Illusions (3 page)

  
         
The airplane rolled to a stop beside us, no extra power required and the propeller clanked softly to stop. I looked closely. There were no bugs on the propeller. Not so much as a single fly killed on that eight-foot blade.

  
         
I sprang to help, unshackled the girl's safety belt, opened the little front-cockpit door for her and showed her where to step so her foot wouldn't go through the wing fabric.

  
         
"How'd you like that?" I said.

  
         
She didn't know I spoke.

  
         
"Grampa, I'm not afraid! I wasn't scared, honest! The house looked like a little toy and Mom waved at me and Don said I was scared just because I fell and died once and I don't have to be afraid anymore! I'm going to be a pilot, Grampa. I'm gonna have an airplane and work on the engine myself and fly everywhere and give rides! Can I do that?"

  
         
Shimoda smiled at the man and shrugged his shoulders.

  
         
"He told you you were going to be a pilot, did he, Sarah ?"

  
         
"No, but I am. I'm already good with engines, you know that!"

  
         
"Well, you can talk about that with your mother. Time for us to be getting home. "

  
         
The two thanked us and one walked, one ran to the pickup truck, both changed by what had happened in the field and in the sky.

  
         
Two automobiles arrived, then another, and we had a
noon
rush of people who wanted to see Ferris from the air. We flew twelve or thirteen flights as fast as we could get them off, and after that I made a run to the station in town to get car gas for the Fleet. Then a few passengers, a few more, and it was evening and we flew solid back-to-back flights till sunset.

  
         
A sign somewhere said Population 200, and by dark I was thinking we had flown them all, and some out-of-towners as well.

 
          
 
I forgot in the rush of flying to ask about Sarah and what Don had told her, whether he had made up the story or if he thought it was true, about dying. And every once in a while I watched his plane closely while passengers changed seats. Not a mark on it, no oil-drop anywhere, and he apparently flew to dodge the bugs that I had to wipe from my windshield every hour or two.

  
         
There was just a little light in the sky when we quit. By the time I laid dry cornstalks in my tin stove, set them over with charcoal bricks and lit the fire, it was full dark, the firelight throwing colors back from the airplanes parked close, and from the golden straw about us.

  
         
I peered into the grocery box. "It's soup or stew or Spaghetti-O's," I said. "Or pears or peaches. Want some hot peaches?"

  
         
"No difference," he said mildly. "Anything or nothing."

  
         
"Man, aren't you hungry? This has been a busy day!"

  
         
"You haven't given me much to be hungry for, unless that's good stew."

  
         
I opened the stew can with my Swiss Air Officer's Escape and Evasion Knife, did a similar, job on the Spaghetti-0's, and popped both cans over the fire.

  
         
My pockets were tight with cash . . . this was one of the pleasanter times of day for me. I pulled the bills out and counted, not bothering much to fold them flat. It came to $147, and I figured in my head, which is not easy for me.

  
         
"That's . . . that's . . . let's see . . . four and carry the two . . . forty-nine flights today! Broke a hundred-dollar day, Don, just me and the Fleet! You must have broke two hundred easy . . . you fly mostly two at a time?"

  
         
"Mostly," he said.

  
         
"About this teacher you're looking for. . ."he said.

  
         
"I ain't looking for no teacher," I said "I am counting money! I can go a week on this,
 
I can be rained out cold for one solid week!"

  
         
He looked at me and smiled. "When you are done swimming in your money," he said, "would you mind passing my stew?""

      
3

  
         
Throngs and masses and crowds of people, torrents of humanity

pouring against one man in the middle of them all. Then the people became an ocean that would drown the man, but in stead of drowning he walked over the ocean, whistling, and disappeared. The ocean of water changed to an ocean of grass. A white-and-gold Travel Air 4000 came down to land on the grass and the pilot got out of the cockpit and put up a cloth sign: "fly $3 fly".

  
         
It was
three o'clock
in the morning when I woke from the dream, remembering it all and for some reason happy for it. I opened my eyes to see in the moonlight that big Travel Air parked alongside the

Fleet. Shimoda sat on his bed roll as he

had when first I met him, leaning back against the left wheel of his airplane It wasn't that I saw him clearly, I just knew he was there.

  
         
"Hi Richard," he said quietly in the dark. "Does that tell you what's going on?"

  
         
"Does what tell me?" I said foggily. I was still remembering and didn't think to be surprised that he'd be awake.

  
         
"Your dream. The guy and the crowds and the airplane," he said patiently. "You were curious about me, so now you know, OK? There were news stories: Donald Shimoda, the one they were beginning to call the Mechanic Messiah, the American Avatar, who disappeared one day in front of twenty-five thousand eye-witnesses?"

  
         
I did remember that, had read it on a small-town
Ohio
newspaper rack, because it was on the front page.

  
         
"Donald Shimoda?"

  
         
"At your service," he said. "Now you know, so you don't have to puzzle me out anymore. Go back to sleep."

