Trophy for Eagles (38 page)

A photo of any woman aviator brought back painful thoughts of Millie. He always wondered what they would be doing now had she
lived, and he castigated himself for the thousandth time for failing to keep her from going. As always, he suffered the last angry
thoughts, the ones he had to shake away, thoughts of how she must have felt during the last few moments of her life, when she knew it
was ending.

The story focused on the new Hafner Cup being awarded for a
transcontinental derby for stock commercial aircraft. First prize was
the cup—Bandy thought it looked like a floral wreath for a gangster's
funeral—$5,000 and an Auburn roadster; second prize was $3,000 and a Pontiac coupe; third was $1,000 and a Model A sedan. It was
a handicap race, with contestants taking off from their hometowns,
sponsored by the local car dealers. The racers were rated on an
elaborate system that considered distance, time en route, and horse
power. It was smart advertising for Hafner and the car companies, well worth the cost of the prizes. Charlotte naturally was not competing for the cup her company had sponsored, but announced that she hoped to win the Katherine Stinson Trophy race.

He folded the paper and looked off into the distance. Charlotte
was apparently immune to aging; she was as beautiful as he remembered her. He wondered what she was really like. The stories about
her sexual prowess and her flying skills were legion, but most of that
was probably bullshit.

At the bottom of the page a squib said, "Foreign Pilots Arrive."
Poland's George Kossowski had brought his gullwing fighter, a
P.Z.L.6; the German ace Hans Westoff was demonstrating the Udet
Flamingo sportplane; and Stephan Dompnier was going to fly a Caudron racer.

He passed his time in the maintenance pits with the various crews, trying to learn as much as he could. Bandy needed race
experience. Flying a fighter was one thing, whipping a racer around
a tight measured course was another. He had flown in pickup events
around the country, pushing a Laird Speed Wing around the pylons, but Cleveland was distinctly a notch up. He planned to
enter as many races as he could, but to fly in only one, the Standard
Mystery Derby. The multiple entries meant he could do some
practice flying every day during the time trials, trying to pick up all
the racing savvy he could.

He had selected the Standard Mystery Derby because it carried a $15,000 first prize, and was generally considered to be the second-
most-important event of the closed-course races. More important,
the big guns like Roscoe Turner and Jimmy Doolittle weren't going
to enter it, preferring to save their engines for the Thompson Trophy race.

The racing crowd was a friendly fraternity off the course, sharing possessions and effort easily. Once the starting flag was dropped,
however, it was every man for himself. The various race teams worked on the ramp in 102 bays arranged in sixteen rows. He wandered through them all, lending a hand here and there, using
his back as a sawhorse while a wheel was changed, or holding down
on the horizontal stabilizer while an engine was run up. In the
process, he got to know everybody and examine everything from
Benny Howard's sleek white Menasco-powered Pete to a workaday
Monocoupe. The time he had free from tweaking his own racer he spent with Howard Hughes and the Gee Bee bunch.

Hughes, now as good a mechanic as he was a pilot, had taken a
job with TWA as Charles Howard. He had then immediately asked
for leave to work with the Granvilles. No one else could have gotten
away with it, but Hughes did, for by now practically everyone in aviation knew about his ruse. Hughes was hoping to get a chance to fly one of the smaller Sportsters, and he brought Bandy up to speed
on the behind-the-scenes activities.

"Are you going to Charlotte Hafner's big party at the country club
tonight?"

"No, I didn't get an invitation."

"Man, there are no invitations. Everybody that's racing is going to
be there. I wouldn't miss it for the world."

Reluctantly, Bandfield let himself be persuaded. He wanted to
learn as much as he could, and the party was a good place. Besides,
it might be interesting to talk to Charlotte again. It would be
worthwhile to get some insight on Bruno's plans for Hafner Aircraft.
He could never like the German ace, but it was impossible not to
admire his success in a tough field. All over the country, aviation
companies were folding, but Bruno managed to keep his firm profitable. Maybe he could learn the secret of his success from Charlotte.

Hughes always insisted on doing the driving. They were in the Chevrolet sedan he'd purchased on arrival. The experience had been worth the whole trip for Bandfield. They had walked into the showroom, and Hughes had pointed to the car and said, "I'll take that one." The bemused salesman almost seemed cheated when Hughes counted out the full price of $650 in cash, with no haggling. It was just another of Hughes's many contradictions.

Bandfield had long since learned about the source of Hughes's funds, the oil-well-drilling-tool companies, but he was always amazed that Howard, as rich as he was, was quite indifferent to
money—as long as he had enough to do exactly what he wanted. It
didn't bother Hughes to eat in the same rotten little airport restaurants that the rest of them did, and he wore the same sort of nondescript oil-stained clothes day in and day out. He took turns when it came to picking up the tab, but he was never flamboyant about his wealth. The car was a good example.

"This is a nice car, Howard, but with all your money, why don't you buy a Packard or a Cadillac? A Pierce-Arrow, maybe?"

"Too conspicuous. The last thing I need is anybody looking at me. And if you take a broad out in a Cadillac, a lot of them put on the dog, play hard to get. They act natural in a Chevy, and you can get right to them." It was a typically pragmatic Hughes viewpoint.

