Jack wiped the residue of the plastic cleaner from the Vagabond’s window trim. After two hours there just wasn’t much left to do with a hangared airplane. Too bad he couldn’t fly it. Just below the window was lettered his Air Force callsign: ‘Smilin’ Jack.’ It seemed sort of obvious, but the guys hadn’t been much for subtle. And it was better than what the other ‘Jack’ had been saddled with.

So he closed the hangar door and headed for the truck. There were no other cars at the airport that Saturday morning. There hadn’t been since the place closed down five months back. The Vagabond was the last plane there. Mike and Bev had sold the place to developers and moved to Arizona. With the constant on-again, off-again flight restrictions, business had gotten too slow to pay the property taxes any more. So they accepted the offer and packed up.

Jack probably should have moved out when the other guys did, but there were no hangars to be had for two hundred miles. Mike and Bev had managed to negotiate an agreement to let the hangar owners stay until the developers got their Planning Board approvals. Besides, he was still paying the mortgage on the hangar building, and couldn’t have afforded inside storage even if it were available. He had assumed that Mike and Bev would keep the field open forever, as they had when they let him put it up. And he didn’t like the idea of what tie-down storage would do to the Vagabond’s fabric.

Unfortunately, the developers’ lawyers had said that while he could leave the plane there, and fly it out once, he couldn’t do any more. Their insurance didn’t cover use of the place as an airport any more. So now he came down, cleaned off the dust, ran the engine for a while, then hit ‘The Beer Mug.’ The good news was that the Vag had never been cleaner.

The bad news was that he was drinking too much.

‘Eleven o’clock,’ he noted. Well, it would be half-past by the time Annie served him his first beer, and that was afternoon somewhere. What the hell.

In plain terms, he realized, he was lonely and frustrated. Frustrated because he’d barely been flying, except with a couple of old friends for flight reviews, in six months. Lonely because the people who used to keep him company had all gone. Five years ago, in the year 2000, it had all seemed like it would never end. Breakfast with the usual suspects at the airport restaurant and then fly somewhere for lunch. Now it was 2005, the restaurant had been closed for a year. Half of his friends had sold their airplanes and bought RVs or fishing boats. Of the rest, well a few had moved to Mexico and a bunch had gone to Canada. Some drove a couple of hundred miles to get to their hangars, and flew from there. So he never saw them any more.

Canada! Of all places. He never thought he’d see the day when he’d think of running off to Canada. But he did think about it. The flying was good there. There were no Temporary Flight Restrictions. He could fly over lakes and reservoirs. He could even maintain his own plane, and still be legal. Property was a lot less than it was here. Then he (and Mary) thought about the grandkids and their parents’ jobs in the City, and that Canada idea went out the window. This was home. Even if he was grounded, lonely, and too often drunk.

He’d been through one of these ‘too often drunk’ spells once before. But that was almost four decades ago, after he came home, home to stay, from his second tour in Vietnam. It started when he had been walking down Main Street on the way to the Armory for his first Reserve meeting. He was in uniform, of course. He was just thinking that his brand new captain’s bars looked pretty good as a counterpoint to the wings.

Coming down the street in the opposite direction was Suzanne Miller, who he hadn’t seen since they graduated from High School. God, she looked incredible. Low-rise jeans, with her belly-button sticking out. Peasant blouse with nothing underneath, leaving to the imagination. And that straight, blond hair. With a daisy at her temple, of all things. Jack had though of apple pie, and how good it was to be home.

‘Hello Suzy!’ he said as he approached. ‘What do you want, baby-killer?’ was her icy response.

Jack was taken aback. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘You heard me,’ she said. ‘You flew bombers. You’re a baby-killer. Here’s what I think of you!’ Here was this beautiful girl, one he went to high school with, had even danced with a few times, calling him this…

Before he could even start to formulate an answer, she was spitting on him. Spitting on his uniform.

‘Hey, what the hell…?’ he started to ask.

It was then that her ‘old man’ appeared. He was a mountain of beard and long hair and leather vest. ‘Is this soldier-boy bothering you, babe?’ He spoke to her, but glared at Jack. This was getting ugly, but fast. It was time to go, quickly. He glanced back in time to see both of them give him the finger.

The meeting seemed surreal. He was introduced, and introduced himself, but he wasn’t really there. He was still on the sidewalk, still on Main Street. He stammered when he talked about where he’d been, and his old squadron. On the way out he noticed that a majority of his fellow reserve officers ducked into the locker room and changed into civvies before leaving the armory. They departed carrying their uniforms in suit-bags over their shoulders.

