Brian Garfield: Relentless

It was a grueling grind and you couldn’t keep it up forever, six nights a week. You started taking a harmless-looking little heart-shaped amphetamine tablet now and then, just to give yourself a bit of an edge. Then you took two and three and four and after a while you had a pocket full of them on every flight, and your nerves drew up like bowstrings and your judgment began to play tricks on you: you’d come in too long, overshoot, tear rubber off the tires braking too hard; you’d overestimate your altitude and come down so hard you bent the landing-gear bracings; you’d be flying through a clear night sky and you’d start to hallucinate, you’d see Carla’s face winking sleepily at you from a cloud, you’d see a North Vietnamese MIG-21 diving at you with tracers winking silently out of its wing guns and you’d take violent evasive action and barely miss clipping a mountaintop.

He began to recognize that he was falling apart and he resolved to steady himself. He took two weeks off and spent the time at Tahoe in a motel just off the lake shore. It took a few days to withdraw from the pills and that was sheer hell but he knew what he was doing. He spent the days around the swimming pool soaking up the mountain sun-this was last June-and evenings he’d go out and gamble a little, taking it easy, just playing a bit of dollar roulette and two-dollar blackjack and not losing more than he could handle. He could feel the tension draining out of him as if a drainplug had been pulled. He started going over to the Nevada side and casually dating the recently freed divorcees who were always in the casinos dying for a man, any man, with no promises demanded and no questions asked.

But he was still putting Carla’s face on every woman he slept with. There was no cure for that malaise.

He’d gone back to work toward the end of June and he’d been flying the old DC-6B up to Portland on a cargo job for a paper mill when he’d flown into a high-tension cable.

There was no excuse for it. The day had been a little misty with drizzling rain but he was flying into a first-class airport on the beams and the visibility was good enough to see the ground from seven or eight hundred feet. The aircraft was in good working order and the copilot had gone through the landing checklist with him without a hitch. But the voice of the girl on the headset, giving him his landing instructions, had reminded him of Carla’s voice and he was seeing Carla’s face in his mind when he should have been watching the earth come up, and the copilot had been working flaps and undercarriage instead of watching the runway, and Walker had lost too much altitude too fast and clipped the power line with the starboard wheel. It had thrown the plane around through a ten-degree arc and she had hit the ground on the port wingtip and spun as if the wingtip were a pivot. The gear had collapsed under her, the props had broken against the concrete, the fuselage had spun with the port wing snapping off at its root and the plane ending up on the grass in half a dozen pieces.

He’d sat in the overturned pilot’s seat, hanging by his seat belt, not feeling a thing, hearing the meatwagon sirens and the wail of tires and the spouting foam of the fire hoses, and then the crash crews had pried the plane open and climbed inside to drag him and the copilot outside. In the ambulance they’d tested him for breaks and concussion but all he had was a few cuts and bruises. The copilot had a gash on his head from the control wheel and for twelve hours he’d been on the critical list, and Walker had waited in the hospital; but the copilot had pulled through, so there was no manslaughter charge against him.

The downed power line had cut electricity in two factories and four hundred houses and a shopping center. The community was incensed, the insurance company was outraged, and when the government had pulled Walker’s license Or-Cal had kicked him out of the firm. They agreed to charge off the demolished airplane against Walker’s invested capital. They lost money on it but they were willing to do that to get rid of him.

It put him on the street without even a tin cup. He had no money and no pilot’s license; anyhow the wreck had made it impossible for him to get a job anywhere in the country in any company that had anything to do with airplanes. They didn’t even want him around airports selling tickets.

The fraternity of airmen had a primitive pride. They didn’t want him around because he was a reminder: It could happen to any of us. Walker’s crash had cost Or-Cal half its contracts and the fraternity couldn’t afford even a hint that this kind of man might be tolerated by them: pilots were always suspect, and partly because of their arrogance they were watched eagerly by groundlings for evidence of recklessness. If it had been only hard luck he might have been protected and supported by his own kind-you rarely heard of a pilot on welfare-but when it was more than hard luck, when it was your own inexcusable stupid failure, there was no room for you because you-had disgraced the fraternity.

He was bitter, there was no way not to be. But he couldn’t blame them. He had been one of them and he understood.

And now at twenty-nine he was burnt out. Washed up.

He’d been in Tucson two months, pumping Texaco gas and drinking up his wages, when the Major had found him.

“You may not remember me. Hargit, Leo Hargit.”

“I remember you, Major.”

The Major had driven into the gas station in a four-year-old Lincoln Continental. It suited him; he had the carriage to bring it off. Steel gray hair close-cropped against a well-shaped skull. Near six feet tall, long-boned, a straight taut body in superb condition. In mufti now, a cool light grey suit that had not come from stock. When Walker had last seen him at Hue the Major had been wearing a Green Beret uniform.

Hargit had a flashing grin, the teeth as white and even as a military cemetery. He was powerfully handsome with that larger-than-life magnetism which was, in certain men, a force of leadership. His face was big and square and all straight lines.

He had got out of the car and shaken hands with Walker. He wasn’t a bone crusher but you could feel the power in his grip; he had muscles he hadn’t even used yet.

“They tell me you’ve had it a little rough, Captain.”

“I haven’t exactly been sweating the income tax.”

“Someplace we can talk?”

Then it wasn’t just an accidental meeting.

“I’ve got the place to myself till three o’clock or so.”

The Major glanced at his watch and shot his cuff. “That ought to be time enough.”

“You want gas in that thing?”

“Let it wait.” The Major had thrown his big arm across Walker’s shoulders and walked him inside the filling station. There was only one chair, by the telephone desk with its credit-card machines and free roadmap stand. The place was a litter of tools and old batteries and cans of oil; it smelled of lubricants. The Major swept a patch of workbench clear of tools, cocked himself on it hipshot with one foot on the floor, and waved Walker into the chair. It gave Hargit the position of command.

The doors were open but it was hot and close. The desert sun shot painful reflections off passing cars and the store windows across the boulevard. Traffic was a steady noise.

“I might have a job for you.”

“Doing what? Back in the Army?”

“No. Something else. Flying a plane.”

Walker’s laugh was more of a snarl. “I haven’t got a license.”

“I’ll get you one.”

“It’s not that easy. They took it away from me and they’re not likely to give it back before World War Five.”

“I’ll get you a license. Hell, a piece of paper?”

“It’s not that easy,” Walker said again, keeping his face blank, trying not to show the bitterness. His overalls were black and filthy with grease and he found himself wiping his hands on the bib front. His fingernails were inky.