The Rocketeer Read online

  The door to the café was situated smack in the fake animal’s belly, and at that moment a large, genuine bulldog was scraping at the door, asking to be let in.

  Millie, wearing a gingham dress with white apron, came to the door in response to the animal’s pathetic whining, but her face was stern. “Forget it, Butch,” she said. “I’d let you in, but that genius over there”—she pointed in annoyance in the direction of Cliff Secord, who was seated opposite Jenny in a booth—“had to go and feed you some beef jerky. You know what that stuff does to you. I can’t have you in here stinking up the joint.”

  Butch whined for sympathy and lay down on his side, looking pathetic and questioning.

  “I know, I know,” said Millie in irritation. “Was up to me, I’d’ve thrown Cliff out with you. Thought he was being funny, Mr. Secord did. But he’s here with his girl and all and, well, you know how it is.”

  Butch looked up at her and obviously didn’t know how it was.

  Millie sighed. “Wait here.” Moments later she returned with a large soup bone which she tossed to Butch, and the obnoxiously homely dog caught it in his large mouth and trotted away, satisfied with the transaction.

  Millie walked back to behind the counter, but not before stopping to give Cliff a quick rap on the head with a frying pan. This drew amused laughter from Skeets, Goose, and Malcolm. “Hey!” Cliff protested.

  “That’s for giving Butch the beef jerky,” she said.

  “I could get amnesia or something!” Cliff told her, rubbing his head. “Forget how to fly, or where I live or my phone number or something.”

  “Phone number!” said Jenny suddenly. “Oh, thanks for reminding me, Millie. I’ve got a new phone number.”

  “Wish she’d picked a way to remind you that was easier on my noggin,” Cliff said.

  “They changed the number on the pay phone at the boardinghouse,” she said. “We were one digit off from a movie theater, and people kept calling and asking us for the times.”

  Cliff patted himself down. “Anybody got a piece of paper Jenny can write her new number on?” he called out.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said, and she got up and went to the wall next to the café’s phone. Nearby were framed photos and other aviation mementos. And around the phone was a series of various phone numbers written right on the wall. Jenny pulled out the pen she always kept with her, not wanting to be caught short the first time someone might ask for her autograph, and wrote ‘Jenny’ on the wall, followed by her number and, as always, her trademark heart with the arrow through it. Then she put the pen back and returned to the table.

  By this point Cliff had recovered enough from the unexpected visitation on his skull by a skillet to remember what he’d been in the middle of saying. “Oh, the Sinclair film!” he said.

  “Yeah, you were tellin’ us about it,” Goose said.

  “Right. Right. So . . . get this, fellas! At the end of the movie he flies over the enemy trenches and drops a bottle of champagne!”

  “Let me guess!” said Goose. “It hits the general and we win the war, right?” This drew a chorus of guffaws from the fliers. They were used to the Hollywood depiction of themselves as all-powerful heroes, but giving good booze to the bad guys . . . uh-uh.

  Privately, Jenny had thought it was a bit much herself, but she was the one who had chosen the movie and talked it up, and she felt constrained to defend it. “It was symbolic!” she said. “He was being chivalrous!”

  “Where’d he get it?” asked Skeets. “The champagne, I mean. They didn’t have liquor stores at the front.”

  “Not that I can recall,” Malcolm said thoughtfully, giving the impression that he was actually trying to remember if there had been liquor stores. “Would’a been nice . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter where he got it, the point is . . . oh, forget it,” Jenny said in exasperation. She turned to Millie, figuring a woman would understand. “It was so romantic, Millie. I cried and cried. Neville was wonderful.”

  “ ‘Neville’?” said Cliff, making no attempt to hide his irritation. “Guy’s never been up in a plane, much less flown one.”

  “Who cares?” said Millie. “He’s a living doll.”

  At that moment Patsy, Millie’s ten-year-old daughter, approached Malcolm. With her brown hair in braids and her general tomboyish attitude, she reminded Millie so much of herself at that age that she found it hard to believe she wasn’t staring into a mirror that showed the past. Patsy, wearing a plaid shirt and blue overalls, was carrying a little tin airplane with a broken wheel.

