Flight of Passage: A True Story

by Buck, Rinker

  “Great. Tell Kern. Now look . . .”

  “Dad, relax. I’m on top of it. First thing in the morning, see, this ole Stearman man is driving us into town for breakfast, and he’s going to show us the store with the waterbags. He’s even going to help us lash the thing between the wheels.”

  “Good work Rink,” my father said. “Cripes, this thing is going just like clockwork. Today, you crossed the Mississippi. Tomorrow, you get the waterbag.”

  He sounded very chipper, hanging up. A thousand miles away, I could almost here him whistling to himself by the phone.

  I always felt great about myself, the perfect son, when I could buffalo my father like that. The truth didn’t matter here. The situation was impervious to truth. I was pretty sure by now that there wasn’t a waterbag in all of America, so how could I truthfully promise to find one? To hell with the truth. My job was keeping the old boy back home happy, so Kern and I could avoid dicking around for a waterbag and get to California. My father would never know the difference anyway.

  Inside the diner, over chicken-fried steak, Kern wasn’t so sure. He was working through his real feelings about the waterbag. I could see that he wanted to please my father, but he was also exasperated by his intrusiveness, his obdurate, private obsession with the waterbag. Finally Kern stabbed his fork into a pile of mashed potatoes and blurted out his thoughts.

  “Rink, you know what I think? You know how I really feel?”

  “No, what?”

  “Fuck the waterbag! Just fuck that damn thing. We’ve flown our asses off for two days and done well. We already looked for one back home. Daddy’s been a real pain in the ass on this one and we don’t need a waterbag.”

  Uh-oh. Kern might occasionally express feelings this strong, but later he would doubt them. I would have to psyche him out. I needed to show some reluctance, put up a little resistance, to harden his anger into a decision. Besides, if I agreed with him too easily, he’d worry that we were ganging up on my father.

  “Well, Kern, gee, I don’t know,” I said. “This waterbag thing could be important, you know.”

  “No, fuck it Rink. I’m pissed at Daddy right now. This is my trip—sorry, our trip. He’s got no right to tell us we need a waterbag to cross the deserts. I’m the pilot-in-command and it’s my decision.”

  “Right. And I’m the copilot. It’s my job to follow orders. So, if you really think this is right. . . .”

  “Rink, stop! I’m not talking about this anymore. I’ve made up my mind. Fuck the waterbag. Now, do you copy that?”

  “Roger. Loud and clear. Foxtrot-Uncle-Charlie-Kilo the waterbag.”

  We rose at dawn and trudged back down the piney highway to the cropduster strip. There were already a lot of planes running, their big Pratt & Whitneys rumbling while the tall landing gears of the Stearmans trembled and strained against wooden chocks. Gangs of cropdusters and hopper crews leaned against the wings, grinning like hyenas and smoking, and there was another group drinking coffee around a shiny canteen truck. Stone-faced, we walked down past the malevolent morons and the droning line of planes. Nobody seemed to want to bother us this early in the day. We quickly pre-flighted and propped the Cub, coasted down the hill, and firewalled the throttle as soon as we hit the runway. We never looked back and we never wanted to hear of Brinkley, Arkansas, again.

  A lonely stretch of flying lay before us. There was still another sixty or seventy miles of timber barrens to the southwest, as featureless and broad as an ocean, with barely a trace of habitation or a checkpoint to look at. Occasionally there was a bubble in the air from cold moisture rising off a lake, and white tracings of ground fog exposed the outlines of creeks and swamps. But mostly all we could do was follow the rails toward Arkadelphia. Kern and I droned along with the throbbing plane, saying nothing to each other. Finally the pine barrens thinned and were broken by shimmering swamplands that gradually gave way to harder soil, rolling beige and red grasslands.

