Trophy for Eagles (16 page)

Bandfield knew how Byrd was suffering. He was the proudest by
far of the lot that had assembled that rainy May, and Lindbergh's success must have been a bitter pill.

The rumors were rife that Byrd's crew was ready to abandon him,
and that Fokker was trying to buy the aircraft back. The papers said
he was receiving hate mail accusing him of fraud and cowardice. His replies had been weak; in the only statement he made to the
press, he said simply that he "didn't wish to undermine the scientific
character of the flight by hasty preparations." Bandfield didn't know
why the explorer hadn't taken off, but he was sure that the reasons were sound.

The imposing name "America Transoceanic Company" was spelled out with unconscious irony over the hangar doors. The
airplane was locked inside, a bad sign. If they were getting ready to
go, the doors should have been open and people should have been swarming over the aircraft.

There was no answer to his knock. He walked around to the side entrance, peering into the gloom of the hangar. A guard, obviously
just awakened, ran over to the door.

"Sorry, sir, no one is here. They are all due out here at the field tonight at midnight for an early-morning takeoff."

Bandfield shrugged and walked away, annoyed again at his timing. As he turned the corner toward the parking lot he ran into Charlotte Hafner.

She was standing with her hands on her hips, her head cast down,
watching him from beneath lowered eyelids, every bit the wholesome hooker.

"Hello, stranger. I've seen you here many times, but we've never
had a chance to meet."

Bandy had been only too aware of her presence on the field;
wherever she walked she was preceded by a bow wave of admiration
that alerted people she was coming. Usually when he saw her she was getting into an airplane with Dusty Rhoades for flight instruction.

"How do you do, Mrs. Hafner? I'm pleased to meet you at last."

"You and Bruno are old friends, I know." She laughed and shrugged, saying in effect, "It's not my fault."

He didn't reply. She was the most beautiful mature woman he had ever seen—nothing to compare to Millie's fresh beauty, of
course, but startling in her own way. She was dressed like Holly
wood's conception of the lady flyer, in a fashion-plate leather coat, jodhpurs, and high laced boots, her large, firm breasts bulging animatedly under a filmy white blouse. She was carrying a helmet and scarf in her hands.

He had assumed she was a bleached blonde; now he could see that her hair was truly golden, with perhaps some slight streaks of silver. "Peaches and cream" was the perfect description of her complexion. The least suggestion of lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth made her seem to be smiling all the time.

He could not help himself. He let his eyes run down her body, appreciating the fullness of her figure. At last she put her hands out and turned around. "Inspection over?" she asked, loving it.

Bandfield blushed and apologized. "I'm sorry. The truth is you are absolutely beautiful, but I was rude to stare."

She reached over and touched his shoulder, running her hand
down his arm almost as if she were checking the conformation of a
horse she wished to buy.

"Don't apologize. All women love to be admired, especially when
they get to be my age."

He moved away slightly. She followed him.

"Have you seen Dusty? He was supposed to meet me here, and
we were going to take a hop in my plane." She pointed to the Waco 10 tethered a hundred yards down the field, canvas covers over its
cockpits and the engine.

"No, nobody's here. The guard says they're coming in at midnight. Must be going to make the try in the morning. I hope they do, and I hope they make it."

"Me too. The papers are beginning to say ugly things about Byrd.
Dusty says it's all nonsense, that he'll go when he's ready." Her
mention of Dusty was matter-of-fact, but then a look of irritation
crossed her face.

"Sure Dusty's not here?" Her voice was a mixture of wistfulness
and hope.

"No, I haven't seen him."

Her expression softened as she darted a glance at him. "What are
you doing this morning?"

Bandfield thought fast. He didn't want to give this woman any instruction in Hafner's airplane. If something happened, a simple ground loop, anything, there would be hell to pay.

"I've got to get back to Manhattan."

"Couldn't you give me some breakfast? I know a little place not far from here where we could have bacon and eggs, maybe, or whatever you wanted."

She placed her hand on his forearm and squeezed. She had moved closer, and he caught her exciting scent.

"I'm sorry." He wrenched away, and said, "You'll have to excuse
me, I've got to go."

She smiled wryly and said, "When you've gotta go, you've gotta

go.

He dove in the Stutz and pulled away, a mixture of regret and relief pouring over him. He thought of her breasts and her obvious availability and toyed with the idea of turning around. Then he thought of Millie and mashed the accelerator down.

*

Salinas, California/July 15, 1927

The sun-dusted hillsides were resting, waiting for the next seasonal splash of rain to paint them green again. The few cows that Clarice Roget insisted on maintaining cut shallow paths up the hills, edging
around the scrub oak and manzanita, coming home at night to the sprawling wooden structure that had begun as barn and then been turned into a combination garage/hangar.

She watched Hadley strut up the path with his cocky walk, arms
flailing, legs swinging wide, knowing that he had forgotten the bitter
disappointment of the
Rocket,
and was already spending the money
Bandy was supposed to win in the next race. There was always a
next race, always something just around the corner. Usually a bill
collector.

She stood on the wooden porch of their unpainted house, wash
ing out his underwear, the suds on her arm giving her deep leathery
tan a glistening cordovan hue.

Hadley's assurance amid poverty galled, and she flushed red, the veins of her neck extending like rhubarb stalks. She smacked the
scrubbing board into the tub in exasperation. "I tell you, Hadley, you'd be better off to burn that garage—"

"Hangar," he interrupted.

