by David Mamet
It was a custom of the house, Parlow said, to trust the madam with the choice of companion. Rather a courtesy, he said, like asking the chef to design the meal. Peekaboo had left the kitchen and was walking across the parlor, smiling at one and all.
“We’ll start with a bottle of plonk and two steaks, please,” Parlow said.
“How would you like them, sir?” the waiter asked.
“Black outside and pink inside,” Parlow said. “Like Bessie Coleman’s pussy.”
Mike saw Peekaboo’s welcoming smile go fixed and false as she turned and retired to the kitchen. The waiter’s face became immobile. Parlow, drunk and oblivious, continued ordering. Mike nodded his agreement to the proposed meal, then rose and excused himself.
He knocked on the door to the kitchen and entered. Peekaboo was seated at her desk. She had an account book open before her, and was topping off a glass of scotch and shaking her head.
As Mike entered she rose. “Sir, I must beg your pardon,” she said, “but the service areas are in no shape which would add to what one surely hopes is the tone of your evening.”
“Ma’am, my name is Mike Hodge,” he said. “My friend is drunk, and spoke grossly and disrespectfully, both of women, and of one of your race who is particularly worthy of respect. I beg you to accept my apology for his crass comment, and can offer only this excuse: that he is drunk, and that he is more drunk than usual, this being Armistice Day. If you would have your people let me know what we owe, we’ll settle up and get out of your hair.”
“What do you care about Bessie Coleman?” Peekaboo said.
“I saw her fly. I was a flier in the War. I knew what I was looking at. She was superb,” Mike said. He shrugged, then bowed his apologies, and turned to leave.
“What’s your name?” Peekaboo said. Mike told her again.
“Please sit down,” she said.
He pulled up a chair, and sat next to her at the rolltop desk. She raised a hand, and a black man in livery brought over a second glass, from the step-back dresser.
The dresser displayed several cut-glass “Bohemian” goblets, and three framed photographs. The largest was of Marcus Garvey. The frame was pressed gutta-percha. Impressed into the bottom were the words “Up, you mighty race, you race of kings—rise to your feet, you can accomplish what you will.”
The second, a publicity photo of a white girl in an off-the-shoulder dress. The third was of Bessie Coleman, in her flying jacket, one hand on the wing of her plane. It was signed, “To Elizabeth —Queen Bess, the Black Sparrow.”
Peekaboo saw Mike looking. She glanced at the photographs, and back at Mike. “Have a damn drink,” she said.
Chapter 8
Mike wore the rosette to the air show. Annie asked him about the rosette. “The French gave it to you,” he said. She asked what for. “For good behavior,” he said.
She asked if it had been difficult to get and he said, no, that good behavior in France was different from its like in the States. She asked him to talk about his having been a flier, but his stories were either too technical, or, if not unfit for her to hear, unfit, in his estimation, for him to tell her. So he took her to the Checkerboard Air Show.
The day was cold, which meant to Mike the engines would have increased performance, a good thing, he thought, as they were all flying Jennys, universally shamed as a hunk of junk.
But they were cheap, after the War, and cheaper still to a veteran. And Mike knew of several which had disappeared through actual bookkeeping error from more than one army base Stateside.
“I never liked them,” he said. She turned to look at him. Her Irish complexion was always magnificent. It shone to even enhanced effect in the cold. He loved her.
“You never liked what?” she said.
He started to speak, and a plane came in for a low pass in front of the grandstand, the wingwalker braced into the wind on the upper wing.
She smiled. “I can’t hear you.”
He raised a finger, and took the small paper bag from his jacket pocket, took from it and tore off a small bit of cotton waste, tore it again, in two, handed the bits to her, and gestured that she should place them in her ears.
As the wingwalkers flew off, the barker called the star attraction: the Black Sparrow, Miss Bessie Coleman. The third American woman to receive a pilot’s license, the first of African heritage, the first woman of color to receive certification from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the official licensing body of French aviation.
