Most people thought he was just irresponsible, that he was just drowning himself in the bottle. But given the life that he’d led, if he hadn’t turned to escape through the booze, that would’ve been it. The End. People back on Earth would tell him to straighten up and fly right, but they may as well have been telling him to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. He didn’t want to go back to that. If he was still alive in the spring, when his tour of duty was up, he’d apply to have it extended. Better that than being driven to suicide.
His brooding was interrupted by the sound of distant thunder. He looked up. At long last, it had returned: the last plane of the 167th TFS. As it approached the roar of its engines gradually drowned out the howling of the storm. Suddenly, the shape of a giant bird appeared out of the whiteness, followed by the sound of an arrester hook snagging the cable. The fighter shook the ground as its wheels made contact with the runway. The hook runner ran out to unhook the cable from the arrester. The ground guide signaled the pilot with powerful flashlights, moving them quickly from belly level to chest: Raise hook. He then lifted his left arm and swept it in a large circle to the left: Proceed to taxiway.
Finally, Amata could do his job. He cut off the intermittent starter and stepped on the accelerator, revving the engine as the black fighter taxied right by him. The metallic whine of its jets grew distant, and he readied himself to get to work. But just as he stepped on the grader’s heavy clutch, he saw someone running toward him. He took his foot off the clutch. The figure made a beeline for the cabin, banged once on the door, then opened it without asking. Icy wind blew into the cabin full force.
“What?!” shouted Amata.
“The de-icer on the gear’s broken down,” the man shouted. He was covered with snow and ice from head to foot. “The storage trench is buried in snow, so we can’t get the arresting gear back into it.”
“Hurry up and close my goddamned door!” Lieutenant Amata shouted back.
“Fine,” the man said. “Just take care of it. You know what to do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Clear the snow without breaking the gear, okay?”
“That’s not my job!”
“Your job’s snow removal. Now get it done fast or we won’t be ready when the next flight returns. And if that happens, it’s on your head!” The man slammed the door shut, which proceeded to bounce back open again, and ran with short steps to a snow truck whose warm windows were steaming up. He climbed in, and the truck soon disappeared into the blizzard.
Amata gritted his teeth. “Fuckers,” he seethed. The ground crews treated him and the men in his unit like slaves, forcing the cold shit-work off on them. He quickly radioed the word to the other drivers. They all bitched but quickly gave in and accepted the situation. They didn’t have the will to argue at that point. Better to just finish the job quickly.
The lieutenant pulled up the hood of his parka, left the grader idling, and got out. He didn’t turn the intermittent starter on. He was being as uncooperative as he could.
He tried to unhook a shovel from the front of the truck, but the detent was caked with ice and wouldn’t move. He got a plastic hammer from his toolbox and smashed at the ice. Tiny ice chips flew up into his face. Remembering there were goggles in the toolbox as well, he returned the hammer to it and then put the goggles on. Then, taking the shovel in hand and feeling for the arresting cable with his foot, he made his way toward the storage trench.
All around him was total whiteness. The snow blew at him mercilessly. It was hard to breathe. He dug into the trench. He began to sweat. His goggles fogged up. Taking them off, he wiped at the insides with his glove, but they soon fogged up again. He threw the shovel aside and furiously starting digging at the snow with his hands. The other members of his unit were probably kicking back with their own stashes of hooch, letting him deal with the task. He knew most of them were alcoholics. They couldn’t fly fighters and they had no advanced skills, so they were almost universally looked down on by the rest of the FAF, and many of them had internalized the same sense of worthlessness.
Conscious of the pain in his side, Lieutenant Amata pulled the collapse lever. The arresting gear went down. However, a bit of ice still jammed in the fulcrum left the gear poking slightly out of the ground. The lieutenant raised the mechanism again, took off his gloves, and began beating the snow off of it. His hands immediately lost all sensation.
At that moment, he was so jealous of the fighter pilots it made his gut burn. They got to fly off of this snow-blasted landscape and rise above the clouds, where the weather was always clear. No way they could ever understand what it was like for the poor slobs below them freezing on the white ground. He had wanted to be a pilot too, but his bad liver washed him out on the hypoxia resistance test. In other words, the only job for him here was this. He’d been called a waste of a human being, and he had agreed. The same went for all the other guys in his unit. They were sneered at and paid less than the pilots, and even what little pay they received was frequently docked for conduct violations—like drinking on the job.
Last year one of the members of his unit had frozen to death trying to haul a broken-down plow off of the runway during a violent blizzard. The brass kept harping on the dead man’s case, saying that it should serve as a warning to the rest and that it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been drinking. Well, of course he was drinking; it was the only means they had to warm themselves up a little and make it easier to move. They tell us to quit drinking, Amata thought bitterly, but they never fix stuff like that bent door or the de-icer on this thing. It was probably cheaper to work a man harder than to fix a machine. If they just used the waste heat from the underground base, they could keep even this huge runway snow-free. But it would cost too much, so they used manual labor instead. Which they could always get more of from Earth.
Lieutenant Amata lowered the gear again. It still stuck up a little. He beat at it with the shovel, then climbed on top of it and jumped up and down to force it closed with his body weight. That got it.
Snow snuck in through the storm seals of his pants, melted, and mixed with his own sweat. He shivered at the clammy, unpleasant feeling, tramped back to the grader, threw the shovel into the cabin, then climbed in and shut the door. Cold wind was still blowing in through the gap, but it was better than being out there. His parka was now a frozen, crunchy mass. He flipped back the hood, spilling snow over the driver’s seat, and held his frozen hands over the defroster until some of their strength returned. He gripped the large steering wheel and threw the truck into gear.
After finishing his work, Lieutenant Amata drove back to the ground vehicle hangar on the side of the runway. The electric shutter door closed automatically behind him, cutting off the howling of the storm. Once he’d killed the grader’s engine, it was quiet except for the sound of the snow blowing against the shutter. He climbed down from the cab, his breath coming out in clouds of white steam that looked like cigarette smoke. The moisture in his now-thawed parka began to refreeze. He thoroughly beat off the snow and ice clinging to him. If it was still on him when he went into the warm locker room, he’d be soaked.
He stripped out of his cold weather gear in the locker room. It stank of sweat. He was chilled to the bone, yet steam still rose from his body when he took off his sweater. The locker room was warmer than the garage, but only by about ten degrees. He wondered if it was the first ten degrees above freezing but had no way to check. The air grew warmer as he made his way to the station. From the outside, to the garage, to the locker room, to the corridor, to the station: warmer and warmer as he went. He’d been told that sudden changes in temperature were physically harmful, but he still wished they would keep the locker room warmer. He walked into the showers, stripped off his soaked undergarments, and threw them down the laundry chute.