Asimov's Science Fiction (16 page)

The dentist had stripped out all the old avionics and replaced them with the latest instrumentation available. I hired a mechanic to restore the 150 to its original configuration, outmoded instruments and all. I wanted it in exactly the condition it had been when I last landed at Crest Airpark. The mechanic thought I was crazy, but he did his work well.

I hired an instructor, but didn't keep him long. He wasn't a proper acolyte, always asking if I was all right, if I was sure I was up to this. What he saw was the pain. I left my Demerol on the ground for these refresher flights. Anyway, the basics of piloting came back to me quickly, the muscle memory part of it. After a few lessons I felt competent to do what I needed to do.

I left Crest Airpark at the same time of day as I had when I was sixteen. I'd kept my logbook and knew the time down to the minute. Of course, this was all ridiculous. Magical thinking. Not really
thinking
at all. Even if the plane was similar, the weather wasn't. Broken clouds and five-mile visibility over the Olympic Peninsula. I feared my ritual in the sky was as bankrupt as the Catholic ceremonies of my boyhood.

By the time I was on an outbound radial from the Hoquiam VOR, I'd been in the air for hours, and I began popping Demerol. The pain ripping through my bowels and joints was simply too intense, otherwise. Intoxicated on painkillers, belief became easier. The Quillayute airport appeared exactly where it was supposed to be. I circled, climbing, looking for a cloud that wasn't a cloud, a cloud painted flat on the sky.

There was no such cloud.

I climbed through a gauzy gray thing, about eighty-two hundred feet up. It was just an ordinary cloud. Sudden pain stitched through my bowels like a tin jag ripping through my Demerol screen. I squeezed my eyes shut, still pulling back on the yoke. The 150 nosed up and began to shudder toward a stall, the warning buzzer drilling out of the headset.

Jim Brodie was surprised to see me back at Crest hours ahead of schedule. And I was surprised to see
him.
In fact, I couldn't stop staring. His hair covered the tops of his ears, which is how a lot of guys wore their hair back in the eighties. But not Jim Brodie. When I took off that morning, he had been wearing his usual crew cut.

During the flight back from Hoquiam, where I'd retreated after escaping the empty world to refuel and call in a new flight plan, I'd thought a lot about what I was going to say to Jim. I had two versions to account for what happened at Quillayute. I would start with the true version—but there was a crossroads in the truth, a point at which I was going to have to jump into the weird with both feet—or veer into a lie that I knew Jim would accept.

Now all I could think about was Jim's hair.

In the airport office, he handed me a can of Pepsi and popped one open for himself. The office was exactly right, from the beat up orange vinyl chairs to the old issues of
Flying
magazine, to the snack and soda vending machines. The office was right, but Jim's hair was wrong.

"So you ran into some trouble?" he said.

"Uh huh."

"Paul, what's wrong? What are you staring at?"

I forced myself to stop staring at his ear comb-over, and launched into my story, concentrating on what I was saying and how Jim was reacting. The crossroads moment came at the point in the story when all the vintage and future out-of-time airplanes made their appearance. I'd watched Jim's face very carefully when I described getting lost near the Olympic Mountains, trying to follow the wrong VOR radial, then finding myself in the white cloud, and the failure of my instrumentation. When I described the behavior of the compass, Jim sat back a little and sipped his Pepsi. It was like I'd been holding his attention on a string, and the string just snapped.

"Back up a minute, Paul. Your compass wouldn't do that, unless there was an almighty powerful magnetic field pulling it off magnetic south."

"You mean magnetic north."

He looked at me funny. "Are you pulling my leg, Paul?"

"No, I—No."

"Look, even if there was a magnetic field, it wouldn't make the compass swing in all directions. When you're done, we'll go out and have a look at it, but I'm telling you it couldn't happen the way you just described."

I nodded, suddenly out of words. If Jim couldn't accept the compass thing how was he going to believe the doorway, the beetles, Maggie and all the rest of it? I already knew the answer. He wasn't
going
to believe it. Nobody was. And I couldn't prove it, either.

