Memoir From Antproof Case (57 page)

On the many commercial flights that for Stillman and Chase I took reluctantly after the war, I was able to spot Air Force veterans because their eyes never stopped moving. They, as I did, felt that the stillness of the passenger cabin was a bad omen. They didn't like to be flown, and neither did I. Civilians think you're crazy or afraid, but being flown and fed makes a military pilot feel that he has been remiss, that much has gone undone, that something is terribly wrong.

As I threaded through thunderheads and cut across immense columnar clouds, I worked without cease. Once in a great while I would think about the ground underneath or the blue of the sky, but then I was back to the quick eye movements and talking-to-yourself stuff that you do when you haven't flown for a long time and you're piloting an overloaded four-engine plane.

The mountains changed color and shape, the fields and rivers were transformed, and the land grew flatter and the air wetter. I landed at Fort Myers at two in the afternoon.

The salt and sand were blinding, the humidity almost unnatural as sea air flowed through my cockpit window like water pouring through a hole in a submarine. I taxied to the end of the field where the oil drums were, and swung my tail around. The sea nearby was so intensely blue that it retained light like a gel, and even though I had just come through a New York summer, when I jumped from the plane to the ground, the heat and the glare nearly made me pass out.

I ate a smoked chicken and watercress sandwich, drank two Coca-Colas, and walked across a strip of marsh to get to the sea. There, with the sun burning the back of my neck as I bent toward the lapping water, I brushed my teeth for about eight minutes, wondering why this obsession had taken hold of me (I am not, generally, an obsessive person), but the water smelled good, and I was happy to be alive.

I went back across the marsh to start refueling. I carried a fuel pump with me, and we had chosen to leave a hand truck with each set of oil drums. Unfortunately, someone had stolen the hand truck at Fort Myers. Rolling and upending the drums added to the strain of hand-cranking each ounce of fuel into the wings. After several hours every muscle in my body ached, I was flushed with sunburn, my hair completely matted with sweat, my hands blistered. I drank a gallon and a half of warm bad-tasting water and loved it. Then, throbbing and red, I secured the fuel tank caps, kicked away the empty oil drums, and climbed back into the plane. I had to fly across the Caribbean before dark, and I was pushing it.

As I closed the door, my eye caught sight of something. Against a background of reeds swaying to and fro in the hot wind off the sea, a little boy was standing stock-still at the edge of the field, watching me. No older than seven or eight, he still had a few gaps in his teeth, his hair was the color of platinum, and his skin dark from the sun.

Well, I thought, children love airplanes, and they make things
up. No one will believe him when he tells them what he saw. On the other hand, what about the empty oil drums and the tracks in the sand? I sealed the door and went forward. The engines started with great eagerness, as if yearning to cut paths through the air. I kept the propellers just below the magical threshold beyond which the plane would begin to strain ahead, but then I dropped the rpm on each engine, unbuckled my belt, and ran to the back. When I opened the door, I waved to my audience to approach the plane, and I began to throw out gold bars. I don't know how many I jettisoned. I had to remove them in a symmetrical pattern so as not to affect the trim, and at the end I retied the load. I jumped to the ground and stood amid the several million dollars in bullion that I had just scattered.

The boy came forward cautiously. I put my arm on his shoulder and spoke in shouts so as to be heard above engines and propeller wash.

"I have to go," I shouted. "These are gold. I stole them. I'll never be back, and no one is following me. Take them...." I looked around and saw nothing but marsh and sand. "Take them somewhere safe, and bury them. When you're older, if you want money, use them slowly, one at a time. You can't ever let anyone see the seals or numbers. Melt down the bars by putting them in a pot over a hot fire. Pour the molten ore into clay molds. It's easy. The gold is pure, and you can sell it for roughly the prices cited in the
Wall Street Journal.
"

He looked at me blankly, never having heard of the
Wall Street Journal.

"You can find out how much it will fetch by looking in the newspaper," I shouted. "Be careful."

He nodded. I straightened my shoulders and smiled at him.

