Flying to Pieces

by Dean Ing

  They moved into this phase of the job with care, assuming now that someone else besides Keikano knew about the cave. Myles prodded suspiciously at anything that looked as if it might be rigged for unpleasant surprises. Nothing blew up or shot darts at them, and while Chip proceeded to the top of the wall, the three older men began to excavate that breast high plug of debris at the lower edge of the same wall. It turned out to be mostly a local form of adobe-mud, weeds, and bark fiber. It turned to clods quickly, and before noon it was only a memory as they continued to widen the hole, spitting dust and confirming that the wall was over a foot thick at its base. When the new passage was five feet wide and six high-Coop had warned that the engine's dolly would require extra headroom-they broke for MRE lunches.

  Squeezing cold pork @how mein directly from its plastic pack into his mouth, Lovett essayed a smile-something between a sneer and a smile-in commentary. "Like eating Jell0 that's been lost in the jungle for thirty years," he added. "Quit bitching, it beats hell out of going hungry.

  You'll need your strength, hanging on that rope," Myles replied, through a mouthful of chili with beans.

  "Tomorrow, maybe. After lunch I'll try to disconnect the APU from that cart. Coop isn't the only A & P mechanic around here. That leaves you and Cris with Chip on the ropes."

  "Chip on the ropes," said the youth. "That's about the size of it. No, I'm okay. Really," he said, noting Lovett's concerned glance.

  "Now Lovett's giving orders," Myles said to Reventlo.

  "Sounds sensible to me, Victor," said the Brit. "Or would you rather I gave the quote order unquote?"

  "At least it's the chain of command we agreed on, and I still don't fuckin' like it."

  "I'm not much of a wrench Boffin. I doubt you are," Reventio explained with the patience of a man knowing he should not have to make such explanations. "Three ropes, three men. What different order would you give, Victor?"

  Thus challenged, Myles sucked more of his lunch down before replying:

  "You and the kid on ropes, Lovett playing with his Jap tinkertoy, and me marking the trees and stuff we gotta take out to move a half-ton cartioad of engine as far as the road. How's that for orders?"

  While Chip kept his head down, unwilling to engage in this petty bickering, Lovett and Reventlo swapped gazes. "Works for me," Lovett shrugged." So long as you're, ah, gainfully employed," Reventlo said to Myles.

  As the afternoon wore on, Myles proved equal to his selfappointed task, cutting small blazes on trees and using a shovel to ascertain where limestone bedrock was near the surface under an accumulation of only fifty years of decaying humus. With a ground-level entrance now, and another of the shovels they'd brought to the cave, they developed a routine. As they worked across and down the jagged upper lip of the false wall, Chip and Reventlo called for rest breaks now and then. When they did, Lovett left the cart and took a shovel to the growing heap of rubble that ranged along the wall outside. It would have to go sooner or later anyway.

  A simple calculation gave Reventio a rough idea of the time they'd need to finish. The wall was something less than a hundred feet across, slightly over thirty high. Three thousand square feet of wall to demolish, and they'd spent a total of roughly sixteen man-hours hanging from ropes to take down about three hundred square feet of wall, yielding a guess of a hundred fifty man-hours before that primitive hangar lay wide open to view. The job was doable, Reventio said, during the time he'd be gone.

  At last, when the sun dropped below tree height and the cave became gloomier, Reventlo eased himself down the loops again, followed by the equally dust-covered Chip. Sweat had carved rivulets down the dust coatings on their faces, as Lovett straightened from his own work and accompanied them outside for a rest. "I find my body a rickety sort of construction," said the Brit, pulling off his gloves. "Don't bruit that about to La Benteen, there's a good lad."

  Lovett only grinned understandingly but, "She could be your daughter,"

  Chip said in surprise.

  "Not in this incarnation. I quail at the though" Reventlo laughed. "I met Elmo's wife once, thirty years ago; didn't know she had a daughter then. Avrile Benteen was an island girl, the purest article. Body of a goddess, mind of a clam. And she chewed betel nut, which places Elmo among the very bravest of men, or the most desperate. Chipper lad, do you know what betel nut portends?"

  As he admitted that he didn't, Chip squandered a gourdful of water on his hair and face. "Why do I get the feeling you're going to tell me?"

