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Afterwards, people like to sit and figure out when it all started.
Mostly people talk about the crash landing, the hot May day in 1926 when an airplane fell clean out of the sky. But there are others who look a little further back. They talk about when the troubles in town first started. They talk about the Volstead Act, the law which prohibited the sale of alcohol the length and breadth of America. They talk about politics and the good old days and the general decline in moral values.
But when you think about it properly, you can see that there is no beginning. Not really. If it hadn’t been for the Great War, there wouldn’t have been Prohibition. If it hadn’t been for the Wright brothers, and Santos-Dumont in France, and all the other guys who spent their lives coaxing chunks of wood and metal to jump into the air and fly, then there wouldn’t have been airplanes, and everything in this story is to do with airplanes.
But if you want to talk about beginnings, then you have to go back to the start. Right to the start. And that wasn’t Santos-Dumont or the Wright brothers, or even Langley and his doomed experiments over the gloomy Mississippi.The beginning was an English guy, name of Sir George Cayley.
Cayley was born in 1773, when George Washington was still a British subject and the good folks of Boston were filling their harbour with forty-five tons of best Bohea tea. Cayley was another one of these guys who ought to have been born with feathers. He wanted to fly. He spent his whole life working on the problem. But unlike all those who had gone before, Cayley got a whole lot of things pretty right.
Up until Sir George, anyone designing a flying machine thought about birds. Birds flap their wings and that’s the whole deal. They get their lift from wings. They get their forward motion from wings. Most of what stops birds rolling around in the sky like corks in a waterfall is built into the wings as well. Lift, thrust and control. All in the same neat instrument.
But that’s birds. Sir George’s particular spark of genius was to see that what worked for birds would never work for humans. So he split the three problems and tackled them separately. He conducted careful scientific experiments on lift, drag and streamlining. He tackled the issues of stability, pitch-control and general aircraft design. He did some tough mathematics and some solid science.
And he got there. He designed the airplane. For lift, he chose a pair of fixed wings, shaped like an aerofoil. For thrust, he chose an airscrew – what we’d call a propeller. And to give his flying machine control, he designed a tail fin and rudder, not a whole lot different from what you see sticking to the ends of airplanes today.
If you want to see the first ever drawing of a working airplane, you’ll find it in the notebooks of good old Sir George. Of course, the gallant knight only had steam engines to play with. There was no way a steam engine of his day would develop enough horsepower to lift itself, an airplane and a human being all together. But he built glidersthough, good ones. You want to know when the first true airplane flight in history took place? Answer: in 1853, when Sir George ordered his coachman out of his coach and into a glider. The glider soared happily into the air, flew five hundred yards across a Yorkshire valley, then came to a bumpy rest. The coachman, already the world’s first airplane pilot, wasn’t too keen on becoming the world’s first airplane casualty and he handed in his notice. Cayley, an old man now, quit building gliders and died almost fifty years before the Wright brothers left earth at Kitty Hawk.
So, if you want a beginning, there it was.
Lift, thrust, control. Three problems. Three solutions. The start of everything.
1 (#ulink_bfd35a0a-1d99-5585-909b-57a7759e6c09)
The pilot lifted his goggles and removed his helmet, all in the same motion. He let helmet and goggles drop to the floor. The air was still cloudy with dust and his eyes pricked.
With an automatic hand, he checked his switches (all off) and the cockpit fuel pipes (all sound). He sniffed to detect any escaping gasoline. The air stank of petrol, but the pilot had never been in a crash where the air smelled any other way. The pilot flexed his left leg, then his right leg, then both arms, then ran his hands over his back, neck and head. His left foot was sore where the rudder bar had snagged it, but apart from that, he seemed to have escaped uninjured. His left arm struck the instrument panel a couple of times softly.
‘Sorry, sweetheart,’ he muttered.
He lifted himself to the lip of the cockpit and stepped down to the ground. The movement made him grimace. Not because of the pain in his foot, but because the undercarriage should have been lifting the fuselage well clear of the ground. But the plane no longer had an undercarriage to speak of, and the fuselage was lying prostrate on the ground like a beached sea animal.
