Brainstorm. I had just spent
$134.00 on a drone that I can fly in my living room.
It is fun, and that’s
all very well. I needed to do something different, for just this once.
Then I got curious. I was looking at these teeny-tiny little
helicopters for, literally, $29.95 on Amazon, (exactly 3 1/2" long. – ed.) and that’s when it hit me. What
if I looked—just looked, at a proper
transmitter…some kits, some ARFs, (almost-ready-to-fly) model aircraft…???
Real, fucking aircraft—in purely relative terms.
Down below, we’ve
linked to a four-channel transmitter, and it’s only…(drum roll please), $135.00,
or about what I paid for the drone.
You see, I also have a
36” wingspan Fokker D-VII in the closet. It's built, it has a brushless motor,
I have two Li-Po batteries for it. It has servos. The old FM transmitter was
obsolete. I took the batteries out before they gooped out and rotted the
innards of the transmitter. What I need is a new transmitter, a new receiver,
and a 12-volt power supply, or I could just charge off the battery in the
vehicle. I need to upgrade to the 2.4 Ghz, modern tech, just for the sake of
safety.
I mean, if you're going to do it, why fuck around.
Electronics are
ridiculously cheap these days. I was looking at CB radios one day, which would
run right here in my apartment off of a
12-V power supply, and you can literally set up for about a hundred bucks
with a cheap radio and a cheap antenna.
And.
I have done all this before—
A simple bench in the
spare bedroom, and I would have the nucleus of a pretty darned good hobby at
minimal cost. Maybe even two hobbies.
***
Click to enlarge.
I am kind of pleased to
see that I held onto that old 12-V/6-V power supply. Lower left foreground, a
pair of Li-Po batteries...a little above that, a portable charger compatible
with Li-Po. There are some old Ni-Cd batteries, a desktop vice, some meters, a
battery cycler/discharger (in red), the obsolete FM Ch. 28 transmitter, and of
course my Fokker D VII. This is equipped with a Frio-10 brushless motor,
mini-servos on elevator, rudder, ailerons, and an ESC, electronic speed control
on the throttle. What I need, is a new transmitter/receiver, and some kind of
benches. Better lighting. I don't know how badly I need to be dragging model
aircraft up and down the stairs, and there is the question of where in the hell
do we fly it.
(Area 52. – ed.)
Looking at the
pictures, we can see a long skinny battery pack that appears to be for the
transmitter. What I can try, is to dig out a trickle charger, plug the battery
into the transmitter, and plug the charging jack into the transmitter and just
see if it takes a charge.
I do not plan on flying
with this radio, but I could at least turn on the radio, plug in the power battery
and discharge the Li-Po batteries. We can run that quiet little electric motor
right in the spare bedroom. I could try charging them, as I purchased that
charger when I went to the brushless motor and Li-Po batteries. I might want to
read up on it first. That only makes sense.
If I dig deep enough, I
might even be able to come up with the manuals.
I have never flown this
aircraft, but all the stuff in the photos has been paid for. There is some food
for thought here. The machine is very dirty after seventeen years of storage.
It will take some time to clean that up. The covering could use a little
tightening. There is a hole in the bottom of the lower left wing. The aileron
hinges are not secure. I need to cut open the covering, align the hinges and
glue them properly. I do have covering of one colour or another, a heat iron,
so all of that is no problem. We can check for warps in the wings while we’re
at it. By the time I take it apart and put it back together again, some of
those long-buried memories might resurface, and the truth is, I actually do
know a fair bit about building and flying R/C aircraft.
***
So, we have an Apollo
25-amp speed control, and there must be a receiver buried in there somewhere.
You can see all the screws and access panels.
One of the things I
might consider is to get a soldering iron, some solder, some soldering paste,
and I could simply buy Ni-Cd cells and assemble my own batteries. I have some
reservations about any transmitter that accepts dry cells—the old Futaba sets
came with rechargeable batteries, along with the trickle charger and three
servos when you bought the four-channel radio.
