The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (6 page)

Home that day, back in my house, there was no one to share the adventure, no one to ask the questions that might show values I'd overlooked. Kathy was out with someone else for the evening on her night off. Brigitte's children had a school play. Jill was tired from work.

The best I could do was long-distance to Rachel, in South Carolina. A pleasure to talk with me, and I was welcome, she said, to stop by whenever I could. I didn't mention the jump, the failed parachute and the other future, my death in the orange grove.

Baked myself a Kartoffelkuchen to celebrate, that night, straight from my grandmother's recipe: potatoes and buttermilks and eggs and nutmegs and vanillas, iced it with white frosting and melted bitter chocolate, ate a third of it warm and alone.

I thought about the jump, and concluded at last that I wouldn't have told them anyway, wouldn't have told anyone what had happened. Would I not have been the showoff bragging death escaped? And what could they say? "Goodness, there's a scary time!" "You must be more careful!"

The observer perched again and wrote. I watched from the corner of my eye.

He's changing. Every day more remote, protected, distant. He builds fests now for the soulmate he hasn't found, bricking wall and maze and mountain fortress, dares her to find him at the hidden center of them all Here's an A in self-protection from the one in the world he might love and who might someday love him. He's in a race, now . . . will she find him before he kills himself?

Kill myself? Suicide? Even our observers don't know who we are. It wasn't my fault, the streamer. A freak failure, it won't happen again!

I didn't bother to recall that I was the one who had packed that parachute.

A week later, I landed for fuel, late on a day in which everything had been going wrong with my huge fast P-51 Mustang. Radios failing, left brake weak, generator burned out, coolant temperatures unexplainably to redline and unexplainedly recovered. Definitely not the best day, definitely the worst airplane I had ever flown.

Most airplanes you love, but some, you just never get along.

Land and gas, tighten the brake and let's get off again, quick as we can. A long flight, watching engine instruments show things not right behind that enormous propeller. Not one part of the airplane cost less than a hundred dollars, and the parts that were breaking like reeds, they cost thousands.

The wheels of the big fighter-plane floated a foot over the runway at Midland, Texas; then they touched. At once the left tire blew out and the airplane swerved toward the edge of the pavement, in a blink off the pavement into the dirt.

No time. Still moving fast enough to fly, I pressed full throttle and forced her back into the air.

Bad choice. Not moving fast enough to fly.

The airplane snarled its nose upward for a second or so, but that was the last it would do. Sagebrush flashed beneath us; the wheels settled and instantly the left main landing gear broke off. The monster propeller hit the ground, and as it bent, the engine wound up, howling, exploding inside.

It was almost familiar, time falling back into slow motion. And look who's here! My observer, with clipboard and pencil! How've you been, guy, haven't seen you in days!

Chats with observer while airplane gets torn to hell in sagebrush. May be worst pilot have ever seen.

Mustang-crashes, I knew full well, are not your everyday left-over-from-dinner airplane-wrecks. The machines are so big and fast and lethal, they go tearing through whatever happens to be in the way and blow up hi sudden pretty fireballs of flame-yellow and dynamite-orange and doom-black, detonating bolts and pieces a half-mile round impact center. The pilot never feels a thing.

Slewing toward me eighty miles per hour was impact coming up ... a diesel-generator shack out in the middle-of-nowhere desert, an orange-and-white checkerboard generator-house that thought it was safe from getting run over by huge fast airplanes crashing. Wrong.

A few more jolts along the way, the other landing gear disappeared, half the right wing was gone, the checkerboard slid huge in the windscreen.

Why is it that I have not left my body? All the books say ...

I slammed forward in the shoulder harness when we hit and the world went black.

For a few seconds, I couldn't see anything. Painless.

It is very quiet, here in heaven, I thought, straightening, shaking my head.

Completely painless. A calm, gentle hissing . . . What is it hi heaven, Richard, that could be hissing?

I opened my eyes to find that heaven looks like a demolished U.S. Government diesel-generator shack, flattened under the wreckage of a very large airplane.

