Air Force Eagles (8 page)

"I'll double your salary, and put Ginny on the payroll at whatever you are making now in the Air Force."

"Gee, I'll have to discuss it with her, Troy."

Sticking out his hand, Troy smiled. "No, you won't. I'm sure she and Elsie have already come to an agreement. Now don't say a word to anyone about the wing, and especially not about the missiles."

The two wives had in fact already come to several agreements, the first of which was that they disliked each other intensely. The second, almost equally important, was that they nevertheless would have to work together.

Elsie McNaughton had been waiting in the grand old Maxwell House Hotel dining room for half an hour, passing the time with bourbon poured from a silver flask into a thick tumbler of ice water. She much preferred the sweeter taste of a Manhattan, but you still couldn't buy drinks in a Nashville restaurant. She glanced at her wristwatch, then poured more whiskey over the ice.

As she sipped, Elsie impatiently tapped a crystal vase with a spoon; she had carved out a career in the almost exclusively male aviation industry by never waiting for anyone or anything. Knowing her temper, the Negro waiter watched her as nervously as a mouse watches a cat.

She had started as a secretary for Bruno Hafner in the old Hafner Aircraft Company, unable to take shorthand, barely able to type, but young, virginal, and eager to learn about everything. The first thing Bruno taught her was sex, but after the first rough edges of his lust had been knocked off, he found she had brains as well and began to treat her as his girl Friday. When Hafner Aircraft went belly up in 1936, Troy McNaughton had bought up its assets—among them Elsie Raynor.

With the experience she'd had with Hafner, she quickly assumed a major role at McNaughton, developing an easygoing, bantering managerial style that did not quite mask her voracious appetite for power. Troy valued her knack for going to the heart of business problems. Sometimes she used sex as a weapon, exploiting the weaknesses of the men she worked with, but most of the time she simply worked harder and gathered more information than anyone else she was competing with. She had used both approaches with her old friend and lover, the late General Henry Caldwell, and it had paid off handsomely over the years. Elsie was a wealthy woman, with a large interest in McNaughton Aircraft held in her own name.

When Ginny finally appeared, clicking in on four-inch high heels, the two women experienced the polar opposite of love at first sight. Elsie thought, A frigging flamenco dancer—where are the castanets? even as she realized the truth—Ginny was too young, too pretty, and too much in love with herself for Elsie to endure. As Ginny walked over, Elsie's eyes swept up and down. Ginny was taller and she had a gorgeous figure—much like her own had been only a few years before.

Elsie sat up straight and stole a quick glance into the mirrored column next to her. She sighed. Twenty extra pounds had mugged her body, making the flat round and the firm sag. Her once silky, copper-gold hair had been turned to dime store henna by too many weekly treatments. In her youth, she used just a touch of makeup, but now she was layered in a rose-pink Elizabeth Arden haze.

Ginny, piling up impressions at equal speed, let her best beauty-contest smile blossom as she thought, She looks like a whorehouse madam.

Elsie half-rose from her seat to greet her. They shook hands formally, each momentarily lost in appraising the other.

If Ginny's first mistake was to be attractive, her second was to dominate the conversation. Elsie tried to interject at first, but soon gave up, confining her remarks to "aha's" and a few "I see's."

"I just love your guesthouse; you must have had a professional decorator in."

Elsie liked the old guesthouse better, where she had roistered with Caldwell and many others. The new place was too luxurious for her, and it didn't even have a mirror by the bed! She started to say that she had done the decorating herself when Ginny went on, "'Course, I'd never hire anyone to do my home. I've got a natural talent for decoration, everyone says so."

Elsie smiled, thinking: You probably love blue-tinted mirrors and movie-dish tableware, you cracker bitch.

In the next hour, Elsie learned far more than she wanted to know about Ginny's aristocratic family, her powerful father, Stan's cleverness, and how much the two of them could do for McNaughton Aircraft. She also saw that as mendaciously cunning as Ginny was, she could be a useful tool—and would never be a threat.

Finally, Ginny ran down, saying, "But goodness me, I've been doing all the talking. Tell me why you all want Stan to come work for you."

