Glory Boys (7 page)

‘Hot air’s a problem?’

‘A plane needs lift to get airborne. Cold air’s got more lift than hot.’

‘So that’s all you’re waiting for? A wind from the south and a bit of cold air?’

‘Uh-huh. Aside from that, we’re ready to go.’

The storekeeper was taken aback. He’d seen the way the plane had smashed up on landing. He hadn’t realised Abe could be ready to move on again so fast. But he controlled his expression and nodded.

‘You’d best go over to Sal Lundmark’s tonight, then. Wouldn’t want to keep you here unnecessarily.’

‘No.’

‘I’ll tell her to expect you.’

‘Thanks.’

Hennessey walked to the barn door and the white dust and beating sun outside. He looked back at the barn, the plane and the pilot. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he muttered. Then he headed out, back to Main Street and his store. He had a cigarette between his lips and was searching his pockets for matches when he heard a movement behind him. It was the airman, a strangely troubled expression on his face.

‘Hen, last night you asked me to do something for you. You asked me to help you and the town here out of a fix, a real bad one. I said no.’

The storekeeper nodded, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat from the fierce overhead sun.

‘I said no for two reasons and I only told you one of them. The reason I told you about had to do with the jam you’re in. It’s not clear to me – as a matter of fact I don’t think it’s clear to you – what one man could hope to do. Even if I wanted to, I don’t see as I could do anything to help.’

‘Uh-huh. And the other reason?’ Hennessey spoke slowly as though the sun was stealing energy from his words. The storekeeper’s cigarette was still between his lips, still unlit.

‘The other reason is me. Before the war, I was a racetrack driver. When the war came, I did everything I could to get out to France, because I thought I’d be able to fly planes and fight them. And I was right. I was right about that part. But I hadn’t understood something then, which I understand now.’

He stopped speaking. His jaw actually locked and he looked as though he wasn’t going to speak another word. It took Hennessey a moment or two to realise that Abe hadn’t simply paused, so it was only after a few seconds that the storekeeper stepped closer and prompted, ‘Yes?’ When Abe spoke, his answer was so quiet that only the baking stillness of the air allowed Hennessey to catch it.

‘A man’s got to want to play the hero. And at first I did, I guess. I was crazy for it. But then they promoted me, gave me a squadron. And I changed, or maybe the war changed me. I wanted nothing to do with any of it. But I had no choice. I was a serving officer with orders to carry out. What I did, I did because I had to. To the best of my abilities. But I’m not the man you thought I was, Hen. I’m sorry.’

The storekeeper nodded, his mouth slightly open and a dark crease running between his eyebrows. He looked surprised or disbelieving. But the look was only temporary. He held up his cigarette, still unlit. He smiled like a man who looks around for his glasses and finds them on his nose. He lit the cigarette and inhaled.

‘I’ll tell Sal Lundmark to expect you. You’ll be getting a pot roast, I expect.’

‘Pot roast sounds good.’

‘And you should ask to see the kid’s collection of flying stuff. He’s nuts about it.’

‘Yeah.’

The storekeeper looked up at Abe’s makeshift windsock. The strip of white silk still hung down, as if in surrender. The two men nodded. Words still unspoken drifted just beyond them, out of reach. Then the storekeeper turned and walked away, shoes scrunching in the dazzling dust.

12

Powell accepted Willard’s offer.

It was an offer that gave everything to Powell, nothing to Willard. Under the terms of the contract – drawn up by Powell’s chief lawyer, then and there, under Willard’s nose – Willard would begin work at Powell Lambert. He’d be a junior employee in the trade finance division, earning a handsome fifteen thousand dollars a year.

Only not.

Of the fifteen thousand dollar salary, Powell would withhold ten thousand in interest payments on the loan. As for the principal, almost nothing was said. Willard wouldn’t even remotely be able to repay the loan from his earnings. When he tried to ask Powell about salary hikes and promotions, Powell dismissed the subject with a brusque jab of his cigar. The only thing Powell did say was, ‘This is Wall Street. There’s money to be made. If you have the gift, you’ll make it. If you don’t…’ He shrugged.

