Before letting his newest recruit out on patrol, Rockwell ordered Thornton to take to the air, twenty-five miles behind the lines, to take part in a dummy patrol and dogfight. Willard thought he’d done OK, but Rockwell had torn Willard’s combat-flying to pieces. Over the next two weeks, he’d reassembled it, from the ground up.
When Willard was allowed back into the air, he scored his first kill on his very first patrol. He wasn’t the best pilot in the sky, but he was no longer a dangerous novice. By October 1918, he’d brought down three German machines – just two short of the magical number, which would turn him from a fine pilot into an officially recognised flying ace.
Rockwell had seen the younger man’s desire and, in the first week of November, assigned him to fly against the enemy Drachen – gas-filled observation balloons, that rose from fixed steel cables a mile back from the collapsing German front. The assignments were simple and dangerous. Simple, because there was nothing easier than shooting at a giant inflammable balloon. Dangerous, because the Germans curtained their precious balloons with intense and accurate anti-aircraft fire. Willard accepted his assignment gravely. Before each flight, he was so afraid, he vomited secretly in the hangar toilet. But he’d hit his targets and escaped being hit himself. On November 8, three days before Armistice was declared, Willard downed his second Drache. A Drache counted the same as an airplane. By the time peace broke out, Willard Thornton was a flying ace. He returned to America, a hero.
He hadn’t been the bravest pilot, or the best. He hadn’t scored anywhere near as many kills as Rockwell or Rickenbacker. But none of that mattered. He was an ace – and he was stunningly good-looking. Up-close, far away, carefully staged or thrillingly informal: there just wasn’t an angle that made him look bad. Sandy-haired, blue-eyed, wide-chinned, strongly built. His smile was terrific, his eyes enticing, his mouth full and kissable. He was dazzling to look at and he knew it.
Hollywood saw the potential and was quick to move. The studios fought to get his signature on a movie deal. One of the studios had a guy literally follow him round with a blank contract. Willard rose to the bait and signed.
His first picture had billed him as ‘Willard T. Thornton, America’s favourite ace’. A movie-going public, still enchanted with its war-time heroes, flocked to see it. For a few brief weeks, Willard’s had been one of the most recognisable faces in America. The second picture had sold well. The next two movies had done OK. The last two had sagged, flopped, sunk from sight.
But Willard had grown up a little. He knew enough to make a picture of his own – ‘Heaven’s Beloved, a picture of class’. He’d asked his father for finance. His father had put him in touch with Ted Powell, a Wall Street banker. Willard had made his pitch – and Powell had bought it. And although the picture was over-schedule, although Daphne O’Hara had just quit right in the middle of filming, although costs were out of control and his precious stunt plane had just crashed, Willard’s luck was staying the course.
Ted Powell continued to believe, continued to come up with cash. The original sixty-thousand dollar loan had mushroomed. First to eighty, then to a hundred, then to one-twenty, then to an ‘open-ended loan facility’ – banker-speak for don’t-even-ask.
Willard was a lucky man, born into a lucky family.
5
The Lundmark kid showed up at seven o’clock sharp, with a pot of coffee and a couple of rolls.
‘Feeding me, huh?’
Abe had been up at dawn, and found nobody yet awake at the hotel. Sooner than wake anyone, he’d come directly to the barn. He’d shaved in a can of hot water brewed over a primus stove, then stripped to the waist and washed under the yard pump. Right now, he was stretched out on a bale of straw, rubbing soft wax into his flying boots and mending a small tear on his jacket.
‘I just thought … if you don’t want it, I can…’
‘No, Brad, I want it. There are a couple of mugs in there,’ said Abe nodding at the rear cockpit of the broken plane. ‘Green canvas bag.’
Lundmark approached the plane like it was holy, and came away with a single mug.
‘Don’t drink coffee? You’re missing out.’
Abe sipped his coffee and took a bite of the bread roll.
‘We’ll get to work shall we? We’ll need to send away for a new blade,’ Abe indicated the busted propeller. ‘Aside from that, if we can find some timber and a forge, I haven’t seen anything we can’t fix.’
