Quick Hop

Drucker didn't like people drinking in his airplane. Especially women.

"Nip?" she wheedled, reaching around with the wildly sloshing pint from the bucket seat behind him. There was no hope of holding it steady against the sway of the plane, so she let it waft back and forth under his nose like a giant bottle of scent. When he crinkled his nostrils, just barely, she giggled. "Dingdong," she belled over the tattoo of the motor. "Avon calling."

"Take it back," he snapped, then added stiffly, "if you will, please, ma'am."

"Don't drink?"

"Not up here." Then, again stiffly, "I'd take it kindly, ma'am----"

"Laura."

"I'd take it kindly if you'd wait until we got back down." He sniffed hard, trying to clear the dank smell of bourbon, the faint musk of womankind.

"Party-poop." She hauled the pint back and poured a jiggly shot into the gold-lacquered plastic cap of the bottle. The cap clacked against her teeth as she knocked down the bourbon, like sludge, with one toss of her high-necked head. The witching scent of her tangled, odorous hair reached Drucker, who kept his binding blue gaze fixed on the rectitudes of his instrument panel. He tracked his exact altitude, air speed, rpm and variation from the horizontal, even as disgust registered itself in an almost calibrated bristling of blond hairs out of his untrimmed nose pits. He reckoned abstractly from all these readings and then precisely corrected for this funky new disturbance, with a sly pull back on the stick over his knees, then a sharp thrust forward. Her groan, sudden and sickly, indicated he'd dealt aright with the trouble. He would have preferred to read a needle on a dial at that point, but the sound of her twisting the cap hastily back onto the bottle had a certain number of rough clicks that could be counted, appraised.

"What'd we hit?" she yapped at him.

"A little low turbulence."

"Balls. I oughta throw up all over you."

He didn't flinch. He simply pulled once more on the black knit tie he wore with the short-sleeved shirt that was checkered off in thin blue lines, like graph paper. He'd heard that pilots wore ties like that way up in the executive jets, where even the sky seemed to be a product of Humble or Du Pont or Chrysler. He intended to rise that high himself someday, though the knit tie was as far along as he'd gotten to date, and it hadn't really held up too well. Tightly linked and spongy when he bought it--out of a warm glass case, like a specimen, on his one charter to New York City--his nervous habit of pulling on it had sprung all the stitches, strangled the knot down to a nubbin that barely covered his cracked collar button. The tie hung down now like a string of tar drooping apart in the sun. He had to stuff it into his belt to keep it together, out of the way. There it seemed to adhere, forming with his belt the axes of the graph across his chest, where shirt wrinkles sometimes worked up into disturbing curves.

"We'll let it go," she said, "but you're a lousy pilot."

He was a crackerjack pilot and knew it. "Ever been up in a plane before?" he asked her.

"Lots."

"Anything this small?"

"The smallest I been up in, they still let you have a drink."

He ignored that.

"It's not the big bumps," she kept after him. "It's the little bumps. That's how you tell a lousy pilot."

"Yes, ma'am."

"When you dove in for the banner. Back there. Did I mind?"

"You was expecting that."

"Like hell."

"It's your banner. You ordered it. What'd you expect?"

"Not that nose dive."

"How'd you think I was going to get it up here?"

"Thought you had it up here already. Then just fart it out the tail, or something."

"I don't know, ma'am." he decided to say. "I guess you ain't thinking too well right now."

"Laura. And say 'drunk' when you mean drunk."

Drucker sniffed.

"Say, 'Laura,' say right out, say, 'Laura, I'm right sorry, but big drunks don't fit in small planes.'" Her giggle was higher, blacker this time. "'Specially my poor little old seaplane with a tail-twitching banner dragging off its ass.' Only you don't talk like that, do you?"

"No, ma'am."

She knocked the bottle hard against the side of the plane, testing the metal, suddenly and resonantly. "What kind of a crate is this you got here, anyhow?"

"An Aeronca."

"That's a seaplane?"

"Not unless you want it to be."

"Not a seaplane?"

"Any plane can be a float plane, ma'am, if it's got the power to take the g load. I put the floats on her."

"Yourself?"

"I can do it myself when I have to."

"Brand-new?"

"Almost."

"You mean used? Like tires?"

"They cost me two thousand dollars."

"Sort of recaps?"

