by Bruce McDougall
Jack stopped his tractor at the end of a runway to watch a salvage crew pulling an airplane from Lake Ontario. Working at the Island Airport in Toronto, he’d been driving up and down the dry fields that grew between the runways, pulling a gang of rotary mowers over the grass. He’d stopped on the seawall when he’d seen the nose of the plane emerging from the calm water.
It was the third week of August, Friday morning. The weather had been sunny and warm for three days. Planes had landed all day on Thursday, most of them flown by doctors who had come to Toronto from the United States to attend a weekend convention. They called themselves The Flying Doctors. Cynical and convinced of his own righteousness, Jack thought the name captured the essence of the medical profession and pilots alike: all training, no imagination.
The first ones to arrive had parked their planes in two parallel rows on the patch of pavement in front of the terminal building. By the afternoon, the rows of Cessnas, Pipers, Mooneys and Beechcrafts extended off the paved apron and into the fields, tied down with ropes attached to steel anchor bolts in the ground. When Jack arrived for work this morning, the airport looked like the crowded parking lot of an exotic shopping mall. Most of the shiny planes were painted red and white or blue and white. A few were green and white. Three or four adventurous medical pilots had painted their aircraft a solid shade of yellow or red. One had no paint at all on its polished aluminum surface. It belonged to a dermatologist from Cincinnati who specialized in facelifts, and it stood out among the crowd like Elton John at a Mennonite funeral.
Late yesterday afternoon, after Jack had gone home at the end of his shift, a twin-engined Beechcraft, with a pilot and two passengers aboard, had circled over the lake to make its approach for a landing. As the plane banked, its wingtip had clipped the surface of the lake. The plane had cartwheeled a couple of times until it settled, upside down, about fifty yards off the end of the runway, then sank, leaving a shimmering puddle of gasoline on the water. The plane had been leased from a company in Ohio. The authorities hadn’t yet released the names of the pilot and his passengers.
A detachment of rescuers from the Harbour Police had arrived within minutes. As darkness fell, they’d shone spotlights across the surface of the water. Finally, finding no survivors, they’d gone home. This morning, two scuba divers from the Harbour Commission had located the wreckage in the murky water that surrounded the airport. They’d attached an iron hook to the wheel assembly under the nose of the plane, and a crane on a barge was pulling it up from the mud.
With the nose above the surface, two Harbour Policemen in a power boat edged up beside it and signaled to the operator to stop the crane while they draped a tarpaulin over the cockpit. When they pulled away, the operator turned on the engine. Out of the water, the plane dangled like a gigantic trinket on a keychain, swaying gently as water gushed through jagged holes in its crumpled fuselage. When the torrent slowed to a trickle, the diesel engine growled, and the crane pulled the battered Beechcraft toward the waiting arms of a worker named Bob. Wearing drab coveralls and thick leather gloves to protect his hands from the sharp edges of the torn metal, Bob guided the plane toward the barge until it came to rest with its wingtip extending over the gunwale. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of junk, Jack thought.
“You can’t stay there, buddy.”
Jack turned in his seat to see a short man in a brown suit and sunglasses walking toward him across the grass. He had white skin with freckles, the kind that burns easily in sunlight, and his limp reddish hair draped his scalp like coloured cellophane on an Easter egg. Jack wondered why the man hadn’t worn a hat. He moved deliberately without urgency, keeping his eyes focused on the barge, hardly glancing at Jack. Jack relaxed. The guy wasn’t giving him an order, just passing along some information. Behind him, a pickup truck had pulled a flatbed trailer onto the edge of the grass and was turning so it could back the trailer up to the seawall. Jack looked back at the barge. It was chugging slowly toward shore, pushing a ripple of water ahead of it as it ploughed over the flat surface of the lake. It would take a couple of minutes to position itself so the crane could transfer the wreckage to the trailer. Jack waited until the guy in the suit stood beside him.
“You need a hand?” he said.
“Nah,” said the man.
Jack pulled a pack of Pall Malls from the breast pocket of his coveralls and reached down to offer one to the guy in the suit. “No filters,” the guy said. But he took one anyway, lit it, then held his lighter up for Jack. They both looked back at the barge.
“Any idea what happened?” Jack said.
“Must have lost the horizon,” the man said.
“How do you lose the horizon?” Jack said.
He’d never flown a small airplane, never even sat inside a cockpit. Flying seemed like a lot of effort for not much reward. The birds that chased him across the fields did it with a lot more grace and a lot less noise.
Airplanes didn’t interest him, but the lake did. He’d felt drawn to it for most of his life. Returning for vacations from Boston, where he’d gone to school for four years, he’d felt his spirit stirring as the highway took him along the lakeshore and into the city, as if he were revisiting an old friend.
He knew that his attachment to the lake had something to do with his father. When Jack was a boy, his father and mother had separated. About a year later, in late October, his father’s body was found floating in the lake. His mother, wanting to save her son from pain, had discouraged Jack from grieving. She’d told him one morning that “your father is dead”, then sent him off to school as if nothing untoward had happened. After that, his she’d said nothing more about his father’s death, and Jack figured it was no big deal. Nor did he think much about the way he felt when he made occasional visits to the waterfront. He’d found several places that were as quiet and peaceful as a cemetery, where he could sit on a bench and look across the water to the horizon. He felt calm when he did this, relieved momentarily of his anxiety, which had become the background music of his life.
