Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Susan’s ruminations were interrupted by a metallic rap-rap of the brass knocker Cliff had installed on the front door, his one contribution to beautifying their jerry-built bungalow. Sarah opened the door to confront a huge awkward man with the most Irish face she had ever seen. He introduced himself as Daniel Hanrahan, Buchanan’s director of internal security. At the moment, he added, he was functioning as a chauffeur. Mrs. Van Ness was in the gray Lincoln parked at the curb. She wondered if she might pay a visit.

  Bewildered and a little scared, Sarah agreed, if Mrs. Van Ness would give her five minutes to straighten up the house. She rushed to the patio to tell Susan Hardy the news. Susan flung dirty towels in the hamper, kicked toys under the couch and shoved the unwashed lunch dishes under the sink while Sarah frantically applied some makeup and put on a decent dress. As Susan tiptoed out the kitchen door, the knocker rapped again and Hanrahan ushered Amanda Van Ness into the house.

  She wore her russet hair braided tightly around her long narrow face, giving her an oddly severe, almost witchy look. “I’m here for a very special reason,” she said. “I want to see Tama’s granddaughter.”

  Sarah plucked Elizabeth from her crib and carried her into the living room. “Can she sit on my lap?” Amanda said.

  “Of course.”

  Sarah gravely introduced them and deposited Elizabeth on Amanda’s lap. The little girl gazed up at Amanda’s solemn face and smiled shyly. “She brings back such memories,” Amanda said. “My daughter is sixteen now. Completely impossible. Adrian plans to send her to England for college. He says an American school will let her run wild.”

  She suddenly glared at Sarah as if she were responsible. “I hated England. I hated everything about it. Do you like California?”

  Sarah managed to stammer an affirmative.

  “Every woman should like California,” Amanda said. “It’s a sensuous, sensual climate. A world where women belong. Women don’t belong in a country like England, where it’s freezing and raining ten months out of the year.”

  Sarah murmured something defensive about enjoying summers in Sussex. Amanda glared again. “That was where Adrian used to go to meet his mistress.”

  She gazed at Elizabeth and her manner softened remarkably. “I’m so glad this little creature will grow up a California woman.”

  Sarah said something about planning to stay in California as long as Buchanan Aircraft had a job for her husband. Amanda glared again. “They’ll always have a job for him. Tama and I will see to that. But that’s not why I’m here. I want you to try to raise this child as a true California woman. A creature with no dependence on a man. Can you do that?”

  Amazed, Sarah could only murmur she had not thought about it. “Begin thinking about it!” Amanda said. “You’re a woman. Haven’t you found out already how much humiliation that involves?”

  She clutched Elizabeth close to her and spoke over her tousled dark head. “You think Tama isn’t humiliated? Her whole life has been one long humiliation. Like mine. If it weren’t for this man, I’d be a prisoner in my own house. He understands. He knows exactly how humiliated women are at Buchanan Aircraft.”

  Hanrahan turned his hat over and over in his hands and murmured something about getting back to work. Unaware of the security chief’s debt of gratitude to Amanda, Sarah could only stare in astonishment, mutely asking the Irishman why he had brought this madwoman into her home. Hanrahan seemed aware of her opinion but he did not attempt to defend himself or quiet Amanda Van Ness. It never occurred to Sarah that most of what Amanda said that day might be the truth.

  HOME IS THE HERO

  “The best thing about the Excalibur, Captain Rickenbacker—”

  “Call me Eddie, for Christ’s sake.”

  Sweat congealed the armpits of Cliff Morris’s Hathaway shirt as he tried to regain his poise before Eddie Rickenbacker’s hard impatient glare. Cliff’s stepfather, Buzz McCall, had the same eyes. Fighter pilot’s eyes. Killer’s eyes. Rickenbacker had been the top American ace in World War I, with twenty-six victories.

  The year was 1948. Buchanan Aircraft’s Excalibur, the plane that was supposed to create an “empire in the sky” for U.S. airlines, flew in four colors on an easel Cliff had set up in Rickenbacker’s fifty-first-floor Rockefeller Center office. The whirling propellers on the four 3,500-horsepower Pratt and Whitney engines seemed ready to pull it off the page and send it roaring around the ceiling. Cliff was planning to flip through the booklet to pages displaying the luxurious interior, the sophisticated cockpit design, the huge baggage compartment.

