The Cannibal Queen Read online

  I don’t think about Vietnam very much anymore and I don’t want to write about it again. Flight of the Intruder was my first and last Vietnam novel. Yet I am a Vietnam veteran. I know full well the scope of the tragedy that occurred when a generation of young men was betrayed by incompetent, foolish politicians interested only in self-aggrandizement and reelection. I know that war is not spit-shined boots or a geopolitical chess game or a football game with bodies.

  I know what real war is.

  But my antipathy for politicians has another side. My Vietnam experience turned my simple-minded acceptance of democracy into a deep-rooted faith. Vietnam proved that democracy works, slowly and inefficiently and inevitably—the rascals who got us into Vietnam were thrown out by the voters when they saw what a mess it was, and the replacement rascals were thrown out when the press showed the public the smoking gun.

  Democracy is built on the simplest premise that has ever supported a political system, that a majority of the voters will be right more often than they are wrong. The inevitable errors will be corrected by the voters—when they perceive those errors. Democracy assumes that saints won’t run for public office. The human condition being what it is, many of those that seek power successfully are charlatans, hypocrites, liars, thieves, and nincompoops, yet democracy provides a way to deprive these people of power when their excesses prove too much. The voters weigh the follies of fallible politicians against their contributions at every election.

  Messy and inefficient as it is, the system works. Not very well and with agonizing slowness, but it does work.

  Talking to a Flight Service Station briefer on Monday morning, I resist the urge to tear out my hair. Another front is moving across Michigan and Lake Erie on its way to western New York and Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. But the scud might lift if I wait until early afternoon, when isolated thunderstorms will be doing their thing.

  Out onto the parking mat to look at the sky. Maybe 1,500 scattered or broken, the dark gray scud whipping along at about twenty knots. I get back into Mr. Hertz’s 1987 Corsica and drive to a McDonald’s for a linger over coffee. Then slowly back to the airport to turn in the car and stroll across the parking lot to the FBO for a visit with Chuck. Finally I load my stuff into the plane and sit on one wheel contemplating the sky and the sad state of my tennis shoes. I pull the sectional from my hip pocket and study it one more time.

  The matchbox where I keep my patience is empty at 10 minutes past 10 A.M. Aaagh! Ten minutes later the Cannibal Queen is airborne headed for the Falls. The powers that rule the skies have agreed that sightseeing aircraft will orbit the Falls clockwise at 2,500 feet, but I can get up only to 2,000 and still stay under this overcast. Fortunately the Queen is the only machine aloft over the Falls. In the cockpit I snap a few photos as a gap in the clouds admits a shaft of sunlight. The sunlight looks better to me than the Falls. I do love it so.

  Leaving the circle over the Falls, the Queen takes me southward along the western shore of the Niagara River and along the western side of Grand Island. The buildings of downtown Buffalo slowly materialize out of the haze. At 2,000 feet I am just two hundred feet below the floor of the Greater Buffalo ARSA while my course takes me just offshore of the downtown and the empty docks and seemingly dead loading yards and factories adjoining them. To my right Lake Erie stretches westward until the gray water merges into the gray haze. As far as I can see the surface of the lake is empty—not a boat, not an ore freighter, not a wake of any kind. It’s as if the city waits at the end of the lake for ships that don’t come anymore.

  I am about ten miles past Buffalo following the shoreline of the lake southwestward when the Lycoming stumbles. The adrenaline jolt is milder this time, but it still has a kick.

  Yet now I know what causes the hiccups. I had just finished leaning the mixture knob another sixteenth of an inch thirty seconds before the hiccup occurred, so now I give back that sixteenth of an inch, then another because I don’t like to do adrenaline on an hourly basis. I just leaned the air-gas mixture too much, that’s all. Ha! And I was worried that something was wrong with that engine.

  That engine is forty-nine years old! It didn’t survive to this great age by indulging in mechanical shenanigans while airborne. Why, some ace without my vast aeronautical skill would have shattered that pretty engine against a granite cloud decades ago if it liked to stop running when provoked.

