Читать книгу Glory Boys - Harry Bingham - Страница 20

The Lundmarks’ home had a double door. A screen door closed shut against evening insects and a green-painted wooden door that was folded back inside the room. Inside, the room was lit by a single oil lamp. What with the wire mesh and the dim light, Abe hadn’t been able to see very much of the interior. He knocked at the door, but out of politeness only, to let the folks inside know he was there. Without waiting, he went on in.

And he saw this: the kid, Brad, staring at him with those big wide-open eyes.

And this: the mother, Sal, her face and neck violently disfigured by red burn marks, her reddish hair growing thin and patchy through the burns on her scalp. And her eyes: pale blue, pretty, and completely blind.

And finally this: a photo on the mantelpiece, framed and spotlessly clean. It showed a man’s face, nice looking and strong, Brad’s father. Beneath the photo, an inscription: Stanford G. Lundmark, A Hero of Independence, 1881–1923.

Right away, Abe knew the nature of the storekeeper’s game – a game perfectly calculated to change Abe’s mind, if anything could. Muttering darkly, Abe assumed a smile and advanced. Sal Lundmark had dinner ready. She asked Abe to say grace, which he did, stiffly and out of practice. ‘Let us thank the Lord for these His gifts of goodness. Amen.’ Abe used the grace his father used to say, but finished wondering whether Sal had been expecting something longer and more ornate.

‘Thank you, Captain.’

The conversation began awkwardly. Sal Lundmark had some kind of idea that Abe had to be treated a little better than royalty, maybe not quite as well as a procession of angels. She asked him if it were true that he’d met President Wilson – which he had. She asked him if the Prince of Wales had been as handsome in real life as he looked in his pictures – Abe said he had. She asked what the food had been like the time he’d been a guest of the French Prime Minister.

At that point, Abe had put his knife and fork down.

‘Ma’am, I did a little flying in the war. Right afterwards, I met a few people, got given some medals, had a big fuss made of me. And you want to know something? I hated it. I like my airplane, I like any place that has airplanes in, and I like places that feel like home.’

There was a pause.

When Sal wasn’t using her hands to eat, she rested them on the edge of the table so she could keep her orientation in the room. ‘And your home,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Your home, I guess…’

‘The place I grew up was a little farmhouse in Kentucky.’ He looked around the cluttered room, which was about thirty feet long by fifteen wide. ‘I’d say it was a little bit smaller than this, and we didn’t have that fancy lean-to affair at the back. But don’t worry,’ he added, ‘although this place feels kind of grand, you’ve made it homey. It’s a pleasure to be here.’

She laughed. Abe laughed. Brad laughed with pleasure at seeing the ice broken. The conversation ran easily after that. Stanford Lundmark had worked as a carpenter and, when work was hard to come by, a farm labourer. Abe knew plenty about farming from his childhood, and they talked about good harvests and lousy employers.

Little by little, Sal opened up to speak about her husband’s death. He’d been one of the men who had first reported the Marion mobsters to the police. Their house had been burned to the ground, blinding Sal and almost killing her. Stanford had rebuilt the house, plank by plank. For a time things had been quiet, but then there had been more unprovoked assaults on Independence. Lundmark had had enough. He’d ridden down into Marion, aiming to sort things out, ‘once and for all’. He’d got his wish, in a manner of speaking. He was gone for two days, before he was found with his head smashed in down among the cornfields on the north side of town.

‘He must have been a hell of a man,’ Abe murmured softly.

Sal nodded. Her eyes couldn’t see, but they could still cry. There was a short silence.

‘You must have been very proud,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Very.’

Abe let the silence run a little longer, then changed subject. He asked Brad if he had collected any flying stuff other than the photo of Abe. He might as well have asked the Pope if he had an interest in prayer books. In an instant, the kid ran upstairs and came down with a whole boxful of photos, news stories, scrapbooks, pages torn from boys’ magazines, movie posters.

Abe laughed. ‘Sal, you know your son is a bit of an obsessionist?’

She smiled and wiped her eyes, but Brad was impervious to irony. He had a small mountain of material relating to Abe; vastly more than Abe had ever wanted to keep himself.

‘And that’s your Croix de Guerre,’ said Brad, slapping down one photo. ‘And that’s your Légion d’honneur –’ another photo ‘– And that’s your Congressional, no, wait, that’s your Distinguished Service Cross, the first one, three oak leaves, then I should have – yes – the Glory Boys piece. Boy! I used to know that article by heart.’

Brad dropped a newspaper article on the table. The article was a syndicated reprint of a piece that had first appeared in the New York Times. Abe had been asked to do an interview with a war correspondent. Abe hadn’t wanted to do it – he didn’t like or approve of the way the press treated the war – and he had given a grudging thirty-minute interview to the journalist in question. That had been all. He’d forgotten the whole thing within five minutes. But then the article had appeared, splashed beneath a huge photo of Abe, ‘Captain Rockwell of the Glory Boys’. The piece had caused a sensation. Nothing in it was untrue. Abe couldn’t even claim that his words had been twisted or distorted. But if Abe had sought to avoid any possible glamourising of his unit and the war in the sky, he couldn’t have failed more completely. The article made Abe out to be America’s hero of heroes; his men to be the bravest of the brave. And it was good. Much though Abe hated it, the article was a superb piece of writing, syndicated, so it seemed, to every newspaper in America. And the name for the squadron had stuck. Abe was never just Captain Rockwell any more, he was always Captain Rockwell of the Glory Boys. The men in the squadron had been intensely proud and had painted the title on the nose and tail of every plane. Abe dated his true and abiding hatred of the war from the moment that article first appeared.

