Flight of Passage: A True Story (7 page)

My father stepped out of the Jeep, lit his pipe, and leaned into the cab beside Kern with his leg resting on the running board.

“Well good, boys, good. Now you’ve got your airplane.”

“Dad,” Kern said. “I’m very grateful for this. Thanks. Not many pilots could do what you did today.”

“Nah, nah, nah, Kern,” my father said. “I mean, shit. In my day, every pilot flew like this.”

In his white scarf and sheepskin flying suit, he skipped brightly up the steps and across the porch of the house, whistling and pleased with himself, an old flyer who hadn’t lost his touch.

Kern let out the clutch of the Jeep and steered for the barn.

“Rink, you wanna know something?”

“No, what?”

“Daddy’s a hot shit.”

This was the problem I had with my brother, the effect he had on me. He always insisted on looking at the bright side of life, half of the truth, bubbling all over with enthusiasm about something that had just happened, especially if it involved my father. They crashed airplanes together, and he was happy about it. They got into screaming matches, but, Kern thought, this was “good for their relationship.” For Kern, at the end of every rainbow, there was a big, freaking pot of gold. His ebullience was so maddening to me that I would instinctively disagree with him about everything, even when he was right, and I would feel this desperate urge to look at the bleaker and more realistic side of life, simply because he refused to do it.

My silence riled him and I knew it, so I didn’t say anything at first. When we got to the barn he tried again. He wasn’t going to shut off the Jeep and stow the plane until I agreed with him.

“Rink, are you listening to me?”

“Yeah . . . I’m listening.”

“I just said: Daddy’s a hot shit.”

“Ah Kern. He’s a maniac. He practically killed himself in the Cub today.”

“See? See? That’s you, isn’t it? You’ve always got to be shitting all over Daddy!”

“Kern, that’s not shitting all over Daddy. It’s the truth. I’m only saying, he’s a maniac.”

“But Rink. It’s the same thing! You say maniac. I say hot shit. It just depends on how you look at it, that’s all.”

“Fine Kern, fine,” I said. “If it’s the same thing, let’s call him a maniac.”

“Okay Rink. Fine,” Kern said. “Look, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll call him a maniac if you call him a hot shit.”

Ah Jesus. This was another thing Kern did to me, the old Tom Sawyer–Huck Finn routine. You get my bag of marbles, I get your dead cat.

“Fine, Kern. Deal,” I said. “Now let’s just get this over with, okay? Daddy’s a hot shit.”

“Great! You said it. Now it’s my turn. Daddy’s a maniac. A maniac! Now, that wasn’t so hard Rink, was it?”

“Oh no Kern, no,” I said. “It was easy. Listen, one other thing.”

“Yeah Rink?”

“Kern, you’re a jackass.”

We stripped the old fabric off the Cub that afternoon. As the shop lights cast spooky shadows of us on the walls, we ran our pen-knives down across the fuselage fabric, pulling the stiff linen off the plane in long rectangular sheets. When we got to the wings, the stench of stale butyrate dope greeted us from inside the rib compartments. It had seeped in there and been trapped for years as the Cub baked outside in the hot sun. The smell assaulted our nostrils and filled the barn, and I always liked that first whiff of airplane dope in the fall. It reminded me of the long winter of inebriation that we faced re-doping the plane.

The metal airframe was in better shape than we expected. Here and there the tubular steel framing was pitted with rust, but that could be easily fixed by sanding and then applying a new coat of rustproof paint. The wing structure consisted of aluminum ribs arrayed in a parallel row, held in place by the two metal spars. Except for a dent or two in the sheet metal that formed the leading edge of the wing, the wings were in excellent shape.

Kern and I baled the old fabric with twine and carried it outside to burn in a one hundred-gallon drum. We started a fire with newspaper and kindling, piled on the bales of fabric, and stood back as the highly flammable linen ignited. Then we warmed up some apple cider on the shop hotplate and carried two chairs outside to watch the fire.

