The Amazon has many characteristics of the sea. It seems never to end, and the clouds above it, like the clouds above the sea, are free of human observation. I imagine that clouds above Chicago, the Mississippi delta, or Ulan Bator are on their best behavior and rather inhibited. That's how they look, anyway. But over the ocean and away from the sea lanes they congregate in vast columns that fill the sky for thousands of square miles, rising so high and with such stateliness and show that if I didn't know better I would think that this is where they mate and die. And the clouds above the Amazon are sea clouds, though their sea is green.
The rivers were clear at first, but then they turned the color of the Afrika Korps or café au lait. I found the almost equal elevation of land and water unsettling. Why did rivers carve channels if they could just run riot all over the green? If the Andes have more snow than usual, the vibrant green forests will be soaked in my least favorite drink. For that reason alone I would not live in the Amazon, and there are other reasons, such as bugs.
Looking down, I thought of all the animals in a timeless eternity among the trees, and of their unbreakable connection with everything that can be sensed and much that cannot. As a boy I had seen animals in the woods, breathing hard, listening, smelling the air, focusing their powerful eyes upon a thousand things without distinction until a threat or a lure leapt from the background. I envied the billions of unconscious creatures below me, except for the fact that they would have to drink from vast rivers of coffee.
Landing without incident at Boa Esperança, I spent the late afternoon and evening refueling, ate quickly, and then fell asleep near the door to the cargo compartment. Though I slept on my pistol, I knew I didn't have to. I was entirely alone, with no company but trees: the savannah, with its little casuarina trees growing here and there, looked like a bankrupt golf course. The stars shone and the night was mute except for the wind, which blew like the steady wind over the ocean.
I had a headache, which may not have been unreasonable after having been shot in the head, but, still, I told myself to stop thinking about it, as I was unable to depart from the plan. The grasses smelled very sweet, the stars stretched from horizon to horizon, and the wind stayed gentle. I slept, knowing that when I awoke I would feel as if I had been away from New York for a million years.
And when I awoke, I did. My previous life had disappeared. If I would never again see a single person who might remember what I remembered, how could I know that I hadn't dreamt the whole thing? Pieces of paper, that's how. Contemporaneous records and accounts, the work of disinterested parties. But not only could these not draw a real picture, I would never have access to them.
I sat in the early morning light, my legs dangling from the door of the plane, completely and forever out of context. This wasn't so bad, and anyway there was no going back. I had arranged to live out my days in peaceful luxury, which seemed rather odd in that for most of my life I had detested luxury and never known peace, which is why the war, though insane, seemed to me to have been the true state of things, and the years in which war did not rage, a grand illusion.
I wondered if I might fall in love again. I was still moved By feminine beauty, although not so much as when I had been young. Unlike many men my age, however, I didn't desire women in their twenties, for they inspired in me a strong paternal and protective feeling, and consorting with them would have been out of the question (except for Marlise). I thought that I might end up married to a dowager shaped like a 1927 Pierce-Arrow. After all, I was almost old enough to be a dowager myself, although I was physically intact, and as strong as an ape.
As I dangled my legs over the savannah, a strange and homely creature walked out from under the plane, stopped, turned to look at me, and froze in amazement. I think it was a kid anteater. About the size of a dog in a cartoon, it was buff-colored with traces of pink, and it had a huge proboscis. It had lumbered into sight like a tiny prehistoric mammoth, and it stood its ground, staring at me, with the air of something that could think. I was probably the first man it had ever seen, in the first C-54, and it was the first kid anteater I had ever seen.
"Hello," I said to him. Perhaps I was attributing to him my own emotions, but I sensed that he felt affection. I knew it was just a baby anteater that neither spoke nor understood English, but I felt much the same as when I had had dinner with the Pope. Just as the Pope had radiated benevolence, so did the anteater. It occurred to me that I might adopt this anteater, but I didn't know what to feed it. Of course, I did know what to feed it—that was easy. But I didn't know how I could get four pounds of ants into my apartment every day, or if I wanted to.
