7. Bill
SEVEN
bill
The sheer amount of equipment required for a launch is daunting. Bill is well accustomed to the accoutrements of war; he is a military man to his core, and the organizing, carrying, and use of the various parts of his uniform and military load are by now second nature to him. But as he and the other men stand in the center of yet another giant, open space in the Launch Operations Center, taking in the various tables laden with items that are of grave importance to an astronaut, he feels like a kid again, ready to start bootcamp and learn the ropes.
“And this, men, is the Primary Life Support Subsystem,” Arvin North says. He has an unlit cigarette tucked behind one ear, and his thick-framed black glasses reflect the overhead lights as he looks at them with both hands on his hips. North has quickly become a huge part of their daily lives, and while Bill associates him with uncomfortable questions, he also sees Arvin North as an authority figure. And no matter what, Bill respects authority. “Your PLSS has the equipment and supplies that you will need to survive in space. I cannot stress enough how important this is.”
North walks over to a table and lifts up a large, square pack. “This will hold your oxygen—an obvious necessity. This is what you breathe in during a spacewalk, and the oxygen will pressurize your suit. Each pack comes with a regulator that ensures proper pressurization.” North picks up a small, square item and holds it aloft for the men to see. “This handy dandy little item will remove carbon dioxide as you exhale it. You need this.” He sets it down and picks up a battery pack with wires coming out of both ends. “This is your electricity. You need this for the suit to work.” North sets it down and picks up a small fan. “This will circulate the oxygen through your suit and life support system. Each of these items works in tandem and is integral to your success and to your survival.” Arvin North walks around another table and sets both hands on top of two more items. “This is your water cooling apparatus—it flows through tubes known as ‘umbilicals’ that are connected to your suit, and this is your two-way radio for communication. Any questions?”
“Will we cover the procedures for repairing a pack while we’re out there, and will we have a backup plan in the event that someone’s pack malfunctions during a spacewalk?” Todd Roman asks, one hand halfway in the air like a Boy Scout asking a question about building a campsite.
Arvin North presses his lips together in a firm line, which Bill takes to mean that he’s losing patience for simplistic questions like this. “Roman,” he says to Todd, “we will cover so much information in the coming weeks and months that you’ll be eating, dreaming, and leaking data about space and aeronautics from your ass every time you sit on the toilet. Got it?”
Todd gives a single nod and clenches his jaw; message received.
“Today I’d like to see each of you put together your own backpack according to the instructions on this piece of paper.” North holds up a single sheet of paper with typewritten instructions. “You will each have your own table,” he says, pointing at the five separate tables covered with the items he’s just shown them. “And when I say go, you will assemble your packs. You have five minutes to complete the task. No one will finish in five minutes. When we’ve attempted it once, you will dismantle your pack, and we will start again. This exercise repeats until every one of you can put together a fully functioning Primary Life Support Subsystem in under five minutes.”
Bill holds in a groan and forces his face to remain completely neutral. Timed drills have always been his personal specialty, but he gets the sense that they’ll be running through this exercise a number of times before they manage to get it right. The men have just eaten lunch before this exercise, and while Bill attempts to keep his brain focused on the information being presented, he’s having a bit of a drop in energy and could use a hot, black coffee to get through this.
“Find a table, any table,” North shouts over the echoey din of the large room as the men speak to one another. “Get in position,” he says, consulting a stopwatch that hangs on a black cord around his neck. “Ready, get set, GO!”
Bill pushes the need for caffeine and a ten minute break from his mind and quickly assesses the items on his table, checking them off mentally as he goes: oxygen, fan, carbon dioxide, electricity, water cooler… He looks at each item from all angles, comparing it to the sheet of paper that Arvin North has set on his table. It’s a fairly easy puzzle to solve, connecting each item to another piece and attempting to fit it all snugly into the pack, but even still, the parts of the backpack are unfamiliar to him, so Bill falters once or twice.
As he’s trying to connect the wires of his battery, Bill watches his own hands. They are steady, even. This is his strongest area: calm stability in the face of pressure or danger. He knows that there is no imminent threat, but even still, there is pressure to get the job done in a short amount of time.
Next to Bill, Ed Maxwell is bent over his own table, working quickly to assemble his pack. Bill notices that Ed’s got his fan in at the wrong angle, but it’s unclear whether or not helping one another is an acceptable move. Arvin North has said nothing about working together, and as Bill glances at Arvin, he sees that there is a slightly bemused, questioning look on North’s face. This is a test , Bill thinks. All of this is a test .
