Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (2 page)

“Yeah, she’s okay,” I said. I balanced the stool on two legs and rested my back on the sandbag wall. The blue runway lights of Stapleton International Airport backlit the filled dance floor. A 737, its jets cranked for take-off, rushed by and rattled the heavy, insulated glass. Even through the music, the engines pushed a subsonic vibration into the bar. Glasses and change buzzed for a second on dark oak table tops.

The Lafayette Escadrille opened a year ago when a group of Denver stock-brokers pooled their money and invested in a “high concept” singles joint; they turned a barn on the edge of the north-south runway into a World War I French chalet. In front of the building, pointing skyward at a ridiculously phallic angle, are a pair of anti-aircraft guns; on the wall inside the door hang black and white photos: a fuzzy shot of Kaiser Wilhelm II visiting an airdrome; a crowd of officers standing around the wreckage of Max Immelmann’s plane; George Guynemer, France’s leading ace, facing the camera with his hands behind his back; Baron Manfred von Richthofen standing for inspection with the pilots of Jagdgeschwader No. 2. I’ve stood in the foyer and studied these pictures when the noise and smoke and disgust have driven me out of the bar. I’ve looked at their gray and grainy faces for some clue as to what they felt when they climbed in their planes. How could they go up every day? No parachutes. No early warning radar. No way to talk to each other.

Inside, the stockbrokers had mounted on the walls propellers, machine guns, flight jackets, leather boots, more pictures and other paraphenalia. The real coup though, held by cables above the dance floor, the most distinctive decoration, is a completely restored Nieuport 17. Its fifteen coats of hand-buffed varnish reflect the runway lights so the plane looks like it’s floating in blue air. When I drink too much I want to climb up to her, to start her engine and fly through the windows. Two months ago—I don’t remember this, but they say it’s true—they pulled me off the access ladder leading to the catwalk above the plane. The only way to get to the ladder is to jump on the bar. I don’t believe them when they say I did that. I stare at the plane for long periods some time.

Brian’s right, it’s a great bar. I go every week, sometimes with him, sometimes by myself. Lots of stewardesses looking for fun on a layover and nurses from Fitzsimmons. Good bands.

A short brunette wearing a fur coat brushed the edge of our table as she walked by.

“Scuse me!” Brian yelled. I’ve seen this approach before. He says the key to scoring is getting their attention, that it doesn’t matter what you say as long as they look at you. He said to me once, “Get them into a rhythm, a call and response thing, and you’re half way home.” She turned her head, looked at him and slowed down. Brian’s One-Stop-Sun-Shop tan and hair is so blond, its white gets most of them.

“Nice jacket. Does that have buttons or a zipper?” He smiled. His teeth are a little crooked and one of the top front ones is turning black from a bad root canal, but he talks so fast and smiles so often that women never seem to mind.

She pulled the edges of the coat closed and hurried towards the bar as if she’d just seen someone she knew.

“Frigid or a lesbo. If they won’t talk, they’re one or the other.” He rested his hand on his beer. The band kicked into a heavily drummed tune that sounded good to dance to.

He pushed his elbows off the table and scanned the room. The late flights were all in and unaccompanied women sipping from wine coolers or spritzers sat together in small groups around the tables. So few men were in the place that women were dancing with each other. They looked like they were having a good time. The Lafayette is an undiscovered resource in Denver. Most guys head for After the Gold Rush or Confetti’s where the ratio is three to one the wrong way.

“I’m going to the aviator,” he said. “Prime time.”

Lafayette’s bathrooms are labled “aviator” and “aviatrix.” When Brian’s on the hunt he will leave once an hour, lock himself in a stall, take a wad of tobacco laced with coke, and come out ready to fly. “Just a pinch between my cheek and gum is the real thing,” he’d say. I’d tried it once, but I got sick. No buzz.

Another bar-ace I know named Quinn, when I asked him what he did to make connections at singles joints, told me, “I plant seeds. I strike up a conversation; maybe dance, buy them a drink. I always make sure they know my name and I know theirs. Two or three weeks later I see them again. We’re friends. They know who I am; I remember them. But I never go home with anyone unless it’s her idea. I’ve learned that it doesn’t do me any good to suggest it. I plant seeds and I wait for the harvest.”

