West of Nowhere

by Alan Lemay

  The bronc' fighter studied her, looking square into her eyes.

  Glory Austin tried to close the gray gates, but she could not. She closed her eyes and began to cry softly, plumb whipped.

  For a moment Pete sat motionless, mystified and baffled. Then he gathered her up and held her gently.

  This girl in his arms was the other Glorynot the straight-sitting, black-clad figure of saddles and bronc's, but the Glory of the old adobe house: a slim, soft-lined girl, too finely and gently drawn to be used for smashing about in arenas for the amusement of crowds. Perhaps she was born to the open-country aristocracy of vast herds. Perhaps she was steadfast and game, and could herself put mastery on a wild-bred horse. But mostly she was just a buckeddown girl with tears on her cheeks and her hair whipped loose about her throat - a girl someone should have taken better care of.

  Pete said: "This show-off stuff isn't for you and me. There's better things for us, in a different kind of place."

  Glory smiled faintly, comfortable in his arms.

  Joe Sebring, piloting a huge-engined gadget with a shape like a clipped-wing bee, found out what he wanted to know in less than ten minutes of flight. He slipped back into the field like a diving kite, and used up three-fourths of the long runway before he dared go to his brakes.

  When he had got her stopped, he pushed up his goggles and rubbed his eyes, dog-tired and disgusted. His engine still needed a lot of work before he could take off in the East-to-West---if he was going to race at all. Forty-four hours before take-off it looked very doubtful. He felt as if he had been quarreling continuously with a cranky, flown-out engine for the last sixty-five or seventy years, and that his own age was about a hundred, instead of his actual twentytwo.

  Joe had an idea that if the inspectors knew as much about his ship as he knew himself, they would snatch its license. He had rebuilt it out of a total crack-up he had bought for coffee money. He had an engine in it out of a different crack-up. And ship and engine were pulled into a struggling compromise by a propeller not intended for either one. It had taken all winter and part of the summer to get the thing approved.

  Yet he knew that this group of misfits would fly like a streak. He had raced it once, and won once, taking the tough Border-to-Border, for an average of one hundred per cent. That was many months ago. Since then he had spent most of his time trying to get his airplane in shape to repeat. Sometimes it looked as if the tired old engine had already given its all.

  Joe had not started out to be a race pilot. He didn't want to be a race pilot now. But he wasn't eligible for the airlines because he didn't have enough blind time, or any other kind of time, nor the money to get it. Until he had won the Border-to-Border, he had been just one of a large order of young pilots coming up the hard way. Perhaps his single victory could have been made to open up some sort of an opportunity for him, but Joe had a special, stubborn reason for wanting to race againand wished he had never heard of it.

  At the apron of hangar two, however, Ellen Scott walked out to the stubby wing of his ship, and he swung down, grinning. He didn't want her to know that only tenacity was keeping his entry in. As soon as he smiled, he looked about half his age one of the penalties of being snub-nosed and freckled, but his hands, as he now pulled off his gloves, were broad, square, and stubborn, and ingrained with engine oil.

  "Joe," Ellen Scott said, "that motor sounds like a basket of beer cans falling down cellar."

  Ellen Scott had a fast plane of her own and got around the country a good deal, but, until yesterday, Joe Sebring had not seen her for a long time. Yesterday, when he had rifled under the power lines with a dead engine, she had walked down the line of hangars to see who the attempted suicide was. She had stayed to spend a couple of hours, watching Joe's work with a sort of absent-minded fascination.

  Today she had come back to turn his prop for him while he checked his timing, and had got a stocking-run out of it. Now she guided a wing as his plane was rolled into the hangar. Nobody else had noticed that Joe Sebring was in the race, and, although this was more than all right with him, it made him appreciate her.

  Joe believed Ellen had won a couple of obscure races for women, somewhere, but she didn't look like a race pilot. She just looked like a girl with mouse-blonde hair, and a tongue that could take care of her. He decided that he liked her he liked her a lot. In a game full of phonies, it seemed to him that she was real, as real as a monkey wrench, only better-looking.

