The Hometown Airline

Victor Morales walked the ramp at first light on the last day the airline would be its own, and the desert wind was already up, and out on the field the jets sat with their tails to the mountains waiting for a name that would not be theirs by morning.

He was fifty-seven and he had been a mechanic long enough that the young ones brought him the problems they could not name, the intermittent ones, the ones that did not throw a code, and he liked that part of the work and would miss it if the work went, which it might. He had come out early because he wanted the field to himself for a few minutes before the shift filled it, the way he had wanted a lot of things quiet lately. The tarmac smelled of jet fuel and sage, the two smells of his whole life folded together, and he stood with his coffee and looked down the line of MD-80s and thought that they were good airplanes and that he had kept them good, and that this was the last morning anyone would say Reno Air over the radio and mean a company and not a memory.

It had started so fast. That was the thing people forgot, that the airline was only seven years old, that it had flown its first paying passengers in the summer of 1992, one new jet nosing out for Seattle, and had grown into a fleet and two hubs and a payroll of thousands before most of the town had stopped being surprised it existed. A hometown airline. People said it like that, one word almost, the way they said hometown team, and they had been proud of it in the specific way a place like Reno is proud of anything it makes itself instead of importing, because the town was used to being a stopover, a place people flew through on the way to somewhere they had decided mattered more. The airline had been theirs. The tails had said so. And now a bigger airline back in Texas had bought it, had bought it last winter for a price in the papers, and after today the tails would go into the shop and come out wearing somebody else’s colors, and the somebody else had its own mechanics and its own seniority lists and its own idea of how many people it needed in Reno, which was fewer.

Victor had been offered a spot. That was the strange weight he was carrying around the ramp this morning. They would take him, the new company, on account of his rating and his years, but the spot was in Texas or in Tulsa, a couple thousand miles from the only ground he had ever stood on, and he would go in at the bottom of a list that ran back decades, behind men half his age, the way the pilots had already learned they would, the pilots who had walked in here proud and been stapled to the bottom of a ladder they had thought they were climbing. Some of them had made a very public unhappiness about it in the spring. Victor understood it. You spent your life earning a place in a line and then the line was dissolved and a new line drawn and your name went to the end of it, and it did not matter how good you were with the intermittent faults.

He thought about his uncle Eddie, who was gone now, who had driven a cab in this town for thirty years and had told Victor once, when Victor was young and full of the air races and thought he was going to work on airplanes forever, that the town did not keep anything, that it tore down what it built and paved what it tore down and a man was a fool to love a building or a business, that the only thing to love was the work in your own two hands, because that traveled with you. Eddie had said it the way he said most things, half a joke, driving. Victor had not understood it then. He had been twenty-two and standing on a dusty ramp out past Sparks watching the fastest airplanes in the world scream around the pylons, the first year of the air races, the year the whole valley turned out, and he had decided that day that he would spend his life close to engines. He had. He just had not known that the engines would keep changing owners while his hands stayed the same.

The shift came on around him now, trucks and voices, the field waking up, and the first departure was rolling before long, one of his airplanes taxiing out into the wind with its old name still on the tail, and Victor stopped what he was doing to watch it go, and so did two or three of the younger men, without saying anything about why. It lined up and stood on the brakes and then came off them and ran down the runway and lifted, gear folding up, and turned out over the meadows toward wherever it was going, and it was just a departure, it happened forty times a day, and it was also the kind of thing that would not happen again after tonight, not like this, not theirs.

One of the young mechanics, a kid named Ferreira who had come on two years ago and would have to decide the same thing Victor had to decide, watched the jet out of sight and then looked over at him. So what are you going to do, the kid said. Texas?

Victor turned his coffee in his hand. He had not decided. He had told himself he would decide by the end of the shift and the end of the shift was the end of the airline and he still had not, and the honest answer was that he did not want to leave the valley his family had lived beside since 1869 and did not want to stop touching airplanes either, and that the world had arranged things so that he could not have both. His great-great-grandmother had come up from Sonora and settled by the river because the work was there. The work had moved before, from the railyard to the casino to the cab to the ramp, and the family had followed it around the valley the way you follow a river, and now the work wanted him to follow it out of the valley entirely, and that was a thing none of them had ever done.

I’ll tell you at quitting time, Victor said.

The kid nodded like that was an answer and went back to his cart. Victor drank the last of his coffee, cold now, and turned to the airplane in front of him, which did not care who owned it and needed a bleed valve looked at before it flew, and he opened the panel and put his hands in, because whatever he decided by tonight, the airplane had to be right this morning, and that much at least was still his.

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