The pilot undid his flying jacket, wiped his forehead on his arm and stepped, blinking, away from the dust and the plane wreck into the brilliant glare of the sun.
And that was how they saw him first. Long afterwards, that was how most of them would remember him as well. A man a little less than medium height. Not big built, but light on his feet. Poised. A sense of athleticism held a long way in reserve. Fair hair very closely cropped. Skin deeply tanned. Eyes of astonishing blueness. His face lined but still somehow young. Or perhaps not young exactly, but alert, watchful. And smiling. That was how they first saw him.
Smiling.
The pilot was used to being stared at, but even for him this was something new. Independence, Georgia boasted a population of 1,386 and right now the pilot was being given the chance to inspect almost every last one of their number.
He wiped his forehead again. Leather flying clothes make a whole lot of sense six thousand feet up in an eighty-mile-an-hour wind. They make a lot less sense the second you touch earth. He shrugged off his jacket and advanced a few more paces. The town had grouped itself into a semicircle around him and was staring at him, like he was something out of the Bible.
‘Hi, folks,’ he said. ‘Seen better landings, huh?’
He laughed. Nobody else moved. They were still staring, still in awe.
‘Thanks for clearing a way for me. Things were getting kinda tough up there.’
There was a bit of shuffling amongst the townsfolk and one of them was pushed to the front.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said. ‘My name’s Herbert Isiah Johnson, and on behalf of Independence and Okinochee County and on behalf of … of … everyone, we’d like to welcome you to Georgia.’
Johnson’s mumblings broke the spell. People surged forward.
‘Gee whizz, Ma, did you see the wing go pop…?’
‘Spark plugs, was it? I once saw that on a Model-T. Lousy sparks…’
‘You OK, pal? You shouldn’t be walking any, not after…’
‘He didn’t take a left. You go past the Ag-Merc, you have to jink a little to the left…’
‘I said them things weren’t safe to use. If the good Lord…’
But amidst the crush of people, there was no one more determined than Brad Lundmark, the red-headed kid who’d first understood the pilot’s need to land. Within seconds of seeing the pilot emerge safely from the wreckage, Lundmark was running. First he ran hard, round a corner, into a simple two-storey house on Second Street. He was inside for about twenty seconds, then came racing out again. He tore back the way he’d come and hurtled into the thick of the crowd. Doggedly, he fought his way to the front.
‘Excuse me, sir. Sir, excuse me, please. Please, sir…’
There was something in Lundmark’s single-mindedness which made other people quit talking, until he found himself talking into a vacuum.
‘Sorry. Sorry. Just…’ He held out the things he’d fetched from the house. They were a well-chewed pencil and a photo. The photograph had been neatly clipped from the pages of a boy’s magazine. It was unmistakably a picture of the pilot, a few years younger and stiffly dressed in military uniform. ‘Captain Rockwell, sir, I wonder if I could have your autograph.’
2 (#ulink_d30821a0-5681-5193-973e-95696d47a8df)
‘Oh for God’s sake!’
Willard Thornton, a dazzlingly good-looking actor of twenty-something, felt sick.
It wasn’t the plane, a neat little Gallaudet, that upset him, but the take-off site. The Gallaudet had been precariously winched up on to the roof of the Corin Tower, twenty-five storeys above ground. The tar roof was flat, a hundred feet square. A low parapet had run round the outside, but had been removed for filming. The place where the blocks had been wrenched away showed up white against the tar. A camera crew stood sullenly, underdressed for the wind that flicked across from the mountains. The cameraman jabbed a finger at the sky.
‘We oughta go. We’re losing light. But what do I care? It’s your picture, buddy.’
Willard scowled again. The cameraman was right. This was his movie. He was actor, writer, director, producer, financier – and right now there was a decision to be made. He thought of the stunt he was about to pull and felt another bout of nausea rise towards his throat.
‘OK, OK,’ he commented, ‘only Jesus Christ!’
