Flight of Passage: A True Story (5 page)

It was a first for Delbarton. No student had ever been delivered to the monks in a police cruiser, and this caused quite a stir when we pulled up in front of Trinity Hall. As I stepped out of the cruiser and thanked the officer for the ride in fine Eddy Haskell style, students started leaning out of the classroom windows and cheering. Even a couple of priests were leaning out over the sills, smiling as they smoked their pipes. A bunch of students tore up their notebooks for confetti and threw it down for the ticker-tape parade effect.

“Nice ass Buck!”

“Way to go!”

“Fucking-A! Great moon!”

What the hell, I thought. It was the same old story for me. Fuck up, be a hero. I dropped my book bag and threw my arms over my head like a boxer to acknowledge the applause of my fellow students, and there were more cheers.

My brother usually drove up to school with a friend, and he wasn’t at the bus stop that morning. But news of the mooning incident had traveled rapidly around school. When classes changed that morning, Kern came running down the hall toward me, all doe-eyed and worried.

“Rink! Jeez, what happened? Are you all right?”

“Kern. It’s not a big deal, okay? Everybody’s cheering for me.”

“No way Rink. You’re screwed. The priests are going to nail you for this. You’ll get tons of detention.”

But Kern had it all wrong. He’d been in so little trouble himself he didn’t know the first thing about the disciplinary system. In the first place, the mooning incident had occurred while I was obeying the orders of a senior, during Freshman Initiation Week no less, which, technically, made it protected behavior. Second, I was an athlete—another thing Kern didn’t know squat about—and athletes were never disciplined at Catholic schools. Father Peter “Skeet” Meaney, the school chaplain and freshman track coach, had recruited me for the cross-country team even before school began, and I had already won my first two races. Just before lunch, one of the seniors who had been at the bus stop that morning pulled me aside and told me how to handle the situation. Father Arthur, the school’s red-haired, sclerotic dean of discipline, would scream at me and call me all kinds of nasty names, but all I had to do was yes-Father and no-Father him to death and I’d get off scot-free.

Artie cornered me up in the lunchroom. Clenching his fists inside his cassock and riding up on the balls of his feet, he screamed at me for ten minutes, calling me a “nudist creep” and telling me that I wasn’t fit to shine my brother’s shoes. But I could tell that the fix was in—Skeet, the track coach, had already interceded for me. Spewing invective, so angry I thought he was going to slug me, Artie assigned me two weeks of afternoon detention, but then he explained that this sentence would be “suspended” as long as I continued to win my cross-country races. The punishment was laughable, and Artie was obviously frustrated by his powerlessness. But he did think that he had a way of getting back at me.

“You know what else I’m going to do to you Buck?”

“No Father.”

“I’m going to tell your father about this. In fact, I already have.”

“Yes Father.”

“I can’t wait to see the look on your face after Tom Buck kicks your ass for this.”

“Yes Father.”

When I got home that night, my father’s Oldsmobile was already parked in the porte cochere. He was home early, a bad sign. Only the most dire family emergency caused him to skip his AA meeting.

As I stepped onto the porch I saw him through the library window, sitting in his rocker while he stared into the fire and smoked his pipe. I couldn’t possibly avoid him. The library was right there, at the front door.

“Godammit Rinker. You promised me. You’re starting at a new school. You were supposed to stay out of trouble this time.”

“Dad. A senior made me do it.”

“Ah horseshit. If a senior told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it?”

“Of course not. But this was different.”

“Horseshit.”

Lately, my father had been improvising techniques from the Alcoholics Anonymous program to deal with me. My behavioral problems, he thought, were like an alcoholic’s, addictive and chronic, and they needed to be addressed systematically with an eye toward a long-term cure. He made me write out on one side of a sheet of paper all of the things that were wrong with me, and then on the other side I had to list all of the measures I could adopt to correct each defect. He made me read the biographies of AA founder Bill W. and the late Matthew Talbot of Dublin, a famous reformed drunk, who my father and his friends in AA were petitioning Rome to have declared the “patron saint of all alcoholics.”

