Warday

“Yessir!” The private snaps to attention and salutes his superior officer. There is a spit-and-polish about these men that I don’t remember from the prewar army. But under the surface, they’re still American. I suspect that I could get a good laugh out of both of them if I could remember a decent joke.

“You know what I think?” Jim says.

“What?”

“It’s a pain in the neck to travel in this country. Frankly, I can’t see how we’re going to get through this without illegal assistance.

For which I guess we’ll have to go back to Kingman.”

When the afternoon train comes in, we go along with the rest of the thirsty, sweating mob that has been kept standing for hours in the sun. For those who can’t pay the price of a ticket, there are two “state cars” at the end of the train, ancient and filthy. These people will be able to get to Kingman by train, but then they’re on their own. It’s a tragedy for them. There is no more romance to being a hobo in America. It means starvation, sometimes slow and sometimes fast.

We reach the outskirts of Kingman at eight o’clock at night.

The hobo city seems even larger, transformed as it is into an ocean of flickering cookfires.

As the train stops, dirty children run up with cups of water, shouting, “Penny, penny, penny,” at the thirsty travelers. Their shrill voices mingle with the barking of skeletal dogs.

It doesn’t take long to find the people-smugglers. The moment we jump down off the train to the dirt siding, we see a man in a cap and dark glasses, far better dressed than most. We catch his eye and he strolls up to us.

“Get you all the way, three golds apiece.”

Another man trots over, lean and quick, wearing a clean white T-shirt, jeans, and hand-tooled boots. “Five for both. And watch out for that turkey, he flew right into an ambush last week.”

“Oh yeah? I’d be in prison camp if I’d done that. Why don’t you tell ’em the way you piled up that Tri-Pacer in June, asshole.”

Suddenly a woman’s voice interrupts from behind us. “One gold each. And I’ll take folding at a hundred to one.”

“Shit, Maggie, you can’t even cover your gas!”

“Maggie—look, you guys, she’s got a rotten plane and a worse copilot. I don’t wanna influence you, but as a professional pilot—”

“I’m better’n no copilot at all, which is what you got, George,” snarls a nine-year-old boy. He and the woman come closer. She is pretty in the gloom, her eyes flashing, her lips edged with a smile.

“We fly a Cessna 182, gentlemen. It’s clean and safe.” The smile develops. She nods toward a decrepit pickup parked just down the track. We bring out our money, then follow her and the boy.

“That’s the last time you undercut us, Maggie,” one of the other smugglers says. “Your prices ain’t worth the risk.”

The truck is rusty and the engine sounds like it’s only firing on about three cylinders, but it runs. “You’re lucky you didn’t go with those two. Likely as not, they’re California agents.” The airport is unlighted, just a dirt strip in the desert and a single ramshackle shed. The only sound, as we get out of the pickup, is the humming of a lighted Coke machine. “How d’you like our runway light?”

Maggie says as we pass it on the way to the flight line. I don’t know about Jim, but I don’t like it very much at all. For a nervous flyer like me, things are beginning to look kind of grim.

A coal-black Cessna 182 awaits us. Maggie and her boy start a flight check, walking around the plane, moving creaky flaps and rattling what seem to be loose propeller blades. Or maybe they’re supposed to be that way.

“You guys ready? We want to get moving in case the competition informs on us. This is a cutthroat business.” She smiles. “You got ID cards?”

We don’t, of course, or we wouldn’t be here. I get set to spend some more money.

“You got to be able to show IDs, or you’ll be in the pen inside of twenty-four hours. All California citizens have them.” I remember as much from the train. “We can give you fakes. They won’t work in a computer, but they’ll pass an eyeballing.”

“Is this part of the service?”

“No way. It’s another sawbuck apiece. We had to pay fifteen hundred for the Polaroid machine. Them things are hard to get. Go in there without cards and you’re wasting your plane fare. You don’t want to have that happen.”

We pay our money and get our cards.

The plane bounces along the “runway,” at last shuddering into the air with a horrible popping from the engine. I almost wish it aloft, but it continues to stagger along at an altitude that could not be more than fifty feet. My heart begins to pound. The plane can’t be working. It’s going to crash.

Suddenly the kid starts counting backwards from ten. He has a stopwatch in his hand, just visible in the dim light from the dashboard. At the count of one, Maggie guns the motor and pulls her stick into her belly. We shoot upward, all except my stomach, which remains hanging, sickeningly, at our previous altitude.

“Power lines,” Maggie comments as we dive back to the altitude of my guts. I look at Jim. His eyes are wide.