Slow as toad to understand what is going on.

Just a minute! Could it be ... this isn't heaven? I'm not dead! I'm sitting inside what's left of this cockpit and the airplane hasn't blown up yet! It's going to go VOWNF! in two seconds and I'm trapped in here . . . I'm not going to be exploded to death I'm going to be burned to death!

Ten seconds later I was sprinting two hundred yards from the steaming wreckage of what had once been a handsome airplane, if not reliable or cheap or sweet. I tripped and threw myself face-down in the sand the way pilots do in movies just before the whole screen blows apart. Face down, covered my neck, waited for the blast.

Able to move with remarkable speed when finally gets picture.

Half a minute. Nothing happened. Another half.

I lifted my head and peeked.

Then I stood up, casually brushed the sand and sagebrush from the front of my clothes. For no reason, an antique rock-'n-roll tune began brassing my mind. I barely noticed. Trying to be nonchalant?

Son of a gun. Never heard of a '51 that didn't go up like a lit powderkeg, and here the one exception is the disaster scattered over there of which lately I was the pilot. Now there will be a stack of paperwork, reports to file ... it'll be hours till I can catch an airliner west from here. The tune clattered on.

Doesn't suffer much from shock. B-plus for cool when it's all over.

Flattered, whistling the tune, I walked back to what was left of the Mustang, found my garment-bag and shaving-kit, took them safely aside.

Strong cockpit, got to say that for the thing.

And of course! The airplane hadn't blown up because we were out of gas, landing.

Around that time the observer faded, shaking his head, and the fire-trucks hove into sight. They didn't seem particularly interested in what I had to say about being out of fuel, smothered the wreck in foam, just in case.

I was concerned about the radios, some of which were undamaged in the cockpit, each of which cost more than gold. "Try not to get any foam in the cockpit, please, fellas? The radios . . ."

Too late. As a precaution against fire, they filled the cockpit to its rails.

So what, I thought helplessly. So-what so-what so-what?

I walked the mile to the airport terminal, bought a ticket on the next airline out, filled in the minimum possible incident report, told the wreckers where to sweep the parts of the obstinate machine.

In that moment, writing my address for them, on a desk in the hangar, I remembered the .words to the tune that had been bebopping through my head since a moment after the crash.

Sh-boom, sh-boom . . . and a lot of ya-t-ta ya-t-tas.

Why should I be humming that song? I wondered. After twenty years, why now?

The song didn't care why, it rattled on: Life could be a dream/Sh-boom/If I could take you to paradise up-above/ Sh-boom ...

The song! It was the ghost of the Mustang singing, complete with sound-effects!

Life could be a dream, sweetheart . . .

Of course life is a dream, you tin witch! And you near did take me to paradise up above! Sh-boom, you shredded hulk!

Is there nothing goes through our mind that has no meaning? That airplane, it never could take me seriously.

The jetliner taxied past the sagebrush on its way to take-off. From the window by my seat I watched.

The foam-slopped Mustang body was already on a flatbed truck; a crane lifted torn wing-sections.

You want to play games, airplane? You like to have something break every flight, you want to have a clash of wills with me?

You lose! May you find someone who will forget your past and nail you back together someday a hundred years from now. May you remember this hour, and be nice to them! I swear, machine-for you I got no nails.

First the parachute failure, now an airplane-crash. I thought about those, flying west, and after a while decided that I had been divinely guided, protected without a scratch through moments turned a little more adventurous than I had planned.

Anybody else would have seen the opposite. The crash wasn't my protection at work, it was my protection running out.

nine

M. WAS drowning in money. People around the world were reading the book, buying copies of other books I had written. Money from every book-sale came from the publisher back to me.

Airplanes I can handle, I thought, but money it makes me nervous. Can money crash?

Palm fronds waved outside his office window, sunlight warmed the reports on his desk. "I can handle this for you, Richard. There's no problem here. I can do it if you want me to." He stood an inch over five feet tall; his hair and beard had turned from red to white over the years, changing a gifted elf to an all-knowing Santa.

