I said, “I always figured your husband was rich.”
“That’s what I thought…. But a lot of people aren’t as rich as they used to be.”
She meant the Crash.
“Anyway,” she continued, moving her head in a slow circle as I continued loosening up her muscles, “he still has access to money. He’s got the kind of tongue that attracts it.”
“Don’t you get tired of it?” I asked, referring to her grueling schedule, but she thought I meant something else.
“Of course I do,” she said. “Marriage doesn’t come naturally to me…but this is more a…business partnership. And I’m grateful for what G. P. has done for me…but, still…the endless schemes, his passion for celebrity, not to mention that ugly temper of his….”
“How ugly does it get?”
She peeked over her shoulder at me, for a moment, as I rubbed. “Does he get physical, do you mean? He knows I’d never put up with that. Ooooo, do that…do that…. A man raises his hand to me, he’s out of my life.”
“You sound like maybe you’ve had some experience in that department.”
“Not really…. Well, didn’t I tell you about my father and the bottle of whiskey?”
We had shared certain childhood secrets on our long rides through the Midwestern nights.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so….”
“He was supposed to not be drinking anymore…supposed to’ve taken ‘the cure.’ I guess I was seven or eight…yes, right there, right there, feel that knot there?…I was probably seven and he had to go on a trip all of a sudden. Sometimes he investigated accidents for the railroad and he’d have to drop everything and just go. So I decided to help him pack and I found a bottle of whiskey in his sock drawer. I was pouring it down the bathroom sink when he noticed me.”
“Oh, brother,” I said. I was working my thumbs at the muscles between her shoulder blades.
“He only struck me a few blows, before my mother intervened,” she said, “and spared me from a real beating…but I swore no man would ever hurt me again. Ouch!”
“Was that too hard?”
“Maybe a little. I think that’s enough, Nate.”
“I’m not tired. I can rub you some more.”
“No.” She wiggle-turned around and now was facing me, still seated Indian-style. She was working her head around on her neck again. “Do any more and it’ll just start to hurt….”
That was when I decided not to try to kiss her. And when my erection wilted.
Room service finally brought our cocoa and Coke, and she sat beside me, but not right beside me, and we talked for maybe another hour.
“I don’t know what I’d’ve done without you on this tour,” she said at one point, her cocoa down to the last sip or two. “It’s getting nasty out there.”
“Yeah, I thought maybe those D.A.R. dames were gonna start busting chairs over each other’s heads, for a while there.”
She laughed; it was almost a giggle. “No, ladies like tonight, that’s one thing, but these public appearances…the shoving, shouting…. I mean, my goodness, what kind of way is that to express admiration? They even cut pieces of fabric from the wings of your plane. Someday a souvenir hound will carry off a vital part and there’ll be a crash.”
“You think that’s what this is about?”
“What what’s about?”
We had spoken little about the threatening notes; I had moved from bodyguard to trusted confidant to friend, and it had just never come up, even if my erection had.
“Could one of your admirers be behind those sick notes?”
She made a goofy face and waved that off. “Why would an admirer threaten me?”
“To stand out from the anonymous crowd. To be special in your life.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me. Of course, then, neither does G. P.’s theory.”
“You mean, that it’s a rival aviatrix.”
She nodded. “I’m sure there’s jealousy, but my peers know I’ve been their champion, that nobody’s worked harder for the betterment of female pilots than Amelia Earhart.”
I was aware, from the question and answer portions of her lectures, that as a founding leader of the Ninety Nines she had worked to make that organization of women pilots a central information exchange on job opportunities.
But I also knew that efforts like that could be dismissed as self-aggrandizement and politics.
“People can be pretty damn petty,” I pointed out. “Besides, Amelia-Earhart-who’s-done-so-much-for-the-betterment-of-female-pilots, trust me…anybody who refers to herself in the third person has enemies.”
She pretended to be annoyed. “You think I’m self-important?”
“For a celebrity, not particularly.”
“Is that what I am? A celebrity?”
“It’s what puts the gas in your airplane, Amy.”
