Glory Boys

Sal nodded. Her eyes couldn’t see, but they could still cry. There was a short silence.

‘You must have been very proud,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Very.’

Abe let the silence run a little longer, then changed subject. He asked Brad if he had collected any flying stuff other than the photo of Abe. He might as well have asked the Pope if he had an interest in prayer books. In an instant, the kid ran upstairs and came down with a whole boxful of photos, news stories, scrapbooks, pages torn from boys’ magazines, movie posters.

Abe laughed. ‘Sal, you know your son is a bit of an obsessionist?’

She smiled and wiped her eyes, but Brad was impervious to irony. He had a small mountain of material relating to Abe; vastly more than Abe had ever wanted to keep himself.

‘And that’s your Croix de Guerre,’ said Brad, slapping down one photo. ‘And that’s your Légion d’honneur –’ another photo ‘– And that’s your Congressional, no, wait, that’s your Distinguished Service Cross, the first one, three oak leaves, then I should have – yes – the Glory Boys piece. Boy! I used to know that article by heart.’

Brad dropped a newspaper article on the table. The article was a syndicated reprint of a piece that had first appeared in the New York Times. Abe had been asked to do an interview with a war correspondent. Abe hadn’t wanted to do it – he didn’t like or approve of the way the press treated the war – and he had given a grudging thirty-minute interview to the journalist in question. That had been all. He’d forgotten the whole thing within five minutes. But then the article had appeared, splashed beneath a huge photo of Abe, ‘Captain Rockwell of the Glory Boys’. The piece had caused a sensation. Nothing in it was untrue. Abe couldn’t even claim that his words had been twisted or distorted. But if Abe had sought to avoid any possible glamourising of his unit and the war in the sky, he couldn’t have failed more completely. The article made Abe out to be America’s hero of heroes; his men to be the bravest of the brave. And it was good. Much though Abe hated it, the article was a superb piece of writing, syndicated, so it seemed, to every newspaper in America. And the name for the squadron had stuck. Abe was never just Captain Rockwell any more, he was always Captain Rockwell of the Glory Boys. The men in the squadron had been intensely proud and had painted the title on the nose and tail of every plane. Abe dated his true and abiding hatred of the war from the moment that article first appeared.

Brad went on digging out items from his collection. Abe rubbed his face, in deep discomfort. He did his best to change the subject.

‘I hope it’s not all me.’

‘No, I’ve got everyone here. Everyone. I mean,’ he added hurriedly, ‘you were always my favourite. You and…’

‘Me and Rickenbacker. Good choice. Rickenbacker was the best.’

Abe felt better now that the kid’s interest was deflected onto other subjects, but one photo of himself as a young man was still visible on the top of the pile. He was wearing a lieutenant’s uniform. He’d only just been commissioned, hadn’t yet shot down a single plane, hadn’t yet experienced a minute in combat. The photo was monochrome, of course, but somehow you could see the startling blue of the young man’s eyes, just as startling as if a piece of sky had fallen down and got lodged there. The young man looked out with confidence and eagerness, as though knowing the place that history had written for him. Abe looked sharply away, as though allergic to the sight. When Brad happened to unfold a newspaper cutting that fell over the photo and covered it, Abe pulled his glance away with an almost visceral feeling of relief.

Sal stood up to make coffee. Abe wanted to help, but she said, ‘You stay where you are. I don’t need eyes to find the blamed coffee pot.’ Meantime, Brad had dug out something that amused Abe. A folded movie poster advertised ‘America’s favourite flying ace’, Willard Thornton.

‘So he’s the favourite,’ laughed Abe. ‘Hear that, Brad? America’s favourite! What’s all this about Rockwell and Rickenbacker?’

‘Oh, him! I don’t really… But say, Captain, he was ninety-first squadron as well. You must have –’

‘Sure, I knew Willie Thornton, all right.’

‘Wow! … I saw one of his movies once. In Jacksonville. I used to quite like him, but the picture was dumb. He shot down about eight machines in one fight.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never watched ’em.’ He smiled. Will Thornton had arrived in the squadron much cockier than his flying skills warranted. But Abe had seen through the bluster. He’d put time into Thornton’s training and the effort had paid off. Abe had come to trust his ability in a fight. If the young man had been able to get his instinctive selfishness under control, he’d have a fine future ahead of him.

