| On the Wing | by Eric Kraft, as Peter Leroy |
| Preface |
| On the Wing | by Eric Kraft, as Peter Leroy |
| Preface |
ON THE WING
YOU CAN ORDER IT
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Preface Albertine Gets the Urge for Going . . . we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight . . . Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”  HE
STORY SO FAR: I had thought, when I began writing about my aerocycle,
my trip to the Land of Enchantment, my sojourn at the Faustroll
Institute for ’Pataphysics (known to some of its alumni as the
Faustroll Institute for Promising Lads), and my return to a hero’s
welcome in Babbington, my home town — Clam Capital of America,
Birthplace of Teen Flight, Gateway to the Past — that I would write one
book of medium size . . . however, the single book that I had
intended to write about my exploit has become three books, the Flying
trilogy.This book is the second volume in that trilogy, which will, when it is complete, set the record straight on the subject of the celebrated solo flight that I made in the summer of my fifteenth year from Babbington, New York, to Corosso, New Mexico. (I was fourteen at the time of the flight; I would turn fifteen at the end of October.) In the first volume, Taking Off, I built the aerocycle, Spirit of Babbington, a single-seat airplane based on drawings that I had found in an ancient issue of a magazine called Impractical Craftsman, made my travel plans, and departed. In this volume, Spirit and I meander from Babbington to New Mexico, and in the third volume, Flying Home, I will return to Babbington, somewhat older and, possibly, somewhat wiser. While I was writing the first volume, Albertine (my darling, my lover, my muse and inspiration, my constant companion, my wife) suffered a crash while riding her bicycle in Manhattan. Emergency medical technicians took her to Carl Schurz Hospital, just down the street from the apartment building where we lived. X-rays revealed that the accident had fractured her pelvis along a nearly continuous line from the symphysis pubis to the crest of ilium, cracking the bone badly enough to keep her off her feet for weeks. During the several days of her hospital stay, days that were only the very beginning of her convalescence, she experienced a Baudelairean return toward childhood, regaining in the highest degree the faculty of keenly interesting herself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial, seeing everything in a state of newness, with the sensory drunkenness of a child. One consequence was her becoming infatuated with the “flyguys,” a swaggering bunch of medical technicians who ferried the sick and injured to Carl Schurz Hospital in helicopters. When Albertine finally earned her release from the hospital by demonstrating that she could hobble about with the aid of a walker, the flyguys announced their intention to take her on a celebratory joyride around Manhattan in their chopper. Her eyes lit up. The flyguys hustled her to the hospital roof in the wheelchair that I’d rented to take her home, and then they trundled her aboard their helicopter. I stood and watched the machine rise and tilt and chatter out over the East River. Then I remained for a long while on the roof waiting for the flyguys to bring her back to me. I waited. Time passed. Foolishly, I had thought that the flyguys would deliver less than they had promised, just take her for a short spin, and bring her right back to me. When that didn’t happen, I began to panic. What if they had conspired to spirit her off, take her from me forever? What if she had become so enamored of them that she couldn’t live without them? What if she thought of this as an escape? What if she had come to think of me as an encumbrance, something that she had to shed before she could fly? What if she had left me on the roof like a broken shackle and had made her getaway? Writing in the calm of a morning several years later, I can allow myself to think that I was deluded, and I can even allow myself to think that, despite my moods and my boundless ineptitude, I am not nearly so difficult to live with as I feared she might think, but at the time the likelihood that she would want to escape from me suddenly seemed very high. I waited some more — and I waited some more. Every time I heard the clatter of a helicopter, my heart leapt and raced like an excited pet eager for Albertine’s tickling caress behind its ears. Every time the clatter passed or turned and trundled away, my heart sighed and slunk into a corner. As time passed, I began to sweat. I began to feel powerless, hopeless, impotent. There was nothing I could do to bring her back. I was standing on a rooftop, with no way to confront the flyguys, reclaim her, sieze her, carry her off, take her home to my cave. When another helicopter began to rattle into range, I decided — or some part of me below consciousness decided — that I wasn’t going to let this one get