Now it was the next morning and the gas was in the plane. The tall, slender woman I’d lusted after the night before was standing next to me on the tarmac, near her ship, buckling a tan helmet under her chin, flashing me that gap-toothed grin she hid from photographers. The weariness was gone, her eyes a piercing blue-gray, her chin firm, and she made a striking Lindberghesque figure in her brown broadcloth chinos and boots befitting a farmer, and of course a properly wrinkled, oil-stained leather flying jacket with its collar winging up, zippered a casual two or three inches, blousing open to reveal a brown-and-tan plaid shirt with a brown bandanna knotted gaily about her graceful throat.
“So is the Vega a good plane?” I asked, working my voice up above the airfield noise. It was windy enough to make my suit and tie flap; my fedora was flattened to my skull with a hand trying to prevent the hat’s takeoff, and with my small suitcase in the other hand, I looked like a door-to-door salesman who wandered off his route.
“It’s fast,” she said.
“That wasn’t the question.”
“Well, the heat buildup in that cramped cockpit can get pretty disagreeable; that’s why I don’t need a flying suit.”
“The question was, is it a good plane?”
“Yes and no.”
“Tell me the ‘no’ part.”
“It can be a little tricky near the ground. That single-chassis construction, with the no-longer-on fuselage, won’t take any plane of the year awards.”
“Why’s that?”
“Folds up like an accordion in a crackup.”
“Jesus! What do you do about that?”
She shrugged. “Don’t crack up.”
And she climbed the small ladder leaning against the plane by the wing, opened the isinglass cockpit cover, and crawled in.
With that heartening observation to cheer me, I boarded through the cabin door toward the middle of the aircraft, crawling over massive fuel tanks to take the single remaining seat, where I buckled myself in. Glancing around at the boxlike tanks that provided less than reassuring company, it occurred to me I was seated in the middle of a flying bomb.
Though she was somewhat above me, I could still get a good view of Amy in the claustrophobic cockpit, her legs resting practically up under the engine mount. No wonder it got hot up there. She started the engine, and while it idled she watched the response of the panel of round dials, checking oil and fuel temperature and engine revolutions per minute.
Curling her long, feminine, artist’s fingers about the stick, she taxied down the runway, turning into the wind, holding the brakes steady and hard, yanking the stick all the way back into her midsection. Revving the motor, she reached up and turned a switch; the sound of the engine’s thrum shifted, and apparently this was what she wanted to hear, because her smile was reflected in the windshield.
With her left hand, she advanced the throttle, slowly, easily, and the churning of the propeller grew to a hard fast roar, as the Vega built speed, racing down the runway. She eased the throttle ahead, to its limit, keeping the stick forward, bringing up the tail; the plane seemed to want to get into the
air but she wasn’t quite ready to let it.
Then she yanked back on the stick and the plane rumbled off the runway, riding the wind, climbing to ten thousand feet and lending me a fine view out my little window of the rolling countryside, shades of brown alternating with emerging green and occasional patches of snow, threaded by sun-glistening rivers and tributaries, interrupted by the occasional town of toy houses.
We didn’t talk much, not with her crammed into that cockpit and the Vega’s deafening prop and engine noise. She was allowing two days to make the nearly two-thousand-mile trek, and had assured me we’d land well before sundown, in Albuquerque.
The trip was mostly uneventful. I ate a box lunch and read the latest issue of Ring magazine and even dozed off, periodically, though late in the day, flying over New Mexico, I got jostled awake by bucking bronco turbulence.
I unbuckled and, moving with the grace of a drunk on an ice floe, made my way to the opening between cabin and cockpit and stuck my head up and in; even right next to her, I had to yell: “Anything I should know back here? Like where my parachute is?”
She hollered back: “We’ve run into some rapidly shifting winds! Don’t panic!”
She was already making her descent toward the runways and hangars of Albuquerque Municipal Airport, where a wind sock on a pole was twirling like a New Year’s Eve noisemaker.
“You were kidding with that ‘folds up like an accordion’ remark, right?”
