Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  His stepbrother’s name filled Cliff’s throat with bile. But years of practice enabled him to conceal it. “Say hello to his father, Buzz,” he said.

  Cassie eyed Buzz skeptically. “You don’t look like him.”

  “He took after his mother,” Buzz said.

  “Billy must be quite a pilot. He likes to test everythin’ to the limit of its structural capacity,” Cassie said.

  “I know all about it. I’m the same way,” Cliff said.

  “It runs in the family,” Buzz said.

  Billy had just become a major in the newly created U.S. Air Force. Recently Buzz had brought him to California to help them test an experimental jet Frank Buchanan was developing at Muroc Air Base in the Mojave Desert.

  “There’s some sort of club you belong to?”

  “The Honeycomb Club. Maybe you’d like to work there. The hours and the pay are a lot better than this job,” Buzz said.

  Cassie’s penciled eyebrows rose. “So I’ve heard.”

  Cliff could almost feel the heat. Cassie had cut loose. She was on her own in California, playing the big-girl game. A lot of stewardesses went this route. There was no limit to what they would try if you got them early. Timing was important. It did not take long for a woman to get her heart broken and turn morose, sullen, bitchy.

  Cliff considered himself a student of women. Even a collector, a connoisseur. Cassie’s down-home drawl added a touch of fire, a suggestion of sultry southern blood. She was ready to do things Cliff could never suggest to Lady Sarah, his private name for his English wife.

  “You ready to go for some of that tonight?” Buzz asked Cliff, as the stewardesses began serving after-dinner drinks.

  He had been planning to get Cassie Trainor’s phone number for future reference and go to the hospital to see Sarah and the baby. But Buzz’s offer was not something Cliff could afford to turn down. It implied Buzz was ready to forget about dragging him to see Captain Eddie—if Cliff forgot about how crudely his old pal rejected him. It even suggested a sort of truce between them, an admission that Cliff was a man now, ready to play games with women Buzz’s way. “Sure,” Cliff said.

  By the time they landed in Los Angeles, twelve hours and ten minutes after leaving Newark, Cliff and Buzz had dates with Cassie and the chipper brunette, whose name was Barbara. Cassie offered to find a date for Jim Redwood but he did not feel in a celebrating mood and went home.

  “What the hell’s the matter with Redwood?” Cliff said, as they waited in the terminal for Cassie and Barbara to change out of their uniforms. “Sometimes I think he’s queer. You can’t get him interested half the time.”

  “A dame broke his heart years ago,” Buzz said. “It happened to me with Billy’s mother. I swore I’d never let it happen again.”

  On that point, he and Buzz were in agreement. Exactly where that left Sarah was something Cliff did not think about very often. Sarah was part of the war, something he had brought home, along with the forty-nine missions and the memory of Schweinfurt.

  With Buzz in charge of the party, they headed for the Trocadero, a place Cassie and Barbara considered as prehistoric as the Great Pyramid. They ate the terrible food and drank a lot of wine and ogled the aging screen stars. Buzz tried to impress Barbara by claiming he had dated some of them in his stunt-flying days. On the way out he squeezed Gloria Swanson’s arm and gave her a big hello. To Cliff’s surprise, she smiled and said: “Hi, Buzz.”

  At ninety miles an hour they hurtled up the coast highway to Buzz’s house in Pacific Palisades. There they persuaded Cassie and Barbara to audition for the Honeycomb Club. Barbara had good breasts and a dark wild pussy but she was shy about taking off her clothes. Cassie had no inhibitions about that or anything else. She was an instant winner. Sex popped out of every pore of her long lithe body.

  Barbara and Buzz went for a swim in the pool and Cassie continued her audition with Cliff in Buzz’s king-sized bed. She was just drunk enough to let him do anything and enjoy it. It was beautiful fucking, exactly the way Cliff liked it. Almost impersonal, so you could concentrate on the performance, the electricity in every touch, every thrust. Yet not completely impersonal, not like whorehouse sex. Pleasure, not money was the payoff. Cliff was proud of his ability to please a woman.

