“That’s right, Leah.” Mr. Hall nodded. “That’s good. You have to be better than me.”
You have to be better than me was one of his favorite lines and the most often repeated by his sons when they imitated him behind his back. I hoped Grayson really was better than his dad, and better than me too. I doubted I could have landed in that wind.
Static sounded over the loudspeaker, then Grayson’s dead calm voice, unflappable as Chuck Yeager, announcing his intention to drop his banner.
Mr. Hall must be so proud of Grayson right now, but he didn’t show it. He just crossed his arms and scanned the sky.
“There he is.” Alec pointed. Now we could see the plane, a tiny dot above the trees, and hear it, a low buzz underneath the wind.
Mr. Hall’s handheld radio crackled down by his side. Then came Grayson’s smooth voice again. “Is the crosswind still bad?” Even though this wasn’t the airport’s frequency but the one Hall Aviation used to communicate with its pilots, it was still public, and Grayson still had to stay calm. In his natural state, he was nothing like Alec and Jake, not calm at all. I imagined every curse word that filled the cockpit when he turned the radio off.
Either that, or he enjoyed the danger, the rush. Grayson was like that.
Mr. Hall glanced at the wind sock, then brought the radio to his mouth. “Affirmative, it’s still bad.”
Long minutes passed while we watched the dot make its way down the length of the runway, the banner now visible as a streak behind the dot. He reached the base of the runway and announced himself smoothly over the loudspeaker, then turned to make his final approach and announced himself again, exactly as Mr. Hall had taught us. The plane descended, roaring closer.
After three years of watching countless banner pickups and drops from the airport office, I still found the sight shocking: how tiny the plane was, how long the banner, how tall and vivid the red letters. The banner he was towing, which he and Alec and I had been taking turns towing all week, was left over from the summer: SUNSET SPECIAL 2 FOR 1 BEACHCOMBERS. I’d been worried Beachcomber’s would blame us when customers asked for a special that the restaurant hadn’t run since last September. But there were no customers in December, at least none who would see the banner from the deserted beach on a blustery day.
SUNSET SPECIAL 2 FOR 1 BEACHCOMBERS came closer and closer to us, dwarfing the plane. Grayson didn’t have to land. He only needed to get near enough to the ground to drop the banner safely, but he was having trouble even with that. The nose of the plane pointed diagonally toward us, rather than straight down the runway, to combat the wind. The left wing rolled up suddenly as Grayson lost control. All four of us watching made a noise.
He straightened the plane as it roared even with us. He was close enough that I could make out the straw cowboy hat he always wore, but nothing else through the windows reflecting the clouds.
“Drop drop drop,” Mr. Hall shouted, not into his radio but into the wind.
On cue, the plane pitched up, climbing to a safer altitude. The banner hung in midair for a moment, then drifted slowly toward Earth. At least, that’s what it looked like at first. The four of us realized at the same time that it was coming toward us, just as Grayson commented over Mr. Hall’s radio, “Maybe y’all should move.”
Alec and Jake dashed one way around the airport office. I ran and Mr. Hall jogged the other way. The seven-foot-tall banner rippled toward us like a snake, impossibly fast for its size, and smack, the metal pole at one end hit the office’s glass door.
Wincing, I rounded the building to the front again and examined the glass. Amazingly, the pole hadn’t broken it. Now the pole scraped along the concrete floor of the porch, dragged by the banner going wild in the wind. Alec and Jake were rolling up the banner from the other end, which had wrapped itself around the far side of the building.
“That’s some wind,” Jake shouted. I’d known Grayson was in trouble when I saw the Halls running. But if I’d had any lingering doubts, this sealed the deal: the fighter pilot home on leave after a year flying dangerous missions in Afghanistan, worried about the wind.
“He could land at another airport,” Alec called to his dad.
“I looked up the storm on radar,” I told Mr. Hall. “It’s a monster. Grayson won’t be able to fly past it. To do him any good, the runway would need a different heading.” That way, he could land into the wind, rather than the wind blowing across the airplane and tossing it off course. Community airports flashed through my mind, airfields up and down the coast where I’d practiced touch-and-go’s, landing and taking off repeatedly.
