by T. E. Cruise
“What’s he talking about, Don?” Susan asked, totally confused.
“I don’t know what he means, honey,” Don said nervously. He glared at Steve. “Just shut up, will you?”
“No! I won’t shut up,” Steve replied, looking amused. “You’re pretty good at needling people, old buddy. You can dish it out, all right, but you can’t take it. You know as well as I do the reason you hate me—”
“Shut up, I said—!” Don’s chair tipped over as he jumped to his feet. He was trembling with anger.
“What’s the matter, bookworm?” Steve taunted, the smile vanishing from his face. “I know you want to keep me out of GAT because you’re afraid of the competition. Well, I don’t blame you. You sure turned out to be inadequate competition concerning—”
Don snatched up his wineglass and hurled its contents across the table, into Steve’s face.
“Oh, my God—” Susan gasped.
Her mother was ashen. Her father’s stunned expression had melted into one of deep grief. Robbie looked like he was about to cry, and Don looked exhausted. He was still trembling, but his head was down and his hands hung limp by his sides.
Steve sat with the wine that had splattered the front of his shirt and suit jacket dripping down his face. “Well, I guess I’ve just had one for the road,” he said mildly.
“You’d better go,” Susan heard her father hoarsely whisper. “Please, it would be the best thing …”
Steve nodded, wiped his face with his napkin, and stood up. “Thanks for a lovely evening.”
(Two)
Steven Gold went upstairs to the guest room he was occupying, changed clothes, and packed quickly. He telephoned for a taxi, and then went back downstairs with his valise, giving the dining room a wide berth. He was waiting for his cab at the front door when his father appeared in the foyer.
“I’m sorry, Pop,” Steve said, setting down his valise. “I’m sorry the evening got spoiled—” He was choosing his words carefully, not about to accept responsibility for what he considered to be Don’s fault.
“Where are you going?”
“I called a cab,” Steve said. “I’ll check into a hotel for tonight, and catch the first flight I can back to Washington tomorrow.”
His father was looking old and gray. Steve felt his anger draining away, to be replaced with compassion. Fuck it, he thought. I can’t do much for him, but at least I can let him off the hook … “Come on, cheer up, Pop.” Steve forced himself to smile apologetically. “It was my fault tonight.”
“No …” He put his hand on Steve’s shoulder. “Don shouldn’t have goaded you like that …”
“Pop …” Steve shook his head. “It was my fault, I tell you. The guy’s so thin-skinned. I should have known better than to push him. I played with fire and I got burned, is all…”
“Steve?” his father began. “What you were talking about before …”
“What was that, Pop?”
“You were suggesting that Don had some reason other than the office to dislike you …?”
“Ah, that was just the wine talking,” Steve said quickly. “I was just shooting my mouth off …”
“Then there is nothing else?” his father prodded. “Nothing more I should know?”
Steve shook his head, grateful that he had another gift to give. “Nothing else you should know, Pop. I swear it to you…”
His father was nodding, looking satisfied. “The thing with Don, he’s as emotional as he is brilliant …”
“Yeah, sure, Pop …” He’s brilliant and I’m dumb …
“I haven’t had the chance to tell you, but Don’s devised a preliminary concept for a radio-controlled rocket engine,” his father continued. “If it pans out, the engine will have the ability to fire repeatedly; not just once until it burns out. An engine like that would allow ground control to actually steer a satellite into a different orbit.” He smiled. “We’re all really excited about it.”
“Sounds great.” Steve smiled back lamely, thinking sadly that he wasn’t part of so much that was happening.
“I don’t know where GAT would be without Don’s innovation …”
His father was trying to explain something to him, Steve realized. I was wrong. Don isn’t Pop’s “yes man”; it’s the other way around…
Outside, there came the sound of tires on the crushed gravel drive. A motor idled. A horn blared.
“Pop, that’s my cab. I gotta go. Tell Mom I’m sorry for what happened.”
“Maybe you should tell her yourself …”
“I can’t go in there,” Steve said, his hand on the doorknob. He smiled wryly as he stepped out into the night. “I’m not used to losing, Pop.”
(Three)
Harrison Household
Brentwood
It was close to four in the morning when Susan Harrision gave up on trying to sleep. Beside her in the double bed Don was snoring soundly. He’d been absolutely contrite during the drive home. Emotionally and physically exhausted, he’d fallen asleep as soon as his head had hit the pillow.
Susan was angry at her husband for what had happened, but she was angry at Steve, as well. Both men had done all they could to humiliate and belittle each other in front of the family, and both men had succeeded.
The wine she’d had at dinner had left her with a parched throat and a headache. Every time she closed her eyes in hopes of dozing off her restless mind replayed that terrible argument, setting her tossing and turning. She gave up and got out of bed, stepping into her slippers and putting on her robe. She was on her way to the kitchen, thinking to make herself a cup of tea, when she noticed light spilling from beneath the staircase door that led up to the attic.
She wrapped her robe around her against the slight chill as she opened the door and went up the stairs. The overhead light was on. In the harsh glare of the bare bulb hanging from the roof rafters she saw her son in his red and white striped pajamas and navy blue corduroy robe sitting cross-legged on an old Oriental carpet. Open beside him was a battered, black and green steamer trunk plastered with travel stickers.
