Air Force Eagles (52 page)

SIGHT-SEEING

Marshall spoke. "Okay. We're ready to go now, but I've still got to do my run and my exercises. If it's all right with you, we'll leave at ten sharp."

Looking admiringly at him, Roget punched him lightly on the arm. "Whatever you're doing, keep it up, Bones. You look like yourself again. When are you going to let Saundra dye your hair? Make you look ten years younger."

"The day after you let her dye yours, Hadley."

Roget laughed, nudged him, and said, "Give it to me straight, John, you making any money yet?"

Sighing, Marshall walked over and leaned against the door of their operations shack. "You know I'm not; all Saundra's money is already long gone, and I'm not letting her sink another dime in it. We've been hauling Fred Peterson's people around, two, three times a week; it's the only thing that lets me meet the payroll. My new partner, Corky Frost, calls it our 'Back of the Bus Airline,' and he's about right."

"How are you feeling about helping these people? I don't mean to pry"—he hesitated, knowing that John knew he wanted to pry, always did, couldn't help it—"but Patty tells me that Saundra's gone off the deep end and it's causing you problems. Is that right?"

"Yeah, it's screwy. Saundra's letting her staff run the business, and she's spending more time and money on the movement than she can afford. The funny thing is, I am, too. It's hard to explain to a white man, Hadley, but this man King is right! Something's got to be done in the South—hell, all over, for that matter, look what the Air Force did to me. The time's coming, and I'm going to support it. I—"

"Whoa, pardner, you don't have to convince me, I'm on your side. But what is it doing to you and Saundra? That's what worries me.

Marshall looked off in the distance. "I'm not sure. It's like she's had a religious calling. In a way, I understand it; King is a real leader, I'm under his influence, too. But ..."

"Is it a romantic interest? Is she in love with him?"

Bones turned and looked him in the eye. "No, I think I could handle that. But this is a religious thing, a kind of exaltation."

"What do you think about it?"

"I hate it. I want to support the cause, just like she does, but not at the expense of my own family. But we've had such rough times since I got back that the worst thing I could do would be to try to interfere."

"Look, if it's any comfort, you're not the only one having problems. Patty and Bandy are fighting all the time over the kids, and Lyra's driving poor old Bear Riley nuts."

"What's the problem?"

"She swears her husband is going to try to do something, hurt her or kidnap the children. Bear half-believes her, but it's making their life tough."

Sensing Marshall's unease, Roget abruptly changed the subject. "Back of the Bus Airline, eh? That's pretty good. Where'd you meet this guy Frost?"

"He's an old desert rat, got a face like a bulldog, been around the airport for years, and funny as hell."

"What'd he invest to get to be a partner?"

"His name and his white skin. I let him be pilot-in-command for any trips down South; that way I don't have to worry about them dumping water in the fuel tank of an uppity nigger's plane."

"What's he think about Fred's friends, and all that civil rights business?"

"He could care less—he's so happy to be working a regular job he'd haul rattlesnakes if he had to."

The two men walked out to the converted Lodestar that Peterson had purchased for the new firm. "How come you didn't want to take a TBM, Hadley?"

"Tact, my boy, tact. My specialty. They're going to be running another test of their little Stearman today, and I thought it would be poor taste to bring a TBM in."

"What the hell's the matter with them, anyway? They're not going to be able to prove anything with a Stearman that we didn't prove last year."

"It's the government—they got their way of doing things and that's it. They'll run the tests on the Stearman, and then maybe they'll buy something from us next year."

"Will you be there to buy from next year? How's your business?"

"No problem. I've sold almost a dozen of these fancy Rockets, and it looks like I've got orders for maybe another dozen more coming. Oilmen love them, and even Mike Todd down in Hollywood is buying one. And I haven't advertised, got no salesmen, this is all drop-in business. I'm sitting pretty, John, but I'd like to sell the TBMs and that old Catalina I got sitting on the line. That old Cat would make the TBMs look sick, but I can't get anybody to listen."

"Bandy says that you're always ten years ahead of your time." Roget interrupted, "Twenty, but who's counting?" "Well, I sure hope he's wrong about that with water-bombing." "No, I think what we're going to have to do is put in one season for free, just follow the fires around, volunteering our services. It'll be expensive as hell, but not as expensive as never getting started." Marshall whistled. "I don't know, Hadley, that'll be tough. I'm not sure if even Peterson could afford to subsidize an operation that size."

"Lemme see what I can do with our banks. Maybe we wouldn't go all the way, just do one section of California. But I'd like to get the Catalina up to Canada; I think I can do some business there, and it ought to be good for Florida, too. They had a big fire in the Everglades and couldn't do anything about it. With all those lakes and canals, it would have been perfect for the Catalina." "Maybe next year?" "If either of us is still in business."

***

Chapter 12

Salinas, California/November 19, 1955

Bandfield woke to the almost forgotten sounds and smells of Patty making coffee. Groaning, he tried to roll over; he was stiff as a board, every joint and muscle aching from the long trip back from Washington in a T-33 the previous afternoon. The T-Bird was fine transportation, but the seat was a torture chamber after a couple of hours.
He'd
rented a car in Los Angeles and didn't even remember the drive to Salinas; he had continually dozed off, awakening sharply to the drum of tires signaling his drift to the side of the road. Easing himself to the side of the bed, he flexed his toes and stretched his muscles, aware for once of the care Patty had taken in decorating their home, imprinting her personality on it with the colors, the pictures, the things he called clutter and she called collectibles. She always said she wanted the home to be cozy and comfortable rather than a work of art. He realized how well she'd succeeded, when he compared it to the clinical austerity of the anonymous BOQ rooms he'd been leaping in and out of for the past six months, all done in early Cheap Motel. Between following up on Coleman's debacle at Frederick and the B-47 accident investigations, he'd been on the road more than three-quarters of the time, often working so late he couldn't even call home. No wonder Patty had given him the freeze last night.

