Chapter Text
November, 1972 - Base Housing
It all starts like this, for Maverick. It’s November 5th, 1972.
There’s two men in the living room with his mother when he gets home from school, and the world tilts on its axis when he sees their grim faces. He’s ten years old, and he knows damn well what it means when a pair of grim-faced men in dress uniforms come to your door. Even forty years later, when so much of his childhood has faded to static, the memory is still stored in high-definition, every detail photorealistically clear. There is a cup of coffee, abandoned on the sideboard without a coaster. It will leave a ring on the wood until he sells the damn thing, fifteen years later. Beside it, on the blue couch, his mother looks ghostly in her white nurse’s uniform, and he knows, even before the Chaplain opens his mouth, what he’s going to say.
Yesterday, Lieutenant Duke Mitchell was killed in action in Vietnam. Mrs. Mitchell, the U.S. Navy and the country owe you a debt that we will never be able to repay. The words sound like he’s said them a thousand times, and he looks like every time he says them, a little more of his own faith has been washed away.
He probably has said them a thousand times, Pete thinks, oddly numb to the whole thing. They’re the third house on their street to get the news this month.
The men excuse themselves unobtrusively, leaving their contact information and a promise that someone will be in touch for all of the arrangements in the next few days. Pete goes and sits next to his mother on the couch. She pulls him into a hug, and they sit there, silent, in a too-quiet house, and try to accept that Duke Mitchell isn’t coming home. He’s left a chasm of grief behind him that Pete doesn’t know how to address. (Decades later, Pete Mitchell will stand in front of his best friend’s wife, and he will wonder how casualty notification team did it, day after day, without it swallowing them whole. He never does find an answer.)
Pete doesn’t cry then, and he won’t cry at the funeral, either. He knows, in some indescribable way, that if he cracks now, if he cries now, the whole thing is going to crumble like a house of cards. The floodgates will break open, and whatever is left of the peace will wash away forever. A car starts in someone else’s driveway, life carrying on despite everything and the moment’s gone, but he’s still trying to hold it all together. It slips from his too-small hands, and even at ten he knows he couldn’t have fixed any of it, but that doesn’t stop him from wishing he could have tried harder.
It’s a heinously beautiful day, clear and blue and beautiful, when they bury his father’s coffin. His suit, bought for Easter, is a little too tight in the shoulders, and a little too short in the leg. He doesn’t mention it. It doesn’t seem important, as silent tears slip down his mother’s face. He knows what happens when you get shot down, same as every other kid on the playground. It’s passed in whispers by the swings, because the adults aren’t going to tell them, so they’ll pass what they can overhear or put together from pieces of scrounged information and rumor. If you’re lucky, they find enough of you to send home. If you’re not, you burn up somewhere in the jungle, and your family gets an empty box and a folded-up flag.
The ground’s freezing mud, and it’s leaking into Pete’s shiny black dress shoes, soaking his socks. The bugler plays and every man in uniform stands to attention. So does Pete, and holds it the whole time the sailors on the funeral detail fold up the flag. One of them marches over to his mother, and when he kneels down to hand her the flag, the knee of his white trousers sinks into the mud and stains. The sailor ignores it, and as his mother takes the flag in her gloved hands, four jets scream overhead, one breaking straight up into the clear blue sky. If he was a little kid, he’d want to wave up at them like he used to. But instead, he watches as they fade into the distance and that’s when it really, truly hits- his dad’s gone, gone-gone, never-coming-home-gone. He slips his hand into his mother’s and she squeezes it, a little too tightly, like she’s reminding herself that he’s still there. It’s okay, he thinks, even though it aches, because they’re all they’ve got left now.
Later, when everyone’s crowded back to their house for casserole and cookies and punch, Pete sneaks out to the back yard, hoping that the usual group of kids will be out back, and he can run off some of the burning feeling in his chest. He’s so goddamn tired of everyone’s mothers and grandmothers patting him on the shoulders, ruffling his hair, pinching his cheeks, telling him that everything will be okay.
It won’t be, he wants to scream, and you know it. My dad’s dead, gone, gone, gone, and never coming home. But his mom will be upset if he screams, or cries, or acts like a baby. So he’s almost relieved when the back yard is mostly deserted. He sits on the bottom of the stairs that lead from the patio to the backyard and watches a line of ants valiantly struggle with a piece of cookie a hundred times larger than any of them. The back door slides open upstairs, and he ignores it, still watching the ants. Someone clicks a lighter, and the smell of tobacco smoke wafts down, bitter and warm in the cold.
“Hey, Bill,” One man says to another, and he turns and looks up. There’s a pair of men in clean dress whites, gold wings glinting on their chests. They shake hands, one claps the other on the shoulder, and passes him a bottle of beer.
“Hey, Andy. They let you home for this?”
“Nah. Week’s R&R, you know. Boss thinks I’m in Thailand with the missus. You?”
“Got back last month. I’ve been offered a shore command.” He sounds hesitant to say it, like it’s something to be ashamed of.
“Good for you, Bill. Bet Betsy’s happy.”
Bill nods, and Pete starts to lose interest in the conversation. Even pilots talk like boring adults half the time.
“I wasn’t sure, you know. It’s not a flying position.”
“Ah.” That would change things, for a pilot, Pete thinks.
“But after Duke burned out…”
There’s a pensive silence, between the two men.
