Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Buzz McCall did a double barrel roll that put him directly above Reynolds’s Camel. Whump—his wheels crunched into Reynolds’s top wing. Whump—he did it again. Spars and fabric flew off. The appalled Reynolds dove for safety. Buzz followed him down, firing the machine guns mounted on his cowling. He was shooting blanks, of course. All the planes were equipped with guns to simulate dogfights at the air shows. Buzz was only adding to Reynolds’s humiliation.

  Reynolds pulled out of his dive at about 1,000 feet with Buzz still on his tail. As the Englishman rolled to the left, the top wing on that side crumpled like a piece of wet cardboard. The Camel slid into a spin, whirling down, down toward the green earth. Frank heard Sammy cry: “Oh, my God!”

  Reynolds never even came close to pulling out. He hit nose first and the plane exploded into a geyser of flame. “He murdered him,” Sammy cried.

  They landed outside a town in northern Idaho and telephoned the Montana state police to report the “accident.” Sammy was so furious with Buzz, she would not go near him that first night. In Frank Buchanan’s tent, she was almost as reluctant to let him touch her, especially when he tried to tell her Buzz had not intended to kill Reynolds.

  Sammy wiped away tears. “It’s just awful thinkin’ of someone dyin’ like that for no reason.”

  Having seen so many pilots die for no apparent reason in France, Frank was unable to share her grief. But he respected it. “You don’t have to do anything for me tonight,” he said. “I’ll read you a poem instead.”

  He pulled out a thin volume with the word Lustra in large letters on the ocher cover.

  “What’s that word mean?” Sammy asked.

  “It’s Latin. Lustra are offerings to the gods to atone for the sins of the people.”

  He opened the book at random and began reading “Dance Figure.”

  Dark eyed, O woman of my dreams

  Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;

  Thy face as a river with lights.

  “Shhhhh-it” Sammy said. “Who wrote that?”

  “Ezra Pound. A poet I met in England.”

  “Do you think my face is a river with lights?”

  “There’s light in it. Beautiful shimmering light sometimes.”

  “Effrontery.” Sammy giggled. She rolled off her cot onto Frank’s. “There’s nothin’ we can do for Renny, is there?”

  She kissed him on the mouth. “Read me another poem by this guy Pound.”

  Frank flipped the pages of Lustra.

  Woman? O Woman is a consummate rage,

  But dead, or asleep, she pleases.

  Take her. She has two excellent seasons.

  Sammy kissed him harder. “I like that.”

  For the first time Frank allowed himself to admit how much he wanted this woman. Trembling with a summer’s desire that a dozen other women had not satisfied, he lifted Sammy’s blouse over her head and kissed the nipples of her small snub breasts. Her neck was wreathed in her golden hair. She kicked off her denim skirt and more golden hair gleamed in the moonlit darkness.

  “You don’t have to,” he whispered, suddenly afraid he would disappoint her.

  “It’s my lustra,” she murmured. She took his hand and placed it on the mound of yellow hair below her waist. “Can you find the right place down there?”

  He found the place with no difficulty. “Hey,” Sammy gasped. “We’re gainin’ altitude.” She wrapped her small hand around his ecstatic penis. “Damn,” she said. “Whyn’t you tell me you had a stick this big? I would’ve been flyin’ with you in July.”

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “Ready for some stunts, pilot?”

  Her fragile body was so light, so limber, yet so taut with desire, so vivid with movement, Frank Buchanan almost spoke. He almost shoved aside Craig and said the unthinkable words, I love you. Did Sammy sense love there beneath his pulsing skin? Frank hoped so.

  It was long past midnight when they subsided into sleep. At dawn they were awakened by the roar of Buzz’s engine. “Let’s go, lovebirds,” he shouted outside the tent flap. “We got a day’s flyin’ to do. The weather don’t look so great to me.”

  Sullen cirrostratus clouds were covering most of the sky. That usually meant rain within twenty-four hours. They flew south across Wyoming and Colorado into Arizona. It was spectacular open country, with the Sierras towering on the right and endless miles of prairie and desert beneath them. A headwind blew the bad weather north into Canada, and they landed that night outside Flagstaff.

