California Gold (93 page)

Occasionally too, in the papers, Jim spied his father’s name. The sight of it filled him with much more sadness and anger than did any photo of his mother. Why had his father hated him? Because of failings in himself? He felt that was true, though he was still too young to puzzle out the nature of those failings and try to change them. But it hardly mattered. He had a new life, a free life. He had long ago decided he’d never go back to the old one.

Now, on the day the P.E. special bore them to the aviation fair, Jim and Jocker both had good jobs in suburban Pasadena. Jim loved being out in the sunshine, learning about and working with the exotic trees and shrubs and flowers of Southern California. Finally, he felt, life was going in the right direction for him. He’d be twelve in the autumn, but he looked two or three years older because of his height and the maturity of his features, and he was starting to get interested stares from young girls. He wasn’t quite old enough to like girls, but he was surprised and vaguely flattered by their new reaction. When he discussed it with Jocker, the old tramp chuckled and said, “Yes, I know you aren’t altogether keen for it now, but wait a while—you’ll be crazy about it. Trust old Jocker.”

“You know I do,” Jim grinned, squeezing his gnarled hand.

The P.E. interurban slid into the two-hundred-foot platform specially built for the air show. Jim took Jocker’s hand and helped him off, elbowing and pushing when necessary. The crowd was boisterous and impatient, and there was a lot of buffeting. Jim felt obliged to protect Jocker, because any rough contact made his joints hurt.

It was a cool, windy morning. Jim shielded his eyes, then pointed toward the hilltop. “Look, Jocker, some of the balloons are up. Don’t you think it’s grand?”

“I think I want to get this over with,” the old tramp said. Jim had trimmed Jocker’s hair for the outing, and Jocker had donned his only suit. But it was shiny at the knees and elbows, and he still looked seedy. “God didn’t mean for Jocker Sprue to leave the ground in a basket dangling from a gas bag. Nor in anything similar. Got me?”

Laughing, Jim clasped his hand tightly and pulled him away from the platform. With whistles and bells, a special train was chugging into a siding, a locomotive and six flatcars carrying shiny autos chained down. Smartly dressed men and women sat in the autos. A banner on one flatcar said
SAN DIEGO AERO-SHOW TRAIN
. The gentlemen who owned the autos began to loosen the chains before the train stopped, excited about the air show.

Well, so was he. So was all of Los Angeles. Flying fever, people called it. In the comics that Jim read faithfully, his favorite, Little Nemo, was zooming through the sky in his own dirigible. On their way to change interurbans they’d passed a saloon advertising Aviation Highballs:
TRY ONE—HAVE A MENTAL ASCENSION.

Strung tight with anticipation, young James Ohio Chance II—now Jim David—pulled the old man along the muddy road to the hilltop, ignoring his complaints.

It was hard going on the road. For one thing, recent winter rains had muddied it. For another, autos in a long line were attempting the ascent and having difficulty because of the mud. Three men with teams of mules worked the roadside, selling their services.

People on foot and on bicycles added to the congestion. Along both shoulders, hawkers shouted and beckoned from canvas booths. You could buy coffee and doughnuts, cheap field glasses, sunglasses, auto radiator caps shaped like airplanes. Jim wasn’t tempted. He’d carefully saved money from his wages to pay their admissions—$1 would take them both into the grandstand—and buy a 10-cent program.

“Take heed,” cried a man temporarily established on a soapbox. “The coming of the airplane will drive the birds from the skies. All species will become extinct because of this mechanical plague.”

“Are the Wrights here?” a man in a mired auto asked. His companion said no, they had refused to attend.

Jim pulled Jocker faster than he wanted to go. A gluey brown mud covered their shoes. At the sound of distant staccato explosions, Jim jumped up and down and squeezed Jocker’s misshapen hand.

“Those are engines, they’re starting engines—we’ve got to hurry.”

“I was happier riding the rods,” Jocker said. But he labored to keep up with the boy.

Tons of sawdust had been thrown on the mud of the exhibit area. Tents sheltered the aircraft on display, and special policemen stood guard to prevent vandalism.

Glenn Curtiss had brought four of his biplanes, and there were three Bleriot monoplanes from France, as well as two Farman biplanes. One tent housed a balloon-gas plant, a mysterious and intricate tangle of tanks, pumps, and pipes. On open ground nearby, an eager young man lectured about his ornithopter, which resembled a unicycle with ribbed wings attached. The young man cleared the crowd away, slipped his arms into straps on the wings, and mounted the cycle seat. He started to flap the wings, and the ornithopter rolled forward perhaps two feet, then crashed sideways.

