by Kim Newman
Charlie's folks weren't important enough to get into the grandstand. They were over in the bleachers at the far side of the runway, sitting with Peggy Sue and her parents. He didn't like that much. For all he knew, they could be discussing wedding arrangements...
"I hear them! They're coming!" someone shouted. Gradually, the field fell silent.
An aero-engine droned in the distance. Captain Rook yelled the Pioneers to attention and 108 pairs of feet slammed into the ground practically in unison. Even Pete Horowitz got in step for the occasion. Over on their right, the 194th did likewise. The regular army drilled a lot less smartly than the Pioneers.
The engine noise got louder. For Charlie, this was torture. He had to keep eyes front, but he wanted to watch the magnificent craft execute what would doubtless be a perfect landing.
The regimental band struck up Sousa's "Heroic Struggle of the Seventh Socialist Air Fleet" Charlie hated that march, because he had once taken a whipping in school for calling it "The Stars and Stripes Forever" the old title his mother still called it by.
Something was out of step. The plane sounded as if it needed a serious overhaul. And it was a small engine, a coughing insect almost lost under the music. Not nearly powerful enough for one of the big Curtiss Helldivers the RFS flew.
Tyres screeched like an abused seagull as they hit the tarmac, left it again, and definitively touched down. Spectators were gasping, chattering in surprise. Some were laughing.
It was time to disobey orders. He let his eyes wander right.
The aircraft bumping past was not a sleek Helldiver, but a biplane plainly held together by spit, gum and string. The landing was a disgrace. Pieces dropped off the smoke-belching machine as it limped down the runway, coming in like the song, On a Wing and an Oath of Loyalty to the Revolution. The engine burped its last, and a two-bladed wooden prop fluttered to a halt. If this was the RFS, everyone had been seriously misled. There were words painted down the side of the fuselage. HUGHES'S HELL'S ANGELS—BARN STORMING AND CROP SPRAYING (CHEAP). Charlie's Enemy Aircraft Recognition badge did not cover this flying freak.
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Everyone else seemed just as confused, but it didn't pay to take risks; if these were the revolutionary heroes, it would cost someone a one-way trip to Alaska if they were insulted. So the military band struck up the latest national anthem, as two men climbed from the battered aircraft. Both wore torn leather flying jackets and oil-stained pants. The younger man reached into the forward cockpit and pulled out a guitar case. The older man, probably in his fifties, opened his jacket and, to the barely-suppressed shock of the spectators, struggled to pull a bottle from an inside pocket. Having succeeded, he uncorked it with his teeth, and took a lengthy, luxurious swig. Apart from Melvin Yandell, Charlie had never seen anyone drink alcohol—he knew the bottle had to be liquor—in public, although almost everyone violated the Prohibition Edict in private.
As the old pilot passed the bottle to the younger man, a girl in her late teens went forward along the red carpet to welcome the RFS on behalf of Roseville, and, in honour of General LeMay's achievements over Tokyo, present them with a bouquet of flowers in the shape of a bomb.
As the girl wobbled, on unfamiliar high heels, Melvin Yandell shouted out something crude about "Texas tootsies", and she blushed flag-red. It was Patsy, Peggy Sue's sister, and, Texan or not, the prettiest girl in town, which was why she was the Welcome Comrade. Patsy, who usually wore shorts or cheerleader skirts, was in a starched pink dress that stuck out three feet in any direction. Charlie wondered if, in three years time, Peggy Sue would be shaped like Patsy, and found himself a little hotter and grittier under the bandanna. He tried to think of Chairman Capone on the toilet, and hoped his mental incontinence wouldn't noticeably swell the front of his perfectly-pressed shorts. Actually, he realised later, he could have sprouted a boner the size of a B-29 and no one would have noticed.
As Patsy approached, a yellow-tooth grin split the older pilot's mask of flying grime. He unwound what had once been a white silk flying scarf to drape it over his plane's wing. He pulled off his flying helmet and goggles, and shook out a wild man's head of long, unkempt grey hair.
Patsy was so concerned with not falling off her heels and humiliating herself she didn't notice that the fliers hardly fit the description of the expected heroes. Charlie realised Patsy was not wearing her glasses this morning, and probably couldn't see the end of the carpet, let alone the air hobo she was giving a floral incendiary.
