I looked closely at the fabric . . . there was a haze of texture, showing through the paint.
"Looks like Ceconite," I said. "Nice job." That would be all the introduction we'd need; one doesn't learn in a day how to tell the difference between Grade-A cotton and Ceconite dacron cloth on old airplanes. "And where did you find the compass?"
He smiled, happy I'd noticed. "Would you believe that I found that in a second-hand store in Dothan, Alabama?
Genuine Royal Air Force compass, 1942. Seven dollars and fifty cents. You tell me how it got there, but I'll tell you I got it out!"
We walked around the Moth, me listening while he talked, and as we did I knew I was clinging to my past, to the known and therefore simple life of flight. Had I been too impulsive, selling the Fleet and chopping the ropes of my yesterdays to go searching for an unknown love? There in the hangar, it was as if my world had become a museum, or an old photograph; a raft cut adrift and floating softly away, slowly into history. . . .
I shook my head, frowned, interrupted the mechanic.
"Is the Moth for sale, Chet?"
He didn't take me seriously. "Every airplane's for sale. Like they say, it's a matter of price. I'm more a builder than a flyer, but I'd want an awful lot of money to sell the Moth, I tell you."
I squatted down and looked beneath the airplane. There was not a trace of oil on the cowling.
Rebuilt a year ago by an aircraft mechanic, I thought, hangared ever since. The Moth was a special find, indeed. I had never for a minute intended to stop flying. I could fly clear across the country, in the Moth. I could fly this airplane to the television interviews, and along the way, I might find my soulmate!
I set my bedroll on the floor for a cushion. It crackled when I sat on it. "How much money is a lot of money if it's cash?"
Chet Davidson went to lunch an hour and a half late. I took the Moth logbooks and manuals with me to the oflice.
"Excuse me, ma'am. You have a telephone, don't you?"
"Sure. Local call?"
•"No."
"Pay phone's just outside the door, sir." "Thank you. You sure have a sweet smile." "Thank you, sir!" A nice custom, wedding-rings. I called Eleanor in New York and told her I'd do the television.
SIX
. HERE'S LEARNINGFUL serenity, comes from sleeping under airplane-wings in country fields: stars and rain and wind color dreams real. Hotels, I found neither educating nor serene.
There's proper balanced nourishment, mixing panbread-flour and streamwater in the civilized wilderness of farmland America. Wolfing peanuts in taxicabs careening toward television studios is not so well-balanced.
There's a proud hurray, when passengers step unharmed from an old two-winger back on the ground again, fear of heights turned to victory. TV-talk forced between paid commercials and the tick of a second-hand, it lacks the same breath of triumph shared.
But she's worth hotels and peanuts and eye-on-the-time interviews, my elusive soulmate, and meet her I would, if I
kept moving, watching, searching through studios in many downtowns.
It did not occur to me to doubt her existing, because I saw almost-hers all about me. I knew from barnstorming that America was pioneered by remarkably attractive women, for their daughters number millions today. A gypsy passing through, I knew them only as lovely customers, sweetly pleasant to watch for the s
pace of a biplane-ride.
My words with them had been practical: The airplane is safer than it looks. If you'll tie your hair with a ribbon before we take off, ma'am, it'll be easier to brush after we land. Yes, it's that windy-ten minutes, after all, in an open cockpit at eighty miles per hour. Thank you. That" will be three dollars, please. You're welcome! I liked the ride, too.
Was it the talk-shows, was it the success of the book, was it my new bank account, or was it simply that I was no longer flying without stop? All at once I was meeting attractive women as never I had before. Intent on my search, I met each of them through a prism of hope: she was the one until she proved me wrong.
Charlene, a television model, might have been my soulmate save that she was too pretty. Invisible flaws in her mirror image reminded her that the Business is cruel, only a few years left to earn a retirement, to save for retraining. We could talk about something else, but not for long. Always she came back to the Business. Contracts, travel, money, agents. It was her way of saying she was frightened, and couldn't think her way out of the murderous silvered glass.
Jaynie had no fear. Jaynie loved parties, she loved drinking. Charming as a sunrise, she clouded and sighed when she found I didn't know where the action was.
Jacqueline neither drank nor partied. Quick and bright by
nature, she couldn't take the brightness for true. "High-school dropout," she said, "not a diploma to my name." Without a diploma, a person can't be educated, can she, and without degrees, a person's got to take what comes and hang on, hang on to the security of cocktail-serving no matter how it scrapes her mind. It's good money, she said. I don't have an education. I had to drop out of school, you understand.