Coast to Coast (8 page)

Birch’s words were muffled by the steady drone of the engine.

“Anyway, I was about four or five when this happened. We had been to Myrtle Beach, and my dad had taken lots of pictures of me.

“And one of the pictures was a sort of double exposure. There were two of me, in side by side inner tubes. I said, ‘Oh, I’m twins!’

“Well, my mom pulled the picture out of my hand and tore it up. She didn’t even look at it. And I said, ‘I wanted that picture! That was my favorite picture!’ And my mom went out of the room.

“My dad said, ‘Want me to show you my favorite?’ And he started turning through the pictures, but as if his mind was on something else—my mom, probably. I felt an undercurrent—something going on that I couldn’t see, like they were always warning me about when I went in the ocean, and—”

“What are you muttering about up there?” Pop asked.

“Nothing.”

“Well, I can’t hear you unless you talk into the tube.”

“I know. I was just remembering something that happened. Oh, Pop, we’re getting low on gas,” Birch said.

This was the third day and they had been flying for four hours. First stop: Cisco, Birch had written. Second stop: She was still waiting to fill that in.

“I said we are low on gas.”

“Did you see that town back there? That was Eastland,” Pop said, “and I knew there was something about Eastland I wanted to remember. I finally thought of it.”

“Pop—”

He went on, unhurried. “The people of Eastland buried a horned toad in the courthouse and it stayed buried thirty years and then it got revived. That toad had its picture taken with Calvin Coolidge. I hope nobody revives me after thirty years.”

“Don’t try to divert me. We’re low on gas.”

Birch kept watching the gas gauge. The wire was right in front of her face, just beyond the windshield.

When the tank was full, the gas wire stuck up twelve inches into the air. Then, as the gas was used, the cork would sink with the fuel level. When she could only see one inch of wire, she always started to worry.

Birch could now see one inch of wire. She said, “Pop, I’m really getting worried.”

There was always something to worry about, she thought. Like yesterday, with the tire. Then when they got the tire fixed, Pop said, “Looks like it’s leaking a little gas.” Then he spent a half hour fiddling with something called the sump bowl.

But the gas gauge was her special, personalized worry, because it was never out of her sight. “Where are we going to land?”

“Right here,” he told her. He pushed his map over her shoulder and pointed with his thumbnail to a magenta dot beside the double line of the highway.

Birch found it on her own map. “It doesn’t even have a name,” she said. “If an airport doesn’t have a name, I know it won’t have a cold drink machine.”

Pop didn’t comment.

“Plus, we may not make it,” Birch said. “You said we were only making fifty-six miles an hour.”

She slumped in her seat. It was lonely in front by herself. At first she had liked it. It was like being in the prow of a boat. She was the first to see everything. Now she felt differently.

“Pop, can I ask you something?”

“If it’s not about where and when we’re going to land and how much gas we’re using.”

“It’s not. Pop, do you ever get lonely?”

He hesitated. “No more than most old people. That’s one reason I asked your mother to help me sell the house. I was trying to get away from some of that.”

“How about on this trip? In the J-3, like right now?”

“No. You’re in front of me and Ace is behind. I couldn’t be lonely with good company like that.”

“You know when I go on trips with my cousins, I have to sit in the backseat with them and they pass the time, Pop, by dividing up the world. Frances goes, ‘This is my street.’ Barb goes, ‘Well, that’s my street over there. I have a mall and all you have is a Pizza Hut.’ Frances goes, ‘I claim that house with a tower.’ Barb goes, ‘Well, I claim that one. It’s got a swimming pool.’”

“So what do you claim, Birch?”

“Nothing, but it keeps me from getting lonely. If I were going to claim something,” she went on firmly, “I’d claim an airport so we could land. I know you don’t want me to say anything,
but!”
She pointed to the gauge.

“I got eyes.”

There was a little bend on the end of the gas wire, and it turned, periscopelike, from side to side with the engine vibration. It seemed to be looking for a landing spot too.

Pop asked, “Can you see the airport yet?”

She pulled herself erect by the support bars and peered through the windshield. “I think so.” She checked the magenta circle on her map. There was a white line in the circle that showed which way the runway lay. The runway ahead lay the same way.