I’m no bar-ace with silhouettes of kills recorded on the headboard. I’m an observer. I want to touch, but not like Brian and Quinn. I mean I like sex just like the next guy, but it doesn’t seem like really being with someone. When I’m through with sex and we’re lying there I secretly grip the pillow, make a fist and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, because it never goes far enough.

A portrait of Raoul Lufbery, the leading ace of the Lafayette Escadrille hangs in the foyer with the other World War I pictures. He’s facing the camera, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger. The caption underneath is a quote, “There are only two kinds of combat pilots: those who shoot and those who get shot.” I guess there is something to that.

I’ve been shot down twice. The first time was only a few miles from the Luxeuil-les-Bains airdrome. An all white Halberstadt appeared out of the sun and fired one burst that destroyed my engine and blew oil into my face, blinding me. The wind whined in the wires as I side-slipped hard to the left and started a flat spin to convince him I was dead. German pilots will sometimes continue firing into a crippled plane so that they can report a clean kill. A spinning plane is impossible to get a good shot at. I tore my goggles off when I was convinced that he was not following and landed in a corn field where a French farmer and his wife fed me wine, cheese and coarse bread until the ambulance from Luxeuil came and picked me up.

I bank my plane east now and head deeper into Boche air. Nearly an hour has passed and I will have to turn back soon. The sun glares directly in front of me through the prop’s thin shadow. Subtle currents bump my craft. My wing tips seem to move of their own accord as I balance in the air. I make tiny adjustments with the rudder pedals and the stick. A Nieuport is nothing like the broad-winged Jennies they trained us on. This is an unforgiving machine. A mistake, a moment’s inattention, and the plane is out of control.

I lean the mixture and retard the spark to extend my flying time. The engine begins to miss and I nudge the levers until it runs smoothly again.

The second time was over Cachy Wood near the Somme front. We were returning to Bar-le-Duc airdrome with a squadron of the new British Handley-Page bombers from a mission to destroy a supply dump deep in German territory when I became separated from the others in a cloud. Clouds are always dangerous when planes fly in formations because the visibility drops to zero, so commonly pilots increase the distance between themselves as they enter mist. When the other planes vanished, and I was alone, the solitude, the soft edge of my wingtips and the drops of water streaming off the wires comforted me.

Finally I popped out of the gray darkness and I searched the sky for my squadron. They were gone, but thirty yards to my right and at my altitude flew a blue and silver Fokker D-2 with a red cowling. The black crosses on the fuselage confirmed that I was facing the enemy. We stared at each other across the distance. His goggles reflected pure glisters of sun as we flew side by side like migrating birds. After we had flown together for a moment, he did an odd thing that has burdened me since, a thing I have told no one, not even the other pilots when we drink and laugh and sing each night to forget the days sorties: he waved.

I wasn’t stunned then, only later as I thought about the image of him facing me, hand extended, palm outward, waving. What I did was I dove right, then pulled the stick up hard hoping to get a shot at his underbelly before he moved, but when I got into position, he was gone. Bullets splintered my left wing V-spar. I snapped a hard barrel roll into a vertical loop, but I didn’t shake him, and another shower of lead found my plane, turning the aileron canvas into fragments of flapping cloth.

Turn after turn he hung to my tail, and though I tried every move I knew, he continued to successfully place shots into my ship. Never have I seen flying of this caliber. We fell 10,000 feet during the maneuvering, and then there was no place to dive to. I hugged the ground hoping that the French troops would shoot at him and not at me. His finishing blast should have caught me the instant I quit dodging, but I flew for thirty seconds and no more tracers streaked by my head; I looked behind. He had pulled his plane to the side and out of position to fire, but he was less than twenty yards away. He pointed to his deadly Spandau guns, shrugged his shoulders and turned his ship to the east. He must have run out of ammunition or suffered a jam in the mechanism. I crashed in Cachy Wood and walked away from the wreckage uninjured.

I never had a chance to fire my guns. I am a clumsy flyer, a technician. My commander says, “You must be a flyer in the heart.” I have never shot down an enemy plane.

