Nothing So Strange (33 page)

“Let’s get into the damn thing and see,” he snapped. “
You
take
off….”

A few minutes later we were high above the desert and Mr. Murdoch’s hut
looked like a nutshell on a yellow carpet. The seats were back and front;
Brad was behind me. I could feel the pressure of his hand on the dual stick
and rudders; he was letting me fly, but doing so, I thought, with an effort.
I turned to look at him once, but his face was clenched; I thought he was
nervous. Then suddenly I felt no pressure from him at all; he had given up
the back-seat driving. I looked round again; he was staring out of the side
window. “All right?” I shouted.

“Sure,” he shouted back.

The plane was too noisy for conversation. I climbed to five thousand, then
headed for Giant’s Pass. It was about a hundred and fifty miles, almost due
north, and against a head wind. The air was bumpy over the scrubby hills. I
watched the instruments, checked on the map, looked out for emergency
landings— the routine I had learned. There were pans of dried-up lakes
here and there. Soon I went off course to pass over the rocks where Valdez,
whoever he was, had hidden. I pointed them out to Brad, but he seemed
unconcerned, and so was I— they were just like any other rocks. But a
mood of exaltation came over me as we flew on; I shouted back to
him—“Like to take over?” I half let go of the controls and in a few
seconds he was flying. Of course anyone could have, even a pupil having a
first lesson; yet as I sat there, my hands and feet idle, I felt I was
accomplishing something in what he was accomplishing. I unpacked the
sandwiches and he took one, but the air was too bumpy for coffee. I thought
that now he had settled down he would probably find the rest of the trip
dull.

Abruptly he swung the plane in a complete right-about turn, then throttled
down. In the sudden near-silence the wind through the struts was like a
fingernail on piano wires.

“What’s the idea?” I asked.

“Just to talk. I hate shouting.”

“How do you like it?”

“Fine.”

“I guessed you wouldn’t be scared.”

“I thought I would, but I’m not. Perhaps you give me confidence. You’re
not bad. Maybe you’ll really know how to fly one of these days.”

“Well thanks.” It was as much of a compliment as I could have hoped for.
“Another sandwich?”

“Not yet.” He began to sing “Auld Lang Syne” at the top of his voice, and
I remembered the last time I had heard that was at the Hampstead house years
before. “Sorry,” he said, after a few bars. “I guess that’s like wanting to
skywrite.”

“Go on,” I said. “Sing all you want.”

“No—we’d best get back to the right direction. I’m turning, then
she’s all yours again.”

“Don’t you want to keep on?”

“No, I’m lazy. You do the work.”

“Okay.”

He throttled up, made the turn, and I took the controls. We flew for an
hour and Giant’s Pass was still some thirty or forty miles ahead. The wind
blew now in gusts and flurries; sometimes the plane seemed to stand still in
the air, like a bird hovering. Once I watched the shadow of the wing as it
passed a certain rock; I didn’t know how large the rock was, but I was sure
that a car could have quickly overtaken us on the ground if there had been a
road. I checked as well as I could from the map and confirmed this. Not that
it mattered; we had all day. But suddenly Brad leaned over and shared the
same misgiving—how were we for gas? I said, not wanting to alarm him:
“Getting a bit low, but I think we’ll make it.”

A few minutes later he shouted back: “We won’t. Better look out for a
place to land.”

I had already thought of that too.

We covered a few more miles. This would be my first emergency landing,
though I had often pointed out to instructors where I would make one if I had
to, and had come down to within a hundred feet of some likely field. But that
was not quite the same as actually doing the thing, and in any case, fields
were different from the desert in a high wind.

