Afterwards: The Airplane

Chronicle 05- 2,400 words

The airplane waited in its ramshackle hangar; oxidizing tin lining a frame of bare timber posts drawn from the forest by a team of horses in days gone by, when such things still happened.

It was younger than the west-facing shack, but only just; having been knocked together by French engineers in prosperous post-war years to serve as a workhorse itself. Its youth passed with the seasons, carrying supplies to isolated northern communities congealing about the Pacific coast, travelling the rivers and estuaries in the wilderness of the Canadian north like a blood cell to the ends of capillaries.

It had been old when The Company sold it at auction to a hunting guide, but still sound and game for terrible winters when it was hailed for food, fuel, and life-saving medicine in times of trouble.

Self-interest had made its various operators attentive to its needs, and whenever parts wore down or tears appeared on its yellow-painted canvas, it had been attended to. Its engines were swapped like transplanted hearts, and cataract-clouded windshields revived with artificial new lenses, but endless canvas skin grafts and a gaudy new metal propeller could never hide the proud skeleton of the airplane as it had been laid down.

It was the radio, however, that was the soul of the craft.

As much as the plane accepted the role it had been created for, and as content in its service as it was, there was no denying the lonesome nature of the work. It was the voices that made the endless struggle against time and nature bearable, the feeling of belonging as a thread on a wider tapestry stretching far beyond the horizon. There were few better able to appreciate the value of an elevated perspective, and the plane allowed for a broader connectivity to which it was entwined during ponderous months of rest and reflection on wind-polished ice.

The song on the radio grew over long decades as more voices joined and settlements widened and defined themselves as seen from the air, but the tune had been constant with familiar verses and unforgettable rounds of chorus… until last winter.

The music changed abruptly, becoming panicked and desperate with screaming voices like the feral screeching of a dying animal, and indeed the airplane had begun to believe that it was truly alone as static dominated the airwaves during the normally busy spring thaw and no pilot came to operate it.

The guide never left his cabin to clean mechanical blood and tighten loosened bolts, not even as leaves flared with autumn’s glow and brittled with winter’s first whisper. The airplane accepted eternity gracefully, not resenting the deprivation of final proud years of service and dignity; and prepared to fade away— until the day a raft sailed into the cove.

Crudely-hewn timber platformed a thin mast bowing under the strain of a poly-plastic sail billowing with chill wind as the ungainly vessel bucked in choppy waters. The airplane wished the vessel well and watched as the wretched figure of a man tumbled to the rocky shore as sharp tombstones shaved splinters from the bobbing hull until the craft hove-over with the rising insistence of a falling barometer, and stood fast on the land upside-down where it would remain until the next thaw at least.

The man dragged himself by inches down the beach towards the guide’s shack, disappearing within and reappearing to pull an emaciated corpse into the bitter cold some time later. The door stayed shut for days afterwards, but a faint glow in the windows gave the airplane cause for hope.

He came down to inspect the hangar once before the first snows came to blanket the land, a rough, rugged man, a composite of all that came before: self-reliant, capable and determined. He seemed satisfied at their meeting and the plane dared to dream of one last flight.

The aircraft saw the man on occasion through the winter, always searching for something or another in the untidy assortment of cast-off machinery and appliances filling creaking outbuildings. Some days he fished the cove, traversing the jagged sheets of razor-edged waves abstractly constructed to radiate long winter twilight in frozen prisms; others he sang into the static; voicing the airplane’s own wordless isolation.

The spring came as it always did— slowly, and then all at once. The sculpted landscape melted in growing days and the cove roared again with crashing surf. The song on the radio was faint now, mere notes and eerie echoes in the ringing silence of absence.

But the man seemed to have a plan.

Sure enough, the airplane felt the thrilling rejuvenation of oil dialysis and seized parts freed like out of reach itches finally scratched. The sun set earlier every day by the time the man seemed content with the servicing, and thick skeins of numberless geese chorused motivation to each other with the first flaps of their great migration south.

The day came when the man checked the engine, laughing and whooping after it caught following several hours of muttering and tinkering. By sunset the next, the plane was strapped with spare jerry cans of fuel and two small duffels had found a place in the spartan cabin on the co-pilots ragged seat. The man passed the final night by the cove singing his lonesome tune to an indifferent ocean of airwaves broken by echoing static surf.

They were airborne to meet the dawn and the man set their course confidently south, running them parallel with and above the waterfowl rising to carry on with their pilgrimage. Soft light illuminated a landscape of greenery tinged with autumn’s burn broken everywhere with inland lakes glowing in a spectrum of gold and crimson while the engine rumbled at the excitement of a new journey.

The airplane didn’t know where it was going, but it knew where it had been untold times before and the man kept to a heading leading them to a well-travelled station serving as a fuelling stop, so the old workhorse focused on the familiar two-step through the turbulence and enjoyed the ride. The empty airways wore on its spirit, but the plane remained hopeful as they closed the distance to the sub-arctic oasis.

The outpost was still as they circled, and no notes answered the inquiring man over the radio as they broke the inlets’s placid surface with aluminum skids, the engine spooling down while they drifted to a floating dock of milled timber stretching out over the water. The man steered them clear of a lone mast standing proud of the surface, hosting a dozen squabbling seagulls screaming dominance of the perch. The ship’s hull revealed itself as they passed, a hideous rotting yellow through the murky water, lurking in the shallows like a predator and spiking the airplane’s oil pressure as it waited for the inevitable attack. None came, and they moored under the gulls’ eternal cry.

