Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (Illusions 1)
By Autumn, I had flown south with the warm air. Good fields were few, but the crowds got bigger all the time. people had always liked to fly in the biplane, and these days more of them were staying to talk and to toast marshmallows over my campfire.
Once in a while somebody who hadn't really been much sick said they felt better for the talking, and the people next day
would look at me strangely, move closer, curious. More than once I flew away early.
No miracles happened, although the Fleet was running better than ever she had, and on less gas. She had stopped throwing oil, stopped killing bugs on her propeller and windscreen. The colder air, no doubt, or the little fellas getting smart enough to dodge.
Still, one river of time had stopped for me that summer noon when Shimoda had been shot. It was an ending I could neither believe nor understand; it was stalled there and I lived it a thousand times again, hoping it might somehow change. It never did. What was I supposed to learn that day?
One night late in October, after I got scared and left a crowd in Mississippi, I came down in a little empty place just big enough to land the Fleet.
Once again before I slept, I thought back to that last moment-why did he die ? There was no reason for it. If what he said was true ....
There was no one now to talk with as we had talked, no one to learn from, no one to stalk and attack with my words, to sharpen my new bright mind against. Myself? Yes, but I wasn't half the fun that Shimoda had been, who taught by keeping me always off-balance with his spiritual karate.
Thinking this I slept, and sleeping, dreamed.
* * * * * * *
He was kneeling on the grass of a meadow his back to me, patching the hole in the side of the Travel Air where the shotgun blast had been. There was a roll of Grade-A aircraft fabric and a can of butyrate dope by his knee.
I knew that I was dreaming, and I knew also that this was real. "DON!"
He stood slowly and turned to face me, smiling at my sorrow and my joy.
"Hi, fella," he said.
I couldn't see for tears. There is no dying, there is no dying at all, and this man was my friend.
"Donald! . . . You're alive! What are you trying to do ?" I ran and threw my arms around him and he was real. I could feel the leather of his flying jacket, crush his arms inside it.
"Hi," he said. "Do you mind ? What I am trying to do is to patch this hole, here."
I was so glad to see him, nothing was impossible.
"With the dope and fabric ?" I said. "With dope and fabric you're trying to fix. .. ? You don't do it that way, you see it perfect, already done . . ." and as I said the words I passed my hand like a screen in front of the ragged bloody hole and when my hand moved by, the hole was gone. There was just pure mirror-painted airplane left, seamless fabric from nose to tail.
"So that's how you do it!" he said, his dark eyes proud of the slow learner who made good at last as a mental mechanic.
I didn't find it strange; in the dream that was the way to do the job.
There was a morning fire by the wing, and a frying pan balanced over it. "You're cooking something, Don! You know, I've never seen you cook anything. What you got ?"
"Pan-bread," he said matter-of-factly. "The one last thing I want to do in your life is show you how this is done."
He cut two pieces with his pocket knife and handed me one. The flavor is still with me as I write . . . the flavor of sawdust and old library paste, warmed in lard.
"What do you think ?" he said.
"Don ..."
"The Phantom's Revenge," he grinned at me. "I made it with plaster." He put his part back in the pan. "To remind you, if ever you want to move somebody to learn, do it with your knowing and not with your pan-bread, OK?"
"NO! Love me, love my pan-bread! It's the staff of life, Don!"
"Very well. But I guarantee--your first supper with anybody is going to be your last if you feed them that stuff."
We laughed and were quiet, and I looked at him in the silence.