Bill Bauer
By Devin Baron
Bill had reached desperation. He decided to get out of the house for a few hours. Maybe going somewhere new would boot him from this workaholic spiral he felt permanently trapped in. He had to get away. Away from the orange-lit garage where he had been slaving away. Away from the engine he couldn’t perfect. Away from his suffocating thoughts and relentless habits.
He walked out of the front door and across the driveway. Carol’s car wasn’t there. Bill wondered if his mom had moved out or something. His obsession with figuring out his plane’s engine was at an excruciating high. He wondered if his mom had finally had enough. He felt her growing more distant ever since Final Fleet had ended. She never brought him tea anymore. She used to always bring hot tea and talk for a few minutes before she went to bed. It was mostly to force Bill to take a break.
He needed those pauses in the day now more than ever. He never stopped anymore. Not even for meals. He had probably lost fifteen or twenty pounds since Final Fleet. His skin looked just as ragged as the grease-stained clothes he rarely changed out of.
He had always been a workaholic, but never quite this brutally. It had always been about achieving greatness before, but now it was more of a distraction. Only after the Final Fleet pilots tragically died did he thrust himself into this destructive spiral. He had grown so close to those pilots.
Carol just retired a month ago, and she had been talking about doing a bunch of things with her new leisure freedom. Bill wouldn’t be surprised if she had caught a plane to Europe without telling him.
He opened the truck door and hopped in. He stared at the blank space in the driveway for another minute before starting the engine. He wished he had done so many things differently. He regretted not taking his mom and brother, Jonathan, flying more. They probably would’ve liked that. Even after his leg injury, Vince, his boss, still would have let him fly one of the Draken helicopters, especially if it was for a family joyride. He realized he never did anything special for them. Though, he couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t arguing about his work-life balance. Carol and Jonathan certainly never made Bill feel good about anything related to planes. It was hard for Bill to show them more of his work, to let them in on the thing they antagonized him about so often.
Bill drove past the Pensacola line. The minutes turned to hours and he finally stopped at a rundown bar and grille in Ponte Vedra, Florida, about twenty miles from Jacksonville. He’d be safe from running into anybody this far out.
He hopped out of the truck. His shoes felt the small white gravel of the parking lot loose beneath them. It reminded him of the old parking lot at Draken International, before it was paved. Something about how the rocks subsiding under each step was connected to that feeling of his early Draken days. He recalled having to prove himself day in and day out. He had to show them he could be just as promising of a flight engineer as he had been a pilot. He had to show his injury wasn’t going to stop him from pursuing greatness. He had sure come a long way from those days.
As Bill walked to the door, a corvette zoomed into a front parking spot. A young couple, in their mid-twenties, got out quickly, seemingly very eager for dinner. Bill questioned how they had the money for that car at their age. He chalked it up to daddy’s money in his head and scoffed internally. He still held the door for them, however.
“Thank you,” the young man said with a kind grin.
“Thank you,” the lady said, even more bubbly.
“You’re welcome.” Bill’s voice couldn’t shake the sadness buried beneath, but their smiles made him happy. He thought of Ethan, Noah, Greg, and Patrick, the four Final Fleet pilots. They weren’t much older than this couple, and yet they were gone.
Bill had met Patrick’s children. He had talked with Ethan about his fiancée. None of those people would get to see their smiles ever again.
Bill sat down on the barstool. “Whiskey. On the rocks please.” The bartender nodded and walked over to grab him a medium-sized glass. Bill coughed a couple times but tried to play if off as a clearing of the throat. He didn’t typically have any allergies, or even believe in allergies for that matter, but any air that wasn’t the dust of his garage was getting to be unusual for his lungs.
“There you go sir.”
“Thank you”
“You doing alright today?” the bartender seemed to half-ask as he picked up the remote and started thumbing through tv channels.
Bill didn’t bother to answer him. The bartender didn’t seem to notice. He stopped on the Formula 1 race and bumped the volume up a couple notches before placing the remote back down on the sticky counter.
Bill knew quite a bit about Formula 1 racing. He hadn’t watched any in a few years, but Vince always updated him about the last weekend’s race when he came into the Draken office on Monday mornings.
“Today’s a Thursday, right?” Bill actually wasn’t all that sure. Days of the week didn’t matter much anymore.
