Authors: Thomas Fleming

Conquerors of the Sky (40 page)

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky

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No, no. It was all insane. What did those warfare words have to do with love? She still believed love was gift and gratitude, sharing and sympathy. For Billy these words did not seem to exist. It was all mockery, skill, daring. If this was the kind of love he found in the sky, she wanted none of it.

And yet, and yetâshe wanted it. She wanted that ascent again, that shuddering fulfillment.

They flew back to Los Angeles in the dawn. “How do you feel?” Billy said, as the rising sun burst over the Sierras, filling the sky with vivid red.

“Good,” Sarah said. It was defiant. But it was true. She felt good.

“How about a little aerial celebration?”

Billy reached over and tightened her seat belt. Without another word he leaned on the half circle of wheel in his hands and the left wing went down and they went somersaulting over it. Sarah felt all the blood in her body bulge into her face. It seemed ready to explode through her skin. Ahead of them she saw the coast of California rotating like a gigantic seesaw, sliding up and down. Then gravity slammed her against the seat and her heart was being crushed into
a small rectangle and her intestines were flattened like ribbons and her thighs stripped of all sensation. Upside down now and slowly revolving with the Pacific sluicing the other way, pouring water over Alaska and the Pole.

“Like that?” Billy said.

“Yes,” Sarah said, all defiance now.

They rolled in the opposite direction this time. The San Gabriel mountains crumbled into the illimitable desert and her eyes bulged with gravity. Her teeth were jammed into an eternal grimace. At any moment she thought she might bite chunks from her lungs. A whining roar from beyond the planets filled her ears.

They were level again. “What was that?” Sarah asked.

“Barrel rolls,” Billy said.

It was more than a celebration. He was giving her a small sample of what he confronted when he pulled a plane out of a 10 or 11 g dive. He was letting her know his art was written with his blood and bones and flesh. He was revealing some of the things he had omitted in their ascent.

Now Billy was all business, clicking overhead switches and checking dials and talking to air traffic controllers at Los Angeles Airport, scouring the sky for other planes. They landed in the same smooth effortless way without saying another word. He walked her to the parking lot where she had left her car. She offered to drive him to the Beverly Wilshire. He said he would get a cab. They stood there in the rosy light while a DC-6 thundered down a nearby runway.

“Should I call you again sometime?” he said.

Sarah's whole body went hot and cold and hot again. “It was wonderful butâmaybe not.”

That was a ridiculous attempt at compromise. Say something else, something that will let him call you and somehow give you the right to refuse. But there were no second chances with Billy. “Okay,” he said.

He stood there for another moment, the smile not quite as confident, his eyes almost sad. A force more powerful than will or ideas flung Sarah against him. She crushed her lips against that unyielding mouth.

Sobbing, she fumbled in her purse for her car keys. Billy found them for her. “See you around,” he said.

FREEDOM FLIGHT

“Will it work in Moosejaw?”

Frank Buchanan's shout made the fluorescent lights in the plasterboard ceiling vibrate. Sam Hardy, the designer in charge of the ailerons on the Talus, trudged out of Frank's office looking as if he would be happy to impale himself on the nearest sharp object. Dick Stone did not know exactly what was wrong but he
knew Frank was talking about Moosejaw, Canada, where the temperature was 40 below zero most of the winter. Ailerons had to work in that sort of weatherâand in desert heat and equatorial humidity.

It was 8 P.M. and no one in the design departmentâat least the part of the department surrounding Frank Buchanan's office, where he kept his brightest peopleâshowed any sign of going home. The designers called the area the Black Hole, after the infamous torture site in Calcutta. Some years later, when astronomers used the name for the mysterious time warps in space created by dead stars, the designers said both meanings were true.

Dick sat in his office just beyond this fluorescent-lit arena tapping data into a new machine he had persuaded Adrian Van Ness to buy, a Miller McCann computer. People in the design department used it too. It saved them hours of slide rule computations. That was one among several reasons why Dick had moved his office out of the executive tower to the edge of the Black Hole.

His main reason was his desire to learn as much as possible about the complications of creating a new plane. By now he knew a lot. He understood the perpetual struggle to anticipate problems like the weather in Moosejaw. He saw why there were so many designers needed to back up Frank Buchanan. He created the original concept of the plane. But every square inch of the creature had to be harmonized with the rest of it. A tail, a flap, a window, required hundreds of drawings by teams of men.

Each day Frank held design conferences with the leaders of the teams. There was a standing rule that nothing on the plane could be changed if those whose work it affected had any objections. If the man in charge of the landing-wheel system wanted to extend the struts an inch or two for what seemed to him a very good reason, everyone concerned with that area of the plane had a voteâand it was frequently negative. The resulting brawls could be spectacular.

