by Max Hennessy
They roared through a village of shabby tin-roofed houses once painted white with gingerbread lace fretwork round the eaves. The coast at this point was already spoiled by filling stations, chicken-dinner restaurants, camping sites and crowded colonies of tiny shingled shacks, labelled with sentimental names like Bide-a-Wee and Dunroamin.
‘Goddam builders,’ Woolff said, without real bitterness, however. ‘Spoilin’ everything everywhere.’
Alongside the road just beyond the village, an air display was taking place, and several elderly Jennies, painted in gaudy colours, stood in a row. Another one was just taxiing away from a flag-enclosed area near the hangar, and Woolff halted the car for them to watch. Nearby a man in a straw hat and tan boots was hanging notices on a fence. BUCK HENNESSEY WILL POSITIVELY HANG BY HIS TEETH BENEATH THE AEROPLANE…
‘Hot air!’ Woolff said. ‘He has a strap round his chest under his clothes.’
The Jenny that had taken off was climbing over the end of the field now and another machine was just being swung into wind by mechanics in the roped area. A patch of undoped fabric rippled in the slipstream, the skeleton of the spars showing through; one wing tip looked like a bandaged toe, and there were several tears along the fuselage which had been crudely sewn up. The pilot walking towards it wore a tight-fitting helmet with fluttering ribbons sewn to the crown, big bug-eyed goggles, a leather jacket, army breeches and puttees.
‘This is why we have to fly the Atlantic,’ Woolff said. ‘People think this is flying.’
‘Do they make much money?’ Ira asked, squinting into the sun towards the crowd.
‘Doing this?’ Woolff shook his head so violently his plump cheeks quivered. ‘Hell, no! Some of ’em are only as good as they talk, though I guess a few of ’em make some dough smuggling booze. You can pick up a Jenny for around three hundred dollars, but I guess they’re not very reliable. Most of ’em have pieces of picket fence held in place with baling wire for the spars they’ve broken, and use rubber hose and adhesive tape to feed the carburettor.’
A band, their hard straw hats on the backs of their heads, their jackets discarded in the heat to show coloured sleeve bands, was playing ‘Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here’ and a few people were sitting, nervously expectant, in flivvers and horse-drawn buggies to watch the display, gnawing on chicken bones and cold fried chops and scattering their newspapers and wrappings to let the breeze do what it willed with them. A few more cars stopped, their occupants in holiday mood, hot little families of six and seven, like all crowds eager to see something happen – the more dangerous the better.
The beribboned pilot had stopped by the second Jenny now and, as the mechanic climbed from the cockpit, a large female figure emerged from the crowd and began to argue with him.
‘This is the stunt man,’ Woolff said in a flat unimpressed voice. ‘This is a regular. The crowd always swallows it.’
The ‘woman’ was insisting on climbing into the plane now, still arguing with the pilot, and as he tried to stop her she gave him a push and he fell backwards off the wing. At once the engine roared and the aeroplane began to roll forwards.
The pilot picked himself up and began to chase after it, shouting, while the crowd screamed in alarm as the ‘woman’ in the cockpit waved her arms and the machine began to zigzag across the field. As it headed towards the parked flivvers and trucks, people began to scatter, but at the last minute it swung into the wind and made a perfect take-off, climbing steeply. At the top of its climb it stalled and dived, then went up into a loop. A series of Immelmann rolls followed, then one half-roll after another until it was in position below the machine which had taken off earlier. The ‘woman’ passenger was standing on the wing now.
‘He’s going to change planes,’ Woolff said, frowning. ‘They do no good to aviation, and if he missed his grip and fell, nobody would give a good goddam. Tonight they’ll be flying around in the dark trailing roman candles. No wonder we’re way behind Europe. We encourage trapeze artists, not aviators.’
He waited until the Jennies had landed and the barnstormers’ officials were moving among the crowd, trying to persuade the laughing farmers to try a flight, then he started the big Sunbeam’s engine again and they moved off through a cloud of drifting dust.
‘They’ll be off again tomorrow,’ Woolff said. ‘To put on another show at Walterboro or Fairfax. They scrape a livin’.’
