Guns (John Hardin series)

by Phil Bowie

  “A pilgrimage to aviation Mecca. Haven’t been there in a while myself so I guess I could use a fix. We can spread a blanket by the airplane for the picnic. How about half a dozen two-inch-thick chicken salad sandwiches and a quart or so of your ginger iced tea? You might want to bring something for Joshua and yourself, too.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “You don’t say that to your pilot.”

  “What do you say?”

  “You say chicken salad, ginger tea, or me?” “And you get to say all three, is that it? Uh-uh. What if I said you have to pick one?”

  “Let me think on that for a minute.” “I will slap you.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Joshua asked.

  Later that same evening Montgomery Davis walked into a smoky Newark, New Jersey, tavern called Little Italy. He recognized Winston in the shadows by the sheer mass of the man, sitting at a small back-corner table lit with a single candle. Davis went over, sat down, and ordered a Heineken from the waitress.

  Winston weighed two-eighty and his immense strength matched his size. He normally moved slowly, never smiled, and had the flat face of a bulldog, which always made him look angry. There was a vague resemblance to the famous prime minister and he smoked fat cigars, hence the name that many had come to know him by. At 48, he was a year older than Davis and had similar experience. Davis had used him as extra security a number of times and on contracted hits twice.

  “We have a contract,” Davis said.

  Winston lit a cigar from the table candle and said, “Where and when?”

  “Down in North Carolina. I’m driving. We’ll leave early on Friday morning. I’ll pick you up at four in front of your house. Bring two changes of clothes and a piece. There’ll be one more along with us.”

  “What? We taking out some crew?”

  “Just one man. They used to call him Cowboy. I don’t think you know him.”

  “What’s so special about this guy it takes three of us?”

  “Strake just wants to be sure. And he wants this one bad.”

  “That’s what you said about the last one. Look, you want a plate of pasta?”

  “No, not here. I had food poisoning once and that will make you picky.”

  “Fuck it. You gotta die of something,” Winston said, and signaled the waitress.

  The next morning was a study in the infinite, the sharp ocean horizon off Ocracoke seeming so far away that the shores of timeless Africa had to be just beyond, the sky so transparently deep in the early sun dazzle that you could sense the panoply of diamond-hard stars out there across the light years.

  Sam, Valerie, and Joshua took off in the cool air and climbed to three thousand feet, where the view was soul-filling. Beyond the blue sound the flat mainland spread away westward, its shores a lacework of bays and river mouths and marshes giving way to great swaths of pine forest and scattered cultivated fields. The sea outshone any precious metal, and the narrow Banks curved away northward. Below, the surf fanned the miles of sand in its patient eons-old rhythm, and there were long swatches of beach elder that would turn butter yellow with the onset of the cooler nights and the winter quietly amassing to blow southward, planning to hitch a ride on the jet stream. Kitty Hawk lay 90 miles ahead and Whiskey Sierra cruised smoothly at 120 miles per hour.

  Valerie was in the right seat beside him and Joshua was belted into the back seat on one of Valerie’s throw pillows so he could see out well. They all wore headsets. Joshua’s forehead was pressed against the right rear Plexiglas and he was looking down absorbed in his own thoughts. Sam was keeping to the sound side of the Banks so both Valerie and the boy could have a good view of them down to the right.

  They passed over the inlet at the northern tip of Ocracoke, a white ferry grinding north with a load of cars heading for the docks on Hatteras Island, trailing a long scarf of gulls. The 208-foot black-and-white spiral-painted lighthouse looked stately standing on Cape Hatteras, whose spear shape pointed toward the ship-tripping shoals that ran out under the swells.

  They flew past the three settlements of Salvo, Waves, and Rodanthe, with wide Oregon Inlet eighteen miles ahead now, spanned by its long, graceful high-rising bridge.

