Better that than the truth.
***
“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
“Unless you’ve seen an arrow.”
“Okay, but as far as jets go—”
“Should you even be talking about this?”
I shrugged.
“So what’s so special about it?” Sam asked, humouring me.
He and Sandy were having a barbeque. Throwing a bit of a party, really. They had the same sort of house as the rest of us, same dry yard, but for some reason theirs was usually where we ended up for barbeques. Everybody was there, the whole bunch, kids and all, adults standing around on the patchy lawn, sitting at the picnic table, milling around the kitchen, kids screaming and running and falling down and laughing. Nobody was listening to Sam and me discuss ‘military secrets’. Hell, we all worked at the same base; everybody would know eventually.
“Well I was talking to Jonesy,” I said, “and he reckons it’s more like a rocket than a plane. You know, long. Tubular. And it has four wings, like this.” I made a cross of my arms. “But set right back. Too far back, in my opinion. Like on the end of an arrow.”
Sam leaned close and said quietly, “You know what I reckon it is?”
“What?”
“I bet… You say it looks like a rocket?”
I nodded.
“I bet, what it is…” He looked around, exaggerating caution. “It’s a rocket.”
I flapped my hands as if to brush him away and he laughed. There was no malice in it. I laughed with him.
“Hey,” he said suddenly, as if the question had just occurred to him. “Why do they call it the Arrow?”
“Because it has four wings like— Oh. Funny.”
As if in agreement, a burst of laughter erupted from where Bull was playing with the kids. He was holding one of them upside down by her ankles, shaking giggles from her as other laughing children clambered over him like a climbing frame. Kennedy was stood at the grill, apron on, beer in one hand and tongs the other. “You need a hand there?” he called to Bull. Ernst Kennedy would one day become ‘Pres’ as in president, but until then he was just Kennedy. “Nah,” was Bull’s answer, to which Kennedy replied, “I was talking to the kids.” He put down his beer and tongs and began rolling his sleeves as if to join them. “Honey, no,” Claire protested, but she was laughing. The very idea of her husband going against Bull was hilarious. Bull didn’t so much fly planes as wear them. Even Doc joined in, taking on that official voice we’ve all hated at some point – “For the sake of your health, I strongly advise against it” – and that got a laugh, too. Doc was our natural enemy, the only man on base who could stop any of us flying, but not today. Today was a good day, a happy day, and I remember it fondly as one of the last good times we were all together.
“Seriously,” Sam said, drawing himself away from the kids at play and the sight of his wife in a crowd of his friends, “I have heard something about it that sits odd with me.” I didn’t ask where he’d heard it, or why. If there really was an Arrow, it would be Sam who flew it. Anybody could have told you that.
“What? It uses rocket fuel? Because it’s a rocket?”
Sam didn’t humour me this time. He just said, “It goes sideways.”
I frowned at him but all he did was drink more beer. “Sideways?”
Sam shrugged, though I think he already knew a bit about it, even then.
“Maybe it rolls,” I said, making a twisting motion with my beer bottle. It wouldn’t be able to go sideways, but maybe it could alter its course in diagonal. Dangerous, though. Stability and control at supersonic speed were the two main concerns of most of our FTTs, each flight test technique measuring and evaluating these capabilities. Another problem at high speed was the damn thermal thicket, severe heating caused by aerodynamic friction causing all sorts of merry hell. But the Arrow wasn’t focussing on any of these things. Not as a main priority, anyway. The Arrow was something very different.
“I’ve heard it’s a spy plane,” I told him. “Hard to detect.”
Sam neither confirmed or denied the suggestion.
“You flying it?”
Sam smiled and said, “Can’t tell you.” It was the way he said yes.
“Sandra know?”
Sam looked at where she stood with the wives and girlfriends by the kitchen door. The other women were laughing but Sandy only smiled, one hand on the swell of her stomach.
“She knows.”
“She give you hell for it?”
She looked over as if sensing she was our topic of conversation instead of planes for a change. Sandy knew the job, and she knew the risks, but she liked to remind Sam from time to time that she didn’t like it. Sam raised his beer to her and she turned her smile up for him, blew him a kiss.
