Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  The reporters drank champagne in the hangar and peered at exhibits of the Lustra’s wing structure and ultra-safe fuel system. Standing on the sidelines watching the party, a glum look on his foxy face, was their original backer, Gordon Cadwallader. Beside Cadwallader was Buchanan’s chief financial officer, a small desiccated accountant named Arnold Appleby, from United American Aircraft, the Detroit company that had bought Buchanan, Lockheed and a dozen other aircraft companies in the bull market frenzy of the late 1920s. He was probably computing the cost of the champagne and the gasoline to fly the Lustra II for five minutes and adding it to his list of complaints in his daily memorandum on cutting costs.

  It was March of 1930 and Wall Street showed no sign of reviving. United American stock, which had once sold as high as 70—close to what people had been paying for General Motors—was now valued at one and a half.

  Beside the accountant stood Amanda Cadwallader in a flowery print dress, her shining eyes on Frank as he explained Lustra II’s virtues to the reporters. Working under terrific pressure to produce planes that would make a profit in spite of the country’s economic collapse, Frank had twice postponed their marriage. She had finally convinced him that she did not care whether he was rich or poor. They were to be married as soon as Lustra II was certified as airworthy by the federal government and she obtained her divorce from Adrian Van Ness.

  Frank was determined to marry Amanda without a trace of Craig’s misogynism in his soul. He had acquired a small library of books on the female body and applied his original mind to the problem of producing perfect bliss between husband and wife with the same passion for perfection he brought to the creation of a new plane. Their love would be as superior to the casual sex of the aircraft world as the Lustra II was to Rag Time.

  “Tonight at our house—a real celebration,” Buzz said, as the reporters departed.

  “You’re all invited,” Tama cooed after the newsmen.

  “I think we better have a talk,” Appleby said to Frank and Buzz.

  Gordon Cadwallader joined them in Appleby’s office. Amanda was left to explore the cabin and cockpit of Lustra II. Appleby wasted no time. “We’re broke,” he said. “We can’t even meet this week’s payroll.”

  “The hell you say,” Buzz roared. “We’ve sold twenty Lustra Ones in the last twelve months and we’ve got orders for another six.”

  “Whatever we’ve made on those transactions—which is damn little, with the salaries you’re paying yourselves, has been requisitioned as an extraordinary expense to meet corporate financial problems,” Appleby said.

  “You son of a bitch!” Frank roared, seizing Appleby by the shirt. “You’re robbing us to keep your Detroit friends driving around in their lousy Packards.”

  “Robbing is hardly the correct term,” Appleby said, disengaging his shirt.

  “We own you, Mr. Buchanan. You are a division of United American Aircraft and we can do what we please with your cash.”

  “What about my stock?” Buzz cried. In the heyday of the bull market, with Lustras selling at the rate of three a month, he had put every cent he had into UAA.

  “You’re a very minor stockholder,” Appleby said.

  “We’re all minor,” Gordon Cadwallader growled. “UAA has twenty million shares outstanding.”

  “We’re declaring bankruptcy and selling off our assets to satisfy class A stockholders and creditors,” Appleby said.

  “What the hell’s a class A stockholder?” Frank said.

  “You’re looking at one,” Gordon Cadwallader snarled. “I’ll only get about ten cents on the dollar. You drew a salary while I got nothing. Not even a dividend.”

  “It was your idea to put us into that Detroit deal!” Frank shouted.

  “You didn’t complain when your stock was worth a half million dollars,” Cadwallader said.

  “You’re robbing my company—my name,” Frank said. “I’m going to sue hell out of you.”

  “I don’t think you have a case,” Cadwallader said. “If you threaten me, I’ll make sure you don’t have a case.”

  “Consider yourself threatened,” Frank said.

  “You’re not welcome in my house any longer.”

  “It’s not your house. Amanda owns it just as much as you do,” Frank shouted. “The same thing goes for those two thousand acres of orange trees. The day after we’re married, I plan to have a lawyer go over the books of Cadwallader Groves and find exactly where the profits are going. Your days of intimidating her into being a silent partner will be over.”

