Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Cliff bowed his head, struggling to control his grief. The surf sent ghostly fingers up the beach toward them. “We’re going to build a new commercial airliner. I’m going to make you the project manager. Then I’m going to switch you to sales when we start selling it. So you can get maximum credit for it.”

  “Thanks, thanks,” Cliff said.

  It was marvelous what you could do with power, Adrian thought. You can triumph over grief, regret, guilt—even hatred. At least, he hoped he was triumphing.

  The next morning, Adrian told Amanda about Tama’s death. He did not want her to read it in the newspaper first. He also wanted to find out more about her friendship, relationship, whatever it was, with Tama.

  Amanda told him nothing. All she said, over and over, was: “Adrian, the time has finally come. You’ll have to pay a price for this. A terrible price.”

  “I didn’t do anything that a thousand other men haven’t done! I did it for your sake! Because I love you. I’ve always loved you. I wanted to come back to you.”

  Whether it was true or not, Adrian now believed it. He was desperate for some kind of resolution, for relief from emotions that were tearing him to pieces. At the office he dictated a statement about Tama Morris’s “tragic death,” expounding on her years of “stellar contributions” to the company.

  That night Adrian brought home a huge bouquet of roses for Amanda. She ignored them. She also continued to ignore his questions about her friendship with Tama.

  “How did she die?” she asked.

  Adrian told her. Amanda smiled. “A true warrior,” she said.

  “Warrior?” Adrian said.

  Amanda refused to say another word. Adrian began to grow alarmed. But he did not know what to do. He was almost as irrational as Amanda at this point. He spent the night in his study, dictating his conception of the Starduster. It would carry 175 passengers and a crew of six at 450 miles an hour. It would have a cruising range of 2,700 miles, just short of transcontinental. He dictated letters to nineteen airline presidents, all members of the Conquistadores del Cielo, asking their opinion of the profitability of such a plane.

  Adrian went to bed at 3 A.M. so exhausted he was sure sleep was only an eyeblink away. But the vision of Tama in the bathtub’s crimson water loomed in the darkness. Her husky voice whispered: Love me, really love me, Adrian.

  I’m sorry, Adrian whispered to the heedless ghost.

  A sound in the darkness. Someone had stumbled into a chair a few feet from the bedroom door. Adrian reached for the gun he kept in the drawer of his night table at Dan Hanrahan’s suggestion, when Califia started sending him menacing letters. Hanrahan had also taught him how to use it.

  Footsteps came toward the bed. A figure was outlined against the starlit window. Adrian rolled out of bed and crouched behind the night table. “Who’s that?” he said.

  “It’s Califia, Adrian, come to avenge her beloved Tama and all the women you’ve degraded in your vicious clubhouse with its golden face.”

  Amanda? Adrian switched on the light and almost dropped the gun. His wife was standing at the foot of the bed, naked, a long carving knife in her hand. Somehow she had cut herself across the top of her right breast, a deep slice that had already coated the breast and half her torso with oozing blood.

  “What in Christ are you doing?” Adrian screamed.

  “I’m going to kill you, Adrian. In Tama’s name. Only then can Califia sleep content in her gold-and-ivory tomb.”

  She walked toward him, the knife raised. “I can use this,” Adrian cried, brandishing the gun.

  “Bullets can’t harm Califia. She’s immortal,” Amanda said in the toneless voice that had been irritating Adrian for months.

  She rounded the corner of the bed and lunged at him. Adrian thrust the lamp in front of him for a shield and the knife sank into the green shade. Amanda pulled it out and tried to raise it again for another thrust. With a snarl Adrian shoved the lamp in her face, knocking her onto the bed. He dove for the knife arm and they wrestled wildly across the double bed, Amanda screaming now, a shrill wail worthy of a jet engine.

  In the melee Amanda received an ugly slash on the neck below her left ear but she continued to do her utmost to kill Adrian. He finally seized her wrist with both hands and smashed it against the other night table. The knife flew free but he still had a madwoman to contend with. Amanda clawed at his eyes, kicked, kneed, all the while shrilling her war cry.