And the meaning of the shrug was obvious. With the contract as it was written now, Willard was a virtual slave. If he couldn’t find two hundred thousand bucks, then he’d be forced to work for Ted Powell for the rest of his life. During the war, Willard had been almost as frightened of capture as he had been of injury. But the barbed wire of a German prison camp could hardly have been more permanent than the contract he had just signed.

And why? Why was he doing what he was doing? Why not take the million, clear the debt, go back out West, get on with life?

Two reasons.

The first was money. A million bucks sounded like a lot. But Willard was a realist. He owed Powell two hundred grand: so a million became eight hundred thousand. And what would Willard live on? In Hollywood he had spent more than a hundred thousand bucks a year. Eight hundred grand would run through his hands in six or seven years, maybe less. And after that, what? To most people, a million dollars would have seemed like the vastest fortune in the world. To Willard, it felt a hair’s breadth from poverty.

But the second reason was the bigger one. He didn’t know how to put it into words. It had to do with pride, with Willard’s sense of himself.

From earliest childhood, he had understood this much: he was the son, the only son, the natural inheritor of the family kingdom. It had always been hard to convey to outsiders the intensity of that feeling. The name for one thing. No one in the family ever called the family business by its name, Thornton Ordnance. It was just the Firm, one word, implicitly capitalised. Willard’s great-grandpa had made it. His grandpa had nourished it. His father had expanded it. It was Willard’s destiny to do the same, to follow in their footsteps, to prove himself worthy of the family name.

And that pointed to a deeper reason still. Willard’s father. Junius Thornton might speak as though it were entirely up to Willard whether or not he joined the Firm, but both men knew that was a lie. It mattered entirely, completely, utterly. If Willard had chosen not to fight for his place at the Firm, Junius wouldn’t have excommunicated his son, but any respect would have vanished completely. Willard already knew too well how bruising his father’s savage, iron-bound silences could be. A lifetime of such silence would have been too much to bear.

And so, as Willard picked up the pen that would sign away his freedom, somewhere in his deepest consciousness he understood this: that everything he was about to do, he was doing for his father.

13

The Lundmarks’ home had a double door. A screen door closed shut against evening insects and a green-painted wooden door that was folded back inside the room. Inside, the room was lit by a single oil lamp. What with the wire mesh and the dim light, Abe hadn’t been able to see very much of the interior. He knocked at the door, but out of politeness only, to let the folks inside know he was there. Without waiting, he went on in.

And he saw this: the kid, Brad, staring at him with those big wide-open eyes.

And this: the mother, Sal, her face and neck violently disfigured by red burn marks, her reddish hair growing thin and patchy through the burns on her scalp. And her eyes: pale blue, pretty, and completely blind.

And finally this: a photo on the mantelpiece, framed and spotlessly clean. It showed a man’s face, nice looking and strong, Brad’s father. Beneath the photo, an inscription: Stanford G. Lundmark, A Hero of Independence, 1881–1923.

Right away, Abe knew the nature of the storekeeper’s game – a game perfectly calculated to change Abe’s mind, if anything could. Muttering darkly, Abe assumed a smile and advanced. Sal Lundmark had dinner ready. She asked Abe to say grace, which he did, stiffly and out of practice. ‘Let us thank the Lord for these His gifts of goodness. Amen.’ Abe used the grace his father used to say, but finished wondering whether Sal had been expecting something longer and more ornate.

‘Thank you, Captain.’

The conversation began awkwardly. Sal Lundmark had some kind of idea that Abe had to be treated a little better than royalty, maybe not quite as well as a procession of angels. She asked him if it were true that he’d met President Wilson – which he had. She asked him if the Prince of Wales had been as handsome in real life as he looked in his pictures – Abe said he had. She asked what the food had been like the time he’d been a guest of the French Prime Minister.

At that point, Abe had put his knife and fork down.

‘Ma’am, I did a little flying in the war. Right afterwards, I met a few people, got given some medals, had a big fuss made of me. And you want to know something? I hated it. I like my airplane, I like any place that has airplanes in, and I like places that feel like home.’

There was a pause.

When Sal wasn’t using her hands to eat, she rested them on the edge of the table so she could keep her orientation in the room. ‘And your home,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Your home, I guess…’

‘The place I grew up was a little farmhouse in Kentucky.’ He looked around the cluttered room, which was about thirty feet long by fifteen wide. ‘I’d say it was a little bit smaller than this, and we didn’t have that fancy lean-to affair at the back. But don’t worry,’ he added, ‘although this place feels kind of grand, you’ve made it homey. It’s a pleasure to be here.’

