The Cannibal Queen (6 page)

When he wakes up I will phone Flight Service and get a weather brief. I suspect this fog won’t lift enough to be flyable until noon at the earliest. So we are in no hurry. Last night we decided to fly down to New Orleans today and spend at least a full day sightseeing—maybe ride a riverboat on the Mississippi and wander around in the French Quarter, America’s tackiest tourist trap.

The quirk in the American psyche that draws people to places like the French Quarter also makes them pull off 1-70 in Oakley, Kansas, and pay real money to see the world’s largest prairie dog and a cow with five legs. Not that I have yet visited the hottest tourist draw in Oakley, Kansas, but I’ll admit, I am curious. I have never seen a 250-pound prairie dog and the sight just might be worth five dollars.

David is waking up now. He looks around, then burrows back under the covers. Now he is examining the sheet situation. His lower one got pulled down and wadded up. He gives up. He flops back and closes his eyes. Another half hour of morning snoozing seems to be in the works. Nope, his eyes are open. He has just logged twelve straight hours of Zs.

I go outside and check the TV tower. The clouds are just above the top of it. Here and there patches of blue are visible. In a little while we can fly.

It is just 11:10
A.M.
on my watch when I add power and push the stick forward to lift the tail. The field elevation here at Monroe, Louisiana, is only 79 feet above sea level but I am still surprised when the manifold pressure needle steadies at 29 inches. We are only losing one inch of pressure in the manifold system, which strikes me as excellent for a normally aspirated engine. That thought is worth a smile, and one spreads across my face.

The plane accelerates well with the tail up and I pull her off and let her climb at 80 MPH, which is still a nice angle in this thick air. I level at 1,000 feet and turn to the southeast.

The bases of the broken clouds are another thousand or so feet above and the visibility is about a dozen miles. The low flat country spreads away in all directions.

When Monroe Departure turns us loose, I climb to 1,500 feet and flip on the intercom. David has his head resting on the right side of the cockpit. “Sleeping already?”

“Playing a game.” He brought his Nintendo Game Boy along on this trip. What did I do to entertain myself at age fourteen, back in the dark ages before electronic games?

I address myself to the chore of holding 135 degrees on the wet compass. It flops around as usual and I remind myself it rotates backward. The airspeed is more or less steady at 95 indicated.

Today I annotate the chart with the time as we pass prominent villages and road intersections. Back to basics. There will be no repeat of yesterday.

After 40 minutes of flying we strike the Mississippi River between Chamblee and Waterproof. I carefully annotate the chart and mark the time, 11:50.

I turn the flying over to David and tell him to keep us over the river heading south. “Where are all the boats and barges?” he asks.

“We’ll see some.”

In less than a minute we do, a group of fifteen barges pushed by one tug heading upriver. And another barge-tug combination a half mile behind the first.

David peers out one side of the cockpit, then the other. Ahead of us dark clouds are building. The forecast was for thunderstorms after one o’clock. They’re early. Low, flat, wet terrain in every direction, a varying mixture of mud and water that would be tempting fate to try an emergency landing on. I survey the levees. Maybe on a levee if the engine quits.

The town of Natchez, Mississippi, comes into view ahead. I search off to the left for the airport and find it. We swing over the northern edge of town and I tell David to follow the four-lane going east. We had planned to go 30 miles east following this highway to a little grass field called Dixie, but now the clouds ahead loom a dark gray, almost black. It still looks pretty good to the south, down the river toward Baton Rouge.

“I think we better land here at Natchez and get some gas. Look at those clouds.”

A woman answers our call on Unicom. I fly a left downwind and land on runway 18. We have been airborne only 1.2 hours, but when the weather gets crummy a fellow can’t have too much gas.

Three black men help us fuel the Queen: a heavyset man in his late fifties, a young man in his twenties, and a teenage boy. The young man laughs when he sees the artwork on the right side of the plane. “Come look at this,” he tells the older man. “She’s all right,” he assures me with a broad grin.