  After Arkadelphia, we entered the pretty, undulating farm country along the Little River. I always loved the sight of agricultural activity from the air. Below us, men on tractors were towing huge agricultural sprayers, and wagons loaded with irrigation pipe, out to the fields. Herds of Hereford and Whiteface were bunched up in the brown-green landscape, massing at feed pens. In the soft, morning light, with the lakes up by Hot Springs glittering like new silver, and the Ouachita Mountains to the northwest glowing purple and black, the Little River was mystical. The far corner of Arkansas is tidy and fenced in, but still it is more western than southern, suggestive of open prairie. It was some of the loveliest country we saw.

  Out over the Little River, throbbing along in the Cub, the simplest thought suddenly occurred to me. I wished that my father could see this exquisite piece of country with me. It was a pity not to share it with him.

  I was often prone to early-morning bouts of loneliness like this in the air. Still, I couldn’t understand why I missed my father so. Certainly I was still boiling inside about the waterbag, and in the full light of day I felt guilty about lying to my father about it last night. But my concerns about him were much greater than that and in fact were buried deeply in medical trauma. That spring, quite by accident, I had begun facing that. All through our coast to coast flight I was brooding through a sense of foreboding about him without quite realizing it.

  In late May, just before Kern and I finished the Cub, I was injured pretty badly in a track accident. I was running the mile in the All-County meet on the old cinder track up in Morristown when a runner ahead of me stumbled and took down the pack. Vaulting over the tangled, cursing mass of bodies in front of me, I felt a sharp stab of pain in my left knee and then I tumbled hard onto the cinders. I had been spiked by another runner, and a two-inch gash was opened in my knee.

  As I stumbled off the track, blood and cinders gushed down my leg. When I looked down, I could see bone at the bottom of the wound, and my entire knee was stuffed like a fruitcake with cinders.

  I was rushed to the hospital. It was a Saturday, my father was called, and he drove right over. I was angry at myself for blowing the race and I was in a lot of pain. Of course I was glad to see my father beside me in the emergency room, but for reasons that even then I knew to be strange.

  Because of my father’s frequent phantom-pain attacks, hospital emergency rooms had been a permanent fixture of my childhood. My father’s attacks often arrived late at night, and Kern and I usually went along to the hospital with my mother to help him in and out of the car. I always felt guilty that I couldn’t do more for my father during these excruciating, mysterious attacks. In the hospital emergency room, he often asked to hold my hand, so that he could squeeze it when a particularly bad spasm began and thus distract himself from the pain. It was a rather compelling shared agony, because my father was quite strong and unavoidably hurt my hand when he squeezed. But he was otherwise very stoic about those terrible phantoms and I was intimidated by that, because I knew that I could never live up to a man as brave as he and endure pain the way he could.

  But it was always easy for me to forget those hospital visits as soon as they were over. My father experienced immediate relief from his phantoms once he received a Demerol shot, and then he dozed contentedly on the car seat during the ride home. The next day he gingerly hobbled around on crutches or on a special, lightweight peg leg that he had bought for recovery periods like this, but otherwise he seemed miraculously restored. We didn’t have much to worry about until the next attack arrived, and that could be many weeks away, sometimes even months.

  As hard as I tried, however, I was never able to forget the first phantom attack I witnessed, when I was eight. My father, Kern, and I were working that day down in our lower field, removing tree stumps with a team of horses from a section of newly cleared meadow. Overexerting himself on a stump, my father keeled over onto the ground and began writhing in agony from his phantoms, his bad leg twitching and jolting into the air. My mother called the police and the of
ficer who arrived decided not to wait for an ambulance but to take my father to the hospital right away in his squad car. The three of us lifted my father into the rear seat of the car, a distance of only ten or twelve yards, but afterward it seemed the longest mile of my life. On the count of three Kern and the police officer lifted my father by his armpits, while I brought up the rear with his legs. As soon as I placed my father’s legs on my shoulders and stood to carry him, his phantomed leg began twitching and banging spasmodically on my shoulder, which set the other leg off, and by the force of those big, immense limbs I was alternately driven into the ground or lifted into the air, but my father called out that I had to hang on and get him to the car. I gripped harder with my arms to restrain his legs, which caused him considerably more pain. But I didn’t have a choice and all I could do was hang on for dear life and stumble along until we deposited him in a heap into the car.