away. I dashed to the elevator penthouse, punched the button, and banged the door with my fist until the elevator arrived. I rushed in and rode down to the ground floor. I hastened through the emergency room with an affectation of calm, as if I weren’t insane, but as soon as I was outside I began running in the direction of the sound of the helicopter. I ran like a boy, a lovesick boy. After a couple of blocks, I stopped to catch my breath and to listen for the sound of the helicopter. It was south of me now. I began running down Second Avenue. I paused again at 86th Street. The helicopter had turned west. I began running along 86th Street. If you’ve tried running along the sidewalks of New York in midafternoon, you know that you step on a lot of toes. I stepped on a lot of toes. People shouted at me. People lashed out at me. One or two people tried to trip me up. I ran until I was out of breath, and even then I walked as quickly as I could, until I heard one helicopter approaching as another receded and realized that I was a man on foot chasing helicopters. I stopped, and I told myself that I was acting like a fool, then corrected myself and told myself that I was a fool. Then, when I had caught my breath, I began running again, in the direction of the most recent helicopter, because, after all, it might be the one that she was in. Did I think about calling the police, dialing 911? Oh, yes. I did. But then I thought about what I would say: “My wife has been abducted by flying EMTs.” They must get a lot of calls like that on any given day. There must be a category for them. Eventually, I gave up. I would tell you that sanity returned, if I thought you would believe it. The truth is that I surrendered to exhaustion and resignation. I walked back to Carl Schurz hospital. I decided that I would wait on the roof. I would wait all afternoon, all evening, all night if I had to. If she never returned, I would be able to say, “I waited all night.” I found that consoling, somehow. I have no idea, now, why I found it consoling then, but I did. I also told myself that I would never tell her about my running through the city in panic, chasing helicopters, and I never have — until now, here, in the pages you’ve just read. THE HELICOPTER eventually reappeared from the north. It swung over Carl Schurz Park and settled gently onto the hospital roof. The flyguys off-loaded Albertine, hugged and fondled her, and finally settled her into the rented wheelchair. We all descended in the elevator, and there was another leave-taking at the hospital door. Then I pushed her home to our apartment, and on the way I confessed to her, with some fervor, my hope that neither she nor I would ever see the flyguys again. ALBERTINE WORKED HARD at her recovery. As soon as she was permitted to exercise, she began riding a recumbent bicycle in the vast, multistory gymnasium up the street from our apartment building, and she swam lap after lap in their 25-meter pool. She never missed a physical therapy session and did all the exercises that her therapists prescribed. One therapist was amazed by what he took to be her tolerance for pain. “It’s not that,” she said. “In truth, I have a very low tolerance for pain, and I’m feeling terrible pain right now, while I’m trying to do what you tell me I should do, but I want to be back on my feet as soon as possible, and if you tell me that this exercise is going to be good for me, then I will do it.” She wasn’t foolish; she didn’t allow her urge to be up and about to drive her to excess. She began slowly, and she avoided any position or effort that was not prescribed, but as she felt her strength return and as the pain began slowly to diminish, she increased the work she did, going far beyond what the therapists had expected her to do. It hurt. I could see that it hurt, when she let it show. There were times in bed when she made the mistake, in sleep or half-sleep, of turning onto her side — or merely beginning to turn onto her side — and the pain made her scream. I PUSHED HER EVERYWHERE in the wheelchair I’d rented, but she hated being in it. She yearned to graduate to the walker — a frame of aluminum tubing that would allow her to take some of her weight off her legs as she moved ahead one slow step at a time. Although she’d passed a “walker test” before leaving the hospital, she wasn’t permitted to leave the chair and walk with the aid of the walker until the line of bone repair along the fracture was strong enough. When that day came, she began a determined assault on distance, beginning with a walk of just a few feet eastward from the front door of the building, along East 89th Street, and back. From that beginning, she extended her range until she could circle the block, working at it with determination and perseverance, as if she were in training for the walker Olympics. ANOTHER CONSEQUENCE of Albertine’s convalescent return toward childhood (and her thereby regaining in the highest