The Pulps.

This is another of those fiction Friday cheat things. At least it is an entry and I'll be a whole day ahead of you again. Yay!

This was started a few years ago as I was experimenting with a new approach to the National Novel Writing Month challenge. Instead of writing one novel of fifty thousand words I thought I would try a pulp serial approach. So, using Lester Dent's pulp formula I decided to write a series of 6000 word novellas. Each "Book" would have been a stand-alone adventure, yet tied into the others. A main protagonist and a sidekick would have been featured in each. The sidekick would have been promoted to Main Character status to replace the former and a new sidekick would be introduced for the next "episode". This was to have continued until the final book when all of the survivors would have been reunited to save the world from a Pulp fate worse than death.

A Novel of Derring-Do and Two-Fisted Adventure.

(C) 2012

The weather had started to close in. Thunderclouds were blooming in the west. Hank Ames needed to get Rosie on the ground, or he’d find himself behind the eight ball. He could probably avoid the weather and fly around the oncoming tempest. That would make the weather his least pressing problem; his big problem would be losing daylight. Even though he was unlikely to fly into a mountain here, flying after dark was not without its hazards and it wasn’t for the faint-hearted. He didn’t have the gas to fly all night, gasoline for Rosie and caffeine for him. It wasn’t like he’d never flown in the dark, he actually had considerable night dark flying. Those flights usually started with taking off in the wee early morning, flying a patrol and returning to base while the sun was still out. A takeoff from a prepared strip in the dark was duck soup when compared with landing. A decent pilot could put the Sikorsky amphibian on nearly any strip of open ground or calm water he could see, and any landing you could walk, or in Hank’s world, swim away from was a good one. It was getting back safely and in one piece that made flying interesting. Once in the air, any flyboy always found his way back to the ground, eventually. Gravity made that easy to do.

 Rosie bounced her way through a downdraft.  Hank kicked in a little left rudder to crab into the crosswind that threatened to blow them off course. He would have to nix the idea of continuing on to Nassau in the Bahamas. That idea was all wet, he’d be wet too if he had to ditch Rosie in the middle of the ocean. He could turn around and return to Watson Island. That wasn’t a good idea either, bacon was hard enough to come by these days; he didn’t have the time to take a trip for biscuits; nothing like wasting both his time and his money. Rosie wasn’t a cheap floozy, she was a high-class dame and she expected to be treated that way. She was a real hay burner; the two Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines each burned about twenty-five gallons an hour. It cost Hank a sawbuck just to get Rosie started and warmed up, and a C-note for the gas to fly 750 miles. It was good the hardships that had hit the rest of the country hadn’t affected his clientele as badly and they still had the dough to burn. Even though the wets had won and gotten prohibition repealed a few years back, there was always Caribbean rum to run back to the mainland. There were always wise guys trying to impress a squeeze, or a gold-digger playing the game. Anyone with the scratch wanted to experience the Caribbean. Bimini, Nassau, and Havana all destinations of choice for the dilettantes and the bon vivants who still had the lettuce to play. After the war, Ames had made connections flying hooch back to the states for some of those wise guys. A long as he was paid, in cash, he didn’t ask any questions, and he quickly forget anything he might have seen or heard. Discretion was a good thing with some; scratch that, most of his clients. The weather and the money involved really left him only one option; he banked right and pointed the twin-engine amphibian toward Bimini’s North Island.

Hank Ames graduated in May 1917 from The Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. By September he found himself as a newly commissioned Ensign, with two years of required sea duty waived, assigned to the Naval Reserve Flying Corps ground school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A fish out of water, a Texan stuck in the land of the Yankees. He made the most out of his time in Cambridge. He excelled in aeronautical studies and the military discipline that The Corps of Cadets had instilled in him made his transition into a naval aviator that much easier. Two months later when he boarded the train for elementary flight training in Key West, the instructors and his fellow students alike regarded him as a real go-getter and a squared way sailor. Ames completed his advanced flight training at the Naval aeronautical station in Pensacola. Though scheduled for go to Britain to fly anti-submarine and zeppelin patrols over the English Channel the Armistice was signed and the war ended before his transfer came through. Curtiss H-12 flying boat patrols from Dinner Key, Florida would have been the closest he got to the war. After he left the Navy he found that Florida and the Caribbean held much more appeal than did the dry and arid lands west of the Brazos River. The West Texas native found he liked being around water, he found a new home in South Florida.

The sky through Rosie’s windscreen grew angrier at each mile that passed beneath the wings.

“Rosie old girl. Looks like it’s a-fixin to blow up a gully washer.” Hank muttered aloud. “Them clouds is getting’ lower and the waves is gettin’ higher. If that keeps up I think we might just run outta sky. We need to find some terra firma gal.” He bumped the throttles forward a little to coax a little more horsepower from the Wasps and find a little more speed against the head wind that was slowing their progress.

A wind from the south has rain in her mouth. He thought just as the first big rain drops splattered against the windscreen. The twin engine Sikorsky wasn’t a small plane; Rosie could carry ten passengers or two tons of cargo. However, with the angry, storm tossed sea brewing below and an angry storm tossed sky trying to swat them into that angry sea Rosie felt as small as that little Curtiss Jenny he had first soloed in eighteen years ago. Hank felt as insignificant as a pimple on an elephant’s hind end. He was beginning to regret his decision to try to make Bimini; he probably should have turned around when he had the chance. At least the mainland would have been easier to find, and would have offered more options.

"Damn the torpedoes!" He said aloud. Bimini was closer. He’d be all right. Rosie would bring him through, she always did. He knew this part of the ocean like he knew the back of his hand.

Downdrafts, updrafts, turbulent cross winds that couldn’t decide where they were coming from or where they were inclined to blow to. Squall lines brought buckets of rain, some of it actually fell in the right direction. Sometimes, it even rained sideways.


Thanks for coming.

See you when I see you, Monday perhaps.  Peace.