Flight of Passage: A True Story (23 page)

Besides, everybody down south was fun-loving and hospitable, and I liked the bumptious, talkative atmosphere in the southern and western cafes. Indeed, it was practically nirvana down there, because the food was so outrageously inexpensive and good. In Arkansas, I discovered the most delectable method of preparing protein known to man, chicken-fried steak, and I ordered one almost every night after that. Give me one of those, with a hefty pile of okra and mashed potatoes on the side, and you can call me Bobby all you want.

When we stepped out of the cafe, the funeral director had swung around with his hearse to run us back to the airport.

At the airport, it was still quite hot, and we were too tired and woozy to fly. Arkansas, and in particular Arkansas food, was a drug that slowed us down. We found a large shade tree behind the operations shack, rolled out our sleeping bags, and slept off our lunch. When we woke, around six, the sun was low, the sky crystal clear, and a light breeze was freshening off the river. We felt revived, ready to fly again, greedy for more miles behind us.

We propped the Cub, taxied down for the active runway, and pushed off southwest for the big Stearman strip at Brinkley that Hank had told us about. The pattern of our days was emerging. Every morning we took off at dawn and flew hard for seven or eight hours, broke at some little town for a late lunch and some sightseeing, and then raced the sun another 250 miles before we tied down for the night.

We flew the oxbows of the Mississippi down to Osceola and found the rail line running southwest. I didn’t want to leave the river yet so I stowed the map and shook the stick, yelling forward to Kern.

“Yo, Jack! Mind if I take the controls?”

“It’s your airplane Bobby.”

I curled down for the river holding lots of power, found a tug pulling a string of barges, and gave it a nice buzz job. Hammerheading up, I dive-bombed the pilot house a couple of times until the crew came out and waved.

What a country it was, I thought, what a journey we were having. Hank in the morning, drawls and a hearse ride in the afternoon. It didn’t seem possible that such differences in terrain and speech could be contained in one day. The shadowy, desolate ravines of western Kentucky had separated morning from afternoon, warping distance and time. It felt as if we’d been gone for a year.

So, lazy and content, feeling queerly detached, we dove down for one last sweep of the river. Then we picked up the rails and had a nice evening run over the monotonously flat and green pine barrens of central Arkansas. The forest seemed to stretch forever and there wasn’t anything to look at but the tracks. But a pink, gauzy sun was dropping low in the west, bathing our faces in warmth, and the air was still, and once more we could forget the hell earlier in the day and enjoy the luxury of flying into pastel light.

The sky was dense with Stearmans when we got to Brinkley. It was a spectacularly clear evening and we could see far across the vast stands of pine. From several directions groups of battered, yellow cropdusters darted over the treetops as they returned from their evening runs. When the planes got close to the field they all dove for the runway at once, twisting and snarling around each other and landing in pods of two or three. It was a dogfight down there.

Greenhorns that we were, we politely entered the pattern according to procedure, inserting ourselves into the maddening flow of planes from a downwind leg. While Kern was busy avoiding one flock of dusters, I was calling out traffic to the left and right, and then some lone yahoo in a big orange Stearman plowed down from over the top of us in a tight turn, practically inverted. We could feel the wash from his prop as he growled past our nose.

So we powered up and went around the field and tried again. But it was useless. Biplanes kept cutting us off. Kern threw up his hands.

“Forget it Rink! I’m just going to fly like these guys.”

I was happy about it. I was drowsy from the long run over the pine barrens and had been fighting sleep for the last forty-five minutes. I hated nodding off in a plane like that. Now I was wide awake, with big monster biplanes growling all around us, trying to figure out this crazy Stearman strip called Brinkley. It looked exciting down there on the ground, with all those yellow biplanes crawling around like Caterpillar tractors and blowing dust back from their tails. This was our second night in a row at a Stearman strip and probably we’d have some fun here.

Besides, I always liked it when my brother got annoyed like that, declared himself, and took command of a situation. That was the brother I wanted and I knew, too, that he would give me a good spot of flying now.

