Accident Report
Jonathan M Barrett
Copyright 2010 Jonathan M Barrett
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The frost is heavy as snow and weeks old in the shadows. Frozen blades of grass crunch beneath Paul's boots, and sprinkles of rime fall as he parts ferns to check for missed scatterings of debris. But everything has been accounted for. He steps back into the sunlight; his lenses turn to shades, and he replaces his beanie with a baseball cap. At this time of day, this time of year, the angle of the sun would have shone a beam of light straight into the pilot's eyes, blinding as a laser.
Out from the trees, Paul looks southeast. Back there, the topography is hellishly tricky for a topdressing pilot. The land rises sharply without warning. The copse of old matai on the hillock is far higher than the surrounding acres of juvenile pine. Just a moment's lapse of concentration, and the gnarly topmost branches would snag the undercarriage, tipping it towards the earth.
In his cups, Paul's father often told him the story of an acquaintance in the auld country; a taciturn man who nevertheless whistled jaunty tunes as he worked. He was a painter on the great bridge across the Forth.
"Did you know," Paul's father would say, "you finish painting it once, then, you just have to start all over again?"
A dutiful son, Paul always managed wonderment.
So, one day, this whistling Sisyphus, snatched a student, who was hardly yet shaving, but sick of life, as he jumped from the balustrade towards an ill-considered death, and held him for half an hour until the police and ambulance crew arrived. His workman's hands gripped the young man's pale wrists and cramped and shook; his veins swelled varicose and the lines of ink of his tattoos spread. But he would not let go. Rescue that day didn't come from a psychologist's smooth logic, but from the tanned and paint-splattered fingers of a worker whose instinct told him to risk his own to hold onto a stranger's life. Can you imagine that? You take one idiot step into the abyss, and an angel pulls you back, an angel who's not one for words but whistles to take his mind off the agony of the sinews tearing in his Popeye's forearms. Paul glances back at the wreckage: if only there had been an angel in the air that day.
Once more, Paul imagines the aircraft's course. Lumbering with its cargo of phosphates, the plane must have clipped the topmost branches, and gravity would have done the rest; an unstoppable trajectory downwards. Paul runs his hand along the belly of the fuselage. He takes off a glove, and touches, probing into the grooves. He sniffs his fingertips. They're fragrant. The scent of smashed timber and pine needles, something like the aftershave he'd splashed on as a young man, overcomes the stench of kerosene that always marks a crash site.
"21 October. 10h 34." Paul talks into his Dictaphone. "Accident report. TopMaster collision event. Investigator's initial impression. The single-engine TopMaster approached the crash site from Exford aerodrome. North-westerly route. Estimated speed, 130 knots. The sun would have been directly in the pilot's line of vision. It's likely he couldn't see an elevated copse of matai." Paul clicks off the machine to blow circulation back into his pink fingers. He switches it back on. "Witness states the aircraft made contact with the matai. Then it crash landed in the pine plantation."
Yellow police tape threads through the loops of the iron rods that mark out the crash site. It's like the needlework of giants. All in all, the site is pretty compact – not like some of the investigations Paul has conducted, ones whose images come back to him just before dawn. No, this is definitely a well-contained site. A premature death, neatly packed up, like the rucksack his son Hamish swung onto his shoulder before he slammed the door in farewell.
Not a day passes without Paul reliving the moment Hamish left. It's like the stage directions for a play. Shelagh, Paul's wife, had persuaded him to try amateur dramatics – something to draw him out of himself, she'd promised. It didn't work, but he helped to plan the productions. So the stage was set: the strapping only son stood to the right, his hand on the door handle; the tearful mother to the left. And, in the centre, the mute father playing the role of the patriarch he's never been. Lights fade. Then the house is empty.
But what do you do? You fill a boy's head with talk of planes. You drive him hours to air shows; all the way there, all the way back the boy would be talk talk talk of engines and acrobatics, thrust and barrel turns. You teach him how to spot the different types of aircraft in the air. You help him glue the Airfix kits together, and then, when he tells you he wants to become a pilot, for once you do speak, the Father voice comes to you. "No. It's too dangerous." No discussion. And your love for him runs so deep, it cannot be spoken. You can't bear the thought of him dead, so you're prepared to cut him out of your life.
Paul hears its engine before the bright green tractor comes into view. A thickset man, about sixty climbs out. It must be cosy in the cabin, seeing how lightly he's dressed – corduroy pants and a supplier's complimentary fleece. There's a snatch of classical music as the farmer opens and shuts the cabin door. "G'day." He calls, and comes as far as the tape boundary. "A bit cold this morning, but they say we might have some rain later, that'll warm things up."
Paul glances towards the cloudless west. He guesses this man hasn't been a farmer all his life; it's probably a retirement folly. "I'm investigating the crash," Paul says.
"Yes, yes. The police said you'd be coming, so I've been looking out for you. I was first on the scene. He came in too low. I knew he was going to hit the pines." The farmer coughs, and looks to the ground. "There was nothing I could do, you understand."
