He ran the plane almost to empty on that inaugural flight. He watched the Curtiss Jenny’s moon shadow race across the fields and forests far below. When he finally reached the last of his fuel, he turned back and prepared to land.
Landing was a lot trickier than it looked. His first couple of attempts almost resulted in disaster. He pointed the airplane down toward the fallow field and dived. But that only increased his speed, and as the earth rushed up to meet him, he realized that his propeller, not the landing gear, would be the first to hit ground. Both times he pulled out of the dive in the nick of time.
Only his lack of fuel saved him. On his third landing attempt, he found himself once again in an unintentional dive. Once again he yanked up on the yoke, and again the Jenny jerked up to pull out of the dive. But at that moment it ran out of gas. The engine died, and Jack felt himself falling. The nose of the aircraft was pitching upward at over ten degrees, so Jack could no longer see the ground. All he could see were the twinkling stars on the horizon. But to his surprise and relief, the biplane began to slow as it fell. It fluttered like a kite without a string until Jack felt the force of the tail hitting the ground. He was thrown forward against his harness when, an instant later, the landing gear also slammed down. And then he was bouncing along uncomfortably as the Curtiss Jenny taxied uncontrollably across the plowed surface of the fallow field—and right into the communal watering pond.
The next day Jack and his mother hired a few transient laborers to help pull the Curtiss Jenny out of the mud and the muck. Remarkably, the plane hadn’t suffered serious damage. A few days later it was dried out and ready to fly again.
His mother wasn’t angry, just glad he’d survived. It also convinced his mother to let him try to take up his father’s business. She secured the contracts, bought the leading arsenate for crop dusting and superphosphate for top dressing, and even secured occasional postal-service subcontracts for mail hauling. They hired a Canadian Great War vet turned American hobo, Jimmy Hunt, as a maintenance mechanic. Jack did the actual flying. And together they managed to save the family business.
But the more Jack flew, the more he yearned for greater challenges. Jimmy Hunt often told Jack stories about the “Knights of the Sky” who fought in the Great War. Jimmy hadn’t been a pilot. But as a mechanic, he’d had a front-row seat for the acrobatic dogfights between aces like Kenneth Conn, Heinrich Kroll, Joseph Fall, and Paul Billik. Hearing those stories, Jack realized that air combat would be the ultimate flight test. He had to join the army. But he also knew he couldn’t make the mistake Jimmy Hunt had made. Only officers could be pilots. So Jack needed a college education. He set aside enough money for correspondence courses, and as soon as he received his diploma, he enlisted.
“And so here I am,” Jack concluded with a cockeyed smile. “Wearing my army wings and offering you girls a chance to fly.”
Mollie bit her lip and glanced nervously over the car seat at Ellen. “What do you think?”
Ellen looked up at Bobby’s face, his features soft in the warm moonlight. Whom did she see there? Bobby or a young Jimmy Stewart? She pulled his arms tighter around her waist. “I feel safe,” she said. And that settled it.
Fifteen minutes later, the girls waited in the jeep while Jack and Bobby snuck into the hangar and prepared the planes. They were P-39 Airacobras, the most powerful aircraft either Jack or Bobby had ever flown. And Bobby was nervous. Not because he feared flying the high-performance airplanes, but because he was afraid they’d be caught.
Jack tried to reassure him. “You know how many girls I took up in the Jenny?”
“These aren’t old biplanes.”
“So what?”
“So we’re stealing military property.”
“Borrowing it.”
“We could be arrested.”
“You asked about the full moon earlier. They call it a hunter’s moon because it’s bright enough to hunt by. It’s also bright enough to fly by, which means we won’t need lights, which means we won’t get caught. Trust me.”
“But the Airacobra’s a single-seater.”
“All the better. That just means Ellen’s gonna have to sit in your lap. She’ll love it. I told you, I’ve done this before.”
“These aren’t farm girls, they’re socialites.”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s a world of difference.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. These girls, they’ve been sheltered their whole lives, chaperoned by crazy aunts everywhere they go, warned not to take risks. You take one of these girls up in a plane, you give her that thrill, and you bring her back down again safe and sound, you know what happens?”
“What happens?”
“She realizes Mommy and Daddy were wrong about taking risks. Risks can be fun. And they start to wonder what else Mommy and Daddy were wrong about.”
Bobby gave in.
Jack was right about taking off. The Army’s Third Air Force was still in an expansion phase, desperately trying to recruit and train as many pilots and ground personnel as possible, and quickly expanding beyond Morrison Army Air Field into the hotels and boardinghouses of West Palm Beach. The result was temporary chaos that wasn’t helped by the tropical surroundings and friendly local females. Jack taxied quietly through the airfield, leading Bobby, with Ellen in his lap, through a maze of tarmacs until they bounced onto a little-used emergency gravel runway. Then he gunned the engine and roared into the night sky.
Bobby followed close behind. Ellen’s breath caught in her throat at the g-forces of the sudden climb. But then she pressed her forehead against the cockpit canopy and gasped in awe at the lights of Palm Beach receding behind her. “They’re beautiful!” she exclaimed.
“Have a closer look.” Bobby twisted the yoke, and the plane yawed into a barrel roll. Ellen grabbed Bobby hard around the neck in terror as he leveled out upside down. “It’s OK,” he reassured her.
Ellen looked down through the Airacobra’s bubble glass canopy at the city that lay before her, a twinkling map. She smiled in amazement at the cars, small as toys, leaving the Everglades Club. Bobby couldn’t help notice that gravity had pulled the hem of her dress all the way up to her waist. He admired her garters for a moment before twisting back into a barrel roll and straightening the plane.
He’d adjusted the Airacobra just in time, for Jack suddenly dived and banked across the Florida peninsula, picking up speed and leaving Palm Beach far behind. Bobby barely kept up. It was only twenty-five miles to the massive Everglades swamp that dominated this part of Florida, and the fast Airacobras covered that distance in less than six minutes. Bobby followed Jack as he buzzed the pine forest that separated east Florida from the swampy wilderness; he matched Jack’s every move. The two planes performed a high-speed aerial dance as Jack led them into a tall upside-down loop, a twisting corkscrew descent, and then buzzed so close to the flat waters of the tepid swamp that the downdraft created a rooster-tail wake as tall as the one caused by the jeep earlier in the evening. The bucking g-forces of each maneuver caused Ellen to clutch Bobby wherever she could, holding on for dear life. She completely forgot about Bobby’s hands. Bobby found himself grabbing and holding taboo regions of flesh, her inner upper thighs, upper ribs, and even straight across her bosom. Before things got out of control, he straightened the plane and climbed higher into the night sky. As Ellen settled back into a modest position on his lap, they both had to catch their breath. Ellen looked over her shoulder at Bobby, staring at him, then sweetly asked, “Can I try?”