Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (8 page)

She hollered back: “We’ve run into some rapidly shifting winds! Don’t panic!”

She was already making her descent toward the runways and hangars of Albuquerque Municipal Airport, where a wind sock on a pole was twirling like a New Year’s Eve noisemaker.

“You were kidding with that ‘folds up like an accordion’ remark, right?”

She was sitting forward and her hands clutched the yoke. “More like a Chinese lantern…. Get back and buckle yourself in, Nate! I never lost a passenger yet.”

I did a clumsy native dance back to my seat, buckled in, and then she shouted at me: “I’m going to have to take the shortest runway! That’s going to mean an abrupt approach….”

The Vega was riding the wind like a motorboat on choppy waters.

“What do you mean,” I asked, “‘abrupt’?”

And she answered me by dropping the plane into a steep forward sideslip. My as-yet-undigested box lunch (tuna salad sandwich, apple, and chocolate chip cookie) damn near made a crash landing. Then the ship began a series of wide fishtails, like the Vega was waving hello to New fucking Mexico.

“Shit!” I yelled. “Are we out of control?”

“That’s on purpose! It cuts speed!”

Maybe the plane’s, but not my pulse rate.

The runway was looming before us, and yet she was flying the plane virtually onto the ground, the throttle opened up. We seemed to be running out of runway; she sideslipped so as not to overshoot it and as I waited for the sound and feel of the Vega’s fixed wheels touching tarmac, and as Amy pulled the stick back to set down, a gust of wind suddenly ballooned the Vega back up twenty feet…and then just as suddenly, that gust of wind died.

And left us there.

Before we could drop like a stone, Amy slammed the throttle forward, the wind came back and the Vega set down without a bounce, though we were still at full throttle; fortunately, the runway was built on something of an incline, dissipating the plane’s forward speed. We careened around the arc of the taxi circle at the runway’s end and finally, blessedly, drew to a halt.

In the dining room of the Hilton Hotel on Copper Avenue that evening, I asked her, “What the hell happened today?”

“When?” she asked, nonchalantly cutting a bite of a big medium rare filet of beef.

“When we almost landed,” I reminded her, “then had to land again?”

She shrugged. She was still in her plaid shirt and knotted scarf—we hadn’t taken time to wash up for dinner, Amy being too hungry to bother. “Technically,” she said, “we were in a stall.”

“Jeez, I hate it when a plane crashes on a technicality.”

She smirked, waved that off, chewed, swallowed, not wanting to be impolite and talk with her mouth full.

“We didn’t crash, silly. We were just caught in a momentary vacuum…. It’s as if all the air pressure got suddenly sucked from the controls.”

“So you put the plane on the ground at full throttle.”

“That seemed to me to be the best option.”

“Isn’t that a pretty good trick?”

“It is if you can get away with it.”

I raised my rum and Coke to her; it was all I was having. “Here’s to one hell of a pilot.”

She liked that. “Thanks, Nathan.” She raised her water glass to me. “Here’s to one hell of a guy.”

That was one of the few times I ever heard her swear, and I took it as a high compliment.

At the door to her suite, I asked, “Need a neck rub tonight? Or maybe just some company?”

Halfway inside already, she smiled almost sadly and said, “No, I don’t think so, thanks. I have to call G. P., write a few letters, then I want to get to bed nice and early.”

I’d been hoping to get to bed nice and early myself; only, not alone.

Maybe she could read my mind, because just before she shut herself in her room, she touched my face, tenderly, with the tips of those long tapering fingers. “Cheerio, Nathan…. We have another long day in the air, tomorrow…and I want to be alert, in case it’s eventful.”

But it wasn’t, really. Smooth flying over the brown and tan and salmon vistas of New Mexico, Arizona, and California, canyons and mesas and only the occasional stray city-boy thought that surviving a crash in this country would mean keeping company with sand and lizards and cactuses. She would dip down low enough to provide a good look at this delightful desolation, the Vega’s cool shadow racing across the godforsaken landscape, where occasional dabs of green were like parsley sprigs on a big empty plate.

The late-afternoon landing at Burbank was blessedly free of unexpected crosswinds and technical stalls. We were close to the ocean now and desert vistas had given way to a breathtaking view of green hills bordering the fertile San Fernando Valley, mountain ranges beyond, some snow-capped, with Burbank and its United Airport nestled in the flatlands between.

