“It was nice to see you again, Major Douglass,” she said, offering her hand like a man. “Take care of yourself.”
“And it was nice to see you, too, Miss Hoche,” Douglass said, and then laughed out loud. “Who do you think you’re fooling?” he asked.
Lieutenant Commander Edwin W. Bitter, USN, came running down the marble corridor. He was out of uniform. He had no tie and no hat, and he was wearing a battered leather aviator’s jacket with a Kuomintang flag painted on the back.
He saw Captain Douglass.
“I don’t mean to intrude,” he said.
“Rack his ass, Dad,” Douglass said. “For the first time in his life he’s out of uniform.”
“I came to wish you Godspeed,” Bitter said.
“Thank you,” Douglass said, a little uncomfortably.
“And to remind you that I have been a self-righteous sonofabitch as long as you’ve known me, and therefore you should not have been surprised.”
“You’re an asshole,” Douglass said,“but I love you.”
“And I wish to apologize to you, too, Charity,” Bitter said.
“That’s all right, Edwin,” Charity said. “I’ve known what a self-righteous asshole you are for a long time, too.”
“I don’t think I wish to know what this is all about,”Captain Douglass said.
“No,” Doug said,“you don’t.” And then he said,“I gotta go.”
He put out his hand to his father, who shook it.
"Hug him, for God’s sake! ” Charity ordered.
They both looked at her, and then embraced.
Doug punched Bitter on the arm, then turned to Charity.
“Do I get a hug too?” she asked.
“A kiss, but only to shut your runaway mouth,” Doug said.
“How dare you, sir?” Charity said, grabbing his ears and kissing him with mock passion on the lips.
It began as a joke, for the amusement of spectators, but it didn’t end that way. When they finally stopped, Charity looked very much as if she was going to cry.
“It’s cold,” Douglass announced, “and two fans make a lot of wind. I think everybody ought to stay inside.”
The ground crew was already at the glistening, somehow menacing twin-engine fighter airplane. There was a ladder against the nose of the fuselage, which sat between the twin-engine booms, and Doug Douglass quickly climbed up it. When he was in the cockpit, a ground crewman climbed the ladder and saw that he was strapped properly into the parachute. Then he climbed back down and removed the ladder.
There were ten meatballs, each representing the kill of a Japanese aircraft, painted on the fuselage nose above the legend “Major Doug Douglass.” The first time Charity saw them, she had thought they were thrilling and very sexy. Now they made her cry, for they reminded her that he was a fighter pilot. What fighter pilots did, presuming they could indeed make it across the Atlantic Ocean, was fight. She wondered if she was seeing him for the last time.
"Clear!” Douglass called down from the cockpit. The starter ground, and the left engine started. The sudden loud noise startled Charity. Then the right propeller began to move, blowing away a cloud of light blue smoke. She saw Douglass pull a helmet over his head and then snap a face mask in place.
He raised his left hand in a very casual wave. One of the engines roared, and the P-38 moved off the parking stand.
He was almost immediately hidden from their sight by
other parked aircraft, but they stood there against the glass of the terminal and waited. Two or three minutes later, they heard the sound of an airplane taking off. Douglass’s P-38C, its wheels already up, flashed past them. The plane turned to the right and was out of sight in thirty seconds.
"He’ll be all right, Charity,” Ed Bitter said. “There are no better pilots than Doug.”