A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (33 page)

Touchdown Tiggler: they called him that on the banner across the street in Wadesville, North Carolina, a little one-bank town where the gas station had to double as a liquor store to make anything half-way near a profit. WADESVILLE PROUDLY WELCOMES ITS FINEST SON, TOUCHDOWN TIGGLER. Everyone turned out that hot morning in 1971 as Tiggler rode through in a movie star’s limousine with the top down. Even Mary-Beth, who twenty years earlier had allowed Spike certain liberties and spent a week or two worrying, and who’d scarcely had a good word to say about him until he was selected for Project Apollo, turned out for the occasion, and reminded those around her – she’d already refreshed their memory a couple of times before – that there’d been a time when she and Spike were, well, real close. Even
then, she professed, she could see that he would go far. How far did he go with you, Mary-Beth, asked one of the sharper young wives of the town, and Mary-Beth smiled beatifically, like a Virgin in a coloring book, knowing that either way her status could only rise.

Meanwhile, Touchdown Tiggler had reached the end of Main Street and turned by the hairdresser called Shear Pleasure, which would care for your poodle too if you took him round the back, and while the public address endlessly played ‘I am just a country boy/Who’s always known the love and joy/Of coming home …’ Spike Tiggler was welcomed three times from one direction and three times from the other. The convertible moved slowly, because after the first triumphal sweep Spike got perched up on the back so that everyone could see him, and each time the limo tortoised past the gas-station-cum-liquor-store its proprietor Buck Weinhart shouted ‘Drive it or milk it!’ in remembrance of Spike’s habit of abusing slow drivers when the pair of them used to stir up the town all those years before. Six times Buck bellowed, ‘Hey, Spike, drive it or milk it!’ and Spike, a stocky, dark-haired figure, waved back with a good-ole-boy inclination of the head. Later, at a civic lunch in the Wadesville diner, which Spike had once thought very grand but which now reminded him of a funeral parlor, the returning hero, at first unfamiliar in his astronaut’s crewcut and city suit which made him look like he was trying out for President Eisenhower, gave a speech about always remembering where you come from however far it is you go, which was accounted fine and dignified by those present, and one of those who spontaneously replied to his words even proposed that in honor of the achievement of their favorite son they should strike Wadesville and rename the town Moonsville, an idea which flourished for a few weeks and then quietly died, partly because of opposition from Old Jessie Wade, last surviving granddaughter of Ruben Wade, a travelling man who way back at the start of the century had decided that pumpkins might grow well on the land hereabouts. The pumpkins failed, as it happened, but that was no reason to dishonor the man now.

Spike Tiggler had not always been as popular in Wadesville as he was that day in 1971, and it wasn’t just Mary-Beth’s mother who’d thought him wild and regretted that the war had ended too soon for them to ship young Tiggler out East and fight the Japs instead of fighting half the town. He was fifteen when they dropped the Hiroshima bomb, an event Mary-Beth’s mother deplored for purely local reasons; but in due course Spike got his war, flying F-86s up to the Yalu River. Twenty-eight missions, two MiG-15s shot down. Reason enough for celebration in Wadesville, though Tiggler did not return at that time, or for a while afterwards. As he was to explain it in 1975, during his first appeal for funds at the Moondust Diner (a change of name approved even by Jessie Wade), the movement of a man’s life, of every life, is marked by escape and return. Escape and return, escape and return, like the tides that play in Albermale Sound and up the Pasquotank River to Elizabeth City. We all go out with the tide, and then we all come back in on the tide. Some of the audience hadn’t ever much left Wadesville in most of their lives, so couldn’t be expected to have an opinion, and Jeff Clayton remarked afterwards that the other year when he’d driven through Fayetteville and around Fort Bragg to visit the World Golf Hall of Fame at Pinehurst and come home in time for his beer ration from Alma, it hadn’t felt to him much like the tides in the Pasquotank River; still, what did Jeff Clayton know, and everyone agreed to give Spike the benefit of the doubt, since Spike had not just been out inta the world but – as old Jessie Wade herself so memorably put it – had been out outa the world as well.

