by Gavin Lyall
Whitmore jammed the cap of the bottle against the arm of his metal chair, smacked it with a huge hand, and tossed the open bottle: it dropped neatly upright into my hands.
I took a swig, sat down in another chair, and told Diego: ‘Been trying to find you since yesterday.’
He smiled his boyish smile. ‘I have heard the sad news already, Señor. I am most sorry for you.’
Whitmore said: ‘You remember you figured he could straighten out our Spanish for us?’
Diego waved a deprecating hand. ‘I will do what I can, Señor Whitmore, but I am no writer…’
‘Hell, it’s your own language, isn’t it? That’s all we want. We damn sure don’t need another lousywriter. ‘ He looked back at me. ‘We got some good news for you, too, fella. We got you another aeroplane. Show him the ‘gram, J.B.’
She passed me a used cable form. It said:Have found B-25 good condition Buenaventura stop price fifteen but can get for twelve stop delivery Barranquilla any time you want ends.Signed with a Spanish name.
I handed it back thoughtfully. J.B. said: ‘I’ve told him to close the deal – subject to our inspection – and get the plane to Barranquilla. We’ll fly down as soon as we hear it’s there -okay?’
‘A twelve thousand dollar aeroplane that must be at least twenty years old,’ I said slowly. ‘She won’t be in one-careful-little-old-lady-owner condition.’
‘Will she fly?’ Whitmore asked.
I shrugged. ‘If she flies from Buenaventura to Barranquilla – and that’s five hundred miles – she could do anything. You’re quite sure she is at Buenaventura and not sitting at the back of a hangar in Barranquilla the whole time?’
There was a crossfire of startled looks. These people must have done plenty of wheeling and dealing in then-time, but it seemed they hadn’t tried buying an old aeroplane before.
Then Diego said carefully: ‘I think, Señor Penrose, you have not met this man’ – he nodded at the cable in her hand -rbut my family has done business with him many times. He is an honest agent.’
The suspicious tension faded. Whitmore stretched his legs again, scratched under his bush shirt, and said: ‘So – okay. You can handle a B-25 okay, fella?’
Out behind him, on the edge of the patio, there was a humming-bird tree: a dead branch set in a block of concrete and carrying a dozen little narrow-necked jars of sugar-water. A few humming-birds were still around, whizzing in and hovering with nickering wings while they dipped their long beaks for the last snort of the evening. To them, flying was just flying, and no worry about what a new pair of wings might feel like… The hell with them; mere helicopter pilots.
I was trying to recall anything anybody had told me about the B-25, known also as the Mitchell. It wasn’t much: except around South America nobody has flown them really seriously since the war, twenty years ago. All I could remember was that they were supposed to be good load-carriers, noisy as hell, and a little tricky until you knew them.
I said: ‘I expect so.’
Whitmore said: ‘Fine, fine. And we figured a new deal foryou – after what happened Saturday. Give him the contract, J.B.’
She gave it me. It was the same as before, except for the pay. Instead of the $20-a-day retainer plus $10 a flying hour and costs, I was now getting a flat $100 a day. It was a nice gesture, seeing it was hardly his fault I’d lost the Dove, but it wasn’t as generous as he probably thought; it would just about let me keep up the mortgage payments I had to go on making on the Dove, confiscated or not, and a bit towards the check four if that day ever came now. He still didn’t really owe me anything anyway.
I put on a cheerful grin and said: ‘Can I call you J.B. – on a $100 a day?’
‘Sign the damn thing.’
I signed.
Luiz sighed. ‘Always signing contracts. I tell you, my friend, you are going to end up with wet feet.’
Whitmore gave him a sharp glance, then came back to me. ‘When we get the ship, you’ll be working off the airstrip up the road’ – he nodded towards Boscobel – ‘so we’ll fix you a hotel room up here.’
I nodded. I had a feeling the Mitchell was going to be a lightish squeeze on that 3,000-foot Boscobel runway: along with the other American wartime medium bombers, it had been designed specifically for the 6,000-foot strips that the Dakota had made a standard all over the world by 1940.
Diego said politely: ‘Now there is another aircraft, Señor, may I perhaps continue my lessons?’
