Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  It wasn’t a question of money. Clinton Dupré had left Jeb more than they would ever need. It was rather, Patricia suspected, her own gentle needling of Jeb about his unpracticality which had made him accept the post. No more ‘causes’ after this. She wondered if that were really such a good thing.

  She crossed the Rue du Mont Blanc at the foot of the bridge and walked along the Quai des Bergues, until she came to the little footbridge that led to her favourite spot in all Geneva— the little island nestling half under the Mont Blanc bridge. The flowers were already blooming there, despite the cold wetness of the spring weather. She walked out to the island and sat on a bench under the willow trees. Only then did she permit herself to think of her son.

  I hope he’s all right. Roland’s with him now—and he’s very experienced, one of the great flyers of all time, the papers say. He’ll take care of Hank. He’ll—

  She saw the swans move out from under the bridge. They were creatures from fairyland in the morning mist. They came silently drifting down the lake towards her, proudly, serenely, their plumage unimaginably white, reflecting a reverse image of their passage palely in the water.

  She sat there, watching them. Then one more came drifting down the lake, far behind the others. She stiffened, staring at him. For this one was blacker than night, than—death, the words formed unbidden in her mind, his form slow-drifting, sombre, funereal.

  It’s only another swan, she told herself. Only a black swan. But she got up from the bench and started running wildly towards the hotel.

  “Is it,” Doctor Meyers wrote in his journal, “that under the stress of unbearably strong emotions the barriers of distance break down, and they, those about to die, force their last agonised message through, triumphing by sheer will over the physical world? But all four women agree upon the time, hours before Hank Dupré died. Yet Mrs. McGregor, the oldest of them, the closest, therefore, to the invisible world of the spirit, saw his death. We know so little. What is time? Can it be bent; are there flaws in its flow, permitting the coexistence of the then and the now, and perhaps, even, when we have learned how, the still to be? This is unscientific nonsense. I know that. But I believe these four women; what’s more, I know, against my better judgment, against my reason, against a lifetime of scientific training, that what they said is true.”

  So, by such a route, Hugo Meyers arrived at February 6, 1920; at his curiously fateful rendezvous with Roland Benton.

  The first red streaks of dawn were there now, in the sky, reflected like blood upon the black and silver water. The reeds made a forest of spears, silhouetted against the burning east. There were spectre shapes, formed of the morning mists, rising above the bayou. Roland got up stiffly, his breath making small puffs of fog, and all the dogs came up at mice, heads lifted, waiting. He slipped the shells into the chambers, snapping the barrels back into place, scanning the sky, waiting. Then he saw the first black V coming in very high and fast, wheeling far out over the marsh, then riding in upon him to the far, thin sound of honking.

  He brought the shot-gun up and held it to his shoulder. As they swept in, he caught the leader in his sights, leading him just enough, touching the trigger, hearing half consciously the gun crash, and he, not even waiting to see the first bird fall, swinging upon the next, firing, seeing it halted suddenly by death, plummeting downward, trailing a scattering of plumage through the still, frosty air. The retrievers plunged in, oblivious to the cold. When they came back again, he took the dripping bundles of feathers from their mouths, and stuffed them into his game-bag, thinking: It’s doubly murderous to kill a thing that flies.

  Then he said it aloud, savouring the words:

  “It is doubly murderous to kill a thing that flies.”

  “Why, Roland?” Hugo Meyers said quietly, from where he had stood for nearly five minutes now, a yard behind the last Benton. “Why is it doubly murderous to kill a thing that flies?”

  Roland stood there, looking at him a long time, and the Benton eyes were veiled. Then they cleared, and he said it:

  “There’s something pure about flight, Hugo. The very idea, I mean. We—we’ve been trying to do it for hundreds of years. And ten years after we’d done it finally, ten short years after all the years of hoping, praying, dreaming—to break away, Hugo—to be free—to soar—do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” Hugo said, “go on.”

  “We fouled it. We made of it an instrument of murder. To blast open the bellies of babies. To cut down women in the streets. To kill each other even—a flyer killing another flyer, can you conceive of anything more horrible?”