With a transmitter, and
a place to work, we can drive electric dune buggies or pickup trucks, tanks, we
can drive an R/C boat, and while I’ve never done a tank, that might be
interesting if it was fairly large, and not too expensive. What the hell,
right. It would look good in the photographs…I could blog about it.
We can always dream.
***
Background. My old man
was in his mid-fifties when he got the itch to fly a radio control airplane. He’d
grown up with rubber band models. He’d built free-flights with Cox .049 motors
on them. We had control-line airplanes that we flew in Germain Park, at least
until the noise complaints started and the cops started showing up…
I stopped in to see the
father figure one day, and I found him down in the basement working on a
.40-powered trainer aircraft. He had all the equipment, brand-new, all kinds of
tools. It was fascinating to watch a person with some experience, and it wasn’t
very long before I was building one of my own.
We flew together as
often as not, for about fifteen or twenty years, and it was something very
precious in that we shared that passion.
I learned at my
father’s knee, ladies and gentlemen, not even so much as an adult, but as a
very small boy. That kind of thing doesn’t happen so often anymore…that kind of
relationship really is special, when you think about it.
Dirty. Where there is an antenna, there must be a receiver...???
Frank was a very neat
builder, but we might also consider the hundreds of models he’d covered using
tissue paper and dope. Heat-shrink covering was a revelation, for a guy like
that, someone who’d never had any money way back when. For Frank, with the
house paid off, a good job, a little money in the bank, and a club full of
pretty good guys to refer to, it must have been the dream of a lifetime—a
humble kind of dream, but a dream nevertheless.
Thank you for reading, and keeping that dream alive.
Note:
these links are for info only, as I am not into affiliate marketing.
Experiment
1:
plug in dedicated Futaba wall charger and attempt to charge Ni-Cd transmitter
and receiver packs. After four hours of charging, there was zero charge. Tags
on the batteries read 2001 and 2005, so that seems to be that. I can buy a
replacement battery at a later date, assuming I wanted to use that transmitter
for a boat or dune buggy. To fly at the local club or M.A.A.C. events, one
would need a current spec radio system.
Experiment
2: assuming
we get any charge at all in the transmitter, plug a power battery into the
plane and see if we can get the motor to turn, actuate control surfaces.
Bearing in mind the results listed above, this experiment is on hold.
All right, ladies and gentlemen. I bought a
drone for $134.00 Cdn. The battery has a small charge. I couldn't get the thing
to light up, and if you can't light up, you can't calibrate. Without lighting up
or calibration, it ain't gonna fly for nobody.
Thinking that maybe the battery
simply wasn't making contact, I discovered that it was actually upside down.
Now, she lights up. So, you turn on the drone, set it on a level surface, in
this case the living room rug. Turn on the transmitter. Push the throttle
(left-hand) stick all the way forward, and then pull it all the way back. The
lights will stop flashing and you are calibrated. You can take off with the
push of a button, and it will adopt a hover at about 1.5 metres. You can push a
button and it will land itself.
Other than that, as I begin to write this story, I have about one minute of
flight time on this machine. Previously, I had achieved about six hours of
flight/crash training on the ESC 2680, which my mother on some mad impulse gave
me for Christmas last year...in order to take pictures or video, I would really
need the app, on a high-end phone, in which case you can record on your
phone's hard-drive or memory card, and you can even fly the thing with your
touch screen. My big goal here is to get more than six hours of flying time,
and maybe even keep the thing around for a while. Either way, it was a big
breakthrough for me, in the sense that I spent a little mad money on what is
basically a toy. I have taken to practicing a slow, measured, but constant rate
of descent. To try to make a nice landing, without just dumping throttle and
smacking her into the carpet.
..might want to read that manual again.
Interestingly, the machine isn’t much better than
I am at landing. It still seems to come down with a bump. There is a ‘stop’
button. I did push that in flight, and it shuts her down and she is a falling
object, nothing more at that point…
Pro Tip: empty the ashtray before flying.
***
I picked this up at my mother’s house Thursday
morning, (I live in an apartment and it’s just easier), it’s now Saturday morning.
