Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “Yeah, but we’re in Mexico,” Craig said. “Where’s the money?”

  The Mexicans gave him a thick roll of bills. They loaded the six bombs, snub-nosed artillery shells, into the bomb basket along with one or two smoke bombs. Someone blew a bugle and the soldiers rushed to their horses. Craig studied a map supplied by the German, Frank spun the prop and they took off.

  At least, they tried to take off. Rag Time bounced down the field and Craig hauled back on the stick. They wobbled into the air and came back down with a shuddering crash. Cursing, Craig gave her full power and this time they got off the ground. But they were not climbing. They were heading straight for the face of a nearby ridge.

  “Throw out two of those goddamn bombs!” Craig shouted.

  The bombs created awesome explosions. Lighter by a hundred pounds, Rag Time cleared the ridge and zoomed down a road that wound behind it. The Mexican army galloped after them, shouting and firing their rifles in the air. Beyond another ridge lay a small valley with a town full of white-walled buildings at the end of it. Craig flew back and forth until the horsemen caught up to them. They formed up in a long line under the directions of the German. He waved a red flag and they charged. Rag Time roared ahead of them until they reached the outskirts of the town.

  “Smoke bombs!” Craig yelled.

  Frank hurled two bombs over the side, creating a billow of white smoke that drifted across the fronts of the houses. Below them, on the roofs of the houses, dozens of men were lying down aiming rifles at the charging horsemen. In one place three men crouched around a machine gun.

  Craig roared over the rooftops at two hundred feet. Some of the riflemen rolled onto their backs and began shooting at Rag Time. A bullet whined by Frank’s head. Another one snapped a wing strut. “Give ’em the first one, kid!” Craig bellowed.

  Frank hauled one of the shells out of the basket and held it over the edge of his seat. It had small fins wired to the side to guide it down. He let it go and it hit only a few feet from the men on one of the roofs. It exploded with a tremendous crash and the roof, the men, vanished. Through a swirl of smoke Frank saw nothing but a dark hole between shattered walls. A man crawled out of the house into the street. Frank realized he was crawling because one of his legs had been blown off below the knee. After a few feet he stopped and lay facedown while a stream of blood trickled from the stump into the gutter.

  “Nice going, kid!” Craig shouted. “Get ready for another run.”

  Frank looked over his shoulder and saw the Mexican army was charging through the smoke, firing their rifles from horseback. The machine gun chattered, emptying a dozen saddles. Craig came in even lower this time. “Get the machine gun,” he shouted, pointing below them.

  Frank shook his head. All he could hear was his mother hissing death machine. He clutched the bomb to his chest. “We’re killing them!” he screamed.

  “That’s the idea!” Craig yelled. “They’re paying us a thousand bucks to do it.”

  “Why are we killing them? What have they done to us?”

  “It’s a goddamn war!” Craig bellowed.

  “I won’t do it. It’s wrong!” Frank cried.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re still a momma’s boy!” Craig snarled.

  He grabbed the bomb out of Frank’s hands, banked and came in even lower, no more than fifty feet above the roofs. More enemy soldiers were shooting at them. But others were jumping off the roofs into the streets in panic. Craig planted the bomb about twenty feet from the machine gun. It blew the men firing the gun off the roof into the field in front of the town. The gun lay on its side like a dead insect.

  The charging horsemen hurtled into the town. Some of the defenders tried to make a stand in the streets but the horsemen rode into them, swinging sabers, firing pistols. Those who were still alive fled out the other end of the town. Craig followed them and demanded another bomb.

  “They’re beaten! Let them go!” Frank said. He grabbed the last two bombs and threw them over the side. They blew big holes in the ground and probably made the fleeing defenders run a little faster. Craig banked back over the town. The victors were dragging people out of houses and shooting them in the streets.

  “Jesus,” Craig said. “Let’s go home.”

  Back in California, Frank made Craig promise he would not fly Rag Time as a bomber again. Frank even wanted Craig to give up the bombing part of the act at air shows but Craig refused. “We’ve got to keep eating, kid,” he said.