Susan took a deep breath. The attic smelled of dust and cedar and the past. That steamer trunk was where she kept her late husband’s things …
“I didn’t know you knew about that trunk.” She tried to keep the resentment she was feeling toward her son out of her voice, but Robbie must have heard it. He looked up at her with his father’s penetrating green eyes beneath his touseled black hair.
“Are you mad?” Robbie murmured.
“No … yes …” She smiled faintly. “Maybe a little … It’s hard to share,” she tried to explain.
Robbie nodded. “I’ve known about the trunk a long time. I’ve been going through it for a while now.” He paused. “Whenever I’m alone …”
She saw that he had pulled out some of the newspaper clippings and photographs, and spread them on the carpet. Beside him was the old shoebox in which she kept her husband’s medals, and his letters to her. She knelt down beside her son and pointed to the shoebox. “Have you read those?”
Robbie shrugged. “I started to once, but they were all full of kind of mushy stuff … and … well …” He blushed. “So I didn’t …”
She put her arms around her son and hugged him. “I appreciate that.”
Robbie didn’t reply. His fingers brushed over the yellowing, brittle scraps of newsprint that chronicled his father’s aviation racing career, and then he picked up a small, faded, black-and-white snapshot of a smiling, tall, dark matinee idol of a man in a tweed suit with too-wide lapels and baggy pants. The man was smoking a cigarette and standing on a beach. In the background, bobbing in the water, was a spindly, single-engine, open-cockpit seaplane.
“This is my favorite one,” Robbie said.
“Mine too,” Susan confided. “It was taken in 1938. In Venice, Italy. At the—”
“Moden Seaplane Races,” Robbie finished for her.
“That’s right,” she said, surp
rised.
“That’s where you met him …”
Susan nodded. “How do you know all that?”
“I asked Grandpa once, and he told me.”
“I see …”
“Mom, do you ever come up here to look at all this stuff?”
She had the strangest impulse to lie. To say that she never did. “Sometimes …”
“When you do, does it make you feel good or bad?” Robbie asked, his green eyes searching.
“It makes me feel, a little both ways …”
He nodded. “If you could have him back again, would you? Instead of Don, I mean—?”
She closed her eyes. “I can’t have him back, Robbie—”
“I know, but if you could …?”
She took hold of her son’s hand and squeezed it. “When you get older, those kinds of make-believe games hurt, so you don’t play them …”
He looked unconvinced. “Mom? When you look at this stuff, don’t you feel like you are choosing?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.” This time she had no problem lying.
“Never mind.” He shrugged, and then gestured to the photograph. “If he was here, do you think that he’d be more like Don or Steve?”
It was an intriguing question. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I want to be like him,” Robbie fiercely replied.
“I see … Well, your father was a very good pilot, but he was also a brilliant engineer…” Susan replied. “Did you know that before he went off to the war he was working on a prototype jet engine.”
“Grandpa told me …”
“Your father would have been a little like both men, I think …”
Robbie frowned, puzzled. Susan knew he couldn’t accept the notion. Steve and Don had positioned themselves too far apart in his eyes; the boy needed to choose one or the other; of course, he already had.
“I think he’d want me to be a pilot, like Grandpa, and Steve …” Robbie mused. “That’s what I think …”
“Maybe …”
“I don’t think he’d like Don at all.”
“Have you seen your father’s medals in the shoebox?” Susan asked, needing to change the subject.
“Yeah …”
“I’ve always intended that they would someday belong to you. What do you think?” she asked confidently. “Would you like them now? To keep in your room?”
She couldn’t believe it when he shook his head.
“I’m going to get my own,” Robbie told her.
CHAPTER 13
* * *
(One)
Alexandria, Virginia
6 May 1960
Ordinarily Steven Gold got a kick out of the Corvette. It was a 1959, red and white Sports Roadster with a manual transmission. When he toed its throttle the car kicked him back against the tan leather bucket seat like a jet fighter.
It was dark, well after the evening rush hour, when Steve had left his Pentagon office. The roads had been clear, but tonight he hadn’t been in the mood to play with the ‘Vette’s fuel-injected V-8. Tonight, as the Corvette’s headlights stabbed the darkness, he was looking forward to a quiet evening in his apartment listening to jazz on the stereo, with no company except for a nice big scotch on the rocks.
He and his staff had been working late every night this week, and it didn’t look like there was an end to the work in sight. Sometime last Sunday night an MR-1, a.k.a. Mayfly spy plane, had been shot down over the Soviet Union. The pilot had been taken alive by the Russians. The pilot’s name was Chet Boskins, a.k.a. “Lowball” to his friends, not many of whom, including Steve, expected to see their fellow pilot again.
