"No, I was being such a dodo. Normally I'm not a slow starter."
"No, most pilots aren't. Mother says most pilots have this stupid mixup between penises and airplanes and flying and fucking, and they tend to jump on a woman the way they jump into a cockpit."
He stared at her. He'd seldom heard a woman use the word fucking before in casual conversation. The fact that they'd been clawing at each other like hungry hounds for five hours didn't diminish his surprise.
"Excuse my French, Bandy. I've been around flyers—and Bruno and Charlotte—too long. Does it offend you?"
"Yeah, a little, but it makes me hot too. Let's try saying it in another context."
"Okay, but only if you promise to do that little trick again."
"Trick?"
"Yes, you know, where we're really passionate, and you think I'm just about ready, and you roll over and put your toe in the electric light socket. That's a real treat."
Laughing, he said, "That's what I call my patented toe-in-socket sex—pretty shocking, huh?" The joking made them easy and considerate with each other, already familiar now, eager to be inventive still, but enjoying just the closeness, the penetrating intimacy. They would doze, then talk, then love, then talk.
He asked, "Is setting a record some sort of symbolic thing for you?"
"There's no sex symbolism in setting records. It's ego, pure and simple. I want to be the most famous woman flyer in the world."
"What does your mother say about that?"
"She understands, but she doesn't approve. She thinks that Bruno has put a jinx on us with the press, that neither one of us will ever get the kind of recognition that Earhart gets."
She ran her fingers through his hair. "You know, as much as I enjoyed making love to you—as much as I needed to make love to you—I like this part best. Let's get a little sleep, and then talk some more."
"It's three o'clock. I'd better get out of here."
"No, stay. To hell with the maids. We're paying for two singles; if we decide just to use a double, it's our business."
Her head fell to his chest, and in seconds she was snoring gently.
Cupping her bottom in his hand, he sighed, "I am one lucky son of a bitch."
*
Downey, California/July 4, 1934
Roget had insisted on delaying the first showing of the new RC-3 until the Fourth of July, to take advantage of the patriotic publicity, and he was angered when a ripple of laughter went through the crowd of reporters. Bandy had signaled the ground crew to open the hangar only to find that the massive sliding doors, rust hidden by huge American flags, were bolted together by a strange square padlock.
"It's that goddam Hughes!" Bandy muttered to Hadley. "That smart-ass was over here fooling around this morning. Send somebody for a bolt-cutter."
Bandy went over and talked to the small group of reporters, who were grinning broadly over the doughnuts and coffee Clarice Roget had provided.
A snap like a rifle shot signaled that Hadley had dealt with the lock. On each side four men pushed the sliding doors rattling back on their bent iron tracks. Inside the hangar, ancient parachutes, patched and yellowed with age, hung like theater curtains to block the view; red-white-and-blue bunting gave a wistful holiday air to the scene.
Herb Hines, from the Los Angeles Times, said, "Getting pretty Hollywood, aren't you, Bandy?"
The curtains parted and the gleaming silver Roget RC-3 rolled forward into the sunlight for the first time, propelled by the hands of every worker who could find a place to shove.
The normally vocal reporters went into a shocked silence, broken by Hines's subdued voice: "Holy Christ. It's a flying hotel."
The tall nose of the RC-3 towered over the crowd of newspaper people, who swarmed around an airplane bigger, sleeker, and shinier than any they had ever seen. The passenger door opened and a short ladder was extended. Ted Mahew stood proudly filling up the center aisle, and passing out press kits, with photos, specifications, and the kinds of words he wanted to read in the papers.
"When's the first flight?"
Mahew's confident pose concealed his raging anxiety. "We're going to begin a very leisurely test program—start with taxi tests, a few lift-offs, and take everything very easy. There is so much new on this airplane—retractable landing gear, landing flaps, controllable-pitch propellers—that it is going to revolutionize the aviation industry. We want to make sure we don't rush it."
Bandy smiled to himself at Mahew's words. Privately the Allied president had been clamoring for a rushed test program, with delivery of the test airplane to the airline in thirty days. Bandy had calmed him by promising to let him fly in the right seat on the initial test flight.
Bandfield retreated to the cockpit to avoid the rush of questions, but more to glow in the pleasure of at last having built an airplane exactly as he'd always wanted to do, scientifically and systematically. The competition to supply the engines had been fierce, so Bandy had a white line painted down the middle of the engine bay, and let the two engine manufacturers, Wright and Pratt & Whitney, have a contest right on the factory floor. They had worked for weeks, customizing the engines to the RC-3. For the time being, it looked as though Wright had won.
Mahew hung around for as long as he could after the press conference, fretting while the normal tuning process delayed the first flight. The brakes needed adjustment, the cowl flaps weren't working right, and there was a shimmy in the tail wheel on the taxi tests. It was all perfectly normal, but each delay jacked Mahew's blood pressure up another few points.
"You're just trying to outwait me, Bandfield. You know I have to get back to Chicago for a meeting with the board, and I know damn well you'll fly this thing the day after I leave." He stormed off with a flurry of threats, furious because he had to take the train. All the airlines, his own included, were grounded because of weather over the Rockies.
