The parade terminated at a makeshift airport, once a city park, where a Ford Trimotor was warming its engines at the end of a rough gravel runway. As our jeep pulled up to the plane, we could see a stretcher being loaded into the cabin under Roxanna’s fretful supervision.
“You brute!” she called out above the hiccoughing of the plane’s motors, as soon as she caught sight of me. When Bruno was stowed aboard and we were being led on at gunpoint, Roxanna developed her theme with more imagination. “Axe-murderer! Fiend! Judas! They’ve got your number now, boy! They’ll take care of you! I only wish I could do it with my own two hands. But I did what I could—I told them who you were—who your father was. Tennyson White! You should have seen the faces they made! And now they’re going to do for you what they did for him—and for the Manglesnatch statue. Ha!” The driver of the jeep began pulling her back. “Send me his ear, officer. And hers too. And their bones: I’ll grind their bones to make my bread!”
When we were at last safely (so to speak) aboard the plane and the hatch was closed, the guard assured us it would be nothing so awful as Roxanna had suggested. “You’d think we wasn’t civilized, the way she talks. Hanging’s the worst that can happen, you know. We’ve got a gallows out front of the courthouse in St Paul can hang five at a time. Christ almighty, you should see that! Oh, sweet Jesus! But don’t you believe any of her bull about cutting folks up in pieces. There ain’t none of that… any more.”
“Could you tell me, please,” I asked of him (for he seemed to be in a better mood now than he’d been in the jeep), “where my daughter is?”
“The little girl? That lady back there’s taking care of her. She asked to be the foster-mother, and so…”
“Petite! With that ogress? No!” Julie struggled against her bonds, while the plane began to taxi down the runway. “You have to stop this machine. I must have my daughter back!” When the plane was off the ground, even Julie could see the futility of further complaint.
The declining sun, scarcely five degrees above the horizon, was visible through the right-hand windows of the cabin, so I knew we were flying south. It seemed probable that so minuscule an aircraft could accomplish only a few hundred miles without having to touch down for fuel. I knew there were important kennels in that direction—Anoka, St Cloud, etc.—but I had never paid any attention to the geography of the Dingoes’ settlements. But the guard had mentioned one city—“St Paul.”
“What will happen when we get to St Paul?” I asked. “Will we be released then? Or held in a dungeon?”
The guard laughed. He didn’t bother to explain the joke.
“Shall I be tried in court? I demand a jury of my peers! I’m innocent. Julie witnessed it. I didn’t mean to…”
As though in reproof, the guard walked to the front of the small cabin to examine Bruno. I was left to stare out the window at the laboring propellers and wish desperately for a Master to assist them at their rustic task.
The guard was called up front to confer with the pilot, and I tried to comfort Julie with hollow reassurances. It was almost a relief when the erratic behavior of the plane (how can the air be bumpy?) took our attention from the longer-range anxieties and focused it on the existential moment, now. The guard returned to announce that the left-hand propeller had failed and the right-hand was going. The plane was losing altitude (though I couldn’t understand how he knew that, since it was perfectly dark and there was no way to judge). I had to help him jettison various complicated metal do-jiggers out the open hatch. The plane (we were told) regained altitude, but it continued to make arhythmic gaspings and grindings. The guard made us get into parachutes and showed us how they worked. One only had to jump, count to ten, pull the little ring out, and wait to see if it would work.
“Have you ever done it?” I asked the guard as we stood looking out the open hatch at the black nothingness below.
“Yeah, once. It was no picnic.”
“But it did work? It usually works?”
“Yeah. The danger isn’t so much in its not opening. It’s how you land. You can break a leg easy, and if you get caught in a bad wind—”
“Good-bye, Darling, Julie!” I shouted. “Wait for me. I’ll rescue you as soon as I possibly can.”
And then I was falling, the plane wasn’t above me, only its fading noise. The stars vanished as I fell through cloud-banks. I counted to five, and I couldn’t think what came next, so I pulled the string, the chute opened, the strap across my chest tightened and pulled me upright, and for a couple of minutes I had nothing to do but swing back and forth lazily in my lattice of straps and regret my hasty derring-do. For all I knew I was over an ocean!
Landing, I knocked my coccyx against some intractable concrete and twisted my ankle. All about me the floodlights switched on, and voices shouted contradictory orders.
“An excellent landing, sir. An as-ton-ishing landing, I would say. I hope you’re quite all right?” The man who addressed me was wearing an overcoat similar to my own. He had great white Franz-Josef moustaches and supported himself on an ornately carved walking stick. I had never seen so wrinkled a face, except in reproductions of Rembrandts.
“Oh, quite,” I replied. “Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”
His hand came up in a stiff salute. “Captain Frangle, sir. I’m commander of this here peniten-itentiary, sir.”
“Peniten-itentiary?”
“Well, that’s what we used to call it. What’s the word now? There’s so many new words for things, I tend to forget one here and one there. Repatriation center—that’s it! For the goddamned pets, you know.”
Chapter Seven
In which I stand in debt to N. Gogol.
Let us say nothing of frying pans and fires. Let us say nothing of probabilities. To have parachuted smack-dab into the middle of the enemy’s camp (and the neatest bomb could not have dropped on its target more truly than I had, by blind chance) is an event so deficient in probability that only the incontrovertible fact of its having happened can ease my embarrassment in relating it. In fiction such a coincidence would be inexcusable; in history these things happen all the time.
So, to return to la chose véritable…
“You have been,” I asked, hesitatingly, “expecting me?”
Captain Frangle twirled a moustache craftily. “There have been rumors… a word dropped here, and a word there… Nothing you can put your finger on, you understand… nothing explicit, but nevertheless.”
“Rumors, you say? Exactly what sort of rumors?”
“Oh—vague rumors, sir! Extremely vague and indistinct. Almost unbelievable, but nevertheless…” And the Captain winked knowingly.
“Nevertheless?” I insisted.
“What I meant to say was—nevertheless, here you are, you see. Which shows, I think, that there must have been something in the rumors after all. Then again, perhaps not. Far be it from me to say, one way or the other. You would certainly know better than I, Major.” He trailed off into a laugh of consummate self-deprecation. Then, turning to two of his underlings who had been gathering up the folds of the parachute, he bade them hurry up with their work—in quite opposite tones.