On the Wing (6 page)

“It has always been a way to clarify my thinking somewhat, and in the years that you and I have been together, it has been a way for me to prepare the witty aphorisms, entertaining anecdotes, and penetrating commentary that I use to impress, entertain, and seduce you.”

“Do you have anything ready?”

“More or less.”

“Speak.”

“I've been reflecting on my role in this adventure.”

“Are we having an adventure?”

“Life is an adventure.”

“Not when I'm waiting on line at the pharmacy.”

“Okay, but this part of our life together is an adventure, and I've been reflecting on my role in it. After all, there you are, at the wheel, clearly the driver, or pilot, and here I am, beside you, with a folder of maps at the ready—”

“A handsome leather folder of maps.”

“Yes. Very manly. I appreciate that. But even with my maps I can't be considered the navigator, since you have chosen the route in advance and printed turn-by-turn directions from three map sites on the World Wide Web.”

“Oh. I see. I'm sorry—”

“No need. No need. I've defined my role, and I'm happy in it.”

“Stud muffin?”

“Not while you're driving.”

“Ye gods, what good are you, then?”

“Exactly the question, I think, that teenage boys used to ask themselves when they cadged rides from friends who had driver's licenses and the use of the family car when they had neither themselves.”

“What good am I?” she cried to the open sky above the crystalline plastic top of the Electro-Flyer in excellent imitation of the wail of a boy whose voice is still changing.

“And the answer, I've decided, is that I am fulfilling the role that in my teenage years was called ‘riding shotgun.'”

“Now why did you call it that?” she asked, speaking this time in the manner of Mr. MacPherson, my high school French teacher, an enthusiastic student of idiom.

“I'm glad you asked,” I said. “I can answer with confidence because as a boy I spent many Saturday mornings at the Babbington Theater, watching westerns.” In the voice of one who knows, I said, “My dear Albertine, we teenage boys used the term because when we were even younger boys we had heard it used so often in westerns that involved stagecoach travel. In those movies, there were always bands of marauding bandits. I should point out that many of those bandits were actually good guys who, through no fault of their own, often just because of a case of mistaken identity, had been driven out of polite society and found themselves forced to turn to banditry to make a living. I don't mean to suggest that all the bad guys were good guys forced to be bad—many were actually bad—most of them, in fact. Sometimes they were greedy, and sometimes they were just mean. They had been brought up that way, I guess, or perhaps they had been starved for affection during childhood. Something like that. Anyway, the point that was brought home again and again to an impressionable boy in the Babbington Theater was that driving a stagecoach through the Old West was a dangerous undertaking, especially if the stage was carrying something valuable that bad guys would want, like gold or the new school marm or somebody's bride from Back East. The hills out there were crawling with bad guys. So, a stagecoach required, in addition to a driver, a second man sitting beside the driver, his right-hand man, right up there on the seat where the driver sat, a man who could fight off the bad guys if they attacked. This second—but equally important—man held, across his lap, at the ready, a shotgun. He wasn't driving. He was ‘riding shotgun.' And here am I riding shotgun for you, so that you can concentrate on your driving, secure in the knowledge that if any bad guys come galloping up beside us with evil intent—I will scare them away with the handsome leather folder of maps that I have lying across my lap, at the ready.”

“That's my guy,” she said.

What I hadn't told her, what I am telling her only now, in this sentence, on this page, is that the guy riding shotgun for her was on the alert for signs of flyguys in the sky, and if he saw them in the rearview mirror or heard the ominous sound of their blades chopping the air, he meant to use his handsome leather book of maps to suggest evasive action—a sudden side trip to someplace hard to spot from the air. He would insist. If necessary, he would plead. If it came to that, he would take the wheel.

