Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (36 page)

Fred Noonan’s widow, Mary Bea, to whom I carried his message, married a widower, happily. For all her complaining about her family, Amy turned out to have a very loyal mother and sister, both of whom honored her at their every opportunity. Amy Otis Earhart, who never really gave up on the thought that her daughter might just show up one day, died at age ninety-five in October 1962.

From Boston to Honolulu, in dozens of towns across America, Amelia Earhart is honored with memorial plaques and markers, and streets and schools are named for her. Commemorative stamps have been issued; libraries and museums honor her with displays. Television movies and documentaries of her life frequently turn up on my Mitsubishi. And her luggage is still being manufactured and sold.

But also, the questions about her disappearance have developed into a cottage industry of research, expeditions, and books of a sort that G. P. Putnam might well have published. Rarely did a researcher track me down, and even more rarely did I cooperate. With one or two exceptions, I didn’t read their books, either. I didn’t need anybody to tell me what happened to Amelia Earhart. Besides which, I was under contract to Uncle Sam to keep my mouth shut; it’s like a deal with the devil—no escape clause.

And the government laughed off the Amelia-on-Saipan stories, though occasional documents surfaced due to the Freedom of Information Act that supported the “theory”; and scores of other letters and documents remain unclassified and/or destroyed. But Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, later Chief of Naval Operations, admitted that the truth about Amelia Earhart would “stagger the imagination.”

In 1969, when I heard, after so many years, from Robert Myers—now a grown man, working in a sugar factory in Salinas, California—it sent me hurtling back to his parents’ living room where we heard that exciting radio drama on the family Philco. Still peppy, he told me he was writing a book about his memories of Amelia and, on weekends and vacations, lecturing on the subject.

I was struck by odd resonances in what he’d said: the statue of sugar Baron Matsue Haruji somehow loomed over the career of Amelia Earhart’s kid pal, now working in a sugar factory, supplementing his income out on the lecture circuit. I wondered if he’d ever spoken at the Coliseum in Des Moines; I wondered if it was even still there.

“She’s alive,” he told me excitedly, and over the phone, the voice, even with the deep, older timber of an adult, still sounded like a kid’s. “She’s a woman named Irene Bolam, and she lives in New Jersey. Fred Noonan’s alive, too!”

“If he is, he’s got a splitting headache,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Look, Robert, it’s nice hearing from you—”

“Fred Noonan is this guy William Van Dusen. This former Air Force major and this author, they’ve researched both of ’em, and Van Dusen and Bolam, their backgrounds are phony. It looks like a witness protection plan kind of deal.”

“I don’t think they had a witness protection program in the forties.”

“How do you know? If Amelia got turned into Tokyo Rose, maybe the government would want to…sort of,
bury
her.”

“Robert, it’s nice hearing from you again.”

“You don’t want to look into this for me?”

“Are you hiring me?”

“I can’t afford that. I work in a factory.”

“I work for a living, too, Robert. Thanks for the call. Good luck.”

And that had been that. I didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad for Robert Myers: his friendship with Amelia had given meaning to his life; yet it had obviously been painful for him, carrying around so many unanswered questions, going through his life a “kid” few took seriously.

I’d been there. I sat in the living room with him. I knew what he’d heard. He just didn’t know where I’d been.

The book that claimed Irene Bolam was Amelia Earhart got its authors sued and itself pulled from the shelves. This made me suspicious, and one day in 1970, when I was visiting the Manhattan office of A-1, I took a side trip to Bedford Hills, New York. I found Irene Bolam in the bar with three other women in the clubhouse of Forsgate Country Club; these were ladies in their late sixties and they seemed to appreciate the attention of a good-looking kid like me, in his early to mid-sixties.

I knew at once which one was Irene. She bore a resemblance to Amy, though her nose was different, wider, larger; noses change, though, not always for the better. And the eyes were a hauntingly familiar blue-gray.

Standing next to the ladies, who looked pretty foxy in their golf sweaters and shorts, I said to Irene, “My name’s Nate Heller. We had a mutual friend.”

“Oh?” She beamed up at me. “And who would that be?”

“Amelia Earhart. I understand you were an aviatrix yourself, and flew with her?”

“That’s right, I was in the Ninety Nines…. Oh, my goodness, I hope you don’t believe that baloney in that horrible book.”