  
         
I thought about that for a long time before I slept.

  
         
"Are you allowed . . . I didn't think . . .you get a job like that, the Messiah, you're supposed to save the world, aren't you? I didn't know the Messiah could just turn

in his keys like that and quit." I sat high on the top cowling of the Fleet and considered my strange friend. ''Toss me a nine-sixteenths, would you please, Don?"

  
         
He hunted in the toolbag and pitched the wrench up to me. As with the other tools that morning, the one he threw slowed and stopped within a foot of me, floating weightless, turning lazy in midair. The moment I touched it, though, it went heavy in my hand, an everyday chrome-vanadium aircraft end-wrench. Well, not quite everyday. Ever since a cheap seven-eighths broke in my hand. I've bought the best tools a man can have . . . this one happened to be a Snap-On, which as any mechanic knows is not your everyday wrench. Might as well be made of gold, the price of the thing, but it's a joy in the hand and you know it will never break, no matter what you do with it.

  
         
"Of course you can quit! Quit anything you want, if you change your mind about doing it. You can quit breathing if you want to." He floated a Phillips screwdriver for his own amusement. "So I quit being the Messiah and if I sound a little defensive, it's maybe because I am still a little defensive. Better that than keeping the job and hating it. A good messiah hates nothing and is free to walk any path he wants to walk. Well, that's true for everybody, of course. We're all the sons of God, or children of the Is, or ideas of the Mind, or however else you want to say it."

  
         
I worked at tightening the cylinder base nuts on the Kinner engine. A good power plant, the old B-5, but these nuts want to loosen themselves every hundred flying hours or so, and it's wise to stay one jump ahead. Sure enough, the first one I put the wrench to went a quarter turn tighter, and I was glad for my wisdom to check them all this morning, before flying any more customers.

  
         
"Well yes Don, but it seems as if Messiahing would be different from other jobs you know? Jesus going back to hammering nails for a living? Maybe it just sounds odd."

  
         
He considered that, trying to see my point "I don't see your point. Strange thing about that is he didn't quit when they first started calling him Savior. Instead at that piece of bad news, he tried logic: 'OK, I'm the son of God, but so are we all; I'm the savior, but so are you! The works that I do, you can do!' Anybody in their right mind understands that."

  
         
It was hot, up on the cowling, but it didn't feel like work. The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. Satisfying, to know that I was keeping the cylinders from flying off the engine.
 
"Say you want another wrench " he said.

  
         
"I do not want another wrench. And I happen to be so spiritually advanced that I consider these tricks of yours mere party games, Shimoda, of a moderately evolved soul. Or maybe a beginning hypnotist."

  
         
"A hypnotist! Boy, are you ever getting warm! But better hypnotist than Messiah. What a dull job! Why didn't I know it was going to be a dull job?"

  
         
"You did," I said wisely. He just laughed.

  
         
"Did you ever consider, Don, that it might not be so easy to quit, after all? That you might not just settle right down to the life of a normal human being?"

  
         
He didn't laugh at that. "You're right, of course," he said, and ran his fingers through his black hair. "Stay in any one place too long, more than a day or two, and people knew I was something strange. Brush against my sleeve, you're healed of terminal cancer, and before the week's out there I'm back in the middle of a crowd again. This airplane keeps me moving, and nobody knows where I came from or where I'm going next, which suits me pretty well."

  
         
"You are gonna have a tougher time than you think, Don."

  
         
"Oh?"

  
         
"Yeah, the whole motion of our time is from the material toward the spiritual . . . slow as it is, it's still a pretty huge motion. I don't think the world is gonna let you alone."

  
         
"It's not me they want, it's the miracles! And those I can teach to somebody else; let him be the Messiah. I won't tell him it's a dull job. And besides,' There is no problem so big that it cannot be run away from.'"
    
I slid from the cowling down to the hay and began tightening the cylinder nuts on number three and four cylinders. Not all of them were loose, but some were. "You are quoting Snoopy the Dog, I believe?"

  
         
"I'll quote the truth wherever I find it, thank you."

  
         
"You can't run away, Don! What if I start worshipping you right now ? What if I get tired of working on my engine and start begging you to heal it for me? Look, I'll give you every dime I make to sundown if you just teach me how to float in the air ? If you don't do it, then I'll know that I'm supposed to start praying to you, Holy One Sent to Lift My Burden."

  
         
He just smiled at me. I still don't think he understood that he couldn't run away. How could I know that when he didn't ?

  
         
"Did you have the whole show, like you see in the movies from
India
? Crowds in the streets, billions of hands touching you flowers and incense, golden platforms with silver tapestries for you to stand on when you spoke?

  
         
"No. Even before I asked for the job, I knew I couldn't stand that. So I chose the
United States
, and I just got the crowds."

  
         
It was pain for him, remembering, and I was sorry I had brought the whole thing
 
up.