by

James Shankman

copyright © 2003

    I used to go up there to the observation deck with my young son whenever we went to the airport and we had some time to kill. My mother used to visit town quite a lot when the kids were small, less and less as they grew older. It was a very small airport, delightfully small, classically small. It had only one runway on the commercial end. It had another for private planes that was out of sight of the main airport. In fact you had to enter from another access road altogether, unmarked and unbidden, if you wanted to see the private airport at all.
   When my mother came in, I would drive up halfheartedly, park the car in the outdoor lot and walk across the street to the Quonset hut that housed the airport’s only gate. It really was a Quonset hut, a silver halfmoon of World War II vintage corrugated steel with two swinging screen doors whose peeling green paint could not prevent the warp that invaded all wooden objects of a certain age when exposed without redress to the summer humidity of the East Coast. Inside the air circulated slowly and patiently by means of wooden ceiling fans made from antique propellers. They hummed absentmindedly like old men on the front porch watching the trucks go by. Tucked into the far left end of the Quonset hut was the airport coffee shop set off by oaktrimmed, glass paneled doors with beveled edges and old airplane designs etched in each glass pane: propellers, parachutes, biplanes and the curious military insignia that spoke the lost language of the air. The heavy sweating waitresses of the coffee shop negotiated its tight dimensions, its overexcited children, its stressed out parents, its preoccupied business travelers and the general air of anxiety with a familiar resignation, their private esprit de corps. The booths were just too small for four people to sit in comfortably. Not that a family of four could ever sit comfortably while awaiting their launch into the middle stratosphere. Mothers and fathers would eye each other uncomfortably, speaking the silent language of parenthood. Not that anything would really go wrong up there, but that they might feel afraid, that the children would see the fear in their hearts. They could read through the worst turbulence imaginable when they flew alone, but with the children every dip and rise, every unexpected bank, every sudden thrust or silence of the engines brought the suffocation of an adrenalin rush. The seats at the counter were too close together for anyone to set down to a meal without tangling elbows with the next guy. The place had a sharp, insistent sound like breaking glass. It smelled predominately of fried eggs, sausage and cheeseburgers deluxe.
    There was no motorized, covered walkway for boarding the jets at this airport. You walked out into the weather, rain, sun, wind or snow, and climbed up an oldfashioned airport gantry into the forward hatch of the 707 or the 737 or whatever the captain was flying that day. You stumbled down it too at the end of a weary flight when you arrived at this airport. That took much more concentration and a firm grip on the handrail. Too much carry-on luggage could send you ass over elbow. The stevedores yanked your luggage out of the cargo hold right in plain sight, loaded it onto a high wiresided wagon and dumped it unceremoniously in a long line at baggage pickup. No conveyor belts here. Every time I showed up I half expected a DC-3 to come trundling up to the passenger gate pointing expectantly towards the sky on its tiny rear wheel as it awaited its complement of intrepid passengers.
    From stem to stern it was the kind of airport that put you in touch with the substance of your endeavor. It did not isolate you in any way from the facts. It did not coddle or baby you. But that was what I liked about it. It had an oddly calming reassurance to it. There was nothing hidden. Nothing up its sleeve. It calmed my quaking fears of flying like no other airport could.
    When I went to pick up my mother I would have to stalk her carefully at the baggage claim area and approach her from directly in front at a distance. I had to let her see me coming. If I appeared out of nowhere into her peripheral vision she would startle like a colt and swear extremely loudly. My mother was a veteran traveler. She had been to every continent except Antarctica, but she did not like to be snuck up on.
    Sometimes in my haste I would leave the house without checking the arrival time of her flight. My son Gabe and I would arrive at the airport to discover that her flight had been delayed by thunderheads or stiff winds or an unspecified mechanical problem. When that happened Gabe and I would climb the steps of the Quonset hut’s broken escalator, whose stairs were made of wooden slats that fit together like fingers laced in prayer, to the second floor where the observation deck sat in the stale heat above the giant rotating fans that recirculated the air of the hangar.
    The entire westfacing wall of this second floor was a quarter moon of Plexiglas. Wooden benches were bolted to the floor along this Plexiglas wall like the benches of Central Park or Coney Island. The floor was made of ancient rotting wood. It gave in places like mossy earth. It had the feel of a gymnasium floor that had been roughed up and left for dead by too many young ruffians with basketballs and high top sneakers.
Up there in the heavy air, Gabe and I would watch the jets land and take off. We would try to figure out which one was Grandma’s, and we would say, “Look there she is in the window with her knitting and her crossword puzzle.”
