The Courtney Entry

by Max Hennessy

  She stared at him for a moment, searching for words, then she reached for her coat and, flashing another glance at Ira, she disappeared. Woolff stared helplessly at the quivering door, his plump round face unhappy.

  ‘Hell,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought it was going to be a lousy deal for the Old Man but I didn’t think he’d take it like that.’

  ‘What happens now?’ Sammy asked.

  Woolff shrugged. ‘He’ll go for the bottle, I guess,’ he said. ‘I’m sure glad Lave Boyle’s around.’

  He jerked at the peak of his vast cap so that it slewed round on his bald head like a skidding car on an icy road, and slouched out of the office, his hands deep in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, the picture of dejection.

  Sammy stared after him as the door slammed for the third time. ‘I reckon we’ve started something, Ira,’ he said. He paused, his face troubled. ‘You don’t think you were too hard on him?’

  The tough independent look appeared on Ira’s face again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. It had to be said, Sammy. I’ve been flying long enough now to know when a plane’s a dud.’ He stared, frowning, through the door towards the sunshine, where Courtney had disappeared. ‘There’s something funny about him I don’t understand,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought he was the sort to listen. Perhaps he’s got business worries. Or perhaps he’s not well. You heard Alix. But we were right to stick out. You don’t arrange to fly four thousand miles over sea unless you think you’ve got a chance of succeeding.’

  Sammy said nothing and Ira went on hotly: ‘He’s got to make up his mind which class he’s in. It’s no good compromising by setting up another class somewhere in between.’ He jerked out a cigarette and lit it. ‘For God’s sake, Sammy,’ he said angrily. ‘I want to fly this bloody plane for him! I think it’s a tremendous idea. Who wouldn’t want to be first? But it’s got to be the right machine. The wrong one would only end in a fiasco and probably a messy death for me and you. That helps nobody at all. It just stops everything in its tracks.’

  He gestured awkwardly, struggling with his emotions. ‘There’s nothing I want to do more than pull this off,’ he went on. ‘I like Courtney. I liked him when I first met him – when I was still a kid in France.’

  ‘I bet he’s changed,’ Sammy said shrewdly.

  Ira paused. ‘Yes, he has,’ he said thoughtfully, staring at his shoes. ‘He’s older and I reckon he’s got a lot on his mind. But don’t take any notice of all that blowhard stuff. He’s an honest man and a decent man. That’s just nervous energy and disappointment – because he isn’t as sure of himself as he seems. I still like him. I like Hal Woolff.’

  Sammy grinned. ‘I like Alix,’ he said. ‘She’s got all the right things in all the right places. Handled right, she could be worth knowing.’

  Ira looked up and grinned. ‘You thinking of trying it?’

  Sammy gave him a sidelong glance. ‘I’m not in the same league,’ he said quickly.

  Ira drew on his cigarette for a while, then he crossed to the window and stood staring into the hangar. As he stuffed his hands into his pockets he remembered the letters Courtney had handed to him.

  He took them from his pocket and opened them slowly, reading them in the empty light of the hangar. There were three from Shanghai, two of them from girls who’d endeavoured to make their last days in South China more cheerful, and one from the Chinese who was looking after the last old aeroplane they still owned out there. There were also a couple of small bills and a letter from Canada.

  The writing seemed familiar and he tore it open hurriedly. Sammy looked over his shoulder and Ira turned.

  ‘It’s from George Cluff,’ he said.

  ‘That bastard,’ Sammy said shortly. Sammy had never had much love for the partner he’d replaced in the failing airline in Africa. He’d had too many good looks and too much success with girls to gain any of the prickly Sammy’s affection.

  ‘He’s in Canada,’ Ira said.

  Sammy gestured at the envelope. ‘How did he know we were here?’

  Ira shrugged. ‘All that guff in the papers when we arrived. TOP BRTISH ACE VISITS U.S. You remember it. He must have seen it somewhere.’

  ‘What’s he doing? Running an ice-cream stall?’

  Ira grinned at Sammy’s cynicism. ‘He’s flying again. He’s been doing some airmail carrying and now he’s talking of a long-distance attempt.’

