I Was Howard Hughes

by Steven Carter

  ME: Well, all right, Mr. Roth. I guess we should get on to our business. The first thing I wanted to ask you, was if you were aware that Howard Hughes knew you had him under surveillance in Reno, and that, in turn, he was actually having you watched?

  AR: (His head snaps up.) What?

  ME: Hughes was having you watched in Reno.

  AR: Bullshit.

  ME: No, sir, it’s true. (I reach into my case and pull out one of Hughes’s diaries. It’s roughly the size of a paperback Bible and has a worn brown leather cover. I unbuckle the strap that seals it and open it to the entry I have marked.) This is dated October eleventh, nineteen-forty-four, and in the heading Hughes has written Reno. About halfway through the entry, he writes, “This man is a waste of our government’s tax dollars, but I feel sorry for him because mere laziness couldn’t produce such poor performance, it’s obviously a lack of native ability. Although I am upset my man following him did not take any and all steps to prevent him from entering our rooms, I will use my influence to make sure he does not get in trouble for fumbling away his pistol. Sometimes, when dealing with incompetents, justice must be tempered with mercy. I suppose most worthwhile men are gone to the military draft, so the FBI is scraping the bottom of the barrel.” (I stop reading and look up at Ashley Roth, who is staring at me with a furious, tight-lipped expression.)

  AR: You son of a bitch.

  ME: I know hearing Hughes’s opinion of your job performance must be upsetting, and I apologize for having to bring it up. But I’d still like to get your reaction. Did you have any idea he was having you followed?

  AR: (His voice rising.) That’s not Hughes’s diary.

  ME: Yes, it is. (I hold up the diary so he can see the pages.) I don’t know if you recognize it or not, but this is Hughes’s handwriting.

  AR: Where’d you get that?

  (I don’t answer.)

  AR: If it is real, you’re not supposed to have it.

  (I still don’t answer.)

  AR: Let me see that thing.

  (He leans across the coffee table and grabs the diary and tries to wrench it from my grip. A tug-of-war ensues, the diary held between our outstretched arms over the coffee table — despite his age, he’s surprisingly strong. The sounds of our struggle — mostly his grunts and low curses — fill the tape for twenty seconds, but finally he lets go of the diary and falls back into the couch. He glares at me as he catches his breath.)

  ME: Mr. Roth, really, this all happened years ago, so there’s no reason to—

  AR: YOU son of a bitch, you’re not going to crucify me like this.

  (With a quickness and agility that surprise me he grabs the baseball bat leaning at his side and with two hands raises it over his head like an ax; he’s staring down at my recorder.)

  ME: NO!

  (He swings the bat down and smashes the recorder. Plastic shards fly everywhere. Luckily, the blow lands on the speaker and not the tape compartment, and before he can swing again I grab the recorder and jump up from my chair, pick up my case, and leave.)

  Richard Vachaas, pilot and engineer at Hughes Aircraft, 1942-1946, reconstructed from Tom Lourdes’s story notes

  Late January 1945 I arrived in Vegas in relief of some fellows who’d been stepping and fetching for Hughes— that was going to be my job now. Hughes wasn’t there, though, and I had to wait around at a hotel for several days. Finally he showed up. I didn’t think he looked too healthy. His color wasn’t good, and he wouldn’t talk much, but when he did, he spoke so low you could barely understand him. He asked me if I had a partner and I said they’d sent just me. He gave me instructions about handling this box he had. Then he said we were going to Shreveport and for me to file the flight plan. The next day, we left after breakfast with him flying. The first hour he checked me out on the Sikorsky, then he talked about his box. It was in the cabin with us, in the storage area behind the seats with a blackout curtain draped over it. I asked him what was in it.

  “You can’t know that,” he said, “not now, not ever. The one most vital and important instruction I will ever give you is this: never, ever, for any reason, try to find out what is in that box.”

  Then he said Napoleon had had a strong box where he kept the maps he used to plan his campaigns and that he kept two guards on it twenty-four hours a day. He said Charlemagne had a box built entirely of gold where he kept his Bible and his collection of miniature gold birds. He said the Ark of the Covenant was a box. He said we begin in boxes, which was what a crib was, and that we end in boxes, which was what a coffin was. He said he was sure boxes were one of mankind’s original creations, since he could think of no naturally occurring boxes. He kept going on and on, talking about boxes. After a while I stopped listening.

  Over Dallas we got a radio message there was a bad thunderstorm up ahead and that we should detour around it. After getting the message Hughes flew about ten minutes without changing course, but from the location of the storm I knew he better change soon.

  “You want me to plot a new route?” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “We really need to,” I said.

  “I’m flying the plane,” he said.

  “Yessir, I know. But we need to change course,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. I sat there and tried to think of what to do or say to change his mind— then we caught some wind from the outer edge of the storm and the plane bounced. After Hughes had us back level he nodded over his shoulder. “Do you really want to know what’s in that box?” he said.

  “Right now, it’s not the first thing on my mind,” I said.

