Free The Last Supper: And Other Stories by Howard Fast

read.
    It was all to no avail, and they were” determined to bring in the plane with all bottles accounted for.
    The next twenty minutes were not very pleasant, and I suppose it was one of the better moments of my life when the airstrip appeared in the hazy distance. We were very low as we came in—our altitude possibly less than a thousand feet, and it all happened very quickly. Something was missing, something important and decisive in our momentary existence, and what was missing clawed at my nerves, my memory, my whole awareness; and then, as the cold sweat of fear broke out all over me, I realized that the missing factor was that loud, ear-splitting crash one hears when a C46 drops its landing gear. We were coming in without wheels.
    I broke into in wild sound, yelling “wheels, undercarriage—” and other associated words as fast and loud as I could, but it was too late. We were already at the landing strip and settling onto the concrete, and suddenly the fat belly of the plane hit the runway, and we made a beautiful landing, tearing out our belly and a good deal of the runway to a symphony of Coca Cola bottles. It was a very good landing; as I heard afterwards, we would hardly have done much better with wheels, except that the bottom part of the plane would have stayed with us, and you couldn’t blame the three young men who flew it for forgetting about their landing gear, considering what we had been through. As a matter of fact, no one was injured, and we picked our way through smashed crates and bottles out onto the lovely earth.
    I was still in Arabia, and I stood in the sun, watching the ambulance and jeeps converge upon us.
    â€œWell, here we are,” the navigator said.
    â€œHere we are,” the co-pilot said.
    â€œYou know, sir,” the pilot said to me, cheerfully, “once you’re in, you can land just as well without the wheels as with them.”
    â€œIt’s hard on the plane,” said the navigator.
    â€œThey probably jammed up with the heat,” the co-pilot lied hopefully.
    â€œA shame about all those bottles, but here we are,” said the pilot. “Still, those bottles—we won’t hear the end of that.”
    â€œWe’re in trouble—real trouble,” the navigator sighed. “If only we were carrying ammo instead!”

Christ in Cuernavaca
    O N A COOL, CLEAR SUMMER MORNING, AS MY WIFE AND I were walking down Dwight D. Morrow Street in Cuernavaca, down from the hilltop toward the old Market, we saw a man riding on a little donkey—or burro , as they call them there—and he looked like Jesus Christ. You might remark that no one knows just what Christ looked like, but there is a face that has formed with time and taken shape in ten thousand paintings and sculptures, and this was the face of that man.
    He was Indian. He wore an old poncho and a flat-brimmed hat, and his long hair hung down under the hat on either side of his long and sensitive face. His face was filled with sorrow, as so many faces in Mexico are, and his dark, beautiful eyes reflected a burden as large as a heavy wooden cross. His saddle was a homemade, hand-carved and crude wooden affair, and the two small milk cans slung on either side of the pommel and the thong sandles on his feet showed that he was a peasant who had come into the city to sell the milk of his few goats. He rode slowly, and his thoughts as well as his sight must have been turned inward, for he seemed to see nothing at all but his own cares and memories.
    We stared at him directly and impolitely, for we could not help but stare at him, and after he had passed by, we looked at each other in wonder; for it is not a very usual experience for anyone to see the living image of Christ riding on a donkey.
    We talked about it as we did our shopping, and then we took our basket of food to the plaza, the village square, so that we might sit and drink a cup of the wonderful Mexican coffee and