Kern shifted his shoulders, grit his teeth, firewalled, and cranked the Cub around 180 degrees. There was a mangy pair of Stearmans just below us, descending wing-to-wing for the runway. Kern kicked out his right rudder to the stop, cross-controlled very hard with the stick and plunged the nose forward, shuddering us in a steep diving slip down to the Stearmans. He parked our nose about 30 feet from the Stearman tails and walked the rudders vigorously to keep us there and fight their wash, and we followed their wake turbulence down to the ground.

It was just bizarre, this Brinkley. Even as we were flaring and Kern was fighting the Cub to get it stalled in the prop-wake of those big Stearmans ahead of us, another yellow monster behind us stalled and bounced onto the strip, and the son of a bitch just rolled right for us without braking. If Kern hadn’t ruddered out of his way, the guy would have tractored right over us. This wasn’t an airport. It was the chariot-race in
Ben-Hur.

Brinkley was a hole. The carcasses of wrecked planes and abandoned engines, festooned with vines and weeds, lay in piles along the edges of the runway and the taxiways. Behind the main staging area for the duster crews ran a Tobacco Road of hangars and bunkhouses, all of it covered by the gray, putrid film of pesticide and dust. No one came out to direct us to an operations shack or gas pump, so we just followed the two planes ahead of us past the hangars. Meanwhile, more Stearmans were landing on the runway, backing up in a line behind us. The pilots raced their engines and waved their arms at us to move out of the way.

I could tell right away that we’d landed at the wrong place. As we taxied by, the duster crews stood in knots, leaning against their wings and kicking at the dust, either ignoring us or waving us to taxi clear of their area. They didn’t want to be bothered with two kids in a shiny Piper Cub. All we could do was continue taxiing along this one-lane tiedown area, until there weren’t any more duster crews or pilots waving us away. Finally, our path was blocked by a rutted hill. Kern powered up and scrambled the Cub to the top, swinging us around to a stop with the brakes.

Now we sat abandoned on a hill above the whole works. Below, the quilt of yellow biplane wings parked at all angles, the gaggles of men, and the haphazard collection of sprayer tanks, hoses, and orange tractors looked like some poorly disciplined guerilla air force. The sun was sinking behind the trees and it was too late to fly on to the next airport.

Our heads were still back in Indiana. There would be a Hank down there to sort this out for us. While I pulled our gear from the plane, Kern walked down the hill to ask about gas and a tiedown. When I heard laughter down by the planes and Kern’s voice rising, I ran down the hill.

Kern was talking to a roughneck who had stepped out from one of the duster crews. He was trying to explain that we’d flown all day from Indiana and that we were headed for California, and that all we needed was some gas and a tiedown spot. Then we’d sleep under the wings and stay out of everybody’s way.

When I got a good look at the fellow, I could see that Kern was talking to the wrong guy. The man’s jeans and shirt were layered with what looked like a week’s worth of pesticides and grease, and he hadn’t shaved in several days. A plug of tobacco dilated his cheek. He sneered at Kern as if he were the dumbest kid he’d ever seen.

“Well whoopee!” the man said. “Prettyboy here is flying his little Piper Cub all the way to California! Me? I’m sprayin’ gypsy moths in M’nro County.”

Peals of laughter howled around us in the dwindling light. For some reason, the duster crew thought that this was the funniest thing they’d heard all year.

They just stood there in the weak light rednecking us, laughing at our penny loafers and paisley shirts, asking us whether our Mamma knew we were out after dark, wondering whether or not we were planning on getting laid, right here in Brinkley, or whether we’d wait until we got to the coast and found some “California snatch.” If we were so smart, flying a little Cub all the way to California, they wanted to know, why the fuck had we landed at a pisshole like Brinkley? It was beginning to look as though old Hank had really screwed the pooch for us on this one.

We turned away for the Cub. As we walked back up the hill the duster crew continued yelling out insults. We were both upset by it. We didn’t know whether we were really in for trouble here, or whether we could get everyone to ignore us by just disappearing behind our plane. Dark, frightening images invaded my thoughts. Our impression of the deep south in those days was formed by the black and white television footage we’d seen of civil rights marches, and the beatings and murders of the freedom riders in Mississippi and Alabama. These buckaroos here in Brinkley could pummel us and leave us half-dead under a wing somewhere, and no one would care. No one would even find us. We sat up by the Cub wondering what to do.