Over beers with Mike Reilly, who’d been home for six months, he asked about that. ‘Almost every one of us has had some kind of confrontation with the long-hairs when we wear our uniforms around on the way to a meeting or to duty. So now we change on post. The Colonel doesn’t want trouble so he looks the other way. He figures it’s better than the busted jaw Buffalo got last Fall. He couldn’t fly for 90 days. Me, I just don’t need that shit.’

After Reilly went home to his wife, Jack had another beer. And another. And thought. But the beers and the thinking didn’t clear it up, so he turned to Scotch. It didn’t make sense. He had thought he was doing his duty, going over after he finished college. He had loved the flying, especially the fighter-bombers. As far as he knew and believed, his targets had been the NVA. Half the time guys that had been shooting at American infantrymen in the last 10 minutes.

Just off base, in town, the Sisters of Mercy used to run an orphanage. Jack found himself spending more and more time there, helping out, playing with the kids, sometimes cleaning or fixing the plumbing. That was where he had learned to speak Vietnamese.

The kids really got to him. A lot of them came to the orphanage after having gotten tangled up with some damned VC device designed to amputate feet and legs. The stigma of losing a limb was great in Vietnam. These kids knew it, and the light in his eyes helped them to go on. In fact, the place became so important to him that he moved up his second tour, and pulled some strings to make sure he stayed on with the same squadron.

‘Baby-killer? What the hell was that about?’ It seemed so far-removed from his experience or anything he ever did.

On top of that, the job hunt wasn’t going well. He had figured that it would be easy, but doors ought to have been open seemed to be closed. At every interview, it seemed, someone would look at him funny, or say ‘hmmm’ when they looked at the service record on his resume. And that had been that. No call back. Nothing. Sure, the local economy wasn’t good for guys with aeronautical engineering degrees, but still, something else was going on. Something he didn’t understand.

He took to spending his afternoons at Kelly’s with pool, beer, and guys who did understand. The lunch-time beer or three started to meld into the before-dinner beer or three and pretty soon the beer ran from noon to midnight. He was well-traveled. He traveled from the bar to the urinal, and back. When he ran out of beer money, a morning shift at the 7-Eleven filled in the gap. And his first six months as a returning war hero had slipped away. But not quite according to plan.

His mom didn’t say much. He didn’t really see her in any case. He usually came home drunk after she went to bed, and was up and out and at the 7-Eleven with a hangover before she got up. Really, she was just glad to have him home. All those pictures of him in uniform hid the fact that she was scared to death of losing the son who looked just like the father who had died just about the time the truce was signed in Korea.

Then along came Mary. They had gotten to talking when she came in for (of all things) an ICEE on a hot August morning. He screwed up the courage to ask her out, and ended up skipping the daily binge for the occasion. When she finally asked him to come meet her parents at dinner, they treated him like royalty. Her father, Mel, kept calling him ‘Captain Jack’ and smiling. Dolores kept trying to feed him more of everything. Even the mashed potatoes where a nice change from his recent diet of beer-nuts, Miller and Jack Daniels, with 7-Eleven twinkies and coffee for breakfast.

After dinner, Mary and Dolores went to do the dishes and suggested that ‘the boys’ go and talk in Mel’s study while ‘the girls’ did the dishes. After the cigars were lit, Mel came right out with it: ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘Mary’s very fond of you. She’s also told me that you’ve been having a tough time finding something to do since you’ve been home. How’d you like to learn the construction business? If you can be a captain in the US Air Force, I bet you could keep a crew honest. Want to give it a try?’ After Jack said ‘yes,’ Mel said, ‘Now you understand that if you break my daughter’s heart I’ll have to fire and then kick your ass.’

Mel needn’t have worried about that. Six months later, Jack asked Mary to be his wife, and she accepted. As it turned out, Mel was a good business teacher and Jack did have a way with the men, even though he hadn’t swung too many hammers himself. One thing led to another, time passed, and in time Mel turned over the reins of the business to Mary and Jack, and answered the call of the golf cart.