He was finally annoyed enough to begin abruptly boasting. "I can do about anything with her I want to, ma'am. I can put floats on her or put wheels on her. Either way. I can haul your banner, ride you around." He thought of more. "I can haul five hundred pounds of spray with her. Take out that bucket seat and the barrel goes right in back, where you are."

"Let's see your teeth."

His jaw tensed, like a stirrup.

"Come on. open up."

"What for?"

"I read somewhere you rot out all your teeth with that stuff."

"Well, hell, as you can readily see." he snarled, turning his rigid neck and giving her at last his full face, "I got all mine." His sudden teeth, fronted like locked shields, startled her. But she still managed, very smartly, to neigh at him.

That might have gotten to him, except that the neighing showed that her own teeth weren't as good as his. Almost, but a little fangy. and red-flecked from scraping clumsily against her lipstick. The rest of her, nice as it was, seemed that kind of careless, too. She had on two tiny, torrid hits of bathing suit and was barely bothering to stay in them. The bra had only a lackadaisical hold on her swaying bosom and the pants hugged way low down on her long belly. She wasn't near being fat, just full and easy and exposed. She'd been wearing high, teetery beach clogs that propped her into ample trim when he picked her up at the pier, but the clogs had gone into her beach bag, now that the bottle was out.

She whinnied at him again, and it struck him that she really did look a lot like good horseflesh.

He turned away from her, back toward flight. "Yes, ma'am, had 'em all, right along," he bragged, "and crop-dusting is how I started out."

Right at the bottom. Right over the bottom land, 12 to 18 inches off the ground. Up to 50 or 100 feet for the tight, screaming turns, but right back down again to one foot for the next desperate run over the tobacco plants or cotton bolls or Christmas-tree seedlings that choked the soil beneath him for two breathless summers. It wasn't flying. It was more like drag racing, pushing a Piper J-3 down an endless dirt track, back country, that switched out from under him in quick, hot, weedy tumbles. But a track he could never feel, hardly see. Its gullies and ruts and washouts blurred into a dull, straw-brown, flickering drift beneath his wings, too near to be really there. He felt like a man forced to walk on air who could barely pick his feet up out of the dust.

And it seemed to stretch forever, that track, always open. Only his own mistake would ever close it. He roared down it, way back into the poorest farm country, alter the odd, bad jobs that the squadrons of crop dusters didn't want. Too hazardous, the prices too low. Skinflint bargains with hard men whose fields were so patchy he could barely dip in and out before the broken barns and leaning silos were up against his windscreen. In the dead summer heat, buckled to those killing, misty spews, he felt himself dragged to the ground by a terrible weariness. If he could only just pull over to the side of the track, now, now while he was down, if he could just rest for a moment from the steady drone of danger. He would be on the verge of turning off the cracked furrows into God knows what awful pile-up when he would suddenly catch himself, tear loose the gathers of poison from his wings and climb up out of their phantom on the tip of his shuddering tail. He had to gain altitude, get up out of there high enough to see where he'd been, what he'd done: and when he looked back, there were always long, lone strips of a greener light, where he'd missed the sorry crop entirely. Then it was neatness that sent him back down again. He dropped in from the other, riskier angle, siding with the rotten barns this time, leaning with the silos, but going up against a stand of tall, fingered poplars that he had to jump like a cat. He would stay down until the last possible sleek moment and then leap, leap out of reach. He cheated the danger over and over, hoping that the chances taken would somehow smooth out the folds in that billowy shroud that he laid over the vegetation, but there always were live, leafy rents left in it. He ended up checkering what he'd striped. At dusk, after sometimes ten hours of flying, the only thought in his mind was to get up higher yet, high enough to lose sight of the tiny (continued on page 90) Quick Hop (continued from page 78) botches in his world below. He would have slept the night through up there if he could have, under dustless stars, and only circled back down again for the cool rise of the new day, utterly fresh this brief time at dawn before he had to leech it with his smoky venoms.

"What's Aeronca mean?"

"Don't know."

"Sounds like an Indian name."

"It's the company name. Maybe somebody in the family."

"That the only name?"

"I guess. I'm H. J. Drucker in the Yellow Pages. Henry Jerome, but they call me Highjack. She's just...." He stroked the stick without changing course. "I guess she's just all I got."