  “You can hire all the lawyers in California,” Appleby said, in his infuriating drone. “This company is out of business, as of tomorrow morning. Notices will be posted, informing the employees before they leave tonight. Its assets and liabilities will be in the hands of the bankruptcy court of Los Angeles County within twenty-four hours.”

  “Why did you torment us—let us fly Lustra Two?” Frank cried.

  Appleby grimaced. It was as close as he ever came to a smile. “Someone may want to buy the plane—and the design. Make sure when you leave tonight that all aspects of your design work will be available to prospective purchasers.”

  “The design of that plane is not for sale,” Frank roared. “That came out of my head.”

  “Your head—as well as your hands—were working for United American Aircraft,” Appleby said.

  The enormous fact of his impotence, of all their impotences, descended on Frank. Gordon Cadwallader completed his humiliation. “Stay away from Amanda. Consider that a warning.”

  Gordon Cadwallader took a bewildered Amanda home. Frank retreated to the McCalls’ house in Long Beach, where a funeral for Buchanan Aircraft lasted far into the night. Bootleg liquor flowed and everyone got very drunk. Frank awoke at noon the following day to find himself in a bed with Gloria Packer. “You looked so sad, Frank. I just wanted you to know I still cared,” Gloria said.

  Frank had tried to stay celibate for the last three years. It had not been easy, with Buzz for a partner. Ten-year-old Billy McCall appeared in the doorway with a pitcher of orange juice, intensifying Frank’s guilt. Buzz had taken Billy into his household when he married Tama. “Any chance of a ride in Lustra Two, Pops?” he said, using the nickname he had given Frank years ago.

  “No one’s ever going to ride in Lustra Two if I can help it,” Frank said.

  Before he could execute his revenge, Frank had to extricate Amanda from her brother’s custody. He drove to Long Beach Airport, where he kept his Lustra I. In a half hour he was circling over the white turreted Cadwallader mansion in Fullerton. Amanda stood on the lawn, waving to him. But it was Gordon Cadwallader who greeted him as he got out of the plane.

  “I think we better have a talk,” Gordon said.

  “I’m through talking to you. I’m here to take Amanda away with me.”

  “If you really love Amanda, you’ll do what I tell you. Get in the car.”

  They climbed into his Hupmobile Six and drove to the nearby mental hospital where Amanda’s mother was an apparently perpetual patient. There were a half-dozen people on the lawn talking to themselves, wandering dazedly with glazed eyes. “It costs me five thousand dollars a year to keep her here,” Gordon Cadwallader said. “If it weren’t for Amanda’s feelings, I’d have sent her to a state hospital years ago. She’s my father’s second wife. She never liked me.”

  Inside, they were greeted by Carl Farber, the German doctor who ran the place. He led Frank to the second floor and stopped before a door marked 13. He opened a small window and invited Frank to look inside. A woman with Amanda’s russet hair and angular face paced up and down the tiny room. She sensed Frank’s eyes on her and flung herself at the door. “Stop these men from tormenting me!” she screamed. “Tell my warriors where I am! Tell them Queen Califia is calling on them to rise again!”

  “Mrs. Cadwallader thinks she’s Califia, the mythical Amazon queen of California,” Dr. Farber said. “An interesting schizophrenic delusion. It
enables her to despise the entire male sex.”

  Back at Casa Felicidad, Gordon led Frank into his office, locked the door and set up a small motion picture projector and screen. He pulled down the shade and they sat in semi-darkness. At first Frank was bewildered by the flickering images. A dark lake, sodden Negro musicians stumbling ashore clutching their instruments, naked women on a barge. He realized it was the British director’s outtake of the party at Modesto, after finishing Loop the Loop. There was Mabel Durand doing a show-it-all shimmy while her ladies in waiting Charlestoned around her in the buff.

  In the next frames Mabel was alone on the raft, stretched on her chaise longue while various members of the cast and crew rose dripping from the black waters of the lake to enjoy her. One was unmistakably Buzz McCall. With his clothes off, he looked part ape. Then another man, bigger than Buzz, with pale skin and reddish hair that looked almost white in the kleig lights. Frank watched himself, sick with shame.

