The Quail Hunter: A Novellette

By Ed Salama

Still in search of her real self, a frustrated young woman leaves the US in a late summer day to go overseas seeking help and advice from a father she didn't see since she was twelve. She leaves a small world she was hoping to change to encounter a big world that will change her forever. This is a true, well documented epic of personal transformation, love, betrayal and a stunning discovery followed by a horrendous war engulfing millions of lives. When her country calls, she becomes one of the first women pilots fighting in silence on a little known front.

This is a daring, fearless account of change, of survival and triumph.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 9, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469783550

Ed Salama

Ed is a screenplay writer. He writes mainly about ordinary persons facing extra ordinary situations. His books are based on real characters he did actually meet or know of. If you are interested in film or TV production, please contact the author at [e-mail]

Book preview

-I-

On that final leg of the landing approach the young pilot didn’t have to keep the sunglasses on as the sun, weak and hesitant in coming forth through the clouds, was behind the plane. In a hazy, lazy late afternoon there seemed to be no reason to hurry, so one could circle around for another ten minutes, just easing on gas and letting the plane simply glide because that was what the old man had suggested; pattern correction, a little juice then let it glide in order to check how the new cables function…so watch where the nose is going and trim then glide again.

With that, the pilot had finished a third test on the small, single engine, old machine and sighed in satisfaction and appreciation of what the old man had done. He must have worked so hard on the plane and fixed all that was needed, which was another proof that he was not only an old pilot, but a rare do-it-all mechanic, a disappearing breed of men who was very proud to have acquired the needed parts from very far away places. An old-boy-network had managed to keep him in touch with the rest of the other boys who were capable of finding and supplying any needed spare parts.

These men were approaching life’s last twilight but still talked about each other as boys and that one had kept a faded photo at a wall in the hangar and talked about it often. The photo had him in uniform somewhere in Europe with a group of six other boys. You could tell that many years ago, they all were handsome, youthful and bright. They stood there smiling to the camera as if they were shooting a movie for Hollywood. When they eventually had made it home, two of them had become amputees; one had lost two legs, the other all of his right arm. The one in the center was left behind, buried under an old oak tree at the edge of a godforsaken village. But those who had survived did manage to stay in touch and to meet every now and then to talk airplanes, celebrate the bliss of having all body parts intact and to get drunk.

The pilot smiled and thought again of the old man who had a passion for these flying machines that he was capable of spreading around as if it was a virus, a passion that made him work so diligently helping all those who came for their ratings to overcome any difficulties in their tests. Around here they talked about him simply as that, the old man, as if he was the only old man around. They did this in a peculiar mixture of affection and awe at his capabilities and the confidence he was able to put in every student.

The young pilot’s thoughts were flowing in a genuine and spontaneous satisfaction at the way mechanical things work, remembering that it was a fascination that had started with childhood when occasionally one misty morning mother was cranking a tractor and her silhouette was half visible to the young eyes. The synchronized magic that followed was what had started this affection for the machines. First it was contact and the powerful sound that follows; shroom! Then the rhythmic humming of the engine that was as sweet as music to the ears. The movement forward, the turns and the movement backward. The way mother could make the huge monster stop and go was such perfect clockwork that makes one think that mother was the magician conjuring the Genie by a simple twist of a finger so that all the immense power is released, power that exceeds what ten men put together could do.

The young pilot looked around and thought again with a half smile, here I am landing in the water. My plane will touch down in this opaque liquid and there is no land to speak of but every one says that they land on the water. Before touching down on this open river all memories of misty early mornings come back to mind. There is something supernatural and magical about what engines can do. Something that goes deep inside you as if it had spiritual proportions difficult to explain…when machines run and keep running smoothly, allowing you to muster their magnificent power, one becomes more than the simple humans who had lived and gone before the age of the machine. The machine makes a human godlike, capable of doing anything one wants. See, we do things in the air just like birds. Barnstormers with their flying machines are even more daring than birds. We can do things in water better than fish can. Knowing and dominating the machine is my nirvana, the absolute real thing. What else could anyone ask for considering the beauty of all things mechanical when they work and keep working flawlessly? Like our flying machines using the laws of flight which are cosmic laws that were here before us, then revealed later to our latter day prophets; Newton, Bernoulli and the brothers Wright. We simply found out about them. We did perfect the balance between all four forces of flight then added some. Lindbergh showed us what new additions to the capabilities of the machine one man could bring about and Amelia Earhart showed what a girl could throw in, and the old man…

