Illusions (5 page)

  
         
In a burst of insight, I pulled the Messiah's Handbook from my pocket and opened it. Two sentences stood alone on the page.

          
 
There is

          
no such thing as a problem

             
without a gift for you

                   
in its hands.

              
You seek problems

            
because you need

           
    
their gifts..

  
         
I didn't quite know why, but reading that eased my confusions. I read it over until I knew it with my eyes closed.

  
         
The name of the town was
Troy
and the pasture there promised to be as good to us as the hayfield in Ferris had been. But in Ferris I had felt a certain calm, and here was a tension in the air that I didn't like at all.

  
         
The flying that was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to our passengers was for me routine, overshadowed by that strange uneasiness. My adventure was this character I was flying with . . . the impossible way he made his airplane go and the odd things that he had said to explain it.

  
         
The people of Troy were no more stunned by the miracle of the Travel Air's flight than I would have been had some town bell rung at noon that hadn't rung for sixty years . . . they didn't know that it was impossible for what was happening to happen.

  
         
"Thanks for the ride!" they said, and, "Is this all you do for a living . . . don't you work somewhere?" and, "Why'd you pick a little place like
Troy
?" and "Jerry your farm's no bigger than a shoebox!"

  
         
We had a busy afternoon. There were lots of people coming out to fly and we were going to make a lot of money. Still, part of me began to say get out get out, get away from this place. I have ignored that before and always been sorry for it.

  
         
About three o'clock I had shut down my engine for gas, walked twice back and forth from the Skelly station with two five gallon cans of car gas, when it struck me that not once had I seen the Travel Air refuel. Shimoda hadn't put gas in his plane since sometime before Ferris, and I had watched him fly that machine for seven hours now, going on eight, without another drop of gas or oil. And though I knew that he was a good man, and wouldn't hurt me, I was frightened again. If you really stretch it, throttle back to minimum revolutions and mixture dead lean in cruise, you can make a Travel Air run five hours at the outside. But not eight hours of take offs and landings.

  
         
He flew steadily on, ride after ride, while I poured the Regular into my center section tank and added a quart of oil to the engine. There was a line of people waiting to fly . . . it was as if he didn't want- to disappoint them. I caught his, though, as he helped a man and wife into the front cockpit of his plane. I tried to sound just as calm and casual as I could.

  
         
"Don, how you doin' on fuel? Need any gas ?" I stood at his wing tip with an empty five-gallon can in my hand.

  
         
He looked straight into my eyes and he frowned, puzzled, as though I had asked if he needed any air to breathe.

  
         
"No," he said, and I felt like a slow first-grader at the back of the classroom. "No, Richard, I don't need any gas."

  
         
It annoyed me. I know a little bit about airplane engines and fuel. "Well then," I flared at him, "how about some uranium ?"

  
         
He laughed and melted me at once. "No thanks. I filled it last year." And then he was in his cockpit and gone with his passengers in that supernatural slow motion take off.

  
         
I wished first that the people would go home, then that we would get out of here fast, people or not, then that I would have the sense to get out of there alone, at once. All I wanted was to take off and find a big empty field far away from any town and just sit and think and write what was happening in my journal, make some sense out of it.

  
         
I stayed out of the Fleet, resting till Shimoda landed again. I walked to his cockpit there in the propeller-blast of the big engine.

  
         
"I've flown about enough, Don, Gonna be on my way, land out from towns and be a little less busy for a while. It's been fun flying with you. See you again some time, OK?"

  
         
He didn't blink. "One more flight and I'll be with you. Guy's been waiting."

  
         
"All right."

  
         
The guy was waiting in a battered wheelchair rolled down the block to the field. He was kind of smashed down and twisted into the seat as if by some high gravity force, but he was here because he wanted to go flying. There were other people around, forty or fifty, some in, some out of their cars, watching curiously how Don would get the man from the chair into the plane.

  
         
He didn't think about it at all. "Do you want to fly?" The man in the wheelchair smiled a twisted smile and nodded sideways.

  
         
"Let's go, let's do it!" Don said quietly, as though he was talking to someone who had waited on the sidelines a long while, whose time had come to go into the game again. If there was anything strange about that moment, looking back on it, it was the intensity with which he spoke. It was casual, yes, but it was a command, too, that expected the man to get up and get into the plane, no excuses. What happened then, it was as if the man had been acting, and finished the last scene of his crippled-invalid part. It looked staged. The high-gravity broke away from him as though it was never there; he launched off the chair at a half-run, amazed at himself, toward the Travel Air.

  
         
I was standing close, and heard him. "What did you do:" he said. "What did
 
you do to me ?" .

 
 
         
"Are you going to fly or not going to fly?" Don said. "The price is three dollars.
 
Pay me before take off, please."

  
         
"I'm flying!" he said. Shimoda didn't help him into the front cockpit, the way he usually helped his passengers.