The runways below were the five spreading arms of a flattened octopus whose head was a sprawling terminal identified by white letters painted on the tarmac before it:
UNITED AIRPORT
. On the runways at left and right of the modernistic, T-shaped terminal, giving it plenty of breathing room, were buildings that from my cabin window looked like flat square matchboxes but were actually massive corrugated-metal hangars, their roofs labeled
UNITED
and
BURBANK
respectively. Amy set gently down, with none of the melodrama of yesterday’s landing, and we taxied, pulling up before a huge hangar door, over which white painted letters added up to
UNITED AIR SERVICES LIMITED
.

We were greeted by a trio of the airfield equivalent of grease monkeys, one of whom provided the ladder for Amy to climb down from the cockpit; she greeted them by name (“Howdy, Jim!,” “Hey, Ernie!,” “Tod, what do you know?”). A fourth man, who brought up the rear in the confident manner of a commanding officer who allows his troops to lead the charge, wore a gray suit and a lighter gray shirt with a gray and black tie and looked as dapper as a movie star, or anyway a movie executive. Small but with a solid, square-shouldered build, he was almost handsome, with bright dark brown eyes, a jutting nose, and a jaunty jutting chin; his slicked-back black hair and slip of a mustache were apparently on loan from Clark Gable.

He and Amy embraced and patted each other on the back like long-lost pals. Both had smiles that threatened to split their faces.

“How’s my girl?” he asked her. “Ready for another foolhardy adventure?”

“Always,” she said, unbuckling her helmet, yanking it off, shaking her mop of curls. “Paul, this is my friend Nathan Heller; he’s been my one-man security team on this lecture tour. Nathan, this is Paul Mantz—he’s the mastermind behind my record flights.”

I had already guessed as much, but extended my hand and said, “Mr. Mantz, I’ve heard big things about you.”

Amy glanced at me, wondering what those big things might be, and I wondered if I’d misspoken: she had never mentioned Mantz to me—everything I knew about the man had come from G. P.

“Call me Paul,” he said, as we shook hands, his grip showing off his strength a little, “and I’ll take the liberty of calling you Nate…and as for what you’ve heard about me, it’s just possible some of it’s true.”

“Well, for one thing, I hear you’re the best stunt pilot in Hollywood.”

He twitched a smile and I sensed some annoyance. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not really a stunt pilot…what I am is a precision pilot. I leave stunts to the fools, kids, and amateurs. By which I mean, the soon to be deceased.”

Amy allowed the three mechanics to take over the Vega, and, with her in the middle, she and Mantz and I walked slowly toward the looming hangar. He had his arm around her, casually; it was hard to tell whether it represented a brotherly familiarity or something else.

“What have you got in mind for me and my baby?” she asked him.

“Angel, the boys in St. Louis have already increased your fuel capacity. I’ve got new magnetic and aperiodic compasses to install and check, we’re upgrading the directional bank and turn indicators, adding improved fuel and temperature gauges, plus a tachometer and a supercharger pressure gauge.”

“Is that all?” she asked mockingly.

“No. I’m gonna have Ernie overhaul the Pratt and Whitney again.”

She frowned at him. “You really think that’s necessary? That engine purred like a kitten, all the way from St. Louis to here. I ran into a wind shear landing at Albuquerque and it performed like a well-tuned race car. You can ask Nathan.”

My opinion, which was that the landing in question had scared holy hell out of me, may not have shed any light on this discussion of technical matters.

But we never got to my opinion; Mantz was already shaking his head, no. “Better safe than sorry. And as for you, young lady, I’ve got a new toy for you to play with…”

We were inside the cavernous hangar now, the golden dying sun filtering in lazily through the many-paned high windows. Half a dozen monoplanes were parked within the tool-littered hangar, including a Vega like Amy’s, only this one was painted red and white with the words
HONEYMOON EXPRESS
painted on the side, in a heart pierced by cupid arrows. Amy had told me earlier that her Vega had no nickname (unlike her famous
Friendship
and Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
) because G. P. figured giving the plane a name and a personality might detract from Amelia Earhart.

