“Let’s see if I get this Southern hospitality thing right,” he hissed into Hogarth’s face as he pushed him outside. “How’s this? Come back again real soon, you all.”
* * *
For some mysterious reason, Fleischer’s weekend passes were cancelled for the next two months.
“It’s that bastard, Hogarth,” he complained to Willie, who knew better than to reply. He knew Fleischer was right, but there was nothing either one of them could do. Things had their own protocol in the South, and nothing they could do would ever change it.
* * *
The coffee and doughnuts story didn’t surprise me at all. I can remember my father championing the underdog many times as I was growing up. He loved challenging authority and took a malevolent glee in winning. He started petitions to get the cop on the beat where our house was, special orthopedic shoes because the guy’s feet hurt in his uniform shoes. He got the city to put a NO AFTERNOON PARKING sign outside a neighborhood store belonging to an elderly butcher, enabling him to have a clear path for delivery trucks. All that relentless energy, boundless and burning, ready to turn a cause into a case into a victory.
And when he came home, the light dampened in his eyes, the vitality drained, the cold, distant anger returned. He set his lips into a tight line and locked himself in the basement to tinker with his electronics and tune out his family and keep the pain at bay.
Chapter 19
It seemed to Willie that Fleischer spent most of his time in the radio office, bent over the small workbench, either tinkering with sketches that might fix the Vultees, or working hard on one or another of what he liked to call his “projects.” This time he was twisting fine, hair-thin silver-gray tungsten wires around tiny pieces of galena crystals, the polycrystalline semiconductors he had salvaged from the dozens of old crystal sets that had been discarded on base after somebody was finished experimenting with them. The galena crystals were suspended from woven strands of tungsten, their gray metal shining against the silver wires in a strikingly delicate pattern.
“What is that for, Sarge?” Willie pointed to the array of sparkling crystals that were gathered on the bench.
Fleischer picked up a few crystals and wiped them against his shirt to polish them. “It’s a gift for my girl. A necklace. She loves it when I send her stuff like this. Just loves it.”
Willie shook his head over the electronic jewelry. “Mmm-mmm,” he replied with a mild sarcasm that was lost on Fleischer. “I’ll just bet she does.”
* * *
Better than the radio stations that played country songs filled with heartbreak all day long was the special station that carried the talks between the pilots on their training flights and the control tower. Fleischer had illicitly wired the wash rack radio to a loudspeaker so that they could pick up transmissions and hear what was happening in the skies above them. He took notes—he was always taking notes—trying to match performance and complaints with the problems he found on the planes when they cleaned them.
A week earlier, he had put a requisition in to advance the pressure on the benzene hoses.
“Maybe the pressure isn’t strong enough to knock off all that oil,” he had explained to Willie. But the brass held firm. Seekircher even made a special trip to Hangar Five to tell Fleischer that the pressure gauge was set by Vultee, approved by Colonel Fairchild, and that there would be no deviation. Just concentrate on cleaning the planes, he said, and send them back out. Solving the crashes wasn’t part of the job description.
* * *
“They’re not worried, because they’re not the ones flying,” Davies commented darkly to Fleischer one night during a drinking session. Fleischer had been complaining about Fairchild’s resistance to any change of wash rack procedure. “They can always order up a new set of planes.”
“Maybe you should put in for something else,” Fleischer answered. “Until I figure things out, Jink, maybe you shouldn’t be flying.”
Davies’s head jerked back in indignation. “Not fly?” He gasped. “I love to fly! I love it. Besides, it got me out of the mines. Do you know how many in my family have died in the mines? I’m ever grateful it got me out of the mines.”
Fleischer looked down and shrugged, embarrassed. “I just don’t want anything to—you know—happen—to—” There was an awkward silence.
“I guess like my trombone playing got me out of Harlem,” Willie broke in. “I played professional for a while. It got me out of a life of trouble.”
“Trombone! You don’t say!” Davies’s voice rose with enthusiasm and relief at being able to change the subject. “I play the valve trombone, myself!”