‘Jesus Christ is about right, darling,’ said Daphne O’Hara, taking a cigarette from the cameraman’s mouth and smoking it down to the butt. O’Hara (or Brunhilde Schulz, to give her the name she was born with) was dressed in a silver evening gown, with enough paste diamonds to bury a duchess. The wind was wrapping her dress hard against her legs and her carefully set hair was beginning to unravel.
‘The light,’ said the cameraman.
‘Forget the light. It’s my hair, sweetheart.’
‘Oh for God’s sake! Let’s do it.’
Willard felt angry and out of control. The cast and crew were on their thirteenth week of filming their feature, Heaven’s Beloved. They already had enough film in the can to make a six-hour movie. But Willard was a realist. He’d seen the rushes. And they were bad. Badly done, badly shot, and dull. Deadly dull. The script had been hastily revised. Stunts had been shoved in in a desperate effort to lift the story. Willard had grown to loathe any mention of the budget.
And now this. The Gallaudet stood in one corner of the roof, with the wind on its nose. They’d selected the plane for its low take-off speed, but even so, Willard guessed, they wouldn’t be fully airborne by the time they reached the edge. Would he have enough lift and forward speed to keep his tail clear as he left the roof? He didn’t know. If the tail caught, would it hook him downwards, or just give him a fright? He didn’t know, but felt sick thinking about it. In the past, he’d preferred to hand the tough stunts over to professional stuntmen, but his last two stuntmen had quit on him after rows over money. In any case, it was only flying wasn’t it?
‘OK. Ready?’
The camera crew positioned themselves. The production guys fussed over the Gallaudet. Then Willard and O’Hara burst from the steel doorway onto the roof. Willard pointed dramatically at the Gallaudet, then the two actors raced across to it.
O’Hara struck a pose by the rear cockpit, which meant, ‘No! Surely not!’ Willard stuck out his chin and looked darkly resolute. ‘But we have to!’ Willard stepped behind O’Hara to help her in. ‘Keep your hand away from my fucking ass,’ she said.
The two actors clambered inside. It was the sort of move which Willard found difficult. He hated the idea of looking bad on camera but could never quite get the hang of making an ungainly move, such as swinging his leg over the cockpit rim, in a way that made him look good. He tutted with annoyance and said, ‘Again!’
They got out and in again. Willard’s second attempt was worse than his first, and what’s more he grazed his hand in the process. Willard wanted to do it over, but was aware of O’Hara behind him, smoking like a steam train and swearing darkly in her native German.
‘That’ll do,’ he said, annoyed.
The camera crew took a few shots of them in the cockpit. The wind rose. Willard knew he ought to cancel the shot and wait until conditions were better. But O’Hara was being wooed by United Artists – Douglas Fairbanks himself had lunched with her – and Willard knew it was only a matter of time before she quit. There was another, stronger flutter of wind. Ten knots gusting to twelve or thirteen. Wind was good because what mattered in take-off was wind speed, not ground speed. But too much wind was bad, because of the risk of the airplane being blown straight back into the side of the building. Willard’s sickness came back, stronger.
The lead production guy said mildly, ‘Thornton, I think…’
‘Yes. Get her started. Jesus Christ!’
The production crew swung the propeller. The engine roared into life. The propeller flashed into a blur. The cameramen positioned themselves. O’Hara stopped smoking and swearing, and flashed a dazzling smile at the cameras. Beneath the wheels, Willard could feel the wooden chocks being pulled away. The graze on his hand was red and angry. He hoped it wouldn’t show on film.
He jammed the throttle forward. The pitch of the engine rose into a full roar. The little plane began to roll forwards. The edge of the building rushed towards them. The Gallaudet’s wheels reached the edge. Her tail was lifted, but the main gear was nowhere close to being airborne. She plunged sickeningly over the edge and was lost from sight.