At that altitude, the image of the old man was sharp in the young pilot’s mind. The old man knows what it is about, not just the pair of rubber strips that he had used to eliminate the vibrations, and he did fix it finally and the machine has no shudders and no shakes after he had done a total rudder cables and trim tab jobs. He insisted on reexamining the whole nine yards. The FEWTL! He will be able to sleep happily after finishing his FEWTL and he had done this for every machine with the care and patience of a mother changing a baby’s diapers. He chalked the capital letters with his greasy fingers on a broken blackboard then eliminated the various items, by the side of his fist, one by one as they were checked, fixed or reexamined. The big letters stood at the top like a line of toy soldiers. He wrote the number of hours on every engine over its serial number at a separate board that he kept at the end of the hangar in his private corner that looked like a hidden shrine, no one but him could enter there. At the edge of the hangar where he was once seen cleaning the old grill by spitting on it then scrubbing the old bars with a metal brush before putting the twenty ounce steak on round dry-fuel discs, that left neither smoke nor smell, then added the fiery sauce that brought tears to his eyes with every bite.

FEW’TL! Watch it! He would point out to the board. It is the basic covenant of peace between you and the machine. Fee-u-tel!! That is how he used to pronounce it with his Southern drawl, with no hints to futility as I thought the first time I heard it. I remember that first time.

For the young pilot watching how the clouds were changing their shapes rapidly, this meant the first letters of five things to do methodically and to check as if going through a sacred religious ritual; Fuselage, Engine mount, Wings, Tail assembly and Landing gear. In the army, where he had all of his years since he was seventeen, apparently they looked at planes the way they thought doctors were supposed to look at a human body; it was made up of many parts that should work together, therefore, if there was a malfunction, the part had to be dissected and examined. Some parts were tossed out and replaced, others routinely oiled and cleaned.

Ah, the boys!

Down on earth, the silver plane was getting bigger and bigger in the eyes of the other flying creatures that had learned not to let any noisy craft, plane or boat bother them, especially at dinner time. One could distinguish at least a dozen different species. Some were flying lazily around in circles watching the ones diving for dinner. The fading sun was taking leave and threw its colored rays on their beaks, eyes and wings. A larger bird seemed like preferring not to work for diner and kept dipping its strong wings systematically in the water as if it was a part of a fitness exercise, but the minute another bird caught a fish, the big one will jump over and snatch it in no time while the young pilot kept watching where the birds roamed in order to avoid them, assuming that even though they are busy fishing and stealing fish from each other, somehow in the midst of all the squeaking and tweeting, they must have been watching the plane. As a child, one observes that animals usually watch humans, and more so, boys, with a certain degree of suspicion from the corner of their eyes, and be ready to run away that is until they make cocksure no danger looms around. Who taught animals this in the first place, to watch humans, to watch boys, with suspicion?

The engine had coughed with a little gasp then became utterly silent and it was not the first time the pilot landed the small plane this way, with engine cut off, so the only sound heard was the scratchy whisper of the wind rushing under the silver wings, almost talking but with a closed mouth; Now you keep going down. Now you trim a tad. Now you straighten the nose just before you hit the water. The resulting splash will get all those birds, who had learned how to ignore planes taking off and landing, to curse in their own way, by squeaking in a volley of a loud protest, then as if according to a pre-set plan, instantly fly up to the height of the trees, then right away dive back after that fish they were watching.

The plane moved forward gracefully under golden rays seeping through the light cumulus until it came to a total halt. The agile thin body in khakis and flannel shirt had kept rubbernecking for a brief moment to align the plane to the empty dock then bouncing nimbly out to pull on the tie down lines and tie it in. At that hour there will be at least two persons who will come to help in a tie-in but none could be seen around. The thin body walked slowly with the leather jacket half thrown on one shoulder while an eager hand had reached for something inside one of the pockets to get a plastic wrapper. This sign was clearly watched by a dozen of the smaller birds who flocked instantly in unison and got what they had expected; Peanuts gently thrown to them by the bronzed hand they came to know and watch with restless expectations. Their sounds now less edgy, probably out of the satisfaction the sight of this familiar lone silhouette offered.

