Final Winter

And with the sound and the lights and the force and everything else, there was a thump and trouble, my God, the trouble in River City for — as Carrie later found out — that damn tailhook had snapped clean off so instead of coming to a nice and abrupt halt, the Viking bolted on the deck and started tilting off the port side, and slamming the throttles to full power didn’t do a damn thing, as the Viking slewed off and both her gloved hands reached down and she tugged the lower ejection handles, and maybe she yelled, ‘Eject, eject, eject’ and maybe she didn’t — depended on what day the remembering was going on — and she and her co-pilot, Lieutenant Tom McGrew of Seattle, Washington, blew out of the doomed aircraft. Carrie had been plucked out of the water, legs and arms bruised, coughing up sea water, to find out that her multimillion dollar aircraft was now several thousand feet below them in the water, and that her copilot had actually drifted under the damn bow of the Enterprise, steaming ahead, where he was either drowned, crushed, or shredded into pieces by one of the four twirling propellers.

Well.

There were investigations and a hearing and eventually Carrie was returned to flight status, but her little steps up on the way to the top of the female flying pyramid were faltering. She would shake and tremble during each landing. More and more times, she would miss the very last arresting wire and would have to bolt from the carrier deck and come around for another approach. Soon enough, she was under the spotlight as a possible candidate for grounding and while this was going on her well-earned and hard-earned call sign had mutated, thanks to the rough humor of carrier pilots, from the proud ‘Smash’ to the shameful ‘Splash’. A pilot who couldn’t make it, a pilot who didn’t have what it took to take a hit and keep on flying. A pilot — God forgive them for using such a cliché — who didn’t have what that writer had called the Right Stuff. Though she was never grounded, her flying reputation was permanently blackened.

Soon afterwards, Carrie left the Navy. And trying to get a regular airline job, flying passengers… well, the airline industry was still grinding along in its recession — isolated from the rest of the goddamn US economy, it seemed — but she was finally able to get a job for the General, flying for AirBox, for the General had a soft spot for all ex-military pilots, male or female, perfect records or not. She was lucky, she knew, even though she never flew into any exotic locales, and she grew intimately aware of which motels were safe enough around some of the places she flew into — AirBox pilots never could afford to stay at a regular chain motel — and the hours sucked. Especially around Christmas, where a young girl always wanted to know why mommy couldn’t attend those special parties or recitals…

Carrie walked to the rear of the house, down a narrow hallway. Past the first door, and through that door she could hear the snoring of her cousin Marilyn and the soft droning of a television set. Marilyn had this awful habit of falling asleep while leaving the television on all night, and since it didn’t keep Susan awake Carrie put up with the waste of having the damn thing suck electricity all night.

Now to the second door. She opened it gently and then stepped in, taking a breath, enjoying the scent of her little girl and her little-girl things. There. A little routine she did, whenever coming back from a flight, was to step into this little cocoon, this little-girl universe, and just let the stress and tension ease on right out of her. She walked to the bed where Susan slept, and knelt down, barely seeing her light blonde hair spread over the pillow. The bedroom was neat and orderly, nothing like her own room down the hallway, and nothing like how Carrie had treated her own things when she’d been a child. That little piece of Susan’s genetic makeup must have come from her father, one Robert Francis O’Connor, another pilot from UPS and with whom she had had a brief and satisfactory affair six years ago, an affair that had produced some wonderful pleasures, some good times, a quick and harsh break-up, and this little bundle of joy beside her.

Carrie took another breath of the room, leaned over and kissed the top of her girl’s head. In this little room, at least, Carrie was known as mom or mommy, but never, ever, was she called Splash.

~ * ~