3 (#ulink_ccdd2206-59cd-5f11-a04d-d585960dba69)
The wall at the end of the barn wasn’t solid, but built of vertical wooden slats to allow the entrance of light and air. The golden evening sunshine poured in and lay in bars across the floor. In the middle, amidst a debris of straw and spilled grain, the airplane sat. It looked oddly at home, like an obsolete piece of agricultural equipment or perhaps an exotic animal lying down to rest. It was a peaceful scene, but somehow sad. The plane looked like it had been shut away to die.
For the first time since his unconventional arrival, Captain Abraham ‘Abe’ Rockwell had a moment alone with his plane. He walked slowly round the battered craft. The hull was badly scraped and there were patches where the plywood had been smashed away completely. Aside from that, there was damage to one of the propeller blades, damage to the lower left wingtip, and the utter destruction of the plane’s undercarriage.
But Abe’s manner wasn’t simply the manner of an equipment-owner attempting to quantify the damage. He didn’t just feel the plane, he stroked it. He ran his hand down the leather edging of the cockpit and brushed away some cobwebs that were already being built. When he got to the nose of the aircraft, he pulled his sleeve over his hand and cleaned up the lettering that read, ‘Sweet Kentucky Poll’. Dissatisfied, he went to the engine, fiddled with a fuel-pipe, pulled it free and dribbled a little fuel onto a rag. Then he set the pipe back in place and scrubbed at the name with the gasoline-soaked cloth. This time, he got the name as bright as he wanted and he straightened.
Straightened and stopped. He turned and spoke directly into the heap of straw that filled the opposite end of the barn.
‘It’s rude to stare.’
Seeing that the straw made no answer, Abe picked up an axe handle from the floor and tossed it onto the top of the heap.
‘Ow!’
The straw wriggled and a red head emerged.
‘I said it’s rude.’
‘Sorry, sir. I…’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing.’
Abe waited a short moment, then shrugged. ‘If it’s nothing, then you won’t mind leaving.’
‘No, sir.’
The red head attached itself to a skinny kid, who slid down the straw pile and landed with a soft thwack. ‘Sorry, sir.’ The kid, whom Abe recognised as the autograph-hunter from earlier, glanced across into a corner of the barn, then brushed himself off, ready to leave. Abe followed his glance. There was a bucket of warm water there, soapy and still steaming, a bath sponge floating on the surface.
‘Wait.’
The kid stopped.
‘You came to clean her?’
The kid nodded. ‘Doesn’t matter, sir. I can do it later. Sorry.’
Abe shook his head. The gesture meant: Don’t leave yet.
‘D’you have a name?’
‘Lundmark, sir.’
‘Your ma and pa think of giving you a first name to go along with that?’
‘Yes, sir. Bradley. Brad.’
‘Mind if I use it?’
‘No, sir.’
‘OK, Brad, now I’m not over-fond of this “sir” business. I’m not in the army now and I don’t want to be. If you want to call me something, I’m happy with just plain Abe. If that’s too much for you, you can call me Captain. Understand?’
‘Yes. Yes, Captain.’
‘Good.’
There was a pause. The slatted evening light was moving round, bringing new parts of the airplane into view and hiding others. Abe found a cobweb he’d missed before and brushed it away absent-mindedly.
‘We’ll start at the nose.’
Abe brought the bucket over to the plane and the two of them began to wash her, nose to tail, removing the dust and the flaking paint and the burned-on oil and the scatter of straw-dust and insects. For about fifty minutes they worked mostly in silence, changing the cleaning water from a pump in the yard outside. Then, as the light began to fade, Abe threw down his sponge.
‘Hell,’ he said. ‘That’s not too bad. For a moment back there, I thought the landing was gonna turn out rough.’
Still clutching his sponge, the kid turned to Abe. ‘You’ve smashed up worse ‘n that?’
‘Yeah, plenty worse.’
The kid’s eyes, which had been large before, grew moon-shaped and moon-sized. Abe, irritated with himself, added sharply: ‘Anyone who flies enough will have a few bad smashes. Most machines fold up pretty easy. The accidents mostly look worse than they are.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Captain.’
‘Yes, Captain.’
