Memoir From Antproof Case (58 page)

"Oh Christ," I said, clenching my teeth as I watched a hole open in the glass right in front of me, and then the left windshield turn red. I couldn't lift even one hand to my head because this had happened at the moment I pulled back on the stick and held. I was airborne over the men who had shot me, so low that I made them kiss the ground like shadows on the pavement. Blood is red, I thought to myself as it poured over me rhythmically with the beating of my heart, for the same reason that fire engines are red, so that you will be sure to notice.

As I ascended to the southeast and into the sun, I wrapped my shirt around my head, surprised that I was still alive. I knew that one does not feel true head wounds, and was grateful that this one had a terrible sting. The bullet had slid along the bone and cut a channel in my scalp, and to this day I have a long scar there. Is it not strange, I thought, that the men who shot me had no idea what was in the plane?

But no matter, I was in the air again, as if for many years I had been a bush pilot and this was the way things were. I was separated from my recent past as much as a man can be, flying over the Gulf of Venezuela and on toward an interior so vast that it broke the blade of time. The wind whistled through the perforated glass in the strangest harmony I have ever heard. It sounded like a cross between a glass harmonica, a tin whistle, and the chorus of La Scala.

Only ten years before, I had done this kind of thing every day, and although I had been luckier then, I was not unlucky now. I liked it, because, among other things, it was excellent confirmation that I was not just another Dickey Piehand.

 

Not long after I reached cruising altitude and crossed the gulf of Venezuela two fighters rose to greet me. I had the right to innocent passage even were I crossing their country without a flight plan.

"What is your destination?" queried the one to my left.

"Abadan."

"Where will you refuel?"

"Recife."

"Where did your flight originate?"

"Los Angeles."

"What is your cargo?"

"Flying empty," I lied. "I'll be bringing back an ape, two ostriches, and a boa constrictor."

Although this shut him up for a while, I noticed that he was staring at me. "What is on your head?" he asked.

"My shirt," I responded. "I have no shirt on my back, because it's on my head."

"Why?"

"The heating controls are broken. It's very hot in here. I soaked the shirt in water. Do you have any ice?"

Just before they swooped away, they told me they would go get some. They were two young men in jet fighters, and I was in deep middle age, with a shirt around my head, in a used C-54. They didn't want to bother with me. They were dismissive. I don't know if they did or did not go by the book, because
I don't know what their book required, but soon I was alone, out of all reach, above the Amazon.

The Amazon has many characteristics of the sea. It seems never to end, and the clouds above it, like the clouds above the sea, are free of human observation. I imagine that clouds above Chicago, the Mississippi delta, or Ulan Bator are on their best behavior and rather inhibited. That's how they look, anyway. But over the ocean and away from the sea lanes they congregate in vast columns that fill the sky for thousands of square miles, rising so high and with such stateliness and show that if I didn't know better I would think that this is where they mate and die. And the clouds above the Amazon are sea clouds, though their sea is green.

The rivers were clear at first, but then they turned the color of the Afrika Korps or café au lait. I found the almost equal elevation of land and water unsettling. Why did rivers carve channels if they could just run riot all over the green? If the Andes have more snow than usual, the vibrant green forests will be soaked in my least favorite drink. For that reason alone I would not live in the Amazon, and there are other reasons, such as bugs.

Looking down, I thought of all the animals in a timeless eternity among the trees, and of their unbreakable connection with everything that can be sensed and much that cannot. As a boy I had seen animals in the woods, breathing hard, listening, smelling the air, focusing their powerful eyes upon a thousand things without distinction until a threat or a lure leapt from the background. I envied the billions of unconscious creatures below me, except for the fact that they would have to drink from vast rivers of coffee.

Landing without incident at Boa Esperança, I spent the late afternoon and evening refueling, ate quickly, and then fell asleep near the door to the cargo compartment. Though I slept on my pistol, I knew I didn't have to. I was entirely alone, with no company but trees: the savannah, with its little casuarina trees growing here and there, looked like a bankrupt golf course. The stars shone and the night was mute except for the wind, which blew like the steady wind over the ocean.

