A little after eleven, Jonesy found the boy near his favorite bass hole. He was hanging from a tree snarled in his shroud lines. Jonesy couldn’t tell if he were dead or alive. Everyone was quiet then, until Charlie and Ed got there with another light and Charlie saw the boy move. There was one hell of a shout for pure joy after that.
Then Charlie gave us the bad news. You couldn’t make the rescue with a few flashlights and the crash teams had nothing to be used right then. It would take a couple hours to rig something up.
It had to happen. You just know it had to happen.
In fact, I think she was there just waiting for it to happen all along.
We told Charlie to hold it a minute and got the Air Force kids to open hangar doors we never thought would ever be opened again. Then, after Vern told Elaine, “Hold it a minute, baby, because you’re going to hear the sweetest love song ever sung,” the two of us got aboard the Dragon Lady and went through the checklist, and when I said, “Start One,” Vern hit the switch.
Yessir, she sure did croon. On all four big ones she sang to us, then we opened her eyes wide when we turned on the landing lights and she brightened up the whole swamp.
Oh, how their faces did look when they saw our lady roll out. I guess it was like seeing a live dinosaur to them, because most didn’t want to believe it at all. Right then the Lady was a living, fire-breathing doll working at what she knew best, taking care of her men, and she was going to make this her last and her biggest.
There were a few of that gang who weren’t that young and from up in the cockpit I saw them take a hasty swipe at eyes that turned misty all of a sudden and I knew that she was their lady too as much as she was ours.
Vern went back to the phone and Pappy got the tail jacked up and somehow they were able to swivel our girl around so that midnight was turned into noon, and all the while those four big engines turned generators by whose light a life was being saved.
They got out there with the power saws, cut their way through to the kid in the tree, roped the debris back with winches filled up along the shore, but it wasn’t quite enough.
It took the chopper to get him out. Vern directed him in, then Charlie Cross and Ed got the kid in a sling along with a medic who got out there and like it all started... suddenly... it was all over. Almost, anyway. We put the Lady back to sleep, but she wasn’t quite the same. She was mired to her belly in the muck of the swamp but we all kissed her tenderly, even those pink-faced Air Force kids, and the two older guys who did it rather forcefully and seemed reluctant to leave her, then we all went to the hangar to smash the glasses in the fireplace. The war was over.
Well, that’s when that Life photographer found us. Don’t ask me how he got there, but he had popped pictures all over the place and there we were, two generations apart, drinking to the old girl outside. Yeah, it made quite a story, our secret society of B-17 lovers who had some harmless good limes like it was still a long time ago.
And, of course, now we had to let the girls in, but you can believe it’s no sewing circle setup because this is a man’s club where all you have to do to get rid of the women is schedule a sex lecture. They don’t act up, though. They’re all the better for it. Let them get raunchy and you just wave a finger at the beautiful doll under colored lights in the background. You don’t buck the Dragon Lady in her own house.
Oh, didn’t I tell you? That new Air Force over at Ellison threw us a thank-you party and got our lady back out of the muck and into a hangar whose interior really is decorated with some of the most beautiful “salvage” you ever saw.
Vern? Shucks, he and Elaine got married and here’s the kicker. They did the bit right in the hangar and I was the best man and when she came down the aisle beside the Dragon Lady he almost keeled over with surprise because instead of a wedding gown she was wearing the same thing she wore in ’41, the pinks and greens of an Army nurse and she was a rank over old Vern.
First thing he did after the ceremony was make old Pappy promote him so he could give her orders. Then he turned and winked at the Dragon Lady.
And I’ll be hanged if she didn’t wink back!
The Dread Chinatown Man
The other day I was walking down Sixth Avenue in New York and directly ahead I spotted a frighteningly familiar face. It was a lot older now, the frame it set on a little stooped, much thinner, but the same face that made my guts churn every time I saw it. So, I did the same thing I used to do a long time ago. Since there was no crowd to get lost in, I stopped, walked back a block and crossed the street to safety where he couldn’t get at me. He had on a faded, dingy’ uniform, but he wasn’t military. He didn’t own a thing, but the comer was his. Eight million people in New York, but he could pick you out of the mob in a millisecond without goofing once, except in my case... and I hated to have to shatter that stupendous ego again... even after being made to look like an idiot a dozen times.
You see, he was the Chinatown Man. He was the advance agent for a sightseeing bus to the Mott and Pell Street section and he had a big card above the visor of his cap that read CHINATOWN TOUR and made him took like that old conductor on the Toonerville Trolly. He could spot a tourist six blocks off, wait for him to hit the corner, then hassle him into a buck-and-a-half trip so fast the poor yokel never knew what hit him and there was no way his country training could protect him against the big city con the Chinatown Man could pitch.
Of course, no self-respecting New Yorker would ever buy the scam, far less than being tabbed for a hayseed. The true natives could handle that with one icy glare or a few choice epithets in a foreign tongue that had plenty of tonal muscle even if he didn’t understand it. But he rarely ever heard it because, psychologist that he was, hayseed picking was his specialty.
Now in the old days, I had an office on 45th Street, three blocks away from his outpost. I was a busy little executive in Howard or Crawford suits. I didn’t wear white socks and my shoes all came from Thom McAn’s. A copy of the World Telegram was always under my arm and a faint five o’clock shadow made me look like I had suffered a hard day at work. In other words, I was the typical New Yorker’s Brooklynite headed for the Brighton Beach B.M.T. and a pot roast supper.
But not to the Chinatown Man. Oh, no, never to the hayseed picker. I could feel his eyes grab me the minute I turned the corner, keeping me locked in on his mental radar until I got within striking distance; then, out of that whole throng, he’d zero in on me with his pitch and brochure, ticket held at ready and left hand at his change holder on his belt. The spiel was hard, fast and loud with everybody listening in, watching my face get red while I fought him off and if I dropped the World Telegram I didn’t ever stop to pick it up.
How I got to hate that guy! Every damn night! I couldn’t even cross the street without feeling I had lost some of my dignity. All I could do was try to outwit him and look forward to holidays and Thursdays when the shopping crowd gave me enough cover to get by on an end run behind a swarm of blocking backs. Or grin evilly when he was already engaged with a real hayseed and had to let a prospective customer slip out of his grasp.
Then the final insult at me... the glove across the jowl, the chip knocked off the shoulder.