Conquerors of the Sky (10 page)

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky

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Adrian did not confront his mother with this new, infinitely more stunning revelation. He was her son, with the same instinct for secrecy and evasion. He walked back through the fog to his flat, where he ignored Amanda's pleas to tell him what was wrong. He sent her to bed and sat in the small study composing a list of adjectives to describe his mother.

lascivious
loose
adulterous
profligate
amoral
lecherous
lubricious
hedonistic
disreputable

He decided he preferred
lubricious
. It best described the cold, concealed lust with which Clarissa and Geoffrey satisfied their appetites. Adrian stared out at the fog, seeing life for the first time with adult eyes. Tugboats hooted derisively on the Thames. Occasionally a larger vessel emitted a long, mocking moan.

In the bedroom slept his California wife whom he had married in his adolescent American idealism, never realizing that a different way of life awaited men of substance. If his mother had only had the courage to tell him. But she clung to her shameful secret, knowing he would condemn her in his ruined father's name.

Now Adrian saw the hidden purpose of the weekend house parties. They were all assignations between lovers like Geoffrey and Clarissa. Men of substance, men with forethought, parked their wives elsewhere and rendezvoused with lubricious women, while the middle and lower classes plodded through torturous moral lives.

The sheer duration of Clarissa's deception staggered Adrian almost as much as the fact. Geoffrey had been her lover when they watched Bleriot fly the Channel. For years before that, probably. All the years she had left her ruined husband behind her in New York to enjoy the company of a man of substance.

Substance? Money! That night the word was scorched into Adrian's brain. The word and its synonyms. Power, pleasure, freedom, lust, desire, fulfillment. And its antonyms: weakness, pain, humiliation, bondage, frustration, deception, loss.

In the morning, a snuffling Amanda begged him to tell her why he had not come to bed until dawn. Was he disturbed to discover he had an ancestor like Oakes Ames, a man as crooked and corrupt as the worst of the California railroad barons?

Adrian's arm froze in the act of raising his coffee cup to his mouth. His historian's brain shifted into gear. Crooked, corrupt? Oakes Ames, the bluff,
blunt shovel maker from Massachusetts who had built the railroad that rescued the United States from dissolution?

Condemned by the hypocrites and thieves in Congress who took his money, Oakes Ames scorned them all and went home refusing to admit an iota of guilt. Here was a man who looked ruin in the eye and defied it. Who did not give a damn if the world considered him corrupt or disgraced. He was a hero who had saved his country.

In a flash Adrian saw an ancestor he could respect, even love. An ancestor who ignoredâno, transcendedâthe approval of women. The fact that both Clarissa and Amanda condemned Oakes Ames, the one in her Boston silence, the other in her California naivete, was the best possible argument in his favor. Oakes Ames combined substance and heroism, money and patriotism, power and indifference to the vacuous morality of the herd.

“I don't think he was corrupt,” Adrian said. “I think you need a different word for him. Effective?”

“He debauched Congress!”

“I suspect that was a contradiction in terms thenâand probably still is one.”

“Adrianâthat's the crudest sort of cynicism. Is that what merchant banking does to you?”

“No. It's what history does to you,” Adrian said.

DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE

A few feet away, the Yellowstone River was a silent silver ribbon in the twilight. The snow-tipped peaks of the Bitterroot Range towered in the distance, cold, silent, serene. The frowning curly-haired young pilot sat with his back against a tree, his face toward the mountains. “The war was a disgrace,” Charles Lindbergh said. “A national disgrace.”

“In more ways than one, Lindy,” Frank Buchanan said.

Fellow members of the Reynolds Air Circus, Frank and Lindbergh had spent the summer of 1922 barnstorming across Montana and Wyoming, risking their planes and their necks at county fairs and rodeos. Frank admired Lindbergh's skill as a pilot. There was nothing he could not make his Lincoln Standard biplane do in the air. Inside loops, stall spins, rolling pullouts. Only Buzz McCall could match him. Two members of the circus had been killed trying to imitate them. Frank, flying a Curtiss Jenny, a leftover wartime trainer that he had picked up for fifty dollars and rebuilt himself, did not even try.

Lindbergh had been too young to get into the war. But he would have refused to fight, even if he had been drafted. He had inherited a violent opposition to it from his congressman father, who had written a book accusing the British and Wall Street of sucking America into the carnage. His father had
been called a traitor and his political career had been destroyed, leaving Lindy with a deep contempt for popular opinion. Already detesting the war for his own reasons, Frank was delighted to add Lindy's populist litany to his creed.

When they were not denouncing the war, Frank and Lindy bemoaned the current state of American aviation. The public only seemed interested in the daring and spectacular side of flying. When two army lieutenants piloted a Dutch Fokker T-2 coast-to-coast in just under twenty-seven hours, Frank had been in San Diego when they landed. The city had gone crazy, honking car horns and blowing factory whistles. But no one seemed interested in using airplanes in any practical or constructive way.

