The Devil Wears Wings Read online

***

  I taxied the Cessna back under Jimmy Clark's sign and Coates and I hit the cement. Clark was waiting in his office doorway wearing his smile like a cash register.

  Coates thanked me and went inside the hangar to pay Clark. I watched his loose-gaited shuffle a moment but didn't wait for him. There wasn't anything more I could tell him. Sometime, somewhere he'd begun flight training, dropped it. He could resume it again, or not, that was his own decision to make.

  I was thirsty.

  I heard the pound of his shoes on the cement behind me. He was running in the sun to overtake me. I paused beside a chain-link fence outside Eastern's loading ramp. Men in coveralls and baseball caps were loading small trailers with suitcases and packages. On the runway a DC-7 was warming up, a pilot shouting out his window to the men on the ground below him. He was pointing to something on the right wing. For an instant, without meaning to at all, I listened to the revving engines. They sounded like Swiss clock movement. I glanced over my shoulder, putting all that out of my mind. Coates was breathing through his mouth when he came alongside.

  "Buy you a drink, Buz?"

  I looked him over, trying to find something in his pout-lipped face. There was nothing but the lopsided smile. But at least he'd dropped this business about wanting to be a flier, the kind of flier a man like Buz Johnson would admire. Here was a boy with a gimmick. I saw he wanted something.

  I don't usually reject any offers of drinks, but I didn't want what went with this boy's offer.

  "I don't think so," I said.

  He grinned, wriggling his brows. "What's the matter, Buz? You don't drink?"

  The way he said this I knew he'd learned plenty about me, and nobody ever learned anything about Buz Johnson without hearing early about his bar time.

  It angered me. Whatever I was, it was my business.

  "What do you want, Coates?"

  He gave me that other-world smile and the flat eyes.

  "Do I have to want something?"

  "You don't have to. But you do."

  He grinned. "Smart man."

  "Forget it. I haven't got any."

  "How do you know until we talk it over?"

  "Maybe I'm tired. But so long." I walked away from him. He hesitated less than a second and then strode after me, his stilt-like legs working like scissor blades.

  "Come on, Buz." He sounded exasperated. "We can have a drink together."

  "Why?"

  "Any law against it?"

  "I don't know. Depends on what you want."

  "My God. I like you. I want to be friendly."

  People brushed by us on both sides, hurrying toward the loading gate. I watched my shortened shadow for a moment. I didn't try to keep the impatience out of my voice.

  "You a lipso?"

  "A what?"

  "A pansy. A diver. A queer."

  "My God." He laughed. "What makes you think that?"

  "I don't know. You're something. You want something."

  He nodded and we moved forward again, going against the current of chattering hurrying people. The p.a. system crackled out its last call for this flight. "Yes. I want something. But I'm not on the make for you." His laugh had an off-key sound. "Not this week. This week, everything is girls with me."

  "So what you want?"

  "Got a deal to discuss with you."

  I stopped walking a few feet outside the glass doors of the administration building. The sun was hot against my head.

  I squinted slightly against the glare.

  "A deal?"

  "Might be a job for you."

  "What kind of job?"

  "You care? You need a good job, don't you?"

  "Scram."

  "You fool nobody." He stopped smiling, gave me a condescending pout. "Teaching dames to wreck planes. Taking lip from a jerk like that guy back there."

  "I do all right."

  "All right? Beer money. This is big. A real job."

  "Doing what?"

  "Flying. That's your racket, ain't it?"

  I exhaled slowly. "This deal. Is it crooked?"

  He shrugged. His brows moved as if they were laughing all by themselves at how naпve one guy could get. Then he laughed, throwing it away. "What else?"

  I turned and walked away from him.

  I pushed open one of the glass doors. It felt chill against my hand, and the air conditioning cooled my face as I went through.

  He ran after me. People glanced up from their leather chairs in the waiting area.

  "Wait a minute. Don't get so holy."

  "Get lost, Coates."

  "I told you. This isn't just some crooked deal. It's big."

  "I heard you."

  "We can talk about it, can't we?"

  "I'm a drunk," I said. "Not a thief."