degree the faculty of keenly interesting herself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial, seeing everything in a state of newness, with the sensory drunkenness of a child) was her surprising interest in the literature of home-built and kit-built aircraft. In particular, she became an avid reader of builders’ logs. If you do not belong to the relatively small group of builders of small aircraft or to the slightly smaller group of their fans, you may not be aware of the custom prevalent among the builders of keeping logs of their progress as they work. For accuracy’s sake, make that “efforts” rather than “progress.” These logs, known among the fraternity of plane-builders as “construction logs” or, for short, “clogs,” are often posted on the World Wide Web. Reading them became Albertine’s pastime, then her passion. I get up earlier in the morning than Albertine does. We both wake at the same time, but I get up, get out of bed, make myself some coffee, and work on my personal history for a while. While I write, Albertine reads. Often, during her recuperation, when I returned to the bedroom after an hour or two of work to wish her good morning, I would find our bed covered with pages of online clogs that she’d printed out for ease of reading in bed. “This isn’t becoming an obsession, is it?” I asked her one morning when the bed was heavily clogged. “A passion,” she admitted, “but not an obsession,” she claimed. “These are really amazing, Peter. There’s such a wealth of human drama in these accounts of failed attempts to realize a dream.” “I have to admit that I haven’t spent any time reading them,” I said. “I can understand that you’d be reluctant to expose yourself to them.” “Why?” “Because I understand you.” “I mean why, in your estimation, wouldn’t I want to expose myself to them?” “Because they are so discouraging. They dash hopes. They shatter illusions. And you are a person who lives on hope and nurses illusions.” “That’s true,” I said. It is. She understands me well. I’m a muddleheaded dreamer. I once belonged to a muddleheaded dreamers’ club, as you will see in the pages to come. “The typical clog begins full of optimism,” she said. “Here — listen to this: ‘The U-Build-It-U-Fly-It kit arrived this morning, and when Delia called me at work to say that it had been delivered I immediately feigned illness and left. I can’t describe the feeling of buoyancy that I felt in the car on the way home, knowing that the kit would be waiting for me there. But I’ll try. It was as if the car and I were not quite touching the road. In a sense, I was already flying, and the car had become the UBI-UFI. Although I hadn’t even opened the kit yet, I felt as if my work was already done, and done well. I felt capable. I felt — how can I put it? — wise. It was as if the lightness I felt were sufficient justification for buying the kit, for the sacrifices I’d inflicted on Delia and the kids. I could fly. That was worth it.’” “That sounds delightful,” I said, naïvely. “It sounds as if the guy is really off to a great start—” “Then, typically, the tedium sets in. Listen: ‘Eighty-three days so far, and I don’t know how much more of this I can take. Night after night, alone in the garage, struggling to decipher the instructions, too bewildered to make any real progress, too proud to ask that wiseass Stan next door for help. Why, why, why did I ever begin this? I feel like a condemned man, condemned to isolation, laboring alone. It’s like trying to cross a desert on foot, or sailing alone around the world, or trying to survey the vast frozen wastes of the Siberian wilderness, struggling to build a shelter out of reeds in the teeth of the cutting wind. Nobody understands what I’m going through, nobody could, nobody cares.’” “Grim,” I said. “Often, there is a laudable effort to soldier on: ‘Today I’ve discovered a new determination, and I’m proud of myself for that. I’ve found a strength of will in myself that I hadn’t known was there, and I think I’m justified in praising myself for that. I’ve learned that I’ve got something I might have to call grit. Or maybe pluck. Or maybe it’s good old American stick-to-itiveness. Whatever you want to call it, I’ve got it. It’s me against this damned plane, and in the name of all that’s holy, I’m going to come out on top!’” “Impressive.” “And then, finally, defeat: ‘This is the end. I just can’t go on. Every day is torture. After hours wasted in the garage, I lie awake in bed trying to find a way out of this folly. For a while, I thought I might be able to persuade the kid next door — the eldest son of that wiseassed bastard, Stan — to take the damned plane off my hands. He spent a couple of evenings watching me work, and I thought I had him hooked, but then he just stopped showing up. Kids today. They’ve got no sense of purpose. They can’t stick with a thing. My only hope, I’ve decided, is to get Delia pregnant. Then I’d have to convert the garage into a room for the