  Sammy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘He’d never make it,’ he said at once. ‘He wasn’t the pilot to start off with, and for another thing, he’d never have the patience. Grab the first thing with a propeller, chuck a suitcase in it, fill it up with juice, and off we go. That’s Cluff’s method. It always was and it always will be. If he goes in for anything like this he’ll end up dead, sure as eggs.’

  Ira wasn’t listening. ‘He’s near Toronto at the moment,’ he said. ‘With a Canadian called Pelletan. They’re doing long-distance flights. He says we’ll be surprised.’

  ‘Disgusted, more like.’

  Ira grinned again. A lot of what Sammy said was true. Cluff had never been a stayer, never a man to face up to odds, and certainly never a man to be bothered with careful preparations. The first thing he’d always asked about were the girls and the drink.

  His nostalgic thoughts were interrupted as Sammy nudged him. He was gesturing at the hangar. The men who’d been working round the half-built Courtney had stopped and were now gathered round Hal Woolff, who was clearly explaining that unexpected snags had arisen. There were a few soured glances in the direction of the office.

  ‘They’re calling us Limeys out there,’ Sammy said flatly.

  Ira chuckled. ‘Limey bastards probably,’ he agreed.

  Sammy shrugged. ‘One thing,’ he said. ‘If Cluffy’s got a plane to fly, he’s one up on us. We haven’t.’

  Chapter 6

  For almost a week they hung about the town and the airfield waiting for a decision.

  The days were hot empty oases when they got up early, as they’d always been used to doing, but after the colossal breakfasts of ham, potatoes, hominy, biscuits and coffee that always seemed to be put in front of them, they found that that was the end of their daily activity.

  Work on the Courtney had come to a complete standstill and they were given bitter looks by the workmen, as though they alone were responsible for the absence of any encouragement. Woolff was always about, plump, amiable, his cap askew, but he seemed depressed, and there was no sign at all of either of the Courtneys.

  They soon grew tired of fried Southern food, especially as the flies that filled the dining room of the hotel were of a rare physique and a quite remarkable determination, and the only flying they saw was by a little Oriole which appeared over the town to stop the traffic while it wrote ‘Lucky Strike’ in the sky in smoke. Once, remembering Alix Courtney’s offer, they climbed into the old De Havilland, wondering whether to take it up. The clouds had sprinkled an unexpected light rain during the night so that the dusty earth smelled sweet and Ira sat for a moment catching the familiar scent of dope and experiencing the momentary thrill that never failed to affect him when he climbed into a cockpit. He stared round him at the patched and varnished fabric and polished metal and saw the greasy stains on the padded leather by his shoulder, then he checked the instruments and moved the ailerons, elevators and rudder, frowning slightly in concentration. But the hard stares from the group of mechanics by the hangar seemed to preclude the possibility of taking off, and they quitted the airfield without leaving the ground.

  Since the meeting with Courtney, which had broken up so abruptly and with such embarrassment, Ira had thought a great deal over what he had stood for so firmly. Despite what he had said, he was still aware that a fierce clean breeze was beginning to blow through American aviation, for all the mistakes that were often made by people such as Courtney who had more enthusiasm than knowledge, and it couldn’t help but affect a man like Ira who had lived all his life by aeroplanes and for aeroplanes, and h
e found himself often wondering if he’d been too severe. It wasn’t given to every pilot in the world to have the opportunity of making an attempt on such a vast peak athwart the progress of aviation as the ocean that lay between the New and the Old Worlds. It was an enormous challenge and such a flight could only be backed by ambitious men, and it was probably impertinence on his part to be too critical.

  Yet, on a flight of nearly 4,000 miles, they could not avoid considering the elements of safety and, while they waited, he studied again and again the reports on Fonck’s crash he had dug up during their brief stay in New York.

  ‘I don’t want a three-engined giant,’ he said slowly to Sammy, more confirmed every day in the belief that he’d been right. ‘Or even a two-engined machine. If you’re a flier, you’ve got to believe in something apart from just flying, and I think they’re building engines these days that will carry us all the way without trouble, so long as we screw ’em in the right numbers to the right fuselage.’

  Lying back on the bed, his feet hanging over the end, Sammy slowly turned the sheets of typewritten paper and the sheaves of press cuttings they’d gathered.

