Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Hatred, hatred, it was like a million cages of hissing snakes writhing across the landscape, Dick thought. Slithering, biting, thrashing across America over Vietnam, the rise and fall of Negro hopes, the virulent political divisions Nixon seemed to encourage. Women like Sarah concentrated it in their tormented hearts. Why did he find himself almost paralyzed by dread?

  Dick slammed down the phone. He did not want to hear another word. He sat in the bedroom while Cliff and Sarah reviled each other for another twenty minutes. Dick stared out the window at the curving ultramodern architecture of the Watergate complex, struggling against a sense of disorientation, disintegration. Were there any certainties in this hate-racked America? Was Adrian Van Ness’s smooth assurance that Richard Nixon was the president who would solve all Buchanan’s problems worth anything?

  As Cliff Morris whirled around the globe selling planes and pursuing Angela Perry, most of the day-to-day decision making had gravitated into Dick’s hands. More than ever he felt the weight of being responsible for the survival of Buchanan and the thousands of designers, engineers, salesmen, and assembly-line workers who had put years of their lives into the company.

  Thunk. Cliff had hung up. He was draining his glass of Inverness as Dick returned to the living room. “Does that happen often?” Dick said.

  Cliff shook his head. “I knew it was there, waiting to come out. The way you know some things in a marriage. You know them but you don’t think about them.”

  Dick nodded, thinking about his own tense marriage. Maybe it was time for some emergency repairs. Exactly what these should or could be, he had no idea.

  Dick drank and listened to Cliff talk about Tama and Buzz and Adrian and Billy and the dirty game Cliff and Sarah had played to destroy him. Cliff did not feel guilty about it because Billy was going to destroy him if he got the big job. That was the game they were playing—kill or be killed—the game that had started when Billy had moved into Cliff’s house at the age of eleven. It was all so stunningly inevitable, Dick was reduced to speechlessness again.

  They went from Billy to Charlie and the mess the United States of America had made of the war in Vietnam. They did not have an answer much less an explanation. They talked as men, as friends, as survivors of an earlier war—and could only agree that America had failed to use its air power in a decisive way. Whether this was the whole truth or only part of it, whether it was even true, was beyond their competence that night. They were dealing with pain, loss, grief, not strategy.

  By the time dawn began tinting the Washington sky, they had both drunk so much Inverness they no were longer making sense. Dick hoisted Cliff to his feet and towed him into the bedroom and sprawled him on the king-size bed.

  “Dick,” Cliff said. “Never forget this. Y’real friend.”

  “Just promise me one thing. You won’t become a movie producer.”

  Cliff shook his head. “Gonna build that bomber. For Charlie. Gonna make it so fucking good no president has to send kids eyeball to eyeball with flak batteries.”

  For Charlie and for Billy McCall. Dick was still struggling with his own memories of the part he had played in Billy’s destruction.

  In the living room, Dick called Cassie in California. “I know you won’t like this—but I’m not going to make it home for Christmas.” He explained what had happened—why he felt Cliff needed a friend to stay with him for a few days.

  “Doesn’t he have a wife?” Cassie said.

  “They’re through. Between this and Angela—she’s ditching him.”

  “Sarah?” Cassie said. She had been on several of Sarah’s benefit committees. They had not become friends. Sarah, performing as that empty vessel, Mrs. Clifford Morris, had no friends.

  Dick gave Cassie a brief summary of the dialogue between Sarah and Cliff. “I didn’t think she could be that impolite,” Cassie said.

  Dread sucked at Dick’s nerves again. He could think of nothing to say. “When can we look forward to celebrating Christmas?” Cassie asked. “Anytime before New Year’s?”

  “I hope so. I’ll call you.”

  “We’ll be so grateful.”

  Dick collapsed on the couch and slept until noon. He awoke with an even more acute sense of dread. It seemed to ooze from the walls of the Watergate complex. Wrong, wrong, whispered a warning voice in his head. Everything was going wrong. Politically, personally. He heard the bitterness in Cassie’s voice and suddenly wanted to be on a plane to California as soon as possible.

