Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  On New Year’s morning, the first day of 1950, the beginning of the second half of the century, Sarah fed the children and took down the Christmas tree. The rituals of motherhood and family completed, she went upstairs to the bedroom where she had slept alone on New Year’s eve and dialed Billy McCall’s number.

  “This is Sarah,” she said. “Are you still flying that route into the wild blue?”

  Two days later, her husband in the Mojave Desert, her daughters asleep, her reliable Mexican maid, Maria, in charge of her house, Sarah drove up Los Angeles’s main street, Wilshire Boulevard, to the hotel that shared its name, and walked to a white lobby phone.

  “May I speak to Major McCall, please?”

  A pause while the operator found the number and she had one last chance to flee. There was something so tawdry about coming to his room like a prostitute. Then Billy’s voice was on the line. “Sarah? I’m on the other side of the lobby.”

  He strolled toward her in casual California clothes, the shirt open at the throat. Sarah felt another rush of warmth. The blond hair reminded her of several boys on whom she had teenage crushes; then the raw-boned western face. He was a remarkable blend of English and American good looks.

  Was she feeling sexual desire for the first time? Were the feelings she had experienced with Cliff a kind of spiritual immolation? Do you have to grow up American to want a man? Sarah’s heart pounded. She could not turn back now.

  “I figured we’d go for a plane ride first,” Billy said. “A friend of mine’s got this place in the desert near Palm Springs.”

  They drove to Los Angeles Airport, where Billy kept a dark green single-engined plane. He told her it was a Lustra, one of Buchanan’s first aircraft. He had rebuilt it himself and installed a new engine. Behind the cockpit he had created a miniature sitting room with a cushioned swivel chair, a couch and a small bar. In minutes they were soaring over the lights of Los Angeles and then over the darkness of the desert toward a horizon filled with stars. “I love to fly at night,” Billy said.

  Some random lights appeared below them. Billy talked to someone on the radio and a half-dozen more powerful lights came on, illuminating a single runway. He landed without even the hint of a bounce and left the plane beside a small control tower. They walked to a station wagon in a nearby parking lot and drove a few miles into the desert to a house surrounded by a high adobe wall.

  Billy unlocked a carved wooden gate and they entered a dark courtyard. He touched a switch just inside the gate and lights glowed around a rectangular pool with two chaises beside it and a bathhouse at the far end. The mission-style house remained in darkness a few dozen feet away.

  Billy disappeared into the house and returned with a bottle of Scotch and some ice. “First we get just a little drunk,” Billy said, pouring her a generous splash.

  “To dull the conscience?” Sarah said.

  “To forget about getting even,” Billy said. “That’s the wrong reason for coming here.”

  They sat down side by side on chaises facing the pool. Sarah sipped her Scotch. It burned deep in her throat. “Tell me what it feels like to go thirteen hundred miles an hour,” she said.

  “Like hitting a home run and scoring a touchdown in the same day.”

  She shook her head, dismissing these male metaphors. “Make me see it, feel it. The whole thing.”

  Billy hunched forward, balancing his glass on his knee. He picked it up and stretched out on the chaise. “You never know if the goddamn plane is going to explode. Two have, already. They didn’t even find pieces of the pilots. With our model, it’s twice as likely to happen because we’re relying on rocket fuel. We were supposed to get jet engines but Westinghouse never came through with the power.”

  He took a hefty swallow of Scotch. “It’s like flying down a tunnel of fire. Any second you expect to disappear. Your body feels like it’s already vanished. You’re scared in a new way, different from combat. You feel like you’re going down God’s throat and He doesn’t like it. Afterward you just want to get drunk.”

  He smiled briefly at her. “That’s the bad flight. Want to hear about the good flight?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said.

  Billy poured himself more Scotch. “The altitude flight. That’s the good flight.”