“Here’s your new best friend, angel,” Mantz said, stepping away from her, gesturing like a ringmaster to his center ring attraction. “The Link blind-flying trainer.”

And here was another little red plane, only this really was a little red plane, not much bigger than the ones that kids went ’round and ’round in at Riverview Park. With its tiny white wings and a precious white-scalloped tail and the words
UNITED
AIR SERVICES
stenciled on its side, the squat fat-nosed trainer had a cockpit lid with no windows, and was elevated from the ground like a carousel horse.

“You’re joking,” she said.

But he wasn’t.

“Angel, as long as you insist on letting that goddamn Gippy con you into these long-distance flights…”

“G. P. doesn’t con me into anything,” she said firmly.

“Well, then, if you insist on trying to prove to yourself that you really are that Amelia Earhart person they write about in the papers, you had better learn some goddamn discipline.”

“I’ve had plenty of blind-flying training,” she said dismissively. “Anyway, I don’t like that term.”

“Call it instrument flying, then. Or dead reckoning—and dead is what you’ll be, angel, if you don’t face the reality of how often your life depends on an ability to fly precise compass headings through the shittiest weather known to God or man.”

“Let’s call it zero-visibility flying.”

“Fine. Call it Mickey and Minnie Mouse in the Tunnel of Love, as far as I give a damn. But over the next several weeks, angel, your pretty behind resides in that red tin can.”

And he gave her pretty behind a couple playful pats, and she laughed and said, “All right, all right, you evil man,” and somebody cleared their throat.

Actually, somebody cleared
her
throat, because it was a woman doing it, a redhead with green eyes and a pert nose and full red-rouged lips and a complexion like fresh cream and a chassis better constructed than any plane on that airfield.

“Isn’t this a cozy sight?” she said, her voice high-pitched, with a hint of Southwestern twang.

It was the least attractive thing about her. She was poised just inside the hangar, and for a fairly small woman, she threw a long shadow. Her frock was a sheer white polka-dot organdy with a draped cowl neck and bare arms, which were folded under the rounded wonders that were her breasts; she had her weight on one leg, though both legs—judging by the sleekly nyloned and well-turned ankles—were worth considering.

“Myrtle,” Amy said, and her voice seemed warm, as did her smile, “how delightful to see you!”

And Amy walked toward the woman with her arms outstretched.

Mantz whispered to me, “That’s the little woman.”

“You’re a lucky man.”

“There’s all kinds of luck.”

Amelia Earhart had now reached Myrtle Mantz, whose icy demeanor seemed suddenly to melt and the redhead accepted, and reciprocated, the hug Amy offered.

I was still trying to figure out what to make of that when they walked toward us, hand in hand, Myrtle’s high heels clicking on the cement floor, echoing in the high-ceilinged space like gunfire. Myrtle was smiling, now; a dazzler it was, too, with no gaps.

“Have you seen the torture chamber your husband’s arranged for me?” Amy asked Myrtle, and the two girls—chums now—peeked in and around the little red plane. Myrtle stood on tippy-toe and, under the organdy dress, the globes of her perfect behind were like firm ripe melons; as much as I admired Amy’s tomboyish pulchritude, Mantz was definitely a guy who didn’t need to leave the house to find a pretty behind to pat.

Shortly thereafter we recommenced to the Union Terminal’s Sky Room, a quaint mix of linen tablecloths, airplane memorabilia and cumbersome dude ranch furnishings. Birds tweeting in cages spoke more of captivity than flight, while a wall of windows looked out over endless runways where the bigger birds of United, Western, and TWA came and went; as dusk turned to evening, floodlights turned the tarmac to instant noon.

Mantz sat beside his wife but across from Amy; I was next to Amy and across from Mrs. Mantz, who was so gorgeous I instantly composed a private, filthy limerick about her, utilizing the word “pants” as the punchline.

A cocky, swaggering little guy, Mantz did most of the talking at dinner, frequently laughing at his own jokes. But mostly he was coaching his star pupil.

“You know you have a tendency to push your engine to the limit,” he said to Amy. We had finished our dinner—everyone had fresh seafood of one kind or another, delicious—and he was working on his third frost-rimmed martini.

“Of course,” Amy said, over her inevitable cup of cocoa. “The extra power makes up for the headwinds.”