The Last Supper: And Other Stories (7 page)

There were three hours before the C46 landed, and I spent those three hours dying slowly, drinking rancid yellow water, swallowing salt tablets, and joining this or that officer or enlisted man in a Coca Cola. They all looked at me as the permanent inhabitants of Death Valley—if there are any—must look at tourists in air-conditioned cars, and some of them, as they sat over Coca Cola, wept with envy and self-pity. The only spark of life they evidenced animated them when they boasted about the heat at their station. There was no denying that they had more and fiercer heat than possibly any other place in the world.

“It's also hot at Abadan,” I remember remarking, just to make conversation, for Abadan was well known and spoken of wherever there were GIs as the “second hottest place in the world.”

“Abadan,” they nodded sadly. “It's never really hot in Abadan. We go to Abadan on leave, and when we tell them how hot it is here, they get angry because they think we're running down their place.”

It was that way, and when the plane finally landed, I felt like a doomed man miraculously reprieved. I slowly shuffled to the porch of the mess and waited for the crew of the C46, who were approaching across the blazing concrete airstrip. They were three cheerful, healthy-looking children, with mustaches, blue eyes, and broad smiles.

“Can you take out a passanger?” I greeted them.

“Oh, yes, sir,” the pilot said. “That is, if you have papers?”

“My papers are OK. You have a passenger.”

“Why, that's fine,” the pilot said, “and we like passangers. It makes things interesting. It's very dull flying cargo in the desert. Nothing interesting ever happens. You're a war correspondent, aren't you, sir? Well, all sorts of interesting things must happen to you.”

“Getting out of here will be the most interesting so far,” I nodded.

“Fine—just fine. It will take us a few hours to load cargo, and then we take off. Where are you bound for, sir?”

“Wherever you're bound for,” wondering again what kind of cargo went out of this place. However, I soon learned, and it should have been obvious from the first. There was only one possible kind of cargo that could be shipped out of that forsaken airstrip, only one product that had lavish and extravagant consumer use. A line of sweating, staggering GIs began to load the plane with crates of empty Coca Cola bottles.

The C46 was a strange, vast, ugly two-motored plane, a huge, whale-like, drop bellied plane, used principally to carry cargo. I had traveled in them many times and had nothing against them except the knowledge that pilots did not like them and vivid memories of the ear-splitting, nerve-wracking crash when the retractible landing gear was lowered. But since all planes were equally uncertain to me, I was able to feel kindly toward this ship from the skies that had come to prevent my body and soul from frying.

This one, however, had no doors. The C46 in service in that part of the world had large double doors, wide enough to accomodate a jeep or a howitzer, but somewhere along the line this one had dropped the doors. It was a little unorthodox to fly in a plane not too unlike a convertible car, but I was in no mood to complain, and I watched with interest as the little pile of Coca Cola crates within the plane grew. It is remarkable how many Coca Cola bottles you can load into an empty C46, but I found it even more remarkable how many bottles of Coca Cola one airstrip can consume. My interest turned to fascination. Again and again, I was certain that it could not continue, that the mess could disgorge no more Coca Cola and that the C46 could hold no more, but soon I began to realize that the capacity of both was beyond anything I had imagined. For almost three hours, under that blazing sun, a steady, unbroken stream of empty Coca Cola bottles poured into the C46. Hot as it was, I had to watch, and I was gradually overcome by a sense of fate and a wave of fascination as the great-bellied plane filled up with the crates of bottles. Thoughtfully, the crew left a narrow area between the Coca Cola bottles and the wall of the plane; otherwise there would have been no room for the single passenger.

Finally it was done, and the navigator, the smallest member of the crew, and seemingly no more than eighteen years old under his whispy mustache, came to inform me that they were ready for the takeoff. As we walked out to the plane, I asked him where he wanted me to ride.

“Why you just make yourself comfortable anywhere,” he answered cheerfully. “We're awful glad to have you with us, because it's very exciting meeting someone like yourself.”