About that, I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t know how die Mitchell would handle yet, but I knew its age and I knew it was a military aeroplane built for the comfort of its bombs and not its pilots.
Whitmore chipped in: ‘Hell, why not? Let the kid have a go – long as he pays his own fuel bills. Maybe you could use him as a copilot on the camera work.’
That wasn’t a bad idea. If I was going to be flying around a load of cameramen and directors, all shouting for the impossible, it could be useful to have anorner pilot, however inexperienced, on board.
I shrugged, ‘You’re the Boss Man.’
‘Okay. So the kid can fly. ‘ The way he said it, the phrase went in capitals: The Kid. Diego had obviously joined the club – but I couldn’t see quite why. He was a nice enough boy, but hardly a drink-from-the-bottle type, and certainly not a professional – at anything. And Whitmore obviously liked pros. That was why I was there: I’d once been a pro fighter pilot. It was why J.B. was allowed into what was a man’s world – she was a pro lawyer. And Luiz, however much he bitched about getting his feet wet, stepped in andgot them wet whenever the script said so.
But Diego? I couldn’t see it.
I finished my beer and Whitmore and Luiz went through their routine and a fresh bottle arrived in my hands. The last light faded from the sky – Jamaican dawns and sunsets are fast, tropical affairs. A couple of lizards came out on the edge of the patio and took up what would be their regular sentry positions and froze there, waiting for a careless night insect.
‘How’s the film coming?’ I asked conversationally. ‘Rewritten any good scripts recently?’
Luiz smiled; Whitmore bent an eyebrow at me. ‘Fella, the only script matters is the shooting script, the one you actually shoot from. And even that don’t matter compared to the picture itself. You can’t go handing out copies of the script and say, “We maybe made a lousy picture, but you’ll like the script.” ‘
J.B. said: ‘We’re three days behind schedule: that’s nearly fifteen thousand dollars on the budget.’
Whitmore waved a bottle. ‘So you’re always behind on location shooting. You tell me a location picture that’s been brought in on time. Hell’ – he turned to Luiz – ‘remember down in Durango?’
Luiz chuckled and started to tell the story – about a film they’d made down in Mexico, five years before, where Whitmore hadn’t been the producer. And the producer had sent in a popular singer to play the young cowboy part. After a couple of weeks, it turned out that the singer didn’t know which side of a horse was up and which end of a gun was front.
Whitmore stopped the whole production dead for four days-with the producer and everybody back to the New York bankers having a coronary every hour on the hour – while he taught the boy to ride and how to pull a gun. At the end of it all, the singer had a broken guitar finger and the critics had hailed him as the man who’d acted rings around old One-Expression. And the film made a vast profit.
Diego laughed politely at the end, but I wasn’t sure he saw the point. I wasn’t sure I saw it myself, unless Whitmore was offering to him a short coarse in riding and twirling Colts in parallel with my flying lessons.
Soon after that, Diego remembered he had an eleven o’clock date in Kingston and did I want a ride back in his E-type? I didn’t, of course, but it seemed the only way I’d stand even a chance of getting home that night, so I went with him.
As we blasted up into the hills out of Port Maria, he said: ‘The new aeroplane, Señorit is most exciting, no?’
‘I hope not.’
He grinned. ‘Ah, I forgot: you do not approve of risks. But for me, an aeroplane that was once an aeroplane of war – it has, one should say, areality.’
Not to me, it didn’t. I didn’t know much about Mitchells and even less about this particular one, but if it was like anywarplane I’d met before it would be a lot more temperamental and liable to bust than any civilian aeroplane. A military plane is a racehorse: you spend most of your time working on it, getting it ready for Race Day. But if an airliner isn’t plodding around like a carthorse it just isn’t earning its keep.
‘It’ll be different from the Dove,’ I said. ‘And the experience won’t be much use; you’ll be flying planes that handle more like the Dove – unless your company goes crazy.’
. ‘Perhaps. But to me, it is a challenge. To say – I flewthis aeroplane.’
‘It isn’t likely to become all that famous. Just a few minutes in a film, that’s all.’
