I opened my mouth to laugh, then closed it. The biggest object I had ever lifted was a semi-trailer full of Johnny Walker and other fine beverages. (Mr. Skalko was unhappy with certain tariffs due him from the passage of this truck through his territory.) That semi dwarfed Quicksilver.
So the gig seemed possible, in theory. Which is all I’ve ever had. (As my father used to say, “Cash, you violate the laws of gravitation.” To which I usually answered: “I never studied law.”) Nevertheless, the very idea of performing a lift while in space and sitting on a rocket—well, it made me feel as faint as when I was washing Dearborn’s vomit off my flesh.
“I don’t know about this,” I said, perhaps more than once. It was one thing to fantasize about kicking up the dust of Mars with your boots. It was quite another to entrust your life to a crazy foreign man with more money than sense, and a drunken pilot. Oh, yes, on a flight to the Moon!
“The compensation would be of the highest degree,” Tominbang was saying, perhaps more than once and in different ways.
I have many faults, among them slovenliness and laziness, but the greatest of these is greed. So I said, “How much?”
And then he mentioned a figure that would not only buy my cooperation, but my silence and enthusiasm and that of everyone I know for at least a year. “Mr. Tominbang,” I said. “You’ve got a deal.”
(If you’re thinking that I thought I would find Eva-Lynne easier to impress if were a moderately richer man, you would be correct.)
Dearborn uttered a snort at this point, forcing me to look his way. “And what about him?”
“He has already agreed to the terms.” He shook his head. “He really just wants to fly Quicksilver again.”
I said “Oh,” or something equally helpful, then added, “Are we going to dry him out? Seeing as how we’ll be a quarter of a million miles from home and depending on his sobriety?”
“I am searching for a way. I would take him into my own residence, but my travel schedule does not permit it.”
“What about Dearborn’s situation? Does he have a wife?”
“Sadly, Commander Dearborn needs a place to stay.”
I don’t want to recount the rest of the conversation. I must have been weakened by dollar signs, because I agreed to take him in.
Temporarily.
“Doreen threw me out when I told her I had spent the weekend with Tominbang.” Dearborn and I were headed back down Highway 14 toward Palmdale. It was mid-afternoon, but he had awakened from his nap as fresh and perky as a teenager on a Sunday morning. If he had any reservations about going off to live with a man he had just met, not to mention vomited on, he hid them. “She thought that was some kind of code name for a Thai hooker, and that was it.”
“Doreen sounds as though she’s a bit suspicious.”
“Well,” Shoe said. “I may have given her reason to be. On other occasions.” And he laughed. “Hey, does this thing go faster than 55?”
“Not when I’m driving it,” I said. That was one of the hard lessons I had learned in my association with Mr. Skalko: keep a low profile and avoid even the appearance of breaking the law.
Dearborn laughed and sat back, his feet up on the dash. “You know, they’ve got this new invention called ‘air conditioning’.”
“Never saw the need,” I said. The high desert gets hot at mid-day, but one of the side effects of my wild card is a lower body temperature. Except when I’m lifting. And I generally don’t lift when driving.
“You’re a deuce, huh?”
“Yeah. Want to get out and walk?”
He pointed to himself. “I’ve got a touch of it myself,” he said, surprising me for the second time that day. I wondered what his power was? But he offered nothing. “Besides, I’ve worked with many a joker in my day.” He pointed to the south and east, the general direction of Tomlin Air Force Base. “Right over there.”
“I didn’t know we were allowed in the Air Force.”
“Well, Crash, there’s allowed, and then there’s ‘allowed’. The policy was certainly against it. But some got in. Stranger things have happened.”
“Like Tominbang getting hold of Quicksilver.”
Dearborn started laughing. “Yeah, ain’t that unusual? It’s not as though we have a lot of them sitting around. They built two, and broke one. There was also some kind of ground spare, but that’s it.”
“So right now, nobody’s missing the Quicksilver.”
“Nope. She’s all ours, Crash.” He slapped me on the back so hard I almost drove off the road. “Hey,” he said, suddenly serious, “what the hell kind of name is Crash? For a flight project, that is.”
“Don’t tell me you’re superstitious.”
“Son, there isn’t a pilot alive who isn’t superstitious.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The name is ‘Cash,’ not ‘Crash’.”
