The flight over Phoenix

The flight over Phoenix
by David Benjamin

“… They patch her up with masking tape
With paper clips and strings
And still she flies, she never dies
Methusaleh with wings…”
— “The Gooney Bird Song”

MADISON, Wis. — I fell in love with the Douglas DC-3 Dakota — military designation: C-47 Skytrain, nickname: Gooney Bird — when I was thirteen. In those days, I was painting and gluing together every plastic aircraft model I could afford. I knew, intimately, all the most glamorous combat planes of the century’s two great wars — Spad and Spitfire, Stuka and Zero, Flying Tiger and sleek Corsair, Richard Bong’s merciless P-38 Lightning. But the one that captured my heart was the drab, gunless and infinitely functional Dakota.

It was C-47s that dropped the 82nd and 101st Airborne, and towed the British gliders, behind the Wehrmacht lines on D-Day. Gooney birds were the backbone of the Berlin airlift. King George VI, Queen Elizabeth II and Field Marshall Montgomery all tooled around in DC-3s. No airplane has appeared in more movies than Donald Douglas’ Dakota, designed in 1934 and already flying commercially for American Airlines by 1936. With its long wings, its big-ass tail assembly and its tireless, dependable twin Wright-Cyclone 710-horsepower air-cooled engines, it is — for the connoisseur— the most elegant aircraft design ever conceived.

The Dakota is a work of art.

So, imagine my surprise when I answered a Facetime call and saw, standing in front of an entire fleet of camouflage-painted vintage DC-3s, my friend Dr. Wilhelm “Red Baron” Bienfang — America’s foremost “idea man.”

Looking at what appeared to be almost two dozen cargo-ready, invasion-striped Dakotas, I said to Bienfang, “Okay, what’s the idea?”

Bienfang looked sly and said, “You’ve seen Romancing the Stone?”

“I love that movie,” I said. “Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny — ”

“Right,” said Bienfang, cutting me off, “do you remember the scene, in the jungle in Colombia, where they find the dead pilot — ”

This time I cut off Bienfang. “Of course. The airplane, with a load of marijuana, crashed in the jungle. It was a C-47!”

Bienfang nodded meaningfully, as I got the drift.

“We’re talking wall, aren’t we?” I said. “Trump’s wall!”

Bienfang grinned. “You know how many Guatemalans, Hondurans, Mexicans, unaccompanied minors and itinerant tomato-pickers — not to mention bales of weed — I can pack into one Gooney Bird?”

I guessed but my number was low.

Bienfang launched a paean to the C-47, but he was of course preaching to the choir. “You can take one of these crates up beyond 20,000 feet and hide behind the overcast, or fly so close to the ground that you clip leaves off the trees and scatter hogs in a barnyard. These beauties are easier to drive than a ’57 Bel Air. If you hug the coast and keep ’em low, they’re radar-proof. They carry enough fuel to hump non-stop from Mexico City to Dodge City without passing ‘Go’ while I collect the two hundred dollars. You can land one on a lumber road, set ’er down on a high-school football field or strap parachutes onto a hundred pregnant Salvadoran muchachas and drop ‘em into a strawberry patch in Nebraska. They’ll be pickin‘ fruit as soon as they hit the ground and birthing anchor babies between the rows!”

Eventually, Bienfang quieted down long enough for me to ask, “Why?”

To which the reply, especially from Bienfang, was obvious: “Money.”

“But what if they don’t build the wall?”

“Who cares?” said Bienfang. “No matter how bad Trump screws it up, America is still the best destination in the world. There’s always going to be a market for folks who’ll do anything — and cough up their last peso — to get here. And hey, cruising through the wild blue yonder in a cozy Dakota beats the heck out of crawling through the desert, swimming the Rio Grande and picking your way through a dozen coils of razor wire.”

Bienfang flickered once on my screen and said, “Wall or no wall, I’m in business. I’ll stay that way as long as there’s a handy avgas pump and a whole great big Third World full of hungry people willing to risk everything for the chance to hum ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ while flipping patties at Burger King.”

“But when they get here, won’t they run into a wall of wallniks, people who’ll do anything — and cough up their last dollar — to keep them out of America?”

“Oh yeah?” said Bienfang, dubiously. “How you gonna spot ’em?”

“Spot ’em? Spot who?”

“The Other People! Your so-called illegals,” said Bienfang. “Undocumented immigrants. Once I land ’em, they disappear. There are twelve million of ’em in America. They grill your eggs, clean your hotel room, mow your lawn, swab your toilet, wash your truck, sweep your gutters, bus your table, pick your lettuce, can your succotash, clear your garbage, lube your Lexus and work on hands and knees at a thousand other crappy jobs. America would be a smelly mess without ’em. But do you look? Can you see ’em? They’re everywhere and nowhere.”

I thought about this. “But if we can’t see them, why are we so afraid?”

“I seem to recall,” mused Bienfang, “someone referring to the president’s pipe-dream border wall as a ‘metaphor.’ Which is exactly right.”

“A metaphor?”

“The wall is a metaphor to fend off a metaphor, one that goes back to the Stone Age. They are the bear at the back of the cave, the monster under the bed and the madwoman in the attic. They are golems, gremlins and doppelgangers, They are the boogeyman, the whisper in the dark, the little devil on your shoulder and a pack of teenage superpredators prowling the park. They are Freddy Krueger in the window and the wendigo in the woods. They are the Mau Mau in Montana, Sharia law in Oklahoma and MS-13 in Lake Forest. They’re Professor Moriarty, Jack the Ripper, Macavity the Mystery Cat and Keyser Sozé! They’re everywhere and nowhere, and our only way to stop them is a wall.”

“But,” I insisted, “there won’t be a wall.”

“All the better,” said Bienfang, “because without the wall (or with the wall! It really doesn’t matter), there will be mindless, groundless, visceral terror abroad in the land. And ruling over the land, stoking our timeless terror, we have a huckster whose only product is paranoia, whose only remedy is a metaphor.”

I finally saw the genius of Bienfang’s vision — pitting one metaphor against another, and flying lazily over both of them in a fleet of classic cargo planes.

“And making a fortune,” said Bienfang.

“This flying refugee asylum,” I said. “Does it, perchance, have a name?”

“Take a look,” said Bienfang. He stood aside, so I could see a three-letter logo painted on the fuselage of the nearest DC-3.

“FIA?” I asked.

Bienfang smiled his all-too-familiar proprietary smile. “Fear Itself Airlines.”