baby. The plane would have to go. I recognize that this is a desperate plan. But I’m a desperate man.’” “Chilling,” I said. For a while, Albertine said nothing. She was overwhelmed, I think, by the emotions occasioned by the builder’s defeat. When, at last, she felt like herself again, she said, “I want to go on the road.” “Touring with your band?” “Be serious, please,” she said. “Maybe it’s my long period of immobility that is making me feel this way, but I’ve got the urge to travel.” “Where do you want to go, my darling? I’ll push you anywhere.” “Oh, please. I don’t want to be pushed. You have been a darling to push me everywhere, and you have been a darling to help me into the pool and into the hot tub, to help me into bed, to help me out of bed. I’ve even enjoyed it. I’ve felt pampered. I’ve felt loved. And I love you for it, for all of it. But I’ve had enough. I don’t want to be helped. I’d like to range beyond this block, beyond this island, and I don’t want to be pushed. I’d like to do what you said not so long ago. How did you put it? ‘Walk out our door one day and just go.’” “That’s it,” I said. “I met a guy named Johnny on my trip to New Mexico who put the urge that way: ‘Just go.’” “‘Just go,’” she said. “That’s right. That’s what I’d like to do.” “And stop somewhere at the end of each day for a hot shower, a delicious meal, and a comfy bed?” “Exactly.” “By what conveyance?” I asked warily. “Plane, train, aerocycle?” “By car, I think.” “We don’t have a car.” “Let’s buy one.” “Are you serious?” “I think I am. Our little world is not enough for me just now. I want to get up and go. I want to be out in the big, wide world, wandering with you.” “And do you have a specific car in mind?” “I’m afraid I do.” “Afraid?” “Yes. Afraid that the car I have in mind is a foolish choice. But I think it’s a choice that you’d make in my place.” “Now I’m afraid,” I said. I should explain the reasons for our fear. I should tell you about our cars — well, not all of them — that would tax your tolerance too much. I will tell you about two of them and you can extrapolate from those. Let’s see. Which two? The Twinkle, I think, since it was our first car, and, of course, the powerful Kramler, since it was our most magnificent. There was a time — a time that today seems very long ago — when Albertine and I were enthusiastic motorists. We took Sunday drives, we made rambling excursions, we were adept at double-clutching. In those years, we owned a number of cars that were great fun to drive, but were very little fun to maintain in driving condition. The first of them was a red Twinkle. This was a British car with right-hand drive. We bought it from an English architect. The Twinkle was all of ten feet long and had ten-inch wheels. It really was great fun to drive. It had two transversely mounted rotary engines. One, in front, beneath its diminutive hood (or bonnet), drove the front wheels; the other, in back, in its trunk (or boot), drove the rear wheels. Both engines were small, but their combined output gave the Twinkle considerable oomph. It went like a bat out of hell — a little red bat out of hell. When I was the Twinkle’s co-owner, I would have bristled if you had told me, Reader, that it looked like a toy, but when I see one on the street today I recognize that it must have looked like a dangerous toy to Albertine’s parents. They had been worried enough about consigning their daughter to the care of the Birdboy of Babbington when we announced that we were going to get married. I must have looked like a dangerous toy myself. Her mother asked Albertine, pointedly, “Wouldn’t you rather go to Europe?” Albertine chose me over the European tour, and not long after making the choice she found herself driving a Twinkle and discovering a love of speed. Alas, as the Twinkle aged, it developed a problem that apparently could not be solved. The engines began twisting on their mounts under acceleration or deceleration. Apparently, the art of mounting engines had not then attained its present degree of perfection. When we made an upshift and accelerated, the engines would twist rearward. This meant that the front engine twisted toward the cockpit until the top struck the fire wall. On deceleration, the reverse phenomenon occurred, with both engines twisting forward, the rear engine striking the back of the diminutive back seat. The only mechanic who even suggested a solution told us that the “constant velocity joints” had to be replaced at a price greater than what we had paid for the car. Putting to work the mechanical skills I’d acquired in building — or attempting to build — a boyhood’s worth of Impractical Craftsman projects, I designed a set of braces for the engines, had a machine shop fabricate them to my specifications, and bolted the braces between the engine block and the fire wall, in front, and between the engine block and the back of the back seat, in the rear. The engines no longer twisted. Success? Not