. Not long after, long stretches of time floated away when I uttered no other woman’s name. “They aren’t coming back.”

  “Those are the facts. But how do you feel?”

  I wasn’t sure. What was the right answer? Depressed? In pain? I settled for the truth.

  “Mostly sort of numb.”

  “Walling yourself off from your feelings will just prolong the healing process.”

  “You never sugar-coat your advice.”

  “I’m not Mary Poppins. You know that.”

  “And you’re not Dear Abby, either.”

  “Our sessions are about your feelings, not about what I learned in medical school.”

  Oh, yes. My feelings. Not the facts, just the feelings, sir. Well, most of the time my feelings suck. “Living is all about suffering.”

  “But a way out of suffering exists. That’s the third of the noble truths, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you working?”

  “A little. There isn’t much to do with the bar right now. I do have some – uhh – legal work.”

  “How does that feel to you?”

  I wasn’t sure. “My client hired me to find his missing daughter. Then my client died.”

  “If you were like most of my patients, I would ask at this point if you think you’re depressed, and, perhaps, I would ask if you ever think of suicide.”

  “But you won’t ask me.”

  “Because we have established that you are not like my other patients.”

  “I don’t know your other patients. But we have determined that I do not think of suicide.”

  “Do you stil
l carry a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “For your work.”

  “For my work, on general principles.”

  When I applied for a carry permit at the Baldwin County sheriff’s office and hesitated when I reached the space on the form that asked for the reason for the application, the clerk told me to write the word “protection” in the blank. It’s a dangerous world. And a gun is a tool for coping with that world, a piece of fine machinery to be used, respected, cared for. Like a Swiss watch, a computer, an airplane.

  “You are not suicidal now?”

  “No.”

  “If I thought you were, I’d have to ask you to let me keep the gun.”

  “If I were suicidal, I’d let you keep it.”

  “Or maybe not.” A slight frown, then a nod, as though she’d resolved something and filed it. “How is your libido?”

  My libido. “Could we talk about suicide again?”

  “Why? Is your libido suicidal?”

  For whatever prehensile reason, I thought of Sally Kronenberg sitting cross-legged on her office floor. “Actually, no. I’m going to be okay, I think.”

  She smiled. “That’s the goal.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The lineman at the FBO used a diesel tow cart to move a Beechjet to clear a path out of the hangar for my Czech warbird. They’d washed the airplane, and it looked as though the tires had received a shot of air.

  Ramp workers here and everywhere else this plane visited gave it a bit more care than they gave the Piper Warriors with bad paint.

  I went inside the lobby of the FBO and checked the weather on the computer in the pilots’ briefing room. Not so bad; high clouds but no more rain predicted for twenty-four hours. The air would be smooth. It was a good day for flying, and I needed to kick the tires and light the fires.

  The little L-39 jet cruised at three hundred fifty knots, and it would do almost five hundred miles per hour at twenty thousand feet.

  It also ate enough cash in maintenance and fuel every year to rent a nice house. In the Warsaw Pact countries, they’d called it the Albatros.

  At Alabama I’d started to school on a football scholarship. Playing your high-school ball at a little north Alabama high school made standing out on film pretty easy; most of the other guys were scrappy but small, the rest fat and slow.

  But it took only my freshman year for Coach Stallings’ staff to see that with me they’d made a mistake, and by the end of the year I agreed. What I lacked in speed, size, and strength, I made up for through lack of discipline in the weight room.

  Leaving the team was a mutual decision with no hard feelings.

  By the time I was twenty, an electrical engineering major, I was paying my way to school working as a flight instructor. I’d earned my license and ratings swapping work for lessons, starting when I was fourteen, at a little country airport.

  After college graduation I took a job with a commuter airline. On my days off, I flew as standby first officer on a Canadair business jet owned by one of the largest independent paper companies in the country.

  After a year flying right seat in a Fairchild Metroliner and another two as captain, I was ready for law school.

  The Metroliner was a decent airplane but noisy. Sitting in the flight cabin just in front of the tips of twin four-bladed propellers moving at supersonic speed, the captain and first officer wore earplugs and noise-attenuating headsets. Still, you would yell to hear yourself for an hour after a long flight.

  But in law school, I discovered I still needed to fly. I joined the Air National Guard, did a couple of summers of basic, and ended up with a ride in a Phantom older than I was.

  That’s when I learned the definition of loud engines. Loud is an F-4 Phantom. From the pilot’s chair, even with a helmet and earplugs, a Phantom at takeoff power sounds like all the beasts of hell in full wail at your back.

  I spent two years flying the RF-4C Phantom on weekends and summer duty with the 117th Air National Guard Tactical Reconnaissance unit in Birmingham. Then in 1990 we got our Gulf War call-up.

  My RIO and I flew low-level photo recon missions over Iraq nearly every day for three months until someone in Washington — no, probably Langley — thought Saddam had learned his lesson.

  When I left Birmingham, I quit the Air Guard and didn’t fly for three years.