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
The drunk accepted the bouquet, laughed a little, tossed it over his shoulder and grabbed Patsy. He began dog-licking her face and sorting through her onion-layers of skirt in search of her backside. This was definitely not the way a socialist hero behaved. It was a prime example of sexual incontinence. Melvin was cheering, but his father shut him up.
Over to the right, a voice called for MPs. It was Colonel Hall, now scowling along the red carpet towards the plane. He reached the fliers as, at the prompting of his friend, the older man reluctantly released Patsy. She slipped off her shoes and ran back towards the grandstand, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. She had probably had to get up at 04:00 hours to start painting her face, and was now badly smudged.
The Colonel was too far away for Charlie to hear everything being said. But he could catch the gist of it. Colonel Hall asked the fliers to identify themselves. Whatever their answer was, it had nothing to do with the RFS. Two MPs arrived and were told to take the pilots away. The younger began pleading apologetically with the Colonel. They had run out of gas and had needed somewhere to land. The Colonel, who just wanted this nuisance out of the way, relented, giving some kind of stern warning. All the soldiers said Colonel Hall was a pushover. The old guy cheered when he was let off, slapped the Colonel on the back so hard the officer's belly shook, and offered some of his liquor to the MPs.
The newcomers, Charlie gathered, were called Jack and Howie.
"In America, we set a great store on mobility, Mr. Lowe. That's one of the things Capone hated, but was never able to crush. Scarface wanted us to stay put on the farm or in the collective, but I guess we're just born with the urge to roam. It's such a goddamn big country. You travel enough, rack up enough good stories, and you become some kind of hero. Most of those wanderers were on the move all the time because they were fugitives from the state. Guess that's what happened to me. I wasn't the first to hit the road with a guitar, though. In the '30s, there was a guy named Guthrie, a wheel in his local collective who one day just plain had enough of Capone flushing the Revolution down the commode and set out to tell the country what he thought of the whole damn ball of wax. They caught him, and hanged him. That brings you up, doesn't it? They hanged a man for singing songs. Somehow, that's the worst thing Capone ever did. I know he had all those Navajos and blacks wiped out and used to shoot down his former friends like jackrabbits, but poor old Woody, hanging from a climbing frame in a schoolyard in Illinois, is like the
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totem to me, the one victim who stands for all the others. Wrote a song about him, once.
"I wrote songs about Jack and Howie too, but you've never heard them. They were early things, and no good. And that's a shame, because those two bums in their beat-up ridiculous flying deathtrap turned my whole life around.
"Jack was French-Canadian, although I think he was born in the USSA. He was handsome in a comic strip way, like Smilin' Jack without the moustache. He started a lot more poems and stories than he finished, got drunk eight nights a week and threw in mornings too, and went after women as if he were trying to beat the record. He wrote a books that came out in Canada and France, and used to get smuggled in, distributed by dissenter groups. There might be official American editions of some of his novels, In the Air, The Subterraneans or Lonesome Traveller, real soon. Word is, he drank himself to death twenty years back, but I don't have to believe that if I don
't want to. When I knew him, years of moonshine had given his voice an extra frog-croak, and he was in poetry the way some of the best guys are in music, because he didn't have a choice. The words were inside, and they just kept bursting out. I wish I could remember more of what he said, because I'd put tunes to it. He used to chew patent medicines like they were life savers, and tried to sleep as little as possible so he could get the most awake time out of his life.
"Howie is the real mystery. Some people say he was born rich and lost it all in the Revolution. This story also claims he gave Al his scar, smashing an ornamental pen-set into the Chairman's face during the storming of the Stock Exchange. Since that'd require Capone to be in the thick of some fighting I tend to discount it as a fanciful rumour. Other people say Howie was some kinda crazy wildcat oilman raised by Apaches, or coyotes. There's even a story that he made a living designing brassieres but that's just too ridiculous, although a job that required a lot of thinking about titties would have suited him fine. Another version is that he used to be a Hollywood movie director in the '30s, and fell foul of the Arbuckle Code while he was making a big aviation epic about aces flying south of the border to rescue POWs the Mexicans were holding after the war. Howie was in trouble because he kept leaving out the screenwriter's twelve-page political speeches so he could spend more time shooting airplanes, but he was actually fired for getting a Party Censor's daughter knocked up and using live ammunition to make a battle scene
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
more realistic. That was considered wasteful and unsocialist. The Party brought in another director, but when they were doing one of these big aerial dogfights—with all the cameras rolling and a million dollars' worth of budget in the air, what with stunt men and old planes and special effects explosions and crashing dirigibles—Howie flies through in a biplane trailing a flag saying 'this movie is horseshit', heads off towards the sunset and is never seen again. Now I don't know if that's true or not, but it's the version you'd want to believe. Right?"
