The Last Inch

J. Aldridge

At forty you were lucky if you still enjoyed flying after twenty years of it, and you were lucky if you could still feel that artistic pleasure of a beginner when you brought the plane down well.

It was all gone; and he was forty-three and his wife had gone back to Linnean Street, Cambridge, Mass., and was leading the life she liked to lead, taking the streetcar to Harvard Square, shopping at the market, living in her old man's decent old farm house which made a decent life for a decent woman.

He had promised to join her before the summer but he knew he would never do it. He also knew he would never get another flying job at his age, not for his sort of flying, even in Canada.

That left him with an apathetic wife who didn't want him, and a ten-year-old boy who had come too late and was, Ben knew in his heart, not part of either of them: a very lonely boy lost between them, who understood, at ten, that his mother had no interest in him, and that his father was a stranger who couldn't talk to him and was too sharp with him in the rare moments when they were together.

This particular moment was no better than the others. Ben had the boy with him in an Auster bumping violently down the 2,000 feet corridor over the Red Sea coast, waiting for the boy to be airsick.

"If you want to be sick," he said to the boy, "put your head well down on the floor so that you don't make the plane dirty."

"Yes," the boy said miserably.

"Are you afraid?"

"A little," the boy answered: a rather pale, shy and serious voice for a North-American boy. "Can these bumps smash the plane?"

Ben had no way of comforting him, excepting the truth. "Only if the plane has not been looked after and periodically checked."

"Is this..." the boy began, but he was too sick to go on.

"It's all right," his father said irritably. "It's a good enough plane."

The boy had his head down and was beginning to cry quietly.

"Don't cry!" Ben ordered him now. "There's no need to cry. Get your head up, Davy! Get it up!"

"How do you know where the wind is?" the boy asked.

"The waves, the odd cloud, the feel," Ben shouted back.

But he no longer knew what.directed his flying. Without thinking about it he knew to a foot where he would put the plane down. He had to know here, because there were no feet to spare-' on this piece of natural sand, which was impossible to approach in anything but a small plane. It was a hundred miles from the nearest native village. It was dead desert country.

"This is what is important," Ben said. "When you level off it's got to be' six inches. Not one foot, or three feet. Six inches! If it's too high and you come down hard, you'll wreck the plane. If it's too low, you hit a bump and go over. It's the last inch that's important."

Davy nodded. He knew. He had seen an Auster like this one go over at Embaba. The student flying it had been killed.

"See!" his father shouted. "Six inches. When she begins to sink, I ease back the stick. I ease it back. Now!" he said and the plane touched down like a snowflake. The last inch! He cut off the engine instantly and put on the heel brakes4 which stopped them short of the sudden drop into the water by six or seven feet.

The two pilots who had discovered this bay had called it Shark Bay, not for its shape but for its population. It was always well filled with good-sized Red Sea sharks who came into it after the big shoals of herring and mullet which looked for a safe place in here from time to time.

It was sharks Ben was here for; and now that he was here he forgot the boy, except to instruct him how to help unload, how to pack the food bag in wet sand, how to keep the sand wet with buckets of sea water, and to bring the tools and the small things necessary for his aqualung and cameras.

"Does anybody ever come here?" Davy asked him.

Ben was too busy to hear him now, but he shook his head. “Nobody! Nobody could get here, except in a light plane. Bring me the two green bags from the floor”, he said, “and keep your head covered against the sun. I don't want you to get sunstroke”.

It was Davy's last question. He had asked his questions seriously trying in that way to soften his father's hard answers. But he gave up the attempt and simply did as he was told. He watched carefully while his father prepared his aqualung eqvipment and underwater cameras to go into the perfect clear coral water to film sharks.

"Don't go near the water!" his father ordered.

Davy said nothing.

"These sharks," his father warned, "will be glad to take a bite at you,' especially on the surface; so don't even put your feet in."

Davy shook his head.

Ben wished he could do more for the boy, but it was too late by many years. When he was away flying (which had been most of the time since Davy was born and since he was a baby, and now when he was growing into his teens) he had never had contact with him. In Colorado, in Florida, in Canada, in Iraq, in Bahrein, and here in Egypt: it should have been his wife's work, Joannie's work, to keep the boy lively and happy.