  “Strange,” Doctor Meyers muttered, “I never thought about it like that.”

  “Yes, yes!” Roland said, “like that! The men who had learned to mount up, to hurdle the mountain-top, to lose themselves in the bosoms of cloud; the men who had left the dirt and smells and littleness, Hugo, the first men in human history who were free—really free up there where you can see how small the world is, measure the littleness of human vanities—these men in the space between 1903 and 1915, say, had already learned to blast each other down out of the clean air, leaving the stink of fabric and oil and human flesh burning as an offence in the very nostrils of God!”

  He held the doctor there with those eyes of his, dead level, sure, until finally the blaze went out of them. Then he said it again, like a litany or a prayer:

  “It’s doubly murderous, Hugo, to kill a thing that flies.”

  “Sit down, Roland,” Hugo Meyers said quietly. “Sit down and tell me about Hank. You can now, you know.”

  The light came back into Roland’s eyes then, the splintering of blue ice into the harsh planes and angles of pure grief; then it smoothed into a glow, into disbelief dying into, finally, what was pure wonder.

  “Yes,” Roland said, “I can, can’t I? How did you know?”

  “I don’t know,” Hugo Meyers growled; “but, anyhow, I knew.”

  “We came up off the ‘drome at fourteen hours,” Roland said. “I was leading, with Hank and Mono as my wingmen—”

  “Mono?” Doctor Meyers said.

  “Quentin Longwood. We called him Mono because he insisted to anybody who would listen that all the aircraft of the future would be monoplanes without struts or flying-wires. He’s right, of course, but it’ll take a long time.”

  “Go on. Sorry I interrupted you.”

  “Bertie Nichols was above and behind Hank, and Tom Cartwright was covering Quentin, making the same kind of a V that ducks and geese make, you understand, Hugo. And then I turned eastward towards the lines.”

  As he told it, he made Hugo Meyers see it: a mixed flight of eight dark-grey Albatross D-5s and ten black Fokker triplanes of Jasta Seven screaming down upon them.

  Roland had fought in the air for two years, but this was a thing he had never been able to dominate, which could not, in fact, be dominated, this awful suddenness with which death came. He had not seen the enemy aircraft. He had searched the whole sky, and he had not seen them. Swearing, he yanked the stick right and left, waggling his wings. Then he eased back on the stick so that the Nieuport’s nose rose imperceptibly, the cross-hairs of the gun-sight climbing the fuselage of the D-5, until the round, helmeted head of the German pilot appeared in them; then his thumb clamping down on the trigger button atop the stick, and the tracers leaping out, the enemy pilot jerking in his seat as the steel-jacketed .30 calibres tore into him, slumping forward, coughing his life out in a thick red tide that obliterated his instruments before his quick-fading sight, the weight of his body, lifeless now, slamming forward against the control-stick, the Albatross going down, straight down.

  He saw, as he pulled up, that Hank was on to another Boche, and that Bertie and Mono had already sent two more down, flaming. Even as he watched, in that curious relative suspension of time, Hank got a long burst into the D-5’s tank, and the Albatross blew up, scattering pieces of dark grey debris all over the sky. The whole action had taken, actually, a shad
e under thirty seconds. The Fokkers of Jasta Seven were gone.

  “I re-grouped the flight and saw I had only four machines left. Tom Cartwright, the new man, the youngster who had arrived two days before at the front, was gone. Then I saw the Fokkers again. They were down almost to ground level pinning hell on a French observation balloon.”

  Down below, the ground crew was frantically trying to haul the fat balloon down; but the lead Fokker got in a long burst with incendiaries, and a solid sheet of flame broiled skyward, with the remainder of the sausage dropping below it like dirty rags. Roland shook his head. He had far too much respect for Jasta Seven Fokkers to lead four Nieuports against ten of them.

