Rocky said, “I think you’ve become infatuated with her or fixated, whatever. You see her as your savior, almost mythical. The mythical Sister Marie Claire. You think she’ll tell you what you need to know, answer the big question. She doesn’t have the answer. For years you’ve wondered how to pay this great, cosmic debt you owe for your luck. You don’t owe anyone anything; you’ve earned your success. You’ve worked hard. There is no answer. She certainly doesn’t have it. She’s just a nun, that’s all she is, you know. A lonely old woman living in the bush in southern Sudan. I wish you had never heard of her.”
Rocky Vicenti, Hanley’s next door neighbor, his widowed lover, sat on a folding chair in his large, dimly lit hanger facing him as he sat on the steps that formed the interior wall of the plane’s cargo door. It was March of 2001 and unusually cold in north-central Indiana. The hanger was built to house two planes and had, before Hanley crashed one when landing at the Russiaville Airport outside of Kokomo almost six months earlier.
“She’s not that old,” Hanley said, trying to not so gently correct her. “She’s younger than me.”
With a coarse black thread as heavy as a strand of dental floss, Hanley mended a weak spot on the border of the netting, which, once fixed, would stretch across the cargo hold of his old, meticulously restore Beech C-45, the plane he would hopscotch across the Atlantic to Europe and then on to Africa.
“Elizabeth called me again yesterday, the third call this week. She’s desperate you know. She thinks I have more control over you than she has. She’s begging me to make you change your mind. She cries every time we talk,” Rocky said, rubbing her left index finger with her right thumb. Hanley watched her as he passed the curved needle back and forth through the fabric, his finger sliding dangerously along the metal toward the point when the needle met resistance. “What did you tell her?” he asked.
“I said what I always say, ‘Your father has made up his mind and no one can change it, not you or me,’ that’s what I told her. I wish I had something else to say to her but I don’t. I wish I had something else to say to you. I’ve run out of things to say. Obviously ‘I love you’ isn’t good enough,” she said.
“You don’t need to say that. Listen, we’ve been through this enough. Elizabeth think’s I’ve lost my mind. I’m sure her mother has helped her with that decision,” he said.
“I don’t know what to say anymore, really I don’t. You’re going to go no matter what anyone says. If your uncle were still alive I’d call him to talk you out of this but he isn’t and he’d probably support you in this decision. He’s the one that told you to always pay your debts in this life anyway. Did he use the word karma when he told you this?”
“Please don’t.”
“Really? It doesn’t matter. You’re leaving to find another woman to help you understand life. I’m afraid you’ll travel ten thousand miles to learn she can’t tell you any more than I can. The trouble is, to sit at her knee or where ever you’ll be sitting, it will still be in a place that can kill you. Maybe that will be enough payment for you. I’ll be left to try to explain that to your daughter and granddaughter. Thanks for that.” Rocky said.
***
Rocky left and now Hanley sat alone, watching an odd cocked rectangle of fall’s sunlight slide across the cement, a bright oddly shaped clock, pushed by the sun’s burning time, admitted through a high window to educate him-about what he wasn’t sure. The window was next to the large hanger door he used to take his plane to the tarmac, then the runway, then into the sky and to wherever he wanted. Flying was an expensive hobby, the plane an expensive toy. He love things of beauty, whether a meticulously restored airplane, a finely crafted table or a watch. He love to look at his plane, the shiny skin of the Beech, polished, reflective of both his money and his love of beautiful things, a mirror of this time of his life, the image there, distinguishable but flawed, no straight lines, no hard information, connected shapes, colors, post-modernistic life imagery that everyone saw differently. But the smooth skin of a woman reflected nothing back at him. A woman was that mirror he must now look to, knowing he would never see himself looking back, his image lost time and again. Hanley considered the conversation the past few minutes, the time spent with Rocky. It had told him nothing.
***
After flying for three weeks, Hanley finally saw Africa in the distance. He could see a deeper haze, gray melting to brown, beneath which lay Egypt. The land before him was the vision he had in his head for two years. That vision would certainly not be the reality. Leaning forward, he stared hard at what he hoped would soon become familiar and yet believed would remain a mystery to him. He had given up much to be here at this moment and he still wasn’t certain why.
He would enter Africa through Egypt, but his destination was Sudan.
The plane, the noise, the squawk of the air traffic controller in his ear, the vibration of two four-hundred-and-fifty horsepower Pratt and Whitney R-985 engines coming through the steering pushed their way back into his head. The big engines thrummed, pulsing, grabbing air, pulling the old Beech C-45 Expeditor toward the coast. Hanley Martin thought about what he
