His idea had been buttressed month after month with information from The Lore of Flight, the Cessna manual, from the public library, from conversations with Carver, from hours spent hanging around the airport, and from the Rand McNally road map of Long Island. The working out of its details and problems had completely taken the place and function of dice baseball, growing in intensity as it became less and less of a game, as his other alternatives fell away and lost their power or potential. Whether it was cause or effect of the death of his Oriole and Viking visions, he didn’t know. He had watched Mr. Carver take off. He had discussed the process with him. He had absorbed the manual. He had never successfully driven a car before, but was convinced he could fly the plane. He could take off, he could maintain level flight, and he was willing to bet — although it was the chanciest part by far — that he could land as well. The Cessna 152 was, as both The Lore of Flight and the Cessna manual had assured him, an exceedingly simple aircraft, a trainer of sorts, a beginner’s machine. He’d gone over and over the procedures in his head night after night, imagining and remembering the plane’s responses, the pictures in his head allowing flights from his desk chair. He’d taken all questions to Mr. Carver or the library and had been satisfied with the answers.
The weather was ideal and he’d be flying VFR, navigating visually, so his radio contact with the tower would be minimal and voice identification impossible. He could bluff his way onto the runway with only the few phrases Carver had used. His bike with the front wheel turned around would fit in the front passenger’s seat. According to the specifications in the Cessna manual, there was room. He’d checked his bike with a tape measure.
He was already on Ferry Boulevard, sweeping from shadow to sun to shadow as he flew past the widely spaced trees. He wasn’t sure how much time he had or when the alarm would be sounded. And he wasn’t sure — he forced the thought from his mind as he pedaled, ducking and leaning forward and pumping furiously — if he could even go through with it, sitting in the cockpit with the engine roaring and the runway stretching flat and terrifying before him.
He would fly to East Hampton. If all went as expected, there would be no notice taken of his flight until too late, nothing considered unusual. Once in the air he would simply cross the Sound and Long Island and bear east along its southern coast. If he appeared from the south, with the wind the usual prevailing westerly, they would tell him to land on runway 28, at the end of which was the dirt path to the road he had glimpsed on his earlier trip. Rand McNally had identified it as Wainscott Road, which after 1.3 miles turned into the East Hampton Turnpike, which passed through Sag Harbor going north 3.3 miles later. He would set the plane down, run the entire length of tarmac to the tree line, engage the parking brake, leave the engine running, and disembark with his bike on the side away from the Hamptons’ service building. There was no tower there and he would not be visible behind the fuselage. He’d take the bike and bag and leave the plane where it was, unharmed, a decoy, a ghost ship. He’d ride to Sag Harbor and then North Haven, take the ferry to Shelter Island, ride to the docks along Ram Island Drive, wait until dark, and take one of the rowboats he had seen so casually tethered to Long Beach Point across less than a mile of bay. At night it would be north-northwest on the compass. It was over a mile long and would be hard to miss. He’s never rowed a boat before for any distance; but, then, he’d never flown a plane before, either, he’d reasoned when that part of the plan had been taking shape. From there he’d go to Plum Island, northeast, and from there if possible due east across another mile or so of Sound — lonely, wild water — to Great Gull Island, devoid of any civilizing symbols and marks on the Rand McNally map and distant and alone out beyond the jaws of eastern Long Island’s north and south peninsulas.
Avco slipped by hardly noticed, as did the airport fence, sunlight beading along its links in rapid succession, and just past stacks of steel drums and an Army trainer he turned onto the access road, bumping over the patched and broken concrete. The small brick Bridgeport Flight Service sat at the terminus of the dead end, and halfway down was the melancholy Windsock Restaurant, its windows broken, seemingly abandoned. He swung a sharp right opposite it through the opening in the interior fence to the hangar area. He slowed as the space opened in front of him.
Planes of all shapes and colors stood tethered and silent before him, set at random angles in a wide arc. From their wing struts and tails, ropes stretched to metal bars sunk in concrete. He eased to a halt straddling the bike, sweat running into the corners of his eyes. There was no sound, no movement. At this time of day he knew there might be only two or three men in the area, and they would almost certainly be seeking refuge in the manager’s air-conditioned office. He slipped the key ring from his pocket and located the Cessna keys, the firm’s name embossed in raised letters on the bow of the key. Then he untied the bag and pulled out the manual and checklist, no bigger together than the monthly missalette at church, retied the bag, and pedaled silently through the grove of struts and wings, quickly weaving his way to the blue-and-white Cessna parked with its tail to him and its nose to the runway. He glided up to its fuselage as if on rails, and was off the bike and fitting the key to the passenger door in seconds.
The handlebars caught and grabbed on the metal skin of the fuselage, balking at the smallish cavity of the door, but he angled them around, hefting the bicycle frame waist-high. The delay was agonizing. Finally it slid in and lay reasonably stable, and he shut the door and moved quickly to the tail. He had the preflight checklist memorized so completely he could visualize the pages in his head. He had them visualized so well — he knew them so well — that he could take shortcuts, save time. He unhooked the rudder gust lock, a metal band around the tail resembling a giant bobby pin, by impatiently spinning the wing nut off that held it together, and set it on the pavement behind him. He disconnected the tail tie-down, unlooping the knots, his fingers fumbling next to the smooth aluminum underside of the tail. He checked the control surfaces for freedom of movement and disconnected the wing tie-downs, flipping the freed ropes from the struts. He gave the tires a shove and hurriedly rolled a nearby stepladder up to the wings to check the fuel quantity visually, then rolled it away. He pulled the canvas cover from the Pitot tube: with the cover on, there would be no ram air input, and with no ram air input, his airspeed indicator and altimeter would not function. The cover still in his hand, he unlocked the other door and clambered aboard, flooded with relief to be finally off the tarmac, but still moving quickly, his hands shaking, pulling out the manual and double-checking the exterior checklist. He’d skipped some checks — oil, landing lights, air filter — gambling somewhat but feeling as though he were pressing his luck to the limit with every moment he stayed outside the plane. From his seat the instrument panel spread before him precisely as expected, the flight controls stabbing upward in a pair of elegant bull’s horns. It was a three-dimensional model of the manual’s full-page black-and-white photograph. That’s all, he told himself. Yet he still shook, and his hand jittered across the plastic surface of the flight control when he reached out to touch it, his sweat leaving a momentary mist of a trail.
Keep moving, he thought. Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, or you’ll never do it. His hands flew.
1. A. Remove control wheel lock.
B. Check ignition switch OFF.
C. Turn on master switch and check fuel quantity indicator; turn master off.