“Florence,” Mr. Hall and I said at the same time. He brought the radio to his mouth again. “Florence has a couple of strips with different headings. Why don’t you fly on over there? We’ll come pick you up, and tomorrow we’ll go back and get the plane.”
“Florence is seventy miles away,” came Grayson’s voice. “I don’t have enough gas to make it.”
“Roger,” Mr. Hall told the radio. He glanced at the wind sock again.
Alec and Jake had wrestled the unwieldy banner into a big, sloppy roll and plopped it on the porch, behind a rocking chair and against the wall, where it wouldn’t blow away. We all walked out to stand on the tarmac again and watch the plane fly parallel to the runway, then turn. Grayson would go through the same motions as on his first pass, but this time he would land.
Or try.
It wasn’t right that he fought through this alone. He and I had no bond, but I would have been the one in the plane instead of him if I hadn’t taken my turn first. Raising my voice over the wind, I told Mr. Hall, “Seems like there’s some advice you could give him.”
Mr. Hall shook his head. “I’ve taught all of you correctly. Whether you learned it correctly or not, I don’t know. That kid never had the sense God gave a goat. He probably thinks this is fun.”
True, Grayson was the live wire in the family, the adrenaline junkie who would do anything on a dare, who’d gotten in trouble in the past year for smoking, drinking, weed, speeding, skipping school—Mr. Hall had spilled it all to me while we were flying. Mr. Hall worried constantly that his ex-wife couldn’t handle raising Grayson on her own. Alec got in trouble only for refusing to rat Grayson out. But I doubted even Grayson enjoyed trying to land the plane in this windstorm.
Worried as I was, what Alec was going through must have been ten times worse. Grayson and he looked nothing alike, and they’d never seemed close. Alec was closer with Jake, glomming onto Jake really, and Grayson was off by himself, getting into trouble. But Grayson and Alec were still brothers, and twins. I wasn’t surprised when Alec crossed one arm on his chest, propped his other elbow on that arm, and put his hand over his mouth.
What did surprise me was that Jake put his arm around Alec’s shoulders.
Over the loudspeaker, Grayson calmly announced his approach. The red plane dropped out of the sky, skimming twenty feet above the runway, then ten.
I squinted and struggled to stand against a cold blast of wind. On that gust, the sound of the tiny engine drifted across the field to us. The motor suddenly roared in a higher pitch as the plane jerked to the left. Grayson was using the stick and the rudder pedals to fight the wind. I was fighting it too, sympathetically, my hands balled into fists, arms tense, toes curling in my shoes. And holding my breath.
The plane made several more agonizing darts this way and that, wings jerking up and leveling off. Finally he was one foot off the runway, inches, then none. The plane landed as straight and level as if the wind were calm.
Mr. Hall said, “Perfect.”
The plane was still rolling fast when the wind swept under it and tipped one wing up to the sky, the other down to scrape the asphalt.
“Damn it,” Mr. Hall barked. I made a noise too, something between a yelp and a scream, and Jake pressed one hand against Alec’s chest to keep him from running across the field. There was nothing we could do for Grayson, and nothing he could do either. Helpless, while someone chanted “No no no no no,” we watched the wing tilt as far up as it could go without the plane turning upside down. The plane seemed to be sinking then, the wind tiring.
That’s when a gust caught the tail instead and spun the still-rolling plane all the way around backward in a ground loop, exactly what we’d all been afraid of and exactly why most people didn’t fly these old-fashioned planes anymore. The wind spun the plane all the way forward again, then lobbed it at the trees.
Now we were running. Jake and Alec shot past me. I hoped they knew how to help Grayson when they reached him. All I could see was the bright red plane propped at an odd angle against the dark tree line. I concentrated on the tarmac under my feet, then the uneven ground where the grass hadn’t been cut since October, then the runway, with my usual bottle of water sloshing hard in my jacket pocket the whole way. As I got close, I remembered I had the phone in my other pocket. I pulled it out to dial 911.
But all three of the boys emerged from underneath the wing: Jake first, then Alec, then Grayson. They were laughing.
I stopped on the asphalt. My lungs burned so painfully that I almost bent over and braced my hands on my knees, but I didn’t want to do that where the boys could see me.