“Yup.” The bartender’s voice sounded more country than it had before, but still with the same level of apathy.
“This must be a rerun then?”
“Yeah. It’s a rerun. They usually play ‘em throughout the week. This is last Sunday’s main event.”
“You follow it pretty closely?”
“Yeah, somewhat closely. Not as much as I followed that Final Fleet.”
The little life Bill had left in his demeanor drained out of him when he heard those two words.
The bartender continued, “My whole family was into Final Fleet. We each had a favorite pilot we were rooting for. My favorite was Ethan, but my kids loved Greg.” He paused for few seconds while he wiped off one of the glasses. “We grew pretty close to those pilots. It’s a shame how that all turned out. Unbelievable really.”
Bill nodded and didn’t say anything at first. The bartender took care of another customer while Bill sat in silence. Then, he came back over and stood near Bill and the tv.
“You know any of the engineers?” Bill asked him.
“Pardon me.”
“I said ‘d’you know any of the engineers?’”
He looked confused for a second, but then he picked up on what Bill was saying. “Oh, you mean for Final Fleet? No, I guess we didn’t follow it that closely.” He said it with a little chortle at the end that wouldn’t have meant anything to anybody else. It was probably just the way he talked.
But Bill thought the little laugh made the comment even more disrespectful.
“What do you mean?”
The bartender turned to look at the man sitting across from him. For the first time since he walked in, the bartender looked into his eyes. Bill’s eyes were exhausted, bewildered, hurt, watery. The bartender was confused. He responded, “What do you mean ‘What do you mean’?” with that same chortle, trying to ease the weird air that was quickly forming.
“What do you mean you don’t know the engineers’ names?”
The bartender unconsciously took a half-step back. There was an anger in his customer’s voice.
Bill repeated himself, “What do you mean you don’t know the engineers’ names? Didn’t they show that on the telecast? Huh? They showed the whole team, didn’t they?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember,” Bill scoffed, “I know they showed the whole goddamn teams, the entire Final Fleet team, every one of em. And you don’t remember the lead flight engineers? What? Were they not important enough for you? They weren’t worthy enough for you?”
He took another step backwards. “It was just a competition. I’m sure--”
“Just a competition! How can you say that?” Bill stood up from his seat. Spit flew from his mouth as he leaned on the counter and yelled over it.
“What do I have to do to be worthy, huh? What do I have to do to be enough?”
The bartender walked to grab his phone, thinking he may have to call the cops. Bill turned to the others sitting at the bar, all of whom were staring at him now. He shouted at them, “You scrubs! You lousy, average people. Not one of you ever chased your dreams. Not one of you is the best at anything! You’re so content with your average, mundane lives. Your perfect families. Your lovely jobs. You make me sick!” He began to walk into the restaurant area, addressing the people at the tables and in the booths. “Am I not enough? Have I not worked hard enough? Huh?” he yelled as he flipped a teenage boy’s basket of buffalo wings off the table. “I’ve given my life to my craft! I’m the best there is!” The spit from his mouth flew into wine glasses as he screamed manically at two middle aged women, who scooted themselves all the way against the wall in their booth. “I’m the best fucking flight engineer in this entire fucking world!” He began to laugh and cry at the same time in a malevolent way. He continued to walk the aisles attacking people. “You people are worthless! Your lives are worthless! I built my legacy! My entire life, I’ve been working my ass off! None of that matters to any of you? Bill Bauer! That name should mean something!”
He stopped shouting and began to wail loudly. His body was getting weaker. He was stumbling. “Noah, Patrick, Greg, Ethan. Oh. Precious Ethan. Y’all know their names. They didn’t work as hard as me, but y’all know their names.”
The words were becoming less and less clear. He was murmuring now, not talking. He mumbled something over and over. His legs gave out; he was now lying there, deteriorated and destroyed, face pressed against the ground. Most people had stepped outside of the restaurant but the few that were still left began to make out what he was saying. “I killed them,” he muttered.
“I killed them.”
“I killed them.”
“I killed them.”
“I killed them.”
“I killed them.”
“I sabotaged their planes. I killed them. All four of them. I killed them all.”
“And they still don’t even know my name.”
“They still don’t know my name.”