  Power was almost as important. With each stroke, each moan of desire, their failure to sell the Excalibur dwindled, the world outside the walls of the bedroom was somehow less threatening, less relentless. Clifford Morris was in absolute control here, a man defying luck, eluding memory and rules, a kind of outlaw.

  Finally, there was no more juice in the joystick. They lay side by side laughing, fondling. “Am I as good as Billy?” Cliff said.

  “You’re better,” Cassie said. “You’re more fun. You didn’t scare me.”

  “How did he scare you?”

  “Never mind.”

  Billy knew zilch about how to acquire a woman. That was what Cliff liked to do. Not just screw them and walk away à la Buzz. He liked to come back for seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, to arouse flutters of love, to toy with the possibility of loving them in return.

  “Billy’s still out at Muroc testing one of our planes. Why don’t you call him right now and tell him I’m better?”

  “Why not?” Cassie said.

  Cliff found Billy’s number in Buzz’s address book. Cassie dialed him and said: “Hey, Billy. You probably don’t remember me. I’m just some stewardess you fucked one night in Manhattan Beach. I’m here with Cliff Morris and I want to tell you—”

  Strange things began happening in Cassie’s body. She shook as if she was having convulsions.

  “I want to tell you—”

  The tremors became more violent. Cliff grabbed her, afraid she was going to fly off the bed.

  “I want to tell you—”

  Cassie flung the phone against the wall and curled into a ball. She bit the back of her hand and sobbed and sobbed. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Cliff said.

  Cassie rolled over on her back and smiled at him. “Nothin’,” she said. “Get me a drink and we’ll go for the record.”

  “Some other night,” Cliff said, putting his hand on her damp pussy in a comforting—and acquiring—way.

  DOES OOO WUVUMS WIDDLE ME?

  “Mr. Stone? Mr. Pesin wants to see you immediately.”

  It was around five o’clock on the day Cliff had called to cancel their dinner date. The vice president of nothing in particular at Pesin’s Baby Wear was sitting in his office reading a symposium, “Religion and the Intellectuals,” in the Partisan Review. For the past three weeks, Dick Stone had not had time to do much reading. No one at Pesin’s Baby Wear had time to do anything but entertain buyers.

  Twice a year they invaded New York like a horde of Visigoths, insulting, demanding, cajoling, sneering, greedy for tickets to Broadway shows, free dinners, exotic sex. Everyone on the executive level of Pesin’s Baby Wear, the comptroller, the production chief, the vice presidents, the designers, were all hurled into the task of keeping these obnoxious provincials happy. As son-in-law and heir apparent to the business. Dick Stone was expected to be more jovial, more amusing, more charming than anyone else.

  Pesin’s Baby Wear was grossing about ten million dollars a year, reason enough, in the opinion of most people, to be very very charming. Sam Pesin had made this obvious more than once, in what he called little hints.

  This afternoon, Sam was pondering the usual rush-hour traffic jamming Seventh Avenue when Dick Stone walked into the office. Sam was a short energetic man who disliked the word energetic. He maintained energetic people were usually dumb. Dynamic was the word he preferred. Last year he had put up most of the money for a testimonial dinner at which the Seventh Avenue Association had hailed him as the dynamo of the baby-wear business.

  “Maybe it’s time we had a talk,” Sam said.

  “I’m listening,” Dick said.

  “It’s not about the grandson. I can wait another year fo
r him. It’s about the business. Your attitude toward it.”

  Trouble, Dick thought. He had been half-expecting it since he declined to escort a half-dozen buyers to the Copacabana last Monday. He had given them the name of the headwaiter and a guarantee they had a front table. All they had to do was sign for anything they wanted to eat, drink, or squeeze. But the headwaiter had gotten a bigger tip from someone else. Instead of topping it the schnooks had left in a huff.

  “Greenberg’s buyer, Shapiro. He went home without giving us a single order. He never even came back to shake hands good-bye.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Too bad? That’s two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of bad. They’ve got stores from one end of New England to the other. The same thing happened with Levitt. He’s always good for fifty thousand dollars. He’s got everything in Pennsylvania south of Lancaster in his pocket. Nothing.”

