Glory Boys (12 page)

Going home that evening, Willard happened to ride in the same elevator as McVeigh. The two men exchanged a couple of words, then fell silent. The elevator moved slowly, people got in, got out. The compartment emptied. All the time, Willard felt McVeigh’s heavy gaze pressing on him. When Willard turned, the big man, with his cropped red hair and football player’s neck, was looking squarely at him, unblinking.

‘Yes?’ said Willard.

McVeigh shook his head.

‘You’ve been staring at me all the way down,’ Willard persisted.

McVeigh paused a second, then stepped half a pace closer. His head was too close. Though Willard weighed in at an athletic one hundred and eighty pounds, McVeigh must have had another forty pounds on him at least. There was something directly threatening in his attitude. Willard’s anger flared. Whatever McVeigh’s problem was, Willard had no intention of backing down.

‘Careful,’ said McVeigh. ‘Asking questions, like you were today.’

‘What d’you mean?’

McVeigh shrugged.

‘What d’you mean? Why the hell shouldn’t I ask questions?’

McVeigh came a little closer still. He had small blue eyes, lost beneath a broad expanse of forehead. ‘Just be careful what you ask and who you ask. You wouldn’t want to…’

The elevator hit the ground floor. Willard clanked open the inner door, then the outer one. The two men held their pose of near-aggression a second longer.

‘I’ll ask who I want, what I want, and I don’t suppose I need to ask your permission, Leo.’

‘That’s up to you.’ McVeigh looked like he was trying to take some of the heat out of the situation, but a muscle continued to clamp and unclamp in his jaw. ‘You do what you like. Just remember … anyhow, goodnight.’

McVeigh turned and walked away. For a big man, he was light on his feet and fast. Willard found himself thinking
that man could be dangerous
. For the second time that day, he found his fist curled into a ball, wanting to thump something.

23

‘I’m Hamilton, Pen Hamilton. Short for Penelope only no one ever calls me that.’

Abe shook her hand. ‘Abe Rockwell. Welcome to Miami.’

‘Abe Rockwell? Captain Rockwell? … Oh, gosh, what a way to meet you! Gee!…’ The woman flier was briefly flustered by finding herself in front of one of the two or three most famous aviators in the United States, but Abe was used to this reaction and brushed it away. ‘I can land the normal way too, you know,’ she added.

‘I bet you can.’

‘I was lucky the sand was soft.’

‘You were lucky you knew how to fly.’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t sure I needed to land. The engine was missing beats, but I still had power. Maybe I could have gone on.’

‘It wasn’t just the distributor blocks, maybe?’

Pen pulled an apologetic face: the first really girlish thing she’d done. The face said, ‘I couldn’t tell a distributor block from a humpback whale.’

‘The distributor blocks on the magnetos,’ Abe pursued. ‘They get coated with carbon when the engine’s running. But they were cleaned before you took off, right?’

‘I’m sorry, Captain. I’m sure I ought to know, but I don’t. They told me she was OK to go.’

Abe felt a jolt of irritation. During the war, he had no time for pilots who couldn’t strip, clean and reassemble an engine. The reason why Abe’s squadron had the best serviced airplanes in the American Army was that Abe made his pilots responsible for the airworthiness of their equipment. It was an attitude he regarded as sacred. And by those standards, Pen Hamilton’s ignorance was shocking, an insult to aviation.

And yet… Pen Hamilton was a woman. She had handled her machine with a rare combination of courage, force and delicacy. She had made a horrendous landing look almost easy – and was now handling herself not with bravado but with modesty. Abe let his irritation pass.

‘The problem sounded to me like your magnetos. If so, you could have gone on to wherever you were going. I’ll take a look, if you want. And please, Miss Hamilton, there’s no need to –’

‘Oh no, call me Pen, please.’

‘Then I’m Abe. No Captains around here, if you don’t mind.’

They grinned at each other, suddenly comfortable.

‘You’ll want to come in and get cleaned up. And something to eat or drink? I was about to have something myself.’

They went in.

