The Last Heroes Page 7

  ‘‘Lying is like fucking, Eddie,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘The first time is sometimes difficult, but after a while you get used to it.’’

  The drinks were served. Canidy downed his and reached for the fresh one.

  ‘‘Have you ever thought of selling your Ford?’’ Bitter asked.

  ‘‘What brought that up?’’ Canidy asked.

  ‘‘Well,’’ Bitter said, uncomfortable, ‘‘when I saw the skipper, he told me I’m being considered for a temporary duty assignment at NAS Anacostia.’’

  ‘‘And?’’

  ‘‘I thought I’d sell my car before I went,’’ Bitter said. ‘‘And if you sold your Ford, and needed a car, I could make you a good price.’’

  ‘‘What are you going to do at NAS Anacostia?’’ Canidy asked innocently.

  ‘‘I . . . uh . . . really haven’t been told,’’ Bitter said.

  ‘‘Christ, I hope you were more convincing, not that it really matters, when you lied to the skipper about your altitude when your engine quit,’’ Canidy said.

  ‘‘What do you mean?’’ Bitter demanded sharply.

  Canidy put his fingers to his temples. ‘‘Confucius say,’’ he said, ‘‘ ‘Every man fly P40-B once for first time.’ "

  Bitter was genuinely surprised that Canidy knew.

  ‘‘Keep your voice down. Someone is liable to hear you.’’

  ‘‘I’ve got bad news for you, Eddie,’’ Canidy said.

  ‘‘What’s that?’’

  ‘‘That since I signed on about an hour before you did, I’m going to outrank you in the Chinese Air and Rickshaw Service, too.’’

  THREE

  Pensacola Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida 9 June 1941

  There was a little slop time written into the primary training program, slack time between the cross-country flight and the graduation ceremony on the last Friday of the training period when the students would get their wings. Things went wrong. Bad weather could delay training flights; students or instructors could become ill. But if everything went according to schedule, there were anywhere from three to four days with nothing for instructor pilots to do.

  IPs would check in at 0730 with the primary flight skipper, and he would then tell them to take off. That meant spending the day playing golf, or lying on the incredibly white beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, or just hanging around the BOQ.

  Ed Bitter and Dick Canidy reported for duty the day after their meeting with General Chennault fully expecting to be told by the skipper to take off. But that didn’t happen.

  ‘‘Don’t ask me what it’s all about,’’ the skipper told them, ‘‘because I don’t know. All I know is that your services are required by the admiral for the rest of the week. You’re to call his aide.’’

  He handed them a name and a telephone number scrawled on a sheet of notepaper.

  They called the aide, and he told them to meet him at hangar six, across the field from primary training. When they got there, he was standing outside the hangar office. He walked them away from the hangar, onto the line of aircraft parked off the taxiway, until he stopped in the shadow of a transient aircraft, a Douglas TBD-1. It carried the numbers VT-8, the only shore-based squadron of the six TBD-1-equipped torpedo bomber squadrons in the Navy.

  ‘‘Either one of you got any time in one of these?’’ he asked, seemingly idly.

  Both shook their heads. The aide shrugged and handed Canidy a thin sheaf of mimeographed orders. Bitter read over Canidy’s shoulder: Lieutenants (j.g.) Bitter and Canidy were ordered by NAS Pensacola to make training flights in TBD-1 aircraft between points within the continental limits of the United States during the fourteen-day period commencing 8 June 1941.

  ‘‘I don’t know how to fly one of these,’’ Canidy said.

  ‘‘I’ll walk you through it,’’ the aide said, ‘‘and take you around the pattern once or twice.’’ He had planned to tell them nothing more, but when he saw their confusion, he felt sorry for them.

  ‘‘You didn’t get this from me, understand?’’ he said, and when they nodded their agreement, he went on. ‘‘General Chennault is trying to get fifty, or maybe the entire hundred of them in the Navy, for his Chinese. For your volunteer group. The admiral doesn’t think the Navy will turn them loose. But it might, and if it happens, there should be somebody over where you two are going who knows how to fly them. Understand? Once an IP, always an IP.’’