“Just a little bit,” Sam said as he smiled at her.
Sam flew the Arrow twice, the first time less than two weeks after that barbeque. You can believe Sandra gave him hell for it before the second time.
“I heard they brought some scientists in from New Mexico.”
Sam’s smile was suddenly gone and he said, “Not just scientists.” Before I could ask what he meant, Fliss came out of the kitchen with a huge bowl of salad and a plate full of bread rolls and announced that Jenny was here, giving us a chance to tone down the humour before she stepped out into the yard.
Unofficially, this little shindig was her farewell party. It was the last time she’d be part of one of our get-togethers. We did it all the time, us pilots and wives. We barely associated with anyone else, actually. Drinks at someone’s place, dinners, group nights out at Ratty’s. But Jenny was taking the kids ‘back home’ to live with her mother for a while and we all knew she’d never be back. Kimble had augered in last month, a miscalculation in fuel consumption leaving him deadstick and spinning before plummeting in a fall he didn’t or couldn’t try to eject from. He’d crunched about fifty yards from the runway. That one was bad. They were all bad, but that one was ugly. I remember watching the duty officer on the phone trying to explain to someone what had happened and he couldn’t do it. He just kept swallowing the words, choking on them, voice breaking with the effort to get them out. In the end I took the phone from him but I couldn’t do it either. I’d put the phone down, then took it off the hook.
“I didn’t know if she’d make it,” Sam said.
For a moment, Jennifer stood framed by the doorway, her two girls looking around from behind her legs. A picture missing its husband and daddy. Then Sam called, “Hey Jenny!” and there was a chorus of “Hi!” and “Hello!” from everybody else, jokes called at the kids, and they were all welcomed back into the crowd.
We forgot all about the Arrow.
***
We all had to sign additional confidentiality contracts after the crash, documents swearing us to secrecy above and beyond standard military practice. There was no expiration date to those agreements, no disclosure after sixty years, exemption from the freedom of information, et cetera, et cetera. But there is an expiration date to this old sack of a body I’m trapped in, and I’m pretty close to it now. I’ll go with a few regrets, like everybody else I reckon, but I don’t want to go with any secrets because they eat you up worse than this cancer I got and I’m not sure they’ll stop eating me even when I’m gone. I never used to be one for believing in anything after but I’ve seen things since then that changed my perspective. Knocked me sideways, you could say. Last thing I want is to go to wherever we go after this still being devoured by secrets. I’ve enough to worry about without adding that.
I saw the Arrow but I never flew it. Nobody flew it, as far as I’m aware, except Sam. I did get to see it up close though because I flew the modified B50 that carried it into the sky. Only for its first drop launch. The second time I saw it I stayed on the ground and shortly after that I saw it again coming in fast, dipping down and flipping and hitting sideways, rolling and breaking open into a fiery ball that opened up like a
curtain to spit out the black charred pieces.
I loved the B50. She was a mighty bird. Nintey-nine feet long, one hundred and forty across the wings, decent cruise speed. Trustworthy. Reliable. Bessie, ours was called, with a long-legged redhead stretched out across her in vivid colours, head turned to smile at you as if she couldn’t care less where she was flying as long as she was flying with you. First time I saw my precious B50 with the Arrow strapped to its belly, though, was the first time I didn’t want to fly. There was something wrong about that thing. This isn’t hindsight here. I felt a genuine sense of foreboding, looking at the Arrow, like the curdling you get in the stomach when you think you hear a rattlesnake. It was longer than I’d imagined. The B50 is nearly a hundred feet long and the Arrow was nearly half that, not including the length of what Sam called ‘the lightning stick’ pointing out from the nose. The wings stuck out like the flights of an arrow or dart and they looked flimsy, like thin sheets of aluminium. Must have been about as thick as a sandwich, at most. Far too short as well, I thought. Looking at it, I couldn’t believe it even flew. It shouldn’t have.
