Letters From the Grave

they died. He was alone in the world. Staring at his wet features in the fractured glass, he wondered if there was still time to regain some youthfulness and lose the crags on his face. Thirty years of chain smoking and excessive alcohol left his skin grey and stained. His gray-brown hair was still full thanks to good genes from his mother’s side. Except for the color, it still looked good combed over. He needed to loose thirty pounds.

  It was a frequent ritual. He went through it most mornings, and it always ended by committing to start reconditioning himself - soon. Fortunately, his medical exams were good enough to fly commercially, the only profession he knew.

  He brushed his teeth and ran the shower before returning to his bedroom for clean underwear and socks. He still had a few clean things, but the stack of laundry on the floor was growing. Living alone for decades, he never rushed to finish domestic duties.

  After showering and shaving, he dressed in one of his vintage green Nomex® flight suits before going to the kitchen to brew a fresh pot of coffee. It was still dark when the percolation started, and he went out the front door to get the morning paper near the driveway. The delivery van was never accurate, throwing the folded paper at speed. It was useless to complain since he was the only person in the neighborhood who even got the paper, which would be happy if he cancelled it. He was barefoot, which was foolish in the steamy Louisiana morning when the snakes prowled around, but he disregarded the danger. In a couple hours, he’d be flying across the Gulf toward oil rigs beyond the horizon, where the danger was a watery grave and sharks. Pilots went down in the Gulf so frequently that the news media didn’t even report most crashes. The bodies and helicopters were usually never recovered.

  The paper was in the drainage swale by the road, partly soaked. Returning to the kitchen, he tossed it on the chipped Formica table and pulled a loaf of bread from the refrigerator. Living alone on the Gulf Coast, he kept everything perishable in the cooler. His normal breakfast was toast with peanut butter. He chuckled to himself that George Washington Carver would be grateful for the support. While the bread toasted, he sat with a glass of milk, scanning the headlines with his Costco reading glasses. His vision was still perfect, except for small print at arm’s length.

  All professional pilots are amateur meteorologists, and he found nothing else of interest before settling on the weather section. The National Weather Service was forecasting an active hurricane season based on water temperature patterns in the Atlantic. After flying the rigs for eight years, he was dreading each summer more and more.

  Katrina had been unbearable. He had refused to fly one shift after eighteen hours in the cockpit. The pilot’s first duty was safety, and he declared himself unsafe to fly without sleep that day. He had never gotten along with the owners at his company, and they weren’t happy about his refusal to fly missions that got them triple billing rates during any crisis. The pilots got nothing extra, despite the danger. He rescued dozens, following the storm and shuttled in and out of Houma airport amidst hundreds of other emergency aircraft with no tower operations. It was as dangerous as any military operation he’d been on.

  He had only taken seven hours off, but the owners of the company saw it as disloyalty. Screw them! He didn’t need the job anymore. The only reason they didn’t fire him was because the military had stopped producing enough pilots, and the newer Officers were paid better now. They stayed in the Army until retirement. None of the new breed needed to fly for minimum wages, as he did in the beginning. Owners of companies like Commercial Helicopters (CHI), his employer, got rich harnessing young men the Army had trained to fly. The Vietnam-era pilots were the original group to exploit, which was the main reason the air-taxi industry grew so rapidly in the Gulf. But now, after most had retired, lost their medical certificates or died, experienced helicopter pilots were scarce. The industry pushed pilots to fly too many hours at low wages. Flying was in the pilots’ blood. When time weary and beyond retraining, they lived near poverty levels, doing what they loved, focusing on a retirement that would never happen for most of them.

