by Buck, Rinker
I could tell right away that we’d landed at the wrong place. As we taxied by, the duster crews stood in knots, leaning against their wings and kicking at the dust, either ignoring us or waving us to taxi clear of their area. They didn’t want to be bothered with two kids in a shiny Piper Cub. All we could do was continue taxiing along this one-lane tiedown area, until there weren’t any more duster crews or pilots waving us away. Finally, our path was blocked by a rutted hill. Kern powered up and scrambled the Cub to the top, swinging us around to a stop with the brakes.
Now we sat abandoned on a hill above the whole works. Below, the quilt of yellow biplane wings parked at all angles, the gaggles of men, and the haphazard collection of sprayer tanks, hoses, and orange tractors looked like some poorly disciplined guerilla air force. The sun was sinking behind the trees and it was too late to fly on to the next airport.
Our heads were still back in Indiana. There would be a Hank down there to sort this out for us. While I pulled our gear from the plane, Kern walked down the hill to ask about gas and a tiedown. When I heard laughter down by the planes and Kern’s voice rising, I ran down the hill.
Kern was talking to a roughneck who had stepped out from one of the duster crews. He was trying to explain that we’d flown all day from Indiana and that we were headed for California, and that all we needed was some gas and a tiedown spot. Then we’d sleep under the wings and stay out of everybody’s way.
When I got a good look at the fellow, I could see that Kern was talking to the wrong guy. The man’s jeans and shirt were layered with what looked like a week’s worth of pesticides and grease, and he hadn’t shaved in several days. A plug of tobacco dilated his cheek. He sneered at Kern as if he were the dumbest kid he’d ever seen.
“Well whoopee!” the man said. “Prettyboy here is flying his little Piper Cub all the way to California! Me? I’m sprayin’ gypsy moths in M’nro County.”
Peals of laughter howled around us in the dwindling light. For some reason, the duster crew thought that this was the funniest thing they’d heard all year.
They just stood there in the weak light rednecking us, laughing at our penny loafers and paisley shirts, asking us whether our Mamma knew we were out after dark, wondering whether or not we were planning on getting laid, right here in Brinkley, or whether we’d wait until we got to the coast and found some “California snatch.” If we were so smart, flying a little Cub all the way to California, they wanted to know, why the fuck had we landed at a pisshole like Brinkley? It was beginning to look as though old Hank had really screwed the pooch for us on this one.
We turned away for the Cub. As we walked back up the hill the duster crew continued yelling out insults. We were both upset by it. We didn’t know whether we were really in for trouble here, or whether we could get everyone to ignore us by just disappearing behind our plane. Dark, frightening images invaded my thoughts. Our impression of the deep south in those days was formed by the black and white television footage we’d seen of civil rights marches, and the beatings and murders of the freedom riders in Mississippi and Alabama. These buckaroos here in Brinkley could pummel us and leave us half-dead under a wing somewhere, and no one would care. No one would even find us. We sat up by the Cub wondering what to do.
Gradually the men below dispersed, scattering into town in their pickups. In the splashy pools of light provided by running tractors, mechanics and a couple of hopper crews worked on the planes.
Kern and I decided to brave the yahoos again, and we strolled back down below.
Walking from one group to the next, we eventually found a man who identified himself as the operations manager of the strip. He grudgingly agreed to run his gas truck up the hill to fuel us. But he wasn’t glad to see us and he told us that we’d made a mistake landing at Brinkley. This was a duster strip, he told us, for “dusters only,” and they didn’t welcome transient traffic. He didn’t want us to sleep on the airport either. When the duster crews came back from town they’d all be drunk and rowdy, and he didn’t want to be “responsible” for what might happen to us.