quite. The cabin roared with the sound of every moving part in both engines, since every vibration and detonation was transmitted via the braces to the steel shell of the car itself. It was like driving inside a hi-fi speaker during a fuzz-bass solo. Clearly the time had come to trade the little baby in on another car or find some sucker to buy the Twinkle from us. My parents had taught me that one never gets a car’s true worth when trading it in, so I advertised it for private sale. When I was demonstrating the Twinkle for potential buyers, I kept the radio volume high and sought out extended fuzz-bass solos. Some sap bought the car. I like to think that he is driving it still, and that it pleases him, noise and all. After the Twinkle, we owned a succession of British sports cars. (I wish that I could say “other British sports cars,” but the Twinkle, a four-passenger car, was never regarded as a sports car by the drivers of two-seaters, who scorned to wave at Albertine and me in the clannish way they greeted the drivers of other two-seaters. The Twinkle was faster than all but the most expensive and exotic of them, but that didn’t matter; in fact, one roadster driver dismissed it as a “hot rod.”) With each of our sports cars, we experienced a brief honeymoon, a euphoric period during which we took several pleasant drives. Then the car would begin breaking down. The drives would become less pleasant, and many of them ended at repair shops. We got to know a number of interesting mechanics. We learned how to whack a fuel pump in just the right way to get it pumping again after it had quit in the fast lane of a highway. We would invest some money — sometimes quite a lot — repairing the sporty little thing, and we would try to convince ourselves that it was now as good as new, but it would keep breaking down, and in time we would sell it and buy another. We had in those days the naïve belief that somewhere there was a reliable British sports car that we could purchase, used, for a reasonable price. Perhaps that belief seems ludicrous to you. Perhaps you cannot imagine that two intelligent young people — which we then were — could labor under such an absurd delusion. If you feel that way, I just want to inform you — or remind you — that a large segment of the population of the United States believes that the sun revolves around the earth, and so I say, in the manner of Bosse-de-Nage in Alfred Jarry’s Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, “Ha-ha.” As we traded in, we traded up. We would rid ourselves of one limping sports car and promptly buy another that was more powerful, more expensive, and more difficult to keep running. We always had an automobile loan, and the balance kept increasing. Little by little, we progressed from one of the most basic sports cars, a Benson-Greeley Gnome, to one of the most sophisticated, the powerful Kramler. Our Kramler was powered by a V-12 engine with four camshafts and nickel-plated cam covers, a thing of great beauty. The entire front of the car’s body tilted up to reveal this engine, in a far more dramatic and aesthetically effective manner than the ordinary hood would have done. Tilting the front end forward did not, however, allow easy access to the engine for the servicing and repair that it required at frequent intervals. That access might have been better provided by the conventional hood arrangement. Instead, the Kramler people required the mechanic to remove the engine and work on it outside the car. A disconcertingly large number of repair and maintenance procedures in the shop manual, which we owned and which I sometimes used as bedtime reading, began with the words, “First remove the engine; see page 19.” One of these procedures was changing the oil filter. We haven’t owned a car for years. Living in Manhattan makes a car unnecessary, and the cost of garaging a car in Manhattan makes a car insupportable. Sometimes I miss driving. I can’t manage to get as excited by a car as I used to, but there are several available now that I would like to drive. I don’t want to own any of them, but I still have the urge to get into something sleek and powerful and just take off, heading west. “What is this fearsome machine you have in mind?” I asked. “It’s a Prysock Electro-Flyer.” “I don’t think I’ve ever seen—” “It’s the only one of its kind. And there will never be another.” “Is it a dream car? A concept car? A show car?” “It was built as a prototype. The designer-builder hoped to put it into production, but he has since abandoned the plan and moved on to other things.” “Mm.” “It’s a sleek little thing with a top speed of 140 miles per hour.” “Impressive,” I said. “Especially for an electric car.” “An electric car? Wow.” “And the Electro-Flyer is, as I’m sure you’ll agree in a moment, when I show you some pictures, a thing of beauty.” “Can’t wait. Somehow ‘Prysock’ does sound vaguely familiar—” “In the spirit of full and frank disclosure, I have to