The Pilot Whose Name Was on the Maps

“Nobody in this valley is hiring a woman to spray their wheat, Laurie. They’re hiring me.”

Don Olheiser said it without looking up from the desk. He said it the way a man reads off a fuel price, flat and certain, while he slid my paycheck across the scarred plywood toward me.

I was still in my flight suit, eleven minutes out of the plane, with fungicide mist dried on my sleeve and the red line of the helmet across my forehead.

The check was for two weeks. Ninety-one hours at $22 an hour. Two thousand and two dollars, before they took the taxes out.

Under his elbow, half under a coffee cup, was the invoice book. The top sheet was 480 acres of spring wheat east of Hoople, fungicide, July 9. Fourteen dollars an acre. Six thousand seven hundred and twenty dollars.

I had flown those 480 acres at six that morning, ducking a set of power lines on the south end on every pass.

The phone on the wall rang while I was standing there. Don picked it up and his whole voice changed. It went warm and easy, the voice he used at the elevator and the café.

“Yep. Yep, I got it done this morning. Went on real nice. No, no trouble with the wires, I’ve been flying under those wires since you were in diapers.”

He laughed. He listened. He said, “You bet. I’ll be over your west quarter Thursday, weather permitting,” and hung up.

Then he looked at me. He did not look ashamed. He looked tired and a little impatient, like I was a gate he had to get out and open.

“That’s how it works,” he said. “They know my name. Forty years they’ve known my name. You go putting yours on it, half of them walk to the outfit in Drayton.”

“I’m not putting my name on anything,” I said. “I’m just flying.”

“Then fly,” he said. “And cash your check.”

I folded the check into the chest pocket of my flight suit and walked back out through the hangar into the sun, and looked at the yellow plane.

She was a single seat turbine sprayer with booms down both wings and a hopper of a little over five hundred gallons. I had put better than eight hundred hours on her.

Nick Wald was rinsing the hopper lines at the mix trailer. He was eighteen that summer, a lanky farm kid with the good sense to say nothing. He held up a thumb with a question in it. I held mine up back. Then I went home.