The low hum of powerful aero-engines came out of the East. This was the sound Charlie had been expecting, the fantasy-fuelled thrum of the machines that had made the USSA masters of the skies over Japan. Neither London nor Petrograd could match the glory of these masterpieces of precision combat engineering.
Captain Rook again ordered the Pioneers to attention, and a pair of Curtiss Helldivers roared out of the sun and overflew the field at 200 feet. The blue-painted aluminium dreams commanded the sky, gleaming in the morning. A banner began to trail from the second plane. THE RFS SALUTES THE GLORIOUS ACHIEVEMENT OF THE PEOPLE OF ROSEVILLE. The Kansans in the stands and the Texans in the bleachers rose as one to cheer, as if the Great Socialist Hero diMaggio had just belted another one out of the field.
The single-engined naval dive bombers circled and passed again, this time a little higher, each executing three perfect victory rolls revealing the red hammer and sickle within white star insignia painted on the port upper and starboard lower wings. The RFS were grandstanding, but it paid to play up to the crowd a little.
Charlie clamped the inside of his cheek with his back teeth, biting until he drew blood in an effort to keep tears from his eyes. On a day like this, he pitied anyone who wasn't a communist, who wasn't an American. For the millionth time he swore to be a pilot. He wouldn't let his eyes fail him; he would sneak a look at the doctor's wallchart and memorise it. To joust in the clouds with the beasts of capitalism and imperialism! That was the best the USSA could offer.
The Helldivers circled the field once more before touching down perfectly. They taxied up to the red carpet close to the biplane. The two deadbeats were watching the proceedings, sharing private jokes as they passed the bottle between them. Colonel Hall should have had these two and their revolting old stringbag taken well out of the way.
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The fliers of the RFS clambered out of their long glass-canopied cockpits, and pulled off jackets and helmets to reveal full dress uniform. Applause greeted each hero as he showed his face. Charlie recognised them all from magazines and newsreels. Hubbard, with his shock of red hair; Duke Morrison, face like the sandy rock of Mount Rushmore; LeMay, jaunty cigar clamped in his teeth and a five-starred brass hat on his bullet-shaped head; and McCarthy, the chubby clown of the outfit. They stepped forward to take their bows. Then Lindbergh climbed out of his plane, dressed in a heated jumpsuit and shining helmet like a character from Flash Gordon Liberates the Universe. He took off his helmet, and showed himself, middle-aged but boyish.
When the bandmaster was satisfied all five were ready, he struck up the national anthem. The pilots slammed mechanically to attention, raising clenched fists in the salute of solidarity.
"Oh say can you see," a lone, clear voice sang, "by the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming..."
More spectators joined the singer. Charlie felt the tug of the music, and opened his throat to join in...
"...whose red stripes and bright star..."
Charlie's voice was good, but they didn't like him to sing with the School Choral Society because, as his teacher said, "you can't leave a tune well enough alone..."
"...the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air..."
There was something about music—any kind of music—that made him feel strange inside.
"Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave..."
The five heroes were deeply moved. Lindbergh and Morrison both had manly tears in their eyes. McCarthy was holding his hands over his mouth and nose as the emotion overcame him, shoulders shaking...
"...o'er the land of the true, and the home of the brave."
At the anthem's end, Howie loped over and presented LeMay with the floral bomb. The General looked uncertainly at the old man, but accepted the bouquet, holding it up for everyone to see. Someone screamed and the MPs drew their pistols. A tendril of smoke was curling up, as if the infernal device were about to go off, scattering shrapnel petals in the crowd. There was a crackle and flames popped out of tribute. LeMay dropped the gift in shocked dismay, spitting out his cigar, and drew one of his pearl-handled revolvers. On the carpet the flowers flared suddenly, as if doused in gasoline.