“See, Jim? Man was never meant to fly. Trains are perfectly good enough.”

“Oh, come on,” the boy said, grinning. “Let’s pay and find a seat. I don’t want to miss Curtiss.”

Mack fought the Packard up the muddy auto road and paid $1 to park. You could watch the air demonstrations from your car but he’d bought a front-row grandstand box for $2. About half past twelve, he ushered Margaret into the box and opened a hamper in which the servants had packed a luncheon and two pair of German field glasses.

The speed course was hexagonal. One straightaway lay close and parallel to the wire fence, the other on the opposite side of the field. Ten-foot towers topped with snapping flags marked the course, and at the foot of each, a deputy with pistol and rifle sat on horseback. A youngster ran onto the field, and one of the deputies galloped to intercept him. The boy darted beneath the deputy’s horse, thumbed his nose, and dug his way under the fence to safety before the deputy could dismount. Margaret laughed and the crowd applauded and whistled.

A lumbering three-hundred-pound man approached the fence and cupped his hands around his mouth.

“Mr. Horton of Long Beach,” Mack said. “They call him the Human Megaphone.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Human Megaphone boomed, “I direct your attention to the flying field. In the replica of his famous
Golden Flyer
air racer, Mr. Glenn H. Curtiss will attempt a new speed record around the course.”

The stands roared. A biplane sheathed in khaki cloth taxied onto the field, its sixty-horse engine chattering and stuttering. The plane, little more than a skeleton of wings and ribs and struts, had a box tail, tricycle gear, and a control wheel. There was no protection for the aviator, merely a small seat attached to the biplane’s lower wing, behind a control wheel. Curtiss sat in the open, his feet braced against pedals. Swathed in a leather coat, scarf, and goggles, he controlled the biplane’s elevator and rudder with the wheel, the brakes and oil pump with the pedals, the wingtip ailerons by means of a shoulder harness worn over his coat.

Mack adjusted his motoring cap to keep the winter sun out of his eyes. Curtiss waved to the crowd, then revved the engine; the biplane bumped and bounced over the ground, and lurched into the air.

Pandemonium. A woman in a nearby box fainted, and Mack’s arms prickled with goose bumps. It was a thrilling sight. He pictured Southern California as he’d first seen it: rural, dusty, a frontier. Now autos and electric interurbans and flying machines were thrusting California, and the world, farther and farther from that lost past of memory.

Curtiss’s biplane climbed above the towers and began to fly the course. When the biplane swooped over the closer straightaway, even sturdy men ducked. The motor roared and the great shadow flickered over upturned faces, the harbinger of the new world coming.

Curtiss failed to set a record that afternoon but he received a standing ovation anyway. When he landed, Mack stood and clapped till his palms ached.

Louis Paulhan took off next. Paulhan was a former circus tightrope walker and mechanic at the Voison airplane works in Paris. A year ago, he’d set a stunning distance and endurance mark, flying eighty-four miles in two hours, forty-four minutes.

Paulhan’s Farman biplane was even more ungainly man Curtiss’s, its wings and tail resembling gray-white box kites, its undercarriage consisting of wheels plus skids. A fifty-horsepower air-cooled Gnome engine powered it. And today, Paulhan carried a passenger. The Human Megaphone stepped forward.

“Riding with Mr. Paulhan is Lieutenant Finger of the United States Army. They will present a demonstration of the potential of airplane warfare.”

The crowd quieted. A man in khaki strapped himself to the wing next to the aviator, his legs dangling over the leading edge.

“I wonder if Paulhan would take me up,” Mack said.

“Would you really want to risk it?”

“Sure. Airplanes aren’t a fad; they’re here for good. We’ll all go up regularly one day.”

He could tell from Margaret’s expression that she doubted it—and feared it if it were true.

The Farman rumbled out and took off, climbing over the field and then circling back on a course between and parallel to the straightaways. Lieutenant Finger leaned over and dropped a paper bag. It hit the ground and burst, shooting out a great cloud of white chalk dust.

“A simulation of dropping high explosives,” explained the Human Megaphone. “Mr. Paulhan confirms that his aircraft can carry up to three hundred pounds of explosives.” The crowd gasped.