“That’s it.” Birch took off her earphones and shook out her hair. Without earphones, the noise was terrible.

“My neck’s hot. My feet are hot. I’m ready to stop. I just figured out why my feet are so hot. They’re on the engine!”

Pop began his descent. He flew over the airport, circled it and then kept heading west.

Birch swirled around. “Aren’t we stopping?”

“See those yellow X’s on the runway?”

Birch leaned against the window.

“Those X’s mean the airport’s closed. We’ll go on to Big Spring.”

“Pop, when we landed at Cisco, you said we had a head wind.”

“We’ve still got it.” Pop checked his computer. “We’ve been flying two hours. We’ve gone—let’s see, one hundred twelve miles. We’ve got another half hour of flying time. You watch for the airport.”

“You always tell me to watch for things to make me shut up.”

Birch bent over her map. Her grandfather had marked off the route and put a slash every ten miles. She counted the slashes, “It’s thirty miles … let’s see. If we have a half hour of gas left and we’re only making fifty-six miles an hour—Pop, we’ll miss it by two miles!”

“You could be right.”

“Pop!”

“There’s another airport northeast of town. Howard County airport. It’s marked closed, but it won’t hurt to take a look.”

Birch checked her map. The closed airport was big with multiple runways. She sat forward tensely. The gas wire was all the way down and had not bobbed for what seemed like hours.

“This is the third airport in a row that’s been closed. Now, where is it? We ought to be able to see it by now. There! There it is!” She pointed. “It’s …”

She trailed off. Then she said, “Pop, it’s got stuff on the runway.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Tires and bales of hay. They’ve made it into a drag strip or a racetrack or something.”

“I don’t want to try to cross town with no more gas than we’ve got. Let me take a look.”

Pop circled the airport while Birch clasped her hands beneath her chin. “Please don’t let us give out of gas. Please don’t let us give out of gas. At least when you’re praying in an airplane you’re bound to be noticed, don’t you think so, Pop? Please don’t let us give out of gas.”

“We’re not going to give out of gas. Now find me some smoke or dust so I know where the wind’s coming from.”

Birch pointed to a yarnlike wisp of smoke on the horizon.

“Straight out of the west. I’ll land on that taxiway”

“Where the tires are?”

“I’ll go over the tires and stop before the bales of hay. Don’t talk to me for a minute.”

He pushed the nose of the plane down and began his descent. The airspeed indicator moved slowly from 75 miles per hour to 85.

Birch pulled her seat belt tighter. Please, please let us make it.

Pop lined up parallel to the taxiway. He pulled on the carburetor heat. He throttled back and slowed to sixty miles per hour. He made a left turn, then another. Now he was on final.

He came in low and slow, as if he had been practicing for this all his life. Then he settled the Cub gently on the taxiway beyond the tires. He stopped well short of the bales of hay.

“Pop! Wonderful!” Birch turned to grin at him. “Wonderful!”

Pop allowed himself to smile before shrugging off her praise. “Now, let’s taxi to the hangar and see if we can scare up some gas.”

“T
HIS IS WHAT’S KNOWN
as high noon out here,” Birch said. She and Ace were sitting under the wing of the J-3. Birch’s long legs were crossed under her, out of the brutal Texas sun. Ace was panting with the heat.

“There isn’t a shade tree within fifty miles.” Birch and Ace were alone.

After Pop had taxied around the bales of hay, across an old runway and through a gate, and stopped in front of the hangar, the three of them had gotten out of the plane. Ace shook himself while Birch and Pop stood in absolute silence. They took in the locked, abandoned hangar, the weeds growing up through the cracked pavement. There was not a person in sight.

“Pop,” Birch said.

“Now don’t start worrying. Somebody’ll turn up.”

“But what if they don’t?”

Pop turned on his heels and walked off, whistling through his teeth. Birch moved into the shade of the wing shoulders sagging. She poured a cup of warm water from the thermos and gave some to Ace.

She heard Pop call, “Anybody home?” again and again, but there was never an answer.

He came back shaking his head. “I can’t raise anybody.” He reached under the seat for the folded gas bags. “I’m going for gas. You stay with the plane.”

“By myself?”

“You and Ace.”

Birch looked around at the deserted rusty buildings. The old metal doors on the hangar rattled in a dry breeze. “Deserted airports are as creepy as haunted houses,” she said.

