Authors: Walter J. Boyne
Between the treatment, the food, and the heat, Stephan knew
that he would deserve any babies he conceived. At the end, he was
aware only of an increased sense of potency, but that could easily be
attributable to abstinence. It had been easy to refuse to join the others, anxious to check their progress, on their clandestine trips
across the border to Nuevo Laredo's red-light district. Lurking in the
back of his mind was a hideous conjecture that some youthful indiscretion was responsible for his fertility problem.
*
Salinas, California/July 30, 1932
Clarice Roget mused at the tremendous change in Bandfield. Ordi
narily brimming with energy, he had come back from Peru in a
supercharged state as they worked desperately night and day to get the bomber proposal prepared. The shock he had felt over Hadley's
accepting money from Hafner Aircraft for the fifty-five-foot wing
disappeared as the engineering fever caught him. Never at rest, his
fingers drumming the table, feet rocking back and forth, twirling from one spot to another like some sort of human milkshake machine, he was exhausting just to watch.
Up at six and at the drafting table by seven, he would work all day
on the bomber, running reams of figures through their pathetic old adding machine, making his slide rule hum as he checked and double-checked. Then he would bolt down an enormous supper, whatever Clarice put on the table, it didn't matter as long as there
were two or three helpings and plenty of bread and butter. After the
cake—she always had at least one kind of cake, maybe two—he'd
race out to the barn to work on the racer, on cars, whatever Hadley
wanted. Around midnight he and Hadley would hunker down over the kitchen table, under the glare of the bare bulb hanging down
from the ceiling, to split half a pie and drink a pot of coffee, talking
over the day and planning the next.
It was as if he worked to rid himself of the Pineapple Derby demons and the sadness that had stolen his youth. Clarice was
always cataloguing the eligible girls that she knew, wondering who
would take him from his memories. He missed that Duncan girl
dreadfully, she knew, but it had been going on too long; it was time
for him to find another woman.
He stood, fidgeting, as Hadley carefully threaded an eight-foot pipe onto the end of the two-foot-long monkey wrench. Grunting
like a wart hog, Howard Hughes—why Hadley bothered to call him
Charles she never could figure out—took time to fit the carefully padded jaws around the battered Monocoupe's propeller hub nut. He laughed. "Always get a bigger hammer, Bandy," he said.
Roget pulled down on the levered wrench, and there was a satisfying pop as the nut broke loose.
"Those bastards are always devils—but at least they keep the prop
on." Hadley wiped his hands and pulled Bandfield into the corner.
"I've got my eye on one hell of a plant in Downey, Bandy. Did you know Charlie Rocheville?"
"No, but I sure loved his airplanes, especially that little midwing
two-seater. Called them Emscos, didn't they?"
"Yeah. They're having big tax troubles with the government, and I can pick up the plant for a song."
"Jeez, that would get us out of this garage and into a real factory."
"Yeah. We could build two or three prototypes at a time in that son of a bitch—a bomber, a fighter, maybe a trainer. And there are all kinds of tools for production." Roget bubbled on, telling him
how the plant was worth over a million, but they could pick it up for
$10,000 in back taxes and about $50,000 in cash. There was $30,000 left from the license deal, and he thought he could get a loan of $20,000 from the bank.
Bandfield knew what he had to do: pick up at least $10,000 or more in prizes in Cleveland.
That afternoon they flew over to Downey in their latest creation, the bright yellow Kitten light plane. They had worked on it off and
on for years, and it was their hole card, their backup in case the
bomber design was not accepted. After looking at the market pretty
carefully, they thought they could sell as many as twenty to thirty
Kittens a year, if they could get a good dealer network.
Downey's huge field, isolated way out in the country some twelve
miles from Long Beach, was deserted. A modern factory building,
assembly bay, machine shop, and administrative section were locked up like so many other plants in Depression-burdened America.
"Breaks your heart, don't it?"
Bandy nodded, pulling himself up on a dusty window ledge to peer inside the assembly bay. There were two long lonely production lines, empty of everything but fixtures and tools. At one end
was a forlorn Emsco trimotor, heavy with dust and the inevitable
pigeon droppings, tires going flat.
"Does the airplane go with the plant?"
"I think everything goes, just as you see it."
A hot lust for the property suffused Bandy. "Jesus Christ, let's buy
it, no matter what it takes. We could do anything with a setup like this. How did they fail? Rocheville is a first-class designer."
"I don't know—the Depression, of course, but I think it was mainly because they were using this as a tax dodge for other businesses. They weren't serious about airplanes."
"We'll be serious."
With one stop for fuel, they flew back to the Roget airstrip,
ignoring the gorgeous sere brown of the California landscape, each lost in his own thoughts. When they got down, Hadley said, "This is
a whole new ball game, Bandy. You can be the chief test pilot and run the engineering department. I figure we can pick up a lot of skilled out-of-work people from Douglas and Northrop, easy."
"Workers won't be our problem."
An argument had long been brewing. Hadley had been sensitive to Bandfield's depression, and repressed his own naturally combative nature. To compensate, as a means of expression, he had
been working furiously on a project of his own, one he intended as a
surprise for Bandfield. He sensed the trouble in the air and decided
to defuse the situation by showing Bandfield his proposal for a new
airplane. Attempting to butter him up, he took Bandy by the elbow
and steered him toward the secluded rear section of the hangar. The
"back room" was always kept under lock and key, and Bandy had
honored Hadley's request not to go in until Roget asked him too. He
knew it was supposed to be a treat.
