“What we’re gonna do,” Louis said, hesitantly at first, “is some of . . . well, some of all of this.”
“’Fraid I don’t follow,” Hutch said, staring at Louis’s handmade illustrations.
“Well, all of these, they all tell a story, they all give their audiences a thrill of danger,” Louis replied. He glanced at Harry. “They pull off something that should be impossible and make them puzzle over a magic trick.”
As Louis continued to talk, his embarrassment was overcome with enthusiasm. He went on to explain that they were going to make it a themed show and wear costumes—the new name of the barnstorming act was to be Eagle & Crane. The act involved an airplane and an automobile, which Hutch and Buzz—if they signed on—would keep in constant motion throughout the show. Meanwhile, Louis and Harry, dressed in costumes inspired by Louis’s comic-book heroes, would perform on the wings as “Eagle” and “Crane.” There was a loose narrative—a battle between good and evil—but really the true spectacle was in the colorful nature of the costumes, in the choreography, and in the story.
He tapped his pencil on one page of the notebook.
“We want to include the automobile‒airplane transfer we been doing,” Louis said. “But we also want to try some other things we ain’t tried yet, too: parachute jumps and more stunt aerobatics in general . . .”
Buzz and Hutch both raised their eyebrows with surprise but looked interested as they nodded and made a closer study of Louis’s sketches and schematics.
“And,” Louis said with an air of show-stopping finality, “we’ll end each performance with one last trick . . .”
“Oh?” Buzz prodded.
“A sort of tribute to the Great Houdini, really,” Harry explained. “Louis and I been talking about a way to combine all our favorite things, our areas of expertise. Just look at what he’s come up with . . .”
Louis flipped the page in his notebook to reveal a detailed diagram of the planned feat. Hutch and Buzz leaned in for a better look. Together, they studied the elaborate sketch. Hutch stroked his chin, his eyebrows raised with an even mixture of dubiousness and awe. They gathered from the details in the drawing that one of the two young men would be rigged up in a straitjacket and dangled upside down from the landing gear, whereupon the Stearman would fly in low circles for the audience while the man performed his escape.
“I sent away for the straitjacket and it arrived last week,” Louis said proudly. He grinned at Harry. “We’ve been practicing a little already how to escape it—on the ground, that is.”
Buzz gave a low-pitched whistle.
“Awfully ambitious of you, fellas,” he said. “This is the kinda stuff Hollywood stuntmen do. Are you up for it, Harry?”
A flicker of a frown passed over Louis’s face. He knew Buzz had directed the comment at Harry because he’d assumed that “Crane” would be doing all the most perilous stunts. It was true, but nonetheless the assumption nagged at Louis.
“I think we’re up for it. Right, Louis?” Harry said.
Louis nodded. He and Harry resumed their detailed explanation of how the show would go: They had decided it would be carefully choreographed and scripted. They needed to hire a good announcer to take care of the latter part. Ava would ask her mother, Cleo, to sew some costumes.
Buzz, Hutch, and Ava all listened and looked on and asked encouraging questions, but Buzz’s comment had subtly brought into the open an unspoken truth. He had stated aloud what all of them already knew: that Harry was by far the better stuntman. Louis could sketch and dream and plan all he liked, but Harry was the true daredevil; Eagle & Crane needed Harry. Without Harry, Louis never would have stepped foot upon a single airplane wing.
37
Newcastle, California * September 20, 1943
There was opium in his body,” Sheriff Whitcomb says, almost as soon as Agent Bonner steps through the door. He delivers the news with a characteristic grunt. “The coroner did as you requested and took some of his blood—Kenichi, the elderly Jap’s, that is. Sent it to that laboratory all the way down in Los Angeles. They wired with the results. Didn’t want to deliver the news over the telephone. I got the details of what was wired right here.”
“Opium?”
Bonner stands frozen in the middle of the sheriff’s office, still holding his hat in his hand. He’d been about to hang it on the coatrack when Sheriff Whitcomb temporarily paralyzed him with the unexpected news.