Not even in the military could the advocates of air power make any headway. General Billy Mitchell was still predicting that the plane could make fleets and armies obsolete. No one paid the slightest attention to him, even when he proved it by sinking two obsolete battleships with two-thousand-pound bombs off the Virginia coast. The United States was manufacturing automobiles and vacuum cleaners and radio sets by the millions. Planes? A handful of stubborn believers in isolated hangars in upstate New York, central Kansas, and southern California were making a few hundred.

None of the plane makers was interested in the ideas Frank Buchanan had brought back from the three years he had spent studying aerodynamics and aircraft design with French and British manufacturers. So here he was, barnstorming.

“What are you going to do for the winter, Lindy?” Frank asked. “Head for California?”

Lindbergh shook his head. “I'm going home to make enough money to buy a better plane. First, though, I'm going to float down the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Missouri in that.” He pointed to a big wide-bottomed rowboat tied to a stake on the riverbank.

“Not a bad idea. You want to improve it?” Frank pointed across the green grass of their camp to the main tent. In front of it, a tiny girl with streaming blond hair was grilling steaks on a bed of coals. “Take Sammy with you,” he said. “Two weeks on the Yellowstone with her will blow the gloom out of your head.”

Lindbergh pulled a fistful of grass out of the ground and studied the wet roots. “No. I need some time alone.”

Lindbergh stalked down to the riverbank to inspect his boat. Frank Buchanan contemplated Samantha Soames against the backdrop of the Rockies. She was as beautifulâand as wildâas an eagle or a mountain lion on those looming slopes. She appealed simultaneously to Craig, the buccaneering pilot whose spirit Frank was sustaining, and Frank, the artist-designer who found beautiful women irresistible.

Sammy was a Wyoming rancher's daughter. Her father had kicked her into a snowdrift when he caught her in the bunkhouse with one of the hired hands. She soon decided aviators were more interesting than cowboys and wound up
with Raynald Reynolds. He had made her America's first female wing walkerâand his mistress.

Frank strolled over to the chuckfire. “I was just talking to the Silent Swede. Lindy. He says he's going to float down the Yellowstone in that boat and he wants you to come with him. But he doesn't have the nerve to ask you.”

Samantha Soames flipped a three-inch-thick steak. “Ain't there a poem about a guy who goes to a girl to ask her favor for some third party?”

“âThe Courtship of Miles Standish' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”

“Yeah. Longfellow. I always liked his name. Do you think he was?” She grinned and flipped another steak. “Guess only Mrs. Longfellow knew for sure. Anyway, there's this punch line in the poem. What was it?”

“âSpeak for yourself, John.'”

“Are you gettin' the message? Or do I have to hit you on the head with a sledgehammer? Daddy used to say that was the only way to get a steer's attention. Some pilots' dumber than steers, I swear.”

“I promised Buzz McCall I'd go to California with him.”

“So? I like him too. If you go along with that sort of effrontery.” Samantha grinned and flipped another steak. “Did I use that word right? I heard you use it the other night around the campfire. Somethin' about Reynolds havin' it.”

“The effrontery to keep ninety percent of the money and only do ten percent of the flying.”

Samantha held out a small, grimy hand. “Tell Lindy he's out of luck. I'm lookin' for some education. That's what I like about flyin' out with you and Buzz. You got lots of poetry and big words in your head. I figure Buzz'll take care of the other side of my ruined character.”

Frank plucked a steak off the fire and strolled over to the tent he shared with Buzz McCall. He raised the flap and there was Buzz on his back, smiling at him upside down, not an unusual way of looking at things for a pilot. Buzz had both hands on the oversize breasts of a lady rancher who owned forty thousand acres near Fort Peck. She had been following them from show to show for weeks. Her husband had been killed in France.

“Come back in a half hour, sport,” Buzz said.

From the darkening distance rose the incongruous sound of voices singing: “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Booming above the mostly off-key chorus were the basso tones of the Rev. Abel Flutterman. Abel had been following the Reynolds Circus around all summer, preaching “the winged gospel” to the thousands of patrons the air shows attracted. According to Abel, who was five-five and weighed about three hundred pounds, the plane was proof that mankind had entered a new spiritual phase, in which they would surmount the evils of the flesh and achieve unparalleled purity of spirit.

Frank sat down under a tree and listened to the sacred music mingling with the lady rancher's cries of ecstasy while he consumed the steak. Sweet music of the sort he soon hoped to be making with Samantha Soames. Buzz eventually emerged from the tent while the lady rancher used the more discreet rear entrance.

“She wants me to marry her,” Buzz said, combing his jet-black hair. “She'll buy me any kind of plane I want.”