Jim wasn't mad at me. I could see that. It was more like he was confused and worried. He
wanted
to believe me about the compass but just couldn't.

"Go on, Paul," he said, when I was quiet too long. There was real kindness in his voice. I couldn't bring myself to ruin it with the truth. "You say there were a lot of old airplanes when you made your approach?"

"It was just a few, actually. I think it was like one of those shows. You know, like they have up in Arlington every year?"

"Oh."

"That's pretty much the whole thing. After I got lost I was scared to go on. That's all."

Jim was really studying me now. I looked at my Pepsi. He put his can down and stood up. "Let's have a look at that compass."

Before we ever got to the compass Jim gripped my arm and pointed at the side of the 150.

"What happened here?"

The metal was creased, the yellow paint scratched off in a long, shiny wound, where the beetle's tentacle whipped out, trying to prevent my escape. But I couldn't tell Jim that. He squeezed my arm, not painfully, just to focus my attention.

"Paul?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know? You must have hit something pretty hard to do that."

"I didn't hit anything," I said, which was true; something hit
me.
"But I was parked for a while at Hoquiam, when I stopped for fuel. Maybe... I don't know."

"Come on, Paul, what happened out there?"

"What I said, that's all."

I looked at my feet, blushing. After a moment, Jim let go of my arm and opened the passenger door.

"Go ahead and get in. We'll check out those instruments."

There was nothing wrong with the instruments. I'd already told him they only stopped working while I was in the white cloud. A little while later, after we talked about re-doing my cross country requirement, I said my awkward goodbye, drove away from Crest Airpark, and it was thirty years before I went back.

At home, when I removed my pants to get in the shower, I saw the envelope I'd folded and stuffed in my back pocket. I held it in the bright bathroom light. Thick gray paper, a stamped return address in Washington D.C., but a typewriter-produced mailing address to some guy named Ralph Hoffman in Aberdeen. Sitting on the toilet seat, I ripped into it eagerly, like the envelope was going to contain an
answer.
Maybe Quillayute had been the location of some kind of Top Secret government experiment.

But the text of the letter, also produced by a manual typewriter, concerned the approval of a claim for veteran's benefits. It was signed by someone in the office of the Secretary of the Army. The only interesting thing about the letter was the date typed in above the "Dear Mr. Hoffman..."

14 September 1926

Did I run back out to Crest the next day, show Jim Brodie the letter, and tell him the whole story? No, of course not. It was just an old letter, not proof of anything. Holding the letter made me feel slightly queasy. Maybe it was just an old letter to other people, but I knew it was an artifact I had no business possessing. It didn't
belong
here. In its own way, the letter was as disturbing as Jim's haircut. Or magnetic south.

And then things got worse.

At that time my dad was working swing-shift at Boeing's Kent facility. My only sibling, David, was nine years older than me and a First Sergeant in the Army, stationed in Berlin. Six years ago our parents had tried to talk David out of enlisting—the Vietnam War had only recently ended. Anyway, it was just my dad and me in the house now, and I would be alone that first night back from Quillayute, until midnight, when he got home from work.

I'd decided I was going to tell him what happened. I wasn't afraid he would think I was lying. He might not believe me, but he was my dad. He was on my side in a way that Jim Brodie couldn't be. Who I really wanted to tell was my brother, but David wasn't due back until Christmas. Dad had remained solid and strong after Mom died. It hurt him bad—they'd been married twenty-six years—but except for that night a couple of weeks after her death, he had held himself together with incredible strength—largely for my sake, I thought. It was Dad who found Jim Brodie through a friend at work and set me up with flying lessons—an expense he couldn't really afford to take on. I think he did it to coax me out of my long depression over Mom's death. My father was a kind and sensitive man, though I don't think I gave him enough credit for it back then.

When he didn't arrive home at his usual hour, I wasn't worried. Dad was a lead man in the factory, which meant he occasionally worked overtime. Normally he called when he was going to be late, though. That
did
bother me a little. It was another not-right thing. I was half asleep on the sofa when a car turned into the driveway, splashing headlights through the curtains. I sat up, waiting for him to come in. After a while—too long a while—a car door slammed, and then keys fumbled at the front door. That went on so long, I wondered if the porch light was burned out. He dropped the keys; I heard them jangle on the porch.