‘Truly, you are not romantic, Señor.‘He grabbed the gear-lever and we went around a dark mountain corner on a prayer and very nearly a wing.
I said, when I had the breath: ‘If that’s romanticism, I’ll take walking.’
He sounded suddenly contrite. ‘You are right, of course One must live to fly this aeroplane.’ And he lifted his foot.
It was a nice thought, if a rather surprising one. I just hoped he wasn’t storing up his ‘romanticism’ for when we got the Mitchell. But for the moment, just doing the rest of the journey less than twice as fast as I’d have liked was enough for me.
FOURTEEN
J.B.rang ME ATthe Myrtle Bank two evenings later: the Mitchell had reached Barranquilla, so would I stay sober enough to catch a West Indian flight the next morning to connect with a Pan Am flight in San Juan to connect with… Barranquilla isn’t a main-line station. I told her to forget it, then rang a friend and bought two very unofficial seats on a Venezuelan cargo plane that was going out to Maracaibo in the morning. From there to Barranquilla is just 200 miles across the frontier.
We ended up hiring a small plane for the last leg, but we reached Barranquilla at four in the afternoon, about twelve hours ahead of her schedule. And there, waiting for us outside the end hangar, was the Mitchell.
Nowadays military aeroplanes have the same sleek good looks as civil aircraft; it wasn’t always so, and the Mitchell came from that time. She was thin, box-sided, square-cut, with a long sneering transparent nose, high cranked wings, huge engines and propellers, fat over-sized main wheels like big boots. Just sitting there, she had the hunched, cluttered look of an old soldier loaded with all his equipment.
But this one was a very old soldier indeed.
J.B. was staring with an expression of sick disbelief. After a while she said quietly: ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Right – now name me the copilot.’ Then I shook my head. ‘If she really flew in from Buenaventura, she must work better than she looks.’
I was trying to persuade myself. The transparent nose had gone smoky and crackled with tiny veins, like the nose of a hardened boozer; the bare aluminium parts, even the props, were covered with the gritty white lichens of oxidisation; the painted parts – some idiot had painted the engines black to hide oil leaks, but also the one colour to over-heat them in this climate – were dulled and flaking. And the hydraulic system must have been leaking like an old shoe because the flaps were drooping half down, the bomb-bay doors half open.
I knew exactly what had happened. She hadn’t been in the air for six months, and then somebody who knew a lot about aeroplanes but even more about money, had made her fit for just the 500-mile ride up from Buenaventura. In two ways, I had to take it from here.
I took a deep breath. ‘All right. Now you find whoever’s in charge. I want a Certificate of Airworthiness, the logbooks -there’s three of them – and any pilot’s notes and engineering manuals he’s got. Anddon’t pay him a peso until I’ve checked them and her.’
She looked at me rather doubtfully, then nodded and went off towards the offices built into the side of the hangar. I started a slow clockwise circuit of the Mitchell, kicking the tyres, squinting into the engines – rust on the cylinder head bolts, of course – banging the inspection panels.
Just below the cockpit there was a piece of overfancy script, mostly washed and faded away by now. After a bit of twisting my head and puzzling, I made it out:Beautiful Dreamer, with a 1940’s-style reclining nude to match. So she’d actually seen squadron service in the war, twenty years ago.
Well, whatever had happened, they’d brought her back -and walked away. And now they were Air Force generals or farmers or just your Friendly Home-Town Used-Car Dealer. And probably it would take them a lot of thinking even to remember the name they’d given her.
But think, boys, try and remember. Just what made her that little bit different from the thousands of other Mitchells they built? How did she fly better than the book says, and how worse? What systems never went wrong – and which never wentright?
Just as man to man, boys – what’s she like in bed? She’s my girl now.
Then I shook my head and reached and slapped the metal below the cockpit – and nearly burned my hand off at the wrist. She’d been sitting in the sun all day. I took a pair of wash-leather flying gloves out of my hip pocket and pulled them on before I tried anything new.
J.B. came out of the hangar with a small, tubby man wearing sunglasses, a black moustache and a grease-stained whitepanamahat. She was carrying a handful of papers and not looking I-feel-like-singing about them.
