Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (Illusions 1)

16

Hardware stores are always long places, shelves going back into forever.

In Hayward Hardware I had gone hunting back in the dim, needing three eighths-inch nuts and bolts and lock washers for the tail skid of the Fleet. Shimoda browsed patiently as I looked, since of course he didn't need anything from a hardware store. The whole economy would collapse, I thought, if everybody was like him, making whatever they wanted out of thought-forms and thin air, repairing things without parts or labor.

At last I found the half-dozen bolts I needed and journeyed with them back toward the counter, where the owner had some soft music playing. Green sleeves; it was a melody that has haunted me happily since I was a boy, played now on a lute over some hidden sound system. . . strange to find in a town of four hundred souls.

Turned out it was strange for Hayward, too, for it wasn't a sound system at all. The owner sat tilted back on his woo en stool at the counter, and listened to the messiah play the notes on a cheap six string guitar from the sale shelf. It was a lovely sound, and I stood quiet there paying my seventy-three cents and being haunted again by the tune. Perhaps it was the tinny quality of the cheap instrument, but it still sounded far misty other-century England.

"Donald, that's beautiful! I didn't know you could play the guitar!"

going to say, 'You never felt that way about guitars, did you ? "'

"You never felt that way about guitars, did you?"

"And this sinking feeling I have right now, Don, tells me that is how you learned to fly. You just got into the Travel Air one day and you flew it. Never been up in an airplane before."

"My, you are intuitive."

"You didn't take the flying test for your license? no, wait. You don't even have a license, do you? A regular flying license."

He looked at me strangely, the whisper of a smile as though I had dared him to come up with a license and he knew that he could do it.

"You mean the piece of paper, Richard? That kind of license?"

"Yes, the piece of paper."

He didn't reach into his pocket or bring out his wallet. He just opened his right hand and there was a flying license, as though he had been carrying it around, waiting for me to ask. It wasn't faded or bent, and I thought that ten seconds ago it hadn't existed at all.

But I took it and looked. It was an official pilot's certificate, Department of Transportation seal on it, Donald William Shimoda, with an Indiana address, licensed commercial pilot with ratings for single- and multi-engine land airplanes, instruments, and gliders.

"You don't have your seaplane ratings, or helicopter?"

"I'll have those if I need to have them," he said so mysteriously that I burst out laughing before he did. The man sweeping the walk of the International Harvester place looked at us and smiled, too.

"What about me?" I said. "I want my airline transport rating:'

"You're gonna have to forge your own licenses," he said.

17

On the Jeff Sykes radio talk show, I saw a Donald Shimoda I had never seen before. The show began at 9:00 p.m. and went till midnight, from a room no bigger than a watchmaker's, lined about with dials and knobs and racks of tape-cartridge commercial spots.

Sykes opened by asking if there wasn't something illegal about flying around the country in an ancient airplane, taking people for rides.

The answer is no, there is nothing illegal about it, the planes are inspected as carefully as any jet transport. They are safer and stronger than most sheet-metal modern airplanes, and all that's needed is a license and a farmer's permission. But Shimoda didn't say that. "No one can stop us from doing what we want to do, Jeff," he said.

Now that is quite true, but it had none of the tact that is called for when you are talking with a radio audience that is wondering what is going on, these airplanes flying around. A minute after he said that, the call-director telephone began lighting up on Sykes' desk.

"We have a caller on line one," Sykes said. "Go ahead, ma'am."

&nb

sp; "Am I on the air?"

"Yes, ma'am, you are on the air and our guest is Mr. Donald Shimoda, the airplane flier. Go ahead, you are on the air."

"Well, I'd like to tell that fellow that not everybody gets to do what they want to do and that some people have to work for their living and hold down a little more responsibility than flying around with some carnival!"