of the discussion was different than any other they’d had since first knowing each other. Jake felt sick. BJ was his best friend, the one person on earth he could talk to about anything. They both shared their thoughts and emotions. They were as close as two older men could be. It would never be the kind of bond he’d had with Bobby, or any other Army buddy. Age changed the way men relate. But BJ was his best friend in the world.
Best Friends
The drive to CHI took exactly an hour, just as he predicted. He parked by the Operations hangar and walked to the service door, dreading what would happen next. When he entered, the staff was all standing by the dispatcher’s radio. Ross was standing directly behind one of the pilots speaking into the microphone. All Jake heard was, “Over.”
Ross saw Jake enter and walked briskly to meet him. “Jake, you’ve got to help us.”
“What’s going on, Ross?”
“We don’t know. BJ just walked out of here and started 0978E and flew off. He didn’t have clearance, Jake.”
“How much fuel did he have?
“It’s been sitting fully fueled for days.”
“Get me a bird!” Jake sprinted to his locker without listening to anything else. He grabbed his new helmet and headed for the door.
Ross met him as they both left the hangar. “What are you doing, Jake?”
“I’m going after him, Ross.”
Ross tried to keep up but thirty years sitting behind a desk and losing sight of his belt buckle at least twenty years ago made it difficult. “Jake, he’s got to return at some point. He’ll need fuel in a few hours.”
Jake stopped and stared at the shorter man. “Ross, he’s not coming back! So, is 067N fueled?”
Ross just stared at him. “Yeah.”
“Right. I’m out of here.”
Jake sprinted to the helipad ignoring the preflight and startup checklist. He plugged in his helmet cable to the communications port and jumped into the pilot’s seat, starting the engine sequence. The passenger door swung open and Ross tried to climb in. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“He stole one of our helicopters, Jake. I’m going with you.”
“Get out!”
“I’m the Acting Operations Manager, you can’t tell me to get out!”
Jake repeated, “Get out! Get out, or I’m going to my truck and go home, and you can forget about getting your precious helo back!”
“Jake, I ah, I...” Ross didn’t complete his sentence after looking at Jake’s glare. He would not win this argument.
The turbine went to full power, and Jake brought full torque onto the drivetrain before the engine was fully to temperature, possibly damaging it. He radioed. “067N outbound, radio check.”
The pilot dispatcher replied, “Good to go, Jake. Good Luck.”
He didn’t reply. He headed southbound at one seven zero degrees, the shortest distance to water. Come on BJ, where are you? Once over water, he rose to fifteen hundred feet and scanned the surface, continuing straight out to sea. At ten miles, he lowered to five hundred feet to lose line-of-sight transmission back to CHI. “Helicopter 0978E outbound, please report.”
“Hi, Jake.”
“Hi, BJ. Where do you think you’re going?”
“It’s a nice day for flying, Jake. I just thought I’d take a ride.”
“This isn’t the way, brother.”
“Jake?”
“Yeah, buddy?”
“Have you had a good life?”
“I don’t know, BJ, it’s still a work in progress. It’s looking up though.”
“That’s good.”
“Come on, BJ, where are you? Where’re you headed?”
“I’m just flying south, Jake. Heading for South America.”
They both knew that the fuel in the helo wouldn’t carry him mid-way into the Gulf. Jake called, “Common, BJ. This isn’t the way.”
“Jake, do you want to hear a story?”
“Sure, brother, tell me.”
“Meet me on Old Glory, 2LF.”
Old Glory was a decommissioned oil rig about thirty miles off the Louisiana Coast. It was a floating rig, scheduled to sink as an artificial reef in another year.
Jake altered course slightly and flew over the water for twenty minutes, passing over the top of the drilling tower. 0978E was on the edge of the helipad. The rotor was not moving, and there was adequate room to land on the opposite edge of the pad. He circled, then set down beside the old helicopter.
He stepped out of his bird while the rotor was slowing after cutting fuel to the engine. He left his helmet on the seat and looked around the platform. BJ was sitting on a safety rail on the opposite side. Jake walked around the tower and approached. BJ was sitting with a gun in his hand. Jake stopped twenty feet away. “What are you planning to do with that?”