In the early days he had tried himself to make friends with the boy. But he was very rarely at home, and the "home" was some outlandish place of Arabia which Joannie had hated and had continually compared with the clear summer evenings and cold sparkling winters and quiet college streets of that New England town. She had found nothing interesting in the mud houses of Bahrein at 110 degrees with 100 degrees humidity; nor in the iron encampments of oilfields, nor even in the dusty streets of Cairo. But all that apathy, (which had increased until it had beaten her) should be disappearing, now when she was at home. He would take the boy back to her, and hope that she would begin to take some interest in him now when she was where she wanted to be. Butshe hadn't shown much interest yet, and she'd left three months ago.

"Fix that strap between my legs," he told Davy.

He had the heavy aqualung on his back. Its two cylinders of compressed air, 56 lbs in weight, would give him the possibility to be thirty feet below for more than an hour. There was no need to go deeper. The sharks didn't.

"And don't throw any stones in the water," his father said, picking up the cylindrical watertight camera box.

"It frightens everything in sight. Even the sharks. Give me the mask."

Davy handed him the glass-fronted mask for his face. "I'll be down there about twenty minutes," Ben told him. “Then I'll come up and have lunch because the sun is already too high. You can put some stones on each side of the plane's wheels, and then sit under the wing out of the sun. Do you get that?”

"Yes," Davy said.

Davy watched the sea swallow his father and sat down to watch for a moment, as if there was something to see.But there was nothing at all, except the air-bubble breaking the surface from time to time.

There was nothing on the surface of the sea, which disappeared in the far horizon; and when he climbed up the hot sand-hill to the highest side of the sand bay, he could see nothing but the bare desert behind him.

Below, there was only the aeroplane, the little silver Auster. He felt free enough now, with no one in sight for a hundred miles, to sit inside the plane and study it. But the smell of it began to make him sick again, so he got out and poured a bucket of water around the sand where the lunch was, and then sat down to see if he could watch the sharks his father was photographing. He could see nothing below surface at all; and in the hot silence and loneliness he wondered what would happen if his father didn't come up again.

Ben was having trouble with the valve' that gave the right amount of air. He wasn't deep, only twenty feet, but the valve worked irregularly.

The sharks were there, but at a distance, just out of camera range.

"This time," he told himself, "I'm going to get three thousand dollars."

He was paid by the Commercial Television Stock Company; a thousand dollars for every five hundred feet of shark film, and a special'thousand dollars for any shot of a hammerhead.

While they ate their silent lunch he changed the film in the French camera and fixed the valve of his aqualung, and it was only when he began to open one of the bottles of lager that he remembered that he had brought nothing lighter to drink for his son.

"Did you find something to drink?" he asked Davy.

"No," Davy told him. "There is no water…"

"You'll have to drink some of this," he told Davy. "Open a bottle and try it, but don't drink too much of it."

He did not like the idea of a ten-year-old drinking beer but there was nothing else. Davy opened a bottle, took a quick drink, but swallowed it with difficulty. He shook his head and gave the bottle back to his father.

"You had better open a can of peaches," Ben said.

A can of peaches was no good in this dry noonday heat, but there was nothing else to give him. Ben lay back when he had finished eating, covered the equipment carefully with a wet towel, looked at Davy to see that he was not ill or in the sun, and went to sleep.

"Does anyone know we are here?" Davy was asking him when he was getting into the water again after his sweaty rest.

"Why do you ask that? What's the matter?"

"I don't know. I just thought…"

"Nobody knows we're here," Ben said. "We get permission from the Egyptians to fly to Hurgada; but they don't know that we come down this far. They must not know either. Remember that!"

"Could they find us?"

Ben thought the boy was afraid that they would be caught for doing something wrong. "No, no one could ever reach us either by sea or by land."

"Doesn't anyone know?" the boy asked, still worried.

"I told you," Ben said irritably. But suddenly he realised and too late that Davy was afraid not of being caught, but of being left alone. "Don't worry about it," Ben said. "You'll be all right."

"It's getting windy," Davy said in his quiet way.

"I know that. I'll be under water about half an hour. Then I'll come up and put in a new film and go down for another ten minutes. So find something to do while I'mgone. You should have brought a fishing line with you."

