Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (5 page)

They park alongside Mal’s hangar–Number 5 in a row of eight–and get out to slide open the corrugated sheetmetal doors. They each take one. Again, Gordon strains at the task in a show-offy way, using only one hand. His door moves a few feet, then stalls. The steel track it rides on is corroded with rust. He tries using both hands, really leans into it, but the big door won’t budge.
Save it, son,
Mal thinks.
You’ll never be a he-man.
Mal goes over and pushes the door the rest of the way, trying to make it look easy, as if he wasn’t really using the leverage from all of his 268 pounds.

Inside the hangar’s grease-smelling shade, the Cessna stands on its three wheels like a proud, sharp-beaked bird. Mal kicks aside the tire blocks, opens the pilot’s door, and pushes the airplane out into the sunlight.
Man, it’s a thing of beauty….
The gleaming red nose cone looks dangerous, the silver prop lethal. The blank, Cyclopean eye of the windshield somehow speaks to him of soulless malice.

Mal loves everything about the plane: the macho complexity of its instrument panel, the new plastic smell of its ox-blood vinyl seats, the muted slosh of aviation fuel in its wing tanks. He runs through a quick pre-flight check before starting her up. The part Gordon likes best is when Mal opens a tiny spigot under the motor cowling and squirts a pinkish-hued stream of high-test fuel onto the tarmac. It looks like a dog pissing. Gordon used to ask why the plane did that and Mal jokingly told him that even planes have to take a leak every now and then–but now Gordon knows better. It’s to make sure there’s no water in the fuel line. Everything checks out okay. Mal spits into the little puddle of gasoline he’s created and the saliva skids along the surface like a bubble.

They both hop into the plane. Gordon sits in the co-pilot’s seat, pretending he’s steering. Mal starts the engine and they taxi toward the runway, waiting for clearance from the control tower. That’s another thing Mal loves about flying: the private language everyone speaks over the radio, a language that makes no sense whatsoever if you’re not a pilot. It’s like belonging to a secret club.

The control tower tells him Runway Two is clear. Mal positions the plane and gets ready for take-off. He stands on the brakes and revs up the engine, checks the flaps, looks over his gauges. The noise inside the cabin is almost deafening. Then with a giddy rush of adrenaline, he lets the brakes go. He can feel the gravel skittering under the Cessna’s tires as it picks up speed, the whole fuselage shaking with the sudden velocity. Mal concentrates on keeping them on a straight path between the landing lights, steering with the pedals at his feet. The prop bites into the air, chews up the sky, gnashes at gravity. They’re hurtling toward the end of the runway like an ape with its ass on fire. Then there’s a brief sensation of floating, a sudden lessening of tension as the engine’s roar smoothes into a drone and the wheels sail clear of the ground. That first moment in the air is as good as it gets for Mal. All of his petty concerns leave him. His mind is clear. It’s just him and the plane for that one split-second –

– then he looks over and sees Gordon smearing the Plexiglas co-pilot’s window with the greasy tip of his nose.

“Hey, Gordon, cut that out!” yells Mal, but Gordon doesn’t hear him. He’s so wrapped up in watching the ground fall away–farmers’ fields dwindling to patchwork quilts, the other airplanes on the tarmac turning into tiny toys–that he’s oblivious to all sounds, even his father’s shouting.

Once they’ve reached cruising altitude, Mal reaches over and taps Gordon on the knee, yelling right into his face: “Let’s go buzz Kingsburg! Want to?” Gordon nods his head in the affirmative, bouncing up and down in his seat.

From 1,300-feet in the air, they follow the same country roads they drove in on, occasionally hitting thermal pockets that cause them to fall off invisible ledges, dropping two or three stories with a sudden smack and shudder. For Mal, piloting a single-engine plane is like driving a go-kart across the sky. It’s a thrill, zooming along at about 120 miles an hour, not all that high above the treetops and telephone poles. It’s nothing like flying in a jet, where there’s a safe cushion of twenty thousand feet between you and the ground.

“Look for
Ze Svedish Teapot!”
Mal shouts like a Scandinavian madman.

