El Paso: A Novel (17 page)

Arthur had been in Chicago for five days, getting into the office at the crack of dawn and not leaving until well after dark, tending to all the myriad little details that he could before an absence of who knew how long. His second-in-command, a vice president named Smith, was a capable man in whose trust Arthur placed the immediate future of the NE&P.

After work, Arthur would drive out to the flying field and work on the Luft-Verkehrs, which he had named
Grendel
, after the monster in
Beowulf
. It didn’t matter to Arthur that Beowulf had killed Grendel in the end, Arthur just liked the name. It was a nice flying ship, much faster and more maneuverable than the Jennys, although it was large, with a wingspan of forty-two feet two inches, and was twenty-five feet seven inches from propeller to tail. The
Grendel
was a two-seater biplane designed by the Germans as a reconnaissance aircraft, which was why it had a four-hour airborne endurance capability, double that of most airplanes. It was powered by a 160-horsepower Mercedes D.III six-cylinder in-line engine, water-cooled, and had an airspeed of eighty-one miles per hour. It could climb to a maximum altitude of 16,405 feet and, more important, had a reinforced landing gear that would allow it to set down in a farm field or other rough surface. It was the envy of every aviator at the Aero Club in Chicago.

Without the added weight of its normal two machine guns and their ammunition, and the gunner, Arthur was able to rearrange the fuselage to carry eight twelve-gallon jerry cans of fuel, which he had instructed the machine shop to connect by copper pipes with a faucet tap in between each can. When the main fuel tank was running low, Arthur could simply reach back and turn one of the taps to add another twelve gallons of fuel, thus doubling his capacity. He also found room for thirty quarts of oil, spare magnetos, firing plugs, cylinder rods, gaskets, hoses, belts, strut wire, grease, an extra propeller, and an expanded tool kit.

All of this preparation in a single week was a stupendous achievement for Arthur Shaughnessy, given that he also had to be in his office twelve hours a day. But it paled in comparison with the acclaim he would receive if he completed his cross-country flight in the time he anticipated. Only a few years earlier a man named Cal Rodgers had set out on a cross-country flight in a Wright biplane from the East Coast to the West Coast. Rodgers had arranged for an entire railroad train to follow him, filled with spare parts, fuel, and a machine and woodworking shop, and, some said, a coffin, just in case. It still took him eighty-two days and seven crash landings before he arrived. The fact that Arthur could now contemplate making a fifteen-hundred-mile journey such as this in three days was a tribute in itself to the lightning advances that aviation was making since the Wright brothers first flew a heavier-than-air craft not much more than a decade earlier.

In the dim light of the hangar, Arthur surveyed
Grendel
, and it had never looked so magnificent. Her candy-apple-red fuselage and wings seemed almost translucent in the light. He had already stowed tins of canned beef, raisins, prunes, apples, oranges, peanut butter, cookies, a large Polish salami, hot mustard, two gallons of water, several bottles of beer, a side of cheddar cheese, and some crackers. In the morning he would stop by the bakery to add two loaves of freshly baked bread and pick up a hot roasted chicken at a delicatessen.

Arthur had stayed up night after night planning the voyage, poring over maps until past two a.m. Regular landing fields were few and far between, especially after Wichita, Kansas. The next one he could hope to make in a day was at Amarillo, Texas, and after that there would only be the vast and empty spaces of Texas and New Mexico before he reached El Paso on the Mexican border.

It was a daunting challenge, but Arthur felt up to it. In fact, he’d been planning such a trip in his mind ever since first setting sight on the Luft-Verkehrs when it arrived in its crate from Germany. It had been his notion to outdo the aviator Rodgers’s feat by flying over the Rockies in a single leap, but now this seemed even better. Nobody had ever flown from Chicago to El Paso, especially single-handed. While he still had worries about the Colonel’s intention to bring his family into the turmoil across the border, Arthur also thought he might set some kind of flying record. And besides, he thought, an airplane might somehow come in handy down in Mexico.

Colonel John Shaughnessy had also been figuring out his game plan. He was not going to be outdone by a son of his who had almost thrown it in his face that a flimsy flying machine could beat a sturdy railroad train operating on its own inexorable timetables. Nevertheless, Shaughnessy had taken precautions. He had arranged with the dispatchers that
The City of Hartford
, NE&P No. 1, would have a through route, no waiting for freights and milk trains.

Through his pals in the business, he secured his clearances and, after studying his routes, concluded that his train would travel directly from Chicago to Memphis, where it would cross the Mississippi and head southwest though Little Rock, Dallas, and on into Big Spring, Texas, to El Paso. There were shorter ways to go—though St. Louis, for instance—but then he would be stuck with trunk lines, and who knew how well they were kept up?

The Colonel calculated that even if Arthur could manage five hundred miles a day in the aircraft, daylight to dusk, he would probably have to set down well before that to refuel, since flying fields weren’t located so conveniently as rail depots. And that was also assuming Arthur didn’t have any mechanical problems or weather that would put him out of action earlier.

Naturally, in the back of his mind the Colonel wished Arthur well. In a sense, it was a no-lose situation for the Colonel, but he still loved a good fight, and wasn’t about to slack off. As he sat at his desk on the train, making mathematic figurings on foolscap and calculating the train speed, route, and downtimes for recoaling, Colonel Shaughnessy was actually proud of his son. Might just be he’d raised a chip off the old block after all. But he wasn’t about to give Arthur a hint of this.

The night before the race began, they all dined in Chicago at the Palmer House, with its huge Corinthian columns, marble-tiled floors, and giant, bulbous chandeliers.

“Well, at least the weather looks good for you,” the Colonel told Arthur. He had checked with the U.S. Weather Bureau and learned that skies were forecast to be clear over the entire section of country that they’d be traveling; perfect autumn days, with a Pacific high lingering over the midlands. Arthur nodded. He’d been checking it himself twice a day.

