Memoir From Antproof Case (19 page)

I imagine that they never looked into my case other than to pass upon my original application, and that if they had, they would have found very little, as most of my existence has had the privilege of having played itself out prior to the advent of computers. And, besides, I am unsure of what charges were filed, if any. Some things are kept quiet to avoid political embarrassment. It is possible that I need never have sought out a country with no extradition treaty, that I might simply have hidden myself in London or Madrid.

Not long ago, the commandante became interested in my origins, and he has embarked upon a languid investigation that I hope he will abandon as soon as he encounters frustration, which is what he does with everything else.

The Brazilian air force has decided to acquire some better planes and form the best older ones into a counterinsurgency group. This makes sense, as the propeller-driven AT-26's are no match for modern fighters or air defenses, while their slow speed makes them ideal for jungle air support.

The new pilots of this group are being trained on the T-27, the
Tucano,
a lesser vehicle but not that much different from the AT-26. As the object is counterinsurgency, many of these men are being shipped to the United States to learn the subject from us. I myself would send them to query the North Vietnamese.

All the pilots speak English, but were given to me for some polish—not Polish, polish. Rather than teach them the diplomatic niceties they wanted for their sojourn in the North—I
fuck your sister?
—I strengthened their aeronautical vocabulary, and in doing so I found that I could not restrain myself from offering them a few pointers about flying.

What could I know about flying? They knew just by looking that I was born before the era of flight, and that to get me into the cockpit of one of their planes they would have had to use a crane. What would I know about a metal-shelled monoplane with machine guns at the wings and streamlined bomb racks? What would I know, indeed.

Over the course of three weeks, I taught them not only the language of flight, but enough hard-learned lessons about guiding planes and using weapons to give them an edge in combat relative not to the Paraguayan air force or the aces of Surinam but to the Luftwaffe, which, admittedly, they were not likely to fight, although their Argentine cousins had recently and foolishly set themselves against the RAF.

I introduced them to maneuvers their instructors had never dreamed of, half of which they refused to believe were possible, except that I was forced into them many times and I always burst out on the other side.

"How do you know about this?" they would ask, dumbfounded.

"I just know," I would reply.

"But how?"

"When you get older, your brain chemistry changes," I told them, "and you become wise. One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you've learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning."

Their mouths were still hanging open when one of them said, "You mean, you know about how to deal with a loss of hydraulic fluid in a dogfight, and the tricks of feathering a propeller in a dive, from heredity?"

I was trapped, but so what? I nodded with absolute certainty.

A week before that batch of students left, the commandante called me in. After reflexively asking if I wanted a cup of coffee, he winced and held his breath. I let it pass.

You see how powerful this wretched substance is? People need it to make a connection with another person, to wake up, to keep awake, to go to sleep, to work, to play, to eat, to embark upon a journey, to disembark from a conveyance.

How many times have I entered a room and been asked, from completely out of the blue, "Would you like some coffee?"

Of course I wouldn't like some coffee. What makes them think I want coffee? And the waitresses! They say, "Would you like your coffee now?"

It
isn't
my coffee, and how dare they assume that the only question is
when
I will drink it? Even after I told them no, they would come around again and ask, "Have you changed your mind about coffee?" "Of course I haven't changed my mind about coffee," I would say. "I'll never change my mind about coffee. I'd rather die."

I had to stop going to restaurants. The sight of people enjoying coffee was so offensive that I stormed out half the time anyway. They drink it with zombie-like expressions that suggest the union of sexual pleasure, religious fervor, and state ceremony.

The users and apologists look at me with wonder, and say, "Ah, but I enjoy it!" Yes, you enjoy it! Heroin addicts enjoy heroin, perverts enjoy their perversions, and Hitler enjoyed invading France. You enjoy it, furthermore, mainly because without it you suffer. The mechanics are similar to those of blackmail and extortion, and the gangster in the piece is a tiny bean that has seized control of half the world.

"How are you?" the commandante asked.

"I'm fine."

