And I'm good at it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm one of those guys who were meant to fly. I'll bet that if the check-ride IP didn't know I have three hours, more or less, total time in a Chinook, I could go out right now and pass the flight test.
"There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots!" Oliver said sonorously. "You ever hear that, Jose?"
"Hey, I'm as cautious as you are. Probably more cautious."
"Just better, huh?"
"Yeah, I think so," Newell said softly. "But what I'm saying, Johnny, is that I have to fly. I have two options. I go back home and fly CH-34s for the Guard, and pick up what time I can in light business-aircraft, and maybe somewhere down the line I can get a job as a corporate pilot. Big damned deal; you're an airborne chauffeur-'Please pass the canapes, Captain.' Or I can trust Augustus and get to fly these new aircraft, all of them. And even if I can't wrangle a Regular Army commission, I think I could probably hang on in the Reserve, on active duty, until I get my twenty in. Then I could retire and see what happens. I would have a pension, which is something to think about. I've got a family to consider. If a corporate pilot busts a flight physical, the next step is standing in a welfare line."
"And you could come on active duty and six months later find yourself in 'Nam with a Russian ground-to-air missile up your ass," Oliver said.
"I have to take that chance."
"Well, I'm proud that you have sought my advice and are taking it so much to heart. ' , Newell laughed and met his eyes: "You're my buddy," he said. "I had to tell you:"
[FIVE]
123 Brookwood Lane
Ozark, Alabama
1740 Hours 28 January 1964
Captain John S. Oliver, in his mess dress uniform, sat in his Pontiac convertible just around the corner from' Liza Wood's house in a position he hoped would permit him to see Liza come home without spotting him.
He had no idea how she would react when he showed up at her house, uninvited. He wondered if he was just making an ass of himself.
He looked at his watch. It was 1740, thirty minutes after her usual time to drive down Brookwood Lane and into her driveway. He decided that she had spotted him and turned off, so that an awkward confrontation could be avoided.
What I should do is leave.
He looked at the watch and pushed the button that started the elapsed-time function. The sweep-second hand began to move. Two smaller dials on the watch's face would now indicate elapsed time up to twelve -hours.
I won't need that much time. If she doesn't get here in five minutes, I'll leave.
Five minutes passed, and he swore, and started the engine.
Then he shut it off. He pushed the buttons starting the elapsed time function again.
"Once more. Another five minutes. That's it," he said, and put his right hand on the steering wheel so he could watch the sweep-second hand marching in half-second jerks around the dial.
The watch, like his mess dress uniform, had come from Hong Kong. He'd gone there with two months' pay and the proceeds of a mostly drunken poker game. And he'd returned to 'Nam with the watch. They had shipped the uniform home.
The watch was an Omega aviator's chronograph, over an inch in diameter, with a circular slide rule bezel, three elapsed-time dials, and a little window which showed the date. It had a waterproof stainless steel case and a matching band.
When he was back in 'Nam, he heard all the remarks about the way you could tell an Army Aviator in the shower was because he would be wearing an enormous watch and a miniature masculine appendage. His company commander, two days before he went in, told him that if he really wanted a watch like that, he should have ordered it through the PX, because the watches on sale in Hong Kong for such marvelous prices were actually forgeries, made in Japan, or right in Hong Kong, and he had probably been screwed.
That had seemed to be a real possibility at the time. He and Charley had been at the grape when they went shopping;
and not only was the watch probably made of Budweiser cans, but the beaming, toothy tailor who offered such great prices on uniforms was probably beaming because he had no intention of ever making them, much less shipping them to the States, like he promised, at no extra charge.
For two weeks he had carefully removed the "Waterproof to 100 Meters" stainless steel Omega Chronograph when he showered so that it wouldn't rust off his wrist before he could somehow get rid of it. Then the Old Man had gone in, and they'd given him the company, and he hadn't had time to worry about his watch, or to pay particular attention to a letter he received from his sister. It said that a huge package had arrived from Hong Kong, and that she had to pay the duty at the Post Office, and would he please send her a check for $32.05, since it was his personal stuff.
The watch had survived 'Nam, but he cracked the crystal shortly after coming back to Rucker when a wrench slipped.