Stripping a plane and watching the fabric burn was a Druid ritual for us, and we looked forward to it every fall. Misty snow began to fall and patches of yellow light splashed out the windows from the shop lights. After the first bales of fabric burned down we threw on the rest. Immense orange and purple flames climbed for the trees, vaporizing the falling snow into wisps of steam and crackling up to the branches above.

Kern grabbed a stick and drew a rough map of the country in the snow. We hadn’t talked about the coast to coast flight very much yet and he was anxious to draw me into his scheme.

“Rinker,” he said, “here’s the plan.”

He made little triangular scratchings for the Allegheny Mountains and a long squiggly line for the Ohio River. Then he drew in the Mississippi and the western plains. He’d been looking at the big world air chart out at the airport. You’d think that to get to Los Angeles all we had to do was take off from New Jersey and point the Cub due west, he said, but actually we’d fly a southwest course for most of the trip, cutting a diagonal across the midwest and the Mississippi Valley before we turned right for the “wide open spaces” of the great west.

Kern was very excited about that, the wide open spaces of the west, especially Texas. He talked about places in mythic Texas—Texarkana, Wichita Falls, El Paso—as if he had already been there. The only thing he couldn’t figure out was the Rocky Mountains. They had him stumped, even a little bit afraid.

He was much further along in his thinking than I thought. Still, I wasn’t confident about this trip. I didn’t see why we had to do it.

Kern stared into the flames, brooding with his hands on his chin. He could sense my reluctance and was frustrated by it. He wanted to get through and explain why he wanted to make the flight, but was afraid of how I would react. Whenever my brother turned sincere on me and revealed a part of himself, I would dig into him for it, and my verbal assaults on him wounded him a lot more than I realized at the time. It wasn’t simply the indignity of it. He had this image of what an older brother should be, partly his own expectations, and partly expectations drilled into him by my father. The older boy was supposed to be tough, impervious to insult, such an authority figure that the younger brother wouldn’t dare cross him. But that wasn’t the case with us and this never stopped bothering Kern.

But I had a lot of admiration for the way he got out what he had to say that night, while we were outside watching the fabric burn. He knew that I would probably rip him to shreds but he said it anyway.

During the years that we were learning to fly at Basking Ridge, the star of the strip was a young airshow pilot, Eddie Mahler. Eddie was a legend on the east coast airshow circuit, even nationally, the best of a new breed of stunt pilot that was revolutionizing airshow work. Among other astonishing maneuvers, Eddie was credited with inventing the “inverted ribbon pickup.” Screaming in over a runway with his open-cockpit biplane rolled upside-down, Eddie plucked a ribbon off a pole with his landing gear and then zoomed back up over the crowd. But most of his airshow work was done in a pearl-white T-6 Texan, virtually identical to my father’s. He and my father often flew off for the shows together, buzzing in low over the crowds in their Twin-Texans and doing some formation aerobatics. When they rumbled in with the Texans and threw open their canopies in front of the stands, the show announcers called them Big Eddie and Peg-Leg Buck. Both of us hero-worshiped Eddie and were impressed that my father could fly with him like that, but it wasn’t as big a deal for me. It was the sort of crazyass thing that I expected my father to do. But Kern couldn’t get over it. He was awed by them both.

Kern looked up from the flames.

“Rink, you’re gonna laugh at me for this, but I’m going to say it.”

“Kern, I won’t laugh.”

“Bull, but I want you to know this. Look, I don’t want to be this scrawny little teenager nobody ever heard of, okay? I want to be like Big Eddie Mahler. Flying across the country is the most exciting thing we can do with our lives right now. People will notice. It’ll be a great thing for aviation. Even guys like Big Eddie will have to respect us. Rink, I want to be
known
, okay? And, you know, I wake up in the morning and remember this trip, and I say to myself, 'Jeez, who the hell came up with this crazy idea?’ I mean, I’m afraid of it, Rink, really afraid sometimes, but we have to do it. The only thing I could come up with, the only thing I could think of, was flying coast to coast in the Cub.”

