The Cannibal Queen Read online

  She cooks it to his order. No McDonald’s, this. Pickles, onion and mustard on a big juicy burger. I watch him eat it with a touch of envy. All burgers were like this when I was a youngster. I didn’t see my first McDonald’s until I was twenty years old, but I refrain from making this remark to David. He would just shake his head and mutter “old geezer” with a grin to take the sting off.

  On the way back to the airplane he looks at the grass. “Not the same as Colorado,” he announces.

  “Too much rain and heat.”

  The black cloud is still obscuring the sky to the southeast, so we plan to fly south around it, down toward Baton Rouge. As we clear Natchez I see the highway leading south and point it out to David. With the plane cruising at 1,500 feet he takes over the flying and moves the plane to the left so as to keep the highway readily in sight without craning his neck. He is fighting to hold the nose down to keep from climbing. “A hundred miles an hour,” he tells me.

  “We’re in an updraft.”

  We cross the Homochitto River at 1:12. Our indicated airspeed is down to 85 and he is losing altitude. We’re in a down-draft now. I help him put in more back stick. Airspeed drops off to 80. Then we are out of it and the airspeed increases as the nose comes down. The storm is now off our left wing, forward and aft as far as I can see, and the way ahead is getting darker. Uh oh!

  As we pass the Netterville Airport by Wilkinson, Mississippi, I can see a gap to the southeast in the rapidly developing wall of black cloud. “Head for the gap,” I tell David, and point. He comes thirty degrees left and settles on a course of about 120.

  By the time we reach Centreville twelve minutes later we are firmly in a cloud canyon, with black storms to the left and right, areas of lightness ahead and behind. I have David steer thirty degrees right, aiming for the lightest area in the sky. We cross Clinton, Louisiana, at 41 after the hour, 46 minutes after takeoff from Natchez.

  The sky is lighter ahead. But only for a moment. We enter a hole. I can look up and see blue sky.

  After a glance I give that up as a waste of time. Black clouds behind us to the north, to the southeast, and directly west. The only relatively clear area is to the southwest, toward Baton Rouge. And they have an airport radar service area.

  I take over the flying and put the airplane in a circle. Jackson, Louisiana, is the nearest airport, but it is right under that boomer to the west. We could go back to Natchez, but the object of today’s journey was to arrive sooner or later in New Orleans.

  I swing the plane toward the west and the road that leads from Clinton to Baton Rouge. When I am near it, I swing to parallel and call Baton Rouge Approach.

  I am too far out and too low.

  We motor inbound awhile. Gray clouds ahead, undoubtedly with water in them. I descend to 1,000 feet, plenty high enough in this pancake-flat country. Now Approach assigns me a discrete IFF squawk and acquires me on their radar. I have no more than rogered them when we fly into a rain shower, which pours on the windscreens and across the wing surfaces. Thanks to some miracle or Lloyd Stearman’s genius, the cockpits remain dry. We fly on, keeping the ground firmly in sight.

  In less than a minute we are through the shower and entering another bright area. The Baton Rouge airport is visible from eight miles away against a backdrop of black cloud. We enter a left downwind for runway 4 and I make like a master flaring in a huge two-knot crosswind.

  Inside the FBO office a corporate pilot is sitting in front of the television displaying the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s weather broadcast. I note with professional interest that he is reading a technothriller and settle in to study the radar picture. Yuck! Level-one rain showers surround Baton Rouge, which is in the only hole for 50 miles. Some level-two and level-three activity down toward New Orleans, but New Orleans itself looks to be free of precipitation. I get David into the room and show him the chart.

  Wanting to teach him to think in aviation terms, I ask, “What do you think we should do?”

  He fires it right back. “What do you want to do?” Okay, Pop. You’re the pilot!

  On our way back to the ramp to tie down the Cannibal Queen, we pass the corporate pilot whose reading we disturbed. He is talking to two compatriots. “The thing that scares me,” he says, “and I have read this in three separate places so it’s probably true, is that the Russians have got this thing that drills a hole in …”

  I go through the door and miss the rest of it. Today Boris Yeltsin is getting elected president of the Russian Republic and he wants to emasculate the Communist-controlled central government. Gorbachev would probably be amazed to hear that some Americans are still worried about the evil empire.

