The Last Ride Forever ©, 1987, 2004, 2007 by Paul Berge, originally appeared in the audio book the Logbook (ISBN 0-9728150-2-3) © 2004. Join a WASP on her final flight.
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(continued from Part 1--see Archive) The pine trees moaned with the wind. Eva drew closer to the hangar. Its boards weathered gray, its windows either missing entirely or cracked. She stepped past a rusted twist of steel tubing with a small tree growing through it. It was a fuselage, but from what she could only guess. A chipmunk sat on the highest point, its front paws held as though in prayer, its eyes fixed and staring. Below him, the grass moved where a snake gradually wound its way along a tube, coiling up towards the chipmunk...
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And, now, Part 2 of The Last Ride Forever, by Paul Berge:
Eva stared. The chipmunk remained immobile, the snake inching ever closer. The wind blew the aroma of the warm pines toward them, and she saw the snake’s tongue shoot out, probing. She wanted to shout, to warn the little animal, but her voice failed her. Gradually, the snake worked his way through the remains of the old airplane, reaching for the chipmunk.
Eva turned to the hangar. She could see where the flying school’s sign had once hung. The COCA COLA sign was still there, but it was shot full of rusty holes, so only the tip of the green bottle was still recognizable.
She looked back at the chipmunk. It never moved.
‘Run!’ she wanted to shout, but the sound never left her voice. The snake, its tongue shooting forth in quick stabs, moved closer.
“Ed was a flight instructor here,” she said, purposefully turning away from the snake. “That’s where I met him.” She pointed at the hangar, to a small door beside the riddled COCA COLA sign. “That was the office. It was full of model airplanes suspended from the ceiling by strings, so whenever anyone opened the door all the little airplanes would dance around like they were caught in a storm.”
She smiled.
She glanced at the chipmunk, still motionless on the fuselage, its paws still in prayer. The snake was now only inches below him.
“There was a map on the wall, too,” she said too loudly. “A map of the whole country, with a tack marking this airport, and a string off that so you could measure distances to any place else in the country.”
The snake was now within striking distance of the chipmunk, but still it refused to move, or admit to the danger.
‘Why don’t you do something?’ she screamed, but again, the voice only echoed in her head, never reaching the animal.
Slowly, the snake’s head rose.
“Do something!”
“We’re doing something,” the young man’s voice came softly through the fog. “You just relax.”
Eva’s vision broke through a heavy cloud. She was no longer at the airport, no longer staring at the hangar and the snake.
“What?” she asked, confused, and saw the doctor leaning over her bed, one hand on her shoulder the other holding a chart in a gray metal folder.
“Can you hear me, Mrs. Gwyer?” He shouted the question, as though calling to her down a long tunnel. She heard his voice, but wanted to ignore him. She turned her head on the pillow and looked down at her feet. The blankets were pulled back, and a nurse rubbed lotion onto her frail twig legs. The hospital gown was bunched to one side.
“I’ll give you something to help you sleep,” the young doctor shouted again and wrote furiously in the metal folder before snapping it shut. She only caught his eyes once, deep set and dark--tired and impersonal eyes.
“I want...” Eva said and forgot what she wanted.
“What, Dear,” the nurse’s friendly voice asked. “What do you want?”
Eva strained to remember what she wanted. She knew she had been dreaming, but the dream was vanishing until all she could remember was the snake.
“A snake,” she announced. ‘No, that can’t be right,’ she thought and laughed inside her head.
“You want a snake?” the nurse asked with an amused lilt in her voice. “I don’t think you want that. Now, just let me turn you over and I’ll get your back.”
Eva felt herself being gently rolled over. She felt as though her body was a light bag of fragile bones ready to crack. Her face pressed into the pillow, her nose filled with the sanitized odor of hospital linen. Across the room she recognized a face, her daughter.
The woman, in her mid-40s, stood alone and sad in the shadows, staring at her dying mother being rubbed and charted by the staff. Eva smiled and saw her daughter force a smile in return. ‘Why is she so gloomy?’ she asked herself, feeling her senses sharpen. “Barbara?” she called.
“Yes, Mom,” her daughter answered and moved toward the bed.
“What am I doing here?” she asked. Her daughter started to answer and looked to the doctor, who shrugged, not an I-don’t-know shrug but more I-can’t-help. Eva tapped her almost hairless skull weakly. “I feel something going on in here, Barbara. There’s something taking me away...”
She closed her eyes.
The doctor took Barbara aside. “She’s in little pain,” he said. He spoke mechanically, having been on duty for over 23 hours already. “She’ll talk about strange things; brain tumors do that. One minute lucid; the next she could babble like an infant.”
