Fire Escape
by Morgan Kohler
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
On his break, Jim leans on the railing of the Spinnaker control tower. Inside, he hears the crackle of the radio as Dustin reads off an instrument clearance to a King Air on the ramp below. Jim pulls from his pocket a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. There’s no longer any need to pretend he’ll quit; there hasn’t been for years, not since Mona served him the divorce papers.
The sun is brutal now at midday, especially for September, in a procession of record highs. The ramp, all black and cracked asphalt, seems to shimmer and, in the distance, even the mountains seem obscured by the oppressive heat.
“Air Attack 58,” he hears Dustin say through the angled glass of the windows, “runway two seven, cleared to land.”
The pilot sounds almost bored when she reads back her landing clearance. It’s work for her, of course, but Jim wonders what made her want to become a pilot in the first place, wonders how the features he imagines on her might light up with the passion of flying, as Cassandra’s had. He’s only seen the woman from the same distance as the now-taxiing King Air, refuses to use the tower binoculars to get a better look into what he would consider the privacy of a cockpit.
But even with his degraded eyesight, he’s made out blonde hair, often braided down to the length of her shoulders, and a medium build. The tanker pilots all have company-issued navy-blue flight suits and clunky black boots, yet picking out her body from among the men is no difficult task. From what he’s gathered through his aging eyes, and from what he can glean from her voice, he puts her age at early forties, maybe younger.
This guessing is a game he’s made for himself over the years. When he was a center controller in Portland, just out of the academy, working nights. After the East Coast redeye runs had all departed, aircraft checking in would be fewer and fewer until the sun began to rise again. So, for the occasional aircraft that did fly through his sector, he would guess what the pilots looked like by their voice. He would guess why they were going to the airport filed in the flight plan. He’d guess at their experience: when he had to yank information on flight following requests, call by call, from a Cessna or Piper or slow-moving, single-engine tail number, Jim knew they were as green as he or at least hadn’t had their hand in it for a while.
He would think: best be careful with this game of imagining that which is likely untrue and certainly unverifiable. This is a good way to crack up, manufactured reality. But then, there was no one to stop him and, after all, wasn’t this the better alternative to falling asleep on his keyboard, the mic keyed to his snores?
* * *
The new waitress at the airport diner is decidedly useless. Jim sits on a stool at the counter, which boasts an atypical layer of grime. Two plates of cold fries and hollowed-out sandwiches, buzzing with flies, lie unbussed. He hasn’t been able to order, and his lunch hour is now half over. He wonders if it wouldn’t be easier to have a cigarette or two to tide him over until dinner.
The bell over the door clatters, and a navy flight suit-clad gaggle spills through. She’s the last to walk in, and he realizes he had her age all wrong: fine lines at the edges of her sharpest features, gray delicately shot through the blonde, creases ringing her neck, the joints in her hands rounded, a crooked finger or two.
Jim tells the group, “Hope you aren’t in a rush.” He tries to laugh but it comes out stilted. From here, up close, he can see her eyes are green, undimmed with age. Her thin wrist is swallowed by a watch so large it must be a man’s — a gift or token from a husband, a lover? There’s no wedding band or hint of a tan line from one, but that doesn’t mean anything in the context of aviators. He recalls the delaminated fingers, the cheap rings Mona had bought and that greened her skin, the loose brown curls ripped from the scalp... No, he won’t let himself cascade further or he’ll be sick.
Finally, the waitress, a girl of maybe twenty, walks from the kitchen, holds a pad and pencil in front of her and looks expectantly at Jim. He jabs a thumb at the group of tanker pilots. “Them first,” he says. “They’re the ones working hard today.”
They order, one by one. He wonders if she’ll recognize his voice, but she only thanks him with a polite smile before following the others to a booth in the corner to wait for their lunches.
Jim racks his brain for any pretext to walk over to the group, introduce himself, maybe invite them all up to the tower. It’s strictly not allowed, but Ray, Dustin and himself will do it on occasion with family or friends. He could frame it as a professional courtesy: “Is there anything we could be doing to better support you all?” he might ask. Or maybe coordinating their releases ahead of time, though he already knows their on-call schedule isn’t always on time, and his offer would frankly be useless.
By the time he’s made up his mind on a course of potential openings, the waitress lumbers in from the kitchen with a stack of creaking Styrofoam containers. The pilots assemble into a receiving line behind him, then, one by one, walk out the door. Jim thought he could feel her eyes on his neck when she stood near him, wondered if the skin, sunburnt too many times to count now, might have given her some pause. Mona had liked his neck, in the beginning.
