Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, Page 2

  "No, sir, I'm ready to go. Can we fly over my farm ?"

  "Sure," I said. "Just point the way you want to go, sir." I dumped my bedroll and toolbag and cook pots from the front cockpit of the Fleet, helped the man into the passenger seat and buckled him in. Then I slid down into the rear cockpit and fastened my own seat belt.

  "Give me a prop, will you, Done"

  "Yep." He brought his water cup with him and stood by the propeller. "What do you want?"

  "Hot and brakes. Pull it slow. The impulse will take it right out of your hand."

  Always when somebody pulls the Fleet propeller, they pull it too fast, and for complicated reasons the engine won't start. But this man pulled it around ever so slowly, as though he had done it for ever. The impulse spring snapped, sparks fired in the cylinders and the old engine was running, that easy. He walked back to his airplane, sat down and began talking to the girl.

  In a great burst of raw horsepower and flying straw the Fleet was in the air, climbing through a hundred feet (if the engine quits now, we land in the corn), five hundred feet (now, and we can turn back and land in the hay. . . now, and it's the cow pasture west), eight hundred feet and level, following the man's finger pointing through the wind southwest.

  Three minutes airborne and we circle a farmstead, barns the color of glowing coals, house of ivory in a sea of mint. A garden in the back for food sweet-corn and lettuce and tomatoes growing.

  The man in the front cockpit looked down through the air as we circled the farmhouse framed between the wings and through the flying wires of the Fleet.

  A woman appeared on the porch below, white apron over blue dress, waving. The man waved back. They would talk later of how they could see each other so well across the sky.

  He looked back at me finally with a nod to say that was enough, thanks, and we could head back now.

  I flew a wide circle around Ferris, to let the people know there was flying going on, and spiraled down over the hayfield to show them just where it was happening. As I slipped down to land, banked steeply over the corn, the Travel Air swept off the ground and turned at once toward the farm we had just left.

  I flew once with a five-ship circus, and for a moment it was that kind of busy feeling . . . one plane lifting off with passengers while another lands. We touched ground with a gentle rumbling crash

  rolled to the far end of the hay, by road.

  The engine stopped, the man unsnapped his safety belt and I helped him out. He took a wallet from his overalls and counted the dollar bills, shaking his head.

  "That's quite a ride, son."

  "We think so. It's a good product we're selling."

  "It's your friend, that's selling!"

  "Oh ?"

  "I'll say. Your friend could sell ashes to the devil, I'll wager, can't he now?"

  "How come you say that ?"

  "The girl, of course. An airplane ride to my granddaughter, Sarah!" As he spoke he watched the Travel Air, a distant silver mote in the air, circling the farmhouse. He spoke as a calm man speaks, noting the dead twig in the yard has just sprouted blossoms and ripe apples.

  "Since she's born, that girl's been wild to death about high places. Screams. Just terrified. Sarah'd no more climb a tree than she'd stir hornets barehand. Won't climb the ladder to the loft, won't go up there if the Flood was rising in the yard. The girl's a wonder with machines, not too bad around animals, but heights, they are a caution to her! And there she is up in the air."

  He talked on about this and other special times; he remembered when the barnstormers used to come through Galesburg, years ago. and Monmouth, flying two wingers the same as we flew, but doing all kinds of crazy stunts with them.

  I watched the distant Travel Air get bigger, spiral down over the field in a bank steeper than I'd ever fly with a girl afraid of heights, slip over the corn and the fence and touch the hay in a threepoint landing that was dazzling to watch. Donald Shimoda must have been flying for a good long while, to land a Travel Air that way.

  The airplane rolled to a stop beside us, no extra power required and the propeller clanked softly to stop. I looked closely. There were no bugs on the propeller. Not so much as a single fly killed on that eight-foot blade.

  I sprang to help, unshackled the girl's safety belt, opened the little front-cockpit door for her and showed her where to step so her foot wouldn't go through the wing fabric.