She was the profits of two summers' dusting and spraying, plus the $400 trade-in on the J-3, along with a healthy share of a new enterprise he'd found to take him up a little higher, mostly on weekends. Down the coast along these summer beaches, maggoty with sun bathers, and during the fall, over the big, broiling stadium at the university, he pulled banners. He felt much better about pulling than spraying. Pulling left the air clean behind him, and he had to drop close to the ground only once, to hook the banner from between the two ground poles, the way the old mail planes used to swoop low for the mailbags without landing. The message was all laid straight for him along the runway, spelled out on the tapes in five-foot, cloth-of-gold letters, ready to be yanked up and plated on the hot blue sky. But he still couldn't fly much above 500 feet if he was going to get the maggots to roll over off their sandy white bellies and squint up at him, toward the light, or the football crowds to shade their eyes with their programs and read what he had to say.

Not really what he had to say. He owned the gold letters and went around himself to all the stores and restaurants and party headquarters, and wrote down the words in his own joggled hand--a straying line of block letters that wavered on the notebook page the same way the banner itself fluttered and snapped when the breezes were bad--but it was what they wanted to say. Not him. He didn't care what was said. His best moment was still when he came back down over the field to drop the banner in a plummeting tangle of flashing gold meaninglessness and then, freed of its drag, climbed up into the unlettered sky again. All he had to know was the count, how many letters would be tied to his tail when he hauled hard and away from his pass between the two ground poles. He could pull 50 with the J-3, then up to 100 when he got the Aeronca, without too much risk of stalling out or twisting the banner so that the message scrambled in mid-air, but it was always safer when the messages were shorter. He struggled to be brief, tightening the phrases, making fewer letters say more for the G.O.P. or the Dems, about the sale or the free snax sat. nite, curtly, to U, but he felt the alphabet itself was weighted against him. The 26 letters struck him as extravagant and wasteful, even a vague source of trouble. It worried him that he had to use some letters all the time and others hardly ever. He often approached unlikely prospects simply because they had names that would help him take up that dangerous slack in the alphabet.

For the longest time, he was stuck with the Zs. He thought of using them for a sleepy sound in a motel ad, but he had only two in the set and it would take at least three to look anything like a convincing snore. Then, speculatively, he clipped them onto a section of tapes in the word Zigzag and hung it up in the shed, hoping somebody would see it and want it. But nobody seemed to, even when he hinted it was sort of a bargain. Finally, on a slow afternoon after the Labor Day weekend, just so he didn't really lose on it, he decided to pull it on his own, make some personal appeal for the word. He didn't quite know what to say, so he laid out the word me, the opposite of u, highly personal, to see if it gave him any ideas. It only made him feel uncomfortable, and he almost took it apart again, but then thought of call me, which sounded more general, helpful, even. Charitably inspired, he strung everything together as call me for free zigzag, adding the number of the pay phone at the airport. He pulled the banner up and down the beaches twice, a little lower than usual, and so that much louder. When he dropped it like an outworn phrase and landed again on the stubbly grass strip, the flight dispatcher was already hanging out of the phone booth, waving at him. He started running for the phone, but it turned out the dispatcher was trying to wave him away. "Never mind the calls," the dispatcher yelled. "Just take care of who's already drove out here on their own." He found them, maybe 30 or so, outside the gate, still in their bathing suits, sandy-legged, fingers clamped onto the wire fencing to hold their places in the pushy line.

"How much for a zigzag? Usually?" asked the lady at the head. She was badly wrapped in a rubbery red suit, still damp with sea smack in its lippy folds.

"Ever had one before?" he asked her, thinking that was a safe enough way to feel out the situation.

"No, honey," she said. "Never gone on one before."

That gave him a quick clue, that idea of going on one, and right then he began to see what a bonanza was opening up for him. El Dorado. He swung the gate back for her politely and announced, "The first zigzagger of the day always goes free, and after that, it's only five dollars, since we're post-season." A few dropped out, swearing at him, but enough stayed.

