The Girl in the Blue Beret - By Bobbie Ann Mason Page 0,5

routine, fairly smooth, until they hit a light chop over Newfoundland and Marshall had to speak to the passengers about seat belts. He didn’t get chatty, the way some pilots did. Just fly the goddamn plane, he told himself.

As they neared New York, the purser got on the intercom to tell everyone that this was the final flight of their captain’s career.

“Land, ho,” Erik said now. “I guess you won’t miss flying in weather.”

“I’ll take weather,” he said. “Gladly.”

He had a bad horizon going in, with a carpet of popcorn clouds, but they cleared as the plank shape of Long Island came into view. Now began the most challenging part of any flight—the landing. Marshall leaned forward. They were easing down to lower altitude, and the swamplands of JFK were becoming distinct. Marshall had always enjoyed the low-altitude stages of flight, when details of the landscape became plain. Today the egrets wading in the swamp looked like flags of surrender.

He made the turn toward Long Beach, over the inlets and swamp to the beckoning runway.

The landing was buffeted a little by crosswinds. He turned into the wind, sidling like a crab as he maneuvered against it. They were over the threshold. He pulled the yoke slightly, flaring. They were centered above the runway.

“Forty, thirty, twenty,” Erik called out.

Marshall pressed the rudder pedal. The nose swung around just as the main gear kissed the concrete. Perfectly aligned, the big ship settled to earth. Kicking the crab out, it was called.

“Nice,” said Erik.

“See. It’s still possible to actually fly a plane once in a while.”

Marshall heard the intercom click on and then some kind of staticky noise. He began to grin, realizing he was hearing applause from the passengers. He was being sent out on a high note, and he found it gratifying.

4.

MARSHALL HAD WANTED TO SNEAK OUT OF THE AIRPORT, but the crew waylaid him with a brief farewell ceremony of plaudits and pranks. The purser gave him a teddy bear dressed in a pioneer flight suit, complete with goggles and a little leather helmet.

“Sure you got all your paperwork done, Marshall?” a junior pilot asked, kidding.

“I’ll have nightmares about that,” Marshall said.

“That’s the thing. More time on paperwork than jiggling the yoke.”

“Aviation has gotten so bureaucratic that even us superheroes have trouble,” Marshall said. He had perfected an avuncular chuckle as a filler for idle conversation.

It was always strange to enter a new decade, he thought as he closed his logbook. It was as if you were allowed for a moment into the workings of time before easing back into the usual steady pace of life. The disbelief that greeted a new decade was a defense against disappearance. Perhaps after he had passed the hurdle of the new decade, the dread would even out and he would simply continue his life. He had imagined retirement as a looming wall, with a lawn chair parked in front, but now he did a little skip at the end of the escalator, a spontaneous grace note of anticipation. Screw the airline.

For the first time in years, he wasn’t required to drop off his passport at the scheduling office.

He found his Honda Civic, its silvery gray like an emblem of age, and drove home as if on autopilot. He always found that the wheel-clutching demands of driving a mere automobile were minor trifles. On the four-lanes he could zip around lumbering trucks and keep the accelerator even, but on streets, with their stop signs and intermittent shopping strips, he grew inattentive.

“I hope you don’t fly that plane the way you’re driving this car,” Loretta had said once. Most of the time she pretended his driving was like Apollo at the reins of his chariot.

As he passed the garbage mountain near Rahway, glittering with green glass, he remembered Loretta saying it sparkled like the aquamarine of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s garbage, he pointed out. His career had liberated him from the kind of work done by most men. He couldn’t imagine himself driving a bulldozer, sculpting refuse. He ascended, bursting through the cloud layers, rising, rising, scooting through the atmosphere, leveling off at thirty-six thousand feet. The jets, the bumping through clouds, the speed—it was like sex, with much more at stake. Sometimes he imagined he could just keep rising until he reached the moon. He thought now about the time, just before Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong was practicing on the flying-bedstead lunar trainer, a framework contraption that hovered. The thing went kerflooie, spun