To enter the front door of Atlantic Aviation, you have to walk along three beds of flowers eighteen steps each then make a sharp left that puts you in front of the red brick structure that, years ago, was used to house some manufacturers of canned food who had faced bankruptcy like scores of businesses in the area, enabling the old man and one of his army buddies to acquire the building for two cents on the dollar. They had fixed the roof but the rain during the afternoon was heavy and water was still dripping down on the side of the building forming shiny, symmetric pearls. The young pilot was still bored and measured its tempo by counting silently; and two, and three, and four…it was exactly one second intervals between the drops. A faint smile followed then a short sigh and a measured swing had ended the last task of the day inside the building. The dim hall had a large wooden counter to the left and a bulletin board to the right. The board was cluttered with messages including a large ‘for sale’ ad. Someone was trying to sell a ‘sofa in mint condition and child clothes as good as new’. On the counter, there was a neat pack of mail tied with a rubber band. A passing glimpse showed the last issue of The Modern Mechanics on top of other magazines and was enough to indicate to whom the mail belongs. The mail was neatly arranged but no one was there. They had a part time secretary, who came three days a week and never on weekends. She was a heavily built woman with three children, an alcoholic husband and a bad case of arthritis who had left a little note on top of the mail scribbling the words Yesterday’s mail also!. The pilot used both hands in picking up the package, carefully pulling out the note through the rubber band and anxiously looking at the printed business envelopes, three of them with different logos, neatly typed for Miss Molly Reiser.

The pilot’s young face flashed a large smile, one that could send sparks one yard in every direction. She was still full of thoughts about how reliable are machines. She concluded that things mechanical do work and are capable of working flawlessly. If other things in life would act similarly! Why not? She wondered in silence.

There was another side door next to the water cooler. She wanted to walk slowly along the river in the empty field that surrounds the building. She liked it best when it was full of yellow and white wild flowers. She couldn’t help but tear through the envelopes, the neatly typed envelopes with perfect logos on their upper left corners. If one second is what it takes to go through each letter after tearing the envelope open, then in a total of three seconds the bright smile was gone. She walked straight ahead leaving the building, and the smile, behind…the childlike, innocent, radiant and wondering smile that the old man had once described as capable of illuminating the hangar at midnight if a sudden black out occurs, a smile made in Indiana showing those teeth that were cut on home grown corn of an endless farm with a few tractors where her mother used to crank the big one before sunrise. She couldn’t help but think of her mother. Mother had a

pair of smiling eyes on a weather-beaten face.

Was mother always smiling?

Her face comes to mind on a background made of immense waves of corn tips bending to the wind, and there is the ever present smile. The mustard-colored long hair flying in every direction the minute she removes her blue scarf just to fix it again, the scarf with white dots. She had two of them and wanted me to wear one. The day the scarf dropped to the ground, she bent to get it but took a handful of earth in her hand and said, This is the promised land of every Irish. In my family alone, three persons had starved to death. America was always good to us, even after that hell of the stock market that made a million beggars a day.

She dwelled on the wrinkles around the beautiful smiling Irish eyes. Mother was always the optimist. Where in hell does cancer come from? Why can’t someone find a cure, if they are capable of building these formidable machines?

She thought of mother all the time wondering if it was in seventh or eighth grade. It must have been Seventh when Julie came in from Texas after her parents were divorced. I cried the worst when they wouldn’t let me go back to the hospital. They drove me to Julie’s house and her grandma was not there. I cried a little more then she showed me her collection of baseball cards. I said that baseball is for boys, Julie and she said Kwatch. Julie’s mother was Austrian and twenty years younger than her father. She always said Kwatch if she didn’t approve of something and she had said Kwatch a lot before leaving her husband and going back to the old country. It was at that time that Julie had come to Indiana to live with her grandma. Julie had been my friend, my only friend since we have met. That Julie! She came with her grandma to the funeral but didn’t listen to anything and kept whispering stupid things about the priest and his shoes saying that they had a crack on both sides. The priest said things that I wanted to listen to and still remember, like naked you come from a womb and naked you go back. I wanted to listen, but Julie pulled on my sleeve. The priest said that the Lord gives and he also takes, which, when you see it as a math equation, is just logic. To me at that age, this was so comforting because my father was overseas and I think that he has been always overseas, in a land mother told me was full of beggars, blind beggars, who get up early in the morning to stand on each street corner and beg for money all day long and until midnight. My mother thought that it was a hopeless and desperate land full of stray cats and the ugliest dogs one could ever imagine. She had gone there and got scared so she decided not to stay there and to leave my father and come back to Indiana. America is God’s gift to those who deserve it, she told me, Your father? I know that he will die there, in that land of beggars