Up above the beach, then out over the surf, she screamed with happy terror every time he banked into a zestful turn and roared her down another white furrow, blooming with foam. It was like dusting cotton, only easy, lazy, safe, his only real worry how to keep this quivering female flesh on the tight edge between delight and delirium. But he managed to hold her there, revving the very flutters of her heart. When he got her back down on the ground again, she was so proud of herself that she decided to wait at the end of the line and pay for another zigzag after the others had all enjoyed theirs. A few more people left when they understood what it was, but he still made $65 before it was too dark to fly. He put together a longer, better banner that night and pulled it down the beaches as soon as they opened the next morning. It worked again, the whole day; and when the dispatcher wanted a share for handling the phone calls and the crowds, he was already thinking about a pair of floats. He could pick up people right off the beach, at one of the piers--who needed a phone or an airport?--and charge them ten dollars for the extra thrill of taking their first zigzag in a real live seaplane.

That marked the start of a general upturn for Drucker. He still did some spraying when the beaches were slow, but only jobs with some real fat in them. His own banner that September afternoon, with its big draw, put him high with the gypsy overlords of the boardwalks. They considered it a first-rate service now to have Highjack Drucker tout for them over the jetties, with a word or two of his own devising out of the unused portions of the alphabet, a service they naturally paid top dollar for. He bought a paperback dictionary and circled words and wrote down asking prices for them in the margins. And sometimes his reputation even got him a charter, the kind of distance and altitude he needed if he was ever going to break out of this bush level of the business into the thin, chill air of the highest finance.

But he felt her hand on his shoulder, delivering a friendly, low-down push. "All you got," she giggled. "You oughta be getting more."

"I do OK," he bristled.

"Sure you do."

"I got people waiting on me."

"Bet I got more. But don't let that keep you from coming around. Someday when you're grounded." Everything seemed to strike her as funny. "OK. Let's (continued on page 176) Quick Hop (continued from page 90) try down over Ocean Bright. Lot of Army fellas go there."

"Pretty far up the coast." Already he wanted to head back.

"So?"

"It'll maybe run more than your fifteen minutes."

"Who's paying?"

"Long as you realize, ma'am."

"Laura, Laura. You got it strung right out there behind you. Why can't you remember it?"

He cringed at that, beginning to regret he'd ever gotten into this queer, drunken deal with her. He could feel every letter of the banner's drag, Miss Laura Wilkins, live model, available hourly, nitely. Myrtle 8-7742. She'd phoned it into the airport, left word for him to pick her up at ten the next morning, she knew which pier. He'd phoned her back to refuse, but heard her out. "I just want all the art students to know I'm here. No law about that." He knew better, but she put up with a quote of S4 a letter for the quarter hour and agreed to S50 more if she could go along for the ride, almost a charter; and he didn't know she had the bottle until they were away from the pier, airborne, and headed in for the banner.

"Might run you another ten, even twenty," he warned.

"I can earn it back."

So, with a deliberate touch of steepness, he banked the Aeronca around until the seacoast rolled under them again. The sand below was sparkling hard and the surf broke frothily, like suds thrown out onto a hot pavement. The plane's shadow skimmed along with them, flat as a skid mark. A lone fisherman came into sight near a tangled rip, then a beach party huddling under a lowering dune. Both looked up at them, simple and direct as gulls, but he was too high to be embarrassed.

Then he was past the jetties and over the mobbed beaches, and had to drop down low enough to be readable. He caught people's nervous attention too quickly. They got right to their feet and stared much longer than they needed. The girls turned inward among themselves, gabbling and pointing, but the men grouped openly into big, waggish greeting parties. Behind him, she was waving back.

Down over Ocean Bright, there was even more male enthusiasm. Some of them drove their fists hard into the air and slapped their forearms meatily. She stopped waving and sat there, almost queenly, taking the salute. A lifeguard stood up on his tower and puffed himself raw on a strung whistle, maybe blowing it at him. He began to wonder if he was breaking some beach regulation.

At last Ocean Bright thinned out and he started to climb away, but a crowd was gathering, roiling, demanding her back. He circled wide, keeping the banner clear, and hove again into their midst. It was all men now, roughly in a circle, with one or two free spirits frantically working in the center with driftwood boards. They were gouging out the shape of a formlessly fat man in the sand. Head, arms, body, legs, toeless feet.

"Will you look at that?" he said.

But that part was hasty, unimportant. They scrambled down on their knees and began digging up wetter sand, piling it on. Then he was past them. By the time he circled back, they had finished and were shaking clasped hands over their heads. The pile had been built, like a sand castle, into two bullocky mounds and a long, erect bunker.