The Farman banked and returned. Finger threw out three more paper bags, and they hit one after another, laying down overlapping circles of white. The crowd hushed again. Wind blew some of the dust, which covered an enormous area. Mack realized that if the plane had dropped bombs instead of chalk, there would be little left of anything at the point of impact.

“Fifty dollars?” Mack said.

“One hundred,” said Paulhan. He was a cheerful young man of twenty-five or so with lively dark eyes and a perfect Gallic mustache waxed to points. His buxom wife, Celeste, and his mechanics, Didier and Edouard, hovered behind him.

“Done.” Mack began to count out bills.

“Are you sure this is safe?” Margaret said.

“Why, I took Monsieur Hearst aloft yesterday; he is still alive,” Paulhan said. “Strap yourself in place, Monsieur Chance.”

Everything happened too hurriedly for Mack to be frightened. He left his cap with Margaret but kept his goggles. The mechanics spun the propeller, the Gnome motor made his eardrums throb, and he gripped the struts of the fragile wing as the ground raced by underneath. Cold wind beat his face. Paulhan lifted the Farman skyward and Mack’s stomach dipped and churned.

He watched the grandstand swoop away and diminish and fields shrink to patterned squares. Paulhan turned west toward the ocean. Mack held tight with both hands, the fear waning.
What an incredible feeling. Angels must feel this way.

They passed over farmhouses, arbors, the interurban line, racing toward the glittering ocean at incredible speed. Mack saw the land and sea from a perspective altogether new, but there was so much moment-by-moment excitement—the motor’s roar, the battering wind, the constant dips and bumps of the biplane—he had no time to consciously examine sensations, only experience them.

“Two thousand feet,” Paulhan shouted over the wind. The struts cut into Mack’s white-knuckled hands. As the Farman shot away from the shoreline like a slingshot stone, he looked down with a new, dizzying feeling. Water—nothing but the herringbone wave pattern of dark-blue water beneath…

Paulhan banked south and pointed at a small fishing smack plowing to sea, then he sank the Farman, and Mack’s belly with it. They flew fifty feet above the fishing boat, the fishermen waved, and Paulhan wagged his wings. Then the aircraft banked again, and Mack confronted the panorama of the California coast: surf, shore, green land, toy buildings, the distant mountains. It reminded him of the moment he came down from the Sierras. It was a magnificent, exalting sight.

Paulhan took note of his passenger’s rapt expression and concentrated on flying.

“It’s the most incredible experience I’ve ever had, Margaret.” Mack was walking through the crowd with his arm around her. Utterly chilled after the flight, he’d dragged her off to search for a coffee booth.

“Didn’t you think you’d fall off or crash?”

“Of course. Every minute. But I didn’t care—”

Suddenly, in the aisle between concession tents, Mack dropped his arm from her waist. He was staring down the lane.

“What is it?”

“Someone who looks familiar.” He bolted forward. “Wait right there.”

He worked his way through the crowd, shoving, turning sideways, his eye fixed on the tall boy studying a display of souvenir pennants. Sunshine lit the boy’s face like a medallion. The boy was fair, handsome, and browner than Carla had ever been. But her features were unmistakable.

“Jim?” Mack shouted, his heart pounding.

The boy turned and saw him. There was a rush of emotions Mack couldn’t quite read—surprise, confusion, fear, perhaps.

“Jim— Damn it, out of my way.” Mack manhandled a portly gentlemen eating cotton candy, and the man stumbled against him, smearing him with the sticky stuff and delaying him for ten seconds. Finally Mack got around him and ran up to the pennant display.

“Where’d that boy go? The one who was standing here?” The concessionaire pointed down the lane between his booth and the next. The lane was empty.

Panting, Jim limped along as fast as he could beneath the grandstand. He kept flinging looks over his shoulder, his deep-blue eyes full of panic. “Look out—one side—let me through.”

He wasn’t sure; he wasn’t sure at all. He’d seen the face only as the briefest of blurs. Then the white-haired man called him by name. Of course there were a lot of Jims in the world. But he wasn’t going to stand around and wait for the man to catch him. If it was his father, he wanted nothing to do with him.

Out of breath, he burst into the sunshine and raced up the grandstand steps. He grabbed the old tramp’s hand, twisted as some root freshly dug from the ground.