  He lay back on the chaise again and his voice dwindled to a murmur. “The first boost that pulls you away from the B-Twenty-nine is nothing to what you get when you ignite all four tubes at thirty thousand feet and start to climb. The altimeter goes up a thousand feet a second and suddenly you’re at sixty thousand feet. You can feel the difference. She doesn’t want to fly in that thin air. But she does as long as you’ve got that power in the tail. You keep going up, up with nothing but a little aileron throw to keep the wings steady. Then you’re at seventy-six thousand and the rockets sputter off.”

  “It’s perfectly quiet?” Sarah said.

  Billy nodded. “You’ve left the world. There’s only this blue-black sky and you and the plane. You feel her vibrations as if they’re happening in your own body. At the same time you’re incredibly aware of your body. As if it’s part of the inside of the plane. You can feel every cell, every muscle, every ounce of fluid. They’re awake, alive in a different way inside you. Everything you see is somehow more intense. Black is blacker, white is whiter. You feel like you’re on the edge of the unknowable.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  Billy’s voice almost faded against the desert wind blowing at the gate, the bubbling water in the pool. “Fear seems independent, a ghost sitting on your shoulder. It doesn’t belong to you anymore. You don’t feel the slightest concern for the future. Everything is now. Nothing has any meaning but this experience. The stuff on the dials, the rocket pressures, the altimeter, the angle of attack light, are meaningless. You stop worrying about everything. You have this feeling that no matter what the dials say, the ship is going to keep flying.”

  Billy reached out and took her empty glass. “That’s what I want us to have tonight. An experience like that.”

  For a moment Sarah was afraid. She banished it. She breathed Billy’s courage, his faith in surviving the unknown. Her dominant emotion remained curiosity. Billy had not mentioned the word love. She wondered if this was a new kind of man she was confronting, a being indifferent to old ideas and feelings.

  “First a swim,” Billy said. He stood up and began undressing. Zip, flip, he was naked. His penis was a long dangling tube. “Come on,” he said, lifting her to her feet. Unbutton, zip, slip, and she was naked too. Billy picked her up and walked slowly down the steps into the pool.

  The water was incredibly cold. He lowered her into it and let her go, then dove deep beside her. She watched him swim underwater to the other end of the pool, each stroke a smooth flowing motion that shot him forward in the green depths. She dove and imitated him. Water flowed against her breasts, thighs. Up she came, gasping for breath. He drew her to him, his hands moving casually around her body. “Isn’t this great?” he said.

  He kissed her, his tongue crowding her mouth. She moved against him in the bubbling water. It was great or at least exotically different. What was she feeling? Sarah told herself to stop worrying about it. This was a man, a pilot, this was California, the beginning of her flight into unknowable freedom, into becoming a grown-up American woman. She was a being unto herself, Sarah, neither Chapman nor Morris. She was severing all the connections here, all thoughts and feelings for parents, husband, daughters.

  They swam to the other end of the pool and Billy carried her to a chaise, where he carefully toweled her dry. “Are you using a diaphragm?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Take it out. What we’re going to do was designed by God. He didn’t factor in diaphragms.”

  She went into the bathhouse and removed the diaphragm. Returning, she walked toward him with a lightness, a fearlessness, that amazed her.

  Billy drew her down on the chaise and began playing with one of her nipp
les. Then his hand traveled down her body and grazed the hair on her mons. Again and again the tips of his fingers, then his palm, passed through the hair, producing shivers of pleasure in her belly and thighs.

  “Hair is an extension of the skin,” Billy whispered. “Do you like that?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I think you’ll like this even more.”

  He wet his fingers with his own saliva and began caressing her clitoris. “Just let go, stop thinking about everything,” he said. “You’re a woman, that’s all you need to know. This is what makes you happy.”

  Waves of warmth began surging through Sarah’s body into her throat. She began to sigh and shiver against him. “We’re only at thirty thousand feet,” Billy said. “We haven’t even fired the rockets yet.”

  He began sweeping the inner wall of her vagina with his index finger, stopping at various points that seemed to treble the pleasure pounding in her body. “Oh,” Sarah cried. “Do that again. Again!”