  Malcolm smiled down at her. He’d remembered the day she was born, and now here she was, more like a genuine person every day.

  “Malcolm, the wheel came off,” she said.

  “Lemme see, princess,” said Malcolm. “Give it to me, we’ll fix it up.”

  “Give it to Cliff, he’ll fly it,” laughed Goose. Jenny looked at him in mild confusion and Cliff shot Goose a look that immediately shut him up.

  Malcolm, meantime, said to Patsy while studying the plane, “Did I ever tell you about the time I got shot down by the Red Baron?”

  Patsy innocently began to nod her head, rather emphatically. But then she caught her mother pointedly shaking her head and giving her the “be polite” stare. So Patsy instantly shifted gears and started shaking her head just as Malcolm looked up.

  “No?” he said, pleased. He could’ve sworn he had. Well, so much the better. As he began fiddling with the toy, he said, “Well, there I was, flying patrol over the Ardennes, when all of a sudden he came screamin’ out of the sun, guns blazing!” Behind him, unseen, Skeets was miming the actions, to the amusement of the other fliers. “I tried to loop, but he stuck to my tail like a dirty diaper. ‘Fore I knew it, my bird was shot to tatters. I musta fell for half an hour, and then smack—!”

  And the wheel from Patsy’s plane shot out of Malcolm’s grasp and landed with a splash in Jenny’s soup. Droplets sprayed all over her blouse.

  “Bull’s-eye, ace,” said Cliff in annoyance.

  “I’m sorry, Jenny,” Malcolm apologized as Jenny dabbed at her blouse with a napkin.

  Cliff fished the wheel out of the soup for her as she said, “That’s okay, Malcolm.” Then, lowering her voice, she said to Cliff, “Elegant dining here at the Bulldog. Once in a while it wouldn’t hurt to try a new place . . . away from the airfield.”

  Cliff felt as if he’d had this conversation a hundred times before. “What’ll it be? The Copa or the Brown Derby? How ’bout the South Seas Club while you’re dreaming?”

  She nodded eagerly. “Yeah! Someplace an actress can get noticed.”

  “And a guy can get skinned!” Cliff protested. “For the cost of dessert in one of those joints, I could overhaul an engine.”

  “I’m not saying all the time . . .” she began, and then she sighed. She smiled in that way that she had, and Cliff simply melted and they took each other’s hands. “Okay,” she said, offering a compromise. “How about this? We’ll have a real night out on the town after you win the Nationals.”

  There was a dead silence from the other fliers as they traded uncomfortable glances. Cliff tried to nod unconvincingly, and now Jenny knew that something was definitely up.

  But it was Malcolm, oblivious to anything unless it was spelled out for him, who swiveled around on the stool and said, “You’re flying in the Nationals after all? I’m glad to hear it, after that landing today.”

  Millie quickly stepped in with a pot of coffee. “How ’bout a warm-up, Malcolm,” she said, hoping to distract him.

  Jenny looked accusingly at Cliff. “You said there were a few bumps.”

  Before Cliff could respond, Malcolm laughed loudly. “Boy, I’ll say! You shoulda seen it. Folded like a kite when she hit the pavement. We thought ol’ Cliffie’s number was up, what with the fire and all.”

  Realizing that subtlety was a lost cause, Millie whacked him with a spoon. He stopped in confusion, looked at the fac
es of the others, and suddenly realized that his big mouth had just landed Cliff in a barrelful of trouble.

  “I was going to tell you,” said Cliff.

  Jenny’s voice could have steamed wallpaper off the wall. “When? After the milkman found out?”

  “Jenny, losing his plane isn’t something a pilot goes bragging about!” said Cliff. The heads of the other pilots bobbed up and down in confirmation. “I . . . didn’t want to spoil our evening.”

  “That’s very thoughtful,” she said. “Thank you. You’d rather make a fool of me.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “I don’t want you to be sorry!” she said in frustration. “I want you to stop treating me like a china cup! Cliff, when something goes wrong, I should be the first to know, not the last.”

  “Honey, everybody else knows because they were there!”

  Immediately Cliff knew that hadn’t sounded right. It came out sounding accusatory, and that was exactly the way Jenny took it before he could clarify. “I had an audition! It was important!”

