Flight of Passage: A True Story (11 page)

After a while Kern was overcome by the dope fumes too and came out and joined us. When he got high, Kern was as funny and relaxed as the next kid and we liked having him out there. We were making great progress on the plane and enjoying our spring together.

My mother didn’t have any idea about what was going on out there. To her a plane rebuild was just a plane rebuild. My father had always been deliberately vague about our weekend activities together and he pawned off a lot of platitudes to my mother that she seemed to accept. For example, despite all evidence to the contrary, he told her that he was “a very safe pilot,” and that he was teaching us to fly the same way. So, he never told her about the airplane dope. Working on an airplane all winter, he told her, “built character in boys,” and Kern and I were getting along so much better that year she figured this must be true.

One night in early May my mother looked out through the kitchen window and saw three of her four oldest children prone on the grass beside the barn. We were completely plastered on dope, but she couldn’t tell that from a distance. Working that hard on a plane, building all that character, must have been tiring, she thought. Maybe we needed something to eat.

So, she loaded up her wicker tray with cookies and milk and came out across the lawn, quiet as a cat. Suddenly she was there, and I was looking up at her pretty, pert face through the little holes in a wicker tray.

“Oh, hi Mom.”

“Are you children all right?”

“Oh we’re fine,” Kern said. “Just taking a rest from the plane.”

“Why are you all lying on the grass?”

“Oh, it’s a nice night out I guess.”

“Well, maybe you should come in.”

“Mommy,” Macky said. “You know what?”

“No dear, what?”

“Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants.”

Karl was a kid who lived in our town and we went to grammar school with him. I’d never heard about his Davy Crockett underpants before, but it sounded like Karl.

“Excuse me Macky?” my mother said, “What did you just say?”

“I said, 'Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants.’”

“Macky. Don’t say that again. I heard you the first time.”

“Mom. You said, 'What did you just say?’ And I said, 'Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants.’”

“Don’t say that!”

“What?”

“That!”

“'Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants?’ What’s wrong with that?”

“Don’t say it!”

Kern and I were just as high as Macky and we didn’t see anything wrong with what she was saying. In fact, it made perfect sense. Karl’s Davy Crockett underpants was the kind of image that naturally rises to the surface and just pops out while you’re doping a plane, and we were grateful for the information, now that it was out.

But my mother was flustered and started looking around for a place to set her tray down.

“Mom,” Macky said, “I don’t know why you’re being so sensitive. All I said was, 'Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants.’”

“Oh dear,” my mother said. “Macky, you really should come inside now.”

“Mom,” Kern said. “It’s not what you think.”

“Oh, not that!” Macky laughed. She had this uproarious, high-octane laugh. “Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants. I saw them in Mrs. Kincherf’s washing machine when Karl was five.”

“Macky, are you
sure
you’re all right?”

“Mom. It’s not important, okay? Let’s drop it. I just wanted you to know.”

My mother left the tray of cookies and milk on the grass and decamped for the house.

We never did hear about Karl and his Davy Crockett underwear again. I knew that my mother was confused and suspicious about the conversation, but she didn’t want to discuss it. That spring when we doped the plane was one of the times I was grateful about being raised a Catholic. At a certain point the doctrine of silence always took over and protected us from having to say anything about our behavior.

Kern was jubilant. We finished recovering the Cub by the end of May, which gave us the three-day Memorial Day weekend for the painstaking job of sectioning off the fuselage and wings with masking tape and newspaper for his paint scheme. There would be plenty of time during the week for spraying on the paint.

He decided to paint the Cub red and white, using the paint design for a 1956 Super Cub, his favorite look among all Cubs. When we got to the wings, Kern masked off large, triangular shapes to paint bright red “sunbursts” on the top surface, like all the stunt pilots had on their planes.

“Sunbursts, Kern?” I said. “Why sunbursts?”

“Ah c’mon Rink. Think. Think.”

“Kern I’m thinking. But I don’t know.”

“Look, if we go down in the deserts or the mountains, they’ll send search planes out.”

“Right. The sunbursts will make it easier to find us from the air.”