I am now deep behind the lines and my neck hurts from craning it left and right looking for the blue and silver Fokker D-2. Captain Thenault would not approve this mission, this search for a single ship, and I could not explain it to him had I asked.

I rub frost off my chronometer. I must turn back soon. I have lost altitude to find warmer air. Now, at 8,000 feet, I see the country below has not been touched by the war. The fields are not pockmarked with craters. There are no black trench lines. A thread of smoke comes from a farmhouse chimney.

Why did he wave to me?

Brian came back from the bathroom wired and began a search and destroy circuit of the bar. He approached two women sitting at a table, borrowed a cigarette, talked to them for a few minutes, went to the next table, asked for a light and talked some more. He danced with one of them, moved to another table and started the cycle over again by borrowing a second cigarette. He calls them “pick-up sticks.” It took him forty minutes to hit on all the tables. I finished a pitcher by myself.

A woman sat alone two tables over, her elbows on the table, holding an empty wine glass by its rim. I thought about sitting next to her and talking. She saw me looking; I turned away.

Brian sat down heavily, his chest sweaty, dark stains down the sides of his shirt.

“You’ve got to dance, Eddie. There’s witch wool all over the place, but it’s not going to flop down in front of you.”

“I don’t see anybody I like.”

“So you’re going to drink and feel sorry for yourself. I don’t want to pull you off the ladder again.”

“If I see somebody, I’ll ask. I don’t know what I want just yet.”

His fingers drummed the table. “What do you want?”

He had me there. What did I want? I’d been thinking about it all night. I’d been thinking about it while I studied that Nieuport 17 suspended over the dancers. I’d been thinking about it while men and women moved around the room in separate little flight paths, never really touching each other. I’d been thinking about it while my hands cupped around the beer mug, while my butt flattened against the wooden stool, and while my feet went to sleep in my fashionable cowboy boots that were too tight.

“How close have you ever been to somebody?” I asked.

“Skin close.”

“Is that all?”

“You mean, have I been in love? Sure. I’ve been in love lots of times. I’m in love every night. Do you mean close like in let’s get married close? Yeah, I even did that once. I know all about close. How close do you want?” He dabbed a beer-soaked napkin on his chest.

“Closer than all that. I want to be in a woman.” There, I had said it.

He laughed. “That’s the best way.”

“No! That’s not what I mean. It’s not sexual. Like, when I kiss a woman, I just kiss her outside. I’m not kissing
her
.” I paused. I didn’t know if I could tell him this. How would he take it? “I want our lips to touch and . . .”

“What?”

Maybe if I rushed it out it wouldn’t sound so crazy. “I want our lips to meld together. I want to push our faces into each other, have our skin melt and flow and mix so that we’re one head, and I want to feel each molecule swapping electrons inside so there’s no telling who is who.

“I want to fill her up, to be smoke and seep inside her skin so that my smoke legs step into her legs, and my smoke belly presses against the inside of her belly, and my smoke arms slide all the way down the inside of her arms until my fingers fill her fingers like a glove.” Brian moved his stool back a few inches from the table.

“And at the same time I want her to be filling me up. I want her to pry off the top of my head and pour herself inside of me, blood and guts and living liquid bone so I can feel her sloshing around behind my eyes, pushing herself into my tongue, running down the inside of my throat. I want to feel her pooling in my feet, creeping up the insides of my legs, spilling over into my genitals like some smooth, heavy, golden lotion.

“But we can’t ever do that. Every time I reach out to touch her, she flies away or she attacks. And it’s not just her, it’s anybody. It’s you and me. All people. We got this war mentality about each other. I see it in terms of her, but it applies all the way around. I’m flying solo, man, and no one can get in my plane. I can’t get in theirs. I touch only the surface.” Brian sat silent. “You asked,” I said.

Finally, he said, “What’s with all the flying shit?”

I must turn back now. I bank my French machine to the west. Already I have cut my reserve too close and will have to chance the archie as I cross the lines. The angry black and yellow puffs of explosive will seek out my fragile wood and canvas craft.

To amuse myself and to take my mind off missing the blue and silver Boche, I sing a song that I heard in the billet last night: