Flight of Passage: A True Story (24 page)

But I couldn’t bother with all that vocabulary right now because I had to cheer my brother up. I didn’t like it when Kern was upset like this because he’d brood all night. I felt responsible for him at such moments. Except for my mother, nobody understood his sensitive nature quite the way I did, and I enjoyed the way I could pull him out of a black mood. That was one thing about Kern that I did know. I could always make him laugh.

Along the highway to the MOTEL CHEAP, I let him sink to his lowest point before I spoke up.

“Hey Kern.”

“Yeah?”

“The Stearman men of the west.”

“Ah Jeez Rink. Don’t start on me now.”

I dropped my bags to the ground and threw my hand out for the imaginary stick, assuming the grandiloquent barnstorming blarney pose of my father.

“The
great
Stearman men of the west.”

Kern was laughing now. He shifted his load to one arm and held his stomach.

“Ah Jeez Rink, can you believe it? They’re
assholes
down here. White trash in a cockpit.”

“Boys,” I continued, sweeping out my arm for emphasis, “You’ll never meet a better group of pilots than the Stearman men of the west.”

Kern was howling, bending over to laugh.

“God Rink,” Kern said. “The Stearman men of the west. What crap. Daddy’s so full of shit sometimes I could scream.”

Paydirt. This was good, very good, I thought. When Kern got cynical about my father, seeing him the way I saw him, I always considered it progress. Anyway, he was happier now. Our situation was pathetic, and we’d really blown it landing at Brinkley. But, what the hell. You couldn’t let these malevolent morons get you down. We were determined to laugh our way through this one and have a sense of humor about ourselves.

Dawdling and howling at our own jokes, we walked up toward the motel.

The MOTEL CHEAP was pretty much as advertised. It was a gray, cinder block affair with hollow-core doors, a broken ice machine, and polyester blankets so worn in the middle we could see right through to the semiwhite sheets. We checked in at the rancid front desk, and were delighted to learn that a room with two beds cost just $3. For some reason that we couldn’t understand, the clerk was surprised that we wanted to keep the room all night. Inside the room, in the drawer of the nightstand, we found a Gideon Bible and a six-pack of condoms. All night, doors kept opening and shutting in the rooms down the line, and drunken caterwauls and heavy sexual moaning reached us through the thin walls. We weren’t familiar with those sounds yet and I just figured that people down here required lots of talk and physical activity to get to sleep. It took me a while to sort out the MOTEL CHEAP, but eventually I realized the truth. The youngest aviators ever to fly America coast to coast spent their second night away from home at an Arkansas whorehouse.

There was a truck stop and diner across the highway. Before we went in for dinner, we walked down past the diesel pumps to a pay phone mounted on an aluminum pole.

We were in a fine mood as we dialed home for the Arkansas gam. Recovering from the rednecks at the strip felt like an injection of courage, and it was a tonic for our companionship. We were almost defiant about it. We could tackle anything now.

My father would be elated to hear that we were across the Mississippi, within striking distance of Texas. At home, by his library phone, he was keeping track of our progress on a large aeronautic planning chart of the continental United States, precisely marking in red pencil the routes we described to him every night. He had bought the chart at a map store in Rockefeller Center in New York just before we left. He was immensely enjoying this exercise, and we welcomed it too, because it kept him busy with something at home and out of our hair. He kept the chart, his pencils, and a route-plotter by the phone every night, so everything would be ready when we called.

“Across the Mississippi!” my father barked into the phone. “
Beyond
the Mississippi. Boys, this is great, just great. Now, let me see. Brinkley. Brinkley, Arkansas. Hell, I remember Brinkley.”

That was bullshit, probably, but who cared? Slowly, we were developing an effective strategy for managing him at long distance. Be prepared for lots of barnstorming blarney, and always be upbeat. The only news he would hear was good news.

Kern fed him just the right diet. He told my father that we’d enjoyed beautiful flying all day, that geezers kept buying us food and fuel, and that we’d met a lot of great Stearman men. 71-Hotel was holding up well. Kern ran him through our routes—East Richmond to Indy, the Wabash to the Ohio, the rail line from Paducah, then Blytheville to Brinkley. He gave me a thumbs up from the phone. My father was swallowing all of it and he was extravagantly pleased.

