A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
Page 26
Along with his father’s car and a resentful Mary-Beth, Spike had left his faith behind when he quit Wadesville. Though he dutifully filled in ‘Baptist’ on all the Navy forms, he didn’t think about the Lord’s commands, or the blessed grace, or being saved, not even on the bad days when one of his fellow-aviators – hell, one of his friends – bought the farm. That was a friend gone, but you didn’t try to raise the Lord on the radio. Spike was a flier, a man of science, an engineer. You might acknowledge God on paper forms just as you deferred to senior officers around the base; yet the moment you were most you, when you were really Spike Tiggler, the kid who’d grown up from a borrowed car on a quiet road to a roaring fighter in an empty sky, was when you’d climbed hard and were levelling out your silver wings, high up in the clear air south of the Yalu River. Then you were wholly in charge, and you were also most alone. This was life, and the only person who could let you down was yourself. On the nose of his F-86 Spike had painted the slogan ‘Drive It or Milk It!’ as a warning to any MiG unlucky enough to catch Lieutenant Tiggler nearly up its ass.
After the war in Korea he transferred to the Navy’s Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland. When the Russians launched their first Sputnik and Project Mercury got under way, Spike volunteered, even though something inside him – and quite a few aviators outside him – insisted that on the first flights they might as well use a chimpanzee, hell, they were going to use a chimpanzee. The job was just riding a rocket; you were a piece of cargo with wires sticking out, a lump of meat for the scientist to study. Part of him wasn’t disappointed he didn’t make the first seven to be chosen, yet part of him was; and next time around he put in again and got himself accepted. It was front-page on the Fayetteville Observer with a photo, which made Mary-Beth forgive him and write; but seeing as his new wife Betty was going through a jealous period he pretended he’d forgotten this particular girl from Wadesville and her letter received no reply.
In the summer of 1974 Spike Tiggler stood on the surface of the moon and threw a football pass four hundred and fifty yards. Touchdown! This was during a thirty-minute period when no specific tasks had been assigned and the two fellows on the surface were allowed to follow up anything that made them curious. Well, Spike had always been curious to see how far you could throw a football up there in the thin atmosphere, and now he knew. Touchdown! The voice at Mission Control sounded indulgent, and so did fellow-astronaut Bud Stomovicz when Spike said he was going to hop on over and get his ball back. He set off across the dead landscape like a jack rabbit with tubes. The moon looked pretty rough and beat-up to Spike, and the dust he stirred, which settled back in slow motion, was like sand from a dirty beach. His football lay beside a small crater. He kicked it gently into the arid hollow, then turned around to examine the distance he had come. The lunar module, almost out of sight, seemed tiny and precarious, a toy spider with a wheezing battery. Spike was not much given to private thinking on a mission – in any case, the work schedule was devised to discourage introspection – but it struck him that he and Bud (plus Mike still circling above in the command module) were as far as you could currently get from the rest of the human species. Yesterday they had watched the earth rise, and for all their bagful of jokes it had been an awesome sight which turned your head upside down. Now, right here, he felt at the very edge of things. If he walked another ten yards, he might just fall off the world’s wingtip and spin boots over helmet into deepest space. Though he knew such an occurrence to be scientifically impossible, that was how it felt to Spike Tiggler.
At this exact moment a voice said to him, ‘Find Noah’s Ark.’
‘Don’t read you,’ he replied, thinking it must be Bud.
‘Didn’t say a word.’ This time it was Bud’s voice. Spike recognized it, and in any case it came through his earphones in the usual way. The other voice had seemed to come direct, to be around him, inside him, close to him, loud yet intimate.
He’d made it a dozen or so yards back towards the LM when the voice repeated its command. ‘Find Noah’s Ark.’ Spike carried on doing his aerated moon-hop, wondering if this was somebody’s joke. But nobody could have put a recorder in his helmet – there wasn’t room for it, he’d have noticed, they wouldn’t have allowed it. You could drive someone nutsy with a trick like that, and though one or two of his fellow-astronauts had a pretty curveball sense of humor, it mainly stopped at hollowing out a plug in your melon slice, slipping mustard into the hole and replacing the plug. Nothing as big-league as this.
‘You’ll find it on Mount Ararat, in Turkey,’ the voice went on. ‘Find it, Spike.’
