Broken Wings

by Terri Blackstock

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  But Erin’s faith had precarious footing in the bargaining room that evening. Zarkoff sat like a hostile king on his throne at the end of the table. He was nursing a cigar whose smoke wafted through the room like a toxic fog designed to keep his subjects in line.

  But the “subjects” were anything but passive. The five on the bargaining committee sat rigidly in their seats, unwilling to let the intimidation of his apparent indifference sway them.

  “The first thing we’d like to address,” Ray Carter began, “is the issue of pay cuts. Our pilots have accepted pay cuts in the past, but this amount is—”

  “Non-negotiable,” Zarkoff said, tapping his cigar ashes out on a tray and ramming the stub back into his mouth.

  Ray glanced up from his notes. “Pardon?”

  “The pay cuts are non-negotiable. Let’s not waste time here. What’s the next gripe?”

  Stunned faces looked at each other, and Lois leaned forward. “Mr. Zarkoff, you can’t be serious. That’s what we’re here for. To negotiate.”

  Zarkoff yanked the cigar from his mouth and leaned forward on the table, his blistering gaze directed at Lois. “Look at me, honey. Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  “But if you won’t even talk, what are we doing here?”

  Zarkoff focused his piercing gaze on Ray Carter. “Was there anything else, Mr. Carter, or is your committee just going to sit here whining?”

  Ray’s jaw took on the hardness of granite as he bit out his next words. “Perhaps we could come back to the issue of pay cuts in a while. Maybe you feel more comfortable right now talking about work conditions. We’re particularly concerned with the cuts in sick leave and the longer hours.”

  “Non-negotiable,” Zarkoff said again.

  Ray slumped back in his seat, a look that was a mixture of both warning and astonishment on his face. “Don’t do this, Mr. Zarkoff. You’ll regret it. I swear you will.”

  “Oh?” Zarkoff asked, looking amused.

  Lois jumped up, unwilling to let Ray lead them right into a strike. “Mr. Zarkoff, our members are getting angry. If you don’t give us a few concessions, this committee can’t be responsible for what they might do.”

  “Are you people threatening me?” Zarkoff asked, amused.

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  Ray’s and Lois’s answers came simultaneously, but Ray shot her a scathing look that said, “Let me handle this.” Lois bit her tongue.

  “Yes, Mr. Zarkoff,” Ray said. “We are threatening you. There’s a lot at stake here. To you, it’s just another takeover, a bigger profit. To us, it’s our livelihood.”

  Zarkoff studied his cigar. “And what a livelihood it is,” he said. “Some of you people have earned a hundred eighty thousand a year.”

  “That was a long time ago,” George Vanderwall piped in. “Since then, we’ve watched our pay be chiseled on until it’s almost half of what we used to make.”

  “It’s difficult to get public sympathy when you’re still making a hundred grand, Mr. Vanderwall.”

  “We don’t all make that much,” Lois argued. “Some of us make substantially less. The point is, when we came to work for this airline in good faith, years ago, we had certain salaries and built our lifestyles in accordance with those salaries. There’s no security anymore. If we take a twenty-five percent cut, those pilots who were once earning a hundred eighty thousand and are now down to a hundred thousand will only be making seventy-five thousand. They have mortgages, Mr. Zarkoff. College expenses for their children. Are you saying that they’re wrong to have counted on their salaries and expected their dedication to this company to at least be repaid with a little security?”

  Zarkoff chuckled, the raspy sound chilling her blood. “My heart bleeds for you poverty-stricken souls,” he droned. “Well, I can see you people feel pretty strongly about this. If that’s the case, then I guess you’ll just have to do what you have to do.”

  Ray Carter’s eyes flashed fire. Lois’s flashed alarm. “What are you saying, Mr. Zarkoff?”

  “I’m just saying that if you people want to strike, nobody’s stopping you. That way you can make your little statement, and I can get on with running my airline.”

