The clochard was stiffening with rigor by now and that was all to Kendig’s advantage. He dragged the corpse forward, closing his mind to the ghoulishness of it and the reek of gasoline. He propped the body in the pilot’s seat and belted it in.
Outside on the grass he opened the bundle of filthy clothes and spread the coat out flat. He piled into the center of it the rest of the clothes, the empty Vittel bottle and his own spare pair of shoes. He tied up the arms and skirt of the coat and carried the bundle into the plane together with the can of gasoline. Then he went back outside again and explored in the trunk of the Peugeot. It was slightly redolent of the dead but that would dissipate. He found a combination windshield-scraper and brush; it would do. He used it to rake the grass where he’d been working. He left no sign in the earth except a set of vague foot-impressions to show he’d walked from the car to the plane; he left the trunk lid ajar with the keys in it both to air it out and to indicate he’d been in a hurry.
When he climbed in the waist door he latched it shut behind him and went forward up the steeply tilted companionway into the cockpit. He tested the clochard’s limbs but they hadn’t stiffened quite enough yet. He couldn’t bear the thought of sitting beside the ghastly dead man for any length of time; he went back into the fuselage and sat under the blister watching the night. Along the edge of the field bare branches were silhouetted against the dark sky, as jagged as cracks in a porcelain surface. Scarves of cloud hung low in the southwest but the clear intense cold held.
He felt a vague urge: the impulse to communicate his gratitude to Carla Fleming. He remembered her soft self-assured voice, her long-boned Modigliani features. He’d never get in touch with her; he couldn’t take the chance.
More than half his money was in the clochard’s money belt and the suitcase but he had about forty thousand dollars in his own belt and pockets and when it ran out he had the talent to make more. He had no papers of any kind but that wasn’t a problem either. This would be a poor time to try to make long-term plans. He’d drift a while and think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his years. There was plenty of time for it. He wouldn’t get bored; he’d got over that, he’d changed too much to fear it. He was capable of life now; perhaps even capable of love—he’d find out about that someday.
He stripped Oakley’s watch off his wrist. After six now; he couldn’t wait longer. He moved at a crouch into the cockpit and got the watch onto the dead wrist. The joints were so stiff he had a lot of trouble moving them; that was how he wanted it.
It had to be done with great caution because if there was a spark at the wrong moment it could incinerate him. He threw all the windows wide open before he began to splash the gasoline around. He poured it liberally around the cockpit, over the corpse and the upholstery. Then he capped the gasoline can and stuffed it into the bundle of things he couldn’t leave behind. He took the candlewick fuse from his shirt pocket and wedged it into a metal seam by the edge of the soaked carpeting. Now he had to wait again while the wind carried the fumes off and evaporated the surface petrol and the rest of it soaked deep into things.
It was a risk but he had to take it and when he judged enough time had passed he turned the ignition switch on and pressed the Mesh button for the Number One engine. The flywheel spun with a grinding effort but the engine didn’t catch right away and he pushed the mixture control to full rich. No sparks in the cockpit; this wouldn’t have worked with a plane that had the engine in the nose of the fuselage. Both engines were in nacelles high on the wings and outboard of the cockpit.
The flywheel struggled and he heard the cylinders catch; he revved it a bit and then got the star-board engine running.
He unlocked the brake and ran the engines up and the PBY started to bounce, rolling slowly out of its parking space onto the strip. He kicked the pedal hard and she turned sedately to the right; he lined her up on the runway and taxied slowly to the far end and made the U-turn wide and slow. Now he had the length of the runway in front of him and a row of high trees at the far end. He remembered the strain with which the instructors regarded student takeoffs; if you didn’t get the nose up fast enough you’d go right into those trees or the power lines beyond.
The emergency hatch was in the bow forward of the windshield; you had to crawl under the dashboard to get to it. That wouldn’t be fast enough. He broke the half-window out of its frame on his right and judged he could work it from there. He set the bundle on his lap and ran up both engines against the brakes. When the plane began to shudder and lurch he released the brakes. It rolled forward and he throttled back; this had to be done precisely and he couldn’t have a lot of speed at first. He bounced forward at twenty miles an hour or so, steering with his feet while he leaned across the aisle and fixed the clochard’s dead fingers to the crescent wheel. He locked both the fists onto the control yoke and jammed the clochard’s feet under the rudder pedals so that they couldn’t kick back and send the plane into a ground loop.
Bumping along on the uneven ground he had a hard time climbing out the window but finally he was hanging there with both shoulders wedged into the opening so that he wouldn’t fall out before he wanted to. The starboard propeller was frighteningly close behind him but he could avoid that easily enough; it was the wing strut and the landing gear he’d have to worry about when he made his drop.
He had two matches in his left hand, pressed together. With that hand he reached the throttles and thrust them all the way forward to emergency speed. There was about a quarter mile of runway left. He struck the two matches and touched the flame to the gasoline-soaked tip of the candlewick. The flame soared bright; he had only a glimpse of it and then he was hunching his shoulders, clutching the dead matchsticks in his left hand and the bundle of oddments in his right.
When he compressed his shoulders he slid down out of the jouncing window. He let go and dropped with his legs all gone to rubber; he felt his feet touch down and he willed himself to collapse and he was still dropping when he saw the strut coming at him but it only glanced off his upraised arm and then the starboard wheel was rutting past him and he was under it and free.
He rolled over and lay flat while the tail surface rumbled overhead, the tail wheel bouncing and veering a little from side to side. He didn’t move after that: he lay prone on his belly and watched, uncaring of the blunt pain in his corded forearm; waiting with his eyes wide stark staring and the breath hung up in his throat.
Gathering speed the PBY began to yaw dangerously and he feared the ground loop but the clochard’s stiff joints held it on something like a course and it kept wobbling toward the end of the runway with a high angry whine of overaccelerated engines. He saw the flames burst alight in the cockpit, fueled by the gasoline-soaked carpeting and Oakley’s saturated clothes. Perhaps it had been unnecessary but he had to make sure the plane caught fire to mask the work he’d done on the clochard with the acid.… It veered right and then left but it didn’t flip over and it didn’t loop around and it must have been doing at least seventy miles an hour when it smashed head-on into the trees. It was an earsplitting crash and there was afterecho and silence before the flames tongued into a ruptured tank and the whole thing went up with a spectacular thundering conflagration: even from where he lay he felt the heat of it on his cheeks.
He picked up the bundle and backed his way to the edge of the runway, dragging the bundle to erase his footprints; he faded into the brush, walking with care and rubbing it out when he left any signs.