  Cliff was still snoring. Dick called Adrian and told him about Charlie. “Good God. How did Sarah take it?” Adrian asked.

  Dick gave him a succinct summary. “This will make Cliff inseparable from that left-wing Hollywood slut,” Adrian said. “She’ll rush to console him. For an artist of her minor talents, real-life drama like this is irresistible. It supplies the emotion her imagination lacks.”

  Adrian sighed. “Are you ready to be the next president of Buchanan Aircraft, Dick?”

  “I don’t think this is the time or place to bring that up,” Dick said.

  “I suppose not,” Adrian said. “But I’m not withdrawing the question.”

  Dick went out in search of breakfast. There was no food in the apartment. When he returned Cliff was on the phone. “Wear a fur coat. It’s cold as hell,” he said. “I’ll be waiting at the gate.”

  Cliff hung up and smiled almost cheerfully at Dick. “I called Angela. She’s flying in. You don’t have to hang around. Don’t you want to get home for Christmas?”

  “I missed my plane.”

  “I’ll get you on an Air Force plane.”

  A call to the Pentagon located a Colossus that was flying replacement crews to Thailand to maintain the B-52 bombing threat until the Communists signed a peace treaty. Dick sat with the young pilots and bombardiers and gunners, listening to them discuss the tactics that were being used over Vietnam. They all thought the generals were idiotic.

  “It’s World War II stuff,” one freckled-faced redhead said to Dick, as if this was synonymous with prehistoric. “We should be coming in low, under the radar.”

  Dick thought of the BX, the invisible plane they should be flying—that they would be flying if the U.S. Congress was not a collection of pinheads. It had taken a full year to negotiate the TPP contract and write up its 13 million pieces of paper. Buchanan’s enemies in the Senate, people like Proxmire and the Creature, were already threatening to block funding for the program. That meant its supporters and the Air Force would keep it alive by turning it into a stealth item in the budget. This accumulated stupidity and hatred left these kids flying bombers that were almost as old as they were into skies full of radar-guided missiles and antiaircraft shells.

  They landed at Vandenberg Air Base in California to refuel and Dick hitched a ride to Los Angeles with a civilian employee. He did not call Cassie. He decided it would be fun to surprise her and the kids. He bailed his car out of LAX and roared up the Ventura Freeway to their house in Nichols Canyon. It was about six o’clock when he unlocked the front door. He found nine-year-old Jake (for John) and seven-year-old Catherine watching television.

  “Daddy!” they yelled and danced around him.

  “Where’s Mommy?”

  “She’s visiting up street,” Jake said. “At Dennisons.”

  The Dennisons were real estate brokers. Dick had bought the house through them. Lately they had hired a publicity man and became known as “brokers to the stars.” They sold houses for fabulous prices in Malibu, Westwood.

  An hour later, there was still no sign of Cassie. “Did Mom say when she’d be home?” Dick asked.

  “No,” Catherine said. “Sometime she stays up there a long time.”

  “What do you do for dinner?”

  “We heat up TV trays in the microwave. Mom showed me how to turn it on,” Jake said.

  “I think I’ll go tell Mom I’m here.”

  Dick walked up the steep winding road, his mind racing ahead to what he might find a
t Dennisons, then denying it as absurd. When he reached the sprawling two-story house, clinging, like his own, to the steep slope of the canyon, he thought it looked deserted. There was only one car in the open garage—a 1960 Dodge. Usually there were three or four, including some flashy sports cars. The Dennisons raced them as a hobby.

  Dick rang the bell. Silence. He rang it again and again. Silence. He pounded on the door. Carl Dennison jerked it open. He was a big freckle-faced man with a handlebar mustache and slightly protruding teeth.

  “Dick!” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for Cassie.”

  “Cassie? I haven’t seen her.”

  He was a very inept liar.

  “The kids told me she was visiting you. Where’s your wife?”

  “She—she’s away.”

  “Cassie!” Dick shouted. “Guess who’s home for Christmas.”

  Silence. Dennison stood there, anxiety exuding from every pore. “Listen,” he said. “This was a onetime thing. She didn’t know Doris had split. We started talking and got carried away—”

  “Cassie!” Dick roared.

