AMERICA ONE

by T I WADE

  Without a word VIN produced what the man wanted out of the car’s glove box.

  “Give the kid a break, officer,” stated Jonesy as the man was handed the paperwork. “The poor kid has just come back from Iraq, has two new prosthetic legs from above the knee, and just got the car. It’s his first piece of freedom for a decade.”

  “This kid is driving like Daytona, and he has no legs?” replied the officer looking at the kid.

  “I didn’t say he didn’t have any legs, I said he has plastic legs,” replied Jonesy minding his attitude as best he could.

  “What service were you in son?” asked the officer.

  “Marines, Force Recon, sir,” replied VIN.

  The officer looked over the paperwork for a few moments, made sure they were current, and handed them back to VIN. “I was also in Force Recon for a couple of years, and my son has just gone into Afghanistan with Force Recon. Kid, stay at or around the speed limit, Ohio is full of Highway Patrol. And drive carefully. Now, get out of here!”

  The second forced stop was just before St. Louis, Missouri. This time the officer was not ex-Force Recon, but Air Force, and again they were lucky. The police officer told the man in the passenger seat of the fancy sports car that he had always wanted to be an Air Force test pilot, but had flown C-130s for a decade before losing his perfect eyesight, and didn’t want to fly a desk for the rest of his life.

  After three tanks of gas, and the Audi happy to be driven harder than ever before, they decided to stop in “Beer City,” St. Louis for a while.

  They visited the stadium and drank a couple of days of beer before Jonesy decided that he’d rather be a Packers fan, and they headed north into Green Bay to check out that area.

  After a week of sightseeing, this time eating cheese with their beer, they decided that it looked too cold for a future place to live and continued westwards.

  They cut across country, aiming to get back to the I-80 Interstate and find beautiful lonely, long stretches of road the Highway Patrol didn’t seem to know about. After nearly hitting a group of cows on a lonely brow of a single lane highway at over 145 miles an hour, VIN decided to cool it and found the Interstate around Iowa City.

  In a major truck stop, Jonesy purchased the most expensive speed-radar detection system that existed. A couple of hundred miles later Jonesy threw it out of the speeding car’s window; with it, VIN thought the Audi undetectable, and drove like a bloody madman.

  Two days later, they had an altercation with a few men in a bar in the middle of Nebraskan nowhere; they did win the fight, but spent a night in the local jail sobering up. The next morning they paid the judge $500 each for the fine and left town. They entered Colorado and headed southwest for Denver, and the mountains.

  Jonesy grew quiet as they neared Denver and VIN found out from the older man, that his parents lived just west of Denver in a little village called Idaho Springs.

  “When was the last time you saw your folks?” asked VIN, driving within the speed limit after passing three patrol cars going the other way within the last hour.

  “About ten years ago. My dad never forgave me for being thrown out of the only institution he called heaven. He told me to never come back, but they are still alive and maybe he has softened a bit, like me.”

  “I doubt that very much,” added VIN smiling.

  A few miles out of Idaho Springs, the Audi had to negotiate a decent but dirty road for the first time in its life. The driveway up to the log home where Jonesy’s parents lived ever since his father had retired decades earlier was quite long; VIN drove carefully and stopped in front of a small, cozy looking house. A very old man sat on a rocker on the porch, and an old lady opened an outer door to peer at unexpected visitors coming up their driveway.

  She saw the lanky blond person climb out of the fancy car’s passenger door and shouted with excitement, slowly hobbling down the porch stairs to greet her son. The old man stayed where he was.

  It took a few minutes of quiet hugging and tears before the lady let go of her son. VIN, with nothing better to do walked up to the old man and introduced himself.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Jones, my name is Victor Isaac Noble, most people in the Marine Corps called me VIN for short,” he said from below the stairs.

  “You walk funny, son. You got a leg problem?”

  “Yes, sir, an IED blew my legs off just outside Baghdad a few months ago.”

