Can a moment be happy and at the same time terrifying? There followed a lot of moments like that. It was a wonder at what could only be called a miraculous healing to a man who looked like he deserved it, and at the same time, something uncomfortable was going to happen when those two came down again. The crowd was a tight knot waiting, and a tight knot of people is a mob and that is not good at all. Minutes ticked, eyes bored into that little biplane flying so carefree in the sun, and some violent thing was set to go off.
The Travel Air flew some steep lazy eights, a tight spiral, and then it was floating over the fence like a slow noisy flying saucer to land. If he had any sense at all, he would let his passenger off at the far side of the field, take off fast and disappear There were more people coming; another wheelchair, pushed by a lady running.
He taxied toward the crowd, spun the plane about to keep the propeller pointing away, shut down the engine. The people ran to the cockpit, and for a minute I thought they were going to tear fabric from the fuselage, to get at the two.
Was it cowardly? I don't know. I walked to my airplane, pumped the throttle and primer, pulled the propeller to start the engine. Then I got into the cockpit and turned the Fleet into the wind and took off. The last I saw of Donald Shimoda, he was sitting on the rim of his cockpit, and the mob had him surrounded. I turned east, then southeast, and after a while the first big field I found with trees for shade and a stream to drink from, I landed for the night. It was a long way from any town.
6
To this day I can't say what it was came over me. It was just that doom feeling, and it drove me out, away even from the strange curious fellow that was Donald Shimoda. If I have to fraternize with doom, even the Messiah Himself is not powerful enough to make me hang around.
I was quiet in the field, a silent huge meadow open to the sky . . . the only sound a little stream I had to listen pretty hard to hear. Lonely again. A person gets used to being alone, but break it just for a day and you have to get used to it again, all over from the beginning.
"OK, so it was fun for a while," I said aloud to the meadow. It was fun and maybe I had a lot to learn from the guy But I get enough of crowds even when they're happy... if they're scared they're either going to crucify somebody or worship him. I'm sorry, that's too much!"
Saying that caught me short. The words I had said could have been Shimoda's exactly. Why did he stay there? I had the sense to leave, and I was no messiah at all.
Illusions. What did he mean about illusions? That mattered more than anything he had said or done fierce, he was, when he said, "It's all illusions!" as though he could blast the idea into my head with sheer force. It was a problem, all right, and I needed its gift, but I still didn't know what it meant.
I got a fire going after a while, cooked me up a kind of leftover goulash of bits and pieces of soybean meat and dry noodles and two hot dogs from three days ago that boiling should have been good for. The toolbag was crushed alongside the grocery box, and for no reason I fetched out the nine-sixteenths and looked at it, wiped it clean and stirred the goulash with it.
I was alone, mind you no one to watch so for fun I tried floating it in the air the way he had done it. If I tossed it right straight up and blinked my eye when it stopped going up and started coming down, I got a
half-second feeling that it was floating. But then it thunked back down on the grass or on my knee and the effect was shattered fast. But this very same wrench... How did he do it?
If that's all illusion, Mister Shimoda, then what is it that is real? And if this life is illusion, why do we live it at all? I gave up at last, tossed the wrench a couple more times and quit. And quitting, was suddenly glad, all at once happy that I was where I was and knew what I knew even though it wasn't the answer to all existence or even a few illusions.
When I'm alone sometimes I sing. "Oh, me and ol' PAINT! . . ." I sang, patting the wing of the Fleet in true love for the thing (remember there was nobody to hear), "We'll wander
the sky... Hoppin' 'round hayfields till one of us gives in..." Music and words both I compose as I go along. "An' it won't be me givin' in, Paint . . . Unless you break a SPAR . . . and then I'll just tie yon up with baling WIRE ... and we'll go flying on... WE'LL GO FLYIN' ON"
The verses are endless when I get going and happy, since the rhyming isn't that critical. I had stopped thinking about the problems of the messiah; there was no way I could figure who he was or what he meant, and so I stopped trying and I guess that's what made me happy.
Long about ten o'clock the fire ran down and so did my song.
"Wherever you are, Donald Shimoda," I said, unrolling my blanket under the wing, "I wish you happy flying and no crowds. If that is what you want. No, I take that back. I wish, dear lonely messiah, that you find whatever it is that you want to find."
His handbook fell out of the pocket as I took off my shirt, and I read it where it opened.
The bond
that links your true family
is not one of blood, but
of respect and joy in
each other's life.
Rarely do members
of one family grow
under the same
roof.
I didn't see how that applied to me and reminded myself never to let a book replace my own thinking. I rustled down under the blanket, and then I was out like a bulb turned off warm and dreamless under the sky and under several thousand stars that were illusions, maybe, but pretty ones, for sure.