The kids were glad to see him, though. Charlotte was seventeen and as beautiful as Patty. George was almost fifteen, big for his age, and built like Bandy's father, blocky but still able to move well, sort of a thin Jackie Gleason. Both children were readers, and when he was on the road, Bandfield tried to read the same books and the same authors, to be sure they had plenty to talk about when he was home. Right now George was devouring all of Kenneth Roberts's books, while Charlotte had discovered Agatha Christie. The music was something else; there they had no common ground at all.

Patty came in as he loved her best, no makeup, hair down, cloaked in a white terry cloth bathrobe, and, he knew, nothing else. She carried a tray bearing two mugs of black coffee, the morning paper, and dog biscuits for their mutt, Maya, now snuggled companionably at the foot of the bed.

"I'm sorry about last night, Bandy. I should have been more welcoming, but you came in, gulped down two big drinks, drank half a bottle of wine while you gobbled dinner and then fell asleep in the chair. Not exactly the Cary Grant treatment."

He pulled her to him and kissed her. "You're right—but I was wiped out. Now I'm feeling frisky, and won't take no for an answer. Where are the kids?"

Later, they lay in each other's arms, content. She snuggled against his chest and said, "Bandy, remember the old days, when you'd come in after a long mission, all hot and sweaty in your flight suit, and we'd make love right away? It was so earthy, so good; now you're always showered and shampooed, sticky with deodorant. Where's my old animal lover?"

"Growf. Right here. Tell you what, I'll work like a horse all day today, and tonight you can have me au naturel. But you have to do the same."

She agreed, and then he said, "But since we've had a little romp this morning, could I get a raincheck until tomorrow?"

"A raincheck? Like making love is some shopper's special? Bandy, you've gotten to be a mood-ruining expert. But, okay, a raincheck, and no showers."

Then, more hesitantly, "Bandy, how much time do you have in the service now—you must be pretty close to the magic twenty-year mark, aren't you?"

"Don't be foolish—Hadley and I need help. But I'm thinking about the kids. You're never around, and they're at a stage when they need you, particularly George. He's so big now, it's tough for me to discipline him."

"You think I should get out at twenty?"

She sat up, leaning on her elbow, pulling the sheet across her breasts. "Let me put it to you differently. If you don't, I'm getting a divorce."

*

En route to Montgomery, Alabama/
December 8, 1956

It was in that lovely ephemeral time just before dawn, when the colors of the eastern sky reach out in long fingers toward the aircraft, and the ground below grudgingly sheds its gray camouflage, giving up its shapes to shadow. The cream and green Roget Rocket was cruising slightly nose down at seventeen thousand feet; they'd burned off most of the fuel coming from Los Angeles, and the two Pratt & Whitney radial engines were throttled back to a comfortable low grumbling hum. In the cabin, Saundra lay asleep on a leather couch, covered with cashmere blankets that bore the monogram fp.

Frost ran his fingers admiringly over the radio console. "This bucket has everything! Old Hadley really did a job on it."

Frost's comments broke in on Marshall's jealous doubts.

"What's that? Yeah, it's sensational. And for the first time in his life, he's making money selling airplanes."

"No wonder he named it 'Rocket'—with a three-hundred-mile-per-hour cruise and a thirty-five-hundred-mile range, this is one going Jesse."

Marshall smiled to himself. Frost probably had no idea that "going Jesse" referred to Jesse Owens, a Black man like himself, a natural leader like the man they were flying money to in Montgomery.

Grateful to have his worries interrupted, he responded, "Yeah, Roget really pissed Lockheed off; they said he could never get this kind of performance out of a Lodestar. It sort of made them look bad when he did, like they didn't do it right the first time."

Frost's laughter seemed to boom across the cockpit. "I'll bet! But it's a whole different deal, customizing one plane at a time instead of turning them out like cookies on a production line. Did Roget have any help with it?"

"Well, Bandy, of course. They'd worked on their first Rocket back in the twenties. And they got Gordon Israel, the racing pilot, to help, knew him from the races at Cleveland. Israel's like Roget, not much for degrees but inspired and with lots of common sense. They cleaned up the whole airframe, changed the wing profile, smoothed out the cowling and nacelles. Then they added a lot of nice touches—flush mounting all the windows, carrying the flush riveting all the way back to the tail, stuff Lockheed couldn't take the time to do."

"I hear Roget went nuts cutting weight and drag."

"Yeah, he went over the entire airplane, all of it, feeling it with his hands, not just trusting his eyes to see something that might cause drag, but sweeping it with his hands like a sculptor molding a statue. It paid off."

Marshall was glad Frost liked the airplane. The man was a natural pilot, one of the few Marshall had ever met, and he handled the Rocket as if he'd flown it for years.

Frost put his finger to his lips as he responded to an inquiry from air traffic control.

"We'll start our descent on the hour, Bones. Now what's the drill?"

"We'll land and taxi over to get refueled. You get off and go into the ops shack to file our clearance for the flight back. We don't want to spend any more time on the ground than we have to. I'll handle the refueling. They won't mind a Black guy doing that. You do the paying, though."

It occurred to Marshall in passing that he was calling himself Black now, just as Saundra and Peterson did. Funny—it was a word he would have refused to use a year ago.

"When we're done, Saundra will get out and walk over to side entrance to the operations shack. Somebody will be there to meet her with a car."

"How about her luggage?"

"She'll take the one bag with her. When you come back out, I'll hustle her bags over to her. I'd like her to get out without anybody seeing her, if I can."