“Anywhere” was a passage of about eighteen inches between the Coca Cola crates and the wall of the plane, so I chose a spot just forward from the gaping doors, spread my raincoat on the floor, and stretched out to await the cool and soothing winds at five thousand feet. From where I lay, I had a pleasant view, not unlike one's view from a convertible car, of the space where doors were supposed to be, and I watched with interest as the airstrip slid beneath us and as finally we were airborne. In moments, the airstrip was far behind us, but the cooling breeze I had anticipated failed to appear. We had climbed to about five or six hundred feet, and there we were, and it gave one a very uncomfortable feeling. We had passed over the white, salt-like expanse of flat where the airstrip was located, and now we were in a region of rolling sand hills, remarkably high sand hills, for it often seemed that we only cleared the tops of them by inches. Then the navigator left the control room and slid back to me along the wall.

“Well, sir,” he said cheerfully, “it's funny, but there seems to be something wrong with the balance.”

“The what?”

“The balance. You see, it's how you load a plane. Now these C46s are marked off for all sorts of army loadings. For example, the marks here on the wall show you just how to load an armored car or a jeep or fifty millimeter guns—all sorts of things that you would be loading with, but of course not Coca Cola.”

“No, I imagine not Coca Cola,” I repeated.

“Of course, you couldn't expect them to think of everything. We just had to use our own judgment loading these bottles, and it's surprising how heavy they are considering that they are empty. We can't seem to get any altitude at all, and it's obvious that there's something wrong with the balance. So the pilot wondered whether you would crawl back to the tail of the plane with me and that might alter the balance a little, so we could make altitude.”

I looked at the open doors and then at the sandhills, and then I nodded and asked a foolish question about parachutes.

“You don't have one? Well, that's strange, and it's against regulations too, but it wouldn't be much use at this altitude. There should be an indraft at the doors.”

As we crawled back to the tail, I made a mental note to ask him what had happened to the doors, and whether they purposely flew without them or whether they had left them somewhere because a piece of whatever strange cargo they might have been carrying then had extruded; but I never did, and to this day the mystery of the doors remains unsolved. Anyway, we crawled far, far into the tail, where we crouched in the lee of a rising mountain of Coca Cola crates, but apparently the balance was still off, and craning his neck to see, the navigator admitted that we were making no more altitude than before.

“Suppose we both go up to the control room now,” he suggested. “It may need weight forward.”

We edged our way back to the control room, joining the pilot and the co-pilot; and in spite of the fact that both of them were that type of young men who are apparently incapable of concern about anything, a faint aura of worry was beginning to gather about them. My own feeling was far more than a faint aura.

“Now isn't that something,” the pilot said to me.

“Just can't make any altitude,” the co-pilot said.

“It's the balance,” the navigator said.

I offered my opinion. “It's the damned Coca Cola bottles. No plane was ever made that could carry this many Coca Cola bottles.”

“They are empty, sir,” the pilot said gently.

“The plane isn't empty. The plane's full.”

“Yes, sir. I meant the Coca Cola bottles are empty. “We did estimate the load as well as we could.”

“It's not the load, it's the balance,” the navigator insisted.

“The trouble is,” the co-pilot added sadly, “that there is nothing in the C46 manual about Coca Cola bottles. Nothing at all. You just have to guess.”

“The trouble is,” I put in, “that sooner or later we're going to run into one of those damned sand mountains.”

“They're not mountains, sir, just sandhills.”

“They look like mountains to me, and if we lose any more altitude, we're going to hit one.”

“It does seem worrisome.”

“It's going to be more than worrisome if we come down in the desert. It seems to me that we ought to turn around and go back to the airstrip.”

“We've thought of that, sir, but we've lost altitude since we went over a ridge back there. I don't think we could
get
back to that airstrip.”

In a way, I was relieved. “Well,” I said, “that does it. There's only one thing we can do.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Get rid of some of the Coca Cola bottles.”

“What?”

“Get rid of them, sir? I don't understand you,” said the co-pilot.