  But now her use of the word important irritated Cliff, sending him from defensive and guilty to annoyed on his own behalf. Resentments he had thought long gone bubbled up. “Yeah, just like the time I flew the Regionals. You had a big part. You stood behind Myrna Loy with a bowl of grapes.”

  Jenny threw her napkin down, leapt up, and grabbed her purse. “ ’Night, Millie. Thanks for the soup,” she said, her voice trembling with embarrassment and fury, and then she turned and stalked out of the café.

  Cliff sat there, all eyes on him, hating himself for blowing it so badly. And finally Millie broke the silence by waving her spoon and shouting, “Well, go after her, you dope!”

  Realizing she was right, and knowing what a dope the others thought he was, Cliff immediately bolted from the table and out the door.

  He ran out into the street just in time to see Jenny hopping a bus. “Jenny!” he called out.

  The bus pulled away and Cliff pounded after it, but it disappeared down the street. He stood there, shoulders sagging, and sighed. “Dammit,” he said.

  There was a heavy footfall behind him. “Cliff, I’m sorry,” said Malcolm. “I really put my foot in it, didn’t I?”

  “It’s all right, Malcolm,” sighed Cliff. “It’s not your fault.”

  He walked back to the Bulldog, leaving Malcolm alone and miserable on the street.

  In the simple house that Cliff and Peevy shared, the old mechanic was seated at the dining room table, which was covered with tools, rivets, and scraps of metal. To his right was a simple metal shell that he’d measured off Cliff’s head hours before so that the helmet he was working on would fit just right.

  He couldn’t get over it. When the thing was finished, Cliff would have a hard head and Peevy’s was still undeniably soft. And yet . . .

  In his career, Peevy had worked with the best fliers around. Everybody knew Peevy. When Wiley Post had wanted someone to check over his equipment five years earlier before launching his epic world flight, who’d he called in for a consult? Peevy. To whom did Jimmy Doolittle attribute his success? Peevy. And when that lanky redhead, Amelia Earhart, prepared to fly alone across the Atlantic in 1932, who checked her engine over? Peevy. In fact, in his heart of hearts, Peevy still blamed himself for Amelia’s being lost a year ago in the Pacific—she had invited him to be a permanent part of her staff. But Peevy had been too involved with Cliff’s career at that point, and besides, hell, he was getting too old for flights from New Guinea to Oakland. To this day he still hoped that somehow, through some miracle, that gutsy little woman would turn up.

  There was a lot in Cliff that reminded Peevy of all those great fliers, those phenomenal pioneers. It was remarkable when Peevy considered that his grandparents had crossed the country in a covered wagon, and here he was working on devices that they would have considered flights of fantasy.

  Cliff could be one of the great ones. Cliff could be the great one. Peevy prided himself on spotting young talent and helping it develop, grow, and blossom. Yet it was difficult with someone like Cliff. On the one hand, you didn’t want to extinguish that enthusiasm and guts that made him what he was. On the other hand, you had to temper his moxie with the common sense that only years of experience could bring.

  Of course, when you thought about it, common sense said that flight was impossible unless you were a bird. Certainly Peevy’s father had believed that the first time, the first time that seven-year-old Peevy jumped off the roof with feathers tied to his arm, flapping furiously. If only his father could see him now!

  It was hard to tell where to draw the line.

  As the first strains of “Begin the Beguine” filtered over the radio, Cliff stormed in, threw down his jacket, and went straight to the phone. In those motions Peevy read the probable outcome of the evening with Jenny, but he simply said neutrally, “You’re home early.”

  “Jenny had a seven A.M. call,” said Cliff.

  Peevy smiled in amusement. The first time Jenny had said something like that to Cliff, he demanded to know who was phoning her so early in the morning. She had to explain, without laughing, that it meant she had to be on the set of a movie at that particular time of the morning. So now Cliff was tossing around that same lingo with no problem.

  Of course, that wasn’t the real reason Cliff was back so early, and Peevy figured he might as well be straightforward about it. “What was the fight about?”

  “I don’t know, Peev,” said Cliff in exasperation. “I can’t figure her out.” He stood with the telephone to his ear, letting it ring and ring before he finally hung up. He stood there for a moment and then said, “Maybe she just needs a little more time.”