She was sitting forward and her hands clutched the yoke. “More like a Chinese lantern…. Get back and buckle yourself in, Nate! I never lost a passenger yet.”
I did a clumsy native dance back to my seat, buckled in, and then she shouted at me: “I’m going to have to take the shortest runway! That’s going to mean an abrupt approach….”
The Vega was riding the wind like a motorboat on choppy waters.
“What do you mean,” I asked, “‘abrupt’?”
And she answered me by dropping the plane into a steep forward sideslip. My as-yet-undigested box lunch (tuna salad sandwich, apple, and chocolate chip cookie) damn near made a crash landing. Then the ship began a series of wide fishtails, like the Vega was waving hello to New fucking Mexico.
“Shit!” I yelled. “Are we out of control?”
“That’s on purpose! It cuts speed!”
Maybe the plane’s, but not my pulse rate.
The runway was looming before us, and yet she was flying the plane virtually onto the ground, the throttle opened up. We seemed to be running out of runway; she sideslipped so as not to overshoot it and as I waited for the sound and feel of the Vega’s fixed wheels touching tarmac, and as Amy pulled the stick back to set down, a gust of wind suddenly ballooned the Vega back up twenty feet…and then just as suddenly, that gust of wind died.
And left us there.
Before we could drop like a stone, Amy slammed the throttle forward, the wind came back and the Vega set down without a bounce, though we were still at full throttle; fortunately, the runway was built on something of an incline, dissipating the plane’s forward speed. We careened around the arc of the taxi circle at the runway’s end and finally, blessedly, drew to a halt.
In the dining room of the Hilton Hotel on Copper Avenue that evening, I asked her, “What the hell happened today?”
“When?” she asked, nonchalantly cutting a bite of a big medium rare filet of beef.
“When we almost landed,” I reminded her, “then had to land again?”
She shrugged. She was still in her plaid shirt and knotted scarf—we hadn’t taken time to wash up for dinner, Amy being too hungry to bother. “Technically,” she said, “we were in a stall.”
“Jeez, I hate it when a plane crashes on a technicality.”
She smirked, waved that off, chewed, swallowed, not wanting to be impolite and talk with her mouth full.
“We didn’t crash, silly. We were just caught in a momentary vacuum…. It’s as if all the air pressure got suddenly sucked from the controls.”
“So you put the plane on the ground at full throttle.”
“That seemed to me to be the best option.”
“Isn’t that a pretty good trick?”
“It is if you can get away with it.”
I raised my rum and Coke to her; it was all I was having. “Here’s to one hell of a pilot.”
She liked that. “Thanks, Nathan.” She raised her water glass to me. “Here’s to one hell of a guy.”
That was one of the few times I ever heard her swear, and I took it as a high compliment.
At the door to her suite, I asked, “Need a neck rub tonight? Or maybe just some company?”
Halfway inside already, she smiled almost sadly and said, “No, I don’t think so, thanks. I have to call G. P., write a few letters, then I want to get to bed nice and early.”
I’d been hoping to get to bed nice and early myself; only, not alone.
Maybe she could read my mind, because just before she shut herself in her room, she touched my face, tenderly, with the tips of those long tapering fingers. “Cheerio, Nathan…. We have another long day in the air, tomorrow…and I want to be alert, in case it’s eventful.”
But it wasn’t, really. Smooth flying over the brown and tan and salmon vistas of New Mexico, Arizona, and California, canyons and mesas and only the occasional stray city-boy thought that surviving a crash in this country would mean keeping company with sand and lizards and cactuses. She would dip down low enough to provide a good look at this delightful desolation, the Vega’s cool shadow racing across the godforsaken landscape, where occasional dabs of green were like parsley sprigs on a big empty plate.
The late-afternoon landing at Burbank was blessedly free of unexpected crosswinds and technical stalls. We were close to the ocean now and desert vistas had given way to a breathtaking view of green hills bordering the fertile San Fernando Valley, mountain ranges beyond, some snow-capped, with Burbank and its United Airport nestled in the flatlands between.