  “Why don’t you fly for a while?” Sam asked, so Valerie took over the dual controls. Sam had been acquainting her with the plane in the hope she would begin formal lessons one day soon, provided he could find a way to pay for them. He knew a semi-retired flight instructor based at the Billy Mitchell strip on Hatteras and believed that she and Valerie would fit well together. So far Valerie had shown a cautious enthusiasm for the idea, and she had a natural ability for it, handling the yoke smoothly and confidently, never over-controlling.

  After she had been flying for a few minutes, banking through a few mild S turns, she said, “How do you do a loop?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Joshua said. “Do one, do one, please.”

  “Your mother’s just kidding, Josh. Or just joshing, kid. Looping isn’t listed anywhere in this airplane’s owner’s manual.”

  “Oh, come on, Sam,” Valerie said over the intercom. “You were a lot more adventurous last night.”

  “I don’t remember doing any loops.”

  “Well, you sure made me do a few.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Joshua said.

  Past Oregon Inlet the beach began to look like most others, crowded with cottages, condos, motels, restaurants, beach wear and souvenir shops, and strip malls with the ubiquitous robot teller machines. Within a few short decades, Sam had thought, shopping will be so damned convenient we’ll just stay right at home and a truck will pull up out front each month with all the stuff they think we ought to have and just draft the money out of our accounts. After the thirty trial days we’ll ask them to please come in and pick up the one or two items we’ve discovered we can probably live without. For those new offerings remaining that will require some choice, fourteen shopping channels will be beamed directly into our frontal lobes.

  Ahead at Whalebone Junction a road ran over to good-sized wooded Roanoke Island and from there on over to the mainland. Roanoke was where Virginia Dare had been spanked to life, the first child born to English parents in America. It was also from Roanoke that Sir Walter Raleigh’s deposited 1587 colony had vanished without a trace, and it had been re-vanishing nightly in season for the last six decades now in an outdoor drama called The Lost Colony.

  Sam thought old Walt might easily have solved the mystery way back then had he but chatted in sign language with some of the Indians who maybe tended to look on these islands as their own turf and on the white man not as an innocent colonist but as an overdressed arrogant invader. What would the English have thought of a 1587 gang of painted breech-clouted Indians who piled out of their seagoing canoes carrying their weapons and set about erecting a walled village on the outskirts of London? Would they have been wholeheartedly welcomed as colonists with lots of wampum to spend? Or diced up and dumped in the Thames?

  There were other examples of olde-tyme English arrogance not far away. Inland over in New Bern back in 1770, Royal Governor William Tryon celebrated the completion of the lavish home meticulously designed and erected for him on sufficient appropriated acreage. It was a home reminiscent of the finer estates in grand old England, replete with manicured decorative gardens wherein one could stroll for an afternoon contemplating one’s superiority, and so having worked up a royal appetite, perhaps then pausing long enough to instruct one of the kitchen persons to put some extra creature to sleep and serve it up as a side dish with that evening’s usual feast.

  While the Tryon family was thusly roughing it in the new colony, their extensive complex maintained at considerable effort by a goodly staff of sweating servants, the homespun-clothed people of New Bern, many of whom were practically eating dirt just to stay alive, derisively called the pretentious piles of bricks “Tryon’s Palace". Today, restored to all its original splendor, what was now proudly called Tryon Palace drew gagg
les of videotaping tourists while in areas of the city not on the official tour routes, only blocks from the Palace, some of the citizenry still practically ate dirt.

  Roanoke was also the home of the Dare County Airport at Manteo, so Sam called them on unicom to advise that he was transiting their air space to land fifteen miles beyond at the small First Flight strip. Down on the right was the 140-foot-high khaki-colored Jockey’s Ridge dune, with three multicolored Rogallo hang gliders poised along its crest looking like prehistoric butterflies. He talked Valerie all the way down to entering a right downwind at eight hundred feet for the runway two-zero end of the narrow unattended strip. It was not the easiest place to land, Sam’s Flight Guide listing a road and unmarked power lines on the runway two approach and a tower, tank, and trees near the runway two-zero approach, the listing also cautioning to watch out for deer. But a small challenge was probably appropriate considering the location.