He was happy about another development, though he wouldn’t share it with us for two more days. Reporters from all over the country had begun calling. The
Indianapolis Star
story was moved that afternoon on the wires of the Associated Press, setting off a mad media scramble to locate us. Newspaper editors from Little Rock to Oklahoma City read the AP copy, checked a map, and were excited about the possibility that we would be passing through their area within the next twenty-four hours, a great local angle for their Independence Day weekend coverage. We’d never even considered that angle, it was just something we backed into by mistake. But two teenage boys, flying coast to coast in a Piper Cub over the July Fourth weekend, was irresistible to a lot of newspapers, and now they were frantic to find us and do a piece. Everyone just assumed that my father would know where we were and that they could track us down through him.

But until we called home at night, my father was as mystified as everyone else about our whereabouts. He’d spent a good part of the day poring over his map at home and calling the FAA weather briefers, convinced that he could accurately track our flight path. But my father didn’t know about the advice we had received from Hank about flying the Kentucky swale, and it completely stymied him. The weather briefers told him that it was virtually impossible for us to traverse the Mississippi River valley that day. He reasoned that we had either swung north above the storms, into Missouri and Oklahoma, or crossed on the eastern face of the Cumberlands, down through Lexington and Nashville.

So, my father told all of the reporters to look along those hypothetical routes, which were hundreds of miles north and east of our actual position. They all came up dry. Every little grass strip for hundreds of miles around St. Louis and Tulsa, and down through central Kentucky and Tennessee, had been harassed by exasperated reporters all evening. Now their deadlines had passed and they were all disappointed and annoyed with my father. Half the newspapers in the south and midwest had been sent on a wild goose chase.

My father was too embarrassed about it to mention the reporters that night. Also, he didn’t want to rattle Kern and overload him with another detail just yet. He had already decided that he wouldn’t crank up his publicity machine until we were safely across the Rockies.

But Kern could sense that something was up. My father wasn’t reacting in the right way to what he was telling him. As Kern described our flight legs over the phone, my father sighed a lot and kept making these little clucking noises with his tongue.

“Oh!” my father said. “So that’s where you went. Good. Good! . . . Ah shit.”

“Hey Dad, c’mon!” Kern exclaimed into the phone. “We made great progress today. We’re a whole leg beyond the Mississippi already.”

“Oh I know, son. I know! It’s just, well, I can’t figure out how you got through Kentucky in that weather.”

Kern didn’t flinch.

“Oh c’mon Dad, get with it. There’s one thing I’ve learned on this trip. The weather reports can be wrong.”

“Right!” my father said. “Right. I copy that.”

Jesus, this was great, a lot better than I expected. Kern was really learning to throw the shit.

They changed the subject. At this point Kern frowned and started stammering on the phone. He didn’t seem to know what to do. He snatched the pencil out of my shirt pocket and wrote out a note in large block letters on the back of the local phonebook.

RINK: THE WATERBAG.

Balls. The waterbag. That damn thing was coming around again. Kern and I had assumed that my father would forget about it by now—we certainly had.

I wasn’t going to let Kern handle this. He could bullshit my father once in a night, but not twice. Out of sympathy and loyalty to my father, Kern might get backed into promising to find a waterbag. No way, I thought. We’d never get to California if we stopped to look for that freaking thing. We’d have to stonewall. I’d found over the years that I could always do that by smothering my father with a lot of detail and senseless lingo, and of course it never hurt to ass-kiss him to death.

I grabbed the phone from Kern.

“Hey Dad!” I said. “It’s great to hear your voice.”

“Rinker! Ditto. Kern tells me that you’re doing all the navigating. That’s great! I can’t believe the time you guys are making.”

“Dad, it’s a beautiful country. Just like you said.”

“Good. Now listen,” my father said. “Kern doesn’t seem to think you can find the waterbag.”

“Nah, nah, Dad. Not to worry. Kern was too busy gassing up the plane tonight, and I forgot to tell him. You see, I met this great Stearman man out here in Brinkley tonight.”

“Yeah? What’s he flying?”

“Oh Jeez Dad you should see it. It’s the monster Stearman. He’s got the big 600 P&W up front, just like your Texan, the three-blade Ham Standard prop, slaved ailerons, and big leading edge spoilers. What an airplane.”