  ‘‘What are we supposed to do, shoot touch-and-goes?’’ Canidy asked. ‘‘So people can see us, and ask what are two primary IPs doing shooting touch-and-goes with a torpedo bomber?’’

  ‘‘Do whatever you want with it,’’ the aide said. ‘‘As long as you don’t do it here. With the orders I just gave you, you can get fuel and whatever else you need at any military air base in the country. What you’re supposed to do is get time in the airplane. How you do that—as long as you do it away from here, and are back for the graduation parade—is up to you.’’

  The TBD-1, called the Devastator, was an old-timer, first flown in 1935. It had a nine-hundred-horsepower Twin Wasp radial engine and was primarily designed to launch torpedoes at enemy shipping. It carried a crew of three: a pilot; a torpedo officer/bomb aimer, usually an aviator; and an enlisted man, a tail gunner, who was known as an airdale. The torpedo officer/bomb aimer performed his function on his stomach under the pilot’s seat, looking out through two windows in the bottom of the fuselage. The aircraft could carry one torpedo in a rack under the fuselage, or twelve one-hundred-pound bombs, six under each wing.

  Normally, when pilots transitioned into a new aircraft, there was at least a week’s ground-school training. This was then followed by an orientation flight, during which an IP gradually and carefully permitted the student to take over the airplane.

  Two hours after Canidy and Bitter met the admiral’s aide at hangar six, he certified them as qualified to fly the Devastator.

  ‘‘Sir,’’ Canidy asked, ‘‘please correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I read our orders, we are permitted to go anyplace we want to. We could head for San Diego if we wanted to, is that right?’’

  ‘‘That’s right,’’ the admiral’s aide said. ‘‘I thought I made that clear.’’

  ‘‘Yes, sir,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘Thank you, sir.’’

  Cedar Rapids, Iowa June 10, 1941

  Canidy drove his Ford convertible straight through from Florida, stopping only to catnap by the side of the road. Ed Bitter was somewhat reluctantly flying the Devastator to Cedar Rapids himself. He wanted to see his father and had to get rid of his car, Canidy had argued, so driving his car home and selling it there seemed like a good idea. So far as their getting time in the Devastator was concerned, he would fly it back from Iowa.

  ‘‘And what am I supposed to do with my car?’’ Bitter had protested.

  ‘‘You really want a suggestion, Eddie?’’

  ‘‘Why don’t I drive my car to Chicago, and you pick me up there?’’

  ‘‘We can make another trip if you like,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘But it would make more sense to leave your car here and then turn it over to The Plantation.’’

  ‘‘Why do I feel I am somehow being screwed?’’

  ‘‘After you really screw somebody one day, you’ll be able to tell the difference,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘In the meantime, don’t rock the boat.’’

  Canidy arrived in Cedar Rapids just after five in the morning and was afraid that he would disturb his father. But when he got to the campus, there was a light on in the apartment’s tiny kitchen. His father was awake, shaved, and dressed, except for the tweed jacket he wore over his clerical dickey.

  They shook hands. His father’s hand felt soft and gentle in his. Gentle and old.

  The Reverend George Crater Canidy, D.D., Ph.D., headmaster of St. Paul’s School, long widowed, lived in a small apartment in the dormitory between the chapel and the Language Building, where he had his office. It was inconceivable that he would li
ve off campus. For in a very real sense, the Rev. Dr. Canidy and St. Paul’s School were one and indivisible.

  Canidy told his father that he was being released from the Navy to go to China and work in the fledgling Chinese aircraft industry. With his engineering degree, that was credible. He did not want to tell his father that he had been given a job where bonuses were paid for the number of people killed.

  The Reverend Dr. Canidy was pleased. He quickly concluded that his son was going to China as a practical missionary, to bring to its downtrodden masses the God-given miracles of Western technology. It wasn’t quite the same thing as his son going to spread the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, but it was far better than his being a sailor in the Navy.

  It would do no harm to let his father believe that, Canidy decided.