Chapter 5

Once Bitten

Ladies and gentlemen,… I … hardly know where to begin, to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes …

Carl Phillips, radio commentator, in Howard Koch's adaptation of H. G. Wells's
The War of the Worlds

THE DAY WAS NEARLY PERFECT for traveling: clear and cool and still. As I pulled onto the road, my heart was full of the mad hope that
Spirit
might on this promising day take to the air and fly me to my next stop.

“Let's go,
Spirit,
” I coaxed her. “Let's rise up, leave the hard pavement below us, and soar into the clear, cool air. Come on, let's go!”

“Oh, please,” she said with a yawn.

“What's the matter?”

“It's so early.”

“But it's such a wonderful morning. Don't you feel the urge to get up and go?”

“Not at all. I'm still tired from yesterday. All that traveling! I've never done anything like that in my life.”

“No,” I said, reluctantly admitting the truth of it, “I guess you haven't.”

“Couldn't we just take it easy today and kind of glide along at a nice easy pace? On the ground?”

“Okay,” I said, but I didn't try to hide my disappointment.

“If I have an easy day today, I might be able to get up into the air tomorrow.”

“If you're making a bargain, I'm going to hold you to it,” I said.

“Of course. I'm an aerocycle of my word.”

So, off we went, at an easy pace. I realize now, in retrospect, that, for the sake of my account, I should have stopped one night in Manhattan. If I had, this chapter might have included some Manhattan adventures. At the time, though, the city seemed an obstacle that stood in the way of my real journey and my real adventure, which lay beyond New York, in the West, so I pushed on through without stopping at all, and we traveled without adventures for the entire day, pleasantly and uneventfully, if slowly, stopping once for gas, and once for lunch, and briefly now and then so that I could stretch my legs and she could rest, until we found ourselves deep in New Jersey, late in the afternoon.

As the shadows began to lengthen and I began to turn my thoughts to dinner, I began to feel that something was odd, though I wasn't quite sure what made me feel that way.

“
Spirit,
” I whispered, “there's something strange going on.”

“What?”

“I don't know—it's hard to put into words—I've just got a strange feeling.”

“You're not giving me much to go on.”

“Well, it feels as if people are watching me—watching us.”

“I suppose it isn't every day that a kid comes flying through these parts on a graceful and gorgeous aerocycle. Of course people are watching.”

“Yeah, but this is more like—surveillance.”

“You've seen too many—” she began, but she broke off, and in a moment said,
sotto voce,
“You're right. We seem to be attracting notice.”

“That's it,” I said, “attracting notice. Am I right that there are some people—keeping an eye on us?”

“You are,” she said. “They're acting as if they're going about their business, but there's something phony about them.”

“They're evenly spaced,” I pointed out, “as if they've been stationed there.”

“Like sentries,” she said with a chill in her voice.

“Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“In the road—ahead—a roadblock.”

“Wow,” she said, and from her tone I could tell that, like me, she found two emotions vying for dominance within her: (1) a fear of the authorities, and (2) pride in our seeming important enough or threatening enough for the authorities to put up a roadblock against us.

I began slowing long before we reached the roadblock, lest the small mob assembled there get the idea that I intended to run it.

“This is my first roadblock,” I confessed to
Spirit.

“Mine, too,” she said, as if I didn't know.

“I'm a little nervous.”

“Me, too.”

There were four police officers manning the roadblock. They wore enormous pistols on their hips. The people in the growing crowd around them were also armed. Shotguns, cradled like babies, were the weapon of choice, and pitchforks, held like lances, the tines directed at
Spirit
and me, were a close second.

I came to a stop, wiped my sweaty palms on my pants legs, swallowed hard, and said, “Hello,” as innocently as I could.

“Don't come no closer,” said the largest of the cops.

“Sorry,” I said, pushing with my heels to back
Spirit
up a bit. “Was I too close? This is my first roadblock—”

“Don't try no funny stuff.”

“No, sir,” I said, shaking my head. “You won't get any funny stuff from me. Not at all. You can ask anybody—”

“Where have you come from?” asked the closest of the pitchforkers.