I was spared the indignity of adding “cook” to my new role as “host” when Dearborn suggested we make a stop in Lancaster for an early dinner. Naturally, he knew a little place just off the Sierra Highway on Avenue I. I was reluctant, at first, until Dearborn offered to pay. “Just because I’m homeless don’t mean I’m broke.”
Well, given the fee Tominbang offered, I was far from broke, too, though my riches were still theoretical—which is to say, non-existent. “Besides,” Dearborn added, “I owe you.”
The restaurant was called Casa Carlos; it was a cinder block structure surrounded by a pitted gravel parking lot. (Actually, that description fits almost any structure in the area.) The jumble of cars spilling beyond the nominal border of the lot testified to the joint’s reputation for fine Mexican cuisine, or possibly the lack of other dining options.
It was dark, smoky and loud when we walked in. The floor was sawdust. The clientele a mixture of agro workers in stained shirts and cowboy hats, and the local gentry in short-sleeved white shirts and undone ties.
At first I expected one of those tiresome displays of familiarity, in which Dearborn, the Anglo regular, would embrace Carlos, the Latino owner, exchanging a few laughs and phrases in Spanish. At which point Carlos would snap his fingers at a waitress and order her to bring “Senior Al” the chimichanga special or whatever. It was the sort of arrival staged by Mr. Skalko across the width of the LA basin.
Nothing of the kind occurred. We slunk into the restaurant like two tourists from Wisconsin, quietly finding a table off in one corner.
Dearborn did take the seat that would keep his back to the wall, and his eyes on the entrance. I’d seen that maneuver with Mr. Skalko, too. “Expecting someone?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. An old buddy who eats here about four times a week.”
I let the subject drop as a waiter arrived. We ordered a beer each, then, when the plates arrived almost instantaneously, started in on the food. I should say, I ate; Dearborn devoured a double combination that seemed to consist of a heap of refried beans and cheese the size of a football. At one point he slowed down long enough to say, “Don’t watch too close now, Cash. I only had one meal in the past twenty-four hours, and, as you will recall, I was unable to retain that for long.”
The beer had mellowed me to the point where I was able to smile at the memory. I got Dearborn talking about himself, partly to avoid having to talk about myself, but also to hear the standard military shit-kicker war story bio. I was surprised, then, when Dearborn told me he was from Chicago and had grown up in a privileged North Shore family. His father had been a senior executive at Sears prior to the wild card, at which point he had been turned, losing his job and his money. Dearborn was lucky enough to win an appointment to the naval academy at Annapolis. After graduating in 1951, he became a naval aviator.
He won his wings of gold too late to shoot it out over Korea, but served with the fleet in the Mediterranean, then did a year of graduate work in nuclear engineering, before coming to Tomlin in 1958 to attend the test pilot school as a navy exchange pilot. “I had just graduated and joined the project when they had the accident.”
He meant the X-11A disaster, the spectacular mid-air collision between a prototype space plane and its mother ship that killed pilots Enloe and Guinan, and sparked a wild card hunt that destroyed the home-grown American space program. Or so I’d heard.
“That was a bad scene, for a long time after. I stayed at Tomlin flying chase and pace on a few other programs. They sure weren’t eager to let the X-11 guys get their hands on new aircraft. We were jinxed.” He smiled. “I missed out on three other accidents. There was quite a bad string there around 1961, ’62.
“But when General Schriever became head of Systems Command, he rammed through the Quicksilver program. I was the only X-11 pilot around, and being in the right place at the right time, got in on the ground floor.” He smiled. “Ruined my navy career, of course.”
“Ruined? Being one of the first Americans to fly into orbit? Even if it was secret, you should have had it made!”
“You don’t know much about the military, do you, Cash? When I joined Quicksilver, I had already spent four years here at Tomlin, which meant I was working for the Air Force, not the Navy. I needed to do a tour at the Pentagon and in ’Nam, then command a ship. If I ever wanted to command a carrier, which is the whole reason you become a navy aviator.
“I stayed at Tomlin through the first year of test flights. Me and the prime Air Force guy, my old buddy, Mike Sampson. Then the program got cut back, and both of us were left twisting in the wind. Sampson made out better than me: he went off to drive 105s out of Cam Ranh Bay, and wound up getting a Purple Heart.
“I was too old to go back to the fleet. Why waste time re-qualifying me for carrier ops? I’d be eligible for retirement before I finished a tour like that. So they assigned me to a missile test squadron at China Lake.” He smiled bitterly. “That’s when I started drinking. And drank myself right out of the cockpit, right out of the Navy, and out of marriage number two.”
