Awake, his body twisting in anguish, Frank remembered the rest of the story. He had landed at nearby Farnborough, the home of the Royal Flying Corps, and raced back to Laffan Plain in a fire truck. They were much too late. Teddy Busk’s blackened corpse sat in the charred skeleton of the plane, his grimaced teeth gleaming in the truck’s headlights. They took the body and the remnants of the plane back to Farnborough and found that the fire had been caused by the motor’s vibration breaking a pipe joint. The motor had run out of fuel and backfired, igniting the gasoline tank. Mournfully, they redesigned the fuel system to make sure it did not happen again.
Tears streamed down Frank Buchanan’s face. The sacrifices men had made to create planes! His mind leaped from this lost brother to other brothers and sons. One above all, whose name he still could not pronounce without tears. Part of the reason he was living in this shack was a desperate wish to reach Billy McCall, wherever he was, beyond the sky.
Frank lay on his back on the boards that served for his bed, hearing his mother hiss: death machine. Slowly, carefully, he sat up and waited for the blood to circulate in his numbed feet and hands. Seizing his cane, he hoisted himself erect and waited again to make sure he had located his center of gravity. His body had become as fragile, as unpredictable as the planes of 1910, with their translucent fabric wings and fuselages, their jungle of guy wires and primitive controls.
Carefully, creakily, Frank heaved himself from his narrow bed and hobbled to a table. Switching on a battery-powered lamp, he sat before a blank sheet of white paper in a loose-leaf folder, pen in hand. For an hour, the paper remained pristine. The gnarled hand, with the blotchy skin where it had been burned off in the crash of a long vanished plane, remained motionless.
Finally, the hand began to move. Father. Father, it wrote. It was Billy, still calling for help. Frank had heard from him a dozen times since he retreated here. Once more Frank struggled to send a message to his mother. Find him and rescue him. Even if you never loved him. Even if you hated him in my name.
As usual, Althea Buchanan replied: I can’t find him in the spirit world. He has no soul. It often happens when a child is born of fierce opposites. She had told him this when Billy was eleven. Frank had struggled to prove she was wrong. But history, another word for mystery, had been like a gigantic windshear, undercutting his hopes and prayers.
Frank stumbled out on the porch and sat down in a cane-bottomed rocking chair. The wind rushed up the mountain to tear at his loose shirt and pants. He looked down on the darkened desert and beyond it, a glare against the overcast, the lights of the city of Los Angeles behind her barrier mountains.
Two hundred years ago, the great Indian medicine man, Tahquitz, had withdrawn to this mountain to brood in lonely despair about the decline of his people. Frank Buchanan had followed him here, also a man in mourning for his people. The Americans of the seventies seemed to have lost their way. Sexual, political, religious extremists hurled insults and slogans. A president betrayed his office and senators and congressmen revealed themselves as hypocrites worshipping the newest goddess, Publicity. Night after night, Buchanan sat at his desk opening his mind to the guardian spirits, hoping for wisdom—an old man’s consolation for his losses. But Tahquitz remained silent.
Frank could almost hear Adrian Van Ness laughing. For a moment he had to struggle against a demoralizing surge of hatred.
Thinking again of Edward Busk in his burning plane, Frank wondered if there was another meaning in the memory. Somewhere a compatriot had died in the long upward struggle men called flight. He was still linked to the great enterprise, so crucial in the conflict between darkness and light, above all to the company he had founded, now an immense family of machinists and designers and analysts and salesmen and executives, working beneath his name. Scarcely a day passed without a letter or a postcard from one of them, recalling the rollout of a famous plane, the triumph of a controversial design, the pathos of an old failure.
They were all linked, the living and the dead, in the cosmic sea of the worldsoul. Frank Buchanan still retained that primary faith, imparted to him by his mother. Within that cosmic soul, each individual soul was part of an eternal struggle between good and evil, between the guardians and the destroyers.
