"How do you do, Mrs. Hafner? I'm pleased to meet you at last."
"You and Bruno are old friends, I know." She laughed and shrugged, saying in effect, "It's not my fault."
He didn't reply. She was the most beautiful mature woman he had ever seen—nothing to compare to Millie's fresh beauty, of course, but startling in her own way. She was dressed like Hollywood's conception of the lady flyer, in a fashion-plate leather coat, jodhpurs, and high laced boots, her large, firm breasts bulging animatedly under a filmy white blouse. She was carrying a helmet and scarf in her hands.
He had assumed she was a bleached blonde; now he could see that her hair was truly golden, with perhaps some slight streaks of silver. "Peaches and cream" was the perfect description of her complexion. The least suggestion of lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth made her seem to be smiling all the time.
He could not help himself. He let his eyes run down her body, appreciating the fullness of her figure. At last she put her hands out and turned around. "Inspection over?" she asked, loving it.
Bandfield blushed and apologized. "I'm sorry. The truth is you are absolutely beautiful, but I was rude to stare."
She reached over and touched his shoulder, running her hand down his arm almost as if she were checking the conformation of a horse she wished to buy.
"Don't apologize. All women love to be admired, especially when they get to be my age."
He moved away slightly. She followed him.
"Have you seen Dusty? He was supposed to meet me here, and we were going to take a hop in my plane." She pointed to the Waco 10 tethered a hundred yards down the field, canvas covers over its cockpits and the engine.
"No, nobody's here. The guard says they're coming in at midnight. Must be going to make the try in the morning. I hope they do, and I hope they make it."
"Me too. The papers are beginning to say ugly things about Byrd. Dusty says it's all nonsense, that he'll go when he's ready." Her mention of Dusty was matter-of-fact, but then a look of irritation crossed her face.
"Sure Dusty's not here?" Her voice was a mixture of wistfulness and hope.
"No, I haven't seen him."
Her expression softened as she darted a glance at him. "What are you doing this morning?"
Bandfield thought fast. He didn't want to give this woman any instruction in Hafner's airplane. If something happened, a simple ground loop, anything, there would be hell to pay.
"I've got to get back to Manhattan."
"Couldn't you give me some breakfast? I know a little place not far from here where we could have bacon and eggs, maybe, or whatever you wanted."
She placed her hand on his forearm and squeezed. She had moved closer, and he caught her exciting scent.
"I'm sorry." He wrenched away, and said, "You'll have to excuse me, I've got to go."
She smiled wryly and said, "When you've gotta go, you've gotta
go.
He dove in the Stutz and pulled away, a mixture of regret and relief pouring over him. He thought of her breasts and her obvious availability and toyed with the idea of turning around. Then he thought of Millie and mashed the accelerator down.
*
Salinas, California/July 15, 1927
The sun-dusted hillsides were resting, waiting for the next seasonal splash of rain to paint them green again. The few cows that Clarice Roget insisted on maintaining cut shallow paths up the hills, edging around the scrub oak and manzanita, coming home at night to the sprawling wooden structure that had begun as barn and then been turned into a combination garage/hangar.
She watched Hadley strut up the path with his cocky walk, arms flailing, legs swinging wide, knowing that he had forgotten the bitter disappointment of the Rocket, and was already spending the money Bandy was supposed to win in the next race. There was always a next race, always something just around the corner. Usually a bill collector.
She stood on the wooden porch of their unpainted house, washing out his underwear, the suds on her arm giving her deep leathery tan a glistening cordovan hue.
Hadley's assurance amid poverty galled, and she flushed red, the veins of her neck extending like rhubarb stalks. She smacked the scrubbing board into the tub in exasperation. "I tell you, Hadley, you'd be better off to burn that garage—"
"Hangar," he interrupted.
"Hangar, garage, it's a junk breeding ground. We ought to start farming, get some acreage where we can plant some beans and sugar beets, and start living a little normal."
It was such an old argument that she understood when Hadley simply turned away to walk back down the gravel path to where the new apprentice was helping him work on the old truck. He hadn't even bothered to repeat that lettuce was the coming cash crop, as he usually did.