‘Really? Wow! You can get it going again, Captain?’
‘Careful, Brad. She’s a lady.’
‘Huh? Oh. I mean, her. Sorry.’
‘Reckon we can. First thing is to send a wire to my friends at Curtiss. Get a new blade out here. There a post office in town?’
‘Sure, Captain…’ Lundmark’s reply wasn’t exactly confident.
Abe was silent for a minute. He’d flown over the town, searching the ground for landing sites. He brought the view to mind. There are an infinity of obstacles that can smash up an aircraft. A cow. A ditch. A rickety fence with a single strand of wire. A boulder. A pothole. A tree stump.
Or telegraph wire. During the war, a friend of Abe’s had been shot up in a dogfight over enemy lines. With fabric streaming from one wing and controls mushy from German bullets, the plane had limped home. Struggling in to land, barely skimming the tree-tops, the plane had struck a line of telegraph wire. The wheels had snagged. The nose had been yanked down. Pilot and plane had dived into the ground at seventy miles an hour.
Abe thought back to his view of the town from above. No wires. ‘There’s no telegraph, is there? Where we gotta go? Brunswick?’
A tiny hesitation. Then: ‘Yeah, Brunswick. Joe Borden takes his cart in on a Tuesday. I guess we could ask him.’
‘Good.’
Abe paused. He’d seen something else from the sky; something that had puzzled him then and was puzzling him even more now. ‘A mile south of here,’ he said, ‘there’s another town.’
‘Uh-huh.’ The kid was non-committal, but evasive. He began cleaning invisible muck from a side of the aircraft which enabled him to keep his expression concealed.
‘There’s no other town marked on my map. It’s Rand McNally, 1921. I’ve never known ’em to be wrong before. Not that wrong anyways.’
‘It’s called Marion. It’s kind of new. Grew up a lot the last couple of years.’
‘That’s a lot of growing.’
‘I guess.’
The kid clearly didn’t want to talk, and, though Abe’s intense blue-eyed stare held the boy a few moments longer, he allowed the matter to drop. But it was a puzzle. It wasn’t just that Rand McNally hadn’t marked the town. It was where the town was and what it was.
What it was, first of all. From the air, Abe had seen large white houses, big yards, motor cars, even a couple of swimming pools. The contrast with the sun-bleached timbers and dusty streets of Independence was even stronger when darkness fell. Whereas Independence couldn’t boast a single electric bulb, the town below had been a blaze of light. The thump of oil-fired generators had thudded softly through the night.
Then there was the matter of where it was. Independence stood in a low range of hills on the edge of the Okefenokee swamps. Between Independence and Jacksonville there were salty marshes, mangrove swamps, a maze of creeks running out to the ocean. Independence was connected to the rest of the world only by a single-track unpaved road, plus the railway which ran just inland from the coast.
Why on earth had a slice of the brash new America wound up in these back-of-beyond swamp lands? Where was the money coming from to finance those new houses, the big cars? And why was the kid Lundmark lying to him about having to hike in to Brunswick to find a telegraph?
Abe could remember the view from the sky perfectly well. Marion, Independence’s mysterious new neighbour, had a line of telegraph wire running directly into it from the south. If Abe wanted to send a telegram, he only had to stroll a mile downhill.
6
Th
e cigar smoke hung blue-grey in the projector beam. The first reel snickered to an end and the screen filled with light. Willard jumped up to change the reel.
‘That dame,’ said Ted Powell, prodding the air with his cigar, looking every inch like the Wall Streeter that he was. ‘Is she meant to be the same as the first one?’
‘Brunhilde Schulz? O’Hara?’
‘Blondie back there. The one who just got kidnapped by the bank robbers.’
‘O’Hara quit on us. Right in the middle of filming. Breach of contract. We found a girl who looked OK from a distance, but all the close-ups are of O’Hara.’
‘Is that why the backgrounds are funny?’
‘They’re not that funny.’ Willard fiddled the second reel into place, poking the fragile celluloid through the little rollers. The lamp inside the projector was burning hot and the whole apparatus was scorching to the touch. ‘Ow! Here. You’ll like this next bit.’