“Exactly. Rink, this paint job could save our lives.”

The stories my father told us when we were young were full of enchanting accounts about him camping beside his plane at night, falling asleep as the stars lit some distant prairie sky. Kern and I wanted to “rough it” too, sleeping under the wings of the Cub every night, an idea that appealed to us both romantically and financially. By now, the last of our snow-plowing money from the winter had been spent on paint for the plane. One evening we sat down and calculated our expenses for the coast-to-coast flight—fuel, meals, motel rooms on rainy nights—and arrived at a total budget of $300. As soon as school let out in early June we found summer jobs to raise the money, and we went about this in our usual way.

I found a cushy job as an exercise boy at a standard-bred trotter farm across the fields from our house. I was assigned the farm’s breeding stock, a couple of stallions and a half-dozen brood mares, each of whom had to be hitched up to an exercise sulky and loped around a large cinder track every couple of days. After the long winter sequestered with the plane, I enjoyed being outside in fresh air and working with horses. I was getting a great tan, and Kern rigged up a holder so I could attach my transistor radio to the sulky and listen to Cousin Brucie on WABC as I circuited the track. The horses could only be run when it was cool, early and late in the day. The rest of the time I took long naps on the tack-room couch.

Kern was miserable at his job. He found work as a cashier at the Acme Supermarket in Bernardsville. The Acme was presided over by a swarthy, pockmarked store manager who strutted the aisles barking out orders and criticizing his employees. Everybody called him Mussolini. Kern and Mussolini took an instant dislike to each other, and practically every shift Kern worked at the Acme was a tragicomedy of labor relations.

Kern was a sensitive, generous kid to begin with, and he naturally sympathized with the female shopper. He had seen what my mother went through several times a week, shopping for all those children. As far as he was concerned, the Acme should treat every customer like “Queen for a Day.” That was his philosophy, his “point of view,” as he put it. Whenever an old lady or a mother with bawling children appeared at his cash register, Kern would hold up his entire checkout lane to help them stack their groceries in boxes. Then he disappeared for the parking lot to load their car. The line of shoppers in his lane backed all the way up into baked goods.

Mussolini went apeshit every time it happened. Storming out of his manager’s booth, he was constantly reprimanding Kern for “not being efficient.” But Kern wouldn’t give in. It was this obdurate mind-block with him. The customer came first, period. As soon as he thought Mussolini wasn’t looking again, he’d help another old lady out to the parking lot. But Mussolini had infallible radar for supermarket gridlock and he’d come racing back out to lambaste Kern.

The whole thing was a farce. My brother was the only teenager in America who could give a shit about Acme customers. But I admired his tenacity and loved hearing about his battles with Mussolini. Finally my older brother was developing into the kind of combative protagonist I had always wanted him to be. But Kern was demoralized about his job. He hated being criticized by the boss every day. When he came in from work, tired and disgusted, he wanted to talk.

“Rink, I’m not giving in to this guy,” Kern vowed. “The Acme should be run for the benefit of the customers, not the store manager.”

“Right,” I said. “It’s the principle that counts.”

“Yeah. You know what else I don’t like about the guy?”

“No, what?”

“Acne. He’s got acne. I mean, Mussolini must be at least thirty-five years old. Adult acne is the pits. No way! I’m not kissing
his
ass.”

Mussolini retaliated by assigning Kern to the late shift. This was supposed to be onerous punishment, because most of the teenagers who worked at the Acme didn’t like working nights. But Kern didn’t mind. Mussolini wasn’t there at night and now Kern could run the most lethargic checkout lane in the supermarket business. Besides, Kern liked having his days free to work on the Cub.

Kern spent the rest of June contentedly putting the finishing touches on 71-Hotel all day before he went into work. He also went flying quite a bit, to work the winter rust off his arm before we took off for the coast. A friend of ours out at the airport, Jack Sylvester, let Kern use his 65-horse Aeronca Champ.

One morning while I was working at the horsefarm, running the big stallion around the track and singing along with my transistor radio to “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” on WABC, I heard a sudden roar and then an airplane tire went by my face. It was Kern, pulling a buzz job in Sylvester’s Champ. I didn’t hear him coming because Kern had snuck up quite low and from behind the trees, with the wind on his nose.