  As always, as the morning wore on, the feeling came to Canidy that rather than coming ‘‘home,’’ he was visiting a school he had long ago attended. Though there was a photograph of his mother on the table beside his father’s chair in the living room, it produced no emotional response. He didn’t really remember her. But of course, he corrected himself, he did. What he remembered was the horrible smell in the hospital room where she had taken so long to die.

  His mind had mostly shut that out, he thought, and in doing so had erased everything, including the good memories. There must have been good times. It was just that he couldn’t remember her. It wasn’t until he saw him—touched his hands—that he remembered what a good man, what a good friend, his father was, and again became aware of the depth of his feeling for him.

  He was also aware that he had to be sort of a disappointment to his father, although his father of course didn’t show it. His father would have been most happy had his son followed in his footsteps, if not as a priest, then as an academic.

  But Canidy’s scholastic prowess was not the result of a love for scholarly things. He wanted to fly, and the price of that was academic success. He could not hang around Cedar Rapids airport, his father told him, while his grades were bad. The payment for his Saturday flying lessons was staying on the headmaster’s list. He had simply raised his grades and kept them at a commendable level by paying attention to what was asked of him. His father’s proud belief to the contrary, he had never really had to ‘‘put his nose to the grindstone and keep it there’’ nor had he ever demonstrated ‘‘remarkable self-discipline.’’

  Canidy often wondered if a son’s duty to his father included doing what the father, who was presumably the wiser, wanted him to do with his life. If that was the case, he was the undutiful son. He wanted neither to mold the characters of young men, which his father had once told him he considered the highest of privileges, nor to care for other people’s souls.

  The Reverend Dr. Canidy did not press the point when his son declined the opportunity to go to morning prayer. Canidy was almost immediately sorry, but by then his father had gone, and the smart thing to do was take a nap. His old room smelled musty.

  He woke at lunchtime, nervous and hungry. He didn’t want to go to the dining room and have the boys gape at him, so he drove the Ford into Cedar Rapids and had lunch in a restaurant, then drove around town until it was time to go to the airport and wait for Bitter and the Devastator to appear.

  Eddie Bitter was very respectful of the Reverend Dr. Canidy when they met, and perfectly willing to put on his white uniform and give a little talk about the Naval Academy and naval aviation to the boys of St. Paul’s at the evening meal.

  After the evening meal, a dozen boys came to his father’s apartment to hear more about the life of a midshipman at Annapolis and of a naval aviator. While Ed entertained the boys, Canidy and his father retired to the comfortable leather chairs of the library.

  ‘‘Eric Fulmar sent me a lovely New Testament in Aramaic the other day,’’ Dr. Canidy said.

  ‘‘Eric Fulmar? My God! Where—and how—is he these days?’’

  ‘‘He’s in Morocco,’’ Dr. Canidy said.

  ‘‘Morocco? What’s he doing in Morocco?’’

  ‘‘Staying out of the war, or so he says. He tells me he’s living with friends there. And his father’s German, you know. They consider Eric a German, too. So he could be drafted.’’

  ‘‘If I know Eric, he’s up to more than hanging around with friends,’’ Canidy said, laughing softly.

  Eric Fulmar was always up to something. Fulmar had gotten the two of them into trouble more times than he’d care to remember. When Canidy had moved into the lower school at St. Paul’s after his mother’s death, he and Eric had become fast friends. Like gasoline and a match, his father said—obviously useful, but explosive when put together without adequate supervision.

  Eric’s mother was Monica Carlisle, the movie star who— happily for her career and income—looked considerably younger than her actual years. Her studio didn’t want it known that Monica, instead of the virginal coed she regularly portrayed on the screen, was the mother of a son to whom (if her studio biography was to be believed) she had given birth at age seven.

  The only time Monica Carlisle had made her presence felt in her son’s life was to get him out of trouble. Canidy grinned to himself, remembering, while his father expounded on the finer points of the Aramaic Bible. One incident in particular stood out among all the scrapes he and Eric had gotten into.

  Toy pistols were forbidden on campus, but they were readily available from Woolworth’s five-and-ten for twenty-nine cents. And wooden matches were easily obtained from the school’s kitchen. The matches, when shot from the pistols, ignited upon contact.