Never had he asked me such a tender question. As far as I can remember, from the beginning of time, no one in uniform had ever asked me this. Given that you might be vaporized at any moment or ripped in three by a cannon shell, queries such as "How are you feeling?" seem ridiculous. I believe it has always been this way, the world 'round, even in armies at peace.

"I was fascinated to hear," the commandante said, continuing his formal tone, "that you have a knowledge of aeronautics."

I said nothing.

"And it occurred to me that we have never spoken about your background."

I said nothing, but my expression hardened.

"What did you do before you came to us?"

I rose to my feet and turned toward the door. As I was beginning to move, he said, "No! Wait. Sit down. I didn't mean to offend you. I'm just curious."

"I worked for a bank," I said, having decided on the instant to answer him. I was not afraid of offending the commandante—they needed me more than I needed them—but I knew that if I made myself a total mystery he would become far more interested than if I threw him some shrimp.

"What kind of a bank?"

"A very small bank," I said, thinking of its physical size, "in New York."

"Not Manufacturing Handover Truss?" he asked, trying to impress me with the fact that he could (sort of) name a New York Bank.

"Oh no, nothing like that. Manufacturing Handover Truss has many, many branches, and we had only one." I excluded foreign cities and domestic affiliates, of course.

"What you did there?" the commandante asked in his smoothest English.

"I was a clerk-messenger," I replied, going back to 1918.

"And why you come here?" he asked.

"It hot here," I said, adapting to his syntax. "No snow. Good for body. Very relaxing."

"No treaty of extradition?" he asked.

"What that?"

"Why you leave little bank?"

"A discrepancy."

"A discrepancy?"

"Yes. I myself decided to leave, entirely of my own volition, after I became responsible for a discrepancy. It was the kind of thing that could easily have been rectified by a simple journal entry, and probably was."

The commandante, who was no fool, closed one eye, lifted one eyebrow higher than the other, and asked, "How many zeros?"

Deciding that he was asking me about my war record, and wanting to avoid tooting my own horn, I took advantage of the fact that I had shot down only Messerschmitts and Heinkels. "Absolutely none," I averred. "Zero Zeros."

"Then your leaving the bank was strictly a matter of honor?" he said, returning to his own language.

"A matter of honor and entirely my decision."

He seemed much relieved, though I cannot imagine why he might have been anxious.

"The air force guy whose name is Popcorn, you know him?"

"He's in my class."

"He says you have to have been a fighter pilot, but he can't figure out which war."

"Of course he can't," I said. "I was born in nineteen-hundred and four. I was fourteen when we signed the Armistice at the end of the First World War, and thirty-seven when we entered the Second, well beyond draft age." I did not volunteer that I had volunteered.

"So you were not a fighter pilot."

"All my life I have been interested in aeronautics and the principles of flight," I continued, truthfully. "I read books. I imagine. I believe that I could fly a 747 purely by logic, and I often dream of being the passenger who is called to land the plane after the three pilots have had heart attacks."

"That's a strange dream."

"Yes. The only thing I don't like about it is that I would be very uncomfortable dressed as a nun. But I
love
to fly! In fact, let me take you up in a small plane, and I'll show you how well theoretical knowledge can be translated into practice."

"No!" he said, holding both hands in front of him with his fingers spread. "That won't be necessary. Obviously, Popcorn is crazy."

"Very."

"You won't go up with him, will you?"

"No no," I said. "I'm too old to fly."

I'm too old to fly.
With these words, I was magically thrown back to the war. I felt as if I were in a fog on a moor, and I could hardly see the commandante or feel the heat of Rio in summer, for suddenly I was a much younger man, in the sky, over Europe.

I must have made my way from the commandante's office blindly, for I remember neither how I exited nor if I departed politely, mesmerized as I was by the roar of the Merlin engine in my P-51. I used to think of the Merlin as if it were fifteen-hundred and twenty horses that could work continuously for twelve hours. Although my father bought an automobile when I was six years old, until then we traveled about on horseback or in a wagon, and even after that we used the automobile only on special occasions, because it was hard to start and you had to change the tires all the time.