  “Sorry to hear that, son. So your new job is driver of a silver airplane without wings, and driving my useless excuse for a son around?”

  “You could say that, sir, and I think you are correct on one part of what you said.”

  “What was that, boy?” the old man asked.

  “Your ‘useless excuse for a son’ is pretty correct, sir. I haven’t found anything he is good at since I met him,” VIN replied, straight faced.

  “At least somebody agrees with me around here,” declared the old man, not moving. “Come sit down. Take the other rocker, and tell me how you lost your legs. It will help me ignore that son of mine for a little while longer.”

  While the two men talked on the porch, Jonesy was herded by his mother into the house.

  An hour later she came out with two cold beers and two plates of food.

  “So, you say you think those guys building the IEDs were Iranians?” the old man asked, accepting his plate and a bottle of beer. He nodded his thanks to his wife, and VIN verbally thanked her. VIN had already noted that both males in the family were so much alike that his travelling companion was nothing more than a wilder chip off the old block, just a quarter of a century younger.

  VIN got to the end of his story and began to eat. It wasn’t long before a new question was asked of him.

  “So why the hell did you pick my son as a travelling partner? I certainly wouldn’t.”

  “I didn’t pick him, sir, he picked me. And, so far, in-between the hangovers—and I have never drunk so much in my life—we seem to get along.”

  “I’m sure, like a snake and a mongoose. I’ve just got to figure out which is the snake and which is the mongoose.”

  After a few minutes they were joined by the other two. VIN gave up his chair to the lady, and both the travelers sat on the top step of the nearly dark porch. The light was switched on as Jonesy’s mother got up to see to her food; silence reigned for most of the meal.

  “So, son, have you been thrown out of any more institutions lately?” asked his father simply. “I see you haven’t been put into one that you couldn’t get out of. You must be behaving yourself.”

  “Joseph, leave your son alone. He is old enough to look after himself,” admonished the mother.

  “Oh, really!” was the answer she received. There were a few minutes of silence.

  “Done any flying lately then, Mr. John Jones?” the old man asked.

  “Just sold a crop duster, dad. I spent the last year in honest employment killing the crap in other people’s fields. Pretty enjoyable flying, I must say.”

  “Well at least you still know how to fly. I suppose you already knew how to fly before you were sixteen, the amount of crap you gave your mother and me in every base we ever lived in.”

  “You could say that, dad.” I didn’t tell you the time the pilot of a small Cessna had a heart attack while he was flying me back into Dyess, did I?”

  “Was that the time they found you in Italy and brought you back via the base in Louisiana? The pilot was found dead at the controls. You were fourteen I think, and, I was still at Dyess in Texas?”

  “That’s right dad, we had just taken off from a base—I can’t remember its name—in this old Cessna 210 spotter aircraft. It was just him and me, and he just got her up to flight altitude and onto auto pilot when he keeled over the controls; I checked for a pulse. We were full of parcels and sacks of letters. I was sitting in the right rear seat and couldn’t see much inside the aircraft because it was full to the roof. Not heavy stuff, just a load of mail.”

 
“He was already dead?” his father asked.

  “Felt like it to me.” I couldn’t find a pulse, so since the aircraft was heading towards Dyess, I left it alone. The flight was about three hours, I guess, and I moved the parcels and into the front right seat to monitor the controls and do the radio work. Nobody seemed to think anything was out of the ordinary when I got into the pattern at Dyess after going back to manual flight. I simply completed the pattern while the runway lights came on, turned on the inner light, read the instructional booklet on landing instructions that was taped on the roof above my head; then I got the engine sounding right, riched up the fuel flow, got the undercarriage down, landed, and taxied to where they told me. It was all quite simple, except that I think I got the propeller pitch out a little as she struggled to taxi. I placed the pilot into a straight up sitting position, put his stiff hands back on the controls, put the parcels back and climbed into the rear seat.”

