Glory Boys Read Online Free Page B

Willard had made his pitch – and Powell had bought it. And although the picture was over-schedule, although Daphne O’Hara had just quit right in the middle of filming, although costs were out of control and his precious stunt plane had just crashed, Willard’s luck was staying the course.
    Ted Powell continued to believe, continued to come up with cash. The original sixty-thousand dollar loan had mushroomed. First to eighty, then to a hundred, then to one-twenty, then to an ‘open-ended loan facility’ – banker-speak for don’t-even-ask.
    Willard was a lucky man, born into a lucky family.

5
    The Lundmark kid showed up at seven o’clock sharp, with a pot of coffee and a couple of rolls.
    ‘Feeding me, huh?’
    Abe had been up at dawn, and found nobody yet awake at the hotel. Sooner than wake anyone, he’d come directly to the barn. He’d shaved in a can of hot water brewed over a primus stove, then stripped to the waist and washed under the yard pump. Right now, he was stretched out on a bale of straw, rubbing soft wax into his flying boots and mending a small tear on his jacket.
    ‘I just thought … if you don’t want it, I can…’
    ‘No, Brad, I want it. There are a couple of mugs in there,’ said Abe nodding at the rear cockpit of the broken plane. ‘Green canvas bag.’
    Lundmark approached the plane like it was holy, and came away with a single mug.
    ‘Don’t drink coffee? You’re missing out.’
    Abe sipped his coffee and took a bite of the bread roll.
    ‘We’ll get to work shall we? We’ll need to send away for a new blade,’ Abe indicated the busted propeller. ‘Aside from that, if we can find some timber and a forge, I haven’t seen anything we can’t fix.’
    ‘Really? Wow! You can get it going again, Captain?’
    ‘Careful, Brad. She’s a lady.’
    ‘Huh? Oh. I mean, her. Sorry.’
    ‘Reckon we can. First thing is to send a wire to my friends at Curtiss. Get a new blade out here. There a post office in town?’
    ‘Sure, Captain…’ Lundmark’s reply wasn’t exactly confident.
    Abe was silent for a minute. He’d flown over the town, searching the ground for landing sites. He brought the view to mind. There are an infinity of obstacles that can smash up an aircraft. A cow. A ditch. A rickety fence with a single strand of wire. A boulder. A pothole. A tree stump.
    Or telegraph wire. During the war, a friend of Abe’s had been shot up in a dogfight over enemy lines. With fabric streaming from one wing and controls mushy from German bullets, the plane had limped home. Struggling in to land, barely skimming the tree-tops, the plane had struck a line of telegraph wire. The wheels had snagged. The nose had been yanked down. Pilot and plane had dived into the ground at seventy miles an hour.
    Abe thought back to his view of the town from above. No wires. ‘There’s no telegraph, is there? Where we gotta go? Brunswick?’
    A tiny hesitation. Then: ‘Yeah, Brunswick. Joe Borden takes his cart in on a Tuesday. I guess we could ask him.’
    ‘Good.’
    Abe paused. He’d seen something else from the sky; something that had puzzled him then and was puzzling him even more now. ‘A mile south of here,’ he said, ‘there’s another town.’
    ‘Uh-huh.’ The kid was non-committal, but evasive. He began cleaning invisible muck from a side of the aircraft which enabled him to keep his expression concealed.
    ‘There’s no other town marked on my map. It’s Rand McNally, 1921. I’ve never known ’em to be wrong before. Not that wrong anyways.’
    ‘It’s called Marion. It’s kind of new. Grew up a lot the last couple of years.’
    ‘That’s a lot of growing.’
    ‘I guess.’
    The kid clearly didn’t want to talk, and, though Abe’s intense blue-eyed stare held the boy a few moments longer, he allowed the matter to drop. But it was a puzzle. It wasn’t just that Rand McNally hadn’t marked the town. It was where the town was and what it was.
    What it was, first of all.