"Where are your parents?" I asked, as they were nowhere to be seen.
He turned his head and looked shy. I was moved by his modesty, his gentleness, his innocence, and his trust. It was plain that he had never met a jaguar, a hunter, or a hyena, and I hoped he never would. Meanwhile, one tear after another had been rolling steadily down my face. "Sorry," I said, wiping my cheeks with the sleeve of my bloody shirt. "Something has got ten hold of me." There I was, on an empty savannah, my head wrapped in a bloody shirt, apologizing to an anteater.
Just as the Pope had gone back to his work, this little creature left, too, turning away and loping over the grass. I started the engines and took off, rising into a clear blue sky.
The flight was uneventful but for a series of disturbing rattles. The landing strips had been rough on the wheels and struts, and raising and lowering the landing gear after Inusu was like listening to lake ice breaking in the spring. I had only three landings and two takeoffs left. Though the landing gear sounded bad, it sounded as if it had some life left in it.
At one in the afternoon I arrived at Alto Parnaíba, landed with a thump, and went into my routine of eating not nearly enough (for I had very little left), drinking lots of warm water, and working for hours to pump fuel into the wings.
When I finished I was the color of a glowing coal. Perhaps because I felt good after having worked hard, I decided that instead of sleeping at Alto Parnaíba I would push on to the next-to-last stop. Then, in the morning, I would fly to my destination, where a heavy truck was waiting, and my new life would begin in earnest.
So I took off at a quarter to four, and landed, hours later, just as it got dark. I was tired, and the landing was brutal. I finished the last of my rations and began to refuel. In a depleted, almost hallucinatory state, I turned the pump for six hours, sometimes as slowly as a drunk, and I kept on telling myself that this was the last time I would need to refuel.
Sometime around midnight, the wind picked up and I felt big drops of rain blown at me from the side. In the distance the black sky was occasionally lit by a quick flash that would spread laterally across a low combustion chamber with a roof of angry clouds. It's good, I thought, that I don't have to fly through that. The rain liberated the smells of the ground, and the wind brought them thick and fast from what seemed to be the heart of the storm.
Though the wind was not strong enough to necessitate tying down the plane, I had to remain awake in case the storm tracked in my direction. After so little sleep and so much exercise, this was very hard. I had to distract myself without dreaming, for a waking dream would have led quickly into sleep. And yet I had very few distractions. I had no lantern, and did not dare tap into the plane's electrical system to supply the cabin lights, because I needed all the power I could get for starting. I could not, therefore, attend to a stamp collection or read a magazine. And I knew that if I stared at the storm on the horizon I would be hypnotized as if by a swinging pocket watch.
I walked into the night until I bumped into one of the little trees that dot the grassland. This I climbed until it could no longer bear my weight and it broke. I then dragged it back to the plane and snapped it into many little pieces that I stacked under the wing.
Though jet fuel is relatively hard to ignite, the engines of the C-54 used high-octane gasoline, which isn't. Even so, 'I risked a fire underneat
h the part of the wing that had no tank in it. The distance between the wing and the top of the flame at its highest was three or four feet, the whole structure was clad in aluminum, and the heat that was unreflected was harmlessly dissipated by the conductive mass of the metal.
I filled a pot with water and set it on the coals amid still-flaming branches. I hadn't shaved or washed for days, and blood was matted in my hair and beard like mud. Soon I had a gallon of roiling hot water. I dipped a cup into this and let it sit for a while before I used it with a bottle of German shower gel that was made from chestnuts and foamed up as thick as whipped cream. I lathered this stuff into my hair and spread it over my face until I looked like someone dressed as a marshmallow. It was supermentholated, and the longer it stayed on the more it stung and the better it felt, so I made a little detour by brushing my teeth yet again, having done so many times that day and at least twice after my dinner of United States Army pork surprise with mummied vegetables and World War I brownie.
