I backed the screws out in the hangar. The moment I saw what the pilot had hidden in that plane before he disappeared, I stepped back, because it was paperwork, and the top sheet had FAILED stamped across it in purple.
Aviation medical certificates. Nine of them, in date order, 1969 through 1974.
Every commercial pilot has to pass a flight physical to keep his certificate current. Wendell Rhodes failed his in the spring of 1969 for vision in the right eye and again for the same thing every year after, and each time he took the paper home, put it behind that panel, and went and got a friendly one somewhere else, or flew on the old one, or just flew.
Five seasons. A man dusting cotton at fifteen feet over other people’s fields with one eye going.
I want to be plain about that. It was not brave. It was the worst thing in that airplane and he knew it better than anybody, and the last sheet in there says so.
On the back of the 1974 certificate, in pencil, dated the eleventh of June, which is the morning he landed and walked away:
Came in low on the Vasquez piece and did not see the pump house until it went under me. There are kids in that yard some mornings. I have been telling myself I could still do this since 1969 and this morning I quit telling myself that. I am not going up again. Put this with the others so I cannot pretend I did not know.
He landed that Cessna in his own field, shut it down, walked to the house, and never flew again.
Here is the part the county never got right. He did not vanish. He sold nothing and told nobody and went to Odessa to live with his sister, and he worked the parts counter at a farm equipment dealer for nineteen years and died in 1998 at eighty-one. Everybody around Hollis decided he had cracked up somewhere or run off from something, because a man who walks away from a running airplane and does not explain himself gets a story built on him inside a week.
The plane sat in that field, then in a barn, and I bought it out of the estate for eight hundred dollars.
His great-nephew is a corn and cotton man near Muleshoe and I tracked him down through the auction company. He is fifty-two and he grew up on the story that his uncle Wendell was a drunk who ran out.
He drove five hours to my hangar to read those nine pieces of paper standing up.
The plane is not scrap anymore. I have got about six hundred hours in it now and it will fly again, and that panel is staying exactly where it is, screwed shut, empty.
The certificates are with the family. His great-nephew had the last one framed with the pencil side facing out, which is the correct way to hang it and I told him so.
A man can spend five years lying to himself about what he can still do. The thing that saved that Vasquez yard was not anybody catching him. It was him finally reading his own handwriting and getting out of the airplane.