Spike Tiggler dated the first ratchet-click of the escape-and-return cycle in his life to the day his father took him to Kitty Hawk, way back before the replica ark went up as a worship center. At this time, there was only the flat runway and the flat open sky above, and then, across an empty road with barely the glint of a distant truck, some flat dunes and the softly churning sea. Where other kids found allure in the lipstick and jazz of a brawling city, Spike found it in the calming simplicity of the land, sea and sky at Kitty Hawk. This, at any rate, was how he
explained it at another of his fund-raising dinners, and they believed him, even though neither Mary-Beth nor Buck Weinhart had heard him talk like that back at the time.

Spike Tiggler’s home town was strong for the Democrats and even stronger for the Baptists. The Sunday after his trip to Kitty Hawk, Spike was heard displaying a rather too disrespectful sort of enthusiasm about the Wright Brothers outside the Church of the Holy Water, and old Jessie Wade opined to the thirteen-year-old that if God had intended us to fly, he’d have given us wings. ‘But God intended us to drive, didn’t he?’ replied young Spike, a shade too quick for courtesy, and actually pointing at the freshly shined Packard in which his elderly detractor had ridden the two hundred yards to church; whereupon Spike’s father reminded him that if it were not for the Sabbath, the Lord might very well have intended Spike to receive a whack upside the head. The exchange, rather than anything about land and sea and sky, was what the inhabitants of Wadesville recalled of Spike Tiggler’s conversation,
c
. 1943.

A couple of years passed, the bomb fell on Hiroshima too soon for Mary-Beth’s mother, and Spike discovered that if God hadn’t given him wheels, then at least his father would occasionally loan him some. On warm evenings he and Buck Weinhart would play their game of picking out a slow automobile on a back road and trailing up behind it until their radiator grille was almost in the other fellow’s trunk. Then, as they pulled softly out and swept past, the two of them would yell in unison, ‘Drive it or milk it, fella!’ It was in the same car and at about this time that Spike, his eyes bulging with hope, said to Mary-Beth, ‘But if God didn’t intend us to use it, what did he put it there for?’ – a remark which set back his cause quite a few weeks, Mary-Beth being of a more church-obedient nature than young Spike, and this courting line of his in any case not being the most persuasive ever invented. A few weeks later, however, Spike found himself in the back seat murmuring, ‘I really don’t think I can live without you, Mary-Beth,’ and this seemed to do the trick.

Spike left Wadesville not too long afterwards, and more or
less the next thing the town heard was that he was flying an F-86 Sabre jet out in Korea and stopping the Communist MiGs from crossing the Yalu River. It had taken a series of moments and emotions, not all of them logically linked, to
get
him there, and if Spike tried to reduce his life to a comic strip, as he sometimes did, he would first of all see himself standing on the dunes at Kitty Hawk, looking out to sea; then grabbing at Mary-Beth’s breast without being rejected and thinking, ‘God can’t strike me dead for this, he can’t’; and then driving at dusk with Buck Weinhart waiting for the early stars to come out. Love of machines was there too, of course, and patriotism, and a strong feeling that he looked pretty cute in his blue uniform; but in a way it was the earlier things he remembered the more vividly. That was what he meant, when he gave his first appeal for funds in 1975, about your life coming back to the place where it started. Wisely, no doubt, he didn’t translate this general sentiment into particular memories, else he probably wouldn’t have gotten a contribution out of Mary-Beth for one thing.

Along with his father’s car and a resentful Mary-Beth, Spike had left his faith behind when he quit Wadesville. Though he dutifully filled in ‘Baptist’ on all the Navy forms, he didn’t think about the Lord’s commands, or the blessed grace, or being saved, not even on the bad days when one of his fellow-aviators – hell, one of his friends – bought the farm. That was a friend gone, but you didn’t try to raise the Lord on the radio. Spike was a flier, a man of science, an engineer. You might acknowledge God on paper forms just as you deferred to senior officers around the base; yet the moment you were most you, when you were really Spike Tiggler, the kid who’d grown up from a borrowed car on a quiet road to a roaring fighter in an empty sky, was when you’d climbed hard and were levelling out your silver wings, high up in the clear air south of the Yalu River. Then you were wholly in charge, and you were also most alone. This was life, and the only person who could let you down was yourself. On the nose of his F-86 Spike had painted the slogan ‘Drive It or Milk It!’ as a warning to any MiG unlucky enough to catch Lieutenant Tiggler nearly up its ass.