  “With a two-hundred-seat capacity, we estimate annual profits per plane of—”

  “Two hundred seats!” The president of Eastern Airlines fell back in his leather cushioned swivel chair and growled with exasperation. “Buzz. The goddamn plane’s too big. We’re flying SkyRangers half empty. What the hell do we want with this whale?”

  Buzz McCall was standing by the window, looking west across New Jersey toward California. His presence was an index of Buchanan’s growing desperation as they struggled to survive in the post—World War II aviation world. Buzz had resisted coming to New York to see Rickenbacker. With some justice, he claimed he had his hands full trying to deal with the chaos on Buchanan’s shrinking assembly lines.

  Jim Redwood, the vice president for sales, tried to rescue the situation. He was Cliff’s height, six-foot-four, with a face full of dewlaps from too much Scotch whiskey. “Eddie—our figures show a steady upturn in the market. Come 1950 there’ll be an explosion. With twenty of these planes you could put National and Braniff out of business.”

  “If you’re wrong they’ll put me out of business while I’m trying to service a five-million-dollar debt. Thanks but no thanks, guys.”

  Buzz cursed steadily in their long ride down in the whooshing elevator. Out on the sidewalk, he jammed his finger into Cliff’s chest. “The next time you get an idea like this, come to me with it, not our famous fucking marketing genius Adrian Van Ness.”

  Last month, Newsweek magazine had run a cover story on Adrian, hailing him as a model of the new postwar executive, a man who combined an uncanny instinct for the marketplace with a profound grasp of the latest technology. Ignoring the help he had gotten from Hitler and Tojo, the magazine told its readers how Adrian had brought Buchanan from bankruptcy to the biggest plane maker in the nation. Ironically, the journalists puffed him just as he was falling on his face. Betting on a steep rise in the flying public, Adrian had built the Excalibur, the biggest airliner in the world—and started selling it a month after the postwar recession sent passenger numbers plummeting.

  Adrian was the toast of the aircraft business, while Buzz grappled with the thousand and one problems of Buchanan’s transition from war to peacetime production. From a hundred thousand workers churning out five hundred planes a month, Buchanan had shrunk to eight thousand workers making—if they were lucky—two hundred planes a year. Adrian had put Buzz in charge of the firing—which made him the most hated man in the company.

  “I’m sorry, Buzz,” Jim Redwood said as they strode through the noonday crowds toward Fifth Avenue. “I thought it was worth a try. It was my idea as much as Cliff’s.”

  “That makes you a pair of assholes,” Buzz said. “Dragging me across the fucking continent to kiss Captain Eddie’s ass. If my war had lasted another month I’d have passed him in the numbers game and I’d be up there running that airline and Eddie’d be a garage mechanic in Milwaukee.”

  “I don’t know what the hell we’re gonna do with this plane,” Redwood said. “Rick was pretty much our last hope.”

  Buzz whirled on Redwood. He knew they had sold a grand total of ten Excaliburs, all to TWA because the airline’s eccentric owner, millionaire Howard Hughes, liked big planes. But Buzz could never tolerate defeatism. “Listen. We’re gonna sell that plane somewhere. Maybe the army if the country wakes up to what the Russians are tryin’ to pull—”

  He pointed to a Daily News hea
dline: BERLIN STILL FREE. President Truman had responded to Russian attempts to drive the Americans, British, and French out of Berlin with a massive airlift.

  “If they had fifty Excaliburs redesigned for cargo, they could keep Berlin supplied till doomsday. Instead they got half-asleep pilots makin’ two flights a day in C-Forty-sevens. It’s just like the last war. The goddamn government makes do with yesterday’s planes and the whole aircraft business stands still.”

  Back at the Waldorf, the desk clerk handed Cliff a telegram. He ripped it open and read: SARAH HAD A GIRL AT 6:30 A.M. TAMA. “Good Christ,” he said, showing the message to Buzz. Sarah was not supposed to deliver for six weeks.