But the fellow had half a heart and he could see that we were upset by the way we had been treated. He told us not to mind the duster crews. Most of those pilots, he explained, were “lifers,” veteran cropdusters who flew the fields and the timber every summer and then eked out a precarious living on unemployment insurance all winter. They didn’t like outsiders, especially “prettyboy pilots” for whom aviation was just a hobby. A lot of these duster pilots, the man said, were also “rejects,” a class of flyer we had heard about. Either because of accident histories, violations on their licenses, or medical limitations, they would never be hired by the military or the airlines. No respectable airport wanted them as flight instructors either. So they were stuck, dusting for a living because that’s the only kind of flying they could do. So much for the fraternity of cropdusters, my father’s vaunted “Stearman men of the west.”
Kern was concerned about leaving 71-Hotel overnight on the strip, but the fellow told us not to worry. It was a clear night and there wouldn’t be much wind, and he threw some chocks under the wheels for us. He promised to keep an eye on the plane himself, but not because he was eager to do us a favor. He just wanted us off the strip for the night, and airborne first thing in the morning, so he didn’t have to worry about us anymore.
We thanked him and left, carrying our pillowcases and sleeping bags under our arms, and walked out to the highway. Out on the road, a pink neon sign flickered a half mile away. MOTEL CHEAP.
It was dusty and pitch-black along the gravel shoulder of the highway. Dirt devils and spent cigarette packs, kicked up by the passing cars, swirled around our legs. As the passing headlights flared onto the pines lining the road, spectral, hideous stick figures jumped from the branches.
I have always thought of that walk with my brother to the MOTEL CHEAP as a portrait of our divergent personalities. Kern was dejected, humiliated by our redneck drubbing at the duster strip. In Indiana, and again at Blytheville, the day had been such a high. Back on the Mississippi delta, everybody joked with us and made us the Arkansas Ken’dees. Here, in the heart of Arkansas darkness, we were just trash to be kicked. Kern’s personality was trusting and euphoric, and the world generally saw that in him and liked it, returning it with a loving surplus. But when events or people turned against him, he became lost in a maze. All he could do was stumble around inside and bump into things, mostly himself, trapped by confusion and anger.
Meanwhile, now that we were safely off the Stearman strip, I was whistling past the graveyard. I fancied myself a grown, experienced boy, full of the dark melodrama of life. I loved the spooky shadows and evil fever lurking in these Arkansas badlands. I was wordy then, quite wordy, a pretension I’d picked up as a result of collecting high grades in English and creative writing. I was always searching for that big, $15 word that described my present situation with what I considered to be suitable erudition. As it happened, the word “malevolence” was one of my favorites that year. I liked malevolence, the way the word sounded, and what it meant. The world was just chock full of malevolence, I thought, and it took a dedicated malevolence-fighter like me to survive this cruel life. And here was a place where the locals truly wallowed in malevolence. Me, frightened by a little malevolence? Never. Come to think of it, there were a lot of other M words that aptly described our predicament just now. Someday I would have great barnstorming blarney tales of my own about central Arkansas, full of alliteration, of course. I couldn’t wait to get home and boast to everyone about my noble forbearance in the face of these monstrous, malignant, malicious, malingering, malfeasant, mendacious, meretricious, and malevolent morons of miserable Arkansas. And they were all malodorous too!
But I couldn’t bother with all that vocabulary right now because I had to cheer my brother up. I didn’t like it when Kern was upset like this because he’d brood all night. I felt responsible for him at such moments. Except for my mother, nobody understo
od his sensitive nature quite the way I did, and I enjoyed the way I could pull him out of a black mood. That was one thing about Kern that I did know. I could always make him laugh.
Along the highway to the MOTEL CHEAP, I let him sink to his lowest point before I spoke up.
“Hey Kern.”
“Yeah?”
“The Stearman men of the west.”
“Ah Jeez Rink. Don’t start on me now.”
I dropped my bags to the ground and threw my hand out for the imaginary stick, assuming the grandiloquent barnstorming blarney pose of my father.
“The great Stearman men of the west.”
Kern was laughing now. He shifted his load to one arm and held his stomach.
“Ah Jeez Rink, can you believe it? They’re assholes down here. White trash in a cockpit.”
“Boys,” I continued, sweeping out my arm for emphasis, “You’ll never meet a better group of pilots than the Stearman men of the west.”
