Glory Boys (28 page)

Willard swept the light around the metal hold. The light was dim, but he could make out the big rolls of cowhide looming out of the shadows. The hold smelled of fuel oil, leather, pine resins, and the faint but odious smell of the tannery. There were a load more boxes to check. Willard didn’t feel like checking them. He felt suddenly nauseous and scrambled out of the hold, out of the cockpit, and too fast down the rickety wooden stepladder.

Tariffs.

A Republican Administration had slapped import tariffs on most things, including Canadian furs. It was fairly obvious – obvious from the moment that Willard had found the tiny dot marked ‘Ruxion’ on the map – that no Customs official was ever going to catch a glimpse of any US-bound cargo. Of course, somewhere down the way the documents would acquire a ‘Tariff Paid’ stamp on them, but Willard assumed such things could be either bought or forged. So this was Powell Lambert’s game: a smuggling racket dressed with Wall Street flair.

He felt sick and uncertain.

He made his way back to the stifling little room where the four Ruxion men chatted together in the half-darkness.

‘That’s all I needed. Thank you.’

‘It’s OK.’

None of the men made any move to get up.

‘Is there any chance of a ride back to the railroad? My train out leaves in ninety minutes.’

The driver shook his head. ‘No train today.’

‘No? I was told in Calgary…’

The driver found something he didn’t like in his throat and hacked unpleasantly until it was cleared. ‘Don’t listen to them in Calgary. There’s a slip just two, three miles down the line. Won’t be another train back up again for a week or two. Depending on the weather. If it snows before then…’ The driver shrugged.

Willard felt like he’d just been sentenced to a fortnight in hell and the man was shrugging. ‘I have to get back out,’ he said in a rising voice. ‘I simply can’t… Can I borrow the car? I could buy it.’

‘Need the car,’ said the driver. ‘Need it here.’

Willard blinked in astonishment. Imprisoned in Ruxion of all places! No linen. No hotel. No company. And – great God! – if the snow came early, then there was no telling how long he might be stuck. Willard began to regret the entire venture. The four men in the room exchanged vile, nodding, amused grins. Willard felt like the new kid at school being deliberately intimidated by his elders.

Then the man on the camp bed spoke, the first time Willard had heard him say anything. Most of the man’s teeth were either missing or so brown that they were invisible inside his mouth.

‘Fly,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I know who you are.’

‘Fly?’

‘Willard T. Thornton. America’s favourite ace. Huh? I’m right, huh? Guy like you shouldn’t need a railroad.’

The suppressed mirth around the room broke out into open chuckles. Willard noticed that none of the men’s dentistry was all that great.

‘You mean fly that airplane south?’

The man on the camp bed relapsed into silence, except to repeat with a kind of sigh, ‘Willard T. Thornton, huh? Willard T. Thornton.’

Mr Chatty indicated his camp bed companion. ‘Ben’s sick. Chest cold. Been coughing up stuff all morning. He’s the pilot around here.’

‘I’ve never flown a thing like that before,’ said Willard, fending off the suggestion. ‘I was a pursuit pilot, not a … not a…’ He faded out, unable to think of any description other than ‘goddamn smuggler’.

‘Flies just the same,’ said Ben the Pilot. ‘Don’t fly no different.’

‘The plane oughta go out today any road,’ said Mr Chatty. ‘It’s loaded, fuelled, ready to go. No telling how long Ben’s gonna be out. If you want to be out before the snows…’

Willard was about to snap something expressing his total lack of concern in Ben’s wellbeing, but he held himself back. It was fly the plane or sit it out in Ruxion. Neither option seemed great, but one of the two seemed a whole lot worse than the other.

‘I don’t have maps,’ said Willard hoarsely. ‘I’m gonna need maps.’

58

The cement block sat in the wall as snug as any of its neighbours, with no more than a thick fingernail’s gap showing at any point.

Abe had a flat-bladed decorator’s knife in his right hand. The knife had its tip turned down into a little hook. Abe probed around the block, found an opening, then slid the knife home. He fished carefully, then felt the tip of the knife catch. He pulled carefully until the block began to come free. When a clear half-inch of block was exposed, he put his hands to it and lifted it out. Behind the block was a cavity, packed with documents: Bosse’s list of information requests and their own list of what had already been accomplished. Abe took both.