He was a friend from my magazine-writing days, editor turned investment counselor. I had liked him from the first story-assignment he had given me, admired his calm sense of business from the first day we had met. I trusted him

completely, and nothing he had said all afternoon had flickered that trust.

"Stan, I can't tell you how glad ..." I said. "It's got to be done right, but I don't know what to do with money; and paperwork and tax-things, I don't know about it, I don't like it. Effective now, Financial Manager, it's your business, full-time, and I'm out of it."

"You don't even want to know about it, Richard?"

I looked again at the graphs of his investing performance. All the lines went straight up.

"Nope," I said. "Well, I want to know if I ask, or if there's any huge decision you're about to make. But so much of what you're doing is so far over my head ..."

"I wish you wouldn't say that," he said. "It's not magic, it's simple technical analysis of commodity markets. Most people fail in commodities because they don't have the capital to cover a margin call when the market moves against them. You-that is, we-don't have that problem. We start investing cautiously, with a large capital reserve. As we earn money with our strategies, we then become more speculative.

"When we walk into something as obvious as a head-and-shoulders in a commodity, we can move a lot of money and make a fortune. And we don't always go long, a lot of people forget that. There's just as much money to be made short." He smiled, noticed I was lost already.

He touched a graph. "Now you take this chart, which is plywood prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. You see right here's the head-and-shoulders starting, the warning that the bottom is about to fall out, this is last April. At that point we would have sold plywood, sold lots of plywood. Then when the price tumbles way down here, we would

have bought lots. Sell high and buy low is the same as buy low and sell high. See that?"

How could we sell . . . "How can we sell before we've bought? Don't we have to buy before we sell?"

"No." He was as calm as a college dean, explaining. "These are commodities futures. We promise to sell later at this price, knowing that before the future comes, when we have to do the selling, we will have bought plywood-or sugar, or copper, or corn-at a much lower price."

"Oh."

"Then we reinvest. And diversify. Off-shore investments. An off-shore corporation might be a good idea, as a matter of fact. But CBT will be the place to start, maybe a seat on the West Coast Commodity Exchange. We'll see. Buy a seat on the Exchange, your broker fees go to nothing. Later, diversification; controlling interest in a little company on its way up could be wise. I'll be doing research. But with the amount of money we have to work with, and a conservative strategy for the markets, it'll be pretty hard to go wrong."

I came away convinced. What a relief! In no way can my financial future get tangled, parachute-like.

I'd never be able to handle money the way Stan did. Not patient enough, wise enough, and I don't have charts that shoot moonward.

Yet wise enough am I to know my own weakness, to find a trusted old friend, and give him control of my money.

77

ten

LAY in the sun on the deck, Donna and me, the two of us on my becalmed sailboat, drifting with the current thirty miles north of Key West. "No woman in my life owns me," I told her quietly, patiently, "and I own not one of them. That's terribly important to me. I promise: never will I be possessive 'of you, never jealous."

"That's a nice change," she said. Her hair was short and black, her brown eyes closed against the sun. She was tanned the color of oiled teak from years of summer since a divorce far northward. "Most men can't understand. I'm living the way I want to. I'll be with them if I want to be with them, I'll be gone if I don't. That doesn't frighten you?" She moved the straps of her bikini, to keep the tan unstreaked.

"Frighten? It delights me! No chains or ropes or knots, no arguments, no boredoms. A present from the heart: I'm here

not because I'm supposed to be here, or because I'm trapped here, but because I'd rather be with you than anywhere in the world."

The water lapped gently. Instead of shadows, bright lights sparkled up on the sail.

"You will find me the safest friend you have," I said.

"Safest?"

"Because I cherish my own freedom, I cherish yours, too. I am extremely sensitive. If ever I touch you, do anything you'd rather no.t, you need whisper the gentlest 'No.' I despise intruders and crashers-into-privacy. You ever hint I'm one myself, you'll find me gone before you finish the hint."

She rolled on her side, head on her arm, and opened her eyes. "That does not sound like a proposal of marriage, Richard."