  Cannibal Queen, you baby doll—we’re on our way!

  17

  THE FLIGHT SERVICE BRIEFER I CALLED FROM THE ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA, FBO’s office began like he was reading my obituary. “VFR flight southward is not recommended. The front is currently passing over Erie. Pittsburgh is predicting thunderstorms and severe rain showers.”

  “What does Pittsburgh have right now?”

  “Forty-five hundred feet scattered, eighty-five hundred broken, ten miles.”

  “Youngstown?”

  “Forty-five hundred scattered, eight thousand overcast, eight miles.”

  “And forecast?”

  “Chance of thunderstorms with ceilings down to fifteen hundred overcast.”

  I gave him my politest thank-you and hung up the phone. I had just landed in the midst of this front passing over Erie, and it wasn’t bad—a couple thousand feet scattered to broken, eight miles or so visibility, just about the conditions I have come to refer to as an Eastern Standard Day. Forty-five hundred scattered and ten miles visibility would be an improvement, about twice as good as the weather I had flying over Florida, the Carolinas, and New England. Definitely flyable. Chance of thunderstorms. Talk about weaseling! Not one chance in ten, or one in two, or one in a hundred, but just a chance! Obviously one must just avoid the thunderstorms. When that looks like it’s going to be impossible, land.

  Listening to weather briefings, one must try to visualize the sky the patter of words is describing. This can be difficult if one pays more attention to the intonation of the briefer’s voice than what is being said or fails to ask questions. You should turn in your pilot’s license if you’re willing to let the briefer make the decision on when to fly. On the other hand, you should also turn in your license if you don’t carefully weigh his advice. The license is in your pocket, Jack!

  Climbing out of Erie I pick up the interstate heading south for Pittsburgh, 1-79. The sky is relatively clear and soon I am up at 3,500 feet to get my piece of that tailwind.

  I cover the fifteen nautical miles between my first two checkpoints in nine and a half minutes. Holding the stick between my knees, I try my hand at higher mathematics. My calculations yield a ground speed of 95 knots. I am indicating my usual 84 at 2,000 RPM and 22 inches, which at this altitude and temperature would give me a true airspeed of about 90, so I’m getting a free ride of five knots. My next check, fourteen miles in eight minutes, gives me a computed ground speed of 105 knots. Better yet, if true. Call it an even 100 knots over the ground with a tailwind component of ten knots. I’ll take that.

  Tailwinds are like smiles from beautiful women—rare and to be cherished. Scientists say that headwinds and tailwinds average each other out over time, but any pilot will tell you he spends most of his flying hours subtracting winds from his ground speed, not adding them. It certainly seems so.

  The sky darkens off to the west, over Youngstown, but I stay over the highway and pass safely without meeting rain. I seem to be racing southward over the scattered farms and towns of the rolling Pennsylvania countryside.

  Approaching Pittsburgh I let the Queen down to 2,000 feet and stare southwestward for my first view of the Ohio River. I catch a glimpse, a place where a break in the overcast admits a beam of sunlight that reflects from the water. I turn in that direction. In seven or eight minutes I am westbound along the river, then am turning to follow it southward around the Pittsburgh TCA.

  I had planned to land at Steubenville, Ohio, for fuel, but the field appears deserted from the air—only one airplane visible parked outside—and no one answers my calls on Unicom. If
there is a fuel pump I can’t see it. I turn southeast to return to the river while I consult the chart.

  Wheeling has an airport, one with a control tower. And it isn’t far from here. So I swoop into Wheeling for fuel. I am in luck. The building the FBO is housed in also contains a short-order lunch counter.

  Airborne again, the route is southeastward away from the Ohio River over a landscape that offers few places to set down in an emergency. The roads meander along twisty, winding streams draining mostly wooded hills. Hills and streams and roads seem to wander crazily in a random pattern across this rugged terrain. Only villages and an occasional farm break the montage of green hillsides. Of necessity I fly a compass course.

