The Girl in the Blue Beret

9.



THE NIGHT BEFORE HE LEFT FOR PARIS, MARSHALL DREAMED he couldn’t pass a check ride. He made goof after goof. He stupidly called out that the reciprocal for due east was 230 degrees. He woke up, kicking off the covers.

Dreams like this were common for many pilots. Marshall would dream he was being tested for his pilot’s license, or his captain’s certification, and everything would go wrong. Numbers etched on his brain did cartwheels. As he lay in bed, he thought about Neil Armstrong, who had commanded the first orbital docking mission. His Gemini capsule had spun out of control. He and his crewmate were spinning so fast they were about to black out, but Armstrong figured out that a thruster must have stuck and made an instant, intuitive move that stopped the spinning. He had to make an unscheduled splashdown in the Pacific, but he prevented a catastrophe and became a national hero.

Looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, Marshall wondered what his own first words on the moon might have been.

“Sorry, folks. I hate to say this but the moon is plug-ugly! We spent twenty billion dollars to come here?

“And where are the moon pies?”

He showered, shaved, ate a bowl of Total, and drank the last of the orange juice. He knocked off the Times crossword in fifteen minutes. Then he washed his bowl and tried to think of what he had forgotten. He had half a day to kill. He repacked his two large bags to make room for his portable typewriter, and he stuffed his brain bag with his French books and some of the letters and photos from the war. Reciprocals kept going through his mind.





MARSHALL, ALWAYS DIGNIFIED on an aircraft, wore dress pants, a blue blazer with brass buttons, and a dark tie. He was seated in row 21, next to two overweight tourists in blue-jeans. It annoyed him to see passengers in jeans. As a pilot, he might have deadheaded in the cockpit jump seat, but now, flying standby, he sat in coach—an aisle seat without even a view of the horizon. He told himself he didn’t need a window. He had crossed the Atlantic so many times, he knew all the coastlines intimately. He sometimes imagined he knew the shapes and textures of particular places in the ocean, the angles of sunlight and shadows on hidden deeps.

When he first joined the airline, the journey to Paris took twenty hours on a Connie, with stops in Newfoundland and Iceland. The pilots slept in shifts, in bunks behind the cockpit. On a 747, the flight was about seven hours. A 747 captain could fly high above the weather on elegant, precise great circle routes. But a Connie flew at fifteen or twenty thousand feet, right in the weather. Marshall would take a Connie between clouds, around them, or sometimes above. He felt that he could maneuver the sky itself to keep the flight smooth. In one of his recurrent flying dreams, he was sitting in an easy chair atop a gleaming metal wing, steering the wing through the sky by thought control. Bank right. The huge wing dipped right, just as he wanted. Straighten. Climb. Accelerate. The magic machine obeyed precisely. He was alone in the sky, master of flight.

The sun was low when the plane was pushed back from the gate and began its crawl to the taxi lane. He couldn’t see the wing flaps from his seat, but he heard them coming down. Whenever Marshall had deadheaded, he was an alert back-seat driver. He could hear each sound the plane made. He could always hear mistakes.

Captain Vogel’s takeoff today wasn’t bad. Marshall loved the speed, the rush, the power of a takeoff even when he wasn’t in charge. He loved racing down the runway. His mind went through all the moves—easing back the yoke, feeling the wings lifting. You were the plane, the bird. You were soaring, rising, guiding, turning. Breathless. A plane wanted to fly; takeoffs were its natural bent. You trusted yourself to the machine. You were the machine. You maneuvered so smoothly that the passengers would think they were sitting in their living rooms. Now, as a passenger, Marshall could hear every note of the ascent. He could feel the engines spool. He could guess the cruising altitude when they reached it. Thirty-six thousand feet, he thought. The heading was about forty-seven degrees east.

The passengers began to squirm after the plane leveled out and the seat-belt sign went off. A woman across from him asked for a blanket.

“Would you like something to drink, sir?” A flight attendant with bulky arms and blowzy hair trundled her cart just past his row and braked it.

“A ginger ale, thanks.”

She scooped the ice with a plastic cup, her fingers touching the ice. The other stew had wrinkles. The airline business was going to hell, he thought. He had to admit their job was hard. Only the stews, on their feet, up and down the aisle, would feel the strain of the 747’s peculiar three-degree nose tilt.

The flight was smooth enough. Airliners had to be flown without flair. In the B-17 sometimes you were bouncing like a child on a rocking horse. The yoke would be vibrating like a jackhammer, and you held on, on a wild ride, better than anything a carnival ever offered.

The man next to him tried to talk about the Mets, but Marshall immersed himself in the packet of V-mail he had written to Loretta from Molesworth Airfield in England.