Chapter 33
Pop Keller sat in the only bar Hanover, Kansas, had to offer, sipping club soda and doing the best he could to shell the peanuts before him. Not so long ago, his drink would have been considerably stronger than club soda, and the peanuts would have been long gone. But the increasing severity of his arthritis had sworn him off booze and made cracking shells an act that he could perform only with gaps in between to let the pain go away.
If this didn’t beat the fuck out of life …
After all he had been through, all he had survived, to be done in by something the doctors said was out of his control. It had gotten bad in a hurry and worse even faster. Shit-rotten timing, with his road show hitting peak season and attendance records shattered everywhere he had been. While Pop sipped club soda, his people were setting up for next weekend’s show in the five-hundred-acre remains of a leveled amusement park.
Not that Pop was one to shy away from work — far from it. It was just since the arthritis had gotten really bad, he wasn’t much good helping out anymore. And Pop had always been one to figure that if you couldn’t pull your weight, it was best to stay away. Besides, the setup had always been his favorite part of the gig, full of anticipation, trying to guess the crowd and sniffing the air to smell for the weather. Now all the setup did was serve as a reminder that his body had turned against him. Be better once Friday rolled along, though, with a three-day weekend gig expected to draw upwards of two hundred thousand people. Christ, during the last stretch of the Flying Devils in his former life he hadn’t seen that many people in a year. Hell, probably closer to two or three.
Still, there had been some grand times back then, with no arthritis to mar them. What the fuck good was money when it hurt like a bastard to count it? It just wasn’t fair, as plenty hadn’t been in his life, so far as Pop Keller was concerned.
His former life in the World War II air-show business had begun early, before the full-blown warbird craze caught on. He bought most of his fighters for the Flying Devils in the fifties and sixties at rock-bottom prices. Through the seventies, the Devils had been the best in the business. They had barnstormed the country with their Piper L-4s, T-6 Texas trainers, P-51 Mustangs, and P-40 Warhawks, just to name a few. Their specialty was mock air battles that flat-out thrilled their audiences. No jet-powered engines, no gymnastic circles in the air. Just plain old gutsy flying in reconditioned fighters.
The planes carried live ammunition in their front-mounted machine guns. The highlight of the exhibition had often been Pop himself putting on an amazing display of target practice from a thousand feet. He’d been able to shoot the horns off a bull, until his eyes went, that is, and that was long before his joints had gone south.
He should have gotten glasses, but the truth was they looked lousy under his leather flying goggles. A dozen years ago now he had been squinting to focus when his fighter had taken a sudden dip and scraped the wing of another. The collision had torn the wing off his buddy’s plane, and a moderate crowd of 1,200 had watched the man crash to his death in a nearby field.
That hadn’t been what ended Pop Keller’s former life, but it came close. He had escaped jail but not scandal. The insurance company had laid into him heavy, and there were so many lawsuits, he had figured he might as well move a cot into Superior Court. Then his best fliers, the young ones, had fled the Devils for the Confederate Air Force or the Valiant Air Command and had taken their planes with them, leaving him with a ragtag unit of both men and machines.
Pop had stuck it out as much for them as for himself, even when pranksters regularly changed the first “e” in his name to an “i” on the billboards, proclaiming him Pop “Killer.” In the end he had been down to thirty-seven fighters, and there had seldom been a day when more than twenty of them were able to take the air. Pop had hired mechanics to patch his fleet together with Scotch tape, Elmer’s glue, whatever it took.
Truth was, he’d been ready to pack it in even before that day his former life had ended eight years before when a stranger had walked into the Texas bar he’d been drinking in. Turned out the man was fighting a war to save the whole goddamn country. By enlisting the aid of Pop and the Flying Devils, who won a battle in the skies over Keysar Flats, the man had succeeded in saving the good ole U.S. of A. But the remainder of the Devils’ fleet was lost in the process. A grateful government wanted to make amends, but they couldn’t replace the only thing Pop cared about: his glorious warbirds. Think of something else, they told him.
Pop thought about it and told them he wanted to establish the nation’s first artillery show. He saw it all in his head, and the sight had him excited. Artillery pieces from past and present blowing the shit out of targets for ninety minutes. Call it something like the National Artillery Brigade. Yeah, the NAB. Government went for it. Set Pop up with the equipment for free and agreed to supply ammo on request.
His present life had begun.
Right now his truck was parked outside in the lot with the National Artillery Brigade’s smoke-and-barrel logo stenciled across both its sides.
And the people loved it. The NAB performed to packed crowds at every stop for its first four years, and things went off generally without a hitch. Then the war in the Gulf had given the nation new pride and a fresh fascination with the weapons of war. After seeing it on television, live seemed even better. Capacity crowds had become jam-packed ones. A few times Pop had turned away more folks for one performance than the Flying Devils had performed before in a month. Extra shows were added. Pop had to hire drivers just to keep him supplied with ammo. He figured he should take a trip to Iraq and buy Saddam Hussein a beer. Shake his hand right before he stuck a Patriot missile up his ass and fired.
Patriot missile …
The thought had given Pop an idea, and he’d called his friends in Washington one more time. Any chance he could add a Patriot missile battery to his show for just a little while? The answer had been no, and it had stayed no until quite recently, when the Patriot ran into some unwelcome publicity. The good PR certainly couldn’t hurt, and three months later the NAB had its Patriots — for a while, anyway.
The battery, complete with its own heavy security, had joined up with the NAB for this Kansas performance, assuring attendance records that might never be broken. Of course, the battery wasn’t really going to do anything except sit there on display, and patrons who wanted a view would only be able to get one from a hundred feet away. Pop was charging ten bucks a head, and that meant two million dollars for a weekend’s work, the NAB well on its way to becoming the hottest attraction in the country.
Move over, Ice Capades.
Give it up, Ringling Brothers.
Pop would have enjoyed it a lot more if his hands didn’t ache so much. A few drinks would briefly drown the pain, but he’d pay for it tomorrow, and tomorrow was getting too close to opening day. So he nursed his club soda and cracked peanuts as best he could to kill the time that it took for the NAB to set up shop. He had the bar to himself, except for a nervous-looking woman sitting in one of its three booths. She’d been staring into a cup of coffee that had long lost its steam, and Pop had looked toward her a few times to see if what she needed was a friend. He always looked away, though, before she had a chance to return his stare. Pop had gotten burned enough times helping out strangers; boy, had he ever. Nope, he was gonna sit this one out. Spend the rest of his downtime doing what he used to do best and remembering what it felt like.