The runways below were the five spreading arms of a flattened octopus whose head was a sprawling terminal identified by white letters painted on the tarmac before it: UNITED AIRPORT. On the runways at left and right of the modernistic, T-shaped terminal, giving it plenty of breathing room, were buildings that from my cabin window looked like flat square matchboxes but were actually massive corrugated-metal hangars, their roofs labeled UNITED and BURBANK respectively. Amy set gently down, with none of the melodrama of yesterday’s landing, and we taxied, pulling up before a huge hangar door, over which white painted letters added up to UNITED AIR SERVICES LIMITED.
We were greeted by a trio of the airfield equivalent of grease monkeys, one of whom provided the ladder for Amy to climb down from the cockpit; she greeted them by name (“Howdy, Jim!,” “Hey, Ernie!,” “Tod, what do you know?”). A fourth man, who brought up the rear in the confident manner of a commanding officer who allows his troops to lead the charge, wore a gray suit and a lighter gray shirt with a gray and black tie and looked as dapper as a movie star, or anyway a movie executive. Small but with a solid, square-shouldered build, he was almost handsome, with bright dark brown eyes, a jutting nose, and a jaunty jutting chin; his slicked-back black hair and slip of a mustache were apparently on loan from Clark Gable.
He and Amy embraced and patted each other on the back like long-lost pals. Both had smiles that threatened to split their faces.
“How’s my girl?” he asked her. “Ready for another foolhardy adventure?”
“Always,” she said, unbuckling her helmet, yanking it off, shaking her mop of curls. “Paul, this is my friend Nathan Heller; he’s been my one-man security team on this lecture tour. Nathan, this is Paul Mantz—he’s the mastermind behind my record flights.”
I had already guessed as much, but extended my hand and said, “Mr. Mantz, I’ve heard big things about you.”
Amy glanced at me, wondering what those big things might be, and I wondered if I’d misspoken: she had never mentione
d Mantz to me—everything I knew about the man had come from G. P.
“Call me Paul,” he said, as we shook hands, his grip showing off his strength a little, “and I’ll take the liberty of calling you Nate…and as for what you’ve heard about me, it’s just possible some of it’s true.”
“Well, for one thing, I hear you’re the best stunt pilot in Hollywood.”
He twitched a smile and I sensed some annoyance. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not really a stunt pilot…what I am is a precision pilot. I leave stunts to the fools, kids, and amateurs. By which I mean, the soon to be deceased.”
Amy allowed the three mechanics to take over the Vega, and, with her in the middle, she and Mantz and I walked slowly toward the looming hangar. He had his arm around her, casually; it was hard to tell whether it represented a brotherly familiarity or something else.
“What have you got in mind for me and my baby?” she asked him.
“Angel, the boys in St. Louis have already increased your fuel capacity. I’ve got new magnetic and aperiodic compasses to install and check, we’re upgrading the directional bank and turn indicators, adding improved fuel and temperature gauges, plus a tachometer and a supercharger pressure gauge.”
“Is that all?” she asked mockingly.
“No. I’m gonna have Ernie overhaul the Pratt and Whitney again.”
She frowned at him. “You really think that’s necessary? That engine purred like a kitten, all the way from St. Louis to here. I ran into a wind shear landing at Albuquerque and it performed like a well-tuned race car. You can ask Nathan.”
My opinion, which was that the landing in question had scared holy hell out of me, may not have shed any light on this discussion of technical matters.
But we never got to my opinion; Mantz was already shaking his head, no. “Better safe than sorry. And as for you, young lady, I’ve got a new toy for you to play with…”
We were inside the cavernous hangar now, the golden dying sun filtering in lazily through the many-paned high windows. Half a dozen monoplanes were parked within the tool-littered hangar, including a Vega like Amy’s, only this one was painted red and white with the words HONEYMOON EXPRESS painted on the side, in a heart pierced by cupid arrows. Amy had told me earlier that her Vega had no nickname (unlike her famous Friendship and Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis) because G. P. figured giving the plane a name and a personality might detract from Amelia Earhart.
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