Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Frank lurched to his feet and pointed a trembling finger at Adrian. “I predict we’re making a horrendous mistake, getting in bed with the generals. We didn’t start out to build planes for them. We built them because we loved flying. Because we wanted to create a better world, not blow it up. People aren’t going to forget a plane dropped this bomb. We’re going to be haunted by it for the rest of our lives.”

  He’s right, whispered the historian in Adrian as Frank reeled out of the dining room. But the words could not be spoken. Adrian Van Ness was the president of the world’s largest aircraft company. He could not let this bizarre eccentric, whom he had reduced to his obedient servant in perpetuity, tell him what to think, much less force him to eat his words in public.

  Adrian’s eyes traveled past the faces of the two dozen executives at other tables. Among the designers, all Frank Buchanan disciples, he saw anxiety on almost every face. Around Buzz McCall and his production engineers he saw only contempt. On the other faces the dominant emotion was consternation.

  “I don’t believe a talent for designing planes includes an ability to predict the future,” Adrian said. He raised his wineglass. “To air power,” he said.

  “Second the motion,” Buzz McCall said, hoisting his Scotch.

  There were no objections to the toast. Everyone drank to air power. “Incidentally,” Buzz said. “I’ve been on the phone to the Pentagon. They’re can-celin’ everything on the books but fifty B—Twenty—nines. Unless someone starts another war real quick we’re gonna have to fire fifty thousand people next week.”

  Ruined clanged in Adrian’s soul. “Peace, it’s wonderful,” he said.

  MOONLIGHT

  An immense moon dangled above Los Angeles, bathing the city and the beaches and the boulevards in its pale yellow light. Amanda Van Ness paced the rooms of her empty house. For three months the world had been at peace. She was sure Adrian spent his nights in Tama’s arms, although he claimed to be grappling with the horrendous problems of converting Buchanan Aircraft to a builder of commercial planes. Victoria was always out with her fellow teenagers. Amanda was alone most of the time.

  Alone but not lonely because in the darkest corner of her soul, Califia lay in an ivory casket, her golden sword in her pale hands. Amanda vowed she would not utter the fateful word that would awaken her. Memory would warm her heart. Those years in Eden would be her refuge.

  For centuries, the moon had summoned lovers to rendezvous. Amanda thought of it gleaming on the forest of grimy oil derricks that Cadwallader Groves had become. She thought of it shining through the sycamores in Topanga Canyon. When Frank was away during the war, she often drove there and sat on the porch, bathing in the glow, relishing the silent affirmation of Eden.

  Why not go again? Why not touch the memory? It would help keep Califia in the tomb. Adrian had told her Frank had sold the house and moved to another canyon. If someone else was living there, she would explain that she had spent four happy years in the house and was simply returning for a look at it. She would be content to sit in her car for a few minutes in the moonlight. The most nervous householder could hardly object to a forty—five—year—old housewife sitting in his driveway for five minutes.

  Amanda drove out Santa Monica Boulevard to the coast highway and swung north beside the ocean. Santa Monica was full of young people with ebullient eyes, laughing mouths. They were Americans, winners of the greatest war in history. The future belonged to them. She wondered if among them there were a few like her, for whom the victory was a wound.

  Oh, Father, with your dream of a world reborn as Eden. Maybe to wish for too much happiness was the worst sin. Perhaps your daughter has learned the lesson of survival. Happiness preserved in the memory, like the beautiful butterflies you used to catch and mount in glass cases on Casa Felicidad’s walls.

  On the coast road the moonlight was incredibly bright. People were driving without headlights. The ocean undulated like an immense shimmering carpet. The narrow entrance to Topanga appeared on the right. In five minutes she was approaching the road to Frank’s house. She shifted into second gear for the steep climb.

  Up the slope labored her 1940 Ford to burst into a clearing twice the size of the one Amanda had known. Half of it was a parking lot filled with at least two dozen cars. Frank’s house was gone. It had been replaced by a hangar-shaped building, the front painted gold and illuminated by concealed searchlights. There were a half-dozen oval windows cut in the side walls. Amanda walked to one of them and looked inside.

