To the Wild Sky

by Ivan Southall

  Even Mark was aghast. He couldn’t believe that this had happened to Colin – Colin, the brother who took everything so seriously, who always did the right thing. He looked like one of those horrible men who got drunk and sat in gutters. Mark just didn’t understand. Colin had looked forward to it all so much, he’d been so excited about it.

  4.

  Jim

  Jan sat perfectly still. She was sweating like a statue of ice thawing in a warm room. Oh, she wished Jim wouldn’t climb so steeply. Jim soared the plane like a kite, he seemed to hang the Egret from her propeller blades as one might hang a sheet to a high line from a single peg.

  The earth beneath, the lake, the plains, seemed to lean back and slide over the edge of the world. The Egret could climb, really climb; her makers had intended that she should. They had sold more of her kind to the armies of the world than they had sold to people like the Hennessys. The Egret in army parlance had another name, a name that expressed her toughness, her usefulness, her lust for work.

  Jim took her up and up and the earth flattened into formlessness, heat-hazed, became a vast raft of drab reds and yellows and purples, that continued to tilt, continued to slide over the edge of the world. The sky ahead was streaked with wind, with long streamers of cloud fragmented like foam on a beach.

  Jan held on, fighting against herself, clutching the stout paper bag that Jim had given her, eyes closed now against the glare, nostrils dilated, nerves plucking at her knees and thighs, trembling inside, still unaware of Colin’s plight, cut off from it by the engine’s roar and her tense concern for the delicate balance of her own stomach. But Jim was not unaware of it; he smelt it first, threw a hand to his head in irritation, and glanced back. He saw four children sitting erect with pained expressions, as though the unfortunate wretch at their feet was an object of disgust, not of sympathy. Jim waved an angry arm at Gerald. ‘Do something,’ that arm said. ‘Don’t sit there.’ But Gerald looked back in silent appeal and raised his open hands, helplessly. What could be done? It was too late.

  ‘Clean him up!’ bellowed Jim.

  Gerald couldn’t hear, but Jan did. She opened her eyes and slightly, carefully, turned her head and looked at Jim, then saw the command in his expression suddenly switch on to her. ‘Look to the front,’ he bellowed and pointed ahead. Jan didn’t see what had happened behind her, but in that instant she knew, and immediately was ill herself. Her body convulsed; sobbing, she buried her face in the bag.

  ‘For Pete’s sake,’ wailed Jim. ‘Kids!’

  He throttled back and steadied on 120 knots at about 4,000 feet. He had wanted to go higher, he had wanted to find tail winds, but not with sick children all over the place!

  ‘Gerald,’ he screamed, ‘Do something with that boy.’ Then he glanced again at Jan. She was well away, poor kid, but at least she was orderly, at least she was prepared. The lad, by the look of it, had been caught napping. Two of them at the same time! And there were almost three hours in the air still ahead of them. Jim felt it wasn’t his day.

  ‘You do it,’ Gerald screamed at Mark. ‘He’s your brother.’

  ‘Do what?’ cried Mark. Colin was the colour of pasteboard, like someone at death’s door; he was limp, like someone with broken bones. There were even tears on his cheeks. It was too much. And Mark wasn’t feeling over-well himself. He was only eleven, after all. Eleven only a month ago. He still felt as though he was only ten. Or maybe nine. The longer he thought about it, the younger he felt. He didn’t want to have to touch Colin. He wanted to look at the view. He’d never been up in an aeroplane before!

  ‘Take his suit off,’ Gerald screamed. ‘I’m blowed if I’m going to do it. Then chuck it out the window or something. Get rid of the horrible thing.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Oh! Wash your ears out!’

  ‘I can’t hear,’ cried Mark. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘It’d be better to chuck them out, not their clothes!’ Bruce howled in Gerald’s ear.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chuck out Colin, and Jan too. Out of the window. It’ll be easier!’

  Gerald didn’t think it was funny.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  It was all right for Bruce. He was stuck in the back out of harm’s way. He didn’t have to do anything. He couldn’t unless Gerald moved first.