*
Downey, California/July 11,1934
At noon on the day following Mahew's departure, the entire staff of Roget Aircraft—four hundred strong—lined up to watch Bandy and Hadley taxi out to put everyone's career on the line. They went through the checklist twice, everything checking perfectly. The engines delivered full power, the propellers changed pitch on cue, and the controls all operated properly.
The usual pretest nervousness gripped Bandy. He turned and said, "Well, Hadley, I guess I can't put it off any longer. We've got a lot riding on this. I hope it'll go okay."
Hadley gave a thumbs-up sign, and Bandy advanced the power. The RC-3 accelerated smoothly, the factory force cheering as it roared by. It broke ground and began to climb at ninety miles per hour.
Bandy and Roget had agreed not to retract the gear on this flight, but when the left engine backfired and billowed black smoke, the planning went out the window.
The usual "Oh shit, it's happening" thoughts went through the crew's minds as Bandy barked out orders.
"Pull up the gear, Hadley. What's going on?"
The right engine coughed, and the power fell back on both engines. The airplane staggered uncertainly, as if a grabbing hand were pulling it to earth. The leaden feel was spelled out on the sagging needles on the manifold pressure gauges. The tachometers surged, fell back, and then stabilized at 2,400 rpm. On the ground the crowd suddenly went silent. One reporter muttered, "It's going in."
Bandy fed in back pressure, caution tempering need, as he kept the nose high and the airspeed hovering around eighty-two miles per hour.
"For Christ's sake, Hadley, what is it?"
The big transport staggered toward an open field. Two pairs of hands flew like fan blades around the compartment, repositioning the controls, checking everything again and again.
"We got fuel pressure, Bandy, and I dipsticked the tanks myself, I know the gauges are okay. The only thing I can think of is contaminated fuel—and I can't believe that. It came out of the same tanks we always use."
Time took on its familiar dual dimensions in the emerg
ency: hours since the emergency started, only seconds since takeoff.
"How about putting her in that field?" Hadley nodded at an angular open area coming up on the right, nestled between an irrigation ditch and an abandoned farm- building.
"Not if I can help it—there's a gully that will tear it in half. I'm going to try to keep it flying long enough to get back home."
Sweat poured down his face, and his wet hands fought the wheel to keep the airplane away from the ragged edge of a stall that would snap them and the Roget Aircraft Company into a smear of burned blackness on the landscape.
His mouth was dry and his words garbled together. "Don't know how accurate the damn airspeed indicator is. This thing could pay off any second. We're too low to jump, so strap yourself in good."
Hadley glanced out, saw that the ground was no closer.
"Keep it as level as possible, Bandy. When it's level, the engines pick up power and we gain a few miles per hour on the airspeed."
Bandfield nodded and began a delicate stepladder dance, edging the RC-3 up foot by foot until they were three hundred feet off the ground, alternately flying level to let the airspeed build a little, and then trading a few miles per hour for ten feet more altitude. At three hundred feet he began a shallow turn to the right. As soon as the right wing lowered in the bank, the left engine barked a series of savage popping backfires. He hurriedly leveled the wings and the engine smoothed out. He tried again, a five-degree bank, and the turn became like the climb, a slow ragged edging toward his goal, the north end of the runway.
"How long will it take for the gear to come down, Hadley?"
Roget, face ashen, thought before saying, "About fifteen to twenty seconds. Better allow for thirty, though."
"Okay. We're lined up. Drop the gear. I'm not going to use any flaps."
The gear came down and Bandy trimmed the nose up to get the eighty-mile-an-hour approach speed he planned. Both engines backfired.
"Put in thirty degrees of flaps."
Hadley started to protest, then ran the handle down. The engines smoothed out as the lowered flaps rotated the nose down, and Bandy was able to add power to keep an even seventy-five miles per hour. The engines seemed to be running right for the first time since takeoff as the runway rushed toward them.
Bandy touched down with both wheels, bounced, held back pressure on the wheel, and let the RC-3 dribble down the runway, sweat sluicing off him in the California sunshine. He let it roll straight ahead, then shut the engines down.
"So much for first flights!"
Roget said softly, "And thank God Mahew wasn't here. If he didn't have a heart attack, he'd have eaten us alive."
The airplane was towed in and the engineers swarmed over it. Two hours later, the Wright engineers came to him, red-faced.
"Our error, Mr. Bandfield."
Bandfield felt sorry for the engineer who poured out the tearful apology. They had installed the float valves in the carburetors with the hinges on the wrong side. When the nose went up, the floats closed. It was a factory modification and they just hadn't picked it up.
"Thank God you didn't crash. And thank you for not letting it crash."
Bandy slumped down, speechless, as the enormity of the error hit him. A stupid error, the worst kind, had almost killed them, and wiped out the company. He didn't reproach himself—there was no way in the world he could have known about the carburetor float valve if the Wright people didn't.
He thought of all the people he'd known who had been trapped and killed by such a pointless mishap. With all his experience, with all his skills, he was totally vulnerable to some distant mechanic's improperly installing a part. In part it was the growing complexity of aircraft. No matter how many hours you worked, you could no longer do everything and check everything yourself.
