[THREE]
Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo
Near Pila, Buenos Aires Province
0925 6 May 1943
Martha Howell had heard thunder during the night, and when she looked out of her window when she woke, she saw dark clouds hovering over the pampas. When she went into Marjorie’s room, she wasn’t there; and when she went into Beth’s room, Beth said that her sister was flying with Clete.
In this weather?
She said nothing to Beth. Clete was no fool and a good pilot; he wouldn’t fly if it was dangerous. But she was a mother, and after she’d had her breakfast, she walked down to the airstrip with a cup of coffee in her hand.
Enrico Rodríguez was sitting in a chair under the wing of the Lockheed Lodestar. When he saw her coming, he rose to his feet. “Buenos dias, señora,” he said politely.
She was not surprised to find him there. “Keep your seat, Enrico,” she said in Spanish, with a smile.
I would have been surprised if he wasn’t here. His devotion to Clete is doglike.
That thought triggered a memory. Of Jim’s dog. Oscar. A black Labrador. Although Jim had been dead a year now, Oscar still spent most of his days lying on the porch of the house at Big Foot Ranch with his head between his paws, waiting for Jim to come home.
James Fitzhugh Howell, her husband, the only man she had ever loved, and whom she missed desperately, had stepped away from the bar at the Petroleum Club in Midland and dropped dead before he got to the men’s room.
She saw a lot of Jim in Cletus, some of it genetic, but most of it in his character—although she had to admit, after seeing so many pictures of Clete’s father, that in his physical features he favored the Frades more than the Howells. They had been like father and son, and Clete had copied Jim in many ways. He even walked like him.
She forced the memories of her husband and Oscar from her mind and looked at the Lodestar. It was painted a brilliant red—Clete said the color was called “Staggerwing Red” because many Beechcraft Staggerwing aircraft were painted that color.
Clete had been very vague about why this plane was painted that color, or even why President Roosevelt had sent it as a gift, “an expression of friendship and admiration,” to the late Colonel Frade to replace the Staggerwing Beechcraft that had been lost in an “accident.”
She looked down the runway and thought that the pampas were much like the plains around Midland, except that here there was rich topsoil, five and six feet deep. Around Midland the land was arid and the topsoil shallow. It took ten times as much acreage to sustain a beef on Big Foot Ranch as it did here.
Two minutes later, her ears picked up the peculiar sound of a Piper Cub’s engine. A minute later, the plane came into view.
As it made its approach, Martha saw her daughter in the front seat. It touched down, immediately took off again, and repeated this process three times before finally completing its landing roll and taxiing up to the hangar.
She was annoyed but not
surprised.
Clete said he was going to give Marjorie some instruction, and that’s what he’s doing. He’s like Jim in that, too. If he says he’s going to do something, he does it.
Jim had taught all of them to fly, Martha included. Clete had been flying all over the ranch by himself long before he was old enough to get a license. And he had regularly flown to and from College Station on weekends when he was at Texas A&M. Jim had waited until the girls were sixteen before teaching them how to fly.
“How’d it go?” Martha asked when they had climbed out of the Cub.
“Another two hundred hours of dual,” Clete said, “and she’ll be ready to taxi it by herself.”
“You can go to hell, Clete,” Marjorie said.
“Actually, she’s not bad,” Clete said. “She was trying to find Buenos Aires, and she was actually pointed in the right direction—”
“Go to hell twice,” Marjorie said.
“—but I didn’t like the weather, so we came back.”
They walked back to the big house, with Enrico trailing behind them with his shotgun. As they approached the steps to the wide veranda, one of the maids came out. “Patrón, you have a telephone call,” she said. “A Captain Ashton.”
“He’s on the phone?” Clete asked, doubtfully.