‘You keep in touch with him?’

‘Not now, no, these movie actors, I doubt if they’d have time for an old beat-up flier like me… Say, though, if you wanted me to ask him to sign that movie poster for you, I expect he’d be happy to oblige.’

‘Really, Captain? Gee whizz, I…’ he trailed off, caught between his excitement at the idea and his desire to make sure that Abe knew he didn’t have a rival for his admiration.

Abe took the poster. ‘I’ll mail it to him with a note. No promises, mind, but I expect he’ll help out.’

Sal came to the table with the coffee. Abe forced the subject away from the war, back to farming and the price of corn. After twenty minutes, he pushed his chair back. ‘Say, Sal, thanks for dinner. It was real good. Nice to eat home-cooked food once in a while.’

‘You couldn’t be more welcome, Captain.’

‘Brad, I’m gonna be leaving town tomorrow. The takeoff could be a mite tricky and I wouldn’t want to carry a passenger, but I’ve heard there’s a stretch of beach just south of Brunswick with room to land.’

‘Oh, sure, Captain. A real good beach. Flat and wide. Not too soft neither.’

‘Well, what d’you say you meet me there tomorrow? Say around noon, if you can get there. We’ll do a little flying together before I head off south.’

‘Oh boy! Mom, can I…?’

‘Oh no, Captain, you don’t want to do that. Brad doesn’t need to –’

‘D’you know what, ma’am? I think as a matter of fact he does.’

And that was that. Abe fixed the date. Poll was ready. Meantime, Hennessey had had the trees felled, the road levelled, any obstacles removed. Main Street, Independence looked almost like a real runway. Abe walked slowly back to the hotel. On the four wooden steps leading up to the hotel’s verandah, there was a man visible only as a bunch of shadows and a red-tipped cigarette.

‘Evening, Hen,’ said Abe.

‘Well, good evening to you. You’re leaving tomorrow I guess?’

‘Yep.’

‘Enjoy your dinner?’

‘You mean, did Sal Lundmark’s blindness make me change my mind?’

‘Either way.’

‘I enjoyed my dinner, Hen. But as for changing my mind, I told you already.’

The storekeeper pulled the cigarette from his mouth and stared at the tip. Then he flicked it, still glowing, out into the street.

‘A man’s gotta try, though.’

‘Sure.’ Abe hesitated. He liked the storekeeper. The man had guts and honesty: characteristics which Abe prized above anything. ‘If things work out, Hen, I’m going to be doing a little flying in these parts. I’m hoping to make a little money flying between Florida and the islands.’

‘There money in that?’

‘Don’t know. Not much. Any case, I aim to find out.’

‘Yeah, well, good luck.’

‘Maybe I’ll get in touch again sometime. If things work out. Any case, if you ever get a postcard from your Auntie Poll, you don’t forget who sent it.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Goodnight, Hen.’

‘Goodnight, Captain.’

‘And thanks. I’m only sorry I couldn’t help.’

PART TWO

Lift

Heavier-than-air flight sounds impossible – and it is. People get confused because they think that planes must weigh a lot. But that’s not true. Not true at all.

On the ground, of course, aircraft weigh something. But on the ground, they aren’t really airplanes, they’re just big chunks of metal with wings. The magic happens when the plane begins to roll forwards and air starts to move over those wings. At first, nothing much happens – nothing visible anyway. But, as the airspeed increases, the wings begin to experience lift. They’re pulling upwards, cancelling gravity, making the plane lighter.

The airspeed gets faster. Once again, the lift on the wings increases. Invisible strings are pulling the plane upwards. As the airspeed goes on increasing, the lift begins to equal gravity. Push the plane through the air just a notch or two faster and the plane rises from the ground, not by some miracle of nature but because it’s helpless to do otherwise.

And that’s it.

That’s why heavier-than-air flight never has been possible and never will be possible. Imagine the biggest, heaviest plane you’ve ever seen in your life. Imagine it one thousandth of a millionth of a millisecond before take-off. The plane may look like it’s sitting on the ground, a clumsy metal skyscraper that’s fallen over. But that’s all illusion. That entire plane – pilot, passengers and all – has become absolutely weightless.