I still recall that day, she thought, because few persons had stood under the rain. She remembered the rain. My face was wet and so were my fingers. The priest said something about eating bread with the sweat of your face. That’s when Julie pulled on my sleeve again to point to the heel of his shoe. She is wild, Julie. She always wished to be a boy and climb trees higher than any boy in town, wild and boyish and a real renegade. She was the first to speak about flying a plane and the first to talk about things forbidden. She once showed me a postcard, inserted inside a book, with a painting in some European museum of two naked girls one holding the other’s nipple between her fingers…and the ribald books and magazines she had, belonged to her mother. Julie told me about the day her mother was calling Austria on the phone. The mother was angry and yelled in front of her that men here must have learned about lovemaking by watching cats and horses. Upset, she packed her stuff and disappeared. Your mother will never come back again, Julie, she remembered and told herself that it was not that easy to forget those days. She stopped briefly and looked at the long grass on the side of the road. I remember that it was summer, she reminisced, when Julie got the huge kite she built herself and took me on her bicycle to the Glassmans field, the one after the third telephone pole to the left, where one could fly a kite to the end of a five hundred yard line. It was harvest time. The afternoon breeze carried the smell of corn. The kernels were about to explode out of where they were neatly arranged on the plants. The red and blue kite kept soaring high in the sky. There was a train that passed through the third town north once a day every afternoon. It shook the ground where we were. After its reverberations faded away, Julie said something about her desire to become a bird and glide over the corn field, at the same height of the kite. Later, she looked intensely in my eyes and said she thought that my eyes were dark green because the light in a corn field is different than in a school yard and that they have the shape of a perfect almond standing on its side. Unexpectedly, she touched my face softly then kissed my neck as I was watching the kite. I jiggled with vibrations. She said that she was sure I was more bosomy than Sally, who had the best shaped teats the size of tennis balls. I couldn’t help laughing because tennis balls sounded to be quite big. I said maybe mine were like ping pong balls. We settled on pears because pears were the closest thing to our measurements. Julie claimed that she can recognize any fruit with her eyes closed and tell what it was, by the mere touch. She touched me times and again, and with the back of her hand also. It was warm and windy and the kite was fluttering like a strange bird doomed to captivity at the end of a line. A line that she held in her left hand. She kissed me after wrapping the end of the line around her elbow to secure it. I was unable to breathe and thought that I would suffocate.

It was the end of the day when we felt like pulling down the red and blue kite. Where did we go? Oh, we went to her place and she talked about her mother who sends her fruitcakes wrapped meticulously in colored wax paper, and her father who was very rich and had four machine guns in his bedroom back where they used to live, until one day he was gunned down by members of his own gang. His own gang! Isn’t this awful?! she would ask then keep talking, probably knowing that she wouldn’t get any answer from me, so she would again keep talking. You see, my mother was a telephone operator in her country, married him for the money! Don’t you think so? she asked. I didn’t know what a gang was and thought that they were a group of musicians.

She looked again at the sky darkening around the edges of the gathering clouds and couldn’t extricate herself out of her memories. All in all, she told herself, I’d die of loneliness if Julie is gone. That summer was the summer of discovery that keeps coming to my memories every harvest season. It must be because I am a nature’s kid and I like trees and birds and lakes and rivers, but more than anything else I like that relaxing humming of engines at low rounds per minutes. It can put me to sleep faster than the Chopin preludes the fat music teacher tried to teach us at school.