  “It’s our airline, too,” Lois said. “Are you seriously willing to jeopardize the safety of the passengers by bringing in new trainees to fill our cockpits?”

  Zarkoff’s grin was all satisfaction. “I have three hundred pilots completing training in Houston right now. They can be here in an afternoon, and we won’t have to cancel a single flight.”

  “You lowdown—”

  “Ray!” Lois stopped the words coming out of his mouth and willed her face not to reveal the rage she felt. “Mr. Zarkoff, don’t you have the slightest concern for the people who have given their lives to this airline?”

  Zarkoff stood up, his bulky frame dominating the small room. A cloudy haze of smoke hung like a royal aura over his head. “My concern is in making this into a profitable company, and if you people don’t want to play the game, then there are hundreds of others who will. And I assure you, none of them will expect to start at a hundred grand or even seventy-five. It’s about time for a housecleaning, anyway. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the press is outside waiting for a statement. I’ll be sure to pass along how pleased I am with the way negotiations turned out.”

  Lois and the other four committee members gaped at him in shocked silence while he gathered his things.

  Erin waited with several others outside the bargaining room, which was really the pilots’ lounge, for the meeting to break up. It was too early, she thought. They hadn’t been in there that long, and there was a multitude of problems to be hashed out. But Erin didn’t want to go home. She wanted to wait for her friend so she’d have Lois to confide in. She wanted to spill out her heart about Addison, to hear her friend’s no-nonsense advice, whatever it might be. So she waited.

  The wait was not long. In moments the door opened. Zarkoff was the first one out, still wearing the Attila the Hun expression he had worn the first day she’d seen him. Others filed out with grim faces.

  When everyone had left the room except for Lois, Erin went inside. Lois was still at the table, her head buried in her arms, and her papers scattered around her.

  “Lois?” Erin asked.

  Lois looked up, misery evident in every line of her face. “Oh, Erin. It was awful. We blew it.”

  Erin sat down across from her roommate. “What happened?”

  Lois leaned back and focused on the ceiling. “He wouldn’t budge. He said every issue we brought up was non-negotiable. Finally, when we were getting nowhere, and tempers were rising, he said that if we didn’t like it, we were certainly welcome to strike. He said he’d replace every last one of us before the day was over if we did. And Erin, I know he will.”

  “That’s it? No bargaining? No discussion? No nothing?”

  “No. We’re sunk, Erin. Those pilots are going to demand a strike, and we’re all going to lose our jobs. I can’t cross the picket line if I’m on the negotiating committee! And you…you haven’t even had the chance to fly yet since your suspension! What are we going to do?”

  Erin propped her chin on her hand and shook her head balefully. “I don’t know, Lois. How long do you think we have?”

  “Are you kidding? I expect a strike vote by tomorrow. The most time we have is two or three days. I don’t know how to make them understand that he wants us to strike.”

  “Maybe it’s the principle of the thing,” Erin said. “Maybe they’re all willing to lose their jobs to keep from working under his conditions.”

  “It sounds real idealistic,” Lois muttered. “But when those bills come due and their kids start needing shoes, let’s see whose principles are strongest then.”

  “You’re going to fight it, then? Try to hold off the strike?”

  “I can’t do that, Erin,” Lois said, defeated. “Not without some solution. What I
have to do is find some other way. Some way to wake that man up.”

  Erin felt exactly the same sentiment, but not about Zarkoff. What she needed was some way to get through to Addison, but she feared it was too late. He’d already cast her off. And she couldn’t talk to Lois about her problem now. Not when Lois’s own concerns were so immediate, so burdensome.

  Both downhearted, the two women went home, feeling like they might each wake up the next day to a world collapsed or entirely changed. They only hoped that Madeline’s usually high spirits could inject some life into their own.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Addison beat out the last few lines on his laptop. His report finished once and for all, he sat staring at the wall for a moment, trying and failing to conjure up some happiness.

  Feeling like a soldier who’d just come in from frontline battle, he turned off the table lamp, casting the apartment into bleak darkness, and went to the couch. He sank down, lying on his back, and stared at the ceiling above him.