Passing along a stretch of twin-rutted road among the trees, the Sunbeam began to labour through deep sand, vibrating violently as the big wheels jerked and shuddered.
‘Damn road,’ Woolff said shortly, his round face gloomy. ‘It’s enough to shake the fillings outa your teeth.’
They finally reached a small town of one-storeyed houses among the chinaberry trees. There was a cinema, an all-night restaurant and a billiards hall, and a hotel with towers, wide piazzas and limp flags where Woolff stopped the car.
‘Guess you’ll want to wash up,’ he said.
Despite its turreted towers and flags, the hotel was a bare sparse place without much comfort. Opposite was the old jail and a weathered harness store that had been there since the Civil War, the bark of its hitching rail nibbled off years before by tethered horses. Its clock tower had painted hands and in its shade gaunt-shanked old men, who looked as though they’d once ridden with Jeb Stuart, sat with their dogs at their feet in the dust, chewing, smoking and spitting, arguing in their slow Southern way, and eyeing the hotel as though its erection had spoiled their peace with the coming and going of the cars it attracted.
Not that it seemed to attract many. Its beds had long since begun to sag from the weight of wayfaring humanity and the walls were thin enough to make it possible to know without straining exactly what was going on in the next room. There were cuspidors everywhere and dust lay thickly on the blades of the fan, among the wickerwork of the chairs and in the lace of the curtains at the windows.
‘Isn’t much,’ Woolff said apologetically. ‘But I guess it’s all Medway runs to.’
‘It’s OK,’ Sammy said generously and entirely without truth. ‘It’s got class. I’m all for class. Good for tick at the grocer’s.’
Woolff gestured. ‘There’s no bar or anything like that,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some goddam funny laws over here about drink just now but I could get you a bottle of something if you want one. We make our own.’
Sammy grinned widely. ‘I like to hear men talk like that,’ he said.
He already had his head in his suitcase and was throwing out, with a fine air of disinterest, clothes that looked to Woolff as though they’d been around for far too long. Ira was by the window, staring thoughtfully out at the dusty street below. They seemed surprisingly at home already, Woolff decided, well in command of themselves and certainly not in need of his ministrations.
* * *
As he brushed his unruly hair before the mirror, Ira’s mind was busy. His eyes rested on a set of typewritten sheets that lay propped up against the side of the mirror, catching an angled ray of sunshine.
It was a dossier on all the previous attempts on the harsh, unpredictable Atlantic, and it wasn’t exactly a story to inspire confidence.
Judged by the short history of aviation, the story was already a long one, well marked with wreckage and illuminated by the sacrificial efforts of young men who believed in the future of the aeroplane. There was nothing in any of the previous attempts to suggest that the next one, whenever it took place, would achieve more than had been achieved already.
He leaned forward, his eyes on the folded sheets of paper, aware of Sammy whistling in the bedroom behind him. Despite the tune, there was a tense nervousness about Sammy and had been all morning, and the brittle gaiety of his manner didn’t delude Ira. He had known Sammy long enough to know that the chirpy enthusiasm he was showing for everything he did hid a deep uncertainty about what was ahead of them.
‘There’ll be some opposition, Ira.’ Sammy’s words came loudly over the rattling of a newsp
aper. ‘It’s all in here. All written up like a prophecy of doom. Chamberlain’s saying he’s got a plane now and so’s that chap Davis, and Sikorsky’s rebuilding for Fonck.’
Ira nodded at the mirror. He knew the details as well as Sammy.
Sammy was still whistling and rattling the newspaper, a curious mixture of boastfulness and unease. Once started on a project, Ira knew, nothing in the world would make him throw in his hand if he believed in it, but Sammy was far from being an inexperienced pilot and was unlikely to accept unnecessary risks without question.
His next words confirmed Ira’s beliefs. ‘How keen are you on this business, Ira?’ he asked, putting his head round the door. The words were spoken casually but Ira knew a lot of heavy thinking had been going on behind them.
Ira turned from the mirror. ‘Dead keen,’ he said. ‘Who wouldn’t want to be first across?’
‘Nobody,’ Sammy said. ‘If it can be done.’
