Storymania - Homeboy by R W Morris

Homeboy
R W Morris

I level off at fifteen hundred feet and remember a story from high school. I think it was called The Ledge or something like that. It was about a man who was convinced he had everything under control, and ended up freezing to death on the ocean. That story got to me. It said no matter how hard you try, it is your environment that decides your fate, not you – never you.

Part of the assignment was to evaluate your own environment.

“On a scale of one to five with a one being financially secure…” I was a four and a half.

“Do your friends have realistic goals which are compatible with their aptitudes?” That one ranged from getting laid to life in prison.

“Do you know your aptitudes, or do you confuse them with your interests?” My wheel cover business – I would not make a living selling wheel covers - that was an interest.
English. I got 92 percent in English and still didn’t know anything.

Math - Algebra in particular. And research - digging for answers.

Accounting. Accounting was my cop-out credit. Accounting was too easy to be interesting. I maintained a constant A-plus in accounting, never understanding how some people could have a problem with it. That was it! I would become an accountant - an inland accountant, far from the ocean.

I am leaving the coast so I flip on my weapons display and see they have put everything exactly where I wanted it. I fix the coast of Africa in my mind’s eye and decide on a heading of one-eighty until I am well inland, then a hard right until I am in the southwest quadrant. This should bring me in well clear of Idris and the SAM battery northeast of it. It will also have me pointing right back at Sicily when the shit hits the fan.

I took college for granted. All I had to do was show them how bright I was and coast through on the American Dream Plan. When I finally got around to doing some of that research I was so good at, I found out college was going to cost a lot of money, and not only that, an accountant had to take a lot of courses I knew absolutely nothing about. Work and study too? Out of the question!

It was the first time it had been my idea to talk to my school counselor.

“The opportunities were there, Benjamin. There were academic scholarships. Unfortunately, you were more interested in clowning around…”

So much for this is the best time of your life, enjoy it while you can.

I get a search warning, so I throttle back and make myself invisible.

I was considering following some of my friends into their calling, just long enough to finance a college education mind you, when the army showed up one afternoon and made its R.O.T.C. pitch. The soldier got my wheels turning. I sensed I should not push the accounting bit too much. Play it cool. Get them to pay for a degree in artillery with maybe a major in accounting. I should have been paying closer attention to the quiet man in civilian clothes who was with the soldier. The man who looked like everyone’s grandfather; the man who called me two days later and asked if he could talk to me after school.

Mr. C. was – is – one of those people you feel instantly comfortable with. Short, rotund, casual, bald on top with a half-halo of white hair resting comfortably on his ears; sincere blue eyes that are never challenging unless he’s teasing you, in which case they twinkle and light up his face. He was leaning against his car stuffing tobacco into that little curved pipe of his when I got out of school that hot, still, afternoon in June. He thanked me for taking the time to see him, and asked if he could call me Ben. He had something else he had to do. Could we talk while we took a little drive?

We made small talk while he gouged a wooden match with his thumbnail, lit up, and we drove sedately out of town in his white Crown Vic with poorly the secured wheel covers. We talked easily about school, friends, teachers, and loyalties. Before I knew it we were driving down a gravel road to a little private airstrip, and he knew everything there was to know about me, because I had spent the last forty minutes telling him. He knew I was not in the muscle end of the Forty-second Street Demons, and that I only indulged in petty theft because just helping my brothers beat the school system was not enough to warrant membership and the insulation it gave me. I do not remember Mr. C. asking me any direct questions during that drive. He even knew when I had lost my virginity, and to whom.

We left the car and entered a Quonset hut where he flirted with an older woman who handed him a set of keys and a clipboard. On the way out to a Cessna, he told me he had a private pilot’s license and had to log a minimum number of hours to keep it. Would I mind going up with him while we continued our talk?

He put me in the left seat and asked me to read off the things on the clipboard and tick them off when he said check. Then he cranked her up and we taxied out while I babbled about how I couldn’t move without touching something that looked important, and how I had never realized there was so little between you and the outside in one of those things.

When we were lined up for takeoff he slid open a window, tapped his pipe on the fuselage, and looked over at me.

“Well?” he shouted over the engine noise.

“What?” I shouted back.

“Are you going to take her up or not?”

I laughed, he didn’t.

“Shine on, man, I don’t know how to fly!”

“Sure you do, it’s easy. Just put your feet on those pedals.”

I stared at him until I decided he wasn’t suicidal, and put my feet on the pedals.

“Push one and see what happens,” he said.

I did and waited.

“What position to do you think they should be in for takeoff?”

“Even?”