Brad went on digging out items from his collection. Abe rubbed his face, in deep discomfort. He did his best to change the subject.

‘I hope it’s not all me.’

‘No, I’ve got everyone here. Everyone. I mean,’ he added hurriedly, ‘you were always my favourite. You and…’

‘Me and Rickenbacker. Good choice. Rickenbacker was the best.’

Abe felt better now that the kid’s interest was deflected onto other subjects, but one photo of himself as a young man was still visible on the top of the pile. He was wearing a lieutenant’s uniform. He’d only just been commissioned, hadn’t yet shot down a single plane, hadn’t yet experienced a minute in combat. The photo was monochrome, of course, but somehow you could see the startling blue of the young man’s eyes, just as startling as if a piece of sky had fallen down and got lodged there. The young man looked out with confidence and eagerness, as though knowing the place that history had written for him. Abe looked sharply away, as though allergic to the sight. When Brad happened to unfold a newspaper cutting that fell over the photo and covered it, Abe pulled his glance away with an almost visceral feeling of relief.

Sal stood up to make coffee. Abe wanted to help, but she said, ‘You stay where you are. I don’t need eyes to find the blamed coffee pot.’ Meantime, Brad had dug out something that amused Abe. A folded movie poster advertised ‘America’s favourite flying ace’, Willard Thornton.

‘So he’s the favourite,’ laughed Abe. ‘Hear that, Brad? America’s favourite! What’s all this about Rockwell and Rickenbacker?’

‘Oh, him! I don’t really… But say, Captain, he was ninety-first squadron as well. You must have –’

‘Sure, I knew Willie Thornton, all right.’

‘Wow! … I saw one of his movies once. In Jacksonville. I used to quite like him, but the picture was dumb. He shot down about eight machines in one fight.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never watched ’em.’ He smiled. Will Thornton had arrived in the squadron much cockier than his flying skills warranted. But Abe had seen through the bluster. He’d put time into Thornton’s training and the effort had paid off. Abe had come to trust his ability in a fight. If the young man had been able to get his instinctive selfishness under control, he’d have a fine future ahead of him.

‘You keep in touch with him?’

‘Not now, no, these movie actors, I doubt if they’d have time for an old beat-up flier like me… Say, though, if you wanted me to ask him to sign that movie poster for you, I expect he’d be happy to oblige.’

‘Really, Captain? Gee whizz, I…’ he trailed off, caught between his excitement at the idea and his desire to make sure that Abe knew he didn’t have a rival for his admiration.

Abe took the poster. ‘I’ll mail it to him with a note. No promises, mind, but I expect he’ll help out.’

Sal came to the table with the coffee. Abe forced the subject away from the war, back to farming and the price of corn. After twenty minutes, he pushed his chair back. ‘Say, Sal, thanks for dinner. It was real good. Nice to eat home-cooked food once in a while.’

‘You couldn’t be more welcome, Captain.’

‘Brad, I’m gonna be leaving town tomorrow. The takeoff could be a mite tricky and I wouldn’t want to carry a passenger, but I’ve heard there’s a stretch of beach just south of Brunswick with room to land.’

‘Oh, sure, Captain. A real good beach. Flat and wide. Not too soft neither.’

‘Well, what d’you say you meet me there tomorrow? Say around noon, if you can get there. We’ll do a little flying together before I head off south.’

‘Oh boy! Mom, can I…?’

‘Oh no, Captain, you don’t want to do that. Brad doesn’t need to –’

‘D’you know what, ma’am? I think as a matter of fact he does.’

And that was that. Abe fixed the date. Poll was ready. Meantime, Hennessey had had the trees felled, the road levelled, any obstacles removed. Main Street, Independence looked almost like a real runway. Abe walked slowly back to the hotel. On the four wooden steps leading up to the hotel’s verandah, there was a man visible only as a bunch of shadows and a red-tipped cigarette.

‘Evening, Hen,’ said Abe.

‘Well, good evening to you. You’re leaving tomorrow I guess?’

‘Yep.’

‘Enjoy your dinner?’

‘You mean, did Sal Lundmark’s blindness make me change my mind?’

‘Either way.’

‘I enjoyed my dinner, Hen. But as for changing my mind, I told you already.’

The storekeeper pulled the cigarette from his mouth and stared at the tip. Then he flicked it, still glowing, out into the street.

‘A man’s gotta try, though.’

‘Sure.’ Abe hesitated. He liked the storekeeper. The man had guts and honesty: characteristics which Abe prized above anything. ‘If things work out, Hen, I’m going to be doing a little flying in these parts. I’m hoping to make a little money flying between Florida and the islands.’

‘There money in that?’

‘Don’t know. Not much. Any case, I aim to find out.’

‘Yeah, well, good luck.’

‘Maybe I’ll get in touch again sometime. If things work out. Any case, if you ever get a postcard from your Auntie Poll, you don’t forget who sent it.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Goodnight, Hen.’

‘Goodnight, Captain.’

‘And thanks. I’m only sorry I couldn’t help.’