"Will you look at that?" he said again.

Suddenly, two stalky girls in bikinis came crashing through the circle, their arms full. They were carrying seaweed. The men caught at them, but they got by and plopped it down. One of the sculptors tried to kick it away and kicked sand instead. Then everybody was kicking and wrestling over the groin, moiling weeds and sand.

He had to laugh, and glanced back to share the laugh and found her pulling hard on the bottle, right from its neck.

"Bastards."

She drank again, her eyes going tarry and sad.

"Bastards make everything dirty."

"Ma'am, I...." He gave a completely mechanical shrug.

"Get me away from here."

"Right."

He pulled the nose up and landward.

"No. Out to sea."

"Ma'am?"

"Want to see what's out there."

"I don't think you're up to the sights."

"You'll get your money. What's to see out there?"

"Well." He thought. "The island's closest."

"What island?"

"Hoof Island. I usually charge----"

"Whatever."

"Long as you realize."

He swung out along the sandy curve beyond Ocean Bright, then over the marshes. The plane's shadow prowled into the salt grass, turning briefly into a hunting shape, but flattened out again over open water. They could see suddenly, utterly straight down into the naked, green grip of the sea. From the delicate rib hollows along the amber shoals out to the far, blue-gray basins, nothing struggled against the vast leverage of its deeps.

"All that water," she said sadly, "and still nothing but all that nothing."

He figured he'd better get that bottle put away again. The plane shivered into a slight yaw at his deft touch and he waited for her response.

"Ohhhh, do it again, handsome. It tickles."

He straightened right out.

"Every bastard I know," she sniggered, "thinks he's a subtle bastard."

He was heavily disconcerted but said nothing until the sea sank fathomlessly from their sight, touched only by the white plucks of gulls that drifted over its dark wash, canny as sea spray. Then he turned and forced himself.

"I'd take it rightly, Laura, if you'd stow that now."

" 'Rightly'?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Laura."

"Laura."

"Why?"

"We're almost to the island."

It was no reason for anything, but she seemed willing to take it as one. "That's dry, too?" He heard the spin of the cap back onto the glass threads as the first bluffs showed chalk.

"How come 'Hoof Island?"

"There's horses." He lost a little altitude, bearing down on the bony cedars that clumped on the barren headland, like lichen.

"We looking for them?"

"They're the sights."

He flew over a black rib of asphalt down the middle of the island with a few deserted, sun-struck dwellings clinging to it like dried scraps. At either end, the asphalt crumbled into ashen sand, still far from the sea, and broken shells littered its length like hail. It was a trapped road, put ashore by some crooked contractor and left to perish.

"Who uses it?"

"Mostly the ponies."

He showed her where they had crossed the macadam recently, scuffing a path through the rime of shattered shells. He told her about the shipwreck long ago of an old steamer ferrying a pony ring north, and how the Shetlands had swum to the island and turned into hardheads the same way the Spanish mounts had turned into mustangs out West. "I'm not lying to you. I can scare 'em up sometimes with the motor."

"People ever come out here?"

"Sometimes."

"What do they do?"

"Stay until they're ready to go back."

He scouted on down the island, but they saw no other trace of the ponies. Looking for them only brought the desolation below that much closer. There seemed nowhere for a horse to hide. All was scant. "You'd be surprised," he kept saying. "All of a sudden, they come right up out of the dunes, hopping like sand fleas." But the dunes stayed as still as death mounds and the sand rippled away from them, scoured and futureless, as if some final wave had just rolled back. Only the plane's shadow, foul upon all the bleak purity, pretended to any errant life.

"Might as well all be under water, too," she said.

He denied that. "It's got...."

"What's it got?"

"A nice location."

She laughed. "This must be about all you've ever seen of anything."

"I been up to New York City," he reacted. "At the East River. A lot of tugboat waves up there."

"That's New York for you." She slapped him on the shoulder. "OK. Enough. Let's go."

He pulled the nose up again. "Maybe another time."

"No. I didn't come here to hustle horses."

He circled back over the head of the island, roaring his motor once more hopefully, but could turn out nothing from the cedars, either. He felt fussed, out of whack, and put his mind to flying straight back in, without another word. But she soon enough had that bottle out again.

"I thought you put that by, Laura," he said.

"We're off the island, aren't we?"