The toothpaste was as white as a swan, and the huge amount I had ladled onto my battered toothbrush cascaded from my mouth like fire-fighting foam. I must say I was having a whale of a time getting clean. Then I realized that someone was watching, and I turned around.
Behind me stood a wan, diminutive, shoeless peasant in the midst of what seemed like cardiac arrest. He wanted to run, but was paralyzed with fear. His chest moved visibly with his heartbeat. I assumed that he thought I was some sort of goblin.
"No no," I said. "Ecce homo, ecce homo." I didn't speak any Portuguese, and certainly not the incomprehensible dialects of the rural north. "Shaving," I said. "Rasoio." I picked up my razor and began to shave, holding out my signal mirror at arm's length. This calmed him. As everyone knows, devils don't shave.
"Hot water," I said as I finished shaving and began to rinse out my hair. It was wonderful, and when at last I was done I stood before him looking like one of those new investment bankers in New York with slicked-down hair, $5,000 suits, suspenders (which, if you are rich, you call braces), and glasses with hair-thin frames. Why do they do that? For decades investment bankers were physically indistinguishable from Harvard deans. Do these young people think that slicked-down hair and zoot suits were once acceptable on Wall Street? They dress now the way gigolos and gangsters used to.
The peasant pointed to my plane, spread his arms, and laughed in amazement. I took that to mean, 'What the hell are you doing here with that huge plane at one o'clock in the morning in the middle of nowhere?' so I said, "Et tu Brute?" but he didn't understand.
I tried to tell him, in Italian, some of my life story. The few cognates that he recognized probably made for an otherworldly tale, and he laughed at totally inappropriate moments. How could he have had the slightest idea of what I was talking about? I pantomimed the theft of Dickey Piehand's car, Constance's coffee dances, killing Mr. Edgar, and meeting the singers in Rome. Then he used the same method to tell me his story, which was, as far as I could ascertain, that he had been a clown in a provincial circus, who, after his wife had been gored by an ox, had left the circus to become an electrician. His dream was to go to Germany. He had a radio—or he wanted a radio. This I gathered as he turned the knobs on an imaginary box and lowered his head to place his ear next to it, smiling.
"Ten radios," I said. "Fifty radios, just for you." I climbed into the plane and retrieved two gold bars that I then presented to him. "Melt them," I ordered, in what was getting to be a habit. "Get rid of the numbers and the seals." He was stunned, I suppose, because when he understood that I was giving them to him, making him immediately the richest man he had ever met, he tried to kiss my hands, but I wouldn't let him. Finally, he hobbled off into the night, barely able to carry his new wealth.
Up ahead, lightning warred in the clouds as if the world were coming to an end, and daylight struggled in vain against the weight of darkness. Despite the stinging wind-driven droplets, the crack of not-so-distant thunder, and the lift and drop of the wings in the violent air, I reeled in my seat and had difficulty keeping my eyes open. At two o'clock in the morning the fire was pink, with white ash that the wind blew into the night, layer by layer, on its stronger gusts.
My sight well accustomed to darkness, I saw quite clearly an agitated glow crawling from the direction in which the peasant had disappeared. It was light from the headlamps of a line of twenty or thirty cars or trucks speeding in my direction. That idiot had undoubtedly made a spectacle of himself and the gold in front of his entire village. Though they might have been peaceable people, it didn't matter. They had probably been drinking coffee all night, and with the plane loaded as it was my life was worth nothing. I was exhausted, and the storm was furious, but I had to get into the air.
I closed the door behind me, ran forward, bumped my head, fell into the pilot's seat, and began to start the engines. If the trucks turned onto the landing strip I wouldn't be able to take off, or, worse, I wouldn't be able to stop, and as I incinerated myself and every vehicle in my path, the flames would light up the night for fifty miles. What would these people know? They were capable of turning onto the field even as I was hurtling toward them far past the point of no return.
