Harry Bingham - Glory Boys

The conversation drifted into the comforting detail of paperwork and insurance forms. Willard was grateful to Ronson for his help. Iggy Claverty came over and helped out too. The problem seemed resolved.

And that was all.

Or almost.

Going home that evening, Willard happened to ride in the same elevator as McVeigh. The two men exchanged a couple of words, then fell silent. The elevator moved slowly, people got in, got out. The compartment emptied. All the time, Willard felt McVeigh’s heavy gaze pressing on him. When Willard turned, the big man, with his cropped red hair and football player’s neck, was looking squarely at him, unblinking.

‘Yes?’ said Willard.

McVeigh shook his head.

‘You’ve been staring at me all the way down,’ Willard persisted.

McVeigh paused a second, then stepped half a pace closer. His head was too close. Though Willard weighed in at an athletic one hundred and eighty pounds, McVeigh must have had another forty pounds on him at least. There was something directly threatening in his attitude. Willard’s anger flared. Whatever McVeigh’s problem was, Willard had no intention of backing down.

‘Careful,’ said McVeigh. ‘Asking questions, like you were today.’

‘What d’you mean?’

McVeigh shrugged.

‘What d’you mean? Why the hell shouldn’t I ask questions?’

McVeigh came a little closer still. He had small blue eyes, lost beneath a broad expanse of forehead. ‘Just be careful what you ask and who you ask. You wouldn’t want to…’

The elevator hit the ground floor. Willard clanked open the inner door, then the outer one. The two men held their pose of near-aggression a second longer.

‘I’ll ask who I want, what I want, and I don’t suppose I need to ask your permission, Leo.’

‘That’s up to you.’ McVeigh looked like he was trying to take some of the heat out of the situation, but a muscle continued to clamp and unclamp in his jaw. ‘You do what you like. Just remember … anyhow, goodnight.’

McVeigh turned and walked away. For a big man, he was light on his feet and fast. Willard found himself thinking that man could be dangerous . For the second time that day, he found his fist curled into a ball, wanting to thump something.

‘I’m Hamilton, Pen Hamilton. Short for Penelope only no one ever calls me that.’

Abe shook her hand. ‘Abe Rockwell. Welcome to Miami.’

‘Abe Rockwell? Captain Rockwell? … Oh, gosh, what a way to meet you! Gee!…’ The woman flier was briefly flustered by finding herself in front of one of the two or three most famous aviators in the United States, but Abe was used to this reaction and brushed it away. ‘I can land the normal way too, you know,’ she added.

‘I bet you can.’

‘I was lucky the sand was soft.’

‘You were lucky you knew how to fly.’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t sure I needed to land. The engine was missing beats, but I still had power. Maybe I could have gone on.’

‘It wasn’t just the distributor blocks, maybe?’

Pen pulled an apologetic face: the first really girlish thing she’d done. The face said, ‘I couldn’t tell a distributor block from a humpback whale.’

‘The distributor blocks on the magnetos,’ Abe pursued. ‘They get coated with carbon when the engine’s running. But they were cleaned before you took off, right?’

‘I’m sorry, Captain. I’m sure I ought to know, but I don’t. They told me she was OK to go.’

Abe felt a jolt of irritation. During the war, he had no time for pilots who couldn’t strip, clean and reassemble an engine. The reason why Abe’s squadron had the best serviced airplanes in the American Army was that Abe made his pilots responsible for the airworthiness of their equipment. It was an attitude he regarded as sacred. And by those standards, Pen Hamilton’s ignorance was shocking, an insult to aviation.

And yet… Pen Hamilton was a woman. She had handled her machine with a rare combination of courage, force and delicacy. She had made a horrendous landing look almost easy – and was now handling herself not with bravado but with modesty. Abe let his irritation pass.

‘The problem sounded to me like your magnetos. If so, you could have gone on to wherever you were going. I’ll take a look, if you want. And please, Miss Hamilton, there’s no need to –’

‘Oh no, call me Pen, please.’

‘Then I’m Abe. No Captains around here, if you don’t mind.’

They grinned at each other, suddenly comfortable.

‘You’ll want to come in and get cleaned up. And something to eat or drink? I was about to have something myself.’

They went in.

Abe could see Pen noticing Abe’s camp bed in the corner of the hangar, his makeshift kitchen, and his barren wardrobe, the logo on Poll’s fuselage: a mailbag in the very approximate shape of a shield with the words ‘US Mail’ stencilled across it. She noticed something else too. Above Abe’s crowded workbench ran a shelf at head height. The shelf was crowded with metal castings, polished, clean and free of dust. Pen looked at the collection with curiosity. The castings were models of aircraft, but not necessarily complete ones. Only four of the castings had nose cone, fuselage, tail, and a full set of wings, upper and lower on both sides. The rest were simply airplane pieces. A fuselage without wings. A wing without a body. A nose cone. A lot of nose cones. She picked up a few of the castings, ran her hands over them and put them down.

‘You make these?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘They’re beautiful.’

‘Yes.’

‘And unusual. Beautiful and unusual.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Since Abe didn’t exactly seem full of chatter on the subject, Pen turned to a different topic. She indicated the mailbag stencilled on Poll’s side.

‘You’re flying the mails?’

Abe nodded

‘I didn’t know there was a route… To Cuba, I guess?’

Abe nodded.

‘Havana?’

Abe nodded.

‘Every day? Over water?’ She took in the information like a professional pilot, calculating the hazards, the safety margin, the rewards. ‘You must hit quite some weather at times.’

Abe gestured at Poll. ‘She’s a strong girl. We get through.’

‘Still…’

Pen washed her face and hands. Abe offered to walk out of the hangar so she could take a proper wash, but, since the washing facilities consisted of a cold tap and a tin water-scoop, Pen managed to resist. By the time she was done, Abe had laid out the only meal he could provide: bread, cold meat, some tomatoes, water. She came over to his little table. First she said she didn’t want anything, then, when Abe pressed her, she ate hungrily.

A moment’s awkward silence was covered by eating.

Abe wasn’t shy of girls. True, he didn’t see much of them. True, he’d never had a relationship that had lasted longer than a couple of months. But he wasn’t shy, nor even inexperienced. He’d dated girls, petted girls, slept with girls. The reason why his relationships had quickly fallen apart was that he’d never really wanted them. Abe knew his priorities and they had never included women. So, aged thirty-six, he wasn’t shy of girls, but he didn’t spend much time with them either.

Pen bit into a tomato. It was overripe. The skin split and spurted juice across the table and down her chin.

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Abe gestured at his linenless table, his bare accommodation. ‘Sorry I haven’t got anywhere better.’

‘You …?’ Pen began to ask the obvious question, then dropped it, embarrassed.

‘Yeah, I’m living here for now. While I get the business started up. In time, I’d like to build a little. Extend the place at the back.’