The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (19 page)

She touched the eraser to the corner of her mouth, looked at me, and after a long silence, she said, "You really don't know, do you?"

"No." I felt sullen, misunderstood and alone.

"I believe you," she said gently. "How can you not know within a million dollars?"

She saw my face and waved her hand to take back what she had said. "OK, OK! You don't know."

I pawed through boxes for a while, hating it. Papers, look

at all these papers. Numbers in unknown handwritings, from different typewriters, yet they were supposed to have something to do with me. Investments, commodities, brokers, taxes, bank accounts . . . "Here's taxes!" I said. "A whole folder of taxes!"

"Good boy!" she said, as though I were a cocker spaniel dug up a lost bracelet.

"Bark," I said. She didn't reply, scanning the titles of the returns, checking the entries there,

It was quiet while she read, and I yawned without opening my mouth, a trick I had learned in high school English. Hating paperwork so, was this to be required learning for me now, more deadly than grammar? Why? I hadn't ignored the paperwork, I had hired people to do it! After hiring them and paying them, why is it me stirring this mess, looking for tax-forms; why is it Leslie catching the load dropped by six high-paid employees? It's not fair!

When somebody writes a best-seller or sings a glorious song or acts a lovely film, they should be issued a heavy grey manual, along with their checks and fanmail and bushels of money:

INTRODUCTION AND WARNING

Congratulations for doing whatever you did to earn all this cash. Although it seems to be yours and you think it ought to be yours for giving whatever gift you gave to society, only about one-tenth of it might actually wind up under your control IF YOU ARE SKILLED IN PAPERWORK.

The rest goes to agents and taxes and accountants and lawyers and staff and governments and guilds and employees that you are going to have to hire to keep

track of all this and to pay the employment taxes for the employees. It doesn't matter that you don't know where to hire the people to do this, that you don't know whom to trust or that you don't know all the bodies that you have to pay; you have to pay them, anyway.

Please begin on Page One and read straight through to page 923, memorizing every line. Then you can go out and have a deductible dinner if you take a business-person with you, talk business, keep the receipt and write who joined you for the meal. If you don't do that you have actually spent twice the amount you thought you did when you paid it.

Hereafter, live your life in strict accord with the rules herein, and we your government might allow you to exist a little longer. Otherwise, abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Not even a pamphlet. Every person who writes a song to enchant us is presumed a competent accountant, record-keeper, guardian of credits and debits payable to invisible agencies of city and state and nation. If one or two of those persons are not suited to these tasks or not blessed with an orderly mind that understands careful record-keeping, their star in the firmament is netted and stuffed into a jail cell. There they must turn their full talent to learning the ways of cells, to mastering this boresome stuff no matter how it tastes like cardboard; they must spend years in stifled darkness before their star may shine again if there is a spark of it left.

Such energy wasted! What other films, what other books, what other songs go unsung while those hours and months

and years pour down plush rat-hole offices of attorneys and accountants and advisers and counselors and consultants paid in desperation for help?

Calm, Richard. You are peeking at your future. If you choose to stay in this country, careful attention to money and its records will be a choke-chain at your neck. Lunge against it, fight it and you will strangle. Just take it nice and easy, walk along slow, agree with every bureau and agent you meet, smile sweetly ... do that and you will be allowed to breathe without being hanged dead on that chain.

But my freedom! I lunged. Aaak! Wheeze. Yike, that is a ferocious collar!

My freedom is a choice now between escape to some other country and careful, slow working out this heap of broken crockery that was my empire. Richard-then made some blind decisions and stupid mistakes that Richard-now will have to pay for.

I watched Leslie studying the tax returns, jotting page after page of notes for the lawyers.

Richard-now, I thought, is not doing a damn thing. Les-lie-now is doing it, and she isn't the tiniest bit responsible for what happened. Leslie didn't get to fly the fast airplanes; she didn't even get a chance to save the empire from disaster. Leslie gets to sweep up the pieces if she can. What a reward, for making a friend of Richard Bach!