The Swedish Teapot is the crowning achievement in a long history of civic mania designed to make Kingsburg famous as
The Swedish Village
. At some point during the Great Depression, desperate for tourism, the city council passed a resolution suggesting that all downtown buildings should have “a Swedish look” to celebrate the fact that 94% of the town’s population had once consisted of Swedish immigrants. But no one could agree on what “a Swedish look” really meant until Mal’s dad, a crafty Norwegian, sold City Hall a big load of discounted lumber. He told them to use it to tart up the storefronts with fake half-timbering and a bunch of brightly painted business signs in Old English script.
Svenske Gifte Shoppe. Andersen’s Autoe Service. Leif’s Olde Tyme Pizza Shacke. Etcetera.
Later, another resolution passed, and the town started hosting an annual Swedish Festival. Big-titted high school cheerleaders in skimpy Swedish costumes danced around a Maypole. A Swedish Parade followed immediately thereafter. It featured the standard fez-wearing Shriners on go-karts, but there was also more idiosyncratic fare–like drunken, moose-antler-wearing Rotarians posing as Vikings, hurling candy at cowering children from the deck of a cardboard Norse ship. Word got around, and the tourists started showing up in droves. Soon orange, yellow, and blue plywood Dala horses were bolted to all the lampposts. Swedish polka music played from loudspeakers on every street corner along Draper Street–Kingsburg’s main drag–from noon until dusk. Then, in a final masterstroke, the city council conceived of a glorious symbol to stand in perpetual recognition of the town’s unique heritage. A crew was hired to scale the 300-foot-tall water tower in
Olafson Park
and transform it into a gigantic Swedish-style coffeepot, complete with spout and handle.

“It holds 1,500,000 cups of coffee!”
literature from the
Kingsburg Chamber of Commerce
proclaims. That same literature doesn’t mention that everyone in town thinks it’s really a teapot. Nor does it mention that The Swedish Teapot holds nothing but well water with potentially chromosome-damaging levels of pesticides and fertilizers from the enormous amount of agricultural work that goes on in the area. Kingsburg’s second claim to fame, after all, is that it’s
The Raisin Capital of the World
, the proud home of Sunny Maid Raisins. For a town to grow as many raisins as Kingsburg grows… well, it just doesn’t come naturally.

“There it is! I see it!” Gordon shouts, pointing at the horizon, as the teapot tower and all the rest of Kingsburg springs into view.

It’s illegal as hell, but Mal points the Cessna’s nose down and swoops right along Draper Street at about 500 feet. The plane’s noise is so loud that it drowns out the polka music. People come out of their stores to see what’s going on. Mal catches a glimpse of roly-poly Mrs. Lundquist, opening the door to her
Swedish Sweets Shoppe
with the sign in the window that says:
Lutefisk Taffy Half-Price.
And there’s that grouchy, bald-headed old fart, Henry Jacobsen, lurching out from under the awning of
Jacobsen’s Pharmacie
wearing a starched white pharmacist’s jacket and shaking his
El Cheapo
aluminum cane.

More people, too many to name, head out onto the sidewalks with their faces tilted upward and their mouths agape. Gordon imagines them all shouting, “Look! Up in the sky! There goes Mal Swannson and his boy, Gordon!” There’s something incredibly satisfying about that kind of attention, and he’s a little disappointed when Mal points them back up toward the clouds and says goodbye to Draper Street with a saucy wag of the Cessna’s wings.

From a safer, FAA-sanctioned altitude, Mal tilts the plane in a slow, lazy circle so they can look down at the rooftops of their own neighborhood from the outskirts of town. “Do you see our house?” Mal asks. Gordon soon picks it out, and Jimmy’s house, too, across an intersection and three rooftops up. He even thinks he can make out Jimmy in the middle of the street, riding his bicycle, although from that height it could be anyone. Gordon waves hello, but the little figure on the bike doesn’t wave back.

The wind picks up on their way back to the airport. Just as Mal is making his final approach–flaps at 20-degrees, the air speed indicator bawling a warning like a mechanical baby–a strong crosswind gusts in and tosses the Cessna sideways off the airstrip. They slam down in the dirt between the landing lights at ninety miles an hour and bounce toward the lake. For one terrible moment it looks like they’re heading straight into the drink. But Mal gooses the prop and gets them airborne again, right out over the lily pads. A maneuver like that is called a “Touch-And-Go”–and it was a bad one. Mal hopes the guys up in the control tower didn’t see it, but they probably did. He flies around the airport again, feeling a little shaky, and lines up for another approach. He takes the crosswind into consideration this time and touches down with hardly a bump. He taxies back to the hangar, puts the plane away as fast as he can, and gets the hell out of there. Driving the Pinto has never felt better.