Smoothing the silver-threaded tablecloth with her hand, Elsie decided to tell Ginny the simple truth.

"Because of your contacts—your stepfather, of course, and all the others. And because your husband will make a good salesman for us. He's much smoother than Troy. Troy's ways were fine for the old days, but the government's more sophisticated now. I understand that Stan has a very winning manner, and that he looks the part."

Ginny was excited, visions of managerial perks dancing in her head. "You don't want him to be just a test pilot?"

The white-jacketed waiter, silver-haired and sleekly deferential, served dessert, orange sherbet for Ginny and bourbon black bottom pecan pie for Elsie.

"Oh, sure, he'll fly as much as he wants to. But Troy wants to use him in Washington to sweeten up the brass—you know, buy them dinner, take them fishing and hunting. Troy always says you sell a hundred times more airplanes on the golf course than you do on the flight line."

"Stan will be perfect for you!"

Elsie just smiled. Maybe he would, at that. She pushed the pecan pie away untasted—perhaps it was time to find out if there was life in the old girl yet.

*

Cleveland, Ohio/March 17, 1948

God bless his father. Usually his calm presence, so benign and filled with good will, made everyone feel better. Now he was mad as hell, veins purpling out in his forehead, arms waving, and everyone was uneasy.

"Start at the beginning, son. I'm tired of wondering what's going on. You and Saundra have been sharp with each other all morning.

The Reverend John Stuart Marshall Sr., three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than his son, was built more like Joe Louis than Father Divine. Curly white hair ran around the monklike tonsure of broad black scalp, and his eyes normally sparkled with humor. Now they flashed an urgent warning that he wanted straight talk. Despite his anger, Reverend Marshall instinctively pulled Saundra close with his beefy arm; she gladly folded herself into him, grateful for his love and warmth, sorry that their bickering had bothered him. She had never really known her own father. For some reason still unrevealed, her sternly religious mother had forbidden even the mention of his name. Their life had been work and church, yet until she'd met John's father she couldn't believe that ministers could laugh, that religion could be comforting.

"Dad, the problem is work! I can't get a flying job. I've been all over the country. If I didn't have Mr. Bandfield's word on it, I'd think I'd been blacklisted by McNaughton."

"Oh, you're 'black' listed, son, we all are. I thought you found that out at Tuskegee." His mother shook with mirth, eyes lit up and crackling white teeth smiling through skin as shiny as a polished pan. Her face was long and narrow, her nose slightly hooked, her smile wide. The family had always had fun, no matter how hard times had been. When everyone was home it sometimes seemed as if laughter would jump the little frame house on Connick Street right off its concrete block foundations. Mary was a tall woman, thin and strong as the lengths of hickory she used to apply to John Jr. 's backside. His copper color and hooked nose came from her side of the family. The senior John Marshall always joked about there being an Indian somewhere in his mother's family woodpile—but never when Mary was around.

She busied herself around the battered oak kitchen table, the center of their life, passing out plates of fragrant stollen, heavy white frosting dotted with raisins, oven-warm and their standard Saturday morning treat. Working for a German family in Shaker Heights for almost twenty years, Mary's cooking style had changed over time to mix its purely Southern origins with German-American dishes. John's favorite meal was still neckbones, sauerkraut, and liver dumplings, a Dixie-Bavarian mixture he'd daydreamed about when eating K-rations in Italy.

"Don't laugh, Mom; at least Tuskegee taught me to fly—I'll always be grateful for that."

Tuskegee Army Air Field had been the experience of a lifetime—and an utter nightmare. Tuskegee was an experiment, to see if Negroes could learn to fly, and the Army handled it in a curious dual fashion. Oh the one hand, the training was just as arduous and fast-paced as at a white flying school. On the other, segregation was preserved almost as strictly as it was in the nearby town of Tuskegee, where the drinking fountains were marked white and colored and hostility lurked behind every glance. Like most of the other aviation cadets, John had endured the humiliation because he loved to fly and because he felt that a chance to be a commissioned pilot offered the best way for Negroes to advance.