The diner grows quiet, like the airfield beyond its north-facing windows. The waitress has disappeared again but, before Jim calls into the kitchen to inform her he’s no longer hungry and would like to cancel the cold cut, he realizes he never placed an order at all.
* * *
It took the better part of ten days, but the fire is now eighty percent contained. The Forest Service has released Air Attack 163 and 12, but 58 remains on station to finish laying a perimeter of bright red retardant on the slopes of the mountains. The outlook is positive.
It’s late on a Friday morning. A rare calm has settled over the airport in terms of wind and the traffic load he must handle. Still a few hours before Dustin will arrive for his overlapping shift, and Jim thinks he might take advantage of the lull to scrub the lines from the coffee pot.
The steel wool is effective against the stains, but it’s old and jagged and should have been replaced years ago, and stray strands keep needling up under his fingernails. He finally realizes he’s bleeding.
Seated at the radio console, Jim starts to swab the cuts with alcohol and goes to open a bandage when the speaker fills the room: “Spinnaker Tower, Air Attack 58, emergency. Currently five miles southeast of the field, making straight in runway two seven.”
Jim makes a chaotic grab for his headset, gets one earcup on enough to hear, then says, “Air Attack 58, Spinnaker Tower. State the nature of your emergency.” He needs more information from her, but his requests are choppy. He’s going to pull the training from his brain bit by sloppy bit.
She responds calmly, “Air Attack 58, engine fire.”
“Air Attack 58, runway two seven cleared to land. No other traffic observed in the vicinity.” The alcohol is still sharp in his nostrils and will color the scene, he thinks, for the rest of his life. “Remember that time,” he might say to her, later. Now, he says, “When able, state number of souls onboard and remaining fuel.”
“One soul onboard, five hours fuel remaining, Air Attack 58.”
Jim rightens his headset only to push an earcup off again. His hand comes to rest on the landline phone. He knows he must pick it up but can’t. He knows pilots are trained for scenarios of all varieties. He knows that as an experienced pilot, she will, statistically, be successful at mitigating additional hazards, especially now that she’s so close to the airfield, and land the jet in a way that allows her to survive.
“Three mile final, runway two seven.”
But Jim also knows that emergencies can morph and surprise. He knows what can insidiously stack up against someone with fatal consequences. He can see it forming in front of him, through the windows of the tower, like he saw it once before from a ramp, a mangled red and white plane, the shock of black smoke on impact.
Jim feels a hot prickle at his neck mingling with the chill of his specter. Before, he wasn’t empowered to pick up the phone — there was no phone, there was no control tower. There was a body trapped upside-down with the blood rushing painfully, constrained and bound among metal panels and a nest of wiring.
There was the seatbelt that locked on its tension reel, such that there was no way out except cutting the belt. Planes were bad enough, a serrated knife in a jean pocket would be a step too far. There was confinement while a fire grew, and the screaming that Jim imagines but never heard from the scorching wreck littering the runway.
There were firefighters, called in via 911 twenty minutes before, gleaming with sweat, axing through the smoldering skin of the aircraft. There was the matter-of-fact discovery of a charred body, white teeth horribly lustrous in an open mouth. Was it from the moment of realization? Will it be the watch or the rings they find melted into skin and bone? Will he have two ghosts lingering about him now? The alcohol is making him dizzy, he thinks.
“One mile final, two seven, runway assured.”
Ultimately, Jim knows he must pick up the phone, the one he’s now bleeding all over, the one that exists, because this is his job, and he’s always done his job, whatever the consequences, be he father or tower controller.
But before he does, he offers up to the unfair, unjust universe, in hopes that luck is on his side this time, that he will go and find her in the office the Forest Service keeps on the airfield. He will find her and introduce himself. He will invite her to coffee should they have an overlapping break, and hope the new waitress is working so that there might be an excuse to extend their time.
He needs to do this before she’s relocated back to Bakersfield or Van Nuys or Santa Monica or wherever lightning strikes next. He will know her name, and she will know his. This at least, let him have this.
He needs a cigarette. He needs it to be different this time. He needs to do his job.
Jim hopes it’s enough for him to be needed here, then he picks up the phone.
Copyright © 2025 by Morgan Kohler