  A beautiful dark-haired woman was bending low, serving food to a bald, grinning fat man. The woman was naked. Amanda recognized the man. It was Moon Davis, Buchanan’s chief test pilot. Next to him, an equally obscene grin on his face, was Buzz McCall, Buchanan’s production chief. Beside him, leering drunkenly, sat Frank Buchanan. In the distance were a half-dozen other beautiful naked women serving food to other members of the Buchanan hierarchy.

  Amanda did not know how long she stood there in the moonlight watching them swill their liquor and chomp on their steaks and ogle the naked women. She looked for Adrian but could not find him. That was hardly a consolation. He was unquestionably a steady customer. But Frank! His presence meant he not only approved, he had collaborated in this desecration of Eden.

  Amanda drove home through the moonlight, blinded by tears. It was a miracle that she reached her Hancock Park driveway alive. In the house, the moonlight continued to flood her mind. Everything in her life was revealed with scarifying clarity. All the truths she had suspected and tried to banish, the truths that she had hoped love would keep at bay.

  Women were men’s victims from the dawn of time. From the days when they oiled their bodies with frankincense and myrrh to please a pharaoh to the gift of their fidelity to lying medieval troubadours to their public prostitution in the celluloid world of Hollywood, they were always victims, exploited, used, abused. Only once, in a dim past before male historians began to write their lies, was there a country where women reigned.

  The land of Califia. California before time began.

  In the theater of her mind, this land would be reborn. Slowly, solemnly, Amanda descended to the ivory casket and spoke the word. Awake, she whispered. Awake, my queen.

  The casket opened. There lay Califia in her silver robes, clutching her golden sword. Her dark-blue eyelids fluttered. The wide sensual mouth trembled. She opened her eyes and spoke. Did someone call my name?

  Almost blinded by the moonlight streaming from Califia’s eyes, Amanda fell to her knees. Your servant, summoning you to restore the reign of women, my queen.

  Will you obey my commands?

  Yes! Yes!

  The ecstasy of surrender flooded Amanda’s soul with the radiance of a thousand moons.

  Then I will arise and ride the winds of night with you. All our deeds will be done in darkness. In the dawn you will resume your disguise of the faithful wife and I will retire to my tomb.

  Yes! Yes!

  With a smile, Califia stepped from the casket and held out her hand to the kneeling Amanda.

  Arise. Let us seek out the worst of the oppressors and design fitting punishments for them.

  Dazedly, Amanda imitated Califia and stripped naked. Together they walked through the silent house to the lawn, where a gleaming silver plane awaited them in the moonlight. At the controls, also naked, was Tama! She too was a servant of Califia! She too had the knowledge of oppression that opened the secret door in the female soul. She smiled a welcome to Amanda and they soared into the moonlit sky.

  Amanda chose their first target, the club on Topanga’s ridge where women were groveling naked before the conquerors of the sky. Down, down they swooped to let Califia and Tama see the obscenity with their own eyes. The rage it ignited there! It was a flame in Amanda’s heart. What will their punishment be, my Queen? Amanda asked as they circled above the building.

  I will lay my most terrible curse on them, Califia said in a voice that had the thunder of surf
in Pacific caves. They will labor and labor but they will never profit, they will never know happiness with a woman again. They will emanate a stench that drives women mad, a foulness that inspires revenge and retaliation in sunlight and moonlight.

  They swooped down again and Califia aimed her golden sword at the building. A terrifying yellow flame leaped from the tip and surged in the window, enveloping everyone in the room. Amanda could see the skulls and the bones beneath the revelers’ flesh. The yellow flame sank into all of them, a divine electrocution that left them looking like putrefying corpses.

  Amanda rejoiced until her eyes found Frank Buchanan. Frank! The five letters that had once encompassed a world. That too was being destroyed by Califia’s vengeance. For a moment grief tore at Amanda’s heart. Was Frank truly among the guilty? Was he too a victim of Buzz McCall, Adrian? It was too late to ask Califia for mercy. She could only weep as he too joined the ranks of the living dead.

  Amanda awoke with sunlight streaming in the window. It was almost noon. Adrian was in the doorway frowning at her. “I’m going to work, even though it’s Saturday,” he said. “Since when have you taken to sleeping in the raw?”