The man walked out of sight somewhere among the cluster of cabins, hangars and storehouses. The plane cooled under the wind’s frigid caress, shuddering in its aluminum bones at the emptiness of the place, and a haunting feeling of greater loss elsewhere on the tapestry sent a tingle down its antenna.

Echoes of sharp hammering reverberated around the sheltered bay, noticed absently by the plane only by virtue of being the only unnatural noise at all. It took a moment for the venerable craft to recognize the gunshots for what they were as it had never heard so many so close together.

The dock vibrated under the running footfalls of the man and then he was ripping fuel canisters from where he had stowed them along the body of the airplane and gathering them in a pitiful cluster along the battered aluminum float.

The people of the outpost streamed towards the man as he cut the rope binding the aircraft in place, and bracing himself between the metal and the wood, he squatted down to press his back against the airframe. The dock swayed as the first of a score of residents stumbled onto the boards, bobbing on the calm water as more trampled over the wood.

The aircraft could see now a terrible affliction among their kind that it had only ever witnessed in its vehicle compatriots: tattered skin hanging in ribbons, missing critical parts, and all manner of lubricants dripping from countless leaks. The man scrabbled to avoid the others, leaping over the growing gap of open water between them and the dock and clinging to a strut while he caught his breath.

The crowd pressed on relentlessly— tumbling from the wood into the lake without hesitation, dragged under the surface by the weight of their tattered clothing. Some floundered without going down— bloated bodies filled with gas or naked; but none were able to make their way over to the float.

The man emptied the canisters as the afflicted milled about the beach; stumbling out of the lake aimlessly and then turning to walk straight back in when they noticed the pair on the water as if for the first time. The airplane felt a shift as one of them managed to reach the aluminum skid from below, hauling itself up towards the man, but he saw the danger and stove the intruder’s skull in with a wrench. A ragged moan rose from the strangers as they pursued the drifting craft, then gurgling as water filled lungs.

The airplane felt the level of fuel sloshing in the tank and dreaded the next leg of their journey, if indeed they were going where it thought. Maybe an engine swap ago, or even the autumn prior. Now, with calcified veins, rusty valves and brittle bones? The man had done what he could to prepare the craft, but he couldn’t turn back the hands of time.

They sat together for a while with the man in the cabin watching the beach, waiting maybe, for it to clear. The sand swarmed with them. No matter how many lost themselves in the inlet, enough would find their way out again.

The man dropped an anchor as the sun set to keep the breeze from carrying them out into deeper waters and stronger winds. He tried the radio a few times during the night between instances of fending off the odd rabid human that found their tenuous chain in the void below, but there was no reply. Dawn revealed the same circuitous movement of the crowd and the man wasted no more time there.

The fuel in the tank lasted them through the short day, the sun seeming to rise and set in an instant to the airplane as a sickly light-headedness settled over the craft. The man urged them ever higher with the joystick as the airplane flashed its warning lights to him. Higher, higher yet. The airplane fought for focus, straining itself in answer to the pilot’s commands.

The air was thin, and the old workhorse flared its intakes— desperate for the right mix of oxygen and fuel. High-pitched ringing filled the radio, fading as the airplane snuffled the last of the fuel from the tank. The engine pumped on bravely for several moments before it seized, silencing its stuttering roar.

Wind screeched over tired wings as they glided onwards. The plane felt a chill without its heartbeat, but it refused defeat as long as it was airborne.

A note pierced the radio waves, heard by the aircraft as if from a great distance as it focused on maintaining the best attitude of its flaps. The man answered and the airplane soared with hope. It concentrated on its antenna, bringing the distant music onto the correct channel and orienting itself to the source, closer than the plane had first thought.

The man sang as they fought gravity, each helping the other to adjust the trim of the craft as they fell through chilling clouds. The notes answered, louder and clearer every moment. The landscape reappeared, darkening with sunset’s deep shadows. A steel cable snapped and the airplane shuddered with the effort of catching enough air under its sagging wings.

The music insisted, calling to them from any of the thousand shrouded coves along the coast, but the airplane couldn’t pinpoint it. The man shouted as a lick of light burst into the sky below them, and he pedalled the rudder to shift their course.

They fell faster, stretching every foot on the altimeter. There would be no circling and landing against the wind this time— they would have only one run at it. Another flare launched skywards, now almost level with the sinking craft. The sun hesitated on the horizon, as if to witness the moment the airplane struck the waves.

The roiling surf was nothing like the sheltered bays the airplane had made a career of landing in, but it felt no fear as the impact sheared away its undercarriage and it was caught in the strong arms of the ocean. It felt the man struggle within the cabin, stunned perhaps by the crash, and saw the distance to the fading beach. He would never make it.

The airplane surged its fuel system with every ounce of spirit it had left, spiking its oil pressure and filling dry chambers with fresh blood. The engine spat seawater and roared fury into its bent propeller, raising the airplane’s nose free of the waves and righting the craft in the current.

The man cracked open his door with bloody hands and braced himself as the aircraft rushed towards the sand on the back of a crashing wave, tumbling out as the frame dragged along the bottom and the engine cut out.

The same wave pulled the craft back into the embrace of the next, knocking loose a wing and pushing it deeper under. The airplane watched the man drag himself out of the water as another rush bent the tail section free of the body, floating away now that it was detached from the heavy frame.

Air gurgled out of the cabin like a dying breath as the plane slipped below the surface, pushed and pulled by swirling currents for long minutes until it settled into its final resting place on the plush sea-floor sand.

All that remained of the airplane was the cabin, the nacelle containing the still heart of the craft, and the radio; drowning as water forced itself into circuits. The airplane prided itself on its final effort, remembered days long past, and eased into sleep to the mournful tune of a pod of whales heard through the antenna.