There were five of them now in the silver space where the coral joined the sand. He was right; The sharks came in almost immediately, smelling the blood of the meat, or feeling it somehow. He kept very still.

"Come on! Come on!" he said quietly.

They came straight for the piece of horsemeat, first the familiar tiger and then two or three smaller sharks of the same shape. They did not swim nor even propel their bodies. They simply moved forward like grey rockets. As they came to the meat they moved a little on one side and took passing bites at it.

He took films of all of it: the approach, the opening of their jaws as if they had tooth-ache, and the grabbing, messy bites that were as ugly a sight as he had seen in his life.

Like every underwater man, he hated and admired them on sight and was afraid of them.

They came back again, and his hundred feet of film was almost finished so he would have to leave all this, go up, reload, and return as quickly as he could. He looked down at the camera for a moment. When he looked up again he saw the unfriendly tiger coming at him.

"Git! Git! Git!"" he shouted through his mouthpiece.

The tiger simply rolled over in his approach, and Ben knew that he was being attacked.

The side-gashing teeth caught Ben's right arm in one sweep and passed across the other arm like a razor. Ben panicked, and in ten seconds he felt rather than saw the next attack. He felt the shark hit him along the legs, and even as he saw one of the smaller sharks come at him, he kicked out at in and rolled over backwards.

He had come to the surface ledge.

He rolled out of the water in a bleeding mess.

When he came to" he remembered at once what had happened, and he wondered how long he had been out – and what happened next.

"Davy!" he shouted.

He could hear his son's voice, but he could hardly see. He knew the physical shock had come upon him. But he saw the boy then, his terrified face looking down at him, and he realised he had only been out for a second, but he could hardly move.

"What shall I do?" Davy was crying. "Look what happened to you!"

Ben closed his eyes to think clearly for a moment. He – knew he could never fly that plane; his arms were like fire and lead, and his legs could not move, and he was not entirely conscious.

"Davy," he said carefully with his eyes closed. "How are my legs?"

"It's not your legs," he heard from Davy's sick-sounding voice. "It's your arms. They're all cut up, they're horrible."

"I know that," he said angrily through his teeth. "What about my legs?"

"They're covered in blood and they're cut up too."

"Badly?"

"Yes, but not like your arms. What do I do?"

Ben looked at his arms then, and saw that the right one seemed almost cut off, and he could see muscle and sinew and not much blood. The left one looked like a chewed-up piece of meat and it was bleeding greatly, and he bent it up, wrist to shoulder, to stop the blood and groaned with pain.

He knew there wasn't much hope.

But then he knew there had to be; because if he died now the boy would be left here and that was a bad prospect. That was a worse prospect than his own condition. They would never find the boy in time – if they could, in fact, find him at all.

"Davy," he said. "Listen to me. Get my shirt and tear it up and wrap up my right arm. Are you listening?"

"Tie up my left arm tight above all those cuts to stop the blood. Then tie my wrist up to my shoulder so me how, as hard as you can. Do you understand? Tie up both my arms."

"Yes, I understand."

"Tie them tight. Do my right arm first, but close up the wound. Do you understand? Is it clear…"

Ben did not hear the answer because he felt himself losing consciousness again, and this time it was longer, and he came to himself and saw the boy working on his left arm with his serious pale face expressing fear and terror and desperation.

“Is that you, Davy?” Ben said and heard his own indistinct speech, and went on. "Listen, boy," he said with dif ficulty. "I'm going to tell it all to you, in case I lose consciousness again. Bandage my arms, so that I don't lose more blood. Fix my legs, and then get me out of this aqualung. It's killing me."

"I've tried to get you out of it," Davy said in his hopeless voice. "But I can't. I don't know how to get you out."

"You'll have to get me out!" Ben said sharply in his old way, but he knew then that the only hope he had for the boy, as well as for himself, was to make Davy think for himself, make him believe that he could do what he had to do.

"I'm going to tell it to you, Davy, so that you understand. Do you hear me?" Ben could hardly hear himself and he didn't' feel the pain for a moment. "You will have to do all this, I'm sorry but you'll have to do it. Don't be upset if I shout at you. That's not important. That's never important. Do you understand me?"

"Yes." He was lying up the left arm and he wasn't listening.