  “Really,” replied the old man, “good thinking. The medical captain told me that he couldn’t understand how the pilot had landed the aircraft, since his body was already cold. And you telling them that it was very cold up-there…bull crap. How many hours did it take me to convince the base commander that you didn’t murder the poor pilot! That incident cost me at least another year before the commander left, and I was finally promoted to major.”

  “Why would I want to murder the man flying me? Didn’t these officers have any brains?” asked Jonesy.

  “After a while I thought the same. Some of these men were purely there to get through their time and then retire. But that was just one out of dozens of problems you caused me. At least you are still alive, and it seems not an embarrassment to your family. I’m off to bed.” And he got up and left the porch.

  His mother took the plates and returned a few minutes later with a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels and three glasses. “At times like this I often sit out here and have a drink or two. Want one?” Both men nodded, and she poured three Texas-size amounts into each glass and handed them out.

  Jonesy relaxed more once his father had gone to bed. It was chilly outside but the liquid kept them warm.

  “He always followed your Air Force career,” his mother began. “He has a whole scrapbook of all the write ups in any civilian newspapers or Air Force publications. His best cutting was when you brought that C-17 in with no engines on a dirt airfield in California; just outside Edwards, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, that one. That was San Luis Obispo airport, not a dirt field,” Jonesy replied as if it was a drive to the supermarket. “I was catching a lift from Hawaii back to Edwards and was a couple of hours out when I heard a change in rhythm in left-wing jet engine number one. I was sleeping on a row of seats that was pretty close to the engine. It sounded like a sort of fuel starvation. The jet seemed to want for fuel, so I headed up to the cockpit to tell the pilot. He was a youngster, not much younger than the kid here, about twenty-five. He was the co-pilot in the right seat, the left seat was full with a snoring flight commander, and the kid told me to mind my own business. Suddenly the engines went dead, the autopilot, or the kid did something weird, and the snoring pilot and I both hit the instrument panel hard. I heard the whack of his head on the instruments and then blood ran down my face and onto the floor I was kneeling on. Suddenly this stupid kid of a pilot starts screaming at the top of his lungs and wakes up the hundred-odd troops in the cargo hold. A couple arrived and I ordered them to get the stupid kid and the unconscious captain out of the cockpit. One of the guys knew me and got the bodies out of my way. I jumped into the left seat and took over the controls. We were losing height and going into a dive. I pulled her out and figured out that, for some dumb reason, one engine was still operating but the other three were dead. The aircraft was pretty heavy with a company of men and equipment. There seemed to be a fuel problem to the three dead engines, and I tried everything to get them fired up again, to no avail. The fourth engine was getting hot, so I calmed her down. One engine couldn’t keep the heavy aircraft airborne so I reduced power enough to keep the engine at normal to high operating temperatures, and this reduced our descent down to a glide of about 150 feet a minute.”

  “Could you make Edwards with one engine?” asked his mother.

  “No way! If I increased power she could fly straight and level, but the one engine would overheat pretty quickly at maximum thrust. I had the Charlie-17 descending through 11,000 feet and everything still worked, the engine was also powering up the electronics and, I hoped, the undercarriage when I needed it. I turned off everything unnecessary and asked if anybody was a pilot. Apart from the kid, who seemed upset and was tied to a seat by some of the guys, I was the only one. The guy who knew me was security, ex-marine I think, and I got him in the right seat to check maps for a possible landing site. We were still over 195 miles from the coast and descending. Our forward speed was about 200 knots and I needed every foot of altitude to get her over an airport somewhere. The closest airport to our route, as I said, was San Luis Obispo. We were north of the usual route due to passing around a thunderstorm an hour or so earlier. The civilian runway was long enough to get the Charlie-17 down as long as the undercarriage and brakes worked. I did my numbers and deduced that the aircraft would have 900 feet of height once we went in, so I called up Edwards, who called up the civilian airport; and we headed there. They had plenty of warning, cleared the airspace for me and got ready. I would only have one chance, and if the undercarriage went down I would put her down on the asphalt. If it didn’t, I would use the grass on the side of the runway. I waited until we were at 1,200 feet altitude and half a mile out when I tried the wheels. I pushed full thrust on the engine, which I hoped fed maximum power into the undercarriage system. They went down. I trimmed her out for landing, told everybody to buckle down, and went in for a perfect landing with the one engine on full thrust. One part I had not thought of was that I only had reverse thrust to help brake on one engine. It wasn’t much help, and I stood on the brakes the last half of the runway and left beautiful black tire marks for a couple hundred yards. Only three tires gave out and the aircraft stopped with a foot or two of asphalt to spare. It wasn’t a very long runway, and I’m sure I touched her wheels down within inches of the beginning of the blacktop. Nothing really much to brag about, mother. I was just doing my job.”

