‘Evening, Hen,’ said Abe.
‘Well, good evening to you. You’re leaving tomorrow I guess?’
‘Yep.’
‘Enjoy your dinner?’
‘You mean, did Sal Lundmark’s blindness make me change my mind?’
‘Either way.’
‘I enjoyed my dinner, Hen. But as for changing my mind, I told you already.’
The storekeeper pulled the cigarette from his mouth and stared at the tip. Then he flicked it, still glowing, out into the street.
‘A man’s gotta try, though.’
‘Sure.’ Abe hesitated. He liked the storekeeper. The man had guts and honesty: characteristics which Abe prized above anything. ‘If things work out, Hen, I’m going to be doing a little flying in these parts. I’m hoping to make a little money flying between Florida and the islands.’
‘There money in that?’
‘Don’t know. Not much. Any case, I aim to find out.’
‘Yeah, well, good luck.’
‘Maybe I’ll get in touch again sometime. If things work out. Any case, if you ever get a postcard from your Auntie Poll, you don’t forget who sent it.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Goodnight, Hen.’
‘Goodnight, Captain.’
‘And thanks. I’m only sorry I couldn’t help.’
Heavier-than-air flight sounds impossible – and it is. People get confused because they think that planes must weigh a lot. But that’s not true. Not true at all.
On the ground, of course, aircraft weigh something. But on the ground, they aren’t really airplanes, they’re just big chunks of metal with wings. The magic happens when the plane begins to roll forwards and air starts to move over those wings. At first, nothing much happens – nothing visible anyway. But, as the airspeed increases, the wings begin to experience lift. They’re pulling upwards, cancelling gravity, making the plane lighter.
The airspeed gets faster. Once again, the lift on the wings increases. Invisible strings are pulling the plane upwards. As the airspeed goes on increasing, the lift begins to equal gravity. Push the plane through the air just a notch or two faster and the plane rises from the ground, not by some miracle of nature but because it’s helpless to do otherwise.
And that’s it.
That’s why heavier-than-air flight never has been possible and never will be possible. Imagine the biggest, heaviest plane you’ve ever seen in your life. Imagine it one thousandth of a millionth of a millisecond before take-off. The plane may look like it’s sitting on the ground, a clumsy metal skyscraper that’s fallen over. But that’s all illusion. That entire plane – pilot, passengers and all – has become absolutely weightless.
It’s so light you could pick it up and throw it over the moon.
Abe quit, he turned his back.
One bright and breezy dawn, with a cool wind a steady ten knots from the south, Abe took Poll to the end of Main Street, opened her throttle, and roared upwards into the eggshell-perfect sky. He dipped his wings, once, twice, then flew away.
As the red-and-white plane danced away towards the ocean, the knots of onlookers broke up, back to their daily business or their morning grits. The last person left squinting into the morning sun was Hennessey Gibson. ‘A nice guy that,’ he muttered. ‘Just a shame he wouldn’t stay.’
Abe kept his date with Brad Lundmark. The Curtiss Jenny had been built as a trainer. It had two cockpits, front and rear, with full controls in each one. Abe took the kid up to fifteen hundred feet, then let the kid take over. Rudder bar left and right. Control stick up, down, port, starboard. Throttle full open, half-off, then full power again. Abe gave the kid two hours in the air. They did a couple of landings, a couple of take-offs. It was the best two hours of Brad Lundmark’s life. Abe dropped the kid back on the sand and filled the tank with gasoline from a red tin fuel can.
‘So long, Brad.’
‘So long, Captain.’
‘You mind you look after your mom, OK?’
‘Sure, Captain. I will.’ On the last two words, Brad’s voice twisted a little and rose half an octave. It was the sort of verbal stumble which probably means nothing. The boy immediately got his control back and added something else in a voice which was completely level and smooth. Only he’d looked away too. He’d darted his eyes quickly out to sea and kept them there ’til his voice had recovered.
The conversation ran on a little. Abe still needed to stow the empty fuel can and clear a few stones away from his prospective take-off site. But the flier had become suddenly gruff, almost angry. They said goodbye again and shook hands. Then Abe took off, climbing aggressively. He headed south, long enough to be sure that Brad had already set off for home, but inside himself the flier was at war.
On the one hand there stood Hennessey and the blind Sal Lundmark, her dead husband and the stricken town. There stood the redhead Brad, the engine-obsessed image of the boy that Abe had once been. And on the other hand, there stood Abe himself; everything he was now, everything he’d ever learned about himself. The two sides struggled for mastery. Neither side won.
Angrily, treating his controls with uncharacteristic roughness, Abe brought Poll round in a long curve that would bring her back up the coast, five miles out to sea and a mile and a quarter above it. Then holding himself directly in between the Marion coast and the eye of the sun, he circled. The mouth of Okefenokee River, a few miles east of Independence, was marked by a cluster of ragged green islands and the branching tongues of a little delta.
Still angry, still grim, but always careful, Abe began to study the sea below. At first glance, the ocean seemed littered with vessels of all sizes, ploughing the violet-blue with trails of random foam. Abe watched until the shapes gradually resolved themselves into a pattern. The smaller ones were mostly fishing boats, tracking shoals of fish. Further out to sea, bigger ships were cruising, paralleling the coast. Abe looked at the whole pattern of shipping, but kept the Okefenokee River always in view.
He didn’t see what he was looking for on that flight, nor any time that day. He felt relieved. The war that had been raging inside him had resolved itself in this way: he had given Hennessey and Brad and all the other figures in his head twenty-four hours exactly. If he found what he was looking for in that time, he’d continue to investigate. But if he didn’t… Waves of relief, of freedom, washed through him at the thought. Abe thought of flying Poll out over the ocean to the islands. The blue ocean with its alternate tints of purple and green, its crests of white, the far horizons, and only the sky above… Abe hoped against hope, that the sea would stay empty.
When darkness fell, he unrolled his sheepskin sleeping roll on a beach a little way north of Brunswick. An hour before light the next morning, he woke up, walked waist-deep into the sea, where he dunked his head and scrubbed