Bandy's voice was tinged with lust. "Do you drive all these?"
"Once in a while. Mostly I use the new Buick to go back and forth to town. It's a darb, got a radio, you can listen to music all the way into town, can you beat that? I'm having them put in all the cars. Bruno Hafner is letting his man Murray do the work."
He stopped and rubbed his hands together. "This is what I wanted to show you. It's my favorite. Grab that side of the cover, and lift it off carefully, so we don't scratch the finish."
They uncovered a glittering 1926 Stutz Vertical Eight, a five-passenger speedster that gave Bandfield an auto-erection. The bright yellow body had horizontal stripes along the cowl that made it look as if it were going ninety sitting still.
"It's my favorite, but I can't drive it anymore—I kept speeding in it, and a motorcycle cop used to lay for me. You and Millie can use it while you're here. Go out on some country road and drive it fast enough to blow the carbon out of it."
The next afternoon Bandfield didn't blow much carbon out, for the twisting Long Island back roads didn't lend themselves to high speeds. Putting along at thirty miles an hour was better suited to the quiet contemplative mood in which Bandy and Millie found themselves. Murray had been there in the morning, and a radio was slung under the dashboard. As they idled along the roads, the trees still in leafy prepubescent spring green, they listened to the speaker putting out "Old Man River." When the song was over, Bandfield snapped the radio off. He drove carefully, reining in the gutty power of the Stutz so he could hear Millie.
"You should join the Book-of-the-Month Club. It's great—makes you read the books everybody is talking about."
He nodded assent. Back in Salinas, people didn't talk too much about books, but he'd join anything she wanted him to, the Elks, the Masons, anything.
"Did you read The Sun Also Rises? Hemingway is so powerful. I'd love to meet him. Maybe you'll meet him in Paris."
Bandy doubted it. "If—when—I get to Paris, I'd rather meet some French flyers than some fat old American writer. And I want to go see the battlefields."
Seeing her disappointment, he countered, "I read Beau Geste, though. Did you? It's about the French Foreign Legion. P. C. Wren wrote it. A grand story—it would be a great movie."
Literature was important to Millie; in the past a reply like Bandy's would have turned her away from one of her suitors in college. But somehow this handsome aviator, rough-hewn though he was, had an appeal that extended beyond books.
"This is the farthest I've ever been from home. How about you?"
"That's the best thing about flying—always on the go."
"We go to St. Louis a lot to see my cousins and watch the Cardinals. And we went to New Orleans once."
He took the lead, and told her about San Antonio, and Mexican food, and the chill high beauty of the Rockies. "I used to have to fly to Albuquerque once in a while—no passengers, just some mail or special freight. I'd fly along just above the mountaintops, and there would be herds of antelope, bounding along the valleys. There are pretty lakes up there, too, probably full offish. It was gorgeous. And the Midwest is beautiful too, miles and miles of farmland."
She seemed to draw a little closer.
"It's really the only way you can see America. You know, flying is just like a lens. It's a big telescope that you can focus on the countryside."
When she nodded, the curls bounced on her forehead. He'd never seen anything so devastating.
"You know, when you see hills on a map, it's just squiggly little lines, and even when you see them from the ground, they're just flat bumps on the horizon. But from the air, you see how they're laid out. You see any lakes or dams, and how the valleys run, and if there are any passes."
She said, excited, "Just imagine if they'd had a plane when people were going west, a plane to go ahead and scout the passes."
"Yeah, and the Indians and the buffalo, too."
They were silent, happy to have found each other, unaware that each was playing the other masterfully, content to chatter and content to be still.
She liked the fact that he took her seriously, that he didn't patronize her the way the boys back home did. She took a chance.
"Do you know why I want to fly?"
He shook his head.
"Two reasons: fairy tales and Jules Verne."
"Jules Verne?"
"You know, Around the World in Eighty Days, the one about the balloon flight. Every time I read it, I wanted to fly, to get away from Green Bay, and just see the world."