  “And those soldiers’ lives you saved?” she retorted.

  “Yeah. A couple of the guys came and said thanks before they disembarked. Nobody at Edwards thought I had done anything fancy, and I never heard anything more. That was a long time ago.”

  “What was the problem with the engines?” VIN asked.

  “The Air Force never gives out that information, but I think it was fuel starvation. I don’t know why only three of the engines and not four, but I would bet something clogged up three of the four fuel lines.”

  It was time for bed.

  After an early breakfast, and the re-appearance of the old man, returning from a long walk, they readied to leave.

  “If you are passing through Idaho Springs, son, I think it’s decent for you to visit your mother. I’ll do my best to put up with your stay. Kid, try and keep my boy out of trouble. That gene went missing when the guy was born!” shouted the old man over the din of the exhausts as he was warming up the engine and about to say their goodbyes. Jonesy had certainly made his mother happy, and his father seemed to have warmed to his son, to at least one percent of a perfect hundred.

  All the way through the remainder of Colorado, not a word was spoken by either man. The Bang & Olufsen speakers blared out 80s music from the satellite radio system, while Jonesy sat deep in thought. VIN realized that his partner had never once asked to drive his car. He could put a damaged C-17 down on a short runway, but had no interest in driving a car which very few had ever had the chance to get behind the wheel.

  He slowly forgot about the rest of the world as the road began to snake through tight mountain passes, and he enjoyed putting the ti
res through their paces.

  A week after leaving the East Coast they reached the end of I-80, in the middle of nowhere, many miles south of Salt Lake City. The car was stopped, the engine was turned off and both men just sat there in silence.

  After about five minutes, VIN realized that it had been four hours since breakfast at Idaho Springs, and his stomach needed some sustenance or victuals. He had heard the weird names the westerners called food in this area.

  “North or south?” VIN asked. “North is Salt Lake City, south is Las Vegas.”

  “Too many ex-girlfriends in Salt Lake; I reckon Las Vegas could be a place to stay for a while. I spent less time at Nellis than I did at Hill Air Force Base, and I know of a great Italian restaurant in Vegas where the ‘Rat Pack’ used to hang out.”

  “Who?” asked VIN.

  “A bit before your time kid. Heard of Bogart, Sinatra, Dean Martin?”

  “Sounds like a little before your time, too,” VIN replied.

  “Yeah! I loved old Sinatra. When I used to catch rides on long trips I could hear the music playing from where I was hiding. The pilots used to tune in to a radio channel playing the old stuff. I was only fourteen or fifteen, but the pilots were from the Rat Pack era. Over many hours, I got to enjoy the music and they played it loud over the intercoms and aircraft speakers. I’ll find us a channel like they used to search for… and head south, kid.”

  It didn’t take long for the satellite hundreds of miles above them to transmit what he was searching for and with the loud crooning of Frank Sinatra, VIN headed south on the straight dual-lane highway which never seemed to end.

  By nightfall, with a burger, and a new tank of gas in St. George, Utah, they left the state and entered Nevada. It was the first day of October.

  Chapter 5

  Do I see a C-5 Galaxy over there?