He snorted.

"We've had our little outing and seen the sights, and now we're tired and happy and want to go home," she cooed, and drank to it.

"True enough," he had to agree, and wondered if it was really worth losing any headway to try to shake her up again.

"I'm waiting."

"Ma'am?"

"For the whirly-whirly."

"The what?"

"I sort of liked it."

"What?"

"And if that's your kick...." With a loud chortle, she threw both arms around his neck, right up to her elbows. "Swing!" He honked fiercely to clear his nose of something overwhelming.

"Get back!" he shouted. "You're drunk!"

But the shock was greater than her hold. She slipped off his shoulders easily and dumped back into the bucket seat, ashimmy with giggles. Then she tapped the bottle lightly against the back of his head, as if clicking glasses. "Can't stand directness, huh?"

Drucker surprised himself. It was something he had the sense not to try with a banner still on. At least not without easing his way down at first, checking the drag until he had some feel for it. But he nosed over, everything on the plane shaking, and dove. He didn't even think of her as a zigzag, only as dead weight, bigger than a full barrel, burdening his neck and shoulders until he finally, barely pulled out again, maybe a foot off the waves. The plane still shook, the banner lashing at the sea like too limp, too long a tail.

He waited to hear from her, the bitch.

When he didn't, he kept on, same as ever. He was so low that the floats ticked, chinked in the heavy sea spray. Then he caught on to the wag of the banner and used it to bring the plane still harder into his pulling turns. They tore even at his own stomach. He checked over his shoulder. She was tight to the seat, her thumb jammed down the neck of the bottle, the knuckle swollen over it like a red cork.

"Let me down," she groaned, "you fucking sea gull."

But he wasn't finished yet. He came booming over the first surf, churning up a rush of people on the beach, then gained a sudden altitude.

"You better kiss down," she threatened.

But he zoomed higher, right over the pier where he'd picked her up, the struts to the floats singing.

"Got to take care of that banner first," he excused himself.

He sped inland and, after a steep pylon turn around a tall motel sign below, arrived over the grass strip of the airport seconds later. When he cut the banner loose, the plane leaped almost onto its nose before he had control of it again. Then he spiraled down around the falling letters, close enough to see them fold and snarl in the air like scratched-out dirty words.

"You had your fun. OK?" she needled.

"I like fun, too. Fun's fun." But by now, she was really trying not to panic. "We've both had fun. Let's get down."

"Soon enough."

"Come on, please, honey, it's been fun." She was slipping. "But back on home, honey, I want down."

"Soon enough." He stared back at the bottle lodged on her thumb and crinkled his nose, almost into a smirk. "You still got time for maybe one more."

She had some self left. Her thumb popped out of the bottle. She even twirled what was left in the bottom at him. then did her best to put it defiantly to her lips.

"Just barely time," he said stiffly, and plunged.

She started screaming somewhere in the middle of her swallow, a wet, gagged "No, no, no! No, please! There's no, no----"

Down, straight down in, until the stubbly grass shoved up under the swollen pontoons, drifting near and green as a crop, like another desperate run along that old endless road.

"No, no wheels!"

The bottle few, scenting everything, and she caved into a silly whimpering all her own.

The floats touched, stubbed, knelled. The knell rose, rose and rose, until it was a sharp, terrible groaning, just short of a last shudder. "I can do just about anything I want with her, ma'am!" he shouted back at her.

The skid began, a long skid that pulled the plane suddenly through the shudder, but would not let go.

"Land her right down on a heavy dew!" he shouted more.

Then he almost had hold, nearly a grip. Not on the grass. On the skid. He understood that skid, knew what it was doing, and went right on bragging.

"Land her on a grass stain, if I had to!"

The skid lightened, came altogether into his grip, and he turned the plane into the greening rush of the field, rocking it gently, certainly down the grass strip.

When the tail dropped, he checked again over his shoulder. She was quivering, her flesh spent and fouled, one tit lolling out in a trickle of bourbon.

"You bastard."

"You're down, aren't you?"

"You bastard."

But he was all business. "We'd better settle up now. Call it an even two hundred for that banner, and fifty for the ride, and ten for Ocean Bright and the island, and I won't charge for the zig----"

She was suddenly up from the bucket seat, leaning at him with all her odor, grossly giggling.

"You owe me, you bastard."