  But I kept my medical current. Late one afternoon in early September, I was sitting on a lawn chair on the beach in front of the Lost Lagoon looking idly at the last of the summer bikinis, and I looked up to watch a yellow Piper Super Cub in slow flight, trolling a banner advertising a new white tablecloth restaurant out on the old Fort Morgan Road.

  I had probably seen the same airplane a hundred times, but that day, watching the little plane crawl across the azure sky, I experienced a feeling of loss I could explain only to another pilot, and the next morning I was in the shack which served as the office of the airport FBO asking if they had a flight instructor who could check me out in a rental plane.

  Thirty minutes later I was at the controls of an aging Cessna 172 with lots of bare aluminum showing through the paint.

  As we turned west, we could see down the Fort Morgan peninsula to Mobile Bay, south to Dauphin Island, and north to the intracoastal waterway that cuts off Gulf Shores and Orange Beach from the mainland of Baldwin County.

  “Beautiful, id’n it?” the instructor shouted. I glanced at him and realized he was reacting to the huge grin on my face.

  We flew west while the instructor yelled information in my ear about avoiding the Bon Secour national wilderness area and the importance of getting updated wind information before landing because of the shifting coastal breeze. Mostly I ignored him.

  Back at the airport, I lined up on the same runway we’d taken off from, but now the wind was blowing about twelve or fifteen knots directly abeam the airplane as the Lycoming sputtered down final.

  I cranked the right wing down against the breeze and held left rudder to hold the nose straight with a touch of extra airspeed for the gusts and only ten degrees of flaps instead of the usual thirty. The instructor sat stone-faced, his hands folded in his lap.

  The plane touched down on its right main first. In a couple of hundred feet, the left main tire squeaked onto the asphalt as I continued to hold left rudder and right aileron. Finally, the nose tire kissed the pavement.

  As we taxied back to the ramp, the instructor leaned over. “I told you you have to check the wind every time out here. But I’ll say one thing. You’re a helluva pilot.”

  I began to teach a few students again and to fly couples up and down the beach once in a while for an occasional sightseeing flight.

  Then one morning after I’d checked on things at the bar and driven out to the airport to meet a student, I heard the high-pitched whine of a jet engine from a couple of miles away.

  I figured maybe a member of the Blue Angels squadron in an FA-18 from over at Pensacola was doing some solo practice, but a few seconds later there was a small jet in camouflage paint entering the pattern for runway 6.

  The airplane taxied to the ramp and shut down, and a balding guy in green coveralls took off a David Clark headset and climbed out of the cockpit.

  After a brief conversation with the pilot, I was on the phone with Major Viktor Bedrosian of Cold War Jets in Talladega, Alabama.

  After the Berlin Wall fell, after the breakup of the U.S.S.R., the former Soviet-bloc countries, particularly East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, were long on military equipment and short on cash.

  The Eastern bloc sold dozens of military surplus jet trainers, most of them practically new, along with spare parts – engines, wings, ejection seats, you name it – to nearly anyone with money in hand.

  Cold War Jets bought out the entire East German Air Force supply of new L-39 parts, including forty-something engines. The jets were shipped in crates to Talladega and reassembled there with no changes aside from installation of U.S.-compatible radio and navigat
ion equipment.

  Major Bedrosian had retired from the former Soviet Air Force and now served as flight instructor.

  I drove up to Talladega on a warm spring day. L-39s were not the only Soviet-bloc jet aircraft available there, and Major Bedrosian and I walked up and down the flight line looking at Iskras and L-29 Delfins as well as three assembled and ready-for-sale L-39s. The Iskras and L-29s were temptingly inexpensive, the price of a used single-engine Cessna. Major Bedrosian patiently explained the virtues and vices of all three models. Then he said, “You know what we used to say about the L-29? The only reason it ever lifts off is that the earth is curved.” A three thousand foot takeoff roll is a seriously long takeoff roll for a jet, underpowered or not.

  Like most Soviet-bloc-designed aircraft, the trainers were built to be dependable and rugged. The Pentagon must have war-gamed for every possible sort of conflict with the Soviets in Europe, and surely they were aware that Soviet aircraft were like the watches in the old Timex commercials — they could take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’. So I wonder whether, if the conflict had stretched into weeks or months, the shorter supply lines and ruggedness of the Soviet weapons systems might not have made a decisive difference. Their military industries designed weapons to be used and reused in the field. The Mig-29, the Soviet bloc’s air superiority fighter, had landing gear so rugged the airplane could operate from unimproved or bomb-damaged landing strips, and the engine inlets included grates that protected the engines from debris. In the U.S., more complex and fragile systems meant higher profits for the weapons industry, so — well. The world will never know.

  Two of the L-39 aircraft for sale sported glowing new Imron paint and state-of-the-art glass cockpit avionics. A third aircraft, with low total time and a low-time engine, wore its original, slightly-faded Czech camouflage livery. The white paint on the landing gear was peeling in a couple of spots, and the avionics, though Westernized, displayed traditional steam gauges. This aircraft reminded me of the sometimes-ratty F-4s I had flown. The asking price was also a hundred thousand dollars lower than the prices of the shiny ones. I took a demonstration flight and signed the papers to acquire the airplane that afternoon.