“No kidding!” Willie was pleased that he and the Welshman had something in common. “Ellington is using the valve trombone, you know. You can get those quick changes from B flat to B natural that you can’t get on the slide.”
“It is a challenge.” Davies nodded.
“Before I got drafted, I was trying a plunger on my slide trombone,” Willie said. “You know, like ‘Tricky Sam’ Nanton. Only I can’t get his ‘voice’.”
“He’s sure one of a kind,” Davies agreed.
Fleischer gave them both an impatient look. Music talk bored him; he’d rather discuss the new radar technology. He leaned forward. “Jink, you probably don’t know this,” he casually dropped into the conversation, “but I, myself, play the flazoo.”
“The what?” Willie and Davies chimed together.
“The flazoo,” Fleischer said evenly. “It’s a toilet paper roll, and you cut holes and hum through it.” He pulled another cap off a bottle and took a deep drink. “Now, let’s stop wasting time talking and slide some beer down our throats.”
* * *
They heard the French boy go down not long after that. Heard him in the radio room, his voice coming out of the illegal wash rack radio in a wild, frantic staccato French. They didn’t understand what he was screaming, but one of the men, from Louisiana, spoke a sort of bayou French.
“He says the equipment is going crazy,” he translated for Fleischer. “He’s trying everything. Doesn’t even have time to open his chute.”
It ended in a crash of angry static that echoed across the hangar and stopped the men in their tracks. They had to clean him up, too. The next day.
Seekircher dropped by the day after that. August was, as usual, the lookout. His job, of pushing the planes into the wash rack, gave him the advantage of being outside most of the time. His second and most important job was to give Fleischer enough warning so he could turn off the receiver in the radio room.
“Visitors,” August yelled, just the way Willie had taught him. It was hard for August to understand things, but if you told him slowly and carefully what to do, he did it well.
As soon as Fleischer heard August’s warning, he flipped the radio switch from intercept to its regularly scheduled country-western heartbreak, silencing the tower voices and leaving nothing but the sound of the smoke and steam and clanging of planes along with the Delmore Brothers singing about how they were Layin’ Down Their Old Guitar and Tellin’ the World Good-Bye. Just in time, too, as Major Seekircher stepped into Hangar Five.
“Fleischer,” Seekircher started, “remember your plan to change the pressure in the wash hoses?”
Fleischer nodded. “Yessir.”
Seekircher made a face. “Well, to hell with Vultee, vary the pressure. See if it helps. At this point, we’ll try anything. Just don’t mention this to Fairchild. He’s afraid to piss, since he’s been bucking for general. It’s just between us.”
“Yessir.” Fleischer saluted, then pulled out a clipboard filled with notes to show Seekircher what he had been planning. Seekircher took it from him and looked it over carefully. There were pages filled with pressure graphs, sketches of the Vultee, and modifications of wash rack procedure. Seekircher ran his thumb up and down each page, quickly scanning the contents.
“You put a lot of thought into this,” he said.
“Yessir.” Fleischer nodded. “And if these ideas don’t work, I have another approach.”
Seekircher handed back the clipboard. “Proceed,” he said grimly. “Try these changes, and then send your reports directly to me. At this point, we have nothing to lose.”
Nothing more to lose except the three or four pilots whom they were already losing almost every week.
* * *
The Brits were on the flight line today. Fleischer had the radio turned on; the men were working hard, but their attention was on the broadcast chatter. They liked listening to the British pilots as they flew, because for all the commands and injunctions and reprimands, the RAF cadets still did pretty much what they wanted once they got into the sky. They had been ordered to perform regulation maneuvers today, but things were sounding more and more like a dogfight.
“Coming in tight. Show me a big smile.” Willie recognized Jink’s voice.
“You can do better than that,” a second Brit replied. They could hear the whining pitch of the engine as it complained its way higher into the sky.
“Flatten out, flatten out,” yelled a third voice. “You damn near hit me.”