    No matter how many times I saw it, I still felt at least a bit of the miraculous when I saw a ten-ton jet roll down the runway, nose up and slip into the air. From the observation deck, the noise of the jet engines was muted, aiding the illusion of effortlessness. If you wanted to go outside and hear the explosive jet engines suck the plane off the ground you could do that to. There was a small caged in balcony on the right side of the deck. Sometimes Gabe was brave enough to go outside. When we did I felt as if the planes were trying to fight their way into the sky, clambering up the ladder of the atmosphere like Jacob on his way to heaven.
    I have no idea when I first noticed the old woman on the observation deck. I had been there so many times. She came out of the background slowly like a hiker coming down a country road. First you’re not sure if you see anything. Then you just know it’s something in the summer heat, and not the shimmering of the pavement. Then you realize it’s moving. And finally you understand it’s a person coming towards you. One of the first things I noticed was that she always wore the same calico dress and the same sperry topsiders. Then I noticed her handbag and how her hair was always curled with great care as if she had taken time with it every day, as if she really wished she could give the illusion she had been to a good beauty parlor. She would sit on the same bench most of the time and I guessed she was watching the planes like everybody else.
    Gabe and I would also come to the observation deck to kill time when my father came to town. He would always need a couple of stiff drinks in the airport bar before he was ready to be met. So Gabe and I would allow him that twenty minutes or so by going upstairs to watch the jets come in.
    One day it occurred to me that the old woman was always there no matter what time of day Gabe and I were there. My mother had a habit of coming in to town from Santa Fe on a Thursday afternoon flight. She would leave around 11am on Sunday. My father on the other hand would come in late Friday evening from Chicago and leave late on Sunday evening, the last flight out. I realized quite suddenly on a Friday night that the old woman was there on the observation deck swinging her sperry topsiders beneath her wooden bench whenever we arrived. I began to watch her more carefully. On a cold Friday evening in the winter the men who de-iced the planes for flight were standing on the wings of a 737 hosing down every inch of its surface with a billowy liquid gas concoction. They were backlit by the airport runway lights, which gave them a ghostly, mechanistic menace. I noticed how the old woman would sit quietly almost absentmindedly and the next moment she would rush right up to the Plexiglas window, place her palms right on the glass, her knotty fingers spread wide with tension and stand as still as a prairie dog with its nose in the wind. It took me a couple of visits to the deck to realize that she only did this when the jets landed. In fact she didn’t seem to pay any attention at all when the jets took off. This was exactly the opposite of the order of interest that Gabe and I took in observing. We liked the way the planes touched down. We could tell a good, greased landing from a bad one, but it was the takeoffs that held our interest: the way the jets accelerated on the runway, the way they pulled their own noses into the air as if by magic, the way they climbed so steeply, the way they banked so quickly and veered off into the distance.
    One night in the late Fall my mother was coming in very late on a Thursday evening. Hers flight had been delayed till about 11pm by very bad rain and fog and heavy winds. The airport was officially asleep. The bar and restaurant were closed. The shoeshine stand was locked away. The rent-a-car desks were dark with misgiving. The magazine stand was shut behind its ghetto fence. But the observation deck was alive with the bright light of anxious waiting. The weather was truly miserable. The ceiling at the airport was officially three hundred feet. I know this because they don’t allow planes to land at this airport even on instruments unless there is a ceiling of three hundred feet, the bare minimum necessary for a pilot to react to the ground when it finally comes up. But to my eye there wasn’t even a hundred feet of visibility in the foggy night. And there hadn’t been a landing since Gabe and I had entered the observation deck. The jets were up there circling, out over the Atlantic, lazy-eighting, watching their jet fuel, their passengers rubbing both hands together to ward off the cold feeling of helplessness, to catch it on fire and burn it away. Except for my mother. She was an impatient traveler, but she felt no fear. Too many years of globetrotting to Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Turkey, Hungary, even Kenya. Suddenly a light came swirling down towards the runway from the east and a jet appeared over the treetops, jesus awfully close to the tree tops, swirling down through a godgiven gap in the soup, its wings teetertottering back and forth like a drunken gull looking for the beach. The old woman jumped startled to her feet and pressed her entire body against the glass. She gathered in a highpitched gasp of air. The jet bounced heavily several times before coming safely to a halt almost out of sight in the fog at the far end of the runway.
