The Rocketeer (8 page)

Far away, out of sight of the Hollywood Hills, the headlights of a truck—Peevy’s truck—were illuminating a metal stake that Cliff was driving into the ground near a large bean field. Despite his long and arduous day, he was throwing himself into his task with undisguised enthusiasm, swinging the mallet and sending it thudding onto the stake over and over, to make sure it was in good and solid.

The stake was attached to a chain, and the other end of the length of links had been nailed to the wooden chest of the statue of Lindbergh. The rocket pack was resting on Lindy’s back as securely as it had been on Cliff’s earlier that day. As Cliff hammered, Peevy unspooled a large roll of wire attached to the ignition switch.

Cliff prodded the stake with his foot and nodded in satisfaction to Peevy. Then they both scurried to a nearby ditch, ducked down behind it, and exchanged a significant look. Cliff gave Peevy a quick thumbs-up as Peevy connected the two ends of wires.

The rocket roared as the circuit was completed, and Peevy and Cliff reflexively ducked. Lindy, this time without benefit of plane or life, went immediately airborne. The chain snapped taut and there, twenty-five feet in the air, the statue was flying in great wide circles at the end of the chain, like a great dog leashed in its backyard. The roar was deafening, but Cliff and Peevy didn’t seem to mind. Instead, they stared up in amazement as Peevy shouted, “If I weren’t seeing it, I wouldn’t believe it . . .”

And then Cliff managed to take his eyes off Lindy and check the grounding. Immediately he shouted in alarm, “Peevy! The stake!”

And sure enough, the stake was loosening in the ground. The pull of the rocket was simply far stronger than they could have anticipated.

Cliff started to leap out of the ditch, but Peevy immediately yanked him back, pointing to the chain that was whirling around at high speed like the world’s longest and deadliest yo-yo string. “That chain will cut you in half!”

But to Cliff, nothing was more important than the hardware. “We’re going to lose it!”

And sure enough the stake uprooted. Lindy rocketed skyward, hurtling upward into the night sky faster and faster. The rocket’s flame dwindled and finally faded into the blackness.

That was it.

It was over.

Cliff couldn’t believe that, after all that—the preparation, the theorizing, the planning—it was gone as if it had never been there.

And then they got a souvenir. They were warned just in time by a strange metallic moaning, and then twenty-five feet of chain slammed into the dusty earth between them.

“Holy hell!” said Peevy in awe.

Cliff’s frustration bubbled over. “We lost it! We shoulda anchored it to your truck!”

“My truck would be halfway to Cincinnati by now, you chowderhead!” retorted Peevy, no happier than Cliff.

They started to argue and then they heard something else—a whistling, like a bomb dropping. They threw themselves to the ground as Lindy had his revenge for being sawed down from his perch. He dive-bombed them from behind, skimming right over them at what seemed to be somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred miles per hour. It missed them by inches and slammed into the ground, plowing a furrow in the bean field before coming to a stop.

They raced over to it and shut the rocket down. It gave a few last sputters of protest and then fell silent, as did the two men for a long moment.

“Peevy,” said Cliff slowly, thoughtfully, “you’d pay to see a man fly, wouldn’t you?”

Peevy had been dreading this moment. He knew it would be coming the second he saw the way Cliff had first looked at the thing. “I know what you’re thinkin’, Clifford,” he said dangerously. “Forget it.”

As if that closed the subject, he grabbed Lindy’s feet and tugged him out of the furrow. Cliff grabbed the other end to help lug him to the truck, but he didn’t stop yammering.

“But I’m talking about making some
real
money here—not just ten bucks a show, but enough to get us back on our feet and into the Nationals.”

“Cliff, are your eyes painted on? That thing’s like strapping nitro to your back. Besides, the feds are mixed up in this.”

“Yeah,” Cliff reminded him sourly, “and thanks to them we’re flying the clown act and scraping for nickels. They
owe
us.”

“Well, maybe they don’t see it that way.” Peevy shrugged, trying not to grunt under the strain of the statue’s weight. “Look, we’re just a couple of sky bums. I don’t want to get tangled up with the FBI.”

