Читать книгу Glory Boys - Harry Bingham - Страница 22

Abe quit, he turned his back.

One bright and breezy dawn, with a cool wind a steady ten knots from the south, Abe took Poll to the end of Main Street, opened her throttle, and roared upwards into the eggshell-perfect sky. He dipped his wings, once, twice, then flew away.

As the red-and-white plane danced away towards the ocean, the knots of onlookers broke up, back to their daily business or their morning grits. The last person left squinting into the morning sun was Hennessey Gibson. ‘A nice guy that,’ he muttered. ‘Just a shame he wouldn’t stay.’

Abe kept his date with Brad Lundmark. The Curtiss Jenny had been built as a trainer. It had two cockpits, front and rear, with full controls in each one. Abe took the kid up to fifteen hundred feet, then let the kid take over. Rudder bar left and right. Control stick up, down, port, starboard. Throttle full open, half-off, then full power again. Abe gave the kid two hours in the air. They did a couple of landings, a couple of take-offs. It was the best two hours of Brad Lundmark’s life. Abe dropped the kid back on the sand and filled the tank with gasoline from a red tin fuel can.

‘So long, Brad.’

‘So long, Captain.’

‘You mind you look after your mom, OK?’

‘Sure, Captain. I will.’ On the last two words, Brad’s voice twisted a little and rose half an octave. It was the sort of verbal stumble which probably means nothing. The boy immediately got his control back and added something else in a voice which was completely level and smooth. Only he’d looked away too. He’d darted his eyes quickly out to sea and kept them there ’til his voice had recovered.

The conversation ran on a little. Abe still needed to stow the empty fuel can and clear a few stones away from his prospective take-off site. But the flier had become suddenly gruff, almost angry. They said goodbye again and shook hands. Then Abe took off, climbing aggressively. He headed south, long enough to be sure that Brad had already set off for home, but inside himself the flier was at war.

On the one hand there stood Hennessey and the blind Sal Lundmark, her dead husband and the stricken town. There stood the redhead Brad, the engine-obsessed image of the boy that Abe had once been. And on the other hand, there stood Abe himself; everything he was now, everything he’d ever learned about himself. The two sides struggled for mastery. Neither side won.

Angrily, treating his controls with uncharacteristic roughness, Abe brought Poll round in a long curve that would bring her back up the coast, five miles out to sea and a mile and a quarter above it. Then holding himself directly in between the Marion coast and the eye of the sun, he circled. The mouth of Okefenokee River, a few miles east of Independence, was marked by a cluster of ragged green islands and the branching tongues of a little delta.

Still angry, still grim, but always careful, Abe began to study the sea below. At first glance, the ocean seemed littered with vessels of all sizes, ploughing the violet-blue with trails of random foam. Abe watched until the shapes gradually resolved themselves into a pattern. The smaller ones were mostly fishing boats, tracking shoals of fish. Further out to sea, bigger ships were cruising, paralleling the coast. Abe looked at the whole pattern of shipping, but kept the Okefenokee River always in view.

He didn’t see what he was looking for on that flight, nor any time that day. He felt relieved. The war that had been raging inside him had resolved itself in this way: he had given Hennessey and Brad and all the other figures in his head twenty-four hours exactly. If he found what he was looking for in that time, he’d continue to investigate. But if he didn’t… Waves of relief, of freedom, washed through him at the thought. Abe thought of flying Poll out over the ocean to the islands. The blue ocean with its alternate tints of purple and green, its crests of white, the far horizons, and only the sky above… Abe hoped against hope, that the sea would stay empty.

When darkness fell, he unrolled his sheepskin sleeping roll on a beach a little way north of Brunswick. An hour before light the next morning, he woke up, walked waist-deep into the sea, where he dunked his head and scrubbed himself clean. Then he returned to shore, dressed and took off. By the time the sun nudged over the horizon, he was in position, lodged invisibly in the glare of dawn.

He watched the coast, watched the boats, searching for what he knew had to be there.

Searched, then, with a sinking heart, he saw it.

Two boats, the size of launches, broke from the green-fringed islands. They could have been fishing boats, only these launches were faster, sharper, lighter, keener. The two boats chugged out to sea, then headed south. Abe, holding his position in the eye of the sun, his stomach churning with a feeling that he couldn’t put into words, turned to follow.