  A month later, on August 23, 1912, Craig was flying low over the ocean before a huge crowd at Long Beach. The concessionaires along the Long Beach Pike, a big amusement park, had hired him to attract customers. On the beach beside Frank, in a swimsuit that displayed a lot of her knockout figure, Muriel Halsey wiggled her bottom excitedly in the sand and said: “He promised to show me something special.”

  A moment later, Craig took his hands off the stick and spread his arms wide. “That’s how safe flying is, ladies and gentlemen,” boomed the Pike’s master of ceremonies through a big megaphone.

  “Gosh, he’s got nerve,” cried Muriel. She had just finished a movie in Hollywood and was sure she could get Craig a part in one. They were shooting five and six pictures a week and were desperate for brawny leading men. She had already urged a director to write a script about a pilot who rescued a blond American girl from Mexican bandits.

  Suddenly Rag Time yawed to the right, her nose dipped and she dove straight down. A trick. He’ll pull it out, Frank thought. This was the stunt Craig was going to show Muriel. He must have learned it in secret so not even Frank knew about it.

  But Rag Time did not pull out. The plane plunged into a flock of gulls riding just beyond the surf. It happened so fast, no one in the crowd made a sound for a full minute. Then a kind of wail swept the beach. The fuselage and the right wing crumpled around Craig, trapping him in the wreckage.

  Frank rowed frantically out with some lifeguards to pull Craig from the hulk minutes before Rag Time sank. But there was nothing more they could for Craig. His neck was broken. He died in the hospital about an hour later, trying to say something to Frank.

  “Care—care—”

  Take care of Mother? Be careful? It did not matter. As he closed Craig’s eyes, Frank Buchanan vowed to build a better, safer plane, one that was not a death machine. He would learn the science of flight, instead of merely tinkering with ailerons and controls like a clever mechanic, which was all Craig had been. He would care about planes in Craig’s memory. He would abandon his mother’s dream of proving the survival of the soul after death. That was a job for a momma’s boy. Building planes was a job for a man.

  Craig’s spirit entered Frank with that word, care. He did not know whether it partook of darkness or of light. It did not matter. Part of Frank became the swaggering older brother who loved and left women as casually as he risked death in the air. Part of shy, studious Frank Buchanan was abandoned that day in 1912 so life could triumph over death.

  Muriel Halsey had sobbed beside the hospital bed as Craig died. She took Frank home to her villa in the Hollywood hills overlooking Los Angeles and fixed him something powerful to drink. Frank gulped it in Craig’s memory, as part of his determination to keep him alive in his mind and body.

  They had several drinks in Craig’s memory. Pretty soon Muriel was telling him how much he looked like Craig. His hair was redder but he had the same build. The same big heart. Muriel joined him on the couch and began kissing him. She said she wanted to give him something to remember Craig by, something Craig liked even more than flying. Frank did not object. He did not worry about Muriel’s emanations. It was another way of becoming Craig.

  In the bedroom, Frank marveled at the design of a woman’s body. All those fascinating curves and cunning concavities and fragile bones. It made him wonder if his mother was right when she contended that Eve, the Creator’s second attempt, was an improvement on the first clumsy model, Adam. As Muriel slithered up his chest to slide her tongue
into his mouth, Frank decided the answer was yes yes yes. Women and planes—two aspects of beauty in space and time—two ascents to bliss.

  THE FUTURE IN THE SKY

  “Here he comes!”

  “We’re in the perfect spot!”

  Nine-year-old Adrian Van Ness stood beside his mother and her English friends on Shakespeare Cliff at Dover, where King Lear once raved against malignant fate. They were watching an incredible sight—a man flying an airplane from France to England. Hundreds of people had flocked to the white chalk bluffs to witness this sensation of the new century.

  “By jove, it makes my blood boil to think a frog’s doing it first,” said a husky English voice above Adrian’s head. Geoffrey Tillotson had broad shoulders and hooded eyes. His black bowler seemed to blot out the sky.

  “It’s glorious nonetheless, Geoffrey.”

