“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?”