Tentatively, apologetically, fearing, for the first time in my life, that it might be the wrong answer, I said, “Babbington.”

“Is that on our planet?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Sure,” I said. “It's just back that way—” I raised my arm to point, and the crowd stiffened, brandishing their weapons. The cops put their hands on their pistol butts. I held my own hands up to show that I was neither armed nor up to any funny stuff, and said, “It's on Long Island—in New York.”

“Oh, yeah? New York?”

“Right.”

“Quick: who plays center field for the Yankees?”

“Mickey Mantle.”

“What does the Statue of Liberty hold in her right hand?”

“In her right hand? I—ah—” I struck Liberty's pose to ensure that I didn't confuse her hands. “A torch,” I announced authoritatively.

“Who is Popeye's nemesis?”

“I—ah—his nemesis—um—Pluto? No—Bluto!”

At once the crowd that had seemed so hostile became warm and welcoming. My interrogator shifted his pitchfork so that the end of its handle rested on the ground with its tines pointing upward. He seemed as relieved as I that the interrogation had gone so well.

“You've got to excuse us,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “Once bitten, twice shy, you know.”

“Who bit you?” I asked.

“Martians.”

“Martians?”

“You don't believe me?”

I sensed that stiffening again, so I was quick to answer, “Of course I believe you. I just didn't know that Martians—um—bit. I thought they used—well—ray guns.”

“You trying to be funny?”

“No, sir! It's just that—I don't know—Martians that bite—”

“It's just an expression,” one of the cops offered helpfully. “Probably derived from experience with dogs, but extended to a wide range of experiences, essentially suggesting that after a bad experience a person tends to be cautious when presented with a similar situation.”

“Is your name MacPherson?” I asked. I couldn't help myself.

“MacPherson? No. Why do you ask?”

“Because my French teacher, back in Babbington, is named MacPherson, and he's very interested in words and phrases that don't mean quite what they seem to mean, like saying ‘once bitten, twice shy' when you mean being cautious after a bad experience.”

“In our case it was a bad experience with Martians,” the interrogator said, evidently not particularly interested in Mr. MacPherson.

“That's incredible!” I said enthusiastically.

“I'm going to assume that you mean ‘amazing' or ‘astonishing' or something like that and not ‘unbelievable.' Am I right?”

“Yes, sir. Definitely. Amazing. Astonishing. Um—tell me about it.”

“That would best be done by Lem here,” he said, beckoning to a venerable member of the armed mob. “He's kind of our local historian.”

“Ahhh,” objected Lem, with a dismissive flap of the hand. “He ain't goin' to believe me no more'n any o' the other outsiders.”

“Now take it easy, Lemuel,” said the largest of the cops, gently. “Don't go getting yourself into a lather. Why don't you tell the boy what happened? Then he'll be able to pass the truth along, and then someday everybody'll know what really happened here.”

Lem shook his head petulantly and looked at his shoes.

“Once bitten, twice shy?” I offered.

“How's that?” asked Lem.

“I guess you've had a bad experience with people you've told the story to,” I said. “Outsiders, I mean.”

“Oh. Yeah. That's so. Say, you catch on right quick.”

“I sure would like to hear about the Martians,” I said.

Lem came forward, took a position beside
Spirit,
turned to me, incidentally, and to the crowd at large, primarily, and began, “Pretty near a score of years ago, Martians landed here, in Hopper's Knoll, at Gurney's farm.”

One of the assembled multitude raised a hand, evidently acknowledging his status as Gurney.

“They came in a spaceship that they had disguised so's it would look like a meteor, but when you got close to it you could see it was more of a kind of yellowish-white cylinder.”

Gurney took a step forward and volunteered, “When it come in out of the sky, I was listening to the radio, kind of halfway listening and halfway dozing, when I heard a hissing sound, kind of like a Fourth of July rocket, and then—bingo!—something smacked the ground. Knocked me out of my chair.”