Downtown (19 page)

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 146

My pilot was a sunburned man with a dark, square face and a no-color burr cut through which brown scalp showed.

His tan stopped at his neck and wrists; I could see pink flesh beyond the perimeters of his shirt. He looked like a laconic South Georgia farmer, but in fact turned out to be the president of a small aviation company nearby. He gave me a brief nod and shook hands with Matt, cocked an eye at the rapidly thinning fog, and said, in a flat drawl, “Ought to be clear enough by the time I get her suited up. You ready?”

He looked at me, and I nodded. I could not have spoken.

I expected him to spit in the dirt.

He produced from somewhere in the hangar a large, heavy leather jacket and put it on me, and a leather cap with goggles that fastened under my chin with a strap. He got the strap too tight, but I did not care. Perhaps it would strangle me; at the very least it would preclude much talking. He added a long white silk scarf and told me to tuck it into the jacket, and found thick leather gloves that were too large.

“Ought to have boots,” he said to Matt over my head, as if I were a monkey dressed for a moon shot, “but I couldn’t find any that would fit her. Okay. If y’all are ready, let’s get to it. I got a ten o’clock meeting in town.”

He turned and walked around the hangar motioning me to follow, and Hank took me by the shoulder and walked me around behind him. The rest of the staff followed us.

Like malicious ducklings, I thought in despair, waddling along behind the pilot, whose name I never got. But at least if he planned to be downtown in three hours, the possibility of imminent death was not on his mind. I repeated to myself, over and over, the little mantra with which I have gotten through many tight spots: in three and a half hours it will be over. I can stand anything for three and a half hours.

147 / DOWNTOWN

We rounded the hangar and I saw the Stearman, sitting alone in the brightening dawn on the empty runway. If Hank had not been firmly behind me with his hand on my shoulder, I believe I would have simply turned tail and fled in an ignominious fast waddle. The little biplane did not look large enough to lift two adults into the sky and bring them down again. It did not look large enough to sit down in. But there were two seats, one behind another, in a small aperture over and slightly behind the double wings, and they were open to the sky. The morning light streamed through the wings themselves, as if they were made of gauze. For all I knew, they were. The plane was a sparkling blue and yellow. I knew that the Stearman had been an early air corps trainer, but this one looked as if it were brand-new. Slightly comforted, I croaked as much to Hank.

“It is,” the pilot said, not looking back from the propeller he was fiddling with. “Or as good as. I restored her myself, in my basement. She won the best-restored Stearman category in the fly-in in Ottumwa last year.”

“Wow,” Hank said reverently.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,” I whispered under my breath, closing my eyes briefly.

“Well, let’s do it,” said the pilot, and simply lifted me beneath my armpits and swung me up into the second seat as if I were a child. I stared straight ahead as he buckled me in, and fitted a cold metal speaking tube in place. I would, I decided, concentrate on the texture of the metal struts, and the rivets, and the back of the seat ahead of me, and just not look out into the air until we were down again.

The pilot swung himself up on the wing and into his seat and buckled himself in. Over the speaking tube he said to me, tinnily, “I’m going to take her up and around ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 148

Stone Mountain, and maybe over it. We’re going to do some simple aerobatics; I don’t have time for much fancy stuff, and besides, your photographer got plenty of those last time.

It ought to be a pretty smooth ride. There’s no wind to speak of. If you think you’re going to vomit, for God’s sake lean away from the wind. Tell me first, if you can.”

“I’m not going to vomit,” I said in the tight little whinny that had become my voice. “But wait, isn’t Lucas Geary supposed to be here? The photographer? I thought the whole point was so he could shoot some more.”

“Naw,” said the tinny voice. “So far as I can tell, the whole point is to scare the living shit out of you. I tell you, I don’t much like ferrying around little girls, but I like less a man who’ll try to scare one to death just for the fun of it. I’m going to fly us around the other side of the mountain and fiddle around some, and come back and tell your editor we did the whole nine yards. You’ll have to put up with a couple of maneuvers so he can see ’em, but they won’t be the big stuff. And I won’t tell if you don’t. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said, thinking that if he asked me at that moment I would have married him. I could grit my teeth through a couple of gentle stunts, and then it would be over. I looked down at the staff, standing in the fresh morning, safe on the cool, damp earth and grinning up at me, and jerked my thumb back as I had seen Errol Flynn do in
Dawn Patrol
.

