Taking Off (11 page)

“Are these the plans for the aerocycle?” Raskol asked.

At the time, I assumed that he must have mistaken my handmade, pencil-drawn plans for a commercial product, an assumption that, I realize now, may have been wrong.

“Yes,” I said, “but not the plans that
Impractical Craftsman
sells. I haven't ordered those. They're too expensive. I'm trying to make my own plans based on the pictures in the article.”

He bent over the plans and studied them closely. “Is this why you're going to learn how to weld?” he asked.

“That's right,” I said, though my learning to weld was becoming less and less likely.

“Are you nuts?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“If you make this thing out of welded steel, it's not going to get off the ground. Never. Not a chance. It's going to be much too heavy.”

“You're sure?” I asked hopefully.

“Sure. You've got to make this out of aluminum.”

“Oh.”

“It's light but strong.”

“Sure.”

“But you can't weld aluminum.”

“Oh?” I asked, brightening.

“Well, I guess, theoretically, somebody could weld aluminum, but it would be a real bitch, what with aluminum's high thermal conductivity and low melting point. I wouldn't bother trying if I were you.”

“What should I—”

“You've got to rivet it together.”

“Oh.” I was going to have to learn riveting. Did I sigh? Probably. Did I frown? Almost certainly. Riveting sounded as arcane, difficult, and expensive as welding. I think I recall that I began to consider flying to New Mexico on a commercial airliner, as Matthew would be doing. His expenses would be paid by the Preparedness Foundation, and he would enjoy tasty meals served by smiling stewardesses, whose attentions were, among my friends, none of whom had ever flown, legendary.

“Or—” said Raskol, with the impish grin of a person bearing good news, “you can just drill the parts and bolt them together.”

Perfect. Not only was drilling already within my repertoire of skills, but my grandfathers owned jars and jars of nuts and bolts. I'd been playing with them since before I could walk. I could drill as well as the next guy, and I could bolt far better than most. To hell with welding.

That afternoon, I began scavenging Babbington for aluminum. I was astonished to find how much aluminum was going to waste in garages and attics: tent poles, flagpoles, folding clothes poles and outdoor drying racks constructed like umbrellas, folding chairs for lawn or beach, the legs and tops of folding tables, the pylons from beach umbrellas, and even window mullions and frames.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the citizens of Babbington for contributing their scrap to my dream. My heart soared when my friends and acquaintances, and even a few of my enemies, endorsed that dream by donating some of the raw materials that would make it a reality. My call for assistance sparked such a remarkable response, an outpouring of aluminum, that it resembled a movement. Its adherents and workers were zealous, some of them wrenching aluminum from the arthritic hands of their reluctant grandparents, and the most fanatical of them resorting to stealing.

I will confess to a heady feeling of power when I saw what I had unleashed—followed by a deflating feeling of impotence when I discovered how difficult is the task of leashing a movement once unleashed. Aluminum scrap kept showing up at our house for years. Eventually the flow dropped to a trickle, but the idea that I needed aluminum was still alive in the world even after I had left Babbington for college, and my mother would often finish her letters to me with a postscript laconically listing the recent deliveries, such as: “P. S. two folding chairs and a tray today.”

Chapter 23

Pinch-a-Penny, the People's Plane

ALBERTINE STARTLED ME. I had been lost in thought. (If Mr. MacPherson were here, he would ask me why I use that expression. In this case, I could tell him that I have often marveled at how apt it is as a description of my state when I am thinking in the experimental mode. I begin somewhere, with an idea or a question, and from that starting point I begin to wander. I go where my thoughts take me, and that is why Albertine has decided that I should no longer drive unless she is with me to bring me, when necessary, back from the distant place to which my thoughts have flown into the immediate context through which the car is hurtling. Sometimes she gives me a nudge to bring me back; sometimes she screams.)

She was looking over my shoulder. I was looking at my computer screen.

“What's that?” she asked.

“It's Pinch-a-Penny, the People's Plane,” I said.

“Ah. The People's Plane.”

“Anyone can fly it. You don't need a license. It democratizes flight.”

