Amerika

by Paul Lally

  ‘How long’s our first leg?’ I said.

  Fatt deferred to Stone, our navigator, who said in precise tones befitting his job, ‘Fifteen hours, fifteen minutes.’

  ‘How many seconds?’ I said, and the others laughed. But Stone just looked at me and I regretted my bad joke.

  Our laughter drew the attention of the Lufthansa flight supervisor, who edged closer. I sent Fatt a warning message with my eyebrows and he had Mason begin his litany of fuel estimates and go-no-go predictions, while I did my best to look serious and interested in the all-too-familiar pre-flight rituals that mark the beginning of the transition of eighty-four thousand pounds of engineered metal into a graceful figure of flight.

  On paper it looked easy. Flying always does. From Baltimore we’d lift off and head southeast fifteen hours to a tiny speck of land in the Azores called Faial, where we’d refuel in Horta Bay, and with any luck - in short supply at the moment if you believed the meteorologist - we’d take off on our second and final leg to Lisbon, where we’d arrive six hours and forty- four minutes later, according to Stone, who’d changed his somewhat casual attitude ever since Fatt pulled the rug out from under him during our check flight. Now he was all business, so much so that he was already wearing his white uniform cap, squared away just right, covering his freshly-barbered scalp, whereas the rest of us were a bit more relaxed as we slouched over the map.

  But despite the casual appearance I felt nervous as hell. About our crew, I mean. Flying for Pan Am was like climbing a long ladder where you begin as an apprentice pilot, work your way up through radio operator to flight engineer to junior pilot, senior pilot, and then to the hallowed ‘Master Pilot Flying Boats’ rating. If, for instance, the radio operator is disabled during a flight, seven other Pan Am crew members know exactly what dials to turn, what frequencies to use, and within seconds can be tapping out Morse code with the best of them.

  Problem solved.

  That said, other than Fatt and me, we had a bunch of flying sailors on our hands. While they were the best for security reasons and the most militarily inclined should the need arise, their cross-training was much weaker than ours. All the more reason for me to keep a sharp eye on Stone and Mason and all the others. Could they cover for each other like Pan Am crews? Maybe so, but I wasn’t counting on it. The Navy worked with strict division of command. Pan Am worked the opposite. Even so, opposites attract, right? So maybe things would work out after all.

  Fatt’s finger landed on Portugal. ‘What’s Lisbon got on the table?’

  Stone consulted his weather forecast notes. As he did, the German supervisor stepped in and said a bit too loudly, ‘They are reporting mostly cloudy, twenty-seven degrees centigrade, winds two-six-zero at ten.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Fatt said. ‘Or should I say danke?’

  ‘Either will suffice, kapitan.’

  ‘Is that weather current or for our estimated arrival?’ Fatt continued. A slight hesitation. ‘That would be for now.’

  Stone looked up from his weather notes. ‘Low pressure system reported on its way out in the next twelve to fifteen hours.’

  ‘My, my,’ Fatt said. ‘What a difference that will make, don’t you think, Herr - sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

  A slight nod. ‘Weinacht.’

  Fatt stuck out his huge hand and swallowed up the supervisor’s. ‘More than a pleasure, I’m sure, Herr Weinacht. So how do you like working this side of the pond?’

  The man hesitated, trying to gauge Fatt’s intentions. Good luck, I thought. Nobody ever knew what Fatt would do next, most of all himself.

  Weinacht finally said, ‘I find Lufthansa flight operations quite similar to yours.’

  ‘Birds of a feather,’ Fatt crooned.

  ‘Except that I must approve your flight plan before you can depart.’

  Fatt looked like somebody slapped him. ‘Since when did that start?’

  A thin smile. ‘Regulations from our Berlin office.’ He put out his pale white hand. ‘May I see what you have prepared? That is, if you’re ready for my review.’

  Fatt’s jaw muscles bulged but he held his tongue. Like watching a volcano get ready to pop, but then it doesn’t. Weinacht pursed his lips and traced his manicured finger down the long list of items that made up our complicated flight: planned courses, winds aloft, fuel estimates, weights and balances, souls-on-board, and so on and so forth, while the rest of us stood like guilty schoolboys waiting for the master to grade our tests.