And then he gets mad at her because she raised her voice to him when he read her private poetry!

Richard, I thought, have you considered the possibility that you may in fact be a god damned worthless son-of-a-bitch? For the first time in my life, I considered that, seriously.

twenty-six

HE ONLY difference might have been that she was quieter than usual, but I didn't notice that.

"I can't believe you don't have your own airplane, Leslie. A meeting in San Diego, it's only half an hour away!" I checked the oil in the engine of the Meyers 200 that I had flown west this time to see her, checked that the fuel caps were on tight and the covers over them closed and locked.

She answered in a voice just above a whisper, as she stood in warm sun by the left wing. She wore a sand-color suit that must have been tailored for her, yet she looked ill at ease near my business-plane.

"Excuse me, wook?" I said. "I didn't quite hear you."

She cleared her throat. "I said that I've managed to get along without an airplane so far."

I put her briefcase in the back, slipped into the left seat,

helped her into the right and closed the door from the inside, talking.

"First time I saw this panel, I said, 'Wow! Look at all the dials and switches and gauges and radios and things!' The Meyers does have more than its share of instruments, but you get used to it after a while and it's pretty simple."

"Good," she said in a tiny voice. She looked at the panel about the way I had looked at the movie-set the day she had taken me to MGM. Not quite that much awe, but I could tell she didn't do this often.

'*PROP CLEAR!" I called, and she looked at me with big eyes, as though something was wrong, that I should be shouting. Not used to anything smaller than a jumbo-jet, I guessed.

"It's OK," I said. "We know there's no one near the airplane, but still we yell Prop clear! or Look out for the propeller! or something like that, so anyone hearing knows that our engine will be starting and get out of the way. An old aviation courtesy."

"Nice," she nodded.

Master switch on, mixture rich, throttle cracked a half-inch open, fuel pump on (I pointed to the fuel-pressure gauge so she could see we had fuel pressure), ignition switch on, starter button down.

The propeller spun; the engine fired at once, catching on four cylinders roughly, then five, then six, smoothing down into a lion's glad purr to be awake again. Now instrument-needles were moving all over the panel: oil pressure, vacuum gauge, ammeter, voltmeter, heading indicator, artificial horizon, navigation indicators. Lights came on to show radio ffequencies; voices sounded in the speakers. A scene I had played some ten thousand times in one airplane or another

since I was a kid out of high school, and I liked it as much now as I did then.

I got the airport takeoff information from the tower, chatted with ground control that we were a Meyers and not a baby Navion, released the brakes and we taxied half a mile to the runway. Leslie watched the instrument panel, the other airplanes taxiing, landing, taking off. She watched me.

"I can't understand a word they're saying," she said. Her hair was combed severely back, tucked under a beige tam-o'-shanter. I felt like a company pilot, with the beautiful president on board for the first time.

"It's air-language, sort of a code," I said. "We can understand it because we know exactly what's going to be said: airplane numbers, runway numbers, takeoff sequences, winds, traffic. Say something the control tower doesn't expect: 'This is Meyers Three Niner Mike, we're having cheese sandwiches please hold the mayo,' the tower-lady will come back, 'What? What? Say again?' Cheese sandwich is not a word in air-language."

So much of hearing, I thought, is listening to what we expect and tuning out the rest. I'm trained to hear air-talk; she's trained to hear music I can't even tell is there. Is it the same with seeing? Do we tune visions out of our eyes, and UFOs and ghosts? Do we tune out tastes, do we tune down our senses, until we discover that the physical world is what we expect it to be, and not a miracle more? What would our day look like if we saw in infrared and ultraviolet, or if we could train ourselves to see auras, futures unformed, pasts lingering?

She listened intently to the radio, puzzling out sudden bursts of tower-talk, and I thought for a second of the widening range of calm adventures I was having with her.

Anyone else this moment would see the trim lovely businesswoman, neatly on her way to discuss film-production finances, above-the-line costs and below-the-lines, shooting schedules and locations.,Yet narrowing my eyes I could see her as she had been an hour earlier, clad only in warm air from two hair dryers after her shower, winking at me as I passed her door, laughing a second later when I ran into the wall.

