by Jill Barnett
“Good morning,” she said.
The newspaper crackled when he dropped it on the table. He stood up quickly. “Morning.” His voice was gruff and deep and had that soft touch of a Texas twang. He looked lanky tall. He wasn’t wearing old coveralls, but a pair of brown pants, a tooled leather belt with a silver buckle, and a cotton shirt with small blue and brown checks on it and pearl buttons on the pockets. There were creases ironed sharply into the sleeves, and the collar points were pressed and starched. His hair was combed back, slick and gleaming, and as she came closer, she could smell the scent of Vitalis.
She helped herself to the coffee and waved at him. “Sit.” She thought it was sweet, the way he’d dressed up for her.
He bent his long frame back into the chair, resting an ankle easily on his knee. “I was thinking about you just before you walked in.”
She sat down across from him and rested her elbows on the table, cupping the mug in her palms. “So, why was I on your mind . . . or shouldn’t I ask?”
“There’s an article about a pilot here in the paper.”
She looked at it. It was open to the comics. “Moon Mullins or Joe Palooka?”
He folded the page back. “No. Here on the front page. Some guy flew his plane to Ireland.”
She frowned. “Why is flying a plane to Ireland enough to put the article on the front page? Did he crash?”
“I guess he landed there by mistake.”
“Where was he going?”
“California.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope. Look.” He handed her the paper.
She scanned the article and laughed a little under her breath, half embarrassed for the guy. “The poor man. They’re calling him Wrong-way Corrigan.”
“Yeah.”
She handed him back the paper. “You wouldn’t be implying that he and I have anything in common, would you?”
He shook his head. “Not me. No sir-ee. Might end up with that chip of yours embedded in my head. Then everyone would say, you know, that Red Walker was a handsome devil until the day Charley Morrison hammered that ugly chip into his head so he looks like Boris Karloff, and it all started when that gal almost landed her plane right into his Texaco gas pumps . . . ”
“I give!” She laughed, holding up both hands. “I admit it. I almost hit your gas pumps.”
He just grinned at her.
She looked down at the pastry. “I thought you said you weren’t very good in the kitchen.”
“I’m not. I change the oil and tune up Cora Miller’s DeSoto and she brings me the best baked goods in the county. Fresh bread, cakes, and pies.”
She took a bite. “This is wonderful.” While she was eating the pie, he reached out and poured more coffee in her cup. He sat there watching her in a way she wished he wouldn’t.
She drank some more coffee, then shifted a little sideways in her chair, and picked up the paper. She tried to read it.
The silence grew more and more awkward, nothing but the sound of the newspaper when one of them turned a page. She quickly downed the rest of her coffee and stood. “Thanks for the great breakfast.” She checked her watch. “I have to get going. It’s late.”
He stood up. His expression said he didn’t want her to go.
She turned and left the room in a hurry. She didn’t want to see the look on his face.
“ALONE AT A TABLE FOR TWO”
Red was leaning against one of the gas pumps when the plane buzzed low over the filling station for the second time, then rocked its wings at him and flew east, off toward Wichita Falls.
He had the sudden urge to run after it. To go out into that field behind the station and just run and run with his arms out to his sides, and maybe some miracle would happen and he would take wing and fly far, far away, away from the ordinary.
It was hot, almost a hundred degrees according to the Oilzum thermometer in the garage. He changed out of his good clothes, back into a clean set of overalls, and as he walked back outside, he stuffed that old red rag into his back pocket.
It was almost ten. Already heat rose from the blacktop in waves, the kind that could boil the breath clean out of your mouth. He stood on that blacktop and could look around him in all four directions. There was nothing but flat Texas horizon for more miles than the human eye could see.
He shoved his hands in his deep pockets and went into the garage and began to drain the oil in Reverend Bailey’s pride, a Tudor DeLuxe five-window coupe with mohair interior and dual sun visors.
That evening he went to his sister’s for supper and told her and Louie Lee about the plane landing there and about Charley Morrison.
Nettie listened all through dinner; then she looked at him for a long time over dessert, last summer’s canned peaches and vanilla ice cream that he and Louie Lee had cranked out of the wooden ice cream maker.
She shook her head and said, “You’re just like Mama.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You want out of here so badly, Red. You always have. When the cars and the trucks stopped at the station, you always went on all night about where they were coming from and where they were going. You used to look up in the sky whenever one of those barnstormers flew over, and anyone with half a brain could see that you wanted to fly away. That’s why Daddy took us to see that plane. He knew you were like Mama.”
He stared at the ice cream melting in the bowl. “I’m like Daddy. I like working on cars.”
“Do you?”
“Yep,” he answered stubbornly, but he couldn’t look her in the eye.
It was still hot at nine o’clock when he went home. The breakfast dishes were sitting on the table, crumbs scattered around them, and a couple of flies were on the last of the shoofly pie. He cleared the dishes, two mugs, two plates, two forks, washed them and put them away in the drawer and open shelf above the counter, where there were six plates and six mugs and six bowls. In the drawer there was plenty of gasoline giveaway silverware with mother-of-pearl handles. If you opened a kitchen drawer or looked at that shelf of dishes, you would think that a whole houseful of people lived there. A big boisterous family where they all talked at once and they didn’t need the radio on for company.