Kern was howling, bending over to laugh.
“God Rink,” Kern said. “The Stearman men of the west. What crap. Daddy’s so full of shit sometimes I could scream.”
Paydirt. This was good, very good, I thought. When Kern got cynical about my father, seeing him the way I saw him, I always considered it progress. Anyway, he was happier now. Our situation was pathetic, and we’d really blown it landing at Brinkley. But, what the hell. You couldn’t let these malevolent morons get you down. We were determined to laugh our way through this one and have a sense of humor about ourselves.
Dawdling and howling at our own jokes, we walked up toward the motel.
The MOTEL CHEAP was pretty much as advertised. It was a gray, cinder block affair with hollow-core doors, a broken ice machine, and polyester blankets so worn in the middle we could see right through to the semiwhite sheets. We checked in at the rancid front desk, and were delighted to learn that a room with two beds cost just $3. For some reason that we couldn’t understand, the clerk was surprised that we wanted to keep the room all night. Inside the room, in the drawer of the nightstand, we found a Gideon Bible and a six-pack of condoms. All night, doors kept opening and shutting in the rooms down the line, and drunken caterwauls and heavy sexual moaning reached us through the thin walls. We weren’t familiar with those sounds yet and I just figured that people down here required lots of talk and physical activity to get to sleep. It took me a while to sort out the MOTEL CHEAP, but eventually I realized the truth. The youngest aviators ever to fly America coast to coast spent their second night away from home at an Arkansas whorehouse.
There was a truck stop and diner across the highway. Before we went in for dinner, we walked down past the diesel pumps to a pay phone mounted on an aluminum pole.
We were in a fine mood as we dialed home for the Arkansas gam. Recovering from the rednecks at the strip felt like an injection of courage, and it was a tonic for our companionship. We were almost defiant about it. We could tackle anything now.
My father would be elated to hear that we were across the Mississippi, within striking distance of Texas. At home, by his library phone, he was keeping track of our progress on a large aeronautic planning chart of the continental United States, precisely marking in red pencil the routes we described to him every night. He had bought the chart at a map store in Rockefeller Center in New York just before we left. He was immensely enjoying this exercise, and we welcomed it too, because it kept him busy with something at home and out of our hair. He kept the chart, his pencils, and a route-plotter by the phone every night, so everything would be ready when we called.
“Across the Mississippi!” my father barked into the phone. “Beyond the Mississippi. Boys, this is great, just great. Now, let me see. Brinkley. Brinkley, Arkansas. Hell, I remember Brinkley.”
That was bullshit, probably, but who cared? Slowly, we were developing an effective strategy for managing him at long distance. Be prepared for lots of barnstorming blarney, and always be upbeat. The only news he would hear was good news.
Kern fed him just the right diet. He told my father that we’d enjoyed beautiful flying all day, that geezers kept buying us food and fuel, and that we’d met a lot of great Stearman men. 71-Hotel was holding up well. Kern ran him through our routes—East Richmond to Indy, the Wabash to the Ohio, the rail line from Paducah, then Blytheville to Brinkley. He gave me a thumbs up from the phone. My father was swallowing all of it and he was extravagantly pleased.
He was happy about another development, though he wouldn’t share it with us for two more days. Reporters from all over the country had begun calling. The Indianapolis Star story was moved that afternoon on the wires of the Associated Press, setting off a mad media scramble to locate us. Newspaper editors from Little Rock to Oklahoma City read the AP copy, checked a map, and were excited about the possibility that we would be passing through their area within the next twenty-four hours, a great local angle for their Independence Day weekend coverage. We’d never even considered that angle, it was just something we backed into by mistake. But two teenage boys, flying coast to coast in a Piper Cub over the July Fourth weekend, was irresistible to a lot of newspapers, and now they were frantic to find us and do a piece. Everyone just assumed that my father would know where we were and that they could track us down through him.