Abe could see Pen noticing Abe’s camp bed in the corner of the hangar, his makeshift kitchen, and his barren wardrobe, the logo on Poll’s fuselage: a mailbag in the very approximate shape of a shield with the words ‘US Mail’ stencilled across it. She noticed something else too. Above Abe’s crowded workbench ran a shelf at head height. The shelf was crowded with metal castings, polished, clean and free of dust. Pen looked at the collection with curiosity. The castings were models of aircraft, but not necessarily complete ones. Only four of the castings had nose cone, fuselage, tail, and a full set of wings, upper and lower on both sides. The rest were simply airplane pieces. A fuselage without wings. A wing without a body. A nose cone. A lot of nose cones. She picked up a few of the castings, ran her hands over them and put them down.

‘You make these?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘They’re beautiful.’

‘Yes.’

‘And unusual. Beautiful and unusual.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Since Abe didn’t exactly seem full of chatter on the subject, Pen turned to a different topic. She indicated the mailbag stencilled on Poll’s side.

‘You’re flying the mails?’

Abe nodded

‘I didn’t know there was a route… To Cuba, I guess?’

Abe nodded.

‘Havana?’

Abe nodded.

‘Every day? Over water?’ She took in the information like a professional pilot, calculating the hazards, the safety margin, the rewards. ‘You must hit quite some weather at times.’

Abe gestured at Poll. ‘She’s a strong girl. We get through.’

‘Still…’

Pen washed her face and hands. Abe offered to walk out of the hangar so she could take a proper wash, but, since the washing facilities consisted of a cold tap and a tin water-scoop, Pen managed to resist. By the time she was done, Abe had laid out the only meal he could provide: bread, cold meat, some tomatoes, water. She came over to his little table. First she said she didn’t want anything, then, when Abe pressed her, she ate hungrily.

A moment’s awkward silence was covered by eating.

Abe wasn’t shy of girls. True, he didn’t see much of them. True, he’d never had a relationship that had lasted longer than a couple of months. But he wasn’t shy, nor even inexperienced. He’d dated girls, petted girls, slept with girls. The reason why his relationships had quickly fallen apart was that he’d never really wanted them. Abe knew his priorities and they had never included women. So, aged thirty-six, he wasn’t shy of girls, but he didn’t spend much time with them either.

Pen bit into a tomato. It was overripe. The skin split and spurted juice across the table and down her chin.

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Abe gestured at his linenless table, his bare accommodation. ‘Sorry I haven’t got anywhere better.’

‘You …?’ Pen began to ask the obvious question, then dropped it, embarrassed.

‘Yeah, I’m living here for now. While I get the business started up. In time, I’d like to build a little. Extend the place at the back.’

Abe gestured at the cement block wall at the rear of the hangar. He knew enough about construction to be able to fix something up. It wasn’t something he’d thought about before, but now that Pen had put him in mind of the idea, he liked it.

‘You just carry mail?’

‘Passengers too. If I can find any. Also cargo.’

‘You get many passengers?’

‘No.’

‘Cargo?’

‘I don’t advertise much. I guess I ought to do a little more.’

He wasn’t being candid. He had only ever placed one advertisement for business. Next door to the hangar, Abe had tacked on a tiny wooden lean-to which he had designated his office. The office held one chair, one table and – pinned to the door in sun and rain – a notice saying ‘Passengers and cargo carried. All enquiries welcome’. Nobody had ever come to the office. Nobody had ever seen the advertisement.

‘What d’you call yourself?’

‘Huh?’

‘The business. It’s got a name, right?’

For a half-second, Abe struggled to remember what he’d written on the notice. Then he got it. ‘Florida International Air Travel. Fancy, huh?’

‘You’ve got an office in town or …?’ Pen trailed off. She was getting the picture. ‘People need to apply here, right? I’ve got friends down here. They’re always running up the coast, or down to Key West and the islands. I’ll have a word. Maybe I can send some clients your way.’

Her glance slid out of the empty hangar to the dusty grass. Aside from her own beautiful machine, there was only Poll: clumsy, old-fashioned, graceless. Abe could see Pen wondering how Abe thought he could recruit passengers without advertising and with only Poll to fly them.

Something in Abe hardened. He changed subject.

‘That your plane?’

Pen’s eyes were still focused out of the hangar door. At Abe’s words she swept her gaze across to her own machine, her eyes softened, then she brought her gaze in, her pupils dilating as she took in Abe’s face. She took a moment to answer and Abe ended up looking longer into her eyes than he’d expected. It was a curious sensation. The eyes were like his eyes: too blue, too clear, the face around too tanned to hold them. Only it wasn’t that. There was something in the way Pen looked at him. It wasn’t the way a woman looked at a man. Her look was direct, frank, open, unembarrassed. There was nothing flirtatious, but nothing modest either. She wasn’t sexless, but she didn’t have to bring her sex into the look that passed between them.