  “Another girl?” Buzz said. “When you gonna stop shootin’ blanks?”

  “Hey. Adrian’s got a girl. He’s nuts about her,” Jim Redwood said.

  “Adrian’s a fucking—aristocrat,” Buzz said, avoiding Cliff’s eyes.

  The averted eyes, the momentary hesitation in his voice, convinced Cliff again that Buzz regretted losing Tama to Adrian. It had nothing to do with affection. He had been unfaithful to Tama with a hundred other women over the past ten years. It was the loss of face, of power, that the switch implied. The rearrangement was part of the new game the war had created. Buzz was no longer the only hero around, the tough guy who made Cliff and even Adrian twitch when he looked at them. The war, a new generation of pilots, had put things in perspective. Buzz was the ace no one remembered, the guy who came in second to Rickenbacker in France flying funny-looking planes that barely went a hundred miles an hour.

  He could handle Buzz now, Cliff told himself. He had told that to Tama with not a little anger when she announced her affair with Adrian and said he had promised to protect Cliff from Buzz. A man with forty-nine missions over Germany did not need protection.

  Except when he fell on his face. When an idea went sour, the way things had just gone with Rickenbacker. Anxiety swelled in Cliff’s belly. Buzz would not let him forget that fiasco for months. Cliff silently cursed Adrian Van Ness and his oversized plane. He forced a smile and socked Buzz on the shoulder. “Hey listen, Grandpa. At least I can still get it up,” he said.

  In the room Cliff telephoned the plant and heard the good-bad news from Tama. “Sarah’s okay. The baby only weighs four pounds. They’ve got her in an incubator. I’ve never seen anything so tiny. How did the meeting go?”

  “Lousy. He practically threw us out.”

  “The son of a bitch. I’ll tell Adrian.”

  For a moment Cliff felt five years old. When was Tama going to stop running his life? He slammed down the phone and called the hospital. After the usual delays, a weary Sarah came on the line. “Honey, I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Cliff said. “How do you feel?”

  “Tired. How did things go at the big meeting?”

  “Lousy.”

  “Oh, Cliff, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. How’s the kid? Tama says she’s so small you can hardly see her.”

  “She’ll be all right. They do wonders with preemies these days.”

  “What’ll we name her?”

  Cliff had wanted a boy so badly, they had not even discussed girls’ names.

  “I like Margaret.”

  She had named their first girl Elizabeth. “What are you trying to do, turn us into a royal family?” Cliff said.

  “I just like the names. Tell me about the meeting.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. He hated the plane. It’s an oversized lemon. A grapefruit.”

  Anxiety crawled in Cliff’s chest. How many cross-examinations from the goddamn women in his life did he have to swallow? “I think you should get out of sales. This plane is making you look like—what’s the word?—a loser,” Sarah said.

  “Listen. You have the babies. I’ll worry about my goddamn career.”

  He slammed down the phone and stood there cursing. Why the hell had he married the daughter of an aircraft executive?

  Buzz charged in, suitcase in hand. “Come on. I got us on the noon balloon out of Newark. An Excalibur.”

  “I thought we were going to stay until tomorrow. I’ve got a date with Dick Stone, my navigator on the Rainbow Express.”

  “Call him and cancel it. Let’s go. We’ve only got an hour. I want you and Redwood there when I talk to Van Ness. We’ve got to convince him this plane is hopeless and figure out another move fast.”

  Cliff called Dick Stone and blamed the cancellation on the unexpected birth. Dick was cheerful about it. “What’s the kid’s name? I want to send a present. I can get it wholesale.”

  “The baby-wear business is good?”

  “The money is great, the business is shitty. How’s the plane business?”

  “The exact opposite,” Cliff said.

  “I may call you one of these days.”

  “I told you, I’ll kick the door open—if it’s still there to kick.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Cliff and Buzz and Jim Redwood stood in the art-deco departure lounge of Newark Airport. Around them were about a hundred fellow businessmen in broad-brimmed felt or Panama hats, many wearing the new nylon cord summer suits, with white shirts and dark ties. Among the men were a dozen or so women wearing hats of assorted spiral shapes, blouses with large balloon sleeves and skirts that covered their knees, the “new look” of the previous year. Cliff preferred the tight skirts of the war years.