That was only round one. When the engineering department began changing things, proclaiming this or that solution would not work, a firestorm of rage invariably swept the design department. The test pilots also had their say. Most of the time they complained about the cockpit, which was never designed to their complete satisfaction. Invariably, because Buzz McCall was a pilot, the engineering department backed them up.

Day after day, Dick was appalled to see thousands of blueprints representing ten times that many man-hours dumped in wastebaskets. Wind-tunnel tests, using scale models, often forced rude reevaluations on everyone, designers and engineers. These were the “unknowns” that only became apparent once a plane was exposed to some of the stresses it faced in the sky. When the real thing began to fly, there were likely to be more shocksâ“unk-unks”âthe unknown unknowns that revealed hidden flaws in the design or unidentified forces in the sky.

But no one in the Black Hole, even those who got the Moosejaw bellow several times a day, really complained. Frank Buchanan was working longer hours than men half his age. His enthusiasm for the Talus, his vision of a new
kind of plane that would surpass in efficiency and safety everything now in the air, galvanized everyone.

Dick's telephone rang. “This is Kirk Willoughby,” a voice said. “Remember me? The company sawbones? You haven't sent me that memo on the Honeycomb Club.”

“I don't get it. Are you working for Dr. Kinsey on the side?”

“Just collecting opinions, pro and con. Believe it or not, some people think we ought to shut it down. They're afraid to say it in public because Buzz McCall will call them pansies. I'm also worried about its effect on the women. A lot of people have been getting letters from someone who calls herself Califia. She sounds a bit homicidal to me. We'd have a hell of a mess if someone got murdered and the tabloids got their hands on the story. Can't you see the headlines? Cost plus sex at Buchanan Aircraft.”

Dick hung up and computed his latest cost projection on the Talus. It was so appalling, he decided not to show it to Frank Buchanan. It would only trigger another tirade on the futility of predicting costs on a radically new plane. At 10 P.M. Dick left the designers burning the midnight fluorescence in the Black Hole and drove down the boulevards to his one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan Beach.

He had moved into the Villa Hermosa, a complex of three-story buildings a few blocks from the ocean. Most of the residents were airline pilots, stewardesses, and middle-level aircraft company executives. Almost all were single. Dick was amazed by the offhand way everyone slept around. Sexual liberation pervaded all branches of the aircraft business.

As he drove through the warm California darkness, the cool sea wind caressing his face, Dick felt desire gathering in his belly, crowding his throat. Cassie Trainor would be waiting for him beside the pool tonight. For the past six months he had been sharing Cassie with Cliff Morris. That meant she agreed not to date anyone else from the Honeycomb Club.

For the first three months Dick had liked it. Cassie just seemed to want to screw. That was all Dick wanted to do too. He did not want to think about it. He wanted to enjoy this strange new world of sexual freedom on its own terms. Cassie was tireless. If he wanted to do it two, three, four, five times a night she was perfectly agreeable. She was always ready for one more. “Come on, go for the record,” she would whisper mockingly. “Show up the Big Shot.”

That was her nickname for Cliff. She had begun to talk about him and other members of the club. It broke Dick's concentration on pure physical pleasure and made him think about the whole arrangement. He was not interested in going for records or showing up his friends. Some members apparently thrived on this sort of stuff.

Dick changed to bathing trunks and found Cassie lounging beside the pool, the social center of the Villa Hermosa. She was listening to a TWA copilot describe his latest narrow escape trying to land in Pittsburgh or Chicago or Raleigh. “The fog was so goddamn thick the propellers sliced it like it was
sausage meat. We had enough ice on the wings to throw a skating partyâ”

“Wait'll you see the Talus,” Dick said. “No worries about ice, ever again. We've got heating coils in the wings that melt it at the flip of a switch.”

“Is that supposed to excite me?” Cassie drawled. She was wearing a blue lastex two-piece bathing suit. The bottom half was cut to the minimum, making her long tawny body resemble a Modigliani painting.

“I thought heat excited you,” Dick said.

“Just about anything excites Cassie,” said Sue, a Pan American stewardess who was currently sleeping with the copilot. She was a honey-blond with a hefty wide-waisted torso and good breasts.

“What excites you?” Cassie said. “A full planeload of ginks lookin' up your dress?”

“No,” Sue said.

“Then shut up about what excites me.”

“Sorry,” Sue said.

“Maybe you excite me,” Cassie said. “Maybe that's where I'm goin'.”

“Not tonight, I hope,” Dick said.

She looked at him with surprising distaste. “No. Not tonight,” she said. He realized Cassie was drunk. It was not the first time she had showed up this way. But it was the first time booze had not put her in a good humor.

