Читать книгу Flying Through Life - robert Psy.D. firth - Страница 11

THE HONEY BEAR

“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”

— Langston Hughes

One day the diminutive Cagin and I rode downtown and were wondering around Tudo street when we saw two Vietnamese kids with a little black bear with an orange scruff of fur under his chin. The bear was just a cub. Jason said he just had to have it. He wound up paying the equivalent of about a hundred bucks for the beast and since we couldn’t very well sit in any of the downtown bars with a bear on a leash, we “de-de mau’ed” ( Vietnamese for getting the F--k out of Dodge) and headed back to the crew house.

We hailed a very small but very clean and neat cab- barely big enough for the two of in the back plus the bear sitting on Jason’s lap. Half way home, the bear said “grrrr” Jason, said “now isn’t that cute, he said Grrr” The next minute all hell broke lose, The bear commenced to turn from a cute cuddly ball of bear into a twenty-five lb. terribly strong, mean tempered maddened beast. We both made a dive into the right front seat with our legs against the roof. The cab driver started howling and the bear was jumping around growling and trying to bite our legs. Frustrated for whatever reason and spitting mad, the bear began ripping the back seat to pieces. When we finally got back to the house, Jason had to give the driver a honey-bee ($100.00) to repair the damage to the cab.

Not knowing exactly what to do with the little tyke, Jason put it in one of the second floor bathrooms. This house had three floors with rooms for ten pilots. Later that day one of the helio-pilots, Dan Walen came dragging in, covered with red dust, hot and tired as all hell.

Dan headed up to take a shower and while he was trying to find the light switch in the bathroom, the bear found his long leg first. It must have felt like a familiar tree- Dan being well over six and a half. Feeling the claws biting into his leg in the pitch black room, he quite naturally screamed bloody murder and came tearing out of the room with the frightened baby bear bawling horribly and digging in for all he was worth onto Dan’s bleeding leg. His towel fell off and the maids started screaming like hell when this huge white, naked, mad-man came running at them with a bear climbing like mad up his leg trying to make a home run and bite Dan’s wildly swinging dick.

Jason, realizing what had happened ran up the stairs yelling at the top of his lungs in his Louisiana accent, “Donсha hurt mah bear now, hear!” Jason somehow got the little bear off Dan’s legs before any serious parts were ingested and Dan went off to tend to his wounds muttering horribly under his breath about “ how the hell anyone could be stupid enough to hide a man-eating, hydrophobic, God-dammed killer bear in the fucking bathroom…etc., etc..”

Jason brought the bear down and introduced it to the shaken maids. Eventually it settled down and began to sleep in one of the chairs. Jason got some water and vegetables for the little critter and thus began the last and happiest twelve months of the little honey bear’s life.

A few days later, I flew the Porter on one of my last single engine trips in Vietnam from Saigon to Danang. I was scheduled to work from this station for two weeks. I remember the weather getting worse as I flew north. This was the monsoon season and I finally arrived somewhere about fifty miles south of Danang with min fuel VFR on top.

I picked up the mike to call for a descent clearance when all the radios suddenly when dead. In fact, the entire ships electrical system was dead. I guess I must have been operating on the battery for a while and had not noticed that the generator was not genning. This was not good! I flew on top of the heavy grey cloud layer to about where I figured I would be well north of the airport and hopefully would have nothing between me and the South China Sea to the east. I could see on the charts that if I was where I hoped I was, the mountain north and west of the field was behind me. I started down through the rain and clouds heading west and praying.

I descended like this through the heavy rain and turbulence to about 300’ above what I sincerely hoped would be the South China sea. After what seemed too long, I finally broke out of the dark clouds and saw the tops of the still darker sea. Slowly, I reversed course and headed back due west. After a few minutes, I could see the beach in front of me and suddenly I saw a company C-45 Twin Beech flying at a few hundred feet north over the beach. He must have been heading to Hue. That told me that if I was right and flew south, I would likely find the airport.

I was right, I could see the many Navy ships in the harbor. At my very low altitude, just under a three hundred foot heavy cloud cover, I had to dodge around their masts and antennas. I could see the south end of the field- my fuel gauges said zero but with no electrical power there was no telling how many minutes I had remaining. With no radios and no lights I couldn’t call the tower and they may not have seen me. With no options I just went ahead and landed on the west taxiway and made the first turn off into the Air America ramp.

I was relieved that I had made it and understood that luck had once again played a big part in my education. I had no business not landing someplace for fuel. There were a lot of options along the way and, in that weather, to cut things so close was stupid. I never did it again. It was raining like hell and I got soaked getting out of the aircraft with my bag and into the ops office.

The station manager, a kind of harried and impatient type wanted me to load up, fuel up and fly a few late afternoon missions. I told him for the second time that there was no electrical system. Either he was a dumb as he looked or didn’t listen- he said, “so what- you can fly it anyway, you just flew in here didn’t you?” He had a point- I told him that the door wasn’t locked and he had my permission- load if up and fly it himself. He elected to remain on the ground as did I.