“Opium?” Bonner repeats again.
“That’s what I said.”
“How much opium?”
“Enough to kill a horse, according to the coroner,” Whitcomb says, grunting again. He hands Bonner the transcription of the results that had come over the wire.
“Opium . . . Is that common around these parts?” Bonner asks, reading and rereading the scanty details. “Easy to acquire?”
Whitcomb shrugs.
“Some folks keep a little around for toothaches and such. The pharmacist two towns over sells a tea plenty of women like. Helps with insomnia, I suppose.”
“Makes sense the Yamadas would be good and stocked, don’t it? Everybody knows Chinamen love to smoke opium,” Henderson chimes in. “Out of those long Oriental pipes they got.”
Bonner doesn’t make the effort to point out the inaccuracies of this statement, and even Whitcomb shakes his head like a weary parent too tired to correct a boisterous, misguided child.
“We ain’t seen opium dens in these parts since the gold-mining days, to be honest,” Whitcomb says to Bonner in a stern, confidential tone, as though to set the F.B.I. agent straight.
“Even so . . . Chinamen are Chinamen, ain’t they—even if they’re Japs,” Henderson persists.
Whitcomb and Bonner have no reply for this; they stare at Henderson, both of them with blank, unamused faces. Bonner shakes himself, still trying to work the puzzle out aloud.
“But the high dosage . . . it doesn’t make any sense . . .”
So much opium! Were Harry and Mr. Yamada suicide pilots after all? And Harry had to have been flying the plane—during the moment they took off, at least. Planes could not take off without a pilot who knew what he was doing, of this Bonner is certain. Could a person ingest that much opium in midair?
“The other body,” Bonner continues, tracing out his thoughts, “did they find opium in the second body as well?”
Whitcomb shakes his head.
“Can’t say. It was too burned-up for anybody to tell, really. The coroner couldn’t get much off it to send to the lab boys in Los Angeles, and they reported back they couldn’t make heads nor tails of what they did send.”
“So . . . just because Kenichi Yamada tested for opium doesn’t mean Harry Yamada necessarily ingested any,” Bonner reflects aloud. “It would make more sense, given the fact that Harry had to have piloted the plane. Perhaps it was a . . . a . . . kindness to his father? A suicide pact, but one that spared his father the pain?”
Sheriff Whitcomb’s mouth twitches irritably. It is plain he doesn’t care for all this speculation, making wild guesses about what dead people did and did not do and why. A plane crashed. There was opium in at least one of the bodies. Fine. Sometimes people did strange things and you couldn’t account for it.
Oblivious to Whitcomb’s fresh annoyance, Bonner moves across the room, back to the empty secretary’s desk, staring at the lab results as if in a trance. Without asking for permission this time, Bonner sinks into Irene’s vacant chair, further unmindful of Whitcomb’s disapproving grunt. Some time passes as Bonner ruminates in silence. Finally, more questions come to him and he pipes up again, breaking the quiet thrum in the room.
“Say, Louis and Harry and that flying circus of theirs . . . the one they started on their own after the first one folded . . . was that operation successful? Know if they turned a profit?”
Yet another grunt from Whitcom
b. “I reckon that’s their business,” the sheriff says.
“I’d say it looked like they were doing pretty okay,” Deputy Henderson chimes in. “Their act sure got an awful lot of attention. Eventually, they even had that Hollywood producer offering to make ’em rich and famous.”
Bonner’s head snaps to attention.
“Hollywood producer?”
“Louis said that fizzled and came to nothing,” Whitcomb reminds his deputy.
Henderson shrugs.
“Well, maybe it did,” he replies, “but they only got themselves to blame. I know for a fact they got a bona fide offer to be in a Hollywood picture. They stood to make some real money, get some fame in the whole deal. Louis told his brother Ernest, and Ernest . . . well, Ernest is the kind of fella who can’t help himself; he’s always gotta run his mouth . . . ya know?”