I had a headache, which may not have been unreasonable after having been shot in the head, but, still, I told myself to stop thinking about it, as I was unable to depart from the plan. The grasses smelled very sweet, the stars stretched from horizon to horizon, and the wind stayed gentle. I slept, knowing that when I awoke I would feel as if I had been away from New York for a million years.

And when I awoke, I did. My previous life had disappeared. If I would never again see a single person who might remember what I remembered, how could I know that I hadn't dreamt the whole thing? Pieces of paper, that's how. Contemporaneous records and accounts, the work of disinterested parties. But not only could these not draw a real picture, I would never have access to them.

I sat in the early morning light, my legs dangling from the door of the plane, completely and forever out of context. This wasn't so bad, and anyway there was no going back. I had arranged to live out my days in peaceful luxury, which seemed rather odd in that for most of my life I had detested luxury and never known peace, which is why the war, though insane, seemed to me to have been the true state of things, and the years in which war did not rage, a grand illusion.

I wondered if I might fall in love again. I was still moved By feminine beauty, although not so much as when I had been young. Unlike many men my age, however, I didn't desire women in their twenties, for they inspired in me a strong paternal
and protective feeling, and consorting with them would have been out of the question (except for Marlise). I thought that I might end up married to a dowager shaped like a 1927 Pierce-Arrow. After all, I was almost old enough to be a dowager myself, although I was physically intact, and as strong as an ape.

As I dangled my legs over the savannah, a strange and homely creature walked out from under the plane, stopped, turned to look at me, and froze in amazement. I think it was a kid anteater. About the size of a dog in a cartoon, it was buff-colored with traces of pink, and it had a huge proboscis. It had lumbered into sight like a tiny prehistoric mammoth, and it stood its ground, staring at me, with the air of something that could think. I was probably the first man it had ever seen, in the first C-54, and it was the first kid anteater I had ever seen.

"Hello," I said to him. Perhaps I was attributing to him my own emotions, but I sensed that he felt affection. I knew it was just a baby anteater that neither spoke nor understood English, but I felt much the same as when I had had dinner with the Pope. Just as the Pope had radiated benevolence, so did the anteater. It occurred to me that I might adopt this anteater, but I didn't know what to feed it. Of course, I
did
know what to feed it—that was easy. But I didn't know how I could get four pounds of ants into my apartment every day, or if I wanted to.

"Where are your parents?" I asked, as they were nowhere to be seen.

He turned his head and looked shy. I was moved by his modesty, his gentleness, his innocence, and his trust. It was plain that he had never met a jaguar, a hunter, or a hyena, and I hoped he never would. Meanwhile, one tear after another had been rolling steadily down my face. "Sorry," I said, wiping my cheeks with the sleeve of my bloody shirt. "Something has got ten hold of me." There I was, on an empty savannah, my head wrapped in a bloody shirt, apologizing to an anteater.

Just as the Pope had gone back to his work, this little creature left, too, turning away and loping over the grass. I started the engines and took off, rising into a clear blue sky.

The flight was uneventful but for a series of disturbing rattles. The landing strips had been rough on the wheels and struts, and raising and lowering the landing gear after Inusu was like listening to lake ice breaking in the spring. I had only three landings and two takeoffs left. Though the landing gear sounded bad, it sounded as if it had some life left in it.

At one in the afternoon I arrived at Alto Parnaíba, landed with a thump, and went into my routine of eating not nearly enough (for I had very little left), drinking lots of warm water, and working for hours to pump fuel into the wings.

When I finished I was the color of a glowing coal. Perhaps because I felt good after having worked hard, I decided that instead of sleeping at Alto Parnaíba I would push on to the next-to-last stop. Then, in the morning, I would fly to my destination, where a heavy truck was waiting, and my new life would begin in earnest.

So I took off at a quarter to four, and landed, hours later, just as it got dark. I was tired, and the landing was brutal. I finished the last of my rations and began to refuel. In a depleted, almost hallucinatory state, I turned the pump for six hours, sometimes as slowly as a drunk, and I kept on telling myself that this was the last time I would need to refuel.