The next bit was the skyscraper scene.
‘That’s me in the plane. I did this stunt myself.’
‘Funny place to park an airplane.’
Willard and the girl who really was O’Hara bounded out onto the roof. They looked dramatic – tragic – resolute. Then they bounded into the plane. The next shot had the propeller whirling and Willard clenching the muscles in his jaw.
‘Plane that starts itself,’ commented Powell. ‘Nice.’
‘She’s only a Gallaudet and she didn’t start herself. We’re doing things cheap here, Powell. Cheap as we can without … without…’
‘I was kidding, Will. And call me Ted.’
The plane rolled to the edge of the building, then plunged out of view. The next shot, taken from a neighbouring rooftop, showed the little Gallaudet dive nose-first for the ground. After falling ten or twelve storeys, the nose had come up and levelled out. There was another close-up of the hero: resolute – victorious – defiant. Then a shot of the Gallaudet flying out of sight, while a group of hoodlums poured out onto the roof and began shaking their fists at the sky.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Powell.
‘Pretty good stunt, isn’t it?’
‘Looks like you just fell clean off the edge.’
‘We did just fall.’
‘Something wrong with the airplane?’
‘No. It’s a question of air speed. You have to build speed before you can climb. And it was a dive, not a fall. Saying “fall” makes it sound bad.’
‘I saw a picture recently where they pulled a stunt like that.’
‘Breaking Free. They had it in Breaking Free.’
‘Yeah, maybe. Only there, the airplane flew, it didn’t just fall. You sure your plane was OK?’
‘They had a catapult. We thought about using a catapult, only it wouldn’t have been very realistic.’
‘Realistic…?’
The two men watched in silence to the end of the reel. They watched the girl be captured twice more by the hoodlums and be rescued back both times. The best stunt showed the girl being snatched by an airplane from a speeding car. The girl didn’t look too much like O’Hara and the pilot didn’t look too much like Willard, but it was a good stunt all the same.
The second reel snickered to its close. Willard got up again, tweaking the cuffs of his shirt from his jacket sleeve so they showed up better. He’d just spent four hundred bucks on a set of silver cuff-links and it annoyed him when they didn’t show. Powell stood up to flex his back. The cigar smoke filled the room like a migraine.
‘How’s distribution coming along? If I was going to be picky about it, I’d have to remind you that your first repayments were due last week.’
‘Distribution?’ said Willard. ‘Don’t you even want the third reel?’
‘Oh, there’s more? Sure…’
The reel ran on in ugly silence. Willard watched it with new eyes and found himself hating every frame of it. A picture of class, indeed! The picture was pitiful, truly pitiful.
He owed Ted Powell one hundred and ninety-four thousand bucks.
7
There was plenty to do.
The first thing was to cut away the ruined fabric and assess damage to the wooden structure beneath. Using knives sharpened in a little engine oil on the step of the barn, Abe and Brad cut away the torn cotton and piled it up in the yard to burn later.
As the ship’s frame began to come into view, Abe was relieved to see that the main wing-struts were scuffed and cracked, but basically intact. The plane looked more like a skeleton now; but there was something fast and hungry in her look as well. He whittled splints for the cracked spars and screwed them carefully into place, wrapping twine round the joins for extra strength.
Then Abe stripped the engine, so he could clean, oil and reassemble it. As he’d known from the outset, it had been a faulty valve in the fuel-line which had created a blockage in the feed. It had been the work of five minutes to locate the problem and fix the valve. Most engine problems were like that. Little tiny niggles, which sometimes killed you, sometimes didn’t.
As the first week merged into the second, the new undercarriage began to take shape. Abe had some ideas on putting a cowling around the wheel base to reduce drag. By stretching cotton tightly over an arrangement of hoops and battens, he succeeded in putting his ideas into practice. Poor old Poll looked like she was wearing her winter stockings, but he promised her that she’d like them once she was airborne.
