Snugly reclined in the leather bucket of the driver’s seat, I eased the Alfa Romeo Montreal around the broad curves and banks of Canyon Road. The cliff walls of Provo Canyon towered a thousand feet above us. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the fall. On our right, behind the cottonwoods, the Provo River surged down its course. My workmate, Kyle Walker, wanted to check out a brunch buffet up in Midway.  People said it was the best in Utah. Plus, he explained, this would give us a chance to put the Montreal through its paces. Midway was twenty-seven miles up the winding canyon highway. We would be able to see what it was made of, this classic Italian supercar. Culinary delight and automotive exhilaration—two birds with one stone.

I had bought the rare Alfa for five thousand dollars cash from a freelance stockbroker in Park City the weekend after Black Monday, now thirteen days behind us. When the stock market crashed, people unloaded peripheral assets quickly. What they needed was liquidity. For people hard hit by the crash, hobby cars were the first to go in the scramble for cash.

The Alfa Romeo Montreal had been my dream car since I had first seen one in Marseille back in 1973. My mother had taken me to the French city as a holiday treat for doing well on the English national exams. Walking along Marseille Harbour with her one day, I heard the low, throaty rumble of a high-performance engine, and—a car lover at eleven as I was at twenty-five—I turned to see what beast made that deep throaty roar. There it was, Ferrari red in the Marseille glare, the unique headlight grills’ horizontal bands covering the four headlights like elegant modernist eyelids, between them the black delta of the hood’s intake vent. I had never seen a car like it.

Here I was now driving one of my own. Black Monday came late enough in the month to prevent hard-hit exotic car owners putting timely ads into the next issue of Hemmings Motor News. If you wanted a Lamborghini Miura or a Maserati Ghibli, that was where you would find them. But once a car you sought appeared in Hemmings, you had to fight off nationwide competition: buyers came from all over. So when I saw an Alfa Romeo Montreal advertised in The Provo Herald, I knew I had to move fast. I got on the horn and sped up Provo Canyon to Park City in my black 1974 Corvette Stingray. I reached the broker’s home thirty minutes after talking to him on the phone.

Not many people were looking for an Alfa Romeo Montreal, it turned out. The broker confessed I was the only one who had responded to his ad. I took five thousand dollars in cash with me, a stack of two hundred and fifty twenties. I knew I wanted the car. In the fourteen years since I had wanted one, I had never seen one for sale. I hadn’t seen another on the road since Marseilles. Few Alfa owners knew the car existed. Two prototypes were built for the Montreal Expo in 1967. The show cars pleased the crowds in Quebec, so the car went into production in the Seventies. Less than four thousand were built. Few reached the States. I was pretty sure this was the only one in Utah. I had to have it. 

The broker was looking for ten thousand dollars, half of what he had paid for the car when he picked it up in mint condition, with low miles, at Fantasy Junction in Oakland four years earlier. But I played a stiff hand. When I pulled the fat wad of twenties out of my back pocket and he laid eyes on the cash, the panicked broker let me have the Bertone masterpiece for five thousand. He hesitated for about a second and a half.

I let him drive the Stingray back down the canyon with me—he wanted to see how that American stallion handled compared with the Alfa. The deal complete and the title in my hand, I drove the Montreal back to Provo. The broker and I raced the two beautiful cars around the canyon’s curves and bends, comparing acceleration and drag. Then I drove him back up the canyon in the Stingray and dropped him off. After all, neither of us was capable of driving two cars at a time.

The dream machine was mine. But I’d been busy working every day until eleven designing an online utility at the software company and hadn’t had time yet to really take the Montreal out for another spin. As it turned out, Kyle—a Lotus owner who also had an interest in European cars—was right about the buffet in Midway. What a feast! It was even more lavish than the Little America buffet in Salt Lake City, which was pretty much the gold standard in Utah. Perhaps it still is. 

But something else happened to us that day during our little canyon jaunt in my newly acquired Italian muscle car. On our way to Midway, we sailed past Bridal Veil Falls and the turn-off for Sundance. The Montreal performed beautifully as we modulated from the canyon road to the slightly tighter, flatter curves of the scenic route. We cruised over the dam and rolled around the shoreline of the Deer Creek Reservoir under clear blue desert skies. Driving conditions were perfect. Traffic was light. I wound up the Alfa on straight stretches and dropped gears on the tighter turns. We sped through Deer Creek State Park and continued to the turnoff for Route 113 at Charleston. There’s a thin corridor of the Wasatch Mountain State Park that curls around the reservoir there, between the highway and the water.