‘The certificate of airworthiness,’ she recited tonelessly, ‘was issued in Colombia two years ago and says it’slimitado. Limited – what does that mean?’
‘Mustn’t ply for hire or reward. I’d expected that. If you own it, you can have it flown how you like. What about the logs?’
She handed them over, three unimpressive little mock-leather volumes like autograph books.
The aircraft one had a chit pinned in the front headed ‘as removed from military records’ which showed the Mitchell had done about six thousand hours before getting a US Air Force overhaul in 1951 which, it claimed, brought her back to the perfection of having done zero hours. But they’d sold her off to Colombia before they could prove themselves wrong.
In Colombia she’d flown another 1,500 hours as a bomber and been given another overhaul which – surprise, surprise -had once more restored her to zero hours condition. However, again she’d been sold off fast – for 900 hours as a freight transport, and then 300 as a private passenger plane. But apart from the delivery flight, carefully entered up as exactly two hours fifty minutes – she hadn’t flown this year.
J.B. said sombrely: ‘How does it look?’
I shrugged. ‘About as I expected. These things might be honest, might not-‘
‘Could we sue on them?’
‘If things go wrong, we and the plane’ll be at the bottom of the Caribbean. Tell him you’ll pay him when I’ve checked it over.’
She gave me a very steady look and said, deliberately toneless: ‘He doesn’t speak English – he says. He also says he has another customer, and he wants his money right now.’
I grinned at the fat face under the greasypanama. I knew the ‘another customer’ line. ‘Tell him,’ I said, speaking slowly and carefully, ‘that according to the log, this aeroplane has, like his sister, been a virgin three times already. I will sleep with her tonight and give my decision tomorrow.’
Our Friendly Home-Town Used-Aeroplane Dealer had gone as rigid as a girder. I knew the don’t-speak-English line, too. Everyone connected with aeroplaneshas to speak English.
J.B. glanced sideways, saw interpretation was unnecessary, and asked me: ‘Why tomorrow?’
‘I won’t do an air test until I’ve run up the engines properly, and I don’t want to do that until this evening when the air’s cooler. Tomorrow.’
She nodded, then handed me the last of the papers: a
collection of stained, loose pages about the size of a science-fiction magazine. ‘That’s all he had.’
The top sheet was headed Flight Handbook, B-25N;USAP; revised to 15 August 1951.Applied to this old lady, science-fiction was about what it would be. I sighed.
J.B. said quickly. ‘If you want to say the hell with this and go back to Jamaica, I won’t be part of any suit against you for breaking your contract.’
‘Thanks. But…’ I looked up at the Mitchell again. Ever since I’d learned to fly, I’d had one dream every few months: that I was sitting in a plane I didn’t trust, and hadn’t any proper instruction about – and I had to fly her. Now I was looking at my bad dream.
There’s always a way to walk away: to walk away first.
‘Thanks,’ I said again. ‘But I’m a pilot – and I don’t have any other plane to fly. I’ll tell you tomorrow.’
She looked at me hard for a moment, then turned to the man in thepanamaand started talking fast, fluent Spanish. I walked away, ducked under the belly of the Mitchell, and 95 climbed up through the open hatch just forward of the bomb-bay.
I was in a narrow, hot, dark cabin about as high as I could stand and not as wide as I could reach with both arms outspread. Ahead of me, up a high step, was a blaze of light coming in through the greenhouse roof on to the side-by-side pilots’ seats. I stayed where I was, straddling the hatch, and looked slowly all around.
The dark green plastic soundproofing on the metal skin was hanging loose by now, only kept in place by the criss-cross of pipes and cables and mess of switchboxes and boards of contact-breakers. Above me there was a filled-in circle in the roof where there had once been a gun-turret. Behind me, the metal box of the bomb-bay blocked off the aft end of the fuselage except for a small space at the top. And around my left knee, a small, square dark tunnel led forward under the pilots’ seats to the bomb-aimer’s position in the transparent nose.
Distant growls and hums off the airfield came up from the hatch at my feet. They annoyed me; I wanted to be alone with this bitch. I found a folding top hatch and slid it shut. The noise stopped.