He looked at those stacks of dishes and began to move things, an earthenware bowl with blue stripes went on the open shelf next to the plates; then he exchanged pans for dishes, dish towels for silverware, mugs for jelly-jar glasses, rearranging everything in that small room, but in the end, not changing a thing.
PART FIVE
LONDON, 1940
“HURRAY HOME”
He was going home. Pilot Officer George Agar Inskip was one of the Brylcreem boys, those glorious, adventuresome flyers of the British Royal Air Force whose images stared back at you from hair oil ads postered all over London. Since May, however, when the Allies suffered a humiliating defeat, that golden-boy shine had quickly tarnished.
There had been long weeks of what-ifs and whys, of army scorn and rampant public criticism of the RAF and their actions in the Battle of France. Those same weeks had been equally long for the pilot officers and crews with No. 77 Fighter Squadron at Wellingham, Essex, a fighter station less than forty miles from London proper, where low morale, a grounding sense of failure, and the no-leave restrictions had made the men tense and edgy.
It had been sheer hell for Skip, who was married scarcely six months and had not even had the opportunity to be one of the pilots involved. Instead of confronting the Luftwaffe over France or evacuating Allied soldiers from Dunkirk, Skip had been relegated to testing aerocraft at Biddington Airfield until a chap named Cunningham finally came in and replaced him.
He sat solemnly in the back of a black cab as it wound its way through a silver maze of London streets thoroughly soaked by the foul weather. Since he’d last been in town, sandbags had been stacked to cover the wide windows of street shops and quaint restaurants. Through rain-beaded cab windows he could make out the hard shells of concrete
pillboxes scattered along the Thames. They sat there like giant grey tortoises at the entrances to the bridges and along the low river walls.
The kerbs, trees, and lampposts were painted white at their bases so one could see them on blacked-out nights, when even the light from a match was forbidden on the city’s streets. Civilians in damp raincoats walked down the roads with canvas gas-mask satchels slung casually over their shoulders and helmets dangling from their arms as if they were merely holiday purchases.
People sidestepped the corrugated steel roofs of Anderson shelters that stuck out from the ground at the corners of parks and greens where colorful flower beds had once grown. Home Guardsmen, with their bayoneted rifles, sped through the streets on roller skates, so if a German paratrooper ever landed nearby, they could be there waiting for him before his Nazi boots ever touched British soil.
This was Britain in the high summer of 1940.
It had been some time since that Sunday morning last September when at a quarter after eleven Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s quiet and disheartened voice came over the wireless to tell the nation that Britain was at war.
But to everyone’s surprise the months following had been anticlimactic. So little had happened that people began to call it the phony war. There had been no invasion as prophesied by the overeager news-press, no gassing or bombing as was direly forewarned in print and on the wireless every single day before Germany invaded Poland.
After the PM’s broadcast, the nation had rushed to paint bus and train windows dark blue, to mask headlamps on taxis and cars, and to swiftly gather up and hide road markers and signposts to confuse any invaders. The people of Britain hung blackout material over their windows, and that same night they huddled deep in their homes, ears sharp and sweat beading on their foreheads, as they waited for the drone of German war planes, for the whistling scream of Nazi bombs, for the hammering sound of distant gun battles echoing from the sea.
But the Luftwaffe never came.
Instead there had been nothing but a few distant skirmishes over the Channel, some frequent buzzing by German planes along the south coast, and an Axis blockade in the Channel that forced more rationing. An easy belief began to spread throughout the country that war was really much further away than anyone ever thought.
Then came the Battle of France and with it a horrid loss of life, of pride, and loss of the belief that their Royal Air Force could protect the soldiers of Britain.
It was an ugly time.
Skip, like so many others, needed to go home. The men needed to remember what they were fighting for, to be with their families and to believe in themselves again.
At least one squadron had been kept in permanent readiness twenty-four hours a day, and officers were confined to camp for long stretches of dead time. However, now the RAF was relaxing its restrictions for the sake of its men’s abominably low morale. Leave was once again available.
He sat in the backseat of a taxi with little pretense of patience. The cabbie, a chap with his cap on sideways and an empty pipe between his teeth, had said little to him except to point out that “the RAF had made a bloody hash of it at Dunkirk.” The taxi made the final turn onto a quiet square near Hyde Park and stopped in front of a familiar Georgian townhouse with tall white columns at the front door— which was painted a glossy black and bore the number twenty-seven in brightly polished brass.
Skip paid the cabbie too much and stuffed a roll of pound notes back into his pocket, then turned, his head down to the bucketting rain, and made for a low, wrought-iron gate and the front steps. A few moments later he stood on a bloodred Aubusson carpet in the warm, dry foyer of the London townhouse he’d known for most of his twenty-four years.
He carelessly shook off the rainwater like a hunting spaniel and tossed his leather gloves and peaked cap on the hall table, a gilt-gesso George II monstrosity with snarling golden dragon heads for feet and an intricate mother-of-pearl inlaid top. The table had been a gift from some royal personage to the first Earl of Chittendon. Skip hated the thing. Always had. It had been in his family for enough years to give beastly nightmares to seven generations’ worth of Inskip offspring.
