The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [61]
The plane was droning along at 4,200 feet—he would forever remember that altimeter reading—when Jake announced:
"I feel a pimple coming on my butt and therefore deem myself incapacitated. Take over."
Ben made a derisive noise. "Thanks anyway, Ice, but it's been too long since—"
"Bullshit, Ben. Once a pilot, always a pilot. Get busy and fly this heap."
"Knock it off, will you?" Unearned favors did not go down well with Ben, never had, never would. "That prissy ops officer had it right, I am a paper-airplane pilot anymore, and nothing—hey, where're you going?"
"To take a leak in the jug, what does it look like?" Jake vacated the pilot's seat and turned sideways to edge past Ben, patting him on the head as he did so. "Better fly the plane, kiddo, somebody has to."
"You damn fool," Ben hurled over his shoulder, his hands clamping onto the controls. Maybe he was imagining, but the Widgeon seemed instantly restless as Jake's weight moving toward the rear of the cabin altered its center of gravity. His hands managing to tame that without any conscious help from the rest of him, Ben scanned the infinite banks of dials, switches, and gauges of an instrument panel that now seemed the size and complexity of a cathedral window. Flight school had never included this peculiar breed of aircraft in the first place. He could hear Jake back there humming loudly to himself while peeing, which did not help. Still inventorying the instrumentation, he kept coming up one short. Precisely now, of course, the Tanana River chose to turn cockeyed, twisting away in fresh directions, glinting like a silver snake. Alert in every corpuscle, Ben could see wirelike trees down there on its banks, he could see the carpet of yellow leaves on the ground, he could see the bald tops of hills regularly passing under the wingtips. What he could not spot, somewhere right under his nose, was the most basic aeronautical instrument.
While he was trying to navigate without it, the Widgeon gravitated below four thousand feet and he hurriedly dropped the flaps for some lift. Just then Jake returned to the cockpit, gyrating into the pilot's seat as the plane bounded upward. "Ride 'em, cowboy. I will say, you fighter jockeys fly livelier than us old bomber drivers."
"Funny as a crutch, Ice," Ben gritted out, hands and eyes busy in several directions. "Here, do something with this airplane."
"Just when you're getting used to it? Wouldn't be fair." The big man sat back comfortably to spectate. "Don't worry, Uncle Jake is here to hold your hand."
"Then get busy and do it." Ben squirmed, feeling his face redden as he had to put the question the rawest rookie pilot would hate to ask. "I give up—did they forget to put the compass in this turd bird?"
Yawning, Jake squinted into the glare of the morning sun. "What, you don't know east when you see it?"
That again. Isn't there any other direction anymore? "Goddamn it, Jake, I mean it. If I can't get a compass bearing I'll eventually have this thing headed off the map somewhere. Let's don't fool around in the middle of Alaska, all right?"
Jake was unfazed. He sat there loudly humming the chorus that went "Some people say there is no Hell, but they're not pilots, so they can't tell" until finally, when Ben had run out of swearwords, he rolled his eyes.
Ben's gaze ascended along with his, to the front ceiling of the cockpit where the compass hung like a bat.
"That maybe is one of the things they're gonna modify in this clunker," Jake speculated as Ben sheepishly adjusted course to the compass setting. "Now then, you ready to fly like a sane person?"
"Damn you, you know I am."
Bursting into laughter even though he still was struggling to tame the Widgeon's twenty-eyed dials and sluggish wings, suddenly Ben had never felt better. It ran through him like the thrill when he first soloed, the magic of being lightly attached to the sky. With