“What happened?” Bonner asks. “Why didn’t it take?”
“I heard one—or maybe both of ’em—decided to back out.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Bonner mumbles, more to himself than anything else.
“Who knows?” Henderson continues. “Maybe it was that girl they were both chasing—Ava what’s-her-name—who talked them out of it. They were funny about her, both of them, I reckon.”
“I don’t understand why the two of you are on about Ava Brooks or Hollywood or any of the rest of it,” Whitcomb abruptly snaps from across the room. “I’ll thank you to both shut your traps and not spread idle gossip about the good folks of this town unless you know something I don’t know and can prove it.”
Bonner falls silent. Whitcomb is right: Bonner can’t prove anything—yet. But, given the new information he’s just acquired—the opium, the alleged Hollywood offer that didn’t pan out—Bonner knows one thing: He certainly has more questions.
38
The Incredible Eagle & Crane Barnstorming Spectacle
Sacramento, California * May 3, 1941
They practiced all spring. It was slow going at first. Louis and Harry had to learn how to move in their costumes, and the stunts they were now attempting were significantly more complicated, not to mention more dangerous. There were a few near misses that terrified Ava at the time. Later the fellas ribbed each other and laughed about their brushes with death as Ava shook her head in disapproval and rolled her eyes.
“Say, Harry,” Buzz teased in the bar one evening after Harry had nearly fallen to his demise that afternoon, “someone oughta have told you: Those wings on your costume are just for show! I’d stick with the plane or at least a parachute if I was you.”
While they practiced and perfected their choreography, Ava set about making arrangements to rent out a string of airfields throughout the state, setting up a tour for their show. Most of the bookings required payment in advance. She was nervous, handing over Mr. Yamada’s money on the expectation that they would be able to fill the stands with spectators.
“I sure hope we can get folks to buy tickets,” Ava muttered to herself as she studied the growing list of costs.
“Spread the rumor someone might die—or, better yet, that someone already did die—and we’ll have no problem filling seats,” Harry joked. “Folks can be awful morbid.”
“Keep practicing with that reckless attitude of yours, and it won’t have to be a rumor,” Ava warned.
They exchanged a look—half-joking, half-serious. Surely, Ava thought, Harry knew by now that he had the power to worry her.
In addition to booking airfields, Ava was also in charge of hiring the show’s final touch: an announcer. According to Louis, it would be the announcer who gave the show life, who transformed the action into a story, and who compelled the audience to feel like they were following a radio program or watching a picture show. Eventually, a man in Auburn answered their ad: a part-time auctioneer named Bob Howard, a sweaty, pink-faced man whose voice seemed to boom directly from the pit of his enormous belly. He wasn’t handsome, but what Bob lacked in appearance he more than made up for in the charismatic appeal of his announcing voice. It turned out he had a talent for memorizing lines, too. He began to practice with them while Ava supervised, and by their second day he had the whole show down pat.
It began to look and sound like an actual spectacle, Ava thought. She felt herself grow hopeful.
* * *
The time for Eagle & Crane’s big premiere finally arrived on a bright spring day in Sacramento. Luckily, the airfield was already fenced and contained ample bleachers. Ava recruited her mother’s help to sell tickets, popcorn, and lemonade. Ava kept a careful count of bodies as they paid and entered.
It was not as many as Ava had hoped, but it was a decent enough mass of folks to qualify as a crowd. There was a genuine current of electric excitement in the air when the show finally began.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” Bob hollered into a megaphone in suave, energetic tones. “What you are about to witness today is no casual, commonplace air show! I assure you, the performance you are about to see is unlike anything you have ever heard of! These are no crop dusters, no farmers with a simple hobby! What you are about to witness is a harrowing, death-defying battle between good and evil! Watch as two ancient gods of the sky slug it out! Half-man, half-bird, these superhumans will test their strength against each other . . . only one may reign supreme! Please, ladies and gentlemen, turn your eyes now to the sky and let us hear some applause as we welcome . . . the spectacular . . . the amazing . . . the incredible EAGLE & CRANE!!!”
