“I always used to say, don’t think about the parachute, think about the controls. But I was young then and didn’t know any better.” Borman put out his hand to shake Pat’s. “There’s more to life than living.”

An hour later Pat was in Eastern business class headed back to Dallas. He hadn’t closed the deal in the room, and any positive indications from Borman were scrapped by the head of HR telling him they had more candidates to interview, ending with the normal “We’ll call you” bullshit. Pat played back the tape on his talk with Borman and sank into dejection. They never really discussed his work experience, just more detail about how you have to slow-roll a space capsule like it’s on a barbecue spit so as to evenly spread the radiation against the hull, how Apollo 8 touched down into ten-foot swells in the Northern Pacific and Borman got seasick, how he had passed on Apollo 11 and why he didn’t want to go back to the moon, “Seen it, done it, knew what was in store for that crew . . .” Pat left knowing more about lunar telemetry than he did about a job at Eastern. So he picked his sour grapes: Everyone knows Eastern is a shit show, an airline on the ropes, and the colonel—Pat still couldn’t believe he was packing a pistol—is going full Nixon on his enemies in the union. His days seem numbered. Maybe that was too strong, but Pat got the distinct sense that Borman was a good but troubled man, who alternated between velvet glove and iron fist, between bended knee and thrusting chest, and that was very hard to read in a boss.

The airplane taxied from the gate, and Pat stared out the window at the shimmering runway, and beyond it, a grassy ditch filled with black puddles. Feeling underwater himself, Pat was suspicious of a place where rain collected rather than ran off. Always smells like a storm is coming. And then something caught his eye. An alligator climbed onto the bank of the runway. It was at least five feet long, its scales dark and wet, and it slunk leisurely with its belly close to the ground until it was on dry grass.

“Can I get you something, sir?”

Pat looked at the blue face of his Timex like it mattered. He ordered a Johnnie Black double, rocks. If Borman had a spy on the plane, so be it.