He liked talking to her better than to anyone, better than to Lindbergh, better than to Hadley. And unlike most smart people he'd met, she listened well, asking intelligent questions.
"I love listening to you. You always know what to say, and I don't have to pry things out of you."
"Like you have to pry the abalone out of their shells?"
She meant it only as a wry comment, but it was wildly funny to him. He liked her sense of humor, brisk and allusive, even if he had to listen closely to tell when she was kidding and when she wasn't.
"You must be a good teacher. Do you like it?"
"I like it, but it's not enough. It won't take me anywhere. I'm dying to see the mountains the way you've seen them, to fly the oceans. Life is so short, and there's so much to do."
He squeezed her hand.
"Anyway, teachers are so underpaid, it makes me mad. Half the women who teach with me are dried-up little Min Gumps who never had a boyfriend, never had a vacation, never laugh. I'm not going to wind up like that."
He shrugged and laughed. "You don't think there's any money in flying, do you?"
"No, but there's a thrill in it. I don't care if it pays anything, just enough to live on, but I want to get on that old magic carpet and fly everywhere. That's why people love movies. They take them everywhere, even if they know it's just an illusion. Besides, as soon as I stop getting sick, I know I'm going to enjoy it, and I'll do the flying myself. I want to go solo, to fly along the beach, just above the waves, to fly through the clouds."
"That can be dangerous—you don't know which way is up in the clouds."
"Good! That's what I want to get away from, a world where everybody knows what's up and down, good and bad. I want to get into the air where there's only me and God and the wind."
He agreed fervently. He would have agreed with her if she'd just recited the alphabet.
"Besides, if I stay a teacher, I'll work for some smelly potbellied old principal till I die a dried-up virgin in Green Bay."
The word virgin was hot stuff, the first overtly sexual signal she had sent. He tried to think of some clever way to capitalize on the opening.
She was quiet for a moment, and then said with a diamond intensity, "I'll make Uncle Jack proud of me." She waited half a beat and whispered, "I'll make you proud of me."
With a muted roar, the Stutz's ninety-two-horsepower Vertical Eight engine carried them from Hempstead to Hampton Bays, then over to Orient Point, where they parked the car on the beach to picnic out of the hamper the valet had provided.
Bandfield was amazed at her appetite. She matched him sandwich for sandwich, pickle for pickle, cup for cup of milk. They sat holding hands at the end of a derelict pier, feeding gulls that curled in a tight clockwise traffic pattern around them. Bandy tried to stall the gulls out, tossing pressed chunks of bread in high arcs that had them skidding in, wings flapping, calling in exasperation.
They drifted back to where he'd spread a lap robe on the sand. She sat primly in her lacy white dress, legs daintily crossed. He stretched on his side, occasionally glancing down to admire his new clothes, the first plus fours he'd ever worn, but most often staring up at her.
Across the road was a tumbledown building, an abandoned tool-shed. Someone had written in broad red brushstrokes the word "Repent," as if to forestall the lovers naturally seeking the beach.
He pointed and said, "We don't have anything to repent—yet," trying to steer conve
rsation back to the subject of virginity.
"Probably a Baptist out here, worrying about people necking on the beach."
"What religion are you?"
"Episcopalian."
Feeling too good, he got too smart. "Isn't an Episcopalian just sort of a cut-rate Catholic?"
She stiffened and drew back. "What kind of a crack is that? What religion are you? Or are you an atheist?"
He felt all the progress he'd made sliding away. "I'm sorry, I was just kidding, no offense. No, I'm not an atheist, but we didn't get any formal religious training. My dad was against it, and I don't think my mom cared."
She smiled, no longer angry. "What would a cake-eater like you know about religion anyway? You're just like the college girl who was an artist, but would never draw the line."
Corny jokes were more his style, and he countered with doggerel he remembered from Cal:
"And you're like the girl in the poem that goes 'She doesn't drink, she doesn't pet, she hasn't been to college yet.' "
She groaned, and he felt as if he'd lost ground again. In many ways, it wasn't fair; she was far better read than he and interested in many more subjects. He realized how narrow his life had become, how totally involved in flying and engineering he was. He tried desperately to recover.