  He laid out his wrenches now, and was at work while his exhaust pipe was still all but glowing.

  Ellen said: "Justine Pryor was here while you were up. She asked about you, Joe."

  "Nice of her."

  "She said... `What... is that punk cluttering up the place with his power glider again'?"

  "I supposed," Joe said, "that it would be something like that."

  "Don't you let it worry you. She was on a scout snoop for Frank Manosky, I'll bet anything. It shows they're afraid of you, Joe!"

  He answered that with an embittered grunt. He was trying to remember the days when he had admired Justine Pryor with a sort of distant, vacant-eyed awe, like a cow admiring a skyrocket. He had not been alone in that. Justine Pryor may not have been the lightning pilot she was supposed to be, but for the present she was almost a national symbol.

  She wore a long, movie-style bob with a sweep to it as if there were head winds in it. Her eyes had a trick slant to them that was plain wicked, and she looked as all girl pilots ought to look. Wherever she went, she was photographed promptly and often, like an accident.

  "Sometimes," Ellen Scott said to Joe, "the lady eagle is pretty hard to take."

  Joe, his hands already covered with grease, tried to scratch his head with the tip of a little fingernail. Ellen took pity on him, and he held his head down while she scratched it for him. He said: "She let me off easy that time, at that."

  "I don't know," Ellen said darkly. "I haven't seen the papers."

  "Why the hell doesn't she lay off me?"

  "She won't ever," Ellen said, "as long as she's in an official state of romance with Frank Manosky in the newspapers. You make good copy...something to wisecrack at. What did you expect, beating her boy by the width of a state, just when they break a quarter-page news photo of Justine kissing Frank good luck?"

  "Aw," Joe grumbled, "why can't they forget it?"

  "It's a business with Justine," Ellen Scott explained it. "Publicity is more than just a hobby with her. It's a racket, a graft, a living. I'll bet she'll take fifty thousand this year for testimonials alone. Naturally...."

  "Well, it isn't a business with me! I just want to fly. I hate this show-off stuff. I'd as soon take a licking as see my name posted in a list, even. I wish I'd never raced at all."

  Ellen said: "I can understand that, Joe. That's why I quit racing. I thought I'd like it, but I didn't. I hated it."

  "It's my own fault," Joe said. "I ran my neck out. I lost my temper, I guess. But...."

  The roar of a neighboring engine swept his voice away. Ellen picked up a clean newspaper the propeller wash had blown in, folded it upon an oily box, and sat on it, hugging her knees.

  "Joe, for heaven's sake, why don't you give up all this nonsense? Withdraw your entry, Joe, while you can still get your money back! That thing won't fly three thousand miles. Some days it won't fly three thousand feet."

  "It has to," he said.

  "You can't fit a forced landing under that thing," she persisted. "Somewhere west of nowhere you'll have to bail out. Joe, you're just throwing away your ship and yourself, too, probably. In heaven's name, why?"

  He wanted to answer that. He would have liked to explain to this kind-spirited girl why he had to go on as he did. But he didn't know how. He was thinking about the Border-to-Border, in which he had beaten Frank Manosky. He wanted to forget it, but nobody who had flown in that hard-luck race ever forgot it. Frank Manosky had been expected to win it by such a margin that the race would look like two races. But things went wro
ng. The racing ships streaked north out of Texas into the teeth of a howler, then blind weather closed over the country, and everything happened to everybody.

  Joe Sebring's own memories were lonesome and personal, about the popping of static, like fat frying in his earphones; the inadequacy of his sparse instruments; and the bad light on what dials he had, when the unnatural dusk caught him. Nobody was as surprised as he was to learn he was first home.

  Second most surprised was Frank Manosky. Frank had lost his radio beam, and had rummaged around the country for it a long time, getting madder every minute. When he found out that some guy named Joe had come from no place to beat him by a matter of hours, he blew up and is sued an ill-considered statement. It had said, in part, that he would undertake to beat this Joe Something ten out of ten, any course, for whatever amount Joe wished to put up. It took a Manosky to get away with a crack like that.