It’s so light you could pick it up and throw it over the moon.

14

Abe quit, he turned his back.

One bright and breezy dawn, with a cool wind a steady ten knots from the south, Abe took Poll to the end of Main Street, opened her throttle, and roared upwards into the eggshell-perfect sky. He dipped his wings, once, twice, then flew away.

As the red-and-white plane danced away towards the ocean, the knots of onlookers broke up, back to their daily business or their morning grits. The last person left squinting into the morning sun was Hennessey Gibson. ‘A nice guy that,’ he muttered. ‘Just a shame he wouldn’t stay.’

Abe kept his date with Brad Lundmark. The Curtiss Jenny had been built as a trainer. It had two cockpits, front and rear, with full controls in each one. Abe took the kid up to fifteen hundred feet, then let the kid take over. Rudder bar left and right. Control stick up, down, port, starboard. Throttle full open, half-off, then full power again. Abe gave the kid two hours in the air. They did a couple of landings, a couple of take-offs. It was the best two hours of Brad Lundmark’s life. Abe dropped the kid back on the sand and filled the tank with gasoline from a red tin fuel can.

‘So long, Brad.’

‘So long, Captain.’

‘You mind you look after your mom, OK?’

‘Sure, Captain. I will.’ On the last two words, Brad’s voice twisted a little and rose half an octave. It was the sort of verbal stumble which probably means nothing. The boy immediately got his control back and added something else in a voice which was completely level and smooth. Only he’d looked away too. He’d darted his eyes quickly out to sea and kept them there ’til his voice had recovered.

The conversation ran on a little. Abe still needed to stow the empty fuel can and clear a few stones away from his prospective take-off site. But the flier had become suddenly gruff, almost angry. They said goodbye again and shook hands. Then Abe took off, climbing aggressively. He headed south, long enough to be sure that Brad had already set off for home, but inside himself the flier was at war.

On the one hand there stood Hennessey and the blind Sal Lundmark, her dead husband and the stricken town. There stood the redhead Brad, the engine-obsessed image of the boy that Abe had once been. And on the other hand, there stood Abe himself; everything he was now, everything he’d ever learned about himself. The two sides struggled for mastery. Neither side won.

Angrily, treating his controls with uncharacteristic roughness, Abe brought Poll round in a long curve that would bring her back up the coast, five miles out to sea and a mile and a quarter above it. Then holding himself directly in between the Marion coast and the eye of the sun, he circled. The mouth of Okefenokee River, a few miles east of Independence, was marked by a cluster of ragged green islands and the branching tongues of a little delta.

Still angry, still grim, but always careful, Abe began to study the sea below. At first glance, the ocean seemed littered with vessels of all sizes, ploughing the violet-blue with trails of random foam. Abe watched until the shapes gradually resolved themselves into a pattern. The smaller ones were mostly fishing boats, tracking shoals of fish. Further out to sea, bigger ships were cruising, paralleling the coast. Abe looked at the whole pattern of shipping, but kept the Okefenokee River always in view.

He didn’t see what he was looking for on that flight, nor any time that day. He felt relieved. The war that had been raging inside him had resolved itself in this way: he had given Hennessey and Brad and all the other figures in his head twenty-four hours exactly. If he found what he was looking for in that time, he’d continue to investigate. But if he didn’t… Waves of relief, of freedom, washed through him at the thought. Abe thought of flying Poll out over the ocean to the islands. The blue ocean with its alternate tints of purple and green, its crests of white, the far horizons, and only the sky above… Abe hoped against hope, that the sea would stay empty.

When darkness fell, he unrolled his sheepskin sleeping roll on a beach a little way north of Brunswick. An hour before light the next morning, he woke up, walked waist-deep into the sea, where he dunked his head and scrubbed himself clean. Then he returned to shore, dressed and took off. By the time the sun nudged over the horizon, he was in position, lodged invisibly in the glare of dawn.

He watched the coast, watched the boats, searching for what he knew had to be there.

Searched, then, with a sinking heart, he saw it.

Two boats, the size of launches, broke from the green-fringed islands. They could have been fishing boats, only these launches were faster, sharper, lighter, keener. The two boats chugged out to sea, then headed south. Abe, holding his position in the eye of the sun, his stomach churning with a feeling that he couldn’t put into words, turned to follow.