This time, my father decided to try a new approach—I think this one was the sixth or seventh step in the AA program. That’s the one where recovering alcoholics contact all the loved ones and friends they had wronged while they were drinking and apologize for some grave offense that they still feel guilty about. Then they had to sit there and listen to all the negative things that their relative had to say about them. This was supposed to provide humbling but useful new material for the recovering alcoholic to work on.

“Rinker,” my father said, “I want you to write a letter of apology to this woman. And no bullshit either. Just give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth, bless-me-father-for-I-have-sinned letter for this old gal and maybe that’ll help you understand why you did this.”

“Dad, I’ll do it.”

I worked my ass off on that letter. Upstairs in my attic room, banging away on my Smith-Corona typewriter, I wrote and rewrote, consulting my Webster’s Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus for just the right words. It had to be perfect. When I was done, I was so proud of the results that I made a carbon and saved it before I took the original down for my father’s approval. Here’s the last paragraph, which appeared just prior to “Sincerely Yours.”

As he read the letter, my father’s hands trembled and he fumbled for his pipe.

“Ah shit Rinker. Look at this thing. You booby-trapped it.”

“Hey, c’mon Dad. It’s a good letter. I worked hard on that.”

“Ah, bull.”

“Dad, let’s just get this over with. I’ll mail it in the morning.”

“Rinker, we can’t send this thing. The goddam lady will die of a heart attack.”

Terrified that I might actually mail it, my father crumpled up the letter and threw it into the fire. He stared into the flames for a while and then sighed.

“Ah hell Rinker. I don’t know whether you’re going to end up in the White House, or down on the Bowery. But right now, you’re my biggest pain in the ass.”

“Ah Dad.”

“Look. Go upstairs and study or something, will you? Get out of my sight.”

When I got to the door my father called out again. He was sitting in his rocker with his back toward me, facing the fire.

“You know what really bothers me about this?”

“No, what?”

“Kern. Your brother. This stuff really hurts him, Rinker. He’s very upset and confused about you. Do you realize that? I’ve asked you not to antagonize him, but you always find a way.”

I wasn’t really that worried about my brother. I’d been antagonizing Kern for so long he practically expected it by now. But I felt awful about what my father said, because he wasn’t really talking about Kern, he was talking about Kern and him together. My father had worked hard over the past four years bringing Kern along, teaching him to fly. His life then was enormously frustrating and complex—too many kids, too many bills, a job in New York that he no longer enjoyed—and watching Kern grow as a pilot had erased a lot of his pain and brought him joy. The day my brother soloed, I think, was the happiest day in my father’s life. They were perfect together, and Kern was practically my father’s alter ego now. Kern’s happiness meant everything to my father, everyone in the family could see that. Bringing Kern out of his shell and boosting his self-confidence had been a major accomplishment for my father. By hurting one of them, he seemed to be saying, I was hurting both of them, threatening the one great contentment of his life over the past few years.

I hated myself for that, but I also hated my situation. Everything I did had to be considered in the light of my father and my brother’s expectations. Their relationship was primary and intense, a given. I was secondary, the also-ran in our threesome. Perhaps I should have been able to figure all of this out. A lot of my behavior had to do with rebelling against what I considered my father’s inordinate sympathy and love for my brother, and certainly I was envious of their relationship. But nobody figures very much out at the age of fourteen.

I never felt guilty for very long. This is just family, I thought, something to get away from. Why should I worry about my father and my brother when things were going so well up at school? Everybody loved the way I mooned that old lady, and I wasn’t going to walk away from popularity that came as easy as that.

My father was impatient by nature and hated dwelling on a problem, and he knew that Kern had him trapped. My father had rushed us through childhood, always throwing us up onto a hotter horse, or into a faster plane, insisting that we accept manly responsibilities early. He was a grand eccentric himself, always spouting off some crazyass barnstorming scheme of his own, and now Kern had simply outdone him. A coast to coast flight was exactly the kind of dreamy, preposterously impractical act that he expected of his oldest son. If he withheld his permission now, he would be turning his back on the boy he had raised.