  “Is it all my fault? Or is it possible that there’s something wrong with this year’s line?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with this year’s line that some dynamic selling couldn’t fix. What the hell happened to you Monday night? How come you left those people on their own at the Copa?”

  “Nancy and I had tickets to Death of a Salesman.”

  “Oh, this is beautiful. You go see a show about a goddamned failure written by a smartass Communist while our clients are left standing around the Copa with their fingers up their asses. Is this what an MBA does for you?”

  “I tipped the headwaiter fifty bucks. Is it my fault if he’s a fink?”

  “It’s nobody’s but your fault. But it’s only a symptom of an overall thing. An overall attitude, Dick. I brought you in here when you married Nancy. I was frankly delighted to have a guy with brains, a hero who bombed the Nazis no less, on the payroll. But I expected some gratitude. Some dynamism. You don’t seem to really care, you know what I mean? You just seem to be going through the motions.”

  “You’re right,” Dick said. “I don’t care. I don’t give a shit whether yellow or blue is the in color for bibs this year. Or whether dresses for one-year-olds should have lace collars. Or whether the Lone Ranger should be on our overalls. I not only don’t give a shit, I don’t give a fuck.”

  At six-one, Stone had about eight inches on Sam Pesin. He had added twenty pounds to his burly thick-necked body since the war. The dynamo of the baby-wear business did not make a sound as his berserk son-in-law strode out of the office.

  Dick squeezed into the packed F train at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street and rode under the East River. What the hell was happening to him? Was he losing his mind? Was his father finally getting to him?

  His father had been disappointed by his decision to go into business. His high marks in college, his intellectual interests, had led Rabbi Saul Stone to expect his only son to choose a profession—the law or medicine or academe. Dick did not completely understand the decision himself. It had something to do with an inchoate desire to become—or remain—part of the American world in which he had participated as an airman. He liked being an American first and a Jew more or less second. His father, worried about the number of Jews marrying Christians in his congregation and elsewhere, had nodded impatiently when Dick tried to explain this to him. “Just be sure you marry a nice Jewish girl,” he had said.

  Was that why he had married Nancy Pesin? Dick wondered as the F train groaned and creaked through the East River tunnel at ten miles an hour. It had seemed logical in so many other ways. She was in the top third of her class at Barnard, a reader and something of a thinker. She had a good disposition and her figure was definitely A+. Inheriting Pesin’s Baby Wear was a not-unpleasant prospect. It dovetailed with another inchoate desire—to acquire enough money to pursue a career as a writer and thinker in the Partisan Review league.

  At last the F Train was through the tunnel, rocketing toward bucolic Forest Hills. Dick walked to the apartment house through the warm June dusk, wondering if Sam Pesin had called his daughter to complain about her ungrateful husband. Nancy had passed little hints of her own about Daddy’s dissatisfaction.

  Up to the third floor in the shiny new high-rise off Queens Boulevard. The aromas of a half dozen dinners mingled in the hall. Veal cordon bleu, his nose told him the minute he opened his door. Nancy was on the telephone in the kitchen, gassing with her best friend and fellow Barnard graduate, Helene Feldman.

  “It’s the most devastating experience I’ve ever had in the theater.”

  She was talking about Death of a Salesman.

  The living room had an oriental rug on the floor, prints from the Museum of Modern Art on the wall, traditional furniture from Sloane’s, except for an immense television set in a mahogany case in front of the window. A Christmas gift from Daddy. In the dining area, the table was set, with a spray of fresh tulips in a vase in the center of it. A shaker sat on the coffee table with martinis for two. What could he complain about? Dick wondered. Wasn’t this the American dream come true? Wouldn’t Willy Loman call him a lucky SOB?

  “Oh—here’s my one and only. I’ll call you tomorrow, dollink.”

  Nancy hung up and emerged from the kitchen, smiling broadly. She was wearing a frilly apron over a dark red dress inset with panels of blue. The energy she put into getting good marks at Barnard now went into being the compleat housewife, with a touch of upper-middle-class chic. “Here he is, home from the garment wars to his little balaboosta,” she bubbled.