  Air mail pilots were among the first aviators to record their fear of flying over this terrain devoid of flat places to make emergency landings. These forested hills were not pretty sights to airmen nursing sick or dying engines. Emergency landings were common, everyday occurrences in the 1920s, before truly reliable aircraft engines came along.

  I sight the smoke coming from the big power generation station at Mannington, West Virginia, and use that as a navigation waypoint. I pass it to the north and cross Fairmont. From there I follow the Tygart River southward.

  Before long I am circling the Lambert Chapel church site and cemetery just north of Belington. The abandoned church has just been torn down—the shrinking congregation could no longer afford to pay a preacher. Circling, I stare down across the top of the lower left wing at the old cemetery and the empty spot where the church stood until last month.

  My father’s parents are buried there along with other Coontses back for four or five generations. Once this valley of the Tygart was the setting for hundreds of farms that supported large families, but no more. Now the farms that haven’t gone back to trees provide only supplemental income for their owners, and not much of that.

  When my father was a boy his parents sent him to this valley to stay with his grandparents for the summer and go with them to Lambert Chapel on Sunday mornings, just as they had done when they were children. Dad played with his many cousins and helped with chores and acquired a collection of wonderful memories.

  The farmers were almost gone by the time I was old enough to hear Dad’s stories. I knew only old men and women living on Social Security checks. And I went with my parents to their funerals in Lambert Chapel when they died, one by one. All that remains today to be seen from the Cannibal Queen are tombstones and naked dirt where the chapel stood.

  Across Laurel Mountain is Elkins, with its airport built by the WPA in the late 1930s that still sells fuel. The town used to be serviced by feeders of major airlines; now only one commuter offers flights—two a day to Newark, New Jersey. I guess when you get to Newark the world awaits.

  The town slides beneath the Queen’s left wing as I make my approach.

  My father’s parents lived in Elkins while I was growing up. They didn’t make their last journey to Lambert Chapel until 1981, when they died just nine days apart. When I was a teenager my grandmother worked in Phil’s Restaurant in downtown Elkins as the evening cashier. I liked to drive to Elkins and visit with her at the restaurant on summer evenings. We would sit in one of the booths and have coffee, and every so often she would walk over to the register when people were leaving. It seemed as if she knew half the people in Elkins. “Hello, Mrs. Coonts,” they would say, and she would give them a warm smile and thank them for coming to Phil’s.

  Sometimes I would drive over to their house and pick up Granddad and take him to his favorite restaurant, The Seneca Trail. He never ate at Phil’s. Claimed Phil had a dirty kitchen and poisoned everybody, which infuriated Grandmother.

  Oh, how pleasant it would be to take a taxi from the airport and find Phil’s still in business and my grandmother Ruby perched on her stool behind the register, greeting all the regulars by name and giving directions to strangers. And to go to South Davis Avenue and find Granddad sitting in the glider on the front porch, wearing his hat, watching the world go by on a hazy summer afternoon.

  I miss them both.

  Twenty nautical miles west of Elkins lies Buckhannon, my favorite American small town. You guessed it, it’s my hometown, the place where I grew up. My parents still live here, and this coming Saturday will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Most of my parents’ friends are still here and many merchants I remember from my youth. Even some of the youngsters I went to school with elected to stay. So I know people here and people know me.

  The downtown has some vacant stores, but its decline is due more to the sad state of West Virginia’s economy than mall blight, although that too has had an effect. The nearest mall is about twenty-five miles away in Clarksburg and nowadays people go there for serious shopping.

  This year they’re building a four-lane bypass on U.S. Route 33 that will take traffic blasting around the north end of Buckhannon at the national speed limit, 55 MPH, which that congressman from New Jersey foisted on an American public that had done him no evil. When I was a kid all that traffic went right down the two lanes of Main Street. Cars and coal trucks rumbled through bumper-to-bumper five days a week, and on Saturdays all the farmers in bib overalls came to town in pickup trucks.