So he'd gone to the PX and bought a regular watch, which he wore for two weeks-until he missed the phony Omega.
So he took the phony Omega to a jeweler in Dothan and told him it probably wouldn't be worth it, but how much would a new crystal for this old junker cost?
"About nineteen dollars," the jeweler told him. "You wear a really top-of-the-line watch like this, and abuse it, you have to expect to pay a little more when you break it. I'll have to send it off to Omega in New York. I don't have the equipment to seal it, to make it waterproof again. You just don't see many watches like this in Dothan. ' , The sweep-second hand had just begun its fourth trip around the face when Liza's car appeared. He watched it intently. She did not even glance in his direction.
He waited, timing it, three minutes more. And then he started the engine and drove down the street and into her driveway. He got out and walked to the kitchen door and knocked.
Liza came from inside the house and opened the kitchen door, but she did not unlatch the screen door. She just looked at him.
"I just happened to be in the neighborhood," Johnny Oliver said with a brightness he didn't feel
"and thought, what the hell, I would just pop in." She looked at him without any expression he could read.
And she didn't reply for a long moment, long enough for him to decide that coming here like this was a bad idea, and that he was about to be turned away.
"I just got home," she said finally, resignedly. She unfastened the screen door latch, then turned and walked back into the kitchen. She went to the sink and leaned against it, watching him as he came in.
"I know," he said.
"What were you doing? Lurking in the woods? With a pair of binoculars? "
"Around the comer," he confessed. "No binoculars."
"Whatever will the neighbors think?" she said.
"I hope they were dazzled. I paid a fortune for this costume."
"What do you want, Johnny?" Liza asked coldly.
"Well, there I was, as I said, in the neighborhood, when all of a sudden there was a brilliant flash of lightning and a deep voice-I'm not saying it was God, but it could have been, I don't know anybody else who talks like that-said, Remember, my son, that women reserve the right to change their minds!" Liza smiled faintly and shook her head.
"Remember, my son," she said
"that when this woman saith no, this woman meaneth no." ."Ah, what the hell. Come on," he said. "There's plenty of time. Not only are Marjorie and Charley going to. be there, but you can wear that black dress that's open to your navel and make all the girls jealous. '
"I was a camp follower once, Johnny. Never again. Get that straight. I mean that." Am'-l wasting my breath? My time? Was Father right? Has she somehow sensed that Captain John S. Oliver, Jr., Warrior Third Class, is really bad news? For her? And for Allan?
They locked eyes for a moment and finally he shrugged.
"I need a shower," she said. "Fix yourself a drink if you like.' , She walked out of the kitchen. After a moment he started into the living room in search of the whiskey.
"B
ut, good try, Johnny. I will admit I was tempted," she called to him from her bedroom. "You are spectacular in that outfit." What she will do now, I hope, I hope, is change her mind.
And when she comes out of the bedroom, she will be wearing a formal dress. And I will be one more rung up the ladder.
Screw you, Father, and your damned female intuition!
He wondered where Allan was. He couldn't ask her. He could hear the sound of her shower and knew that meant she couldn't hear him if he asked. He took his drink and went and looked in the boy's room. He wasn't there. So Mother Wood must have him.
Did she park him with Mother Wood, hoping I would call and ask her to change her mind, or even come the way I did?
He went back in the living room, turned the television on, and sat down in what had been Lieutenant Allan Wood's chair, and which was now, he thought, by default, at least sometimes considered to be his.
Liza came out her bedroom, wearing a bathrobe, with her head wrapped in a towel.
She has washed her hair; women about to go to a formal dinner party do not wash their hair.
"I guess I can take that as a final no, huh? The washed.
hair?
"Your powers of deduction are fantastic," she said," and walked across the room to where the whiskey sat on a table.
"I probably shouldn't tell you this, but you have an ally in Mother Wood."
"All contributions gratefully accepted."
"She thinks you would make a good daddy for Allan."
"So do I." , , Anyway, when I told her I wasn't going with you to the Norwich thing, she said the same thing you did, that women are allowed to change their minds. So he's spending the night with Grandma." .
"I'll send her a dozen roses," Oliver said. "So go with the wet hair. You're a fashion setter. You show up with wet hair, and there will be twenty women at the next party in wet hair." She smiled at him over the rim of her glass.
