Time had indeed been kind to Cliff Harper. The devastatingly handsome pilot whom Uncle Sam had known had become a middle-aged man who still had an immense physical charm. It was not just a matter of matinee-idol looks. It was also a matter of charisma.
Cliff Harper stopped some ten metres away. He still carried himself with grace and strength. I realised he hadn’t seen me. He had taken off his glasses and was wiping them with a handkerchief.
I stepped into his line of vision. For some reason I became so angry:
‘Why now, Mr Harper? Why come now?’
Cliff Harper gave a gasp.
‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘My son told me you looked like the photograph, but —’
‘Why didn’t you stay in the past where you belong?’
Cliff Harper didn’t hear me. He took a step forward, his walking stick slipped on the tiled floor and he fell into my arms:
‘I never expected you to look so like Sam —’
I helped him to a nearby seat. Some passersby stopped and asked if I needed any assistance.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But perhaps a glass of water?’
I turned to Cliff Harper. I was still angry.
‘How did you find me?’
‘I have friends in the airlines. When I came back from Vietnam I became a commercial pilot. My friends were able to check on the incoming flight details you gave me on the telephone and tell me when you were flying out.’
He was still looking at me as if he couldn’t believe — or was afraid to believe — who I was.
‘So why now? Why?’
‘Young Cliff gave me Tunui a te Ika and your letter. I knew then that I couldn’t keep on closing Sam out of my memory.’
He began to talk fast, almost as if he was pleading for me to understand.
‘This might be hard for you to understand, but whenever memories of those war years threaten to come into my mind, I close them off. It’s the same with Sam. I dare not think about him. If I do —’
He was expecting me to reply, but I remained tight-lipped, refusing to give him any quarter. He tried again.
‘You live your life, son, that’s all I can say. When I left Sam, and your country, I closed the door. I thought, ‘Sam’s made his decision to stay with his family.’ I was stubborn. I was too proud. I kept going forward. Day by day. Month by month. Year by year. And, you know, all of a sudden I’d made it to the other side. I met Wendy. A really good woman. We got ourselves three kids. All boys. Eldest is twenty-five now, Cliff junior, whom you’ve already met.’
‘You still haven’t told me why you decided to come to see me now.’
Cliff Harper looked up. His eyes were brimming with tears.
‘Do you know anything at all about love, son? Do you know what it is like to close it away, lock yourself up so damned tight and throw away the key? Sam and I, we were going to be back to back together against the rest of the world. I believed it would happen. He believed it would happen. When it didn’t, I didn’t blame him. I blamed myself. I’ve been blaming myself these past thirty years. And I know this sounds crazy, but I got to thinking that Sam, he blamed me too. When you began to telephone me, I just didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know anything. Don’t you understand? I should never have left Sam behind.’
Then he became angry. He pulled Tunui a te Ika out of his pocket.
‘No, you wouldn’t know anything about love, you son of a bitch. And you had to bring me the goddam key, didn’t you —’
His face grew grim.
‘You had to disobey me and you’ve left me with a lot of explaining to do to my family. That’s in the future, but right now I want to know about the past. So you start talking, son, and start talking fast. I want to know the details of what happened to Sam. You said in your letter there had been a car accident —’
‘He was coming to meet you at the airport. There was a woman changing her tyre on the side of the road. Uncle Sam stopped to help her. It was raining. The traffic was heavy. While Uncle Sam was changing the tyre, a truck smashed into the car. It fell on him. He died instantly.’
Cliff Harper gave a sharp cry. He groaned and hunched forward.
‘Dear God —’
Five minutes later, I was sitting with Cliff Harper in the business class lounge. We had managed to make a kind of peace with each other, and Cliff Harper was making peace with his past. It was strange how it happened. The story of Sam’s death may have been a tragedy, but in some wonderful way it was also an affirmation that Cliff Harper had been waiting for all these years.
‘So he was coming,’ he whispered to himself. ‘And he stopped to help somebody who’d broken down on the road? That was just like Sam. I wouldn’t have expected him to do anything else.’
Cliff Harper turned to me and sighed.
‘You’ll never know the hell I went through when I left your grandfather’s farm. When I arrived in Auckland I tried telephoning Sam, but Arapeta always answered. He would never let me speak to Sam. I tried to get through to George to see if he would get a message through to Sam. But that never worked either. By the time Friday night arrived I was going crazy with anxiety. I checked in early and I waited and waited. I died a thousand times thinking “There he is!” when it was somebody else. That night, waiting there for Sam while everybody around me had someone they were saying goodbye to or travelling with, was the loneliest night of my life. I heard the first boarding call. The second. The third. Then —’
The loudspeaker crackled.
‘Would Mr Harper please go through Customs and board his flight immediately at Gate One.’
Cliff was going out of his mind. He couldn’t wait any longer. In desperation, he turned to the Customs officer at the gate.
‘Sir, I need to leave a message. There’s a friend of mine, his name’s Sam, he’s supposed to be here. If he arrives, please give him this note.’
Cliff scribbled his Illinois address and phone number: Back of the Moon, Muskegon County, Illinois. He folded the note and put Sam’s name on the front.
‘Please tell him to call me as soon as he can,’ Cliff said.
The loudspeaker crackled again:
‘Mr Harper, Mr Cliff Harper, your plane is waiting for immediate departure.’
Across the departure hall, Cliff Harper saw something strange, almost surreal. A young woman was stumbling through the crowd in a dazed manner. She looked like a madwoman. Her evening dress was spattered with the brown rust colour that Cliff knew was dried blood. She was calling for somebody:
‘Chris? Chris —’
An airport security officer went over to her, and tried to get her to leave. She kept resisting, saying:
‘No, I must find him.’
An old man approached the girl. He cradled her and she collapsed into his arms.
Once more the loudspeaker:
‘Mr Harper? Mr Cliff Harper —’
Cliff’s heart was beating with pain. He thought of the time when Sam had come along on the rescue mission to bring out a downed F-4 fighter pilot. Sam was on the ground with the pilot. The enemy were closing in. Suddenly there was a whump and the chopper juddered in the air:
‘They’ve got a rocket launcher!’ Seymour yelled. ‘We’re hit! We’re hit!’
Cliff’s body flooded with adrenalin: ‘God, don’t let me go down like Fox.’ He was checking his gauges, his training automatically initiating the procedures to ensure damage control. To his right he heard the Skyraiders begin high-speed strafing of the area from which the rocket had been launched, walking their incendiary shells down the slope. The forest flamed and smoked.