  That silken American voice belonged to Adrian’s mother, Clarissa Ames Van Ness. She was almost as tall as Geoffrey Tillotson. She wore a wide-brimmed black straw hat with a spume of white aigrettes. The hat was tilted on her beautiful head like a Jules Verne spaceship.

  “You’re right about that. Keep your eye on him, young fellows. You’re seeing the future overhead. Everyone’s future!” Geoffrey Tillotson said.

  The white monoplane sailed over their heads, its motor clattering. At first it looked more like an insect than a bird, with the whirring propeller in its snout. But the outspread wings, the wheels jutting below the fuselage, recaptured a resemblance to the gulls that glided overhead, shrilling excitedly at this intruder in their sky.

  “What keeps him up?” Adrian’s mother asked.

  “Aerodynamics,” Geoffrey said.

  The plane was so low you could see the pilot at the controls, wearing a helmet and goggles. “I say, Father, I’m going to learn to fly one of those things straightaway,” said Peter Tillotson, Geoffrey’s fourteen-year-old son. He was thick-bodied and muscular like his father.

  Adrian did not like Peter very much. At the Tillotson house in Kent, not far from Dover, he had insisted on teaching Adrian how to play rugby, knocking him down repeatedly in the process. Adrian hated sports. Books were what he loved. He was reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He had found it in the Tillotson library. He was enthralled by the descriptions of Rome’s armies and emperors.

  Peter had called Decline and Fall “eighteenth-century rubbish.” Geoffrey Tillotson had defended Adrian’s fascination with it. He said it was a great book. Then he told a funny story about it. When the author completed the second volume, he presented it to his patron, the Duke of Gloucester, who said, “Another damn thick square book. Always scribble scribble scribble. Eh, Gibbon?”

  Everyone laughed and Adrian felt his face, his whole body grow hot. He thought they were laughing at him. He did not know exactly why he was often afraid people were laughing at him. It had something to do with his father. At St. Edmund’s School in New York several boys had told him his father should be in jail. When Adrian asked his mother about it, she had gotten very angry. “That’s a filthy lie!” she said.

  Adrian thought she was angry at him and began to cry. His mother had cried too. Then she wrote the headmaster a letter. He had preached a sermon in chapel about the sin of slander. The next day at lunch, one of the boys had said, “My father still says your father belongs in jail, Van Ness.” Everyone at the table had laughed.

  The airplane tilted to the left after it passed over their heads and soared over Dover Castle. It tilted again and dropped lower and lower. He was going to land! They rushed to a big open touring car that Geoffrey Tillotson owned. The chauffeur cranked the motor and they beeped through the crowd pouring down the narrow street into town.

  The plane was sitting in the center of the North Fall Meadow behind the eastern cliffs. The pilot, a stocky Frenchman named Louis Bleriot, was standing beside it, pleading with the hundreds of people swirling around him. “Non, non, s’il vous plait, do not touch,” he begged as they pressed closer. “It is easily damaged.”

  The thing looked very fragile. You could almost see through the fabric on the body and wings. Above them loomed Dover Castle, with its scarred octagonal Pharos, a relic of an original Roman fort. It was the oldest standing building in England. Geoffrey Tillotson pointed to it and said: “Forts, armies, ships, this thing will make them obsolete, mark my words.”

  Back in New York, Adrian’s mother transferred him to the Trinity School. No one taunted or laughed at him there but Adrian often thought he saw hints of it in some boys’ eyes. He made no friends. He spent most of his free time reading or talking to his mother or the maids. The following summer when they returned to England, Adrian’s mother enrolled him in the Anson School. She told him he would be happier there than he was at Trinity or St. Edmund’s in New York. She was wrong.

  The school was in a gloomy set of buildings on a hill in Sussex. Adrian did not like any of the boys in his form any more than he liked Peter Tillotson. They all seemed to take special pleasure in flattening him in the compulsory rugby games. Night after night Adrian lay in bed, his body an aching bruise.

