Flying Blind

I nodded.

He leaned forward, puppy-dog eager, looking from me to Mantz and back again. “Would you like to come to my house and listen, tonight? I’m sure my mom and dad wouldn’t mind.”

“Thanks, kid,” Mantz said, with a sick smile. “I think I’ll take a rain check.”

I put a hand on Mantz’s shoulder. “Paul, can I have a word with you, for a minute? Outside?”

His eyes narrowed. “Sure.”

“Robert, you think you can handle another snail?”

The boy beamed. “Boy, could I! Warmed up and everything?”

“Live a little,” I said, and nodded over to Mom behind the counter, who smiled and took care of the order, as Mantz and I headed outside.

He dug a pack of Camels out of his sportcoat and lighted one up, saying, “You can’t believe any of that baloney. Tell me you don’t.”

There was runway noise and I had to work my voice up. “How do you explain some of what he knows? The names of those islands, for example?”

Mantz smirked, shrugged, blew smoke out his nose like a dragon. “I never heard of those islands. Maybe he made ’em up.”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“Maybe he’s got a Rand McNally atlas in his house. Look, he and Amelia were friends, all of that stuff he told you was legit…. But now he’s stayin’ up at night, with his head filled with what he’s readin’ in the papers about his famous friend, and he’s listening to staticky garbage and his imagination is running wild.”

“Is it possible for that Philco to be picking her up?”

“Sure.” The cigarette bobbled in his mouth as he spoke. “McMenamy thinks he’s heard her, too—of course, he hasn’t heard twenty or thirty exciting episodes like Robert has!”

Through the window we could see the kid chowing down on another snail.

I said, “I don’t understand how either of them could be hearing what the Itasca and the rest of the Navy and Coast Guard can’t.”

Mantz raised an eyebrow. “Well, the Electra’s radios sure can’t transmit over any considerable distance, but there’s always ‘skip.’”

“What’s skip?”

“A freak but common phenomenon. Sometimes radio reception turns up hundreds, even thousands of miles away.”

“And that’s what Robert could be hearing?”

“I think Robert’s hearing pixies.”

“I’m going to take him up on his invitation.”

“You gotta be pullin’ my leg! You can’t—”

“Go home. I’ll catch the train back to L.A. tomorrow.”

“Heller—”

“I’m going over to Robert’s to listen to the radio. Who knows? Maybe Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy, will win the big game.”

“I’m an Amos ‘n’ Andy man myself,” Mantz said, pitching his cigarette, sending it sparking to the ground. “And I’m takin’ my plane back to Burbank, before I miss tonight’s installment.”

The Myers house, though in a heavily residential section on the north edge of Oakland, sat alone on a small hill, a shingled bungalow absurdly dominated by that sixty-foot copper antenna Robert had told us about. That, at least, had been no exaggeration.

The boy had hitchhiked home, on the understanding that I would drop by after supper, his parents suitably warned. Robert knew I planned to check in at the Bay Farm Airport Hotel, which I did, and it was there that he tracked me down.

“I thought you didn’t have a phone,” I said into the receiver, as I sat on the edge of my bed in the hotel room.

“We don’t,” the kid’s voice said, “but our neighbor does. My folks want you to come over for supper. My mom’s a really good cook.”

I accepted, and drove over there in a buggy that Mantz’s friend, airport manager Guy Turner, loaned me, a ’32 Ford station wagon with bay farm airport stenciled on either side. When I parked out front, the hangars of the airport four miles away were visible from the hill the house perched upon.

Dinner was pleasant enough, in the small dining room of the cramped, modestly furnished home—meat loaf and mashed potatoes and creamed corn, served up by Robert’s mother Anna, an attractive woman in her thirties. His father Bob, Sr., a solid-looking quiet man, a little older than his wife, worked night shift in a canning factory. Robert’s sister, a cute blonde, probably seventeen, and a younger brother, maybe twelve, were fairly talkative, not at all put off by the presence of a stranger.

I had been introduced as a friend of both Paul Mantz and Amelia Earhart, and as a detective who was interested in checking out the short-wave transmissions Robert had reported. They understood I was not from the police, and I implied I was working for Mantz, whom both parents had met at the airport on an occasion or two.

Questions about what Chicago was like predominated, and the father—who had said little throughout the