Matt’s half-smirk gave way to a full smile, and he jerked his thumb in return. Alicia rolled her eyes and looked away.

“Good girl, Smokes,” I saw Hank’s lips say, though I could not hear him.

Tom Gordon walked to the front of the plane and reached high and grabbed the top blade of the propeller. The pilot nodded, and Tom gave a mighty downward 149 / DOWNTOWN

heave that pulled him up off the earth for a moment, and the plane’s engine coughed into life. I pulled down my goggles. The pilot gave Tom a thumb-and-forefinger circle and the plane began to bounce, slowly, down the rough dirt runway. I burrowed deep into my seat and grabbed the bottom of it and closed my eyes. The goggles cut into my face.

“Thirty more minutes. Just thirty more minutes…”

We accelerated rapidly, and fled down the runway, bouncing high at intervals like a jackrabbit. For a long second there was only the roar of the engine and the interminable jouncing and what seemed to me great speed, and then, abruptly, we were up.

For a moment it was much better, and I opened my eyes, thinking, “Well, if this is all there is to it…,” and then the little plane flew straight up and sideways and dropped like a bird shot out of the sky. My stomach rose into my mouth.

“What was that?” I could not help crying.

“Little updraft,” came the voice in my ear. “You get ’em in the early mornings this time of year; the sun’s warming the cold ground. Relax. It’s a smooth morning.”

We did not hit any more updrafts, though the plane wobbled like a bicycle going too slow. The wind in my face was a solid force, and despite the goggles tears stung down my cheeks, drying almost instantly. My ears roared. I felt the cold, but somehow it did not register.

“You looking? This is something to see,” the pilot said into the tube, and I opened my eyes, to see the great pewter granite bulk of Stone Mountain wheeling up beneath and above us. We were circling about two-thirds of the way up it, flying so close that I could see the scars and striations on its face, and the pockets of scrubby growth, and, just coming into view, Gutzon Borglum’s monolithic equestrian carvings of President

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 150

Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and General Stone-wall Jackson. I watched, all fear forgotten, as General Lee’s titanic gray profile streamed past me. I only realized my mouth was open when I felt the frigid air that was burning my throat and chest.

“Oh, Lord,” I said.

“Right. Okay, brace up. Here we go,” he said, and before I made the mental transition from awe to terror he took the Stearman up, steadily and inexorably, until we were nearly vertical. The engine drone built to a great scream and the little craft shook all over, and my own scream was totally lost in the roar of the wind. I closed my eyes.

Suddenly the awful sensation of falling upward into nothing stopped, and I opened my eyes again, and saw the horizon of the earth wheel over my head, slowly and majestically, and knew that I was hanging upside down from an open cockpit, and had no idea on earth what, except a webbing of straps, was keeping me in the plane. I saw the mountain, and the hangar, and small dots that I knew to be my treacherous compatriots, all upside down, and then we swept down again in a great, stomach-turning dive, and I screwed my eyes shut once more and kept them shut until I felt the plane, at last, level out in the air.

“Okay?” came the pilot’s voice.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, feeling my head swim as though I was going to faint.

“One more, then,” he said.

We were much higher; the earth and hangar looked very small, and I could barely make out the staff. This time he nosed the Stearman into a deep dive that was worse by far than anything we had done; by the time he took it up, I was crying with terror. We did the inside loop again, but this time I knew to wait for the respite of the 151 / DOWNTOWN

gravity-free moment at its apex, and that the downsweep that followed it would soon end. And it did. The pilot flew in low to where Matt and the staff stood, waggled his wings and pointed to the mountain, and roared off around it. Behind me I could hear, just for a moment, faint cheers. They were the sweetest sound I had ever heard.