Adrian Van Ness had mocked that childhood faith. Adrian had mocked many things. His soul was an abyss of hatred or loss that Frank Buchanan had never been able to penetrate. That was another reason for his sojourn in the desert—he wanted to eradicate the last vestige of hatred for Adrian from his spirit. All he had to show for it was another failure.
A clattering, poppering roar in the sky above him. Searchlights blazing, a Buchanan helicopter was descending to the small landing strip a few hundred yards from the shack. In a few minutes Bruce Simons, Buchanan’s tall flashy director of public relations, and a young stranger approached the porch. Behind them came Kirk Willoughby, the company’s pink-cheeked, balding chief physician.
“Frank, how the hell are you?” Bruce said in his breeziest style, pumping his hand. “I hope you don’t mind us dropping in this way at five A.M. We tried to call you but your phone doesn’t seem to be working.”
“I disconnected it a month ago.”
“This is Mark Casey of the L.A. Times. Their aviation reporter.”
“I told you I was through giving interviews, Bruce.”
“This isn’t just another interview, Frank. Adrian Van Ness died last night. Mark would like to talk to you about your memories of him—the early days of the company—where you see it going now that his influence—”
“Adrian! You’re sure? How—what was the cause?”
“A heart attack, apparently. The doc here was treating him for heart disease—”
“Amanda—Mrs. Van Ness—how is she—where is she?”
“She’s still in Virginia. But I presume she’ll return to California. We’re going to have a memorial service for Adrian at the company next week,” Simons said.
Suddenly Frank Buchanan’s world was no longer a gray meaningless place. He no longer belonged in the desert. But he could not possibly explain that to Simons or to this earnest young reporter, who looked as if he was born the day before yesterday.
Kirk Willoughby understood, of course. He knew more about Adrian and Frank and Amanda than anyone in the company, except inquisitive Sarah Chapman Morris. He was here to make sure the news did not abort Frank’s laboring heart. A superfluous worry.
They sat down on the porch and Mark Casey began asking him the standard questions. What was the secret of his long, successful collaboration with Adrian Van Ness? What was their most important plane? What was Adrian Van Ness’s contribution to Buchanan’s success? Was he involved in the company’s recent difficulties with the government? How did Frank see Buchanan’s future now?
Frank’s answers were not lies. He said the secret of his collaboration with Adrian was mutual respect. Of course they argued now and then, ho ho ho. But they realized each had a part to play. As for their most important plane—each one was important while they were building it. Frequently important enough to be the margin between bankruptcy and solvency, ho ho ho.
Adrian’s greatest contribution was forethought. He was always thinking ahead to the next generation airliner or fighter plane. Of course he wasn’t always right but neither were Douglas or Lockheed or Boeing right all the time, ho ho ho. As for Adrian’s involvement with the company in recent years—he had retired to the cheering section, like him. The company’s future? It was bright. The Buchanan rainbow—Adrian’s idea, by the way—still reached over the horizon—and the plane soaring above it might soon be flying at hypersonic speed.
Almost all of it was true. But it was only one percent of the truth. Watching the boyish reporter take it down, Frank remembered so many things he could never tell him, so many things a thirty-five-year-old would find it hard—per—haps impossible—to understand.
Mark Casey said he was delighted with the interview. Bruce Simons said they ha
d to get back to Los Angeles as soon as possible. “I think I’ll stay with this old curmudgeon for a while. Check out a few things like his blood pressure and his heartbeat,” Kirk Willoughby said. “You can send the chopper back for me in an hour or two.”
The helicopter clattered into the sky. Frank Buchanan gazed at Willoughby. “It’s impossible to explain,” he said.
“I know,” Willoughby said.
“You’d have to go back to the beginning.”
“I know,” Willoughby said.
He pulled a flask of Scotch out of his pocket and poured a drink for himself and Frank. “Dick Stone’s going to be the new CEO. Cliff’s out. Does that bother you?”
“It’s a pretty raw deal in some ways. Cliff isn’t really responsible for our sins. Adrian’s the culprit.”
Frank sipped the Scotch. Bitter memories flowed into his mind with the taste. “The culprit—in so many ways.”