BJ lifted the gun, not pointing it at Jake. “I don’t know, just felt like I should have it.” He waved it up and down before settling it in his lap.
Jake walked two paces forward, facing BJ about fifteen feet away. “Can we just talk about it?”
“He’s my son, Jake.”
Jake stared at him. “What do you mean, BJ?”
“Ryan. He’s my son. My whole name is William Ryan Jones. Get it? Billy Jones – BJ.”
Jake looked stunned. “I don’t get it.”
He stepped closer to BJ, who lifted the gun, still not aiming directly at Jake. “What are you gonna do, BJ, shoot me?”
“I wouldn’t do that, Jake. Just stay back, okay? I want to tell you the story, but don’t rush it.”
“Okay, pal. I’m just going to sit here on the deck and listen.” He sat down cross-legged, representing no threat to BJ.
“He got a rotten deal in life, Jake. It was my fault. I don’t want to make excuses for what he’s done, or what I’ve done, but you should understand why he’s the way he is.”
Jake looked down, then back up. “BJ, he killed some people.”
BJ looked away momentarily and took a deep breath. “Yeah, he did. But I want to tell you everything. You’ve been my only friend, and I betrayed you. I won’t live with that, but I want you to know the whole story.”
“I’m listening.” Jake didn’t know how to react. They both had baggage and shared a lot of secrets. Now his best friend had ended it.
“After ‘Nam, I was pretty messed up, lots of us were. You know my story. I’m not trying to make excuses, but it probably sounds like it.
“Anyway, I came back from Vietnam and paid for this Vietnamese girl, Anh, to come to the states. She was young and scared of the NVA (North Vietnamese Army), so she came to live with me, and I treated her like the bar girls we had over there. Only, she wasn’t like that.
“After several years, she got pregnant, and I beat her up a lot, so when the boy was born, she left. I never saw her again. That’s why he’s small and looks different than me.
“I had the baby and no wife. The hospital gave him my name because I didn’t bother to think of anything else. I didn’t even bother to pick up the birth certificate.
“For a long time, I just wanted to hide from everyone, hide from society in general. I didn’t even think about flying. I barely scraped by and I had the kid around my neck. That’s the way I looked at it. I hit a low point when he was barely a school kid and nearly killed him. I was a drunk and useless.
“That shook me up pretty good, so I left him and never planned to be around him again. I guess he started using only his first two names and dropped the third, which I can’t blame him for.
“I ended up on the Gulf Coast, and CHI was hiring pilots. Believe me, it changed my life, but it didn’t help him at all. I basically forgot about him, just like Anh. I guess I thought it was better for him, but I really didn’t care. It took me a long time to get back to being someone who might be considered normal. You had a lot to do with it when you came along. I was just turning a new
leaf when you came to us.”
Jake didn’t look at him directly. “So, where’s this going, BJ?”
“Like I said, it’s kinda a long story. Okay, so, a couple years or so ago, I got this call from police in Oklahoma. Will Ryan was in some serious trouble, and the state was tired of paying his rent. Some officer tracked me down and asked me to pay his bail so that they could keep him out of jail. They weren’t doing him a favor. They were just tired of paying for his upkeep.
“At first, I didn’t know what to say. I’d abandoned the kid almost fifteen years before, and didn’t ever expect to hear from him. Then, there he was. I had to do something, and I decided to help him. You were part of the reason I’d become a more decent person.”
Jake looked at him chagrinned, “Oh, great. You’re blaming this on me?”
“No, Jake. You know I wouldn’t do that. So, I bailed him out. I actually drove to Tulsa and got him outta jail. I didn’t know what to expect, and there wasn’t any kind of huggy reunion or anything. He just looked at me and left. I followed him, and we talked. He blamed me for everything.
“Believe me, Jake, I wanted us to have a new beginning, but it wasn’t ever going to be possible.
BJ played with the gun for a moment, trying to regain his thoughts.
Jake asked, “BJ, why don’t you put the gun down, and let’s just talk.”
He looked at Jake and pursed his lips. “I can’t do it, Jake.”
Jake started to say something more when BJ continued. “Out of the blue, he called me more than a year ago and needed some money. He didn’t say why, but I was so desperate to repair our relationship that I sent him five hundred. Then he called a couple weeks