  He saw the parachutes of the balloonists blossom out, wondering for the hundredth time when, if ever, someone would adapt the bulky life-savers for use in planes, thinking of the dozens of boys he had known personally whom a ‘chute could have saved; then, against his will, he was already screaming downward, because at that last possible instant he had seen the Fokkers sliding down, taking turns at machine-gunning the parachutists. From the way they hung beneath the shroud-lines, he was sure they were already dead, but the Fokkers rode on in upon them, pencilling the air with the white criss-cross of tracers, with their targets jerking like macabre marionettes under the impact of the slugs.

  Roland got the leader in his sights, and sent him down, burning. Then, as he dived upon another, his guns jammed.

  “I cleared the jam and turned back; but I was already too late. Mono was going down in a flat spin; but at the last minute he pulled out of it and started for home, trench-hopping. He got the hell shot out of him, but he made it. Then, off to my left, I saw Bertie. He was flying straight and level, under perfect control, Hugo, only he was trailing a sheet of flame from his nose to his stabiliser, and fifty yards out beyond that.

  “He—he climbed out of the cockpit, Hugo. It was the damnedest thing to watch. Then he reached back into that hell inside the cockpit and found the stick, and slipped her beautifully, blowing the flames out and away from him; but one of the Fokkers caught him across the middle with a burst. His feet slipped off the wing, but he was still hanging on to the rim of the pit by one arm. Then he got his other hand up to his face, put his thumb to his nose, and wiggled his fingers at me. Then he let go, sprawling out on nothing, Hugo, going down. . . .”

  “Take it easy, boy,” Hugo said; “you don’t have to go on with this.”

  “I want to—in fact, I’ve got to,” Roland said. “There weren’t but two of us left then—me and Hank. And there were eight Fokkers, because somebody, Mono or Hank, had gotten another one. I signalled for Hank to get the hell out of there.

  “Then because he was still green and scared—anybody who tells you he wasn’t scared is a whore-hopping son of a liar, Hugo; I used to get out of the cockpit and throw up—he forgot the ten thousand times I’d told him you couldn’t power-dive a Nieuport Twenty-eight.”

  “Why not?” Hugo said.

  “Because the fabric wasn’t stitched on to the upper wing right. No matter how many more stitches you had your rigger put in, the fabric would still burst on that top wing in a vertical power dive. Hank’s machine and Bertie’s and Mono’s and mine all had twice the stitches they came with; but a square metre came off of Hank’s top wing when he shoved that stick all the way forward. After the war was over they found out they’d sewed them in the wrong place. I saw d’Avoville wring a Twenty-eight out at le Bourget and everything stayed together; hell of a lot of good that did Hank and all the other good flyers they killed.”

  “That was the first mistake he made. The second one was when we were over our ‘drome, and he forgot that after you’ve throttled back a monosoupape le Rhóne, you have to gun it with extreme caution.”

  Hugo shook his head.

  “Greek,” he said, “pure Attic Greek.”

  “I could explain it, but it would take too long. Put it this way, Hugo: every time you slowed up that motor, it slung raw petrol into its own cowling. Then when you opened it up to get more speed, the exhaust flames hit the raw petrol—and you’d catch fire five times out of five if you weren’t damned careful.”

  “Who the hell,” Hugo roared, “ever accepted a machine like that for service?”

  “Nobody,” Roland said. “The French rejected them after the first test. Then some glory-hungry blockhead in our Procurement Command started yowling for planes so we could shoot down the whole damned German Air Force, which, being Americans, and therefore God’s chosen race, was going to be easy for us. We had to have Spads, hundreds of Spads right away. Only the French were catching hell supplying Spads to their own crack escadrilles—the Spad being the only decent aircraft they ever produced—so they couldn’t do it. So our swivel-chair heroes swore they’d take anything they could get, down to and including 1914 Voisin pushers, and still lick the hell out of the Boche.”

  “Aren’t you being a little bitter, son?” Hugo said.

  “I am bitter. So they sent us over the lines in Nieuport Twenty-eights, which were sweet little buses to fly; but which killed so many of our own pilots, including Raoul Lufbery, Hugo, that the boys swore the German General Staff had awarded both the Iron Cross and the Pour le Mérite to the bloke who designed them. But I reckon we couldn’t argue, considering the fact that the country in which the aeroplane was invented never put one single aircraft of totally American design and manufacture into the air in the whole damned war.”