  ‘Suits me, Ira,’ he said. ‘There seem to be a lot of elements hanging round Courtney’s project that hung round Fonck’s and I don’t want to end up like him. This stuff makes horrifying reading.’

  * * *

  Read in cold blood, it was a grim story, terrifying in its implications, and as Sammy tossed the papers to the bed, his eyes were direct and sober. ‘What went wrong, Ira?’ he asked.

  Ira gestured angrily. ‘The Sikorsky was too damn heavy,’ he said simply. ‘They couldn’t lift it off. It was overloaded.’

  Sammy shrugged. ‘They had to carry the juice for the trip,’ he pointed out.

  ‘But not the drawing room and the dining room and the furniture and the hot meals.’

  Sammy gestured. ‘They must have known what it would do.’

  ‘I doubt it. They didn’t fly enough load tests. Fonck wasn’t ready. He ought to have put it off till this year.’

  Sammy stared. ‘Why didn’t he?’

  Ira shrugged, his fingers toying with the cuttings. ‘Publicity,’ he said. ‘They’d talked so much of getting off in 1926 they not only couldn’t postpone, they even had to rush the preparations – cutting corners just as Courtney wants us to do.’

  Sammy frowned and Ira went on quickly. ‘They didn’t even pay any attention to the runway,’ he said. ‘They hadn’t time. And, God, Sammy, that plane weighed over twelve tons! It had short- and long-wave radios and special flotation bags in case they had to come down in the sea. And four men! Four, Sammy! With special meals on board all ready to celebrate the end of the flight.’

  He tossed the cuttings down. ‘And while they were wheeling it out, the tail skid fell off the dolly and damaged the centre rudder and the auxiliary gear, and by the time they’d done all the repairs the wind had changed from head to tail and they were trying to take off with a relative speed of around fifty miles an hour. No wonder they didn’t make it.’

  Sammy was frowning heavily now. ‘Why didn’t they cut the engines, Ira?’ he asked in a slow bewildered voice. ‘When the auxiliary wheel came loose. They must have had plenty of time.’

  ‘Fonck said it would have thrown the machine out of control. He said there were so many people watching he’d have hit them. The coroner agreed to call it an accident.’

  Sammy pulled a face. ‘Four men’s two too many to fly a plane anywhere,’ he said firmly. ‘And flotation bags – for God’s sake, he was going to fly the bloody thing, not sail it! You’ve got to take a chance somewhere.’

  Ira nodded. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘You’ve got to take a chance somewhere. But not in building the machine or getting it off the ground.’

  * * *

  The weather remained hot and stuffy, and out of sheer boredom Sammy went overboard for everything American. Outlandish ties and extraordinary socks began to take the place of the stiff collars and waistcoats he’d always previously worn, and to his wardrobe he added brown and white shoes, a bow-tie and a large cloth cap like Hal Woolff’s with a broken peak as big as the blade of a shovel. It made him look like a third-rate gangster, especially as chewing gum appeared in his mouth with the Americanisms he’d taken to using. Finally, to his delight, he found that with a great deal of winking, nodding and conspiratorial whispering he could buy bootleg gin in a dark office behind a saloon at the end of the main street that looked like something out of a Western film.

  ‘Prohibition doesn’t seem to prohibit much,’ he grinned.

  Although the notice on the swing doors said the place sold only soft drinks, in the room at the back there were four round tables and an unmistakable smell of liquor, and after a great deal of pantomime at the door, Sammy tried pushing his way in as though he’d been buying illicit spirits all his life. The gin tasted like petrol, they found, but it helped to relieve the monotony, and the fact that it was illegal gave it a little extra zip to make up for the taste.

  Then he found that the man who ran the town store had a daughter with whom he had more in common than he thought and took to disappearing to the beach after dark in the hired Ford sedan he and Ira shared, and not returning till the early hours of the morning.

  ‘She’s not very bright,’ he grinned. ‘But she’s interested and she thinks I look like Rudolf Valentino.’

  Sammy’s young life had contained more than its fair share of drama and he’d long since left his youth behind, and he suffered now from an aggressiveness towards women – as though, even while he enjoyed them, he didn’t believe in them much any more. Like Ira, he’d opted for living for the day and didn’t question too much what made it up.

