Shapiro prepared for the next day’s deposition of a Raytheon sales manager who’d fired his administrative assistant after she refused to go to a motel with him. But the case seemed silly now in contrast to the news from the Mediterranean. Maybe a million Jews dead. Maybe two million. Another million in the camps and tens of thousands more in the ships.
Shapiro knew he had to do something to take his mind off the news, something that would take all his concentration. That’s what his sailplane was for. No matter how much a next day’s jury argument consumed his thinking—so he could not take a shower without the words of his closing argument forming silently in the back of his throat—he knew that once he strapped himself into the sailplane and wiggled the rudder to signal the towplane pilot he was ready to be pulled into the sky, his mind would focus on nothing except the aircraft and what was happening to the air around it.
“Good to see you again, Ben,” Willy, the glider club’s towplane pilot, said when Shapiro pulled up to the club hanger. Willy was a retired commercial pilot, never having made it to a major carrier before mandatory retirement. “Too bad what’s happening to your people over there. Who would have thought somebody would be crazy enough to mess with an atom bomb? Must have killed himself, too, don’t you think?”
Shapiro gave Willy a nod, then a second quick look, surprised but not upset about the “your people.” He’d never discussed being Jewish with Willy, or hardly anybody else for that matter. For him being Jewish was more a fact of life, like being six feet tall. It wasn’t as if he ever went to religious services or bought Kosher meat for any other reason than that it seemed healthier. Shapiro referred to himself as a “gastronomic Jew,” not a religious one.
“Yeah, too bad, too bad,” Shapiro muttered. “How’s the lift today, Will? Been up yet?”
“It’s developing,” Willy answered, looking up at the puffy white cumulus clouds, a sign of rising air currents. “A hell of a lot of traffic out of South Weymouth, though. Never seen it so busy there.”
South Weymouth Naval Air Station was a recently reopened Navy Reserve air base a dozen miles north of Plymouth from which the Massachusetts Air National Guard flew F-15s up and down the northeastern seaboard.
Military traffic complicated the basic rule of safety in the sky—the rule that said, “Don’t worry. It’s a big sky and you’re in a little airplane.” Gliders were a special problem.
The largest piece of metal in Shapiro’s glider was the thermos bottle he carried his Gatorade in. The German-built, fiberglass-and-carbon-fiber sailplane, with its wings only inches thick and its smoothly curved body, was a better stealth aircraft than the hundred-million-dollar fighters the Air Force was so proud of. The glider returned a radar echo about as well as a hawk with a bottle cap in its mouth, and its circling flight, searching for the same rising air currents as the birds used, was a perfect imitation of a lazy bird of prey.
“Your tax dollars at work, Willy,” Shapiro said. “If those Reserve pilots are up on a Wednesday, you can bet they’re getting time and a half.”
Shapiro walked slowly around the glider, mentally ticking off each of the twenty-seven items on his preflight check list, then kicked the wheel centered under the cockpit and gave each wingtip a good shake, just to prove once again that the plastic plane would stay together when he hit the turbulence that marked entry into strong lift.
He opened the rear canopy in the two-person glider and checked that the safety harness straps were buckled, holding the seat cushions in place so nothing could get loose in the rear cockpit and jam the controls.
Some glider pilots would chat away while going through the preflight ritual. Shapiro, Willy learned from experience, treated each stage of the inspection like a surgical procedure, counting the number of threads showing beyond the safety nuts on each connection. This attention to detail paid off in the courtroom and carried into every aspect of Shapiro’s life, including what was supposed to be recreation. His wife joked that he planned their vacations down to making reservations at gas stations every 375 miles, knowing his car got 400 miles to a tank.
To a woman who never turned off a light or closed a drawer, who tossed away the cap when she opened a new tube of toothpaste, this seemed to be a foible she categorized as one of those “Jewish things” about him caused by a compulsive mother, things she sometimes found enchanting but usually put aside with a laugh. In Sally Spofford’s childhood in the big house on the rocks overlooking the ocean on Boston’s North Shore, there was always somebody else to worry about the details, to turn off the lights, to make sure the gas tank was full.
The tow pilot walked over to Shapiro’s glider.
“Let’s go up to three thousand feet. A tourist flight today,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro squirmed into the front seat in the glider, lying back with his head held up by a small adjustable support. The shape of the glider was designed to minimize air resistance, with the smallest frontal area the designer could devise and still fit the pilot. Shapiro buckled all five straps, one from each side around his waist, one over each shoulder and one coming up between his legs, the “aerobatic” strap designed to keep him from sliding under the instrument panel when he turned the plane upside down. He closed and latched the hinged plastic canopy, put his feet on the rudder pedals and gently grasped the control stick, projecting between his legs, in his right hand.
The tow pilot attached the towrope to the release mechanism in the glider’s nose, tugged to confirm it held tightly, then walked the 200-foot length of the rope to the towplane and started his engine.
Shapiro breathed in, filled his lungs with air, held his breath, then released the air slowly. Chanting his “rope break” mantra of “stick forward, land straight ahead, stick forward, land straight ahead,” the action to take if the towrope broke in the first 200 feet of flight, he stepped down hard on the right rudder pedal, then hard on the left, wiggling the plane’s rudder from side to side to signal the tow pilot he was ready.
He heard the towplane get full throttle, and the next second he was moving along the grass field the gliders used. In thirty yards he had enough speed to ease back on the stick and lift the glider five feet off the grass, holding it there until the towplane rose from the ground. Carefully duplicating each movement of the towplane, wings banked right, then level, then left, then level, the two aircraft rose into the sky, linked by a rope umbilical.
At 200 feet his mantra changed to “sharp turn to the left, stick forward,” knowing he had to act instantly should the rope break above 200 feet of altitude, turning the glider back to the airfield before it ran out of altitude and hit the trees at the end of the runway. The rope had never broken, but some day it would. Shapiro got through life knowing that even though the odds against disaster were a thousand to one, if you did something a thousand times, disaster was a certainty. He expected the towrope to break on every takeoff, just as he expected the arresting police officer to lie at every trial. In both cases, if the expected didn’t happen, he was pleasantly surprised.
The towplane circled and crossed the duck-shaped pond southeast of the grass field that marked the IP, the interception point, where gliders entered the landing pattern for that runway, just as the altimeter needle touched 3,000 feet. As the glider passed over the pond, Shapiro took the yellow release handle in his left hand and gave it a strong pull, then another to be sure the towrope released. Two tugs on the release were standard procedure. Just in case. Following the prearranged pattern, the towplane banked sharply to the left and the glider gently to the right.
Pointing the plane’s nose into the wind coming from the ocean five miles to the east, Shapiro slowed the plane to forty-seven miles an hour, its minimum sinking speed. Although almost all glider competition was in smaller one-person aircraft, Shapiro preferred his two-seater. Few things impressed clients more than a glider ride. Besides, it got them used to being in a position where their lawyer was in complete control of their fate.