Sam was already inside. Normally he’d have climbed into it at 7000 feet but he needed to be fixed in this time. I knocked hello on the canopy, heard him knock back. The glass was reflective. In fact, the metal of the entire thing was so highly polished it shone like a sliver mirror. I didn’t like the way it distorted our reflections either, bending our features around into strange shapes that seemed wrong not just as representations of ourselves but because the Arrow didn’t seem to reflect light right. I hated carrying it and felt the whole time like my precious Bessie was pregnant with some monstrous malignant parasite. It was a pleasure to drop the damn thing into the clouds.
“Twenty-five thousand and climbing.”
Roger that. How’s she feel up there?
“Feels fine,” I reported. “Bessie’s always a smooth fine ride.”
Roger that.
My co-pilot that trip was Kennedy. He looked at me and said, “Except she ain’t.” He had his hand over the mike, his words only for me. “She ain’t right, is she Finn?”
Finn as in Huckleberry. I’m named after Tom Sawyer which was the only book my father ever read so of course everybody called me Huck, or Finn, or Huckleberry.
“Just a bubble in the pipes or something,” I said. “She’s fine.”
She felt heavy, though. Whatever the Arrow weighed, Bessie was flying like she felt more than every pound of it, dragging her down. Her turns were sluggish and shaky even when there wasn’t any chop.
“You okay back there Sam?”
“He can’t hear you,” Kennedy reminded me. Again.
I didn’t like that, either. I didn’t like Sam without a radio. No test pilot should be without a radio, and yet the Arrow didn’t have one. Part of the stealth thing, maybe, but I got the impression Sam didn’t think so. He said it didn’t bother him. He’d always had a great memory and I’d seen the truth of that, seen him relay every change and movement after landing a test where the radio failed. He’d be doing that again now, this time on purpose, remembering everything his control panel told him as well as when. “But I don’t think they’re so interested in all that at this stage,” he told me. “I think they just want to know if it works.” And maybe that was a good thing. Too many pilots have crunched because they were paying too much attention to the controls, diligently relaying information when they should’ve been pulling up or pulling out of whatever envelope-pushing power drive they were in. When I think of how he came in on that second landing, though, I wonder if he forgot he didn’t have one and I wonder what he would have said before the screams. I’m glad I’ll never know.
“Hey Kennedy? What do you know about this thing?”
He checked the instruments more than he needed to when he answered, his eyes everywhere but on me.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “I know that.”
I was both glad and worried that someone else felt it too.
“Nosing over at twenty-six thousand feet,” I told control.
Roger that. Twenty-six thousand.
“Let’s dump it,” I said to Kennedy. “About time Sam did some of the work around here.”
He smiled. “Amen to that.”
I could tell Kennedy was thinking the same thing I was, better him than me or there but for the grace of God go I. Not that we’d have ever been assigned the Arrow. Something else it didn’t have was the option to punch out, and there was really only one of us you could count on to never do that. I reckon about fifty percent of pilots have had to eject at some point in their career, but Sam wasn’t one of them. I’d seen him land deadstick, twice, when his fuel ran out, rather than eject. He joked it was too dangerous, that punching out was just killing yourself before the ground could do it for you, but maybe he wasn’t really joking. When you eject, you’re fired from the jet by a blast of nitroglycerine like a human bullet and a lot of men got hurt hitting the edge of the cockpit on the way out. Some even died. One guy I heard of, caught in a spin, ejected sideways and was torn apart. The air you’re fired into is like a wall at the speeds we flew. Which was why so many tried to bring the plane down no matter what problems they were having. And, of course, for many it was an issue of pride. Not me. I’ve ejected three times. First and second time bust up my knee, and the third time broke both ankles but luckily there was never any permanent mobility damage. I was hurt badly each time but I survived. Maybe I could’ve wrestled the plane down and escaped injury altogether, but maybe not. Maybe I’d have died.
For the Arrow, Sam had no choice. He was bolted in. The only parachutes the Arrow had were drogues, chutes to slow it down for landing. Not that a parachute would necessarily help you much anyway. We’d seen plenty of chutes fail to open, too, pilots – friends – hitting the ground and becoming puddles or long smears on the sand. No, when Sam landed, a ground crew had to get him out. He had the means to do it himself if he had to, but it was pretty cramped in there and not an easy thing to do, Sam said.