"It was wonderful the other night at the Waldorf, wasn't it? I still feel a little bad about Slim and his mother—we managed to ignore them all night."
"They understood. He and Uncle Jack were busy drawing airplanes all over the napkins; I thought the waiter was going to make them pay extra."
They were still for a moment, and then she leaned over him, took his face in her hands, and said, "Bandy, you are being a gentleman, but I can't stand that sad look any longer."
Her lips were soft and full, and he pulled her over him so that she lay across his chest, her heavy breasts pressing into him. They kissed for long minutes, and he felt their passion growing when she rolled away.
"Whew, hot stuff, eh? We'd better get started back."
Flustered, he helped her fold the blanket. "I'm sorry if I was too forward, Millie."
"You? It was me. I kissed you. But we've got to be careful. I think we like each other enough to get into trouble if we don't watch out. A little more of that and I'd have you out of Uncle Jack's knickers and into mine."
He reached for her, and she laughed, pushing him away. "We've hardly met, and I've been brought up with some pretty conventional ideas about sex."
He was content to have been so close so soon. Her exquisite naturalness pleased and excited him, making him feel that he was something special to her. On the way out, they had stopped at a two-pump Sinclair station to find a bathroom for her. Returning, there were no gas stations, no restaurants, and she made him stop the car and bounded into the shrubbery, yelling, "No peeking!" Later he slid his arm around her shoulders. She fed him the line "Don't you think you'd better use two hands?" and he responded, as they both knew he would, with "No, I've got to use one to drive."
They were entering the muddy back road to Roosevelt Field when she pointed up to the sky. The underbelly of the low-lying clouds was crimson. "Something is on fire."
Bandfield floored the accelerator, and the Stutz leaped ahead. As they turned into the field, he yelled, "Jesus, that's my hangar!"
He jumped from the car, the muddy ground sucking at his shoes. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lindbergh racing toward him, trying to cut him off from the hangar. He slowed abruptly as fuel tanks of the Rocket exploded in an incandescent black mushroom that carried the roof with it, collapsing the four walls of the frame hangar outward. Bandy saw the shattered Rocket airborne for the last time, rising twenty feet straight up before flopping down, the wings bent in a ragged V. The flames blossomed again and then died. There wasn't much to burn besides the airplane. Bandy stood transfixed with fury and frustration as people materialized on all sides.
The fire truck from Curtiss Field pulled up. The firemen unlimbered hoses, not to save anything, but to keep the flames from spreading to the next hangar.
Lindbergh pulled him aside. "My God, Bandy, this is awful. We'll get you another airplane."
Bandfield looked at him numbly, then stood raging by the embers for an hour, Millie brimming with silent sympathy. Finally, he asked Lindbergh to drive her home, determined to spend the night in the operations shack so he could go through the ashes in the morning. Something was wrong. He knew the hangar had not ignited spontaneously; he'd cleaned it up well.
He was up at dawn to poke through the still-hot ruins to see if there was anything worth salvaging. There was nothing, only the scrap metal of the wonderful J5 engine he and Hadley had scraped and saved for. Cliff Langworthy, the volunteer fire captain from Curtiss Field, came over to see him as he poked through the ashes.
"Sorry about this, Mr. Bandfield. We got here as soon as we could. There's not much you can do with an airplane when it's burning."
"Could it have been the wiring for the hangar lights?"
"Could be, but I don't think so. That's one of the few things we can check on and control. We can't control somebody leaving some greasy rags around, or spilling a can of gasoline."
Bandfield exploded. "There was no goddam gasoline or dirty rags in that hangar! I cleaned the goddam place up myself. And I topped off the tanks and secured the caps myself. The fire must have started in the airplane itself. If the fucking building had caught fire, someone would have seen it."
"No need to swear, Mr. Bandfield. I know you're upset, but hangars catch on fire all the time."