  He shoved Dennison aside and strode into the house. The place was all but stripped of furniture. Doris had apparently split in a moving van. He found Cassie sitting on the edge of an unmade bed off the living room, pulling on a pair of blue jeans. On top she was still naked. She looked ashamed—and defiant. With great deliberation she put on an old denim shirt and buttoned it.

  “Merry Christmas,” Cassie said.

  Dick realized she was drunk. “Let’s go home,” he said.

  They walked stiff-legged downhill to their house. “Reminds me of my stewardess days,” Cassie said. “Walking down the aisle while the plane was climbing. Gave all the ginks a good look at the equipment.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Dick said.

  “Not long. Let’s have dinner and argue later, when the kids are in bed.”

  They struggled through dinner with the kids doing all the talking—mostly about school. Dick gave them a laundered version of visiting the White House, which impressed Jake. They watched a dramatization of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol until nine o’clock. Unreality clawed at Dick’s brain. In Washington Cliff Morris grieved for his son, blasted out of the sky by Russian missiles over Hanoi. He sat in California watching sentiments that moved nineteenth-century Londoners to tears, trying to think of what to say to his adulterous wife.

  Cassie put the kids to bed. Dick waited in the living room. She finally appeared, a half glass of bourbon in her hand. He grabbed it away from her and threw it into the fireplace. Seeing her on the booze upset him more than her infidelity.

  “Why?” he said. “That’s what I want to know. Do you love him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then—why?”

  “He talked me into it. He made me feel sorry for him. It was better than feeling nothing—the way I feel with you.”

  “You need help,” Dick said. “I’ll talk to our medical director. He’ll suggest a therapist.”

  “Great,” Cassie said. “It’ll be nice to have an intelligent adult to talk to for a change.”

  “We can work this out. It won’t be easy but I’ll try to understand.”

  “I don’t want your lousy understanding,” Cassie said. “I don’t want your goddamn condescending forgiveness either.”

  She strode defiantly to the bar and filled another glass with bourbon. “You want to know the real reason for this mess?” she said, her voice thickening with tears. “I could put up with your impossible hours. I want to see us win this damn war as much as you do. I could even put up with your stupid guilt about killin’ Billy McCall. What I can’t stand is knowin’ you don’t love me. You never have. I don’t know what the hell you love besides your miserable airplane company.”

  Are you ready to be the next president of Buchanan Aircraft, Dick? whispered Adrian Van Ness.

  Was this the price he was paying? Was that his secret motive from the start? A sly ambition, nurtured in the small hours of the morning, watching Cliff Morris flounder? No. Dick denied the accusation. He was working for those kids on their way to fly obsolete planes into a vortex of radar-guided antiaircraft fire over Hanoi. Maybe he was no longer working for the greater glory of the United States of America. He was still working for the fliers, for the brotherhood of the air against the greedy ignorant groundlings.

  True enough, true enough. But that commitment did not explain why he had lost his all-American girl.

  Dick saw Cliff Morris in that king-size bed in the Watergate apartment, entangled with Angela, emptying his grief, his pain, into her. Breaking through loss and bitterness to clutch at joy. Freedom—that was what the image said. In some incomprehensible way, the word, the image, belonged to California, even though it was being enacted in Washington. It was not just the freedom to fuck. It was an inward thing, a kind of space between a man’s mind and heart where a person lived. Why had Dick Stone lost his space? What was wrong with him?

  At first I thought I could not bear

  The depths of my despair

  Amalie. She was still there, barring his way to happiness.

  ECHO CHAMBER

  “That was beautiful,” Susan Hardy said when Sarah Morris finished telling her husband how much she hated him. Susan helped Sarah weep for Charlie through the rest of that long night. They wept as women and drank like men. Susan let Sarah read aloud the letters Charlie had written her from Vietnam, telling her how much he loved to fly, how unafraid he was of dying. If I have to die in order to fly I’ll take it. I’ve been dying to fly all my life. It’s logical.

