“I hate those things,” she said. “But a boy like that, maybe he’ll stay in school and amount to something.”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling sick.
“Sheryl,” Billy called from inside the car. “This year.”
“See you soon, hon,” my mom said. She air-kissed her fingertips and blew the kiss to me, then shuffled around the car, kicking up dust, and got in on the other side.
Waving to the car as it disappeared into the forest, I realized I was still holding a dead cigarette. Normally I would have taken it inside, made sure the fire was out, and deposited the butt in the trash. Today I tossed it onto the dirt along with countless butts from my mom and everyone who’d ever lived here, then climbed the cement blocks and went inside the trailer.
The wall where the TV had been looked bare, even though it wasn’t. Before the TV had appeared, my mom had hung my first-, second-, and third-grade school photos there in frames. Fourth grade was the year she started saying the school was gouging her and the pictures were highway robbery. My newly exposed smiling faces watched me as I passed through the combined den and kitchen. I escaped down the hall and into my bedroom, where I opened my dresser drawer and pulled out the trailer lease agreement. My mom threw stuff like this away. I tried to snag it from her first. Sometimes having the paperwork helped when a landlord wanted to kick us out. This time it would help me forge her signature.
I pulled the permission form out of my pocket and unfolded it. For something to press down on, I drew the magazine off the top of my dresser: last month’s issue of Plane & Pilot, which I’d borrowed from the airport office. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. I liked to read the articles in bed at night. They kept me company. I’d always intended to take the magazine back. Suddenly I felt like a thief.
And I wasn’t done. Watching my mom’s signature on the lease, I copied the S in Sheryl onto the permission form. It wasn’t a perfect imitation. My hand shook. But Mr. Hall wouldn’t have her signature on file for comparison like the school did. I copied heryl. I was going to get in trouble for this. It would come back to haunt me, I knew. I copied the J in Jones. The alternative was to stay on the ground and never go up in an airplane. I copied ones. Go ahead and fork over my last dollar to my mom so she and Billy or whoever her boyfriend was that month could fund a party with my money, he could get a new fishing rod and a shotgun, they could pawn it all for beer money or for crack if he was one of those boyfriends, then try to win the money back at the Indian casino in North Carolina. I underlined Sheryl Jones just as she did, like an eighth grader still in love with her own signature.
I pocketed the form. With the magazine under my elbow, I locked the trailer door behind me and walked to work. I skirted just beyond reach of my neighbor’s chained pit bull, prompting the dog to bark and lunge maniacally at me. As I popped out of the forest, into the long, wide clearing, the barking was drowned out by an airplane engine. The World War II Stearman biplane that Mark’s uncle once used for crop dusting was coming in for a landing.
Mark had told me that his uncle, Mr. Simon, had bought three Air Tractors just recently—the ugliest planes I’d seen at the airport yet, with ridiculously long noses and harsh angles, painted garish yellow. Now that Mr. Simon used those monstrosities for crop dusting, he’d converted the biplane back into a passenger plane so one of the crop-duster pilots could give tourists a joyride.
The biplane was beautiful, the huge motor in the nose balanced by the long wings above and below. It looked like it had soared out of a time machine. I watched it sail downward and held my breath for the crash—but planes always seemed to me like they should crash. None of them had actually crashed while I’d been a witness. The biplane skimmed to a smooth landing and slowed. I tripped and realized I’d stumbled out of the long grass and onto the asphalt tarmac.
Way in the distance, the men of the airport lounged in rocking chairs on the office porch. Mr. Hall. The Admiral, an actual retired admiral who looked anything but in his cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirt. Mr. Simon, looking exactly like the owner of a crop-dusting business in overalls and a baseball hat from an airplane manufacturer. Another retired Navy guy—Heaven Beach was a popular place for them to settle. The jet pilot for one of the local corporations. As I drew close, several of them turned to watch me.