  With the Queen tied down and the controls locked, we rent a car for the remainder of our journey to New Orleans. I’ve parked planes before when the weather got too bad, and a lot farther away from my destination. This is part of flying light airplanes and, I tell myself smugly, one reason I am still alive and kicking.

  Ten miles out of Baton Rouge the deluge begins. “Glad we aren’t flying.”

  David agrees with this sentiment.

  “You sleepy?” I ask him.

  “Naw,” he says, then a minute later reclines his seat and goes promptly to sleep.

  The downpour continues for an hour, until we are only fifteen miles west of New Orleans. David sleeps soundly through the whole thing.

  After checking into the hotel right on Bourbon Street in the heart of the French Quarter, father and son set forth to see the sights. There are a lot more T-shirt emporiums than I remember from my visit four years ago, but about the same number of sex shows. The only businesses that are disappearing are the bars with live jazz bands. I only see two left. Pete Fountain’s place is gone and so is Al Hirt’s. Preservation Hall looks even filthier and more forlorn than it did in ’87.

  My first visit here was in 1968 when a bunch of guys and I drove over one Saturday from Pensacola, Florida. Somewhere at home I still have a black-and-white photo one of the guys took of me standing by a light pole on Bourbon Street the summer I turned twenty-two. The place had more mystique for me then. Now it strikes me as just plain tacky—the inscription on one of the T-shirts for sale to the boobs from Colorado and all points east and west captures the raw essence of Bourbon Street today: “Just suck it.”

  Maybe the place was tacky back in 1968 but I was too green to see it.

  David is not interested in the square in front of the Louisiana Historical Museum or the statue of Andrew Jackson and he doesn’t even glance at the paintings the artists have hanging on the wrought-iron fence. We climb the levee, sit in silent contemplation of the vast river for 30 or 40 seconds—the maximum period a fourteen-year-old can remain in one place motionless without the sword of school authority hanging over his neck—then walk westward down the levee to the paddleboat Natchez. A few moments later we are the proud possessors of two tickets for the seven o’clock dinner cruise.

  “You want to lose these, or shall I?” I ask David, holding out the tickets.

  “You do it,” he says, grinning.

  We walk around for an hour and ruin our dinner with ice cream cones. Going aboard at 6:15, we find dinner is served cafeteria-style and has already begun. We join the line and both choose the chicken instead of the fish. It is okay.

  When the boat casts off we are standing back aft watching the giant paddlewheel flail the water and the sailor untying the ropes holding the stern to the pier. As he flakes down the ropes on the deck I explain to my son that the trick is to make the ropes uncoil without knotting or kinking. He nods silently. Through the years he has become resigned to the fact that his father is full of odd, worthless bits of information that will be bestowed upon his gratis for little or no reason.

  The ship’s whistle roars loudly—steam—and the wheel churns the water. We go to the bow and breathe deeply of the smell of the river and the sea carried by the breeze.

  Coming back upriver an hour later David asks for
something to toss into the paddlewheel. I give him a paper pipe filter. He throws it. Then he spits. “Wouldn’t it be nifty to drop a water balloon and see it break on the paddle?”

  I agree that that would indeed be nifty. Water balloons fascinate him. He was disappointed that we were assigned a second-floor room in our hotel: water balloons have to fall a lot farther than that to be worth the trouble.

  We pass alongside the minesweeper fleet moored at Navy Supply Center New Orleans. I explain that the little ships are made of wood so that they won’t influence magnetic mines. We are deep into a discussion of the technology of mines as we pass by the ships. People are visible on the bridges. I can see an Officer of the Deck in whites greeting sailors in civilian clothes coming back from liberty. It would really be fun to spend a few years on a little ship like one of these minesweepers, everyone knowing everyone, sailing here and there, charging ashore on liberty. I was a naval aviator and the smallest ship I served aboard was USS Enterprise—just me and the captain and five thousand other guys. Okay, maybe I envy the little-ship sailors.