There were electrodes monitoring most of Spike’s physical reactions, and he guessed they’d see the needles jumping all over the graphs when this part of the mission was reviewed. If so, it wouldn’t be beyond him to dream up a cover story. For the moment, he just wanted to think about what he’d heard, what it might mean. So when he returned to the LM he made a crack about a fumble by the wide receiver, and went back to being a normal astronaut, that’s to say test pilot turned chimpanzee turned national hero turned Stuntman turned prospective congressman or if not that then future decorative board member of a dozen corporations. He hadn’t been the first man to stand on the moon, but there were never going to be so many that he’d stop being a rarity, a cause for celebrity and reward. Spike Tiggler knew a few of the angles, and Betty a whole lot more, which had helped their marriage along on several occasions. He thought he was getting a tall, athletic girl with a good figure, who read The Joy of Cooking on their honeymoon and kept her fear to herself when he was late returning to base; but she turned out a sight more familiar with the reproductive habits of the dollar than he was. ‘You do the flying and I’ll do the thinking,’ she’d occasionally say to him, which sounded like a tease, or at any rate both of them mostly pretended that it was only a tease. So Spike Tiggler went back to his mission and fulfilled his work schedule and let no-one suspect that anything had changed, that everything had changed.
After splashdown came the personal how-de-do from the White House, then the medical, the debriefing, the first call to Betty, the first night again with Betty … and the fame. In the throbbing cities he’d always distrusted – smug Washington, cynical New York, nutsy San Francisco – Spike Tiggler was big; in North Carolina he was huge. Tickertape was upended on his head like bowls of spaghetti; his right hand discovered the fatigue of congratulation; he was kissed, hugged, pawed, slapped, punched. Small boys would dig in his vest pocket and shamelessly beg for moondust. Most of all, people just wanted to be with him, beside him for a few minutes, breathe in the air that he was breathing out, wonder at the man from outer space who was also the man from the neighboring county. It was after some months of fevered coast-to-coast coddling that the North Carolina state legislature, proud of its boy and a little jealous that he seemed to have somehow become a general property of the nation, announced that they were striking a medal to be awarded at a special ceremony. What more appropriate place, everyone agreed, than at Kitty Hawk, on the flat land beneath the flat sky?
Appropriate words were pronounced that afternoon, yet Spike could only half apprehend them; Betty had on a new outfit with even a hat and needed reassurance that she was looking terrific, which she was, but she didn’t get it. A large gold medal, with the Kitty Hawk on one side and the Apollo capsule on the other, was hung around his neck; Spike’s hand was battered several dozen more times; and all the while, as he gave out the polite smile and the inclination of the head, he was thinking about that moment on the drive, the moment that told him.
It had been cordial, not to say flattering, in the back of the Governor’s limousine, and Betty had been looking so good he thought he should tell her only was shy of doing so in front of the Governor and his wife. There was the usual conversation about gravity and moon-hopping and earth-rise and tell me, what about going to the bathroom, when suddenly, just as they were nearing Kitty Hawk, he saw the Ark by the side of the road. A huge,
beached ark, high at both ends, with slatted wooden sides. The Governor followed Spike’s head indulgently as it panned through 180 degrees, then answered his question without it being put. ‘Some kinda church,’ said the Governor. ‘They stuck it up not long back. Probably got a load of animals in it.’ He laughed, and Betty joined in carefully.
‘Do you believe in God?’ asked Spike all of a sudden.
‘Couldn’t get to be Governor of North Carolina without,’ came the good-humored reply.
‘No, do you believe in God,’ Tiggler repeated, with a directness that could easily be misread for something they didn’t need.
‘Honey,’ said Betty quietly.
‘I sure do think we’re nearly there,’ said the Governor’s wife, straightening a box-pleat with a white-gloved hand.
In their hotel room that evening, Betty was at first inclined to be conciliatory. It must be a strain, she thought, however dandy it might be. I wouldn’t like to get up on platforms and tell everyone for the fiftieth time what it was like and how proud it made me feel, even if it did make me feel proud and I did want to talk about it for the fiftieth time. So she mothered him a little and asked if he was feeling tired, and tried to get him to spit out any excuse as to why not once, not once in the whole damn day, had he mentioned her outfit, and didn’t he know how uncertain she was whether primrose yellow was really her color. But this failed to work, and so Betty, who could never get to sleep unless things were out in the open, asked him if he wanted a drink and why had he gone all funny on them just before the ceremony, and if he wanted her frank opinion the soonest way to foul up the future career they’d both agreed on was for him to start asking State Governors whether or not they believed in God, for Christ’s sake. Who did he think he was?
‘My life has changed,’ said Spike.
‘Are you trying to tell me something?’ Betty was normally suspicious and couldn’t help noticing how many letters a famous man is liable to receive from women who didn’t know him, from the Mary-Beths and all the potential Mary-Beths of the world.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘You come back to where you started from. I went 240,000 miles to see the moon – and it was the earth that was really worth looking at.’
‘You do need a drink.’ She paused, half-way across the room to the frigobar, but he hadn’t spoken, or moved, or gestured. ‘Heck, I need a drink.’ She sat down beside her husband with a sour mash and waited.
‘When I was a kid my Pa took me to Kitty Hawk. I was twelve, thirteen. It made me into an aviator. That’s all I wanted to do from that day.’