  He spent most of his free time in the library, reading history books like Decline and Fall, which seemed to infuriate the boys in his form. They called him the American wog and massacred him relentlessly on the rugby field. He became a prime target of sixth formers who selected lower formers to be initiated into a tradition of the Anson School known as The Deflowering.

  Adrian declined to cooperate. This soon led to a midnight summons. A rough hand shook him awake in his darkened dormitory. “Get up, wog. The council is meeting,” hissed a commanding voice. In his bare feet, Adrian hurried along the icy floor and up the equally icy stone stairs to the top floor of the three-hundred-year-old dormitory.

  Candles flickered in teacups. The council sat in an awesome row, their faces obscured by silk stockings they had stolen from their mothers. “Who’s this?” asked the chairman.

  “The American wog.”

  “What’s the charge?”

  “For the fifth consecutive night, he was told to get a pound of butter from dinner for the usual purpose and he refused. He also failed to save the correct portion of his dessert. We suspect he’s trying to start a bloody revolution.”

  “We’ve been checking on you, wog. We think your real name’s Von Ness. We think you’re a bloody German,” the chairman said.

  “I’m not. Van Ness is a Dutch name. My father is descended from some of the first settlers in America.”

  “What does your father do for a living, wog?”

  “Nothing.”

  Laughter. “Why doesn’t he do anything, wog?”

  “None of your business.”

  “We’re making it our business, wog. Explain.”

  “My mother has money. He doesn’t have to work.”

  “Very suspicious. He’s either a spy or a layabout. Tell us more about your mother.”

  “Her maiden name was Ames. She’s from Boston.”

  “Why is she living in England while your father stays in New York?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is she a spy, wog?”

  “No. She hates the Germans like everyone else.”

  Adrian did not pretend to understand the antagonism for Germany seething through England in 1911. Even schoolboys talked confidently, eagerly, of fighting a war to teach the Kaiser and his generals a lesson in humility.

  “You know what the butter is used for, wog?”

  “It’s for the Rammer,” Adrian said.

  “What does the Rammer do, wog?”

  “He—he breaks in virgins.”

  “Why didn’t you bring the butter, wog?”

  “I don’t want to be broken in.”

  “Wog, how many times do you have to be told what you want doesn’t matter? We’re the rulers, you’re the slave. Tomorrow night you will visit the Rammer with the pound of butter or your life will cease. You will become one of the living de
ad. Do you understand that, wog?”

  “Yes.”

  No one spoke to the living dead. They were treated as if they were invisible. Everyone walked straight at them in the corridors. They stepped on their feet in class. They refused to pass them food in the dining hall.

  “For the present you are sentenced to double the usual punishment. Bend over.”

  Adrian pulled down his pants and bent double, his hands gripping the back of a chair.

  “My god, that’s a fat one. I can practically hear the Rammer salivating,” one of the council said.

  “Apply the punishment.”

  Again and again the paddle smashed against Adrian’s buttocks. Waves of pain flooded his body. He thought for a while he was going to suffocate. Tears poured down his face. The council counted each stroke in chorus. “Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three.” They stopped at twenty-five.

  Curled into a sobbing fetal ball in his icy bed, Adrian vowed not to tell anyone why his father lived in such a peculiar way. Last spring, before they left for England, Adrian had found the courage to ask his mother to explain it. His mother had taken him into her bedroom, which smelled of lilacs. They sat in two barrel chairs by the bay window overlooking Central Park. She told him how his father had been ruined in 1893, seven years before he was born.

  The word ruined had tolled on her lips like a funeral bell. The stock market on Wall Street had crashed and some people who had given his father money to invest blamed him for losing it. She said the crash had not been his fault and no one really thought he should go to jail. When people lost money they said mean things.

  His mother had seized Adrian by his shoulders and said: “Your father is a good man. We live on my money. You must never mention any of this to your father or anyone else.” ,

  It was enormously confusing. Ruined meant your wife seldom used your first name. In England his mother called many people by their first names. In New York his mother called his father you. Will you be home for dinner tonight? Do you plan to go to Bar Harbor this summer? Are you going to Long Island this weekend?