Читать книгу Glory Boys - Harry Bingham - Страница 12

The Lundmark kid showed up at seven o’clock sharp, with a pot of coffee and a couple of rolls.

‘Feeding me, huh?’

Abe had been up at dawn, and found nobody yet awake at the hotel. Sooner than wake anyone, he’d come directly to the barn. He’d shaved in a can of hot water brewed over a primus stove, then stripped to the waist and washed under the yard pump. Right now, he was stretched out on a bale of straw, rubbing soft wax into his flying boots and mending a small tear on his jacket.

‘I just thought … if you don’t want it, I can…’

‘No, Brad, I want it. There are a couple of mugs in there,’ said Abe nodding at the rear cockpit of the broken plane. ‘Green canvas bag.’

Lundmark approached the plane like it was holy, and came away with a single mug.

‘Don’t drink coffee? You’re missing out.’

Abe sipped his coffee and took a bite of the bread roll.

‘We’ll get to work shall we? We’ll need to send away for a new blade,’ Abe indicated the busted propeller. ‘Aside from that, if we can find some timber and a forge, I haven’t seen anything we can’t fix.’

‘Really? Wow! You can get it going again, Captain?’

‘Careful, Brad. She’s a lady.’

‘Huh? Oh. I mean, her. Sorry.’

‘Reckon we can. First thing is to send a wire to my friends at Curtiss. Get a new blade out here. There a post office in town?’

‘Sure, Captain…’ Lundmark’s reply wasn’t exactly confident.

Abe was silent for a minute. He’d flown over the town, searching the ground for landing sites. He brought the view to mind. There are an infinity of obstacles that can smash up an aircraft. A cow. A ditch. A rickety fence with a single strand of wire. A boulder. A pothole. A tree stump.

Or telegraph wire. During the war, a friend of Abe’s had been shot up in a dogfight over enemy lines. With fabric streaming from one wing and controls mushy from German bullets, the plane had limped home. Struggling in to land, barely skimming the tree-tops, the plane had struck a line of telegraph wire. The wheels had snagged. The nose had been yanked down. Pilot and plane had dived into the ground at seventy miles an hour.

Abe thought back to his view of the town from above. No wires. ‘There’s no telegraph, is there? Where we gotta go? Brunswick?’

A tiny hesitation. Then: ‘Yeah, Brunswick. Joe Borden takes his cart in on a Tuesday. I guess we could ask him.’

‘Good.’

Abe paused. He’d seen something else from the sky; something that had puzzled him then and was puzzling him even more now. ‘A mile south of here,’ he said, ‘there’s another town.’

‘Uh-huh.’ The kid was non-committal, but evasive. He began cleaning invisible muck from a side of the aircraft which enabled him to keep his expression concealed.

‘There’s no other town marked on my map. It’s Rand McNally, 1921. I’ve never known ’em to be wrong before. Not that wrong anyways.’

‘It’s called Marion. It’s kind of new. Grew up a lot the last couple of years.’

‘That’s a lot of growing.’

‘I guess.’

The kid clearly didn’t want to talk, and, though Abe’s intense blue-eyed stare held the boy a few moments longer, he allowed the matter to drop. But it was a puzzle. It wasn’t just that Rand McNally hadn’t marked the town. It was where the town was and what it was.

What it was, first of all. From the air, Abe had seen large white houses, big yards, motor cars, even a couple of swimming pools. The contrast with the sun-bleached timbers and dusty streets of Independence was even stronger when darkness fell. Whereas Independence couldn’t boast a single electric bulb, the town below had been a blaze of light. The thump of oil-fired generators had thudded softly through the night.

Then there was the matter of where it was. Independence stood in a low range of hills on the edge of the Okefenokee swamps. Between Independence and Jacksonville there were salty marshes, mangrove swamps, a maze of creeks running out to the ocean. Independence was connected to the rest of the world only by a single-track unpaved road, plus the railway which ran just inland from the coast.

Why on earth had a slice of the brash new America wound up in these back-of-beyond swamp lands? Where was the money coming from to finance those new houses, the big cars? And why was the kid Lundmark lying to him about having to hike in to Brunswick to find a telegraph?

Abe could remember the view from the sky perfectly well. Marion, Independence’s mysterious new neighbour, had a line of telegraph wire running directly into it from the south. If Abe wanted to send a telegram, he only had to stroll a mile downhill.