Sleeping Dogs

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Anyone would say it was too nice a day for bad things to happen. Bright sun, blue sky, puffy clouds. Routine mission — if anything was ever routine piloting a B-52 on its way to a rendezvous over Russia.

“Climbing to ten thousand feet,” Risstup answers the controller.

“Roger, climbing to ten thousand,” he hears. Risstup liked to explain to friends it was more like driving an eighteen-wheeler than flying a plane. Over fifty yards long, three stories high and capable of lugging thirty-five tons of nukes through the skies, the B-52 was a beast. Risstup loved to regale his buddies with his flyboy stories, always finishing up with, “And you know what its nickname is?”

A dramatic pause and then, “Buff — B-U-F-F — and that stands for big, ugly, fat…”

Not missing a beat, his friends immediately chorused out the answer and Risstup reveled in the chortling and manly grabass that followed.

Always amazed him that the damn thing got off the ground in the first place, up until the last feet of runway the huge wheel trucks lumbered on, weighing the plane down like ten-foot-tall wet boots, until finally in the last few seconds when there was precious little runway left the wings bulled the wheels into the air.

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