by Bill Mesce
“A lot.”
“Michael Sean always had a bug in his ear about flying. Why not? I was flying the mail when he was born, then I was with the airline. He even took some trips with me. And he knew about my days with Rickenbacker. You know how that kind of thing makes an impression on a kid. Well, when the war broke out, he wanted to be like his old man and be a dashing young fighter pilot. But he couldn’t cut the vision test. I can’t say me and his mom weren’t relieved over that. But Michael was determined. Stubborn like his mom, too. When the Air Corps turned him down, he tried the Marines, then the Navy. He couldn’t make it into the pilot’s seat, but his eyes were good enough for him to make radio/gunner on a Devastator. He was with one of Saratogas torpedo squadrons at Coral Sea.” Doheeny took the photo back from Harry and slid it carefully back into its place in his billfold. He held the billfold in his hand, the thumb caressing the cracked leather. “Even after a year and a half Mary Margaret keeps thinking he’ll turn up somehow Missing isn’t dead, she thinks. So, he was at Coral Sea while I was bussing businessmen to Cleveland. Now I do this. It helps me live with that.”
Harry looked down at the photo of his own two boys a long time before he slid it back into his billfold.
“How old are they?” Doheeny asked.
“Eight and six.”
“Pray for a short war, Harry.”
*
The Dakota followed the Hamilton Inlet to the coast, a strip of glossy blackness between two shadowy shoulders of forest. Over the Atlantic, the aeroplane banked into a more north-northeasterly track. Once settled in on course, Doheeny turned the controls over to his copilot and went back to the cargo cabin.
Kneece was sitting with Sparks, passing the time on another guitar lesson. The flight mechanic was, again, snoring on the navigation table.
“When did that poor guy get to sleep?” Harry asked.
“Probably not until five minutes after takeoff.” Doheeny shivered. “Little chilly, hm? Afraid not much heat gets back here, and it’s not going to get better. I see my little guy took care of you.” He meant their parkas, procured for them from the Goose Bay stores.
“It was no fun stripping down to climb into the long johns he got us.”
“Let me get you guys something to warm your insides.” Doheeny poured them each a mug of something steaming from a thermos by the navigation table.
Harry caught a sweet whiff. “Hot chocolate?”
“Where the hell did you get this?” Kneece demanded, his face, in closed-eye trance, lingering over the aromatic vapors curling out of his cup. “I don’t think I’ve seen even a Tootsie Roll in six months.”
Doheeny nodded at the snoring flight mechanic. “I don’t know where he scrounges it, I don’t know how, and I don’t ask. I just always make sure to say thank you and let him know it’s appreciated. If you want to see more of this, I recommend you do the same.” He sat next to Harry. “Sleep well?”
They shared a chuckle. “Probably about as well as you.”
“The place seemed pretty busy last night,” Doheeny mused.
“It’s not always like that?”
“Not like last night. That was a lot of traffic in and out. Something’s up somewhere.” Doheeny let the subject go with a shrug, and turned back to Sparks. “Hey, Junior, bravo!” he called out, nodding as the wireless operator forced his fingers into unaccustomed curls round the neck of the guitar. “You’re sounding a hundred percent better already! Good work, kiddo!”
Sparks bowed his head sharply, a cartoon of a Philharmonic soloist acknowledging applause.
“Very nice,” Doheeny said. “What is it?”
“Another ‘some kinda Mozart’?” Harry asked.
“Some kinda Bach this time,” Kneece said.
Doheeny shook his head appreciatively. “By the time we get where we’re going, we’re going to be the most cultured sons of bitches in the North Atlantic!”
The flight mechanic was still prostrate on the navigation table, and now Sparks was dozing in his chair in front of his set and Kneece was stretched out on the bench seat. The only noise in the cargo cabin was the humming of the engines, and Kneece’s snoring.
Harry sat with a pad of foolscap in his lap. In his law studies days, he had developed a trick of analysis for himself. He would boil each component of the issue at hand — a known fact, a rumor, a speculation, even questions — down to some elemental phrase, write it on an index card, and continue until the entire matter was thus reduced to its basal parts. He could then — literally — lay the case out in front of him, like a puzzle, taking it all in at a glance. He would move a piece here and there until sections of the picture began to form.
