Wingman
By Tanya Whiton
Wednesday, February 7, 1973: The plane was already on fire when it hit our building, and the pilot was already dead.
I learned this fact many years later, after I’d tracked my father down. He relayed the story over pints at a pub in South Boston as if it were part of a logical continuum—fate was already in motion. Everything had been decided. Rumor was the pilot, Robert Lee Ward, was smoking in his mask. Twenty-eight thousand feet over San Francisco Bay, his flight leader flying alongside, and he just dropped out of sight. The other pilot radioed Oakland Air Traffic Control to say—here, my dad got a little choked up—he’d lost his wingman.
I was pretty boggy by that point in the conversation. But I had some questions that needed answering, and they weren’t about the payload a U.S. Navy A-7E Corsair II could carry, or which squadron it had belonged to. I wasn’t interested in bandying dusty Vietnam-era acronyms, or discussing the unique qualities of the A-7E’s flaps. He’d been a civilian, anyway—even if all his friends at Alameda Naval Air Station were enlisted guys.
Dirtballs, was what my mom called them. Turds. She’d protested the war.
The bartender set another round in front of us. My old man looked me over, and lifted a pint in one swollen, cracked claw.
“My buddies, you know, they got to go to all these exotic places.”
They’d been on carriers in the Gulf of Siam. They’d taken leave in Bangkok. They’d haggled with tiny Korean ladies in the Seoul markets, picked up some jungle bug while marooned on Guam. They had stories to tell. If things were shitty—if, for example, a guy lived in a lousy apartment building that smelled of other people’s cooking, well, it was all temporary. But not for my dad. He could never get away.
“Must’ve been tough,” I said.
An American Airlines Boeing 727 departing Boston was framed momentarily in the bar’s one narrow window.
Did he know the Island smelled like burned flesh and jet fuel for months after the crash? Did he know that my friends and I found shards of metal in the trees? Or that mom and I slept on a pile of blankets on the floor of a neighbor’s house? Every day, I circled the blackened hole in the ground where Robert Lee Ward’s oxygen mask and parachute vest were found.
And fifty four days after the A-7 plummeted out of the night sky, the remains of an unknown white male between the ages of thirty and forty were discovered. It was decided they belonged to my father.
And yet here he was. What did he have to say about that?
He exhaled and shook his head. College hadn’t taught me anything.
“The plane was already on fire,” he repeated. “It—you have to understand, son—it made an opening.”
About the Author:
Tanya Whiton’s fiction has recently been featured in The Cincinnati Review, Al Pie de la Letra, and Fanzine, and is forthcoming in Collateral. Her story “Up” was nominated for the 2018 Best Microfiction Anthology, and she won second prize in Zoetrope: All Story’s 2017 Short Fiction Contest. Her short story “Atlantic Window in a New England Character” was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Tennessee Williams Contest. She is also the co-writer and an associate producer of the documentary feature THE ZEN SPEAKER: BREAKING THE SILENCE.
The former Associate Director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program, Tanya has taught creative writing and professional development skills for writers for the Lesley Seminars, Stonecoast Writers’ Conference, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and the University of Southern Maine.
About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:
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