As I reached hearing distance, all of them watched me, and they fell completely silent. I was sure they were staring at the copy of Plane & Pilot under my arm. I hoped my elbow covered the label with the airport address. I stepped under the awning.
Mr. Hall said, “Hello, Leah.”
“Hello, Leah. Good afternoon, Leah,” came a chorus of voices.
I grinned blankly, staring past them at the runway, as I backed through the glass door.
The town sent one of their maintenance guys, Leon, to take care of the airport when I wasn’t around. He put chocks under airplane wheels just fine, but he didn’t have the greatest telephone skills, and I’d made him promise never to touch the files because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he could read. I took the keys and the airport cell phone from him. After he left, I listened to the messages he’d let go to voice mail. As I called a man back about renting a hangar and went over the lease agreement with him, my skin caught on fire. If I got caught forging my mother’s name on Mr. Hall’s permission form, I couldn’t very well claim I was only fourteen years old and didn’t understand what was legal in paperwork and what wasn’t.
I tried to forget it and play friendly airport hostess as I greeted a millionaire jetting in for a weekend vacation with his family. I called the town’s only limo service to come pick them up. I made fresh coffee in the break room. I wiped the whole office down, even the empty rooms. After the old men left the porch and I was pretty sure nobody was watching, I slipped the copy of Plane & Pilot back onto a table in the lobby.
For the last hour and a half the office was open, I sat in a rocking chair on the porch in the hot afternoon, watching the occasional air traffic. The office was set slightly ahead of the straight line of hangars. Beyond the brick corners of the building, I couldn’t always see who was prepping a plane to go up. I loved when an engine suddenly roared to life, startling me, and the plane taxied to the end of the runway. It revved its motor, then sped toward me and lifted with no additional noise at all, like a car driving up a hill, except there was nothing underneath but the runway and then grass and then trees and then—I couldn’t see where it went.
At two minutes until closing time, I lit a cigarette. Mr. Hall’s truck still sat outside his hangar, but he might close up and go home at any moment. Then I would lose another night of sleep and go through this whole ordeal again tomorrow. I had told him I would be back today with my signed permission form, but maybe he didn’t believe I would get my mother to sign it. And he would be correct. Please don’t leave.
Exactly at closing time, I stubbed out my cigarette in the urn of sand outside the office door and walked over to the Hall Aviation hangar. I’d learned the hard way yesterday not to bang on the outer door, because this just annoyed Mr. Hall. The screech as the door opened was warning enough for him. I walked on in. Beyond the shadows of the airplanes, he looked up from his desk inside his bright glassed-in office in the corner and swept his hand toward the empty seat.
I dug in my pocket for the money and the permission form, unfolding them and handing them over as I sat down.
He set them aside without looking at them. “You’re back.”
“Yes, sir.” Why had he placed my money and the form to one side? Did he already know the signature was a fake? I forced myself to calm down and concentrate on his face, as if I actually wanted to have a conversation with him.
He was in his late forties, like the parents of fourteen-year-olds ought to be. I could tell his hair used to be blond and curly like Grayson’s, but it was turning white, and he’d cut it so short that it looked almost straight. I could also tell he used to be hot like Grayson. The traces of a strong chin and hi
gh cheekbones were still there in his weathered face, but he seemed to have gained a lot of weight quickly. His face was misshapen with it now, and the roll didn’t sit right around his gut.
“I figured you’d be back,” he said. “How are you liking your job over at the office?”
I loved my job. It was the best thing I’d ever done. But I knew that would sound weird and overeager. Basically all I did was sit on my ass over there. I said, “It’s going okay.”
“The airport old-timers have a joke about you.”
He meant the men who talked on the porch. I stiffened, bracing to get made fun of even here at the airport, where I had felt relatively safe.
He rumbled on, “We’re remembering something that happened fifteen years ago, and somebody will say, ‘Ask Leah.’ Get it? You do such a good job and know everything that’s going on. We’ve never had anybody like you running the office before.”