  Gordon Cadwallader stopped the camera. “I had a private detective investigate you last year when it began to look like you might actually marry Amanda. He picked this up on the blackmail market. Do you think I should show it to Amanda?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Write her a letter, telling her you’re bankrupt and you think it best to stop seeing her.”

  Frank sat down at Cadwallader’s desk and wrote the letter. He stalked to his Lustra I and flew to Santa Monica, where he found the Buchanan Aircraft Company hangar padlocked and a notice of bankruptcy pasted on the doors. He borrowed a sledgehammer from one of the other hangars, smashed the lock and got into the cockpit of Lustra II.

  Airborne, he roared above Los Angeles and its curving boulevards. Gordon Cadwallader and United American Aircraft had stolen his happiness, his future. But they would not steal Lustra II. Without this plane, Buchanan Aircraft was worth nothing.

  Pulling a parachute from beneath the copilot’s seat, Frank turned Lustra II’s sleek nose east, toward the Mojave. Over the desert, he shoved the controls forward, kicked open the cockpit door and flung himself into space. By a miracle he evaded the tail and his parachute soon opened. Beneath his feet, the beautiful white plane exploded in a blossom of orange flame on the desert floor.

  The sight made him feel guilty of a crime almost as brutal as the one Gordon Cadwallader had committed against him and Amanda. How could he ever explain it to Buzz and the men who had worked on the plane, who loved it as their creation as much as his? There was only one thing to do—obliterate all trace of Frank Buchanan, the plane designer. Hitching a ride back to Santa Monica, he began methodically destroying the thousands of drawings and blueprints that had gone into the creation of Lustra II and Lustra I.

  He was interrupted by a woman’s voice crying “Frank” at the far end of the hangar. It echoed around him like a spirit from the other world. He walked through the dimness to confront Amanda.

  “What does this letter mean?”

  “It means I—can’t marry you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m bankrupt. I haven’t a cent. Surely your brother’s told you.”

  “He told me a great many things. I want to hear them from you.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He said this letter proved what he’d suspected all along. You never wanted anything from us but money and now that the money is gone—we’re almost as poor as you these days—you’re no longer interested. You came out there today to ask him for money and when he told you how little we had you wrote this—this abominable letter.”

  She was weeping now. What could he say? Gordon Cadwallader was perfectly capable of showing her that film. She might end up in Farber’s sanitarium raving like her mother. “That’s something of an exaggeration. I still care for you—”

  “What else matters? I don’t give a damn whether you’re rich or poor. I never have. I’d give myself to you right now if I thought—”

  She struggled to control the tears that were flooding her voice.

  “If I thought you were telling the truth.”

  She turned and walked slowly toward the open doors at the front of the hangar. Sunlight blazed outside. A yellow Lockheed Vega was racing down the runway to zoom into the sky. The plane evoked his dream of soaring in this woman’s arms to new altitudes.

  “Tell your brother I crashed Lustra Two. Tell him there’s nothing here for him to sell.”

  It was better to play the madman. Better to be nothing but the stunt-flying bum who had plummeted into her life three years ago. Any humiliation, the worst possible disguise, was better than her seeing that film. His performance was a last twisted gesture of love. Weeping, cursing, Frank Buchanan went back to destroying his paper airplanes.

  LOVE AMONG THE ORANGES

  Six months later, Adrian Van Ness sat on the porch of Casa Felicidad, holding his wife Amanda’s hand. California sunshine streamed down on them. The air was thick with the perfume of orange blossoms. For Adrian it was the scent of the promised land.

  The situation was unreal but Adrian had grown used to unreality since Wall Street crashed. Clinging to his fragments of fatherhood from Geoffrey Tillotson, he had driven west through a landscape of pain. The Great Depression was twisting America on a continental rack. On the outskirts of city after city, homeless men lived in hobo jungles, clusters of tin shacks and empty packing cases. They crowded around fires in trash cans on street corners and glared at him as he drove past in his yellow Hispano-Suiza. He was frequently tempted to tell them the car was his last remaining asset.