  He walked off down the hallway, leaving Peevy quietly working at the table and saying to himself, “Don’t give her too much time. ’Cause somebody’s gonna figure that girl out.”

  The radio was broadcasting nothing but dead air as Peevy dozed in an easy chair. Clad in a worn bathrobe, yawning after an uneasy night’s sleep, Cliff shuffled toward the kitchen, stopping only to turn off the radio and toss a blanket over Peevy.

  The amount of debris on the dining room table seemed to have grown exponentially, and in the middle of it was something covered with a large polishing cloth. Cliff reached over and removed the cloth, and then whistled softly at what he saw.

  He picked it up and held it at arm’s length. It was something right out of Metropolis. The morning sunlight glinted off the burnished metal of the helmet, creating a soft and yet powerful glow. An aerodynamic fin curved from the helmet’s crown. Amber lenses were set in the eye sockets, and vents had been cut into the mouth area.

  He whistled and looked at the sleeping mechanic in amazement. “Onward and upward,” he said.

  9

  On the curving stairway of the castle, two expert swordsmen were locked in mortal combat.

  Sir Alec of Trent, dressed in the finery of the English court, parried a thrust from the man who was before him, the man who had the temerity to run about in a dashing, form-fitting black mask and go by the absurd name of the Laughing Bandit. Noblemen and women in the court below gasped in appreciation of Sir Alec’s skill and yet their faces seemed torn in their loyalties. The Laughing Bandit was so heroic, so mysterious . . .

  The bandit leapt down from the stairway directly into the midst of the amazed audience. They backed away to give him room as Sir Alec duplicated the feat. The two men paused, taking a breath, as if sensing that this was the final engagement. Then they came at each other, their footwork unerring, their swords a mutual blur. To those watching it was amazing, two blades practically invisible.

  The bandit pressed the attack, driving Sir Alec back, back, and suddenly Sir Alec was amazed to find that he had run out of room, his back against a stone column. The momentary lapse was potentially fatal against an opponent of the Laughing Bandit’s skill, and the masked man did not miss it. The sword flashed out and knocked Sir Alec’s rapier to the ground
. An instant later the point of the bandit’s sword was at the throat of Sir Alec.

  The nobleman drew himself up and radiated disdain, even now, when his demise was imminent. “What, kill me as I stand? I thought you were a sporting man.”

  “True,” said the Laughing Bandit with his famed insouciance. “I would hate to stain my legend on a villain such as you.”

  The bandit’s swordpoint stabbed forward to a different target—the red rose on Sir Alec’s tunic, which he flicked through the air to land in the hands of a beautiful noblewoman.

  Sir Alec’s face purpled with rage as the Laughing Bandit then, in an utter show of self-confidence, flipped the nobleman’s sword to him with the toe of his boot.

  It was clear at that moment that Sir Alec knew he could not beat the bandit man to man, but that wouldn’t stop him. Alec immediately bolted, and the bandit took off in pursuit.

  Sir Alec charged up another winding stone stairway, running higher and higher as the bandit unhesitatingly pursued him. Just as the bandit was about to catch up with him, near the top, three guards appeared practically out of nowhere.

  The bandit hesitated, and then realized that he was in trouble when two more guards advanced from behind, blocking his escape.

  Sir Alec now stood five steps in front of him, a smug expression on his face. “Prepare to die, that we may learn the true identity of the Laughing Bandit!”

  “Why wait?” shot back the Laughing Bandit.

  He ripped off his mask and there was a collective gasp from the noblemen upon seeing those fierce eyes and sculpted features. “It’s Sir Reginald!” cried out a nobleman.

  “None other!” declared Sir Reginald and, using the moment of surprise, thrust forward with his sword. The point struck home and Sir Alec gasped, clutching at his chest. His eyes rolled back and he tumbled off the stairway toward the castle floor below.

  With a roar of fury the troops of the late Sir Alec charged Sir Reginald, a.k.a. the Laughing Bandit. The bandit leapt off the stairway, grabbing a lanyard that was anchoring a chandelier, and swung in a graceful arc to the banquet table below.