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“You had your goddamned leg frozen—locked at the knee with full rudder. And you’d hauled back on the stick for good measure. Jesus Christ, Luke! The low wing was up and over before I knew what the fuck had happened.” “How many turns?” Luke asked, feeling a fatigue he’d never known in Grady’s presence. “Three, maybe four; ate up most of the ‘fudge factor’ before I could get your leg out of the way.” Quad twist triple flip. “Good thing we had some air under our asses.” “Yeah. The three most useless things in aviation,” Grady said. “Fuel in the bowser, runway behind, and air above.” Luke wished he were sleeping, instead of swimming through the black, tarry sludge that filled his vision. But he owed Grady the debriefing. “How did you recover?” “Cut power—right back to idle. Like this.” Grady pantomimed with hands and feet. “Stick neutral, full rudder, hard against the spin, stop the rotation, level the wings and ease out of the dive, my friend. Then,” he shrugged—nothing to it—“routine stall recovery.” “With how much air to spare?” “Not much, buddy.” He bent low toward the bed. “I came—” index finger and thumb a centimetre apart “—that close to pissing myself. And way too close to chopping brush on your dad’s wood lot.” He paused. “What?” “For a couple of seconds,” he began, eyes narrowed, “I was inclined to—” opened hands a V bracketing his solemn whisper “—let it go.” “What do you mean?” “Without a fight.” Gave his head a little shake. “I thought, fuck it: just—let—it—go. Fuck it all. But there was you, old son, the last male in the Standhoffer line. And.” A full Grady grin. “I wanted to prove them wrong about me. Fancy that.” “Jesus, airman,” Luke said, taking one of Grady’s favourite tones. “Does that make you an adult?” “Maybe it does, buddy.” He nodded. “Maybe it does.” To survive his own death wish. Luke wondered what that would look like. There’s nothing heroic about Icarus, grounded, he decided. Icarus, crash-and-burn, now: he was mythologized. If the golden boy had survived his solo flight and high dive—he’d be remembered—for what? For hanging up his skis. Setting fire to the pilot’s licence he hadn’t quite earned. Climbing down from the ten-metre tower to paddle in the shallows. “What do I do now?” Luke asked, a voice so small it might be a child’s. “‘What do you get when—’” Grady started. “I don’t need a fucking joke.” “No joke.” Grady stood. “Like they say: ‘Any landing you walk away from is a good one.’” He tipped Luke a salute. Then, over his shoulder, “You get your life back.” From the hallway, an open-ended prompt, a challenge: “You get—” Luke pressed his palms to his ears until it hurt, until he heard his pulse so loud it might escape between his fingers to fill the room with the percussion line of a hurtin’ song—emotionally attuned to the sweet sweet failure of being alive.
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