  "Because your education is not complete until you've seen it. Haven't spotted any devotees here but-very well. The betel palm has a nut, mottled brownish, hard as my-um, fairly hard. In Asia and Oceania they boil the nut, slice and dry it, then wrap it in a kind of leaf. Then they chew it."

  Chip. squinted quizzically. "Candy?"

  "More like snuff; alkaloids, y'know. Calming influence. Half a billion people use it, I would guess."

  "You're hiding a punch line, Mr. Reventlo. Cancer, I bet." 'No. It merely induces the user to spit vast streams of red spittle, turns the teeth black as a coal-scuttle, and dyes the mouth and gums a nice, horrid brick red. Makes a young girl look as if she's been eating the hemorrhoids out of a camel. Fair takes your breath away, it does. Your appetites for dalliance or dinner, too. There's a goodly number of ladies who may be my daughters and not know it, but none of them could, by any stretch of the imagination, be Avrile Benteen's. You may trust me on this," Reventlo said with dark assurance.

  Lovett chuckled softly and endorsed Reventlo's account. "Maybe that's why so many people do it with their eyes closed," he offered,

  "I would hazard a guess," said the Brit, "that Elmo and Avrile pioneered the practice." A shudder. "Let us pass on to some more agreeable topic."

  "Looks like Myles is knocking off," Lovett observed.

  "I said, something more agreeable," Reventio groused, but managed a wave and smile for the survivalist.

  "You guys work fast," Myles said, scanning the wall as he approached, nodding his approval so that drops of sweat fell from his beard.

  "Lisien, we won't have to do much blasting to clear the airstrip.

  Soil's, so thin there, most of the trees and stuff can barely get a grip. All we gotta do is put fifty men to work pulling stuff down to drag away."

  "Or one belly-scraping Letoumeau," Lovett observed. "We won't have to renegotiate for that."

  "Man, what a D-8 Caterpillar could do," Myles said.

  "It's a nice thought, but even if I found one I'm not sure I could get it here," said Reventlo.

  "Do what you can," Lovett said, brushing off his trousers, collecting empty water gourds.

  "But first I must launch from Fundabora. If you don't mind a new directive, lads, we should spend tomorrow clearing a path for that nice new antique engine."

  Myles: "Getting antsy, Cris?"

  Reventlo: "If you think I'm anxious, try and imagine the niindset of a certain digger in Alice Springs. They've heard of handcuffs in the Northern Territory, too." His tone said he was half in earnest. ' So their last hour of labor that day was spent learning how to clear, undergrowth from bedrock. It appeared that they might clear a narrow path as far as the road in one day, provided they could use their crew from the maintenance sheds. I They found Coop and Benteen already picking at the buffet provided nightly in the council house lobby, using sections of some broadicaf as plates. Evidently the staff had decided to provide more everyday far-e on this night. When Benteen referred to the leaf as breadfruit, Reventlo objected that breadfruit leaves had fingerlike projections.

  "At the end of the branch, yes," Benteen said. "Not at the base."

  "I won't debate you on islander expertise," the Brit smiled.

  "I was raised on breadfuit, in breadfruit, and under breadfruit," she confided. "A shady tree that makes good canoes, bark fiber mats, a nice bland mush like yarn, and a decent place-setting if you don't like washing dishes. Try it like poi," she said, using two fingers to spoon some of the
stuff to her mouth.

  Chip pointed to another mass of mushy food in a huge clamshell. "I thought this was breadfruit," he said.

  "Taro's a root," she said; "dug up like turnips, only better.

  "Great. There's paste, and there's paste," he said. 'I forgot; the breadfuit sap makes glue, too," she said, laughing. "Ignore the taro and breadfruit, then, and have some fried bananas."

  "That's different; ftied paste," Chip said with patently false enthusiasm, reaching for a handful of some crackly protein.

  "Oh, shut up and eat your grasshoppers," Benteen said, giggling as Chip snatched his hand back. "Use your eyes, Chip. Those are just funny-looking shrimp, actually," she went on, popping one into her mouth. "And this is crab over here, and there's coconut milk, too. Or would you rather tear into an MRE?"

  "Gah," said Lovett, helping himself to the taro. "I'll take these Guamanian grits, thanks."

  They took their meals out to the C-47 to discuss their progress. Coop brightened at the idea of working in the cave. "I won't mind a break from the sheds," he said. "Couple of days more and we may have Benteen trying out the Letoumeau. Meanwhile the sheds are like an oven in the afternoon and I'm welding in there. 'Course, where our friend Pilau is-,-comic relief ain't far off."

