Flight of Passage: A True Story (34 page)

Pate told my father that he’d keep an eye on us and show us the southern route into California which, he assured my father, he knew better than his “wife’s ass.” The waterbag came up, Pate picked up on that instantly, and he hurled my father a monstrous bag of dung on that subject, making it sound as if we had the goddam thing. My father was worried about another thing. He wanted us to lay over and rest for a day in El Paso. Pate said that he would take care of that too. By the time they hung up I could hear my father laughing on the other end of the phone, happy that we were now in the hands of a great old Stearman man.

Pate leaned back in the chair and blew a few smoke rings. I liked the man, right away. He reminded me a lot of this crazyass priest we had back at school, Father Lucien.

“Shit, hunh?” Pate said.

“Yeah, shit, Mr. Pate.”

“Robert. Call me Robert, son.”

“Shit, Robert.”

“Yeah, well, shit, I know what you mean son. I got out of Missouri when I was sixteen years old. We were dirt farmers, poor. It was the middle of the Depression. You know what one of the last things I ever said to my father was?”

“No, what?”

“Shit. That’s all there was left to say. Shit.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Shit. I try and get along with my father, you know, but sometimes . . .”

“Hey, stop worrying about your dad, all right?” Pate said. “I cheered him up good. He’s happier than shit right now. This kind of thing happens on a big trip and you can’t let it get to you. Right now, we should concentrate on having some fun.”

“All right Robert.”

I told Pate not to bring up the one-day layover, because Kern was dead-set against it. Probably, we’d just fly into Arizona tomorrow, and then call home and tell my father that we were still in El Paso.

“Don’t say a word,” Pate said. “I’ll handle it.”

The Pates were tired from flying all day too, so we ate in the motel dining room. In the booth, I got wedged in between Pate and Ellen, and Kern and Elsa sat together on the other side. All through dinner, while Pate regaled us with some great barnstorming blarney, Elsa was mooning over Kern and paying him compliments, telling him what a great pilot he was. Kern smiled bashfully and blushed right through his sunburn. It was an awful waste of a woman, I thought, stashing Elsa over there with Kern, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that now so I just sat there and enjoyed my chicken-fried steak, listening to Pate’s incomparable tales.

During dessert, Elsa put her arm around Kern’s shoulder.

“Kern,” she said. “We had a fight with Robert today, up in the plane. He doesn’t like the way we take pictures for him.”

“Gee, that’s too bad,” Kern said.

“Well, not really,” Elsa said. “Ellen and I are on strike now. We’re not flying with Robert tomorrow. We’re just going to hang out by the pool. Stay with us, just one day. You need a rest. You’re going to make it to California, easy, by the end of the week.”

Elsa had her nails dug lightly into Kern’s shoulder and she was dangling a spoon over the rim of a glass, making tingling sounds on the ice.

“Oh sure Elsa,” Kern said. “I mean, yeah. We’re laying over a day in El Paso. All along, that’s been the plan.”

In the morning, Pate left the motel at dawn to go flying. Throughout the 1960s, he spent most of the summer in El Paso, taking off every day for photo-recon missions out over the Guadalupe Range. Over the winter, back in Sacramento, he analyzed the pictures. He was convinced that he could locate the site where the fabulous treasure of the Montezuma, the last Aztec emperor, had been buried in the mountains in the sixteenth century. As a matter of fact, he had already stumbled across the site, once, but then lost it, which we would learn more about that night. Before he left that morning, Pate told Ellen and Elsa to open up a restaurant tab for us and make sure that we enjoyed a relaxing day.

It was balmy, out by the blue motel pool, definitely my idea of luxury accommodations. Elsa was stunning in her red tank suit, and there were several teenage girls vacationing with their families at the motel, sunning themselves in bikinis and listening to transistor radios, slipping like seals in and out of the warm water. Ellen Pate, appalled at our sunburns, laid us down on chaise longues and administered a welcome and relaxing massage of suntan oil. Elsa and Kern had a great time out on the diving board, practicing their flips. Ellen was a school teacher and liked talking about books, and she seemed impressed by the amount of reading I had done. Actually, half of those books I had read in Cliffs Notes, but I could always throw a good line to a classy older lady and make her feel like I was going to be the next Ernest Hemingway, so I enjoyed myself. We ordered an early lunch from the restaurant and ate it at a table by the pool, and it was Ellen Pate who introduced me to the margarita.