  She said nothing. She was terrified that she might betray Califia.

  “You can sleep any way you please—but you ought to get under the covers—or shut the door. It’s not a habit I want Victoria to acquire.”

  She knew what he was thinking. That was the way she had slept with Frank. He was right, of course. Just in time she remembered her promise to be a dutiful wife by daylight. “I won’t do it again,” she said.

  Adrian walked over to the bed and kissed her. With a terrific effort she managed to accept the touch of his loathsome lips. “You could also get pneumonia. It got quite chilly last night.”

  “Thank you for taking such good care of me.”

  From the darkness Califia whispered: Well done, my good and faithful servant.

  For a moment Amanda wondered if this was freedom or a new more terrible bondage.

  It was too late to do anything but obey. Thank you, my queen.

  As Adrian regarded her with his usual condescension, Amanda slowly regained her joy. All the atomic bombs and flying superfortresses in the world would not protect this man from Califia’s vengeance.

  BOOK FIVE

  WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA

  Sarah Chapman Morris sat on the patio of her south Los Angeles tract house in the February sunshine, reading a letter from her mother. It was one long lament about everything that was wrong with England. The country was bankrupt, freezing, starving. The winter of 1946 was the coldest in memory and the winter of 1947 was no better.

  Sarah’s two-year-old, Elizabeth, tugged at her sleeve. “Want a cookie, Mommy. Cookie—and ice cream.”

  Why not? Sarah could not get over living in this land of abundance. She scooped some creamy dark chocolate chip ice cream into a dish and put a chocolate chip cookie beside it. She fixed another dish for herself—with two scoops. They sat out on the patio eating this delicious mid-afternoon treat.

  “Can I have a bite?” called her neighbor, Susan Hardy, from her patio. She also had a two-year-old—a boy—staggering around.

  “Come on over, we’ll have a party,” Sarah said. Susan’s husband worked at Buchanan Aircraft as a designer. That in itself was a bond. Cliff was already working there two days a week, making calls with the head of the sales department. When he graduated from UCLA next term, he would go to work full time.

  Sarah liked Susan because she was so American. She was utterly totally disrespectful about everything. She called President Harry S. Truman “the haberdasher.” She was equally contemptuous of the governor of California and its two senators. “Pointy-heads,” she called them. She called her husband “the Hardy Boy,” a reference to a series of books for adolescents. She never stopped complaining about the long hours he worked—and frequently hinted that instead of designing planes at midnight he was seeing other women—which did not seem to bother her.

  A Vassar graduate, class of 1942, Susan was just that much older than Sarah to give her a voice of authority. She was a chunky woman, with a strong sensual mouth, overgenerous breasts, and a heavy bottom. She smoked continuously, dropping ashes into everything. Some probably fell into her ice cream but she slurped it down nonstop. Susan leaned back, lit another cigarette and sighed. “California! It’s so goddamn boring!”

  She was off on one of her favorite topics, comparing Los Angeles and New York, where she grew up. There was no comparison, in Susan’s opinion. Los Angeles had no Broadway theater, no decent restaurants, no art museums, no department stores worth patronizing—nothing. “I’ve been much too busy to be bored,” Sarah said.

  “What are you going to do when you finally get Cliff through college?”

  “Oh—I don’t know. Have another baby, probably.”

  “You’re the one who should be going to college.”

  There was some truth to that. Cliff had absolutely no interest in the required history and English and French courses he was taking. Sarah had written all his term papers. She had even written a paper for one of his economics courses. He was getting a B.S. in that weighty subject. “But I don’t have a job waiting for me at Buchanan,” she said.

  “He may not have one either, from what I hear,” Susan said. “They’re in a lot of trouble.”

  Sarah simply could not believe it. The biggest plane maker of the country that had built a thousand planes a month—with Buchanan frequently accounting for half of them—could not possibly go bankrupt. The English aircraft business was in the doldrums, like the rest of England. But that was understandable, if regrettable. Flying to California had given Sarah a sense of the immensity of America. Gazing down from the plane at the endless miles of prairies, the snowcapped mountains rimming them, she had felt awed, even privileged to find herself part of this tremendous nation.