What a shame, I thought, that such pleasures always lead to taking-for-granted, to frowns and arguments and all the wrecked shambles of marriage, married or not.

I pressed the microphone button on the control wheel. "Meyers Two Three Niner Mike's ready to go on Two-One."

"Three Nine Mike, you are cleared for takeoff, please expedite. Aircraft on final approach."

"Mike, Roger," I said. I reached across the company president to check her door latched and locked. "Ready?" I said.

"Yes," she said, looking straight ahead.

The Meyers' purr swept into a three-hundred horsepower wall of sound. We were pressed back into our seats as the airplane surged down the runway, already changing from asphalt and painted lines into a long blur, into Santa Monica falling away.

I moved the landing-gear lever to the UP position.

"The wheels are coming up now," I said to Leslie, "and now, the flaps ... see them retract into the wing? Now we'll come back to climb power and it will get a little quieter in here. ..." I spun the throttle down a few turns, then the propeller pitch knob, then the mixture control to bring the exhaust-gas temperature up where it belonged.

Three red lights were glowing on the panel ... the wheels were streamlined out of the way, up and locked. Gear lever to neutral, to shut off the hydraulic pump. The airplane settled into her climb, going up something less than a thousand feet per minute. She did not climb like the T-33, but then she wasn't burning six hundred gallons per hour, either.

Shoreline moved below, hundreds of people on the beach. If the engine fails now, I thought, we've got enough altitude to turn back and land on the golf course, or now, back on the runway itself. We swung into a wide turn up over the airport, then locked onto the first heading for San Diego. That heading took us over Los Angeles International Airport, and Leslie pointed to a sparse line of jetliners on final approach to land.

"Are we in their way?"

"Nope," I said. "There's a corridor over the airport; we're in it now. Safest place for us to be is right over the runways, 'cause all the big jets come in from one side to land, they go out the other side to take off, see that? 'String of pearls,' the controllers call them. At night they're a string of diamonds, with their lights on."

I eased the power down to cruise, the engine going quieter still. She asked questions with her eyes when I changed things in the airplane, and I told her what was going on.

"Now we're all leveled off. See the airspeed needle moving? That will come up to right about here; it'll show about a hundred and ninety miles per hour. This dial is our altitude. The little hand shows thousands; the big one shows hundreds. What's our altitude?"

"Three thousand ... five hundred?"

"Tell me without the question mark."

She leaned against me to see the altimeter straight-on. "Three thousand five hundred."

"Right!"

A Cessna 182 flew toward us in the corridor, a thousand feet above our altitude. "See there? She's flying at four thousand five hundred feet, going in the opposite direction. There are rules we follow to keep us from flying too close together. Even so, any airplane you see, even if you know I see it too, point it out to me. We always want to look around, see and be seen. We have strobe-lights on the tip of the tail and on the belly, to help other airplanes see us."

She nodded, looked for other airplanes. The air was smooth as a lake of cream-except for the hum of the engine, we could have been flying a low-speed space capsule in a pass along planet Earth. I reached down and adjusted the trim knob on the instrument panel. The faster the airplane flew, the more it wanted to be trimmed nose-down, else it would climb.

"Do you want to fly it?"

She edged away, as if she thought I was going to hand her the engine. "No thank you, wookie. I don't know how."

"The airplane flies itself. The pilot just shows it where to go. Gently, gently. Put your hand on the control wheel in front of you. Real lightly. Just a thumb and two fingers. That's OK. I promise I won't let you do anything bad."

She put her fingers gingerly on the wheel, as though it were a steel trap set to gnash her hand.

"All you do is press down, ever so soft, on the right side of the wheel."

She looked at me, questions.

"Go on. Believe me, the airplane loves it! Give it a little pressure on the right."

The wheel moved half an inch under her touch, and of course the Meyers tilted slowly right, starting to turn. She caught her breath.