15

It was 31 May 1926.

Willard stood, face washed and shoes shined, in Ted Powell’s eighteenth-storey office. The banker was on the telephone and held up a finger, indicating that Willard should neither move nor speak. The call ran on for six minutes before Powell hung up. He stared at Willard.

‘It’s eight-thirty,’ he said.

‘You said I should come by first thing.’

‘We start at eight.’

‘Oh.’

‘Never mind. Tomorrow. I’ll show you around.’

Brusque and unfriendly, Powell shot his newest recruit around the premises. Powell never knocked on any door. He just threw them open and snapped out the name of each department or office as he did so. ‘Typing Pool’, ‘Mail Room’, ‘Mr Barker and Mr Grainger, in charge of our trade finance operation’, ‘Legal’, ‘Letters of Credit’, ‘Settlements’, and so on. Powell Lambert occupied four floors of its building. Although Willard saw everything at too great a speed to take it in, he was given the impression of a purposeful, dynamic, dedicated business enterprise. The more routine areas of the bank – the Typing Pool, the bay where the settlement clerks went about their business – were neat but functional. The parts of the bank open to clients or reserved for senior officers were kept immaculate and expensive: thick carpets, colonial period clocks, large mahogany desks, crystal light fittings.

The only time when Powell slowed down was in the Investment Bureau. The Bureau was lavishly furnished. It would have given off the air of a gentlemen’s club, except that the undercurrent of a steely dedication to making money was stronger there than anywhere. Desks sat at long distances from each other across a wide green carpet. Young men, a couple of them no older than Willard, murmured into phones or sat at one another’s desks calmly chatting. Unlike the less favoured areas, Willard witnessed no stiffening into silence when Powell walked in. He greeted his employees by their first names. They greeted him back, not bothering to rise, not ending their phone calls, sometimes greeting him with nothing more than a look and a nod.

Willard felt the difference in atmosphere instantly. If he’d ever imagined working behind a desk, then this was the sort of desk he’d like to occupy. Thus far on his tour, he had felt the cold chains of his contractual imprisonment rattling louder and louder with each new depressing stride. Here, it was different, brighter, hopeful. He looked up expectantly and Powell seemed to confirm his rising hope.

‘Every part of Powell Lambert is important,’ said Powell, ‘but the Investment Bureau is worth everything else in the bank put together – good morning, Freddie. D’you get your revenge on the golf course, then? Ha! Thought as much. This is where the substantial profit-making activities of the firm are concentrated.’ As he spoke those words, ‘substantial profit-making activities’, Powell’s face screwed up as though he were speaking of something sacred. He paused, before adding in a different tone, ‘That loan of ours.’

‘Yes?’

‘If you are ever to pay it off, it will be through your ability to earn exceptional returns on assets entrusted to you by the firm.’

‘Gosh, you’d give me a chance in Investments one day?’

‘I didn’t say that. Your record in the moving picture business does not inspire confidence.’

Willard winced. He felt the crushing weight of his debt, his failure in the movies, of his father’s doubts. Then, noticing that there was a part of the top, twentieth, floor that they had not visited, tried to win back some credit for himself by pointing it out.

‘What’s through there, Ted? Anything important?’

‘That depends on what you consider important.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s lifting machinery. It drives the elevators. It means you are not obliged to climb seventeen flights of stairs on your way in to work. Does that strike you as important?’

‘No.’

Powell made no answer, except to say, ‘You will start out in Trade Finance. Downstairs.’

He strode downstairs, and marched Willard along a corridor to a door, marked ‘Trade Finance’. He flung it open. Inside was a good-sized room, thirty foot by twenty, mahogany panelled to waist-height, painted dirty cream above. A big map of the United States was the only decoration, aside from a large black-and-white clock set in a frame of dark wood. The room was less bleak than the factory-conditions of the Typing Pool, but a long way from the studied luxury of the Investment Bureau. Looking at his new workplace, Willard felt his throat tighten with nerves.