“Maxwell,” Bill barks in a confident tone, loud enough that Arvin North will hear him clearly. “Turn that fan counterclockwise and slide it in the other way.”
Ed glances up from the task at hand and looks at Bill with just the slightest trace of annoyance. Still, he rotates the fan, and it slips in easily. “Thanks,” Ed says, moving on to the next item.
Bill chooses to keep working on his own pack and not to look back at Arvin North.
When the buzzer goes off, Bill, Ed, and Jay Reed have completed the task. Todd Roman and Vance Majors have not.
“Unpack the items and place them back on the table,” North says, resetting his stopwatch. “We begin again in ten seconds.” He stares at the stopwatch as the seconds tick away. “And…go!”
When five o’clock rolls around, the men are mentally drained. They’ve finally completed the task in under five minutes—all of them—and Bill’s gone beyond the need for coffee to the need for a stiff drink.
“Let’s hit the Black Hole, yeah?” Ed says as they all walk down the linoleum-tiled hallway of the Launch Operations Center that evening, lunch boxes in hand, egos checked by a day of doing and re-doing the same task repeatedly.
The Black Hole is the bar right off the property, beachside and open-air to catch the breeze off the water. Bill has been there twice, and to be perfectly honest, he loves it.
“I’m in,” Bill says, stopping at the front counter and leaning an elbow on it. “But I need to call home first and let Jo know I’ll be late for dinner. Meet you guys there?”
Todd slips on his aviator sunglasses as they hit the front lobby with its tall ceilings and potted plants. “See you there, bud,” he says, lifting one hand in the air as he pushes through the front door and out into the hot evening.
Two beautiful secretaries are bustling around and closing things up for the day. They smile at Bill.
“Help you, Lieutenant Colonel Booker?” one of them asks, looking up at him from beneath a fringe of darkly mascaraed lashes. Her name is Debra, and she’s got a pep to her that reminds Bill of the girl who led the cheer squad at his high school. He’s heard more than one male employee in the lunch room commenting on Debra’s assets and her smile with a knowing laugh, but she seems cheerfully oblivious to the fact that the guys think of her as the unofficial NASA pinup girl.
“Hi, Deb.” Bill is still leaning on the counter. “Mind if I borrow your phone to call home and check in?”
Debra, a bottle blonde with smooth skin, an hourglass figure, and a penchant for a flipped bouffant hairdo and slim pencil skirts, smiles at him with her row of straight, pearly-white teeth. “Sure,” she says in a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice. “Of course you can.” Without taking her eyes from Bill, she pushes the heavy phone across the counter towards him and then walks away to retrieve her purse from the office space in the back.
“Jojo,” Bills says when Jo answers. “Hi, hon. The guys want to stop off at the Black Hole for a beer—it’s been a day, baby. Mind if I’m a little late for dinner? No, no. You don’t have to hold things for me—just feed the kids. Okay. Sure. Love you.” He hangs up the phone with a firm hand and pushes it back towards Debra’s spot behind the counter. “Thanks, Deb!” Bill calls into the void. The front lobby has emptied out, as business hours are over. Night security will come in soon to man things, but the astronauts and the pretty front desk ladies are done for the day.
Debra comes out of the office with a purse dangling from one shoulder, and a thin cardigan draped over her tanned arm. “Headed to the Black Hole?” she asks conversationally, walking out the front door with Bill. He holds the door for her, admiring offhandedly the way her rear end swings from side to side as she walks.
“Sure. But just for one drink.” He squints out at the lot to where his Corvette is parked. “Gotta get home for dinner with the family,” he adds. He’s just told Jo to go ahead and eat without him, but somehow it feels better to add the fact of his family into this conversation so that Debra doesn’t think he has any nefarious intentions with her.
“Of course,” Debra says with a smile. “You being a family man and all.” She stops walking and stands next to a powder blue 1954 Ford Fairlane. With one hand held over her eyes to shield them from the bright sun, Debra smiles up at Bill, highlighting how much smaller and daintier she is than him. “I might stop by for a drink myself. I’ve got no one to get home to—aside from my roommate, Cathy, and she doesn’t care when I get in.”
Bill feels something—a familiar tug, a forgotten sense of promise or excitement—as he realizes that Debra has gone beyond simple friendliness and entered the realm of flirting. He squashes the feeling immediately. “Good on you,” he says instead, walking to his car. “A career woman with her independence. Very admirable.” Bill tips his imaginary hat to her, and then he turns towards his Corvette without another word.