  "We're going to need him and that half-track," said Lovett, "so be nice to him."

  "That's getting easier to do," Coop replied, "even though there's dumb, and there's dumber, and then there's Pilau."

  "What's he done now," Lovett asked. 'Not as dumb as Coop thinks,"

  Benteen countered. "That pluperfect little bureaucrat Merizo has been lusting after the scooters; you knew that." Lovett nodded assent and she went on: "So this morning he came to the sheds with a couple of his TV

  wrestlers and insisted we show him how'to drive a Cushman. So I had to leave Coop to give lessons."

  "Nothing wrong with that," Myles said.

  "I suppose not, but given the fact that we know how Pilau got those stripes on his back and legs, you can't expect me to enjoy Merizo's enjoyment when he's ripping up and down the drive at top speed with me for a passenger."

  I'll m jealous," said Reventlo, grinning.

  "Oh, yes, he looks for bumps. I think he likes it when my front bounces off his back."

  "The cad," Reventlo said, enjoying himself immensely. "And he dresses as such a gentleman! I take it he didn't crash and bum with you."

  "Not with me," Benteen said, now smiling at her thoughts. "But he said he'd be needing to take a drive alone later. And he did.

  Reventlo blinked. "And," he prompted.

  "And his builyboys bodily carried the Cushman back to us later," Coop put in, "front fork bent to shit, headlight busted, splash guards like pretzels. I'm fixing it, though. Seems that Merizo had driven out to the village and was terrorizing everybody for about thirty seconds-until he decided to turn around and do it again. For that, he had to use the brake.

  By now, Lovett had already begun to laugh. "And Pilau had oiled it again," he managed to say.

  "You can really kill a punch line, Wade," said Coop.' "That's what happened. You could see Merizo was cruising for a bruising the way he gunned away from the shed. And he got his bruising; went ass over teakettle right in front of his peons in the village, laid himself out cold. I checked the scooter out and asked Pilau the big question. He denied it, but hell, I could see and smell the evidence. I backed him up anyhow; Benteen convinced the big guys that Merizo's brakes had just plain failed. Nobody's fault that Merizo got a broken arm.

  "I love it," Benteen said. "It was not an innocent mistake. Pilau gets his revenge, and his victim's none the wiser."

  Reventlo, the only one to hear of Merizo's spill without obvious satisfaction, shook his head. "I'm glad you're glad, but before you shred your sleeves laughing up them, remember we've been warned that someone may be planning nasty surprises for us. What if Merizo is behind that after all?"

  "Our side got in a preemptive strike," Myles grunted. 'But not a decisive one, which would only leave him more determined," said Reventlo.

  "He won't have much time for that for a while,'.' Benteen said. "Cris, you have to understand that these people are getting ready for a big annual celebration, and Merizo is the ringmaster. I don't think Jean-Claude will take kindly to excuses, merely because Merizo made marmalade of himself. As long. as he can breathe, he still has his job to do." @

  "I hope you're right," said the Brit, who then described the work already done at the cave, and what remained to be done. He ended with,

  "If there's one good thing to come from this public-school foolishness of Pilau's, it's this: we shall have the use of that half-track, without question."

  "Say again," Coop requested.

  Reventlo's smile was bland. "Even if Pilau didn't sabotage the scooter, your claiming he did would send him poling off toward the horizon on the nearest raft."

  "You mean blackmail him," Chip -said, not too pleased with the idea.

  "Reason with him," the Brit amended. 'Make him an offer he can't refuse," Chip insisted, with a glum expression. "I saw the movie. That sucks."

  Lovett coughed for attention. "The question is whether we want to be perfectly circular assholes about this."

  "The question," Myles corrected, "is, do we want six or eight or ten million bucks' worth of airplanes, or don't we?"

  Reventlo turned toward the bearded Texan. "Victor, I have never heard you so eloquent. My answer is in the affirmative.

  Lovett felt troubled knowing that if it came to a vote he, too, would side with Reventlo and Myles on this. To salve his conscience he said,

  "Look, let's catch our fly with honey if we can. Let me talk to Pilau; if we select some heavy stuff in the cave and tell him we need to move it to the sheds, and then divert him to the plane to load that engine, we might avoid bad feelings."

  "You mean hold back the threat as an ace in the hole," Myles said.