I’m up to about 21 minutes of flying time at this point. I have hit the leg of
the coffee table and a desk exactly twice. So, it’s best to take that learning
curve nice and slow…that way, we can keep our toy a little bit longer.
There are five major forces acting on an
aircraft in flight. These are lift, thrust, mass, drag and money. It is wise to
bear this in mind. We are trading dollars for air time. The more air time you
achieve, the cheaper it is, and we are paying by the minute with these things. My
first drone, the ESC 2680, lasted long enough so that I got about six hours of
flying. I also got to crash the thing about a hundred and fifty to two hundred
times as well. This results in chipped blades, cut blades, nicked blades, not
to mention a few nicks and scratches on myself as well. It will also,
eventually result in a broken gearbox, which is what killed it in the end.
These little nicks and scratches included several
on the outside of the forearms, literally a defense injury, in that the thing
was coming at me, and I blocked it like a freaking ninja, ladies and gentlemen.
I have to admit, that thing got me three or four times, and I have no doubt it
would take out an eye pretty easily and no one needs that now, do they.
With that drone, there was provision for a
micro SD card and even that would have taken an account activation and an app
on a cell phone in order to make that work. All I really care about is flying the thing. I suppose I can afford to indulge the impulse, but also, loading up your learning curve a little too ambitiously just increases the workload and the likelihood of mistakes, crashes and damage.
That particular (ESC) drone cost $89.99 at Costco,
and the big weakness was the fact that the motors were long skinny things
embedded in the arms, and the rotor was driven by a pinion and a larger white
plastic gear. The gears were shit plastic, never mind how bad the pilot is. The
Chubory F-89 is direct drive, which at least eliminates one major weakness of
design.
The ESC came with one battery, and it lasted up
to fifteen minutes. The F-89 comes with two batteries. This is actually a bit
of a sore point, as the manual and the online materials state that it should
take anything up to three hours to charge, and the battery is good for twenty
minutes.
This is bullshit. The batteries take about an hour and ten minutes to
charge, you’re lucky to get seven to ten minutes out of it, and with my own
brand of training and confidence building, that means a lot of hovering and
gentle control movements. All of which burns power, but perhaps at a slightly
lower rate than driving it all over the sky at full throttle. A minor point, a
hover is a hover, no matter the altitude, although it does take more power to get
higher—
The thing is so small, you don’t want to take
it too far away in any case.
In terms of comparison, the ESC machine held
the hover with a certain precision, the F-89 will tend to drift back and forth.
If in flying, one mistake compounds on another, (and the one before it, and the one
before that), then this seems to be evident when the machine is hovering with
no inputs from the pilot. It will drift around to a certain extent, and then it will try to correct itself, to the extent the thing appears to be a little bit confused.
When you just wanted to rotate in position, the ESC machine would do a tighter circle, although not exactly head-of-a-pin stuff. The F-89 has a larger circle, I use this effect to sort of drive it around the living room using rotational inputs on the left-hand stick only. If it gets too close, I can shove it forward with the right-hand stick, or pull it back. I'm still flying the back-end view sort of thing, when it is pointed at you all directional inputs are of course reversed. (Up and down are still up and down, the throttle remains the same.) I can always land if I'm a bit confused and getting a little too close to a bookcase or whatever. As for the alleged trim button, it would appear to be
useless, although I could have another look at that manual. Basically, you can push on that thing all day long, nothing is going to happen.
In other observations, the F-89 has a switch on
the top in all the major pictures online, at the store and on the
manufacturer’s website. The switch on my machine is on the bottom. Clearly this
is not exactly the same product as advertised, and which seemed all right to
this uninitiated fledgling pilot…this is not exactly a recommendation, not for
either machine.
END
Please check out The Handbag’s Tale on Google Play, the original novella that
inspired The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series. Click on the audiobook
and you will see that it is free.
After
a solid eight hours in the sack, I moseyed around, lazed in the shower, shaved
up as best I could, and futzed around in general. Being away from our normal
base, there were few routine chores. Basically we were just killing time.