But his wife adored it. And he was so bloody in love with her that denying her anything was out of the question. He decided long ago that he would teach his future children to have loud fits of temper whenever they looked at the ghastly thing. Perhaps the little mites’ tears would send the bloody table to the darkest corner of the fifth floor attic once and for all.
He looked around him for a moment, soaking up what was familiar but didn’t quite feel familiar, until the warmth and smell of home began to permeate his memory. While he took great pride in his position with the British Royal Air Force, while he loved flying and planes, at that particular moment, Skip thought it was a damn fine thing to be home.
For the next few days his mind and body would not belong to his country. He would not have to think about the advantages of Hurricanes and Spitfires, of learning to identify enemy aircraft, of flight schedules or meteorology or why they had lost in France. He would not think about Goering’s Luftwaffe or Nazi Germany or the fact that his country was ashamed of the RAF. He wanted, and perhaps needed, nothing more than to concentrate his efforts on his wife and on making that newest generation of Inskip children.
He draped his heavy, government-issue greatcoat on a nearby coat-stand and glanced in the gilt wood mirror above the grim table. His dress blues fit him well and were clean and neat. Some officers had been hit with mud and dirt clods by rowdy soldiers and angry citizens who had spotted the pilots at the train station near the airfield.
He ran a quick hand through his black hair, raised his chin to straighten the knot in his dark tie, then tugged down twice on his uniform jacket before he turned and took the marble stairs two at a time.
“Greer?”
“Skip? You’re home? I’m up here, darling!”
She met him at the top of the stairs, running towards him in the vibrant way she had. She was laughing a joyous and wonderful laugh— all because he’d come home.
Suddenly nothing else in this wild and war-torn world mattered.
Her long, slim arms wrapped around his neck, her hands drove through his hair, and her lips were on his. She smelled like Greer, like Ma Griffe and the lemon water and vinegar she used to rinse her hair, scents that reminded him of everything that was vital in the world.
She pulled her lips from his, looked at his face as if she were trying to memorize it, then drew her fingers over his mouth, rubbing slightly. “Red lipstick,” she explained.
“Tastes good.”
“It’s called Cherry Bomb.”
“You taste good.”
Her smile was familiar, and still could make him lose his thoughts. Then she gave him a long erotic kiss that rocked his gravity and hit him as if he were greying out at four G’s. “Welcome home, my darling husband.”
“God . . . but I missed you.” He brushed his hands along her wavy blonde hair. Her body against his was finer than in his dreams, softer than his memory. Just the pressure of her breasts made him so hard he felt like he could fuck for a week. He slipped his tongue into her mouth, then slid his hands slowly down her back, along her spine, and gripped her bottom.
Her body was slim and tight from years of riding, from jumping, hunting, and dressage, at which she was more than accomplished; she was a master in haute école.
And he was glad of it, especially late at night when she was on top of him, when his cock was so hard it ached like it was bruised, until that single, final moment when he was finally buried deep inside of her, where she was hot and wet and only his. He loved her naked, her pale skin glistening with sweat from a night of long, slow, drawn-out fucking, the kind where you both were so together you made it last without a single word, without a challenge. Those were the times when her tight thighs—those of a superb equestrian—flexed and gripped his hips hard as she rode him. And it was then when he thanked God, K
ing, and Country that he’d married such a fine horsewoman, particularly one who knew not to rush her fences.
“I’M STEPPING OUT WITH A MEMORY TONIGHT”
The next afternoon Skip stared down at his notes on the desk and tried to think of anything else he needed to include in his report.
The Defiant tested out pleasantly enough, handled well and without any vices. Its Merlin engine with increased boost pressure from 6 to 12 psi for short periods is as fine as it is in the Hurricane or the Spitfire. The possibility of a two-seater, pilot and gunner, is admirable, but therein also lies the basic flaw of this aeroplane. While an original concept, the massive four-gun turret set in the fuselage behind the cockpit creates a distinct division between the pilot maneuvering the aircraft and the gunner trying to line a sight. The pilot must anticipate the gunner’s needs—an impossibility. With no fixed forward-firing armament, the craft has a blind spot and is vulnerable to an enemy attacking beneath the tail . . .
He replaced his pen into the silver inkwell, and put his report in an envelope for the post. One thing was certain, the Defiant was no Spitfire. He’d flown his first Spit about eight months before the war began, when his squadron had received the new planes.
The Spitfire was a monoplane, designed with a new concept: cantilever construction. In a biplane you could look out and see the lines that held the wings together. The monoplane’s construction was hidden and didn’t seem at all plausible. The first time he took her up, he kept looking at the wings, expecting them to fly off at any moment, especially when he took her speed to full force.
But he and the other pilots found that the Spitfire was just what her name implied, an aeroplane that soared as elegantly as an eagle and handled as if you were flying a dream. She could reach an unprecedented four hundred miles per hour in level flight, easily carried a total of eight Browning machine guns, and was so maneuverable that she could outdive and outclimb any other British aerocraft. She was sleek. She handled beautifully. And she looked fast.