Pat didn’t have the heart to go into the Sabre reports that made clear what a moribund toehold the Love Field operation had become. I could have written this up from Irving. If folks want to fly Kelleher’s cheapo airline, so be it. I’ve just got to hold on, make it another five years to get Dan through school. Pat stood—behind Gene was a picture of LBJ taking the oath next to a despairing Jackie. MS or not, I can still make five years and retire early on disability. Pat then looked out the tinted windows of the office at runway 13L, smeared black with skid marks, and wondered where Air Force One had been parked during that dreadful moment. Pat noticed a 727 with a government tail number taxiing to the private hangar.

“Who’s that?”

“Let me see.” Gene checked the tower manifest. “Chairman of the Fed coming to town. Greenspan.”

“Great name for the guy in charge of all the money.”

Gene stayed wearily well mannered. “I appreciate the visit, Pat.”

“Well, it’s on my way home.”

What good is a company that always casts off its own people? Pat shook Gene’s hand and kept this futile thought to himself. He didn’t give a shit about Love Field. No one did. And he wasn’t headed home or back to AMR this afternoon. He was headed to the bar.

Happy Landings was the last remaining dive bar on this stretch of Lemmon Avenue near Love Field. It catered to the airport crowd and wasn’t full of overflow from the drug motels and peep shows on Harry Hines Boulevard. The bar was A/C permafrosted and dark—well suited to the afternoon drinker. Pat strolled in around two p.m. and no one looked up. George Strait leaked out of a distant speaker, and a white fluorescent gloom fell over the pool table, the rest of the bar lit by neon signs and slivers of reality peeking under purple curtains. A few model airplanes hanging in approach over the corners of the bar were all that was left of the go-go seventies, when Happy Landings had been the unofficial departure lounge for all the fresh, young air geishas and cabin jockeys to points hot tubbed and coked out. Pat parked under a B-25 replica with the shark’s mouth bristling across the nose. He hunkered down on a black pleather stool across from two old Braniff girls who looked laid over for good.

“Chicken Little kind of day?” It was the owner and bartender, Steve Miller. Not that Steve Miller, just a good ole boy in a striped off-blue cowboy shirt and jeans belted by a big-ass buckle made of two silver arrows. The one pointed up read: the man; the one pointing down decreed: the legend.

“Work sucks, but I’m working on it.”

“Work is for jerks. One and one?”