Meanwhile, in the hangar, Pen was getting dinner going. In a breach of her normal slacks-and-shirt policy, she was wearing a pretty cream sleeveless dress with matching flat-soled pumps. If she hadn’t mussed up her hair within minutes of combing it, she might have been almost smart.

She’d brought food – potted meats, cheeses, salads, olives and bread – and laid it out on a board table covered by a clean white sheet. On a table to the side, stood a gramophone and dance records. Although, strictly speaking,
Sweet Kentucky Poll
was no longer entitled to her own hangarage now that the two DH-4s needed space, Abe hadn’t been able to bear the idea of putting her out with nothing to wear. So he’d ordered a canvas canopy from a fisherman’s store in Brunswick, but until it came, Poll continued to occupy the hangar, nosing the table like a wolf come to share with the mice.

The men came to join Pen. Both of them were in shirtsleeves and neither wore a tie. Initially, Arnie was nervous at Pen’s sudden air of femininity, but she resolutely refused to acknowledge that anything had changed and he soon acclimatised. He stole a slice of sausage which he ate quickly with his long, bony fingers.

‘Nice,’ he commented.

‘Mason’s providing the wine,’ said Abe, producing a couple of bottles. ‘I hope it’s OK.’

Pen turned the bottles into the light. The wine was from one of the great French vineyards, one of the best pre-war vintages. ‘Good? This is exceptional.’

‘He said it was. I didn’t know.’

They sat down and began to eat. Abe’s home was ready now. He’d built himself a kitchen, a bathroom, bedroom-cum-living room. Though Arnie was shacking up with Abe for now, he too was getting his own place built on site. But though Abe’s new home was more comfortable, the hangar had one overwhelming advantage: its size. With the table in the middle of the floor anyone outside trying to listen in would have been a solid twenty feet from the action. With the gramophone playing as well, any conversation would have been absolutely inaudible.

They got down to business.

‘We’ve made a good start,’ said Abe, ‘but looking at this list of Bosse’s, we’ve got a lot still to do. We’re getting great photographic evidence. Pen, you’ve given us all we need on where Mason buys his stuff, who he buys it from, that kind of thing. But we’ve got nothing financial. We can’t prove how much money is coming in, what it’s spent on, or where the profits go. Bosse needs all of that. We need to figure out our next steps. What to do, how to do it.’

Pen nodded slowly. It was a topic she and the others had been thinking about for some time. ‘Well, one place to start is the mail. All the mail from the United States to Havana comes through us. Arnie reckons he could build me a steam valve…’

Arnie nodded. ‘Right. Running right off of the engine. Simple one-finger release. Pot of gum concealed in the cockpit side-panel. No problem. It can be ready in a couple of days.’

Abe smiled, but – Pen fancied or was she imagining it? – there was something a little ghostly in his smile. ‘Good. Only, Arnie, you might want to put steam valves into both airplanes. I’ve got a fancy that Mason might start giving us his best stuff to carry.’

‘Huh? You mean Mason’s just going to hand us all his most crucial documents?’

‘Well, not all, just some. And he doesn’t know it yet.’

Abe explained his idea: a beautiful one in its way. The length of Bosse’s list already seemed less daunting. They ate and drank. They listened to the dance music. The conversation began to drift. Arnie asked Abe about the time before the war when Abe had been a race car driver. It was a world Pen knew nothing of and Abe talked with absorption, passion and colour. He’d obviously loved driving and only the superior thrill of an aircraft engine had been able to lure him away.

‘But you don’t have a car here,’ said Pen. ‘You don’t miss driving?’

‘I’ve got Poll. I’ve got Sue. I even get to drive your sweet little Curtiss.’

‘That’s not the same.’

‘I guess I did my time on the racetrack.’

An evasion. Pen was getting used to them. She noted to herself how Abe’s involvement with racetracks had come to an abrupt end with the onset of war. His military career had ended with equal sharpness. So had his time with the Post Office, with pylon-racing, with movie-stunting, with test-flying and anything else he’d ever touched. The theme of deep involvement followed by abrupt termination seemed too often repeated to be coincidence. She couldn’t explain it. He wouldn’t talk about it. Although Pen had been working right alongside Abe for five weeks now, it seemed she knew him less and less with each passing day.

