Taking Off (18 page)

“You going to the course at the library next Wednesday?” one of the men asked.

“What course is that?” asked another.

“Cultivation and Propagation of Succulents.”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“They make very nice houseplants, I'm told. It's free, and you get to take a cutting home with you.”

“I might be there. How about you, kid?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. I patted my pockets as if looking for something. “You know, I think I left my—pen—in the hangar. I've got to go back. Maybe I'll see you next week.”

I returned to the hangar and found Derringer slumped in a chair, a pint bottle of Don Q rum in his hand and a distant look on his face.

“Mr. Derringer?” I asked.

“Yeah?” he said without looking at me.

“I was wondering if you'd be willing to give me a few lessons for a reduced price. I've got my own plane. Almost. Well, not a plane exactly. An aerocycle—but it's not quite finished. Maybe I could get by with just three lessons—taking off, steering, and landing. Make that four lessons. There's one other thing that I really want to learn—something I yearn to learn.”

“Oh, yeah? What do you
yearn
to learn?”

“I yearn to learn the Immelmann turn.”

“What's that?” he asked.

“It's—it's—well—”

“Yeah?”

“It's on page eighty-eight,” I said, pointing to his copy of
Elements of Aeronautics.

He flipped the book open and flipped the pages until he came to page eighty-eight. He bent over the book and studied the diagram. “You must be crazy!” he said. “That looks impossible.”

*   *   *

ALTHOUGH I had only that one flying lesson, it did teach me something. I think I can see that I took much of what Derringer said about seat-of-the-pants flying to heart. I became a seat-of-the-pants flier when I eventually did build my aerocycle and took off for the Faustroll Institute, and much later in life, I became a seat-of the-pants memoirist. When you are a seat-of-the-pants memoirist you don't write about your life; you live your memoirs. You begin to feel that you and your account of yourself are one, like a mythical beast.

Chapter 37

If Only …

I TIPTOED into Albertine's hospital room, in case she was asleep. She was. She lay on her back, with the bed cranked up so that her upper body was raised from the horizontal. Her mouth hung slightly open. As she breathed, she snuffled. I wouldn't call it snoring, not quite, but it was a near cousin. I wasn't seeing her at her best. The slack mouth and the snuffling did not become her. I knew that the woman who had worried about exposing her underwear in a dogboarding accident would not want me—or anyone else—to see her this way, so I retreated from the room and returned to the nurses' station down the hall.

“She asleep?” asked a nurse.

“Yeah,” I said.

“It's the meds. She'll go in and out. You can wait here if you want, but it would be better if you wait in there with her, so she sees you when she wakes up.”

“You think so?”

“She's been asking for you.”

“She has?” I said. I shouldn't have been surprised to find that she had been asking for me, but I was. I was so pleased and flattered by the thought of her asking for me, like a wasting heroine in a sentimental movie, that I may have blushed and stammered. In fact, I'm sure I did. I didn't say, “She has?” I said, “Sh-sh-she has?”

The nurse gave me a smile and said, “Of course she has. You know she has.” There was something in her manner, and her smile, that made me wonder if she thought that I wasn't really Albertine's husband. “You ought to wait in her room—so that you're there when she wakes up.”

“Yes,” I said. “I'll do that.”

I returned to her room and found her awake.

“Hi,” she said shyly, as if we didn't know each other as well as we do.

“Hi,” said I, in much the same manner. Perhaps it was the setting that made us feel unfamiliar.

“Did you write about the crash?” she asked, with a bit of vacancy at the end, as if she had omitted
yet.

“Yes,” I said. “I set it in Central Park.”

“A much nicer setting,” she said. “Much nicer. But why there? Why did you put us there?”

“I had you crash into a dogboarder instead of a construction worker.”

“I can't stand those dogboarders.”

“I know.”

“Did you include the flying EMTs?”

“What?”

“The flying EMTs. When I was in the emergency room, there were EMTs who brought people in by helicopter. They landed on the roof.”

“I forgot.”

“They were dashing. They had a certain swagger.”

“I'll put them in,” I promised.

“Thank you,” she said, shy again.

“I wish it hadn't happened,” I said. “I wish we could take the day back, and choose to do something else instead of riding—”

“—in the park.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So do I,” she said. “Believe me.”

“I'm sure you do,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose so, but that sort of regret can lead you down the dark alleys of If and into the dangerous part of town they call If Only.”

Chapter 38

Recruiting the Crew

I KNEW—or I thought I knew—that I could count on certain people to help me when I actually began to build the aerocycle. I thought that I could count on my friends, and I thought I knew who they were. As I began letting them know that the big day was nearly upon us, however, I began to hear from them a chorus of excuses. Actually, it wasn't a chorus, since their excuses were all highly individual and sometimes quite inventive; it was more like a cacophony of excuses.

Raskol announced that he was spending all his time cramming for the dread-inducing College Competency Exams, the CCEs, though he had often told me that he considered college a waste of time and wanted to go to work on the bay after he finished high school, eventually buy his own boat, and live a life much like his father's. “I'm working with a tutor,” he said with apparent pride. “Rudolph Derringer.”

“CFI?” I asked.

“Huh?” he said.

“Never mind,” I said.

Spike O'Grady claimed to have become a balletomane. “I can't miss any of the performances during the Babbington Festival of the Dance,” she said swooningly.

“I didn't even know there was a Babbington Festival of the Dance,” I admitted.

With an expression of wonder at my ignorance, she said, “It's an annual affair.”

I shrugged.

“All those darling children from Miss Lois's School of Dance and Arlene's Dancing Academy and all the other little dancing schools in the greater Babbington area hold their recitals in one enchanting festival,” she said, cracking her knuckles.