Buchanan offered Buzz a chunk of steak. It was not the first nor would it be the last proposition of this sort Buzz received. His compact body emanated animal magnetism. Recklessness of an ultimate variety glinted in his gray eyes, flashed in his slanting grin. Why any woman thought she could domesticate him was a mystery.

“Sammy's coming to California with us. She says she can keep us both happy.”

Buzz squinted though the deepening twilight toward the chuckfire. “Is that okay with you?”

“Sure.”

“Reynolds won't like it.”

“Doesn't that make it even more appealing?”

“What about next summer when we need the work?”

“Who knows where we'll be next summer? You could be back in the army. I could be running my own aircraft company.”

“Yeah. Or we could both be on some bread line in Dubuque behind Billy Mitchell and the rest of the Army Air Corps.”

Buzz was bitter about the way America had abandoned her fliers. General Billy Mitchell had recruited Buzz for the provisional air brigade that had dropped the bombs on the battleships to demonstrate the potency of air power. The brigade had been disbanded a week later. The Navy and Army brass had combined forces to smear Mitchell as a liar and a publicity hound.

A short figure in a black flight jacket, white scarf, and tan jodhpurs strutted up to them. Raynald Reynolds had flown for the British during the war and had acquired pretensions to being a gentleman. “Where are you lads winging it for the winter?” he said.

“Florida,” Frank said. “Or Texas.”

“I'm thinking of Mexico,” Reynolds said. “They'd love Sammy down there. Mexicans adore blond hair. But she doesn't want to go.”

“Maybe she's bored with the way you fly your crate like an old lady with rheumatism,” Buzz said.

“I don't believe in taking unnecessary chances,” Reynolds huffed. “I don't ask my pilots to take any either. You and Lindbergh take chances up there that aren't necessary to please the public. I've made that veddy clear.”

“Veddy clear,” Buzz said.

“I don't think I want you back next year, McCall. You're a disruptive influence. The same goes for you, Buchanan.”

“Who knows where we'll all be next year?” Buzz said, winking at Frank.

At dawn the next morning Buzz and Frank bumped down the pasture that passed for an airfield. Sammy was in the front seat of Frank's Jenny; her suitcase was stashed in the backseat of Buzz's Spad. Reynolds came running out of his tent, pulling on his jodhpurs and gesticulating wildly. The combination resulted
in loss of control of the jodhpurs, which collapsed to knee level, pitching him into a nose-first landing.

At five hundred feet, Buzz did one of his more spectacular loops, pulling out so low Lindbergh and other pilots who were emerging from their tents threw themselves flat to escape decapitation. As Buzz whizzed over the prone Reynolds, something pink fluttered from his cockpit: a pair of Sammy's panties.

Reynolds raced to his Sopwith Camel and took off in pursuit. The Camel's superior airspeed soon overtook Frank and Buzz. Reynolds pulled alongside Frank's Jenny, shouting “
I love you
.” The words were drowned by the roar of the motors. But Frank had no trouble reading the Englishman's lips. Sammy paid no attention to him.

Buzz McCall did a double barrel roll that put him directly above Reynolds's Camel.
Whump
âhis wheels crunched into Reynolds's top wing.
Whump
âhe did it again. Spars and fabric flew off. The appalled Reynolds dove for safety. Buzz followed him down, firing the machine guns mounted on his cowling. He was shooting blanks, of course. All the planes were equipped with guns to simulate dogfights at the air shows. Buzz was only adding to Reynolds's humiliation.

Reynolds pulled out of his dive at about 1,000 feet with Buzz still on his tail. As the Englishman rolled to the left, the top wing on that side crumpled like a piece of wet cardboard. The Camel slid into a spin, whirling down, down toward the green earth. Frank heard Sammy cry: “Oh, my God!”

Reynolds never even came close to pulling out. He hit nose first and the plane exploded into a geyser of flame. “He murdered him,” Sammy cried.

They landed outside a town in northern Idaho and telephoned the Montana state police to report the “accident.” Sammy was so furious with Buzz, she would not go near him that first night. In Frank Buchanan's tent, she was almost as reluctant to let him touch her, especially when he tried to tell her Buzz had not intended to kill Reynolds.

Sammy wiped away tears. “It's just awful thinkin' of someone dyin' like that for no reason.”

Having seen so many pilots die for no apparent reason in France, Frank was unable to share her grief. But he respected it. “You don't have to do anything for me tonight,” he said. “I'll read you a poem instead.”

He pulled out a thin volume with the word
Lustra
in large letters on the ocher cover.

“What's that word mean?” Sammy asked.

“It's Latin.
Lustra
are offerings to the gods to atone for the sins of the people.”

He opened the book at random and began reading “Dance Figure.”

Dark eyed, O woman of my dreams
Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;
Thy face as a river with lights.

“Shhhhh-it” Sammy said. “Who wrote that?”

“Ezra Pound. A poet I met in England.”

“Do you think my face is a river with lights?”

“There's light in it. Beautiful shimmering light sometimes.”