Brian Garfield: Necessity

It means she needs to stay aloof-no efforts to make friends or steady companions. Not until she is comfortable in a new identity with a past so well rehearsed that it comes to mind as readily as if it were real.

The hairdresser sends her away in a wheeling cloud of advice about the most fabulous little places to shop and the most divine sushi restaurant.

She has destroyed her old credit cards but still keeps the old driver’s license; she’ll need it one more time.

The plan is based in part on the cautionary advice with which she was endowed inadvertently by that dreadful little investigator, what was his name? Something aquatic, like his sharkskin clothes …

Seale, that’s it. Ray Seale.

From the outset she has implemented the plan with businesslike thoroughness and she’s applied a ruthless concentration to the details-because she can’t afford to make mistakes, and because for at least some of the time it keeps her mind off her fears for herself and for Ellen.

Much of the time she feels as though she is trying to walk underwater. There seems to be a haze over her vision: a translucence that separates her from reality. The things that she requires of herself are things that she accomplishes with prompt inventive adroitness but it is as if someone else were accomplishing them. Feeling dreamlike, trancelike, she knows she must keep moving briskly because, like a bicyclist, she’ll fall down if she stops.

Wednesday morning there is rain but she drives to Van Nuys Airport anyway. The storm has brought road oil to the surface and she feels the car slide when she makes the turn into the parking lot, going too fast. A blast of wind strikes; the car shudders and she has a queasy sensation when the seat seems to pitch to one side under her.

There is the throat-tightening awareness that the car is out of control. She sees the metal chainlink fence skidding toward her in the rain; she remembers to lift her foot off the gas and waits in dread for the tires to find their grip.

Managing narrowly not to hit the fence, she rolls into a parking space and sits precariously still with the windshield wipers batting, wind rocking the car, afraid to breathe while she waits for the pulse to subside and reminds herself that none of this is going to be any good if she totals herself in a stupid careless accident.

If you can’t remember to care about yourself, she thinks, care about Ellen.

She sucks in a deep lungful of air and waits a while, hoping the rain will quit or at least let up; she has no umbrella. It’s a long way to walk and she doesn’t see a parking area any closer than this one. Between gusts she recognizes the place down the field from his description on the phone: “I’ve got a little office in the hangar next door to the Beechcraft Agency. You can see it from the parking lot.”

She remembers his voice now: coarse, a whisky-cigarette baritone with a rough resonance of barrooms and card games; on the phone it made her think of lumps of rock rattling down a metal chute. She’d telephoned five flying schools and in each case she’d asked to talk to the instructor. She’s picked this one because he answered his own phone and his intonation suggested he might not mind doing something a little out of the ordinary for a price.

He says his name is Charlie Reid.

The rain doesn’t look as if it wants to depart. She makes a face and gets out of the car, fashions a tent over her head with the morning paper and runs toward the hangar, trying to dodge the puddles.

The open runway area presents no obstacles to the wind, which gropes for her in gusts, blasting rain into her face under the newspaper. By the time she reaches the door the newspaper is disintegrating and her hair is a sodden mat.

She hopes it is the right place. She goes in.

A man sits in a swivel chair at a cheap metal desk. Steam drifts from the Styrofoam cup in his hand; coffee makes a strong smell in the tiny office. The sign appended to the wall is in cardboard and appears to have been lettered with crayons by a meticulous child: “Reid Air Service and Flying School.” Nearby are Visa and Mastercard emblems.

He is huge and unkempt in work boots, dungarees and a faded mustard yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway back to his elbows. There are bags under his eyes; the lived-in face is creased and amused. It is evident he’s been watching her through the window. He says in his rumbling voice, “You must want to fly awful bad.”

“I do.”

It elicits his skeptical grunt. He lifts a large metal wastebasket onto the desk.

She drops the sodden newspaper into it. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” He secretes the wastebasket under the desk. Then he stands up. He is big.

Six-two, she thinks; probably six-four if he’d stand up straight. He towers. The shoulders belong on a water buffalo.

“You’re ten minutes late,” he says. “Not that it matters. Nothing out there flying right now except a few skateboards and umbrellas.”

“I don’t want to fly today. I want to learn to fly.”

“I know. Usually I take ’em up the first day. See how they like the feel of it. Half the people that go up with me never come back for lesson number two.” He has a bellicose grin that surprises her because it engages her.

She thinks: I don’t wonder they don’t come back. One look at him and most sane individuals would think twice about going up in an airplane with him.

He says: “Some people just don’t take to flying upside down, that kind of thing. How’s your stomach?”

She is brushing herself off-ineffectually. Her feet are soaked and around them grows a puddle at which the man stares with a widening one-sided grin. All his expressions have a sardonic tilt.

Wet to the skin and miserable, she replies with tart defiance: “My stomach’s all right. You might offer me a towel.”

“Bathroom’s in the hangar next door. But you have to go outdoors to get there.”

“I don’t suppose you have an umbrella.”

“Never use ’em.” His leer is a bit lewd. She wonders what it is about her that amuses him so. She doesn’t feel a bit funny.

He is putting on a hat-a baseball sort of cap. He says, “Well shit,” and clumps past her to the door. “Wait here.” He goes out into the rain.

She feels she’s achieved a petty victory. She glances through the jumbled papers on his desk and has a quick look at the documents that are thumbtacked to the wall under the crayon-on-cardboard sign. Beside an old map of Angola-what’s that doing here? — she spots his private pilot’s license, dated 1951, and his commercial licenses-single-engine and pilot-instructor, both dated 1974-and a certificate from the State of California permitting Charles W. Reid to operate a bonded school for the training of private pilots in single-engine dual control aircraft. There is the inevitable Playboy calendar nude. Off to one side she sees an Air Force certificate: he retired in 1972 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, which probably means he’d been serving as a major-not a very high rank after twenty years’ service. Most of the documents are dirty and have gone ragged around the edges; none is framed.

Thumbtacked on the side wall above the desk, where he’ll see it when he is sitting down, is a color snapshot of a nine- or ten-year-old boy with masses of brown hair and a big jaw like Reid’s.

Wind slams the door open and he lunges into the room with a wadded towel in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other. He kicks the door shut behind him. All his motions are big and rangy: he moves like a large predator with total confidence in his own physical authority. He sets the coffee on the desk and proffers the towel. “Here you go.”