Index cards were a bit impractical in the cargo cabin, but foolscap would suffice. On the paper he had written:
GRASSI/GREENLAND GREENLAND DUTIES?
GREENLAND CONTACTS?
LEFT WHEN/HOW?
GRASSI DEAD ORKNEYS
ORKNEY CONTACTS?
RICKS
After a moment’s hesitation, he penned one more note:
LONDON AUGUST
For some time he stared at the notations on the page, but there were too few pieces to toy with, and too many of those contained question marks.
“What’s so distracting is all the racket he’s making!” Doheeny was crouched over Kneece’s sprawled shape, trying to sight his octant through one of the aeroplane’s windows. “This is hard enough, and I’ve never exactly been an ace at it.”
Harry looked for a sign that this was intended humorously To his dismay, he saw none. “What happens if we miss?”
“I don’t have to get us on the money, Harry. Just close enough to pick up a radio beacon. Providing the beacon’s working and the tower hasn’t been blown down. You want to see something that takes the mystique out of celestial navigation?” Doheeny explained that he could only spy Sirius — his third star sighting — through the small window above the chemical toilet in the rear of the plane. “I wonder if Magellan did his navigating in the can.”
Finished with his star shootings, Doheeny spread a navigational chart on the floor so as not to disturb the sleeping flight mechanic.
“How’re we doing?” Harry asked.
“About seven hundred miles to go. Hey, look, Short Stuff” — meaning his copilot — “is going to sack out for a bit. Want to sit up front?”
“It looks different in the movies,” Harry commented once he’d squeezed into the right-hand seat. He and Doheeny sat nearly shoulder to shoulder in the cockpit seats, and there seemed precious little room between Harry and any other point in the cockpit. The only light was the glow of the control panel dials.
Doheeny nodded. “One time they were running some John Garfield movie in the mess at Presque Isle. I had to laugh. I forget the name of it, but he’s on a B-17. They made the damned thing look like the Queen Mary. The way they had them walking around in that thing, you’d think it was a ballroom with wings. I pity the kid who saw that movie and thought, ‘Oh, boy! I want to fly one of those!’ That hotshot got a real unpleasant surprise.”
To one side of the Dakota, the sea fleetingly mirrored the pale light of the moon as it slipped behind one cloud after another in the heavily patched sky, just enough to hint at the heaving surface, oily in the night. But to Harry’s side, looking away from the moon, the North Atlantic rollers had disappeared into a dimensionless blackness. No horizon line demarcated sea from sky.
“How do you tell where the water is?” Harry asked.
“When you see a fish go by the window, we’re too low. Just kidding, Harry. Actually, one of these gizmos on the panel tells me. I think. Which one is it now? Boy, I hope it’s working. Harry, I’m kidding. We’ve got to work on your sense of humor. Hey, would you like to fly her a little bit?”
“Is this another joke?”
“It’ll be fine. I won’t let you get us into any trouble.”
“I’ll pass, thanks. You could ask Captain Kneece.” Doheeny laughed
. “Kid looks like he’d try to put us through a loop just for the fun of it.”
They talked only sporadically, and of little things: family, food, a favorite program on the wireless back home. But for the most part they let the time slip by quietly Back in the cargo cabin, the world glimpsed only in fragments through the small windows, Harry had felt the ship vulnerable, at the whim of winds, hilltops, and spearing trees. But here, seeing the world in panorama gave him, paradoxically, a greater sense of stability, a sureness of his place, however insignificant he and the ship might be suspended in the fathomless dark. And there was a security seeing Doheeny’s massive hands on the control yoke, the humming aeroplane obviously and easily in his thrall.
*
“Sir? Semitak Island, sir.”
Harry stirred from his sleep. “What?” Rubbing his eyes, he looked up to see the flight mechanic hovering over him. “Semitak Island, sir. I thought you’d want to know.”
Harry, again, tried to rise. This time, the flight mechanic took him by the arm and helped him upright. Harry arched his back and groaned.