  “I got a weird letter in the mail yesterday,” Buzz said, trying to pass the time. “Written in words clipped from a newspaper. It said something about a dame named Califia who’s gonna cut my throat. There’s probably a lot of dames’d like to do that—but I can’t place this one.”

  “Maybe it’s one of Tama’s movie names,” Jim Redwood said. Everyone knew about Tama’s vendetta against Buzz.

  “Trans World Airlines Flight six-oh-seven to Los Angeles departing from Gate one-sixteen,” gargled the invisible announcer.

  The Excalibur sat on the runway looking twice as big as Cliff remembered it. He found himself eyeing the plane, wondering if someone had ground-tested the engines, checked the fuel lines, the electrical systems. In his seat, he listened tensely as the pilot turned over the motors, waiting for the throaty roar that announced the right fuel mixture.

  Nothing to worry about, he told himself. Nothing to worry about. TWA was a first-class airline with good pilots. Down the runway they thundered, the huge engines sending vibrations of power through the fuselage that surpassed anything Cliff had ever felt aboard a B-17. He found himself bracing his legs against the footrest as if he expected a crash. Nothing to worry about.

  Clunk the wheels retracted. The Excalibur dipped and wobbled slightly as they hit some turbulence. Pinpoints of sweat sprang out all over Cliff’s body. It all came back every time he flew, the way they had become pariahs. The Rainbow Express’s copilot had told a friend about the double-cross they had pulled over Schweinfurt and the story spread through the 103rd Bombardment Group. Whenever the 103rd flew the Purple Heart corner, the Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts seemed to attack with special fury. The rest of the group started blaming their losses on the Rainbow Express. The thing hung over them like a gigantic hoodoo, tormenting everyone in the crew.

  Inevitably, the story got to their commanding officer, Colonel Atwood, who hauled them into his office and raved about court-martials and perpetual disgrace. “We’ll volunteer for another twenty-five,” Dick Stone had said. Before Cliff could say or do anything, all the others volunteered. That had left Cliff no choice. He had to join them for another nine months of gambling with death over Germany.

  Cliff took a deep breath. Now was the time to finish it. They had evened the score. They had flown another twenty-three missions. On the twenty-fourth, the Rainbow Express had taken a direct hit over Berlin. Didn’t that even the score? Getting blown out of a plane clutching your parachute, somehow strapping it on as you fell toward the burning city beneath you? Yes, Cliff told himself. It evened the score.

&nbs
p; “Jesus Christ, you’re still jumpy in a plane, ain’t you,” Buzz said.

  “I’m just jumpy for a drink,” Cliff said.

  Suddenly Cliff wanted to tell Buzz what had happened over Schweinfurt. Instead of the old antagonism, the submerged quarrel for Tama’s love, they finally had something to share as men. Buzz had risked death in the air on the western front. Maybe he would tell him what happened over Schweinfurt was all right.

  For a moment the words crowded into Cliff’s throat. Across the aisle Jim Redwood, eager for his first Scotch of the day, buzzed for the stewardess. “What’ll it be, guys?” he said.

  Jim would never understand what he wanted to tell Buzz. The sales chief was always introducing Cliff as his “assistant war hero,” reciting his number of missions, his miraculous survival over Berlin. Cliff let the moment pass.

  The Excalibur climbed to 27,000 feet and the captain told them their route to Los Angeles. The stewardesses brought them their drinks. A tall sinewy redhead who wore her blue garrison cap at a cocky angle got their attention. “There’s a live one,” Cliff said. Her partner, a short chipper brunette, was not bad either.

  On they flew into deepening dusk. The Excalibur’s fuel tanks were big enough to skip landing at Chicago, a standard requirement for other cross-country flights. The stewardesses served dinner. Cliff asked the redhead if she lived in Los Angeles.

  “Mayn-hattun Beach,” she said, with an accent that had to be Tennessee or Kentucky.

  “We work for Buchanan Aircraft in Santa Monica.”

  “As a test pilot?” she asked.

  “No. In sales.”

  “If you see someone named Billy McCall tell him Cassie Trainor says hello.”