The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [61]
She pulled away. “I want a chance to do something special and the Navy’s my chance. Sam! Tell him it’s my life.”
Clark folded his napkin. “I know it’s your life. That’s my point.” He left the kitchen.
Sam called an old friend, a state senator, about Annie’s applying to Annapolis. The senator arranged a nominating letter. Jack Peregrine’s daughter became the flyer that she had always assumed her father had never become himself, just as she’d assumed he’d never swum around Manhattan, or won a Silver Star, or beaten Minnesota Fats at nine-ball, or almost sold her to gangsters for $25,000 dollars, or studied with Einstein—unless he’d misheard Einstein’s theory of relativity and thought E=mc2 meant that nothing could ever be true.
***
At Destin Airworks on the outskirts of Emerald, Sam, Clark, and D. K. huddled under the overhang. The wind suddenly swung back like a boomerang, bringing rain again, blowing the black eagle banner sideways above the hangar. Annie untied the lines from the wings of the Piper Warrior. The plane was old but—as D. K. said—“If you keep your parts oiled, old can be better than new.”
D. K. was much grayer than when he’d first begun to teach his prize pupil; his tight cornrow braids, even his once sable-brown skin, had grayed. And his torso had so fattened from decades of being confined to his wheelchair that he wore nothing but black pajamas all year like, he said, “the fuckin’ Viet Cong.”
Now that Clark and Sam had seen the latest air traffic weather readout, they were urgently trying to stop Annie from leaving for St. Louis until morning.
“I continue to blame the two of you for this whole thing,” Clark told Sam and D. K. “If it wasn’t for you two, she wouldn’t know how to fly a plane.”
Sam said, “Oh shut up, Clark. If it wasn’t for the two of us, you’d have her still riding a tricycle.”
“That’s a real slow way to St. Louis,” laughed D. K.
Annie called from under the plane. “Just keep talking among yourselves if it makes you feel any better.”
“Fine,” sighed Sam. “If you’re flying…fly.”
Chapter 18
Flight
Lifting himself in his wheelchair to ease his back, the crippled vet said maybe it was just as well that his legs were numb because everything else had started to hurt. “Getting old sure isn’t for sissies.”
Staring glumly at the weather radar on D. K.’s small screen, Clark mumbled, “Isn’t getting old what we want Annie to do?”
D. K. admitted that Annie’s insistence on taking her small plane up in this rain, when no commercial planes were flying, was “Mustang but shaky.”
“‘Mustang’ meaning foolish bravado?” asked Clark.
D. K. stroked his grizzled cornrows. “There’s a lot of bravado rusted in gook at the bottom of the China Sea. Bad day, you get hosed, you deep-six fifty million bucks worth of A-6E without a cloud in the sky, so what the fuck, who knows?”
Clark looked dubiously at the black whirling clouds. “I hope you do. Exactly how dangerous is it?”
“Don’t ask me, Clark. Dina fell down four little steps and she was dead the next morning. I knew this old guy, flew in the 303rd, Hell’s Angels, out of England, 364 combat missions by 1945. Not a scratch on him.” D. K. shrugged, shoving his wheelchair over to the Piper Warrior and calling under the wing. “You done under there? You check it all again?”
“Done.” Annie crawled out from where swirling script still faintly spelled King of the Sky. She wiped her hands on an old towel and handed the vet her checklist. Then she took her uncle aside. “Clark, you want to know something, don’t ask D. K., ask me.”
“You’ll just say you can do it.”
“’Cause that’s the answer. The answer is, I landed a fifty-two-thousand pound Super Hornet fighter jet in force-three winds on the deck of the USS Eisenhower when it was rolling in twenty-foot swells. That’s the answer.”
“Annie’s got the stuff,” D. K. called over agreeably.
“Excuse me.” Clark pointed at the wheelchair. “You had the stuff, according to you, D. K.”
D. K. winked at his star pupil. “In St. Louis, whatcha wanna bet, they won’t be firing rockets