Glory Boys Read Online Free PDF

it wouldn’t have been very realistic.’
    ‘Realistic…?’
    The two men watched in silence to the end of the reel. They watched the girl be captured twice more by the hoodlums and be rescued back both times. The best stunt showed the girl being snatched by an airplane from a speeding car. The girl didn’t look too much like O’Hara and the pilot didn’t look too much like Willard, but it was a good stunt all the same.
    The second reel snickered to its close. Willard got up again, tweaking the cuffs of his shirt from his jacket sleeve so they showed up better. He’d just spent four hundred bucks on a set of silver cuff-links and it annoyed him when they didn’t show. Powell stood up to flex his back. The cigar smoke filled the room like a migraine.
    ‘How’s distribution coming along? If I was going to be picky about it, I’d have to remind you that your first repayments were due last week.’
    ‘Distribution?’ said Willard. ‘Don’t you even want the third reel?’
    ‘Oh, there’s more? Sure…’
    The reel ran on in ugly silence. Willard watched it with new eyes and found himself hating every frame of it. A picture of class, indeed! The picture was pitiful, truly pitiful.
    He owed Ted Powell one hundred and ninety-four thousand bucks.

7
    There was plenty to do.
    The first thing was to cut away the ruined fabric and assess damage to the wooden structure beneath. Using knives sharpened in a little engine oil on the step of the barn, Abe and Brad cut away the torn cotton and piled it up in the yard to burn later.
    As the ship’s frame began to come into view, Abe was relieved to see that the main wing-struts were scuffed and cracked, but basically intact. The plane looked more like a skeleton now; but there was something fast and hungry in her look as well. He whittled splints for the cracked spars and screwed them carefully into place, wrapping twine round the joins for extra strength.
    Then Abe stripped the engine, so he could clean, oil and reassemble it. As he’d known from the outset, it had been a faulty valve in the fuel-line which had created a blockage in the feed. It had been the work of five minutes to locate the problem and fix the valve. Most engine problems were like that. Little tiny niggles, which sometimes killed you, sometimes didn’t.
    As the first week merged into the second, the new undercarriage began to take shape. Abe had some ideas on putting a cowling around the wheel base to reduce drag. By stretching cotton tightly over an arrangement of hoops and battens, he succeeded in putting his ideas into practice. Poor old Poll looked like she was wearing her winter stockings, but he promised her that she’d like them once she was airborne.
    When the structural work was all done, he and Brad wound swathes of cotton around the exposed frame, pulling it tight so the fabric was hard and taut. Then they painted her: red and white, the colours Abe had used ever since his days as a barnstormer. Then, to protect the paint and fabric, they painted her again with cellulose dope, a kind of aviator’s varnish.
    The battered airplane began to look herself again; perhaps better.
    Abe usually worked alone – he usually did pretty much everything alone – but he liked working with the kid. The kid’s enthusiasm was uncanny. His aptitude too. Again and again Brad reminded Abe of himself at the same age. It was almost like working with a version of himself plucked from twenty years into the past.
    As the days passed, Abe had counted another twenty-three bullet holes in the buildings around Independence. The glossy boomtown down the hill still seemed to be invisible. There was still no explanation of why Independence was the only town in America which still treated ex-army pilots as descended demi-gods. Abe kept his eyes open and his mouth shut.
    On the evening of the tenth day, Abe was sitting alone in the hotel dining room, eating cold pie and potatoes. Then, just as he was finishing, Gibson