  
         
The people in the cars were out of the cars--there was an odd murmur from the watchers and then shocked silence. The man hadn't walked since his truck went off a bridge eleven years before.

  
         
Like a kid putting on bed sheet wings, he hopped to the cockpit and slid down into the seat, moving his arms a lot as though he had just been given arms to play with.

  
         
Before anybody could talk, Don Pressed the throttle and the Travel Air rolled up
 
into the air, steep-turning around the trees and climbing like fury.

  
         
Can a moment be happy and at the same time terrifying? There followed a lot of moments like that. It was a wonder at what could only be called a miraculous healing to a man who looked like he deserved it, and at the same time, something uncomfortable was going to happen when those two came down again. The crowd was a tight knot waiting, and a tight knot of people is a mob and that is not good at all. Minutes ticked, eyes bored into that little biplane flying so carefree in the sun, and some violent thing was set to go off.

 
          
 
The Travel Air flew some steep lazy eights, a tight spiral, and then it was floating over the fence like a slow noisy flying saucer to land. If he had any sense at all, he would let his passenger off at the far side of the field, take off fast and disappear There were more people coming; another wheelchair, pushed by a lady running.

  
         
He taxied toward the crowd, spun the plane about to keep the propeller pointing away, shut down the engine. The people ran to the cockpit, and for a minute I thought they were going to tear fabric from the fuselage, to get at the two.

  
         
Was it cowardly? I don't know. I walked to my airplane, pumped the throttle and primer, pulled the propeller to start the engine. Then I got into the cockpit and turned the Fleet into the wind and took off. The last I saw of Donald Shimoda, he was sitting on the rim of his cockpit, and the mob had him surrounded. I turned east, then southeast, and after a while the first big field I found with trees for shade and a stream to drink from, I landed for the night. It was a long way from any town.

6

  
         
To this day I can't say what it was came over me. It was just that doom feeling, and it drove me out, away even from the strange curious fellow that was Donald Shimoda. If I have to fraternize with doom, even the Messiah Himself is not powerful enough to make me hang around.

  
         
I was quiet in the field, a silent huge meadow open to the sky . . . the only sound a little stream I had to listen pretty hard to hear. Lonely again. A person gets used to being alone, but break it just for a day and you have to get used to it again, all over from the beginning.

  
         
"OK, so it was fun for a while," I said aloud to the meadow. It was fun and maybe I had a lot to learn from the guy But I get enough of crowds even when they're happy... if they're scared they're either going to crucify somebody or worship him. I'm sorry, that's too much!"

  
         
Saying that caught me short. The words I had said could have been Shimoda's exactly. Why did he stay there? I had the sense to leave, and I was no messiah at all.

  
         
Illusions. What did he mean about illusions? That mattered more than anything he had said or done fierce, he was, when he said, "It's all illusions!" as though he could blast the idea into my head with sheer force. It was a problem, all right, and I needed its gift, but I still didn't know what it meant.

 
          
 
I got a fire going after a while, cooked me up a kind of leftover goulash of bits and pieces of soybean meat and dry noodles and two hot dogs from three days ago that boiling should have been good for. The toolbag was crushed alongside the grocery box, and for no reason I fetched out the nine-sixteenths and looked at it, wiped it clean and stirred the goulash with it.

  
         
I was alone, mind you no one to watch so for fun I tried floating it in the air the way he had done it. If I tossed it right straight up and blinked my eye when it stopped going up and started coming down, I got a

half-second feeling that it was floating. But then it thunked back down on the grass or on my knee and the effect was shattered fast. But this very same wrench... How did he do it?

  
         
If that's all illusion, Mister Shimoda, then what is it that is real? And if this life is illusion, why do we live it at all? I gave up at last, tossed the wrench a couple more times and quit. And quitting, was suddenly glad, all at once happy that I was where I was and knew what I knew even though it wasn't the answer to all existence or even a few illusions.

  
         
When I'm alone sometimes I sing. "Oh, me and ol' PAINT! . . ." I sang, patting the wing of the Fleet in true love for the thing (remember there was nobody to hear), "We'll wander the sky... Hoppin' 'round hayfields till one of us gives in..."
 
Music and words both I compose as I go along. "An' it won't be me givin' in, Paint . . . Unless you break a SPAR . . . and then I'll just tie yon up with baling WIRE ... and we'll go flying on... WE'LL GO FLYIN' ON"

  
         
The verses are endless when I get going and happy, since the rhyming isn't that critical. I had stopped thinking about the problems of the messiah; there was no way I could figure who he was or what he meant, and so I stopped trying and I guess that's what made me happy.

   
        
Long about
ten o'clock
the fire ran down and so did my song.

   
        
"Wherever you are, Donald Shimoda," I said, unrolling my blanket under the wing, "I wish you happy flying and no crowds. If that is what you want. No, I take that back. I wish, dear lonely messiah, that you find whatever it is that you want to find."