Amerika (7 page)

Not me.

As a pilot, all I ever cared about was the next airport, and the one after that. Where I just took off from was instant history. Let other people sort out what was left behind. Not this time, though. Today I had to go back, pick up the pieces with Abby and try to make sense of what was left of our family.

We lifted off Runway two-six, just after four o’clock in the afternoon. Full gas tanks, engines purring, landing gear working, ceiling and visibility unlimited, Abby in the right seat and Lobster Mike’s cash-in-advance paid cargo in the hold. Life was good.

If everything worked according to plan, we’d make Miami in two hours, unload the lobsters dockside, re-fuel and be back in Key West in time for supper. But rarely does anything happen that way with me. And especially not when I’m operating a machine with tens of thousands of parts, any one of which could and often would go wrong. But so far, so good as we leveled off at two thousand feet.

I pulled out the locking clip on the control wheel and swung it over to

Abby. ‘You have the aircraft.’

‘I have the aircraft, sir.’

I could barely hide my smile at her serious face when she nodded, crisply  repeated  the  ritual-like  response,  opened  her  small  hands  and gripped the large wooded control wheel. But she held it with a light touch. Fingertips. Sign of a good pilot.

‘Rudder pedals okay?’ I said.

‘Affirmative.’ She tapped the wooden blocks I’d strapped onto the pedals so her short legs could reach them.

‘Maintain a heading of zero-six-zero degrees, altitude of two thousand.

Keep an eye out for other aircraft, and holler if you need me.’

‘Roger, zero-six-zero degrees, two thousand feet, and watch out for  bogies.’

I laughed, ‘Where’d you pick that up?’ She shrugged. ‘I forget.’

‘C’mon, which radio show?’

Another shrug. ‘Terry and the Pirates. They’re shooting down bogies all the time.’

‘Haven’t heard them for a while.’

‘It’s such great show. When I grow up I want to be an air pirate just like them and shoot down Nazis. They’re so mean.’

‘That’s for sure.’

Our nation’s forty-eight states were on their own. Some of them defiantly flew their state flags over the stars and stripes to protest to the ‘cowardly Neutrality Act.’ Texas was one, Louisiana another. More and more each day it seemed.

‘Back soon.’

I clambered over the small partition separating the cockpit from the passenger compartment to check out my mother’s tie downs - not that I needed to. She came from a long line of Key West ‘wreckers;’ men who ever since the seventeenth century had made a living salvaging the remains of storm-wrecked ships in the Florida Straits. No surprise that each of her knots was perfect, just like her cigars. I pumped up pressure in a small tank filled with sea water and waved the spray nozzle back and forth over the squirming lobsters. Their rubber- banded claws clicked like castanets in their fury at being trapped in a cage.

‘I know how you feel, fellas.’

Abby shouted, ‘Traffic, ten o’clock high.’

‘Look again. This is a no-fly zone except for us.’

‘But I see it, Daddy!’

Seconds later I saw it too, a big, beautiful Pan Am Sikorsky S-40 flying boat about a thousand feet above us, on the same course, her four engines throttled back to lose altitude without causing a drop of gin to spill in the cocktails the passenger were no doubt enjoying. 

This must be Pan Am’s twice- daily Havana/Miami Flight, right on schedule and earning another hefty chunk of money for Juan Trippe and company. Unlike the Baltimore-based Boeing 314 Clippers painted in Lufthansa colors, the S-42 still had its Pan American Airways lettering. I couldn’t begin to imagine the deal Trippe had cut with the Nazis to keep his airline going, but the man never did business with anybody unless a hefty chunk of cash led in a straight line from the signed contract to his bank account.

Back in the early-30s, our Miami/Havana flight had been one of my first regular assignments as a ‘Pilot-in-Training,’ the term Pan Am gave their new-hires. Fortunately I got promoted to the engineering side soon after and lost that designation. Then I transitioned to navigator and then finally to the cockpit as first officer. All new-hires went this same route; step by step, job by job, up the long ladder to the left seat. Nobody ever just walked in and took over as captain. Pan Am’s Chief Engineer André Preister saw to that.

I  first  met  that  stiff-necked,  bald  headed,  tight-fisted,  hard-headed Dutchman when I was nineteen. I was working the radio night shift one night when Orlando dropped by for a visit. My job in the operations hut involved  very  little  work  on  this  particular  night  because  weather  had delayed the Havana takeoff.

I had been sitting doing nothing for two solid hours waiting for the Morse code signal from the airplane telling me they had finally lifted off. Once that happened, I would stay busy transmitting and receiving position reports all along the ninety-mile route separating Key West from Havana. But at this rate it looked like it would never happen.

At the time, Orlando worked at the Key West docks as a marine engine mechanic laboring in the hulls of smelly old fishing boats, making sense of their beat-up engines and barely getting paid. Since I spent my nights here, we didn’t see each other as much as we used to when we were kids. I remember that particular night saying something to him like, ‘Ninety miles from here to Havana is nothing. I could piss that far.’

Orlando’s booming laughter made me laugh too.

Preister’s voice cut through us like a saber. ‘Vatt iss so funny?’ He stood in the doorway, short and stern, his small eyes blinking rapidly in the bright light. He pointed accusingly at Orlando. ‘Who iss diss?’

‘My friend, Mr. Diaz.’

‘No visitors on duty, Mr. Carter. You know dat iss the rule. Get out now Mister Diazzzzz.’

I thought fast. ‘But sir, Orlando wasn’t here to visit. He was here to see you about a job.’

‘A yob?’