“Snack bar upstairs,” the older man informs me after a look at David, the bottomless pit. He had breakfast just two and a half hours ago, but he is indeed hungry again. The snack bar is a short-order grill manned by a large black woman with a friendly smile. The odor of grease is heavy in the air. David orders a hamburger and fries and gets a coke from the pop machine.

She cooks it to his order. No McDonald’s, this. Pickles, onion and mustard on a big juicy burger. I watch him eat it with a touch of envy. All burgers were like this when I was a youngster. I didn’t see my first McDonald’s until I was twenty years old, but I refrain from making this remark to David. He would just shake his head and mutter “old geezer” with a grin to take the sting off.

On the way back to the airplane he looks at the grass. “Not the same as Colorado,” he announces.

“Too much rain and heat.”

The black cloud is still obscuring the sky to the southeast, so we plan to fly south around it, down toward Baton Rouge. As we clear Natchez I see the highway leading south and point it out to David. With the plane cruising at 1,500 feet he takes over the flying and moves the plane to the left so as to keep the highway readily in sight without craning his neck. He is fighting to hold the nose down to keep from climbing. “A hundred miles an hour,” he tells me.

“We’re in an updraft.”

We cross the Homochitto River at 1:12. Our indicated airspeed is down to 85 and he is losing altitude. We’re in a down-draft now. I help him put in more back stick. Airspeed drops off to 80. Then we are out of it and the airspeed increases as the nose comes down. The storm is now off our left wing, forward and aft as far as I can see, and the way ahead is getting darker. Uh oh!

As we pass the Netterville Airport by Wilkinson, Mississippi, I can see a gap to the southeast in the rapidly developing wall of black cloud. “Head for the gap,” I tell David, and point. He comes thirty degrees left and settles on a course of about 120.

By the time we reach Centreville twelve minutes later we are firmly in a cloud canyon, with black storms to the left and right, areas of lightness ahead and behind. I have David steer thirty degrees right, aiming for the lightest area in the sky. We cross Clinton, Louisiana, at 41 after the hour, 46 minutes after takeoff from Natchez.

The sky is lighter ahead. But only for a moment. We enter a hole. I can look up and see blue sky.

After a glance I give that up as a waste of time. Black clouds behind us to the north, to the southeast, and directly west. The only relatively clear area is to the southwest, toward Baton Rouge. And they have an airport radar service area.

I take over the flying and put the airplane in a circle. Jackson, Louisiana, is the nearest airport, but it is right under that boomer to the west. We could go back to Natchez, but the object of today’s journey was to arrive sooner or later in New Orleans.

I swing the plane toward the west and the road that leads from Clinton to Baton Rouge. When I am near it, I swing to parallel and call Baton Rouge Approach.

I am too far out and too low.

We motor inbound awhile. Gray clouds ahead, undoubtedly with water in them. I descend to 1,000 feet, plenty high enough in this pancake-flat country. Now Approach assigns me a discrete IFF squawk and acquires me on their radar. I have no more than rogered them when we fly into a rain shower, which pours on the windscreens and across the wing surfaces. Thanks to some miracle or Lloyd Stearman’s genius, the cockpits remain dry. We fly on, keeping the ground firmly in sight.

In less than a minute we are through the shower and entering another bright area. The Baton Rouge airport is visible from eight miles away against a backdrop of black cloud. We enter a left downwind for runway 4 and I make like a master flaring in a huge two-knot crosswind.

Inside the FBO office a corporate pilot is sitting in front of the television displaying the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s weather broadcast. I note with professional interest that he is reading a technothriller and settle in to study the radar picture. Yuck! Level-one rain showers surround Baton Rouge, which is in the only hole for 50 miles. Some level-two and level-three activity down toward New Orleans, but New Orleans itself looks to be free of precipitation. I get David into the room and show him the chart.

Wanting to teach him to think in aviation terms, I ask, “What do you think we should do?”

He fires it right back. “What do you want to do?” Okay, Pop. You’re the pilot!

On our way back to the ramp to tie down the
Cannibal
Queen, we pass the corporate pilot whose reading we disturbed. He is talking to two compatriots. “The thing that scares me,” he says, “and I have read this in three separate places so it’s probably true, is that the Russians have got this thing that drills a hole in …”

I go through the door and miss the rest of it. Today Boris Yeltsin is getting elected president of the Russian Republic and he wants to emasculate the Communist-controlled central government. Gorbachev would probably be amazed to hear that some Americans are still worried about the evil empire.