  Even with the purse he had won, Joe could not have afforded to put up more than half a dollar, and it curled him. He answered, for publication, that he would gladly show Manosky the way home again in the next national point-topoint. He said he felt sorry for Manosky, wandering around lost like that, and honestly wanted to help him.

  Whenever Joe thought about it, his ears burned. He didn't know how to explain to Ellen that he either had to race again, and soon, or crawl under a board.

  "I talked myself into a hole," he told her. "I have to fly my way out of it."

  "That's crazy! Airplanes fly by means of their engines," she answered him. "You can't fly a mile by the sheer power of hope. What are you going to do when she slings rocker arms all over Missouri? Break out a canoe paddle?"

  "What's the matter with this engine?" he demanded weakly.

  "It's had five owners at least, and two or three of them are dead. It was a lemon to begin with, and it has more flying hours on it than a ton of owls. And it's going to heat until it melts."

  "Maybe," he said doggedly, "it won't, this time."

  She was quiet for a few minutes while Joe worked steadily.

  "Did you hear about Justine Pryor's new grandstand play?" she said next. "She's going ahead of the race in her flying make-up box that the Hawkwing people furnish her for nothing, and take charge of Manosky's refueling crew at Encampment, just ahead of his last hop."

  Joe Sebring made a big show of being fair. "Well, probably somebody needs to take charge of it. Encampment has a kind of a dopey crew, Ellen."

  "Yes, it's bad. I know." Then she faltered under a sudden impulse. "Do you want me to fly on ahead and line up a crew there for you? I could be in Encampment some time tomorrow night...plenty of time. And I will, if you want me to."

  He looked at her oddly, and jumped to the conclusion that it was a gag. "They wouldn't take your picture, toots," he said, "even if you did."

  She was silent for so long that he had forgotten all about it by the time she spoke again.

  "I think you're the scum of the earth," she said. "I hope Manosky meets you on his way back." And she left there. She was gone as he turned around.

  He smiled vaguely, his mind full of engine, and took a few more half-hearted turns of the wrench. Then suddenly he realized what she had offered him, and what he had done. He slung down his wrenches and ran after her. "Hey, Ellen!" It didn't do any good. Her taxi was already pulling out of the parking lot.

  Alone in the vast, shadowy hangar, its floor crowded with inter-lapped planes, he felt about the worst he ever had in his life. He would have gone to look for her if he had known where to look. It occurred to him that he knew almost nothing about her at all. He didn't know where she was stopping, or what town she lived in when she was home. But now that she was gone, he was lonely and discouraged, unwilling to work any more, little time as he had left. He didn't care much whether he made the take-off or not.

  He began putting away his tools. Then his eye dropped upon the newspaper Ellen had laid on the box. A face in halftone arrested his glance.

  Justine Pryor was beautiful in newsprint again, in helmet and raised goggles. Joe's eye ran down the adjacent interview, and his own name jumped out at him. They had not forgotten to ask Justine about that old joke the duel between the crack racer, Manosky, and the unknown kid, Joe Sebring, who had beaten him.

  It always gave Joe an unpleasant shock to see his name in print. He winced, even before he read the paragraph. Sebring doesn't figure in this, Justine Pryor was quoted. Probably he doesn't even mean to take off' I don't believe you could get him into a race with Frank if you chloroformed him.

  Joe's brow cleared, and he smiled. Meticulously he laid the newspaper back on the box. Then he got out his tools again, and worked until after midnight.

  He looked for Ellen all the next day, but she didn't show. It was the eve of the race, and he hardly had time to get to his tuning flights. At noon he took half an hour he could not spare, and went down the hangar line, trying to find out how he could reach her. But the young people had gone to lunch, and he didn't learn anything.

  It was starting time, and his ship was warming up on the apron in a murky drizzle before he saw her. She was in a group of people who stood close inside the ropes that held the spectators back. She hadn't come forward to speak to him. The loudspeakers were already roaring his name, warning him to get out on the line, but he went to her, and she walked to his plane with him.