Reluctantly,
I toyed with some food, but sooner or later I had to get back to work. I have
to admit to a kind of bone-weary fatigue, though.
About
six o’clock, the bunch of us rendezvoused in the empty hangar reserved for our
briefings. It was our office and command facility here at St. Omer aerodrome.
Minimalist,
to say the least.
“Have
a coffee, sir?” Jaeckl offered, reaching for the cups lined up by the urn.
I
nodded.
“Major
Dawley, bring us up to speed, please?” I asked.
The
assembly quieted down a little, although they were pretty subdued to begin
with.
Everyone
was dead tired by this time, after working on the AEG’s all night long.
Poor
guys could barely think straight.
“All
righty, then. Gentlemen, listen up please.” He began, standing by the
blackboard.
“So
far, the two Handley-Pages are in running condition, and Pete is working on the
AEG’s.”
“So.
Last night was a bit of a non-starter, but Lieutenant-Colonel Tucker decided to
drop his bomb over the North Sea, rather than try to land with it. But that’s
good, actually, as we have now confirmed that the dropping mechanism works just
fine, if nothing else.”
“We
enjoyed the flight, burned off fuel, and just cruised around in general.” I
reported, and the boys all nodded and smiled.
“We
had a blast.” Bernie, eyes all bloodshot.
He
looked kind of hung-over.
“Pete
thinks he has the problem cured, and assures us the Handley-Page airplanes are
top-notch.” The Major continued. “Referring to the AEG’s, we just don’t know
yet. But it is still early. The basic plan is to try again. We take off at the
same time, and proceed to the target with as many planes as we have. The
weather is good for tonight, as far as we can safely predict.”
Down
south, there was a chance of thundershowers.
‘If
possible these should be avoided.’
Agents
were again waiting at our jump point in Switzerland. The men checked their
notes from the previous day and made new ones. I prayed that something would go
wrong. I was hoping to get caught, but so far no one had even inquired as to
our business here at St. Omer.
“When
you take off, circle for height, but no more than half an hour. Then steer an
initial course of one-hundred-eighty degrees for one hour, then turn to
one-hundred-twenty degrees and look for the markers. Keep your route
description handy. Land at field ‘B’ and refuel. This is a long trip. At Nancy,
turn to approximately eighty-seven degrees, fly to the town of Strasbourg. From
there, a course of approximately forty-three degrees takes you more or less to
Baden-Baden.”
“The
sketches you have are fairly good. In the final analysis, use your own
judgment. If necessary, jettison the bomb over enemy territory, and return to
field, ‘B.’”
Details,
details, so many details, but it allowed time to think and study the map.
The
beauty lies in the details.
We
heard engines fire up outside, and a ragged cheer.
Rumble,
rumble, rumble…they kept going. One of the AEG’s. Two foreign engines were
running.
We
looked at each other, many with eyebrows raised.
Someone
knocked eagerly at the door. It opened with a thud as Taffy lurched in, wearing
an expectant and happy grin.
He
was just about to speak, when the engine notes went flat, first one, then the
other.
He
stood there shaking his head.
Finally,
he came out with it.
“Whale…oil…beef…hooked.”
He said, or something like that, then turned and in a dejected fashion began to
shuffle off to the door.
“Aw,
Pete.” He muttered as the door slammed behind him.
A
few grimaces, a few grins.
“Sounds
like he’s getting closer.” Said Major Dawley, a little tongue in cheek jab at
yours truly.
Jaeckl
wouldn’t let it get out of hand. He was just screwing with us.
The
teletype machine clattered. Dawley and Hastings, who was also there to help
out, consulted. They muttered between themselves while we waited.
“Doesn’t
look good.” Hastings said, beckoning me over.
And
there you have it. We had to stand them down again. The effing weather had
socked in the southern end of our course for a day at least. More like three or
four, judging by the maps and the data provided. Privately, I was relieved.
Those AEG’s flew in here. Those motors just had to run, sooner or later. Good
old Howard-Smythe had sent my coded telegram right on schedule. And he had been
bribed to forget well.
“Why
not do a big beer run?” I suggested. “It might be good navigation practice.”