That was the day Frank Farthing died. Frank had taxied out with a load of visiting American university professors and was waiting at the north end of the runway for take off clearance when I landed. He was supposed to be taking them to visit the still operating and famous University of Hue about forty minutes north. Frank was an ex Navy enlisted guy who had learned to fly privately and wound up as a pilot on the Volpar Beech. This was a highly modified version of the old Twin Beech re-fitted with turbo-prop engines and a nose wheel. It was fast and had something like eight passenger seats. (Danang airport looking north)

That day Frank took off to the North, probably right about the same time when the base manager and I were arguing. He turned a little right, climbing into the soup. Minutes latter, he disappeared from this life with all his passengers. The aircraft was found the next day where it had been flown at two hundred miles per hour straight into the rocks of Monkey Mountain. We never did learn why Frank did this- probably just some kind of vertigo or lapse in situational awareness. If he had remained VFR and stayed under the weather like the Beech that had passed in front of me he might likely have made the flight without incident.

Back in Saigon Jason and I had both moved out of the crew zoo and rented homes of our own. I was sharing my place with an old friend, Glenn Van Ingen, who, as I write, is living the life or Reilly in Hawaii. Of course Reilly is bound to come home some time and disrupt Van’s island paradise.

One day Jason came over and said that he had a “terrible problem” and would I please help him. “Sure, what’s the deal?” Well, he explained, his wife was coming to visit- I said Jason, I thought she was already here. He said, ”Rabbet, that ain’t mah wife, that’s Brenda.” I knew Brenda, I thought she was his wife. He had moved into the private house from the crew house because she had flown in to be with him. In those days, Vietnam wasn’t a hard ship post and a lot of the pilots had their families with them.

Jason’s real world wife had called and given him twenty-four hours notice that she was coming to visit. She didn’t know about Brenda but Brenda certainly knew about her. Jason asked if Brenda could stay with us and pretend she was my girl friend. This was easy, Brenda was lovely and this seemed like it might work. We all spent the rest of the day making sure that everything that Brenda owned was out of Jason’s place.

Mrs. Broussard showed up at Tan Se Nuit the next morning and Jason brought her home. The bear was there - he had forgotten to tell her about the little honey bear. That wasn’t all- Cynthia was there too. Cynthia, who’s that? Charlie, one of our stranger pilots, was Cynthia’s owner. She was a twelve foot 100 lb python who used to travel with Captain Charlie in his big flight kit between the seats in the Twin Beech. She had been with Charlie for years and was altogether a lovely snake with a gentle disposition. Charlie had a two week stint up-country and had asked Jason to take her until he got back. Cynthia was easy to keep, a rat every two weeks from the cage Charlie left and she slept under Jason’s bed or the closet floor.

Mrs. Broussard wasn’t impressed with our neighborhood. The drive to Chi Lang from the airport was pretty horrible for the uninitiated. The Mrs. had never been outside of her little state of Louisiana and the chaotic traffic, noise, filth, smells nasty little people, unbelievably crowded streets, all combined to make her regret her decision to visit her dear husband. This was before she got to the house.

Once inside, after traveling for more than thirty hours, she wanted a bath. Immediately she started bitching with considerable volume that there wasn’t a bath tub. Even if there had been there wasn’t any hot water. I had hot water, but I bought electric heater made for this and hooked it into the plumbing- Jason didn’t.

The Missus, according to Jason, came out of the cold shower and was sitting very unhappily on the bed drying her hair with the towel covering her eyes. This was the very moment the bear choose to rub up against her bare legs. The scream could be heard all over the neighborhood- louder even than poor Dan’s had been. Jason finally got her calmed down but not before he had to bring the bear over to my place too.

Later that night the end came. The Missus got up to pee in the middle of the night and sat down on the john, turned on the light, opened her eyes and saw Cynthia curled up in the shower. This time the screaming when on for thirty minutes- nothing Jason could say calmed her down in the slightest. He had to get a cab and go with her to a downtown hotel. The next morning he took her back to the airport where she caught a flight to Bangkok on the first departing aircraft out of this horrible country.

Brenda moved back in and fed the badly terrified little bear a whole jar of blueberry jelly which the little tyke adored more than anything. For weeks, smelling something only he could smell, he would hold the then long thoroughly empty jar in his little paws and rolling on his back with his long purple bear tongue, happily lick the inside of the glass jar for hours. With profuse thanks Brenda also gave Cynthia an extra fat rat for which she was also quite grateful. Sadly, one day the honey bear crawled through the porch screen, up the nearest telephone pole and began gnawing on one of the many wires. Unfortunately, the one he picked carried 250 Volts. Jason never did buy another bear.