Clarice glared out the window at her husband. Theirs was a comfortable marriage of total misunderstanding, one that only strong personalities could survive. They were so completely devoid of common interests that each remained an intriguing mystery to the other. She was flint-hard, farm born and bred, glorying in the rituals of planting and harvest, breeding and birthing. He was steel-sharp and devoted to machines, seeing in them an uplifting, challenging sculptural beauty that was usually lost on others, always on her. She liked to go to church services, he liked to tell naughty jokes. They repeatedly struck sparks, their differences both the root of their difficulties and the source of their strength. Physically they looked remarkably alike, both tall and lean, with straw-colored hair that their hard life was sure to turn white early.
The weathered sign over the hangar door said "Roget Aircraft," but the yard was filled with the pick-up automobile work Hadley did to make a living. Clarice's gnarled hands drummed on the table. Her eyes were troubled. Her husband had built a few good airplanes, she guessed, but none had made any money. She ran the books and knew that fixing cars was their bread and butter. The problem, of course, was that to Hadley and Bandy, cars were mere commodities, something they could fix and forget, while airplanes were utterly absorbing works of art in which they lost themselves. She knew, too, that they took half the normal time to repair an American car and twice as much as was necessary to repair an airplane. But in the past few years, word of Hadley's mechanical ability—and his set of metric tools—had spread and rich people were bringing exotic foreign cars, Lanchesters, Isotta-Fraschinis, Hispano-Suizas, from as far away as San Francisco. Clarice didn't want to see anything but forgettable Fords and Chevies in the yard; when they bent over a Rolls, they fell in love with it and lost money.
She turned and put a blue enameled coffeepot, as chipped by life as herself, on the stove to perk. Eight thick pepper-dusted slices of sidemeat sizzled in a black griddle, ready for the second breakfast. Hadley took most of his meals and gallons of coffee out in the garage. She figured he'd swallowed as much crankcase oil from his fingers as mayonnaise from the bread over the years, for he rarely bothered to stop to wash his hands. He would never grow up, never get the grease from under his nails or his back off a creeper. Hadley always talked about striking it rich some day, creating an airplane that they could build in quantity, moving to Los Angeles and building a factory. The truth was that he thought he'd already struck it rich, getting to work on such nice machinery every day.
She'd been glad when Bandy left to fly to Paris, happier still that he had stayed away even after the disaster of the fire. It was good for Bandy to be away from her husband for a while, to avoid being pressed utterly into Hadley's mold, and she was solaced by the emerging independence she sensed in him. Perhaps it was inevitable; his father had been a rebel, a huge, lovable man who embraced every cause except earning a steady living for his family. George Bandfield had a wild red streak in him, a joyous brawling love for the underdog that took him into the Oregon forests to help the woodcutters and to the San Francisco docks to rally the longshoremen. He had dominated his wife completely, just as he'd tried to do with Bandy. But his son had reacted differently, tempering under the treatment until he was steel-h
ard and resilient, as conservative as his father was radical, as bullheaded as Hadley when he was right, but quick to admit it when he realized he was wrong.
Yet they all missed George Bandfield. His wife, Emily, had loved him unflaggingly even though she had seen her ranch eaten up acre by acre, to fuel his follies, adoring him with the mindless, assertive passion peculiar to women whose marriages are considered mistakes by everyone else. When George Bandfield left she stopped living in all but the literal sense. Always fragile and withdrawn, she had become just a paper image of an old woman, in bed for most of the day, barely able to let a hired woman feed and take care of her. Clarice knew that his mother's death had added to Bandy's sense of guilt. He once told her he felt his dad had left because his own success in school had been too much of a contrast.
Clarice felt that Bandy had two legacies from his father. The first was his profound love for the underdog, and the second was his mechanical aptitude. To be Hadley Roget's partner, he'd need them both.