With the
Queen
tied down and the controls locked, we rent a car for the remainder of our journey to New Orleans. I’ve parked planes before when the weather got too bad, and a lot farther away from my destination. This is part of flying light airplanes and, I tell myself smugly, one reason I am still alive and kicking.

Ten miles out of Baton Rouge the deluge begins. “Glad we aren’t flying.”

David agrees with this sentiment.

“You sleepy?” I ask him.

“Naw,” he says, then a minute later reclines his seat and goes promptly to sleep.

The downpour continues for an hour, until we are only fifteen miles west of New Orleans. David sleeps soundly through the whole thing.

After checking into the hotel right on Bourbon Street in the heart of the French Quarter, father and son set forth to see the sights. There are a lot more T-shirt emporiums than I remember from my visit four years ago, but about the same number of sex shows. The only businesses that are disappearing are the bars with live jazz bands. I only see two left. Pete Fountain’s place is gone and so is Al Hirt’s. Preservation Hall looks even filthier and more forlorn than it did in ’87.

My first visit here was in 1968 when a bunch of guys and I drove over one Saturday from Pensacola, Florida. Somewhere at home I still have a black-and-white photo one of the guys took of me standing by a light pole on Bourbon Street the summer I turned twenty-two. The place had more mystique for me then. Now it strikes me as just plain tacky—the inscription on one of the T-shirts for sale to the boobs from Colorado and all points east and west captures the raw essence of Bourbon Street today: “Just suck it.”

Maybe the place was tacky back in 1968 but I was too green to see it.

David is not interested in the square in front of the Louisiana Historical Museum or the statue of Andrew Jackson and he doesn’t even glance at the paintings the artists have hanging on the wrought-iron fence. We climb the levee, sit in silent contemplation of the vast river for 30 or 40 seconds—the maximum period a fourteen-year-old can remain in one place motionless without the sword of school authority hanging over his neck—then walk westward down the levee to the paddleboat
Natchez
. A few moments later we are the proud possessors of two tickets for the seven o’clock dinner cruise.

“You want to lose these, or shall I?” I ask David, holding out the tickets.

“You do it,” he says, grinning.

We walk around for an hour and ruin our dinner with ice cream cones. Going aboard at 6:15, we find dinner is served cafeteria-style and has already begun. We join the line and both choose the chicken instead of the fish. It is okay.

When the boat casts off we are standing back aft watching the giant paddlewheel flail the water and the sailor untying the ropes holding the stern to the pier. As he flakes down the ropes on the deck I explain to my son that the trick is to make the ropes uncoil without knotting or kinking. He nods silently. Through the years he has become resigned to the fact that his father is full of odd, worthless bits of information that will be bestowed upon his gratis for little or no reason.

The ship’s whistle roars loudly—steam—and the wheel churns the water. We go to the bow and breathe deeply of the smell of the river and the sea carried by the breeze.

Coming back upriver an hour later David asks for something to toss into the paddlewheel. I give him a paper pipe filter. He throws it. Then he spits. “Wouldn’t it be nifty to drop a water balloon and see it break on the paddle?”

I agree that that would indeed be nifty. Water balloons fascinate him. He was disappointed that we were assigned a second-floor room in our hotel: water balloons have to fall a lot farther than that to be worth the trouble.

We pass alongside the minesweeper fleet moored at Navy Supply Center New Orleans. I explain that the little ships are made of wood so that they won’t influence magnetic mines. We are deep into a discussion of the technology of mines as we pass by the ships. People are visible on the bridges. I can see an Officer of the Deck in whites greeting sailors in civilian clothes coming back from liberty. It would really be fun to spend a few years on a little ship like one of these minesweepers, everyone knowing everyone, sailing here and there, charging ashore on liberty. I was a naval aviator and the smallest ship I served aboard was USS
Enterprise
—just me and the captain and five thousand other guys. Okay, maybe I envy the little-ship sailors.