  “Am I still on the blacklist?” Buzz asked, after dinner.

  “Oh, I guess not,” Sammy said. “A deal’s a deal.”

  Frank was amazed by the pain he felt when Sammy disappeared into Buzz’s tent. He ordered himself to grow up. He reminded himself of how often Buzz had saved his life on the western front. He tried to tell himself there was nothing special about Samantha Soames except that spectacular blond hair. She was like a hundred, a thousand other women who were crazy about pilots.

  An hour later, Sammy was still inside Buzz’s tent and Frank was pacing up and down in the desert beyond the glow of the campfire, barely able to restrain his rage. He finally went to bed and lay rigid on his cot, trying to think of other things. He did not know what time it was when Sammy lay down in the cot beside him.

  In the morning Frank recoiled from Buzz’s casual cheer. Sammy seemed almost as morose. Frank could not decide whether that was a good or bad sign. They flew across Arizona into California. Soon they were in the high desert, with its miles of scrub grass and lonely Joshua trees. They landed on a dry lake bed outside the tiny town of Muroc. Los Angeles was just over the San Gabriel Mountains, less than an hour’s flying away.

  A half-dozen people came out to inspect the planes but no one seemed interested in paying five dollars for a half hour in the air. Buzz could not resist taking two younger women up free. Around the campfire they discussed their prospects for making a living in California. The care and feeding of gasoline engines was expensive. Buzz thought Sammy would draw crowds as a wing walker. He had ideas for a series of hair-raising stunts, including a barrel roll with her on the wing and a midair transfer from his Spad to Frank’s Jenny.

  “Are you willing, Sammy?” Frank said. “We’re asking you to take most of the chances.”

  “Sure,” Sammy said.

  That night Sammy came to Frank’s tent and asked him to read her more poetry. He chose his favorite among Pound’s translations from the Provençal, in which the troubadour tells his unfaithful beloved he will never find another woman like her, so he is going to select traits from a dozen women and “make me a borrowed lady.”

  “Why did you read that one?”

  “I have a feeling I’ve lost you.”

  “Buzz is in his tent right now with one of the girls he took up today. Yet I’ll come to him if he wants me. I wanted him the first time I saw him. It just grew and grew all summer. Why is that, Frank?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll be good to you too. I really do want to learn some more poems and big words. Teach me another one now.”

  “Hedonist.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Someone who lives only for pleasure.”

  “That’s Buzz, isn’t it. Or is it me?”

  “It’s all of us.”

  Throughout the winter of 1921, Frank and Buzz and Sammy worked the great central valley of California, where people seldom saw planes. They fitted Buzz’s plane with the foot grips and the wire that would enable Sammy to stand on his wing, only a few feet from the whirling propeller. The first time Buzz did a barrel roll with her in that position, her right hand holding the wire, the left held defiantly aloft, Frank almost lost control of his Jenny. But Sammy came out of the roll unfazed, smiling, her blond hair streaming behind her in the airflow.

  The midair transfer was a tricky business in even a moderate wind. Sammy walked out on Buzz’s lower wing and held up one finger. They bot
h started counting to thirteen. Precisely at that number, chosen by Sammy as a defiance of fate, she stepped gracefully, casually from Buzz’s wing onto Frank’s, and strolled to his front cockpit.

  Thousands of California’s farmers paid five dollars a head to see a beautiful woman risk death in an airplane. A man could never have attracted the crowds they drew that winter from towns like Grenada, Weed, Yreka, Tulare. At night there was love in the separate tents. Love that soon became as complex and dangerous as the stunts they were doing in the air.

  Sammy wanted to respond to Frank’s poetic vision of her. But she could not escape her dark compulsion for Buzz. That made her more and more contemptuous of her own character. Not a good frame of mind for a woman who was defying death in the air two or three times a week.