  "How'd you like that?" I said.

  She didn't know I spoke.

  "Grampa, I'm not afraid! I wasn't scared, honest! The house looked like a little toy and Mom waved at me and Don said I was scared just because I fell and died once and I don't have to be afraid anymore! I'm going to be a pilot, Grampa. I'm gonna have an airplane and work on the engine myself and fly everywhere and give rides! Can I do that?"

  Shimoda smiled at the man and shrugged his shoulders.

  "He told you you were going to be a pilot, did he, Sarah ?"

  "No, but I am. I'm already good with engines, you know that!"

  "Well, you can talk about that with your mother. Time for us to be getting home. "

  The two thanked us and one walked, one ran to the pickup truck, both changed by what had happened in the field and in the sky.

  Two automobiles arrived, then another, and we had a noon rush of people who wanted to see Ferris from the air. We flew twelve or thirteen flights as fast as we could get them off, and after that I made a run to the station in town to get car gas for the Fleet. Then a few passengers, a few more, and it was evening and we flew solid back-to-back flights till sunset.

  A sign somewhere said Population 200, and by dark I was thinking we had flown them all, and some out-of-towners as well.

  I forgot in the rush of flying to ask about Sarah and what Don had told her, whether he had made up the story or if he thought it was true, about dying. And every once in a while I watched his plane closely while passengers changed seats. Not a mark on it, no oil-drop anywhere, and he apparently flew to dodge the bugs that I had to wipe from my windshield every hour or two.

  There was just a little light in the sky when we quit. By the time I laid dry cornstalks in my tin stove, set them over with charcoal bricks and lit the fire, it was full dark, the firelight throwing colors back from the airplanes parked close, and from the golden straw about us.

  I peered into the grocery box. "It's soup or stew or Spaghetti-O's," I said. "Or pears or peaches. Want some hot peaches?"

  "No difference," he said mildly. "Anything or nothing."

  "Man, aren't you hungry? This has been a busy day!"

  "You haven't given me much to be hungry for, unless that's good stew."

  I opened the stew can with my Swiss Air Officer's Escape and Evasion Knife, did a similar, job on the Spaghetti-0's, and popped both cans over the fire.

  My pockets were tight with cash . . . this was one of the pleasanter times of day for me. I pulled the bills out and counted, not bothering much to fold them flat. It came to $147, and I figured in my head, which is not easy for me.

  "That's . . . that's . . . let's see . . . four and carry the two . . . forty-nine flights today! Broke a hundred-dollar day, Don, just me and the Fleet! You must have broke two hundred easy . . . you fly mostly two at a time?"

  "Mostly," he said.

  "About this teacher you're looking for. . ."he said.

  "I ain't looking for no teacher," I said "I am counting money! I can go a week on this, I can be rained out cold for one solid week!"

  He looked at me and smiled. "When you are done swimming in your money," he said, "would you mind passing my stew?""

  3

  Throngs and masses and crowds of people, torrents of humanity

  pouring against one man in the middle of them all. Then the people became an ocean that would drown the man, but in stead of drowning he walked over the ocean, whistling, and disappeared. The ocean of water changed to an ocean of grass. A white-and-gold Travel Air 4000 came down to land on the grass and the pilot got
out of the cockpit and put up a cloth sign: "fly $3 fly".

  It was three o'clock in the morning when I woke from the dream, remembering it all and for some reason happy for it. I opened my eyes to see in the moonlight that big Travel Air parked alongside the

  Fleet. Shimoda sat on his bed roll as he

  had when first I met him, leaning back against the left wheel of his airplane It wasn't that I saw him clearly, I just knew he was there.

  "Hi Richard," he said quietly in the dark. "Does that tell you what's going on?"

  "Does what tell me?" I said foggily. I was still remembering and didn't think to be surprised that he'd be awake.