Kern kept the ugly yellow Champ on the deck all the way across the farm. His prop blew a rooster-tail of track cinders into my face, and he mowed over a big swath of cattails and bamboo grass when he blasted past the swamp. My heart raced. I loved it when Kern flew like that. His depth-perception and timing were precise and he was just so good already, nimble and hot and cocksure, as good as my father or the great Eddie Mahler.

At the tree-line, Kern pulled the Champ up hard and banked left.

It was a hot, muggy morning. On a day like that, the elevated temperature and humidity cause the air molecules to expand, providing less lift for a wing. And the Champ was a loser, a notorious loser. The fuselage was shaped like a bathtub, and the wings were stubby and fat, about as aerodynamic as an Italian villa. Even on a good day, Champs couldn’t climb for shit.

Ah c’mon Kern, I said to myself. Put the nose down and level those wings. You’re going to spin the airplane.

At the top of the turn, that’s exactly what he did. The nose suddenly pitched up, the high wing stalled and fell to the right, and the plane violently corkscrewed around into a spin.

Spins are aggravated stalls, something that happens when a plane is slowed beyond the point at which it will fly any longer and the wings are banked over or the rudder pushed out. In a standard stall, with the wings level, most planes will recover straight ahead in a few hundred feet. In a spin, the plane cranks over in the direction of the turn and falls into uncontrolled flight. Rotating like a top, the plane plummets with the nose pointed straight at the ground, screaming in the slipstream as it falls wing-over-wing. The increased forces of gravity pull the pilot down into the seat, and the earth gyrating around through the windshield is disorienting and terrifying. Generally a thousand feet or more is lost before the plane builds up enough speed to recover. But most pilots don’t recover. Because spins were considered too dangerous, the FAA had phased spin-training out of its curriculum, and most flight schools merely taught pilots how to avoid them. But my father insisted that Kern and I learn to fly the old-fashioned way and gave us spin-training himself.

Still, in a dogmeat design like a Champ, there wasn’t much hope. Spins are great killers of pilots, and Kern’s was the worst kind—unintended, and low to the ground. At entry he had 800 feet, tops.

I pulled up the horse to watch my brother die.

Kern was doomed, but he did have one advantage that would make this interesting, I thought. He had nerves of steel at the controls of a plane and he wouldn’t be spooked by the ground spinning up and trying to swallow the plane. I was willing to bet that he could get the wings level before he cratered into the trees.

My heart pounded. Jabbing out with an imaginary stick, kicking the sulky’s footrests for rudders, I talked my brother through the maneuver. Actually, it was my father’s voice, yelling forward over the noise of a wailing prop and screaming wings.

Let the spin define itself son. Don’t panic and pull out too early.

Good Kern. Close the throttle and keep the stick in your lap. One turn, one and a half, now two. Good. Neutral stick and hard left rudder against the rotation. Goose the stick forward to break the spin.

Jesus. I could hear power coming on. He was recovering.

The engine roared and the wings were just coming level as the plane disappeared behind the trees.

The trees blocked my view. I didn’t hear a crash or see an impact cloud, but still, I didn’t know. Spin-impacts can be deceptively uneventful—the landing gear might take the brunt of the crash, snap off, and then the plane flips over and noiselessly slides out of view into high grass. Pilots aren’t killed by the impact, they’re killed by the lateral G-forces of slamming against their seat harnesses and flipping over at seventy miles per hour. It could be that, or Kern could have made it out of the fields next door and over the telephone wires by the road. I just didn’t know. An agonizing minute went by, then another. All I could do was stare at the trees and wait.

On the other side of James Street, there was a long, low valley of mowed fields that sloped down to Congressman Peter Frelinghuysen’s house. There was an extra 100 feet of diving space in there if Kern could rudder across the road and get into the safety of the lower ground.

In fact, that’s what he did. Staying low to gather speed, fishtailing across the phone wires into the hay fields, Kern blasted the Champ at full power up over the Congressman’s front lawn.