    She collapsed back on the bench that Gabe and I were sharing with her. “I like to watch them land,” she said. She realized instinctively that I had heard her speak. She sat as still as a stone, like a rabbit that knows it’s been spotted, trying to decide what to do next. Then she smiled at me politely for a moment until she could safely tiptoe away into her own thoughts again. I noticed in that brief exchange that her right eye smiled rather brightly and clearly with a knowing edge, but the left side of her face was much darker, flatter, more severe. It brooded.
I turned to Gabe to see if he was ready to go get his grandmother, when she said, “Yes, I do. I like to see them land. Just makes me feel good is all.”
    I could tell she wasn’t talking to me, so I had to leave it at that, but now my radar was up and receiving, looking for the signal in the noise.
    In midwinter my father came in during a blizzard. I couldn’t believe the guy. I couldn’t believe the airline was flying. I couldn’t believe the runway was open. My driveway wasn’t open. It was brimming with eighteen inches of snow like clotted cream in a saucer on an English country breakfast table. My father was a go-anywhere, fly-anything kind of guy. He tried to fly into New York during the hurricane of ’87 when my wife and I were living on the Upper West Side with our newborn daughter, Haley. I had called him to warn him not to come, that we were expecting a hurricane and there was no need to take the risk. “The streets are deserted,” I told him. “The windows are all taped up. I think it’s the real thing.”
    “Look, I’m going to the airport,” he said. “If the captain wants to fly, I’m going with him.”
    I tried to argue with him that the captain had to fly. The captain was under considerable pressure from the airline to make the flight.
    “You gotta be kidding,” he said.” “I’ll take my chances.”
    In the end the captain didn’t fly, and New York City got something like six inches of rain.
    On this night, however, the captain did fly, and he managed to land; but Gabe and I were not there to see it. We were spinning our wheels in the driveway which waited patiently at the bottom of the snowplow list to be cleared of its drifts. I trudged over to a neighbor’s house and borrowed his Jeep Cherokee. He was a good guy. Most guys wouldn’t let you near their car in a situation like that. But my buddy Stuey was just a workingclass kid from the Bronx who stepped in a pile of shit down on Wall Street. He didn’t have your typical suburban proprietary instincts.
    I drove slowly slowly slowly over the snowslicked streets. In some places I was following tracks in the foot and a half high snow like I was on safari in the mud of the African savannah. Snow hung sleepily from the tree branches. The thick precipitation muffled all sounds on the ground, in the air and in the mind. I traveled in silence concentrating on the cornering, the braking, the acceleration and the knotted muscles in my shoulders. I tried to breathe into my diaphragm like a waitress pouring hot coffee into a cup.
    When I got to the airport, I knew where he would be. I walked in as easily as I could.
    “I’d like you to meet Lydia,” he said to me from his seat at the compact, masculine, brokendown bar. He reached out and introduced me to the old woman from the observation deck. “She’s been keeping me very good company.”
    Lydia had a bit of a flush in her sandpaper cheeks. She held out her hand to me so delicately I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to kiss it or shake it. Her eyes were red with drink. Martini glasses waltzed before her on the bar, their necklines all plunged low.
    “So you’re picking up old ladies at the bar?” I said to him in the car as we drove carefully home. The last six miles of any plane trip are the most dangerous.
    “Have to stay in practice,” he said. “You never know when it might come in handy.”
    “Dad.”
    “No, seriously. She looked like she wanted to talk. So we talked.”
    ‘She looked like she wanted to talk’ is my father’s way of saying she was alive and breathing and I needed some company.
    “What did you talk about?”
    “The war as a matter of fact. She was a WAC. She flew fighter planes overland as part of an Army Air Corps delivery service. She was washed out for alcoholism, I think, if you read between the lines.”
    My father was very good at reading between the lines. The stuff between the lines was always more interesting to him than the lines themselves. He would have made a great literary critic.
    “They sent her down to Tallahassee and they put her in the control tower directing traffic at a flight school for bomber pilots. I guess she saw a lot of crash landings. You know we had bombers made out of wood when the war broke out. Even the metal bombers weren’t exactly built to last. I saw some landings, you know, pilot would make a perfectly good landing and the plane would just break up on impact and the gas tank would explode and all hell would break lose. Lot of burn victims in those days.” Then he went silent for the rest of the trip as the snow fell like stars in the white night.
    On Sunday we took my dad back to the airport and Gabe and I went up to the observation deck because we’d missed our chance on Friday. The day was bright and brittle as an icicle. Sunshine bobsledded through the snowfields and shook the trees that surrounded the airport.