"Who are you?" he shouted back at me, his high voice clearing the roar of the engines more easily than had my own.

I had to think before I was able to answer. "You see that?" I asked, pointing at the airplane, and still shouting above the roar. "It's a time machine. I came back here to help you. Do you understand?"

"Yes. But who are you?"

"Don't you know?" I asked, looking directly into his eyes. "I'm you."

 

As I flew across the Caribbean, the sun sliding down my right windshield, I grew careless but I got happy. I had many reasons for dropping my guard. I was pleasantly exhausted and I needed rest: to remain tense would only have exhausted me further. My hope was that as I flew in a semisomnolent state, luck would be with me, and that by the time I landed at Inusu I would have a combined second and third wind.

And, then, after I had flown over Cuba and held the eastern shore of Jamaica on my right, I was over water and could not turn back. Were I to go down, I would go down. My enterprise would fail and the gold would be lost at sea, not to mention me. Why, then, check oil pressures? Why scan the sky for nonexistent enemy fighters? Why suffer any torture of the soul when the only thing below was the sea, that quickly swallows planes and pilots into blue invisibility.

The world was changing beneath me, the islets, capes, and coasts were of an entirely different character than those in the north. Here, everything was green and sunny, and the sea blazed with color. The palm trees were as uniform and docile as well behaved lapdogs. They lined the beaches and grew in rows as if by command. The palm is a conformist, its trunk and fronds
monotonously regularized, whereas the oak, for example, is as idiosyncratic as an English aristocrat, its hardwood bred to stand up to storms and hold its ground. And the oak is modest: it has acorns, not coconuts. As for the waves, they had a different curl and a languorous pace, and the color of the depths and shallows seemed rich and relaxed even from 10,000 feet.

I knew I was going to a place where nothing would be the same and where things did not move but drift. Though the greater part of those who lose themselves in these regions of the world, where fate is not an enemy but an ally, come back, some are lost forever. They die there in unconscious ecstasy, having been long forgotten in the clarity and cold of the cities of the north.

Because I could not return, it was as if I had come to the end of things, as if I had already died, which is why I was so relaxed. Sometimes I even closed my eyes and flew by feel. As I had no solution to the problems of landing on an unlighted airstrip after dark, or of defending myself and my cargo against bandits in whose code killing is a necessity of self-esteem, I refused to worry. Instead, I happily gathered strength for the improvisations to come.

Much light is lost in flying east, and I saw the peninsula looming ahead in midnight blue even though, to my right, I could still see the glow of the departing sun. It was only because I was so high that I could observe dusk and the deep night at the same time: at sea level not a trace of day would have been apparent.

How was I to find the landing strip in the dark? I didn't even care, and then as if by magic the moon came over the horizon in otherworldly saffron. I cut my airspeed and started to descend, knowing that by the time I reached the midpoint of the peninsula the moon would be as white as a house on a Greek island and low enough to cast sharp identifying shadows. It was, it did. With the lights of Inusu to the northeast, I found the stream, flashing like a white thread and blackening when my angle changed, and I found the cleft in the hills, and there was the landing strip, a black plinth that had been knocked over and now lay breathlessly on its back.

I had extinguished my running lights, but I went in with a roar of the engines I could not do without. When the ground was so close that the wings no longer glowed in the moonlight and were immersed in shadow, I switched on my landing lights. Their bright illumination after hours of darkness was almost like daylight. But as soon as I touched down on three points, I extinguished the lights. I would have cut the engines, too, but I had to taxi the final two hundred feet to the end of the runway, where, as at Fort Myers, I pivoted the tail and pointed the nose for takeoff.

After a day of flight, the silence was hard to bear. Blood pounded through my arteries so hard I could hear nothing else.

The night air was sweet. In Florida it had been fragrant, too, but the salt and iodine of the sea had been a counterpoint to the sweetness. Here, I felt as if I were inside a sugared pineapple.