  Carol took hold of Gerald’s arm and squeezed it. She didn’t say anything but she didn’t need to. Gerald knew what she meant. She was asking him to do it. But he couldn’t. Gerald hated dirt, hated mess, hated smells. It was an abhorrence that was stronger than loyalties, stronger than friendship. Gerald wasn’t neat and tidy because he was a wealthy man’s son, but was simply because he was Gerald. He had no tie with this creature on the floor. The Colin he knew he admired for his good manners, his quietness, his cleanliness; just as he admired Carol for the same things. And Bruce? Heaven alone knew why he chose Bruce as a friend. They were complete opposites. Perhaps Bruce was the foil.

  Bruce yelled: ‘Come on, Gerald. Fair crack of the whip.’

  And Carol still squeezed his arm, though he tried to pretend that her hand was not there.

  Colin struggled to move away from them towards the door, away from their legs and feet, away from the faces that he had looked to in vain. But there was nowhere to go. It wasn’t like a ship or a house. There wasn’t a bunk he could go to, or a cabin, or a bathroom. There wasn’t anywhere private. They were all so close together. He couldn’t get out of their sight. He couldn’t retreat from them to clean himself up, to compose himself, for in truth he offended himself even more than he offended them. He was deeply hurt. Surely friends and brothers couldn’t hate a fellow just because he was sick? He had never looked for help before to find the need shunned. There was love in his home. He had even thought there was love in Mark. There was the pilot, raving and shouting soundlessly; there were his friends frozen.

  These were not ordered thoughts, or feelings that came to him clearly and distinctly one after the other in a logical way; they were all part of his overall hurt and resentment.

  He tried to get his coat off by himself, but the effort made him sick again and they didn’t even hand him a paper bag or a glass of water. He knew there was water in a canvas bag. He knew there was a plastic beaker. It was like something imagined in the middle of the night, when a fellow had gone to bed excited, and slept in fits and starts between bad dreams. It was then, only then that Gerald edged towards him almost with loathing, with his face half-turned away, a grey face that scarcely looked like Gerald at all.

  Gerald took his coat, distastefully turned it inside out, rolled it up and pushed it away with his foot. Then he tried to take his trousers, but Colin wouldn’t let him. He struck weakly at Gerald with his clenched fist and made himself sick again.

  They looked at each other as they had never looked at each other before, drawing farther apart, shrinking from each other, almost hating each other: Gerald, for what Colin had made him do: Colin, for what Gerald had done too late. Then Colin couldn’t sit up any more and Gerald with something like finality secured his seat belt again. Colin sagged at last on to his side, half twisted, half lying down, panting for breath, and almost at once fell asleep. It was the one escape that he could take, his only escape, and he had not imagined that it was there.

  Jim could see what was going on, but was too impatient, too frustrated, to work out the reasons for it. All he could feel was an intense annoyance, an intense disappointment in the quality of the children. He was surprised, perhaps a bit shocked. Like Bert, he too had forgotten what it was like to be a boy – and he had forgotten something else, for he had long outgrown it. He had forgotten that the children were in the air. They were not themselves; part of them was left behind on the ground, far below, and they would not find it again until they returned to the ground; the finer edge, the sharper edge of feeling and common sense, even of simpler processes of thought. Jim had forgotten what it was like to be imprisoned in a vibra
ting box of sound high above the earth; he had forgotten the quiet insistence of the man who had taught him how to fly years ago, the repeating of things over and over again, the struggle to think, the struggle to work out the right heading to steer, the difficulty of obeying or carrying out efficiently the simplest order or duty. Jim had forgotten that even an intelligent and fully-grown man could behave like a perfect fool in the air until he became accustomed to it. It was one of those mysteries of the human mind and the human body. Man was born with two legs to walk on the ground, not with wings to fly.

  Jan was asleep now beside him, lolling in her seat limply; all strength drained from her; held there by the harness buckled across her lap; just as well she hadn’t followed his example and released her harness after take-off, or she would have fallen out. She was terribly pale and her hair hung over her forehead in strands. Jim decided, then, to go higher, to look for the tail-winds, if they were to be found.