One night late that week my father called us down to his library. He was sitting on his rocker in front of the fire staring pensively into the flames, drawing on a long, curved briar.

“Ah screw it Kern,” my father said. “I’m sick of thinking about this. You and Rinky can fly to California. Hell, it’s even a good idea.”

Kern launched off the couch.

“Yoweeee! Thanks Dad. Thanks! I promise we won’t disappoint you. Jeez. This is great!”

Dashing out of the library for the staircase, he floated up the carpeted steps as if he were riding a cushion of air.

“Whoa! Hey Kern, whoa,” my father called after him. “Where you going? I wanna talk about this thing. Plan the trip.”

“Later Dad,” Kern called down from the landing. “I want to order my maps.”

My father sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and laughed.

“Jeez,” he said. “Kern.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Kern.”

My father had this enormously persuasive manner of leaning over almost perpendicular in his chair, joining the tips of his fingers from both hands into a steeple, and staring someone right in the face. I’d seen him do this at AA meetings, at political gatherings, and with the worshipful young salesmen flocking in and out of his office in New York. He tapped me on the knee.

“Now listen here young man,” he said. “One thing.”

“Dad, you don’t have to say it. I know. Don’t screw this one up. For Kern’s sake.”

“Well good, Rinker. Exactly. But think of yourself too. Your brother
likes
you, he wants you along on this trip. Think of the things you’ll learn, working on the plane. And the country you’ll see! Why, Jesus, Texas. Texas! Texas is magnificent from the air. This is a wonderful opportunity for you.”

“Sure Dad. Texas.”

“Deal?”

“Deal.”

This was the kind of thinking I had to engage in. Because my brother liked me, because it was a wonderful opportunity for me, we would be flying out past Texas together, and then somehow we would hoist ourselves over the Rocky Mountains in an 85-horsepower Piper Cub.

We brought the Cub home the day after Thanksgiving. In earlier years we disassembled our “winter planes” out at the airport, lashing the wings to wooden cradles mounted on the sides of our Jeep pickup and hitching the tail to the rear bumper, so that the plane towed backward on its landing gear. We inched the plane home that way, over twelve miles of back roads, and it usually took us all day. But Kern decided this year that this method wasn’t efficient. He made arrangements with a neighbor, Barclay Morrison, to fly the Cub into the small private landing strip that Barclay maintained on his place. This would save us a lot of time and wear and tear on the plane.

Kern was excited about it. He planned to fly the Cub in himself, and he was determined to have the plane in the barn by the long Thanksgiving weekend, so we could get a head start on stripping off the old fabric and sanding down the airframe for repainting. He couldn’t wait to get to work, and all through Thanksgiving dinner he bubbled over about his plans for the plane and his various dreams about our trip.

The next morning was blustery and cold. A ceiling of high cirrus blocked the sun and waves of low cumulus raked the hills. The wind was blowing straight out of the north, gusting to twenty-five knots or more, and we knew without even driving over there that we’d face a fierce crosswind at Barclay’s east-to-west strip.

Barclay’s field was narrow and short, just 800 feet. It sat atop a high, grassy hill with steeply sloping ravines on three sides. In winds like these, Kern knew that he couldn’t possibly put the Cub down and get it stopped before he ran off the edge.

At breakfast, Kern was very glum about it, and his immense brown eyes were opened wide with dejection, as big as hubcaps.

“Dad. Rink,” he sighed. “The mission is scrubbed.”

My father sat with his elbows on the table, holding a cup of coffee in both hands. He hated to see Kern disappointed like that. He stared dreamily out the windows to the trees at the far edge of our field, which were bent over in the wind. Normally these were no conditions to fly in, but normally had never appealed to my father very much.

“Wipe that scowl off your face son,” my father said. “I’ll fly the Cub into Barclay’s for you.”