He managed it that second time, though. Even after all that rolling, with fire filling the tube, he managed to pop that top off and clamber out, but by then it was far too late.
***
One of the first things Sandra asked me was if there was any pain and so of course I lied. I told her Sam died on impact. That it was all very quick. I don’t know if she asked anybody else. I don’t think so. You wouldn’t, would you, once you had the answer you wanted, even if you suspected it was a lie. Especially then, I think. I told her that her husband died a hero and a patriot and she slapped me. She told me, reminded me, that he died a husband and a father, and then she beat at my chest and then she clung to me, handfuls of my uniform bunched in her fists as she sobbed. I could feel her bump between us, and I’m sure something thumped there, too. A kick or throb as Sandy cried. It broke my heart. She kept blaming the machine. A lot of wives did when it happened. It’s understandable. Speak to any surviving pilot, though, and he’ll tell you they’d have done it differently, somehow. Whatever was wrong with the damn plane, however good a friend the dead pilot might have been, the rest of us would be convinced we could have landed it safely, and in kidding ourselves we placed blame on the dead. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, but we did it so we could keep flying. But Sam was the best pilot I’d ever known, and I’d seen the Arrow, and so when Sandy cried, “It was the plane, it was the damn plane,” I was inclined to agree. None of us thought we could have handled it better. After a moment I held her, and a while after that I stroked her hair and said the things people say when it’s the tone of voice that matters more than the words. Awful things, like everything was going to be okay. You’ll be okay. They’ll look after you.
I held her like that a few times. She said seeing the uniform reminded her, so whenever I visited after work she had to go through it all again. I stopped visiting after that but one day she phoned and told me to wear my civvies. She reminded me of my promise to Sam
, my obligation to her and their unborn child, and though she had her girlfriends she worried that her grief was beginning to bore them, or wear them down, remind them that their own husbands faced the same risk every day. Back then, in the 50s, test pilots died with alarming frequency. Jets were new, experimental, and fighter pilots were keen to test themselves as well as the planes. Some reports put the deaths at one each week across the country and I can easily believe that. We knew it, and we faced it, even enjoyed it most of the time like it was an enemy to be beaten. Flying at those speeds, being in control of that kind of thrust, you felt the power of the machine all the way through you and you were free, so long as you could control it. Nothing held you down, nothing held you back, when you were up there, and as well as free you felt kind of…separate. From everything. Special, I suppose. The world was below you and you just…were. You existed, and you pushed that existence to its limits.
The money was good, too. $5000 a year, in those days? I know it motivated Sam. He wanted his kid to go to the best college they could afford. It was never just about the money though, not even for Sam, and however attractive it seemed financially, it was always hard on the families. I didn’t have one myself, but I saw it. Saw it all the time. Deborah Pattern, she had a full nervous breakdown after Tailor crunched. Inflight explosion, no chance of survival. When Kimble ploughed a new ditch into the airfield, Jennifer took the kids back home. Same with Lenny, Hamilton, Lee, all of them friends. All of them leaving wives behind, leaving children. I used to say this was why I stayed single. Then, all of a sudden it seemed, though really it had been a long time coming, I had a ready-made family of my own to worry about.
I can’t tell you the first time I kissed Sandra, but I remember it was as she broke away from one of those comforting embraces and I know she kissed me back at first. After that, I went back to not visiting for a while until she asked. I don’t think she ever really loved me, not in the way a woman should love her husband, and certainly not the way she loved Sam, but we made it work for a while. I do think she saw me as a good man. Someone who would take care of her. And she knew how much I loved her, knows how much I love her still, which is an awful lot even if she can’t give it back the same way. But sometimes I wonder if she wasn’t the only one who saw our relationship as a way of staying close to Sam. It was a complicated and sometimes painful marriage but I took care of her and Tom as best I could.
Interzone #266 - September-October 2016 Page 7