This was a moment, I suspected, when my personality could be fatal for my brother. I tried to get the right words out.

“Kern, I can understand that. I mean, I actually do. But don’t call yourself scrawny, okay?”

“But I am scrawny.”

“Fuck that Kern. We’re
both
scrawny.”

“But Rink, that’s the point! It’s easy for you. You’re an athlete. You’re popular at school. Even when you mooned that old lady everybody loved you for it. All I’ve got is aviation, and I just want to do this one thing really well. Just one thing Rink. One thing! I need you for this. Just help me fly the Cub to California.”

Jesus. I felt I could cry about this. To Kern, everything I did well qualified me as an awful brother. What was I supposed to do? Throw on a pair of dork shorts and play with Louie? Turn myself into an athletic spaz? I wasn’t miserable because Kern blamed me for my success. I was miserable because I couldn’t understand why he just didn’t ignore me.

“Ah shit Kern . . . okay. It’s fine. I don’t want to fight about this. But there’s still one thing I don’t understand.”

“What’s that?”

“Look,” I said. “What do you need me for? If I were in your shoes, I’d make this flight alone. You know, screw the younger brother, just leave his ass at home. Then you get to California and you can hog all the credit for yourself.”

“Rink, no. You’ve got to understand this part. It’s important. I can’t make this trip alone. Jeez, think about it. We’ll hit weather. We’ve got mountains to cross. And the deserts—I think there’s eight hundred miles of deserts between here and L.A. It’ll be a full-time job for me just handling the plane. We’re going to need positive contact with the ground at all times, a navigator, Rink. We can’t get lost. I can’t do both of those jobs at once.”

Most of what he was saying was true, but I wouldn’t appreciate it until we got out there. Part of my problem was that I was less experienced at flying, and I didn’t understand everything that went into it. My brother had always made it look easy, and I took a lot for granted. But mostly I was stalled by my congenital personality clash with Kern. Everything he said and did burned with earnestness and conviction. It was like atmospheric static out there, cluttering up a radio signal. Now that there was really something to be earnest about, I couldn’t hear it.

But I really didn’t want to fight with Kern anymore. I felt awful because he always seemed to be jealous of me. I would have to make the effort.

“All right Kern. I’m going to do this thing for you. For the next six months, you own my ass.”

“No Rink, no. We’re going to do this together, and share everything. I want you to bone up on navigation, study the books, learn the maps. It’s something you’re good at and we’ll need it on the flight. We’re a team, Rink. We’re going to do this as a team.”

Shitbag. A team. I cringed inside when my brother got optimistic and saintly like that, as if we really could reform and become a “team,” mostly because I was afraid that we couldn’t. But I had to try.

“Okay Kern,” I said. “A team. The team approach.”

The wind picked up and the snow started falling harder, slanting down in front of our faces and eddying into swirls around our feet. Kern threw on the last bales of fabric and the flames rose again, throwing shadows of the trees against the barn. When the snow started caking on our hair, we went back inside and worked some more on the plane.

We finished sanding the fuselage on Sunday afternoon. Dusting off our old Sears Roebuck paint compressor, we sprayed on the first coat of military-green zinc paint. As Kern swept over the airframe with the spray-gun, I followed behind with a rag to wipe off any drips.

Kern and Louie had wired the barn for sound. When my father updated the radios in his Texan, they rescued the old low-frequency receiver from the corner of the hangar floor and installed it in the tack room adjoining our shop. The Texan radio was a big heavy tube job dating back to World War II, with these immense, clunky dials that made it look like it belonged in a Soviet spacecraft. They cannibalized a set of speakers out of my grandfather’s old bullet-nosed Studebaker, which sat abandoned out behind the barn. The result was another Buck family shitrig, with a nice assist for Louie, but it worked all right for the shop. The speakers were scratchy and throbbed like bassoons on the low notes, and we could only receive a couple of stations. But one high-powered AM signal came in loud and clear.