Hell, it’s an old story, why repeat it?
Charlie Cross, our engineer, and I wanted to operate a rice-seeding outfit using Stearmans. The wives cried us out of it. Henry Lucerne, the navigator, Vic Cabot, the radioman, and “Tiny” Sinkwich, who handled the right waist gun, were going to patent and manufacture an electronic homing device for private planes.
That meant a few initial hardships, the giving up of minor, but stable, positions and the women sulked them out of that. Needless to say, somebody else invented and sold the same thing and made a fortune, but when you mentioned it to the girls you only got a frosty stare.
Lou Kubitsky, the other waist gunner, didn’t do too badly. Before the war he was a fighter and, had he gone back into it, he would have had his head knocked off. Instead, he became a grocer and, when the community developed, his store was in the center of it and he made out just great. He was happy, all right, but he sure hated groceries. So on the side he managed a couple of fighters, sparred with them and kept his hand in.
George Poe, Arnie Castle, and Fred Halloway were salesmen for the same firm of Coster and Selig, Printers, lived in the same northeast sector of the suburbs, borrowed each other’s tools, and looked to the sky whenever a prop job went over, and studiously ignored the blowjobs as interlopers. Each had a wife who had sweated out all 82 missions and to whom even talk of flying was anathema.
So there we were, all paramours of the Dragon Lady, and, with one exception, no longer bold, but getting old. And when that lone exception showed up it meant a lot of fun for a while as long as you could take a week of cold silences, too-casual meals, and a few other things pouting women can conjure up.
Which brings us back to Vern Tice again.
He was 38 last year, still in good shape with hardly any grey showing and no sign of fat, good-looking as always, with a mint in his back pocket he had picked up on speculative deals most smart money stayed away from. His big deal was banking a Broadway show for 50 percent that gave him a gigantic return with a year and a half run. But women? Oh, he loved ’em all. Marry one? After seeing the trap we were all in?
Laugh, laugh.
That’s the way things stood the day old Vern blew in driving a white Jag with the leading lady of Fielder’s Choice next to him. She was a big blonde beaut dripping diamonds and furs with a laugh like ice clinking in a highball and without her as a come-on we never would have made the briefing because it was an axiom among the women that we should never all get together at the same time.
Elaine Hood fixed that. Every one of the girls wanted a look at this fabulous creature who was all over the covers of current magazines and in most of the gossip columns every week. Smart boy, that Vern. He had checked her out well on her procedures, then let her solo in this strange world of suburbanism.
One thing about her. She was ready for combat right off. She didn’t go into it with her head up and locked, not a bit. That girl had all her guns armed and went into tactical maneuvers like a 50-mission vet. The other women never had a chance, really.
So after supper at the country club they were all glad to let the boys go hang around the bar for once while they started pumping Elaine for all the latest tidbits.
Being Monday, we had the bar all to ourselves, toasted the old days a few times, then Charlie Cross said with peculiar feeling, “To the old girl herself. To the Dragon Lady, laddies.”
We lifted our glasses to that one, all right.
When we put them down Vern said, “Miss her, don’t you?”
“Come off it,” George Poe said, “who doesn’t? Man, I’ve put in a thousand missions in dreams since I saw her last.”
“How’d you all like to see her again?” Vern said.
For a good ten seconds it was real quiet. If anybody else had said that there would have been the usual good-natured groans of acknowledgment, but this time it was Vern who said it and suddenly we knew what the pitch was. We knew, but we couldn’t be quite sure.
Tiny Sinkwich turned around real slowly and put up some ack-ack. “She’s long gone in some smelter’s pot, buddy. That or blown up doing drone duty for rocket jockeys in F-l00s.”
Vern’s grin went all the way across his face. “You think?”
I said, “Okay, kid, drop your flaps and take us in. You’ve had something cooking ever since you taxied up. Now start debriefing.”
He was enjoying every second of it. He had us hanging by our shroud lines and wasn’t cutting us loose until he had to. Finally he said, “I bought the Dragon Lady.”
“You what?” Charlie’s voice was almost a squeak.
“That’s right. I bought her. I went through surplus sales and dragged the old girl out of the pile and right now she’s sitting over at the Lakemore Airfield in the big hangar as pretty as you please.”
“You’re crazy,” I said, “Lakemore’s abandoned. It’s all swamp from where the water backed up from the government dam project. You couldn’t put a Piper Cub in there.”
Vern grinned again and nodded sagely. “I know. She went in by truck.”
From down at the end where Ed Parcy guarded the tail out of sheer force of habit, he said skeptically, “There’s no road into there, buddy.”
Between sips of his drink Vern said, “There is now. I bought a road, too. Those steel mats they used to lay up for temporary runways over sand or muck. Worked real well.”
“Lakemore Airfield was owned by...” Vic Cabot started to say.
Then Vern cut him off with, “The Blakenship family. I bought it from them. The deed is free and clear and all ours.”
I think we said it all at once. “Ours?”
He laughed at the expressions on our faces. “Sure. You don’t think I’d keep the old dame all to myself, do you?”
Henry Lucerne said, “But...”
“Look,” Vern told all of us. “I’ve watched you guys losing your lift ever since we left the Lady. You’re all like kids with your toy taken away and those dames in there...” He waved a thumb over his shoulder, “won’t give it back. Well, now they got trouble because we got our dame back and she’s all ours.”
You don’t say much at a moment like that. You try to think of something but it won’t come out so you have a drink to cover your astonishment and when it’s down it all begins to make sense. Everybody tried to talk at once, slap each other’s back and finally came to the same thought.
They left it up to me to put it into words. I said, “There’s only one problem, friend. We can’t fly her around. It would cost an arm and a leg for fuel and parts — and who knows if we can even get her license back?”
“So who needs to fly?” Vern asked me.
I just looked at him. In fact, we all did.
He laughed and said, “Buddies, we got ourselves the craziest clubhouse anybody ever saw on the best patch of ground for fishing and duck shooting in the whole state.”
And when we thought about it, he was right.
Thus began the second saga of the Dragon Lady.
Elaine Hood was a real pro at her job. She hinted that if the gals “could only” take off a week she’d like to show them around the big town north of us and you never saw nine wives go to work so fast. Oh, we let them sweat a little bit and work their female wiles to the limit, but finally we okayed their flight plans, let them arrange for in-law baby sitters, and saw them all off at the station.
That same day we all started our vacations and went back to our true love, our one wife, the Dragon Lady, and there behind the faded and weather-worn walls of the old hangar primped and petted her until she was a thing of beauty again.