  ‘Alles ist in ordnung,’ he said finally.

  ‘Whatever the hell that means,’ Fatt snapped.

  ‘It means that you have done adequate preparation for me to grant permission for you and your crew to safely transport the souls on board this Lufthansa flight to Lisbon, Portugal, and then return to this operating base.’

  ‘Just ‘adequate preparation’?’

  ‘At the present time Pan American crews are the most qualified in operating Lufthansa’s Boeing flying boats, but we will be replacing you with properly trained German personnel in the very near future.’

  ‘How near’s that future, pal?’

  Weinacht said nothing. Just thin smile as he signed his name. When he finished he said, ‘Gut reise, Kapitan.’

  Even with swastikas on her triple tail, the Yankee Clipper looked beautiful as she rubbed against the dock, her silver-painted metal skin a brightly polished sheen in the late morning sunlight. An impressive stack of rising cumulus in the east gave fair warning of a bumpy ride to come later on, but hopefully we could skirt around the more serious columns of rising air.

  Just as flickering lights in a theater lobby signal the end of intermission, so did Pan Am’s GONG resonating over the terminal loudspeakers declare that the Lisbon clipper was ready to depart.

  ‘Okay, gentlemen, let’s start the parade,’ Fatt intoned as we prepared to leave the operations room. In reverse order of rank we proceeded down the curving, flower-lined sidewalk in perfect step; fourth officer, third officer, second officer, second radio officer, first radio officer, and so on up the hallowed seniority ladder through engineering and navigation officers until it reached me, just one car shy of the Grand Caboose himself, Master of Flying Boats James. J. Fatt commanding, whose footfalls sounded behind me like bass drums.

  All for show? You bet. Andre Preister may have been a cold-hearted Dutchman with Baltic Sea water in his veins, but he knew how to put on a show for his paying customers. And with Trippe as his ‘producer,’ they made sure that before every flight Pan Am crews displayed an unparalleled measure of confidence, courage and safety for their passengers, who stood waiting for the second boarding bell that would let them share in the excitement, too.

  It’s fun to watch a circus parade, but much better if you get to march with the clowns - meaning us. Am I being cynical? Yes. Is it an unfair assessment? Perhaps, but after years of doing this ‘March of the Confident Airmen’ to ease passengers’ fears, I believe that what we were actually doing was convincing ourselves too – at least a little.

  The boarding crew, dressed in spotless white coveralls, saluted sharply as we passed. I noticed with a pang that LUFTHANSA had replaced the PAA letters formerly embroidered on the back. This sad truth was brought home even closer when I heard them calling out to each other in German. Even so, they seemed to know their job as one of them opened the passenger boarding door over the port sponson and waited at rigid attention for our crew parade to march across the aluminum boarding ramp that spanned the narrow space between the plane and the dock.

  No hollow boom from our footsteps this time as we walked on the aluminum surface. The sponson’s fuel tanks were topped off with over a thousand gallons of one hundred-octane aviation fuel. That, plus twelve hundred gallons in our wing tanks, gave us over five thousand gallons for our engines to gulp for our fifteen-hour leap to Horta.

  One by one the flight crew stepped into the open hatch and then down inside the lounge where Nawrocki and his steward waited with
beaming smiles.

  Fatt touched my sleeve. ‘Mind doing the honors with the passengers, kid?’ I got work to do.’

  He maneuvered his bulk into the hatch, momentarily filling it entirely with Pan Am uniform blue, his broad pants bottom, like mine, shiny-bright from hundreds of hours in the cockpit. I turned to the boarding crewman, a young man about the age I was when I first got started in the business. ‘I’ll take it from here, pal.’

  He looked blank. I didn’t know the word for ‘Beat it’ in German, so I tried using my thumb instead to show him where to go. That and a big smile did the trick. He scurried over to the edge of the sponson where it met the boarding ramp and resumed his stiff posture of attention. I had to admit, Lufthansa folks were no slouches when it came to style.