She sighed and turned away from the window when Hadley rolled the truck to the side and began to work on one of his latest acquisitions, a blood-red Standard biplane he'd picked up from a wrecking yard, gear crumpled around its cowling like seaweed on a boulder. She knew he planned to use parts from it in fixing up the shattered hulk he was rebuilding for Bandy to fly to Hawaii.
Down in the yard, Hadley wrenched the rudder from the Standard's fuselage; an argument with Clarice always put a fine edge on Hadley's always volatile temper. "Goddammit, Howard, let's get busy. I ain't paying you to stand around and spit."
"You're not paying me anything, Hadley, I'm paying you, remember?"
Hadley glowered as the youth went on, "And to you, and everybody here, I'm Charles Howard, not Howard Hughes. I want to be able to move around without a lot of lawyers following me."
"Charles Howard" was tall and lean, with a broad face and a quick smile. His eyes were dark and darting, moving always as if something he could learn had just eluded him. A year ago, Hadley had taught him to fly. Now he was teaching him to be a mechanic.
"What's with this Charles Howard crap anyway, Howard? I know you have pots of money, but why do you need an alias?"
Howard put down a wrench. "Look, I'll tell you again. I want to be something in this industry, but I want to do it on merit. I could walk into any airline in the country and get a job as Howard Hughes because they'd all want to skin a dumb kid out of his money. They'd let me fly and tell me I was doing well no matter how badly I did."
Hadley was nodding. He had indeed been told before, but he wanted to hear it again, to see if this hardworking, no-nonsense young millionaire was sincere. He grumbled some more, trying to find an argument he could win. He stood glaring at the younger man like an ancient British gladiator thrown into the ring with some up-and-coming young Celt. Roget was tall, and his thin blond hair was sunbaked to silver. His spare frame was covered with a well-defined musculature looking like braided steel wire under his skin. Hughes was as tall as Roget and his negative image in coloration, with a deeply tanned skin and dark black hair. He didn't seem to be heavily muscled but had proved already that he was just as strong as the older man.
Hughes shot Hadley a grin and broke into his thoughts. "I don't know why you worry what my name is. You rarely call me anything but smart-ass. But I keep remembering that it takes a crusty old bastard like you to tell me the truth. Besides that, I like the way you work."
He turned to the Standard, then looked back.
"Charles Howard. Don't you forget, because that's the way the checks will be signed, too."
*
Oakland, California/August 6, 1927
Lindbergh had lit the torch; James Dole had thrown a bucket of gasoline on it. Pineapple Derby madness was already overshadowing the covey of proposed transatlantic flights, and pilots and airplanes from every corner of the country were converging on Oakland.
The flexible contest rules—the race had already been postponed twice—were bent to accommodate crazy contestants. Airplanes that had been intended to do no more than carry two passengers in and out of cow pastures were being filled with homemade gas tanks for the 2,400-mile flight across total emptiness. In backyards and barns, welding torches glowed, fabricating monstrosities that could barely get off the ground, much less across an ocean.
There was a fever, a contagion, and it was simply Lindberghitis. The slim, soft-spoken airman had given more than stature to an industry; he had given hope. Pilots who had starved for years were willing to risk anything for a chance at glory.
It had never been tougher for Bandfield; the prize money dictated that he compete, even though it meant compromising everything he believed in, everything for which he'd tried to stand for. Instead of flying a well-engineered, well-proven plane in which safety was an uppermost consideration, he was back working with Roget, trying to pull rabbit performance out of a tired old hat of an airplane. Hadley had persuaded Vance Breese to sell them an ancient beat-up crate that had been used on the Varney Air Lines Elko, Nevada, to Pasco, Washington, route. It was an open-cockpit four-placer that had crashed twice, the scars of its rebuilds evident in the cut-and-try welding of its fuselage and the splices in its wing. Yet it had one great virtue: it was available. Now they were working night and day to install the tanks where wet mail sacks had lain and scared passengers had thrown up as it threaded through the passes in the Rockies.
Roget passed the time by riding Charles Howard unmercifully while the three of them spent twenty hours a day trying to stretch and strengthen the mail plane.