But until we called home at night, my father was as mystified as everyone else about our whereabouts. He’d spent a good part of the day poring over his map at home and calling the FAA weather briefers, convinced that he could accurately track our flight path. But my father didn’t know about the advice we had received from Hank about flying the Kentucky swale, and it completely stymied him. The weather briefers told him that it was virtually impossible for us to traverse the Mississippi River valley that day. He reasoned that we had either swung north above the storms, into Missouri and Oklahoma, or crossed on the eastern face of the Cumberlands, down through Lexington and Nashville.
So, my father told all of the reporters to look along those hypothetical routes, which were hundreds of miles north and east of our actual position. They all came up dry. Every little grass strip for hundreds of miles around St. Louis and Tulsa, and down through central Kentucky and Tennessee, had been harassed by exasperated reporters all evening. Now their deadlines had passed and they were all disappointed and annoyed with my father. Half the newspapers in the south and midwest had been sent on a wild goose chase.
My father was too embarrassed about it to mention the reporters that night. Also, he didn’t want to rattle Kern and overload him with another detail just yet. He had already decided that he wouldn’t crank up his publicity machine until we were safely across the Rockies.
But Kern could sense that something was up. My father wasn’t reacting in the right way to what he was telling him. As Kern described our flight legs over the phone, my father sighed a lot and kept making these little clucking noises with his tongue.
“Oh!” my father said. “So that’s where you went. Good. Good! . . . Ah shit.”
“Hey Dad, c’mon!” Kern exclaimed into the phone. “We made great progress today. We’re a whole leg beyond the Mississippi already.”
“Oh I know, son. I know! It’s just, well, I can’t figure out how you got through Kentucky in that weather.”
Kern didn’t flinch.
“Oh c’mon Dad, get with it. There’s one thing I’ve learned on this trip. The weather reports can be wrong.”
“Right!” my father said. “Right. I copy that.”
Jesus, this was great, a lot better than I expected. Kern was really learning to throw the shit.
They changed the subject. At this point Kern frowned and started stammering on the phone. He didn’t seem to know what to do. He snatched the pencil out of my shirt pocket and wrote out a note in large block letters on the back of the local phonebook.
RINK: THE WATERBAG.
Balls. The waterbag. That damn thing was coming around again. Kern and I had assumed that my father would forget about it by
now—we certainly had.
I wasn’t going to let Kern handle this. He could bullshit my father once in a night, but not twice. Out of sympathy and loyalty to my father, Kern might get backed into promising to find a waterbag. No way, I thought. We’d never get to California if we stopped to look for that freaking thing. We’d have to stonewall. I’d found over the years that I could always do that by smothering my father with a lot of detail and senseless lingo, and of course it never hurt to ass-kiss him to death.
I grabbed the phone from Kern.
“Hey Dad!” I said. “It’s great to hear your voice.”
“Rinker! Ditto. Kern tells me that you’re doing all the navigating. That’s great! I can’t believe the time you guys are making.”
“Dad, it’s a beautiful country. Just like you said.”
“Good. Now listen,” my father said. “Kern doesn’t seem to think you can find the waterbag.”
“Nah, nah, Dad. Not to worry. Kern was too busy gassing up the plane tonight, and I forgot to tell him. You see, I met this great Stearman man out here in Brinkley tonight.”
“Yeah? What’s he flying?”
“Oh Jeez Dad you should see it. It’s the monster Stearman. He’s got the big 600 P&W up front, just like your Texan, the three-blade Ham Standard prop, slaved ailerons, and big leading edge spoilers. What an airplane.”
“Ah shit. I wish I could see that. You must be meeting all these great Stearman men. Good chaps, are they?”
“Oh the best Dad, the best. Great guys. Just like you told us. The Stearman men of the west.”
“Ah great. That’s great. Now look. About the waterbag.”
“Dad it’s okay! We’re covered. It’s just like you said it would be. This Stearman guy, see, he says that every hardware store down here has tons of waterbags. They’re stacked right up to the ceiling.”
“See? See? What’d I tell you?”
“Oh yeah Dad. You were right. This is waterbag country down here.”