  Walking back to the hotel after dark we find the streets full of people drinking beer from plastic cups. This still looks like the Bourbon Street crowd I remember from my youth—families on vacation, young couples glued to each other, teenagers out for a toot and an occasional knot of sailors in civilian clothes— but something is different. On the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter it hits me. The sound has changed.

  Twenty years ago the background beat was jazz. Now it is rock music. Today the place has the look and feel and sound of North Beach in San Francisco.

  David examines the window displays of the sexual paraphernalia shops and the transvestite show. He peers around the door touts of the girlie clubs for a glimpse of the naked females cavorting within. “Let’s go to see one of these shows,” he pleads after scrutinizing the eight-by-ten publicity photos posted outside a club with the proud name of The Orgy.

  I shake my head.

  “You ever been in one of these places?”

  “Yeah. A time or two.”

  “Well, let’s go.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not old enough.”

  “How old do I have to be?”

  “Older.”

  5

  WE LEAVE BATON ROUGE ON A TYPICALLY HAZY SUMMER MORNING by climbing to 1,000 feet and flying eastward above the interstate. Those highway engineers did all the surveying years ago, so why reinvent the wheel?

  The drone of the Lycoming is a pleasant accompaniment for singing or dreaming or contemplating the vicissitudes of life. It’s also a good background for flying.

  I am flying up a storm when I spot a Cessna 152 at my 7 o’clock, at my altitude and also using the interstate to navigate eastward. Before long the Cessna pulls even about a hundred yards to my left. I wave wildly. The pair in the Cessna’s cockpit ignore me, if they see me at all. And they pull steadily away.

  The ignominy of it! Passed by a spam can!

  I slump lower in my seat and scan the gauges listlessly. Ah me. To find a flying machine slower than this one would be difficult today. Most slower machines have been enshrined in museums or left in weed patches to rust into oblivion. Occasionally some charitable soul hauled one of the rotted wrecks to the junkyard and put it out of its misery in a smelter. But most planes just surrendered atom by atom amid the weeds where fate had abandoned them.

  The reason is economics. Keeping an aircraft airworthy is an expensive undertaking, as Orville and Wilbur quickly learned. Technical progress in aviation has been driven by the demand for quicker, more fuel-efficient machines, ones able to carry a greater payload at less cost. Obsolete aircraft that could no longer pay their way were usually abandoned without ceremony.

  And this Stearman, Cannibal Queen, is obsolete, by any measure. The ubiquitous Cessna 152 also holds two people, but it is faster, uses less fuel, and is much cheaper to maintain. It lacks the vices inherent in the tail-wheel configuration and so is easier for primary flight students to master. And it lacks a soul.

  The Queen has one.

  I’m sure of it.

  Test pilot Chuck Yeager once noted laconically, “An airplane is an airplane,” but Lordy, I hope there’s more to a great machine than that. Don’t the sweat, blood and tears of its creators count for anything? When steel and wood and aluminum become works of art, doesn’t that matter? What about all the men and women who strapped themselves into the cockpit and there tried to master the secrets of flight, to fulfill this species’ deepest yearnings? Surely all those hopes and dreams are somehow embodied in this inanimate thing. Surely.

  David and I really didn’t need to stop at St. Elmo, Alabama, a little one-runway paved strip just south of Mobile. Perhaps it was the stench that infuriated David as we flew past the refineries at Pascagoula, Mississippi, or perhaps all the coffee I drank earlier that morning, but I didn’t think I could hold out another twenty minutes.

  We swooped in to St. Elmo and taxied to the fuel pump; then I abandoned the plane in an undignified dash for the restroom. When I returned the plane was surrounded by a half dozen men and the girl from the desk. She helped David and me fuel while the men admired the plane.