"Dad, the only people hiring pilots are the airlines, and of course they're not taking on any Negroes. I thought about seeing if I could get back into the Air Force, but after our problems at Lockbourne, I decided against it."

Saundra's smile was tight. "No, no more Lockbournes, please."

The old man's manner softened. "I have to tell you, son, I was worried when you left the Air Corps." He would never call it anything else but Air
Corps.
"I knew that when that McTaggart outfit offered you a job, they didn't know you were colored."

"McNaughton, Dad. And they must have known; there was a box to check for race on the application, and I told them that I'd learned to fly at Tuskegee and fought overseas with the 332nd. No white boys did that!"

"No matter. When somebody realized who—and what—you were, they took care of things. Just like I said they would."

His mother broke in. "Amen. He said that the very day we got your letter saying you were going to work for them."

John Sr. looked at her and smiled. They'd been together thirty-five years now, survived two wars, a depression, and two race riots, one in Detroit, and the other in East St. Louis. They'd had five children, and three had lived to maturity. She was still a good-looking woman.

"What's this business you're in now?"

"I don't know a whole lot, and most of what I know I can't tell. All I can tell you is that I've got a job, flying for a foreign government, and the pay is good—six hundred dollars a month, as long as I'm there."

"Six hundred dollars a month! Whooee! Sure beats a dollar a day at the foundry. But where are you going, John?"

"That's what I can't tell you. As soon as I can, I will, and I won't be gone any longer than I have to. If Saundra can stay here with you, I can save a lot of money, and maybe come back and start a business of my own."

"You know that Saundra's welcome here. You just be sure you come back." He paused. "It's not this 'ace' thing, is it, son? You don't have to prove yourself to anyone, you've already done that."

John Marshall flushed; as usual his dad was on target.

"No, no, Dad, it's nothing like that."

His father smiled and said, "Son, you forget a daddy can tell when his son is fibbing, and you're fibbing now. I just hope it's a good cause."

"It is; you'd join yourself if you knew what it was." Then he laughed and added, "'Course, you're not exactly in the line of work they'd want to use," and made his father angry because he wouldn't tell him any more.

That night Saundra lay next to him, cradled in his arms, crying softly because he was leaving, again. His parents, knowing they would want to be alone, had said good-bye that afternoon, driving to St. Louis in their two-tone gray 1940 Nash Ambassador to see the Reverend's sister. The elder Marshall loved the Nash because the front seat folded back to make a bed, and they never had to worry about finding a place to stay that would accept Negroes. They packed a big hamper of food, slept in the car by the side of the road, and used the woods for a restroom.

"Don't cry, honey, not on our last night for a while."

"I should be better at this. We've had almost as many 'last nights' as we've had nights together."

It was true. They'd been married less than a year when he went off to flying school—just in time, it turned out; a few months later married men weren't being admitted to the program. Since then only his job with McNaughton had given them any kind of home life, even though the little house they'd rented in the desert had been lonely and primitive. There'd been no place for her—no place livable—when he came back to Tuskegee, and their experience at Lockbourne was too painful to recall.

"Do you mind staying here? Would you rather go back and live with your mother?"

"Never! I love her, but I hate being with her. Mother is always scrubbing life on the washboard of religion. Your parents are so different—you're so different."

"That's why you love me so." They kissed for a long while, and she pulled away to ask, "What's this 'ace' thing your daddy asked about?"

He'd never discussed it with her, and knew he couldn't now. She'd never understand. "Ah, when I went to flying school I told my daddy that I wanted to be an ace, shoot everybody down—just foolish young man's talk. Don't think about it."

"Your father's not the only one who can tell when you're fibbing."

He licked her tears, little salt kisses, savoring them. Her big brown eyes had been the first thing that attracted him to her when they'd met at school. Widely spaced, her eyes shimmered with a serene intelligence that had captivated him at once. Just over five feet tall and weighing only a hundred pounds, her energy and imagination belied her doll-like size. She could be formidable when really angry—he'd learned long ago when to back off. And, he confessed to himself, he loved her figure best of all—small, well-formed breasts, a flat stomach that V'd into a wild mound of curly hair that she was ashamed of and a darling rounded bottom that he could never keep his hands from.