  Old habits die hard: I re-checked my tie, fussed with my hat, and tugged at my uniform jacket to line up the buttons, Preister-style. My pants felt loose and I risked a quick five seconds to reach inside and tighten my belt another notch. I didn’t feel thinner, but I must have lost weight since I handed my rig over to Pan Am stores. Going through hell does that to a person. I was no exception. With that thought, my mind sensed an opportunity to start re-hashing what I’d been through during the past six months, but blessedly, the faraway boarding bell distracted it the way a pretty toy distracts a weeping toddler.

  The twin doors of the Marine Terminal swung open just as the last of the double GONGS echoed across the water. A phalanx of dark-suited, no- nonsense men led the passenger parade, hats square on their heads, steps firm, shoulders back, ‘compliance officer’ written all over their stern, well- fed faces. Each carried a small, light blue Pan Am overnight bag for his personal belongings, like pajamas and toothbrush, for when he turned in at night. Everything else was in baggage.

  I’m not a religious man, but my few years spent as an altar boy taught me that pomp and ceremony are the sizzle on a steak. No matter how thin that steak is, or even if it’s hamburger, if you’ve got enough candles, sweet- smelling incense, a decent choir and lots of stained glass windows, you can get most folks to believe in any damn thing you want. In Pan Am’s case, we wanted our passengers to believe that flying over three thousand miles of ocean at six thousand feet with nothing between us and destruction but four engines and a thin-skinned flying boat was the most natural thing in the world to do.

  Boarding GONGS helped. Overnight bags helped, attentive stewards with ready smiles and heaping plates of food and drink helped, not to mention flight officers like me with premature wrinkles around their eyes. We were the high priests they looked up to. All we had to do is look back at them with a calm, almost half-bored look that said in effect,

  ‘This turbulent air that’s got you bouncing up and down? Almost ready to vomit? Scared out of your wits? Not to worry, my friend, it’s perfectly normal. You can tell by the way I’m looking at you with this half-smile on my face and a look of serene understanding that I know what I’m talking about. I’m a professional here to serve you, and everything is going to turn out just fine, you’ll see.’

  That’s what I was keeping in mind I smartly saluted the first of the compliance officers to land on the sponson and make his way to the boarding door.

  ‘Willkommen, mein herr,’ I said with a happy grin.

  He nodded curtly, grunted slightly, but said nothing as he heaved his fat legs up the small step stool and then squirmed inside. I kept my smile plastered on as the next group arrived, deep in discussion. They barely noticed my existence, so intent were they on some matter that, from the looks on their somber faces, must have been essential to the future of the Third Reich.

  ‘Good afternoon, captain,’ a gentle male voice said, and I turned to see a short, dark-haired, youngish man wearing a priest’s collar.

  ‘You must be Father Petrucelli,’ I said, quickly remembering his name on the manifest.

  His eyes danced, ‘Please it’s Father Dominic.’

  ‘God’s business in Lisbon?’

  ‘Rome, actually.’ He patted his breast pocket. ‘Providing Mussolini lets me in.’

  I started to say something, but the Nazi compliance officer behind the priest cleared his throat impatiently.

  ‘Enjoy your flight, father.’

  ‘How could I not?’ He glanced up into the sky. ‘I’ll be with the angels.’

  ‘And a few devils, too.’

  And so the boarding continued; a few kind words when I thought they were needed, a smart salute when it fit the bill, a simple nod, a wave, each gesture calculated to fit the needs of the particular person. And rightfully so. Trans-oceanic clipper passengers were paying top dollar and expected service to equal it, and God help you if they didn’t get it. But not all of them. In some cases companies were footing the bill, like The New York Times reporter for instance, who gave me a happy wink.

  ‘Ava James on my flight. How lucky can a man get?’

  ‘Not much more, I guess.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll be at the same seating.’ He gave me a look. ‘Think you could fix that up for me, captain? I’m a big fan.’‘

  See what I can do.’

  He glanced around, quickly. The next batch of passengers were far enough away for him to say quietly, ‘What’s it like flying a Kraut plane?’

  ‘Boeing built her. The swastikas are just paint.’

  He shook his head. ‘Still can’t believe it. You?’

  I shrugged my shoulders but kept my big mouth shut.