Although Mal doesn’t notice, Gordon tries to suppress the knowledge that they both almost met a watery death in the same algae-green lake where he used to chase frogs and capture tadpoles in Folgers’ coffee cans. In fact, Gordon doesn’t betray even so much as a glimmer of anxiety until they get home, when he scampers into the bathroom just off the garage and barfs up a bellyful of partially-digested Super Sugar Smacks. Before he can finish, his mother click-clacks over on her high heels to stand above him, asking, “What’s the matter? Did your father feed you too much candy?”

“Motion sickness,” Mal explains–and leaves it at that.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

The day Mal is initiated into the Hoo-Hoo Club starts out like any other. At 7:30 in the morning, he unlocks the hardware store’s front doors and turns off the alarm. As President and CEO of
Swannson Lumber, Inc.
, Mal could assign that task to someone else and sleep in, but he likes doing it. Unlocking the doors always makes him feel like the king of his domain. He’s greeted by the familiar smells of sawdust, greasy bolts, jute twine (macramé is getting to be a big fad), oily dust in the racks of galvanized plumbing supplies, the stench of new plastic steaming off green vinyl garden hoses, the baked electronics of unpacked Black-and-Decker power drills. Virile smells. Masculine smells.
If someone could put those smells in a bottle of aftershave,
Mal thinks,
they’d have a big winner.

He turns on the coffeepot and dumps two cups of Folgers into the filter. The lumberyard crew will be in soon, and they’ll want to stand around drinking coffee and telling jokes for a good twenty minutes before they start their day. The yard crew consists of three minimum-wage Mexicans–Paco, Leo, and Ruben–and their foreman, Johnny Hoss, the self-proclaimed “World’s Strongest Okie.” Even though Mal stands almost a full head taller, there’s something about Johnny Hoss that intimidates him. There are stories floating around about Johnny. How he lied about his age to get into boot camp, shipping out of Oklahoma to Vietnam just before his sixteenth birthday. How he specialized in night operations behind enemy lines once he got there, trained to decapitate his foes with a length of piano wire. How he killed a hundred men that way, maybe more. Mal once saw Johnny demonstrate his piano wire technique on a four-by-four post, snapping it neatly in two. He also saw Johnny fill the back of a pickup truck with 94-pound sacks of concrete mix, tossing them from a platform a good twelve feet away as if they weighed no more than goosedown pillows. The man could pick up an armload of 20-foot Douglas fir beams and walk them across the yard without even breaking a sweat. His perpetually sunburned neck was bigger than his square, crewcut head. His belly looked like he spent every afternoon drinking gallons of beer, but it was all pure muscle. The only things even slightly soft about Johnny Hoss were his eyes, which were large and brown, with extravagant lashes. They were movie star eyes, really. They made him just too damn good-looking.

“Hey, Boss. Today’s the big day, huh?”

It’s Mike Shriver, Mal’s Number One air conditioning man, sneaking up on him, snapping him out of his thoughts about Johnny.

“Yep, tonight’s the night,” says Mal. “Today we’re men, but tomorrow we’re Hoo-Hoos.”

Mal has invited Mike–and Johnny Hoss–to be initiated into the Hoo-Hoo Club with him. He didn’t want to do it alone. Besides, the club’s numbers have been dwindling in recent years and it will make Mal look good, bringing in some fresh blood.

He and Mike head back to Mal’s office to look over their schedule. Mike perches himself on Mal’s drafting stool, looking like a big, friendly vulture in an oversized navy blue mechanic’s jumpsuit with his name stitched in red across the left breast pocket. He has a narrow, pockmarked jaw and a snaggle-toothed overbite that causes his lips to stick out beyond the tip of his nose. His close-set, watery yellow eyes usually convey one of two expressions–bewilderment or suspicion–from under the grease-stained brim of the Benjamin Moore Paint cap he always has on. Not even his mother would ever make the mistake of calling him handsome, but he’s one hell of a Westinghouse Certified Air Conditioning Technician. Mike brings in more money for Mal than any other single employee. In a way, Mal loves him like a son. Better than a son, actually, compared to his feelings about Gordon.

Mike says, “I stayed late last night and finished hooking up ol’ Mrs. Emmersen’s unit. Man, oh man, when I turned that baby on, I thought snow was gonna come out of the vents.”

“Yeah, we sold her way too many BTUs,” Mal admits. “But she’s rich now that Bob cashed it in. She can afford it.”

“I just hope she doesn’t leave it on all day and then come home to find her cats frozen stiff.” Mike lets out a self-congratulatory chuckle at the end of that little joke.