  Sam took over and concentrated on making the best landing he could, aware that the shades of the famous duo might be standing in their habitual suits and ties nearby atop Kill Devil Hill watching. Wilbur runs a hand over his bald pate and says, “What do you think brother, a six?” And Orville tugs his handlebar mustache and says, “Aw heck, let’s give him an eight, Curly. One or two of our landings that day back in oh-three weren’t all that great either, remember?”

  Sam parked the plane on the apron and set the hand brake. There were no facilities at the strip, and no other planes.

  They walked along a narrow paved footpath that wound up the broad grassy flank of Kill Devil Hill, Valerie in front followed by Sam and the boy. Joshua was holding Sam’s hand and skipping. Appraising Valerie, Sam quietly sang Waylon’s song about a good-looking long-legged Nashville woman with a sexy wiggle in her walk.

  Back over her shoulder she said, “Well I’m from Cherokee, mister, but you got the rest right.”

  “Why did you leave the reservation, miss?”

  “Find me a handsome rich white boy. Make all my dreams come true.”

  “Well,” Sam said, “I’m white.”

  “What am I?” Joshua asked.

  “You’re a wild Indian,” Valerie said.

  The sixty-foot granite monument atop the low summit carried a beacon on its top. It had been years since Sam had been here—way back before what he thought of as his other life—but this place still held almost a religious significance for him. They took in the view from the hilltop. A warm breeze was building and a few fair-weather cumuli were gathering in the western sky.

  A re-creation of the original rustic wooden camp, where the brothers had slept nightly in burlap slings hung from the rafters above their workbenches, lay below on the plain. Near that there was the contrast of the glassy modern memorial building. Small rough granite boulders marked the distances of the four powered flights made on December 17, 1903, the first just twelve seconds long and covering 120 feet, the fourth and longest lasting 59 seconds and going 852 feet.

  “Come on,” Sam said. “Let’s walk down to the memorial building.”

  “Good goo, those are big kites,” Joshua said as they walked inside. Replicas of the 1902 glider and the 1903 powered Flyer were perched behind ropes in the center of the building.

  “They sure do look like kites,” Sam said, “but if you look closely you’ll see they’re built a whole lot better than any kites you’ve seen.” Crafted of spruce and ash braced by wires, with wings covered by finely-sewn muslin, the Flyer achieved roll control by means of a hip cradle that was attached to wing-warping cables, the cradle strapped onto the pilot who lay prone on the lower wing of the stacked pair. The pilot controlled pitch with a vertical wooden lever in his left hand that changed the tilt on the biplane elevator extending from the front. The landing gear were simple ski-type skids. A twelve-horsepower four-cylinder gasoline engine spun twin pusher counter-rotating propellers through a simple chain-and-sprocket drive. The Flyer had a forty-foot wingspan and weighed 600 pounds.

  It was a sophisticated creation based on hard-won theory and solid scientific fact, and Sam explained the finer points to Joshua, who paid rapt attention.

  Exhibits behind glass around the walls displayed the engine design, yellowed notes and calculations, and various mementos. There was a wooden wind tunnel that the brothers had built.

  There was a single photograph of the first powered flight. It had been snapped with Orville’s camera by their volunteer helper John T. Daniels, who knew little of photography, but Ansel Adams could hardly have done a finer job of it.

  Sam pointed at the image and said, “Look at that, will you? Talk about a Kodak moment.”

  The priceless old photo showed the Flyer going away two feet above the far end of the rail, Orville prone on the lower wing, the elevators canted to begin climbing free of the shadow on the sand, the props blurred as the engine belted out all it had, the big wings tilted only slightly to the left, and Wilbur standing tensely to the right, his right elbow bent, his suit jacket blowing back in the wind, watching his brother and their creation intently, and every fiber of him obviously projecting go…go…go…

  Sam, standing there imagining the staccato clatter of the four-banger engine and the icy wind in his face and the brace wires thrumming as the Flyer came alive, knew he had often felt much the same flush of elation that Orville had certainly felt at that moment captured so dramatically on that two-cent rectangle of emulsion a century ago.