Margot and Martha Glynn claimed that they had to spend every waking hour posing for their father, the painter Andy Glynn. “Our father is having a bit of a
crise,
” said Margot. “He has not been selling quite so well as he used to.”

“And that is putting a pinch on the family finances,” said Martha. “Cheaper cuts of meat, domestic wine, the usual cutbacks.”

“But he's begun to worry about the future, and he feels the need to put some money by for the wife and daughters, in anticipation of the time when he shuffles off the mortal coil.”

“So he's decided to reinvent himself as a painter of frankly erotic studies of beautiful young girls interpreted as nymphs and fairies,” said Martha.

“You can see that we are kept quite busy,” said Margot with a proud toss of her golden hair.

You may not be surprised, Reader, to learn that I thought then of abandoning the flying project entirely and devoting myself to assisting Andy Glynn, but I was stung by the girls' apparently giving not a thought to the idea of abandoning the erotic painting project and assisting me, so I just said, “Yes, I guess you are,” and went to browse in greener pastures.

When I asked Mr. MacPherson what he thought “the mortal coil” was, he said, “The mortal coil is a lot like the madding crowd or the vale of tears. It's where we live, and it's the condition of human life, with its worries and woes, hustle and bustle, turmoil and tumult, which is what
coil
means, as perhaps you did not know, and the certainty of death, which is what
mortal
means, as I suspect you did know. ‘Deid men are free men,' my father used to say. They are free of the coil, at least, and far from the madding crowd. Hamlet used the ‘mortal coil' phrase in his famous soliloquoy, the one that begins with ‘To be or not to be: that is the question.' When he's thinking of killing himself, he wonders what death would be like. Like sleep? ‘To sleep: perchance to dream,' he says, ‘ay, there's the rub; / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil / Must give us pause.'”

“Would you like to help me build a small airplane out of parts of old motorcycles?” I asked.

“Sorry, Peter,” he said. “After school hours, I abandon myself to strong drink.”

“Really?” I asked, astonished by such an admission from an adult, and particularly from a teacher.

“‘It's a dry tale that disna end in a drink,'” he said.

Marvin Jones claimed that he had to entertain visiting relatives. “My aunt Sylvia and uncle Gordon are coming,” he said, “and seven of my cousins. There's a lot of cooking to do, housecleaning, turning the basement into a dormitory, that sort of thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I thought you'd—”

“Family is the most important thing, Peter. As my mother says, ‘Friends may be friends for a lifetime, but family is forever.'”

“Yeah,” I said. “But remember that ‘Freendship canna stand aye on ane side.'”

“Who said that?”

“Mr. MacPherson.”

Matthew Barber claimed that he wanted to help but couldn't because his mother had forbidden it, on the grounds that being associated with “Peter and his crazy flying scheme” would make him a pariah at the Summer Institute. Patti Fiorenza was rarely to be seen. She was either off riding in a convertible with a tattooed thug or rehearsing with whatever doo-wop group she happened to be in at the moment. Porky White said that he was so busy with plans to open a second clam bar that he couldn't even think of anything else.

“I know it doesn't seem like such a big deal to open another little restaurant in the next town, but I've got a feeling that this is the start of something big,” he said. “I see Kap'n Klam Family Restaurants from coast to coast someday, and I want to make sure that I get it right, right from the start. You understand, don't you?”

“Sure,” I said. “I feel the same way about my solo flight to New Mexico. I'd like to get it right, right from the start—which is going to be hard if I never get the plane built.”

“Mm, yeah,” he said distractedly. Then he stopped what he was doing, thought for a moment, and said suddenly, with enthusiasm, “Say, Peter! How about if you trail one of those advertising banners behind you, like the ones you see behind the planes that buzz the beach? ‘Kap'n Klam is coming!' It'll get people wondering who the Kap'n is, get them interested in buying a franchise.”

“A franchise?”

“Yeah,” he said, returning to the papers that were spread across the counter. “It's a brilliant idea. I'll explain it to you later. What do you say about the banner?”

“Okay, I guess, if it's not too heavy.”

“How heavy could it be? I'll get to work on it. Sorry I can't help you with the plane.”

“Aerocycle.”

“Right. Sorry.”

*   *   *

MY FRIENDS, it seemed, had let me down. My father, on the other hand, and to my great surprise, was eager. When I returned home, defeated in my effort to rally recruits to the cause, he was out in the garage, making an inventory of the materials on hand and assigning tasks to personnel we didn't have, pausing now and then to rub his hands in anticipatory glee, looking forward to the start of the work.

“Big day tomorrow!” he said when he noticed me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Big day.”

I didn't have the heart to tell him that we'd be working alone, or to point out that work without help was likely to be work without glee.

Chapter 39

Al and I, Unstoppable

ALBERTINE attempted to shift her position, winced, tried to smile as if the pain she felt were not really so bad, then settled back against the pillow and lay there in silence for a while before she spoke, or before she could manage to speak.

“So he did help you,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I've made him an enthusiastic supporter of my plans to see how things might have gone between us if he had been an enthusiastic supporter of my plans.”

“Peter, did he ever actually
prevent
you from doing the things that you thought were important to you, the things that you thought were worth doing?”

“You've forgotten about his not allowing me to see that play?”

“Other than that.”

“He told me that I couldn't change my major to molluscan biology.”

“But you did.”

“He told me that I couldn't marry you.”

“So did your mother.”

“True.”

“And yet you did.”

“I was unstoppable. So were you. Your parents offered you Europe to reject me, remember.”

“A trip to Europe, not Europe.”

“You mean—you had your price—but they wouldn't meet it?”

“Nothing short of all of Europe would have stopped me.”