Though I wanted to make a fire for cooking, I dared not. I had no idea who had heard my engines, how curious they might be, whether they could find me, how long it might take, and what they might want. For the moment, I felt quite safe, so I left the plane and went to the fuel. It hadn't been touched, and the hand truck was there. It was possible that no one had set foot on our airstrip since we had bought it.

I went back to the plane and ate a dinner of two cans of tuna fish, a bunch of celery, and a French bread that was as hard as a torpedo. And min-er-al wa-ter, something I associate with health even though it's only water. I brushed my teeth. Though I had intended to refuel in the darkness, my limbs grew numb
and I knew that, no matter what, I had to sleep, so I climbed into the plane, closed the door, and slept in sweet air flowing gently through the cockpit windows. My sleep was so profound that even before I closed my eyes I forgot who I was or where I was, being aware of only the fragrant air. I slept not the fitful sleep of someone who wants to die, I slept, instead, like someone who no longer cares, and in this I found miraculous rest.

 

Awakening at dawn, I opened the door of the plane upon a carpet of golden grasses. The field was empty, with no sign of life. I couldn't imagine that anyone who might want to take advantage of me would be up at such an hour, for in my experience the rising sun is anathema to criminals. But something made me hurry, skip breakfast, and neglect to shave. Though it seemed like years, I had been gone from New York for not quite twenty-four hours, and I was already quite comfortable being uncomfortable. In fact, I looked upon comfort with disgust.

I rushed the oil drums as if my life depended on it, running with the hand truck in the hot sun. The more I pumped, the better I felt, even if my arms and abdomen were burning with the effort and my eyes stinging with sweat. And the more fuel I loaded, the later it got, which made me work harder. I was one man, in the open, with only a pistol.

When I had three drums left to load and had nearly killed myself transferring fifty-seven drums of fuel and running back and forth from wing to wing, ducking under the fuselage like Toulouse-Lautrec, I climbed up to set the cap. As I crouched on the wing, I looked to the end of the field, and I stopped breathing. Half a dozen men were coming toward me from about half a mile away. While I was working the pump, they hadn't been able to see me, but after I climbed on the wing they started running. Each one had a rifle slung across his back, and they moved with the age-old urgency of hunters closing for the kill.

Never in my life have I moved faster. I fixed the cap on the fuel inlet so fast I cut my hands. Then I jumped from the wing and grabbed the fuel pump with such force that the hoses snapped past me and sprayed the side of the plane with gasoline. Throwing the pump into the plane, I ran beneath it, without slowing, dwarf-style, and jumped onto the other wing. That cap was locked tight quicker than the first, and shortly thereafter I was inside the plane, breathing like an antelope.

I yanked the hoses in so I could close the door, and was sprayed with gasoline. No matter. The door was locked. With no time to have checked the progress of the six men, I had not known how close they were. Only from the cockpit window did I see that they had slowed. They weren't runners, it was hot and humid, and they were carrying a lot of weight. They looked miserable but they refused to quit, and they were near enough now for me to see them clearly.

To a man they were thin and dirty and they carried bandoliers of ammunition. Going through the order as rapidly as I could, I started my engines and they took fire quickly and eagerly, as engines often will in the heat. I brought them up to full throttle faster than I should have, and I felt a shudder in the metal.

The roar of more than five thousand horses was encouraging. I released the brakes and began to roll. The moment the plane moved, my friends began to wave their arms. Then, one by one, they dropped to a kneeling position and lifted their rifles.

The plane was heavily loaded and moving on a rough surface, so it was going very slowly. I was banging my right fist on the center console, screaming, "Go! Go! Go!" and even before they fired I had begun to squint ahead and keep low.

As the C-54 began to roll and pick up speed, moving straight
at them, I saw muzzle flashes even in die morning sun. At first every shot missed, but then they started to bite. When they hit the body of the plane they sounded like plums thrown against a wall, and when they hit the propellers they sounded like the bells in a bingo hall. I hardly breathed.

The closer I came, the better their shooting. Every hair on my body stood at electrified attention as the windshields exploded with random holes that were immediately twinned on the bulkhead behind me. Thirty seconds and I would sail over the rifles, but the shots kept coming.