She dropped her eyes.

‘Yes. Lovely, isn’t she?’

Abe nodded. He’d done some test flying for Curtiss once, only got out once things had proceeded a little too far with a girl that lived nearby. But he said nothing about that, just, ‘Beautiful. Nobody makes ’em better.’

‘I’m lucky.’

Abe looked at the plane again. It was a hellishly serious machine, fiercely fast, a machine which demanded speed, strength and decision from its pilot.

‘You fly her for fun, or…?’

‘For fun, yes, I guess. I race her.’

‘Pylon racing? Competitively?’

‘I race her anywhere I can. The Arberry Cup once. The Burlington Medal. The Conway.’

There was a tiny flicker around her eyes when she named the last race. The flicker jogged a memory for Abe. He didn’t follow aviation gossip much, but he’d raced a little right after the war and had kept an interest in the major events. Her name, Hamilton, rang a bell…

‘The Conway? Hold on, you didn’t just fly in that.’

The flicker transferred from eyes to mouth, where it broke out into a smile. ‘Last year. Bertie Acosta had to drop out with engine trouble. I was able to take advantage.’

Abe smiled and shook his head. ‘No, Pen, a win’s a win. Nothing to do with another guy’s engine. Any case, the Conway’s the only one to win, right?’

She returned his smile. The Conway Cup had been inaugurated in September 1920. The first name engraved on the silverware was ‘Captain A. Rockwell.’

They laughed together. Their eyes touched and didn’t move away. The moment didn’t last long, but it lasted long enough for them both to feel something. Something shared, something mutual.

Abe held Pen’s gaze a moment longer, then felt suddenly uncomfortable. He stood up abruptly and went to make coffee, suddenly angry at his spartan accommodation. Almost deliberately, he made the coffee too strong, too gritty. He made it so nobody could possibly like it, probably not even drink it. Pen attempted more conversation, but Abe had closed up. Some women would have needed to talk into the vacuum, but not Pen. Quietness didn’t bother her, nor the coffee. She seemed relaxed. But time was running by. She would need to find accommodation in town. Abe offered the name of a couple of hotels that weren’t too dear. Pen took the information like she didn’t need it, but was too polite to say so.

‘I’ll send a truck,’ she said.

‘Huh?’

‘A truck. For the plane.’

Abe was puzzled. ‘Why?’

‘You said there was a problem with distributing something. The blocks? I thought…’

Abe was annoyed again, but tried not to show it. ‘Pen, the blocks need cleaning, nothing else. It’ll take twenty minutes at the outside.’

‘Oh.’ There was a pause. ‘I guess I ought to know that.’

‘I can show you how if you want.’

She hesitated. ‘I…’

‘Yes?’

‘Captain, I can fly ’em, I can’t fix ’em. I’m not about to try.’

Abe’s annoyance fluctuated uncertainly. On the one hand, her attitude was something he hated. On the other hand, there was something amazingly uncomplicated about her. And she could fly. She could certainly fly.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve been wanting the City to move that damn telegraph wire for some time. I’ll call ’em. Tell ’em they almost got themselves a fatal accident. If they don’t move the wire, then I will. I’ll fly your plane back for you. Just let me know where to bring her.’

‘Oh, no, I couldn’t ask you to do that. If you tell me when the wire’s gone, I can come by and –’

‘Pen, I hope you’re not going to stop me flying her.’

‘You want to?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

She grinned. When she wasn’t smiling, her face was withdrawn, quiet, thoughtful. It was the sort of face you could easily overlook, glance at and not properly notice. But when she smiled, she changed. Everything in her face became open and welcoming. When she smiled, her face called out to you like a bonfire of straw on an autumn day. She put a hand inside a shirt pocket and pulled out a simple white calling card. It bore her name and an address in South Carolina.

‘Thanks,’ she said, and walked away.

24

Willard waved goodbye and watched his guests go volubly down the hall. They’d enjoyed martinis with Willard, now were going on to the Algonquin for dinner and would be off to a jazz club in Greenwich Village before eventually rolling into bed.