  I walked away from him again. This time I meant it and he didn't follow me. But when I was three or four steps away from him, he laughed.

  "Not everybody is a drunk," he said after me. "But we're all thieves."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I felt better after I'd had a whisky-and-beer in the Rudder. Only two things lifted me up any more: a good plane or a couple of drinks.

  I sat on this stool, leaning on the bar, liking the looks and feel of this

  place, liking everything about it except the reflection of myself I kept bumping into when I stared straight ahead into the shadowy mirror. Even the shadowyness couldn't hide from me what I was. Forget it, boy, I told myself, maybe you aren't licked yet.

  Maybe I wasn't licked, but I wasn't a boy any more, either. I still wanted the things I had wanted ten years ago and fifteen years ago. I had changed, but the things I wanted hadn't and were still as far removed as ever.

  "How's it going, Buz?" the bartender said. He had dose-cropped brown hair, close-shaved, round, chubby face, a neat white jacket. He

  complemented the vaguely lighted, swankly appointed Rudder Room. That was what I liked about this place, the quiet atmosphere of elegance. I hated hot, sweaty joints. This was the sort of drinking spot I wished I could afford.

  I shrugged, motioned for a refill.

  "Hear your pupil almost planted you this morning."

  News travels fast around an airfield. I nodded. "She acted like she was mad at me."

  "Somebody says she's not too large in the learning."

  "She might make it, but it's going to be hard for her. Like impossible."

  "Some social dame, isn't she?"

  "Oh, she'll have a swank funeral." I lifted my glass. "I drink to her."

  "Maybe you could teach her something else, Buz."

  "Not me. Those rich dames-"

  Somebody sat on the stool beside me. I was the only one at the bar at ten in the morning; the bar was lined with empty stools. I didn't have to look to see who it was.

  "You mind?" Coates said.

  "It's a public bar."

  "Yeah. That's the way I figured it."

  "I see you also waited until I'd had two drinks. You just don't know my capacity." I glanced up at the bartender. "Ollie, tell him about my capacity."

  "In quarts or litres?" Ollie said.

  "It's not like that at all," Coates said. "You see, I got to thinking. I mean - what we were talking about. I wanted to come in and ask you to forget it."

  "So okay."

  "Fine. I mean, hell, you're not interested. I mean, I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention what I said to anybody."

  I didn't bother answering that.

  He finished off a martini, sat twisting the glass stem in his fingers. His hands were thin and white with knobby knuckles. I didn't know what this boy had accumulated, but whatever it was, he'd never worked for it. His fingers and palms were hospital-white and uncalloused.

  He said, "It was just that-well, I'd heard so much about you. You've got a war record a yard long. I mean, I really have heard about you. I mean even that freight airline you ran after the war."

  I stared at the wet place on the bar, thinking about that freigh
t line. We got hard-up and flew a consignment of shrimp in our only plane and this was the coup-de-grace that put us out of business. We couldn't fly anything but shrimp after that; they wouldn't even let us belly up to a hangar. We had to park our crate out far afield, and downwind. We stunk even worse than business. It felt fine now, remembering it, though. There were worse times. We were our own mechanics. If our plane developed engine trouble in Central America, we had to fly down there and repair it ourselves. We could hitch air-rides, but couldn't afford to pay mechanics.

  My mind moved forward, following that line of thought, the way it will sometime. You start with a simple thought and it'll drag you through a lot of complicated thoughts. Our air-freight line continued losing money and we went out of business and nobody noticed. I hooked on with an airfreight service that was larger than our operation: this boy owned three Air Force surplus planes.

  I felt the sharp twist of agony. I could still feel this guy's fist twisted in my shirt pulling me up so I was as tall as he was. He had to hold me there because I was too potted to stand alone. You're fired, Johnson, you're fired, you damned drunk. Anybody who'd let you fly their planes is a damned fool and I'm no damned fool. I wriggled, I could speak distinctly enough to make him understand me, even if I couldn't make him care. I yelled at him. I can fly better dead drunk, I told him, than you can dead sober. His voice was hard, and all the old friendship we'd had during the war and after it was gone. Maybe you can, he said, but not for my company.