  "That's not what I meant, but it might work out that way," Lovett admitted. He could tell that Chip was making some pitiless judgments about them all, now, and wondered how he was judging his own grandfather.

  It was decided that, because the entire crew should be able to create the necessary path in a day, they would suspend work in the sheds. They would ask Pilau and Keikano to help, citing the movement of heavy hardware to the sheds. No one had seen the schoolteacher that day, but perhaps he'd been pressed into service for the upcoming celebration.

  Usually, said Chip, Keikano dropped in for a friendly evening chat. He might even be waiting now.

  Another brief rain squall found the council house later, but Keikano did not. Vic Myles dictated his version of recent events in a whisper while Chip dutifully fed them into his computer and Lovett visited Reventlo's room. Though he sensed an odd reserve in Benteen and the Brit, Wade Lovett didn't tumble to its meaning at first. Finally, after Revendo used the phrase "odd man out" for the second time, he realized that he was the odd man, and that his old buddy Cris was wishing he were out.

  Lovett returned to his room thinking that over, realizing that if Mel Benteen was to develop a soft spot for any of them, it would most likely be Reventlo whose spot might not be soft, but the old boy claimed it was still dependable. Chip was alone now. Sighing, Lovett arranged his mosquito nel "Ready for lamps out?"

  "Sure," said Chip. When all was in darkness, the youth said, "Pop?"

  "Drop it on me," said Lovett. "Pilau's a good guy. He shouldn't get his butt in a crack." 'I know that." Chuckling: "But he should be more cautious, a man his age."

  "Like you and the others? Uh-huh. Anyhow, you did the right thing.

  Thanks."

  "You mean as an asshole I'm not quite complete?" 'Well-not as perfectly tubular as some I could name. You still have some sharp comers."

  "Speaking of sharp, where d'you suppose Keikano is?"

  "I'm clueless, Pop. And I kinda miss him."

  "I know you do." Lovett would have liked to say more.

 
His tone must have said that, for Chip laughed softly. "Don't sweat it.

  I know what you think, and to some degree you're right, I guess. We'll talk about it sometime," And long after Chip's snores signaled the sleep of the not quite-innocent, Lovett lay awake wondering what he would say when "sometime" came.

  q -----------------------------------------

  It was only because Coop had suggested pulling down some of the shallow-rooted little palms with rope the next morning that Chip scrambled up the incline at the cave to untie their ropes. And if Chip hadn't found one anchoring root almost completely severed, somebody could've taken a nice long fall the next time he climbed'that rope. As soon as Victor Myles heard of it, he huffed up the slope to make an, expert appraisal.

  The root hadn't been cut, Myles noted as he studied this subtle sabotage; it had been worn away, abraded as if by natural causes. But Lovett had checked the anchorage the day before. The abrasion was all new-overnight, in fact. That's when Myles decided to take the interior steps back down, rolling that cement cover plate away from the upper cave opening; and that is when Chip walloped Victor Myles aside with a body block, his warning shout half-lost in the ensuing slither and a rattling crash like that of a dozen bowling balls.

  "Goddamn-dt, kid, what're you trying to do?" Myles's glare was furious as the youth pulled himself off the older man's chest.

  "Trying to keep you alive," said Chip, pointing to the pile of stones, some the size of a melon, that now rested in front of the cave opening.

  Trickles of dirt dribbled tardily from above. "Sorry 'bout that, Mr.

  Myles. Next time you want me to think it over first?"

  Myles, grumbling about smartass kids, dusted himself off and then attended to this second little surprise. Having heard the commotion, Lovett hurried up the slope in time to see Myles identify the trigger stick. While Chip explained what had happened and helped Lovett roll those little boulders down the slope, Myles studied the -telltale wooden piece, something even simpler than a hunter's deadfall trap. He displayed the hardwood rod with its short Y tip. "He hid that critical rock under those big leaves and balanced it so it was barely held in place by the Y end of the stick, with the stick hidden under leaves and its plain end wedged against the cement cover. The other rocks were stacked behind the first one. Move the cover a little; stick comes loose; first fuckin' rock comes down. Followed by the others. Slick," he commented, hurling the telltale trigger rod far out over the cliff. "If you didn't know what to look for, you'd think this was accidental. But the little fucker didn't count on Vic Myles," he said to himself, as if testing the phrase for his publisher.