PT-22

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. The whole truck seemed to lift into the air and violently come crashing down as it passed over each freeway extension. Bang. Bang. Bang. Ignoring the pleas of the 22-year-old suspension to slow down, the man in the driver’s seat remained dead still. His stone-like face, at this point in the journey dirty and unshaven, let loose no hint of emotion, and his ice blue eyes continued to follow the darting white lines as they had for the past 500 miles. Only someone who truly knew this man would have been able to catch a glimpse of happiness, to see brief respite that this particularly rough stretch of Interstate 64 had brought him. But alas, there was nobody, and there had never been anybody for that matter, who truly knew this man.

*****

In reality, the cross-country journey of this bedraggled, blue-eyed man began back when he was not yet bedraggled or a man, but rather a boy still very much full of life and very blue-eyed. More specifically, it was a warm April morning, the likes of which are pretty rare in the small western Massachusetts town that the boy called home.

That morning was a Saturday, the one day of the week that his father did not have to work. His father ran a car rental service out of an old garage in Boston, and the long hours and grueling commute left him with little time or energy to devote towards his children. So, as the oldest child of six, the boy, at the time only sixteen and in his second year at the local high school, was in charge of looking after his brothers and sisters, all of whom had become extremely close after their mother had left in the middle of the night for Hawaii with her doctor only a couple of years before.

So the boy had come to cherish Saturdays. He didn’t have to prepare breakfast, and instead got to wake up to the smell of fresh donuts from the local bakery, mixed with the strong aroma of motor oil. The boy loved the thick, acrid smell of oil, likely because his father always smelled like motor oil; he spent all of his days around cars, and on Saturdays he would wake before any of the children to tinker with his newest toy, whether it was a rusted old Chevrolet or a victimized rental Cadillac. Every Saturday began the same way: the children would wake up, one by one, and grab a donut before heading into the old barn, to climb and explore amongst the piles of rusted car parts as their father worked. The boy would always make sure he was the first one up, and he would sit for hours before anyone else joined him, watching his father with the cars.

That particular Saturday, however, marked the first day that Robbins Airport, the local seasonal airstrip, would be open, in conjunction with the good weather. Every year at this time, for as long as could remember, the boy and his father would make the hour-long trip to the airport together. There they would spend the day, just the two of them, amidst the airplanes and their pilots, all of whom were friendly and often quick to boast of crazy experience that they had had in the past with the boy’s father. This day was the best day of the year for the boy; aside from the airplanes, he had the complete attention of his father. They would sit in the gentle shade of a Cessna 140 or a Piper Cherokee and eat ham sandwiches, the air around them thick with the excitement of men doing what they loved, the miracle of flight, and the rich scent of motor oil. But the part that the boy loved the most was the stories his father would tell during that time, stories of youth and flight and excitement from his time as a B-17 bomber pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. They would sit there for hours, just the boy and his father, and the boy loved him.

Somehow, these days would always end the same way. The two would find themselves standing around the most beautiful airplane in the whole airport. It was an old monoplane, and its chrome finish shined brilliantly in the springtime sun. Over the years, the boy had come to know this particular plane very well – it was a Ryan PT-22 from 1939, his father had eagerly explained, the very same plane that he had learned to fly in. This particular one was locally owned by a man his father called “Ted”, a skinny man in his fifties with a big mustache and bigger smile. The boy loved this plane because it was beautiful and shiny. To his father, however, it meant something much, much more.

Every year, the boy and his father would stand, staring at the chrome and yellow aircraft, for what seemed like hours. The boy didn’t dare make a sound as he looked on at the plane, occasionally stealing glances at his father, whose ice blue eyes would vigorously work over every inch of its mirrored body. Sometimes the man would laugh, other times he would cry. After he was finished, his father would reach down and give the boy a big hug, pulling him deep into his scratchy beard and flannel shirt that smelled like motor oil. On that day, once a year, the boy loved his father, and his father loved him back.

But on that warm Saturday morning, things went terribly wrong for the boy. Usually the first to rise, he got up to find his father was already waking up his brothers and sisters. Minutes later, he was left speechless as his father pulled the big, old Buick from the barn, and all six of them piled in.