“Anarchizes flight, you mean. Driving is bad enough, but just imagine ‘anyone' getting into one of these things and whizzing around without training, tutelage, examination, or certification.”

“Scary,” I admitted. I pointed to the photograph. “I would like to point out, however, that the frame is made of aluminum tubing.”

“It looks like a folding table.”

“There are remarkable similarities between this plane and the one that I built—the resemblance to a folding table being only one of them.”

“Did it really look like this?”

“The frame did—part of it—but by the time I was finished, I had made many original contributions to the design—”

“Improvements?”

“Adaptations inspired by necessity.”

“Necessity being defined as the demands of aeronautical engineering and fluid dynamics?”

“Necessity being defined by what I had on hand,” I muttered, returning to my study of the Pinch-a-Penny.

“Come on,” she urged, with a nudge of her hip. “Tell me about the People's Plane.”

“Well, Norton Prysock—”

“Norton Prysock? Who's he?”

“The designer of the Pinch-a-Penny.”

“Nort to his intimates, no doubt.”

“Well,
I
certainly wouldn't doubt it. Nort says here on his website that this plane can be built in about two hundred fifty hours, using only simple hand tools. Anyone can do it, just by following the steps in the construction manual and referring to the detailed plans.”

“‘Anyone,' says Nort.”

“Says Nort.”

“An unsupportable claim, I think. ‘Anyone'? You would think that ‘anyone' could make a decent bagel just by following the steps in the manual and referring to the detailed plans, but experience belies it again and again.”

“He makes a point of the fact that no welding is required.”

“The bagel analogy holds.”

“He says he's sold more than two thousand sets of plans.”

“I smell a home business for you there.”

“Hundreds of Pinch-a-Pennies are currently under construction,” I went on.

“Says Nort.”

“Says he.”

“I take that to mean that hundreds of Pinch-a-Penny projects are languishing in back yards and garages.”

“Seven are flying. Have flown.”

“Seven.” She leaned toward the screen. “Tell me what you see here,” she said.

I looked at the photograph on the Pinch-a-Penny website.

“I see a stocky man, whom I take to be Norton Prysock, standing beside what I assume is his own Pinch-a-Penny, at the point in its construction when it was complete except that the fabric that would eventually cover the wings, control surfaces, and, optionally, the fuselage aft of the cockpit had not yet been applied.”

“Do we know that he ever did get around to covering the thing?”

“Skeptic,” I whined.

“And daughter of a skeptic,” she reminded me. “What did my father always say?”

“‘Assume nothing.'”

“Look behind Nort and the Pinch-a-Penny, Peter, and tell me what you see there.”

“There's an outbuilding of some kind, a shed or garage, or a shed with a carport attached—”

“—and the siding has never been put on it, just the raw boards that are supposed to underlie the siding.”

“Right.”

“And the roof has been covered with tar paper but not shingled.”

“Right.”

“There is a stack of something on the left and a stack of something else on the right, both stacks covered with tarpaulins.”

“Maybe he's going to use those tarps as fabric for the wings.”

“I wouldn't be surprised. And then whatever is under those tarps will be exposed to the weather, and in time will molder and rot.”

“Maybe.”

“Nort has a serious personality flaw, Peter. He is not a finisher. He probably abandoned the carport project when the Pinch-a-Penny passion struck.”

“I don't know about that. He looks so relaxed and self-confident—the way he's leaning on the plane—” In the photograph, Nort was resting his right elbow on the aluminum just ahead of the cockpit.

“He
appears
to be leaning on it,” said Albertine, “but I don't think he actually is.”

“You don't?”

“No. There is a tension in his body that makes me think he is holding himself in that position, giving the appearance of the builder at his ease, resting on the plane he has built, but in fact being careful not to put any weight on it.”

I looked more closely. I took the magnifying glass from my desk drawer and looked more closely still.

“Well?” she asked.

“You may be right,” I said.

Chapter 24

Surplus Motorcycles? Why Not?

THE HEART of the aerocycle design was a surplus motorcycle. The people at
Impractical Craftsman
asserted that the builder could obtain a surplus motorcycle locally and easily. They passed over the acquisition of a surplus motorcycle so quickly, in so few words, that I got the impression of a vast glut of surplus motorcycles, a buyer's market in surplus motorcycles, and I was amazed that I hadn't ever seen any abandoned by the side of the road, considering that the glut must have made them all but worthless.