"Hangar, garage, it's a junk breeding ground. We ought to start
farming, get some acreage where we can plant some beans and sugar
beets, and start living a little normal."

It was such an old argument that she understood when Hadley
simply turned away to walk back down the gravel path to where the
new apprentice was helping him work on the old truck. He hadn't
even bothered to repeat that lettuce was the coming cash crop, as he
usually did.

Clarice glared out the window at her husband. Theirs was a comfortable marriage of total misunderstanding, one that only
strong personalities could survive. They were so completely devoid
of common interests that each remained an intriguing mystery to the other. She was flint-hard, farm born and bred, glorying in the rituals of planting and harvest, breeding and birthing. He was
steel-sharp and devoted to machines, seeing in them an uplifting,
challenging sculptural beauty that was usually lost on others, always
on her. She liked to go to church services, he liked to tell naughty
jokes. They repeatedly struck sparks, their differences both the root of their difficulties and the source of their strength. Physically they looked remarkably alike, both tall and lean, with straw-colored hair
that their hard life was sure to turn white early.

The weathered sign over the hangar door said "Roget Aircraft,"
but the yard was filled with the pick-up automobile work Hadley did
to make a living. Clarice's gnarled hands drummed on the table. Her eyes were troubled. Her husband had built a few good airplanes, she guessed, but none had made any money. She ran the books and knew that fixing cars was their bread and butter. The
problem, of course, was that to Hadley and Bandy, cars were mere
commodities, something they could fix and forget, while airplanes were utterly absorbing works of art in which they lost themselves. She knew, too, that they took half the normal time to repair an American car and twice as much as was necessary to repair an airplane. But in the past few years, word of Hadley's mechanical ability—and his set of metric tools—had spread and rich people
were bringing exotic foreign cars, Lanchesters, Isotta-Fraschinis,
Hispano-Suizas, from as far away as San Francisco. Clarice didn't
want to see anything but forgettable Fords and Chevies in the yard;
when they bent over a Rolls, they fell in love with it and lost money.

She turned and put a blue enameled coffeepot, as chipped by life as herself, on the stove to perk. Eight thick pepper-dusted slices of sidemeat sizzled in a black griddle, ready for the second breakfast.
Hadley took most of his meals and gallons of coffee out in the
garage. She figured he'd swallowed as much crankcase oil from his fingers as mayonnaise from the bread over the years, for he rarely bothered to stop to wash his hands. He would never grow up, never
get the grease from under his nails or his back off a creeper. Hadley
always talked about striking it rich some day, creating an airplane that they could build in quantity, moving to Los Angeles and
building a factory. The truth was that he thought he'd already struck
it rich, getting to work on such nice machinery every day.

She'd been glad when Bandy left to fly to Paris, happier still that
he had stayed away even after the disaster of the fire. It was good for
Bandy to be away from her husband for a while, to avoid being pressed utterly into Hadley's mold, and she was solaced by the emerging independence she sensed in him. Perhaps it was inevitable; his father had been a rebel, a huge, lovable man who
embraced every cause except earning a steady living for his family.
George Bandfield had a wild red streak in him, a joyous brawling love for the underdog that took him into the Oregon forests to help the woodcutters and to the San Francisco docks to rally the longshoremen. He had dominated his wife completely, just as he'd
tried to do with Bandy. But his son had reacted differently, temper
ing under the treatment until he was steel-hard and resilient,
as conservative as his father was radical, as bullheaded as Hadley
when he was right, but quick to admit it when he realized he was wrong.

Yet they all missed George Bandfield. His wife, Emily, had loved
him unflaggingly even though she had seen her ranch eaten up acre by acre, to fuel his follies, adoring him with the mindless, assertive
passion peculiar to women whose marriages are considered mistakes
by everyone else. When George Bandfield left she stopped living in
all but the literal sense. Always fragile and withdrawn, she had
become just a paper image of an old woman, in bed for most of the
day, barely able to let a hired woman feed and take care of her.
Clarice knew that his mother's death had added to Bandy's sense of
guilt. He once told her he felt his dad had left because his own success in school had been too much of a contrast.

Clarice felt that Bandy had two legacies from his father. The first was his profound love for the underdog, and the second was his
mechanical aptitude. To be Hadley Roget's partner, he'd need them both.

She sighed and turned away from the window when Hadley
rolled the truck to the side and began to work on one of his latest acquisitions, a blood-red Standard biplane he'd picked up from a wrecking yard, gear crumpled around its cowling like seaweed on a
boulder. She knew he planned to use parts from it in fixing up the shattered hulk he was rebuilding for Bandy to fly to Hawaii.

Down in the yard, Hadley wrenched the rudder from the Standard's
fuselage; an argument with Clarice always put a fine edge on Hadley's always volatile temper. "Goddammit, Howard, let's get busy. I ain't paying you to stand around and spit."

"You're not paying me anything, Hadley, I'm paying you, remember?"

Hadley glowered as the youth went on, "And to you, and every
body here, I'm Charles Howard, not Howard Hughes. I want to be able to move around without a lot of lawyers following me."

"Charles Howard" was tall and lean, with a broad face and a
quick smile. His eyes were dark and darting, moving always as if
something he could learn had just eluded him. A year ago, Hadley had taught him to fly. Now he was teaching him to be a mechanic.