  He was somewhere in the darkness with his girl among the trees near the beach when the owner of the local newspaper stopped Ira in the hotel lobby.

  ‘Name of Nestor, Captain,’ he introduced himself. ‘Robert E. Lee Nestor. I run the Medway Examiner.’

  He was a huge man with a vast paunch that hung over his belt, a round, moon-shaped face as pale as death and shining with sweat, and the reek of prohibition whisky hanging round him like an aura. ‘Thought I’d look you up,’ he said. ‘My job’s to find out what goes on around the town. Yes, sirree.’

  Ira nodded, remembering the shabby little newspaper he’d read, a drab sheet full of misprints and folksy chat and almost entirely devoid of news.

  ‘Seen you around the town,’ Nestor went on. ‘Made enquiries. Any new faces, people talk round here. Everybody’s kin in Medway, see? Scratch any guy you like, you’ll find he’s a cousin. Hear you’re quite a flier.’

  Ira grinned. ‘When I learned to fly,’ he pointed out, cheerfully, ‘you looked over the side and found the ground had gone, so you had to do something about getting down or kill yourself. They were lousy instructors.’

  ‘Yeah!’ Nestor didn’t seem to understand his leg was being pulled and he greeted Ira’s words with a straight face.

  ‘Some folk are like that,’ he said. ‘Like one family’s all mean and another can’t none of them carry their liquor.’ He paused and eyed Ira with a damp pale eye as expressionless as a suet pudding. ‘I hear they’re building a new plane out at the airfield,’ he ended.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What for, Captain?’

  Ira hesitated. ‘Just to fly, Mr Nestor,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Anything special about her?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’

  Nestor seemed disappointed, but he didn’t pursue the line of enquiry. Obviously he wasn’t a technical man.

  ‘I hear things,’ he said. ‘I heard it was a long-distance plane.’

  Ira smiled. ‘Lots of people are building long-distance planes these days, Mr Nestor,’ he said. ‘Every mail plane that flies has to be a long-distance plane. Four hours’ flying time’s around five hundred miles. That’s long-distance.’

  ‘Sure.’ Nestor nodded. ‘Sure, I get you. I heard the
y’d stopped work on her.’

  Ira lit a cigarette to give himself time to choose his words. ‘Temporarily, Mr Nestor,’ he said. ‘Just a hold-up.’

  ‘Nothin’ permanent?’

  Ira shook his head. ‘Not on your life. Aviation’s still in its infancy. You have to stop now and then to argue things out.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Nestor nodded solemnly. ‘I guess you’re right. But the rumour got around. Medway folk wouldn’t like to see work stopped. Work’s hard enough to find around here best of times. When them Yankees came down to Medway after their cheap labour we got to expectin’ big things. Medway folk’d be worried if work stopped. They got no love for Yankees, and them Courtneys come from up North. Do we get to see this plane?’

  ‘Eventually, I expect. When it’s finished.’

  ‘Swell.’ Nestor nodded. ‘Me, I’m strictly a horse-and-buggy man, though I drive a Model-T these days. What are you doin’ here in Medway?’

  ‘Let’s say I’m a test pilot,’ Ira suggested.

  Nestor seemed satisfied. ‘I jest like to know, Captain,’ he said. ‘You-all ain’t sore at me askin’?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  ‘Fine. Anythin’ props up, I’m always interested.’

  * * *

  He hadn’t been gone long when Woolff appeared, dragging his vast cap over his eye in a shy violent gesture that left it looking as though some strong wind had caught it and spun it round on his bullet head.

  ‘Hello there, Ira,’ he said embarrassedly.

  After the high feelings at the airfield Ira was pleased to see him.

  He tossed Nestor’s pasteboard visiting card on the bed and produced a bottle and two glasses. ‘Sammy got it somewhere,’ he said. ‘It’s not too bad, apart from the taste.’

  Woolff eyed the bottle dubiously, but he accepted a drink. ‘I got a good recipe for gin,’ he said. ‘You can borrow my bathroom if you want to make some.’ He cautiously tasted the drink and looked up. ‘Saw Nestor downstairs,’ he went on. ‘Owner of the local sheet. He’s a troublemaker – a real cheapskate.’