His face lit up. “And you said you couldn’t fly! Same thing with the yoke, Ben, that thing right there. Just keep it nice and even until this needle is pointing here, then pull back a couple of inches and hold it.”

I reviewed that while he put his pipe away and closed the window. He sat watching me while I responded like any healthy eighteen-year-old whose courage is being tested with something he always wanted to try.

“So where’s the gas pedal?”

“Oh, sorry, slipped my mind. That knob. Pull it back all the way, slowly.”

He talked to me about the evils of over-controlling as we careened down the runway. He stressed the importance of a slow hand and an easy touch (he even whistled a few bars) as we roller-coasted up to five thousand feet. And he discussed my life’s options while I was busy with the exhilaration of trying to defy a law of nature in a straight and level manner.

We struck a deal. R.O.T.C. was out because they already had enough accountants in the artillery. As I had no interest in science, so were West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy. But that was all right. His organization could use an accountant who could fly.

By the time we landed I had agreed to sign a contract that said his agency would finance a college education, along with living expenses and flying lessons. In exchange for this I would be required to attend specialized training between terms, and serve five years of obligatory service after graduation. After that, I could do what I pleased.

The closer we got to my place the quieter I got, until he finally said, “I know what you’re thinking, Ben, but we’re almost there and you haven’t asked, so I’ll just tell you. It’s your talent for research that interests us primarily. I talked to your teachers, and they say you are something of a genius when it comes to ferreting out facts. That, combined with your aptitude for the financial application of numbers, makes you ideal for a project we have on the drawing board, which should blossom into reality in about four years. We will need an auditor, an auditor we can trust. Loyalty, Ben, is there a higher virtue?”

“Like self-preservation?”

He laughed. “Your teachers were right! We are not the C.I.A., Ben. You will not be spooking around some Latin American country shaking trees. I can’t tell you any more than that because whenever I volunteer information another hair falls out of my head. Do you have any interest in photography?”

“No.”

“Well, we might ask you to do a little of that for us, but don’t worry. Our equipment is user friendly.”

He pulled up in front of my place and turned in his seat.

“You have a lot of nerve,” he said.

“Say what?”

“The flying today. Taking off is nothing. A lot of flying schools hook people with that one because there’s little danger involved. Landing is the dangerous part, but you went ahead and did that too.”

“All I had to do was exactly what you told me, man.”

He nodded, and pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket. “We want you. If you want us, call me at this number before Friday.”

I pick up a bandit ninety miles out at one o’clock, and wonder if I should change to a hi-lo approach while there’s still time. No. Don’t vacillate. Decide and do. Go in low, avoid the window altogether. Decrease the chance of being tracked – increase the chance of getting bounced. Dilemmas. What would life be without them?

After he dropped me off I went up to my quiet place on the roof and sat contemplating the card, which had nothing on it but a phone number. There it was. A college education, no need to hold down a job to pay for it, and a pilot’s license as a bonus. I knew what I was getting, but what exactly was I going to have to give? I was trying to sort out what use a flying accountant with a camera might be to someone, when two of the brothers showed up and told me we were riding out that night. The Chicanos needed a touch-up regarding territorial prerogatives. I would drive as usual, staying behind the wheel while they did the banging. I called him on Thursday.

That first term was tough, not because of the work, although I was certainly right about having to study, but because I had to live, work, and try to play with a bunch of careless people who mingled haphazardly and left their doors unlocked a lot of the time. The college president told me that if it weren’t for my academic record and the influence of the multinational corporation sponsoring me, he would expel me, and demanded I return his wheel covers.

I spent almost all my free time flying, having to change from one school to another every now and then because of my tendency to push their aircraft, and myself, to the edge with little experiments that turned out to already have names like, Immelman, Split S, and Hammerhead Stall. I finally got my license and, out of nowhere, a little flying club contacted me and said my dues had been paid for a year, and they didn’t care how I flew. I didn’t bother asking who set it up.

I ranked third overall at the end of that term, and received an envelope by messenger. The envelope contained airline tickets to Florida and asked me to report to a naval air station for “special intake” training. My eagerly anticipated winter vacation, lying on a beach under the palms with a little specialized training on the side, turned into a nightmare of enforced study and physical training with no more than four hours sleep a night.

There were seven of us on that course, all civilians, all with Mr. C.’s agency or one of its siblings, but I was the only accountant. The rest were into psychology, sociology, or political science. Three of us were stubborn enough, or stupid enough, to stick with it, and, at the get together we had the night before we left, the lieutenant commander behaved as if we had enjoyed it as much as he had. He urged us to keep fit and retain what we had learned. We would need it for our next holiday.