  “You still haven’t told me about Hank,” Doctor Meyers said.

  “I went down to the tree-tops to protect Hank,” Roland whispered; and the pain was there now, naked in his voice. “Then we . . . we started home.”

  He was back with it again, living it. He had fought off the whole Fokker patrol, crossing and re-crossing Hank’s tail, taking their fire, seeing his wind-screen fly into splinters, his oil-gauge disappear in a splurge of broken glass and oil, his goggles hanging half-way down his face where a grazing tracer had cut the strap, doing things with a Nieuport that no Nieuport could do, making that mass of steel and spruce and fabric respond to his naked will.

  It stayed with him, its wings and fuselage seamed with bullet-holes, crossing the noses of the Fokkers so close they had to turn out, charging them and firing head-on, until the lines were behind them and their ‘drome almost in sight. Then his guns jammed again, just as he saw a Fokker straighten out of a turn above and behind Hank, the muzzles of its machine-guns winking, the tracers pencilling their white trails through the air towards Hank’s cockpit, reaching their mark, so that Hank went into one half-turn of a spin before yanking his Nieuport out of it twenty feet above the ground and heading for home. Roland’s right gun was still jammed tight, but with his left he sent the Fokker plunging headlong into the ground, and then followed Hank’s sinking plane to the ‘drome, where it made the field, only to dissolve into a roaring whoosh of flame.

  Mono, standing by the piste, saw the two planes coming in, Roland’s plane staggering through the air, holding together by a miracle, and Hank’s a flaming torch, but still under control, landing too fast with only half an upper wing to support it, touching down, bouncing, then going up on its nose with the flames roaring straight back, enveloping the cockpit; and Roland standing up in his still-moving machine, jumping before she stopped, hitting the tarmac running straight towards the wreck of Hank’s Nieuport, and he, Mono, knowing the tank was going at any second, knowing that Hank was beyond human help, cut Roland off, tackling him, pulling him down; but he, with that strength that comes from utter desperation, struggling to his feet, hammering at Quentin with both fists, got free and five yards closer to the Nieuport before Mono pulled him down again. Close enough to hear Hank’s choked, muffled, “God, oh God, oh God—” coming out of the fire; and he, rising to his knees, got his service Colt out and aimed it with great care; but Mono knocked his arm up so that the bullet ploughed into a hangar roof; and then the tank blew.

  That was all of it, the whole story, excep
t the part he did not tell Hugo: how he, with two hours of daylight still left, borrowed, or, more truly, stole, another plane and went out alone hunting for Jasta Seven. He did not find them. Instead he ran into another unit, on the very first day they were trying out their new Fokker D-7s, and plunged headlong into a flight of twenty-five of the most nearly-perfect pursuit planes produced in the whole history of flight up to that time, and came out of it alive, saved by the fact that they were too many, that much of the time they had to hold their fire to keep from hitting each other; that they were not yet familiar with their machines’ almost limitless possibilities; and by something else—luck, chance, a silver dome of thundercloud into which to dive, disappearing from their sight in the cool white blanket of mist—by these, and perhaps even by a girl lying on a bed in a hospital barracks, fingering a rosary and crying, by an old, old woman in far-off Louisiana, down on her knees in prayer.

  No, he did not tell Hugo that, nor the story of the leave they forced him to take, after they found him passed out cold in the cockpit upon landing, without a scratch on him, Twenty-four hours later he was in Paris, stopping at every other bistro to toss down another fine, although the inside of his stomach felt as if it had vitriol in it now.

  He came out of the last one, staggering a little. There was on the trottoir ahead of him a soldier walking with a girl. Roland didn’t even look at the soldier. He just started running towards the girl, knowing with absolute certainty that only one person in Paris walked like that, seeing her moving through the silvery luminosity of the mist-veiled moonlight, the soldier holding her arm, the two of them making silhouettes walking, but he, running after them, was already sure.