Washington was in an uproar. The Soviets were milking the fiasco for all it was worth, doing their “Imperialist War Mongerers” number at the United Nations and in the international press. The White House, the State Department, and NASA—which was gamely claiming that it had sponsored the overflights for meteorological research purposes—were all putting out conflicting statements. At the Pentagon, Steve, who was the USAF/CIA liaison in charge of technological developments, had been keeping his staff busy working the telephones and typewriters, helping to put out media fires by generating a load of technical horseshit designed to back up NASA’s stories. Both the Air Force and the CIA were frantic not to be drawn into it, despite the reports that Lowball had been carrying I.D. and had announced to his Commie captors that he was a civilian pilot employed by the CIA.
Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, Khrushchev was threatening to disrupt this month’s Big Four Summit in Paris, and derail the disarmament talks in Geneva. At the United Nations Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko was demanding an official apology from Ike. Someone with access to the Oval Office had confided to Steve that the President was bullshit that the MR-1 incident would taint his last months in office and throw November’s election to the Democrats. At the very least, the incident was expected to give a boost to the Democrats’ likely candidate, a senator from New England named Kennedy…
As far as Steve could tell, nobody seemed much concerned about the captured MR-1 pilot, except, perhaps, Jack Horton. The CIA man was telling everyone who would listen that none of this would be happening if Chet Boskins had done “the right thing” …
For his part Steve was sorry he’d ever become involved in the pilot recruitment program. He couldn’t help thinking that if he hadn’t been so good at his job, Lowball wouldn’t now be languishing in a Russian prison cell. Sure he’d taken on the job for self-serving reasons, but he’d also sincerely felt that he was doing his patriotic duty. He’d thought that he was being a good soldier, but Jack Horton and his band of spooks had used him like a fool; a dupe. Not that Steve had any business feeling sorry for himself. The stuff coming in through the diplomatic channels had it that if the United States didn’t publicly apologize, the pilot would be tried as a spy. If the Soviets carried through with that threat, Lowball’s certain conviction could mean his execution or at best a lengthy prison term.
As Steve drove through Alexandria’s quiet tree-lined streets, and then turned onto Prince Street, he wondered what Lowball was thinking right now. Was he blaming Steve for getting him into this mess? It didn’t really matter to Steve whether or not Lowball blamed him for his predicament because Steve blamed himself. He was trying his best to make things up to Lowball. He’d been making the rounds up on the Hill, leaking the facts about what had happened to certain influential members of Congress in the hopes that they would push to get the pilot released through diplomacy. Some of the people Steve had talked to had warned that he was pushing too hard; that what he was trying to do on Lowball’s behalf could end up hurting his own career.
Steve was certainly worried about that: The Air Force was all he had. Still, he figured he owed Lowball, and he believed in paying his debts.
He was driving slowly along Prince Street as usual, looking for a parking space. As he passed his apartment house his headlights picked up a shabbily dressed character shouldering a knapsack lurking out in front. He found a spot half a block down, and parked the car. Walking back to his apartment he saw that the guy was still there, leaning against a lamppost a few paces away.
A coffeehouse that featured live jazz, and poetry readings for beatnik types, had recently opened on King Street. Steve figured this guy was one of those. By the light cast by the street lamp Steve saw that the guy was tall and stocky, wearing grimy pants, sneakers, a dark turtleneck sweater, and a torn, brown canvas workman’s jacket. He had a dark blue baseball cap pulled down low on his brow obscuring his face, and that knapsack on his shoulder.
In the past, Steve—wearing civies—had dropped by the King Street hipster joint a couple of times for the music, which he kind of liked … He’d even picked himself up a set of bongo drums and a how-to book at the local music store … But he had use for the poetry, which tended toward leftist political slogans against the so-called military-industrial complex.
As Steve reached his front steps the
beatnick detached himself from his lamppost to approach him. Probably looking for a handout, Steve thought, cautioning himself to ignore any slurs the guy might cast against his uniform. He was just too tired to get into it tonight; he would think about the scotch on the rocks waiting upstairs—
“Uncle Steve …”
Steve paused to stare. “Robbie?”
He and Robbie had been writing to each other, but he hadn’t seen his nephew, or any of his family, for a long time. He talked on the telephone with his parents, and now and again his sister called, but since that family dinner when he’d had it out with his brother-in-law, he’d accepted the fact that he was persona non grata back home, and had acted accordingly.
Robbie, grinning, had taken off his baseball cap to give Steve a better look. “Sorry if I scared you …”
“You’d scare anybody, buddy.” Steve laughed, coming back down the steps. “Look how big you’ve grown!”
“I’m seventeen now, Uncle Steve,” Robbie said quietly.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Steve asked.
“I ran away from home.”
“Oh …” Steve replied awkwardly, shocked that nobody back in L.A. had seen fit to telephone him with the news. He supposed that he really was out of the family. “Your mother must be frantic.”
Robbie looked away. Steve wrinkled his nose. “Whew, when was the last time you showered?”
“Last Sunday morning.” Robbie shrugged. “I’ve been on the road since then.”
“You hitchhike?”
Robbie nodded. “Not bad making it across the country in under a week, huh? I got a couple of good rides from truckers.”
“Well, come on upstairs,” Steve said. “You can get cleaned up, and I’ll make us something to eat. You must be hungry?”
“I could eat.” Robbie nodded.
“Eggs and bacon are all I have, I’m afraid,” Steve said. “I don’t do much cooking …”