Discovery it was. We kept going back and hiding in different spots where we could see any person walking or any bike on the dust road, without any one seeing us. Terrible Julie, she is sometimes as bad as an angry tigress and her ways are as sensual as landing a seaplane for the first time ever. You glide and glide and the momentum increases to the powerful anticipation then the splash. She is wild Julie, wild and buoyant and uplifting half the time, but caustic and awful twenty percent of the time and my companion for all the time the last three years. It is fixation and it is not only physical, it is mental, was what a fake blond once told me when she was talking about her own experience.

There were no birds at all in this part of the river. They were hanging about the docks half a mile back. The pilot walked slowly in the direction of the birds where a beat-up pickup truck was parked behind the red brick structure. Weekdays were rather subdued in this place but weekends were really dead. The light rainfall had already started by the time she reached the truck. It was just another wet day in March that had ended with one significant difference; the day had brought three neatly typed envelopes that made her angry. The wet asphalt roads reflected the lights of cars and trucks driving in the other direction. She was angry and wanted to share her anger with someone, someone like Julie that had kept her frustration as well as imagination run unbridled.

If Julie were a real boy, she kept thinking again, I would introduce him as my boyfriend and give her the name Jule and everyone would notice that Jule is moody, dominant, jealous and bitchy…a person who could be as malicious as a wild cat and as tender as a poet and as poetic as a moon shining timidly over a serene river.…one who pays upfront to get a pilot’s license but who changes his mind suddenly to describe flying as a shameless pursuit in which humans are harassing the birds! Then to go ahead and buy a tenor sax and start talking about jazz as the new religion! What can I do about the friend who after finishing reading an article in a magazine about expatriate writers, declares that it is a waste of time and breath to continue living in this desolate part of the tasteless side of the Atlantic, that the best alternative available to dying of boredom and alienation among the frigid Anglo-Saxons, is to go to Paris to study Beaux Arts or become a sculptor, or a dress designer. My problem is that Jule is a photographer and a dreamer who whips up new ideas after any heavy meal. I will really never call her Jule in the presence of strangers and it is only when we meet with the gang in one place or another because many of the girls had nicknames or boy’s names. One was married and her photo would show in the social section of Palm Beach and Miami magazines, but she had this lover who was a sales girl in a department store. These were okay but some were very difficult to understand and they scared me. If it were not for my friend Jule, I wouldn’t care about seeing any of them. And so I never introduced her to anyone! and it was always the other way around, Julie was the one who introduced me, to every one we know and always in two simple words that reek of possession; my girlfriend! I don’t like to be owned but if she goes to Paris, alone, I’ll loose my mind. What on earth is this Paris she talks about every time we get together with the dyed-blond singer who smokes in the rest rooms? I never liked her painted hair, and how she smells! Like a scorched potato skin at the back of the hangar where the old man fixes his dinner. She used to live in Paris until last summer and she does talk pompously. As if she really knows all those writers and artists whose names she keeps repeating. She was a lover of this Dutch girl and, Oh shit, another pothole!

The truck bounced over the deep hole in the road and settled back sending water ramming at other cars before the busy intersection. It is good she couldn’t hear the words aimed at her from several mud soaked cars in every direction.

-2

The topless car pulled in front of the passageway where the road ends. Julie was driving nervously and she pressed on the brakes in a way that shook up the two passengers and both gasped in reaction. Molly tightened her grip on the blue plastic folder and inserted it in her cloth handbag. She’d hardly stepped out when Julie backed up speedily sending dust and hoot up in the air. Waving her hand without looking at her, she just muttered, One hour. Here.

Molly was still watching her with big eyes that kept following the car until it stopped, turned around and was gobbled by the large road. She cut through the grass towards the flowers, entered the double door that opens both ways, stopped briefly to smile at the secretary who was on the phone with someone, probably very far away, as the woman was putting all her energy in her throat when she yelled her last words Be Good Ya’all!. Once done talking, she pulled two envelopes of identical size and waved them over her head cheerfully Miz Reizer, for you.

The curiosity in her eyes was begging to know what was inside the envelopes.

Molly’s smile froze. Her eyes were fixed at the two envelopes as she took them in a clear anticipation. The logos on the upper left corner sent an electric spark along her spine. She was about to rip them open then and there but hesitated for a second and turned away absent-mindedly before going up the stairs. She didn’t want the secretary to watch her. Slowly, she opened the first one. It