Sometime around midnight, the wind picked up and I felt big drops of rain blown at me from the side. In the distance the black sky was occasionally lit by a quick flash that would spread laterally across a low combustion chamber with a roof of angry clouds. It's good, I thought, that I don't have to fly through
that. The rain liberated the smells of the ground, and the wind brought them thick and fast from what seemed to be the heart of the storm.

Though the wind was not strong enough to necessitate tying down the plane, I had to remain awake in case the storm tracked in my direction. After so little sleep and so much exercise, this was very hard. I had to distract myself without dreaming, for a waking dream would have led quickly into sleep. And yet I had very few distractions. I had no lantern, and did not dare tap into the plane's electrical system to supply the cabin lights, because I needed all the power I could get for starting. I could not, therefore, attend to a stamp collection or read a magazine. And I knew that if I stared at the storm on the horizon I would be hypnotized as if by a swinging pocket watch.

I walked into the night until I bumped into one of the little trees that dot the grassland. This I climbed until it could no longer bear my weight and it broke. I then dragged it back to the plane and snapped it into many little pieces that I stacked under the wing.

Though jet fuel is relatively hard to ignite, the engines of the C-54 used high-octane gasoline, which isn't. Even so, 'I risked a fire underneath the part of the wing that had no tank in it. The distance between the wing and the top of the flame at its highest was three or four feet, the whole structure was clad in aluminum, and the heat that was unreflected was harmlessly dissipated by the conductive mass of the metal.

I filled a pot with water and set it on the coals amid still-flaming branches. I hadn't shaved or washed for days, and blood was matted in my hair and beard like mud. Soon I had a gallon of roiling hot water. I dipped a cup into this and let it sit for a while before I used it with a bottle of German shower gel that was made from chestnuts and foamed up as thick as whipped cream. I lathered this stuff into my hair and spread it over my face until I looked like someone dressed as a marshmallow. It was supermentholated, and the longer it stayed on the more it stung and the better it felt, so I made a little detour by brushing my teeth yet again, having done so many times that day and at least twice after my dinner of United States Army pork surprise with mummied vegetables and World War I brownie.

The toothpaste was as white as a swan, and the huge amount I had ladled onto my battered toothbrush cascaded from my mouth like fire-fighting foam. I must say I was having a whale of a time getting clean. Then I realized that someone was watching, and I turned around.

Behind me stood a wan, diminutive, shoeless peasant in the midst of what seemed like cardiac arrest. He wanted to run, but was paralyzed with fear. His chest moved visibly with his heartbeat. I assumed that he thought I was some sort of goblin.

"No no," I said. "
Ecce homo, ecce homo.
" I didn't speak any Portuguese, and certainly not the incomprehensible dialects of the rural north. "Shaving," I said. "
Rasoio.
" I picked up my razor and began to shave, holding out my signal mirror at arm's length. This calmed him. As everyone knows, devils don't shave.

"Hot water," I said as I finished shaving and began to rinse out my hair. It was wonderful, and when at last I was done I stood before him looking like one of those new investment bankers in New York with slicked-down hair, $5,000 suits, suspenders (which, if you are rich, you call
braces),
and glasses with hair-thin frames. Why do they do that? For decades investment bankers were physically indistinguishable from Harvard deans. Do these young people think that slicked-down hair and zoot suits were once acceptable on Wall Street? They dress now the way gigolos and gangsters used to.

The peasant pointed to my plane, spread his arms, and laughed in amazement. I took that to mean, 'What the hell are you doing here with that huge plane at one o'clock in the morning in the middle of nowhere?' so I said, "
Et tu Brute?
" but he didn't understand.

I tried to tell him, in Italian, some of my life story. The few cognates that he recognized probably made for an otherworldly tale, and he laughed at totally inappropriate moments. How could he have had the slightest idea of what I was talking about? I pantomimed the theft of Dickey Piehand's car, Constance's coffee dances, killing Mr. Edgar, and meeting the singers in Rome. Then he used the same method to tell me his story, which was, as far as I could ascertain, that he had been a clown in a provincial circus, who, after his wife had been gored by an ox, had left the circus to become an electrician. His dream was to go to Germany. He had a radio—or he wanted a radio. This I gathered as he turned the knobs on an imaginary box and lowered his head to place his ear next to it, smiling.