“I think you’ve got Adrian wrong. You’ve always had him wrong.”
“You’re saying you never know the whole truth about a man—even when you work with him for forty-seven years?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe none of them, including himself, were as innocent as they wished they were—or as guilty as they feared they were. “Amanda—do you think it’s possible—?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
“If I can hold her in my arms for a year—or even a month—I’ll forgive the universe.”
The two men sipped their Scotch in silence, while from the empty desert welled the faces and the voices, the illusions and the heartbreak of the living and the dead. Above them flew the planes—from the wobbling fabric creatures of the first decade to the titanium projectiles of today. Seventy-six years of flight through Frank Buchanan’s life and Adrian Van Ness’s life and so many other lives.
This was their journey, Frank thought. Only someone who flew the route across memory and time and history could decide who should be forgiven, who should be condemned. For himself, he relied on two lines from his favorite poet.
Let the gods forgive what I
have made.
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.
EXILE
As usual, Sarah Chapman Morris awoke an hour before dawn. She lay in bed, watching the windowpane grow gray. Around the house stretched the southern California desert, arid mile after mile to the Salton Sea and Death Valley. It was a landscape as different from the green flowering England of her youth as nature—or the imagination—could devise. The aridity, the emptiness corresponded exactly with her state of mind and soul.
Thirty-six years. Thirty-six years since Sarah Chapman walked down the aisle of the country church outside Rackreath Air Base arm in arm with Captain Clifford Morris, the handsome American bomber pilot, whose indifference to religion dismayed her devout Catholic mother. Her brother Derek, flying fighters for the RAF, had asked in his brutal way how she could marry anyone from the “Bloody 103rd” bombardment group. Did she have some peculiar desire to become a widow?
Sarah put on a dressing gown and padded through the silent house to the room that had been her husband’s study. She pressed a button on the desk. Along the wall to the right of the terrace doors, concealed lights illuminated an immense painting of a B-17 plowing through flak-infested skies, spewing bullets from its turret and tail and waist guns at German fighters. Beneath the cockpit window was a crescent rainbow with a plane soaring above it. At least once a day, Sarah stared at the painting as if she needed to convince herself that her life was not a dream.
On the empty dest was a letter from Adrian Van Ness.
Dear Cliff:
We have weathered the worst of the scandal without losing a single contract. This is a tribute to your reputation within the aircraft industry and in Congress. Alas, the same thing cannot be said for the Buchanan Corporation. Over the years we have acquired enemies in the press and in Washington, D.C. who are still pursuing us. The other day I heard from one of our closest Pentagon friends that our chief tormentor in the Senate was threatening to start a new round of hearings to explore our “continuing culpability” because we have, he claims, displayed not a single sign of repentance for our sins. I am sure you realize more negative publicity would make it impossible for us to obtain the financing we so badly need.
For thirty years you have demonstrated a readiness to work, to serve, to sacrifice for Buchanan. Can I ask you to consider an ultimate sacrifice, your resignation?
I have told Dick Stone you might want to discuss the terms of your retirement. He has orders from me to be even more generous than he would be under ordinary circumstances.
Regretfully,
Adrian
The bastard, Sarah Chapman Morris thought. The corrupt ruthless brilliant bastard. She should have known it was coming. She should have known Adrian Van Ness would send her a copy of this letter. It was exactly what a master of forethought would do. He was trying to stir pity in her forlorn heart.
A crash. The wind was blowing a shutter or a door somewhere in the house. Sarah padded through the rooms full of sleek chrome-and-glass furniture. The noise was coming from one of the patio doors. She stepped outside and let the cold desert wind cut into her flesh for a long minute. A plane was coming over the Funeral Mountains, beginning its descent to Los Angeles. The way she and Cliff had arrived thirty-four years ago.
The passengers would soon be looking down on the awesome sea of lights, the forty-six square miles of a city that was not a city, a vast collection of canyons and arroyos and flats and seacoast in search of an identity, with Hollywood in the center of it, infecting everything with its amoral hedonism.