  Cursing, terrified, Adrian wound her into the sheet and shouted for their Mexican housekeeper. She stood in the doorway, bug-eyed at the blood-smeared bed, the wrecked lamp, the knife. “Call Dr. Kirk Willoughby,” he said. He gave her the number from memory. “Tell him it’s an emergency. Emergencia!”

  She scampered away and he was left with Amanda raving. “Kill me. Kill me now!” she screamed. “I want to die like a warrior in the service of my queen. I don’t want to spend another hour as a prisoner of you loathsome men.”

  “Shut up!” Adrian jammed his hand over her mouth and pressed the sheet into the wounds on her neck and breast, stanching the flow of blood.

  Kirk Willoughby found him in this position when he arrived. Adrian told him what had happened and begged him to deal with Amanda without calling a hospital ambulance. He dreaded what people in the company and the aircraft business would say if the story got into the newspapers.

  “They’ll think I attacked her,” he said.

  “You’ll both be attacked by Califia, Queen of California, the moment I free myself,” Amanda screamed, resuming her wild thrashing.

  Amanda kicked and spit and clawed furiously at Willoughby when he tried to approach her. “We’ll be glad to submit to your royal whims, your highness, if you’ll let us tend to your wounds,” Willoughby said.

  “Bring Sarah Morris to me. The mother of Tama’s granddaughters. I have a message for her,” Amanda said.

  Willoughby’s eyes sought Adrian’s. He nodded. He was ready to do anything to satisfy this madwoman. He called Cliff Morris and told him to bring Sarah to the house. Thanks to the freeway, they arrived in fifteen minutes. Adrian explained Amanda’s delusion and advised Sarah to pretend to be a subject of Queen Califia.

  By that time Willoughby had given Amanda an injection of morphine and stitched her wounds. She was propped against the back of the bed, looking weirdly regal with the sheet robed around her. She seemed pleased to see Sarah, who could only stare incomprehensibly at her.

  “You must explain to your daughters exactly what happened tonight,” Amanda said. “I was distressed to see that my breasts had grown back and resolved to amputate one, as an example to my followers. I wanted to be sure none of us would ever be enslaved in their gold-smeared club in Topanga Canyon. The loss of blood weakened me and I was unable to kill the chief scum bearer, Amanda’s husband. Will you tell them that?”

  “Yes, your majesty,” Sarah said.

  “Assure them my followers haven’t deserted me. They’re out there in the night, waiting to be summoned. But I’ve failed them with my weakness for male vileness and luxury. I never should have signed even a temporary truce with them. I’ve paid a terrible price for it. I’ve lost my dearest truest follower, Tama. You knew her and loved her, didn’t you?

  “I did, your majesty,” Sarah said. “She was a wonderful woman.”

  “I let him destroy her,” Amanda said, glaring at Adrian. “I watched and let him destroy her because I thought she was happy. I didn’t believe any woman could be happy with this monster but I let her try. I let her die of unhappiness. Now I want to die too.”

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow, your majesty,” Willoughby said. He had called an ambulance from a private sanitarium in the San Fernando Valley. The attendants were at the door. Strapped to the stretcher, Amanda left them screaming: “Tell your daughters they can kill Califia a thousand times but she’ll always return!”

  Adrian thanked Sarah Morris and got her and Cliff out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not
like the way she was looking at him. There seemed to be an unspoken accusation in her eyes. He ordered the housekeeper to clean up the bedroom and retreated to his study. Around him lay the pieces of his personal life, like the wreckage of a crashed plane.

  Adrian banished the mess from his sight and whispered the name of his new airliner: “Starduster.” It was going to make a billion dollars for Buchanan Aircraft. Did that justify Tama’s sightless stare, Amanda’s blood-soaked madness, Sarah Morris’s accusing glare?

  Of course not. The two things had nothing to do with each other. He was a man who made planes and had trouble with women. The two things had nothing to do with each other. Nothing! For a few desperate minutes, Adrian almost believed it.

  WHAT DO WOMEN REALLY WANT?

  Starduster, Starduster, Starduster. She was sick of it, Sarah Morris thought, as her husband orated another aspostrophe to the plane that was going to make their fortune. Usually she tolerated these monologues at the dinner table. Why was she irked by a Saturday morning version? What was wrong with her? Didn’t she want to make a fortune?