The grandstand was three-quarters full, more than half of them were black; and black and white were intermixed. “Well, that’s right,” Mike thought, “now the whites are at the other people’s show; and common courtesy, on the part of both, for the day, overrides race prejudice. If only I could write.”
Bessie Coleman came in from two thousand feet, slipping the plane down, crosswind, at the edge of the field. She straightened up, and touched down on one wheel, and held it on the ground, tail up, walking the plane back and forth between the right main and the left. She added power in front of the grandstand and took the Jenny up and over.
“No, that’s too low for a loop,” Mike said. Annie felt, rather than heard, him.
She looked at him, and then looked back at the plane.
The plane neared the top of the loop. Mike saw the upcoming maneuver, and nodded. It was not the loop, but a simple Immelmann. The half loop was followed by a half roll. The plane, as it went inverted, was rolled upright, and on the reciprocal heading, as they’d taught him at Fort Bliss.
The clue that she was about to do one rather than the other partook, to Mike’s mind, of the occult. It was obvious, of course, that she was not about to loop. She had just barely enough altitude to complete the loop, but if the engine failed before the top, she’d fall out of it, or fly in it. But the feeling took him back to France, and to a nonanalytical life.
There the ability to predict the enemy’s move meant life or death. Some learned to do it, some did not. The second group died from enemy fire, the first were generally spared to die of mechanical failure.
The Jenny flew off for another pass. The barker spoke through his megaphone.
Mike said, “That’s called an Immelmann.” Annie smiled, and took the cotton from her ears. “That’s called an Immelmann,” he said. “We called them ‘Jenny Immelmann.’”
She started to ask why, then turned at the barker’s direction to “Pay attention to the field before your grandstand.” A young man was running out, holding aloft a yellow square of fabric.
“Watch as Miss Bessie Coleman, the Black Sparrow, plucks from the ground this handkerchief, with the tip of her wing, at one hundred fifty miles an hour!”
The young man checked the wind sock, the bunched yellow square on the ground ten yards in front of the grandstand. He found several pebbles on the ground and weighted the square down.
“Hardly a handkerchief,” Mike thought. More a bedspread. Certainly not 150 miles an hour, which the Jenny could achieve only at full throttle in a vertical dive, for the five seconds before the wings came off.
He smiled at the showman’s duplicity.
Bessie Coleman came around for a low pass. “Here she comes,” the showman yelled.
The audience leaned toward the plane. Mike shook his head. “Testing the wind,” he said.
“Lower and lower,” the showman said. “ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILES AN HOUR. THINK OF IT. Yes . . . Yes . . . ?”
She flew over the fabric at a good three feet. The audience stared. She dropped the wing.
“TO CATCH THE HANDKERCHIEF IN HER WINGTIP!” the barker screamed. “THE LEAST MISCALCULATION . . .”
Mike looked at the wind sock. “Dead into the wind,” he thought. “That’s right. To do the gag she’s going to have to slow it down without cutting the power much.”
The crowd expressed its disappointment as Bessie flew over the fabric, leveled the wings, and climbed.
“THE MANIPULATION OF THE AIRPLANE
, AT THESE SPEEDS AND IN SUCH CLOSE PROXIMITY TO THE GROUND, REQUIRES SKILL POSSESSED BY FEW, BY FEW AVIATORS. THE SLIGHTEST EDDY IN THE WIND COULD BRING DISASTER, IT COULD BRING DISASTER, MAY GOD FORBID, BEFORE YOUR EYES. HERE SHE COMES.”
“Well, yeah,” Mike thought of the crowd, “you’re delighted. You might see somebody turned to smoke. Unlikely, as, if the gag fails, she can go around; if the engine fails, she can put it down, right into the wind; but if she catches a wingtip, we’re going to see a cute cartwheel.”
The crowd hushed as the plane came back for the next pass. “Okay,” Mike thought, “she’s giving herself a bit of crosswind, to keep the low wing down.” He snuck a glance at the wind sock, which he thought of as the Effel.