    Lydia sat on her bench. A woolen overcoat lay on her lap like a favorite dog. She smoothed it absently with her quiet hands as she watched the flightpath for the next arrival.
    I had it in mind to take her under my wing. I felt she needed protection up there on this flight deck of the imagination, but also I needed to get to the bottom of her. There was just too much lying beneath the surface of her water glinting up. She took us under hers instead. She came over and sat down next to Gabe and told him she knew his grandfather. Gabe smiled shyly. She said, “You see that big tower over there young fella, well that’s the air traffic control tower where they keep track of all the planes that are in the air and they tell them how to land and take off safely. And I used to work in one of those towers. What do you think about that?”
    Gabe was genuinely impressed. He looked at me as if to ask for permission to speak to a stranger. I raised my eyebrows and made a face of mock surprise to encourage him.
    “That is so cool,” he said.
    “You bet it is. I was an air traffic controller in the World War II. And after the war too. And my husband was a pilot. How about that?”
    “That is so cool,” Gabe said.
    “My husband, he used to say you’re only as good as your last takeoff. He also used to say he did his best flying when he was scared out of his wits.”
    That made me a little uneasy, and I reached for Gabe’s hand in case things got inappropriate for a ten year old.
    “Did he ever get really scared?” Gabe asked. I guess he couldn’t help himself.
    “Well, there was the one time. I could hear it in his voice. I was up there in the control tower that day.”
    “And did he do his best flying that day?”
    “I suppose he did,” she said. “I suppose he did.” She turned away tightly. Her shoulders hunched up and her head bowed into her chest. “Just wasn’t good enough, I guess.” She clenched her forearms into her soft calico bosom. I could here her struggling not to cry.
    “Go get yourself a candybar, Gabe,” I said.
She held on tightly in her throat, but a tiny moan seeped out, then a string of quiet, stifled cries like an engine of sorrow trying to turn over in the cold. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t put my arm around this frail stranger. I couldn’t say it was alright. I couldn’t give her any sort of comfort. All I could do was listen the way one listens to the song of a dusty brown little bird so high in the trees you can’t even see it as it sings its heart out at dusk on a warm summer evening, piercing you with intervals you’ve never heard before, intervals that stir you to tears.
    When she finally stopped, she apologized for her outburst. Her breath was still trembling in her chest. She ran her hands over her dress smoothing out the wrinkles, as if it were the dress that needed calming down and not the hands. She took a deep breath and looked out the observation window into the distance as if I weren’t there. A dark blue jet was coming in for a landing slow and steady wheels unfolding from the wings giving it the air of a bandylegged old man tripping down the stairs, arms outstretched, eyes wide, trusting in god to save his hips. As its nose fell into place on the runway, Lydia began to brighten a bit. She cocked her head to one side then looked up and shrugged the briefest shrug.
    “There, you see. That’s so much better. I really do like to see them land. It does me a world of good.”
    “Why is that, Lydia?” I was surprised at my forwardness.
    “Well, I suppose it just calms me down, I guess.”
    One day in the heat of the summer I drove my wife, Gabe and Haley to the airport. They were going to visit my parents in their respective homes. At the last minute I had to beg off the trip because of a disaster at the office. My wife was not pleased. Gabe was not happy either. Haley had reached the age where she could care less. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky that day. Not a spec of weather as my mother used to say when a highpressure system was hovering above and she was feeling lighthearted.
    I went up to the observation deck to watch them take off. I had the subdued but wickedly exhilarating feeling of a man with nothing to do. I had time to kill. I would kill it indeed. I would murder it, slaughter it at my leisure, draw and quarter it as a warning, burn it at the stake and display its head on a pike so that its minions might never threaten my kingdom again without weighing the mayhem of my wrath. I would watch the planes and eat a hot dog, drink a soda, maybe even talk to a stranger.
    Lydia seemed surprised to see me without Gabe. I sat down with her on her blue wooden bench. I could feel the rounded bolts against my jeans where the thighs of the countless other observers had worn down the wood and the left the metal in relief. I pointed out my family as they walked out on the tarmac to their waiting jet. Gabe turned back to look for me on the observation deck. He squinted into the sun looking for my face. I jumped up, spreadeagled myself against the glass and pressed my face into it like a cartoon character. He tugged on his mother’s arm and pointed up at me. She stopped, cocked her head, then shook it in mock disbelief. Haley curled up into a question mark of embarrassment. And they were off with Gabe walking backwards all they way to the gantry.