“Oh, ha-ha,” I said. The joke wasn’t funny, but he was trying to pay me a compliment. Which was ridiculous, because anybody could have done the job I was doing if they’d cared. Though, come to think of it, maybe caring was the secret ingredient.
“Why do you want to be a pilot?”
I opened my mouth. This was a test, and I shouldn’t hesitate with an answer. The truth was, I didn’t understand the question. I was here for one lesson. One. Maybe in my fantasies over the last month, I had pictured myself with a job as an airline pilot, in a dark blue uniform, with my hair tucked and sprayed into submission under a neat brimmed hat, standing in the doorway to the cockpit and greeting passengers as they boarded, all of them looking me up and down and mistrusting a small woman, but deciding to give me their confidence because of the uniform and the vast airplane that was all mine to fly. At least, that’s how I pictured an airline flight starting. I’d never flown before. I’d only seen it on TV. Maybe my fantasy was stupid.
On a sigh I said, “I like airplanes.”
He raised his white-blond brows at me, not helping me at all, waiting for me to continue.
I swallowed. “I’ve always lived near the airport.”
“Really?” he asked, furrowing his brow now, confused.
“Not this airport,” I clarified. “Other airports. I move a lot. The last one was at the Air Force base, and I got closer than I’d ever been to an airplane. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
This he understood, nodding slowly.
“When I moved here, I got the job at the office. Now I’m not just hearing the airplanes and seeing a flash of them above me through the trees. I watch them take off and land. They look like they shouldn’t be able to fly.”
He laughed. Though he cut himself off quickly, pressing his lips together, I could tell he was trying not to grin. “Let me tell you something, Leah. Years ago, this place was crawling with kids wanting to be pilots. There were four folks doing your job, two in the office and two on the tarmac. That rabbit warren of empty rooms you’re in charge of was full of business. But since 9/11 and the bad publicity about airports and a couple of recessions, not as many people want to take flying lessons.”
I nodded. The office with all its nice furniture and no people did smack of more exciting days gone by.
“We old guys, not just here but across the country, talk about getting young people excited about flying again. What we say is this: Most people hear an airplane in the sky and think, ‘There’s an airplane,’ and go back to what they were doing. A few folks look around for the airplane, try to figure out what kind of plane it is, and watch it from the time they spot it to the time it disappears on the horizon, maybe after that. Those kids are the ones who will be pilots.” He pointed at me. “I knew that about you. I’ve just been waiting for you to show up.” He reached for my form.
He was telling me I was some kind of Chosen One. Yet he expressed this opinion with a self-satisfied, know-it-all air that ticked me off. I suddenly understood why, when he’d yelled at Grayson for handling the banners wrong last month, Grayson had yelled back.
Mr. Hall eyed me over the top of the paper, then looked at the form again. I forgot my annoyance. Panic took over as I realized he was examining the forgery.
He set the form almost all the way down on the desk. It drifted the rest of the distance to lie on piles of other paperwork. He said, “I’ll give you a lesson on one condition.”
That I go back and get the form signed by my mother for real this time? This would be better than having me arrested for forgery, yet neither was the answer I wanted. My stomach turned over as I waited for him to finish.
“Quit smoking,” he said.
I sucked in a breath, surprised that he would care whether I smoked, and that he would even know—though I probably reeked of it. My mother certainly did after she’d lit up.
Then I was relieved that he hadn’t mentioned my mother’s signature. Then annoyed that he was getting in my business. “I am paying you,” I pointed out. “You can’t make me quit smoking.”
“You can’t make me take you flying.” He grinned at me, rubbing it in.
Then he leaned forward like he was letting me in on a secret. “I’m doing you a favor. It took me thirty years to quit. Okay?”
I nodded. I didn’t have any choice.
“Then let’s go.” He jumped up from his chair like a kid. Maybe he really had been waiting for me to come in.
I followed him as he wound between and under the planes packed into the hangar like puzzle pieces. Finally we reached a white plane, larger than the others, a four-seater. We circled it as he pointed out things that could go wrong with it and that I should be looking for before I flew. He sent me up on a stepladder to stick a glass rod into the wing to check the fuel level.