“Shoulda woke me up, sir,” the flight mechanic said. “I woulda given you the table.” In atonement, he held out a mug. “That’s the last of it, Major, and it’s not that warm.” Harry took a sip of the chocolate, which was not warm at all, but he appreciated the token. “What’s Semitak Island?” “That’s where the radio beacon is. It means we’re close. The beacon’s like a road sign. It gets kinda easy from here on in.”
Harry shivered and pulled on the parka he’d been using as a blanket. Across the cabin, a sleep-tousled Kneece was making smacking noises with his tongue. “Jesus, I’d give a day on the beach at Edisto to be able to brush my teeth,” the young man grumbled.
The flight crew were all awake now, and at their stations. The sky had lightened to a gunmetal gray. The patchwork of clouds of the night before had now knit into an unbroken blanket the color of dirty linen.
The flight mechanic looked at the cloud cover with a studying eye. “I don’t like that.”
The ocean had the same dull, metallic cast as the sky, broken by white tips that exploded in spray as they were caught by a wicked wind, dotted by growlers bobbing among the waves, and statuesque bergs of dingy ice, their cathedral spires swaying in the heavy seas.
“Are we ahead of schedule?” Harry asked the flight mechanic.
“No, sir. Just about right on. Why?”
“I know your captain was trying to time our arrival to daylight. It looks like he’s going to come in ahead of sunup.”
“This is sunup, Major. The sun never really gets much higher this time of year.”
“Hey,” the copilot called back, “there’s a door prize for anybody who can tell me why they call this ice cube Greenland.”
Kneece twisted about, trying to see ahead through the windows. His eyes went wide, his jaw dropped. “Jeeeee-suuuuuusssss…”
In August, as Harry’s Liberty ship had rounded Kap Farvel, there had been a jewel-like quality to the place, the ice cap glaring under the summer sun, girdled by a lowland band of green pastures, the beaches sloping into emerald water. But this was now winter’s kingdom. Through the window Harry saw a wall of ice that ran towering and unbroken from one horizon to the other. The winter snows seemed to extend the cap all the way to the stony beach and even farther, in a berg-speckled sheet of ice extending a mile or more from the shore.
The Dakota slid into a northward course, following the coast. Then, “Clubhouse turn, Harry!” Doheeny warned, and the plane banked sickeningly right.
As the Dakota leveled off, the bluffs became a solid wall of rock. The Dakota rose and Harry could see that the two walls were the sides of an inlet. The fjord’s waters were host to a parade of bergs, large and small, steepled and flat-topped, all fixed in the inlet’s solid cover of ice. Doheeny flew a straight course that intersected the winding fjord below.
“Here we go,” Harry heard the flight mechanic say.
Harry looked up from his window to see the sergeant staring outside. The mechanic had made this flight innumerable times, but evidently this was a sight that still enthralled him.
Harry could see why. The walls of the fjord pulled back to reveal an enormous geologic bowl, an arena for titans set at the feet of guardian mountains. The vast base of the bowl was a bay filled with frozen sea, at the head of which Harry could see the Quonsets and control tower of an aerodrome clustered against the base of the mountains. A C-47 was lifting off the aerodrome’s single runway, while another aeroplane — this one a small, single-engined craft — was just touching down.
“Your captain said landing here was kind of tricky,” Harry said. “This doesn’t look much different than the other fields.”
“Take a good look at that runway, Major. It’s on a slope. We have to land uphill.”
Harry knew too little about the science of aviation to understand the difficulties of such a landing, but his feeling was that if it was a concern to Doheeny and to the usually blithe flight mechanic, then it was going to be a concern for poor old Harry.
Doheeny lined the Dakota up over the bay for his landing; Harry heard the landing gear come down. He looked to the flight mechanic for some cue as to how to prepare himself (and what to prepare himself for): The mechanic offered nothing more than a reassuring smile. But as the ship neared the ground, the mechanic’s face twisted into the grimace of someone expecting a sharp jar, and that’s exactly what followed.