  What was he going to do about this impossible choice he faced? What was he going to do about his professional life? What was he going to do about Erin?

  It was frightening, even contemplating quitting the NTSB, when it had been such an anchor to him since Amanda’s death. It had been his vengeance for his wife’s crash. It had been his purpose for going on.

  Now the purpose seemed hollow and futile. The loneliness was still there, as well as his need for human love, in larger doses than three days at a time. He needed Erin, not in fragments or phone conversations. He needed her always.

  Summoning all his courage, he considered the possibility that it was time for some other man to fill his shoes, someone else who had a debt to collect, a passion for the illusive lives he may or may not save in his work, a need to feel he was doing something, however naive that feeling may be. Maybe that person could take up the cause and see it through, finish the work Addison had started. Maybe it was time for him to go back to piloting in one form or another. He’d watched Erin get her wings back. Was it time he sought out his own? Was it time to end this dark phase of his life and enter a much brighter one centered on love instead of disaster?

  Not certain which way he should turn, he chose to fall on his knees and take the matter to God.

  Erin sat on the couch between Lois and Madeline that night, desperately fighting her urge to go to bed and cry her heart out. But Lois needed her. They watched the news, waiting to see the press’s interpretation of the contract negotiations, but all Erin could see or hear was Addison’s face as he’d told her he needed time to think.

  Pain twisted like a knife inside her, carving out a growing hollow that she doubted would heal. She now knew how difficult it had been for Addison to get over his loss of Amanda, for she had lost Addison, not to death, but to circumstance.

  “Here it is!” Lois said as the Southeast logo appeared on the screen. She leaned over to turn it up. “Listen.”

  “…after the recent takeover by Trans Western. Collin Zarkoff, sometimes dubbed the Lee Iacocca of the airline industry, had this to say about negotiations that took place at the Southeast headquarters tonight.”

  The film clip showed Zarkoff standing proudly out in front of a Southeast aircraft, as if it were his own personal creation. He smiled, projecting a different image than his usual grim-faced persona, and he played to the press like a master. “I believe the Southeast pilots and I have come to an understanding tonight,” he assured the reporters. “We had a nice little talk, got some things aired out, and I think they realize that I have nothing but the best in mind for this airline.”

  “Will there be a strike?” Carl Logan, a well-known field reporter, asked.

  Zarkoff set his massive arm around the interviewer’s shoulders and chuckled as if they’d been lifelong buddies. “Well, you know, I’m not holding my breath, Carl. We both laid our cards out tonight, and I think we each know where the other stands.”

  “The man should go into politics,” Lois muttered through her teeth.

  “He can’t. He’s making too much money with his airlines.”

  “The media people love him,” Lois went on. “‘The Lee Iacocca of the airline industry!’ If they only knew.”

  Erin hugged her knees to her chest. “Maybe you should tell them. Might hamper his good-natured image a bit. Give them a view from the other side.”

  “Yeah,” Lois sighed, “but how? He’s been playing this game a lot longer than we have.”

  The telephone rang, startling them both, and Erin couldn’t help bounding toward it.

  “It’s probably one of the union members,” Lois said. “The phone’ll be ringing off the hook tonight!”

  Erin ignored the speculation and grabbed the phone, praying it was Addison. “Hello?”

  “Erin? It’s Frank,” the caller said, dashing her hopes. She lowered herself to the chair beside the telephone and tried to hide the disappointment in her voice.

  “Hi, Frank.”

  “Listen,” he said. “I just heard the news and I’m anticipating a strike vote tomorrow. We’ve got to get you up before then so you won’t be counted as inactive when things start happening. So I’m scheduling you for the eleven o’clock flight to Washington, D.C., tomorrow morning.”

  Washington? she thought dismally. That was probably the flight Addison was taking. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose.

  “Erin? You’re not having second thoughts on me, are you? I have enough problems .. .”