  “That’s the Grafenberg spot,” Billy said. “He was one of the pioneer sex pilots.”

  Curving across her mind like a shooting star was the realization that Billy was flying her, she was his plane. But it did not matter. She was past caring, past thinking, all she wanted was more of those knowing fingers. “Don’t look at me, just look at the stars,” Billy said.

  He took her hand and wrapped it around his penis. It was huge, pulsing. She gazed into the night sky while pleasure cascaded through her body. She was coming. It had been a year, perhaps two, since she had an orgasm with Cliff.

  Billy scooped the creamy ointment from her labia and spread it across her lips. “Ambrosia,” he said. “The food of the gods. You want some of mine?”

  A stream of clear fluid was oozing from his penis. It was not semen. She did not know what it was. She took some on her fingers and put it in her mouth. It had no taste.

  “It’s coming without coming,” Billy said. “It takes willpower—and practice.”

  His forefinger was still moving deep in her vagina, his thumb was stroking her clitoris. Now his tongue was in her mouth, then curling from her nipples down her breasts. “I think you’re ready. You must have been in the mood. I’ve never seen anyone climb so fast,” he said.

  “Yes, yes, ready,” Sarah gasped.

  He lifted her on top of him and his penis filled her with new pleasure and something more profound, a sense of absolute surrender to every motion, every touch. Her whole body was in orgasm now. Her thighs, her breasts pulsed, a mist enveloped her eyes.

  “Let go, let go of everything,” Billy said and began moving inside her, each thrust sending new pleasure surging through her body and mind. There was no longer any distinction between these two realities. Sarah had receded from Chapman and dismissed Morris. She was in a world of pure feeling where only Billy McCall, the spaceship of her body beneath his hands, was real.

  Billy was coming now too, she could feel the vibrations in his chest. Both his hands were on her breasts, massaging them firmly, steadily. He smiled up at her from the level chaise. “Isn’t it great?” he whispered in the same low intense voice he had used describing his flight in the rocket plane.

  He drew her down for a kiss that consumed her. His penis moved up her vagina as his tongue filled her mouth. In slow, careful syncopation they reversed again and again. Sarah began leaving the world. Her eyes saw nothing but the black sky and its infinity of stars. She was up there with transcendent beings, beyond fear and anxiety, soaring through the night on a fuel she had never encountered before. “Now,” Billy said. “Now. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, yes, yes!”

  He came with a shuddering growl, clutching her breasts, holding her at arm’s length, simultaneously apart and together, a new kind of human vehicle. Sarah vanished in this final eruption. There was no self at this altitude, only woman, man, primary words, primary beings. Again and again and again Billy came until the green water in the pool, the stars above it vanished in a wild wish that it would never end. She was inside something vast and smooth, a universe of black satin and simultaneously outside it, gazing down on the shining pool and their entwined bodies, glowing like stars. She was nowhere and everywhere, blinded and visionary, forever lost and eternally found to be the woman she had imagined, brave, proud, free.

  When Sarah opened her eyes Billy was lying beside her, his fingertips moving slowly across the damp hair of her mons. “Now we glide down in nice, long spirals,” he said. “In a half hour we’ll be ready for another swim and a midnight supper.”

  This time the swim was more dreamlike. They emerged from the pool, put on terry cloth robes and sat down at a redwood table behind the chaises. Billy brought cold chicken and California champagne from the house. “I had a feeling you were ready for something like that,” he said. “After five years of Cliff.”

  “Can’t we leave him out of it?”

  Billy shrugged. “We can try.”

  He raised his champagne. They touched glasses and Billy smiled. “Take a look at your eyes,” he said.

  She examined them in the mirror of her compact. She was appalled. The lids were a dark blue. They looked bruised. “They’re engorged,” Billy said. “That’s what eye shadow is all about.”

  “How did you find out so much about women?”

