Authors: Walter J. Boyne
They were entering the muddy back road to Roosevelt Field when
she pointed up to the sky. The underbelly of the low-lying clouds was crimson. "Something is on fire."
Bandfield floored the accelerator, and the Stutz leaped ahead. As
they turned into the field, he yelled, "Jesus, that's my hangar!"
He jumped from the car, the muddy ground sucking at his shoes.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lindbergh racing toward him, trying to cut him off from the hangar. He slowed abruptly as fuel tanks of the
Rocket
exploded in an incandescent black mushroom
that carried the roof with it, collapsing the four walls of the frame
hangar outward. Bandy saw the shattered
Rocket
airborne for the last
time, rising twenty feet straight up before flopping down, the wings
bent in a ragged V. The flames blossomed again and then died. There wasn't much to burn besides the airplane. Bandy stood transfixed with fury and frustration as people materialized on all sides.
The fire truck from Curtiss Field pulled up. The firemen unlimbered hoses, not to save anything, but to keep the flames from spreading to the next hangar.
Lindbergh pulled him aside. "My God, Bandy, this is awful. We'll get you another airplane."
Bandfield looked at him numbly, then stood raging by the embers
for an hour, Millie brimming with silent sympathy. Finally, he asked Lindbergh to drive her home, determined to spend the night in the operations shack so he could go through the ashes in the morning. Something was wrong. He knew the hangar had not ignited spontaneously; he'd cleaned it up well.
He was up at dawn to poke through the still-hot ruins to see if there was anything worth salvaging. There was nothing, only the scrap metal of the wonderful J5 engine he and Hadley had scraped and saved for. Cliff Langworthy, the volunteer fire captain from Curtiss Field, came over to see him as he poked through the ashes.
"Sorry about this, Mr. Bandfield. We got here as soon as we could. There's not much you can do with an airplane when it's burning."
"Could it have been the wiring for the hangar lights?"
"Could be, but I don't think so. That's one of the few things we
can check on and control. We can't control somebody leaving some
greasy rags around, or spilling a can of gasoline."
Bandfield exploded. "There was no goddam gasoline or dirty rags
in that hangar! I cleaned the goddam place up myself. And I topped
off the tanks and secured the caps myself. The fire must have started
in the airplane itself. If the fucking building had caught fire, someone would have seen it."
"No need to swear, Mr. Bandfield. I know you're upset, but hangars catch on fire all the time."
Bandfield slumped on the running board of the Stutz, head in
hands, trying to compose a telegram to his partner, an anvil of guilt
compressing his lungs into a tight dry ball. He'd been messing around with a girl when the airplane burned. He had been totally
irresponsible, driving a fancy car, picnicking, doing everything but
attending to business. The airplane, the flight, his career, all had gone up in smoke.
He walked over to the operations shack, one knee torn out of his
borrowed plus fours by a sharp shred of the cowling he'd been so
proud of, his hands and face filthy from the greasy soot. When he got to the door, he heard Hafner laughing inside, and a jolt went through him. The dirty German bastard had set his airplane on fire! He knew it, just as he knew he couldn't prove it.
The little group of pilots turned when he came in, each trying to convey sympathy. Lindbergh again murmured something about finding another airplane, and Byrd suggested he might have a spot
for Bandy on his crew. Rhoades simply shook his head and punched
him lightly on his arm.
But Hafner said, "To be honest with you, Mr. Bandfield, I'm very
sorry about your accident. You would have been a great competitor,
m sure.
The alarm bells, already quivering, went to full blast. Bandfield's dad had always told him to distrust anyone who started a conversa
tion with "To be honest." An unreasoning fury drove the words from his throat.
"That's hard to believe, Hafner, since you probably set the son of a bitch on fire in the first place."
There was a dead silence, and the other pilots seemed to back
away. Hafner looked at him, eyes wide, then turned to Byrd. "He's
upset."
Lindbergh took Bandfield by the arm, whispering, "You're way out of line, Bandy. Bruno wouldn't do anything like that."
Bandy shook his arm free. "I'm going to ask for a police investiga
tion, Hafner. You know goddam well that airplane didn't just catch on fire by itself."
"That's enough from you, Mr. Bandfield. You can do what you
like, but take your dirty mouth and your dirty hands and face out of
here before I forget myself."
Turning to look at Byrd again, he didn't see Bandfield's right hand coming up from the floor. It caught him on the side of the jaw, sending him sprawling back to bounce against the wall and slide to the floor. The impact knocked a framed picture of Clara
Bow from the wall, its metal corner gouging a strip of flesh from Hafner's forehead. He lay glassy-eyed, as much from surprise as the
blow, blood spouting like a fountain down his face and chest.
Rhoades dropped to attend to him while Byrd and Lindbergh hustled Bandfield out.
"You'd better get out of here, Bandy. When he gets up, he'll break you in half. What the hell got into you?"
Bandfield broke and ran for the Stutz, still convinced that Hafner
had sabotaged his airplane, but embarrassed at his loss of control and miserable that he'd made such an ass of himself in front of the others.
*
Pau, France/May 18, 1927
Stephan Dompnier swallowed hard as his stomach pressed downward against his throat. Too much cognac, he tried to tell himself;
he knew it was the prolonged inverted glide. It annoyed him to be
made ill by a girl pilot, even one he loved.