Bandfield slumped on the running board of the Stutz, head in hands, trying to compose a telegram to his partner, an anvil of guilt compressing his lungs into a tight dry ball. He'd been messing around with a girl when the airplane burned. He had been totally irresponsible, driving a fancy car, picnicking, doing everything but attending to business. The airplane, the flight, his career, all had gone up in smoke.
He walked over to the operations shack, one knee torn out of his borrowed plus fours by a sharp shred of the cowling he'd been so proud of, his hands and face filthy from the greasy soot. When he got to the door, he heard Hafner laughing inside, and a jolt went through him. The dirty German bastard had set his airplane on fire! He knew it, just as he knew he couldn't prove it.
The little group of pilots turned when he came in, each trying to convey sympathy. Lindbergh again murmured something about finding another airplane, and Byrd suggested he might have a spot for Bandy on his crew. Rhoades simply shook his head and punched him lightly on his arm.
But Hafner said, "To be honest with you, Mr. Bandfield, I'm very sorry about your accident. You would have been a great competitor, m sure.
The alarm bells, already quivering, went to full blast. Bandfield's dad had always told him to distrust anyone who started a conversation with "To be honest." An unreasoning fury drove the words from his throat.
"That's hard to believe, Hafner, since you probably set the son of a bitch on fire in the first place."
There was a dead silence, and the other pilots seemed to back away. Hafner looked at him, eyes wide, then turned to Byrd. "He's upset."
Lindbergh took Bandfield by the arm, whispering, "You're way out of line, Bandy. Bruno wouldn't do anything like that."
Bandy shook his arm free. "I'm going to ask for a police investigation, Hafner. You know goddam well that airplane didn't just catch on fire by itself."
"That's enough from you, Mr. Bandfield. You can do what you like, but take your dirty mouth and your dirty hands and face out of here before I forget myself."
Turning to look at Byrd again, he didn't see Bandfield's right hand coming up from the floor. It caught him on the side of the jaw, sending him sprawling back to bounce against the wall and slide to the floor. The impact knocked a framed picture of Clara Bow from the wall, its metal corner gouging a strip of flesh from Hafner's forehead. He lay glassy-eyed, as much from surprise as the blow, blood spouting like a fountain
down his face and chest.
Rhoades dropped to attend to him while Byrd and Lindbergh hustled Bandfield out.
"You'd better get out of here, Bandy. When he gets up, he'll break you in half. What the hell got into you?"
Bandfield broke and ran for the Stutz, still convinced that Hafner had sabotaged his airplane, but embarrassed at his loss of control and miserable that he'd made such an ass of himself in front of the others.
*
Pau, France/May 18, 1927
Stephan Dompnier swallowed hard as his stomach pressed downward against his throat. Too much cognac, he tried to tell himself; he knew it was the prolonged inverted glide. It annoyed him to be made ill by a girl pilot, even one he loved.
He focused his attention on her intense beauty, biting down on her breasts in his imagination as he'd inadvertently found himself doing early that morning. She was concentrating, checking the bit of string that stretched back from the engine, making sure they weren't slipping as they S-turned upside down. The vision of her sweet body came to him strongly; it pleased him to know that at this moment it carried his seed, and indeed she might be pregnant by him. He had a quick visual image of a tiny embryo in goggles and scarf, staring upward at the sky.
"Landing?" he pleaded.
She nodded, pointing straight over her head, down into the ancient city of Pau, crisscrossed by the rail lines running west to Toulouse and east to Biarritz. Stephan had made his first flight here in 1917, in a Bleriot. Then the greatest hazard had been a midair collision, for the skies were filled with trainers, the ground a daily target for crashing airplanes. Now Pau was once again just a minor resort commune, its casino lofted above the gorge-bound Garonne River, the hotels perched upon the hills in red-tiled disarray.
It seemed impossible that this cool, precise pilot could be the same woman who had driven him crazy night and day for the last six weeks. In bed, she was totally abandoned, substituting imagination and enthusiasm for the experience he deeply hoped she lacked.
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