    “Why are you letting them go like that?” she asked me very sternly.
“I had a last minute emergency at the office. I have to be at the office all day Saturday and Sunday.”
    “No, no that’s not right,” she said.
“Shame I had all those frequent flier miles. I could have flown for free.”
   “There’s no such thing,” Lydia replied almost sharply but really not because I could tell she wasn’t really talking to me but to herself.
   As we fell silent the captain and the co-pilot strolled out of the gate to their jet.
    “Aren’t they a bit late?” I wondered outloud.
“Well, now that’s not the pilot there. They’re just deadheads.”
    “Beg your pardon?”
    “Deadheads,” she repeated as if it were plain as the nose on my face. “Well, all right. That means they’re hitching a ride because they’ve got a flight somewheres else. They’re not working this flight. They’re deadheads.”
    “Oh. So they’re flying for free.”
She looked at me quite guardedly as if she suspected I was trying to start an argument or pick a fight but she said nothing.
    “There’s no such thing as flying for free,” she repeated, but this time it was meant for me.
    “That’s very funny,” I said. ”Deadhead means something very different in my lingo, in my generation I mean.”
     “Is that right?” I could tell she didn’t want to pursue it. She was being polite again, but I had to go on or I would be drawing attention to her discomfort. I had to pretend not to notice.
    “There was a rock and roll band. The most popular of them all. The Grateful Dead. And there was an army of very loyal fans, a very ragtag army of hippies and all who traveled around the country just following the band wherever they went. They all had beat up old cars and trucks and campers and they lived in them and followed the band around. That’s all they did. They lived for the band. They called themselves deadheads.”
    And that was where we left it. I got up to go home. I no longer felt like watching the planes. Something uncomfortable had come between us. I sensed our relationship was too frail to stand this strain. As I was walking away Lydia opened her purse and said, ”My boys were deadheads.” I saw her hand feel for something in the purse. I could tell she had found it. She seemed to be fingering something, running it through her hand like a smooth stone that knew every thick crease of her palm, every brittle crook of her fingers, every rocky knot of her knuckles.
    “Really,” I said and I smiled. I didn’t know whether to come back or not.
    She didn’t like the smile. “Not your kind of deadhead. The other kind. Like those two out there.” She looked out onto the tarmac as if she were surveying a stormy sea from a tall lonely lighthouse.
    “Your sons were pilots too?”
    She didn’t reply. Some people don’t respond to rhetorical questions. They know you’re just filling the airwaves.
    “What happened, Lydia?” Sometimes you just have to lay your cards on the table.
    She looked out over the concrete shoals beneath her trying to keep them alight for all comers. “They were deadheading on my husband’s flight. That’s all. As simple as that. But you can’t fly for free. Like I was saying. They paid. They all paid.”
    We’ve become very good friends, Lydia and I. We are very familiar to one another now. I come as often as I can to watch the planes land. And I like it. Perhaps ‘like’ is too strong a word. I watch them land. The way they come lumbering out of the sky, ungainly, tipsy, impossibly heavy for the air, sloshing out of the sky like children down a waterslide at an amusement park, until the last second when they touch the ground and suddenly they are where they belong again on a wide concrete road roaring like eighteen-wheelers down an empty highway. The way they come slowly, inevitably to rest. Like a person who can’t catch his breath finally getting a first good lungful.
    I admire the benign stasis of the airplane standing stock still, nowhere to go, mission accomplished. I can feel everyone breathe inside the cabin. And I can see all the families and friends just pulling into the airport, parking their cars, making their way through the anonymous crowd, drawn to the magnetic source of all their thoughts.
    I admire the complicated intricacy of this dance of many strangers repeating itself endlessly, endlessly without incident, without report.
    I do feel good for them all. I send up an inward cheer each time they cross the goal line. I feel like walking up and congratulating them all on their landing, shaking hands all around, buying beers for everyone. But I’ve never really been that sort of people person. So I watch the planes land instead and imagine the rest.
    I have all the time in the world to consider it. I’m rich now. Everyone on the plane was watching the takeoff on their video monitor when the aircraft stalled and went into a spin during its ascent. The jury awarded a hell of a lot for pain and suffering on that. Watching your own jet crash on TV, the jury couldn’t get past that. Even though it only took less than thirty seconds to fall. Like a line drive hitting the shortstop’s mitt and dropping ignominiously at his feet. No sense in throwing it to first. The runner is already safe. Instead he picks it up halfheartedly and looks at it as if there were something wrong with the ball.