“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 hear 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.
“Now,” Mr. Hall said. “You were telling me that you like to watch airplanes, and they look like they shouldn’t be able to fly.”
“Yeah. And that was even before I knew what I know now.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him shift, turning his shoulders toward me. I faced him too, for the first time since we’d been packed close in the cockpit. He tilted his head to one side, considering me, his weathered face impossible to read. But his voice was kind as he said, “There are lots of mistakes you can make. Pilots make them, and pilots die. Obstacles will kill you. The weather will kill you. But, as I’m about to show you, the airplane is your friend. The plane wants to fly.”
“If it has gas,” I said dryly.
“The gas is going to get the engine up to fifty-five knots—sixty-three miles an hour—but that’s all we need. Once we have air moving that fast over and under the wing, the shape of the wing creates lift. The airplane is an amazing invention. Watch.”
He faced forward. The engine moaned. We were racing down the runway before I realized it was too late to bail out.
“I’m not doing anything,” he said. Sure enough, his hands were off the steering wheel, fingers splayed, as we drew even with the Simon Air Agriculture hangar and rose into the air. “Lift. It’s all in the way this fantastic machine is constructed.”
We shot over the trees at the end of the runway and kept rising. I hadn’t realized how vast the forest was, unbroken in that direction as far as I could see. The plane slowly banked, and we circled back over the airport. I’d never realized how long my walk was from the airport office to the trailer park. I had thought it was fairly short because there were no trees or buildings marking my place beyond the last hangar, but the flat grass was deceiving. It was a long way.
Then we buzzed the trailer park. The directions of the roads and the narrow spaces between the trailers seemed different as I looked down on them. But this eagle’s-eye view was the true view, I realized. The view I’d had my whole life, at trailer level—that was the disorienting perspective. I was able to pick out my own trailer because of the position of the long metal roof in relation to the dark palm tree next to my bedroom window, which was taller than the trees around it. And the next second, when the plane had gained more altitude, I could see the ocean.
“Oh my God!” My own voice was loud enough in my headphones to hurt my ears. I had forgotten about the Chuck Yeager person who always spoke calmly. I thought Mr. Hall might reprimand me, but he just chuckled as I stared out the window.
Heaven Beach was, after all, a beach town. Other residents went to the ocean every day. I had known the ocean was there. I just didn’t get to see it very often. It might as well have been a million miles away from the trailer instead of two. And now, there it was, rising to meet the sky, dark blue crossed with white waves. I could see whole waves, crawling in slow motion toward the shore.
“Now you take the yoke,” Mr. Hall said.
Yoke. Not steering wheel. Lifting my head from the window, I put my hands on the grips and squeezed. My fingers trembled.
“You won’t kill us,” he assured me. “My controls double yours, remember? If you make a mistake, I’ll pull us out. Just do what I say, and you’ll be flying. First, for safety, we have to make sure only one of us is trying to fly this thing at a time. I’m transferring control to you. I say, ‘Your airplane.’ You say, ‘My airplane.’”
“My airplane,” I whispered.
“Press your right foot pedal—gently first, to get the feel of it. That will turn us.”
I did what he said. The plane veered away from the beach. I was flying. I was seeing everything for the first time and maybe the last. All of it at once was overwhelming. I stole a look back over my shoulder at the ocean, fascinated by this beautiful piece of the Earth that everyone else enjoyed and that was so close to where I lived, yet completely out of my reach.
We flew—I flew—over the high school, and the discount store out on the highway. They looked exactly alike, just a flat black roof, a huge rectangle with smaller squares hanging off here and there for the gym or the garden department, and silver cubes of industrial air conditioners on top. I wouldn’t have been able to tell the school and the store apart if it hadn’t been for their huge signs out front, which from the air were tiny.
Since Mr. Hall had told me to head back inland, I’d been afraid the flight was about to end. But now he instructed me to point the plane back east toward the ocean, then north. We flew up the coast to little beach towns where I’d never been. Civilization petered out and nature preserves took over, with wide rivers snaking through swamps to the sea. We flew all the way to Cape Fear in North Carolina—my first time out of South Carolina, ever. The buildings of downtown Wilmington were visible on the horizon when Mr. Hall said, “We could land and see my boys, but I don’t think they’d appreciate that. We’d better go back. I can fly in the dark, but you can’t. That’s a lesson way down the road.”