He was as good as his word. We flew around to the other side of Stone Mountain and he did a few gentle curves and figure eights, and we killed perhaps twenty more minutes, and then he brought us home. It was Matt Comfort himself who stood beneath the wing to catch me when I crawled out of my seat, and I have always been glad that he was such a small man and my padded weight put him off balance so that he stumbled and nearly fell with me, because I could not, for that first moment back on earth, have stood. I could make myself smile brilliantly to their applause, and say the proper things, like “It was wonderful, like being a bird,” but I could not make my legs hold me up. I think, of them all, only Hank knew that. He came running over and picked me up in his arms like a child and bore me back to the hangar, humming loudly the Triumphal March from
Aïda
.

“You did yourself more good today than you know,” he whispered in my ear, and I said, “I hope so, because if I had to do that again I’d shoot myself.”

Behind me I heard my pilot telling Matt Comfort that he had taken me behind the mountain and turned me “every which way but loose.”

“One day,” I said to Hank, still in a whisper, “I’m going to dedicate a book to that man.”

Presently Hank set me down and I was able to make my legs work, and I walked with him and Tom Gordon into the hangar to divest myself of some of the layers of clothes. Matt had gone on to the office with Alicia, and Charlie had scratched off in the Camaro, top down in ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 152

the warm, late-winter morning. When I reached the hangar, Lucas Geary was standing just inside it, drinking a Coca-Cola. With him was a tall black man I had never seen before, wearing, as Luke was, bleached, thin-worn blue jeans and a work shirt that had unquestionably seen many days of hard labor.

When Luke saw me he saluted me with the Coca-Cola bottle and smiled the lazy, feral smile I had noticed the day before.

“So you did it,” he said.

“So I did,” I said. “No thanks to you. I thought you were supposed to shoot it. Or did you just figure I’d back out, like everybody else?”

“Well, I thought you might,” he said. “But just in case you didn’t, we got here in time to snap a few of you coming down. Just for the record, in case Comfort should conveni-ently forget that you really did it.”

I looked at him with interest; did he sense, then what I knew: that Matt had been testing me with the flight and was not apt to be totally pleased with the result? His narrow blue eyes crinkled in their nests of freckled flesh, and I could read nothing in them but a sort of abstracted awareness. His eyes might have been cameras themselves.

As I thought it, he picked up the Leica that hung around his neck, shook what looked to be toast crumbs from it, and aimed it at my face. It is the shot that ran with the photo-essay: me still in the leather cap with the goggles pushed off my face, looking up at him with my lips slightly parted. It is an extreme close-up, and by some trick of light and shade in the hangar, in my pupils are mirrored the tiny thin reflections of another small plane that stood nearby in the hangar. It is a tricky shot, but it does have impact. I never minded the comparisons it drew, when it ran, to the young Amelia Earhart.

153 / DOWNTOWN

At the time, I merely said, “If you point that thing at me again I’m going to spit into it,” and he laughed and dropped the camera. It bounced on its strap against his chest.

“This is John Howard,” he said, and the black man stepped forward and held out his hand, saying nothing and studying me.

“Smoky O’Donnell,” Luke said.

John Howard shook my hand briefly and nodded, but still did not speak. His hand was hard and dry and warm. I wondered who he was.

“I’m glad to meet you,” I said.

“Thank you,” John Howard said. He had an actor’s voice, deep and musical, with the quality that I have always thought of as projection in it: I thought that he could make himself heard for a long distance without raising his voice. He had a long, narrow head with a close crop of only slightly napped hair, and a remarkable face. It was angular and seemed modeled of rough bronze planes, rather like one of Frederic Remington’s statues, and the only noticeably Negroid trace in it was the slightly flared nostrils. His eyes were, instead of brown, a yellowish hazel that you could see into; a wolf’s eyes. A long grayish scar ran through one eyebrow, bisecting it, and down across his left eye socket, just missing the eye.

The scar raised one-half of his eyebrow so that he had a permanently quizzical look that saved him from mere handsomeness. But he was that, too. John Howard was always a man on whom it was a pleasure to look—up to a point.

Little in his ledged face responded to other people. He was as still, in repose, as a bronze carving, much the color of one, and had the same surface warmth. At first I thought he was a workman of some sort, with whom Luke Geary had struck up a conversation, but when he spoke I knew that he was not.