Conquerors of the Sky (81 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky
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Sarah Morris spent most of the morning driving around Los Angeles. She parked in front of their ranch house in their old development, remembering the pudgy English war bride gorging on sweets until Tama launched her redesign program. She strolled through the faded lobby of the Beverly Wilshire, where the trim American wife had met Billy McCall. She wandered past the opulent shops on Rodeo Drive where she had shopped and charged as Mrs. Clifford Morris. So many lost or discarded selves. Who was she, anyway?
She called her daughters to tell them what she might do. Elizabeth, no longer in revolt against the establishment—she now had two sons by her San Francisco doctor—encouraged her. Margaret, on her way to being one of the country's leading Chinese scholars at Stanford, was scathingly negative. She wondered how Sarah could go back to a man who was still a glorified adolescent.
That afternoon Sarah drove to Palos Verdes, full of doubt and hesitation. She tried to regain the night of mutual surrender with the big playboy who had wept and vowed never to hit her again. But she could not stop remembering the night in Lima when he had fucked her with triumphant indifference to her feelings.
The house looked deserted, even abandoned. Blinds drooped at odd angles, curtains dangled. Cliff's white Mercedes in the driveway was the only sign of life, and that might have been left behind by the fugitive she was seeking. Inside, the living room made her wince. Newspapers and magazines littered the couches. Ashtrays were full of butts. An empty Scotch bottle stood on an end table. The smell of liquor hung in the stale air.
She flung open some windows and the terrace door. The sea wind swirled through the place, blowing papers every which way. Footsteps thudded in the study. Cliff stood there in his shorts, running his hand through his uncombed hair.
“Hello,” Sarah said.
He was not as gray as Dick Stone. Probably because he was getting touch-ups regularly. That was what a man did when he pursued a younger woman. But there were fault lines in his face that revealed age and loss—he was too much of a man's man to ask a plastic surgeon to remove them.
“I'm on the telephone,” he said.
Sarah picked up the extension in the living room and listened to him talking to a man with a Texas drawl. He was telling Cliff he was not interested in a takeover of the Buchanan Corporation.
“It'd be like rustlin' a herd of starved longhorns, Cliff. I'd lose my shirt keepin' you alive before I could get you to market.”
Cliff started telling him about a new missile the rocket division was developing.
He suggested Buchanan might merge with Northrop and the raider could take over both companies. He read him a glowing report on Northrop's finances in a recent issue of
Aviation Week.
“Sorry, Cliff boy,” drawled the prospect. “I'm on the prowl for a drug company with a cure for arthritis. That sort of thing. You hear 'bout one, let me know. There'll be a finder's fee.”
The line went dead. Cliff emerged from the study again, pulling on a pair of chinos. “What brings you here?” he said.
“I'd like to come home,” Sarah said. “Is it possible?”
“It's still your house as much as it's mine,” Cliff said. “That's the law in California.”
“Am I welcome?”
“Give me one reason why you should be.”
“I spent the last year in the desert looking at a Joshua tree. Eventually it started talking to me. It said go home and ask your husband to forgive you.”
Cliff padded to the bar and poured himself a drink. Was he trying to blot her out in advance? Sarah looked past him at the windows opening on the Pacific and kept talking.
“In order to do that I had to ask myself if I forgave him. The answer was maybe. There was another reason. The longer I looked at that tree raising those stubby arms to the sky, the more I began to realize how much I wanted to try to love you again as my husband—someone who tried to achieve certain things in his life and succeeded sometimes—and failed sometimes. The way I tried to love you and failed and tried again and succeeded. Then failed because of so many things. Peru, the Prince, Vietnam, Charlie—Billy. Things we didn't expect. So we weren't very good at coping with them.”
“Who sent you here?” Cliff said.
“Dick Stone called me. He told me about Adrian. Before he died, Adrian sent me a copy of the letter he wrote you, urging you to resign.”
“That's why Dick called you! Can't you see that? He wants you to help him get rid of me. How the hell can you play Dick's game and tell me you love me?”
For a moment the whole room blurred. Sarah felt the wind blowing through her flesh into her bones, shattering them one by one. Was it finally ultimately impossible?
“I'm playing my own game,” she said, her voice sounding as if she was shouting into a gale. “I'm trying to convince you there's life after aerospace. There's a life we can have together we never had except in fits and starts and failures.”
“I don't want your goddamn pity!” Cliff roared. “I want a woman who loves a man, not a has-been!”
For a moment Sarah almost gave up. The wind tugged at more than her bones and flesh. It was blowing away everything, memory, hope, understanding. The word
has-been
seemed to abrogate both their lives. All Cliff could see was his corporate title. He did not exist outside it.
She tried one more time, clutching the back of a chair for stability. “I don't see a has-been. I see the man who brought the
Rainbow Express
back from Schweinfurt with more holes in it than anyone could count. I see a man who volunteered for another twenty-five missions because he was ashamed of something he'd done on that raid. A man who had the courage to do that—in spite of his fear—is a man I want to spend the rest of my life trying to love.”
Cliff clutched his glass as if it were the only thing keeping him erect. “Who told you about Schweinfurt? Adrian? That son of a bitch—”
“Dick Stone told me. He said he had enough confidence in my judgment—to believe I could share it with you—in the right way. He gave me this—for you. He found it in Adrian's papers.”
Cliff grabbed the envelope stuffed with the German protest. He flipped through the sheets of paper and slowly crumpled them into a moist mass in his big hands. He began breathing in deep gulps. Tears gushed from his eyes.