  He knew that at his present height he was in a freshening southerly stream. The aircraft was drifting to starboard, into the north, and he had had to alter course considerably to correct it. He didn’t want to prolong the flight a minute longer than necessary. Two kids sick already; there might be more to come! That sort of thing, once started, was like measles. It was catching!

  And he wanted to get to Coonabibba before the rain. Coonabibba was dry and dusty. There was a cushion of dust on the surface, soft underfoot like a deep-pile rug. Sheep would have been dying at Coonabibba if grass had been their mainstay, but succulent saltbush was the wealth of Coonabibba and it continued to thrive months after the last blade of grass had withered into the ground.

  Rain would turn Coonabibba into a sea of red mud inches deep like a sea of treacle, that would pluck a man’s shoes from his feet and stop a motor-car and pose a problem for an aircraft touching down. Jim had never seen it happen; he had seen Coonabibba only as a plain of dust stirring in the breezes, but Gerald’s father had described it and on that point, on what rain meant to Coonabibba when it came without warning, he couldn’t be wrong.

  But was it rain in the sky or wind? Was it wind rushing north to fill the depression up Queensland way? High-level wind was no problem. Surface wind was dangerous. Surface wind meant dust and Jim had already had enough of dust for his liking. Trying to find Coonabibba homestead in a dust storm was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

  He went up to 6,000 feet and then to 7,000, but the wind was still on his beam, still blowing from the south, drifting him to starboard. Jim needed no instruments to measure the wind, no computations by a navigator; his experienced eye judged the drift against purple smudges on the ground, against lonely roads, apparently endlessly straight, against the faint lines of trees that marked dried-up water-courses. To the inexperienced eye, the land beneath was featureless. To Jim it was a map, rich in detail, still clearly defining his track towards Coonabibba, but there were no tailwinds to be found, not at any height that he could reach without oxygen for his ailing passengers. The movement of the air was a massive movement from south to north; it bore all the marks of a major change in the pattern of the weather. He might reach Coonabibba before it broke, before it turned to blinding dust or rain, but the children were in for a rough week-end. There’d be no tennis or horse-riding or long drives in the blitz buggy. There would be a house full of people with nothing to do!

  Jim glanced back again to check on the children. That was all he did; twisted his body and turned his head; but a pain as though a bullet had hit him wrenched through his chest.

  His face registered astonishment more than pain; astonishment, not because he failed to understand, but because he did understand.

  There was a motionless instant in time. In that instant he lived out the rest of his life.

  His startled mind cried a question that he addressed to God. It was not a prayer, because he didn’t have time for that, or the inclination. His mind cried silently: ‘Why me? Why now? I’m only forty-four.’

  And so he died, astonished.

  5.

  Gerald

  Carol was watching him. She had seen him turn his head and her eyes had gone to his face. But his head and shoulders were against the light, shadowed against the glare, so that at first she did not see him in detail.

  Carol liked the look of Jim. She hoped that the man she married some day would have a jaw like his, clean and square, manly but kind. She wondered in that instant whether Gerald would make a man like Jim. His hair was much the same colour, even the shape of his head was similar. But Gerald would grow taller than Jim, and probably leaner. Already he was tall for his age. Probably that was why he wore his clothes so well, good clothes of the right size – not short in the legs or tight under the arms like Bruce’s.

  It was interesting, wondering what sort of man each boy in this aeroplane would become. The boy and the man, the same person, but so different. A snub-nosed boy like Bruce, full of fun, could become a man with wrinkles of worry and bitterness and blotchy skin, grey-haired or bald, needing a shave. She preferred fair men; dark men by the end of the day had shadows on their faces, blue or black shadows, almost like stains.

  Something was wrong. Or was she imagining it? Jim’s head was still turned towards her but his body seemed to be falling to one side towards Jan. It was some cruel, ridiculous trick of the light.

  Suddenly, she grabbed at Gerald. In the same instant Bruce’s hand came down like a hammer on Gerald’s shoulder, and the aeroplane had dropped a wing and everything in it seemed to be sliding unnaturally to one side. The Egret was turning, but not as it should. The controls were crossed; it was skidding.

  Mark screamed something. It was not a word, it was a boy’s fear of the unknown and Gerald heard it faintly. He knew it came from someone else, but it seemed to express his own uncomprehending alarm.