When the structural work was all done, he and Brad wound swathes of cotton around the exposed frame, pulling it tight so the fabric was hard and taut. Then they painted her: red and white, the colours Abe had used ever since his days as a barnstormer. Then, to protect the paint and fabric, they painted her again with cellulose dope, a kind of aviator’s varnish.
The battered airplane began to look herself again; perhaps better.
Abe usually worked alone – he usually did pretty much everything alone – but he liked working with the kid. The kid’s enthusiasm was uncanny. His aptitude too. Again and again Brad reminded Abe of himself at the same age. It was almost like working with a version of himself plucked from twenty years into the past.
As the days passed, Abe had counted another twenty-three bullet holes in the buildings around Independence. The glossy boomtown down the hill still seemed to be invisible. There was still no explanation of why Independence was the only town in America which still treated ex-army pilots as descended demi-gods. Abe kept his eyes open and his mouth shut.
On the evening of the tenth day, Abe was sitting alone in the hotel dining room, eating cold pie and potatoes. Then, just as he was finishing, Gibson Hennessey, the tall storekeeper, wandered in. The two men nodded a greeting.
‘Ed Houghton looking after you OK?’
Abe thought of the mountainous puddings he’d been subjected to – each one of them ‘in his honour’.
‘Yeah. Sometimes even better than that,’ he commented.
‘Ted’s right hospitable when he wants to be, especially in the pudding-making department.’ Humour flickered round the storekeeper’s mouth, before his voice changed again. ‘You won’t take this bad, I hope, but there’s a little whiskey to be had, if you were a whiskey-drinking man.’
‘From time to time.’
The storekeeper wandered over to the shelves where the glasses were kept. He helped himself to a couple and led the way upstairs, clearly knowing which room Abe had been given. At the door, he stood back politely and let Abe open up.
The room was the best in the hotel, but simple enough for all that. There was a deep and comfortable bed, a dressing table and chair, a wardrobe, and a small green armchair which emitted puffs of dust if anyone sat on it. There were a couple of oil lamps, grown smoky from needing their wicks trimming. A thin curtain moved sluggishly in front of the open window.
‘This OK for you?’ said Hennessey, looking around. ‘I got a better room over at my place if you want it, only I figured you’d be happier without a troop of little Hennesseys yelling and
screaming the whole time.’
‘You figured right.’
‘I’d probably be happier, matter of fact.’
Abe pulled off his boots and stretched out on the bed. Not satisfied with his first attempt at getting comfortable, he pounded and pummelled his pillows into shape, before lying back with a sigh. Hennessey put the two glasses on the table and produced a pint-bottle wrapped in brown paper from his coat pocket. He poured the whiskey and handed Abe a glass.
‘Local moonshine. Been going long before Volstead, keep going a long time after. It’s always had quite a following in Independence.’
Abe sipped. The whiskey was good and he drank again. They’d been varnishing again today, and, though Abe liked the smell, it always made him dizzy. The whiskey helped.
‘Mind if I smoke?’ Hennessey produced a packet from his pocket and offered them to Abe. The pilot shook his head, but told Hennessey to go ahead. For a while, the two men were silent together, Hennessey smoking by the open window, Abe lying, eyes half-closed, on the bed. Eventually the storekeeper broke the silence.
‘Being a famous man and all, I guess you get a lot of attention? Even when you don’t announce your presence by putting your machine right down on Main Street.’
Nothing in Abe’s manner changed, except that beneath his lids, his eyes grew more alert.
‘Truthfully, Hennessey? I haven’t been received like this for five years.’
The storekeeper smiled. ‘No shortage of patriotism in Independence. That’s the trouble with this country, see. Short memories. People ought to remember more.’ He finished his cigarette and tossed the glowing butt in a wide arc out onto the dirt street outside. He watched it go.
‘That’s the trouble with America, huh?’ said Abe softly. ‘And what’s the matter with Independence?’
The tall storekeeper turned from the window. ‘What makes you think there’s anything wrong?’
Abe closed his eyes and rested the glass of whiskey on his chest. ‘Only everything I’ve seen since coming. That’s all.’
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