Hadley's grin grew as he led him back through the assorted Roget promises of the past. He threaded his way between the Rascal racer,
still not complete but almost there, and the shattered remains of the
flying wing that had promised so much. It was a long-range airplane Hadley had lovingly built, mostly wing with twin rudders set out on
tail booms; he had bailed out of it when he encountered violent wing flutter on a test flight. The yellow ceiling lights cast dancing
shadows on the bitter endings of so many promising starts. Only the familiar, intoxicating smell of oil, dope, and gasoline was comfort
ing.
He followed Hadley into the darkened room.
"Okay," the older man said, and turned on the overhead lights.
In the center of the immaculate floor was a full-size drawing of a
jet-black racer, a bigger edition of the Rascal. A mock-up of the right wing, supported by a sawhorse, extended from the drawing. The cowling was huge—Hadley intended it to enclose a Wasp Senior radial engine. The retractable landing gear was designed to pull up into the fuselage, just as on the Navy's Grumman fighters. The mocked-up wing was short and thick. The tiny cockpit was faired into the rudder coaming with a bulbous sliding canopy, just big enough for his head.
"Jesus, it looks like a cross between a Wedell-Williams and a Gee
Bee, the best features of both."
"That's not all, Bandy. Watch."
Hadley ran power cables to a plug on the side of the cardboard fuselage.
"Look at this!" The older man threw a switch, and an electric motor moaned behind the fuselage drawing. The wing quivered, elongating, the black tip extending out for another six feet. At the
point of farthest extension, there was a one-foot strip painted gleam
ing white for emphasis.
"Holy Christ, what is this? A variable wingspan?"
"Yeah, it gives you twelve feet more wingspan, and you'll have
inboard flaps and outboard slots, too."
Roget extolled the plane's features. The landing gear and flaps were electrically driven, like the wing.
"This should give us maybe three-ten, three twenty-five miles an
hour. You land with the wings extended too, of course. Keeps landing speeds down in the seventy-mile-an-hour range."
A transcendent tinkerer's joy suffused Hadley's face. "I'm—
we're—calling this one the Roget Rambler, cause she's really going
to ramble. Don't worry about the strength, either, Bandy. I've got
this figured out so that it can't be overstressed, no matter what speed
you're going when you retract or extend the wings, and they'll always work together."
Bandfield didn't say anything. He walked around the mock-up airplane, checking the extension mechanism. Hadley looked like a grandfather giving out Christmas toys to the family.
"What do you think? We could fly it with the wings extended in
the Bendix, retracted in the Thompson. In the Bendix you could
even pull the wings in bit by bit as you burned off fuel, and pick up
your speed as you went."
Bandfield was silent. The airplane looked wonderful, and he was
going to have to be negative about it. Hadley simply had to start being more businesslike.
"It looks great, but I've got to talk to you. Let's see if Clarice will
give us some coffee."
Hadley was taken aback, puzzled and hurt. The Rambler was easily the best thing he'd ever done, and Bandy was reacting strangely.
In the kitchen, they sat around the oilcloth-covered table. On the
side was a tablet on which Hadley did his sketches and Clarice tried
to scratch out the numbers that would somehow stretch her budget. Bandy guessed that she hadn't seen a dime of the license fee; it wouldn't occur to Hadley to spend money on anything but airplanes. Even groceries came after parts at the Rogers'.
"What's the matter, Bandy, don't you like the airplane?"
The younger man spooned sugar into his coffee, turning the eddies of the condensed Pet Milk from rich cream to light brown. He stared at the trademark, wide-eyed concentric cows trailing off into some bovine infinity in the center of the can. He wished
there were somewhere he could go to get away from the problem at
hand.
"I'm not going to talk about the airplane, per se. But I don't know
any way to say this except straight out. Times are changing. I'm not talking about the Depression, or Roosevelt, or maybe repealing
Prohibition. I'm talking about aviation. And I've got to tell you something unpleasant. You're just not being serious enough about your airplanes."
Hadley snapped to a scorpion stance, back arched, ready to
pounce, all the old aggressiveness at the ready. His voice raised in
indignation.
"What do you mean? Just because you've got an engineering degree doesn't give you the right to talk like that. There's not another airplane in the United States that's more advanced."
"No, you're exactly right. And we haven't even flown the Rascal,
and you're already dreaming about something else. And we've got the bomber to do!"
He stopped to take control of his voice. "Hadley, these aren't model airplanes, these are hot, untried, full-sized ships, and we've
got to start spending the necessary time to develop them. You can't
make them and then throw them away like a toothbrush."
"That's what everybody else is doing, Bandy. You don't see the same airplanes every year at Cleveland, do you?"
"Yeah, you do, the winners mostly. Jimmy Wedell started out with a tiny little airplane with a Chevrolet engine, and he's developed it into the hottest thing around. It's not a killer like the Gee Bees."
Unconsciously, they had squared off, moving so that the table was no longer between them, assuming a crouch, arms positioned
for protection, hands beginning to curl into fists. Bandfield sensed it
and blushed; he would rather put his arm in a prop than strike Hadley.
"And it takes time to work the bugs out. Airplanes are different
now, more power, more stress. You can't just play with them anymore."
Hadley didn't say anything. Bandy was glad Clarice had left the room.
Bandfield's voice changed to a kindly, pleading tone. "Think about it. When you learned to fly, when you started building
airplanes, everything was the same. Wood spars, wood ribs, wood-
and-wire fuselages. No stress analysis. You'd just eyeball it, then maybe make a part a little bigger if you didn't think it was strong
enough. Then they started using steel tubing, with maybe alumi
num ribs if you were fancy. That's where you still are, and that's all
over. Metal airplanes with retractable landing gear are going to be
what everybody needs. And you can't build them the way you can
wood-and-rag ships, with a handful of men in a tiny shop."