  Another gust of wind rocked the plane and Hughes wrestled with the stick. A dark wall of rain appeared on the horizon.

  “We’ve got to get out of this,” I said.

  “You spend your whole damn life afraid of dying,” Hughes said. He opened up the throttle and the plane sped up. Blue lightning flashed ahead of us. “That’s really too bad.”

  Hughes diary entry, February 3, 1945

  My plans have been foiled by His whims at every turn so I thought let Him hit me, He’s never knocked me down with lightning before. Usually He uses a blonde.

  Richard Vachaas, reconstructed from Tom Lourdes’s story notes

  I told him I was taking the wheel and getting us out of there. He shook his head and said, “It’s too late. Our best chance now is to go straight through.”

  He was right. And truth is, I’d never flown in a storm as bad as that one so I probably couldn’t have gotten us out of it anyway. The lightning was so close the electricity in the air raised the hair on my arms. The sky was pitch-black and the rain was thick and the wind never let up— the wind seemed like it had a mind of its own, like it was bullying us. We were just a toy up there.

  In the middle of the storm Hughes was practically standing up to wrestle with the stick, but he started talking about his box again, shouting above the roar of the engines and the rain and wind and thunder. “What is in that box back there,” he shouted, “is unexplainable. If I were to tell you what was in it, you would know its physical contents, but that’s all. You wouldn’t know the truth.”

  “Please, just get us through this,” I said.

  “We’ll either get through it or we won’t,” he said, “and it probably doesn’t have a helluva lot to do with me. I’m just flying the plane. I’m just the pilot. I can push some pedals and pull the stick, but what’s that compared to all the physics working against us? Really, the fact that any airplane stays airborne five seconds in even perfect weather is a miracle. You’re an engineer. You know that.”

  I didn’t answer him. I just closed my eyes to pray. The plane was jerking violently and even as heavy as that box was, it was sliding around behind us, thumping from one side of the fuselage to the other. I finally quit praying and opened my eyes and looked at Hughes. He was sitting down now. He had his fedora tipped back on his head and an opened bottle of milk was between his legs. It was sloshing onto his lap but he
didn’t seem to care. From the expression on his face you would’ve thought he was driving a car down the street on Sunday morning, but that stick was whipping around in his hands like a snake.

  “What’s in that box,” he said, “is as close as you’ll ever get to having the whole ball of yarn in your hands. The alpha and the omega. That’s why it’s vitally important you follow my instructions regarding it to the letter.”

  I closed my eyes again and started muttering the Our Father; I was sure I was going to die. Then I felt the bottom fall out and the plane plunged and banked. I opened my eyes and instinctively grabbed my stick. Hughes was no longer holding his. He was staring at his hands, which were shaking violently. I managed to keep us from going into a roll or a stall and got us back level but in that kind of wind I didn’t know how long I could keep us there. Hughes was holding his hands together to keep them from shaking.

  “Give me some help!” I shouted.

  He tried to. He unclasped his hands but as soon as he did they started shaking so much he couldn’t hold on to anything.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  So I kept flying, and he talked me through it. It was a good thing, too, because I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. It was rough for another ten, fifteen minutes, but we finally came out on the other side of the storm and almost as soon as we did it was time to start our descent toward Shreveport. Hughes said, “Don’t you tell anyone what just happened. There are people who would love to have that information and use it against me, so this is very important. Do you understand? You tell anyone and I find out about it, you’ll have a price to pay, trust me.”

  That ticked me off. I didn’t like being threatened, plus it was his stupidity that had just put us through such a dangerous experience, so I wasn’t in a mood to let his comment, which sounded half-baked to me, just pass off.

  “Who’d like to have it?” I said.

  “A lot of people,” he said. “They’re looking for any crack in my armor.”

  “You just got the shakes,” I said. “That’s no crime.”

  “When you’ve got as much money as I do,” he said, “there’s no one you can trust. Say I go to a doctor about something simple, a headache or some dizziness. Two days later I might find myself in a straitjacket and someone in my business organization who I never suspected of disloyalty suddenly has power of attorney over my affairs.”

  “Is that really likely?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I don’t see how—”

  “Just fly the plane,” he said.

  After we landed, we took a taxi to a hotel near the bus station. I went through setting up that box in its room for the first time— what a damn silly operation that was. That night as I lay in bed I decided I was never getting in a plane with Hughes again. If I lost my job, I lost it.

  The next morning, Hughes wasn’t in his room. I waited around that day and the next and he didn’t show up. I thought about calling the plant, but then decided to wait. I realized I was getting paid to loaf around, which was fine with me.

  Luther Tees, Shreveport police officer, 1932— 1957, reconstructed from Tom Lourdes’s story notes

  I was on patrol around midnight when I saw a man sitting on the curb under a streetlight. He had a quart bottle of milk and a loaf of bread. He was dressed like a bum and he was writing in a notebook he had on the sidewalk beside him. I thought he might be an escapee from the prisoner-of-war camp just outside town— they had a thousand Germans out there they used in the cotton and sugar cane. So I stopped the car and got out and asked him for some identification. He didn’t say a word, he didn’t look at me, he just kept drawing in his notebook. The light wasn’t the best but it looked like he was working on something to do with an airplane. The fact he wouldn’t talk made me think, yeah, this probably is a German— he didn’t want me to hear his voice.