Meanwhile, back at press headquarters in New York—my father’s paneled office at
Look
—the phones were busy. He was beginning to sense, as he put it, that we were going national. One of the big television networks had called and requested an interview with us that afternoon in El Paso. They were flying a producer and camera crew up from Dallas on an afternoon flight. But because the crew wanted to jump right on the next flight back to Dallas, they wouldn’t have time to drive across town to the general aviation strip. Instead, my father agreed to have us meet them at the big international airport.

Without a radio, technically we were not allowed to land at El Paso International, a controlled field with an FAA traffic-control tower. But there were ways around the rules and my father was good at that. He phoned the FAA tower supervisor at El Paso, explained the situation and obtained a special clearance for us to land by light-gun signals. We learned about all of this when a motel clerk ran out and told us that we had an urgent phone call from my father in New York.

Kern took the call, and wasn’t very happy about it, but my father had him boxed in. Everything was all set up. They were using Runway 22 at El Paso International, and all we had to do was report on a right base, wiggle our wings, and wait for a green light-gun signal from the tower. We didn’t have much time. The network camera crew was already in the air out of Dallas.

So we did that dumbass thing, annoyed at my father for intruding again. First, we had to put up with the waterbag jive, now this. In the middle of our day of rest, we’d be flying with the big jets into El Paso International, without a radio, no less. Changing quickly out of our bathing suits, we dashed off to the general aviation strip in the motel van.

Landing without a radio at a controlled airport wasn’t that unusual, as long as certain FAA procedures were followed. We vaguely remembered the light signals from
The Private Pilot’s Handbook.
A red light from the tower meant discontinue approach. Flashing green meant stand by. A steady green was clearance to land. What we couldn’t have known was that the FAA tower supervisor that my father had spoken with at noon was nearing the end of his shift. He never alerted the incoming crew that a red and white Piper Cub would be appearing in their airspace. As we entered the pattern at the international field and began waving our wings, Kern was busy staying clear of other planes. I watched the tower for the light gun. First, we got a long, ominous red. Then I saw green.

“Green light Kern!”

“Steady green, or flashing green?”

“Ah shit, I don’t know Kern. Green. There it goes again.”

So, we landed. As we rolled out a big cargo plane roared over our heads and pulled up its wheels.

“Rinker, you better be right about that green light,” Kern said. “That plane just did a go-around.”

But I was wrong, dead wrong. We had never been cleared to land. The gas jockey at the general aviation terminal was waiting for us, and he pointed over to the FAA control tower.

“They just called,” he said. “And they don’t sound too happy. They want you over there, pronto.”

Kern exploded with rage. He decided that it was better to confront the FAA without his cowboy hat and angrily tossed it in the baggage compartment.

“Godammit Rinker. Your ass is grass right now. They can pull my license for this! It could screw up our whole trip.”

It was a long walk across the tarmac to the tower, then up several flights of echoing, steel-grate stairs to the top.

We knew a tight-ass when we saw one, and the FAA tower supervisor was unmistakably the type. He was expressionless and curt and wore a shiny white shirt with epaulets and a plastic pocket protector full of pens. He knew all right that we were those kids flying to California—his wife had seen us last night on TV. But the rules were the rules. We had “busted his airspace” and landed without clearance on a flashing green light. He’d been forced to divert another plane. He didn’t care about my father allegedly calling ahead to alert the tower. No one had called
him.

Kern was professional and calm, and elected for the kiss-ass approach.

“Okay, sir, we respect the rules,” Kern said. “The rules say phone ahead for permission, wave your wings, look for the green light. That’s what we did. That’s our position.”

“Position?” the supervisor snapped. “That’s your
position?
So, you’re taking a position already, hunh? Well, you don’t have a position. You have a violation. I’m legally entitled to pull your license right here. That’s a
position
too.”

I detested authority so much, especially plastic pocket-protector authority, that I could hardly see straight. And I was furious at my father for setting up this senseless interview at the international strip, even more than I was angry with myself for mixing up the flashing and steady green lights. We should have ignored my father’s latest intrusion and stood up the television crew. Right now, I could have been safely back at the motel pool, drinking margaritas with Ellen.