Claus Strucker was seated at the opposite end of the table, wearing a high formal collar that appeared to be chafing his neck. “So?” Strucker said expansively. “Who am I going to be pulling for?” He tried adjusting the collar but it seemed to do no good. “Will l bet on the man I arranged to receive this extraordinary German aircraft, or my gracious host on his train down to Mexico?”

“If you’re betting money,” Arthur said, “I’d put it in the air.”

“Ha!” the Colonel responded. “My wheels may be slow, but they turn day and night. Haven’t you heard the fable of the tortoise and the hare?”

“Papa will win,” Katherine said emphatically.

“Ungrateful child,” the Colonel responded. “I suppose the lot of you are against me!” They all laughed. Katherine wasn’t against the Colonel, she loved the Old Man and his nutty ways; in fact, she sensed she was like him in his impetuosity, his zaniness. She brushed a long curl off her forehead and said:

“No, Grandpapa, we’re just
for
Papa.” Shaughnessy truly loved this golden child; what beauty, what poise, what . . .
Shaughnessyness
. And oh, how she could ride a horse.

“Trains go to El Paso all the time,” Beatie put in. “But aeroplanes don’t. I think that’s what everybody’s trying to say.”

“And there’s a reason for that,” answered the Colonel. “Reliability. We make our own stock in pure reliability.”

“It’s a new and different world,” Strucker exuded. “Great changes are overtaking us.” He tried shrugging his shoulders but the collar was getting the best of him. A red mark had appeared on his neck.

Arthur looked at the German. True, Strucker had arranged the aircraft purchase, but there had always been something about the man he didn’t exactly comprehend. His manners were almost too polished; his eyes were unreadable, and if the “great changes” he was speaking of were embodied in what the Germans were up to in Europe these days, Arthur felt he could do without them. He might have said something about that, but instead he just smiled.

“And when we get into Mexico,” the Colonel continued, “you can bet we’ll all be on steel wheels and rails, because they don’t even know what a flying machine is down there.” He was so confident in winning that he had tipped off an executive at his pal Hearst’s newspaper, and the morning news was full of the train-plane race.

Arthur answered, “I still think we should let the situation that we find once we get to El Paso dictate whether or not we actually go into Mexico. Things can change very quickly in the kind of war they’re fighting.”

“Oh, please don’t start that up again,” his father groaned. “We aren’t quitters.”

Arthur sat looking at his father, trying to meet the man’s eyes with a defiant stare, but the Colonel gazed at the napkin in his lap, paying Arthur no attention. The table was suddenly silent, then everyone heard Strucker try to stifle a belch. He had fiddled with the collar so much it had sprung open and framed his neck ridiculously like a set of white wings.

DESPITE THE WEATHER REPORT,
when Arthur took off next morning the skies over Chicago were gray and thick. He climbed the
Grendel
to eight thousand feet and broke through the overcast. The sun shone brightly as he scanned the dusky bank of cloud beneath him that stretched from horizon to horizon. He wished it had been clear, because he’d hoped to locate the Colonel’s train and give it a barnstorming buzz, but since that wasn’t possible, Arthur concentrated on his tasks at hand. Navigating by compass was the most difficult; he felt the tug of a westerly wind and knew it would push him off course. He kept the needle of the compass south-southwest, but since he was above the cloud ceiling there were no reference points. He could dip beneath it, but no telling what he’d find; the soup might go all the way to the ground. Kansas City would have been the better destination but it was too far. A little town called Kirksville lay about two hundred miles closer and it had a landing field. Arthur had earlier arranged by phone to have someone meet him there and refuel the plane. He would rest that night beneath the wings, in a sleeping bag.

He wondered how his father’s part of the race was going. The Old Man was always a determined competitor and Arthur knew he’d have
The City of Hartford
at full steam. As he floated near the heavens, he recalled the time at a dinner party years earlier when the Colonel, after having a few, bet the owner of a Muncie steel mill fifty thousand dollars he could hit the bull’s-eye of a target with a hatchet thrown from fifty feet. Next morning, instead of eating crow and calling the thing off, the Colonel phoned the man and told him to bring his fifty thousand. The Colonel won it, too.

About noon the cloudbank dropped off, a relief to Arthur, since the land below was now clearly visible, large patches of farm fields dotted with the occasional house and barn. Below he could see the Illinois River and followed it until in the distance he got a glimpse of the vast Mississippi, shimmering in the bright autumn sun. After he’d flown across it, he descended to about three hundred feet to get his bearings. Surprisingly, a road sign told him he was on Route 6, which ran right into Kirksville.

After another hour he spotted the landing field on the south side of the town and was astonished to see a host of automobiles and a huge crowd of people. Arthur circled the strip twice, noted the wind sock, then brought the Luft-Verkehrs in for a smooth landing on a grassy field. When he taxied up to the flying shack, the mob surged around the
Grendel
.

“You the feller going to El Paso?” asked a man in a grease-monkey suit.

“That’s me,” Arthur said as he climbed down from the cockpit. A cheer rose from the crowd.

“Well, mister, we’re all proud of you,” said the grease monkey. “I’ll get you gassed up right now.” He went to a fuel truck and pulled it beside
Grendel
, put the nozzle into the fuel tank, and began pumping with a hand lever. Meantime, everyone wanted to shake Arthur’s hand. He received so many invitations to dinner and a warm bed he was not only stunned, but perplexed about how to handle the offers.

Finally it was agreed there would be a dinner in Arthur’s honor at the town Elks Club, and afterward he could decide whose bedroom he wanted to sleep in. He knew from the map that he had come 489 miles.