Howard was eager enough, but Roget was a constant critic. "Godammit, Charlie, I said to be here at seven o'clock. I'm busier than a one-armed paperhanger with the crabs, and you come sauntering in at nine. Where the hell were you?"
"Sorry, Hadley—I had a date, went to see Wings, then for a drive in the country."
"That's a pretty good movie, Charlie. I really liked the flying scenes." Bandfield felt obliged to make amends for Hadley's continual hard-timing of the boy.
"The movie stinks. I've seen it five times, and it gets worse every time."
Hadley snorted. "Well, smart-ass, why don't you make a better one?"
Howard looked at him. "I just might, Hadley, and I'll get you to fix up the airplanes for me. That was one of the problems—the airplanes didn't look like real World War airplanes. My date said so too, and she doesn't know anything about it."
"Well, your ass has a date with my foot if you're late again. Now get your kiester over to Manly's supply shack and get me some gasket material, and try to get back here before winter." Howard shot off on the double.
"How come you're so hard on that guy, Hadley? I know you're a mean old geezer, but he's not used to it."
"Look, Bandy, Charles Howard is just the name he works under. His real name is Howard Hughes, and he's the richest kid in town, the guy who put up the money for this airplane. I taught him to fly, and now I'm teaching him to build airplanes."
“Holy shit, Hadley. Then how come you're so mean-ass to him?"
"He told me to treat him just like I'd treat anybody else. He doesn't want any publicity. And he figures somebody would find out who he is if I was nice to him."
"Yeah, that'd be a tip-off. What kind of a pilot is he?"
"He's a fucking natural. He says after this, he's going to get a job as a copilot on an airline, then go into aviation in a big way. I want you to be nice to him, though—we may want to tap his bankroll again someday."
Bandfield shook his head. Winter had taught him rich people could be nice; maybe Charlie Howard, whatever his name was, would be okay.
In the meantime, he had to figure some way to cram enough fuel tanks in the airplane to get him to Hawaii. Normally the Breese had a range of six hundred miles at the outside. Bandfield winced at the overload he knew it had to carry to get him 2,400 miles to Hawaii. They were going to have to beef up the landing gear, run another strut to the wing, and reinforce the fuselage to tak
e the weight of the tanks and gasoline. It was baling-wire-and-bolt-on mechanics, the very thing he hated, and had sworn he'd never do again.
He kept a running tab on the weight not only because he had to for the judges but also to keep track of the center of gravity. If it hadn't been for the rules, he would have thrown the records away, because they provided nothing but bad news.
The Oakland flight line was like old home week, and he was pleased when Jack Winter walked in, immaculate in gray plus fours, maroon sweater, and white cap. He'd invited Bandy to make a thorough inspection of his gorgeously finished Vega himself. It was the first plane of the new Lockheed line, and no effort had been spared on it. It reassured him about Millie; if any plane could make it, the Vega could.
"Did you hear about Art Rogers?"
Bandy shook his head no.
"He went in yesterday on a test flight."
Bandfield rubbed his hands on some cotton wool. "Can't say it surprises me. The plane was too radical."
A special plane had been built for Rogers, the twin-engine, twin-tail Angel of Los Angeles. He had read about it and seen some photos. The Angel was an absurd conception powered by two tiny three-cylinder British Lucifer engines, notoriously unreliable, mounted front and back on the little egg-shaped fuselage. Thin booms carried the twin-ruddered tail surfaces. Like most of the planes entered in the race, it was a half-baked design scratched out on butcher paper by a nonengineer.
Roget stuck his head in the hangar. "Come on out—here comes the Hoot Gibson special! It's crazier-looking than a bag full of assholes!" They strolled out to watch the big twin-engine Fisk triplane, financed by the cowboy star and carrying his portrait on the nose, ease around the pattern looking more like a three-masted clipper ship than an airplane.
"Christ, that crate is all drag and a yard wide."
Bandfield shook his head. "He's overshooting final. He ought to go around."
The Fisk, close enough now so that they could see its orange wings and black fuselage, moved slowly in a turn back toward the edge of the field.
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