The Air Race

Victor Morales had been on the ground crew since Thursday, four days before the races started, and by Sunday morning his hands were black with engine grease and his ears rang from the sound of twelve-cylinder Merlins and his back ached from crawling under fuselages, and he was as happy as he had been in his twenty-two years of life.

The Sky Ranch Airport sat on flat desert between Sparks and Pyramid Lake, a dirt strip with a few hangars and a wind sock and not much else, except that this week it was something else entirely. This week there were grandstands and tents and a public address system and fuel trucks and food vendors and eighty thousand people who had come to watch airplanes fly fast and low around pylons set in the sage, and Victor was part of it, had a laminated badge that said CREW clipped to his shirt, had a reason to be on the other side of the fence where the machines lived.

His uncle Eddie had driven him out here Thursday morning in the cab, the old Checker that Eddie still drove three days a week though he was fifty now and complained about his back. Eddie had looked at the planes lined up on the ramp and shaken his head.

“Your grandfather worked the rail yard,” Eddie said. “Your father worked the casino floor. Now you’re working on airplanes. I don’t know what that means but it means something.”

Victor had not answered because he did not know what it meant either, except that he was good with engines and had been good with engines since he was fifteen and tore apart a flathead Ford in his mother’s driveway in Sparks and put it back together and it ran, and his shop teacher at Sparks High had said he had hands for it, the kind of hands that understood machinery without needing to be told twice how it worked. He had done two years at the vo-tech and then a year at a garage on Fourth Street and then the job posting had come through from a man named Bill Stead who was organizing an air race and needed mechanics who could work fast and were not afraid of loud things.

Stead was a rancher and a pilot and a man who got things done by deciding they would be done and then not stopping until they were. He had been trying to bring air racing back to the country for years. The FAA had shut it down after an accident in Cleveland in 1949, fifteen years ago, and everyone said it was dead, that the government would never allow it again, that the insurance would kill it even if the government did not. Stead had not listened to everyone. He had talked to the FAA and the sponsors and the military and the television people and the Reno business community, and he had chosen this year, 1964, Nevada’s centennial, because a hundred years of statehood deserved something more than a parade.

Victor had seen Stead twice on the ramp, a stocky man in a leather jacket and a ball cap, walking fast, talking to three people at once, pointing at things that needed to be moved or fixed or finished. He had not spoken to Victor or to any of the ground crew directly. He did not need to. The crew chief handled that, a retired Air Force mechanic named Harwell who knew P-51s the way Victor knew flathead Fords, from the inside out, from the sound of them, from the feel of the wrench on the bolt.

The planes were the thing. Victor could not get past the planes. There were Mustangs and Bearcats and Sea Furies and Corsairs, wartime fighters that had been built to kill and were now rebuilt to race, the guns removed and the paint stripped and the engines bored out to produce power that their designers had never intended, two thousand horsepower from an engine rated for fifteen hundred, the metal stressed to the edge of what metal could endure.

He had spent Friday under the cowling of a P-51D called Miss Behavin’, checking the coolant lines, replacing a gasket that Harwell had flagged during the morning walk-around. The pilot, a dentist from Sacramento who raced on weekends, had stood by the wing tip and watched Victor work and asked questions that Victor answered without looking up because the work was the thing, the gasket and the torque spec and the line pressure, and if he got it wrong the pilot would die, which was not something the dentist from Sacramento seemed to think about as much as Victor did.

Sunday morning. Race day. The grandstands were full by nine. The sun was up and the sky was clear and the wind was light from the west, perfect conditions, the kind of day that made you understand why someone had looked at this flat empty valley and said yes, here, this is where we fly. The desert stretched in every direction, brown and gold and infinite, the mountains blue at the edges, the sage dotted with pylons that marked the course, a closed circuit eight miles around that the planes would fly at three hundred miles an hour fifty feet off the ground.

Victor stood at the edge of the ramp and watched the first heat taxi out. Six planes, throttling up, the noise building until it was not noise but pressure, a physical force against his chest, and then they were rolling and then they were up, one after another, climbing fast and banking left toward the first pylon, and the crowd roared and Victor stood still and watched them fly.

They came around the first lap in a loose string, the lead plane maybe two seconds ahead of the second, both of them low, their shadows racing across the sage beneath them, and Victor could see the afternoon sun flash off the polished aluminum of the lead plane’s belly as it banked through the turn. Three hundred and ten miles an hour, the PA announcer said. Three hundred and fifteen on the back straight.

He thought about his uncle Eddie, who was somewhere in the grandstands with a beer and a sunburn, watching this. Eddie who had driven a cab for fifteen years on the same streets, the same routes, Virginia to the depot, the depot to the Riverside, the Riverside to South Virginia, the same slow circles at twenty-five miles an hour. And here was Victor on the other side of that, watching a machine he had put his hands inside moving at three hundred miles an hour in a circle of its own, a circle so fast it blurred.

The heat finished. The planes came back in, engines ticking as they cooled on the ramp, the pilots climbing out stiff-legged and grinning. Victor and Harwell and the rest of the crew went to work immediately, checking oil levels and coolant temperatures and tire pressures, looking for leaks, listening for sounds that should not be there. They had twenty minutes before the next heat.

The afternoon wore on. Heat after heat. The noise and the speed and the crowd and the dust. The Unlimited class went last, the fastest planes, the ones that Victor had spent all week servicing, and they flew at speeds that made the earlier classes look slow, four hundred miles an hour around the pylons, the banking so steep the wingtips seemed to brush the sage.

It was over by five. The crowd began to leave. The planes sat on the ramp, engines cooling, oil dripping slow drops onto the hardpan beneath them. The sky was still clear and the wind had died and the sage smelled like sage again instead of high-octane fuel, and Victor stood on the ramp with his badge on his chest and his hands in his pockets and looked at the mountains going gold in the late light and thought that he had found the thing he was meant to do, or something close to it, something with engines and speed and the desert and the sound of it, all of it together, on this flat strip of ground between two towns where his family had lived for a hundred years.

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