Bessie came in, five feet above the ground. Fifty yards off she lowered the upwind wing; the plane descended slowly and evenly. “She can crack off the under-wing skid,” Mike thought, “plane’ll still fly. Ah, that’s the trick. She can’t catch it with the wingtip, as she’d have to come in with an eighty-degree bank. She’s going to catch it in the skid.”
As she did.
The skid, a half hoop of wood below the wing, caught up the yellow square, which now streamed behind the climbing plane. Bessie waggled the wings. The crowd cheered.
The showman was explaining to them the triumph over death they had just witnessed, but they did not hear. They cheered. The blacks in the audience pounded each other on the back. The blacks and the whites so forgot themselves as to exchange looks of head-shaking wonder, and many shook hands.
Annie, still watching the plane, put her small hand in Mike’s. He thought it was the most intimate gesture, and was touched by her trust. “Yeah, I’m a fool,” he thought.
“A tear in the wind might put that Jenny in the stands,” he thought, “but that girl can fly.” And he remembered that the maneuver had been named for Max Immelmann, the German flier who, supposedly, had invented it, and personalized it, in supposed honor of his wife, whose name might have been Jenny, and who, it was supposed, might, at times, have wanted to get on top.
Jenny Immelmann, he thought, and split-ass, meaning a high-speed turn. Which was sanitized into Split S, and no one who’d not been at the Front would ever know why. And Effel, he thought, forgotten in the fog of war. The Effel, for the wind sock.
Who was there left to tell the story? F.L. for “French letter,” meaning condom, which the wind sock absolutely resembled, and the various attempts at jokes, none any good, about the Effel Tower.
“Well, we didn’t have to joke about sex,” he thought, “we had so much of it. But nothing like the Irish girl.” For what he had with the Irish girl was, as Sergeant MacAleister might have said, “pure D love.”
The sergeant had been his first instructor in ground school. Mike had quoted him several times to any cub he thought might profit by instruction and not find the quote sententious.
“First thing, call things by their name” was the sergeant’s opening advice, on a freezing-cold day at Fort Bliss, when he’d been walking them around the plane. “This here is a JN-4 from the Glenn Curtiss Company, which, in this case, was manufactured, as this plaque clearly shows, Under Contract by the Furness Corporation of Oneonta, New York.”
The sergeant circled the plane, and the company circled the sergeant.
“Always call the same thing, the same thing,” he said. “If you want, on the other hand, to wash your ass out of here previous to what would normally occur, you mention to your flight instructor ‘that thing there,’ or, should he ask you its name, respond with anything in this world other than its name. You will learn its name in these little talks, and in the manual, operator, military, Curtiss JN-4, which you will never call a Jenny, and I advise you not to think of, lest you fall into that fault, as a Jenny. For that is not its name.”
He’d pointed at the half hoop under and just inboard from the wingtip of the lower wing.
“Now, what would you suppose this is?”
Several raised their hands.
“You worthless, deaf, and stupid sonsabitches. Did I not just conclude informing you never to suppose? ‘Well, Sergeant, what if,’ you may wonder, ‘I actually knew the answer?’
“Candidates? That’s not the question that I asked. Don’t ever fucking ‘suppose,’ or we’re sending you home to Mother. Welcome to the military.”
The part at which the sergeant pointed, as Mike, along with the bulk of the candidates, learned, was the “under-wing skid.” Its purpose was to prevent a ground loop. A ground loop was “the undesired, uncontrolled rotation of the grounded aircraft in a horizontal plane pivoting on its center of gravity.” The center of gravity was, in the JN-4, depending upon loading, between 68 and 82.5 inches aft of the propeller spinner.
Mike had seen wingwalkers hang from the wing skid, hang by their knees, hang by one hand, “miss the grip,” and fall as the crowd screamed, only to have the fall arrested by the cleverly concealed parachute, thus giving the observers both the thrill of violent death and the reassurance that it was all in good fun.
Now Bessie Coleman demonstrated a snap roll in eight points, stopping the plane precisely at each forty-five-degree angle.
“Better than I could ever do,” Mike thought. “Much better.”
The yellow fabric added prettily to the sight as the plane rolled inverted and performed half a loop to return for landing.