  Sitting in the air-conditioned Rudder Room now, I ordered another

  drink, quick, trying to blur the pain of that memory. I had liked that guy. We had logged a lot of hours together. I had wanted him to like me because we'd been together a lot of times, a lot of places we could never forget, when we tried. Besides, this was the nineteenth or twentieth job I'd had since they agreed to let me resign my Air Force commission, but even that wasn't what was important. This guy was a nice joe, and he was a flier, and I wanted to be a nice joe, and work around a guy that was my kind of flier. And he didn't want me around because when I took a drink with him, I couldn't stop drinking, and I was a lush and nobody trusted a lush when his chance of staying in business rode every time one of his planes took off. Hell, I couldn't even blame him.

  I glared around the quiet room, hearing the piped-in music, seeing the bottles stacked so the indirect lighting danced in them, everything swank and quietly elegant, and me sitting there in it tormented and sweated because I was remembering something there was no sense remembering and all because some slob with a gimmick wouldn't let me alone.

  I turned on the stool and looked at him, the pale hair, the pale lashes, the thin face. If ever a guy turned it to clabber…

  "Why don't you get lost?" I said. I was louder than the music, louder than the rumble of a revving ship out on the runways. Ollie glanced up, polishing glasses behind the bar. Everybody knew Buz Johnson. He could be trouble when he got a load on.

  Coates turned his glass upside down, trapping the olive under it and rolling it around on the damp bar.

  "I don't know," he said. "Just trying to be friendly."

  "I got my own friends."

  "Sure you have. But you got any friends that can help you latch on to a hundred grand?"

  My face twisted. I could feel it rutting, feel it twist, getting ugly so the ugliness hurt. I stared at the glass in my fist. Then I threw it down on the bar so it smashed and shards flew. I waited, but Ollie didn't say anything. He was watching a big Eastern DC-7 out on a runway.

  I walked out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I got off the bus at the corner of Crawley and walked east toward my

  apartment, my nostrils still dogged with the fumes from the bus's diesel engine. For me, this was one of the worst effects of being stranded on the ground, the smell of fumes and the people crowding you. Sometimes the whole city crowded me and I got claustrophobia standing in the middle of a street.

  I heard the kids yelling, and somebody said that's where God is, in a kid's yell, but that isn't where God is for me. I felt the sun against my shoulders, sweating out the beer, dehydrating me. I'd thought I could get all the way home without a drink, but I saw now I wasn't going to be able to make it.

  I felt the tensions and the town closing in, riding my shoulders. Sunpark wasn't a bad town, as good as any, fine if you thought any town was good. It had a lot of sunshine, about three hundred thousand people, and squatted on a rim of the Gulf of Mexico. There were tourists, and industry, and shipping and an Air Force base with jets smearing up the sky like a kid with wet chalk.

  I walked past the entrance of my apartment house. Cars rattled the narrow street and the noon-smell of cooking almost smothered me. I saw old men sitting in the sun waiting for lunch and men talking outside small shops. I stepped around some little girls playing jacks on the walk and went in the Old Sarge's Bar on the comer of Eighth.

  I blinked against the beer-cool darkness and saw the only customer in there at this hour was a woman. She sat at the far end of the bar staring into a beer glass and listening to the juke box beside her. I didn't check her because I have one other weakness, too-just any doll won't do. But I didn't want to get involved in that line of thought, either.

  I leaned against the bar between two stools because I owed the Old Sarge some money and I didn't want him to think I could pay off or that I meant to order without admitting I was already on the cuff. These matters are delicate.

  "Hi, Major." The Old Sarge smiled. His face had the look of rare roast beef and wrinkled up around the eyes when he smiled.

  He was polishing glasses, a big man with chunky hands and beefy shoulders, too bulky for the space behind the bar, too big for his whole establishment. The bar was a curved deal along the side of a wall. There were a couple of booths, a few tables, a television set strung from the ceiling, and the juke box glowing like a chameleon. Old Sarge had once displayed a life-size nude behind the bar, something he had found in Italy during the war and lugged through hell to get back here to his place. He said he had gone all through the war thinking how that Italian nude was going to dress up his place when he returned to Sunpark. He'd owned this same bar before they drafted him. But then it had been called The Friendly Bar. He had changed the name when he got home and hung up his nude. The bluenoses had made him take it down four or five years ago.