I looked in the Yellow Pages under “Motorcycles, Surplus,” but there was no entry for “Motorcycles, Surplus.” I looked under “Surplus,” but the only listing there was for the Babbington Army and Navy Store, and I knew from my frequent visits that although they carried lots of useful gear, they had no motorcycles.

“Where are all the surplus motorcycles?” I asked my friend Raskol, who, I assumed, was likely to know.

“Surplus motorcycles?”

“Yeah. Aren't there a lot of surplus motorcycles going begging?”

“What makes you think that?”

“I got the impression—”

“—the misimpression.”

“I don't think so.”

“Hey, Ernie!” he called into the house.

“Whaddaya want, shithead?” growled one or the other of his brothers, both of whom were named Ernie, possibly because Raskol's parents were twice as fond of the name as were the average parents of an Ernie, or because they were half as inventive, or because they were much, much more forgetful.

“You know where there are any surplus motorcycles?”

“Surplus?”

“Yeah.”

“Motorcycles?”

“Yeah.”

“Surplus motorcycles?”

“That's the concept: surplus motorcycles.”

“Where the fuck did you get the idea that there are surplus motorcycles?”

“Peter.”

Ernie advanced out of the perpetual gloom of the Lodkochnikov interior, astonishment and contempt struggling for dominance in his expression.

“Surplus fucking motorcycles?”

“Well—yeah.”

“Hey, Ernie!” he called into the house.

“Whaddaya want, shithead?” growled the other Ernie.

“Is there such a thing as surplus motorcycles?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.”

“Where the fuck are they?”

“Somewhere over the rainbow, beyond the sea, in never-never land, on the unicorn ranch, where virgins ride them when they herd the beasts.”

“That's a good one, Ernie,” said the Ernie standing in front of us, shaking his head in chortling admiration. “Jesus, that's a good one.”

*   *   *

RASKOL AND I walked down the plank that linked the front porch of their riverside house on stilts with the margin of River Sound Road. When we were well out of earshot of the two Ernies, I said, “I thought they'd know. I thought you'd know.”

“Nobody can know something that can't be known,” he said. “There aren't any surplus motorcycles, so there isn't any way that anybody could know where to find them.” He took note of my crestfallen look and gave me a punch on the shoulder. “However,” he said, “there are wrecked motorcycles, quite a few of them, and I know where they are.”

“Where?”

“Pretty far. We'll have to drive. I'll pick you up tonight. Midnight.”

*   *   *

IN DEFENSE OF THE EDITORS of
Impractical Craftsman,
I will say that I have come to think that an assumption underlay their assertion that a surplus motorcycle would be easy to obtain, a collective assumption arising from what today I can recognize as the naïveté of the incurably hopeful. I recognize it now between the lines in those old issues of
Impractical Craftsman
because I recognize it now in myself. You need a motorcycle. You want a motorcycle. You know you can't afford a new one. If only there were some surplus ones available, cheap. Surplus motorcycles? Well, gee, why not? Sure. Of course. The world must be rich in them, if there's any justice.

Chapter 25

A Sop

RASKOL did not have a New York State driver's license, nor did he have his father's license to drive the family truck. However, occasionally, at night, when the rest of his family was asleep, he would slip outside and cross the street to the weedy lot where the Lodkochnikovs parked the family truck, an old Studebaker C-Cab pickup, put his shoulder to the doorframe and roll the truck away silently, pushing it along the road until he was far enough from the house to start it without being heard, and take it for a ride. I sometimes went with him on these rides. Most of the time, we went wherever fancy took us, inventing ways to let chance determine which turn to make at the next intersection, but now and then we would get the urge to go somewhere in particular, to take a trip with a destination, and when we did, the destination was usually Montauk, the eastern tip of the south fork of Long Island. I would slip out of my house and wait for him at the corner, three houses south, distant enough so that my parents, who were sometimes wakeful, wouldn't hear the door when I climbed in and pulled it shut.