“I don’t want to keep it. Just borrow it for a while.”

“You do, eh? Well, if you borrow something and don’t tell anybody, they call it stealing.” He didn’t add that borrowing something like this could also be termed “suicide.”

Cliff was undeterred. “Just a week or two! Soon as we can afford a new plane, we’ll give it back. I swear.”

Peevy shook his head, unconvinced. “Did you see what this thing just did? You want to turn your head into a plow? The thing don’t work!”

“You’re always telling me what a genius you are. Fix it!” said Cliff, hurling down a challenge.

Somehow he always knew just what to say to get Peevy’s goat. The annoying thing was that Peevy had already started coming up with ideas to fix the thing. He couldn’t help it. The ideas just started coming and he felt the itch to try them, just to see if they would work. But that didn’t mean everything was jake about the idea of turning Cliff into a flying guinea pig.

But was it that very different, really, from sending him up in things like the GeeBee? Someone had to be first with any new aviation advancement, and if anyone could handle it—

He shook his head, amazed at the direction his thoughts were taking. “We’re gonna need a hell of a lawyer,” he said ruefully.

Cliff grinned to himself. He had gotten Peevy thinking of possibilities—and he hadn’t even needed to mention the other thing on his mind, namely, that he was trying to get together enough scratch to treat his girlfriend, Jenny, right. There were so many rich hotshots who could show her a great time, and she was always talking in significantly wistful tones about the places she wished she could go and do and see, places that needed guys with serious money to make it happen. Cliff wasn’t one of those guys, and he was becoming preoccupied with the notion that if he stayed a poor pilot without two nickels to rub together much longer, Jenny was going to go waltzing off into the sunset with one of her big-bucks Hollywood pals. Hell, strapping a rocket to his back was preferable to watching Jenny slip through his fingers any day of the week.

They tossed the statue into the truck, and Cliff studied poor Lindy’s head. It had been completely splintered and Cliff realized that his skull, rock-hard as it was often called, would probably not fare much better.

“
I
think we need a helmet,” he said.

T
he radio in the small bedroom was cheerfully playing a big band rendition of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and Jenny hummed along with it as she leaned forward into the mirror, applying her lipstick.

The black-and-white photograph that Cliff carried with him would do her justice only on the day the entire world went color blind. Up until that time, Jenny Blake remained a gorgeous creature who could be appreciated only in full living color. Her skin was soft and white, her just-decorated lips a startling and yet stunning red, and her long black hair lay meticulously about her shoulders. She wore a tight red skirt that ended provocatively just above the knee, and a low-cut striped wool shirt with a deep scooped back. She finished clipping the stocking to the garter and smoothed the red skirt, smiling at herself once more into the mirror approvingly.

Twenty-four years old and dressed to kill.

There was the sound of a car honking outside and she turned toward her friend and roommate, Irma. “Whose is it?” she asked.

Irma glanced out the window. “Yours. The flyboy. You know, I can’t figure out what the attraction is.”

“Oh,” she laughed, “he likes me only because there’s a model of plane called a Jenny.”

“No,” said Irma. “I mean I can’t understand what you see in him.”

Jenny smiled once more. “He makes me laugh.”

Cliff hopped out of the truck and crossed the street toward Jenny’s place. Technically speaking, it wasn’t just Jenny’s place. It was the place of a lot of young women, all of them actresses. The boardinghouse catered to them, and Cliff sometimes jokingly referred to it as the “Home for Wayward Girls,” which usually earned him an amused slap on the arm from Jenny.

Other young men were picking up their dates, all under the stone-faced supervision of the matron, Mrs. Pye. The other men barely spoke to her beyond the formal, “ ’Evening, ma’am,” but Cliff was just outgoing enough—or stupid enough—to try to do more. “Good evening, Mrs. Pye,” he said gregariously. “I’ve come to pick up Jenny.”

He started forward and, pretty much as he expected, Mrs. Pye placed an immovable palm on his chest.