  They helped us push the Queen away from the pump, and with much waving David and I departed. We flew across Mobile Bay and alighted in Fairhope, Alabama. There we used the phone and called William E. Butterworth—Bill—who is better known under his nom de plume of W. E. B. Griffin as the author of the Brotherhood of War and The Corps series published by Putnam.

  Bill answered the phone and readily accepted my invitation to go for a ride in the Stearman. But first he wanted to buy us lunch, which he did at the country club associated with the Marriott resort in which he lives at Clear Point.

  Bill is in his early sixties and has made his living for almost forty years as a writer. He is the author of over 140 books written under fourteen pen names, adopted, according to his wife, because the libraries would only buy one William E. Butterworth book a year.

  At lunch he tells us anecdotes of his early writing days and his latest trip to New York for the big thumb-your-nose-at-the-rest-of-the-publishing-world party that Phyllis Grann, Putnam’s president and CEO, threw for her best-selling scribblers. He and Tom Clancy had lunch with Robert Gottlieb, who is also my agent, and Bill tells me about that. All in all, he concludes, he had a great time and he’s glad he went.

  Then he launches into a discussion of his upcoming duck-hunting expedition to Uruguay. “It’s one of the few places left in the world,” he says, “that doesn’t have signs saying ‘Welcome American Tourists’ and ‘Thank You for Not Smoking.’ ”

  Back at the Butterworth home after lunch, Mrs. Butterworth, who has the flu, presents David with three of Bill’s books and one of her own, for she is a writer too and a recognized expert on calligraphy.

  A pilot who hasn’t flown in years, Bill has trouble maintaining altitude in the Stearman. He persists in placing the nose too low even though I am coaching him on the intercom, which is truly lousy. Electronic wizardry is not yet up to the challenge of making a decent intercom for an open-cockpit aircraft. This is Bill’s first ride in one and the newness of the sensations overrides his rusty piloting instincts. Finally I take the controls and do pirouettes a thousand feet above his house, then take him sightseeing along the east side of the bay.

  Bill Butterworth is the writer so many of us aspire to be, a man who earned a living doing what he wanted to do. He is an original character, opinionated, self-confident, sure of himself. I bid him good-bye wondering if I have enough of that fire to sustain a career. Oh well, time will tell.

  Flying on to Pensacola, Dave and I find the clouds are getting lower and the visibility deteriorating, a typical summer afternoon on the gulf coast. In these climes mornings are the time to fly, the earlier the better.

  We cross directly over Saufley Field, the field where I learned to fly, and I point it out to Davi
d. The airplanes are all gone now, moved to the main Naval Air Station—“mainside”—and the old runways have been crisscrossed by new ones, so almost the whole square mile is paved. I went out there last year for a look-see during a Pensacola visit and was stunned to see the abandoned hangars and the empty parking mats with weeds growing up through the cracks. Today from the air we can’t see the weeds.

  Approach gives us a right base approach to runway 16 at Pensacola Regional. We swoop in and I manage a beautiful landing, the main wheels kissing just an instant before the tail. One of the old hands at the St. Francis fly-in recommended this as his preferred technique, but I can rarely do it this well. More practice—I need more practice.

  We park at the FBO and fuel the plane with the help of two college students who are in awe of the big biplane. They provide rags for me to wipe the oil off the front of the fuselage and a screwdriver for David and me to remove the hubcaps so we can get at the inflation valves on the main tires. David has been complaining that the right main tire is low, and he is right. It has about ten pounds of air in it. After some sweating on the hot concrete, we manage to get the hub plates off both wheels and fill them to 35 PSI.

  With the job done he tells me that my shirt is filthy with oil and sweat. I wipe my oily, greasy hands on my jeans and use a sleeve to swab my forehead. Then I grin at him. One of the first lessons I learned in this town is that flying is a sweaty business not for the fastidious. That is one of the things I like about it.

  Inside the FBO the desk lady makes phone calls to every rental car agency in town and informs us there are no wheels to be had. A big whing-ding of World War II vets is down at the civic center. Then she tries the hotels. The civic center Hilton is full, but on her third call she finds us a room at a Holiday Inn at one of the malls.