In spite of that, he had ordered a beer, though, to be fair, he had barely sipped it. “I’m guessing Doreen is number three?”
“Correct. I came back to southern California to work for Lock-heed as a civilian, since they had the support contract for Quicksilver. She was my first secretary . . .” He laughed at the memory. “Guess I wasn’t cut out to work in an office. Too much opportunity for mischief.”
I must have been feeling brave. I pointed at the beer on the table. “Are you cut out for Tominbang’s project?”
Dearborn smiled, picked up the beer and poured it on the saw-dust floor. “Being the first human on the Moon? I can give up drinking for that, no problem!”
His voice trailed off and his expression grew tense. I realized he was looking over my shoulder. “Well, well, well,” he said, softly.
I turned and looked: all I could see was another man about Dearborn’s age, though smaller and less weathered, smiling and chatting with the hostess. “Is that the guy you were expecting?”
“Yes. Major Mike Sampson! Hey, ‘Wrong Way’!” He started his phrase in a conversational tone, but by the time he reached “Wrong Way” he was shouting.
“Wrong Way” Sampson—the compact man at the entrance—turned with the deliberation of a gunfighter being challenged. Then he recognized Dearborn, and his face lit up like a harvest moon. Working his way to your table, he knocked over other patrons like tenpins, stopping short of actually hugging Dearborn. Instead, he punched him the shoulder. “You lucky son of a bitch!” he said.
“How much luck can I have, if you found me!” They exchanged similar sentiments for several minutes. Eventually I was introduced; Sampson wound up joining us.
It turned out that he had recently returned to Tomlin after recovering from wounds received in combat. He was now head of something called a “joint test force” at the flight test center. “Why didn’t you just take disability?” Dearborn said.
“Because I wasn’t disabled,” Sampson snapped. “Yeager fought his way back into the cockpit after getting burned in that crash, and he was much worse off than me.” He hesitated, glancing in my direction, but some invisible gesture from Dearborn cleared him for further revelation. “Besides, the Air Force has some very interesting stuff cooking. I want to be part of it.”
“Nothing as interesting as what we’re doing,” Dearborn said, shooting me an all-too-visible shit-eating grin. He then proceeded to violate every clause in Tominbang’s confidentiality agreement, telling Sampson every detail of the project!
Sampson absorbed the information silently, but appreciatively, nodding with growing enthusiasm. “I should have known,” he said. “Everybody was saying, ‘Poor Al, he really screwed the pooch at China Lake.’ But I knew better. I said, ‘It only means there’s something great coming along for him.’”
Sampson would go far in politics, because he almost had me believing him. Dearborn chose to do the same. “Thanks, buddy. But I really pushed the envelope on luck this time, let me tell you.”
“We’re older, Al. Like pro athletes, the power isn’t what it was.”
“We’ve both got enough juice for one last caper, especially something like this. Are you in?”
“Hell, yes!” They shook on it. “Obviously, it will all be on the Q.T. Vacation time or evenings.”
“You already know the vehicle, so you shouldn’t need more than that.”
After confirming various phone numbers and some personal catchup—there was fond mention of a woman named Peggy, a name which meant nothing to me—Sampson went off to meet his original dinner companions, who must have been furious by that time.
I was a little furious myself. “What do you think you’re doing? You told him about the project and signed him up as what? Your alternate?”
“Look, Tominbang’s putting out a lot of his own money in this. And, let’s face it, Cash, I’m not the most reliable individual. I’m thinking of the program at large: Sampson’s good. Weird, but good. He’ll be there only if we need him.”
“Do you think we will?”
“The one thing I learned from flight test is this: nothing ever goes as planned. I don’t care if you’re a nat, a joker or a deuce. Always, always, always have a backup.”
My apartment had two bedrooms, and came already furnished, so I was easily able to make up a place for Dearborn to sleep. Or, to be more precise, to live.
Before turning in, he said, “Days on the flight line start early, Co-pilot.” Somehow, between the pouring of the beer on the floor, and my announcement that I had made up his bed, “Co-pilot” had become Dearborn’s name for me. “I usually wanted to be at ops by six A.M. Since we aren’t flying yet, I want to be back at Tehachapi by seven.”
Which is why Haugen’s Bakery appeared to be closed when we pulled in the next morning. It was six-twenty—mid-morning by bakery hours. Seeing lights and activity within, I got out of the car and rapped on the front door. Dearborn got out to stand looking across the high desert to where the sun was already up, shining down on the vastness that was Tomlin.
