Free Flight by GINGER STRAND Page B

system. They drill wells down into the aquifer and bring the water up into a pipe that rotates around the well like the hand of a clock. You can see it from the air. Each one makes a green circle.” He pauses, visualizing it. “Twenty years ago, there were hundreds of them. You’d fly over and see green polka dots for miles across the yellow plains. Now one in three is brown. The wells are dry.” His voice cracks as he says it; he’s overwhelmed by his own words. That’s what his book is trying to explain. The great trajectory. A tremor rises in his throat, almost as if he might cry. He looks in the mirror again, to see if Kit has understood.
    The young man is looking out the window. “No shortage of water here,” he says.
    “But that’s just it,” Will tells him. “Now that they’ve pumped the aquifer half dry, they want to start pumping water down from theGreat Lakes. But it’ll be the same problem all over again. It just delays the inevitable.”
    “The inevitable?” Kit is flagging. Carol is glancing at Will as if wishing he would be quiet. He looks away, back to the road, where water sluices toward them from the wheels of the car ahead.
    “The depletion of our natural resources,” he says. “The end of our culture. It’s all wrapped up together.”
    Leanne moves in the backseat, and Will glances at her in the mirror, thinking she might say something. But she, too, is gazing out the window.
    “Yeah, well, you may be right about that,” Kit says. He speaks lightly, drawing the conversation closed like a neat little sack. Placating the old guy to get him to shut up. Will glances at Carol, casting about for a way to keep asserting his point until the young man gets it. His impulse is a tiny flame persisting in a doused fire.
    As if sensing this, Carol moves to stamp it out for good. “That’s farmers for you,” she says. “Always full of dire predictions.” She turns to them with a conspiratorial smile. It’s meant as a joke, but Will can hear the edge in it.
    “Well, you laugh now,” he says. He tries to think of a better rejoinder, an eye-opening way to finish, but nothing comes. Like birds, the words flit away.
    Will had his FAA oral the Monday after the steak-house dinner.
    “How does the fuel-dump system work, and what is the jettison rate?” All FAA inspectors looked like retired G-men. This one read the questions off his clipboard, and Will answered slowly and carefully, not getting anything wrong. When he was young, he used to try to answer quickly, to show that he didn’t have to think about it. Now he knew it was more important to get it exactly right, even if that took a few seconds more.
    “What’s the maximum starting exhaust gas temperature?”
    Will joined TWA in 1968. It was the end of a big hiring spree at the major airlines: United, Pan Am, TWA. He had agonized forweeks over which airline to join, ultimately choosing TWA over United. It was the wrong decision, he knew now, but how could he have foreseen it? “I want us to be able to travel to Europe,” he had told Carol. TWA and Pan Am were the flagship carriers, worldwide symbols of American prosperity and glamour. United was the poor relation in those days, the country cousin back home. Now Pan Am was dead and TWA was in perpetual trouble. Its refusal to die was an industry joke. By the year 2010, the joke went, there would be only three U.S. airlines left: American, Delta, and “the financially struggling TWA.”
    They did get to travel. When the girls were little, Will gave Carol tickets to London in her Christmas stocking. He wasn’t there to see her surprise. He was away on a trip, as he always was on Christmas through the long years he spent at the bottom of a huge seniority list. Being hired at the end of a big wave meant he flew flight engineer for fifteen years before even getting promoted to copilot. Now they didn’t even have flight engineers anymore. Only the last few 727s required three guys in the