By the time Jack finished his stint in the Air Guard, his uniform sported oak-leaf clusters. Mary gave him a ‘major’ party to celebrate his retirement. Not having a semi-retired Thud to fly on the odd weekends any more, he had located the Vagabond on the bulletin board at Mike and Bev’s little airfield. The farmer who owned it said he’d let it go for a thousand bucks if Jack promised to fly it, and the deal was done. Then Jack had spent 20 hours trying to get his heels around the idea of an airplane that made a fighter seem tame on the ground in a cross-wind.

The Vagabond was more than an airplane. It was his ticket to a social circle in which everyone had one thing in common. They all knew the sky, and knew what it was to hold one’s fate in one’s own hands. They understood. Through all the stresses of running the business, and raising the kids, and dental work, and countless other things, he had a little ‘support group’ that revolved around breakfast.

The kids had arrived, and grew up without major incident. In their turn, two of them learned to fly in the Vagabond, though neither really ‘took’ to it. Then the grandchildren showed up, and gave Mary a full-time occupation, with overtime on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Grandpa was in charge of flying (to the horror of one daughter-in-law and one son-in-law) and fishing.

About then an offer had come to buy the business. It was enough to see to their needs for around 70 years, plus help with the grandkids’ college educations. That decided it, and just moments after he got home from Vietnam, or so it seemed, he was retired. Like clockwork, he was at the airport for breakfast each morning. A bit of puttering in the hangar followed, and then flying the Vagabond. Sometimes alone, sometimes in company with other vintage machines, and sometimes just with no particular goal in mind but to fly.

Then there was the ‘big one.’ The Vagabond took him to Alaska, to Maine, to Florida, and to New Mexico. Then home. That was enough to write home about. In fact, he wrote home to Mary every day. All along the way were the fellow pilots who understood, took him in, fed him, let him wash his clothes, then drove him to the airport at the crack of dawn.

Things went along about like that until September 11, 2001. Then all hell broke loose, and its fury was turned upon the little airplanes of America. It didn’t make sense, but there it was. Over the ensuing year, the General Aviation infrastructure struggled, then wobbled, and then it collapsed almost utterly. Three years later, four-fifths of the small airports in America had closed permanently. Most had condominiums built where runways and taxiways once stretched out. Virtually all of them were gone within 100 miles of major metropolitan areas. There was just no place to fly, even in the 90-day periods which interspersed security ‘alerts’ which nearly always came to nothing. Also gone was virtually everything around the Northeast, where nuclear plants with strict no-fly zones around them proliferated.

As airport after airport closed, it became more difficult to find fuel, or maintenance, or instruction. Some sort of critical mass had been lost, and little airplanes in America had become an aberration or were relegated to the limited areas of the Southwestern Desert which were not ‘owned’ by the military. Many private aircraft were sold. Ironically, a large percentage went to the Middle East. Many others were exported out of the United States with their owners and their assets. Residential airparks had suddenly cropped up in Canada, Mexico, and even Belize, where the governments were friendly to aviators (sometimes motivated by well-placed bribes) and enjoyed their boost to the local economy.

Most of the major flight academies had also moved to Mexico and Canada. For all practical purposes, anything smaller than a business-jet had disappeared from the skies of the ‘lower 48.’

Now all that was a done deal. They were all gone, and Jack was lonely. Mary was still with him, but he missed the company of pilots that had been his social anchor for four decades.

‘Hey! Smilin’ Jack!’ called Annie as he crossed the threshold at The Beer Mug. ‘Put a smile on my face, Annie,’ he replied. As she filled his personalized mug from the taps, he took a moment to note that, as a man grows older, the number of women who look good in a pair of tight jeans increases. Thirty years ago, Annie would have reminded him of his mother.

Around five o’clock Mary stopped by to drive him home for dinner. They would pick up his truck in the morning.

Next morning, his head hurt as it usually did.

‘Jack,’ said Mary after breakfast. ‘I was thinking. Maybe we could sell this place and buy a little condo in town to have a place to be near the kids part of the time. If we did, couldn’t we afford a lot and a hangar home in that airpark up in British Columbia? You know, the one your friends bought into? I think that would be okay for us. The grandkids are older now, and don’t need to be here all the time. They could come visit us.0x92

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Jack, as he imagined flying once again flying every day.

‘And Jack?’ said Mary. ‘There’s a meeting for Vietnam vets and their wives over at the VA today. Maybe we could go over together.’

Jack began to think that today and tomorrow could be different.

‘Smilin Jack gone to Canada,’ he thought. ‘Go figure.’

ã 2001 Greg Bullough