The “oh my goodness” gave me a start: it was a favorite phrase of Amy’s.

But this wasn’t Amy. Amy couldn’t look at me and not betray the feelings we’d had. If by some bizarre circumstance, this was an Amelia Earhart who had survived those bullets and been carted off to Tokyo, brainwashed by Tojo, returned home, and brainwashed again by Uncle Sam…if that ridiculous scenario were even possible, I didn’t want to know.

Whether this was Irene Bolam, or Amelia Earhart, I knew one thing for sure: my Amy wasn’t in this old woman’s eyes.

I sat with the girls and they had tropical drinks with umbrellas while I had a rum and Coke. One of the girls was a widow with a nice body and a decent face lift and I think I could have got lucky. But I was an old married man now, and had changed my ways.

Irene Bolam died in July 1982. She left her body to science and her family honored her wishes that her fingerprints not be shared with those who had been hounding her about her identity.

The Continental DC-10 circled lazily on its approach, as the island of Saipan made itself known through the clouds. We had left Guam forty-five minutes before—Buddy Busch, his two-man camera crew, and me. At first glance the long narrow island appeared to be nothing more than a jungle with a mountain rising from its midst; but soon rolling hills, shell-pocked cliffs, and white sand beaches disclosed their presence, as did roads, buildings, and cultivated fields.

This was a slightly different view than I’d gotten from the
Yankee
or its dinghy, and I could finally understand what everyone had been raving about all these years: the ocean waters surrounding Saipan were dazzlingly blue and turquoise and green and yet transparent.

“Someday I’m gonna bring the wife along,” Buddy said. “She dudn’t believe me, ’bout how pretty them waters is. You been here before, Nate—ever see the like of it, anywheres else?”

“The folksier you get, Buddy,” I said, “the less you’re getting out of me.”

Buddy was frustrated that I had yet to open up about my own Saipan experiences.

“And the stars at night…” he began.

“Are big and bright? Deep in the heart of Saipan?”

“Back in ’45, every night, we’d be on our cots in our tents and Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’ would come driftin’ across the camp, over the loudspeaker…. It was like he was singin’ about Saipan.”

“I doubt he was.”

“Well,” he said defensively, “
I
never seen the like of it. Parade of damn stars traipsin’ across the sky…. Or was I just young, and my memory’s playin’ tricks with me?”

“I ask myself that often,” I said.

Even from the air, the scars left on this island by World War II were readily apparent, violent punctuation marks in a peaceful sentence: a tank’s head poking out of the water a few hundred yards offshore; a barge marooned on the coral reef; a wrecked fuselage, half in the water, half on the beach—shimmering twisted metal in crystal-blue waters.

The DC-10 touched down at Kobler Field, near the former Aslito Haneda, aka Isley. We taxied over to a cement shed with a wooden roof emblazoned saipan in white letters; this and two Quonset-hut hangars was the Saipan airport.

“This is my fourth time here,” Buddy said coming down the deplaning steps, “and I never quite get used to how different it is from the war—no jeeps, or military trucks, no soldiers, sailors or Marines.”

The tiny airport, run by Chamorros, was a surprisingly bustling place filled with the Babel-like chatter of many languages—tourists from all over the world coming to this vacation center, Europeans, Arabs, but mostly Japanese. Buddy had told me to expect that: Saipan was a combination war shrine and honeymoon resort for the Japanese.

“Yeah, and they’re buyin’ back this island they lost,” he’d told me on the plane, “piece at a time.”

A Ford van Buddy had arranged was waiting, and we loaded our suitcases and the camera and recording gear—which was ensconced in heavy-duty flight cases—into the back. The two-man camera crew was also from Dallas; Phil was clean-cut and owned the video production company that had gone in partners with Buddy on a documentary of our visit, and Steve was a skinny, bearded, longhaired good old boy who I took for a hippie until I realized he was a Vietnam veteran—both knew their stuff. I told them I didn’t want to be on camera and they said fine, I could “grip.”

“What is a grip?” I’d seen that in the end credits of movies and always wondered.

“It means you help haul shit,” Steve said, ever-present cigarette bobbing.