Another envelope was delivered when I returned to college. It congratulated me and said things would get easier from now on. It also recommended I concentrate on cost accounting, and it wouldn’t hurt to think aviation industry while doing so. It was signed “Suspiciously yours”. I was being twinkled from afar.

I changed. It was hard, but I had to if I wanted to graduate. I made myself vulnerable – the first sin of the streets. I opened up to others. I walked alone at night. I sat at parties and listened to total strangers tell me more about themselves than they should have. I even stopped locking my door every time I went out. And I flew my ass off at yet another flying club that contacted me. This one was into restored war birds: P 51’s, P 47’s, and even an F 86 Saber Jet. At the end of that second term I had only been called to the president’s office twice, and once was to feel me out for a student instructor’s position. I learned to accept what was being offered by the right people, and who those people were.

I survived six more holidays in Florida varying in length from one to seven weeks, and that lieutenant commander became a mentor and partner in crime to me. The man had the style of a college president and the soul of a brother. He taught me the difference between flying a plane and wearing it.

“You are Mr. A-6E Intruder, a middle aged gentleman who specializes in attack and interdiction bombing. You are very good at your job, but you must keep in mind that you are in poor physical condition. If you try to perform like a young man you will have a stroke and die.

“You are Master F-16C Falcon. Mr. Electric is your street name and you are King of the Break Dancers!”

I pick up the SAM battery’s signature along with another orbiting bandit, so I pitch down to seven hundred feet and hold. I see a trace of surf in the blackness ahead, and I wonder what the lieutenant commander would say about an X-17. You’re a Frisbee, good luck?

On graduation day my envelope contained tickets to California and instructions to report to Mr. C. at Lockheed, so off I went, with a college degree in commerce and a major in destruction from the air. I was expected, and security escorted me deep into the Skunk Works where Mr. C. was waiting for me in a little makeshift office, which was to be mine.

“Things are coming together beautifully, Ben,” he said, tapping my chest with the stem of his pipe. “You’re half way where you want to be, and so are we. How’s your love life anyway?”

I snapped my fingers like someone who just knew he would forget something, and followed him out onto the floor where he introduced two gentlemen as the project director and the chief technician. We were standing under something that looked like a cross between a mainplane and a water slide for masochists. I reached up to touch it, but hesitated, wondering if it was safe.

“It’s a rubber-ceramic combination,” the chief tech smiled.

“Why?”

“Low radar signature.”

“Interesting shape,” I offered. “Will it fly?”

Silence.

I looked at Mr. C. He laughed and took me by the arm.

“Never mind that for now. Let’s go to the office and talk about your love life.”

In my office he wrote a dollar figure on a scrap of paper and slid it across the desk to me. I whistled lowly and asked how many we got for that. He held up one finger. The agency wanted that figure lowered, a lot. He answered all my questions about design, purpose, and deadlines, but danced around the ones about the test pilot. Four months later we had lowered the cost by having to sacrifice maneuverability for stealth, and I no longer wondered who the test pilot was going to be. A year after that I spent two months testing it, and reported to Mr. C. that we had a ridiculously expensive, radar evading weapons platform that had best throw up its wings and surrender if challenged by a real airplane.

He said that was good enough, and we talked about the remaining three and a half years of my obligatory service. He mentioned photography, and I realized I was no longer as comfortable with him as I used to be.

I cross the coast and get a yellow light as one of the bandits breaks orbit and starts for me from five o’clock high. I check the time. It’s too late to abort. The one-elevens are committed. I pitch down to under two hundred feet, roll right five degrees to round off that ninety degree turn I wanted but can no longer afford, and fight to keep her somewhere between two hundred feet and the deck. The bandit changes course to intercept me, but the yellow light blinks off, and my pucker factor drops as I see him heading for where I was when he last had me.

Mr. C. packed my bride and me into a C-5A Galaxy and sent us to the Mediterranean for our honeymoon, where we behaved like typical American tourists. We flew to exotic places, we took pictures, we were a bother to the locals. The one low point was when a pushy, macho type just wouldn’t take his eyes off my lady, and followed us out past the Line of Death, three-quarters of the way back to Sicily. I got jealous, and while he was still trying to get a lock on her, I turned and smoked him with an AMRAAM at twelve miles. So much for staying out of the muscle end of things.

Flying this low is eating up too much time. If I stay under two hundred feet and try to swing in behind Idris, I’ll arrive after the one-elevens. If I go in between Idris and the SAM battery (and they don’t shoot my ass off) I’ll arrive before the one-elevens. If I fly any higher, I’ll probably have to go fangs out with that suspicious individual in the MIG and be late anyway. I wonder if he’s an accountant too? I’ll take the short cut. Better to be early than late for an important appointment, like the briefing this afternoon.