She laughed. Abe laughed. Brad laughed with pleasure at seeing the ice broken. The conversation ran easily after that. Stanford Lundmark had worked as a carpenter and, when work was hard to come by, a farm labourer. Abe knew plenty about farming from his childhood, and they talked about good harvests and lousy employers.

Little by little, Sal opened up to speak about her husband’s death. He’d been one of the men who had first reported the Marion mobsters to the police. Their house had been burned to the ground, blinding Sal and almost killing her. Stanford had rebuilt the house, plank by plank. For a time things had been quiet, but then there had been more unprovoked assaults on Independence. Lundmark had had enough. He’d ridden down into Marion, aiming to sort things out, ‘once and for all’. He’d got his wish, in a manner of speaking. He was gone for two days, before he was found with his head smashed in down among the cornfields on the north side of town.

‘He must have been a hell of a man,’ Abe murmured softly.

Sal nodded. Her eyes couldn’t see, but they could still cry. There was a short silence.

‘You must have been very proud,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Very.’

Abe let the silence run a little longer, then changed subject. He asked Brad if he had collected any flying stuff other than the photo of Abe. He might as well have asked the Pope if he had an interest in prayer books. In an instant, the kid ran upstairs and came down with a whole boxful of photos, news stories, scrapbooks, pages torn from boys’ magazines, movie posters.

Abe laughed. ‘Sal, you know your son is a bit of an obsessionist?’

She smiled and wiped her eyes, but Brad was impervious to irony. He had a small mountain of material relating to Abe; vastly more than Abe had ever wanted to keep himself.

‘And that’s your Croix de Guerre,’ said Brad, slapping down one photo. ‘And that’s your Légion d’honneur –’ another photo ‘– And that’s your Congressional, no, wait,
that’s
your Distinguished Service Cross, the first one, three oak leaves, then I should have – yes – the Glory Boys piece. Boy! I used to know that article by heart.’

Brad dropped a newspaper article on the table. The article was a syndicated reprint of a piece that had first appeared in the
New York Times.
Abe had been asked to do an interview with a war correspondent. Abe hadn’t wanted to do it – he didn’t like or approve of the way the press treated the war – and he had given a grudging thirty-minute interview to the journalist in question. That had been all. He’d forgotten the whole thing within five minutes. But then the article had appeared, splashed beneath a huge photo of Abe, ‘Captain Rockwell of the Glory Boys’. The piece had caused a sensation. Nothing in it was untrue. Abe couldn’t even claim that his words had been twisted or distorted. But if Abe had sought to avoid any possible glamourising of his unit and the war in the sky, he couldn’t have failed more completely. The article made Abe out to be America’s hero of heroes; his men to be the bravest of the brave. And it was good. Much though Abe hated it, the article was a superb piece of writing, syndicated, so it seemed, to every newspaper in America. And the name for the squadron had stuck. Abe was never just Captain Rockwell any more, he was always Captain Rockwell of the Glory Boys. The men in the squadron had been intensely proud and had painted the title on the nose and tail of every plane. Abe dated his true and abiding hatred of the war from the moment that article first appeared.

Brad went on digging out items from his collection. Abe rubbed his face, in deep discomfort. He did his best to change the subject.

‘I hope it’s not all me.’

‘No, I’ve got everyone here. Everyone. I mean,’ he added hurriedly, ‘you were always my favourite. You and…’

‘Me and Rickenbacker. Good choice. Rickenbacker was the best.’

Abe felt better now that the kid’s interest was deflected onto other subjects, but one photo of himself as a young man was still visible on the top of the pile. He was wearing a lieutenant’s uniform. He’d only just been commissioned, hadn’t yet shot down a single plane, hadn’t yet experienced a minute in combat. The photo was monochrome, of course, but somehow you could see the startling blue of the young man’s eyes, just as startling as if a piece of sky had fallen down and got lodged there. The young man looked out with confidence and eagerness, as though knowing the place that history had written for him. Abe looked sharply away, as though allergic to the sight. When Brad happened to unfold a newspaper cutting that fell over the photo and covered it, Abe pulled his glance away with an almost visceral feeling of relief.