‘Why shouldn’t it be done?’ Ira asked. ‘The Yanks got their flying boats to Lisbon.’
‘One,’ Sammy pointed out bluntly. ‘Out of four. And that stopped at the Azores on the way.’
Ira shrugged. ‘I’ll bet you my salary for the month someone gets across this year – non-stop.’
‘Maybe.’ Sammy paused, not entirely convinced, because he, too, had read Ira’s typed notes. ‘You ever get nervous, Ira?’ he asked.
Ira’s face became as sombre as Sammy’s. Despite his enthusiasm, he had never blinded himself to the dangers of what they were proposing to do. ‘I get nervous all right,’ he said.
Sammy paused. ‘What do you reckon of our chances?’
Ira hesitated before answering. Their chances depended on so many things – high among them chance itself.
‘Depends on the plane Courtney’s building,’ he said. ‘It’s not just luck that that prize of Orteig’s hasn’t been collected yet.’
Still trying to force the mop of black hair into some sort of order, he crossed to the window and stared out over the dusty little town. Over the sea to the south-east, thundery dark clouds were now building up so that the sun shone through in lurid rays with a strange sort of menace, as though the heavens were full of evil.
‘There must be a chance, though,’ he said. ‘Or experts like Fonck and Nungesser and Byrd wouldn’t be thinking about it, too. We’re not exactly novices ourselves, either. There was never much in Russia or Africa or China to pick out as landmarks. Our chances are as good as anybody else’s if we take the right precautions.’
Despite his words, however, he was aware of how little they really knew of ocean flying, and Fonck’s crash the previous year had been a salutary lesson to anyone with too much ambition. Setting out to fly farther than any man had ever flown before, he hadn’t even got off the ground. Suddenly Ira remembered the man from Nebraska who’d plagued him on the train south.
‘Why go in for aeroplanes?’ he’d said cheerfully. ‘They’re building airships these days big enough to carry fifty passengers and crew. What aeroplane’ll ever do that?’ His contempt for heavier-than-air machines had been clear, Ira remembered. ‘Sure, this guy, Byrd, flew over the Pole, but that’s not to Paris, and this Chamberlain, hell, he’s just a barnstormer, son – a stunt man! And look what happened to Fonck last September! This Orteig’s sure got his nerve!’
Perhaps he had, Ira thought as he carefully knotted his tie. Perhaps the man from Nebraska had been more right than he realised and they were all a little mad to think of lifting an aeroplane across the Atlantic.
* * *
Woolff, who had disappeared to fill the Sunbeam with petrol, returned as they were snatching a puff at a cigarette. He tossed a New York newspaper down as he entered the room.
‘Found this downstairs,’ he said. ‘Thought you might like to see it. It’s about the Orteig competition.’
Ira reached for the sheets which were folded back at the story. Most of it concerned Coli and his new partner, Nungesser, who were to fly a new type of Levasseur designed for the French Navy.
‘They’ve got a watertight hull,’ Woolff said slowly, his brows down in a puzzled frown as though he were trying to work out the intricacies of the design. ‘So they can jettison the undercarriage after take-off and float on the sea when they land.’
His eyes caught Ira’s and Ira grinned. To Ira the idea of an aeroplane full of highly inflammable fuel so rejecting the earth as to give up, by dropping its wheels, its chances of returning to it in safety in the event of something going wrong seemed an extraordinary line of thinking. It was probably daring enough to succeed, however, he decided, because he’d long since come to the conclusion that it would require daring – and innovation – to get a fragile machine across 3,600 miles of ocean where there would be no landmarks, nowhere to put down in case of engine failure, and precious little good weather to help it along the way.
Woolff watched him as he laid down the newspaper. So far, Sammy had done most of the talking but Woolff guessed that it wasn’t because Ira hadn’t any views of his own. There was too much intelligence in his face to lead Woolff into thinking that, and behind the craggy look that came from a scarred chin and a broken nose – relics of crashes during the war – there was a shrewd sensitivity that probably explained his silence.
