“I’m having a party over at my house … wonder if I could hire you to give us a little airshow. We’re just on the edge of town, right over there.”
“Doubt if you’d see much,” I said. “My minimum altitude is fifteen hundred feet above the ground, and I’d start at three thousand. Be just a little speck to you, is all.”
“That doesn’t make any difference. Could you give us a show for say … twenty-five dollars?”
“Sure thing, if you want it. But I’m not coming down less than fifteen hundred feet.”
“Fine.” He took two tens and a five-dollar bill from his wallet. “Could you be up at seven-thirty?”
“No problem. You keep your money, though. If you think it was worth it, you can stop by and give us the money tomorrow. If you don’t like it, don’t bother.”
At seven-thirty we were over the cornfields at the edge of town, and starting our first loop. By seven-forty the show was over, and we circled down over the park to watch the baseball game.
When we landed, Stu had two passengers ready to go.
“Give us a wild ride!” they said.
They got the Standard Wild Ride; steep turns, sideslips, with the wind smashing over them, dives and zooms. They were as gay and excited in the air as though the biplane was the biggest fastest roller-coaster in the world, and all of a sudden I was surprised at it. During the minutes we had been flying, I was thinking about moving out of Monmouth, and wondered where we might go next. I wasn’t seeing the ride as wild or the Parks as a roller-coaster. Fun, perhaps, in a mild sort of way, and interesting, but hardly exciting.
A revelation, that, and a warning of evil. The summer was beginning to go stale, I was taking even the strange and adventurous life of a gypsy pilot for granted, and as just another job.
I pulled the airplane up into a half-roll, which set them to clutching the leather cockpit-rim in fearful delight, and talked out loud to myself. “Hey listen, Richard! That’s the wind! Hear it through the wires, feel it on your face, beating these goggles! Wake up! This is here and now, and time for you to be alive! Snap out of it! See! Taste! Wake up!”
All at once I could hear again … the blast and concussion of the Whirlwind went from an unheard Niagara to the roar of a wild old engine again, a highspeed metronome firing dynamite with each beat of its blade.
That magnificent perfect sound … how long had it been since I had ceased to listen to it? Weeks. That sun, bright as incandescent steel in a blue-fire sky … how long since I had leaned back my head and held the taste of that sun in my mouth? I opened my eyes and looked right up into it and drank the heat of it. I took off one glove and grabbed a handful of wind, never breathed by anybody in ten billion years, and I grabbed it and snuffed it deep within me.
The people ahead of you, Richard, open your eyes! Who are they? Look at them! See! They changed at once from passengers into living people, a young man, a young woman, bright and happy and beautiful in the way that we are all beautiful when we are for a moment completely unconscious of ourselves, when we are looking out toward something that absorbs us completely.
We banked again, steeply, and they looked together down fifteen feet of brilliant lemon wings and nine hundred feet of hard transparent air and five feet of corn-plant sea and a tenth-inch of black loam, stuffed with minerals. Wings, air, corn, loam, minerals and birds and lakes and roads and fences and cows and trees and grass and flowers—every bit of it moved in a great sweeping stroke of colors, and the colors went in through the wide open eyes of these fellow-people of mine, and deep into their hearts, to surface in a smile or a laugh and the brave beautiful look of those who have not yet chosen to die.
Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop tasting and feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and the sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask, if you must, to protect the kid from the world, but if you let that kid disappear, buddy, you are grown up and you are dead.
The tall old wheels rumbled and thumped on earth soft as a giant petrified pillow, and the flight, the first ride for my passengers and the thousandth for me, was over. They became conscious of themselves again and said thank you that was great and paid Stu six dollars and got into their automobile and drove away. I said thank you, it’s been nice flying with you, and I was absolutely dead certain that we would all remember our flight together for a very long time.
That night, Stu and I laid out the couch cushions into islands of soft on the office floor, cast mild and pleasant wrath upon the man who never returned to pay us for our $25 air-show, and settled down with strawberry soda pop in mosquitoless air. The only light in the room came from the sun, reflected off the moon bright enough to show the colors of the biplane outside.
“Stuart Sandy MacPherson,” I said. “Who the devil are you?”
The boy’s mask of solemn quiet was more and more clearly a pure fake, for quiet solemn people do not jump from the wings of airplanes a mile in the air, or travel half-way across the country to become a barnstormer. Even Stu realized that the question was in order, and didn’t dodge it.
“Sometimes I’m not too sure who I am,” he said. “I was on the varsity tennis team, in high school, if that helps you very much. I did some mountain climbing …”
I blinked. “You mean regular mountain climbing? With the ropes and pitons and crampons and rock walls and all that? Or do you mean just hills that you can walk up?”
“The whole works. It was fun. Until I got hit on the head with a rock. Knocked me out for a while. I was lucky I was roped to the guy ahead of me.”
“You were just dangling there in space, at the end of a rope?”
“Yeah.”
“Boy.”
“Yeah. Well, then I quit mountain climbing and took up flying. Got my private license. Flying Piper Cubs.”
“Stu! Why didn’t you say you had your license? You know, my gosh! You’re supposed to tell us things like that!”
I thought, in the darkness, that he shrugged.