  Outside, Sam spread a blanket on the grass near the plane, anchoring it with two quart containers of aviation oil, and they shared a late lunch, Joshua asking questions about the Wrights and Sam trying to answer them accurately.

  “It’s all because of avian envy, you know,” Valerie said.

  Sam, his cheeks full of her excellent chicken salad, raised an eyebrow.

  “Well,” Valerie said, “what if there hadn’t been any birds around to show us it was even possible in the first place? People watched them for centuries, and envied them. Right up there on top of that hill, on top of that monument, on top of that beacon, there ought to be a sculpture of a little sparrow in flight.”

  Out over the beach, the gulls seemed to cheer raucously in agreement.

  When they took off from the narrow strip and banked away southward, Sam could easily imagine the wraiths of Orville and Wilbur standing there side by side in their suits and stiff white collars and ties on the summit of Kill Devil and, in the manner of every pilot everywhere, shading their eyes with their hands and looking up as an airplane went by.

  “It’s about time you got back to me,” Davis said. “Are you at a pay phone?”

  “Yes,” Donny said in his childish voice.

  “All right. Hang up and call me back in ten minutes at…” Davis gave him the number of a pay phone in the parking lot of the convenience store at the corner of his street.

  When Donny called exactly ten minutes later Davis said, “We have a contract. One customer. Some way out of town. I’ll be driving. Bring two changes of clothes and your own tools; everything you described to me two weeks ago.”

  “Do I know the customer?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the pay?”

  “We’ll talk about that later. I’ll pick you up at your place at four-thirty Friday morning.”

  “That’s pretty short notice.”

  “You should have called me back sooner. Do you want to go or not?”

  “Hey, I’ll be ready,” Donny said. “Hell, I’m always ready.”

  10

  SAM KEPT A RUSTY BICYCLE ON THE SMALL BACK PORCH OF his cottage and, like many other people on the island, often used it to run errands. That early Thursday morning was chilly and dew-damp when he rode through the village to the new rental cottage.

  He unlocked the place, checked over the materials Brad had left inside, and spent the morning hanging sheet rock and taping joints, whistling to himself.

  At eleven-thirty he dusted himself off and rode the bike over to the school. Jos
hua had secured his promise to have lunch with him. Valerie was at work. The boy lit up when he spotted Sam waiting outside the classroom that contained the combined kindergarten and first grade classes. Outside on the wall near the door there were twelve crayoned sheets of paper taped up in a row. The theme was obviously outer space, going by the multitude of stars and fiery-tailed rockets. Sam found Joshua’s rendition and immediately judged it to be the best of the lot.

  Joshua’s teacher, a pleasant woman just shy of 50, greeted him with a smile. “I’m Belinda Jameson,” she said. “So you’re the famous Mr. Bass. We’ve heard quite a lot about you. Joshua ranks you right up there alongside Spiderman.”

  “He’s a pretty neat kid.”

  “He surely is. They all are. They keep me young. No matter what happens, they start out each day as brand new. They don’t hold any grudges and everything they learn carries a touch of magic for them. Their imaginations are just boundless.”

  She led the line of them down the hall to the small cafeteria, Sam walking along beside Joshua, who proudly held his hand. They went through the food line, Joshua slipping an extra two peanut butter cookies onto Sam’s tray. Joshua gave his lunch number to the woman at the end of the line and Sam paid for his own tray.

  Trying to fold his frame up enough to sit beside Joshua at a table on one of the somewhat undersized chairs was a project, but he managed by keeping his legs out to one side.

  “What have you been doing today?” he asked the boy.

  “Miz Jameson showed us how to make paper-bag puppets. I made a bear. And I’m in the count-to-fifty club. Sam, you can take one of those cookies with you for a snack this afternoon.”

  “Thanks, I will. I saw your space drawing. Good job.”

  Joshua smiled and took a bite of cookie and a gulp from his small carton of chocolate milk.