Fangs Out (19 page)

“You’re not helping much, Andy. In fact, you’re the opposite of help. My airplane’s in pieces because somebody at
your
airport decided to test the theory that what goes up must come down, and you can’t—or won’t—provide me
any
information that could help me locate the people responsible? What if this guy is some kind of deranged wacko who has it in for general aviation? Do you have any idea how many pilots could be at risk?”

Granted, I was laying it on thick, but I figured I had nothing to lose.

“Sir, I get where you’re coming from,” Andrew said, “and our office will cooperate fully with any investigation the FAA has going, or any other agency, for that matter, but I really can’t—”

“What if it was your airplane, Andy?” I said, cutting him off. “What would you do, wait for some government investigation to play out? That could take years. Have you
worked
with the FAA? Look up the word ‘bureaucracy’ in the dictionary. Do you know what you’ll find? A picture of FAA headquarters.”

Andy reiterated that he empathized with my situation, but said his hands were tied. He simply was not authorized to release any information.

The words, “I understand,” slipped from my mouth before I realized I’d even formed them. I found myself more pleased than upset. Understanding is the first step toward acceptance, and acceptance is the first step to achieving inner peace—even if there still remained a large part of me that wanted to wring Andy’s bureaucratic pencil neck on principle alone.

I
T WAS
nearly noon by the time I left the airport manager’s office. Inside the terminal lobby, I caught a whiff of Mexican food. Nothing quite whets the appetite like the fragrance of boiling lard, especially when you’ve missed breakfast. A sign pointed to a restaurant on the terminal building’s second floor. I bounded up the stairs.

“Welcome to Casa Machado. Would you like a table by the window? You can see the airplanes that way.”

“Bueno.”

I followed the young hostess in her colorful Mexican skirt. The restaurant was Spanish baroque in décor. Models of airplanes hung from the ceiling. A busboy delivered water, salsa, and a basket of warm tortilla chips almost before I’d sat down.

“Would you like something to drink? Iced tea?”

“How ’bout an Arnold Palmer?”

The busboy nodded regally, almost bowing, and went to fetch my drink.

I scanned the menu, then punched in Savannah’s number on my phone again. Still no answer. Her conspicuous silence weighed heavily. It’s hard to reconcile with a former spouse when she’s about as communicative as a terrorist on the lam.

“Have you had a chance to decide?” The waitress was big and brown, with a moist radiant smile.

“What is your expert opinion of the
chile verde
burrito?”

“Muy delicioso.”

“Sold.”

She jotted down my order, scooped up my menu, smiled that smile, and left for the kitchen. I gazed out the window as a yellow airplane came in for landing.

Two old men, each pushing ninety, were sitting at the next table over, both finished with lunch, eyeing the same plane.

“What is that, a T-6?” one of them asked me, squinting hard out the window.

“It is.”

“Thought so. Did my advanced training in one of those babies.” His accent was straight out of Chicago. His wire-frame aviator bifocals seemed too large for his wizened face, as did his “56th Fighter Group” baseball cap. “Good airplane, that Texan.”

“Great
airplane, that Texan,” I said. It took me a second to remember him. “Didn’t I see you on TV last night?”

He grinned yellow teeth. “Sure hope it wasn’t on
America’s Most Wanted.”

“On the news. You heard the engine on that Cessna before it went down.”

“Been near seventy years since I heard an engine like that. It was attached to the airplane I was flying at the time. Cost me two years, cooling my heels in a German stalag, courtesy of Herr Hitler.”

He’d gone to work for Pan Am flying DC-3’s after the war, he volunteered without me asking, and retired three decades later as a 747 captain, with more than 40,000 hours logged. I was impressed.

“The 56th flew Thunderbolts,” I said, pointing to his cap.

He seemed pleased that I would know such trivia. “You a pilot?”

“I flew Thunderbolt II’s in Desert Storm. Mind if I join you gentlemen?”

“That all depends,” he said, teasingly. “Are you a
good
pilot?”

“You wouldn’t have known by what happened yesterday. That was my Cessna.”

“The one that went down? That was you?”

I nodded.

The old man leaned across the table and yelled at his friend. “That was his Cessna that went down yesterday!”

His friend, a frail-looking fellow with hearing aids in both ears, took a long moment to digest the information, looking over at me not unpleasantly, then finally nodded like he understood. “Glad you’re still kicking!” he said to me loudly.

“He can’t hear too good and I don’t see too good,” the old man in the baseball cap said. “Together we make one helluva pilot. I’m Ernie Holland, by the way. Everybody calls me Dutch.”

“Cordell Logan.”

I shook his knobby hand, grabbed my water glass and sat down at their table.

“That tin-eared crumb bum you’re sittin’ next to is Al Demaerschalk,” Holland said. “Al’s an ace. Flew Sabres in Korea. Bagged three MiG-15’s in one day over the Yalu.”

“Say again?” Al said cupping his ear.

“I said you’re a crumb bum!”

Al nodded and gave me a modest shrug, his eyes twinkling.

“Al could tell ya how many rivets were on the underside of the wing, every detail,” Dutch said. “Got one of those Kodak memories. Remembers everything, even if he don’t hear too good anymore.”

I shook Demaerschalk’s hand. “It’s an honor to meet you both.”

“So what’s the story on your engine?” Dutch Holland said. “What happened? Why’d it fail?”

“It was tampered with.”

The old man leaned forward on his elbows and gave me a quizzical look. The irises of his hazel-brown eyes were clouded with cataracts.

“
Tampered
with?”