  "Hello, Sarge," I said. "I'm not fixed to pay up, but I wondered how bad shape my credit is in?"

  He shrugged. "Hell, Major. Four or five weeks. Nothing."

  "You know, Sarge, you're first on my list. The minute-"

  "Look. I know that. Am I hounding you?"

  "It's not that. It's a thirsty day."

  "Say, what's the matter with you, Major? If you can't come here for a few drinks, what the hell? I know you'll pay me. Good Lord, last time how long was it?"

  "You're trying to embarrass me," I said, perching one cheek on a stool.

  "Hell, Major, you know better than that. Look. My wife. You know my wife. God, you don't have to answer that. Everybody this end of town knows my wife-like they used to know the air-raid sirens during the war. Look. Not even my wife worries about your tab. She keeps the books. She raises hell about Reilly, about the Dago. She never has mentioned you one time. Not one time. I'll tell you what, we'll run your tab until my wife complains. How's that? That way it don't have to be between us and we don't have to talk about it. Okay?"

  "I think that sounds fine." I dampened my lips and he poured me a double bourbon and a beer chaser.

  "Not many guys left around here who're like us, Major. Like you and me-guys I can talk to. Not any more. I swear, I don't know what happens to them. Some guys are dead, but some of the others-they act like what we went through never even happened. They don't even care about it any more."

  "They never did care, Sarge."

  "Why should they? They sat on their fat 4-F behinds, walked around

  on their flat feet and made more damned money than the
y could even spend. Why should they care?"

  "I don't know."

  "You know. Major. It's too bad you were commissioned. You could have had one hell of a good time if you'd been a non-com."

  "No. I wouldn't have gotten to fly."

  "Yeah. That's true. Of you. Maybe the officers in the Air Force weren't such stupid bastards as in the Army anyhow. In the Navy now I heard most of the officers had pretty good sense. Most of them just stayed out of the way and let the petty officers run things. And if you don't think the petty officers run the Navy, you just never been in it. Guy in here said their exec stayed in his sack, or at the coffee urn in officer's country and you couldn't find him without radar. The only decisions he would make would be if port side or starboard got first liberty. Anything more than that, he'd get clabbery diarrhea."

  "Most of us were just guys trying to do what they told us. Most of us didn't know how."

  "Except you. You knew how to handle those planes. Eh, Major?"

  I moved the beer mug around on the cool bar. "I guess that was the only time I was ever worth a damn. I thought I was flying for some reason, doing some good. And I came back home to find out I was doing it because I was a jerk without influence enough to get out of it."

  "You had a lot of company, Major."

  "Yeah. That's what made it fine. The best guys in the world were the poor sons of bitches who didn't have influence enough to get out of being there. We really lived, Sarge."

  He kept refilling my glasses. I got to thinking about the war in the Pacific, and later the retread action I'd had in Korea. At the time, it had been hell. But it didn't seem like hell now. I needed those wars. I accomplished something. Some men look back to the town where they were born, the first girl they loved. Me? I seemed to wake up, to come alive when I arrived at that flight school in Georgia. 1942. August. I had a purpose in life. I drank then. We all did. But it was different because we didn't need to drink. We had something else first. Something I didn't have any more.

  Sometimes, it seemed to me, a man needed one more war. They took everything else away from him, the bastards who walked the ground. They hated you and tried to drag you down and show you what a nothing you were without your plane and your war. It got so you remembered the odds against you as a good thing, a chance to live high and go out fast. It sounds trite now, but it was true- so true that it became trite. Just the same, being shot from the air wasn't the worst way to die. Every man got it sometime-and the slow way with the smiling Jimmy Clarks riding you because if he didn't he would feel inferior and he couldn't stand that-could be a lot worse. During the war, you remembered, you lived high, drank hard, spent free. A man couldn't want any more than that.