“How much longer?”
“Anytime,” he said. “All we can do is keep her comfortable.”
“What, no more miracle cures like the chemotherapy, until the rest of her hair falls out? Or maybe teeth or eyes?”
“I’m sorry. We had to try, but we can’t always...”
She cut him off with a wave, and he left the room. The nurse finished the rubdown, rolled Eva onto her back and tucked the blankets securely around her. She then placed the oxygen tubes back into her nostrils and started to leave.
“Thank-you,” Barbara said, her voice hollow.
“Your mother has been talking about airplanes a great deal. Did she work for the airlines?”
Barbara thought for a minute. “No,” she said. And then, “But she was a pilot…”
“Oh?”
“A long time ago, before the war, before I was born. And during the war she flew with the WASP….”
“Oh, I’ve heard of them,” the nurse said and tried to recall the acronym: “Women’s Air Something Planes?”
“Women Airforce Service Pilots…yes. She flew bombers on, ah, ferry flights, during the war.”
“Really?” The nurse seemed honestly impressed.
Barbara laughed. “I haven’t thought about that in years; she rarely ever mentioned it. She has some old photographs of herself in the pilot’s seat of these big old airplanes, her and some other women in uniform. She said they flew all kinds of warplanes across the country. She saw more military duty than many men in the service, but for years they never received any recognition from the government as veterans. I don’t know if they’d even let her into a veteran’s hospital. She’d never let me ask.”
“Did she fly after the war?” the nurse asked.
“No, she became pregnant with me in 1945, and my father was killed over Germany. He was a fighter pilot. She never flew again. Rarely spoke of him.”
“Did she remarry?”
“Yes, and he became my father. He died several years ago. I loved him, but I don’t think they really ever got along too well together.”
Suddenly, Barbara looked at the nurse. “I don’t know why I told you that...I shouldn’t have. Excuse me.”
She stared at her mother, thin and still beneath the heavy covers. Only the occasional rise and fall of her chest indicating any life. “Please call me if anything...” She left the room in a hurry.
Eva unhooked the hem of her hospital gown from the rusty barb on the wire fence. Her bare feet pressed lightly into the dried weeds. Overhead, an airliner descended toward a runway three miles away, and Eva walked toward the old hangar on the deserted airstrip.
The scent of pine was heavy in the warm air, and she breathed in deeply. Passing a dusty pit full of beer cans and a shopping cart, she remembered a day in 1940 when a friend ground looped a Taylorcraft into it.
“Oh, they got into such an argument,” she said aloud. “They eventually got married, you know,” she said to no one. “George and Doris that is. He went off and flew bombers in the Pacific--B-24’s. She was the one who told me all about the WASP, talked me into joining. Last I heard they lived in New York, upstate somewhere. He’s retired from TWA, I believe. She writes to me--a Christmas card every year...” Her voice trailed off as she stepped onto the deteriorated runway and stared at the wooden hangar.
Eva reached the chain link fence. Her legs grew heavy, her breath tight and short. She leaned against the fence.
“There was a grass strip that ran across the paved runway,” she said. “We actually preferred the grass to the pavement. Every landing was a good one on grass. The flight examiners would make us land on the pavement, and, oh, how the tires would chirp and squeal. Showed us what sloppy landings we were really making. Did I mention I soloed here? In a Waco?”
She pushed away from the fence, stepped over a broken bottle and walked toward the hangar. Her pace quickened with each step.
“We had a Fairchild.” She pointed toward a cluster of low trees. “There was another hangar there.” The concrete base of the long vanished hangar could be seen through the foliage.
“I took my instrument training in the Fairchild. Ed instructed in that, too.” She looked away. A flight of robins lifted from the pine trees, circled over the runway, and in an undulating wave, returned to the woods. Eva continued toward the hangar.
She saw the rusted fuselage beneath the bullet riddled COCA COLA sign. The chipmunk sat unmoving, unaware of the snake beginning to coil along the welded tubing toward him.
‘That’s not the place to be,’ she tried to say, but the words stuck in her throat. The snake reached for the upper tube and, tongue probing the air, wound slowly toward the chipmunk.
Eva turned and ran. The bristled weeds clutched at her gown and legs. She reached the hangar completely out of breath and pressed her face against the wooden door. It gave. She stepped back and glanced over her shoulder at the fuselage where the chipmunk was about to be swallowed whole by the snake. She pressed on the door and followed it inside. (to be continued…)
*** End Part 2 of 3 ***
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