  “I said I need to see some ID,” I told him.

  He stopped drawing, took a big gulp of milk, a bite of bread, then sat there chewing, looking straight ahead like I wasn’t even there.

  “Tell me your name,” I said sternly.

  He didn’t answer and his eyes didn’t register anything.

  “If you don’t tell me I’m going to have to arrest you,” I said.

  He gave me a dirty look then, but he still didn’t answer. He went back to drawing.

  I went to the car and radioed for help and a few minutes later another car arrived. He didn’t give us any trouble when we got him up off the curb. I noticed he walked with a limp, like one leg was shorter than the other. He didn’t say one word until we had him at the city jail and then, finally, after I’d banged the blackjack on the table in front of him a couple of times, he said his name was Howard Hughes. I had to smile. I figured he was just another poor soul who’d lost his head and that I’d be calling the state hospital that night. The only problem was the paperwork for that kind of thing was a pisser. I’d be half the night doing it. But if I could get him to tell me some kind of sane-sounding lie I could put in a report, I wouldn’t have to send him to Baton Rouge. Of course, I could’ve made up the lie myself, but I never did like doing that. It was a line I just didn’t like to cross.

  “I guess you mean the Howard Hughes?” I said.

  He nodded. “The aviator,” he said.

  “Look, friend, if you can tell me who you really are I might be able to let you go,” I said. “Otherwise I’ve got to keep you for vagrancy.”

  “I’m not a vagrant,” he said. Then he slipped out of one of his tennis shoes and in the bottom of it was an inch-high stack of money— there was his limp. I got the money out. It was all hundreds. Son of a bitch, I said to myself, I might have a hold-up man on my hands, and one that wasn’t too smart, either, showing me the money like that. I handcuffed him to his chair. Then I picked up his notebook and started looking through it. Lots of real precise sketches, like something a professional would do. I held up one of them and asked him what it was.

  “That’s the tail section of a reconnaissance plane I’m building for the military,” he said.

  “Look, I’m tired of fooling with you. Tell me who you really are,” I said.

  “I’m Howard Hughes,” he said.

  So I put him in the drunk tank. I figured if nice wouldn’t work, maybe that would. Right away he started yelling he wanted his notebook, but I kept it and looked through it, thinking he would’ve written his name in it somewhere. The pages were filled with math equations and drawings, and the only thing not like that was a page where he’d written in big letters, I AM NOT AFRAID.

  Since the notebook didn’t have anything useful I went down there and gave it back to him to shut him up. He was the only one in the cell awake. The other three were passed out. Stank like a son of a bitch in there because one of the drunks had messed himself both ways.

  “What’s all that math about?” I asked.

  “Airplanes,” he said.

  “Well, it makes you out to be an educated man,” I said.

  “I told you, I’m Howard Hughes.”

  “Then why’re you going around like a hobo?” I asked.

  He plopped down right where he was and sat Indian-style on the floor and started thumbing through the notebook. I squatted so we were face-to-face. “Come on, tell me. Why is Howard Hughes going around like this?”

  He kept staring at the notebook, turning pages. “At least one thing in life must make sense,” he said. “Now, these do make some sense,” and he pointed to some figures in his notebook, “but these aren’t much more than the kinds of little disturbances a fly might leave in a pile of loose shit.”

  I watched him a moment. “Say,” I said. “You didn’t maybe lose someone overseas, did you?”

  “No. But Ava Gardner won’t marry me,” he said.

  I shook my head and stood up. It looked like I was going to be doing that paperwork after all. “Well, you’re still young,” I said. “Maybe she’ll change her mind yet.”

/>   “That’s one lie I’ve stopped believing,” he said.

  I decided to give it one last shot. “Look,” I said, “I know how it is. I got a boy overseas right now and sometimes I think I can’t take it. But when I get too worried about that or anything else I think about deep-sea fishing, and I manage to go to Florida every year and fish for a week. Down to the Keys if I can. You just got to keep your mind on something like that. So whatever’s bothering you, just—”

  “I won an air race in Florida in thirty-two,” he said.

  “Just tell me who you are,” I said, “and where you got that stack of money. Then I can let you go.”

  He looked up from his notebook, but he wasn’t looking at me. “Florida,” he said.

  “That’s where you got the money?” I said.

  “Florida could be Nevada,” he said.

  “What’d you mean?” I said.

  He shut the notebook and stood up. “Call the Blue Chateau Hotel and ask for Richard Vachaas,” he said. “He’ll confirm that I’m Howard Hughes.”

  Hughes diary entry, February 8, 1945

  Reasons Florida Will Work

  1. Relatively undeveloped, though not quite as good in this respect as Nevada.

  2. Warm climate, allowing year-round golf.

  3. Governor Ellis is a drinker.

  4. Easy access to ports and to the oilfields of Texas and Central America.