"I'm not calling to make you feel better," Carl said. "I'm calling because you're going to be flying freight at night in a year if you don't hear this, so listen." The diner was called the Stateline, though it was nowhere near a state line, and it sat off Route 17 in Mahwah between a tire place and a shuttered Blockbuster that still had the sign up. Carl Jenkins had picked it, and the time, 10:15 on a Tuesday, after the breakfast crowd and before lunch. He was there first. Thirty-one years of showing up at airplanes an hour before anybody needed him had made it a habit he no longer tried to break.
Gerald Pruitt came in at 10:19 in a windbreaker and khakis, which was the first thing Carl noticed, because he had only ever seen the man in four stripes and a tie. Without the uniform Gerald looked smaller and older and oddly undefended, fifty-four, thinning hair, a face that had been red for so long it had set that way. He scanned the booths the way a pilot scans a ramp, found Carl, did not smile, did not wave. He sat down across from him and put both hands flat on the table.
"You said listen," Gerald said. "So I'm here."
"You're here," Carl agreed. He pushed a menu across. "Eat something. Eggs are fine. Don't get the pancakes."
The waitress came and Gerald ordered two eggs over medium and dry toast and coffee, and Carl ordered the same except wheat, and then neither man said anything for about a minute. A truck went by on 17. The coffee came. Gerald put his hands around the mug and did not drink from it.
Carl had decided on the drive up that he would not give a speech, because speeches were what people gave when they wanted to feel something themselves, and he did not need to feel anything.
"Nineteen ninety-eight," he said. "I'm flying a Saab out of Pittsburgh. Allegheny Valley Air. You remember them?"
"Folded in oh-three."
"Folded in oh-three. I had eleven hundred hours when I got hired, which was low, but it was a hiring boom and they were taking people. Eighteen months later I had twenty-three hundred and I'd passed every check ride first time. The upgrade list went up in the crew room in a plastic sleeve, you know the kind, and I wasn't on it. Okay. Next list, six months later. Not on it. I go to the chief pilot. He's a nice man. He says, Carl, it's seniority and it's need and it's the training department's bandwidth, and all of that was true, every word. The next list, there's a guy on it who got hired four months after me. I go back. Same answer, same nice man."
The eggs came. Carl salted his and did not pick up the fork.
"Seven years," he said. "Seven years in the right seat. I watched eleven men go to the left seat who were hired after me. Two of them I had trained in the sim as a check-airman's helper because they needed somebody and I had the hours. I know every one of their names. I'm not going to tell you their names because that's not the point. The point is nobody ever said a word to me. Nobody called me anything. Nobody told me to move to the back. It was all seniority and need and bandwidth, and every single time I went in there the nice man looked me in the eye and he believed what he was saying."
Gerald was watching him. He had not touched the eggs either.
"Then in two thousand five a new chief pilot comes in, from Delta, white guy, Georgia, and he pulls every file in the building because that's how he does things, and he calls me into his office on his third week and he's got my file open on his desk and he says, Carl, what the hell happened here. And I said, you tell me. And he looked at it a while and he closed it and he said, I can't fix seven years. I can put you in the next class. And he did. I made captain at thirty-five. Retired off the 767 at sixty. That's the whole story. There's no part where somebody yells. There's no part where somebody's a villain. That's what it actually was."
He picked up his fork then and ate some eggs, and gave Gerald the time.
Gerald looked at the window. On the glass the word STATELINE was painted backwards. He had told his own story, the 2004 story, to an HR investigator twenty-six days ago, and she had listened with a pleasant face and then turned her laptop around and shown him the seniority list and the training record, eleven hundred more hours and a type rating he did not have. He had said, "That's not how I remember it," and the investigator had said, kindly, "I know."
"The kid," Gerald said. "In oh-four. The one who got mine." He stopped. Started again. "He wasn't a kid. He was thirty-one. I was thirty-two. I've been calling him a kid for twenty years."
Carl did not say anything.
"Eleven hundred hours," Gerald said. "He'd flown freight. Night freight, Caravans, out of Reading. I knew that. I knew it then. I just—" He turned his mug a quarter turn on the table. "By about the tenth time I told it he was twenty-five and he'd been there a year. I don't know when that happened. I don't remember deciding to make it that."
"Nobody decides," Carl said. "You tell it the way it hurts less, and then you tell it again, and after a while you can't find the real one anymore."
The waitress refilled their coffee. Gerald waited until she had gone.
He had one question and he had been carrying it for thirty days, through the parking lot and the phone calls and a week in the Boca condo with the blinds drawn. It was not a question about Naomi Kessler-Ward, or the seat, or what he had shouted. It was a smaller question and a worse one.
"When you were in the right seat," he said. "Those seven years. The captains you flew with. Did they know?"
Carl considered that. He gave it the weight it deserved.
"Some of them," he said. "A few of them knew and it bothered them and they didn't say anything because what were they going to say. Most of them didn't think about it at all. I was the first officer, I ran the checklist, I flew my legs, I was good. They liked me. They'd have told you they liked me. And one or two of them—" He shrugged. "One or two of them, I'd be sitting there at three in the morning on a deadhead with the autopilot on and the guy next to me would start telling me about some first officer who got his upgrade ahead of him back in the day. And I'd say, that so. And he'd say, yeah, and the guy was black, not that that's got anything to do with it. And I'd say, no, of course not. And we'd fly on to Harrisburg."
Gerald's face did something then that Carl had not seen it do before. It did not go redder. It went still.
"You flew with me," he said. "Twice. On the 650, before all this. Last summer, that Nantucket turn, and the Vail trip in January."
"I did."
"Did I—"