I turned to yell back to Mr. Hall that Grayson was okay. He saw the boys too and slowed from a jog to a walk. He put his hand over his heart.
As I walked down the short, grassy slope to where the airplane was lodged and the boys stood, Jake said, “I wish the Admiral had seen it. He would have recommended you for an aircraft carrier.” Jake worshipped the Admiral for his combat record.
Grayson knew how special this compliment was. It showed in his grin. “Oh, pshaw, it was nothing.” Even his eyes laughed, which looked strange to me. I rarely saw Grayson without his aviator shades and his straw cowboy hat. They must be lost in the cockpit.
“I wish we’d filmed it,” Alec said. “I wish you could have seen it yourself, Grayson. It seriously looked like you were about to lose it, what, three, four times?”
“Six or seven times,” Jake said.
“I don’t have to see it,” Grayson said. “But if we can get the tractor to haul the plane back onto the runway and it checks out, I’ll go again.”
Jake and Alec hooted laughter. Alec said, “That’s exactly what I was thinking: ‘Grayson is probably enjoying this.’”
“That’s what Dad was thinking too,” Jake said. He slipped into the imitation of Mr. Hall that all his sons could do so well. “‘That boy probably thinks this is fun. He never did have the sense God gave a goat.’”
Their laughter quieted as Mr. Hall passed me on the grass. Grayson still smiled, but the laughter had left his eyes. He waited for his father’s verdict.
I held my breath for the second time that afternoon. When something went wrong at Hall Aviation, it was usually Grayson’s fault, because he forgot a chore or blew it off. But Mr. Hall tended to blame him even when the problem was Alec’s fault, or Jake’s fault, or Mr. Hall’s own fault, or nobody’s fault at all. I had wanted to tell Mr. Hall this before, but it was not my place to say.
Mr. Hall slapped Grayson’s shoulder, then moved his hand to the back of Grayson’s neck. “And that, son, is a ground loop.”
They all burst into laughter again, Mr. Hall included. Grayson said sarcastically, “Thank you for the insight, Father.”
“Let’s see what kind of damage you did to her.” Mr. Hall walked around the wing tip lodged in the grass, heading for the nose. Alec and Jake followed him, but Grayson stayed where he was. Now that they weren’t watching him, his blond brows knitted. He looked at the plane, then at the sky, and bit his lip.
I whispered, “Are you really okay?”
His gray eyes widened at me, as if he hadn’t noticed me standing there until now. He whispered back, “Actually, I think I’m going to hurl.”
“I’ll cover for you.”
He stared at me for a moment more, like he didn’t trust me. Then he turned and jogged toward the trees.
I followed Mr. Hall and the boys around the wing and peered over their shoulders as they turned the seemingly undamaged propeller by hand, testing it. I waited until they noticed Grayson was missing.
“Grayson? Where’s Grayson?” Mr. Hall called.
I glanced back at the wing. “Uh-oh, the gas tank has ruptured.”
“What?” Mr. Hall bellowed. He and Alec and Jake moved from the propeller to crowd around the wing. I pointed to a scrape as if I thought this indicated structural damage to the tank. They poked at the wing, ran their hands along it, fingered the joints. After a few long minutes, Mr. Hall looked up at me like I’d lost my mind.
I felt Grayson’s shadow return behind me. “I guess not,” I said.
All of them straightened and discussed the findings. Grayson stepped toward them without comment like he’d been hanging around the other end of the plane the whole time. The consensus was that the plane was hardly damaged at all, but they wanted to tow it back to the hangar where they could get a better look before the rain came. Without glancing at Grayson, I handed him my bottle of water. He took a swig while the rest of them were talking and spat it on the grass.
They all turned and sauntered back toward the hangar. Their laughter rolled back to me against the cold wind. It wasn’t like the boys had forgotten me, because I was never part of their family anyway. I was nothing to remember. But Mr. Hall had forgotten me completely, as if I hadn’t been standing next to him while we witnessed the wreck.
That was only fitting. All three of his sons were with him at once. That hardly ever happened anymore. It was Christmas. And Grayson was safe.