I had thought that people would always have horses, and was amazed that before I was twenty the streets of New York were crowded with automobiles, and that people used them, for example, to go from Albany to Syracuse.

Horses were my first language. I knew the power of one good horse, and it was impressive, for one good horse could pull a wagon that, fully loaded, weighed a ton. It would have to be on fairly level ground; if you wanted to pull a wagon like that up a gradual incline you'd hitch up another animal. With a four-horse team you could run the steepest hills of Ossining all day long, even when winter had captured the town, icicles hung from the gutters, and escaped slabs of packed snow slid down Main Street at fifty miles an hour.

A good horse can carry a 150-pound man as if he didn't exist. Many times I have rocketed along blind and dangerous trails because my mount has forgotten that he carries me. If 150 pounds is to one horse an almost inconsequential burden, what of 1,520 horses that carry the five tons of a fully loaded P-51—including armament, ammunition, bombs, fuel, and fuel in drop tanks? And when you were over the target, you were much lighter and leaner, having burned two thousand pounds of fuel and shed your drop tanks. And as you expended ammunition, you grew lighter still.

Simple division says that each horse is carrying six and a half pounds, about the weight of four horseshoes. What we are talking about then is a naked horse that could fly, that never got tired, that had no friction from the ground, less friction in the thin air than near the surface, and the help of gravity in half its maneuvers. A P-51 could really fly. And so could I.

Although in 1941 I was working in the department that advised the bank on political risk, and although I believed the United States would eventually enter the war, I knew very little about the Orient and had estimated that our participation would be delayed until 1943 or 1944, by which time I would have been forty. Forty was then far more significant an indication of diminished physical prowess than it is now, and I believed that, having been too young for the first war, I would as well be too old for the second.

Then came Pearl Harbor. Though thirty-seven, I volunteered. They would have me, however, only as a desk soldier in Washington. As I circulated among the various combat commands, trying to gain entry, I learned that someone who could fly was worth a great many points to the recruiters, who would bend almost any rule to take him in.

I announced that I was taking leave from Stillman and Chase, went to an ordinary bank, withdrew $5,000 in cash, and got on the train to Poughkeepsie. Then I walked fifteen miles to Alford Field, found the director of the flying school, and asked him to teach me to fly like an acrobat.

"I can't," he said. "In three weeks I'm going to San Antonio to teach army pilots."

"That's great," I replied. "We've got three whole weeks."

"Not much we can do in that time," he said. "Not safely."

"Did I say safely?"

"No, but I did."

"It's war," I announced. "The whole thing is unsafe. I'll give you five thousand dollars."

"Five thousand for three weeks' work?" It was an immense sum.

"Look, don't get carried away," I said. "I want you to work me fourteen hours a day. That means a lot of flying time, gasoline, extra pay for your mechanic, spare parts, room, board, and the chance that I may crash your plane or even kill you."

"That sounds attractive," he said.

"Hey," I said, "I'm a fast learner. You put me through my paces and I'll wear you out. I can drive just about anything."

He was a few years younger than I, much taller, unsophisticated, and a great pilot. "All right," he said. "For the time remaining to me, which I'm pretty sure is the last three weeks of May, and may be the last three weeks of my life, I'll do it. We're going to be drinking a lot of coffee!"

"The hell we are," I said. "We're not going to drink even one cup."

We started with theory. Sitting down right where we were, I grabbed a pad of paper and he talked for the rest of the day. I was jamming it in like a window-smasher at Tiffany or (as I would later) when I stuffed chocolate-covered cherries into my mouth as I heard Constance coming down the stairs so I could swallow them before she got to the kitchen. I would then pretend to be washing dishes in one of the deep stainless steel sinks, whereas I would actually be drinking a gallon of ice-cold water, because I knew that she wanted to have sex on the steam table, and when I kissed her I didn't want to be found out.