After the war in Korea he transferred to the Navy’s Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland. When the Russians launched their first Sputnik and Project Mercury got under way, Spike volunteered, even though something inside him – and quite a few aviators outside him – insisted that on the first flights they might as well use a chimpanzee, hell, they were
going
to use a chimpanzee. The job was just riding a rocket; you were a piece of cargo with wires sticking out, a lump of meat for the scientist to study. Part of him wasn’t disappointed he didn’t make the first seven to be chosen, yet part of him was; and next time around he put in again and got himself accepted. It was front-page on the
Fayetteville Observer
with a photo, which made Mary-Beth forgive him and write; but seeing as his new wife Betty was going through a jealous period he pretended he’d forgotten this particular girl from Wadesville and her letter received no reply.

In the summer of 1974 Spike Tiggler stood on the surface of the moon and threw a football pass four hundred and fifty yards. Touchdown! This was during a thirty-minute period when no specific tasks had been assigned and the two fellows on the surface were allowed to follow up anything that made them curious. Well, Spike had always been curious to see how far you could throw a football up there in the thin atmosphere, and now he knew. Touchdown! The voice at Mission Control sounded indulgent, and so did fellow-astronaut Bud Stomovicz when Spike said he was going to hop on over and get his ball back. He set off across the dead landscape like a jack rabbit with tubes. The moon looked pretty rough and beat-up to Spike, and the dust he stirred, which settled back in slow motion, was like sand from a dirty beach. His football lay beside a small crater. He kicked it gently into the arid hollow, then turned around to examine the distance he had come. The lunar module, almost out of sight, seemed tiny and precarious, a toy spider with a wheezing battery. Spike was not much given to private thinking on a mission – in any case, the work schedule was devised to discourage introspection – but it struck him that he and Bud (plus Mike still circling above in the command module) were as
far as you could currently get from the rest of the human species. Yesterday they had watched the earth rise, and for all their bagful of jokes it had been an awesome sight which turned your head upside down. Now, right here, he felt at the very edge of things. If he walked another ten yards, he might just fall off the world’s wingtip and spin boots over helmet into deepest space. Though he knew such an occurrence to be scientifically impossible, that was how it felt to Spike Tiggler.

At this exact moment a voice said to him, ‘Find Noah’s Ark.’

‘Don’t read you,’ he replied, thinking it must be Bud.

‘Didn’t say a word.’ This time it was Bud’s voice. Spike recognized it, and in any case it came through his earphones in the usual way. The other voice had seemed to come direct, to be around him, inside him, close to him, loud yet intimate.

He’d made it a dozen or so yards back towards the LM when the voice repeated its command. ‘Find Noah’s Ark.’ Spike carried on doing his aerated moon-hop, wondering if this was somebody’s joke. But nobody could have put a recorder in his helmet – there wasn’t room for it, he’d have noticed, they wouldn’t have allowed it. You could drive someone nutsy with a trick like that, and though one or two of his fellow-astronauts had a pretty curveball sense of humor, it mainly stopped at hollowing out a plug in your melon slice, slipping mustard into the hole and replacing the plug. Nothing as big-league as this.

‘You’ll find it on Mount Ararat, in Turkey,’ the voice went on. ‘Find it, Spike.’

There were electrodes monitoring most of Spike’s physical reactions, and he guessed they’d see the needles jumping all over the graphs when this part of the mission was reviewed. If so, it wouldn’t be beyond him to dream up a cover story. For the moment, he just wanted to think about what he’d heard, what it might mean. So when he returned to the LM he made a crack about a fumble by the wide receiver, and went back to being a normal astronaut, that’s to say test pilot turned chimpanzee turned national hero turned Stuntman turned prospective congressman or if not that then future decorative board member of a dozen corporations. He hadn’t been the first man to stand on the
moon, but there were never going to be so many that he’d stop being a rarity, a cause for celebrity and reward. Spike Tiggler knew a few of the angles, and Betty a whole lot more, which had helped their marriage along on several occasions. He thought he was getting a tall, athletic girl with a good figure, who read
The Joy of Cooking
on their honeymoon and kept her fear to herself when he was late returning to base; but she turned out a sight more familiar with the reproductive habits of the dollar than he was. ‘You do the flying and I’ll do the thinking,’ she’d occasionally say to him, which sounded like a tease, or at any rate both of them mostly pretended that it was only a tease. So Spike Tiggler went back to his mission and fulfilled his work schedule and let no-one suspect that anything had changed, that everything had changed.