“The
weather down south looks bad for three for four days.” Put in Dawley.
The
boys sat around scratching their heads.
“All
right, take the damned bombs off the Handley-Pages.” I ordered to a few muffled
groans and gripes.
It
would be a dry run to Farnborough, perhaps even with two AEG’s…as we heard them
up and roar again…maybe Pete was learning his trade, finally, and the two
bombers of Trenchard’s.
“Why
don’t we just lock up here and take the whole damned crew?” Queried Hastings.
“You
could send half of them on a pass, for a day or two.”
I
told you Hastings was smart. We made our way across the pavement to the line-up
of aircraft, all four with little clumps of men working on them.
“Good
idea. But first we have to get there.” I acknowledged. “Let’s have a look at
these ruddy Hun bombers.”
Tipping
the wink to Jaeckl, he went to the rear of the cockpit and sat there looking
innocent.
“Try
her out.” I suggested to poor old Pete, and gave it a big whack on the cowling
beside the firewall with the flat of my hand.
Pete
stood there, looking apprehensive, but the plane’s twin engines fired right up
this time. Pete looked fit to be tied. He was one stressed-out individual.
He
just about died when I made the other plane start up, too. Poor Pete. I’ll
never forget it. He was groaning, and cursing, and pulling clumps of his
thinning blonde hair right out of his head.
“Well,
that makes two AEGS and two H-P’s.” Jaeckl joked. “For now, anyways.”
“Put
a bomb on mine.” I noted for Jaeckl’s benefit, as he moved away. “I want to try
something.”
His
eyebrows rose, but he just saluted.
“I
want to find out if we can land safely with a bomb on, at night. Those things
are expensive, and the Ministry wants to know.”
It was
our excuse for being experimental, after all.
This AEG bomber is now in a museum in Canada.
“Who
will I be riding with?” He asked over his shoulder. “Someone else, hopefully?”
So
Bert Hall flew one AEG, Owens flew another. Dexter flew the other Handley-Page,
and mine was the second, number, ‘oh-twenty-one.’ Soon we were over the
channel.
Because
of the relative lack of experience we all had, except Bert, the officers were
scattered amongst four planes, and the ground crew was divided into two groups.
Some were going on leave in Paris, no hardship for them, and the rest were
flying with us.
My
plane had a somewhat smaller crew because of the big bomb in the belly. I must
say, it was an impressive sight, with the two Fritzie planes up front and down
below, with Dexter in, ‘oh-nineteen,’ and myself in, ‘oh-twenty-one,’ up top.
At
this time of night, it was safer to fly southwest down the Channel, then
approach from the south. Bert’s navigation was impeccable. He might have done
this sort of thing before. A smuggler’s route.
We
landed at Farnborough in the middle of the night, but a quick radio call ahead
by Dawley made certain of our welcome. They even used the beer trucks to help
light up the fricking runway. That Dawley, he was always coming up with a new
twist.
I
guess it goes without saying that I didn’t pooch the landing.
And
then, a batch of mechanics were sent on leave, to take effect the minute our
wheels cleared ground. We left the AEG’s in England, so I sent Owens and Dexter
on leave as well.
We
kept exactly two mechanics, (not Pete,) and landed back at St. Omer about nine
o’clock in the morning. All we had to do was unload, and have a nap, and think
up our next stunt.
It’s
too bad, really. I wouldn’t have minded a crack at old Kaiser Willy, and no
doubt Bert would have bombed the War Office, Winnie’s place, or even Windsor
Castle.
‘If
the price was right.’
We
had the motive, we had the intent, we had the means. We simply didn’t get the
opportunity. Timing is everything, eh?
It
might have done some good, to let the gentry know they can be held accountable.
***
She said yes.
While
home in London, Jennifer had agreed to marry me. But I don’t want to get into
the mushy stuff too deeply, for this is my future wife after all. For that
reason, I have deliberately not fantasized, nor mentally soliloquized about
her.
Sitting
there, back inside our old command tent, flushed with the vacation, I spent
some time reading all the reports of the last week’s activities. The boys were
doing very well, with only two minor casualties.