It was in that narrow stretch of no man’s land between Route 113 and the park boundary that we saw something neither of us had ever seen before. Parked improbably on the grass just off the road was an old helicopter. One of those with a round glass dome. Like the ones in M.A.S.H. I soon learned it was a Bell H-13 Sioux Observation helicopter. Stranger still, there was a man there by the side of the highway, holding a handwritten sign: “Helicopter Rides: 15 minutes—$100.” 

We cruised on by. For a few seconds, neither of us said anything. Then Kyle piped up. “Was that guy back there really offering rides in his chopper for a hundred bucks?” Doesn’t that seem kinda cheap?” Neither of us, we discovered, had ever ridden in a helicopter. Kyle looked at his watch. “It’s one. The brunch goes till three.  We’ve totally got fifteen minutes to kill.”

“Dya think the guy’d take the two of us up and let us split it?”

“Well, he’s standing by the road holding a sign. It’s hard to think of someone who owns a helicopter being hard up enough to ask for cash by the roadside like a kid trying to sell lemonade. Could he be another Black Monday casualty?”

“Oh, right! I guess.”

“We go back and ask him if we can split it, right? Are you game?”

“I’m game.”

Back we went. The burly bearded guy holding the sign put it down and walked over to us. We got out of the car and Kyle asked him if he’d take the two of us up for fifty each, a hundred total.

“Yup. A hundred dollars gets you fifteen minutes in the chopper.” He looked over my new acquisition. “Nice Bertone,” he said, reducing the three syllables of the Italian to two and rhyming the second one with ‘bone.’

He had picked up this identification by reading—shrewdly it seemed to me— the designer’s small signature panel behind the front wheel. But know-all Kyle corrected the bear-like man in aviators. 

“Actually it’s an Alfa Romeo? Ber-tone-ay is just the designer, though this is one of his most beautiful designs.” Pivoting his head slowly, the chopper man shot Kyle a look of death.

The guy was a dark horse alright. For a minute, I couldn’t figure out what it was about him. Then I realized I had met his type before. Scattered here and there like abandoned wrecks, they were a regular feature of the American human landscape. The signs were clear. The death stare. The undertone of doom. The chopper behind him. I shot Kyle a shut-the-fuck-up look and tried to smooth things over.

“Well, you’re right in a way—it is a Bertone!” I pronounced it correctly, as Kyle had. “Because Bertone was the designer Alfa Romeo chose specifically to design this particular car!” 

The chopper man looked at us both in silent dismay.

What a couple of fools! Someone somewhere had described a jerk as someone who couldn’t see himself as others did. Maybe—I had time to think—Kyle was a jerk by this definition and I wasn’t. But the chopper man made an effort to pass over our condescending automotive prattle. He needed our business after all. He looked back at the Italian car, gleaming and gloriously red in the bright sunlight.

            “I’ve never seen an Alfa like it!” He forced out an uncomfortable smile.

“Yeah. It’s a bituva rare one. I was lucky. Picked it up a coupla weeks back.”

“Oh, you did, did you? Really? Well, a lot of cars, and, uh, other luxuries, have been put up for sale lately.” There was that grim undertone again. “People are unloading their prized assets left and right.”

Was there an implication here about us? Did we seem like vultures to the man offering cheap rides in his helicopter by the side of the road? New economy shitheads, flush with cash and buying out the old fogeys who hadn’t protected their investments? The hated yuppies shoving aside older, more soulful generations? Perhaps. Still, all we wanted to do was give him money and get a ride and all he wanted was to give us a ride and get his hands on some cash. Or so it seemed.

The chopper guy asked if I would pop the hood of the Montreal so he could see what it had in the way of an engine. I obliged. The pilot lifted an intake valve with a forefinger and whistled at the bent ducts below. 

“Two hundred horse?”

“Just about—one ninety-seven.” 

Kyle was anxious to talk about stuff that might make the pilot more cheerful. “How about the chopper? What’s the story on that? It’s a beauty!” I closed the hood. We walked over to the miraculous contraption on the grass. The pilot told us about the great glass bird. There was an immediate lift in his voice as he rattled off its specs. A lot of technical stuff. Not only was he the pilot but he was also the chopper’s mechanic. He’d had plenty of practice, we learned, during the war. They didn’t fly the Sioux much in the hot zones. Too much glass. Almost no armor. I remembered Randall Jarrell’s poem about the death of a ball-turret gunner.  Still, our guide had piloted similar machines on combat missions. We avoided the question of how he had been able to buy his own private helicopter. We pulled out our wallets and handed over the cash. He stuffed it in his front pocket without a look.

His name was Mitch. I took the seat beside him, and Kyle squeezed himself onto a small bench seat behind us. Kyle was worried about the three of us being too heavy. Mitch was a big man. Neither of us was small. But Mitch quickly set our minds at ease.

“I’ve picked up five fully kitted marines in these things. Two bolted to the sides on MedEvac stretcher paniers. We’re well within the maximum lift guidelines.”