  Thirty-six names on the manifest. Thirty-four souls-on-board so far, including Inspector Bauer who looked like a kid on a holiday as he fairly skipped across the sponson and darted inside without saying a word, but not without raising his eyebrows in a silent message of shared excitement. I acknowledged his gesture with a smile and a small salute.

  On the other side of the plane, engine number one groaned and spluttered into life. Fatt was getting down to business right on schedule. The boarding crew glanced at each other, readying themselves for the next step of their departure drill. I raised my hand and signaled the crew chief to wait. I pointed at the terminal and held up two fingers.

  ‘Zwei mehr,’ I said.

  ‘Jawohl, kapitan.’

  The whine of a generator overhead as the polished propeller blades of engine number four started turning. I grabbed my hat just as the cylinders caught and coughed a cloud of white smoke that quickly vanished in the brisk wind of the bay.

  As if that were their entrance cue, Ava and Ziggy sailed from out of the Marine Terminal with two ticket agents on either side, chattering away but she shook her head dismissively and waved her hand in the air, holding a jeweled cigarette holder the way the Pope holds his crosier. The agents, ignored and vanquished, slowed to a stop while she sailed onward, victorious.

  Naturally, Ziggy carried their overnight bags, leaving her free to glide along with imperial ease. Her left hand rose to guard her feathered hat as she encountered the slipstream from the idling engines. She nodded at the boarding crew who stood frozen at attention like white-uniformed Nutcrackers.

  Ziggy darted across the boarding ramp to wait on the other side, his hand extended, as though Ava were about to alight from a Venetian gondola. She strode forward, shoulders back, face angled just so for the non-existent cameras, her smile the happiest of sunrises, and as her eyes found mine, I couldn’t help but smile back.

  ‘Anchors aweigh and all that,’ she shouted to be heard above the clattering engine.

  I saluted smartly. ‘Welcome aboard, Miss James. I hope you enjoy the flight.’

  Her hand on my sleeve was light as a feather but I felt it all the same.

  She rose on her tiptoes and her lips brushed my ear as she whispered, ‘Curtain up, my darling Sam.’

  Open water looks the same no matter how high you fly. It’s not like land, where you judge your altitude in relation to how things look down there. Flying over water is like crossing a featureless desert; interesting for about five minutes, but after that, you start looking everywh
ere else but down - unless you’re a navigator like Stone, who had just used his Very pistol to shoot a flare down the tube next to his chart table. Now he was using a wind triangle to calculate our drift based on the smoke from the flare as it drifted down to the sea.

  Pilots fly planes, but navigators tell them where to go. Stone was using dead reckoning to estimate where we were now in relation to a fixed point we had passed three hundred miles earlier. He used time, speed and distance to make his carefully calculated guess, but wind was critical to his calculations. So he hedged his bets by measuring how the smoke drifted in relation to the wind as it fell through the sky. He returned to his chart table, bent over and made some tiny pencil notations on the chart unrolled before him.

  I turned in my seat and called out, ‘Are we in Cleveland yet?’

  He frowned at my lame joke as would any navigator worth his salt. I had been in his shoes years ago when, as a navigator, the fate of a clipper and her passengers often rested on my tired shoulders in the middle of a thunderstorm over Brazil when I wasn’t sure of where I was, and hoped to God the course I had plotted on the chart was correct. If not we would be flying into the side of some nameless mountain.

  Minutes later Stone came up to our flight station with a slip of paper. On it he had written the compass heading: 110.

  I said, ‘Can we take this to the bank?’

  ‘You can cash it, while you’re there,’ Stone said sharply. Then turned and walked away.

  Fatt’s eyebrows rose marginally, but he said nothing. Neither did I, but we both noted the ring of absolute confidence in Stone’s voice. When it’s your job to tell people where they’re going and when they’ll arrive, you have to be as sure of yourself as you are that the sun will rise in the morning. Especially when you’re feeling just the opposite; that time, speed and distance be damned, something in your gut keeps saying, ‘You’re lost, pal, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ That’s when your voice has to strengthen, your eye sharpen, your shoulders square as you proclaim that this is the heading that will lead everyone home -- which made me wonder if Stone was selling us a bill of goods.