Bandfield had no illusions about himself, no false modesty, knowing his virtues as well as his limits. One virtue was an ability to be utterly emotionless about engineering problems, to see them in a clear light. It was impossible to feel the same way about human-error problems.
An urgent need to see Patty came over him, an almost childlike desire to flee and bind himself in her arms. The feeling shook him. He had never needed anyone before. Never had anyone been able to barge in emotionally when he was having practical flying or engineering problems, not even Millie. He had loved her, but now he realized how entirely different it had been. He had always wanted to protect and take care of Millie—with Patty he wanted to share, to discuss, to sort things out. She offered a kind of resilient strength that he had never known before—but now that he recognized it, he needed it, and badly.
Thinking about her shifted the whole perspective of the near-accident. She was the important thing in his life, and the racing airplane they were planning had to work flawlessly. He realized that his entire future happiness was bound up with an engineering problem far more important even than the RC-3: Patty's flying the racer.
She had come to California to help with the design—at least that was the excuse they used. They had spent every possible day together since the wonderful night in the Brown Palace, and he realized that they had formed a strong partnership that could endure almost anything—even marriage. If everything went well, she could handle the airplane easily. If she had some sort of unusual emergency, she would probably be overwhelmed. In an airplane as tricky as the Beechcraft, the accident would probably be fatal.
He realized again that he did not handle personal problems with the clinical precision with which he attacked engineering difficulties. She had made it perfectly clear that if she married him, he would have to let her do exactly what she wanted to do about flying. The only solution, the only middle ground, was for him to stay with her, to train her and prepare her for the flights as if she were a boxer getting ready for a championship fight. Maybe, after they were married, after they had started a family, she would have a change of heart.
It was the best solution he could come up with to bridge the twin personal and engineering problems. He felt better and was turning his attention back to the recalcitrant carburetors when he thought to himself, I've got to tell her about this, about how I feel. It might be important to her.
The next flight of the RC-3 went off perfectly, and Bandy decided he'd raise and lower the gear on purpose this time. The rest of the testing passed so smoothly they were able to double up on the test objectives, and by the end of the month, Bandy felt they could take their "final exam," the route test with Mahew.
*
Denver, Colorado/August 6, 1934
The Brown Palace seemed far less comforting than it had last year during the first three days of his visit to Denver. Instead of being locked in Patty's energetic embrace, Bandfield spent his time showing the Allied Airlines brass and their wives through the airplane, and listening to Mahew complain about everything.
"Charles Lindbergh is coming in tonight about six; I'll want him in the copilot's seat tomorrow."
Bandfield nodded; he would have preferred Roget, but only because he was familiar with the airplane. Lindbergh would do well.
Bandfield had raced out to buy Patty a present. He went overboard and got her a $35 Elgin watch, particularly enjoying it because there had been a time when all he had in the world was $30 to get him to Paris. He paid cash for the watch, even though there was a time-payment plan available. At the cash register, there had been a big display of Mickey and Minnie Mouse watches, $1 apiece. He'd bought a Minnie Mouse and asked for a big box. When he gave them to her, he would put the Minnie Mouse on top of the Elgin, just for a gag.
The evening wasn't promising. He was going to have to be pleasant to Lindbergh without appearing to trade on their past relationship. And it wasn't going to be easy to be pleasant. From the press, Bandfield had discovered how versatile his old flight-school friend had become. He had already made many flights as important as the one to Paris, and now was busy in some very scientific activities, far removed from the world of stick and rudder.
Lindbergh was working on something called a perfusion pump as a step toward an artificial heart. His experiments, done with some French doctor, had been written up in medical journals and the popular press.
Perhaps even more surprising was his political clout. He hadn't been afraid to take on President Roosevelt when the big air-mail scandal erupted. It was all politics—Roosevelt had canceled the air-mail contracts with the airlines and assigned the Army to do the job. Initially, the Army hadn't had the training or the equipment, and a lot of deaths had resulted. Eddie Rickenbacker had called Roosevelt a murderer, and gotten away with it. Lindbergh had been less dramatic, but his voice carried more weight, and his direct confrontation with Roosevelt had been strongly criticized. It was as if the public wouldn't allow a hero to be controversial. He was always going to be "Lucky Lindy" on his way to Paris; publicizing his political points of view didn't sit well.
Bandfield was too honest not to admit to himself that much of the problem was jealousy. Lindbergh's successes had been a too-sweet coating over the bitter pill of Lindy's failure to help Roget Aircraft when it desperately needed it. He knew that if the positions had been reversed, if he'd made the famous Paris flight and Lindbergh was struggling to sell airplanes, he would have helped Lindbergh.
Maybe that was one of the prices of fame—maybe you couldn't help your friends. And Lindbergh had paid another terrible price, the loss of his baby. Bandfield looked over at the framed picture of Patty on the hotel dresser and gave a little salute. He tried to imagine what it would be like to live with her someday, to have babies. The thought of losing their child to a kidnapper was impossible! His heart went out to Lindbergh as he went downstairs to the dining room.
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