“They paid me nine million four hundred thousand dollars, Trent,” I said. “That is the answer to your question, and it is the answer to every other question you have asked me this weekend.” I tapped the schedule on the porch rail. “Arnaud Ag Aviation was sold in the spring. Line five is the Air Tractor, unit five, the same airplane your son has parked behind his barn with a price painted on the door. It belongs to the buyer, Trent. Garrett wrote four hundred ten thousand dollars on a machine that was never his to sell.” Out over the rice fields, a flock of ducks lifted off the water all at once.
Trent stared at me. “Boyd, you never said a word. Twenty two ducks, and you never said a word.” “You asked me to pluck them, and I plucked them,” I said. “A man should know what company he keeps.” Garrett took a step backward. “Mr. Arnaud, I thought the airplane was being sold off before the bank got it. Somebody said so.” “Lonnie called me Friday night,” I said. “He told me you showed up with a trailer and a story that I had approved. I had approved nothing. Lonnie kept every plane in that hangar flying for twenty years, and he does not lie for anybody.”
Garrett looked at his father, and his father looked at the ground. “Dad, you said it was a favor from Boyd,” Garrett said quietly. “You said he wanted us to have the start.” “I said what I wanted to be true,” Trent muttered. The screen door behind us creaked, and the guests who had been laughing over their plates of smoked duck drifted out onto the porch, one by one, and went quiet. The sun was dropping low behind the cypress, and the whole Grand Prairie turned the color of a copper kettle, which is a poor light for a man who has just been caught.
An Air Tractor with a price painted on its door gave one father the weekend to bring his son back to Stuttgart.
I kept my voice as even as a straight runway. “Here are my terms. By Sunday night the airplane goes back to the hangar in Stuttgart, with Lonnie looking over every inch of it, and the trailer and the fuel go on Garrett. The sign comes off the door, and Hargrove Aerial never files another paper. The pilots on the schedule keep their jobs, and nobody tells the buyer a word more than the truth. If the airplane is back and whole by the end of the weekend, I will not pursue a thing. If it is not, I will let the lawyers do their work.”
By Sunday noon the airplane was back. Garrett towed it himself, with Lonnie riding in the cab and saying not a single word. And the surprise was waiting at the hangar. Nine pilots from all over the Delta had driven in without being asked, men I had trained and flown beside for thirty years, and they stood in a line along the apron with their caps in their hands. They had heard what happened from Lonnie. A big pilot named Dutch put his hand on the wing and said, “Boyd, we would have helped you carry it.” I had to look at the sky for a while after that.
The money consequences arrived quickly. Trent had borrowed against his farm to pay for a hangar lease and a fuel account for Hargrove Aerial, and his banker called the loan on Monday. He had to sell the new duck boat and half of the combine fleet to cover it. The supplier of chemicals that Garrett had ordered on credit sent a bill for nineteen thousand dollars, and the insurance agent canceled a policy that had been bought under my company name. By the end of the week, Trent had no business and no airplane, and he came to my porch with his hat in his hands, which I think cost him more than the money.
Lonnie spent that Sunday afternoon going over the airplane with a flashlight and a clipboard, the way he had done a thousand times before a season began. He checked the hopper, the gates, the wing struts and the log book, and he found a cracked fairing and a missing inspection plate, both from the trip on the trailer. “Another day and this would have cost a real fortune,” he told me, wiping his hands. I told him to write it all down and send the bill to Trent. He grinned, pulled the pencil from behind his ear, and wrote it in capital letters so that no one could ever claim they had not read it.
I am not made of stone. Garrett is thirty four, and he had a good heart under a bad idea, and I have seen worse young men grow into better ones. So I called the new owners and asked whether they could use a ground crew boy who knew how to wash an airplane, load a hopper and keep his mouth shut. They said yes, at a fair wage, starting on the loading pad. I told Garrett the terms. He accepted before I finished speaking. Then I told him he would learn to fly the right way, with the old pilots, or not at all.
Trent came to me last, and it was the hardest conversation. We stood at the rail of the porch, where the schedule had lain only a week earlier. He said he had been jealous for thirty years, of the airplanes, of the money, of the way people from Stuttgart tipped their hats to me at the feed store. I told him that I had been jealous of him too, of his son, who was loud and alive and always in the middle of a room. Then I handed him a plucked mallard and a paring knife and asked if he remembered how to dress one properly. He laughed so hard he cried.
The next duck opener came with a cold wind and a thick fog on the water. Garrett stood at the cleaning table in a borrowed apron and plucked twenty two mallards without a complaint, one after another, feathers flying around him like snow. Lonnie kept the count and teased him about every feather he missed. In the hangar, the Air Tractor waited in the dark, freshly washed, with unit five painted bright on the tail. When Garrett finished the last bird, he held it up and grinned at me. “Mr. Arnaud,” he said, “I believe that is the best work I have ever done.” I told him it was a start.