We were fastening our belts and the rotors above us were already spinning.  Soon the machine juddered upwards and we were airborne. Mitch seemed to become a different man at the controls. Alert. Alive. A paragon of competence. Flipping switches and rotating dials, he handled the controls with the cool technical expertise of an astronaut. He spoke to us out of the side of his mouth as we rose above the Heber Valley through the thin autumnal air. The views from the giant eyeball of the chopper dome were amazing. Over on our left was Soldier Hollow. Beyond that, the symphonic colors of the State Park leaves lay before us at their peak of their chromatic splendor—a transcendent vision of nature.

Kyle—a bit of a thrill seeker—asked Mitch if it was possible for him to scare us a bit without doing anything really dangerous. Could Mitch show us what the chopper could do? The pilot smiled faintly and jammed the controls to the right. The machine banked at ninety degrees as we veered over the outskirts of Heber.

“You mean like that?!” He turned to me with a jagged-tooth smile. My knuckles whitened as I gripped the side of the seat. I looked back at Kyle. His eyes were as big as clocks. Suddenly Mitch pulled the controls towards him, and we tilted back into a near vertical climb.

“Or maybe you mean like this?!”

“Whoa!” We were both thrown into the back of our seats. 

Mitch climbed and climbed. Then, at the top of a huge Saint Louis arch parabola, he flipped a couple of switches, rammed the controls forward and yelled. “Or like this!! Like that goddam market dive a few weeks back!! Straight down to motherfucking hell!! That what you guys are lookin’ for?! A crash!?”

We dove towards the manicured farmlands, three men in a great glass bubble plummeting towards the shattering earth. But Mitch pulled out of the dive at the last minute and swerved left, zooming towards the Wasatch Cache National Forest. We dopplered over the Provo River and made for the mountains. I could see Big Baldy up ahead of us in the clouds. 

I was getting nauseous, but before I’d caught my breath, Kyle asked Mitch what other maneuvers he could show us. Mitch was glad of a chance to show us what this old bird could do. Now he was really enjoying himself. When groundfire was intense, he told us, there was a maneuver they did called the screwdriver to avoid anti-aircraft and small arms fire. 

“It went like this!” Then, arms whirling like Shiva, he threw us into a maelstrom of kinetic chaos. We reeled from left to right, right to left, seeming almost to rotate three-sixties in the air. Mitch pulled at all the controls like a madman. Our bodies reeled. Left and right. Right and left. Up and down. Over and across. Mitch was in his element now. Back in the theatre. Stone face steadfast against the reeling earth. All controls an extension of his will. A daredevil cheating fate, weaving his flying machine between the flak and shrapnel of death and doom.

I was glad when the screwdriver was over, and we could turn again in the broad gentle curves of a recreational flight. Mitch returned too—once again he was just a guy giving a couple of tourists joy rides in his chopper. Our fifteen-minute whirligig through the sky, needless to say, passed quickly. Soon we were hovering over the field next to the Montreal. Down on the ground, the beautiful Italian machine seemed modest in its powers as we jiggered towards the flat grassland beside it. Both of us were nauseous and unsteady on our legs when we climbed out. Noticing this, Mitch chuckled. He had shown us something, after all. What, I wasn’t exactly sure. 

“Ber-tone-ay!” he exclaimed with a laugh, clamping a meaty paw on the hood of the Alfa, his handprint disappearing like a chimera. “That is one helluva fine lookin setta wheels you got there! Hotdamn! Anyway. I’ll be out here Saturday and Sunday afternoons for the next little while. If you know what I mean. You fellas know anyone else who wants a chopper ride, send ‘em on up and I’ll give ‘em a ride to remember.  People can charter me for longer trips too if they want. There’s nothing like the High Uintas at this time of year. I can go farther afield than that, if you know anyone who’s interested. All the way down to the Grand Canyon. Zion. Bryce. Bright Angel Point. Angels Landing. Wherever. Longer trips just need a refueling stop, and it gets a bit expensive, but still—if you know anyone….”

We told him we’d ask around at the company. Kyle got in the passenger side of the Alfa and waved goodbye to Mitch, thanking him for the ride. I shook the pilot’s hand, thanked him for a memorable experience, and climbed into the driver seat. We turned the Alfa around and rolled past Mitch. He leaned against the dome of the chopper and waved with a glum smile as we passed. 

Before I turned back onto the highway, I looked in the rearview mirror and caught a last glimpse of the pilot. His smile was gone. He looked at the ground, shook his head, shuffled off to retrieve his sign, brought it back, and rested it against the chopper door. Then he leaned against the dome again, legs crossed at the ankles. As their images receded behind me, the man and his machine merged into one complex silhouette in the fierce rays of the sun.