  My father congratulated me heartily for that, but I didn’t feel any better about it. Collapsed in the rear seat of the car with his shoulders resting against the door, still twitching all over, his face was as white as marble and his eyes were bulging out of their sockets. For years, I was haunted by that memory and that vision of him. An older boy, or maybe just a stronger one, I thought, could have cradled those legs in his arms more gently and delivered my father to the car with less pain. To get him to the safety of the car, and thus to the hospital, I had caused him immeasurable suffering.

  These real-life medical dramas had a parallel existence in my dreams. I not only dreamed frequently about my father dying, hardly surprising under the circumstances, but I dreamed a lot about becoming a victim myself. In my dreams, I was forever waking up in recovery rooms from spectacular airplane and car wrecks, usually to find my father sitting beside me and complimenting me on my relaxed composure. I suppose I was meant to conclude that I could handle injury as well as he could. I considered myself crazy and obsessed for having such dreams and never told anyone about them.

  There was nothing dreamlike about my visit to the emergency room after I was spiked. As a plastic surgeon probed the wound on my knee, I was holding my father’s hand, or at least the three fingers that I could get mine around, to squeeze against the pain. The surgeon explained that there was no way of flushing all those cinders out of my knee. They would work out through the surface over time. It took two separate layers of sutures to close the wound. But because of all the cinders compacted in my knee, the local anesthetic couldn’t reach the nerve ends and wasn’t very effective.

  The surgeon worked on me for about forty-five minutes and I was in agony, feeling every millimeter of the needle and string as they ground over the cinders. I winced a lot, squeezed my father’s fingers, and tears welled in the corners of my eyes. Toward the end I trembled in a cold sweat and my father stroked my back beneath my running jersey.

  I was pleased with myself, however, for taking all those stitches without complaining. My father was watching and complimenting me, which was important enough to me, but I also felt that I had proven something to myself. There wasn’t anything particularly mysterious or mythic about enduring physical pain. When you had to, you just did it.

  At an emotional moment like this, my father’s storytelling prowess was an asset. He could always pull the right story from his vast trove of tales. Moved by what he saw me go through that day, I guess, he decided to share with me the details of his big crash in 1946. Instead of returning directly home, he took me to a restaurant in Bernardsville for a late lunch, and as soon as we sat down he began to tell me about his crash. I was immensely relieved, and curious, because his accident had always been shrouded in mystery, and it was the one flying story he never told. Finally I would learn the truth about the accident that continued to blight all of our lives.

  The accident occurred in June 1946 outside Wilmington, Delaware, while my father was on a business trip with a young salesman he was training for Time Inc. The big mistake he made that day was allowing his traveling companion, who had been trained to fly by the Navy during World War II, to take the controls of the plane. He was unfamiliar with the highly unusual design of the plane that my father owned, an experimental Skyfarer, which among other eccentricities had unorthodox rudders. When the engine failed on takeoff, the young salesmen tried to squeeze the plane into a small field for an emergency landing. They brushed a tree going in and damaged the right wing. Just before they touched down the engine roared back to life. My father took the controls and managed to climb back up to 2,000 feet. As he maneuvered to return to the airport in Wilmington, the damaged wing came off at the root and disappeared off the side. They spun down for the trees in a terrifying maple-leaf spin.

  My father never really knew what happened after impact, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to resolve two versions of the same event that he dimly recalled. Either he was thrown clear of the wreck on impact and went back to the plane to save his friend, or he was struggling to extricate both of them from the seats after the plane caught fire. In either case, the flames spread quickly and reached the fuel tanks in the wings, which were full. My father was thrown clear by the explosion. The engine blew off in the same direction, landing on my father’s leg and pinning him against a tree. His back was broken and he couldn’t move, his leg was on fire, and all he could do was lay there helpless as his plane and passenger burned.