  Jake had been fortunate in a way. He’d never married and even at his meager wage plus his Army retirement pay, he was able to pay off his mortgage and make other tangible investments. The house wasn’t much, and Louisiana property values wouldn’t allow him to ever consider moving elsewhere, but the place was his free and clear with taxes below a thousand dollars a year. His truck was almost twenty years old. Without frills, he could keep replacing engines and other parts from junkers, doing the work himself. His wealth, if you could call it that, was in three large gun vaults in the back bedroom. One had guns in it, a collection begun as a child; but, the rest were filled with an amazing collection of gold coins and gold commemorative pieces and small ingots collected since his first paycheck. He had begun subscribing to the mint publications while in the military and bought almost every coin or medallion offered for investment. He often chuckled that they represented the most secure investment because no one could get the safes out of the house. Even when he was on extended flight circuits, gone for several days along the Texas Gulf, he never worried about losing the safes. The house could burn down without affecting his collection. In total, he figured the safes contained close to a million dollars due to increases in the value of gold over the years.

  Finishing the paper, he turned off the coffee pot and the lights and locked the back door behind him as he walked to the carport. He thought, damn, another soaking day, I’ll never get used to this. As he stepped up into the cab of his F150 and started the engine, he wiped the sweat from his forehead onto his sleeve. He wasn’t required to wear the Nomex gear, but it was his last mental connection to his youth as an Army pilot. That night, he’d check his blood pressure again, knowing the elevated temperature would push him near the limit for flying. The only time he didn’t drink himself unconscious at night was when his license was in danger of suspension. He would need to lose weight before his annual physical in the Fall. Smoking also contributed to the problem, but he refused to think about quitting that.

  The old pickup started quickly, and he backed out of the narrow driveway onto the street before remembering to turn on the headlights. With a cup of coffee steaming in his left hand, he shifted through the manual transmission using his knees to steer. At this dark hour, there was no other traffic to worry about. He left it in second gear before coasting to a stop only a block away to pick up a rider. Will Ryan had joined CHI a few months earlier as a mechanic, and Jake enjoyed his company on the twenty minute ride to the airfield. Will had an old pickup, but he said the transmission was shot. Even though the mechanics made more money than rookie pilots, there was a hierarchy of respect for the men who actually flew over water days and nights, sometimes in the worst weather imaginable. The pilots routinely risked their lives to move workers off the rigs during storms. The esteem of the job had a lot to do with the reason men wanted to fly. There were no women pilots at CHI because the pay was low, and the schedule wouldn’t permit raising a family.

  Jake parked at the curb, and the inside lights were turned off as Will closed the front door of his old rental cottage. It was starting to mist, so the mechanic jogged across the lawn and jumped into the passenger side saying, “Mornin’, Jake. Thanks for pickin’ me up, man. This would not be a day for my cycle.”

  “Yeah, the weather service is forecasting morning showers and a steamy afternoon. Crank the window down some, Will. I don’t have any AC in this bucket.”

  “Okay, but we could get wet.”

  “Hey, a little dampness in the breeze will feel good.”

  They rode on, mostly in silence, listening to the news station as Jake finished his coffee. Approaching the field, Will said, “067N is going down for her annual today, so you’ll need to use one of the other helo’s until we get the old bird checked out.”

  Jake reflected, “Yeah, the controls are pretty loose and the tail rotor is sloppy.”

  “I’ll ge
t it all inspected and she’ll fly like a new bird when she’s all fixed up.” Jake knew Will was just a shop helper, but he liked to brag.

  CHI was not the most safety conscious operation on the Gulf Coast but six hundred horsepower Bell 407 helicopters cost almost two million dollars, and they would never risk losing one in the Gulf to save a few bucks on maintenance. The FAA had mandatory annual inspections, but the more important assessments of air worthiness came from the pilots. Time in the air, mixed with corrosive sea air and harsh Gulf Coast weather contributed to faster metal fatigue. Equipment failures were sometimes unpredictable with manufacturer calculations made under normal operating conditions. The Bell Ranger number 067N needed a complete physical exam and some surgery by Jake’s experienced assessment. Despite his difference with management, whom he avoided, the best helicopter in their fleet was entrusted to him. He was their top pilot.

  Jake and Will separated after parking outside the operations hangar. Jake went to the dispatcher, Bill Jones, who was his only real friend on the staff. Bill (BJ) was several years older than Jake, but had failed his medical exam