From the doorway of the tower, I heard the scrape of heavy boots on the metal steps.

“Say, what’s going on here?”

It was Pate. He had been right behind us in the airport traffic pattern, returning from his flight over the mountains. He was surprised to see our Cub over the international airport and had heard the radio chatter about the “intruder” over the field. He rushed right over to the tower after he landed.

There was none of this “yes sir” “no sir” obsequiousness to Robert Pate. Twenty years of government service had hardened him to pocket-protector types. Lighting up a fresh cigar, waving his Stetson in the air, he lit into the tower supervisor.

“Say, do you know who these boys are?” Pate growled. “They’re flying a Piper Cub, without a radio, coast to coast. You should be begging them for their autographs. Green light or no green light, nobody’s going to bust them.”

Pate intimated that he had a lot of powerful friends, senators and Air Force generals and the like, and he was just enough of a kick-ass guy, standing there with this silver belt-buckle on that looked as though it cost $500, to intimidate a pocket-protector turd. “Somebody’s butt is going to be sausage for this one,” Pate said, “And I’m the kind of guy who will make sure that happens.” Besides, he said, he was behind us in the pattern and had seen everything. If the tower wrote us up for a violation, he would submit his own report and vouch for us. The FAA regional office, he said, would file this one under “Chicken Shit.”

I didn’t think that Pate’s approach was going to work, and neither did Kern. Every time Pate stopped to catch his breath, Kern jumped in and pleaded with him to stop.

“Robert, please, relax,” Kern said. “I can handle this. This fellow here, he’s just trying to do his job. I’ve got a position, and he’s got a position.”

Mr. Pocket Protector really liked that. Pate’s appearance in the tower annoyed him, and now this sunburnt kid was interrupting to say that the FAA was just full of swell guys, trying to do their jobs. Even when he’d just busted your airspace, Kern was too earnest and lovable to resist. When Pate finally shut up, the tower supervisor explained that the rules required him to file an incident report, but he would be recommending that no action be taken. Once we returned home, Kern would probably have to file a routine reply to the report.

We thanked him, and quickly got the hell out of there. Down on the ramp, Pate clapped Kern on the back.

“Perfect buddy, just perfect,” Pate said. “We aced it.”

“We did?” Kern said.

“Oh, shit yes,” Pate said. “The FAA’s always trying to violate me too. Fuck ’em. All you gotta do is give ’em the good-cop bad-cop routine. And Jeez, you’re a natural at the good cop. Say, where’s your cowboy hat? There’s a film crew over there, waiting.”

We ended up enjoying our interview with the television crew. On a one-on-one basis, away from the melee of a press conference, broadcasters could behave quite politely when they wanted to. The crew was relieved to learn that the other networks hadn’t found us yet. The producer and the cameraman obviously enjoyed us a lot and they were very interested in our personal backgrounds and the details of our flight.

We learned a lot about television and its filming methods from that crew. They filmed Kern and me taxiing the Cub around the ramp a couple of times, and we did the Brakes, Throttle, Contact! routine with the cameras rolling, then we walked out to the plane from the pilots’ shack with our maps spread out in front of us, discussing our routes. Without the cameras rolling, the producer had us talk into the microphone for five minutes about our flight. I didn’t get that at all. Now they weren’t going to have pictures that went with their sound.

I was intensely curious about that. Kern wasn’t much interested in the actual mechanics of news-gathering, what was happening behind the scenes. But I was fascinated by it.

“Hey, I don’t understand this,” I said to the producer. “If you want to interview us about our flight, why don’t you just take pictures of us talking about it?”

The producer explained that he didn’t want to file our story as a standard news piece. Once we arrived in California, he said, our flight would be big news, “even bigger than it is now,” and the network would have exclusive background material. The story would be prepared as a weekend feature. They would use the shots of us landing in L.A., which they could pick up from their local affiliate, and then splice in some of the shots they were taking now in El Paso. But these would be used as background visuals. The core of the story would be our voiceover narration about the flight. This made sense to me, but I still didn’t understand why the network was going to so much trouble.