Woolff had worked around airfields long enough to know that most people thought of aviators simply as lusty, noisy young men in army breeches who had a tendency to drink too much; but studying the keen-faced quiet young man opposite him, he knew that he was looking at a professional, and that the real professionals spent their time less on drink than over a work bench in a hangar jotting down figures on a scrap of paper, or labouring far into the night on some piece of recalcitrant machinery on which their lives might depend.
‘That crash of Fonck’s didn’t put anybody off,’ he said. ‘There are a couple of Frenchmen and a German crew with a Junkers somewhere, too, to say nothing of all the oddballs who want to get in on the act – this airmail-pilot building in California, for instance.’
Sammy looked startled. ‘The sky’ll be black with aeroplanes,’ he observed.
Ira was studying Woolff carefully. ‘What does Courtney expect out of this fight?’ he asked.
Woolff shrugged. ‘Publicity, I guess,’ he said. ‘Having his ship first across’ll produce more publicity than all the billboards you could ever set up. Like us all, I guess he hopes it’ll prove flying has a future.’
‘It has,’ Ira said.
Woolff stared at him. There had been many times in the past when he hadn’t thought it had, because most aviators, good, bad and indifferent, still flew antiquated aeroplanes – not from choice or devilry, but because governments couldn’t see to the next milestone, let alone beyond it.
‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘It has.’
‘What’s Courtney’s plane like?’ Sammy asked unexpectedly.
Woolff gestured. ‘Different.’ He didn’t seem impressed, somehow. ‘He’s planned to have two engines slung from the top wing. She’ll cruise at around a hundred and she’ll hold enough fuel for four thousand miles.’
Ira rubbed his nose. ‘Will she lift it?’ he asked.
Woolff looked up, frowning, his eyes troubled, and when he didn’t answer at once, Ira went on quickly.
‘His aeroplane could be fast as greased lightning,’ he said. ‘But it wouldn’t make much difference if the ratio between her weight and her power were wrong.’
Sammy nodded agreement. ‘It’d be handing it to Isaac on a plate.’
‘Isaac?’
Sammy gestured. ‘Isaac Newton. Gravity.’
Woolff frowned again. Unwittingly they had touched at once on the one thing that had been troubling him. ‘I wondered about that,’ he said. ‘According to Courtney, it will.’
‘What do you think of it?’ Ira asked.
Woolff shrugged. ‘I don’t think,’ he said. ‘I just build it. When a guy as decent as Courtney sets his heart on an aeroplane you don’t start off by te
lling him what’s wrong with it.’
‘Is something wrong with it?’
Woolff evaded the question again. ‘I guess if there is you’ll soon spot it,’ he said.
Ira and Sammy exchanged glances. They had never flown particularly for the thought of reward and they had always undertaken the dangers of flying as part of their profession, and it had never been in their minds as they struggled to improve on the ancient machines it had been their lot to fly that they were furthering the progress of aviation and the grand design into which they and their small achievements might fit. They were simply trying to wring a living out of something they enjoyed, and could think of no other way of life, so that they never considered themselves martyrs and certainly never thought of themselves as brave. Nevertheless, they were professionals and as professionals they believed in taking every possible precaution against disaster.
Woolff was obviously aware of what they were thinking and he flashed a glance at Ira that was bleak with honesty.
‘You’ll have to ask Courtney himself about it,’ he said at last. ‘Or Alix.’
‘Who’s this Alix bloke?’ Sammy asked.
Woolff grinned. ‘It’s not a “bloke”. It’s his daughter.’
‘I didn’t know he had one,’ Ira said.
‘Sure.’ Woolff’s expression softened. ‘She’s OK.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘OK,’ Woolff said again, as though afraid of putting them off with too much praise. ‘She’s quite a dame. Drives a goddam big Pierce Arrow. Flies her Pa’s plane.’ He pulled a wry face. ‘Sort of headstrong. Maybe she’s had her own way too much – his wife died some years back. She’s OK.’
Ira gave him a searching look. ‘How much does she know about aeroplanes?’ he asked.
‘Plenty. She was married to an aviator.’
‘Was?’ Sammy asked.
‘It didn’t work out.’
‘Is she a partner or something?’