Jack had begun working at the airport after he’d graduated from Harvard. He intended to make some money before he went to law school in the fall. But now he’d abandoned law school, twice, and walked away from several steady jobs returning each time to his job at the airport. He’d now worked there, off and on, for six years, and he’d begun to wonder if he’d ever leave. He was almost thirty, and his future didn’t look so promising as it had when he’d barely entered his twenties.
He knew that his chronic anxiety and crippling self-doubt had something to do with growing up without a father, but he figured he’d just have to accommodate those conditions like a man with a withered leg or a chronic disease and try to avoid situations and people that might aggravate them or cause him to suffer. Spending his days alone on a tractor, singing songs to the birds as he looked out at the slate-grey lake, had so far become his best option.
To get to work every morning, Jack rode his bike through the city streets and under an elevated expressway, teeming with rush-hour traffic, to a ferry dock by the lakeshore. From there, Jack could have thrown a baseball across the channel to the airport. Just before seven, with the sun rising over the harbour, he and a few other passengers boarded a four-car ferryboat called the Maple City. The crossing took less than a minute, but once he reached the other side, Jack felt as if he’d entered another world.
In a small white house beside the ferry dock, the lighthouse keeper named Orville lived with his wife, whom Jack had never seen. Three times a day, Orville rode his bicycle along the concrete seawall to the lighthouse at the far end of the island, where he puttered around with a clipboard and took readings from the instruments inside. On Saturdays, he took his bike on the ferry and rode into the city to buy groceries at the Ukrainian vegetable shops and Hungarian delicatessens on Queen Street. Sometimes he returned to the island with a cylinder of kilbassa sausage wrapped in brown paper, walked over to the coffee room and cut slices off the sausage with his pocketknife to give to the airport workers who gathered there during their breaks.
Workers at the airport wore shapeless coveralls made of drab khaki twill, with the yellow and black insignia of the city’s Harbour Commission stitched across the breast pocket. In his coveralls, Jack felt anonymous and inaccessible, especially when he drove on his tractor to the far reaches of the airport near the chain link fence that kept visitors away. But even slouching around the airport with a lawn mower or a can of paint in his hand, he drew little attention. He was a humdrum maintenance man, paid to do a humdrum job.
Jack spent most days on the tractor, pulling a team of bush mowers through the acres of long grass that grew between the runways. Away from the world and its confusion, singing songs under the incessant din of the tractor’s engine, followed by a flock of swallows that dived after bugs roused by the mower from the grass, he felt as safe as he would ever feel in his life.
“Clear day. Not much wind,” said the guy in the suit. “Twin engines.” He shrugged. “Pilot must have lost the horizon. Can’t think of any other reason to drop her in the water.”
Jack looked across the open water to the line that distinguished the metallic blue of the lake from the robin’s egg blue of the sky. The line seemed pretty obvious to him. “How do you lose the horizon?” he said again.
“You don’t fly a plane?” the guy said. He looked up at Jack.
“I put gas in them,” said Jack. “That’s about it.”
The guy gestured with his right hand, palm down, toward the lake. The burning tip of his cigarette stuck up between his first and second fingers. He drew a small arc through the air. Jack noticed the freckles and fine hairs on the back of the guy’s hand, the Timex watch on a cheap gold bracelet around his wrist, short fingers, nails trimmed or bitten down to opaque stubs.
“To a pilot banking over a lake,” the guy said, “the colour of the sky can look the same as the colour of the water. He has to use his instruments to judge his altitude. Sometimes a pilot doesn’t trust his altimeter or forgets to adjust it.”
He turned his hand to the left until the tip of his cigarette was pointing back at him. “He looks through the windshield. Lets the wing drop. Flies too close to the water.”
He rotated his hand and snapped it upward. Then he shrugged. He took a final puff of his cigarette and flipped the butt toward the seawall. “I’m not saying that’s what happened here,” the guy said. “But it happens.”
“You fly?” Jack said.
“Used to,” the guy said.
“You with the police?” Jack said.
“MOT,” said the guy. He nodded toward the green pickup truck. The words Ministry of Transport were painted in red on the door. The barge had reached the seawall and was bobbing gently in its own wake. “Thanks for the cigarette,” he said.
Jack started the engine of the tractor. He turned and pulled the mowers slowly away from the seawall, then looked behind him. The guy in the suit was turning his right arm in a small circle at his hip, signaling to the crane operator to start unloading his cargo.
The steel cable attached to the airplane went taut. The worker on the barge stood beside the fuselage with one gloved hand on the plane’s remaining wing. The cable jerked slightly. The tarpaulin slid from the cockpit, landing in a heap on the floor of the barge. Before the worker could pull up the tarp again, the plane rose awkwardly into the air. Inside the plane, Jack could see two men and a woman staring through the windscreen like tourists on a carnival ride. He turned his attention back to the expanse of grass in front of him, reluctant to intrude on their privacy, rested his forehead on the steering wheel and drove blindly forward, drowning in a torrent of sadness and grief over people he’d never met in his life.
Bruce McDougall has worked in Toronto as an airport attendant, bouncer, taxi driver, social worker, newspaper reporter and freelance writer. He’s published two collections of short stories (Porcupine’s Quill), a novel (Owl Canyon Press), a non-fiction novel about pro hockey (Goose Lane Editions) that was a finalist for a Toronto Book Award, several biographies and a dozen business books.