The ship hit the ground uncommonly hard and Harry heard a disturbing — loud — metallic clatter. His first panicked thought was that parts of the aeroplane were coming loose.
“It’s OK,” the flight mechanic called over the din. “We’re down.”
“What’s all that racket?”
“Runway’s steel matting. Always sounds like that.”
The tail of the Dakota set down lightly and the ship rolled to a slowing taxi.
Kneece let out a sigh of relief and turned to Harry with a grin. “Any landing you can walk, crawl, or limp away from, right?”
The Dakota taxied to a parking area; the engines windmilled to silence. Doheeny cheerily donned his Father Christmas cap and beard, tossed a mailbag over his shoulder, and waited for the flight mechanic to crack the door.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” Doheeny bellowed into the frigid Greenland air. “Say hello to Santa Claus, kids!”
Outside, a voice snarled: “Just gimme the fuckin’ mail ’fore I freeze my fuckin’ nuts off!”
Chapter Five: Erebus
“‘Fraid I have to close up the bar, sar,” the Officers Mess barman said.
If there’s a sadder pronouncement, I’ve yet to hear it.
“The mess’ll be open for them joes what’s on the night flights,” the barman said, “so’s you and the other gennelman can stay and be comfy. Anythin’ else I can do for you sars ’fore I close ’er up?”
“Polly, put the kettle on, Polly, put the kettle on.”
“‘Scuse, sar?”
I took a deep breath, hoping to clear my head. There’d been one toddy too many, I suppose. “Another cuppa for my friend, if you please, my good fellow, and I’ll have one as well. Make ’em steaming, there’s the good lad, laddie.”
Maybe it’d been more than one toddy too many.
I laid a fiver on the bar in gratuity for the barman’s evening ministrations, generosity that was, perhaps, another product of the superfluous toddies. Little matter; it was the paper’s money.
The barman locked up his cabinets and cubbies, switched off the overhead lights, and left us with the cozy glow of a few table lamps round the lounging area near the stove. It was a typical RAF mess, a motley collection of furniture that looked to be leave-behinds at a church jumble sale: leather chairs and a sofa, their split hides heavily patched with adhesive tape; fabric chairs bleeding stuffing. I handed Harry his tea and nestled with mine on a particularly dilapidated piece where one had to sit just so to avoid the attentions of an over-aroused cush
ion spring.
Harry was standing by the window, his billfold open in his hand. I heard a crackle as his thumb caressed one of the cellophane photograph sleeves.
There were two pictures there, one a blurry photo showing two youngsters playing about their sled on a field of snow. So heavily wrapped in winter outerwear, their faces so small and undistinguished in the field of view, they could’ve been Eskimo children. It was the last picture Harry had taken of his sons, shot the previous winter before he’d shipped out.
The other photo was several years older, taken at some sort of party-like gathering. The woman at its center was seated at a dinner table, looking over her shoulder at the camera. A warm, wide smile enlivened otherwise unexceptional features. In the unadorned way she drew back her light hair, in the simple cut of what I’m sure was her one posh frock, the lack of jewelry except for a pair of small earrings and a gold band on her left ring finger, one saw not a plain woman, but one of simple grace. It drew one to her, a woman who, paradoxically, one might pass on the street without a second glance.
“If you’re wondering if she’ll forgive your going, I’d be thinking aye,” I said.
“Did your wife forgive you?”
“Different kettle of fish, old man. You’ve hardly ever been away. I was hardly ever home.”
“Do you know what a dybbuk is?”
“Pardon?”
Something outside the rime-ringed windowpanes drew his attention. “They’re coming back. They’re carrying guns.”
“Tut-tut, Harry I believe the soldiery prefer the appellation ‘weapon.’ Little boys play with ‘guns.’ Big boys play with ‘weapons.’”
“Play?”
“There’s an old epigram, one of those classical Greek things, though for the life of me I can’t remember the attribution just now. Bloody toddies. Or age.”
“You were saying.”
“The boys throw stones at the frogs in fun; but the frogs, they die in earnest.’ Or words to that effect.”
Harry looked back out into the falling snow. “Are we the boys or the frogs?”