I worked as fast as I could, but it takes time to start four engines, and in the terrible moments of waiting I watched the string of foreshortened lights approach in darkness and rain, bobbing up and down with the contours of the road.
Right inboard, running ... left inboard, running ... right outboard, running. The left outboard, however, refused to start. It spun around, it coughed, and it sputtered. I adjusted the fuel mixture. The engine spat out a huge cloud of white, smoke. "Come on!" I shouted, giving it another try. "Come on!" It cycled with determination, it coughed again, it sputtered and sputtered, and then it took. Soon its many knife blades were twirling faster than human vision was made to see, and as I pushed against the throttle the noise and vibration lifted me in my seat.
Brakes released. The plane pitched forward and began to roll. Fully loaded with fuel and a cargo of metal, with engines hot at maximum rpm, it would have made a magnificent sight as it plowed into the trucks. And if there were thirty trucks and each one carried, who knows, ten people, or just half that number? I would kill or maim two-thirds of them—a hundred people.
In an instant I had to decide whether or not to put on my lights. If I put them on, the convoy would see that I was rolling at great speed. Presumably, this would stop it from turning onto the runway.
I threw the switch. Now, I knew, the people on the trucks could see two great blinding lights rushing toward them on a parallel but offset track. They would have to be insane to turn onto the runway.
They were. They did. Not the lead vehicle, but one from the middle, the others following instantly and without hesitation. I was going too fast to stop. Had I tried to stop I would have plowed into them too slowly even to skip over them, like a perfectly aimed, slow-motion bowling ball.
So I pounded the throttles forward and my eyes leapt from the lights ahead to my instruments. I wasn't going to make it. I blinked the lights. Those idiots blinked their lights back at me! What were they thinking?
Then, as if struck by lightning, I realized that with the winds of the storm coming from directly ahead, my airspeed was more than sufficient for takeoff. I pulled back the stick as fast as I could, and I rose.
But the plane was so heavily loaded that the angle of ascent was nearly flat. Only seconds remained before a collision. I started to pull in the landing gear. The landing gear was normally slow to retract, and it had been damaged. It made all kinds of new noises as it was pulled in. I was suddenly right on top of the first truck, which had turned left to avoid impact.
With a tremendous thud the left wheel hit the roof of the cab and my right wing rose. I compensated but the left wing rose too much, because the landing gear had been snapped off like a chicken leg. I lifted the right wing, which had come within a few feet of the ground, and then, having cleared the other trucks, I wa
s level and rising.
Never had I flown directly into the heart of a storm, for the P-51 has the speed and agility to dodge just about anything, and neither bombing raids nor fighter patrols were run in impossible weather. The lightning-infested bales of black cotton that lay ahead were new to me. I was awake, but I had neither the confidence nor the anger that swells as combat approaches. I was, however, unafraid. The immensity of the storm was the antidote to fear, if only because it was impossible to be afraid of everything, and as it got closer, it expanded until it became everything.
All I could do was climb. No fuel was left at Alto Parnaíba, and my tanks had fuel enough only for a straight shot through the storm. I knew I was going to hit the wall, but hoped it would be above the lightning.
Water sprayed from the holes in the windshields and ran over the instrument panels. Eventually its weight could take down the C-54, and I could do nothing to stop it. I reentered the clouds at fourteen thousand feet. It had been turbulent outside, but once within the clouds the plane immediately dropped down four thousand feet, caught in a column of air pushing toward the ground like a piston. It felt like a dive even though the nose was angled up, and the only way out was to move slowly forward through the downdraft.
Finally, at 10,000 feet, the plane exited into relatively tranquil darkness that lit up like a flashbulb only several times a minute as lightning was diffused throughout the clouds. The wings were vibrating, the engines straining, and water sprayed through the windshields. When it had cracked the sky with lines like those in shattered glass, the lightning was less terrible than when it turned everything in the universe to the color of magnesium.