“Gonna do some hedgehopping,” said the second pilot, meaning he was bringing his plane in low.
“Check your six,” the third voice warned. He meant that he was close on the other’s tail. The men in the wash rack listened to the pilots taunt each other, listened to the engines humming, the laughter at near misses. Fleischer was smiling with satisfaction. He had fine-tuned these planes like Swiss watches, and he liked hearing them being put to the test.
“Angels four,” Davies reported, meaning he was four thousand feet up. “Nice view.” His tone of his voice changed suddenly. “Bloody hell,” he suddenly yelled. “She’s not responding. I can’t keep her nose up.”
Fleischer stiffened. Willie handed his hose off to the man next to him and immediately joined Fleischer in front of the hangar.
“That’s Jink,” Fleischer said to Willie.
“I know,” Willie replied. “But if any flyboy can pull it out, he can.”
“Bloody hell,” Jink was yelling. “Bloody hell.” The engine went quiet; the men shut down the hoses to listen. You could hear a pin drop in the wash rack.
“Looks like I’m going to get a faceful of your special swamp,” Jink yelled. “Bloody hell!”
There was an earsplitting roar, the twang of metal. Several minutes of silence.
“Oh God,” said Fleischer.
“Amen,” said Willie.
Then Jink’s voice again, first dazed, then strong, followed by a loud laugh. “That was a bit of a dicey-do. Landed in some treetops. Sorry, mates, I think I pranged your kite.”
Chapter 20
“Pranged?” Fleischer kept repeating. “Pranged?”
“Enough now, mate.” Davies took a long, soulful drink from his ever-present bottle of Glenfiddich. “I’ve had my fill of flak from my CO. Broke? Smashed up? What do you Yanks say?”
“Busted,” said Willie.
They were sitting in the office, zero hundred hours again, in the dark again, and drinking. Again. They had become an odd trio, different accents, different colors, different personalities. Fleischer was wiry, quiet, and serious, Davies, brawny and fair, was a cutup, while Willie, dark as a Hershey’s bar, was suspicious, worried. Not friends exactly, but drawn together by their interest in electronics and planes and flying and the war, and where it was all going, and a little bit of music even, thrown into the mix.
“Pranged!” Fleischer snorted. “You’d think they’d teach you Brits real English.”
“Welshmen,” Davies corrected him.
“Well, pranged or not,” Fleischer said, “what the hell happened up there?”
“I don’t know.” Davies grew uncharacteristically somber. “She just started pulling from side to side as soon as I started cruising. I hit about two hundred twenty-five or so knots. The brass hats are blaming it on me, you know, that I was buggering around, but I swear, I was just cruising when the stick went dead.”
“You scared of going up there again?” Willie asked him. “You know, after this?”
Davies snorted. “I’m keen as mustard to fly again.” His voice went soft, his words coming out in a reverential whisper. “It gets in your blood. It’s like—the plane is your body, though your mind, your mind is flying ahead of the plane. You got to fly ahead of the plane.”
Willie leaned forward, almost like he was going to pray. “I know what you mean,” he said reverentially. “Like music—you got to see the notes that are coming ahead, all the while you’re playing the notes in front of you. You got to be ready.”
“Yes, music.” Davies nodded enthusiastically. “You got to fly like you’re playing music. Your body does it, automatically, but your mind is way ahead.”
After that, all they talked about was music. They were drawn together by the music.
At least Davies and Willie were. Davies liked the jazz that was coming out of the States, his favorite song being Ellington’s version of “Take the ‘A’ Train,” though Willie mentioned that he preferred the one by the Delta Rhythm Boys. They talked about Count Basie, Jelly Roll Morton, and Jack Teagarden, who also played the trombone. They always talked music until Fleischer would go crazy and tell them to shut up. He had a tin ear, he said; all music sounded the same to him.