Arnie had gone to get Abe’s deck of cards and was persuading him to do tricks. But Pen watched with a sceptical eye. She had never been interested in card tricks and she’d never flown as a pursuit pilot. But some of the patterns of thinking made intuitive sense to her. She could feel Abe trying to steer her eye in one direction and she taught herself to look hard in the other. The more she learned to ‘read’ the tricks, the less impressive they appeared. They seemed shallow, a distraction from the real world.

The dance music upped its tempo. Pen felt an impulse to release her feelings in movement.

‘Arnie, do you dance?’

‘Uh, not really, I wouldn’t say –’

Both men were like this. If she raised a topic that in any way connected with her other life – either her gender or her money – then both men instantly backed away. But she wasn’t having it.

‘Great,’ she said, scraping her seat back, ‘it’ll be great to learn.’

She dragged Arnie up. He was a strong man, but came over a babe-in-arms when asked to lead Pen through the dance. But she persevered. She gave him the confidence to lead her correctly. He was a slightly literal dancer: too keen on getting the steps just right, not happy just to let the music flow. But all the same, she was pleased. She enjoyed her dance.

The record finished. Pen didn’t put another one on. She wanted Abe to ask her to dance, but he didn’t, he just sat at the table drinking coffee and flicking playing cards through his hands. It was rude, she thought. Even if he didn’t want to, he should have asked anyway. But he didn’t. He didn’t ask her. She didn’t ask him.

She was about to say her goodbyes and go, when she noticed something new.

The workbench ran along the back wall of the hangar, then turned at right angles and ran halfway up one of the side walls. For a long time, Abe’s collection of castings had sat on a shelf above the workbench on the back wall. The shelf had finished right there at the corner. But not any more. Someone, either Abe or Arnie, had fixed a shelf along the other wall too. The collection of castings was already crowding along the new shelf towards the end. At a rough guess, Abe’s thirty or forty castings had suddenly become fifty or sixty.

Pen’s brain, a little drunk, a little tired, suddenly sobered up. Going to the shelf, she reached one of the new castings down. The size of a loaf, the casting was metal and very heavy. The model was of an aircraft fuselage, but had no wings, no undercarriage, no tail fin.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

Abe came over. ‘It’s the Dayton-Wright O-W fuselage, as near as we can get it.’

She looked between the two men and saw closed faces, a secret shared away from her. Abe took the casting from her and began stroking it unconsciously, always in the direction of air movement, nose to tail, nose to tail.

‘It’s a kind of hobby of ours. The accuracy is better than one part in twenty.’

‘You do it just for fun?’ Pen’s voice rose in disbelief.

‘Well, there’s a serious purpose, I guess. I’ve long had a feeling that airplane design has been too much about engine development, not enough about aerodynamics. These castings are a way to look at some of the aerodynamic issues.’

‘And how do you do that?’

‘Oh, you know, we’ll figure something out.’

Abe’s statement hardly marked a natural end to the conversation. Mostly, you’d think a pilot would want to go on from there, talk about his passion to somebody who could understand. But he didn’t. He put the casting on the shelf, went back to the table, drank another cup of coffee, yawned.

We’ll figure something out
. That was a meaningless statement. Or rather: it had plenty of meaning, but not the one contained in the actual words. Abe’s answer meant: I’m sorry, I’m not going to tell you, you don’t belong.

Pen heard his answer: not the words, but the real message. She felt his physical presence very close to her, like a second shadow. But the closeness was an illusion. This was a race-car driver who didn’t own a car; a combat pilot who hated war; a friend who wouldn’t dance; an airman who wouldn’t: share.

She felt isolated. She felt unwanted. She felt betrayed.

59

From the cockpit, the runway looked long, but from the cockpit runways always do. Beyond the end of the grass strip, there was a litter of grey rocks funnelling down to a stream bed. Beyond the stream, there were pines, forty feet tall and more, climbing a steep slope up the hillside.

Willard felt bad.

A sense of danger hid in his stomach, like a wild beast curled in its burrow. He couldn’t make it out. He’d done a careful pre-flight inspection and run the engine for twenty minutes at half revs to check out any irregularity. He wasn’t familiar with the type of plane, a Martin C-1, and in any event, Willard had been a pilot, not a grease-monkey. Nevertheless, Willard knew enough to know that the basics seemed completely fine. He was even surprised by the apparent competence of the two card players, who turned out to be responsible for servicing the plane.