point out that the Prysock Electro-Flyer is—how shall I put this—derivative.” “Oh?” I said, puzzled. “The design was heavily influenced by the 1960 Nu-Klea Disco Volante Runabout.” “Disco Volante? As in—” “As in ‘Flying Saucer.’” “Oh,” I said, disappointed. “We’d be buying a replica.” “Not exactly. The mechanicals are original with the designer-builder.” “But still—” “I know how you feel about replicas,” she said quickly, “but this is different. It’s the work of a madman obsessed with detail and accuracy.” “Oh!” I said, brightening. “Here’s his ad.” I looked at the picture. I read the copy. “You mean Norton Prysock built this thing?” I asked. “Built this beautiful car. Yes.” “I seem to recall that you had a low opinion of Nort and his skills when you examined the photographs of the Pinch-a-Penny on his Web site.” “I still think that as an aeronautical engineer he’s not much use.” “But you think he could build a good car?” “I’ll want to examine it carefully, of course, take it for a spin, and have a mechanic go over it thoroughly, but I suspect that this car is the one good thing Norton Prysock ever made — and remember, too, that in the case of the Pinch-a-Penny he was asking me to believe that he could get me into the air and keep me there, while in the case of the Electro-Flyer he is making no such claim.” “I don’t know,” I said. “I see a dangerous parallel between Nort’s situation and my own when I began building the aerocycle: I had drawings of a finished plane, but no plans for building it, so I had to improvise. Nort had nothing but pictures of the Disco Volante, which were the equivalent of the drawings I had, invaluable as inspiration but useless in terms of engineering — so he must have had to do a lot of improvising — and the result —” “Oh, Peter.” “I’m trying to be realistic.” “Don’t.” I looked at her, looked into her eyes, saw the longing there, and said, “Okay.”  DESPITE WHAT HIS AD CLAIMED, Norton Prysock was not willing to let the world’s only Electro-Flyer go for what we considered a reasonable offer. Even after a long negotiation he wanted much, much more than I thought Albertine would be willing to pay. “He is asking us to pay for a car more than twney-six point three percent of the cost of the average studio apartment in Manhattan,” I said as Albertine and I huddled at the end of Nort’s driveway, conferring. “Where did you get that bit of information?” “I’m basing it on a survey reported in this morning’s Times,” I said, unfolding the paper to the story. Albertine skimmed it quickly and announced, “But he’s asking less than one percent of the average price of a Manhattan property with four bedrooms or more.” “Are you kidding?” I asked her. “No,” she said, pointing to the relevant figure. “Peter—” “Yes?” “If we sold our apartment — a two-bedroom apartment, I remind you — we could buy this car — and have lots and lots of change left over.” “Shouldn’t we save that for our golden years?” “Yes, we should. That would be wise. It would be prudent. We try to be wise. We try to be prudent. Well, I try to be prudent. However, after my fall I find that I am feeling the cold breath of mortality on the back of my neck, and it’s making me impulsive and foolish.” “Are you sure it’s not the hot breath of the great god Urge that you feel?” “Could be,” she said coquettishly. “Urge couldn’t be appeased with some shoes, could he?” “Not this time,” she said. I was about to speak again, but she put a finger over my mouth, shushed me, and said, “Listen.” I listened. I expected her to speak; I thought she wanted me to listen to her, but after a minute, she said, “Sometimes, more and more often, especially at night, I can hear them, out beyond us, ranged in rings and rings around rings, the angry, murderous, rapacious numbers of our species, growling and cursing and gnashing their teeth, brandishing their weapons, blowing one another to smithereens, feeding their hatred with hatred, stoking their anger with anger, fueling their selfishness with arrogance. There’s no getting away from them, but we could do as your pal B. W. Beath advised and, for a while at least, just pass through the squabbling world without being a part of it, like a breeze.” “In an Electro-Flyer?” I asked. “In the Electro-Flyer,” she said. We paid Nort’s price. Peter Leroy New York City February 15, 2007 |
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ON THE WING
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Copyright © 2007 by Eric Kraft On the Wing is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. St. Martin’s Press will publish On the Wing in the summer of 2007. For information about publication rights outside the U. S. A., audio rights, serial rights, screen rights, and so on, e-mail Kraft’s indefatigable agent, Alec “Nick” Rafter. The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile. |
ABOUT
THE PERSONAL HISTORY
LITTLE
FOLLIES
COMPLETE
SITE CONTENTS
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