Dead Man's Hand

The last time I saw Jean-Marc, he was wearing a particularly noticeable and unique ring that he had picked up in his travels. I had never seen anything quite like it. It was in gold and silver, extremely detailed, of a tall ship, fully rigged and under full sail, on what appeared to be black onyx. When I asked him about it, he said he had found the ring during one of his market forays in the Merkato in Addis. The souk he bought it from wasn't able to tell him anything about the ring.

I wanted to look at the ring more closely. When I asked him to take it off, he refused. Obviously it had a great deal of meaning to him, and to some extent I understood why, given the intricacy of the design. Where he bought it probably figured into that too. In any case, I thought the ring summed up every aspect of our occupations as aviators. We wandered around the world, across oceans and continents, moving from location to location, contract to contract, job to job, and relationship to relationship.

Making arrangements

The transient nature of our occupation scattered us far and wide across the country and the world. It was a rare occurrence when any of us ended up back at the company's head office. When we did we liked to get out on the hanger floor and mingle with the maintenance people responsible for the well-being of the aircraft with which we entrusted our lives and the lives of our passengers.

If the right crowd was in town, some of us would end up hitting the hotel down the road for an evening well-spent until closing time. The hotel owner was a former company employee. If he was in a particularly good mood, he'd lock the doors and allow the drinking and partying to go on well past closing time and into the wee hours of the morning.

Plenty of tips kept one or two of the waitresses interested, but only enough to encourage them to serve more alcohol. None of us ever convinced one of them to go home with us or to go out on anything resembling a date. Perhaps through experience they had grown wary of spending time with anyone involved in the transient world of aviation.

One of the maintenance crew that usually came along for the beer was young Bill, a lowly apprentice. He was a slow-witted, slow-talking, slow-moving man with a drawl that managed to irritate the hell out of anyone who spent too much time listening to him. Consequently, we had labeled him as not the brightest bulb in the hangar, so to speak.

Bill was married to a girl who didn't take kindly to his evenings spent out on the town with the boys and subsequent absences from the dinner table at home. After a night of drunken debauchery he would drag his sorry ass back into the shop on a Tuesday or a Wednesday or a Friday morning with a hang-dog look on his face and a ready story about what his wife had done to punish him this time.

Eventually, we became fed up with Bill's constant whining. Following one particularly long and winding nighttime trail of destruction, we ended up at a strip joint to close out the evening's entertainment. When the place shut down, some of us pulled Bill out to the parking lot and gave him a pep-talk before sending him on his way. With our words of encouragement freshly implanted in Bill's tiny brain, he was no doubt eager to test our advice. He departed for house and home where he was sure to be chastised by his bride one more time. His tardiness in arriving would most certainly bring on wifey's shrill tongue and disagreeable disposition one more time.

Following this most recent episode, Bill didn't show up at work for a couple of days. Larry, the owner of the company—in his own right not to be outdone as a drinking machine along with the rest of us—called Bill's bride to inquire if he was sick. Unfortunately for Bill, this was not the case, and upon hanging up the phone, Larry came out to tell us that Bill was in jail. A quick call to the precinct confirmed this, and one of us went down to bail the man out. Finally, Bill was back on the shop floor once again. This time he had an even sadder tale of woe with which to regale his comrades.