  “How’s your mother-in-law treating you these days?”

  “She still hasn’t called me Sarah.”

  “Be nice to her anyway. She reminds me of my mother. The kind of woman you shouldn’t cross. Because she’ll never forget it.”

  Susan did not have much respect for her ultra-dignified mother. She made upper-class New York sound as stuffy and proper as England. From that viewpoint, she was glad to be in California, where there was no proper way of doing anything. Susan’s father, who had died in World War I a few months before she was born, was the only person she respected. Sarah sometimes wondered if his loss was the real reason for Susan’s anger at the United States of America. In the name of her dead father she seemed to be determined to take a man’s jaundiced viewpoint on everything. That made her a passionate student of office politics at Buchanan Aircraft, a subject that definitely included Sarah’s exotic, irritating mother-in-law, Tama Morris.

  By this time Sarah knew sultry sullen-eyed Tama was the mistress of Buchanan’s president, Adrian Van Ness. She had divorced Cliff’s stepfather, the company’s production chief, Buzz McCall, more or less formalizing the arrangement. Hints and prods from Susan had prompted Sarah, after weeks of hesitation, to ask Cliff about it. Was it true that Tama exercised enormous power inside Buchanan—not only from her special status but because, in Susan’s words, she “knew where the bodies were buried”? Cliff had stared at her in astonishment, then burst out laughing. Flustered, Sarah had asked Cliff in her earnest English way if bodies were literally buried somewhere. “How the hell do I know?” he snarled.

  When he was in the mood, Cliff could be incredibly charming—the ebullient swaggering flyboy she had loved and married in England. When he was not in the mood he was about as charming as a tarantula—a creature she had encountered in her bed on their American honeymoon in Mexico in 1945, paid for by Tama.

  It was absurd but sometimes Sarah suspected her mother-in-law of putting—or at least wishing—the insect beneath her sheets. There seemed to be an irreducible wall of hostility between her and Tama. It apparently had somethin
g to do with Cliff volunteering for those extra twenty-five missions over Germany. Tama seemed to think that Sarah had put the idea in his head, when she had actually wept and begged him not to do it. When his insistence on continuing to fight what he called “our war” had been a crucial part of her decision to leave the WAAFs and marry him. She felt compelled to equal such courage, such sacrifice, with the gift of herself. Most of the time, their marriage still lived on the emotional capital of those extra twenty-five missions.

  Susan began talking about Adrian Van Ness. Her mother had known him in New York. She told Sarah about Adrian’s unsavory father and aloof Boston-born mother and the rumors of infidelity and criminality that had swirled around them. She added far more specific rumors about the insatiable sexual appetite of Buzz McCall, Tama’s ex-husband—and his friend Frank Buchanan, the company’s resident genius who had reportedly seduced Adrian’s wife, Amanda.

  Sarah listened to these stories with an odd mixture of disbelief and indifference. The victorious war seemed to insulate them from the failures of the older generation—and give them a sense of ownership of the future. At Cliff’s suggestion, Sarah had invited Frank Buchanan to dinner a month ago. She liked him instantly; he so much resembled her father—a man without guile because his heart and soul were absorbed by creating planes. She found it hard to believe such a shy, diffident unworldly man was capable of seducing another man’s wife.

  Sarah had invited the Hardys to the dinner, a gesture for which Susan was enormously grateful. She was sure it had a lot to do with the Hardy Boy’s rapid advancement at Buchanan. Susan disagreed with Sarah’s assessment of Frank. Even in those prefeminist days, she found it hard to believe any man was without guile. That made her even more curious about Amanda Van Ness. Susan begged Sarah to quiz Cliff about her but inquiries produced nothing but grunts and snarls.

  Now, her ice cream consumed, her cigarette glowing, Susan began speculating about Amanda. She was probably a nonentity. After all, she was a born Californian. They had nothing upstairs but sunshine. But Amanda was rumored to be immensely wealthy. Her brother was becoming one of the country’s premier oil tycoons. Maybe Frank Buchanan had seduced her, hoping to get his hands on her money so he could take over the company and get rid of Adrian Van Ness, whom he seemed to hate.