Brad touched my shoulder and pointed far ahead to a white patch gleaming
in the sun. “Try for that,” he shouted. I changed course, and the white patch
approached so slowly that the ground as well as the air seemed in battle for
every inch. Even descending did not give much extra speed, because at the
lower levels the wind was a hurricane. I had never flown, much less landed,
against such odds, and had there been gas I would have turned back to Lost
Water rather than try it. I glanced at Brad and saw his face a little set; I
wanted to beg him to make the landing himself; but I couldn’t ask, because he
had said he had confidence in me and if he were nervous that was all he was
depending on. I flew down to a thousand feet and at one moment had trouble in
keeping the plane right side up; I wondered what would happen if it did
capsize; there were things you could do if you thought of them quickly
enough. I tried to remember them. The white patch rose like a wall as the
downdraft increased; I pulled back the stick and then felt a forward pressure
as Brad checked the movement. I realized a few seconds later he had probably
saved us from a stall. “Try again,” he shouted over my shoulder. “But with
power this time.”

I had never done that before either. I flew round again and remade the
approach. A terrific gust dropped the plane five hundred feet in a single
swirl, but with power on I managed to level up till the white patch lay
beneath. It proved to be the dried bed of a lake, smoother than any airfield
runway; except for the wind a landing would be easy. I waited for lulls
between gusts, then came down in a hurry. After we had touched ground the
next gust almost blew us over. “Don’t stop,” Brad shouted. “Taxi over
there….” He pointed in a direction where the lake bed elbowed into
surrounding upland. We covered half a mile, tacking like a yacht whenever the
big gusts came. Presently in the lee of a hill the wind lessened. We stopped
and clambered out.

“Well!” I said.

“Well?” he answered, and slapped me on the back. Then he put stones
against the wheels and climbed up to unscrew the cap of the gas tank. “Down
to the last drop,” he reported.

“We were lucky.”

“The motor’s fouled up too—didn’t you notice the engine
missing?”

“I didn’t notice anything….”

“Bad gas. Or else worn rings. Or loose bolts on a cylinder head…. You
made a pretty good landing. I’d half a mind to do it for you, at the end, but
then I thought you’d like the practice.”

“Practice! Do you know I’ve never done a thing like that before?”

“I thought you hadn’t. That’s why I said you did pretty well.”

“And … and weren’t you scared of letting me?”

“No. For one thing, I was a bit confident you’d make it.”

“Any other reason?”

He was already pouring coffee from the thermos. “I don’t want to sound
melodramatic, but I suddenly realized while we were flying that I don’t give
a damn about certain things any more … and one of them’s my life.”

“Another must be
my
life, in that case.”

“Sure…. Sit down. Coffee’s only warm—altitude always loosens
corks. You should squeeze them tight again after you climb.”

We sat in the shade of a yellow rock and I had a queer feeling that nobody
else since the earth began had been exactly where we were. Which was quite
possible, for we were a mile from the roughest road, and twenty from the
nearest town. “We’ve got to get gas,” I said, searching the map.

“
You
have. My job’s on the motor. I didn’t quite like the way she
behaved those last few miles.”

“No? What’s wrong?”

“Just that I wouldn’t want to fly her anywhere else without a checkup. I’m
a good mechanic—did you know that? Take me about a couple of
hours—time for you to hitchhike to the nearest gas station…. But no
hurry. Eat your sandwiches and have a cigarette…. I like it here. For the
first time in God knows how long I’m reasonably sure I’m not being spied on.”
And suddenly he drew me down to him on the desert sand and kissed me. It was
different from that time in the car. Perhaps the relief after tension made us
both responsive to something no longer within bounds.

He said later, beginning quietly: “You think I’m still out of my mind,
don’t you? All this stuff about being watched everywhere…. Neurosis …
psychosis … one of those jargon words. You’re calm about it, that’s one
thing. You’re always calm. I like that. It’s my favorite cure. When I saw
your head in front of me while we were flying I was calm too. And I didn’t
care what happened. That was part of the calmness. I kept thinking of
Bill—probably because we’d talked about him in the car. When we were in
those gusts I thought ‘For Christ’s sake, God, what are you trying to do to
us?’—but I wasn’t mad about it, as Bill was, I was calm. It seemed a
good question. Something worth a bit of research, if anyone had time for it
these days and wasn’t being watched. There I go again—the neurosis.
Just for the moment I even suspected Murdoch— because they put the
unlikeliest people on to jobs like that—just as they did in the army
… in New York … Washington … and … other places…. Of course it
sounds incredible. I sometimes dream it’s still just algebra—with a
flaw in it somewhere. A big dud. That’s what I hoped—that’s what they
knew I hoped. So they watched me afterwards. Maybe in case I suddenly wrote
the truth in the sky. The mysterious way in which God moves, specially
prepared for those over two-thirty-five, and when you read God backwards it
spells Dog. In another moment I will give you my prediction for the end of
the world, but first, a message from your announcer….”