"Good boy!" Ben tried to get a little encouragement into his words, but he couldn't do it. He did not know yet how to get to the boy," but he would find the way somehow.This ten-year-old boy had a super-human job before him if he was to remain alive.

"Get my knife out of my belt," Ben said, "and cut off all the straps of the aqualung." That was the knife he had had no time to use. "Don't cut yourself."

"I'll be all right," Davy said, standing up and looking sick at the sight of his own bloody hands. "If you could lif t your head a little I could pull one of the straps off, theone I undid."

"All right. I'll lift my head!"

Ben lifted his head and wondered why he felt so paralysed. With t hism ovement h ep assedo ut a gain, and this time into the terrible black pain that seemed to last too long, although he only half-felt it. He came to slowly and felt a little rested and not so paralysed.

"Hello, Davy," he said from his far distance.

"I got you off the aqualung," he heard the boy's frightened voice say. "You're still bleeding down the legs…"

"Never mind my legs," he said and opened his eyes and tried to rise up a little to see what shape he was in, but he was afraid of passing out, and he knew he could not sit up or stand up; and now when the boy had tied his arms back he was helpless from the waist up.'4 The worst had yet to come, and he had to think about it for a moment.

The only chance for the boy now was the plane, and Davy would have to fly it. There was no other chance, no other way. But now he had to think. He must not frighten the boy off. If he told Davy he would have to fly the plane, it would frighten him. He had to think carefully about how to do this; about how to think this into the boy" and persuade him to do it without knowing it. He had to feel his way into his son's frightened, childish mind. He looked closely at Davy then and he realised that it was a long time since he had really seen the boy.

He looks educated, Ben thought, and knew it was a strange idea. But his serious-faced boy was like him himself: a stern surface over something harder and wilder within. But the pale, rather square face did not look like a happy face, not now or ever, and when Davy saw his father look so closely at him he turned away and began to cry.

"Never mind, kid," Ben said slowly.

"Are you going to die?" Davy asked him.

"Do I look that bad?" Ben said without thinking about it.

"Yes," Davy said into his tears.

Ben knew that he had made a mistake, and he must never speak to the boy again without thinking carefully of what he was saying.

"Don't let all this blood and mess fool you. I have been smashed up like this before, two or three times. I don't think you remember when I was in hospital up in Saskatoon…"

Davy nodded. "I remember, but you were in hospital."

"Sure! Sure! That's right," he was trying to overcome his wish to faint of f again. "I'll tell you what we'll do. You get that big towel and put it near me and I'll roll on it somehow, and I'll get up to the plane. How about that, eh?"

"I won't be able to pull you up," the boy said, in defeat. "Ahhh," Ben said with a special gentleness. "You don't know what you can do until you try, kid. I suppose you're thirsty. There's no water, is there?"

"No, I'm not thirsty..." Davy had gone off to get the towel, and Ben said into the air with especial care:

"Next time we'll bring a dozen Coca-Cola. Ice too."

Davy brought the towel and lay it down near him, and by a sideways movement that seemed to tear his arm and chest and legs apart he got his back on to the towel and felt his heels dig into the sand, but he did not pass out.

"Now get me up to the plane," Ben said faintly.

"You pull, and I'll push with my heels. Never mind the bumps, just get me there!"

"How can you fly the plane?" Davy asked from in front of him.

Ben closed his eyes to think of how this boy felt. Ben was thinking, He must not know he has to fly it, the thought will frighten him terribly.

"These little Austers fly themselves," he said. "You just have to set the course, that's easy…"

"But you can't use your arms and hands. And you don't open your eyes."

"Don't give it a thought, Davy. I can fly blindfold with my knees. Start pulling!"

"How are you?" he said to the boy who was breathing heavily, all tired out. "You look all in."

"No, I'm not," Davy said angrily. "I'm all right."

That surprised Ben because he had never heard the tone of revolt or anger in his son's voice before; but still it must be there with a face like that. He wondered how a man could have lived with a son so long and never seenhis face clearly. The shock was wearing off. But he was physically too weak, and he could feel the blood gently flowing out of his left arm, and he couldn't raise a limb, even a finger (if he had one) to help himself. Davy would have to get the plane off and fly it, and land it.

It would be enough if he could survive long enough to talk this boy down with the plane" at Cairo. That would be absolutely enough. That was the only chance.