He’s pretty sure that he’s leaving Debra standing there in the parking lot wondering if she’s said something wrong, but he’s also fairly certain that he’s deterred her from showing up at the Black Hole that evening looking for witty banter or a free drink. A flirtation of any sort is simply a distraction that he does not need—nor does his marriage need it—and so Bill throws his briefcase onto the passenger seat of the Corvette, revs the engine, and pulls out of the lot without a single look back at Debra.
The Black Hole has a bar made of polished driftwood that looks like it’s been slightly burned in a bonfire. The chairs and stools are all handmade and covered in naugahyde, and paper lanterns in a rainbow of colors hang from the ceiling and above the bar, swaying back and forth in the breeze that comes in off the water through the open walls.
“The ITEMS in this pack are THINGS you need to know INTIMATELY,” Todd Roman is saying when Bill enters the bar. Todd is standing beside the table where the men are all slouched casually, nursing cold beers from bottles, or holding short, stout glasses of amber liquid. It’s clear that Todd is mimicking Arvin North, and the other men hoot with laughter. Vance Majors slaps the table, one eye closed as he laughs heartily.
“Hoo, boy—that’s some imitation,” Ed says with glee.
Bill walks directly to the bar and orders a Carlsberg. With his beer in hand, he winds through the tables full of NASA employees, local pilots, and women wearing short skirts and bright smiles.
“Pull up a chair, Booker,” Ed Maxwell says, reaching out and dragging an empty seat from another table without standing. He pats the chair. “Thanks for helping me out today. Didn’t know we could work together on that project.”
“I didn’t either,” Bill says, sitting down and leaning back with a sigh as he takes his first long, cold sip of beer. “But I figured we’d be working as a team in space, so it would benefit us to figure out how to do it with our feet still planted on Earth.”
“Good thinking,” Ed says, holding up his bottle of beer to tap against Bill’s with a muted clink . “Hey, how was Sexy Deb?” Ed lifts his eyebrows as he watches Bill’s face.
Bill does not smile. “I just borrowed her phone for a sec.” This is not an answer to Ed’s question, but, as policy, Bill refuses to engage in lowbrow talk. He was one of the few guys in the Air Force who would never shoot the bull about the women he’d been with, and it has always been his modus operandi to keep his private life private. No question. “Hey, don’t you have to check in with Francesca after work?”
“Frankie?” Ed frowns. “Nah. She’s got her own life. She’s probably getting her hair done or having a drink with the girls.”
Bill drinks his beer pensively. “What girls?”
“The other wives,” Ed says with a shrug.
Bill glances at the men gathered around their table: Vance, Jay, and Todd all have wives and children, and the chance that their wives have gotten babysitters to go out for drinks at dinnertime with Francesca seems low. “Are you sure?” he asks.
Ed’s easygoing smile slips a little. “Hey,” he says, nudging Bill with his elbow. “Why are you so worried about my wife? Yours doesn’t give you enough grief so you gotta start looking for some to borrow?”
Bill holds up a hand. “No, sorry. Not my business. You’re right.”
Ed visibly relaxes and takes another drink of his beer. “It’s fine. I’m just stressed. It’s like I need to stop off and have a beer on my way home if I’m going to handle whatever Frankie throws at me—you know what I mean?”
Bill nods to keep the peace, but in truth, he doesn’t know what Ed means. He and Jo rarely fight; in a dozen years of marriage, they’ve not always seen eye-to-eye, but there are no tantrums with Jo. Sure, he usually knows where he stands when it comes to her opinions, but she’s the kind of girl who rolls up her sleeves and gets things done. It’s one of the things he’s always loved most about his wife.
As the guys are sitting around the table dissecting the work day and discussing the intricacies of the backpack they’d spent the afternoon piecing together, a woman in a pastel pink dress walks across the bar and stops in front of the jukebox. She runs a bright red fingernail down the list of songs, finally dropping a dime in the slot and choosing “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Frankie Valli Bill wants no part in getting caught talking about the big boss behind his back.
Out in the parking lot Bill heaves a sigh of relief that the day is behind him. The knots in his shoulders have melted somewhat with the lubrication of the Carlsberg, and he knows that a dinner kept warm in the oven, and an evening with his family await him just a short drive away.
As he slides into the car with its top down, Bill can hear a whoop of laughter from inside the bar, and then the song changes to “Lovers Who Wander” by Dion. He shakes his head.
Bill guns his engine and lets it rev for a second before roaring out of the parking lot and onto A1A.
With the sun sunk low in a marigold sky, he pushes the pedal down hard and races towards home.