Dropped

[Leafstorm]

Yesterday a P-47 Thunderbolt crashed into my parent’s house.

I’d decided to take a break from the comedy and tragedy of the city and go to Ohio to visit my folks. I had taken them into town in my rental car, to shop at Penney’s and get some take-out pizza, and when we returned the sheriff, fire department, and an ambulance were in the driveway and on the front lawn.

“Oh My!” said my mom, as if a casserole had burned, when she saw the plane’s tail and part of its fuselage sticking up out of the roof. The wings, cockpit, nose, and four-blade propeller were a tangled pile in the living room. The neighbors down the road will tell the story for years, especially the part about how lucky we were to have been out of the house shopping at Penney’s.

When a plane crashes into a house in a suburb it’s just bad luck for that house – could just as easily have been one of the houses next door, or a house across the street. My folk’s nearest neighbor is a half mile down the road, and between them is nothing but flat corn fields. Even a pilot gliding in with no power could have set it down with minimum damage to both plane and crops.

Like everyone else, I assumed it was a freak accident – which happens more often than we care to believe. Yet I couldn’t help but smell a hint of malicious intent. It was as if a big red target had been painted on the roof of the house.

Then it got stranger.

Probably no less than twenty people – sheriff, deputies, fire department, EMR team, me and my folks – saw a skeleton being lifted into the ambulance: a skeleton inside a flight suit, its rib cage collapsed under the weight of a heavy leather flight jacket, hand bones protruding from the sleeves, with a tarnished gold ring encircling a slim white finger. I heard my mom’s breath catch and I turned to look at her. She was gazing in rigid silence at the face of a bleached white skull.

The sheriff figured it was some kind of sick prank: the pilot bailed out at the last minute and left the skeleton to crash into the house. Why?

“Maybe he wanted to create a Big Foot kind of legend – The Skeleton Pilot,” said the sheriff.

“Kind of a dangerous and expensive way to create a legend, don’t you think?” I remarked. “WW II planes aren’t cheap.” The sheriff shrugged and sent a few deputies into the woods to see if they could flush out the pilot.

The next morning Mrs. Bork brought over some food and invited us to stay at her house. Since the bedrooms were undamaged and it was summer, we thankfully accepted the food but decided to stay at home. We chatted with Ms. Bork about the plane and the mysterious lack of a pilot – the sheriff’s men never found him in the woods, nor a parachute or any other trace. Then some men in dark suits rang the doorbell.

They flashed official federal government badges and said they were from the so-n-so agency. They wanted to look at the plane. My brother Ed, who lives only five miles away, had come by late in the day and had used his tractor to yank the plane out of the house. It now sat in the yard next to the garden. A beautiful plane, really, the American Republic P-47 Thunderbolt – the rugged, big-nosed, well-armed “Jug”. A guy would have to be nuts, desperate, or both to deliberately crash one of these aviation icons.

The suits didn’t stay long – not at the house or even in Ohio. Ed’s sister’s best friend works for the county coroner, and in the evening we’d heard through the phone tree that the feds had already claimed the “body” and had left town.

Then Mom started to cry. Dad said it was stress – her house had just been kamakazied by a 12,000 pound plane and she was worn out. She was tight-lipped and eventually calmed down – with considerable effort and self-control, I noticed. After Dad had gone to bed she took me outside and aimed a flashlight’s beam at the plane’s crumpled nose, focusing on the painting of a little blond girl with the words “Alice in Wonderland” underneath.

“He meant me,” she said after a few moments of silence.

“Care to elaborate on that, Alice?” I said.

“He was just a boy, so full of conviction, and promises – and a little full of himself, too.” She chuckled and gazed into the night, like she was looking down a hole into the past.

“We met in Detroit, where I was still living with my parents. He wanted to marry me before he went overseas, but I said no because I’d just met him. I suppose I loved him, but I didn’t tell him that. When he told me he’d be flying missions over France and Germany – it was just after D-day – I got scared because I thought he’d be killed, so I said no.

“He wrote to me several weeks later and told me what he’d named his plane, and he said he still planned to marry me when the war was over. But I’d met your dad, who was a little younger, and also loved me . . . and was here.

“I wrote him back and told him to find another girl because I was going to marry your dad. It was hard to do, but I wanted him to know. I got one more letter from him, close to the end of the war. He said he wasn’t going to give up on me, and that after the war he was going to find me and marry me.

“I wrote to him one last time and made it very clear that he shouldn’t come after me. I never heard from him . . . for several months.”

“For several months? You mean he did look you up?”

She aimed the flashlight beam upward and gazed at the shattered razorback canopy before answering.

“No, not exactly. I got one more letter from him, almost a full year after the war ended. I guess it had gotten lost along the way – your dad and I left Detroit after we married and moved down here. He’d written it on V-E Day, and in it he said he was flying straight home, across the Atlantic, and planned to land his plane on the street in front of my house. Well, I just thought he’d gone nuts. I didn’t know a lot about planes, but I knew his plane couldn’t fly all that way.”

I nodded my head in agreement with the “nuts” part.

“But now I know that it could,” she said. I glanced at her.

“No, Mom, you were right, it can’t. The P-47’s got a range of less than a thousand miles. You’re telling me this was his plane, right? Then obviously somebody acquired it after the war and flew it yesterday from not far away, maybe down from Toledo or from Dayton, the air museum there.”

She was shaking her head – to say I was wrong.

“Not likely it was your friend, Mom,” I persisted. “He’d be in his eighties now. He probably asked his son or someone to give you the plane. The guy was obsessed with you, his Alice, upset that his love was unrequited, so he wanted to have the last say. And if he was pissed off about being jilted, his last say was to crash the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ through your roof.”

“All very plausible,” she said after a moment. “But there was more in that last letter of his. It was crazy talk – I still have it, I’ll show it to you – but he mentioned making a pact, with whom he didn’t say, so that he could do the impossible. He told me the plane wouldn’t make it across the ocean unless he made this pact. So apparently that’s what he did – made a bargain and took off. But we’d moved and he couldn’t have known where to. So he must have just kept flying. And if he could fly across the Atlantic, long after the plane should have run out of gas, who’s to say he didn’t just keep on flying – flying and flying until he knew where to come down, or until . . .”

“Until?”

“Until God, or the Devil, whichever one had granted his prayer, grew tired of the game and let the plane drop – like a cat might grow bored with its favorite toy mouse and walk away from it, or like a young girl might . . .”

Her hand was trembling so I took the flashlight and held it steady on the plane.

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“That he flew for over sixty years searching for me, and then dropped – or was dropped – into my house. Maybe he died at some point years ago and kept on flying. Or maybe as he neared his destination his guardian angel, or whatever, withdrew his supernatural support, and he rapidly aged and died, his flesh decaying in the seconds it took the plane to plummet. It was him, I tell you. It was him.”

I turned the light slightly to illuminate her face. Tears were in her eyes and some had already made their way down her wrinkled cheeks. I thought it was all nonsense, but I couldn’t tell her that.

“How do you know?”

“The ring on his finger was my high school class ring. I’d given it to him before he shipped out.”

We returned to the house. Just before going to bed I saw her in the living room, alone in the dark, gazing up at the stars through the hole in the roof – the same stars that a teenager had prayed to over sixty years ago.