“Detroit-Parks. Not too many of them made, so don’t feel bad you didn’t know her. Wright engine. You should have been able to tell the Wright, way it’s all covered with oil.”
“Adams, the name. Lyle. Yeah. Wright stop throwing oil and you better look out. Mind if I look inside?”
Headlights wash the biplane as the pickup turns and rolls closer. The door squeaks open and there are footsteps on the gravel.
“This is a nice little airplane. Look at that. Booster magneto, isn’t it? Boy. Haven’t seen an airplane with a booster mag since I was a kid. And a spark advance. Hey. This is a real flying machine!”
“Nice to hear those words, sir. Most people look at her and wonder how such an old pile of sticks and rag ever get into the air.”
“No, no. Fine airplane. Hey, you want to put her in the hangar tonight? I’ll roll one of the Ag-Cats out and we can swing you right on in. Never matter if it rain on the Gat. Throw a cockpit cover on her, is all.”
“Why, thank y’, Lyle. Doesn’t look like we’ll be getting any rain tonight, though, and I want to be gone before the sun’s up tomorrow. Kinda hard to pull out of a hangar for one guy to do. We been sleeping out anyway.”
“Suit yourself. But I start dusting about sunup anyway; I’ll be out here.”
“That’s OK. Got a place to get some gas, by the way? Might as well get her all filled up tonight.”
“Sure thing. And I’ll drive you down to the café to dinner, if you want.”
* * *
Dinner at the café, with little bits of Louisiana thrown in for flavor. Lyle Adams is a Yankee. Came south to do a little dusting and turned out he liked it and stayed and started his own dusting business. Spraying, nowadays, mostly spraying and seeding. Not a whole lot of dusting still being done. The big modern Ag-Cat is a misty distant offspring of the Parks and her era. A wor
king airplane, with a chemical hopper instead of a front cockpit, all metal and biplane. The Cat looks modern and efficient, and is both. Adams trusts it wholly, loves the machine.
“Great airplane, great airplane. All that wing, she just turns on a dime and gets right back into the field. Course she’s not like an old airplane at all. I used to fly a Howard, up in Minnesota. Take hunters and fishermen out to places where no one’d ever been before. Land in the fields . . . I remember one time I took four of these guys way up north . . .”
The hours spin around swiftly, as they always do when new friends meet. At last the café lights go out and we rattle back in the ADAMS FLYING SERVICE pickup truck to the black green grass under the black yellow wing under a shimmering black sky.
“You sure got a lot of stars down here, Lyle.”
“Kind of a nice place to live, all right. If you like to farm. If you like to fly airplanes, too. Pretty nice place. You’re welcome to sleep at the house, now, like I say. Can’t say as I’d make you come, though, night like this. Fact, I should bring my bag out and sleep under that wing with you. Long time since I done any of that. . . .”
The handshake in the dark, the wishes for good sleep, the assurances of meeting when the sun comes up tomorrow, and the pickup is crunching away, dwindling its light, quiet, turning the corner, flickering behind a row of trees, gone.
9
MORNING. NO, NOT MORNING EVEN, just a glow in the direction from which we came last night. The sleeping bag is stowed away in the front cockpit, and with it the last bit of warmth in all the state of Louisiana. The air that I breathe steams about me and the rubber of the tall old tires is brittle and hard. My fingers don’t work well at pulling the cowling hold-down clips. The gasoline, as I drain a little of it to check for water, is like liquid hydrogen across my hands. Perhaps I should warm the oil. Drain it out and put it in a big can over the fire, the way the barnstormers used to do with their oil on cold nights. Too late now. Pull the drain plug this morning and the oil wouldn’t even pour. It would just lie there in the tank and huddle for warmth.
White lights sweep suddenly across the Parks, and rolling truck wheels crunch again on the gravel.
“Morning!”
“Oh, morning, Lyle. How are you, beside frozen solid?”
“Cold? Man, this is great weather! Little chill makes you feel like workin’, of a morning. You ‘bout ready for breakfast?”
“Don’t think so, this morning. Want to go as far as we can today, use all the daylight. Thanks the same.”
“What daylight you talking about? Sun won’t be up enough to fly by for another half hour. And you’ve got to have some breakfast. Hop in, cafe’s just a minute down the road.”
I should explain that I don’t like breakfasts. I should tell him that the time till sunup should be spent warming the engine. Perhaps the engine won’t even start, in the cold, or it might take half an hour to get it to fire.
But the pickup’s door is open in the dark, it is clear that everyone in this state expects a person to eat breakfast, and the task of explaining my hurry is much more difficult than stepping into a truck and closing a door. So I’ll lose half an hour, trade it for a doughnut and a quick view of a duster pilot’s morning.
A Louisiana duster pilot, I discover, knows everyone in town, and everyone in town is at the café before sunup. As we walk heavy-booted into the bright-lit room, setting the brass doorbells jingling, the sheriff and the farmers look around from their coffee to wish a good morning to the president of the Adams Flying Service. And they mean it, for his good mornings, with smooth air and without wind, are theirs, too. In the calm, his ag-planes can work constantly over their fields, seeding and spraying and killing leaf rollers and lygus bugs and darkling ground beetles, animals that once destroyed both fields and farmers. Lyle Adams is an important and respected man in Rayville.
I collect stares for my strangeness and scarf and heavy flying jacket, Lyle Adams, who lives the same world as I, who worries about engines and flies open-cockpit biplanes every day from the Rayville Airport, collects “Mornin’,” and “How’re’y’?” and “You workin’ the rice today, aren’t y’, Lyle?” My host is not an aviator in this town, he is a businessman and a farmer, and a little bit of a savior, a protecting god.