Old Ed Looks for Matches

By Piet van Wyk de Vries

Don’t let anybody tell you that nighttime in the desert is cold. It’s not. You may think it is, but after a while you will realize that all you are feeling is the absence of warmth. The nights are like that, and if you keep still and still your mind, you can feel the ebbs of the remaining heat of the day around you. Creeping around you like a thief, like a prankster. Never there.

There enough to be missed.

It is the mornings that are cold.That grey hour before the sun, when the last of the previous day evaporates, and the cold makes you shake so hard you have to sit down. Ed grew up in the snow. He knew cold, but not this. It was the lack of moisture in it that got him. At home it was wet when it was cold. Here it was dry. A baked out freeze that kept everything that remained alive from moving until the sun finally breached the horizon and the heat punched you in the chest like a fist. But for now even the flies were still. Millions and millions of them, all hidden away in little places where the sun would not reach. In a while they would start appearing everywhere. After a few months you just did not bother anymore. They were in your clothes, in your ears, in your eyes, like dust. You just accepted it and tried to be still.

This was the worst time, this cold hour. If they didn’t get a visit within the next few minutes they would not come at all. These morning attacks were the worst. Every now and again. This was why you had to wake up early and sit away from the planes, why young Benni was already up the tree. Eddy remembered the first time, though that kid’s name was long lost. They were all busy warming up for their own little morning visit. The planes were revving and creeping around the ground like cold flies. The kid was bare chested. A fitter if he remembers right. Loose boots and baggy shorts, and no telling what part was sweat and what part was oil, maybe 18, half the age of the old old chief.

Ed screamed at him and gestured for him to get out of the way of a plane trying to turn into the taxi area. These children were always taking stupid chances like that. The kid smiled through a week’s youthful stubble and waved as a shadow crossed him, as a light quiet breeze picked him up by the small of his back and threw him up and over Ed, out of the way of the plane. Itself was slowly spinning around it’s remaining leg like a tied dog. The pilot spilling over the side of the cockpit before being yanked back violently by his radio chord, twisting his ankle when he fell from the wing.

The body of the boy was like jelly, like a crushed fly. Everything was broken it seemed, and not a drop of blood. A cold broken body to bury before the flies and the sun came. So everything is broken. Isn’t it always? Ed fixed them. He could , and have in the past, put together an entire airframe from scrap pieces. He could have his boys strip and rebuild an engine in an afternoon. Less if they could work in shade. Probably in a couple of hours if they could get rid of the flies too. But that kid was just broken too much. Ed took out his handkerchief and looked for a cleanish spot. He smelled tea brewing as he put the handkerchief over his finger and started cleaning his teeth.

Everything was dirty anyway. The planes were old and the pilots did not like them. There were rumors that the department was going to allow this rotten plane to be modified again, instead of pouring all their resources into the successor. A few months ago when the desert was new and clean these were the greatest kites in the sky, but now they flew them low and never fast enough, trying to catch the others napping under their own wings. Ed didn’t like flying. He liked engines. He stood up and squinted at the horizon. Just a little while longer.

He could hear the distant buzz of the morning patrol. Faint echos of the low whistle these planes were known for. The sun was going to come over that black rocky line in a few minutes and then you’d be reminded of just how far away from home you were. The heat would suck out your moisture like a squeezed sponge. If you looked down you had only ever to wait a moment before you would drip past your eyes into the sand. By eleven even the sweat in your boots would start cooking out, and you would breathe short breaths of air so thick with warmth it was almost a liquid.

Everything had to get done before that. The rest of the day until a few hours before sunset everyone would sit around. Somewhere under a shade or a wing. Still.

Perhaps cutting a gasket, perhaps cleaning a filter or loading a drum. Some would write and some would just look at the shadows creeping around the earth like a sad old woman, moving so slowly that she was upon you before you could breathe deeply and prepare to defend yourself. Whispering to you with her arid breath that her brother the prankster will keep you and haunt you in the night.

Ed walked back to Black 7 to check that young Richard didn’t make a mess of replacing the oil lines these types seemed to like destroying. But not before a last glance into the angry sun, boiling over the hills like an army of fireflies. He shoveled up to the plane feeling like there was dry dust in every crack of his frozen face , and tried to shake a cigarette out of the pack, coordinating his shivers just so. Mindfull of the loose tobacco, he moved the cigarette with his lips so it remained horizontal as he looked down. The two pats over his pockets were perhaps not enough to explore the emptiness, though enough to reveal the absence of matches.

He turned back to the smell of tea, to the smell of fire.

Old Ed Looks for Matches

By Piet van Wyk de Vries

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