The drive to the country club took them along the edge of a
run-down factory area. The plants, long idle, were odd geometries
of corrugated sheet iron, broken by the sharp angles of elongated windows designed to admit light on hustling assembly lines. Some
were coated in a red oxide that gave off a ruddy sunset glow, but the
rest were slumped under coats of rust and grime. A few of the
buildings were well maintained by firms that had some faint hope of
resuming operation, hope that the Depression would end some
time, but most were coming apart, the windows broken, with weeds and even trees growing up between the ties of the railroad spurs that
once had served them. For no reason that he could identify, the most poignant were the construction yards, where conveyor belts
still stood extended above the piles of sand and gravel, like starving
primitive cranes in the act of feeding their young.

In a neat arrangement, calculated long ago by the employers as a
means to get people to work on time, the factories were bordered with houses as identical as checkers. Bandfield knew them well, having lived in one in Monterey the year his dad worked at a
cannery. They were called straightbacks, with a fifteen-foot-wide
living room running across the front which led straight back to a tiny
bedroom and kitchen. He couldn't tell, but he thought most would
have an indoor bathroom—toilet, claw-leg tub used regularly every
Saturday, and a pedestal sink. A tiny coal stove that would glow
red-hot in the winter would be set just at the end of the living room,
so that its warmth would drift into the bedroom. The kitchen and bathroom would make do with heat from the coal-fired range.

Judging by the number of people who sat slumped on the slanting
steps of the wooden porches, most of the living rooms would have
folding cots set up, to handle the children or adults who had moved in to share the tiny rent.

The one dominating feature was the lack of color. Everything was
gray, houses, clothing, and faces. Even the leaves of the trees had
grown gray with the tired dust of the Depression.

At a stop sign, a little boy and girl were standing, dressed in
overalls of ragged gray ticking. The girl had a doll tucked under her
arms, head in, legs flopping down. She lifted her hand and flexed her fingers in a little wave.

Hughes had missed it all, saying not a word until he turned a jog
in the road and came on a brightly lighted little commercial center. A crowd had gathered in front of the doughnut shop to watch the cascade of dough rings splash into the hot grease, frizzle, then automatically be flipped to get a squirt of liquid sugar. The hot,
greasy sweet smell mixed with the sudsy odor of a saloon. Next door
to the tavern, convenient for dropping the kids off while Dad had a
beer, the incandescent bulbs of the theater marquee chased them
selves in sequential blackouts. Black letters on the back-lit marquee
announced the film:
Sky Devils,
starring Spencer Tracy. Hughes punched him and said, "That's mine, Bandy. I made it with out-
takes from
Hell's Angels.
Cost me less than half a million to put it in
the can, and it's made that back already."

Bandfield noticed that there was a quiet, well-mannered line waiting for the box office to open. Maybe Hughes knew what he
was doing. Maybe he'd find a way to make money with airplanes as
well.

And maybe his father, old George Bandfield, knew what he was
talking about too! What the hell was wrong with a country that would let buildings like this go idle and people starve? The odd thing was that he was part of the problem, building useless things like racing planes when there were hungry people around.

"Did you see those little kids back there, Howard?"

"No, I learned a long time ago never to look at anybody on the streets. First thing you know, they want a handout."

Bandfield shook his head as Cleveland fell away behind them into well-ordered fields. Something must be wrong with the system, and
he wasn't helping. There should be something he could do. He was still musing three miles later when they turned into the country
club's driveway. It was long and rolling, bordered by painted white
stones and trees whitewashed a neat four feet up their trunks. Beyond the symmetry of the trees were the well-watered fairways and the pool-table greens.

"No gray allowed," he said out loud. Hughes looked at him, bushy eyebrows arched. Bandfield remembered that his father always used to complain about golfers wasting their time, turning good land idle.

"Golfs a stupid game, Howard. Did you ever play?"

"Christ, Bandy, I'm an expert. I'm going to win the Open someday—didn't you know that?"

Bandfield didn't reply. He might have known that Hughes would
be as ambitious—and as capable—in golf as he was in flying, films,
and girl chasing.

He wet his finger with saliva and scrubbed at a spot on his lapel. Since the palmy days on Long Island, when Jack Winter's valet had showered him with clothes, Bandfield had gradually reverted to the
usual pilot's wardrobe of a scruffy suit, a few shirts, and a couple of
pairs of pants. This morning he'd placed his suit pants under the
mattress in his hotel room in the wan hope that some of the wrinkles
would be pressed away.

As they got out he felt his usual remorse about any social func
tion, wishing he were back in the hangar with the airplanes. Hadley
had been smart, refusing to come along and commenting, "I'm not going to dress up and go in and stand around talking to a bunch of guys I was talking to all day."

At least Bruno wouldn't be there; he was supposed to be back East
somewhere working yet another Hafner deal. Charlotte had planned far enough ahead to have the country club at her disposal, and taken
the care to have half of Cleveland's best-looking debutantes on hand. There was plenty to drink, and the food was laid out in a lavish display that would have fed the American Expeditionary Force for a week.

Hughes disappeared as soon as they entered, and Bandfield went
straight to the buffet, where a smiling Negro in a brilliant white
jacket was dispensing platter-sized plates. Bandy moved through the
line, concentrating on the peeled boiled shrimp and the thin slices
of roast beef piled on miniature slices of bread. There was a big bowl
of mixed olives, green and black. He put a dozen on his plate, and realized that it looked greedy. He picked up a slice of rye bread, covered the olives, then added six more to the top. Six was reason
able.