“Stop talking like that,” I cried. “Whatever it means, stop it—stop
it!”

“I’m sorry. Perhaps I
am
out of my mind. Maybe they don’t watch me
half as much as I imagine. Or maybe I’m not watched at all and it just proves
I’m out of my mind for thinking so.”

“No, no, don’t worry about that. You’re not out of your mind.”

“But if I think I’m being watched when I’m not … because
you
don’t believe it, do you?”

I saw the look in his eyes and knew there was no longer any alternative. I
said simply: “Darling, yes. I believe it.”

“
What
?”

“I believe it. I believe
you
.”

“Hey, let’s get this straight. So I
am
being watched? It’s true,
then?”

“Yes, yes, I believe you—”

“But what evidence have you? You know more than you’ll say, don’t
you?”

“Brad, please—please don’t—”

“Listen, I want to know what
you
know. What makes you agree with me
that I’m being watched all the time? Who’s on the job now? Is it Dan? Why do
you think
anyone’s
watching me?”

I pulled his head against mine and held it there while I whispered:
“Because
I
am, Brad.”

“
You
?”

“Yes, darling.”

“What do you mean?”

I told him then about Mr. Small. I told him how I had gone to a downtown
office in New York to be interrogated, how Mr. Small had followed me to
California for further questioning, and how Brad’s visit to Vista Grande had
been arranged so that I could keep an eye on him, size him up, try to get him
to talk—but precisely about what, they wouldn’t tell me. It was the
vaguest assignment. “So I said I’d try, but I didn’t try—except for
what I wanted myself, and that was to get to know you again after all these
years.”

After the first shock he was calmer than I had expected, and he wasn’t
angry with me at all, as I thought he might have been. “So
you’ve
been
watching me,” he said reflectively, as if he must make it fit in with other
things in his mind.

“Yes—but not for him. For myself.”

“And what are you going to tell him?”

“Either everything or nothing, darling, but not half and half.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s the mistake I’ve already made and perhaps you have too.”

He said with a sigh: “You’re uncanny sometimes…. And you’ve helped me
tremendously. D’you know, I’m
relieved
at what you’ve said—about
you watching me. I began to think I was going out of my mind—I wasn’t
sure … sometimes I wondered if it were all my imagination. Now I
know
it isn’t…. Fine…. And I can fly too—that’s something
else you’ve shown me.” He took my hand and held it rather solemnly. “Just
like you, Jane. Remember that time in Vienna when I said you’d always be on
my side?”

That wasn’t quite what he had said, but I liked the misquotation.

“What do they suspect me of?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know, Brad. Maybe the fact that you worked with Framm started
them off. But after what you did in the army I don’t see why you shouldn’t be
able to make them trust you…. That is, unless there are other angles I
don’t know about.”

“There are.”

“What?”

“I can’t tell you—now. I wish I could and it’s perhaps absurd that I
can’t, but—”

“All right. Don’t bother.”

“What’s so wonderful is that
you
trust me. It doesn’t occur to you
that I might have done anything bad, does it?”

“Have you?”

He shook his head. “But I love the way you ask. You remind me of the
priest who heard a confession of murder and merely asked very calmly ‘How
many murders, my son?’ Not that the parallel fits me, but I think it does
you.”

“It might. Or maybe I’m just remembering Daniel Webster’s remark that
there’s nothing so strange as truth. I can always imagine you getting into
the most complicated trouble from the highest possible motives. I’m capable
of doing that myself, that’s why it doesn’t shock me so much.”

He laughed and then asked seriously: “When do you see this man again?”

“I don’t know, exactly. He was coming today, to the house, but we’ve
missed him by making this trip. I did that deliberately.”