"I read your statement." Paul wishes it were otherwise, but he knows he's brought a pall over the farmer's day.
"Yes, of course you did." The farmer stares at the wreckage and says, "I tell you something, um, mate, I couldn't do your job."
Paul hesitates. You investigate accidents to make things safer. If you do that, you might prevent something terrible happening to your own. "I'm sorry you had to witness this."
The farmer's brow furrows. Perhaps, he's wondering if Paul is somehow responsible. The farmer rubs his hands together. "I'll leave you to it." Another few bars of classical music, then the snorting, dragon breath of the tractor fills the clearing, and the visitor is gone.
Paul has gathered enough evidence. It's clear what happened; there's no need for him to linger.
He steadies himself with a hand on the roof of the car, and balances on one leg like a crane, as he uses a stick to scrape mud from the sole of his wellies. He pulls on his shoes one by one, and then places the boots on the newspaper he'd left ready for them. He'll clean them properly at home.
Along the logging road, Paul slows almost to a stop at the blind corners. No trucks today – still you can never be too careful. Paul's father had been a miner, a man who risked being crushed beneath measureless tons of lignite every working day. His son Hamish became a topdressing pilot who might fall to earth at any time. Mole to swift – it's evolution of a kind, but Paul had hoped for a different kind of progress. He could show, but not tell his son of his love. His father couldn't even show love. Paul had thought, perhaps, Hamish would be able to do both. Now, he'll never know.
So often he wishes he could get it all out. To fill his Dictaphone tapes with the words he could never say to those he loved. Then play them back. Or have Janine in the office type his terse statements into flowing sentences as she always does. Maybe he would even leave a message for her, beyond the gruff thanks for her meticulous work.
There's a tavern on State Highway 7 run by an eccentric ex-pilot. Paul always stops off there when he's in this neck of t
he woods. He ashamed to admit it, but coming back from air shows in Blenheim, many is the time he's left Hamish in the car with a bottle of L&P, soon sucked empty, while he's propped up the bar, listening to the flyers' tales, nodding along, and erupting into backslapping laughter at the punch lines. But today, he'll take nothing stronger than a cappuccino. The car park is empty, and, as he circles, cracking the thin ice over potholes, he resigns himself to just driving on, but he's sees there's a light on in the bar, and manoeuvres precisely into a parking space.
Nothing has changed inside. The gas heaters are on full, but the place is musty and damp as it always is, even in summer. The ex-pilot has moved into an old folks home in town, so the woman behind the bar tells Paul. She's his granddaughter. Somewhere along the line, the daredevil's famous eccentricity became dementia. She's got a wee baby asleep in a car seat on the bar, all wrapped up in layers of wool, only his chubby pink face exposed. Hamish and his girl might have a baby like this now. Paul can't help glancing back at the sleeping child, the miniature flyer in his ejector seat, as he performs his ritual inspection of the framed photos around the walls.
"That's Grandpa in Korea," the woman tells him. She knows all the stories as well as Paul does. There's Vietnam, and then the wild early days of topdressing. Here's the one of ex-pilot that day he landed on the state highway, and taxied into the car park outside the tavern. A barmaid in flowery crimplene holds a glass of beer to the open cockpit window. Who would have thought one man could have survived all that recklessness, but live long enough to forget everything? And yet a novice can have one lapse of concentration, and he's done for.
Paul eyes the spectrum of bottles ranged behind the bar. In his time, he could have handled a few scotches on a cold day; later, he might even manage to tell a few stories of his own, perhaps, the one he'd inherited from his father, about an angel painting a bridge. But the young woman wouldn't be good company; the old days have gone.
Paul drinks his coffee standing at the bar in silence.
After long minutes, the woman, who'd gone back to her magazine, must remember he's still there. She looks up. "So, were you a pilot too?"
"No." Paul says, and feels his cheeks redden.
She turns a page and glances down. "But you knew Grandpa?"
Paul nods. Knew of him; knew his stories. He doesn't put her straight.
"He was like crazy. Well, I guess he is crazy now." She looks around the bar. "He tried to burn this place down. Dad said that was the last straw."
The baby snuffles and stirs. He struggles against his harness, and lets out a high mew of protest. Paul guesses the woman will want to feed her baby.
"Thanks for the coffee."
She has her back to him as she fiddles with the belt buckle. "No worries." The baby is freed and is silent for a moment as he stares at Paul.
In the car park, Paul turns on the engine to get the heater going, and inserts a new cassette into his Dictaphone. "Accident report. TopMaster collision event." He clicks off the machine, and rubs the heel of his palm across his eyes. "It was not the pilot's fault. With the angle of the sun, the most experienced pilot in the world could not have seen the copse of matai." Paul stows the Dictaphone in the glove box, and takes out his mobile. He's got this far before, but this time doesn't hesitate to dial the number. "Hamish. It's, me, Dad. I need to talk to you."
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About the author
Jonathan M Barrett lives and teaches in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written several plays, novels and short stories.
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