  "Your dream. The guy and the crowds and the airplane," he said patiently. "You were curious about me, so now you know, OK? There were news stories: Donald Shimoda, the one they were beginning to call the Mechanic Messiah, the American Avatar, who disappeared one day in front of twenty-five thousand eye-witnesses?"

  I did remember that, had read it on a small-town Ohio newspaper rack, because it was on the front page.

  "Donald Shimoda?"

  "At your service," he said. "Now you know, so you don't have to puzzle me out anymore. Go back to sleep."

  I thought about that for a long time before I slept.

  "Are you allowed . . . I didn't think . . .you get a job like that, the Messiah, you're supposed to save the world, aren't you? I didn't know the Messiah could just turn

  in his keys like that and quit." I sat high on the top cowling of the Fleet and considered my strange friend. ''Toss me a nine-sixteenths, would you please, Don?"

  He hunted in the toolbag and pitched the wrench up to me. As with the other tools that morning, the one he threw slowed and stopped within a foot of me, floating weightless, turning lazy in midair. The moment I touched it, though, it went heavy in my hand, an everyday chrome-vanadium aircraft end-wrench. Well, not quite everyday. Ever since a cheap seven-eighths broke in my hand. I've bought the best tools a man can have . . . this one happened to be a Snap-On, which as any mechanic knows is not your everyday wrench. Might as well be made of gold, the price of the thing, but it's a joy in the hand and you know it will never break, no matter what you do with it.

  "Of course you can quit! Quit anything you want, if you change your mind about doing it. You can quit breathing if you want to." He floated a Phillips screwdriver for his own amusement. "So I quit being the Messiah and if I sound a little defensive, it's maybe because I am still a little defensive. Better that than keeping the job and hating it. A good messiah hates nothing and is free to walk any path he wants to walk. Well, that's true for everybody, of course. We're all the sons of God, or children of the Is, or ideas of the Mind, or however else you want to say it."

  I worked at tightening the cylinder base nuts on the Kinner engine. A good power plant, the old B-5, but these nuts want to loosen themselves every hundred flying hours or so, and it's wise to stay one jump ahead. Sure enough, the first one I put the wrench to went a quarter turn tighter, and I was glad for my wisdom to check them all this morning, before flying any more customers.

  "Well yes Don, but it seems as if Messiahing would be different from other jobs you know? Jesus going back to hammering nails for a living? Maybe it just sounds odd."

  He considered that, trying to see my point "I don't see your point. Strange thing about that is he didn't quit when they first started calling him Savior. Instead at that piece of bad news, he tried logic: 'OK, I'm the son of God, but so are we all; I'm the savior, but so are you! The works that I do, you can do!' Anybody in their right mind understands that."

  It was hot, up on the cowling, but it didn't feel like work. The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. Satisfying, to know that I was keeping the cylinders from flying off the engine. "Say you want another wrench " he said.

  "I do not want another wrench. And I happen to be so spiritually advanced that I consider these tricks of yours mere party games, Shimoda, of a moderately evolved soul. Or maybe a beginning hypnotist."

  "A hypnotist! Boy, are you ever getting warm! But better hypnotist than Messiah. What a dull job! Why didn't I know it was going to be a dull job?"

  "You did," I said wisely. He just laughed.

  "Did you ever consider, Don, that it might not be so easy to quit, after all? That you might not just settle right down to the life of a normal human being?"

  He didn't laugh at that. "You're right, of course," he said, and ran his fingers through his black hair. "Stay in any one place too long, more than a day or two, and people knew I was something strange. Brush against my sleeve, you're healed of terminal cancer, and before the week's out there I'm back in the middle of a crowd again. This airplane keeps me moving, and nobody knows where I came from or where I'm going next, which suits me pretty well."

  "You are gonna have a tougher time than you think, Don."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah, the whole motion of our time is from the material toward the spiritual . . . slow as it is, it's still a pretty huge motion. I don't think the world is gonna let you alone."