Gradually the men below dispersed, scattering into town in their pickups. In the splashy pools of light provided by running tractors, mechanics and a couple of hopper crews worked on the planes.

Kern and I decided to brave the yahoos again, and we strolled back down below.

Walking from one group to the next, we eventually found a man who identified himself as the operations manager of the strip. He grudgingly agreed to run his gas truck up the hill to fuel us. But he wasn’t glad to see us and he told us that we’d made a mistake landing at Brinkley. This was a duster strip, he told us, for “dusters only,” and they didn’t welcome transient traffic. He didn’t want us to sleep on the airport either. When the duster crews came back from town they’d all be drunk and rowdy, and he didn’t want to be “responsible” for what might happen to us.

But the fellow had half a heart and he could see that we were upset by the way we had been treated. He told us not to mind the duster crews. Most of those pilots, he explained, were “lifers,” veteran cropdusters who flew the fields and the timber every summer and then eked out a precarious living on unemployment insurance all winter. They didn’t like outsiders, especially “prettyboy pilots” for whom aviation was just a hobby. A lot of these duster pilots, the man said, were also “rejects,” a class of flyer we had heard about. Either because of accident histories, violations on their licenses, or medical limitations, they would never be hired by the military or the airlines. No respectable airport wanted them as flight instructors either. So they were stuck, dusting for a living because that’s the only kind of flying they could do. So much for the fraternity of cropdusters, my father’s vaunted “Stearman men of the west.”

Kern was concerned about leaving 71-Hotel overnight on the strip, but the fellow told us not to worry. It was a clear night and there wouldn’t be much wind, and he threw some chocks under the wheels for us. He promised to keep an eye on the plane himself, but not because he was eager to do us a favor. He just wanted us off the strip for the night, and airborne first thing in the morning, so he didn’t have to worry about us anymore.

We thanked him and left, carrying our pillowcases and sleeping bags under our arms, and walked out to the highway. Out on the road, a pink neon sign flickered a half mile away. MOTEL CHEAP.

It was dusty and pitch-black along the gravel shoulder of the highway. Dirt devils and spent cigarette packs, kicked up by the passing cars, swirled around our legs. As the passing headlights flared onto the pines lining the road, spectral, hideous stick figures jumped from the branches.

I have always thought of that walk with my brother to the MOTEL CHEAP as a portrait of our divergent personalities. Kern was dejected, humiliated by our redneck drubbing at the duster strip. In Indiana, and again at Blytheville, the day had been such a high. Back on the Mississippi delta, everybody joked with us and made us the Arkansas Ken’dees. Here, in the heart of Arkansas darkness, we were just trash to be kicked. Kern’s personality was trusting and euphoric, and the world generally saw that in him and liked it, returning it with a loving surplus. But when events or people turned against him, he became lost in a maze. All he could do was stumble around inside and bump into things, mostly himself, trapped by confusion and anger.

Meanwhile, now that we were safely off the Stearman strip, I was whistling past the graveyard. I fancied myself a grown, experienced boy, full of the dark melodrama of life. I loved the spooky shadows and evil fever lurking in these Arkansas badlands. I was wordy then, quite wordy, a pretension I’d picked up as a result of collecting high grades in English and creative writing. I was always searching for that big, $15 word that described my present situation with what I considered to be suitable erudition. As it happened, the word “malevolence” was one of my favorites that year. I liked malevolence, the way the word sounded, and what it meant. The world was just chock full of malevolence, I thought, and it took a dedicated malevolence-fighter like me to survive this cruel life. And here was a place where the locals truly wallowed in malevolence. Me, frightened by a little malevolence? Never. Come to think of it, there were a lot of other M words that aptly described our predicament just now. Someday I would have great barnstorming blarney tales of my own about central Arkansas, full of alliteration, of course. I couldn’t wait to get home and boast to everyone about my noble forbearance in the face of these monstrous, malignant, malicious, malingering, malfeasant, mendacious, meretricious, and malevolent morons of miserable Arkansas. And they were all malodorous too!