“Should’ve RTB’d.” Andy says, “Not speaking ill of the dead, but we both know you can’t fly like that, not with a kid back home and expect to make it back stateside.”
Something about it boils in Pete’s blood, the way he’s so goddamn casual about it.
“Might as well have told the guy to stop breathing. I’ve never seen someone fly like that before. Man belonged up there.” Bill replies. “I don’t think I do, really, not like that. I’ve had my time in the sky– it’s time to come down and take care of my family, you know? Before I go try to be a hero and wind up flying into the side of a mountain.”
“Well, he always said he wasn’t about to let the Viet Cong kill him.” Andy says dryly.
The other man snorts. “Got his wish, I guess. Hell, it’s getting late– I should get back home before Betsy sends out a search party. Toast?”
“Toast.” Andy agrees, and clears his throat, “To a goddamn good pilot. Duke Mitchell belonged to the sky, and the sky took him back.”
Their bottles clink together.
“Duke Mitchell. Clear skies and tailwinds, brother.”
That night, Pete lies awake, watching the model planes he built with his dad swaying where they’re suspended in a v formation from his ceiling in the breeze from his open window. The F-4 has gotten twisted around in it’s strings, flying backwards against the formation. A sudden strange urge tears through him and he throws himself out of bed. He drags out his desk chair and climbs onto it, heedless of its wobbly leg. Dad will fix it, he thinks, and then or he won’t, I guess. He’s still too short to reach, so he grabs a few books off his shelf, and stacks them up on the seat, and then climbs up on the whole stack and pulls the F-4 back where it should be. It holds for a moment, then slowly rotates again.
He pulls it back again, too quickly. He realizes his mistake as soon as it’s too late, his socks slipping on the book cover, the chair tilting in slow-motion. He feels it like a pull in his gut, like when his Dad pulled back on the yoke and climbed them into the sky, the feeling of pressing backwards into the seat and then the wings catching the air. But no catch comes, gravity stays engaged. He overbalances and falls and the chair and the books and the plane come down with him to the floor in a terrible clatter that brings his mom running in.
The left wing comes off of the little F-4 in the crash, and the metal cuts deep into his palm, and that’s how his mother finds him, silent tears and a bloody hand, cradling the broken toy. She patches him up and holds him as the dam breaks and the tears stream down his face and he cries and cries and cries until he falls asleep.
In the morning, she gets them both dressed and drives to the hardware store and they pick up some glue and they sit down at the kitchen table to fix the plane. She hangs it back up, and they watch it twist again, still flying backwards after all that.
His mother watches it twist and sighs.
“Duke never could do things by the book.”
Pete looks up at it, too.
“Is that why he died?” He asks in a small voice. She turns sharply to him.
“He was a damn good pilot, Pete.” The venom in her voice surprises him. He’s never heard her curse before, not ever. “That’s what they all said, all the boys he flew with. I know what the Navy said, but we knew your father better than they did. I don’t know all the details but I do know this- your father died doing what he did best, and that’s better than most people can say.”
Pete looks at the fighter jet flying above him. He thinks about what his Dad looked like when he said goodbye, when he patted Pete on the shoulder and said If you miss me, wave at one of these knuckleheads flying over, and they’ll call me up on the radio and let me know.
Before he left the last time, Duke took Pete up for a flight, in an old prop plane that belonged to a friend. Pete had watched, wide-eyed, as his dad had walked around the plane, pulling on things and checking knuts and wires, before boosting him into the back seat and starting up. Pete had to sit on two phone books to see out, and his dad had made sure he knew not to push any buttons without Duke telling him to. You’re my co-pilot, buddy– I can’t see what you’re doing back there, so I’m going to trust you, okay? Pete had nodded, and given his dad a little half-salute that had made him roar with laughter. We’ll make a pilot out of you for sure, Pete.
They’d taxied out onto the grass strip, and Pete felt a low hum of apprehension, not quite fear, because his dad had it, but the wheels were bumping over the ground, and they were going faster and faster, faster than Pete had ever gone in his life, even when the carnival came into town and he’d ridden on the roller coaster. The roller coaster had had tracks, and a set speed, and Pete could watch the gears click, the mechanical belt pull them to the top of the hill. Here, there were no tracks, no belt pulling them, just his dad, steady on the controls, and the plane, rocketing for the end of the runway, and at the very, very last second, when Pete had been sure they were going off the end and straight into the fence, the nose pitched up and the fence slid down below the horizon, and their wheels left the ground behind. He’s dreamed about it ever since, half-convinced that he’d dreamed that, too, because flying had been unbelievable, like nothing he’d ever felt. It had been like peddling all the way to the top of the biggest hill in their neighborhood and coasting back down, so fast the mailboxes blurred and his heart pounded, but that had been a half-second, before he’d realized that his brakes weren’t working the way they should and he’d almost crashed, but this was the whole time, every second in the air as incredible as the first.
Pete rubs the bandaged cut on his hand and thinks about what it feels like to fly. He thinks about how the world looks when it falls away from you,about how everything spreads out like an unfolded map. Things make sense in the air, in a way they don’t on the ground. He thinks about the man who gave a speech at his dad’s memorial, saying he belonged to the sky, and the sky took him back.
Pete Mitchell sets his mind, there and then, that he’s going to be the best goddamn pilot the Navy’s ever seen, and if they don’t want to see it he’ll make them.