At that point, Hutch piloted the Stearman so it swooped down low over the top of the crowd while Louis and Harry stood, one of them on each wing, their arms outstretched. Louis’s costume was white and blue, with a hood and mask that was patterned after an American bald eagle. Harry’s costume was white and black with a bit of red, and a hood and mask patterned after a red-crowned crane. Both costumes were draped with “wings” that hung from their arms, from their shoulders to their elbows, almost like a pair of truncated capes that otherwise might belong to a comic-book hero. The hoods were snug, like normal aviators’ caps, but came down to form masks over the top halves of their faces, with holes for their eyes, and the noses of each costume tailored to resemble birds’ beaks.
Admittedly, the costumes and all the extra fuss had a somewhat silly, juvenile aura about them. But this was quickly undercut as Eagle & Crane launched into their first stunt, which was a violent, terrifying mock fight. They danced back and forth across the plane, climbing from one wing to the other, pretending to antagonize each other.
Of course, as Crane, Harry was obliged to play the bad guy. They knew their audiences were bound to be mainly white folk, and most spectators would side with Louis, with his face full of freckles, costumed as an all-American eagle; they identified with him too closely to see him fail. When it came to the Eagle & Crane equation, both Louis and Harry understood it was Eagle who must always, always win.
As the more villainous one, Crane attacked Eagle first, of course, and the whole crowd gasped as Eagle took a terrible punch, windmilled his arms, and rose up on his tiptoes, nearly “falling” to his death. Then it was Crane’s turn to take a punch and nearly fall. The sum effect of this very real-looking fight ultimately hushed the onlookers and quieted any skepticism or ridicule that otherwise might have ensued on account of their gaudy pageantry.
Next, Hutch flew another low pass over the crowd as Louis and Harry climbed up onto the upper wings. They took turns doing further stunts. They did handstands; they hung on and waved their arms dramatically as Hutch flew the Stearman through a series of barrel rolls; they braced themselves against a special metal scaffolding (installed for specifically this purpose) as Hutch flew a grand loop-the-loop. There were more choreographed fights and feats of strength; they did push-ups and pull-ups and dared each other via pantomime to dangle off various parts of the biplane.
Eventually, as Hutch was flying so high th
e two barnstormers were barely discernible, Eagle was able to get the upper hand, and during the struggle the villainous Crane fell from the plane and came plummeting down from the sky.
Everyone gasped. Several women screamed.
Harry’s parachute would open at the perfect time—just at the point where a frightened audience had grown certain the macabre action was real and that they were witnessing a horrifying accident.
“Aaaaaand it looks like the evil Crane is getting a-way, ladies and gentlemen! . . . What’s that? Oh dear! He’s vowing to take revenge against our noble Eagle!”
Harry, having landed, gathered up his parachute and shook his fist in the air at Hutch and Louis as they flew on without him. A hearty round of boos sounded in the stands, the audience having quickly recovered from its scare and ready to participate again.
“Careful, folks! Crane is a dastardly character! Who knows what diabolical plans the evil Crane has in store for us all!”
Harry shook his fist at the crowd. More booing.
Next, Buzz zoomed up in the shiny red Ford Deluxe convertible that Kenichi Yamada had purchased for this very purpose, and Harry leapt into the open passenger seat. He pointed one finger into the sky after Hutch’s now-distant plane, as if to say, Follow that Eagle! Hutch made a turn and came in for another pass. Buzz revved the car’s engine and charged toward the approaching airplane, then spun the car around using the handbrake and hit the gas again, furiously shifting and trying to keep up as now the plane and the car were running parallel to each other.
Hutch’s plane was trailing a rope ladder. It flapped behind the Stearman as he put the plane down low to the ground.
“Looks like the fight between Eagle & Crane isn’t over just yet, folks! I can see Crane aims to get back aboard that plane!” Bob bellowed. “Will he make it?”
Eagle & Crane Page 25