  Already, the Starduster had doubled Cliff’s salary. They had moved from south Los Angeles to a stone-and-stucco house on the upper slope of the Palos Verdes peninsula, with a marvelous view of the ocean. It was a nice place to live, washed by sea breezes, largely free of the noxious gases that created smog attacks in the rest of Los Angeles.

  Maybe her alienation was simply British. While the Starduster gathered momentum, her father and his colleagues at de Havilland were frantically trying to find out why the Comet had disintegrated in midair three times. They were conducting enormously expensive tests that were driving the company to the edge of bankruptcy. Her mother related the doleful story to Sarah in weekly letters. When she tried to talk to Cliff about it, he had gloated—yes, gloated—over the Comet’s failure. In a flash her English self, her English pride, had been reborn inside her American persona.

  “Bzzzzzzz.” Her six-year-old son came racing into the living room flying a scale model of a B-17 in his upraised hand. He rounded the couch and a wingtip caught a lamp shade. The lamp toppled onto a vase and water and tulips spewed all over the couch. “Oh!” Sarah cried, seizing him in a near death grip.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Cliff said. “He didn’t mean it. Right, Charlie?”

  “Right,” Charlie said, twisting away from Sarah. The mockery in his green eyes, the curve of his smile, left Sarah shaking inside. Was she looking at Billy McCall’s son? The rest of Charlie diminished the fear. He had jet-black hair and a physique that seemed closer to Cliff’s thick-boned body than Billy’s lean sinewy frame. But Billy’s father, Buzz McCall, was thick-boned and dark to the point of swarthiness.

  Cliff was oblivious to the resemblance. Charlie was his son, the light of his life, the reason he went to work every morning with a smile on his face. Charlie and the Starduster. They had transformed Cliff’s life, rescued him from the morose, sullen husband who had emerged from the destruction of the Talus. Sarah told herself she should be grateful for that. But gratitude kept eluding her. Maybe it was because another secret separated her even more brutally from Cliff’s happiness.

  It lay upstairs at the bottom of her jewelry box. A letter that had arrived the day after Tama committed suicide. On the blue-bordered page were three words: I was wrong. Sarah knew why Tama had killed herself. Cliff had choked out the awful story the night of her death. The next day the letter arrived, addressed to Sarah.

  Since that day it arrived again and again in Sarah’s mind. I was wrong reverberated through her soul. Wrong about what? Sarah asked. The answers were endlessly puzzling and often demoralizing. Wrong about what a person can accomplish in America? Wrong about the power of love? Wrong about Cliff? Wrong about leaving her first unloved husband, Cliff’s lost father, disobeying the injunction of the Catholic Church? Wrong about trusting Adrian Van Ness? Wrong about redesigning Sarah Chapman to be an executive’s wife?

  Some—perhaps all—of these questions caused sadness to seep through Sarah’s soul. She awoke in the gray predawn light and prowled the rooms of her house. She stood in the doorway and contemplated her two daughters and her son, blissfully asleep in the peaceful year 1957 and wondered what their futures would be. It was the age of Ike, the general and president who ruled a prosperous, self-satisfied America. She read magazines that declared the family was the natural center of a woman’s life, the only social entity to which she should ever belong. The editors of the Ladies Home Journal told her that an incredible 97 percent of American women had taken marriage vows.

  Where did that leave Tama’s I was wrong? Where did it leave Sarah? Another voice answered that question. Humiliated, Amanda Van Ness whispered. It was a year since she had been summoned to her audience with Queen Califia in Adrian Van Ness’s blood-smeared bedroom. The episode still partook too much of a nightmare to think coherently about it. But it had engraved Amanda on Sarah’s consciousness as a primary being, a symbolic woman. Again and again she found herself returning to Amanda’s first visit to their tract house in south Los Angeles, when she had warned Sarah and her daughters against humiliation.

  Sarah had told no one about her midnight visit to the Van Ness house. But everyone in the company soon knew about Amanda’s breakdown. Susan Hardy said Buzz McCall had gotten the story from the Mexican housekeeper, whom Adrian had fired a week after the incident. Buzz claimed Adrian had known Amanda was Califia, the woman who had sent threatening letters to half the executives in the company. Buzz claimed it was a plot to close the Honeycomb Club. For Susan, the discovery of the existence of the club had been a humiliation. Sarah, more sure of her ability to match the Honeycomb’s women in the bedroom, had only been dismayed. Now she wondered if she too should feel humiliated in the name of other women who felt that way.