“I should have told you. But I never thought you'd forgive me—I never had that much confidence. I was—”
“Afraid. Not of me. But of your idea of me. Little Miss England, the hero-worshipping cockteaser. Afraid of that stupid idiotic girl who only knew what she could see and touch and kiss. You were so handsome—and I was so young. You were almost as young.”
The wind was roaring through the room now, a gale, a cyclone. “Cliff—let's say good-bye to both those sad wonderful people. Good-bye forever—without regrets. With affection.”
He hunched over his drink, refusing to abandon his misery. “I lied to you.” “That was part of being in love. I lied to you too. Telling you I was in love with you when I was really in love with an idea, with the drama, with the heroic anguish of watching you take off and praying you back again.”
Neither of them had moved an inch. They were like a pair of talking stanchions. Sarah felt the wind shoving her toward him but she was afraid he would flee.
“You had a hero—now you've got a has-been,” he said, regret, ambition still gouging him. “Do you expect me to believe you love both guys? Why don't you tell me to go down fighting? Why are we going to let that bastard Adrian Van Ness have the final say?”
“You did go down fighting. In those hearings. That's when I started to love you again. I saw you really didn't believe you'd done anything wrong. I watched the rest of those hearings and saw why you played the game that way. Everyone else was doing it. In a sense—a very special sense—you didn't do anything wrong.”
She walked to the bar and put her hand on his arm. “But in another sense you did. It was wrong. All those men you bribed—in Japan—Holland—Germany—they've gone to jail. They were breaking their laws, if you weren't. We were both right—and both wrong that night in Lima. I didn't—I couldn't love you enough to explain it.”
“Because of Billy?” he snarled.
The wind almost flung her across the room and out the door. She had to cling to something and it turned out to be his arm. “You could say that. It wouldn't be completely untrue. But he was only part of it. The other part was the way we'd failed—we hadn't loved each other before he arrived on the scene.”
He was facing her on the bar stool, listening, seeming to agree. He abruptly turned away. “Yeah,” he said, in the same bitter voice.
A wildness swelled in Sarah's throat. It reminded her of the night with Billy McCall in the desert. She had gone too far. She was not going to let this man escape her.
“You know what I see us doing?” she said.
“What?”
“Learning to fly. Buying a plane and flying it together, all over the country, the world. I'd feel so close to Charlie. Closer than we could ever get on the ground—”
A different man confronted her. Defeated and full of an emotion darker than anger. An ominous compound of bitterness and violence. “You really want to fly with me? After what happened to Billy? That wasn't an accident, you know. Somebody put that plane into that dive. I've thought about doing the same thing. I don't know when the impulse will suddenly get too strong to resist. You ready to fly with that kind of pilot?”
“Yes,” Sarah said. “I'm ready to fly with that kind of pilot.”
“I mean it,” Cliff said. “I sat here half the day thinking about how to do it. Thinking about Tama—”
Sarah walked past him into the master bedroom. In the back of a drawer full of old lingerie, she found Tama's letter.
I was wrong.
The words glared up at her again, full of even more meanings now. She walked back to the living room and handed it to Cliff.
“Your mother sent this to me the night she died. I saved it for some reason. Maybe so I could give it to you now.”
“What does it mean?” Cliff said dazedly, clutching the blue-bordered page.
“Whatever you want it to mean.”
“Jesus,” Cliff said. “Jesus.”
He ran his fingers over the words. “Sarah,” he said. “It means so many goddamn things. Wrong about marrying Buzz. Wrong about putting that son of a bitch in charge of my life. Wrong about trusting Adrian. Wrong about—”
“Yes,” Sarah said, putting her hand on the paper too, letting all the wrongs she had committed and had been committed against her mingle in the words. “Maybe she's saying she was wrong about what she did that night too. It would be so wrong for you to do it now and leave me without the only man I ever tried to love.”
Tears streamed down her face. Cliff's arms were around her. His lips were in her hair, on her throat. “Sarah, Sarah. It's okay. It's not going to happen now. You're right. Everything you've been saying is right. Dick Stone can have
the goddamn company and welcome to it. I've got you. That's enough for me.”
He was still the salesman, selling himself on the idea. She knew it would not be that simple. She knew there would be times when he would see an Aurora soaring into the sky or a Colossus rumbling toward a runway and he would hunger for the glory days. But she promised the good angels who had brought her here and given her the words of consolation and hope that she would not falter, she would not fail again.
The telephone rang. They both gazed at it, recognizing it as an enemy, the world beyond these walls, intruding with a demand or a question. “Answer it, will you?” Cliff said. “If it's Dick, tell him he'll have my letter of resignation on his desk tomorrow morning.”
“This is Mark Casey of the
Los Angeles Times,”
said the smooth voice in Sarah's ear. “Is Cliff Morris there? We just got word of the crash of Buchanan's experimental bomber. I was hoping he might have a comment on it.”
It was an ultimate test. Why not find out now? For a moment Sarah wondered if she should remind Cliff of the night he had promised to build the plane as a memorial to Charlie. She decided not to take Dick Stone's advice. She wanted this to be a test of what they had just said to each other, nothing else.
She told Cliff who it was and why he was calling. All the implications flashed across his face. Here was his chance to destroy Dick Stone, to create a vacuum that the board of directors might ask him to fill, for want of a better candidate.
“Hello, Mark,” Cliff said. “It's a shame about the plane. I know. I agree. There are times when some planes seem jinxed. They break your heart along with your pocketbook. This is one of them—”
Cliff was looking at Sarah as he said the next words. But she sensed he was also seeing something or someone else she could not share.

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