THROUGH WITH ENGINES NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF LAW
They had come from the painting shop of the P&FE maintenance yard, and consequently were of the highest quality, and designed to resist the ravages of storms at sea.
It had taken Patricia most of Pick Pickering’s life to get rid of the signs and replace them with something a little more attractive—and a little less belligerent. One original sign survived, and was now mounted on the wall of what she thought of as “the playroom,” and her husband referred to as the “big bar,” there being another—the “little bar”—by the swimming pool.
“Honey,” Fleming Pickering said to Ernie McCoy, “I just had a great idea. Why don’t you stay at Through with Engines while Ken’s at Camp Pendleton?”
She smiled at him, but there was an I know what you’re up to look in her eyes.
What the hell, when in doubt, tell the truth.
“It won’t be much fun for you down there, Ernie,” he said. “And Patricia—if she’s not already back—will want to see you.”
And want to talk to you, especially after I tell her about Ken being reduced to the ranks. It’s absolutely true that she thinks of you as a daughter. And talking to Patricia would certainly be a very good thing for you.
“I go where Ken goes,” Ernie said. “But thanks, Uncle Flem.”
“Have you considered that he might want you to stay at Through with Engines?”
“Pick said that, when he offered us Through with Engines, ” Ernie said. “Your minds run in similar paths.” She paused, then repeated, “I go where Ken goes.”
“Okay.”
“Pick’s going to fly us down there in his airplane,” she said. “We’re going from the airport to Through with Engines, spend the night, fly down to San Diego—North Island Naval Air Station—in the morning. Pick will then run the girls out of his suite in the Coronado Beach, and turn it over to us.”
“I didn’t know,” Pickering said.
“That way, I’ll have a little time with Aunt Pat,” Ernie went on. “The Pickerings are taking good care of the McCoys, Uncle Flem, and the McCoys really appreciate it.”
“Ernie, I don’t know how much good I’ll be able to do Ken,” Pickering said.
“I know you’ll do what you can,” she said, and then Ken had appeared in the aisle and he changed the subject.
Pick’s airplane was a Staggerwing Beechcraft, so called because the upper wing of the single-engine biplane was mounted farther aft than the lower. It was painted bright yellow, and there was a legend painted in script on the engine nacelle, “Once Is Enough.”
“I’ll bite,” Ernie McCoy said, pointing to the legend after her husband and Pick Pickering had rolled the aircraft from the hangar behind the main house of Through with Engines. “Once what is enough?”
“Once under the Golden Gate Bridge,” Ken McCoy said, smiling at her.
“Mom’s father gave me the Beech when I came home from the Pacific,” Pick said. “It used to be Foster Hotel’s. Now they have an R4D. Together with a long ‘once is enough’ speech. So I had it painted on the nacelle.”
“Once what is enough?” Ernie said.
“I told you, baby,” McCoy said, smiling at her. “Once under the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“He flew this under the Golden Gate Bridge?” Ernie asked, incredulously.
“With poor George Hart with him,” McCoy said, chuckling at the memory.
“At the time it seemed like a splendid idea,” Pick said.
“George had just gone to work for the Boss,” McCoy said. “Colonel Rickabee decided the Boss needed a bodyguard, so I went to Parris Island and found George in boot camp. He’d been a detective in Saint Louis. . . .”
“Still is,” Pick said. “I saw him there a couple of months ago. He’s twice a captain, once in the cops, and once in the Corps Reserve. He’s got an infantry company.”
“I didn’t know that,” McCoy said. “Anyway, one day George is a boot, and the next day he’s a sergeant bodyguard protecting the Boss, and the day after that, the Boss collapses—malaria and exhaustion; that was right after he was hit on the tin can leaving Guadalcanal, and they made him a Brigadier—in the suite in the Foster Lafayette in Washington and winds up in the hospital. Rickabee sends George out here to tell the lunatic here that his father’s going to be all right, and the lunatic here loads him in this—which he stole from his grandfather for the occasion, by the way—and flies under the Golden Gate. George told me he prayed to be able to go