"You're an imaginative fellow," Liza said. "Tell me, does the fact that we're alone here, behind locked doors, give you any ideas?"
"I have those ideas whether or not the doors are locked."
"I know." She reached up and unwound the towel turban on her head.
Then she met his eyes. Then she pulled the belt of her bathrobe loose, let the robe fall open, and shrugged out of it.
Then she walked, stark naked, back into her bedroom.
Johnny Oliver opened his eyes and saw Liza Wood curled up next to him. He could make out the individual vertebrae in her back.
I must have dozed off, he thought. The last I remember, she had sort of crawled onto me.
He raised his left wrist and looked at his watch.
It was time to go.
Very carefully, so as not to disturb Liza, he sat up and ~g his legs out of her bed.
Her hand touched his back, and he looked over ~is shoulder at her.
Goddamn, she's beautiful! Whoever said that having a kid ruins a woman's body was full of shit.
"If I asked you-begged you-not to go out there," Liza Wood asked
"would you stay?" "
I have to go."
"Why?"
"The Bellmons are going to be there. And Charley and Marjorie. I'm expected."
"And you want to go," she said, a challenge rather than a question.
"I want to go with you," he said. "Failing that, I have to go. Come with me."
"Do what you think..you have to do," Liza said, and rolled over on the bed, facing away from him.
"I could come back," he said. "I'll eat, and make my excuses. I am a very talented liar. I'll think of something wholly credible to tell them: I have to get my alligator back from the vet. I have been named man of the year by the Ozark Horticultural Society and they're going to name a rose after me."
"If you go .out there now, don't come back, period."
"Hey, that sounds like a threat," he said softly, after a moment.
"More like a statement of fact. We can't go on like this. I don't want to get to the point where you are so much a part of my life-of Allan's too-that I can't cut you ,out of it."
"You and Allan are the most important part of my life."
"We're next in line, right after the goddamned Army," Liza said. "So that's not true."
"Liza, I'm a soldier. I wouldn't be any good doing anything else."
"You're beginning to convince me of that. I thought maybe You Samson, Me Delilah would work. Obviously it didn't." -"What?" he asked, not understanding her.
"You don't think she really cut off his hair, do you?" she asked bitterly.
"As I remember that story, she also blinded him. And then he died, when he pulled the walls in on him," Oliver said.
"Honey, I told you, I have to go." She shrugged her shoulders but didn't say anything.
He shrugged, stood up, and started to get dressed.
After a minute or so she rose from the bed and walked into the bathroom. He heard the toilet flush and then the sound of the shower. The sound of the shower ended before he was dressed, but she did not come out of the bathroom.
He tied his bow tie and checked his appearance in her hall mirror.
"Have a good time," she called.
"Oh, Jesus," he muttered. Then he walked out to the driveway and got in his Pontiac.
She came to the kitchen door in her bathrobe. He rolled down the window.
"I meant that," she said. "Have a good time."
"Can I come back?" She shook her head, no. "Not tonight," she said. "Not for a while. Let's see what happens." She gave him a little wave and went back in the house.
He sat there with the engine idling for more than a minute, wondering what would happen if he didn't go out to the post, if he went back in the house instead.
That wouldn't solve a goddamn thing, he decided finally.
If I go back in there, she'll think I'm giving in. And when she found out that's not true, that would just make things worse.
He put the Pontiac in gear and backed down the driveway.
[SIX]
The Officers' Open Mess
Fort Rucker, Alabama
2320 Hours 28 January 1964
"I'm sorry your girl couldn't come," Mrs. Robert F. Bellmon said to Captain John S. Oliver as they danced. "It's been a great party. Even the Great Stone Face seems to be enjoying himself." She nodded, and he looked in that direction and saw Major General Robert F. Bellmon doing the Charleston with Marjorie.
He laughed, and then blurted "The problem is that she lost one husband and doesn't want to go through that again.
She just told me I have to make up my mind between the Army and her."
"Oh, I'm sorry, Johnny," Barbara Bellmon said. "For the both of you. But mostly for her. A woman is kidding herself if she thinks she can make a man do something he really' doesn't want to do."
The Aviators Page 31