“We’re lucky the J-3 can use car gas. All I have to do is find a filling station.”

“Can’t I come? I really don’t want to be by myself.”

“Keep her company, Ace!”

He was at the chain link fence, tossing the gas bags over, climbing. He jumped, landed on the hard dry dirt, picked up the bags and moved on down the road. He was whistling again.

Pop was one of that hard, stringy breed of men who crossed the country in the first place, Birch thought. Men that cut down forests and plowed land and scaled mountains and then looked around for something else to do. “He’s not made of flesh, Ace, like you and me. He’s pure gristle.” And with a sigh, she settled under the wing for a long wait.

Now Birch reached out and scratched Ace behind the ear. The dog rolled his eyes gratefully in her direction. “And you’re probably hotter than I am,” she said, “because you’ve got all this black fur.” She sighed.

“I really thought we were going to crash, Ace. And when something like that happens to a person, like almost crashing, well, your whole life is supposed to pass in front of your eyes. You know what passed in front of my eyes? A poem that my grandmother wrote.

“It was about a baby that died, Ace, on my birthday. And all of a sudden I knew that poem meant one of two things. Either my mom’s natural baby died—or lived just a little while. Five breadths is a very little while. And so maybe—this is probably not what happened exactly, but maybe someone else in the hospital had had a baby and was going to put her up for adoption, and that was me. And my mom and dad adopted me.” She trailed off, shaking her head.

“The reason I don’t think that happened is because my mom would tell me that right off. ‘You are adopted.’ But, then, she didn’t tell me about being named for a tree right off, so maybe …”

Birch recrossed her legs, brushed some gravel off the sides, and looked again at her watch. “We’ve been here an hour.

“The other thing—and this really bothers me—the other thing is that the baby that died was—” She couldn’t say the word. She backed up. “Everyone is always telling me how big and healthy I was. I weighed nine pounds! And so you have to figure that if I weighed nine pounds, I pretty much used up all the vitamins and all the minerals and whatever else there was. And if there was another baby there—a twin.” It was a word she could not keep avoiding. “If there was a twin, there wouldn’t be any nourishment for him, or her, because I was hogging it all. It’s like I was a murderer almost. I just hate the thought of myself taking and taking and—”

She heard the sound of a truck and got to her feet. Moving into the sunlight, she shaded her eyes and saw Pop climbing out of a pickup truck. He reached back inside for two bags of red gas.

“Meet me at the fence,” he called.

“I hope he thought to get me something to drink, Ace.”

Pop was lifting the first bag over the fence when she got there. “It’s heavy,” he warned. She set it down and reached for the second.

He said, “You gas up the plane while I take the truck back.”

“Pop, I don’t know how to …”

He was already in the truck, backing up. He drove away in a column of dust.

Birch lugged the bags of gas to the plane. “Did you hear that, Ace? He goes, ‘Gas up the plane.’ I’d like to know who he’d have ordered around if I hadn’t come.”

She reached to the top of the cowl and unscrewed the gas cap. She lifted it off, being careful with the cork-tipped stick. With an, “Oof,” she heaved the gas bag onto the cowling.

She turned the cap on the gas bag, and gas began to flow into the airplane. “Next he’ll go, ‘Change the oil. Fix the flat. Do this. Do that. Fly the airplane. Do a triple loop …’”

The gas was almost out of the first bag when her grandfather arrived on foot. Birch watched as he climbed the fence. “Pop, you better get out of the sun. Your face is red.”

“It’s always red.”

“Not this red, Pop.”

“Well, I have been all over the county,” he said cheerfully. “I walked till I found the caretaker. He lives in a mobile home about a mile down the road. He wanted to help—Texans like to be of help—but he didn’t have a car. His aunt’s car was up on blocks, so he cut a section out of his garden hose and we tried to siphon out some gas. It was too low. I’ll take that.”

Birch folded up the empty gas bag while he talked.

“So then I kept going and found somebody with a pickup and got directions to the nearest gas station which was five miles down the road.” He emptied the second bag and folded it up. “It took all ten gallons and is still a gallon from full. That figures to be about four gallons an hour for the previous flight—and we had at least a gallon left, so we could have made the seven miles across town.”