‘I know, honey.’ She took his hand.
‘I joined the Navy. I was a good aviator. I transferred to Pax River. I volunteered for Project Mercury. I didn’t get accepted at first but I kept on and they accepted me in the end. I was listed for Project Apollo. I did all the training. I landed on the moon.’
‘I know, honey.’
‘ … and there … there,’ he went on, squeezing Betty’s hand as he prepared to tell her for the first time, ‘God told me to find Noah’s Ark.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I’d just thrown the football. I’d just thrown the football and found it and kicked it into a little crater and was wondering if I was out of range of the camera and if they’d call a foul if they spotted it, when God speaks to me. Find Noah’s Ark.’ He looked across at his wife. ‘It was like, here you are a grown man and you make it to the moon and what do you want to do? Throw footballs. Time to start putting away childish things, that’s what God was telling me.’
‘How you sure it was God, honey?’
Spike ignored the question. ‘I didn’t tell anyone. I know I’m not hallucinating, I know I’ve heard what I’ve heard, but I don’t tell. Maybe I’m not quite sure, maybe I want to forget it. And what happens? The very day I go back to Kitty Hawk, where it all started all those years ago, the very day I go back I see the God-damn Ark. Don’t forget what I said – that’s His message, isn’t it? Loud and clear. That’s what it means. Go ahead and get your medal, but don’t forget what I said.’
Betty took a sip of her whisky. ‘So what you gonna do, Spike?’ Normally, when discussing his career, she said we rather than you; this time he was out on his own.
‘I don’t know yet. I don’t know yet.’
The NASA psychiatrist that Betty consulted had a good line in nodding, as if to suggest that she’d have to tell him something far more outrageous before he’d throw down his pen and admit the fellow was minus some buttons, crazier than a bedbug. He nodded, and said how he and his colleagues had been anticipating a few adjustment problems, after all someone who went to the moon and looked back at the earth must be a bit like the first guy who ever stood on his head and took in the view from that direction, which might affect your behavioral pattern, and what with the stress of the flight and the enormous publicity attending the missions, it wasn’t altogether surprising that one or two reality shifts might have taken place, but there was no reason to believe that their effects might be either serious or long-lasting.
‘You’re not answering my question.’
‘What is your question?’ The psychiatrist was not aware that she’d asked one.
‘Is my husband – I don’t know what technical term you might use, doctor – is my husband a fruitcake?’
There was a lot more nodding, this time in a horizontal rather than vertical plane, and examples of perceptual disorientation were given, and Spike’s records were examined, on every one of which he had firmly written Baptist, and it seemed to Betty that the psychiatrist would have been more surprised if Spike hadn’t heard God speak to him on the moon’s surface, and when she asked him ‘But was Spike hallucinating?’ he merely replied, ‘What do you think?’ which didn’t seem to Betty to advance the conversation, indeed it was almost as if she was the crazy one for doubting her husband. One result of the meeting was that Betty went away feeling she had betrayed her husband rather than helped him; and the other was that when, three months later, Spike put in for release from the space program there wasn’t much serious opposition to his request as long as the whole thing was handled low-profile, because what was clear from the psychiatrist’s report was that Spike was minus some buttons, crazier than a bedbug, a fifty-carat fruitcake, and that he probably believed after close personal inspection that the moon was made of green cheese. So there was a move to a desk job in general media promotions, then a Navy transfer back to trainers, but within a year of hopping around in the gray ash Spike Tiggler was back in civvies and Betty was wondering what happened when you fell off the box car of the gravy train.
It was Spike’s announcement that he had booked the Moondust Diner in Wadesville for the first of his fund-raising get-togethers that moved Betty to wonder if the most painless thing wouldn’t be to close The Joy of Cooking and head for an early divorce. Spike had done nothing for nearly a year except go out one day and buy a Bible. Then he’d go missing in the course of the evening, and she’d find him on the back porch, the Scripture open on his knees and his eyes turned upward to the stars. Her friends were exhaustingly sympathetic: after all it must be tough coming back from up there and having to readjust to the daily grind. It was clear to Betty that the fame of Touchdown Tiggler could run for quite a few years without having to put any more gas in the tank, and it was equally clear she could count on support – since fame followed by crack-up was not just American, but almost downright patriotic – but even so she felt cheated. All those years of doing what was right by Spike’s career, of being shunted around the country, never quite having a proper home, waiting, hoping for the big payout … and then, when it comes, when those big round dollars come cascading out of the machine, what does Spike do? Instead of holding out his hat and catching them, he hits the back porch and looks at the stars. Meet my husband, he’s the one with the Bible on his knees and the torn pants and the funny look in his eye. No, he didn’t get himself attacked, he just jumped off the box car of the gravy train.