The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [90]
“Everybody’s going private. It’s the way to go. You should get out of the Navy.”
“I love the Navy.”
Brad shrugged. “Hey, you ask me, serving your country’s just bullshit.” He slipped the white Navy cap from her head and looked at the braided brim sadly. “I tell you, Annie. I was so over that ‘yes sir, no sir’ rulebook, do unto others. I’m about me now. Like you always said, don’t count on anybody, don’t hope, be first, keep it going, see the goal, get there. You taught me all that.”
Annie felt disconcerted to hear her views so brutally summarized. “You make me sound like Ayn Rand for Dummies.”
“I’m not kidding. You nailed it. And Hopper Jets’s doing great now. The tax breaks we’re getting? It’s like Fort Knox is your personal shopper. Still, I’m in the Reserves; they could haul me back. Ali Al Saleem, when I got assigned, you remember? Naval Forward Engagement? Man, I did not want to go.”
She gave his hand a rub. “Everybody’s scared.”
“Oh, I wasn’t scared. I was just having too much fun at the base.” He grinned. “I’m strictly off the pills. Long time now.”
“Good…” They’d always pretended the problem was not a problem.
They talked for a while about jet planes, about the successor to the Boeing FA-18E Super Hornet; about the old superstar, the Blackbird SR-71. Talking the language of planes had been the closest they’d gotten to intimacy. She thought about telling him she had just been chosen to do a test flight of a new F-35 Lightning II.
The waitress was pretty in a hefty, gold-electrolyted way. Brad, as was his habit, began to flirt with her, telling her about his having once met Laura Bush, although he kept referring to the First Lady as Laurel Bush. Annie listened, puzzled that she’d never before registered how loudly Brad spoke, taking up public space as if unaware that anyone else was in it.
Hearing that he was a pilot, the waitress pointed at Lindbergh’s Monocoupe D-145’s bright orange under-wings, suspended in air. Last night, she said, the cleaning crew had noticed a man in a security uniform, standing atop a hydraulic lift that was raised to the height of that airplane. This man had crawled into its cockpit.
Annie interrupted. “Which man? Who was he?”
“Well, that’s the whole point,” said the waitress. The cleaning women had assumed the man was airport personnel when he’d ascended on the lift and climbed into the plane. They’d watched him, figuring he was going to dust off the plane or something and then suddenly he’d crawled back out of the plane onto the lift and had started to do a kind of Latin dance to the Muzak, like a mambo or a salsa, right there on the little platform of the hydraulic lift. When he’d lowered himself to the floor, one of the cleaning women had told him that he was a great dancer. He’d put his arm around her and led her around the floor in big waltzing circles. Then he’d kissed all three cleaning women. He’d run away when one pointed out that he wore a baggage crew jumpsuit, which appeared to have nothing to do with maintenance of the Monocoupe. “Wasn’t that weird?” the waitress asked Brad and Annie.
“Very,” Annie agreed. She did not believe in that much coincidence. While she wasn’t sure why her father had been dancing around in air, she knew for certain that he’d been the man doing so. She pressed for further details but the waitress could give her none.
As they waited for the check, Brad pointed out an ad for Hopper Jets on the wall. “Got our hub in Atlanta, plus new offices in Miami, Houston, and Nashville. Fleet of three-fifty. Leather, marble, whole top of the line, A.”
“Wonderful.”
“Learjet 45s, these new Cessna Citation Mustangs.” He leaned toward her. “Quit the Navy. I’d hire you in a nanosecond.” He grinned with his old seductiveness. “You could jet a lot of celebrities around. We’ve flown stars you couldn’t even imagine.”
“Courtney Love.”
“Who? What’s so funny?”
Annie shook her head. “You had your picture taken with Courtney Love, but it turned out to be a male impersonator.”
Brad stared at her. “I don’t remember that.”
“Sam’s got the picture of you and Courtney