“You know my rules,” she said stiffly. “No gentlemen after six
P.M.
”

He winked. “I’m not a gentleman.”

“You can say that again,” she said. “This time don’t forget the curfew. I lock up at eleven sharp.”

He remembered the last time, when they’d gotten in at 11:05 and the front door had been bolted. Cliff had wound up breaking a window to get Jenny in, which resulted in police cars showing up and a mad dash through backyards and . . .

“Okay, warden,” said Cliff, having no desire to repeat the experience.

Jenny swept out and chastely kissed Cliff on the cheek. She draped an arm around his neck and called out, “ ’Night, Mrs. Pye!”

“Have a good time, dear. If he tries anything, deck him.” As she retreated into the boardinghouse, Cliff had a sneaking suspicion that that philosophy explained what must have happened to Mr. Pye.

As soon as the door slammed, Jenny threw both arms around Cliff’s neck and kissed him long and hard on the mouth. The length and passion of the kiss drew good-natured hoots and catcalls from the other girls who were walking past or hanging out windows. Cliff broke off the embrace and, grinning, he and Jenny set off strolling down the street.

“Cliff!” she said in that marvelously bubbly way she had. “Guess what! I think I got the part!”

“That’s great!”

“I won’t know for sure till I get to the set tomorrow, but the director liked my reading best.”

“You mean you have lines this time?” said Cliff, surprised.

“Just one,” she admitted, and then brightened, “but it’s to Neville Sinclair.”

“Lemme hear it.”

She stopped, threw her head back, and exclaimed, “Oh! My prince! Would that you drink of my lips as deeply!”

Suddenly Cliff felt a slight buzz of annoyance. “And then he kisses you, right?” he said.

“Naw, he’s too busy killing someone.”

Her response had been an offhanded one, but then the tone of Cliff’s question sank in on her and she realized, barely suppressing a smile, that he was jealous. And since she was in far too good a mood to want a fight, she said briskly, “Now you tell me.”

He looked at her, confused. “What?”

“What do you think! The GeeBee, the maiden voyage! How’d it go?”

“Okay, I guess,” he said evasively.

She couldn’t quite hide her annoyance. “That’s it? ‘Okay, I guess’?” She had been sure that Cliff would be very enthusiastic about it, and it irked her that he didn’t deem it all that important. “How’d she fly?”

“She
flew
great,” said Cliff. “Landing had a few bumps. Got some bugs to work out.” He shrugged as if it were all meaningless and then said, “We gotta hurry if we’re gonna catch a movie. I hear a new Cagney picture opened.”

“So did a new Neville Sinclair picture.”

“Aw, Jenny, Cagney’s better,” protested Cliff. And he really was a big Cagney fan—had been ever since 1935, when Cagney appeared in both
Ceiling Zero
and
Devil Dogs of the Air,
two fairly sharp films about airmen, even if they were made by Hollywood types. Of course, Cliff didn’t bother to add that he didn’t feel like shelling out dough to go see some guy that Jenny might be talking about kissing tomorrow. He thought about Sinclair and all those pansy movies he’d made with his hoi polloi accent and snooty airs that made women swoon and men guffaw. “You won’t catch Cagney lounging around a penthouse in his underwear or walking poodles in the park or—”

“Or getting shot down behind enemy lines?”

He paused in surprise. “What?”

“The movie?” she prompted.
“Wings of Honor
? Neville Sinclair?”

He realized that this was leading toward the inevitable giving-in to Jenny, and he might as well do it gracefully. Besides, it might be worth a few laughs to see the fancy dan trying to pretend that he’s in the same class with Jimmy Cagney or Ralph Bellamy, or even Cary Grant, who had some of the same airs but at least seemed like he was taking himself a bit less seriously.

“This I gotta see,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.

The show had already started as Cliff and Jenny made their way down the darkened aisle. Cliff was loaded down with popcorn and sodas, muttering, “Excuse me, pardon me,” as people who were already seated reluctantly moved their legs to accommodate him and Jenny squeezing past.