The Pilot Whose Name Was on the Maps

The kitchen table

The night after the paycheck, I sat down at the kitchen table with my logbook and the stack of my weekly time slips and a calculator that had been my dad’s.

I added the acres in my remarks column, then counted what was still on the board. Six thousand four hundred by the end of the season.

Six thousand four hundred times fourteen dollars an acre was eighty nine thousand six hundred dollars.

My time slips for the season would come to about two hundred and twelve hours, counting every hour under the wing waiting on wind. At twenty two dollars, four thousand six hundred and sixty four dollars.

I sat and looked at those two numbers for a long time.

I know the airplane costs money. Fuel, insurance, the engine overhaul. Nobody fair expects the pilot to take home the whole fourteen dollars.

But everywhere I ever flew, the pilot’s share ran about thirty cents on the dollar. On eighty nine thousand six hundred, that was around twenty six thousand eight hundred and eighty.

And that was not the part that kept me up. The phone call was. He was not just paying me like a hired hand. He was telling the men I flew for that I did not exist.

Pete came in from the shop at ten that night with grease to his elbows. He saw my face and the calculator and he washed his hands at the sink a long time before he sat down.

“What is it,” he said.

I showed him the check and the invoice numbers and told him about the phone call. I told it flat, the way his dad would have. I was too tired to cry.

Pete looked at the numbers for a long time. He has big hands and he put them flat on the table on either side of the logbook, like he was holding the table down.

“He’s telling them he’s flying,” Pete said.

“Every one of them. I heard him.”

“He can’t fly. Everybody knows he can’t fly.”

“Nobody knows,” I said. “He never told anybody about the medical. He’s been telling the whole valley he’s out there every morning.”

Pete got up and stood at the window. You could see the yard light and the dark machine shed and beyond it the flat fields going out forever under the stars.

“I’ll go talk to him,” he said.

“You can go talk to him,” I said. “I’m not going to.”

He turned around and looked at me. He was not angry. He wanted to understand.

“Why not, Laurie? Why not just go in there and have it out with him?”

“You don’t argue with your father in law in his own hangar, Pete. Not in this family. He’d dig in, and I’d lose my seat, and you’d lose your dad, and nothing would change.”

“Then what,” Pete said.

I put my hand on the logbook. “So I fly. I sign in every morning and write it all down, same as always. The maps don’t lie. Sooner or later somebody who matters will look at one.”

People ask why I didn’t just quit, or call a lawyer, or tell the whole café. The plain answer: I had nowhere else to fly in that valley that summer, and the only one a scene would have hurt was my husband.