“This seems awfully low-tech,” I said, resistant to these chores if they were busywork, like everything in my definitely-not-college-track classes at school. “Don’t airplanes have a gas gauge in the cockpit?”
“They do,” he said. “I’ve just showed you a bunch of things on this aircraft that can break. Don’t you think a gas gauge can break?”
“I guess.”
“‘I guess’ will get you killed.”
I recognized the tone he used to reprimand Grayson. He didn’t have to use it on me. I turned around on the stepladder and looked down at him.
Seeming to realize he’d mistakenly snapped at me like someone he loved, he held up both hands, explaining himself. “If the gas gauge were broken on your car and you unexpectedly ran out of fuel, what would you do?”
“Pull over.” I didn’t know, really. I could get my learner’s permit when I turned fifteen in a month and a half. But with my mom gone all the time, I doubted I would ever learn to drive.
“That’s right,” he said. “And if the gas gauge were broken on your plane and you unexpectedly ran out of fuel, what would you do?”
“Crash?”
I had meant this as a sarcastic joke, but when he folded his arms, I realized that’s exactly what would happen.
From then on, I did what he told me without complaining and tried to remember everything he said. There was too much information, especially now that I realized my life would be riding on it, lots of other lives too, if I actually became a pilot. My little fantasy of nodding to passengers as they boarded my airliner seemed naive now. I would hide my misgivings from Mr. Hall, get through this lesson, and never come back.
He showed me how to pull the enormous front doors of the hangar open to the afternoon breeze. Then he told me to help him push the plane out of the hangar. I thought he was kidding this time—the two of us pushing this heavy airplane around. But come to think of it, I’d seen men pushing small planes on the tarmac. They must be lighter than they looked. I shoved from behind, he tugged on a contraption made to steer the front wheel, and the plane was rolling by itself onto the tarmac. We climbed into the plane, which wasn’t as luxurious as I’d pictured, with thin upholstery like a cheap car. We plugged bulky headsets into the dashboard so we could hea
r each other when we spoke into the microphones.
“Clear!” he yelled, his voice like gravel. He pressed a button. The propeller spun so fast it disappeared. The powerful vibration shook my seat. He drove the plane down the tarmac, past the hangars, and turned around. The trailer park was directly behind us. The other end of the runway was far off. My heart raced.
“Now we check the controls,” he said, his voice tinny in my headphones. “Don’t just look at these dials. Your brain can stay asleep that way. Touch each one and make sure it’s working.” He made me touch all the black circles in the high dashboard that curved in front of us. Then he showed me how to use the steering wheel—when he moved his, mine moved the same way—and the foot pedals. We looked out the windows to make sure the parts of the airplane were doing what the controls told them. I felt sick, and then my headphones filled with static. Something had gone horribly wrong.
Mr. Hall reached over. With calloused fingers, he bent my microphone a few millimeters farther from my lips. The static had been my own hysterical breathing.
“Ever read The Right Stuff?” he asked. “Heard of Chuck Yeager?”
“No.” I tried to utter the syllable casually, but I sounded like I was strangling.
“Chuck Yeager was an Air Force test pilot. First man to break the sound barrier, back in 1947. Other pilots were amazed at what he was willing to risk his life to do, and even more amazed at how calm he stayed while he did it—at least, that’s how he sounded. Airline pilots all use the Yeager voice when they come over the intercom and speak to the passengers, right?”
“Right.” I had no clue.
“And we use the Yeager voice on the radio too, no matter what kind of trouble we get into. Cracking up where the public can hear would be bad for business. Use the Yeager voice and say this.”
I repeated his words, information about the airport and our plane so other pilots in the area wouldn’t crash into us when we took off. In my own headphones I sounded like I was six years old. Any second, pilots and mechanics would come streaming out of the hangars like ants to pull the rogue toddler out of the cockpit.