Problem was, even with my leather jacket, leather flying helmet, leather gloves, and goggles, the open cockpit tended to get a little nippy on days like this when the temperature ran about 42 degrees. My nose was running pretty bad. That wasn’t supposed to happen to daring young men in Snoopy helmets.
Right now all I could think of was some brandy warmed by the fireplace in the venerable old house where I live, and the opportunity to smoke my one allotted bowl of Captain Black for the day and to pick up where I’d left off in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. Or to do some more reading for an anecdotal history of Iowa I’m planning to write, a task that takes great research reading.
I put the handsome red barnstormer down in a field of reedy green buffalo grass, the tall wheels bouncing merrily over the bumps, the engine expelling war clouds of thin blue smoke.
No Saturday-afternoon cowboy hero had ever been better treated to the adulation of young people than I was that afternoon, twenty-six of them in all, a few more girls than boys to reflect our modern age, each nattily gussied up in the Civil Air Patrol uniform.
“You ever going to take anybody else up in that, Robert?” a ferociously freckled girl asked.
“If I can ever get the right kind of insurance,” I said.
“Oh, shoot,” she said. A small choir of groaners joined her.
“You ever get scared in an old bucket like this?” one of the boys asked. “I mean, after what happened to Mac and all last year?”
I grinned, the dashing hero to the end. “I can’t think of a better way to go than in old Liberty here.”
“Did you name her ‘Liberty’?” another boy asked.
“Nope. That was the name she came with.”
A girl beamed. “I’m glad she’s a she.”
I looked out over the faces and said, “I need six bodies to help me push Liberty into the hangar over there. Any volunteers?”
They all joined in, of course, resembling a noisy mob in a movie, Liberty regal in her stubborn way as she was pushed through grass almost tall enough to brush the engine. Flat midwestern prairie rolled to distant blue hills and a pale gold scimitar of moon could be seen now that four o’clock was here.
“Thanks, everybody,” I said, starting to tie her down once we were in the hangar, and now that their adult leader was starting to hustle them into the three waiting vans.
He was named Neely. He was a nice guy who’d been under the spell of aviation his entire life.
“Gosh,” he said, sounding awfully young for someone well into his sixties, “the kids sure did love the exhibition.”
“Well, I loved putting it on for them.”
“You’re a great guy, Mr. Payne, and I’d like to thank you.”
He took my hand and pumped it like a well handle he was having some trouble with. Even at his age he was gangly and a little awkward with the social graces. But he was honest and decent and industrious, and our country needed a whole hell of a lot more people like him.
Then he was gone, echoing footsteps out the small hangar, leaving me to chill wind and the smell of fuel and oil and the cold spring day itself. I had goose bumps, and my nose was still running.
I was finishing up, pulling the tarp over the double cockpit, when I heard a voice say, “You sure do all right with the ladies, Mr. Payne.”
“I do?” I turned around now that I was done.
Peterson from the adjacent airport.
He leered, his thick horn-rimmed glasses raising up on his pudgy cheeks. Peterson was the successful nerd all grown up, a beeper clipped to the waist of his wash pants, a formidable ring of keys dangling from his belt, a walkie-talkie filling his left hand and half a dozen pens lining his shirt pocket. His shoes were scuffed brown Hush Puppies with black shoe-strings broken so many times their knots resembled tassels.
The tiny airport Peterson manages has a coffee shop where one afternoon a female cousin of one of the local pilots was bold enough to ask me if I’d like to have dinner with her that night. “You’re a very interesting man, Mr. Payne,” she’d said. “My cousin even seems to believe that you might have been in the FBI at one time.”
Ever since then, Peterson has taken the opportunity to tell anybody who would listen that I am a “lady-killer.” Indeed, I had recently overheard him employing a phrase I don’t believe I’ve heard since 1962. “Ole Payne here,” he’d told a mutual friend in front of me, “gets more ass than a toilet seat.”
Whoever said that we live in a coarse and vulgar age has never met the eloquent Harold J. Peterson.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Harold.”
“This woman. Real high-class stuff. She just stopped by the coffee shop. Wanted me to give you this.”
He handed me a heavy number-ten manila envelope sealed carefully with long strips of fiber tape.
I hefted it, felt a familiar shape inside.
“She give you her name?”
“Nope. And she wasn’t the kind of gal you ask questions, either. Pulls up in this fancy dark blue Caddy four-door that looked like it had just rolled right off the dealer floor. Hell, when she opened the door, I could smell the new leather seats. Even had a driver. Guy in a suit and mirror sunglasses. Looked like an FBI agent, actually. You know — like you used to be.”
“She say anything else?”
He shook his head. “Nope, just asked if I knew you and would I give you this envelope.”
“Thanks, Harold. I appreciate it.”
“Got time for some coffee?”
“Afraid not. Want to get home and lay out some things for tomorrow. Try some new tackle on some carp.”
“Hell, my pa always said that there was no tackle or no man that a carp ever feared under any circumstances. And he was right. My cousin used to say they were demonically possessed, was how they could chew up tackle that way.”
I smiled. Fish lore dies hard up near the Mississippi. Marquette and Joliet, who were among the first white men to see the vast river, were warned by Indians that it was inhabited by monsters and giant fish that would devour them. This was back in 1673, about the time they reached the mouth of the Wisconsin River. Some of those Indian tales were still being told today.
I thanked him again and walked over to my jeep in the tall grass, fired her up and let her idle a few minutes. She was born Army green in late 1944, just about the time we put the hammerlock on the Germans, and since then she had been passed down from my grandfather to my father to me. Whenever my mother wanted to nudge me gently toward getting married and settling down, she’d say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a son to give the old jeep to? It would’ve made your father so happy.”
While the jeep was gaining strength, I slit the envelope open with a thumbnail and looked inside.
There was a half-inch of good green currency. Thumbing it, I guessed somewhere in the vicinity of ten thousand Yankee dollars.
I sat there in the soughing midwestern wind for a time and watched a hawk splay its wings in silhouette against the soft blue prairie sky.
I wondered who the woman was and why she wanted to give me so much money.
3
In this part of the state, the soil is rich and dark and loamy. I helped dig the grave for Katherine Louise Payne, so I know about the soil firsthand. We went down six feet, as mandated by law.