That thought was what helped him get into the plane. Then he was trying to tell the boy what to do, but he could not get it out. The boy was going to panic, Ben turned his head and felt it, and he said, "Did I bring up the camera, Davy? Or did I leave it on the bottom?"

"It's down near the water."

"Go and get it."

"It's going to be you, Davy. You will have to do it. So listen. Are the wheels clear?"

"Yes, I pulled all the stones away." Davy was sitting there with his teeth clenched.

"What's that shaking us?"

"The wind."

He had forgotten that. "Now this is what you do, Davy," he said, and thought it out slowly. "Give the throttle an inch, not too much. Do it now. Put your whole foot on the brakes, Davy. Good! You've done that! Now switch her on; the black switch on my side. That's fine, Davy. Now you have to push the button; and when the plane starts you open up the throttle a little."

"I can do it," the boy said, and Ben thought he heard the sharp note of his own voice in it, but not quite. "There's so much wind now," the boy said. "It's too strong and I don't like it."

"Are we facing into wind, Davy? Did you get us down wind? Don't be afraid of the wind."

He'll do it, though, Ben decided wearily and happily. Then he passed out into the depths he had tried to keep out of for the boy's sake. And even as he went out, deep, he thought he would be lucky this time if he came out of it at all. He was going too far. And the boy would be lucky if he came out of it. That was all he could think of before he lost contact with himself.

At three thousand feet on his own Davy did not think he could cry again in his lifetime. He had dried himself out of tears. He had boasted only once in his ten years that his father was a pilot. He had remembered everything his father had told him about this plane, and he guessed a lot more which his father had not told him.

It was clam and almost white up here. The sea was green. The desert was very dirty-looking with the high wind blowing a sheet of dust over it. In front the horizon was not clear any more, and the dust was coming up higher, but he could see the sea very clearly.

He understood maps. They were not difficult to understand. He knew where the chart was and he pulled it out of the door pocket and wondered what he must do at Suez. He knew that too. There was a toad to Cairo which went west across the desert. West would be easy. The road would be easy to see, and he would know Suez because that was where the sea ended and the canal began. There, you turned left.

He was afraid of his father, or he had been. But now he couldn't look at his father because he was asleep with his mouth open, and was horribly covered with blood and half-naked and tied up. He did not want his father to die; and he did not want his mother to die; or anyone; and yet that was what happened. People did die."

He did not like to be so high. It was unpleasant, and the plane moved so slowly over the earth. He had noticed that. But he would be afraid to go down into the wind again when he had to land. He did not know what he would do. He would not have control of the plane when it began to bump and lurch. He wouldn't keep it straight," and he wouldn't be able to level it off when it came near the ground.

His father might be dead. He looked and saw the quick breaths that came not very often. The tears that Davy thought had dried up in him were on the lower lids of his dark eyes and he felt them run over and come down his cheeks. He licked them in and watched the sea.

It was at the last inch from the ground that Davy lost his nerve at last; and he was lost in his own fears and in his own death, and he could not speak nor shout nor cry nor sob. He was trying to shout Now! Now! Now! but the fear was too great and in that last moment he felt the lift of the nose, and heard the hard roar of the engine still rotating and felt the bump as the plane hit the ground with its wheels, and the sickening rise and the long wait for the next touch-down; and then he left the touch- down on the tail and the wheels, the last inch of it. The plane turned as the wind threw it around in a ground circle, and when it stopped dead he heard the stillness.[...]

When they brought Davy in, it seemed to Ben that this was the same boy, with the same face he had discovered not long ago. What he had discovered was one thing. But the boy had probably not made any such discoveries about his father.

"Well, Davy?" he said shyly to the boy. "That was pretty good, wasn't it!""

Davy nodded. Ben knew he didn't think it pretty good at all; but some day he would. Some day the boy would understand how good it was. That was worth working on.

Ben smiled. Well, at least it was the truth. This would take time. It would t,ake all the time the boy had given him. But it seemed to Ben, looking at those pale eyes and non-American face, that it would be such valuable time. It would be time so valuably spent that nothing else would be so important. He would get to the boy. Sooner or later he would get to him. That last inch, which parted all things, was never easy to overcome, until you knew how. But knowing how'-' was the flyer's business, and at heart Ben remained a very good flyer.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 2121