  After helping Sarah clean up the mess on the couch, Cliff headed for another weekend of work on the Starduster. Charlie and his sister Margaret went off to a play group at the country club, and Elizabeth, now a precocious fourteen, vanished in a swirl of hair spray and mascara with a troop of equally precocious girlfriends. Sarah helped Maria make the beds and then went out on the porch to read The Lonely Crowd, a book that argued Americans were shifting their values from inner moral codes to the opinions of those around them. Sarah suspected they had been doing that since 1776—but California was a giant laboratory that seemed to prove every word of the sociologist’s argument.

  Grrrr. Her concentration was broken by another plane, this one’s motor not created by the voice of a six-year-old. Over the ocean, a green monoplane was tracing a Jackson Pollock line against the blue sky, rolling, diving, looping, spinning in and out of near disaster again and again, carving the air into forms that built wildly, musically on one another. There was a rhythm to it, violent, spasmodic, that found an echo in Sarah’s inner ear. It resembled the new music, rock and roll, which her daughter Elizabeth found exhilarating and Cliff found infuriating. The pilot ended his performance with the most dangerous stunt in the aerobatic book, a lomcevak. He climbed almost vertically until he stalled and then tumbled down, tail over nose, wing over wing as if he and the machine had simultaneously gone berserk. He regained control less than fifty feet off the water and roared skyward for a farewell loop.

  Sarah gripped the railing of the porch with both hands, feeling as weak, as feeble as a ninety-year-old. Billy McCall was back in Los Angeles. Whenever he arrived, he announced his presence to her this way. It had become a cruel game they played with each other. The next time she saw him at a Buchanan party or ceremony, she would smile and tell him how much she enjoyed his performance. He would nod and tell her he was working on a whole new repertoire out in the desert.

  I was wrong. What was Tama telling her? Wrong to cling to Cliff and her children, in spite of the sadness that washed through her body like a tide of sludge? Wrong to trust her body to deliver happiness? Wrong to be born a woman? Maybe that was the fundamental mistake.

  That
night when Cliff came home Sarah kissed him and said: “I want to learn to fly.”

  “What?” He looked at her as if she had gone insane.

  “I’ve always wanted to learn. Will you teach me?”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t flown a plane since I left the army. You know that.”

  “You could brush up easily enough. Then you could teach me.”

  He started to get angry—or ashamed. “Sarah—we’ve got three kids to raise. Flying is dangerous. Dangerous as hell.”

  “How can you say that? When you’re busy trying to sell the whole world on how safe it is.”

  “The airlines are pretty safe. But flying around in a private plane isn’t. Unless you do it all the time and keep your skills sharp. That’s why I gave it up. I didn’t have the time. Or the money.”

  He was lying. He gave it up because he was afraid of it. How did she know that? Was Billy McCall whispering it to her? “Why the hell do you want to learn?” Cliff asked, trying to control his exasperation.

  “For the thrill of it! Because I’ve got three kids am I condemned to being a hausfrau for the rest of my life?”

  “I sure as hell hope you’re going to stay around and raise them. Flying isn’t thrilling once you learn. Did you ever talk to an airline pilot? They’re bored stiff most of the time. It’s like driving a truck.”

  “Dick Stone seems to think it’s still thrilling.”

  “That’s because he flies up to Palo Alto to see a girl who likes doing it at ten thousand feet.”

  Sarah shook her head. “He loves it. You can see it on his face, in his eyes, when he talks about it.”

  “I don’t care whether you love it or hate it. You’re still not entitled to risk your neck learning how to fly—with three kids to raise.”

  She could not tell him she wanted to invade Billy McCall’s sky, she wanted to face him as an equal. That was the only way she could respond to his challenge. The other way, the telephone call for another flight to the desert, was the really ruinous choice. That would separate her from Cliff, the children, forever. Dying in the wreckage of a plane would not do that. It would leave her enshrined in their hearts as a cynosure of courage, a martyr of the air.