  She threw her arms around him, nestling her body as close as possible and kissed him on the lips. Her tongue played around his mouth. “Does ooo wuvums widdle me?” she gurgled.

  From the sky above them came the distant grumble of a plane landing at La Guardia Airport. The apartment house was only a block from one of the approach patterns. “No,” Dick said.

  The word spoke itself. It was an eruption, an explosion of memory and impulse and desire. He was back in Sam Pesin’s office telling him he did not give a fuck and simultaneously in his father’s temple in Rego Park listening to him compare the metaphor of the promised land to Thomas Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness. He was on the telephone hearing Cliff Morris tell him the plane business was great.

  Nancy had not used baby talk when he dated her, nor when they began sleeping together, in her last term at Barnard. She had been passionate but shy in those encounters. The baby talk had started on their honeymoon. Dick soon discovered it had deep roots. Sam Pesin talked that way to his daughter whenever they met. Does oo wuvums Daddykins? he would gurgle. Why had it suddenly become intolerable?

  Nancy stepped back. Dick could see her thinking: how could he mean that? Not love this beautiful apartment, the great dinners I cook for him every night, followed by equally scrumptious screwing? Not love the perfect deal I’ve handed him? All he has to do is put up with the dynamo for another ten years or so and take over and run the business his way? No?

  “I’ve had it with your father and I’ve had it with you and your stupid baby talk,” Dick said. “I want a divorce.”

  Nancy’s pretty face puckered like a two-year-old. Wailing, she fled into the bathroom. Dick sat down on the couch and tried to think about what he was doing. He was frightened by his inability to understand this defiant inner self, this Samson who was ready to pull down the walls and ceiling.

  He could only compare what he had just done to volunteering for another twenty-five missions to get the stench of Schweinfurt out of his soul. That too had seemed an act of insanity. It would have been easy enough to blame the whole thing on Cliff Morris and let Colonel Atwood court-martial him, as he had been longing to do since training days. Only their tail gunner, Mike Shannon, seemed to understand why Dick had volunteered. Mike had been the first member of the crew to follow his lead. Where did these explosions of anger or need or morality—Dick did not know what to call them—come from?

  He had no answer to the larger question. He only knew the source of this convulsion, the root of the no he had just snarled in his wife’s face.
It was the sense of being swallowed by Jewishness again. He wanted to be part of the American world of 1948, the America that had just won the greatest war in history. Instead he was stuck in a Jewish corner of New York where he felt as separated from the rest of the country as if he had emigrated to Israel.

  Dick heard Cliff Morris telling him the plane business was great and the pay was shitty. Why did that appeal to him? Was there a moral dimension in those words? Or was it simply the fact that the airplane business was in California, as far away from New York as he could get?

  Or was there some unfinished business between him and Cliff, something to do with those five minutes over Schweinfurt in a plane built by Buchanan Aircraft, five minutes that distorted and confused something deep in his soul—maybe in both their souls?

  With an angry shake of his large head, Dick Stone told himself to cut the bullshit. When he got going he was worse than his father the rabbi. He was a goddamn mystic.

  He strode into the bedroom and began throwing clothes in a suitcase. If Cliff Morris welched on his promise, he would talk his way into Buchanan on his own. Or into Lockheed or Douglas or North American. One way or another, he was on his way to California to get into the plane business.

  PEACETIME BLUES

  In his split-level house in south Los Angeles, Cliff Morris was awakened by his three-year-old, Liz, giving him a big wet kiss. “You smell funny, Daddy,” she said.

  “I feel funny too,” Cliff said. “They call it a hangover.”

  He gulped aspirins and drove to the hospital, surprising Sarah. “I haven’t even combed my hair,” she said.

  Cliff was tempted to tell her that would not make much difference. Sarah had gained about thirty pounds with this latest baby. The trim brunette who filled out her WAAF uniform in all the right places at Thorpe Abbots Air Base had almost vanished in rolls of fat. She swore she was going to lose weight—a song Cliff had heard before. Sarah could not resist six ounces of heavy cream on her breakfast cereal and a half pound of butter on every slice of bread.