  At first Buzz continued to take other women into his tent. He was trying to deny Sammy’s growing power over him. Buzz began drinking harder. He was always a drinker, like most pilots. Drinking was part of the code, part of the way you controlled your fear and defied the groundlings. But this was a different kind of drinking. Buzz was using liquor to escape Sammy.

  One night, outside Coachello, Buzz stumbled into the camp as drunk as Frank had ever seen him. “Sammy’s not goin’ near your goddamn tent tonight,” he said.

  “Did she say that?”

  “No. I did.”

  “Why don’t we ask her?”

  “I won’t ask her. I’ll tell her. Just like I’m tellin’ you.”

  Sammy strolled into the firelight with the groceries for dinner. “You’re not fuckin’ him any more. I just told him,” Buzz said.

  “I don’t fuck him. I love him.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re saying that because you don’t want to hurt me,” Frank said.

  “Shut up!” Sammy cried. “You’re a pair of bastards. Why did I ever go near you?”

  Long after midnight, Sammy slipped into Frank’s tent and pressed her lips on his mouth. “I do love you,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I love the poems, the words. Teach me one more.”

  “Euphoria.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “A feeling of great happiness. What we feel when we fly. What I felt the first night with you.”

  They made love one last time. Behind his closed eyes Frank saw Sammy on the wing, the blond hair streaming almost to the tail of the stubby Spad, a miraculous figure against the blue dome of the sky. Tomorrow or the next day or some day in the next week or month, one of them, perhaps all of them, would die if he tried to fight Buzz for her.

  The next day they flew to Ukiah to participate in the town’s annual rodeo. They went up to do their usual assortment of death-defying dives and spins and barrel rolls. As always the climax of the stunts was Sammy’s wing walk. Frank thought she looked unsteady when she got up on the wing. With her feet in the grips and the wire wound around her right wrist, Buzz went into his barrel roll. Halfway around Sammy flew into the air and stopped only when the wire ran out.

  She dangled there with Buzz flying upside down. If he rolled rightside up the wire might cut through the spars and fabric and amputate his wing. Frank went to full throttle and pulled under the swaying figure. Inch by inch, he moved closer, praying he would not slash her with the propeller. It required exquisite judgment to place the plane just far enough ahead of her to get Sammy’s feet into the front cockpit.

  “Now!” Frank roared.

  She dropped into the cockpit. Below them, the crowd went wild. They thought it was part of the show. On the ground, Sammy could not explain it. When Buzz rolled, she had blacked out. The next thing she knew she was dangling by the wire. While the cowboys rode their bucking broncos, Sammy went in search of a doctor in Ukiah. She came back with astonishing news. She was pregnant.

  “How could you let that happen?” Buzz shouted.

  “I don’t know. I guess maybe the diaphragm wore out. Or God wants us to have a kid.”

  “There are ways to get rid of it,” Buzz said.

  “Not in my book there ain’t,” Sammy said.

  Frank could not believe Sammy’s transformation over the next several months. She stopped wing walking and started going to church services and prayer meetings. She began urging Buzz to figure out some other way to make a living in aviation. She did not want their son growing up in a barnstormer’s world. Buzz defiantly insisted he could make enough money to support them.

  To prove it, Buzz developed a new repertoire of stunts that were so dangerous he did not even ask Frank Buchanan to try them. Buzz flew under highway bridges and through walls of fire, he did barrel rolls at twenty-five feet and landed the Spad on the roof of a speeding car. When they reenacted aerial combat and Frank shot him down, Buzz did not pull out of the spin until he was close to treetop level. Every show, Frank was braced for a crash that did not happen.

  The baby was born while they were performing in Turlock. Who should be there to baptize him but the Rev. Abel Flutterman? He had bought himself a Jenny and was flying it around California spreading his winged gospel with spectacular success. Sammy brought the infant to a prayer meeting and Flutterman dunked him in a tin tub and pronounced him “a son of the sky.” William Craig McCall (his middle name chosen by Frank) responded with a spluttering squawk.

  A month later, Sammy said she was ready to start wing walking again. Buzz objected. His stunts were drawing big crowds all over the state. They did not need her help. Sammy insisted and as usual got her way—and then some. She announced they would do the stunt they had improvised on her last outing—a fall from Buzz’s wing and a rescue by Frank.