* * *
Fleischer became obsessed after Davies’s crash. He changed the pressure settings for the hoses practically every day; he took notes. He had the men send the planes through the drying procedure twice before they got his okay to reassemble them; he crawled up and down every inch of every plane, balancing across the forty-two-foot wingspan, climbing the eleven-foot frame, testing the bolts on the round barrel of its Pratt and Whitney engine, running ground checks by revving the engines on the bench. Finding nothing. There was no hydraulic system—the large flaps were operated by a crank-and-pulley system—and no retractable landing gear, so he focused on the engines. And by every standard, the engines looked fine.
“I don’t get it,” he confided to Willie one morning after the second crash in as many days. “Okay, it was another Brit and he was buzzing a few cows, but they do that all the time.”
“He didn’t pull up fast enough,” Willie replied. “Smacked right into a tree.”
“That shouldn’t have happened. Those throttle jockeys are fast.” Fleischer’s eyes looked haunted. “And the planes should be sharp,” he repeated. “They tell me that sometimes the rudders feel mushy, or the gauges go off, or they lose the radio. Sometimes the transmitter cuts out, but okay, they can deal with no transmitter until they land. But when the engines go? How can the engines just stall?”
“Gremlins?” Willie offered. That’s what the Brits always blamed their problems on in their journals. The ones who kept journals. Gremlins, they wrote in big block letters, Gremlins in the engine today. Gremlins in the transmitter. Gremlins holding back the landing flaps. Gremlins in the engine. Fleischer was starting to believe that just maybe the imaginary creatures were real. Sabotage? For months there had been reports of Jerries infiltrating waters off the coast and he’d thought it was confined there, but now he was starting to consider there might be someone right there on base, maybe even a few someones, like a secret bund sabotaging the training . . . he was ready to believe anything.
“Could be that guy from Vultee was right,” Fleischer continued, more to himself than Willie. He ran his hand through his hair with exasperation. “They’re crashing right after they leave us. Within twenty-four hours. How can that be possible? We’re cleaning them exactly to specs.”
Willie didn’t know. He was starting to believe something that made his skin crawl. That maybe there was someone in the wash rack who was an infiltrator. Someone they were working with every day.
They were going to modify the pressure settings on the hoses again. Fleischer had handed Willie a sheet of paper filled with yet another set of numbers
. “It has to be something to do with the connections,” Fleischer said. He had been sitting up all night, staring at the plane in the wash rack, as if it were going to speak to him personally. The men had found him sitting in front of it when they reported for duty early in the morning, sipping a cup of cold coffee, his eyes half-closed, muttering about the connections. “They shoot off a lot of oil. It’s got to be gumming the connections,” was the way he had greeted Willie. “I really think it’s the connections.”
When Willie raised the pressure settings, the hoses took on a life of their own, snaking violently from side to side, lifting the men off their feet and jerking them like a bucking bronc across the floor. They held on for as long as they could, before one of the hoses finally wrenched itself out of their hands, spraying carbon tet all over the hangar, and knocking a few men against the walls.
“Never thought I could get wounded just cleaning a plane in Alabama,” one of the men commented to Willie.
“I know,” Willie agreed. “If things get any worse, we’ll be putting in for Purple Hearts.”
It took them three hours to clean it all up. Three hours wasted, of precious time. Three hours when they could have turned and burned at least two more planes.
Seekircher came in at the end of the shift and blew a fuse.
“Where are the goddamned planes?” he demanded.
Fleischer looked at him, bewildered. There was one in the wash rack, one being dried, one being reassembled. “They’re right here, getting serviced.”
“And that’s the problem. Fairchild’s been on my ass all week,” Seekircher snapped, then pointed outside, to the sky. “They’re in here getting serviced and they should be up there. Flying.”
* * *
Orders came down a week later, to change the solvent. Hogarth delivered the news with gusto.
“Gasoline,” he announced. “Looks like you guys are going incendiary.”
Willie knew what he meant. The flash point of gasoline was dangerously lower than kerosene. That meant it was more explosive; even the fumes were prone to ignite. Vultee, unable to come up with any solutions, had issued the change in solvents.
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