  The farmers liked to stand on the corner of Kanawha and Main in front of the G. C. Murphy Five-and-Dime trading watches and spitting tobacco juice on the curb. My mother was always appalled by men chewing tobacco, but I thought it would be a fine thing to be an accurate casual spitter and even tried chewing a few times, though I never told her that. I never could get the hang of spitting just so. My mouth watered too much.

  Saturday mornings I liked to stand inside Murphy’s Five-and-Dime and read comic books. Then in the afternoon my brother and I would go to a movie. There were three theaters to choose from back then—today they are all closed—and they all had matinees. Our choice of theaters was often dictated by the state of our finances. The Saturday matinee at the Kanawha Theatre cost a quarter, at the West fifteen cents, and at the Opera House a whole dime. One year my dad did a bunch of work for Garland West, who owned the West Theatre, and didn’t charge him anything, so from then on my brother and I got into the West absolutely free. That was a deal!

  In the finest American tradition my mom routinely used the car to taxi us boys around town. I grew up thinking of Buckhan-non as a big place. Today when I go back I am stunned when I see how small it really is. From my parents’ house to the West Theatre in the heart of the business district is three-quarters of a mile, and the same from their house to the grade school and junior high I attended. If I cut across fields the distance to school is less than half a mile and can be walked at a comfortable pace in ten minutes.

  After I graduated from law school in December 1979, at the age of thirty-three, I came back to Buckhannon to practice law in my father’s firm. He had had a major stroke six months before and been forced to retire. My mother needed help taking care of him and the other lawyers in the firm wanted me. The fly in the wine was that my wife refused to leave Colorado. Her invalid mother was living with us in Colorado and the alternative to that arrangement was a nursing home. So trusting that it would all work out somehow, I came back to Buckhannon alone.

  It didn’t work out. After Nancy’s mother passed away in the summer of 1980 she still refused to join me. Dad’s health improved enough so that Mom could take care of him by herself. And I learned that you can’t go back. You can’t go back to your boyhood home after being away for fifteen years and expect to find it the comfortable, delightful place you remember. Buckhannon wasn’t that for me in 1980 and ’81. It was a small coal town in a depressed area, and the coal mines were shutting down, one by one.

  One day I advised a divorce client wailing about her finances and job prospects to pack the kids in the car and get out of West Virginia. Desperate to be with my wife and children, that evening I decided to take my own advice. I eventually landed a job in Denver as an in-house attorney for an oil company. In July 19
81 I truly left Buckhannon.

  I go back occasionally to visit my parents. On these short visits I can recapture the hometown that I remember. It is once again a delightful little town of 8,000 people, complete with an excellent private college, West Virginia Wesleyan, pretty homes on shady streets, and good people who can be good friends if you will only take the time to get to know them. I have. I still have friends in Buckhannon that I visit every time I am there.

  I am thinking of them when the spire of Wesleyan’s chapel appears in the haze. There’s the courthouse! And the First Methodist Church and Frank Hartman’s house next to it! And the college, and that tree on the corner of Camden and Meade that I passed out under the Saturday I got drunk for the first time. There’s the house where my first girlfriend lived. … . From a thousand feet you can see it all, so neat and appealing, people and cars coming and going, folks in their yards. … .

  I circle my parents’ house, hoping Mom will hear the Queen and come out into the yard. Today the house is surrounded by big trees; when we moved in this was naked cow pasture on a hillside. I was eleven that summer. I helped plant all those trees.

  The Queen floats round and round, the wings almost vertical, the engine noise surely audible to those below. From this height I can even see their barbecue grill. But no one appears in the yard.

  I level the wings and head for the airport, a strip in a little valley a mile west of town. A hill guards the approach end of runway 26, so I cautiously S-turn around it to line the Queen up with the narrow ribbon of asphalt.

  Another plane lands just ahead on me. This is unusual. Normally there are only three planes in the hangar north of the runway and I have rarely seen them fly. The FBO here went out of business fifteen years ago. His fuel pumps are rusting just as he left them.