No. That was the old Sarah talking, the once proper English girl with her devotion to spiritual ideals. That woman was dead. As obliterated as the test pilots who smashed their experimental jets into the desert floor at 2,500 miles an hour. Miss Sarah Chapman was gone into some region where souls occasionally communicated with the living. Now she was a semi-divorced American wife named Ms. Sarah Morris shivering in the desert wind beneath a starry California sky with the blank black bulk of the mountains looming in the night a few dozen miles away.
They had all come so far.
Was the distance the human equivalent of losing your soul—or finding it? Sarah pondered that question for another thirty seconds as the jetliner descended, wingtip lights blinking. In a few more minutes the landing headlights would come on and it would resemble a prehistoric creature, a pterodactyl or some other monster plunging out of time into man’s exhausted mind.
She hated planes.
Was that true? She had always loved the idea of planes. Maybe she just hated what men did to make and sell them. That thought led to eighty-three year-old Frank Buchanan in his shack above Tahquitz Canyon. To memories of yesterday’s soaring session in his sailplane, Rainbow’s End. My God, how she loved those motorless hours in the sky with him! Almost as much as she loved the hours of reminiscence she had mined from his shy, reclusive soul.
Sleep was out of the question now. In the bathroom, Sarah washed her face and studied herself in the mirror by the dim glow of the night light. She looked ghostly as well as ghastly. Maybe she had become Miss Sarah Chapman again. Maybe she had died and was starting to relive her life, backwards. But Adrian’s letter to Cliff mocked that silly idea. The letter was like a gaff in her flesh, flinging her forward into time again.
Sarah padded into the sunken living room and pulled a video at random from a rack beside the television set. She shoved it into the VCR and sat down. A stubby-winged, thick-bodied plane hurtled toward her on the television screen. She almost cried out.
“The Wild Aces,” growled a gravel-voiced narrator. “They take the fight to the enemy. They hit him where it hurts.”
It was a video of a film Buchanan had made to help sell their ground-support plane, the Thunderer. The narrator told why it was the best plane the U.S. Marines had ev
er bought for the money, his voice rasping against the rising beat of a frenzied orchestra. The Thunderer could carry more bombs, more hardware than anything the enemy could put in the sky. It could carry two-hundred-and-fifty-, five-hundred-, thousand-pound bombs. It had a twenty-millimeter cannon that fired 600 rounds a minute. It had Shrike missiles that could demolish the enemy’s surface-to-air missile sites. That was the Thunderer’s job. To come in low and get those SAM sites to make things safe for the bombers following them.
Sarah sat and watched the pilots getting into their G suits. She prayed she would not see her son. She no longer thought God was listening but she prayed anyway. It did no good. They all looked like Charlie. They were all young and cheerful and had short hair and strong jaws and firm, proud American mouths.
Sarah watched them climb into their cockpits and put on their shiny plastic helmets and clamp the oxygen masks on their faces. She watched them taxi down the runway, shove the throttles forward and vault into the sky, flame spewing from their afterburners.
“Taking it to the enemy,” roared the narrator. Sarah watched the bombs explode on bridges, rail yards, factories, on what the narrator called troop concentrations but looked like trees and farms. The bombs burst and burst, sometimes leaping up in great orange gushes of flame, usually mushrooming into serrated puffs of earth and exploding dust.
Click. The screen went dark. Susan Hardy stood beside it, a blur against the gray desert dawn. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Are you trying to drive yourself crazy?”
“Maybe,” Sarah said.
Her fellow pilgrim, with the burning passion for peace in her eyes. Sarah had traded her life as the wife of the chief executive officer of the Buchanan Corporation for exile with this woman. Susan was her oldest American friend. She had divorced her unfaithful husband years ago. She had led Sarah into the exhilarating bewildering worlds of the women’s movement and the peace movement.
Without turning on a light, Susan sat down on the couch beside Sarah and kissed her on the cheek. “You’re trying to accept it, aren’t you? The whole thing. But that’s the wrong way to go. Acceptance is just another word for surrendering to the bastards.”
Conquerors of the Sky Page 3