The
Rittmeester Gunter von Fluebl, and Oberstleutnant Heinz Smiltz, ‘bit the dust.’
Thirteen
enemy planes shot down. And two minor aces. Simply awesome.
About
then the witch doctor, the head-shrinker, Doctor Scolz came in. It was his last
day with us. He appeared to be very drunk. Not a happy drunk, either. The surly
kind.
“So,
I’ll say goodbye then.” I murmured, still reading.
He
stood in front of the desk. He saluted, and clicked his heels. Very formal. He
rocked back and forth ever so slightly. A veritable stew of breath came out of
him, and wafted its way across. The doctor had been drinking heavily for some
days now.
Over
the last two or three weeks, the poor fellow had taken to talking to himself.
Beginning to lose the personal grooming. Perhaps we’d been a too little hard on
him.
“Incidentally,
I have just turned in all your psychological assessments.” He said with a
certain relish.
He
seemed to expect some kind of response.
“That’s
okay Doc. We all have our little role to play. By any chance do I fit the
profile of an asshole?” And I just kept on reading.
Poor
guy didn’t laugh. He just turned and headed for the door. Don’t go away mad,
Doc…just go away. I didn’t laugh either. But that was about as close to an
apology as he was ever going to get.
As
the flap of the tent swished closed behind his sorry ass, Howard-Smythe turned
aside from the tele-printer machine.
“You
would have to be some kind of anal retentive to want his job.” He allowed.
In
some way this put the final polish on what had been, from the onset, a pretty
bad scene.
***
One
fine day it was all over. We stood there, unable to comprehend, or to believe.
We muttered, and loitered. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day. An armistice.
It
was unbelievable.
Why?
I
mean, why stop now?
Yet
it is in writing. We have it in writing. It’s an order. Hard to believe.
Accepting it is difficult. The sense of relief…overwhelming…a curiously subdued
bunch of guys.
It
was surreal.
The
land is oddly silent. The air is strangely clear. The sound of the guns peter
away, down to nothing.
“Well,
I’ll be damned.” Said Andrew, who only yesterday was totally flushed with the
pride of a double victory.
“I
honestly didn’t think I would live to see it.” I admonished the boys nearest.
“I just stopped thinking about it.”
Now
my knees, my whole body went slack. All I wanted to do was to sit down. Those
guys broke out a bottle, and music began to play.
My
thoughts were haunted with a vision of Jennifer, pale and ghostly, hanging in
the sky. All I had to do was to go home…it was over. It was all over with—and I
lived.
I
lived. I lived.
Holy,
Jesus Fucking Christ…I lived.
***
He let him live...
For
some reason, I wanted one last flight. Just one. It didn’t seem fair, to have
such a beautiful plane. I had spent weeks tuning it. Many hours of hard work
went into all the little tweaks, and for what? It was all so useless.
I
experienced a moment of real anger, a kind of narcissistic rage, thinking about
that.
Our
orders were to stand down and preserve our machines for later analysis.
It
was time to get ready for the next war.
So I
took off alone, and headed for the Western Front. It was about ten-thirty or
twenty to eleven or so. I took it up sunwards, climbing through 10,500 feet,
and then opened up the throttle. Just to see what she could do. My SE was
holding at about a hundred and sixty-five at 10,500 feet…beautiful. Just
beautiful. Just think of what we could have done, given a little more time.
That’s
when I saw him, off to the south and about 2,000 feet higher.
The
black nose, the familiar wings. A Fokker D-VII. They don’t give those out to
just anybody. He saw me. I could tell because he re-aligned the plane.
My
guns were already cocked.
The
clock said, ‘five to eleven,’ and I grinned in ferocious, blood-thirsty mirth.
“I’ll
be fucking damned.” I oathed in fury. “I know thee, sir…”
For
the rest of the quote the reader will have to consult Shakespeare’s, ‘King
Lear.’
It’s
pretty offensive.
I
must say I was impressed.