  "Look," he said. "I want you to know this. I think you're swell. I think you're great. And you can have anything I've got, any time, ever."

  She smiled then, and lifted her face." 'Bye, Joe." As he kissed her, a flash bulb blazed against the gray day, and Ellen grinned. "I got my picture taken, after all. Good luck, mister!"

  Then, presently, he was on the line. The roar of big engines beyond his own, all over the place, blanketed the world with uproar. His hands were sweating, and there was a taut-drawn strain in his left cheek to the point of pain....

  He took off muddily, but shook free of the field at last, and the earth fell away, wheeling slowly eastward under him as it fell. Then he got his ship's tail up, and flight relapsed into the alert monotony of cross-country, his eyes flicking through a familiar routine of instruments and horizons.

  He had time to think a little bit then, and began thinking about the first time he had seen Ellen Scott. She had made a last-minute entry in a minor trophy race for women, and was trying to get away without her family knowing about it. She didn't have any money with her, and didn't know anybody or any of the ropes, and her tachometer drive had washed out. She was looking like a scared lost kid, who probably ought to be spanked and sent home, when Joe took her under his wing, and got her to the line.

  Later, more people knew her name, for she took second to Justine Pryor. She had written to him after that. It had been a nice letter, warm and grateful. Sometimes, he thought, he ought to have answered it.

  She was changed a good deal now. She didn't look lost or scared any more an improvement. She had something, and, now that he was away from her, he realized that it was something he needed.

  During the second hour his oil temperature was rising, and it seemed to him that a new note was coming into the voice of his motor. After that he had no time for anything but his worries. By the time he refueled at Kansas City, first of his two refuelings, he knew that he was in all the trouble he had ever expected. He hung his gloves over the temperature indicators, in hopes the ground crew would not recognize what serious shape he was in.

  He took off from there in fifth place, and somehow coaxed and cussed his airplane the length of Oklahoma, boring stubbornly into the eye of the sinking sun. He even nursed her over the Continental Divide, mainly by the power of prayer. But it was no good, and he knew it. As the coast ranges began to rise from the desert's rim, he watched his oil pressure flutter weakly, and smelled the engine's incandescent heat, and admitted that Ellen had been right.

  By the time he sloped down upon Encampment, he knew that he was lucky even to make the field. He managed to wheel within a few h
undred feet of the pumps before he stopped rolling, and a crew ran out to push him in. As he climbed down stiffly, an assistant dispatcher was rattling in his ear: "You're twenty minutes ahead of Tex Campbell, nobody leading you. Frank Manosky is close onto Tex. He's pulled up fast in the last couple of hours. It'll be you and him. If you can hold your pace...."

  "Listen," Sebring said. "Listen. I can't...." Then he saw who else was there.

  With his mind full of engine failures, Joe had forgotten that Justine Pryor had flown ahead to set up Manosky's crew. She was standing by the pumps, her mouth drawn, her eyes hard. She looked cross.

  "Wasn't looking for you out here," she said. "You certainly aren't going to try to go on...are you?"

  His hand shook as he held the match. "What do you think?"

  She must have taken that for a negative, for she looked relieved. "Tough going, my boy. Better luck next time!"

  Joe Sebring bit the cigarette he had been smoking in two, and spat out the pieces. He knew he ought to tell the crew to turn off their pumps and roll his ship out of the way, to make room for other planes that would be going on. But he just walked along the edge of the field by himself, looking at the mountains. They looked dead, ugly, and desolate, with the last of the daylight behind them. When he went back to his plane, he was polishing his goggles.

  Justine Pryor was still there, and she was looking dumbfounded. "If you take that thing up, you ought to be grounded for life.. .and I'll see to it!"

  "I have to go back and look for Frank," he answered. "I think he's lost again."

  The slanted eyes blazed at him greenly. "Smart guy, huh? Well, you remember this...I've seen a hundred like you! I've seen them come and go!"

  He climbed into the cockpit. "Tell Frank Manosky you just now saw me come and go. Frank will be interested. Prop clear!"