  ‘Jim,’ he howled at the limit of his voice, lurching forward against his harness, throwing out an arm. He had never produced a louder sound nor one that had had less effect. It was impossible to converse in the Egret except by mouth to ear.

  ‘Jim!’ But Gerald wasn’t addressing him any longer, not as a particular person or as a pilot of the Egret. He was crying the name as he might cry into a great silence or a black night, as he might cry as he fell from a cliff-top or into an animal trap, helplessly, wildly, in panic.

  Jim had slipped now into an extraordinary attitude, right away from the controls, his head against Jan, his weight bearing on her in such a way that she, too, had slipped sideways until she could slip no farther, until her head and shoulders were hard against the side of the aircraft.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ screamed Bruce. ‘What’s he doing?’

  Gerald didn’t know; not that he heard Bruce; it was simply that he was asking himself the same question, or trying to ask it, trying to frame the thought against the wishes of an almost commanding part of him that didn’t want to know at all, that was afraid to know, that wanted to turn and run. In his mind he was doing that already. He was running away from the situation as fast as he could.

  ‘He’s sick,’ screamed Carol, shaking Gerald and pushing him. ‘Go to him, Gerald! Help him!’

  Gerald heard her, but he didn’t want to move; he didn’t want to admit that anything was wrong. Once that admission was made, all sorts of things that he scarcely dared think about would centre suddenly on him.

  Jim couldn’t be sick. He was a strong man. He had marked up thousands of hours in the air; he’d been a pilot of light aircraft for more than twenty years. He had flown in North America and the Antarctic and in Africa. Men like Jim didn’t get sick in the air.

  The aircraft was still slipping; it was beginning to lose height; beginning to go down in a wide and curious curve; and Jan was waking up, struggling under the weight that bore against her. Gerald saw her face twisting and straining, and knew that she was crying out, shouting; he could see that she could not dislodge Jim and that he seemed to be incapable of raising himself.

  Ger
ald’s mental block was still there, his panic was still there, and his fear of crossing the aircraft’s centre of gravity was also there. He knew that if he moved forward the angle of dive must inevitably steepen. If he transferred his own weight forward he might never shift Jim from the controls. The dive might become too steep.

  Carol didn’t know that, Bruce didn’t know it, Mark didn’t know it. They rained blows on him, they screamed at him to shift him from his seat, but they didn’t understand that his hesitation was not cowardice. Even in the midst of his fright and indecision, Gerald knew that the aircraft was going to crash unless Jim pulled himself together. It would crash if Gerald failed to go to Jim’s assistance, but it would just as surely crash if he did. Only Jim could get them out of it.

  ‘He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.’

  It was Carol’s voice, but it came from Jan, from the agonized framing of Jan’s lips. She was crying, ‘He’s dead. He must be dead. Get up, Mr Jim. Oh, what am I to do? Get up, Mr Jim.’

  It didn’t matter any more. Nothing mattered very much. When death was as sure, as certain as this, did it matter whether it came in three minutes or two minutes or less? Gerald tore his seat harness away and plunged into the cockpit, stumbling over Colin, falling to his knees in sharp contact with the dead man’s back. It was an awful sensation, even though a fleeting one; he seemed to have fallen against a sack of grain rather than against a man.

  Gerald embraced the man and dragged frantically with strength of a kind he had never used before, well aware that he had only seconds before the dive became too steep. Jan, too, heaved up from her seat with a desperate convulsion of strength that she produced out of her weakness and her exhaustion, as a dying creature might use up its life force in a single effort. And the steepening dive did the rest; it didn’t hold the body down; it ejected it. Suddenly, Jim came out like a cork from a bottle, almost over the top of Gerald, over-balancing the boy, pinning him against the door by his right arm and shoulder, but so frightening him, so revolting him, that he was pinned there for an instant only. Gerald recoiled from the weight of the dead man as from an electric shock. He saw then, in a vivid moment, that his left hand had closed fiercely over the back of the pilot’s seat and that Jan was leaning towards him, both arms extended, her agitated fingers only inches from his face, her own face behind the fingers, beyond, stamped with the sort of expression he had never seen at any other time, on any face.