That Saturday, which was supposed to be the best day of the year, was the worst, as the boy was forced to share his father with his siblings. There were still ham sandwiches and lively stories, but the New England air seemed colder than the boy remembered, and the sun could not escape from its thick veil of clouds. Even though he realized it was selfish, it pained him to watch his father joke around with his younger sisters, or introduce his brother to the owned of the twin-engined Piper Apache. In fact, the only real contact that the boy had with his father on that day has when they locked eyes upon leaving the airport, ice blue stare meeting ice blue stare, when they walked past the PT-22 without stopping.

*****

Thirty years later, the boy, now a bedraggled man with ice blue eyes, found himself completely and utterly alone. The afternoon light was a dreary gray, as the sun fought a losing battle with the dark, menacing storm clouds hovering above the West Virginian fields. Having left the construction behind, the only sound resonating through the cab of the truck was the gentle clatter of its turbo-diesel engine, punctuated only by the occasional squeak or rattle of the tired suspension.

By his calculation, it was exactly three weeks, or twenty-one days, since his father’s funeral. The service had been small, the mourners composed of family (all of the man’s siblings now had children of their own), as well as a few close pilot friends, and a coworker from his days at the car rental shop. For multiple reasons, the memorial ceremony had been held at the old Robbins Airport Hangar. It was the first time that the man had been back there since he was sixteen, and the whole place was much smaller and run down than he remembered it. There were now only a couple of old planes on the runway, and the rich smell of oil had been replaced by a new, bitter smell of rust.

For his whole life, the man had never been close to his father. Following high school, he had attended college, gotten a job as an accountant, and moved out to San Francisco. Over the years he saw his father less and less. He had his job, and before he knew it, his brothers and sisters had their own families. He was indefinitely settled out west, while the rest of his family was firmly rooted in New England. As the lives of all involved became more complicated, family reunions went from bi-annual, to every year at the holidays, to every few years, and eventually ceased to exist all together. The news of his father’s cancer had been delivered over the phone, by his youngest sister. Although surprised by the news (the man always thought of his father as the healthy, energetic man who fixed cars and ate donuts), what surprised him the most was his lack of emotion. Where he had expected feelings of intense remorse, he found that he felt nothing.
Even at the funeral, sadness had escaped him. Although his father had been nothing but kind and supportive to him, there were no tears or moments of distress, which startled him. While all of his brothers and sisters cried around him, the man could not cry. Instead, he sat there quietly, left with the thought that he could not remember ever having loved his father.

The weekend following the funeral, the man cancelled his return flight from Logan Airport to his life in California. After a quick jump he had his father’s last car, a 1983 diesel Ford Bronco, up and running, and, an hour later, he was hurtling south on Interstate 495.

The next few weeks were a dreary blur of freeway exit signs, cheap motels, and thundering aircraft engines. Using a guide hastily printed from the $0.10 a minute Internet at the Super 8 Motel in Warwick, Rhode Island, the man had driven to every Air Show that he could find. He had been to the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Bonanza in Manchester New Hampshire, the Coastal Carolina Airshow in Wilmington, North Carolina, the Binghamton Airshow in Binghamton, New York, and a dozen other shows in between. The drives between the shows were very long and boring (the truck's radio had been broken for a decade), and the only food came from the occasional rest stop or motel continental breakfast. He was truly exhausted, and the anxiety from the funeral had still not left him, but the man remained possessed by an unexplained desire that kept him traveling.

Pulling off of highway at the exit for Beckley, West Virginia, and following signs towards Beckley Airshow 2008, the smallest show of his journey, the man guided the old truck towards the small airport runway. Minutes later he had passed through the entry gate, and the diesel engine clattering away, had pulled to a stop in the empty parking lot. Slowly, the man stepped out of the truck, and walked towards the great emptiness of the airstrip. The air about the man had the familiar scent of motor oil, and the sky was beginning to lighten up. It didn’t take the man very long at all to notice the majestic airplane taxiing towards him on the runway. It was a Ryan PT-22, unmistakable in its beauty. At that moment the blinding orange sun broke free from the clouds, and was reflected brilliantly off of the long, chromed fuselage. Squinting against the light, the man’s ice blue eyes met those of the pilot’s. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he was not alone.