Something
about a, ‘son of a mongrel bitch,’ as I recall, but he was diving onto me and
all there was to do was line up the sights, a little in front of old Herman,
and let him have a burst right in the kisser.
Hah.
Gotcha, you motherfucker.
He
flew right into that one.
“Who
the hell do you fucking think you’re dealing with here?” I bellowed as he went
by.
He
pulled right, and I pulled right, and we entered the good old, ‘kurvenkampf,’ as taught by von
Richtofen, and Boelcke, and a hundred dead men before and since.
Herman
Goering shot down Duzek, Elmer Duzek, only three weeks before. Did Elmer want
to be the last man to die? One of the last? Only another three weeks, and he
would have made it. He had a mother and a sister.
The
red and black D-VII suddenly reversed his turn, but of course I anticipated
this move, having seen it before. Pulled the throttle back to about half.
Patience is a virtue, and I knew he would dive below me…sure enough, and I
flipped over, following him down to the clouds…the clouds were about 8,000 feet
and I figured he’d go east. No, he’ll go south, sunwards, and sure enough there
he was.
Pulling
out now, he pulls up and over, and now I turned and fishtailed to keep him in
front of my guns…and still he was out of range. His loop did him no good. But
he’s out of range.
He
must recognize me as well. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month.
Eleven
o’clock, and yet neither one of us can break off safely. Who knows what his
intentions are now? I wasn’t too sure what mine were. But I was open to
suggestion.
We
made a head-on pass. A little burst of smoke from his guns was enough to
confirm his intentions, as my own finger gently squeezed the trigger. Through
the smoke and vibration, I’m sure I got hits…and got hit…something thwacked
through some part of my airframe.
He
made a couple of strange moves, and I just watched him.
I
had all day.
The
sun behind me, lots of fuel.
We’re
all alone up here, buddy…and it suddenly clicked in.
He
was no longer trying to shoot me down, but only trying to avoid my guns.
Now
I get it. This calls for…a snap roll.
Fuck.
Sure enough, he does a snap roll too.
And
then he looks over, as if to say, ‘Big deal.’
Suddenly
he was edging up beside my plane. Waving, both hands in the air, he points and
shrugs.
Face
impassive, it is the bland-looking, fat-faced man. Not wearing a face mask, he
gave me a big, happy smile. All I could do was to show him the big thumbs-up.
He
saluted, and bowed his head.
His
guns were jammed. I fired a short burst, because mine weren’t.
And
again, he shrugged. Then, slowly, ever so slowly, he began to turn off to the
east.
I
watched the tail end of that plane, for a long, long time, let me tell you.
I
don’t know why. There is no rhyme or reason for it.
Decided
to let the cocksucker live.
It
was eleven minutes and eleven seconds past eleven, and I don’t get paid for
this.
So I
turned it for home.
I
let him live.
My
thought was, “Enough, already, Herman.”
What
do I care if the man’s a transvestite? Lord knows, we shot down enough of his
goofy little buddies.
Epilogue
A Splendid Wedding
Standing
there blinking in the sun, on the steps of the church. People took pictures and
threw rice. A gaggle of Jennifer’s girlfriends waved and cried, and carried on
something awful.
Her
mom cried.
Her
dad beamed and called me, ‘son.’
He
slipped me an envelope absolutely jammed with cash, when no one was looking.
Jolly
nice of him.
We
got in the back of a big car and someone drove us away, a young male relative
of my wife’s.
Jennifer’s
folks, Mr. and Mrs. Bolteman, threw us an absolutely splendid wedding.
After
demobilization things flashed by in a blur.
I
was in a profound state of shock for a long time, but I remember little
snatches of it.
We
found ourselves on the fantail of a ship.
Standing
there, with my wife, my love and my life, we watched the green hills of England
receding over the horizon.
I
was afraid my legs would begin shaking.
Entwined
with each other, we kissed long and deep. I squeezed her. I didn’t want to let
go.
“Well,
old girl.” I murmured, face buried in her hair. “What do you think?”
“It
will be fine.” She told me dreamily. “As long as we have each other.”
I
just kept my face in her hair and bawled my eyes out.