  This was a great discovery, but what was more exciting was the potential of the white powder on the head of the match—removed from the wooden stick and piled in quantities, this stuff did great things. And later, even under the most severe of interrogations, Canidy and Fulmar steadfastly denied any knowledge of the rash of small, foul-smelling explosions that ruined the locks of the dormitory doors and terrorized the school for a week.

  Then they were caught, literally with smoking guns, for a number of crimes all at once.

  The day of the annual fall nature walk for the lower school, led by the biology instructor, seemed like the perfect time to test out some hypotheses concerning their tin guns and match heads. There were lots of tempting leaf piles along the street that led to the woods. First Canidy spoke earnestly with the teacher about chlorophyll while Eric, at the rear of the procession, gleefully let fly both guns. Canidy grinned as he remembered the small tussle they’d had when Eric hadn’t shown up at the appointed time to take his turn discussing things with the teacher. So Eric got all the leaf piles on the street, and Canidy didn’t get his turn until they reached the woods.

  His first four were sadly disappointing. But the fifth was a beauty. There was a sharp crack, followed a moment later by a vulgar obscenity from the biology teacher.

  ‘‘Shit!’’ he howled. ‘‘Jesus Christ, I’ve been shot!’’

  He dropped to the ground, pulling up his trouser legs. Blood oozed from a dime-size wound in his calf.

  ‘‘Fulmar did it!’’ one of the boys announced righteously. ‘‘He’s got the gun!’’

  A nearby teacher instinctively scooped up Fulmar by the collar of his jacket, considered for a moment what to do about Canidy, then grabbed him by the collar and marched the both of them back to the stricken biology instructor. Just then a deep, low, roaring boom reverberated from the street. Fulmar’s work in the fall leaves had reached the gas tank of a Studebaker President four-door sedan.

  The fire department, three police cars, and an ambulance rushed to the scene. In addition to the Studebaker, leaf piles for three blocks were on fire. The police knew a bullet wound when they saw one, and since the kid obviously hadn’t done it with his toy pistol, that meant there was some kind of nut out there with a .22 shooting at people. Hands on their revolvers, they fanned out looking for him.

  The Reverend Dr. Canidy’s high reputation and considerable influence with
in Cedar Rapids did not keep Eric and Dick out of the Cedar Rapids Children’s Home, at least not for two days. The picture in the paper showed the two boys being collared by the police.

  This picture, more than anything else, brought in Monica Carlisle’s young lawyer, Stanley Fine. Fine bought a new Studebaker President in exchange for an agreement not to press charges. In court, he argued for the Reverend Dr. Canidy’s exemplary reputation for dealing with boys, and the presiding judge of the juvenile court turned the malefactors over to the Reverend for rehabilitation. The real rehabilitation was administered by the physical-education instructor, who used a wide leather belt, which stung like hell and left red welts, but which did no real damage. Fine returned to Hollywood, leaving behind him two shiny silver dollars that were immediately traded in at Woolworth’s for two more tin guns.

  The question of expelling Eric came up, but it was dismissed. The two kids were in their last year at St. Paul’s Lower School. In the fall, Canidy would be sent to St. Mark’s School in Southboro, Mass., and Dr. Canidy recommended to Monica Carlisle that a military school might be perfect for her son’s high-school education. The two friends believed they would never see each other again after they graduated from St. Paul’s.

  But when Canidy arrived in Southboro, Fulmar was waiting for him. And grinning.

  ‘‘It took two full weeks of tantrums,’’ he announced, doing a little joyful jig. His just-a-little-too-long blond hair kept flopping over his eyes, but he was too happy to notice. ‘‘But they finally caved in. What is this place, anyway? You know how hard it was to get me in here?’’

  They had not quite two years together at St. Mark’s; then Fulmar was sent to stay with his father in Europe, where he was to continue his education.

  They exchanged the usual letters for a while, but eventually stopped. Still, in Canidy’s mind, Eric Fulmar was one hell of a guy.