There were five desks, plus a circular well-shaped one in the middle. A secretary sat in the middle of the circular one. Four young men sat at theirs, on the phone, bent over paperwork, or yawning and reaching for coffee. But as soon as Powell’s frame was visible in the doorway, everything changed. The yawning man reached for his pen instead of his coffee. The secretary rolled her chair closer to Powell. The man on the phone finished his call. The room went still.

‘Trade Finance,’ said Powell, ‘our main activity. This is the engine room of Powell Lambert, an important place. And these are your colleagues.’ Powell grinned meaninglessly, letting his grin linger as his eyes patrolled. ‘Hughes, McVeigh, Claverty, Ronson.’ Powell named the four men in turn, jabbing at them with his finger as though they were bullocks at market. He didn’t look at the secretary, let alone give her a name. ‘You’ll get on with them all. They’ll tell you what to do. If you have any questions…’ Powell tailed off, as though already bored.

‘If I have any questions, I’ll come to you. Sure. Thanks for the introduction, Ted.’

Powell’s gaze flicked sharply around to Willard.

‘If you have any questions, you will not so much as think of disturbing me with them. These men here will sort you out.’

‘Certainly. Sorry. Of course.’

‘And you will not call me Ted.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Powell, I thought you said I should call you…’

‘When I said that, Thornton, you were not my employee.’

‘Yes, Mr Powell.’

The silence lasted a second or two longer than it should have done.

‘Well?’

‘Nothing, sir. Thank you.’

Willard went to the empty desk and sat down.

16

Down in the swampy heat and dirt roads of southern Georgia, a little red-headed kid, aviation crazy as he was, got an envelope through the post. The letter contained a movie poster signed by Willard T. Thornton. It wasn’t Lundmark’s battered old poster, but a brand new one, large and glossy, with an extravagant signature in thick blue pencil that came pretty near to deleting the smaller figure of Willard’s leading lady and co-star. Along with the poster there was a short note in a separate envelope addressed to Captain Rockwell. Brad didn’t know where to find Abe, but he put the envelope aside in case.

And the poster?

There Brad had a problem. His main hero (by a long way) was Abe Rockwell. Next on the list was Ed Rickenbacker. A long, long way after that came some of the other names from the American war in the air and, definitely on the list but a fair way down it, came Willard Thornton. If Brad had just put his poster up, slap-bang on the wall of the sitting room, it would have looked as though he ranked Thornton right up with the best of them. The idea outraged Brad’s sense of decency. So in the end, he compromised. The poster was too good not to be displayed, but Thornton didn’t merit a place in either the sitting room or Brad’s attic bedroom. And so Thornton’s handsome face found itself in the lean-to. But the walls of the little room were covered with shelves, so Brad tacked it to the ceiling instead, where it hung upside down, looming down as though the movie star were about to come diving to earth. In the meantime, Brad had got out his father’s old carpentry tools and built a frame for the photo which Abe had signed minutes after his abrupt arrival in Independence. The photo of Abe went on the mantelpiece, only a few inches sideways from the photo of Brad’s father.

Abe in the living room, Thornton in the lean-to. Brad figured he’d got it just about right.

17

‘Heck, Rockwell, nice to see you again. Darn nice. Very dang darn nice.’

General Superintendent Carl Egge of the Air Mail Service of the United States Post Office puffed up and down, pumping Abe’s hand. The two men had known each other from two or three years before, when Egge had been in charge of the St Louis–Minneapolis sector of the transcontinental route and Abe had been his senior pilot.

‘Nice to see you too, Egge.’

‘Carl, please! Lord’s sakes! Can you think of anything sounds dumber than Egge? Lord! I once worked right alongside a fellow with quite a name too. Can you guess what he was called? Huh? Give you a hint there. We made quite a famous pair.’

Abe knew perfectly well the name of Egge’s former coworker, because Egge had told him on a dozen occasions in the past.

‘No idea, Carl.’

‘Jimmy Bacon. Bacon. Egge and Bacon. How about that?’

‘Very good.’

‘I’ll say! Boy! Egge and Bacon! Quite a pair!’

Egge puffed and hooted his way into something like quietness. They talked a little about Egge’s plans for the Air Mail Service, before Abe brought up the subject he’d come to discuss.

‘Say, Carl, you ever thought of opening up an international route?’

‘Hoo! Boy! Do you ever come up with some queer ideas! International? I should say not.’