PULP ORIGINALS
Harry Whittington's
THE DEVIL WEARS WINGS
They gave me the okay from the control tower and I told the girl to take it down. I had been telling her she was going to be all right, and sometimes it looked as if she’d make it, but now I knew better. I had been upstairs with her for about an hour and this was more than enough. I needed a drink, I needed to lie down somewhere until the knots in my stomach loosened; what I really needed was to vomit. She sank the stabilizer, but pulled back too far and I tried to keep my voice level as I warned her to take it easy. When I spoke, she went to sweat and rode the brake. The tires struck concrete, squealing. We hopped straight up about twenty feet and I didn’t say anything. But when the Cessna’s right wing-tip scorched the runway, that’s when I really yelled.
I put my lungs and my guts into it. That yell had been stacking up in me for a long time and when I finally unfroze her and took the controls and taxied along the chute toward the hangar, the woman, the plane and I were still trembling.
I cut the engine, killing it in the shadow of the damnedest sign I ever saw. It compounded the illness in me every time I brought in a plane, walked toward it, or remembered it over a beer. Sunpark International Airport is a sprawling flat with take-off patterns that accommodate the new jet service ships. It is a way station between Miami, New Orleans, Havana, South America, New York. Huge metal cribs house Eastern, Delta, American, Pan-Am ASA. All the big lines touch down there, but as far as I was concerned that sign, sprawled across the entrance of Hangar 2, dwarfed and mocked everything else on the field.
“Smiling Jimmy Clark Can Teach You to Fly.” Jimmy Clark’s smiling face covered the whole left end of the sign, and his face was bigger than his plane. I always mistrust a man who eternally smiles, and he had the kind of smile that made my skin crawl. His thick red hair was like a tight skull cap over a short forehead and squinted blue eyes you still couldn’t see into even when his photo was blown up bigger than his own estimation of himself.
One thing you had to admit about that picture. It was a perfect likeness. The only lie was the sign itself. Jimmy Clark couldn’t teach you to fly. He’d been piloting planes for twenty-five years and still was no flier. Jimmy Clark could smile though. His photo proved this.
My pupil got out of the Cessna first, still shaken, and very pale. “I guess I washed out,” she said.
I jumped out on the grease-spotted cement beside her. I was aware of a dozen things at once: grease jockeys grin-ning in a knot inside the shadowed hangar watching us but pretending they weren’t; the pattern of black sky-chutes in geometric lines dictated by the wind’s will; the neon passenger-service signs glowing palely in the stark white sunlight; Jimmy Clark standing in the doorway of his glass--partitioned office and not smiling; the look of illness in the girl’s face. But mostly I was thinking my legs felt as though I’d finally reached shore after wading a long time in a rough surf.
“I washed out. I really washed out,” she said. I glanced at her and that’s when I realized she was bearing down too hard on it. She wanted me to lie to her. She wasn’t upset because of her miserable exhibition of flying; she was dis-turbed because I’d wailed at her like a dying weasel. She didn’t want the truth at all.
I watched a fly crawl across the breast of her flying jacket. She’d bought expensive, fashionable flying togs.
I felt myself tightening up again. I hadn’t disliked her before, but suddenly I saw her as she really was, and it was everything I’d lived to hate in a female. She had this chopped hair and a full-fed face and flat eyes you can’t see into and a superior air that was bred into her from the day she was born expecting everything handed to her and get-ting it. She was full in the face, full in the breasts, full in the hips because she’d been fed and pampered and spoiled until she was soft everywhere except in her attitude toward other people, women who crossed her and men who didn’t snap to heel.
I pulled my gaze up to her face. She was slightly taller than I, because let’s face it, the only place I’m a big man is behind the controls of a plane. I touch five-seven standing on the ground. I find myself looking up to most guys, and some women. Nobody ever hated standing on the ground more than I did once I learned to fly.
“I’m no damn good. I’m never going to learn, Buz.”
I licked my tongue around the inside of my mouth. It felt cottony dry. I needed a drink and couldn’t help looking toward the Rudder upstairs in the clean-lined, blue-metal--and-glass administration building. The kindliest thing I could think to tell her at the moment was that even some birds aren’t equipped to fly. But I wasn’t feeling very kindly.
“Are you mad with me, Buz?”
“Why should I be mad?” I couldn’t help it if my voice shook slightly.
“You are mad. I don’t blame you. I almost wrecked the plane, almost killed both of us.”
I squinted against the sun. “I’ve been nearer dead plenty of times.”
“But not because of stupidity.”
“You got a point there.”
She caught her breath, drew herself up and I saw the resentment and anger in her eyes. I could also see the college she attended, the sorority she ruled. She could say what she liked about herself; it was all clever and joking anyhow. But me she had paid some money. She had paid me to lie to her, to make her look as good as those tailored togs.
The fly got tired and flew away. The fly was lucky.
“You could be a little nice about it.” Her mouth got sulky. I could feel the trembling start in my stomach. I could be nice to her, help her get a license, invite her to take off and kill herself and any innocent bystanders. I wanted to give it to her straight. As far as I could see, a woman driving a car was bad enough, but a woman at the controls of a plane just didn’t make pretty good sense. I was even willing to admit this was just one man’s opinion. All I wanted was to tell her the truth.
I glanced across her shoulder and saw Jimmy Clark poised to smile in his office doorway.
He didn’t have to say it: Who did I think I was? The C.A.A.? God? Did I think I owned this flying school? If I chased away paying customers, who would buy my beer?
“We all get nervous,” I said.
“Yes.” She was mollified. ‘I just got nervous. I don’t know what was the matter. The earth was rushing up at me. It scared hell out of me. I know better.”
“Sure you do. Buz Johnson’s your teacher. You got to know better.”
“What went wrong, Buz?”
I wanted to hit her. My fist was a soggy doughnut at the end of my arm. I wanted to tell her what went wrong: You got up this morning, doll. You put on those fancy togs and you drove out here, that’s what went wrong.
Aloud, I said, “You got to take it easier. A big healthy doll like you. You got muscles. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Okay?”
She felt better; she forgave me. She squeezed my arm and walked away. I watched it for a while.
She could walk all right.
After a minute, Clark whistled me to heel. I turned around, feeling the sun bite into my shoulders, and walked into the hangar toward him. I wanted to get in out of the heat anyway.
Besides, where I was standing, I could still see that sign.
READ WHITTINGTON'S 'I REMEMBER IT WELL'
READ JASON STARR'S INTRODUCTION TO HARRY WHITTINGTON
Link to: Crimeculture Noir Originals