“How did she catch the handkerchief on the skid?” Mike wondered. “How would I do it?” He decided he would sleeve the wing skid in canvas, and tie fishhooks to it. “That’s so obvious and blunt it’s probably true,” he thought.
“Yeah,” he told Peekaboo, “always call things by their name.”
“That’s true,” she said, “that’s what the Bible said.”
“Is that so?” Mike said.
“I don’t know it, I’ve been told,” she said.
“By whom?” Mike said.
“By the odd minister. Can’t say I’ve seen many a priest since I came up here. They take a vow of poverty. Or maybe I heard it in church.
“I want to ask you something,” Peekaboo said.
“Alright,” Mike said.
“What was that War about?”
“They shot the Archduke Ferdinand,” Mike said. “What would you do?”
Parlow had long since passed out upstairs, and his girl came down to the whorehouse kitchen for a smoke.
Marcus, the man in livery, watched over the young boy in the butler’s pantry, who was shining shoes. Peekaboo and Mike sat at the kitchen table drinking.
“The Everleigh Club,” she said. “‘Girls of All Nations.’”
“Was it true?” Mike asked. “Marshall Field’s son?”
“The Marshall Field’s son? Far’s I know it was true. Shot him in the Everleigh Club and carted him home. But, those days, the Levee was the Levee . . .” Mike nodded to keep her in her rhythm. “Anything which did not happen, was like, if not sure, to happen ’fore you turned around. Those were the real days.”
“You were there?” Mike said.
“Honey, I’d been there, young and pretty as I was, I would’ve ended up fucked to death, and my jewelry stole by some no-good handsome, indigent man, left me for someone he, on the moment, fancied better; weeped myself into stupidity; and got passed down the line ’til I was turning tricks for rolling papers; and I thank the Lord he spared me from that common fate. Tell me more about this War of yours.”
“That War,” Mike said, “wrong with it was, even f’you don’t get killed, past a certain point, you’re just getting good at it, they called it off. You can’t do it for a living.”
“Called it a draw,” Peekaboo said. “Didn’t they?”
“No, that’s not what they called it, but that’s what it was,” Mike said.
“Tell you what else,” Peekaboo said. “Mentioning? The Everleighs? Most of the, alright . . . ?” Mike nodded. “‘Girls of All Nations,’ Everleigh House? They were colored girls. Some high yaller, she’s the Haw
aiian, or her eyes got the merest slant to ’em, a Cossack, or something, whatever they are. Indonesian, you see? Or Samoan; or, she’s white-featured, she might be a Hindu, or somesuch, got up in a shawl. Plus which, anybody could ‘pass’ . . .” She inclined her head, finishing the thought.
“A lot of ’em could pass,” Mike said.
“They still do,” Marcus said.
“Marcus,” Peekaboo said, “we got some coffee?”
Marcus left his perch in the doorway to the butler’s pantry, and walked to the stove. “Dora . . . ?” he said to Parlow’s girl.
“Yes, please,” she said.
Marcus began to make the coffee.
“I could not have passed, of course,” Peekaboo said, “but I might, at a stretch, have been a Hindu. P.S., all these smart millionaires, all over the country, ‘Girls of All Nations,’ where the Everleighs going to recruit some actual, what are they . . . all the different races? White girls, too, could do an accent, many of ’em, passed ’em off as a White Russian countess. Fellow wants his dick sucked, he’s already getting fooled.”
“How is that?” Mike said.
“How is that? What difference does it make? Some chippie he picks up, buys her a cold drink; or a similar girl, in a costume, fifty, one hundred dollars, the same treatment? He ain’t paying for sex: b’lieve it or not, what he’s paying for? Illusion.
“You want to go upstairs?” Peekaboo asked. Mike shrugged.
“Well, no, you came here.”
“I’m in love,” Mike said.
“Yeah, you told me. Dora: who’s rested?” Peekaboo said. “What would you like tonight?” she asked Mike. “Hell, I know what you’d like: small, slim, and leggy.”
“How’d you know what I like?” Mike said.