As I waited for Eva-Lynne, I wondered idly where she lived—a trailer out back, perhaps? Or one of the grim little brick bungalows scattered in half-assed developments among the Joshua trees?
And did she live with anyone? She wore no ring. And in all the hours I had spent in her company, however remotely, I had never seen her with a boyfriend, or seen her give any sign of having one.
A key rattled in the door: Eva-Lynne, brushing a stray wisp of blond hair away from her face. “Oh, hi!” A pause. “Cash!” She lowered her voice . . . flirtatiously? “My hero. We’re just opening. The usual?”
“Yes, thank you.”
I followed her in. “You’re early today,” she said, slipping behind the counter, though not without giving me a memorable retreating vision. “New job?”
“How did you know?” The door opened and closed behind me.
“Just a guess. You’ve always looked a little—at odds,” she said, handing me a cup and my bag of Danish, and waving away my money. “My treat, as a thanks for yesterday.”
I was so pleased by the mere knowledge that Eva-Lynne had actually given me some thought that I almost missed what happened next:
Dearborn stepped up to the counter. He made no overt sign that he found Eva-Lynne attractive. In fact, he was painfully polite, as he asked for a large cup of black coffee.
She spilled it. “Oh, God,” she said, reddening, “what’s the matter with me?”
Dearborn quickly righted the cup and sopped up the pool of coffee with a napkin before Eva-Lynne could deploy her counter rag.
It was only a moment, but it made me sick. Dearborn’s mere presence had unnerved Eva-Lynne.
I had to keep him away from her.
We said nothing about the events at the bakery as we drove the last few miles up to Tehachapi-Kern Airport. What, indeed, could I have said? Commander Dearborn, please don’t have any contact with a woman I worship from afar?
He would have laughed at me. I would have laughed at me.
Then we reached Tominbang’s hangar, and the subject no longer seemed as critical.
In the hours since Dearborn and I had driven off, the Quicksilver team had gained a number of new members. First off, a pair of steely-eyed security guards in khaki and sunglasses quizzed us before we could get close.
There were at least thirty cars of varying age and make in the lot. The lights were on in the hangar. People were scurrying around, apparently to great purpose. Tominbang was the center of attention, introducing people to each other, signing various pieces of paper, smiling and nodding the whole time.
Many of the new hires, I realized, were deuces. Possibly all of them. “I guess Tominbang’s the only nat in the place,” I said to Dearborn.
“Think again, Co-pilot.”
I hadn’t spotted Tominbang as a deuce, but, then, I often fail to detect them. It made all the sense in the world, though. Who else would have come up with the idea of a flight to the Moon as a solution to a financial problem?
Sure enough, spotting us, Tominbang broke away from the fluid horde. “Greetings, crew mates!” He was smiling so broadly that he seemed deranged, an unfortunate image. Certainly he was, now that I had been alerted to it, clearly a deuce. “We are really rolling now!”
Paralyzed by the troubling sight of Tominbang’s smile, I could not respond. Fortunately, Dearborn was more resilient. “Where the hell did all these people come from, T?”
“I have been hiring them in Los Angeles for the past three weeks. Today was the day they were to report.”
I finally found my voice. “What are they supposed to be doing?”
Tominbang was like a car salesman showing off the features of a new model Buick. “That group,” he said, indicating a group of five examining the undercarriage of Quicksilver, “will perform mechanical modifications to the exterior of the vehicle.”
“Landing gear,” Dearborn added, helpfully. Obviously he had had more extensive conversations with Tominbang than I.
A smaller clump was busy looking into the open cockpit. “That team will modify the life support systems, and also the space suits.” I hadn’t thought about space suits. Obviously we couldn’t walk on the Moon in our street clothes!
There were other groups in discussion—legal, security and public relations, Tominbang said. I gave those issues zero thought at that time.
The smallest group—a pair of jokers, one an honest-to-God human-sized cockroach, the other apparently related, since he looked like a giant bee—stood nearby, watching us with what I took to be unnecessary interest. “And what do they want?”
“Ah,” Tominbang said, as Dearborn chuckled, “our trajectory team. These are specialists from Cal Tech who will program the maneuvers Commander Dearborn will make with the Quicksilver.”
“The nav system is primitive, but workable. Propulsion is the big question mark.”
“I thought propulsion was my responsibility,” I said, foolishly.