  Adrian went to California with only the dimmest idea of what he was going to do when he got there. Amanda and her orange groves were a faint hope, no more. When he wrote to explain why he was unable to continue the support money he had sent her since their separation, there had been no answer.

  In Orange County, he discovered Amanda was, if anything, more forlorn than the woman he had sent home from England. Her brother hinted there had been a romance that had recently expired. He urged Adrian to consider a reconciliation. He also filled Adrian in on the chaos in the California aircraft industry. Companies were going bankrupt and being sold at knockdown prices every third day. He added his personal tale of woe—the paper million he had lost in United American Aircraft. Adrian, who had lost ten times that amount in the same and similar companies, pretended to be sympathetic.

  For a month Adrian had concealed his desperation and waited for a sign of forgiveness from Amanda. She had maintained a melancholy distance. With his money running low, he had decided to gamble on a frontal assault. “After the way I treated you in London, I have absolutely no claim on your affections,” he said. “I see now I was completely under my mother’s influence.”

  “I understood, Adrian. I was afraid it would happen.”

  “In the past month I’ve come to feel we never really separated. I feel as if we we’ve been sharing similar experiences. The pain of loneliness—and heartbreak. Will you take me back, Amanda?”

  “Adrian I—I’m afraid the same thing would happen. I’m sure your mother still hates me.”

  “My mother’s approval or disapproval no longer interests me. I doubt if we’ll ever see her in California. The only thing that matters is the way I’ve regained my old feeling for you.”

  “I’m not sure what I feel—”

  “Darling, I know you still love me. I admit—why should I deny it?—I’ve been trying to reawaken that love for the past month. Say yes.”

  Amanda wept and told him about her chaste romance with Frank Buchanan and his abominable behavior at its close. In her heart she felt she had been unfaithful to Adrian. Could he forgive her? Adrian considered matching the story with his far less platonic heartbreak with Beryl Suydam and decided against it.

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” he assured her. “I hope someday soon I can give that bastard Buchanan what he deserves.”

  “Oh Adrian. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  They kissed across the tea
table.

  That night, while Amanda waited upstairs, Adrian and Gordon Cadwallader met in the study and executed a legal document. For fifty thousand dollars, Adrian sold Amanda’s rights to 50 percent of Cadwallader Groves. Adrian also agreed to take over the expense of maintaining Amanda’s mother in Dr. Farber’s sanitarium.

  Upstairs, Adrian discovered that fifty thousand dollars was erotic, even if his trembling wife was almost its opposite. Amanda returned to his arms with a stifled, possibly regretful cry that only made him feel more powerful, more confident in the future, in spite of the comatose stock market and the doom-crying newspapers.

  In the morning Amanda began packing for a second honeymoon on Catalina Island. Adrian told her they would have to delay their idyl for a day. He was due in bankruptcy court at 10 A.M., where he expected to buy the Buchanan Aircraft Company. “Then I’m going down to the factory, where I gather your former friend Mr. Buchanan is still lurking, and throw him out on his head.”

  Amanda kissed him fiercely. “Let me come. I want to see it!”

  “No. Gordon tells me he may get violent.”

  “I want to come,” Amanda said, displaying a willfulness Adrian thought life’s disappointments had demolished.

  Trained from birth to please women whenever possible, Adrian shrugged. “All right. But it may be unpleasant.”

  They drove to the Los Angeles County Courthouse with Gordon Cadwallader’s lawyer, who was handling the legal details. The lawyer had told Adrian the business would not take five minutes and he was right. There were no other bidders. The balding judge obviously regarded Adrian as slightly insane as he banged his gavel and informed him that he was the sole owner of Buchanan Aircraft, including its debts and liabilities, for thirty thousand dollars.

  Adrian shook hands with the lawyer and whizzed to the Buchanan plant in Santa Monica with Amanda beside him in the Hispano-Suiza. In the design and engineering offices at the rear of the main hangar, they found a swarthy man in a flying jacket and overalls cleaning out his desk. He looked at Adrian in his dark blue Savile Row suit as if he was a somewhat comic figure and introduced himself as Buzz McCall, the former chief of production.