The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [65]
Instead he gave a little jump from his crouched position, and when he came down the front of the plane teeter-tottered a bit higher, still staggering toward the treetops.
He did it again, the Widgeon's nose once more bobbing up ever so slightly. By now the wall of dark green branches was rushing at them so close and hard the effect was hypnotic. This was it, he knew, that daylight nightmare of Cass's engine hurtling forward to crush her but in this case two engines to rip loose and plow flesh, one each for Jake and him. His mortal organs getting busy with their last task, Ben braced himself into the back corner of the cabin for the crash, staring uncontrollably at the ridiculous agency of his oncoming death, the tops of evergreens as serene as Christmas trees.
Then sky.
It took some moments for this unexpected lease on existence to register on him. He huddled there not daring to move lest any twitch of a muscle disturb whatever equilibrium the Widgeon was struggling itself into. Its engines still at full throttle, he could feel the floor of the plane lurching drunkenly under him, but along with it was what could be construed as—Jesus, is it? Is it?—the sensation of lift.
Then the engine noise settled to a guttural effort and Jake was calling over his shoulder in a shaky voice: "Nothing to it. You can come out of hiding now."
Ben stumbled his way forward and dumped himself into the copilot's seat. Trees still were not very far below, but the Widgeon laboriously kept on rising above the branches' reach.
He saw Jake was wearing a grin big enough to eat pie sideways.
"Kind of puckers a guy up, down there in the seat of the pants, don't it? Better get busy writing all this up, scribe, so they'll give us medals for getting this tub off the ground."
"Right, Ice. A piece of gravel pinned on with a Band-Aid. How about if I just sit here and let my insides catch up with me?"
They flew giddily, men given wings, for the next little while. Canada's immense share of the earth spread around them in the clear autumn morning in timber thick as fur and pocket mirror lakes and rivers flowing north.
Fondling the controls, Jake was chortling and calculating aloud how long it would take to fuel up in Edmonton and then the flying time to reach East Base for suppertime beer at the Officers' Club, when one of the engines went rough, smoothed out, sputtered a time or two, and quit.
"Now goddamn what?" Jake indignantly checked the instrument panel. "Take a look, it's the one on your side."
Before the words were out of Jake's mouth, Ben had craned around to give the stilled engine a looking-over. It only took an instant. Aviation gasoline was whipping away behind the engine in a fine mist. "It's slobbering fuel like crazy," he reported hoarsely.
"Then I guess we do without that one, don't we." Jake feathered the propeller before the words were out of his mouth. "We'll have to limp on in to Edmon—"
The other engine quit.
—"aw, shit," Jake finished his sentence.
In the vacuum after that, the only sounds the wind in the struts and the creaks of a gliding plane, the pair of men stared the question at each other and made the same guess without having to say it. The Widgeon's repeated rough treatment on the gravel runway must have ruptured the fuel lines, and the gravity-defying takeoff over the treetops had encouraged leakage. By now Jake was striving to maintain altitude with every stunt he could think of with the controls and the flaps, while Ben twisted in every direction in search of water they could set the plane down on. Off on the horizon a lake gleamed, but too far for any sinking airplane to reach.
"This thing glides like a dump truck," Jake said with strained calm. "How about we belly in on that clear patch down there?"
With gas all over us? Shielding the sun from his eyes with his hands, Ben scanned the stretch of forestless terrain coming under the plane, like a shaved-away spot on a mammoth