  “Frank Buchanan taught me most of it. He gave me books on physiology, sex techniques. It made sense. Before you fly a plane, you spend a lot of time studying the manual, finding out how she works, how far you can push the flight envelope. Why not do the same thing with a woman?”

  “That’s what we were doing? Pushing the envelope?” Sarah said.

  “We were way up there,” Billy said. “I haven’t found many who can go that high. Want to do it again before we go home?”

  For a moment, desire seized her, the stars beckoned. But Sarah found something in her soul resisting Billy. “Now that I’m back on earth, I think I’ll stay here for a while.”

  “Suit yourself,” Billy said.

  He was stunningly, brutally indifferent. There were endless numbers of women out there waiting to be flown. Was she wrong to let him go? Desire or its echo in memory clutched at Sarah’s throat. She was almost ready to change her mind.

  “I’ve never had English pussy before. I’m gonna look for more,” Billy said.

  He was still smiling but he knew he was hurting her. That meant she had hurt him by saying no. She was glad she had said it. She was almost proud of her power to hurt him. She did not seem capable of arousing any other emotion in him.

  Suddenly she wanted to rage at him, fling food and dishes. I gave myself to you. I gave you everything. She wanted to scream it in his face. She wanted to run howling into the desert to repent her surrender, to escape the temptation pulsing in Billy McCall’s cock. What was happening to her?

  She did none of those violent things, of course. A determination to match Billy’s cool uncaring produced a frozen politeness. Sarah hated it almost as much as she feared the other impulses. What was she doing? Was she rejecting the greatest love of her life—of any woman’s life? Was it waiting behind Billy’s smile for the woman who risked everything to penetrate his uncaring?

  No, no. It was all insane. What did those warfare words have to do with love? She still believed love was gift and gratitude, sharing and sympathy. For Billy these words did not seem to exist. It was all mockery, skill, daring. If this was the kind of love he found in the sky, she wanted none of it.

  And yet, and yet—she wanted it. She wanted that ascent again, that shuddering fulfillment.

  They flew back to Los Angeles in the dawn. “How do you feel?” Billy said, as the rising sun burst over the Sierras, filling the sky with vivid red.

  “Good,” Sarah said. It was defiant. But it was true. She felt good.

  “How about a little aerial celebration?”

  Billy reached over and tightened her seat belt. Without another word he leaned on the half circle of wheel in his hands and
the left wing went down and they went somersaulting over it. Sarah felt all the blood in her body bulge into her face. It seemed ready to explode through her skin. Ahead of them she saw the coast of California rotating like a gigantic seesaw, sliding up and down. Then gravity slammed her against the seat and her heart was being crushed into a small rectangle and her intestines were flattened like ribbons and her thighs stripped of all sensation. Upside down now and slowly revolving with the Pacific sluicing the other way, pouring water over Alaska and the Pole.

  “Like that?” Billy said.

  “Yes,” Sarah said, all defiance now.

  They rolled in the opposite direction this time. The San Gabriel mountains crumbled into the illimitable desert and her eyes bulged with gravity. Her teeth were jammed into an eternal grimace. At any moment she thought she might bite chunks from her lungs. A whining roar from beyond the planets filled her ears.

  They were level again. “What was that?” Sarah asked.

  “Barrel rolls,” Billy said.

  It was more than a celebration. He was giving her a small sample of what he confronted when he pulled a plane out of a 10 or 11 g dive. He was letting her know his art was written with his blood and bones and flesh. He was revealing some of the things he had omitted in their ascent.

  Now Billy was all business, clicking overhead switches and checking dials and talking to air traffic controllers at Los Angeles Airport, scouring the sky for other planes. They landed in the same smooth effortless way without saying another word. He walked her to the parking lot where she had left her car. She offered to drive him to the Beverly Wilshire. He said he would get a cab. They stood there in the rosy light while a DC-6 thundered down a nearby runway.

  “Should I call you again sometime?” he said.

  Sarah’s whole body went hot and cold and hot again. “It was wonderful but—maybe not.”