I got up and opened the door. The porch light was on, and Dad was stooped over, groping for his dropped keys. His hair was mussed, his bald crown red and scabrous in the porch light.

"Dad—?"

He came up with his keys and patted me on the shoulder as he passed into the house. "Paulie, worked late. How'd the big adventure go?"

"Good." It's all I could get out.

"Tell me all about it tomorrow, huh? I'm beat."

Dad reeked of gin. I closed the front door and watched him weave down the hall to his bedroom. There was never alcohol in the house, not since that one time when he didn't even open the bottle. But after Dad went to bed, I found three empty bottles of Tanqueray in the trash. Just like the old days, before he'd quit.

It was a couple of days before I learned that my brother was dead. I was used to thinking he would be home at the end of the year, after his deployment, and I was looking forward to seeing him again. Nine years older made him feel like another adult, one I could relate to more easily. When I casually made reference at the breakfast table to David's impending return, Dad leveled me with bleary eyes over the rim of his coffee cup.

"What's wrong with you, Paul?"

"What?"

He put his cup down and left the room. I stared after him, bewildered, at first, and then frightened. In David's bedroom, which Dad had converted to a "den" after my brother enlisted, I found a picture on the wall that hadn't been there when I left for Crest Airpark the previous day. It was in a group of family photos, most of which my Mom had framed. In the place where there had been a studio picture of my brother in his army uniform, looking almost laughably fresh-faced, there was now a shot of him in jungle fatigues with his arms around the shoulders of a couple of guys similarly dressed. David's cap was pushed back, and he was smiling. The background was some kind of military compound. In the white border of the photo, cramped words in blue magic marker identified the location as
Able Base, Chu Lai Province, Vietnam. 1979.
Eventually I found the letter—the one that had probably been hand-delivered, confirming David had been killed in action—killed in a war that should have already ended. I cried alone in my brother's old bedroom, cried my eyes out.

I had been wrong to think I'd made it back home.

In 1982, if you wanted to research something, you went to the library. I found what I was looking for in the main branch of the Seattle Public Library: a detailed history about the early days of Air Mail service in the United States.

Maggie got a whole page.

US MAIL 246 was lost and never found, somewhere in the dense wilderness of the Olympic Peninsula, September 18, 1926. At the time there were only a handful of female pilots in the world. Maggie's picture showed her standing next to her de Havilland DH-4, the same "ship" I'd seen trapped in the high canopy of the rain forest with a pair of broken wings and a gaping hole spilling mail like blood from a mortal wound. Maggie looked confident and ready to take on anything in her leather jacket and boots, her right hand gripping the strut of the plane. She stared straight into the camera (I imagined one of those tripod things where the photographer huddles under a black cloth and holds up a pan of flash powder). It was a sepia-toned picture. Back in the twenties, if you wanted a color photograph you had to "tint" it by hand. If anyone had bothered to tint the Maggie picture they would have had to find paint the exact color of blue fire. I stared at that picture for a long time, and I swear that after a while I could see the blue fire even without the tinting.

I found books about missing aircraft, looking for details that were lacking in the history of airmail. My most interesting discovery was that the airspace over that quadrant of the Olympic Peninsula was considered a kind of Bermuda Triangle of the sky. At least it was by one Art Feinberg, author of
Mysterious Vanishings.
I put the book down, wondering if Jim Brodie had been aware of this reputation.

That summer I borrowed my dad's car and drove out to Quillayute. It was a long drive, and I got lost more than once, heading north up the wilderness coast. The Navy base appeared empty and abandoned, except for a couple of guys clanging away at something in the one intact hangar. The sky hung low and gray, but I tried to imagine a blue expanse and a white cumulus, painted flat against the sky. I
could
imagine it. But that's all it felt like: imagination. Not a memory of a real thing.