  My father’s life was saved by a young nurse. Because of the postwar housing shortage, she was living in a lakeside bungalow near the remote spot where the plane went in. She rushed through the woods, somehow managed to free my father’s mangled leg from underneath the hissing engine, and pulled him to safety away from the burning plane. Several acres of dry pine were ignited by the flaming wreckage. Working around the fire, a logging crew spent almost three hours cutting a path to my father so he could be evacuated by ambulance. While my father waited in the forest within sight of his smoking plane, a rescue squad of medics and nurses hiked in to begin treating him.

  My father was particularly passionate about one detail that he shared with me that day. In fact, I had never seen him so emotional.

  While he was still in the forest, resting on a stretcher among charred trees, it was obvious that he had lost an immense amount of blood. A tall black medic knelt down on the pine needles beside my father, held up a plastic container of sterile blood plasma, and found a vein in his arm for the needle. While he held up the bag with one hand, letting the plasma trickle down, the medic wiped my father’s forehead with a clean bandage and stroked his cheek.

  It was odd, my father thought, the sensations he could remember. He was sure that he was dying, and the forest smelled of burnt pine needles and bark. There were birds singing in the trees all around him. He could hear the grunt and heave of the logging crew approaching as they cut a makeshift ambulance road. All the while the medic stroked his cheek and spoke with him in a deep southern accent.

  “Now listen here Mister Pilot,” the medic said, “God doesn’t want you yet. You’re my responsibility now. I’m not allow’n you to die, you hear?”

  He spent the entire summer recovering in the hospital in Wilmington, and wasn’t released until September. In addition to his broken back and crushed leg, all of his ribs were fractured and he had severe internal injuries. The surgeons found a large section of his scalp inside his shirt. Several times, his condition was grave enough to warrant the Last Rites of the church. “I got so sick of that damn priest,” my father said, “I threw him out of the room.”

  Many of the nurses and the orderlies at the hospital were also black, and my father believed that they saved his life. It was a spiritual experience for him, perhaps the most intense of his life. When he described this to me, my father had that dreamy, far-off look he would get when something meant a lot to him.

  “Rinker, I went down in my Skyfarer as big a racist as any other jerk out of Scranton, Pennsylvania. My parents didn’t deliberately raise me to hate blacks. I was simply taught to avoid them and
think of them as inferior. But I couldn’t feel that way after my wreck. Every one of those blacks in the hospital was so gentle and kind to me. They did things for me they didn’t have to. It’s pathetic. It’s a statement on human nature. But I had to go through an experience like that, so much pain, losing a leg, a crash that practically destroyed my life and career, just to feel the right way about a group of people I never should have judged in the first place. I never got over it. It’s still something that divides me from my brothers. They don’t understand this about me. But it’s as simple as that. I love the black race. They are the best people on earth.”

  Listening to my father say that was a revelation for me. I was confused at the time, embarrassed even, about my father’s growing radicalism over civil rights. I was desperate for a normal life and a normal father—it would have been a lot easier on me if he was just some run-of-the-mill suburban chucklehead, playing golf on Saturday afternoon. It was painful, watching him go through these crusades. Most of the time he seemed blindly furious at the world—at the Roman Catholic Church, for failing to integrate its schools, and for not wholeheartedly supporting the civil rights movement, at friends from work who still told racist jokes—and I couldn’t understand such anger when outwardly his life seemed so successful, and should have been so easy for him. Kern and I were both aware that my father was changing quickly on us, but we didn’t know why. Now I realized that there was a strong personal basis for my father’s activism.

  At the restaurant, I was exhausted and my knee was pounding, but we talked for a while more and I enjoyed it. Actually, my father talked and I listened. Once he began revealing himself to me, he didn’t seem able to stop. Perhaps it had something to do with his background in AA. The long confessional monologue, encouraged in twelve-step programs, was a habit for him by now. He said something else that day that stayed with me for years.

  “You know, I always thought I’d be satisfied just to see Kern solo. Then he had to get his private. Now, you’re planning this coast to coast flight. Hell, this is great for me. After Kern was born, I was hospitalized a lot, and then I went through my amputation. I was drinking right up until you were born, Rinker. There were times, lots of times, when I didn’t think I’d live to see you boys grown.”