“I thought I’d died and gone to hell. There I was, falling like a stone, trapped in that goddam bubble with the wind howling like the Devil’s wolves and not a friendly face in sight. Or an unfriendly one, for that matter. But there were the clouds, and the sun coming up, and the blue sky up above, and the water down below, so I began to think, ‘Well, this ain’t hell just yet, but it might be soon.’
“Then we started to tumble, turning slowly, over and over. Blue sky. Blue water. Blue sky. Blue water. I was never much for religion, but I tell you, I started praying. Nothing like impending doom to focus your mind, boy. ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ I said, ‘You get me out of this and I promise I’ll never cheat again, at anything. I promise I’ll never smoke another cigar or take another drink. I’ll go to church every Sunday, any church you like, you just tell me which one and I’ll go there. I’ll never curse or swear again, I swear. I’ll be kind to dumb animals and women. I’ll call my mother once a week whether she likes it or not. Oh . . . and I promise I’ll name my first son Lancaster!’”
Naturally, by this point in the story, the air around my dad was a haze of blue smoke, and his throat was so dry from talking that he’d guzzle half a bottle of Carling’s Red Cap and call forth a manly belch before continuing.
“And I kept every one of them promises, too,” he’d say with a wink. “Except maybe for the cheating part.
“The good Lord musta been smiling on me that day, Lanc, because somehow the wind took hold of us, me and the little piece of airplane I called home, and we stopped tumbling and just sort of glided down onto the water. It was the softest crash landing I ever had. The tail piece hit the water first and there I was, floating upside down in my bubble. I unstrapped myself right quick, hit my head again goddammit, grabbed the nearest scrap of metal and smashed the glass. I stuck my head out of that turret, took the biggest gulp of salty sea air you can imagine, and hollered like a crazy man.”
Puffing on his cigar, Cuban when he could afford them, he looked like a steam engine getting ready to mount a steep incline. It mirrored his thoughts, I always supposed, upwards to the heavens he’d just tumbled from, towards God Almighty, and he was building up pressure to continue the story.
I was never right about that.
“The truth is, I think I was half-crazy. Must have had a concussion or something from banging around in that turret like a jumping bean. My head hurt like hell. But I hollered. Don’t know what I expected, out there in the middle of Jonah’s own wet wilderness. The ass end of the plane was sinking. Not fast, mind you, but enough to make me nervous. So I prayed some more while I hollered.
“And what do you know? Just as the water was lapping around my knees, what happens along but a German U-boat? ‘If that don’t beat all,’ I said to myself. She was bearing straight down on me, and I had a little moment of fear there. But then I saw the entire crew was on board and they were cheering!
“They scooped me up and crowded around me, clapping me on the back, everyone talking at once, laughing as if it was the funniest thing in the world. ‘Der Teufel mit Flügel’n’ they called me. The Devil with Wings!
“I fell on my knees and kissed their boots, I tell you. Then I gave them all cigarettes. The captain, Otto von Braunschweiger, took me inside that floating coffin, gave me some kind of hellish schnapps, and then he interrogated me.
“It was the strangest interrogation, too. Of course, being a loyal Canadian, I wasn’t gonna tell him nothin’. Name, rank, and serial number. That was it. But he kept asking me, over and over and over, about herring of all things. ‘Do ze British haf pickled herring? Vhere do zey keep zem?’ He kept at me, never giving me a moment’s rest, for over a week, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I’m ashamed to say I finally broke. Even so, I tried to feed him disinformation. I gave him the phone number of the St. John’s harbour police.
“Well, he got right on that radio-telephone, ship-to-shore, and spoke to them. God knows what they thought of it all, but Captain Otto wasn’t taking ‘No’ for an answer. He ordered thirty-six cases of cod, and damned if he didn’t get them too! The middle of the night we rendezvous-ed with some old hulk of a steamer, the Flying Dutchman or some such, that gloomed up through the fog off the Grand Banks. Twenty minutes later, the cargo had been taken on, and five minutes after that we were diving to the bottom of the deep blue sea, making a beeline for the Fatherland.
“And that’s where I spent the rest of the war. In a POW camp. And somehow I was famous there too as The Devil with Wings. I heard that Captain Otto became Vice-Admiral Otto and tried to further his career by promoting a plan to surround Australia. And when the Americans came to liberate us, they’d heard of me too, and I nearly got court-martialed for trading with the enemy.
“But it all worked out in the end, and I came home to the welcoming arms of the family. And here I am now, and here you are, my first-born, and I named you Lancaster, just like I said I would, in honour of that Blankity-Lanc that gave me such a soft landing in the old North Sea.”
“Dad, that’s the goofiest story I ever heard,” I would say.
“Don’t sass your old man,” he’d say, tapping the side of his nose. “That’s my story and I’m stuck with it.”
He’d lean back in his chair, stretch his legs out, and gulp the rest of his beer.
“That’s my story. And I’m stuck with it.”
No, Dad, that’s your story and I’m stuck with it.
✈ ✈ ✈
