One

May 1947

I read the carefully hand-lettered words on the tile in front of me:

Pilots With Short Exhaust Stacks and Low Manifold Pressure Please Taxi Close

Grinning, I looked to my left to observe my good friend and, unknown to me, future business associate, Lance Cantrell. Lance’s head was tilted back and his eyes were closed; my grin broadened.

From which of the aforementioned maladies do you suffer, Lance? I wondered and then grunted my amusement of the notion that he might just endure both.

“What?” Lance asked, his eyes fluttering open.

“Nothing.” I knew the innocence of my reply would serve to provoke.

“I know that laugh, Joe. That was not a nothing laugh.”

“Forget it.” I zipped my trousers and stepped over to the washbasin.

“It’s not good to laugh a nothing laugh while standing next to someone in the men’s room. It can give a guy a complex.”

“You, a complex? You’re a war hero. War heroes don’t have complexes.”

“War heroes especially have complexes,” Lance said, joining me at the sink. “Especially when they come home to find their best girl is now someone else’s best girl.”

“Women are fickle like that,” I said, shutting off the water.

“I would have waited for her.”

“You don’t know that. And you don’t know what it’s like to have to wait.”

“I waited.”

“What, for the bullet that never came?” I asked, drying my hands.

“That’s right.”

“That’s different, Lance.”

“How is it any different?”

I looked squarely at Lance, a decorated bomber pilot whom I hadn’t seen for nearly six years. Short but powerfully built, Lance had been a high school football star and heartthrob. The wavy blond hair of his youth was now cropped to regulation length beneath his Air Force cap, and behind the blue eyes that had, six years ago, betrayed youthful cockiness there now resided an especial worldliness tinged with a healthy dose of weariness. No doubt the war had left its indelible mark on Lance. In ways that I—because I’d turned 30 a year before the country entered the war, along with a high draw in the lottery, and therefore missed serving a tour of duty—could only speculate. But there was something else in his demeanor as well. It took me a moment to recognize it for what it was: resentment.

“How is it any different?” Lance demanded a second time, daring me to put what he was feeling into perspective for him.

“You were waiting for something that wouldn’t have made any difference to you, because had it come you wouldn’t have known. On the other hand, she would’ve had to live with the result for the rest of her life.”

“So she found comfort elsewhere.”

I could only shrug, and I immediately regretted the nonchalance of my gesture. “She must not have loved you.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“You want me to sugar-coat it for you?” I didn’t understand Lance’s angst over a creature that could be found in any bar and had for the price of a couple drinks.

“I want the last six years of my life back!”

There was nothing I could say to appease Lance’s pain.

“It’s not fair,” he whispered because it wasn’t, and because it wasn’t there was nothing else he could say. The statement sounded like a plea: a child bemoaning the iniquity of having been cheated at a game of checkers by an older sibling.

“Who says it’s supposed to be?” I said.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I guess not.” I was glad that I didn’t. “Look, Lance, very little of anything that happens to us in life—good, bad or indifferent—has anything to do with fairness.”

“She couldn’t wait six years?”

Lance’s eyes lay bare a pain upon which I could only wonder.

Six years, I reflected.

Six years ago tears might’ve helped to ease Lance’s grief. Apparently the war had robbed him of that release.

No matter, I reasoned. He’ll get over her.

I’d never met a woman worth bleeding over. Just the same, I figured I’d do well to introduce Lance to one or two of the women I’d helped through their own grief, the result of the male mass exodus the war had propagated.

 “Maybe she didn’t want to wait,” I said.

Glancing at the mirror’s image of myself, I gave a casual tug on the leading edge of the fedora that sat atop my head and said, “Come on, Lance.” Then, putting my arm around my pal’s shoulders, I added, “Let’s get your bags and get you home. You’ll feel better once you get out of uniform.”

Lance said nothing as he allowed me to steer him out of the men’s room and toward baggage claim.

Some dim part of me understood why, with the war nearly over, Lance’s girl, Becky, had stopped her correspondence with the man who was in his own way fighting for truth, justice and the American way. To the masses heroes are loved and worshipped. Made into larger-than-life icons, it is perhaps just that status that condemns them to exile from the lives of those closest to them. Unreal and unrecognizable, they become undesirable to those who prefer an affinity with something more attainable.

That Lance could still harbor the ache of his broken heart so long after the fact I couldn’t begin to perceive; to me women were akin to a tunnel train: another would be along in a few minutes. Patience inevitably paid off. You just needed to keep your eye on your destination.

I couldn’t understand Lance’s reluctance to let go of the anguish that had become his copilot these last two years. Still, he was my pal, and it pained me to see him so despondent. It wasn’t right. So it was no surprise when I took it upon myself to make right in Lance’s life what Becky had managed to leave in such a state of disarray.

Lindy, my gal Friday and sometime lover, had a friend. Blond and buxom had been Lindy’s description of Ginger—the woman I hoped would realign Lance’s priorities. Certainly from Lindy’s physical biography of her, Ginger should’ve very easily straightened out that part of his anatomy that, once straightened, would’ve helped him forget that Becky had ever existed.

To my relief, Lance did indeed find a new focus for his life. But it didn’t come as a result of Ginger’s ministrations. For all of my intuition, for all my good intentions and well-laid plans, I couldn’t have foreseen what Lindy’s unsolicited involvement would precipitate. For by simply taking initiative, Lindy set into motion a series of events that would forever alter my future as well as the lives of countless others who hadn’t yet been born.