  Sarah could see him laughing as he wrote it. He could make a joke out of anything, even death. Courage was as natural to him as breathing.

  “Burn them,” Susan said.

  “Burn them?”

  “They’re dangerous. Your husband would try to publish them. He’d try to make Charlie a martyr of the air. He’d inspire thousands, millions, of others to think that way. We’d never eliminate the war love from their souls.”

  Burn them? Sarah could not strike the match. She let Susan do it. She piled the letters in the fireplace and burned them with her zippo. “Zip and they’re zapped,” Susan said. A bad joke.

  Susan had not abandoned their friendship when Cliff became president of Buchanan. She sent Sarah notices of meetings of Women Concerned About the War and similar groups with capital letters. Sarah sent her money. After Billy and Victoria died and she became Mrs. Clifford Morris, the hollow woman, going through the motions of celebrity, Sarah sent Susan even more money.

  In return Susan kept Sarah informed about the latest gossip at Buchanan, which she obtained through her “network.” Sarah was confused by the term at first. She thought a network was something that broadcast television and radio shows. Susan explained this network broadcast the kind of information women needed to survive in a male-dominated world. She told her Cliff had seduced an actress named Angela-something in his office and was now seeing her almost nightly in her house above Mulholland Drive.

  Of course Susan had no idea Mrs. Clifford Morris did not care whom her husband was seeing or what he was doing with her. She was actually relieved that she was not required to be Sarah, to play that part in the bedroom where she had shivered and shaken with horror and terror for the deaths her hatred, her inverted love, had caused. Sarah understood why Cliff was equally reluctant to visit her there, even if he did not understand why, even if he was simply trying to avoid the dead weight of her despair, a potentially fatal drag on his salesman’s buoyancy.

  If Sarah did not care, what explained that explosion of hatred? Was it simply a performance to please Susan, her only friend? Or was Mrs. Clifford Morris in touch with Sarah on some subterranean level? Perhaps that was it. Lately Mrs. Clifford Morris had been giving Susan Hardy more and more money and going to some of her capital-letter groups with her. She listened to angry women telling each other how
their husbands and lovers had abused and exploited them. Many were from the aircraft business but not all. The aircraft business did not have a monopoly on macho males who only wanted one thing from a woman. At these meetings for some peculiar reason Mrs. Clifford Morris found herself able to get in touch with her previous incarnation, Sarah.

  Now she sat and watched Charlie’s letters burn. Having just resigned as Mrs. Clifford Morris, she had to let Sarah do her thinking. She thought it was a shame. She wept uncontrollably and remembered things that Mrs. Clifford Morris had successfully forgotten. Charlie zooming around the house with a model plane in his hand, smashing lamps and vases. Cliff beside her in the bed upstairs, sharing his fears and hopes about the Talus and other planes.

  “You can’t stay here any longer,” Susan decreed. “You need a different site to launch your new consciousness.”

  Oh, good, thought the ghost of Mrs. Clifford Morris. I will be neither Mrs. nor Miss. I will be Ms. A nice foreshortening of the self—an alphabetical lobotomy.

  They would move to the desert and convert Mrs. Clifford Morris’s vacation house into a center for Women for Peace and Freedom. That was Susan’s latest capital letter group. After thinking about it carefully, Susan decided it would be better if Ms. Sarah Morris did not divorce Clifford Morris for the time being. Divorce was an ultimate weapon, which should be used when a man was least able to cope with it. For the time being Cliff Morris was riding high on money from the war machine. Better to wait until he was dumped by his Hollywood dream girl or by Buchanan or both and then stick it to him.

  A marvelous phrase that summed up msdom, Sarah thought. In the new age that would unfold in their desert encounter sessions, they would acquire the ability to stick it to all of them.

  “All the murderers and their war machine,” Susan said. She was one of the leaders of the antiwar movement in California. Major politicians conferred with her before making statements. She was in touch with gays and lesbians in San Francisco who were organizing their own political movement. Excitement, energy, surrounded Susan, turning her into a pillar of fire. Out of the flames would emerge a new kind of beast, a woman who could stick it to them.