Japanese machine-gun bunkers provided decorative cement touches on the road leading out of the airport. Beach Road itself, lined with flame trees, was a macadam fast track—back when the
shichokan
had driven me through this part of the island, the dirt road had been a glorified oxcart path. The cars outnumbered the bicycles now, but there were still plenty of the latter, often with Japanese tourists on them.

We passed through several native villages that had turned into modern little towns—Chalan Kanoa, which sported banks and a post office and a shopping district, as well as wood-frame houses and tin-roofed huts, vaguely similar to Garapan of old—and Susupe, which the army’s tent city had evolved into, where we stayed at a motel called the Sun Inn, behind a ballpark by a high school.

“Now I know you think I’m probably just bein’ a cheap bastard,” Buddy said, as we unloaded our stuff into a motel that looked like it belonged next to a strip club outside the Little Rock, Arkansas, airport. “But if we stay in one of them new fancy tourist highrises, up in Garapan, we’ll have trouble holdin’ court with the locals we need to talk to.”

The Sun Inn had a freestanding restaurant where we could sit and talk and sip coffee with our Chamorro subjects, in unintimidating surroundings.

“I’d like to bitch,” I said, “but as a veteran of a hundred thousand interviews, I agree with you. Once we get checked in, you mind if we take a spin up to Garapan?”

“Not at all,” Buddy grinned. “Kinda curious to see your old stompin’ grounds?”

“I think that’s ‘stamping grounds.’”

“Not in Texas.”

Garapan had not changed. It had gone away. This new city, called Garapan, wasn’t even on quite the same patch of earth; it was further south, its resort hotels lining white Micro Beach. Buddy took me to Sugar King Park, where the statue of Baron Matsue Haruji lorded over what was now a small botanical garden; also on display amid the palm and flame trees—and popular with Japanese children—was a little red and white locomotive, looking like the Little Engine That Could, resting on the last fragment of railroad track that once circled Saipan. It was probably the locomotive I saw at Tanapag Harbor, so very long ago.

“That statue is one of the handful of survivin’ physical remains of the original Garapan,” Buddy told me. His camera crew was catching some shots of the park, for color.

“Looks like the Baron’s got a bullet hole in his left temple,” I said, taking a closer gander.

“Yeah. Probably some jarhead, when we were occupyin’ the place, takin’ target practice…. There’s only two buildings from old Garapan still standin’—if standin’ is the word.” He nodded his head across the way, where the walls of the old hospital poked above overgrown grass. “That’s the old imperial hospital…and, not too far from here, the old Garapan Prison, which is all overgrowed. We need to get shots of that.”

“I’ll pass,” I said.

He frowned in surprise. “You don’t want to go over there to the prison with us?”

“If you don’t mind, no.”

“Well, we’ll do it another day, then. We need to get ahold of Sammy Munez, anyways.”

Munez met with us in a booth at the back of the Sun Inn coffee shop. Samuel Munez was a respected member of the community, a member of the House of Representatives of Micronesia, and had avoided previous researchers into the Earhart mystery.

But Buddy Busch was an ingratiating guy, and after three trips to Saipan, had made a lot of friends; the head of a local car dealership—who had provided our van—had arranged for us to meet with Munez, a compact, not quite stocky Chamorro in his mid-thirties with pleasant sad features on an egg-shaped head.

“You served in the Army here?” Munez asked Buddy. Munez wore sunglasses, a yellow and green tropical-style sportshirt, and navy shorts. “Wartime?”

It was just Busch and me and Munez in the booth; no camera crew yet. Buddy and Munez were drinking coffee but the climate—eighty degrees that would have been heaven if it hadn’t been so damn muggy—had me drinking Coke.

“Yes I did,” Buddy said, “only I was a Marine.”

“You, too?” Munez asked me.

“I was a Marine,” I said. “I was in the Pacific but not here. Guadalcanal.”

“I have a souvenir a Marine gave me,” Munez said, with a sly smile. His English was near perfect, though he had an accent, which had a jerky Hispanic lilt.

“Must be a lot of those on this island,” Buddy said affably.

Munez patted his thigh. “Mine is from a hand grenade. Still in me. What is that called?”

“Shrapnel,” I said.

Munez smiled, nodded. “The Marine who threw it was very upset. He apologize to us, bandage my leg himself. He thought we were Japanese…. You Americans were much kinder to us than the Japanese.”