  They flew to Petaluma to help celebrate its claim to being the chicken capital of the world. Crowds had driven down from San Francisco and Sacramento to feast on the hundreds of pounds of broiling birds and enjoy the Buzz McCall Air Show. Up they climbed into an azure June sky, without a sign of a cloud. Onto the wing sprang Sammy to clutch the wire and wave exultantly to the sun, the crowd below, perhaps to God. Over Buzz went for the climactic barrel roll. Sammy flew into space.

  The wire snapped. They had left it coiled in the rear cockpit of Buzz’s plane for eight months. It had never occurred to them to replace it. They knew nothing about the tensile capacity of one-inch wound steel cable, its shelf life, its eventual fatigue. Down tumbled Sammy, her blond hair streaming. After her dove Buzz. Did he really think he could snatch her from oblivion?

  A farewell word leaped into Frank’s mind: expiate. Sammy walked on wings because deep in her woman’s soul she could not forgive herself for the dark compulsion at the center of her wildness. She had hoped a child would atone for it. But she had found it necessary to go back to challenging death again.

  Expiate. What would he and Buzz have to do to atone for their stupidity and arrogance and lust? In a frenzy Frank pounded his fists against his windscreen and cursed at the uncaring sky.

  They were at a thousand feet when the wire parted. At two hundred feet Buzz overtook Sammy but there was no possibility of maneuvering the plane into position to stop her fall. Above them, Frank saw Buzz’s outstretched arm reaching for that ribbon of yellow hair. He closed his eyes, unable to bear the sight of the woman and the plane going into the ground together.

  When Frank looked down again, Sammy’s body was on the grass, arms flung out in a final plea. Buzz was circling above her. Somehow he had pulled out of the dive.

  Only as Frank landed did he realize that he and Buzz were the bereaved parents of William Craig McCall, already known as Billy—the son of the uncaring sky.

  REALIST IN LOVE

  It took Adrian Van Ness several months to absorb the discovery that his mother and Geoffrey Tillotson were lovers. Already adept at masking his feelings, Adrian was able to deal coolly, affably with both of them at business and on social occasions. But the revelation inevitably affected his feelings for his wife. From a figure of pity and sympathy, Amanda became a burden, a walking, talking mistake.

  Amanda also changed her mind about him. Their disag
reement over Oakes Ames meant a great deal to her. She brought it up again and again until Adrian finally told her he was sick of arguing about it. Having jettisoned idealism, he found it hard to grasp how much it still meant to Amanda. She blamed his fall from grace on Geoffrey Tillotson, whom she saw changing her sensitive poet into a hard-hearted banker—the sort of grasping amoral capitalist her father had fought in California.

  Adrian also grew irked by Amanda’s inability—he saw it as unwillingness—to adapt to their social life. When she accompanied him to house parties, she was intimidated by the upper class. She thought they were snubbing her. Adrian tried to explain the difference between English and American manners. “Just because they don’t use your first name doesn’t mean they’re unfriendly,” he said.

  “I know when I’m being snubbed, Adrian,” Amanda insisted. “You’re so eager to kowtow to them, you barely notice it.”

  “There’s no need for you to come. I’m perfectly happy to kowtow on my own,” Adrian said.

  A few weeks after that nasty exchange, Adrian was invited to a house party in Sussex. Amanda, wheezing and sneezing with her worst cold yet, stayed in London. The house was Ravenswood, country home of Lord Elgin, chairman of the Cunard Line. It had a hundred rooms and at least that many servants. Around it were miles of woods and fields where guests shot grouse and hunted foxes.

  The weather was cold and rainy. After unpacking, Adrian descended to the great hall and drank mulled wine before a blazing fire. A small dark-eyed brunette joined him, introducing herself as Beryl Suydam. She ordered sherry, remarking she was half frozen.

  “What brings you here? Are you a member of the family?” Adrian asked.

  “I was engaged to Lord Elgin’s son, William. He was killed on the Somme.”