  "It's not me they want, it's the miracles! And those I can teach to somebody else; let him be the Messiah. I won't tell him it's a dull job. And besides,' There is no problem so big that it cannot be run away from.'" I slid from the cowling down to the hay and began tightening the cylinder nuts on number three and four cylinders. Not all of them were loose, but some were. "You are quoting Snoopy the Dog, I believe?"

  "I'll quote the truth wherever I find it, thank you."

  "You can't run away, Don! What if I start worshipping you right now ? What if I get tired of working on my engine and start begging you to heal it for me? Look, I'll give you every dime I make to sundown if you just teach me how to float in the air ? If you don't do it, then I'll know that I'm supposed to start praying to you, Holy One Sent to Lift My Burden."

  He just smiled at me. I still don't think he understood that he couldn't run away. How could I know that when he didn't ?

  "Did you have the whole show, like you see in the movies from India? Crowds in the streets, billions of hands touching you flowers and incense, golden platforms with silver tapestries for you to stand on when you spoke?

  "No. Even before I asked for the job, I knew I couldn't stand that. So I chose the United States, and I just got the crowds."

  It was pain for him, remembering, and I was sorry I had brought the whole thing up.

  He sat in the hay and talked on, looking through me. "I wanted to say, for the love of God, if you want freedom and joy so much, can't you see it's not anywhere outside of you? Say you have it, and you have it! Act as if it's yours, and it is! Richard, what is so damned hard about that: But they didn't even hear, most of them. Miracles--like going to auto races to see the crashes, they came to me to see miracles. First it's frustrating and then after a while it just gets dull. I have no idea how the other messiahs could stand it,"

  "You put it that way, it does lose some of its charm," I said. I tightened the last nut and put the tools away. "Where are we headed today?"

  He walked to my cockpit, and instead of wiping the bugs off my windshield, he passed his hand over it and the smashed little creatures came alive and flew away. His own windshield never needed cleaning, of course, and now I knew his engine would never need any maintenance, either.

  "I don't know," he said. "I don't know where we're headed."

  "What do you mean? You know the past and the future of all things. You know exactly where we're going!"

  He sighed. "Yeah. But I try not to think about it. "

  For a while, as I was working on the cylinders, I got to thinking wow, all I have to do is stay with this guy and there will be no problems, nothing bad will happen and everything will turn out fine. But the way he said that: "I try not to think about it" made me remember what had happened to the other Messiahs sent into this world. Common sense shouted at me to turn south after take off and get as far away from the man as I could get. But as I said,
it gets lonely, flying this way alone and I was glad to find him, just to have somebody to talk with who knew an aileron from a vertical stabilizer.

  I should have turned south, but after take off I stayed with him and we flew north and east into that future that he tried not to think about.

  4

  "Where do you learn all this stuff, Don ? You know so much, or maybe I just think you do. No. You do know a lot. Is it all practice ? Don't

  you get any formal training to be a Master."

  "They give you a book to read."

  I hung a fresh-washed silk scarf on the flying wires and stared at him. "A book?"

  "Savior's Manual. It's kind of the bible for masters. There's a copy around here somewhere, if you're interested."

  "Yes, yes! You mean a regular book that tells you . . ?"

  He rummaged around for a while in the baggage space behind the headrest of the Travel Air and came up with a small volume bound in what looked like suede.

  Messiah' s Handbook,

  Reminders for the Advanced

  Soul.

  "What do you mean Savior's Manual? This says Messiah's Handbook "

  "Something like that." He started to pick up things around his airplane as though he thought it was time to be moving on.

  You

  teach best

  what you most need

  to learn.

  "You're awfully quiet over there, Richard," said Shimoda, as though he wanted to talk with me.

  "Yeah," I said, and went on reading. If this was a book for masters only, I didn't want to let go of it.

  Live

  never to be

  ashamed if anything you do

  or say is published

  around the world even if

  what is published

  is not true.

  You are led

  through your lifetime

  by the inner learning creature,