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
Howie made exaggeratedly sorry noises and stepped in to stamp on the burning flowers. Someone in the section tittered, and Charlie hissed shut up and stand to attention. His cheeks burned at the disgrace, and he hoped Rook hadn't noted the lapse of discipline. Moments later, Colonel Hall and two jeeploads of MPs, white bands around their helmets, were on the scene. Two soldiers grabbed the old man. A cigarette lighter fell from his grip.
Now, Charlie could hear exactly what was going on. LeMay said in a chill-making rasp that he'd never been so insulted, "not even Tojo tried to off me with a bunch of flowers dipped in aviation fuel. Not even that bastard Mountbatten. It's an insult to the Navy, the Air Force, First Secretary Capone, the Communist Party and the American People."
Colonel Hall apologised as though his career depended on it, which, come to think of it, it did. Jack, the younger pilot, pleaded on his friend's behalf, saying that the guy was a decorated war veteran, that whenever he saw a Helldiver it reminded him of the comrades he had lost in the Pacific and he broke down.
"Veritably, he's as good a communist as the next guy. He needs treatment not punishment." Jack spoke fast, with a singsong French flavour, and was persuasive, even if he was feeding everyone a bullshit salad with chives. LeMay was unimpressed and single-minded, demanding with icy authority that Hall have the recidivist shot right this instant.
Colonel Hall dithered. He wasn't sure if shooting strange civilians fell within his jurisdiction. "Goddamnit to Hell," LeMay swore, cocking his pistol, "I'll scrag the vermin myself."
"Uh, General, surely you wouldn't do that," said the Colonel, with a panic-tinged laugh, probably uttering the bravest sentence of his life.
"Hall you melonhead,
I've killed cities! One tatterdemalian hooligan more or less will make no difference. Remember, we are already at War."
"Howie has a silver plate in his head from the War," said Jack. "The boches shot him down over Dresden, tortured him, burned his ranch..."
Jack was just talking, filling in the space between LeMay and the Colonel.
"Hold on, Comrade General," put in Colonel Lindbergh, "if the man's a veteran, we should make allowances. A man who fights for his country deserves to cut loose some time..."
"Goddamnit Lindy, this bastard tried to fry us. He's a dangerous arsonist!"
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"Respectfully, calm down. We don't want to spoil this lovely reception."
"No, uh, sir," put in Colonel Hall, relieved at having the Lone Eagle back him up, "I'll have this malefactor slapped in the guardhouse at Fort Baxter pending a full investigation."
"Just keep him out of my flightpath, you hear," said LeMay, stabbing Colonel Hall in the chest with an unlit cigar.
LeMay lit up, and puffed angry smoke, while Lindbergh stood over him, willing him to settle his feathers. Hall had the MPs bundle Howie into one of the jeeps. He grinned and waved at the crowds as if he were sat next to the Homecoming Queen on the float at the Revolutionary Victory Parade. He exchanged a few words with his co-pilot and was unceremoniously driven off for a weekend's incarceration. Charlie heard they kept cattle prods and car batteries with crocodile clips and jump leads in the Fort Baxter guardhouse, and used them to re-educate political offenders. He guessed Howie's brains were too scrambled for the process to have much effect.
Everything calmed down again, and the reception was back on course.
It was time for the speeches to begin. He hoped the fliers might have something interesting to say, but he was experienced enough to realise the crowd was in for an hour or three of numbing boredom as various Party officials blew wind. Osgood Yandell was pulling twenty or thirty sheets of notes out of his briefcase. Charlie knew the Party Chairman would lecture the assembled multitudes on the Responsibilities of a Young Communist while Melvin, Philly and Chick sloped off to smoke cigarettes and play cards. Even after that, it was unlikely the fliers would treat them to anything more than the usual homilies about production targets and the Party. He hoped he would get a chance to talk to Colonel Lindbergh or one of the others later. The fliers would be presenting awards for achievement in the evening at the public reception. Since Charlie had a good shot at winning a medal, he hoped he'd meet Lindbergh on the dais as the award was pinned to his uniform. Then, he wouldn't mind how long the speeches had been.