“I think I'll take a swim,” Dick said. He did two laps in a lazy Australian crawl. “Come on in,” he called to Cassie.

She was still working on Sue. “Why the hell don't you get a job where you get paid for doin' it?” she said. “That's why you're on the goddamn plane but they don't pay you any real money for it.”

“I think you ought to try diddling yourself for a change,” Sue said.

With a lunge worthy of an offended tigress, Cassie raked Sue's face with her nails. The stewardess screamed and fell into the pool. Cassie dove on top of her and held her head under the water. “Hey, you're drowning her!” the bewildered copilot yelled and leaped on top of Cassie to rescue his girl. After a lot of thrashing he managed to pry her hands off Sue's throat.

“Get her out of here,” Sue screamed, clutching her bleeding face.

Appalled, Dick led Cassie to his apartment. “What the hell is the matter?” he said.

“Nothin'. Nothin' for you to worry about,” Cassie said. She pulled off her bottom, slipped out of her top and stood there, hands on her hips, naked. “Let's do it,” she said.

“Wait a minute,” Dick said. “Wait a couple of minutes. I'm not exactly in the mood after seeing you practically commit murder.”

“Ain't that too damn bad. I thought you were a war hero. Forty-nine missions with the Big Shot? Why should you be bothered by a little friendly killin'? In case you're interested, this is my forty-ninth mission for the Honeycomb Club. I've been keepin' a record. Maybe you've noticed I'm kind of interested in records.”

“I have noticed that,” Dick said. “But something's gone wrong. You were flying high until tonight.”

“How the hell would you know?”

“I guess I wouldn't. I thought you didn't want to talk about anything.”

“I don't,” Cassie said. “Let's fuck. I'm ready when you are.”

It was the first time Dick had heard a woman say
fuck.
It only confirmed how disturbed, maybe crazy, Cassie was. “I'd like to know what's wrong first.”

“Nothin'!”

“That's obviously bullshit.”

Cassie walked over to the window and stared down at the pool. “It's a sort of anniversary. But I can handle it.”

“What happened?”

“I met somebody three years ago today. He broke my goddamn heart. That's all. You don't care. You'd rather have it without any heart. Isn't that what all you bastards want? A nice smooth fuckin' machine?”

“I thought if you liked it and I liked itâ”

“What's there to like? After the first couple of dozen times you start to feel dead down there. You start to feel death creepin' up through your whole body. Pretty soon you actually want death to show this certain bastard what he's done. You know he doesn't care but that doesn't matter. You think maybe it'll make him careâand that's all you want.”

Cassie started trembling from head to foot. “Hey,” Dick said. “Hey.” He put his arms around her. “Hey, listen. It isn't that bad. It can't be that bad.”

Cassie had crossed some sort of boundary. She had exceeded some sort of tolerance in her soul. For a moment he wondered if she was Califia, the woman who had sent threatening letters to half the executives at Buchanan. “Listen,” he said. “We don't have to do it. Let's just lie down and let me hold you for a while.”

He led her into the bedroom, his arm around her waist. It was strange. He did not have an erection. Until tonight, he could not look at Cassie naked without getting aroused. Touching her stirred instant desire. Was it all in his head? Dick wondered. Was the other Cassie, the fucking machine with the blank smile and mocking eyes, an ultimate expression of male freedom? While this Cassie, a woman in pain, was something else?

They lay down in the double bed, face to face, his arms around her. Gradually Cassie stopped trembling. But her tears continued for a long time, a silent bitter stream, eventually soaking the pillowcase. “Why did this guy break your heart?” he said.

“I don't know,” Cassie said. “I don't think anybody ever knows till it happens, do they?”

“That's the way it works in novels,” Dick said. “But in real life we usually get some warning signals and back off.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better? Tellin' me it's my fault?” Cassie said.

“I don't mean it that way. I'm trying to help you think about it. Look at it objectively.”

“Just hold me. That helps more than anything.”

They lay there, listening to laughter and shouts and splashing from the pool. Airline people lived on such crazy schedules, there were swimmers at all hours of the night. Often Dick was awakened at 3 A.M. by water polo contests between copilots and flight engineers, with stews cheering on the sidelines.

“Are all Jews this nice to women?” Cassie said.

“I don't know. I sort of doubt it,” Dick said.

“You're the only one I've ever met this close. I never saw one in Noglichucky Hollow.”

That was Cassie's Tennessee birthplace. She often compared it to Al Capp's Dogpatch. “Why did you leave that garden spot?” Dick asked.

“The only man I cared about got killed in the Pacific. He was a strafer pilot. You ever heard of them?”

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky

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