I knew by the tone of the tech-sergeant’s voice it wasn’t just pictures they wanted this time. All he said was, “The base commander would like to discuss the benevolent fund with you at sixteen hundred hours, if you’re available.”
They were always polite. It was never an order, just a request. I was, after all, a civilian, just an accountant who looked after the base funds. Pretence. Everyone down to the cleaner knew what I really did, and who my real bosses were, but they never talked about it. Not if they wanted to keep their jobs.

It was a quarter after three when I got that call, and the base commander’s office was only five minutes away, so I carried on with what I was doing, feeling myself become very slow and precise as my awareness did a one hundred and eighty degree turn inward. I felt the air conditioning on my face; the weight of my shirt on my shoulders; the pressure of my feet on the floor.

Maybe not. Maybe not yet. Maybe not me. We knew something was coming because that silly man across the sea had gone and shot off his mouth way too much. Now, a lot of ordinary people back home were letting the right people know it was okay to do something. An offer that would not be refused. The mind whirls, but the body steadies.

My body got me to the base commander’s office ten minutes early, and I was shown right in. The three of them were grinning like a bunch of assholes, so I grinned right back at them as I sat down and traded stupid, macho quips until they handed me the decoded message.

I made a show of reading it carefully while it darted through my eyes into my brain in one frantic lump. …requests retaliatory surgical strike headquarters bunker Tripoli…coordinate with F111’s….

Absolutely not! Completely out of the question. I’m an accountant for Christ’s sake! What the hell have we got an air force for? Look, take the goddam accounting degree and shove it! Request denied.

“Mavericks,” I said. “One for the bunker and one for the SAM radar on the way in.” I pretended to think for a moment. “Hang a couple of Durandals in bay three, and I’ll do the runway at Idris while I’m at it.”

They sympathized, but I was going to have to control myself. Just go in, do the bunker, and get out. The one-elevens were just insurance, and would abort once I’d done the deed. The base commander put a fatherly hand on my shoulder as I was leaving and said, with moist eyes, “I envy you, son. I wish it was me.” That made two of us.

I fly between Idris and the SAM battery with my asshole snapping open and shut every time the tracking light blinks on and off. The lights of Tripoli appear as a thin line ahead. My lady tries to climb up for a better look, but I won’t let her, so she gets pouty and tries to land. This is no time for a tiff, my sweet! I really need you to be with me on this one. I switch on target I.D. and get a reading of forty-six miles.

I had time to kill, and I had to kill it on the base because it was considered poor form to leave right after being briefed for a mission. I was an associate member of the officer’s club, but I did not feel like going over there and listen to those guys wish it was them instead of me. There was a room set aside for me in the B.O.Q.’s but I didn’t feel like being alone either. So I went to the movie. I watched it three times, whatever it was, then I went to Dispersal, put on my wedding suit, and strolled through the moonless night to the hangar where my lady slept.

A crack of light appeared and got wider as the hangar doors opened to reveal her, along with the unmistakable silhouette of Mr. C. standing off to the side, looking up at one of her folded wings.

“Yo! Mr. C.! How’s it hangin’, man?”

“Hello, Ben. How’s your love life anyway?”

As he turned to me and reached for his pipe I noticed that, in silhouette, the tufts of hair above his ears no longer resembled a halo. He lit up while they towed her out and one of the ground crew scrambled into the cockpit. She sighed and slowly stretched her arms.

Forty miles to target. Twenty-four to be in range. The lock alarm fills the cockpit like God’s fingernails on the canopy. Can’t evade at this altitude unless I go to full throttle and make myself the only accountant in the gallery. Wait for the undulation. Stay low, stay slow. Wait until they launch. They lose the lock, but the tracking light stays on. Next time they’ll launch immediately. Thirty-nine miles. They only hesitated because I appeared out of nowhere and should be one of theirs. Next time they won’t care.

“You’re scandalous, Mr. C.”

“We are what we are.”

“I thought the deal was accounting, with a little photography on the side.”

I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was smiling as he put his head back and mushroomed a line of smoke into the night.

“No one is forcing you to do this, Ben? All you had to do was say no. Why didn’t you?”

All I could do was stand there and stare at him.

He slowly shook his head. “You’re no accountant, you never were, you never will be. Look at you. You’re still wearing colors, you’re still riding out. You’re a homeboy, Ben. Accept it.”

Thirty-eight miles and I know I cannot wait any longer. It is going to be a long run in. Too long, but it is that or bone out – the second sin of the streets. Bay four whines open, and I feel the Maverick pylon drop and lock. I push my head back into the cushion and reach for the throttle.

Say what the hell. It was this or a life of crime.