Get Me to the Church on Time

9.

Divorces are all alike, according to Dostoievsky, or some Russian, but marriages are each unique, or different, or something. Our wedding was no exception.

It started off great. There’s nothing like a morning ceremony. My only regret was that Candy couldn’t get the whole day off.

The weather was perfect. The sun shone down from a cloudless sky on the long, level lawn of the Squirrel Ridge Holiness Church. Cindy’s catering van arrived at ten, and she and the two kids, Ess and Em, started unloading folding tables and paper plates, plastic toothpicks and cut flowers, and coolers filled with crab cakes and ham biscuits for the open-air lunchtime reception.

All Candy’s friends from the Huntsville Parks Department were there, plus the friends we had in common, like Bonnie from the Bonny Baguette (who brought her little blackboard with the daily specials written on it; it was like her brain) and Buzzer from Squirrel Ridge, the Nursing Home, complete with diamond nose stud. My friend Hoppy from Hoppy’s Good Gulf, who happened to be a Holiness preacher, was officiating. (“Course I’ll marry Whipper Will’s young-un to Whipper Will’s Yank, ‘nuff said.”).

Aunt Minnie looked lovely in her colorful Lifthatvanian peasant costume (red and blue, with pink lace around the sleeves) smelling faintly of mothballs. Even Uncle Mort sported a gay ribbon round his urn.

It was all perfect, except—where was Wu?

“He’ll be here,” said Cindy as she unpacked the ice sculpture of Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveler (the only thing the local ice sculptor knew how to do), and sent Ess and Em to arrange the flowers near the altar.

“He’s on a very slow plane,” I said.

Finally, we felt like we had to get started, Best Man or no. It was 11:55 and the guests were beginning to wilt. I gave a reluctant nod and the twin fiddles struck up “The Wedding March”—

And here came the bride. I hadn’t seen Candy since the night before. She looked resplendent in her dress white uniform, complete with veil, her medals gleaming in the sun. Her bridesmaids all wore khaki and pink.

Since I was short a ring, Hoppy slipped me the rubber O-ring from the front pump of a Ford C-6 transmission. “Use this, Yank,” he whispered. “You can replace it with the real one later.”

“Brethren and sistren and such, we are gathered here today…” Hoppy began. Then he sniffed, and cocked his head, and looked around. “Is that a Ford?”

It was indeed. There is nothing that stops a wedding like a “Tin Goose” setting down on a church lawn. Those fat-winged little birds can land almost anywhere.

This one taxied up between the ham biscuit and punch tables, and shut down all three engines with a couple of backfires and a loud cough-cough. The silence was deafening.

The little cabin door opened, and out stepped a six foot Chinaman in a powder blue tux and a scuffed leather helmet. It was my best Man, Wilson Wu. He took off the helmet as he jogged up the aisle to polite applause.

“Sorry I’m late!” he whispered, slipping me the ring.

“What’s with the blue tux?” I knew it wasn’t the one I had reserved for him at Five Points Formal Wear.

“Picked it up last night during a fuel stop in Bozeman,” he said. “It was prom night there, and blue was all they had left.”

Hoppy was pulling my sleeve, asking me questions. “Of course I do!” I said. “You bet I do!” There was the business with the ring, the real one (“Is that platinum or just white gold?” Cindy gasped). Then it was time to kiss the bride.

Then it was time to kiss the bride again.

As soon as the ceremony was over, the twin fiddles struck up “Brand-new Tennessee Waltz,” and we all drifted back to the tables in the shade of the Trimotor for refreshments. We found an unfamiliar Mayan-Chinese-looking dude eyeing the shrimp, and made him welcome. It was Wu’s pilot friend, Huan Juan. Ess and Em served the congealed salad, after shrieking and hugging their father, whom they hadn’t seen in six weeks.

“I should have known better than to worry, Wu,” I said. “But did you say Bozeman? I thought that was in Montana.”

“It is,” he said, filling his plate with potato salad. “It’s not on the way from eastern Quetzalcan to northern Alabama, unless you take the Great Triangle Route.”

I knew he wanted me to ask, so I did: “The what?”

Smiling proudly, Wu took a stack of ham biscuits. “You know how a Great Circle Route looks longer on a map, but is in fact the shortest way across the real surface of the spherical Earth?”

“Uh huh.” I grabbed some more of the shrimp. They were going fast. The twin fiddles launched into “Orange Blossom Special.”

“Well, in all my struggles with the Time axes for EMS, I accidentally discovered the shortest route across the negatively folded surface of local space-time. Local meaning, our Universe. Look.”

Wu took what I thought was a map out of the pocket of his tux and unrolled it. It was covered with figures:

“As you can see, it’s sort of counter-intuitive,” he said. “It means flying certain strict patterns and altitudes, and of course it only works in a three engine plane. But there it is. The shortest Great Triangle Space-Time Route from Quetzalcan City to Huntsville traverses the Montana high plains and skims the edge of Chesapeake Bay.”

“Amazing,” I said. The shrimp, which are as big as pistol grips, are grown in freshwater ponds in western Kentucky. I couldn’t stop eating them.

“Numbers don’t he,” said Wu. “Not counting fuel stops, and with a Ford Trimotor there are lots of those, it took Huan Juan and me only 22 hours to fly 6476.54 miles in a plane with a top speed of 112 mph. Let me try one of those giant shrimp.”

“That’s great,” I said, looking through the thinning crowd for Candy. “But it’s almost 12:20, and Candy has to be at work at one.”

Wu looked shocked. “No Honeymoon?”

I shook my head. “Candy traded shifts for the trip to New York, and now she has to work nights, plus all weekend.”

“It’s not very romantic,” said Candy, edging up beside me. “But it was the best we could do. Huan Juan, have you tried the giant shrimp?”

The pilot nodded without answering. He and Wu were consulting in whispers. They looked up at the clear blue sky, then down at the calculations on the unrolled paper.

“They are intimately entwined,” I heard Wu say (I thought he was talking about Candy and me; I found out later he was talking about Time and Space). “All you have to do to unravel and reverse them is substitute this N for this 34.8, and hold steady at 2622 feet and 97 mph, air speed. Can you fly it?”

Huan Juan nodded, reaching for another giant shrimp.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Let’s take a ride,” said Wu, snapping his leather helmet under his chin. “Don’t look so surprised. This Trimotor’s equipped with a luxury Pullman cabin; it once belonged to a Latin American dictator.”

“Where are we going?” I asked, pulling Candy to my side.

Cindy handed Candy a bouquet. Hoppy and Bonnie and all our friends were applauding.

With a shy smile she pulled me aside. While Em and Ess tied shoes to the tail of the plane, and while Huan Juan and Wu cranked up the three ancient air-cooled radials with a deafening roar, and while the rest of the guests polished off the giant shrimp, Candy opened the top button of her tunic to give me a glimpse of what she was wearing underneath.

Then we got on the plane and soared off into the clear blue. But that’s another story altogether.