I exchanged a wordless glance with Orlando. He squinted ever so slightly, our silent signal that meant ‘go for it,’ so I continued quickly, ‘Mr. Diaz one of the best mechanics in Key West, sir. And since you fired Mr. Brewster the other day, I thought maybe you could find time to…’

Preister said, ‘I haff already five egg-sellent candidates.’

‘But none of them are as good Mr. Diaz.’

‘Vy you say diss?’

‘I’ve seen him raise engines from the dead. Like Lazarus in the bible. In fact, I sometimes call him Jesus - just kidding, of course - but it’s true.’

‘Vatt is true?’

‘The marine engines he works on are beat up, worn out pieces of junk when he gets his hands on them, but a few hours later they’re running like new. Show him your hands, O.’

Orlando spread open his hands. The imbedded grease stains traced a complex map upon his pink palms.

‘If he laid his hands on four-oh-six’s engines in hangar two, I bet you they’d start working for a change.’

Preister frowned. ‘Nussing will make dem work right. I am sending dem back to Wright.’

Orlando said, ‘Mind if I take a look first, sir?’

‘Deez are airplane engines, not boats.’

‘Beg pardon, sir, but a bad engine’s a bad engine. Let me take a look. If I get ‘em going you hire me, if I don’t, you don’t. My work won’t cost you a penny. It’s on the house.’ Orlando’s smile lit up the room. ‘How’s that sound?’

Preister took the measure of this towering giant. Orlando was only nineteen years old like me, but he looked a lot older. Maybe the lateness of the  hour  or  a  sudden  flash  of  insight,  but  whatever  the  reason  the Dutchman dropped his customary rod-up-his-ass attitude and said, ‘Hangar two. You come back in morning.’

‘If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll start in right now.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You haff tools?’

‘I’ll get ‘em.’

When dawn broke the next day, the birds were singing, and so were the engines on NC 406. Orlando was hired, and he stayed with Pan Am until the day I got fired.

At the time of my disgrace, he said to me, ‘You need me more than they do.’

‘For what?’

‘For
Carter Aviation
.  We can’t have an airline without a licensed mechanic.’

‘We?’

He took my hand in his callused and scarred mitt and shook it.

‘Us.’

Abby watched in silence as the Pan Am S-40 grew smaller and smaller, easily traveling fifty knots faster than us.

‘Were they fun to fly?’ she said.

‘Fun and hard. Lots of moving parts, both on the ground and in the air.’

The wake of the plane caused some mild turbulence that Abby handled easily. She patted the control wheel. ‘Nice having you here instead of there.’

‘Good.’

‘You were never home before. Just mommy and me all the time – I mean, before Baby Eddie came. We never EVER saw you.’

‘Not true. I was home plenty of times.’

She shook her head. ‘Not enough.’

‘I had to make money to buy food and clothes for the family.’

She shook her head in disagreement, but didn’t say anything. Instead, she looked out her side window. ‘If you follow the railroad tracks, isn’t that the same course to Miami?

I let her change the subject. ‘More or less, yes.’

‘Then why don’t we? Mail plane pilots flew the rails all the time.’

‘They did, but what do you do when it’s cloudy and you can’t see the ground?’

She sighed and tapped the compass. ‘I guess you follow this. But it’s not as much fun - tell me about Pop-Pop.’

‘You know the story.’

‘I  like  hearing  it  when  I  can  see  the  railroad  tracks  where  it  happened.’

‘Watch your heading. We’ve drifted five degrees.’

She tapped the rudder pedals. ‘Sorry.’ Then she grinned. ‘Pop-Pop didn’t have to worry about compasses. He just rode the rails.’

My father, John Carter, had worked his way up from a hostler servicing Florida East Coast engines in Miami, to fireman when they extended the line down to Key West. He met my mother there, and when he got promoted to road engineer, they married and that’s when I was born.

‘It didn’t happen on a day like this,’ I said.

‘A terrible hurricane. High winds, rain, the worst weather they’d seen in ten years.’

‘Who’s telling this story?’

‘Sorry.’

‘The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 was heading straight for the Middle Keys just as Pop-Pop was finishing up his Key West-Miami run. He heard about it and volunteered to run a rescue train down there to save the track workers.’

‘Islamadora!’

The small town slowly drifted by below, nestled in a pearl-like string of keys. Even six years later, it still bore the scars of the hurricane’s path.

‘Did Pop-Pop drown?’

‘Most likely.’

She shivered. ‘Water over the tracks, people stranded everywhere, including the men on the bridge, right?’

‘During the depression FDR sent men across America to bridges, highways, schools, swimming pools. About six hundred men, mostly World War One army vets, were working in Islamadora when the hurricane hit.’

‘Just as Pop-Pop got there with his rescue train.’

‘Some say the wind was over two hundred miles an hour. The first storm surge scoured the town clean of everything; palm trees, houses, people, you name it, gone for good.’

‘But it didn’t blow over the train.’

‘Too heavy. If Pop-Pop had stayed inside with the fireman, he would have probably survived.’

‘But the soldiers were too scared to come out of their barracks, right?’

‘Pop kept blowing the train whistle for them to find their way to the train, but they stayed put. So he went outside to fetch them. The fireman said Pop-Pop managed to lead the first bunch back to the train. Then headed back to get the rest. That’s when the second storm surge hit and swept away the building and everybody inside it.’

‘A wall of water.’

‘Over four hundred folks drowned that day.’

‘Would have been more without Pop-Pop helping, right?’

I thought of the letters mailed to my mother after the funeral. Some crudely-spelled, others more eloquent, but all of them praising my father’s train for having saved their lives and expressing condolences that he lost his life in doing so.