“Ah shit. I wish I could see that. You must be meeting all these great Stearman men. Good chaps, are they?”

“Oh the best Dad, the best. Great guys. Just like you told us. The Stearman men of the west.”

“Ah great. That’s great. Now look. About the waterbag.”

“Dad it’s okay! We’re covered. It’s just like you said it would be. This Stearman guy, see, he says that every hardware store down here has tons of waterbags. They’re stacked right up to the ceiling.”

“See? See? What’d I tell you?”

“Oh yeah Dad. You were right. This is waterbag country down here.”

“Great. Tell Kern. Now look . . .”

“Dad, relax. I’m on top of it. First thing in the morning, see, this ole Stearman man is driving us into town for breakfast, and he’s going to show us the store with the waterbags. He’s even going to help us lash the thing between the wheels.”

“Good work Rink,” my father said. “Cripes, this thing is going just like clockwork. Today, you crossed the Mississippi. Tomorrow, you get the waterbag.”

He sounded very chipper, hanging up. A thousand miles away, I could almost here him whistling to himself by the phone.

I always felt great about myself, the perfect son, when I could buffalo my father like that. The truth didn’t matter here. The situation was impervious to truth. I was pretty sure by now that there wasn’t a waterbag in all of America, so how could I truthfully promise to find one? To hell with the truth. My job was keeping the old boy back home happy, so Kern and I could avoid dicking around for a waterbag and get to California. My father would never know the difference anyway.

Inside the diner, over chicken-fried steak, Kern wasn’t so sure. He was working through his real feelings about the waterbag. I could see that he wanted to please my father, but he was also exasperated by his intrusiveness, his obdurate, private obsession with the waterbag. Finally Kern stabbed his fork into a pile of mashed potatoes and blurted out his thoughts.

“Rink, you know what I think? You know how I really feel?”

“No, what?”

“Fuck the waterbag! Just fuck that damn thing. We’ve flown our asses off for two days and done well. We already looked for one back home. Daddy’s been a real pain in the ass on this one and we don’t need a waterbag.”

Uh-oh. Kern might occasionally express feelings this strong, but later he would doubt them. I would have to psyche him out. I needed to show some reluctance, put up a little resistance, to harden his anger into a decision. Besides, if I agreed with him too easily, he’d worry that we were ganging up on my father.

“Well, Kern, gee, I don’t know,” I said. “This waterbag thing could be important, you know.”

“No, fuck it Rink. I’m pissed at Daddy right now. This is my trip—sorry, our trip. He’s got no right to tell us we need a waterbag to cross the deserts. I’m the pilot-in-command and it’s
my
decision.”

“Right. And I’m the copilot. It’s my job to follow orders. So, if you really think this is right. . . .”

“Rink, stop! I’m not talking about this anymore. I’ve made up my mind. Fuck the waterbag. Now, do you copy that?”

“Roger. Loud and clear. Foxtrot-Uncle-Charlie-Kilo the waterbag.”

We rose at dawn and trudged back down the piney highway to the cropduster strip. There were already a lot of planes running, their big Pratt & Whitneys rumbling while the tall landing gears of the Stearmans trembled and strained against wooden chocks. Gangs of cropdusters and hopper crews leaned against the wings, grinning like hyenas and smoking, and there was another group drinking coffee around a shiny canteen truck. Stone-faced, we walked down past the malevolent morons and the droning line of planes. Nobody seemed to want to bother us this early in the day. We quickly pre-flighted and propped the Cub, coasted down the hill, and firewalled the throttle as soon as we hit the runway. We never looked back and we never wanted to hear of Brinkley, Arkansas, again.

A lonely stretch of flying lay before us. There was still another sixty or seventy miles of timber barrens to the southwest, as featureless and broad as an ocean, with barely a trace of habitation or a checkpoint to look at. Occasionally there was a bubble in the air from cold moisture rising off a lake, and white tracings of ground fog exposed the outlines of creeks and swamps. But mostly all we could do was follow the rails toward Arkadelphia. Kern and I droned along with the throbbing plane, saying nothing to each other. Finally the pine barrens thinned and were broken by shimmering swamplands that gradually gave way to harder soil, rolling beige and red grasslands.