  “No,” Erin said quickly. “I’ll be there. Count on me.”

  “I will,” he said.

  When she hung up, she sat staring at the phone for a minute, thinking of the irony—the absurdity—of her piloting Addison’s flight.

  She stood up, sighing from her soul, fighting the tears threatening her. “I have to go to bed,” she told her roommates. “I have to fly to Washington tomorrow.”

  “Thank goodness,” Lois said. “That’ll get you back on the payroll. Now if we can just keep from snatching you back off it in a strike.”

  Lois watched Erin rush to her room, wishing from the depths of her soul that she could help her in some way. But there was nothing she could do to lift her friend’s spirits. When Madeline had gone to bed, Lois got on her knees and prayed for her friend. Then she prayed for the negotiations she seemed so helpless to influence.

  Just before she started to bed, Lois unplugged the telephone. To Lois, the silence was sweet relief from the barrage of questions she faced. To Erin, the silence was reinforced certainty that she and Addison were finished.

  To Addison, Lois’s act resulted in an unanswered ring sounding uselessly against his ear, making him sure that his hesitation, his confusion, had driven Erin away, and that she wouldn’t answer his call if he were the last man on earth. Still, he kept trying to get through well into the night, until he drifted into a restless sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It felt good to be back in uniform, but the relief seemed secondary to the heavyheartedness Erin felt the next morning. Addison hadn’t called. He’d had all night to think, to reevaluate, and whatever he’d come up with, it hadn’t warranted a phone call.

  Lois followed behind her at the airport, quietly absorbed in her own thoughts about the union meeting and strike vote that were slated to take place that morning. Erin had the deep need to tell her friend what had happened with Addison, that the relationship was over and that she couldn’t remember what life had been like before he’d entered her life. What would it be like without him now?

  That was the worst thing about going on with life when others made their exits. No longer would Mick be there on the long trips, to banter and joke with, to confide in, to turn to. No longer would Addison be there to fill the yawning void in her heart.

  But she couldn’t tell Lois that, not when both their careers hung in the balance. Lois was carrying union responsibilities on her shoulders like a delicate time bomb. In just a few hours they mi
ght not even have their jobs left. But that was secondary to her losing Addison.

  Take the job, Lord. Just give me another chance with him.

  Lois got her an absentee ballot, since she’d be on her flight by the time the meeting began. She waited, preoccupied, while Erin voted against the strike. Erin dropped the vote through the slit in the locked box and studied her friend. Lois was staring at the stack of ballots as if they would come alive and riot against her. “You okay, Lo?”

  “Yeah,” Lois whispered. “Just a little nervous. I’m just praying all the pilots who won’t be here will have sense enough to use these absentee ballots or the computer votes they can make through other hubs. And I’m praying they’ll cast the right vote.” Her eyes lost their glaze, and she glanced at Erin.

  “What about you? How are you holding up? First flight and all…”

  “I’m fine,” Erin assured her. “Just fine.”

  Lois took a heavy breath. Her haggardness testified to her lack of sleep the night before. “Look, don’t let any of this distract you today. There’s nothing more you can do, now that you’ve voted. Just pretend nothing unusual is happening and concentrate on that flight, okay?”

  Erin smiled at her friend’s concern. “I will. Don’t worry.”

  Lois glanced up the corridor. “Well, I guess I’d better go start lobbying. Maybe I can change a few minds in the time I have before the meeting.”

  Erin watched Lois head toward a cluster of pilots in the coffee shop. She couldn’t help being grateful for a moment alone with her thoughts.

  Erin checked her watch, saw that she still had plenty of time before she had to be at her gate, and she made her way upstairs to the pilot’s lounge. It was still empty because of the early hour, so she went in and closed the door behind her. She crossed her arms and ambled over to the windowsill. Through the glass she could see the maze of runways lined with planes waiting for clearance to take off.

  Again, the irony of her situation struck her. Addison would be on her plane this morning. She’d be overcoming one complication in her life while another one became more deeply rooted.