“Dump them,” I said emphatically. “Pitch them out of the open doors. And keep dumping them until we're light enough to make altitude.”

“The Coca Cola bottles, sir?”

“Exactly—that's just what I had in mind, the Coca Cola bottles.”

“You don't mean dump them? You don't mean throw them away?”

“That's exactly what I mean.”

“Oh, no sir,” said the pilot.

“We couldn't do that,” said the co-pilot.

“Not with Coca Cola bottles,” the navigator said seriously. Anything else, yes. Jeeps, tanks, guns—oh, yes, certainly, if the situation warranted it. But not Coca Cola bottles. I'm afraid you don't understand about Coca Cola, sir.”

“You see, Coca Cola,” said the pilot, “well, I don't really know how to explain. It takes years in the army to understand what I mean. I know you probably have had a great deal of experience, sir, but in the army it's something else. You don't just throw away Coca Cola bottles.”

“Our manifest would be short,” the navigator said. “They would ask what happened to the bottles? We would say, we dumped them into the Arabian desert. Oh, no, no, sir. You don't. You just don't.”

“I'll take the responsibility myself,” I begged them. “Put it all on my shoulders. I'll be responsible to the Coca Cola Company and the army. As a matter of fact, I'll pay for the damn bottles.”

“Oh, no sir—you just can't take such a responsibility.”

Plunging wildly, I said, “I outrank all of you. Here's my company status. Suppose I order you to.”

“Well, sir, I'm afraid not,” the pilot said sadly. “You don't really outrank us as a correspondent. I'm afraid you have no right to order us to do so.”

“But sooner or later, we're going to hit one of those mountains of sand. Don't you know what it means to come down in the Arabian desert? You know the Arabs don't like Americans, and that's if they find us and we don't die of thirst, and if they find us, you know what kind of things they do.”

“Yes, sir, it's a pretty bad situation, isn't it,” the pilot agreed. “It's a shame we have to be in such a situation, but I really don't know what to do about it. The only thing we could think of was to call ahead to the next airstrip and tell them we're coming in to reload. That's about eighty miles from here and no bad ridges in between. We have a very good chance of making it, sir.”

I appealed to their pride and pointed out what an ignoble way to die this was, crushed like an insect between sand and Coca Cola bottles; I drew vivid pictures of Arab atrocities against Americans, embroidering them with full barracks detail; I spoke of the process of dehydration in that desert heat and of how it feels to die of thirst, or how I thought it would feel to die of thirst from the best accounts I had read.

It was all to no avail, and they were” determined to bring in the plane with all bottles accounted for.

The next twenty minutes were not very pleasant, and I suppose it was one of the better moments of my life when the airstrip appeared in the hazy distance. We were very low as we came in—our altitude possibly less than a thousand feet, and it all happened very quickly. Something was missing, something important and decisive in our momentary existence, and what was missing clawed at my nerves, my memory, my whole awareness; and then, as the cold sweat of fear broke out all over me, I realized that the missing factor was that loud, ear-splitting crash one hears when a C46 drops its landing gear. We were coming in without wheels.

I broke into in wild sound, yelling “wheels, undercarriage—” and other associated words as fast and loud as I could, but it was too late. We were already at the landing strip and settling onto the concrete, and suddenly the fat belly of the plane hit the runway, and we made a beautiful landing, tearing out our belly and a good deal of the runway to a symphony of Coca Cola bottles. It was a very good landing; as I heard afterwards, we would hardly have done much better with wheels, except that the bottom part of the plane would have stayed with us, and you couldn't blame the three young men who flew it for forgetting about their landing gear, considering what we had been through. As a matter of fact, no one was injured, and we picked our way through smashed crates and bottles out onto the lovely earth.

I was still in Arabia, and I stood in the sun, watching the ambulance and jeeps converge upon us.

“Well, here we are,” the navigator said.

“Here we are,” the co-pilot said.

“You know, sir,” the pilot said to me, cheerfully, “once you're in, you can land just as well without the wheels as with them.”