“Somebody plugged the breather line with a wad of duct tape. They say duct tape has a thousand uses? Make it a thousand and one.”

Holland leaned across the table to Demaerschalk and shouted, “They tampered with his engine!”

“What?”

“THEY TAMPERED WITH HIS ENGINE!”

Other diners paused mid-bite to glance over.

Demaerschalk looked at Holland, then at me, then back at Holland, with a sudden desperation in his eyes. “I gotta use the john,” the old man said, again too loudly, and got to his feet unsteadily.

Holland watched his friend totter away. Then he glanced over his shoulder, making sure nobody could overhear us. “I think I might’ve seen something,” he said in a confiding tone. “I mean as far as your airplane goes.”

“What did you see, Dutch?”

Holland leaned closer and lowered his voice even more.

“Somebody tinkering with your ship.”

We waited for his friend, Al, to come back from the men’s room, but he never showed.

Eleven

A
merica’s smaller airports are crawling with old pilots like Dutch Holland. Grounded after failing to pass their FAA-mandated medical exam, unable to shed their love of aviation, they continue hanging around the flight line, often living in the hangars where their airplanes sit rusting because their aging owners are no longer legally permitted to fly them.

Holland’s hangar was located at the east end of Montgomery Airport. The remnants of my airplane were sitting in a hangar on the west end, nearly a mile away.

“Got your TV, your icebox, your hot plate; cot’s over there, and there’s a port-a-john down the way. All the modern conveniences of home,” Holland said proudly, giving me the cook’s tour, the central feature of which was an immaculately maintained four-seat, single-engine Piper Cherokee older than I was. “Airport administration doesn’t care for us living out here—they’re worried about liability—but as long as you don’t make waves, they more or less leave you alone.”

He was a widower, Holland said. The concept of living at the airport was so incomprehensible to his country club wife, he never once attempted to float the balloon while she was alive. After she died, he sold their home overlooking a golf course in suburban Poway and moved.

“I wouldn’t trade it for all the tea in China,” Holland said.

I considered for a millisecond hooking him up with my landlady, then quickly came to my senses. Mrs. Schmulowitz had chewed through nearly as many husbands as Henry VIII had wives.

“Dutch, you said you saw somebody tinkering with my airplane.”

“Slow down, sonny,” he said, raising the main door of his hangar with the push of a button. “I was in a rush, too, when I was your age. When you get to be ninety-one, and you can see the end of the road, you’re not as much in a big hurry to get where you’re going.”

He offered me a cold bottle of water from his dorm fridge, which I readily accepted, then labored to unfold a couple of flimsy, aluminum-frame beach chairs. I knew enough not to offer my help; it would have only offended him. He set the chairs facing out toward the flight line, then slowly lowered himself into one of them with an arthritic groan. The worn mesh webbing sagged under his weight.

“Unless you’re waiting for an engraved invitation from the King of Siam, might as well take a load off.”

I sat down beside him.

The old pilot watched with rapt fascination as a two-seat Robinson helicopter swooped in across the field about a quarter-mile away and hovered over the tarmac.

“Always wanted to get a chopper rating,” Holland said. “Never got around to it.”

“There’s a little known law of physics. Helicopters don’t really fly, Dutch. They just beat the air into submission.”

He looked over at me like it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard, then looked back out at the flight line. “Your Cessna was parked over there, at Champion Jet Center.”

I followed Holland’s gnarled index finger to a small fleet of sleek Gulfstreams and Citations about fifty yards away, each easily worth the price of a Beverly Hills mansion.

“I noticed your ship right off,” he said. “Most everybody who flies in here from out of town in small planes like yours, they tie down over on the transient ramp outside the terminal. Cheaper to park over there. You must’ve been born with a silver spoon.”

A silver spoon. Right. That’s me.

As Holland told it, he was sitting exactly where we were, enjoying the cool night air and a bedtime toddy, when a small pickup truck drove onto the tarmac and stopped near my airplane. Wearing a baseball cap and mechanic’s coveralls, the driver got out with a flashlight and opened the
Ruptured Duck’s
cowling like he knew what he was doing. He rummaged around inside the engine compartment for about five minutes, then buttoned up the cowling, got back in his truck, and drove off. The truck was light in color, possibly white. It was too dark, Dutch said, to make out much detail beyond that.

“My eyes,” he said apologetically, “aren’t what they used to be.”

I told him I appreciated the tip, and asked that he pass it on to Paul Horvath, the FAA investigator I’d met with that morning. Holland pursed his lips and said he’d have to think about it.

“There’s nothing to think about, Dutch. With all due respect, somebody tried to kill me yesterday. You have an obligation to tell the authorities what you saw.”

“I do that, I draw attention to myself. I draw attention to myself, airport management kicks me out.”

“But you went on TV. How is that not drawing attention to yourself?”

“I-I don’t know,” Holland stammered, growing agitated. “I was just standing there and next thing you know, some pretty girl’s pointing a microphone in my face, asking me what I saw. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. I made a mistake. A stupid mistake.”

He got up slowly out of his chair, painfully, bracing his hands on his knees, and said it was time for his nap. My cue to leave. I jotted down Horvath’s number on a business card and handed it to him. The old man tucked the card in his shirt pocket without looking at it and started folding up the beach chairs. I asked him what happened to his friend, Al Demaerschalk.

“He never came back from the bathroom,” I said.

“I don’t know.”

Dutch Holland suddenly seemed in a big rush to put distance between us. I had to jump clear of the hangar door as it came down, him on the inside, me looking in.

The story of my life.