He focused his attention on her intense beauty, biting down on her breasts in his imagination as he'd inadvertently found himself doing early that morning. She was concentrating, checking the bit of string that stretched back from the engine, making sure they weren't slipping as they S-turned upside down. The vision of her
sweet body came to him strongly; it pleased him to know that at this
moment it carried his seed, and indeed she might be pregnant by
him. He had a quick visual image of a tiny embryo in goggles and
scarf, staring upward at the sky.
"Landing?" he pleaded.
She nodded, pointing straight over her head, down into the
ancient city of Pau, crisscrossed by the rail lines running west to Toulouse and east to Biarritz. Stephan had made his first flight here
in 1917, in a Bleriot. Then the greatest hazard had been a midair
collision, for the skies were filled with trainers, the ground a daily target for crashing airplanes. Now Pau was once again just a minor
resort commune, its casino lofted above the gorge-bound Garonne River, the hotels perched upon the hills in red-tiled disarray.
It seemed impossible that this cool, precise pilot could be the
same woman who had driven him crazy night and day for the last six
weeks. In bed, she was totally abandoned, substituting imagination
and enthusiasm for the experience he deeply hoped she lacked.
They glided on upside down, and he laughed to think that was how they had started the day, coupling fiercely upside down, hang
ing off the end of the bed, her little body pumping ferociously at his,
her eyes wild with excitement. They had awakened at four, and
came together quickly. She would not let him rest; when his energy
flagged, she summoned his excitement with her mouth in an eager frenzy. Heat roared over him as he remembered how they had
giggled as she Wrestled with him, somehow working her way under
him, trying to reverse their positions without him withdrawing, finally failing in a roar of laughter. She had given up, and walked
over to get her robe. He saw that her firm bottom was ripped, not by
his nails, but by hers, long red streaks dividing her sweet rump into
broad bands of white, creating a luscious flag of self-inflicted pas
sionate pain.
It was a puzzle. She had said she was a virgin when he first took
her, and she had seemed to be. He couldn't believe that she could
have been so extraordinarily deceitful as to fake it, to carry pigeon's
blood in a wax capsule as errant Roman women were supposed to
have done on their wedding nights. It wouldn't have made sense. He had told her he didn't care, and was actually concerned that he
was despoiling a virgin. And she swore that what she did was all new
to her, all natural. He wanted to believe it, did believe it, gloried in
believing it.
Now that he was so hopelessly in love, so utterly beside himself, it
wouldn't matter if he found out that she had come from some whorehouse in Marseilles. Nothing she or anyone might do would change his feelings, charged with so much besides sex, for her.
Patty snapped the little Farman Sport upright with a flourish, glanced south to the Pyrenees for orientation, then cut the fuel and switched off the magneto.
"Dead-stick landing," she yelled.
He nodded; she was showing off, and why not? She was good. His
thoughts ran back to when Patty had first asked him to teach her to
fly. He'd never had a woman student before, and was inclined to
refuse. But he had served with her father and could not deny her.
He leaned over. "You're too close in and too high."
Patty shook her head. "Ah, we'll see." If she landed long, ran off the end of the field, turned over, so what? The war put things in perspective. There was little genuine risk.
Her glance caught him studying her. She sent a smile that burned
down to his belly, and then returned to her absorption in the approach.
He told himself that she looked like her father, not really sure this
was the case. He'd known Donald Morgan for only four weeks
before his death. But a month was more than a lifetime at the front,
and aces were heroes to the new pilots. Morgan was credited with
five official kills, and his comrades said there were a dozen more. It
was all the more amazing because he was an old man for combat
flying, thirty. Dompnier was then twenty-two, the same age as Patty
now.
He checked the smoke from the factories. The wind had switched and was stronger. She wasn't too close in at all; what must she think
of his judgment! The huge field, still cluttered with dozens of
hangars and hundreds of smaller buildings, was devoid of traffic. A
Nieuport 29 fighter was being rolled into the hangar of the unit he commanded. For the thousandth time, he asked himself why he stayed on, an aging captain going nowhere, and for the thousandth time he answered himself—for the flying. He could find other, better-paying jobs, but he couldn't live without flying.
God, he loved her; teaching her had been torture. When he let
her solo, he had sweated as never before, almost collapsing in relief
when she landed. That night, filled with champagne and passion,
they had made love the first time. Now she had fifty hours of flying
time, her license, and his heart. She knew she was good, and it
worried him; overconfidence came easily to young pilots, especially
the talented ones, and it was the greatest hazard.
They were too close to the hangar line.
"A
droit,"
he commanded, pointing to the north.
Patty shook her head and laughed, concentrating. She trod on the rudder pedals and fishtailed the tiny biplane, slowing its powerless
glide, stirring his stomach.
"I give up." Dompnier put his hands at his sides and waited for the broad green flying field to reach up and meet them.
The trainer touched down simultaneously on its two wheels and tail skid, and Patty jammed in full left rudder. Two-thirds through the turn, she countered with full right, and the tiny airplane rolled forward to stop precisely on the spot from which they had started.
In the always-deadening silence after a flight, he yelled, "Ah, you are incorrigible and I love you." He would have kissed her if the
mechanics, a covey of raucous enlisted men still glowing from the
noon wine, Gauloise cigarettes drooping from the corners of their
lips, had not been slouching forward to trundle the airplane into the
hangar. In war there was never enough manpower for anything; in peace there was always too much.